Byron Easy

by Jude Cook

  Hopeless, I know.

  An electric pause. Then he leans forward, the tracksuit scrunching in the bends of his limbs. Poking an oil-stained finger at my third eye (almost touching it) he says this to me:

  ‘You—fuck nuts—you, I never want to see again. Capiche?’

  I nod vigorously, hypnotised by how long these moments always seem to take. Then he’s off, down the carriage to corral his children; a thousand eyes feasting on my face. Glancing up at the Accountant Couple, I give them my best, my largest smile. They look down instantly at the scratched Formica, as if it held information of great importance.

  Ah, well. At least it’s taken my mind off the past for a moment and forced me to focus on the journey. And that can only be a good thing. As with any journey, one begins at Point A, things occur (and the really significant things are always thoughts, memories, insights, terrors—not the quotidian narrative of events), and eventually one arrives, some time later, at Point B; usually with fizzing limbs and hospitalising indigestion. The mental journey is always richer, for it contains recollection, fascination; though not much tranquillity in which to contemplate them. Despite the much-vaunted psychopathic state known as ‘living in the present’, one doesn’t want to lose the precious stones of the past. One doesn’t want to forget them, to see them drop away through the mind’s vast sieve of worthy and unworthy keepsakes. There they go: the good and the bad; the treasured and the negligible; the love and the hate. One becomes a loving curator of a self-important myth. A hero in one’s own epic drama. An uncommon desire, maybe, but then these are uncommon times. Above all, one wants to remember before one forgets, before one jumps to faulty conclusions. To remember in order to comprehensively understand all one has undergone, or endured. Quick now! Remember, record, embark. Quick now, before they go; before it’s too late.

  It always takes something like this—present pain, present smell, present occurrence—to fix one firmly in the horrific Now. Of course, Now is not where I’d want to be if I had the choice. If I could be anywhere in time I’d be anywhere but Now, with its tiresome demands and shrieking infants and blade-cold dusks and suitcase-strikes—that stuff that masquerades as real life but isn’t really; that great battalion of distraction ranged against one with its weapons drawn at any given moment of the day. Real life always seems to occur in the past, qualified by perspective. Existence is a mosaic of moments. And one wants to pin down those moments, those memories, like fat-torsoed moths under milky glass, as if one were the soul’s lepidopterist. The present, meanwhile, is still too hot to the touch, too raw, too evolving for us to call it real. Can you honestly say, gentle reader, that what’s going on around you now is real? Or is it the projection of some giant celestial panopticon; God’s dream. Perhaps, come New Year’s Eve, we will all find out. Overrated, to say the least, is the Now. Living in the present? For people with too much time on their hands, if you ask me. But, for a split-second, being whacked in the face took my mind off her (thank you, Tracksuit Man, and Happy Christmas).

  Oh yeah, her. In case I forget to mention it later, this half-drunk writer has recently separated from his wife. From his half-Spanish wife of three years. That was the special trouble I was telling you about earlier. The exploding of lawful, awful wedlock. Not unusual for a modern marriage, I suppose. We met when the present century was in its staggering, senile nineties (and it still is, of course, for a couple of high-anxiety days). Yes, we met, fell in love, got hitched, and somewhere along the line became separated. Some vital component was lost. The wife should really understand this better than me, what with her career of bereavement following her mother s death, but something tells me she doesn’t understand any of it; not one little bit. Christ, three years of marriage! Three years of microscopic London flats, of shouting and ducking airborne crockery, of sitting opposite each other during a million sweltering meals. All those carrots, those carbohydrates, those trawler-nets of spaghetti, paddy fields of rice, lakes of gravy, Thameses of tea … Where did those evenings disappear to? What did we talk about during them? And then there are the friends and family, people who I will never see again, people she is probably scornfully indoctrinating with lies as I sit here, gassy and humiliated on this bristling train seat. People such as her father, vertiginous and patrician Ian Haste with his air of past financial indiscretion, who never thought much of me anyway and had me fingered as a penniless loser from the start. Or her dizzy old bat of a grandmother—Montserrat, monstrous Montserrat—with her beaked Castilian nose; her melanotic skin the texture of beige silk, a result of going to bed every night with her face slicked in olive oil. I can still hear her haranguing voice in our many kitchens: ‘Ay, ay, ay! Qué pasa? Qué pasa?’ The outrageous pronouncements that needed delicate translation: ‘No hay coño que no está en venta.’ Her! Still going strong at eighty-four; still amoral, manipulative and selectively deaf at that indecent age! And then there’s Leocadia, the long-suffering aunt who had to look after the old war-horse. Leocadia, Leo for short; withdrawn, subjugated, meek; the veins on her hands distended and liquorice-coloured from years of domestic service. Leo with her spick-and-span stone-floored apartment by the aromatic Mediterranean where we spent our honeymoon. Yes, they’re all hating me now, in that uniquely proud Spanish way. Hating me for that zenith of sin, that ultimate deviation of being a husband who couldn’t provide financially, who didn’t sire grandchildren … As for the others, the others were my friends too, but I suppose they’ll cross the street or jump behind parked cars to avoid me now. Antonia and Nick, for instance, the swinging scenesters who were our closest friends; a pair of sixties throwbacks with the finery of their buckled clothes; their amnesiac, sybaritic lifestyle. Nick with his gracious limbs and foppish cuffs, who tried so hard to interest me in the names of footballers over pints of his beloved Guinness. Or Antonia, who grew up on a farm; a heavy-chested naif with her intensely nurturing nature; her rustic hands and lactic, silk-screen complexion … And then there’s the wife herself: tall and physically intimidating, with her charcoal brows and centrifugal radiance (and who, according to her osteopath, could have grown to over six feet if a curvature of the spine hadn’t lowered her shoulders into a witch-like arch before the age of ten). Yeah, the wife—another ghost I will never see again, unless it’s within the dusty cell of the divorce court. I can picture her now if I close my tired eyes: the wife with her white plastic-rimmed shades, her showy snakeskin knee-boots, her cobalt ring. Her unforgettable pupils, like droplets of ink on a chestnut. The wife with her many coats, her many cats. The wife and her many ailments that mysteriously came and went when it suited her. The wife at full throttle with her Pearl Harbors of vitriol, her dictionaries of prejudice. The wife. Her.

  ‘Welcome to Great North Eastern Railways. The restaurant car will be serving hot tea and coffee, fresh soup, gourmet sandwiches and a range of crisps and snack products.’

  The nasal, infiltrating whine snaps me out of my lamentable meditation. All around people are hoisting travel bags; marshalling wallets of Christmas cash. Then a nauseating list: ‘Hot baguettes with fillings of roast beef, roast chicken, roast turkey and stuffing; toasted bacon and tomato sandwiches plus a wide range of home-made cakes, biscuits, pastries, hot drinks as well as a fully licensed bar. The buffet trolley will also be passing through Standard Accommodation. Thank you—we look forward to seeing you and hope you have a pleasant journey.’

  Standard Accommodation. That must be me.

  I close my notebook, re-cap my pen and turn to the rain-sullied window. We are still stationary. Outside, under the cathedral-dome of an umbrella, a woman is kissing her lover goodbye. I notice immediately that she is crying; her generously lashed lids blinking every time the wind sends a gust of drizzle her way; the long runnels forming kohl-black roads in her foundation. She looks small, forlorn, sinister even, among the equidistant lamp posts and agoraphobia-inducing concrete walkways of the platform. A dark, gale-blasted survivor of some terrible saga of love; one purse-like hand pu
rsuing the folds of her lover’s overcoat. Why do women cry so much? The world must hurt women more than it hurts men for them to cry so much. Her face turns upwards now to receive the last kiss, the important kiss, the one that needs to hold the correct note of gravity, of poised farewell, of future intent. Then her man turns rapidly and walks towards the glowing interior of the train. In close-up, his face is creased and orange; reflecting the sad ambers of the dusk lights, the bullying wind. He’s hunched, swarthy, slick-haired and dry-eyed—just the type, I note abysmally, that the wife used to go for.

  Enough! Enough about her. I had better tell you about me first while there’s still time, while it’s still light. We’ll get to her later. To understand me you’d better know something about my mum and dad. Yes, that David Copperfield crap. Because these are confessions, right? You might have already identified the slightly hysterical tone, rich with grievances. St Augustine, Rousseau, Philip Roth—those whinging bastards all had a record to set straight. It will come as no surprise, then, to learn that I am an only child, the only child of Sinead and Desmond Easy (Des for short). I have a half-sister, born when I was eleven, but she can wait. My father, who also suffered the trauma of early baldness always—to my mind at least—had a strange way of looking at me. He would stare under the heavy, shrouded lids of his eyes, as if squinting, or trying to figure out a particularly tricky equation. Apparently, I just didn’t add up. Or balance out. In fact, he had a brilliant mathematical, or rather scientific, mind. Unfortunately, he instilled in me a hatred of the sciences by his very proselytising of them as academic subjects. ‘God is dead,’ he would proclaim while burning lamb chops under the grill in the white house where I grew up. ‘And science will prove it—probably in your lifetime. So stop wasting your eyesight on poetry.’ Precociously, I would answer that, for God to be dead, he must once have been alive. My father’s squint would then become even warier. His path in life, his golden route to the threadbare carpet of his early thirties and beyond, was as unsystematic, as unscientific, as could be. Evacuated from the blighted terraces and V2 craters of Barnet during the war, he grew up on the Isle of Wight. I’ve often wondered whether those years on an island, surrounded by incurious sheep and paedophiles, weren’t the crucible for his strangely insular and reactionary views later in life. I can still hear his pedagogic voice holding forth to a schoolfriend who had just discovered Marxism: ‘There are either winners or losers in this life, and giving your money away is the sure route to becoming the latter!’ I remember asking him whether he considered Gandhi a loser, only for him to reply that Gandhi didn’t count on the Isle of Wight after the war: the only things that did were the price of butter and the availability of primitive condoms. He certainly made me never want to visit the place, the Isle of off-White—a chunk of Great Britain that, once detached, should have just sunk quietly into the Channel, volunteering, as it were, its own superfluousness. At seventeen, and very pleased with himself (with an ingenuous self-confidence that never left him his whole life), he won a scholarship to Cambridge to study chemistry. The old grammar-school boy-at-sea-in-an-ocean-of-toffs scenario. From this pinnacle, it was downhill all the way—on graduating he found a post as a rank-and-file research chemist for a French laxative and cosmetics company based in Bedfordshire called Diatrix, where he remained until … You may have noticed I’m talking about my father in the past tense, as if he had already joined the Dead, those watchers and hand-wringers on their plinths of stone. But he’s not dead. I just haven’t spoken to him for ten years. Or rather, we haven’t spoken to each other for ten years. The feeling, and it makes me short of breath and bewildered to admit it here, is woundingly mutual. I know where to find him. He knows where to find me. But neither of us have found the other, for over a decade.

  A psychiatrist could probably make much of this, along with the head-blowing-off daydream(which isn’t my only persistent hallucination, I should stress. I have another—of solvency and spiritual calm—involving a spacious timber-floored flat, its bookshelves rich in reference works, its walls punctuated by framed charcoal sketches; a piano, upright or grand, I don’t have a preference; and the faint smell of lavender pot-pourri in the immaculate, startling can). Although psychoanalysis, it has to be said, so often misses the point—the subtext to many of its questions about parents seems to go something like: What were you doing hanging around with a father like that in the first place? As if anyone ever had a choice.

  But my father was, is, an intelligent man. After his emigration to Sydney, Australia, with a new wife, I began to miss the stimulation of his bookshelves (not him, you note, but his bookshelves—why, why, why? What am I that I can be so frigidly monstrous when it comes to the central relationship of my life?). My formative memory is of an entire ranged wall in our living room bearing texts on at least twenty runnered shelves. An odyssey, a magical orange-grove for a child; a gift. As I grew older I could see that some of the erudite works looked suspiciously unread, their spines pristine and uncreased; also that his taste, in his fifties, had come to rest on dry historical accounts, political philosophy, along with biographies of prominent chemists and right-wing politicians. The roman candles of literature (the Lawrence, the Joyce, the Kerouac, the Yeats) had been consigned to the dustbin marked ‘deluded youth’. (Though you had to search for this dustbin. The exciting books were often hidden behind the volumes of European history, in piles or stacks—concealed like pornography.) But he did have books. Books that are probably the cause of all my present heartache and pain; though one doesn’t choose the inviolable facts of one’s upbringing, good or bad.

  Yes, an intelligent man, and sure proof that you can read all the great works of literature and still be as confused about your moral and spiritual life as the dustman who devours the Sun every day as if it were The Book of Common Prayer. And maybe this is at the core, the rotten root, of why we haven’t communicated since I ceased to be a teenager. You see, at that age, Desmond Easy personified the perils, the folly, of the man who has made firm metaphysical conclusions one way or the other (there being no persuasive evidence in either direction, as any fule kno). A lot depends on what you believe, of course; where you stand vis-à-vis the afterlife. In his case, two thousand years of philosophical debate could be distilled into a simple sentence: there was no God. A committed atheist probably from before birth, I would feel corroded, soul-contaminated, every time I endured another spleen-filled rant about how our only destination was the avid soil and its gleeful worms; or about getting and spending and the greasy world of commerce; or the importance of chemistry as an A-level subject. That’s not where my head was at, not in the least. I was all for keeping my options open. When the bullet enters my brain (as it most certainly will), I’d like to believe in the slimmest possibility that the Big Man Upstairs will be there, shaking his fist, cursing that I’d arrived too early. And when I engaged my father in argument, I would witness his divorce-injured spirit cowering as I expounded (ludicrously, at that age!) the doctrines of Platonic transmigration, of Lawrence’s soaring and solipsistic life-belief and the lyric (largely stolen from the French Symbolists, I was later disappointed to discover) to The Doors’ ‘Break on Through to the Other Side’. So we agreed to leave it. We agreed to differ. For ten years thus far. The bond cracked twixt son and father.

  My mother, however, was a different kettle of ballgames—a free spirit, but most tangibly different in her physical characteristics. While my altitudinally challenged father was always fighting a tendency to flab in the upper arms and was bald as an acorn by the time he reached thirty-five, Sinead Mary Maguire (to use her stunningly beautiful and evocative maiden name) was an elegant raven-haired head above the crowd. Literally. By seventeen she was a giraffe-like five foot eleven. The daughter of an Irish miner displaced to Leeds in the 1930s scramble for work; early photographs demonstrate just why half of male North Yorkshire spent much of its spare time in garages repairing cars they’d crashed while straining to catch a glimpse of her on the street.
In one, taken when she was just eighteen, her mathematically perfect legs curl from under a pleated schoolgirl skirt and end in those juvenilely-buckled court shoes that young women wore in the fifties. Atop this, her tiny waist is overfolded by thin but capable hands, which for some time now have tragically borne the distorting tree-branch knobbles of arthritis. Then her face: an oval of health and intuition divided by a long fluted nose; bearing a mouth so heavily lipsticked that it appears black in the creased monochrome of the picture. The only disappointment, in the photo, are her grey eyes—smudged and indistinct, in real life they were the colour of rain. Finally, her hair: a straight burnished cascade of witch-like ebony, mirroring the hue of her permanently raised, questioning eyebrows. A dark beauty, then: someone in whom life’s vital appetites vibrated strongly—one of those rare Southern Irish women who seemed to have bypassed the gene pool of freckles and carroty hair and been awarded the full set of night-black attributes reserved for Gothic heroines.

  So why did she end up with Des Easy? Well, that’s simple. My mother was, for a long while, a terrible judge of men. After the dismal, rationed privations of her teenage years (bananas something seen only in films until the age of sixteen), and a tragic accident in which a faulty gas main killed her mother and much-younger brother at a Butlin’s holiday camp, she found herself teaching nursery-school children the alphabet using colourful wooden representations of letters. A brief affair later with the married headmaster, which scandalised the entire Leeds suburb where the school was undistinguishedly situated, and she found herself with the same primary-hued wooden letters at a school in Lewisham, with slightly older, but infinitely more vicious, more worldly, more feral children. She stayed for ten years.