Byron Easy

by Jude Cook

  ‘You’re not throwing those away are you? They’ve only been on the floor. We can’t afford to chuck ’em away’

  She span round, her eyes full of cat-like venom, a sneer on her wonderfully thin, crisply outlined lips.

  ‘You can’t afford to. I’m paying all the fucking bills.’

  ‘And I’m paying the fucking rent.’ I slammed the tap off and wrapped my hand in a tea towel, tourniquet-tight. ‘All you do is spend, spend, spend.’

  In the last fortnight alone she’d taken delivery of four new pairs of trousers, a climbing frame and mischief-centre for her beloved Siamese cats, and an in-car CD-system for her vintage VW, a car she couldn’t afford in the first place. She stood before me, a shaking wall of perdition, her impressively ironed and coordinated work clothes almost trembling with righteousness.

  ‘It’s my money!’ she cried, and sent a coffee cup skidding across the surface until it exploded against the toaster.

  ‘It’s never just your money when you’re married!’

  I started to search for a dustpan and brush for the shards of the cup; always my first instinct when objects were smashed, regardless of the perpetrator.

  ‘And what were you doing to set the house on fire? You’re an idiot! Cabrón!’

  ‘I was cooking your breakfast.’

  ‘No you weren’t—you were reading.’ She disappeared into the living room, returning a moment later brandishing the copy of Culture and Society. ‘Why don’t you make some real money instead of filling your head with this shit?’ She was screaming now, at full-philistine-throttle; hurling the book into the bin to join the still-fuming sausages. ‘If you’re not reading …’ (she pronounced the word like some sort of religious curse) ‘… then you’re getting pissed with that idiot Rudi.’

  ‘Oh, so now we’re going to hear all this Rudi crap again, are we? He’s my childhood friend. My best friend. I’m entitled to have at least one, or is that against the bloody law now?’

  Rudi Buckle—hirsute, stocky, early-thirties swordsman and all-round good guy—had been at school with me in Hamford. My oldest pal, as I think I mentioned earlier. Although six months my senior, and a pragmatic Scot of Italian extraction, I would always consider him my closest friend. His folks had moved down from Glasgow to nearby Stevenage when his old man had been transferred to the huge British Aerospace plant that provided most of the work in the area. Rudi was effortlessly charismatic, with a kind of swashbuckling confidence, and initially my wife had warmed to him. But gradually he’d become a bête noire, probably through every fault of his own. He’d turned up in London five years ago to start a car valeting business after a similar operation had failed in backwards, provincial Hamford. A year down the line and it had become a thriving monster—he was always meeting crooks and casino owners with their needy Bentleys and voluminous Mercs. He never left the house with less than five hundred quid in his wallet, just in case he met some near-autistic dolly bird still impressed by flash Scotsmen with pockets full of dough. But Rudi’s pragmatism covered a strong streak of flakiness. He always had money, but he owed a fortune too. And I was always borrowing from him. And, just recently, drinking a bottle of whisky well into the night at his place to avoid the barren Sahara that was now my marriage bed. He called it ‘hard drinking’, and it certainly was hard to imbibe that much every night without dying. I love that adjective: hard. No one describes gluttony as hard-eating. It’s that macho qualification—hard rock, hard porn. Hard drinking.

  ‘He’s a pisshead—strutting around like he owns everything. Someone should cut his balls off.’

  A familiar deranged look appeared in the black points of her eyes. She was one of the few women I’d known mad enough to carry out such a threat. I shouted back,

  ‘Well, that’s something you know all about!’

  ‘And you’re just a loser. I’m too good for you, and you know it. My mother—God rest her soul—made the same mistake with Dad. She could’ve married ten millionaires! They were offering her yachts, jewellery, just to have an affair with them. And she ended up with him.’

  ‘Oh, Christ—not this now!’

  Her mother Ramona, a beautiful Spanish immigrant who’d arrived at Victoria station in the early sixties with no more than a suitcase and her stunning looks, had worked her way up the ranks in the hotel business until she was manager of one of the largest Bayswater international stopovers. She, like Rudi, was always encountering the dangerously glamorous, rich or unscrupulous in the course of her work—except in this case they were valeting her, usually on stolen weekday afternoons in one of the deluxe, white-carpeted suites. Ramona had died in a car crash when my wife was only sixteen, and, to deal with the grief of this defining disaster, she’d devoted her life to becoming her mother; mimicking her profligate habits, her clothes, ambitions, qualities. A modest inheritance, wrested from her father, helped her in this costly endeavour. As I watched my wife—that concentration of fluent vitriol—seethe in front of me, I opened my mouth and said the only thing I knew would end the argument swiftly: ‘You’re not your mother.’

  ‘Drop dead.’

  And, with that bon mot, she snatched her embossed VW keys and stormed out, slamming the front door with such ferocity that the living-room lampshade plummeted to the ground in a hail of plaster, like a hanged man through a trapdoor.

  At that moment I became aware of the smell of burning. Then I looked at the bin. It was on fire—the pages of Culture and Society curling among greedy orange flames.

  So, that morning, by the time I reached the sun-carved, chalk-white edifice of the Eastman, I was almost drunk on the lethal Black Dog. Like mustard gas, I felt it was jaundicing my face, adding a sickly lime-pallor to my ears and throat. I wasn’t even sure I could make it through the richly timbered, impressively slow revolving door without the unendurable weight of Time and Self pushing me out into the street again, like a gravitational force.

  I stopped in the vaporising heat, in blinking disbelief that I could sink so low. Poleaxed by the ponderous millstone, the axle-load, the great sum of Self.

  ‘Mr Easy? If you’d like to follow me.’

  Well, she’s pretty, I thought, the weight decreasing appreciably by a couple of kilograms.

  I followed my glamorous, flat-shoed Burmese nurse into a spare, fluorescent-lit cubicle, pausing to reflect that heels, though impractical on the disinfectant-slippery tiles of the Eastman hospital, might have lifted my depression for ever.

  ‘I’m Dr Amir. We’re just going to conduct a couple of experiments and then look at the possible analyses.’

  Doctor! And I thought she was only … Christ, they’re getting younger by the hour, just like coppers. Dr Amir could only have been twenty-six and was possessed of the kind of heartbreaking, leather-dark, make-up-free complexion that Gauguin drank himself to death over. Her mouth, as richly lipsticked as a London bus, shimmered and concentrated the bright glosses of the overhead striplights. I glanced around: no winey blood-furrowed parlour carpet like Dr Demjanjuk’s converted Chamber of Horrors, just the immaculate chessboard tiles. White, black, white, black.

  She handed me a specimen bottle. I had to spit into it for fifteen minutes.

  When she returned, clutching a clipboard to her bust, I had only managed a pitiful amount of bone-dry froth. But that’s life, isn’t it? When put to the test, very few of us can rise to the grand occasion, can do what we promised, let alone surpass ourselves. On any other morning that month I could have filled three bathtubs to the brim with spittle, doused house fires with phlegm, flooded high streets with saliva. On any other morning …

  As I apologised, hoping she wouldn’t read my parlous performance as a sign of any sexual inadequacy, Dr Amir suggested that my problem was maybe only subjective, a perceived problem. After all, how much is too much? Too much saliva? Too little hair? Too much depression? Aren’t all complaints, apart from the obvious tangible ones like severed limbs and terminal illnesses, subjective? It was all about putting up with
it, adaptation, I was briskly and sexily told. There was an operation, she revealed, but this was expensive, risky and usually only performed on slavering schizophrenics or multiple sclerosis sufferers. I was just about to ask whether it was not simply possible to buy a whole new mouth from reception when she said this to me:

  ‘Mr Easy, sometimes dental problems such as yours are psychosomatic; are brought on by stress or depression. If you like we can refer you to the Eastman’s dental psychiatrist. Would you like that?’

  Apparently, such a thing as a dental psychiatrist existed. I wondered briefly if, the night before, she hadn’t been a participant in one of those epic benders that junior doctors legendarily enjoy after their sixteen-hour shifts, and whether this might be clouding her professional judgement somewhat. I also pondered the possibility that, after the conveyer belt of vodkas and pricey bottled beers, some strapping-armed hospital porter hadn’t lifted her coffee-creamy thighs around his waist and banged her remorselessly against the bedroom door, her jet, incensey hair and pillar-box lips wet with the reflected light from her studious standard lamp.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I replied, my mouth suddenly full of spit.

  ‘Well, if you do decide, you’ll have to fill out one of these.’

  She unhooked a form from her clipboard, moving thrillingly close as she did so.

  ‘There’s space to list any psychiatric problems or stressful events you may have experienced over the last eight years. I’m afraid the amount of saliva you produced is pretty standard for a man of your age.’

  Age. My age. Oh God, to be young enough for her, to not be this frazzled car-wreck of doomy neuroses and nightly death-dreams. To be a strapping-armed hospital porter. To have money. To not be shackled to the black ball and chain of writing. To not feel the weight of Self, like someone in concrete waders standing on my chest. To not be married.

  ‘Have you any history of depression, Mr Easy?’ asked Dr Amir as I dithered with my ballpoint. A sententious expression appeared on her face. She looked candidly through me, right back to the cot I bawled in, aged one, when I was still unaware that, as bad as this being-a-hungry-baby caper is, there’s worse, much worse, much more to bawl about coming later.

  ‘I’ve been as depressed as the next man, I suppose,’ I lied, with refreshing simplicity.

  And as the sentence left my desert-dry lips I felt two awful and conflicting things at once. The first was a galactic sense of enfolding warmth, like a heroin-surge; a blanket of childhood safety engulfing the nerves and bloodstream. Merely the interest from another human being, a stranger, an unconditional hand of heated care reaching out from the squalid sea of indifferent inscrutable faces one encounters on any given day in London, was enough to lift my spirits. How long had it been? How long since anyone had shown any curiosity over my suffering, into what had fucked up this Grand Old Man of Misery? How many aeons had it been since anyone had taken a look at my black-box recorder to see what had gone wrong, what had malfunctioned? Nobody had. At least not for a long time. Not my mother, nor Rudi, nor Antonia and Nick, nor the rest of my sleazily ambitious acquaintances. Not my increasingly malicious wife. No, certainly not her.

  The second and simultaneous reaction went something like this: where to begin? Oh, where, where in the universe to begin? I know a lot of life-sentence depressives and, not to diminish their anguish—cold posterity will decide whether what they endured was worth the effort, was worth sticking it out to the bitter end for—nearly all of them have been through some form of counselling, of therapy. I never have. For the simple reason that I know what the root, the core, the cause of the malaise to be. The problem, unfortunately folks, is me. No traumas of hypnotism-induced total recall, no mornings spent baseball-batting chunky pillows in anger-catharsis classes, no costly hours dangling my feet from leather sofas and pouring out histories of incests and primal-woundings will ever resolve it, will ever clear the mess up, relieve the weight, the pure tonnage. Because I am the problem. The problem is me. In essence, my essence is to blame. That thing that crystallises hard into all you’ve got after the world ceases to be a horizon-wide playground of possibilities—one’s very quiddity—is the culprit. In the end, I have done all the damage.

  And this is not unusual. It’s just that most depressives haven’t reconciled themselves to the fact. They’re still looking outside themselves for a cause, as if the contingent world really had an effect on the Self. Human beings are pervious to things, to the great shit-storm of occurrence that awaits them after the soft bay of childhood, in different ways. For instance, one individual’s mother could die and leave him or her with nothing much more than a sweet absence, a sentimental vulnerability to any talk of mothers and their passing away. But nothing that would prevent them from leading a productive, coherent life. On the other hand, for another individual, it could spell a life sentence of bereavement; of perpetual howling after the loved-one; of feeling the raw hole of loss in just about everything they ever attempt, as they hurl themselves through one destructive personal relationship after another, like those iron wrecking balls they use to bring down tower blocks. This was the case with her, as it happened. With her, the woman I married.

  I filled in the form inaccurately and left. Dr Amir’s sapling-brown eyes would never understand. But the process of confession, of being probed in the very interior by such a simple sentence, had left me high; vulnerable as a peeled egg.

  I gained the street and stood in the cornea-slicing sunlight. And then they came, the hot tears, like a sneeze, like a sudden, churning faultline split in the soul. I moved off among the indifferent faces; the rib-cracking weight on my chest doubled, if not almost trebled.

  In case you’re wondering whether the train has moved or not, it hasn’t. Tracksuit Man is still sitting in his Santa hat, bellicose with booze. A third game of dominoes has just commenced before me. The tensed carriage is still putrid with the stink of pasties, whisky-breaths, wet cattle, hot leather, sweaty fabrics, migrainey perfumes and burps.

  Think I’ll take a look outside.

  Stationary, abandoned luggage-buggies crouch forlornly on the concourse. A smattering of leather-smocked desperadoes and tubercular grans are sucking whey-faced at last-minute cigarettes (how I long to join them!). A porter with his porter-hands clasped trimly behind his back like a beat-copper perambulates unsteadily, close to the crouched carriages, disguising his six lunchtime shots with a practised ease. Further off, where no people go, a ragged T-shirt caught in a bulging wire-mesh fence flaps madly on the whippet-quick wind. No blessing in that ungentle breeze.

  Getting dark out there.

  The blood-crimson ribbons of cloud seem to have been cowed, demoted somehow to the bottom of the sky’s three-tier colour hierarchy. Red, hospital-white, then boiling storm-blue; like a judgement hand unclosing over sewery, dogshitty London. A quick look around. Everyone seems glad to be getting out. Brightly relieved to be heading off, departing, travelling from station to station. Released from the cage of work or school, or penurious debasement, they all appear lighter than perhaps they would if one encountered them in the street or job uniform; as if they’d all been given an extra lung or a transfusion of new blood. See them smiling: exalted and helium-light. Getting out of the smoke. The dirty old town. Leaving Old Father Thames to receive its Christmas suicides, unobserved by the writhing directional hordes that batter its bridges by day.

  Rattle-tattle-spattle.

  The rain has picked up from nowhere, announcing itself like a spew of gravel against my smeary window. An hysterical rivulet of water in the corner of the frame, like a mad artery, pulsates and quivers—endlessly replenished. It must be time to go. I need to go. Every stasis-yellowed nerve in my body yearns for movement, extradition. I’ve never wanted anything more in my life. To convert the present quickly and painlessly into the past. To slide away amnesic, the chromium rails diminishing to nothing behind.

  Go, go, go. Please—let’s get out of here.

  I suppose I sh
ould tell you more about her. No. She can wait. She made me wait enough, over the three tarnished, nightmare-vivid years of our marriage. I must have clocked up a thousand man-hours in attendance for her. Not just the usual bum-numbing sojourn outside the women’s changing rooms in the alarmingly populous department store. Not just the nervy, tenterhooks evening by the phone wondering whether to ring around the hospitals and enquire about recent traffic accidents. Not just the pregnant millennium it always took her to decide on tea as opposed to coffee in the greasy spoon before quickly reversing her decision. But the season, the lifetime, the fourth dimension spent waiting for her to change. To reach her emotional first birthday. To grow out of her scarily psychotic temper tantrums. To stop taking everyone she encountered up and down in her emotional elevator. To cease being a habitual liar and truth-strangler. To take her first faltering, nappy-free steps on the road to having any insight into anything at all, anywhere. To stop being what psychologists amusingly call an ‘adult baby’. To learn how to behave.

  There. I’ve already started telling you about her. She’s burst through what I originally intended to report and established herself centre stage, grossly unavoidable—forcing everyone, through sheer might of personality, to be somehow contingent upon her. She’s here now—not physically with me, of course, on this train of pain, but with me nonetheless. And even that’s in character: affrontingly omnipresent, she always got her own way. And she never did change.

  Which all makes it sound like I hate her. That I despise and reject every wretched facet of her five-note emotional range. And I do. If I heard on whatever grimly whispered grapevine that my estranged wife had been murdered I would turn myself in at the nearest police station, convinced I was guilty on grounds of mere thought-transference. That she’d perished telekinetically, as it were. But all this doesn’t explain why, on a daily basis, for the past three months, as regular as the milkman, I have been poleaxed, soul-hindered, by the most innocuous of phenomena. A vintage VW outside the post office near my Kentish Town flat can cause untold internal disturbance. A tall jar of pimento olives in the supermarket as I make my grisly bachelor rounds is a morning-sabotaging obstacle. A cause of shrill physical pain and panic, like the moment of childhood drama when you realise you’ve let slip your mother’s hand in a crowd. The wife introduced me to olives. By the end of our three-year tenure I was an olive gourmet; an expert on shape, size, contour and colour in the multifarious universe of the olive. I was an honorary Spaniard, or, at the very least, an honorary Greek, since it was at the orange-tumbling all-night Cypriot grocers that we embarked on our odyssey of olives. I’m certain that their bitter, briny, delectable tang will eternally conjure the potent myths of her cooking; her mother-learnt spice-knowledge, pulse-knowledge, olive-knowledge. I am convinced that, at eighty, the insatiable saltiness of an olive (mostly green, sometimes black) will rein me back to our three varnished, vanished dream-vivid years of marriage; with all chronology lost—every day at once in photographic detail.