Byron Easy

by Jude Cook

  Byron Easy

  Jude Cook

  To my mother and father

  Contents

  1 Negative Capability

  2 Never Met a Girl Like You Before

  3 This Is Only Temporary

  4 Home

  5 Asmodeus

  6 Less Haste, More Speed

  7 Night

  8 One More Stop

  Acknowledgements

  … I am not asleep.

  I weep; and walk through endless ways of thought.

  Oedipus the King

  Sophocles

  1

  Negative Capability

  MY NAME IS BYRON Easy and I am sitting—or rather, sardined—in a tight table-constricted booth on a train at King’s Cross, and, until a few moments ago, I was alone with my thoughts. I am pointing north, waiting to depart, and already dying for a cigarette. The fuzzy reds of Santa hats out on the bracing concourse remind me dismally that it’s Christmas Eve. Oh, and not just any Christmas Eve, but, on a more dramatic level, the last one of the twentieth century; hence the atmosphere of millennial panic inside the carriage, the general feeling that the human race is reaching escape velocity. That it is dealing with last things. I must confess now that I am returning to my mother in Leeds—pathetic really, at this age, this altitude. And I’m trying to remember a lot of facts in order to forget them. Believe me, it’s the only way. If you want to close the door on the past, remember it all first; otherwise it keeps returning, like the Christmas puppy discarded two streets away, or the breeze-blocked corpse that refuses to sink in the Lea Valley reservoir. Yes, I’m trying to remember it all, while waiting to depart.

  You probably won’t get much in the way of the train’s interior or the wintry English countryside as it flashes unstoppably past, because they constitute the irrelevant details. The unrecallable facts. The minutiae of a journey. The surface gloss. But I do have a story to tell. And I think it’s for the best that I’m out of town over the festive break as I’ve begun to cut a sad figure in the taverns of north London, what with all the trouble a couple of months back. Not the usual writer’s trouble—money-trouble, soul-trouble—but special trouble, of a type you may have problems identifying with at first. Anyhow, you can most likely imagine what a non-smoking carriage of a British Rail train resembles on Christmas Eve: the abbreviated space packed with shrieking saliva-mouthed infants; the solitary sons and their gold-brocaded luggage (their inevitable spectacles parked on waxy nose-bridges); the long-married grandparents deep in the tartan seats, sipping lidded styrofoam teas that dangle cotton tags. The tang of whisky. The parps of blown noses. The palpable and depressing sense of anticipation. You’ve all been here before—in the needling heat, the mince-pie air. Yeah, the faceless cast is all prepared for departure. Present and correct and Christmas hungry, Christmas randy; all with the common purpose of Yuletide repatriation, of being with their loved ones on the twenty-fifth of December.

  However, today remains stubbornly the twenty-fourth of December, and there is still the journey to shoulder through; those memories to recall.

  My name is Byron Easy. I am a writer sitting on a train; and I think about this shit way too much.

  Of course, the following shit you just couldn’t make up. Who would want to? This kind of shit is always present in people’s lives, waiting to be recorded, dissected, embarked upon. Like a journey, I guess. Like the journey I am about to begin, half drunk and headachy at three-thirty on a winter’s afternoon.

  If I look onto the concourse, I can see a quick wind making ripples in what could be a puddle of urine. Also, a haggard pigeon spitting a cigarette butt. Further still, an apoplectic traveller locked into a dispute with a ticket inspector. In other words, the usual troubled waters of the earth, which I fully intend to forsake.

  I am trying to bear all this in mind when a human voice wakes me.

  ‘’Scuse me? Is anyone sitting there?’

  A timid young couple, slightly blurred around the edges from all the wine I had to sink to board this train, enters my field of vision. The man, whose reedy Estuary vowels formed the question, is dressed in the dichromatic uniform of the trainee accountant. Maybe he is an accountant. Maybe they both are, and spend their Friday nights in Pizza Hut discussing the small progresses made on their investment portfolios. His avidly defiant eyes gaze down at me: an estate-leer, once learnt never eradicated, like the rude glottal stops. His forehead, a bubbling Icelandic spa of acne, gleams under a hairline itself largely a strip of exposed scalp due to an over-application of wet gel. He stands in prickling anxiety of my reply. I must look drunk, or slightly dangerous. If he were a poet he would adduce that I had not loved the world, nor had the world loved me. But it is unlikely he is a poet, not with hair like that. Maybe it’s my two days of stubble and florid colour that cause him to hover there uncertainly. Maybe it’s my clenched fists, which lie taut-skinned and raw from the cold on the bare Formica. I should mention again that this churl is flanked by his partner, a bony, bloodless woman who wears a crinkled A-line skirt and a complexion as pale as a sheet of writing paper. The man’s face twitches slightly. There is a lengthy silence; his question still poised and resonating. I have faced him down. I note that his expression has modulated into the counterfeit smile reserved for the job interview. My blood-drunk eyes survey his dripping scalp, then meet his stare. I growl, ‘Is it still raining out?’

  The couple exchange rapid, nervous glances. He doesn’t get it. He thinks I’m mad. With a strangled timbre, he repeats his question.

  ‘I mean, are they taken, mate? The seats?’

  A theatrical pause before I relent.

  ‘Nah, you go ahead.’

  There is a tangible gust of relief; a relaxation. They make to sit down opposite me. Rapidly contorting my face into an expressionless mask, defiant of every conversational opener known to man, I allow myself a long sigh through the nostrils.

  Oh well, I always was a pushover.

  My name is Byron Easy, and I must never get my hands on a gun.

  Why? Because I would blow my own head off, that’s why. Not somebody else’s head, but my own horny, just-turned-thirty, drinker’s head, with its retreating hairline that seems to be constantly saying to Time: ‘Okay, brother … you win.’

  To be frank, just lately this is an action I visualise performing once, twice, three times a day. Oh, and once more before I fall asleep at night, like some kind of morbid nightcap. The unwanted, unwarranted vision upon closing the eyes: the clip slammed chunkily into the stock, the hammer coaxed back, the short journey made by the barrel to the back of the mouth, then … then blackness, like a suddenly extinguished television screen. Not even a sound to accompany the shot, because there wouldn’t be a sound. You would go before you heard the sound. Like the soldier says, you never hear the bullet that kills you. No, there would be no bang and nothing more to see for ever and ever, amen. Although that, I suppose, depends on what you believe.

  Is this unusual, or do you harbour the same reckless, annihilating impulses? They say all great men have been heroes, conquerors and cuckolds in their time, but I can only be certain I belong to one of those categories. That’s not to say I believe I’m great—if I am, it will be of the variety that is unwillingly thrust upon one. Maybe I am more gravely ill than I at first suspected. But I am not making things up, unlike some I could mention.

  My name is … A note about the light: the carriage has, predictably, eye-tiring fluorescent strips blinking invisibly at two-hundred frames per second. This will ensure at least a third of the passengers will be nodded-out over sports pages and last-minute Christmas cards by the time we trundle into Doncaster. By then, of course, it will be dark; the white neon tubes will paradoxically appear to originate from the station platform in the ra
in-dotted, reflective windows. All very misleading. I know it will be dark because it is dusk now. A London dusk of measly rain; hostile and blade-cold, with red stricken clouds clinging low to a black horizon. I know they will be asleep because I will be awake; deep in my own abyss of thought.

  Why plumb such an abyss, you may ask? What could precipitate such an urge? Well, the events of last night, for a start. Though it might be some time before I feel ready to share them with you. The plain facts don’t do them justice. I spent the majority of the evening drinking champagne at the house of an old friend—my oldest friend, in fact. Sounds great, does it not? I can still picture the jewel-bright bubbles, their inevitable effervescent journey to the meniscus; still hear the soft burr of Rudi’s familiar voice above the discordant clanking of metal or tin from outside …

  Then something occurred that changed everything; that accounts for my current state of disturbed, amped-up intensity; of dangerous melancholy; of near-clairvoyance. This state had its genesis in the small hours, and was still going strong this morning, which for me fell between eleven forty-five and midday. Waking unshaven under my coat, on the sofa of my shared flat, magnesium light penetrating the blinds, I decided to skip breakfast. Grim laughter, a kind of debauched chagrin, chased me around the room as I gathered my meagre possessions. The gloomy egoist is always at his best in the morning, so I was relishing my strange mood of vindication, achievement, fear. After my second or third glass of lunchtime Rioja (straight from the bottle, so I’m guessing here) I began to pack. Not that I am wealthy in worldly goods, but I managed to strip it down to the bare essentials. All my leather shoulder bag contains—all I have under the sun—is a notebook, a Leeds street-finder, the now empty bottle of red, a toothbrush, a wad of crumpled fivers in a Jiffy bag (both courtesy of Rudi), and a change of socks (why socks and not underwear isn’t coherently explicable at the moment).

  Oh, and a single pamphlet of poetry. Its author? Me, actually

  Well, I did declare that I was a writer. And one has to cite proof for one’s assertions. The story of my succès d’estime is too circuitous to discuss here, suffice to say that I have a single copy of it left, the one I carry with me now—like a talisman of dormant talent. Taking it from my bag, I hold it to my nostrils. It smells faintly of cat litter. The very sight of it troubles my heart. They say train journeys often precipitate poetry, and, before one knows it, the past. Both require time to do them justice. Well, for once I have time on my hands: the nasal announcement that disturbed my thoughts a moment ago informed us that, due to a person under a train at Stevenage, we were subject to ‘a substantial delay’. So for the foreseeable future I’m going nowhere. And I plan to do a fair amount of writing, along with the obsessive acts of recollection—the industrial amount of thinking I intend to do before my inevitable end; my long-anticipated felo de se …

  Don’t believe me? Just watch me now, as Bowie muttered at the end of ‘Star’.

  The celebrity psychologists state that pain only lasts a second—that it’s up to us to decide whether we want to perpetuate it by morbid reflection. But the pain of the last two months, caused by the special trouble I mentioned, has begun to feel chronic. I have decided, at last, to put an end to it. I just haven’t settled—in the manner of famous cowards—on the best method yet.

  Think I’ll take a quick look around.

  Hey, I was wrong. My company isn’t faceless in the least. I am surrounded by more arresting physiognomy than you would encounter on a tier of a football ground. A Hogarthian mob in catalogue clothes. And all so purposeful, so alert … There’s always a moment during a good afternoon drunk when you become vividly aware that, all around you, people are operating life soberly. They’re conducting phone conversations without speaking into the wrong end of their mobiles, or gangwaying to the Gents without tripping over, or turning the pages of a newspaper without blacking adjacent eyes. It’s a great moment, like putting your contact lenses back in.

  A door hisses open to the rear of me, allowing in a blast of fridge-cold air, dust and the smell of fried onions. The hair in my nostrils prickles, my eyes weep from their corners … then the warmth is mercifully restored. If I were a philosopher I would ruminate upon the idea that the cold is now the past moment, the dead moment; whereas this is the present moment, the living one. That ‘now’ seems to hold me transfixed in the glare of its paradoxical headlights—how can anything past be happening ‘now’? But there is too much stimulation for such inquiries. A passenger shuffles by, his toilet-cleaner cologne smarting like a smack in the face. Well, that’s certainly woken me up.

  Newly and thrillingly aware of the teeming variety inside the carriage, I take out my black notebook, one of many that I never leave the house without. It falls open to reveal the skeleton of a poem, in spidery longhand, on the facing page. The Accountant Couple glance away as if I’ve just produced pornography. Verse? Scandalous! What did they expect, a ledger? I uncork my favourite fountain pen only to witness their ears virtually humming with embarrassment. Fuck ’em—I’ve always written in these things, especially on trains. And one day I will throw them all on the bonfire, like all good writers should. I commence with a short, if adjectivally challenged, description of my fellow inmates.

  Fat, thin, tall, short …

  Ah, it’s no good. There’s too much to take in—an overwhelming tidal wave of diversity in search of a seat; an anthropologist’s gang-bang. Pascal said only stupid people thought everybody was fundamentally alike; referring of course to the interior, not the deceptive carapace we spend our lives lugging around. Giving up, I let the pen drop and simply stare. The man who just bustled past, letting in the cold air, turns out to be a priest; the egregious white band like a pure strip of snow between his black cassock and triple chin. Beyond him there are frowning fathers and slickly hipped girls (all undoubtedly younger than me); patrolling lads in knee-length Saturday night pulling-shirts; giggling sari’d Bengalis; a pair of Upper-Street Sapphic sisters; a septuagenarian dressed entirely in blue denim; a supermarket-shoed fashion-catastrophe bending under the logged and straining luggage racks (O, the varieties of luggage!). Then there are the cuff-linked ex-aviators; the desperate frauds and baldies; trophy wives next to unspeakably smeared infants; faded neckerchiefed blondes, their crisp-packet faces trowelled with slap; Suit-and-Ties reeking from work; growling misfits; teenagers with heads square as televisions; girls with intelligent continental mouths who will incongruously disembark at Grantham; cheeky mites with gurning fissogs; wind-blasted aunts; solemn-jawed Christians smelling of new laundry; hippy mums in earth-brown rollnecks; acne-beasts; sunlamp survivors; once-successful Lotharios chinking under bazaars of catalogue-bought gold …

  I pick up my pen.

  Waistcoated wankers, passage-staggerers, nippers and grippers, seal-bark coughers, self-pitying snifflers, hawkers, tutters, scratchers, groaners, verbal diarrhoeics, carol-hummers, dribblers, tongue-lollers (the proximity of all this hot blood!), balls-rearrangers, piles sufferers, dye-jobs, stroke victims, syrup-apologists, recently suntanned showoffs, cold sores, frowners and debt-drowners, blackheads and smackheads, sad Jacks and six-packs, Johnny-no-mates and fashion plates, cancelled beefcake, vacuum-eyed jailbait, bitter-guts, sweating gluttons, pee-desperate ten-year-olds, furtive scribblers, diddlers, con-men, strongmen and me.

  Bosh! The cornice of a suitcase on its way to the angled luggage racks scores a direct hit on my right temple. A gross lardball in a rippling, seething tracksuit is leaning monstrously into my personal space; sharing his body odour—like an olfactory festive gift—with seats thirty-seven to forty-two. He looks oddly familiar. He looks gross. And he certainly hasn’t noticed that he’s injured a fellow human. Pain, like thumb-pressure to the actual brain itself, enters the right side of my face and vibrates along the lines of my jaw and skull. In clinical close-up I watch the man’s T-shirt reveal a vast, pubicly forested space-hopper belly as he berths his case. Then, with a burp, he rejoins his two incredibly bolshy an
d stupid-looking children further down the aisle, pausing only to clip one of them over the crown.

  I huff and I puff and feel a prickling in my nuts. Oh, you shithouse! Oh you clumsy—If it wasn’t Christmas (and he wasn’t bigger, badder, exponentially more than me) I would’ve definitely called him a …

  ‘Kant!’

  The man turns in full movie slow-mo to face me. Again that familiar snarl. Oh dear. I’ve done it now. The word, as a word so often will when you’re drunk, just slipped out.

  ‘What did you call me?’

  I see at once that his face—lopsided with venom and ovoid under a lawn of bristle—has murder written across it. As he advances, I become aware of the Accountant Couple, now crimson with shame and stress, physically diminishing in their seats; probably wishing they’d cabbed it or chartered a helicopter to Leeds instead. With a burger-waft of bad armpits, the big man is once again back in my personal force field, closer (if that were humanly possible without him actually penetrating me) than before. His deceptive height really is something of a phenomenon: taller at a distance, up close he is Danny DeVito as Napoleon. I see that his eyes are deranged with afternoon alcohol. I note the mottled blue of a swift tattooed on his grilled neck. Then my voice appears from nowhere.

  ‘I didn’t call you anything. I said don’t!’

  The man’s children watch this terrible, thrilling scene like two orphans on a sinking ship. It is surely something they have witnessed before. Just daddy doing his stuff.

  ‘That’s not what you said …’ The big man’s voice is graphically deep, an Essex gravel pit of menace and harm. Our stares are now locked like antlers.

  ‘I meant don’t hit him. The kid. I was hit when I was a child …’ (I think the pale woman opposite coughs at this sentence, shifting her weight to the other bony buttock) ‘… and look how I turned out.’ He remains impassive. For some reason he doesn’t seem impressed by this. I try another tack. ‘Okay, I’m lying. I’ve got Tourette’s, which makes me shout out the names of dead German philosophers.’