by Jude Cook
A vision in tartan flares, white brothel-creepers, bare Spanish midriff and ebony-everything-else was pointing to a knackered guitar amp, gripped almost manfully by a bony hand. And that face. Impossible not to be transfixed by that face. Thin, brown, mobile; full of immediate light and energy from her big eyes and triumphant nose. In first meetings, the face decides everything. It shouldn’t be like that, but it is.
‘I can’t, but Martin probably can,’ I said, drinking her in.
‘It’s only one of the knobs. It’s fallen inside.’
There was a brief pause that the soul registered as an hour, not the split-second it actually was. In that pause our eyes transmitted the vital, instantaneous information that indicates you will become involved. It is written in the fixed stars. Unavoidable. An a priori union. A fact waiting to become fact.
Finally, I found the power of speech.
‘You’d better sling it in the rehearsal room, then.’
It took five minutes of bluff and quackery to even get the back off, but, with her waiting patiently amid the stale fragrances of male sweat and spent testosterone, I managed to nurse her ageing amplifier into some semblance of signal-carrying utility.
‘You’re very brown,’ I ventured, after I’d finished; coiling leads like hangman’s ropes over my left arm. ‘Just been on holiday?’ The white and scarlet ruff of her knickers was showing over her waistband, and I tried helplessly not to focus on it as I spoke to her.
‘It’s my natural colour,’ she said, and turned the full force of her Medusa smile towards my pale, diminishing face. ‘I’m Spanish.’
There was something in her aura, her gait, that held great forcefulness—an assertive brightness that attracted and repelled at the same time. I would later learn that this mysterious anima held the key to why she never kept any friends. The strength of attraction inevitably led to an equal and opposite repulsion. As she stood there, waiting for the bill, or God knows what, I looked her up and down admiringly; and she, incredibly, did the same to me, a playful grin fixed on her thin, propulsive lips. Under the peacockery of her fresh-smelling clothes she was somehow unevenly proportioned—long-femured, but with fine angular bones in her upper torso; her buttercup breasts fixed high and happily on her ribcage. Very early twenties, I supposed. Spanish, she claims. Why didn’t I believe her? Very definitely Mediterranean; her eyes shoeshine brown. Yet there was something about her attitude to the whole package—her body, her projectile personality—that said she wasn’t in total possession of it, or found it a burden. An uneasy vibration.
She surveyed the tatty room, and I knew she was going to ask a question that gave her an excuse to make a return visit.
‘How much does this place go out for? The rehearsal?’
I was just about to answer when Martin craned his head around the door. Instead of uttering my name he looked at Mandy and said:
‘Mandy!’
‘Martin!’ yelled the girl, her nutritious voice at full throttle. ‘How’s it going? Byron’s been fiddling with his screwdriver for me.’
They embraced, and I saw then how tall she was at full stretch, Martin being about as dwarfish as I am. Of course, they knew each other. Martin knew every musician in north London. Most of them owed him money. I watched them there, the old rocker advanced enough in years to be her father, and thought how much Mandy comported herself like his elder, his mother, even. I also felt another immediate emotion: jealousy—so unexpected, so debilitating, like an infusion of icy mercury into the emotional bloodstream, that I almost lost my balance. I examined myself briefly for its cause. It was her fully engaged, hyperactive interaction with Martin, moments after extending the same treatment to me, that rankled. Some people just make you yearn to be their favourite. I later discovered that she dished this treatment out to everyone whom she didn’t consider a threat. She radiated a certain freedom, or at least equally conferred charm; right down to flirtations she didn’t intend.
Mandy and Martin noisily descended the uneven steps to the ground floor. I listened to the sound of the pinging till and their boisterous goodbyes.
And that was that.
That was the extent of it for a couple of weeks, until she returned to use the rehearsal room with Fellatrix, the all-girl Stooges-soundalike band with which she was captain, organiser and all-round glamorous mascot. In those two weeks I pumped Martin for every conceivable detail about her band, her life, her inevitable boyfriend. I lost count of the times I asked him to wipe the lascivious smirk off his face. He didn’t tell me much, as he knew I was altogether preoccupied with a girl I had been seeing since Christmas—fragrant, diffident, middle-class Bea, Mandy’s diametrical opposite. To Martin, his long-time customer was just mad, driven, Spanish Mandy with all the drooling suitors in the world. But to me she was suddenly an obsession; some kind of terrible erotic epicentre. I was in love, or lust, confusingly with someone I had exchanged ten sentences with.
Strange how the little details linger in the mind … Her flexed, femininely capable rod-thin upper arms. Her fresh-smelling clothes. Her caramel midriff. Her sheeny hair, reflective as a London black cab after rain. Her equivocal exuberance; actressy and assertive. The ring on her third finger: a plastic rhomboid of tacky sapphire, so different to the austere wedding band which would replace it. Or her teeth. Mandy’s immaculate teeth, lionised and loved—as I would soon find out—by half of north London simultaneously
The train is leaving the subterranean rush of the tunnel. The last of the red lights are flecking past as I observe my eyeless face in the black square of the window. The century is ending. The millennium is ending. Everywhere there is an atmosphere of temporality, of provisionality, of Nostradaman doom and silly superstitions over last things. My hangover and damaged forehead seem to have joyfully joined forces, having made some kind of pact to double my torment. My need for a cigarette suddenly appears to be life-threatening. I advance a finger around the frame—an aluminium rail, like a new bicycle wheel, set in a richly black tube of sealant. Mandy and Martin: friends for donkey’s years, or so it turned out.
First meetings, then. Always potent with the stock psychological truths: eighty per cent of communication is done by the body only twenty by conversation, or: never underestimate the sense of smell on a first encounter, or: attraction is largely pheromonal. All true, all true. But way off the mark when it comes to adumbrating the complete experience, the sensory cosmos available to us when meeting someone significant for the first time. Mandy had been too much that March morning—a telephone exchange of conflicting signals, enticements, vibrations. But there always is too much to take in on these occasions, too much for the time we’re usually allotted. One really is assimilating a whole being: eyes, body, soul, capacities—not just their cosmetic radiance. In fiction, these initial encounters are usually cack-handedly omen-heavy. The spilt glass of red wine will indicate that blood is to be shed; the clutch of lilies the heroine is arranging in the florist’s window points the way to her terminal illness; the squalling children in the playpark beyond that incipient bus stop tells us the couple’s family will be large and loquacious. But real life is never so tidily signposted. One rakes the past for signals, only to find confusion, arbitrariness. In fiction, everything is revealed in retrospect as latent; but in life there is no clear map of predestination. There are too many wild cards. You yourself are a factor in the equation too; its crucial determiner. You change the course of the other person’s life just as irrevocably as they change yours. Together you create a deadly dynamic. You are both the wild card. Character is destiny only up to a certain point. In truth, it is two people’s evolving lives that force the alchemy.
There is another crucial message that can be adduced from first meetings. It goes something like: enjoy this now, this spring-fresh fascination. This is as good as it will ever get. Because human beings have a tendency to go downhill from this point onwards.
It makes me feel no easier, no more placated, to digest all this informatio
n as the train hurtles towards maximum speed. The void of the tunnel is becoming a soot-blackened wall, racing at a kamikaze pace beyond my window. The knowledge that I will never see Mandy in the way I did on that day in March seems as strong as the knowledge of my own death—and just as terrifying, just as tiring.
I blow my nose into a serviette left by the last occupant of seat number forty-two. Hopefully the Accountant Couple haven’t noticed I’m crying. They both appear rapt by the pink Hiroshima of the sunset; airport blockbusters lowered in their grey hands.
We’re out onto higher ground now. The vomit-encrusted portals of Finsbury Park have been replaced by the vista of Tottenham’s vast gas works. Beyond this I can see the riding luxuriant barge of Alexandra Palace, its planes of Aegean glass kaleidoscopic in the failing light. There’s an old danger in the air, the danger of descending blackness and cold, of having to find shelter and food and primal warmth. The human animal hurrying to its cave, its burrow. Man, could I use some of that primal warmth now. From this vantage, the petering sprawl of north London can be assimilated in all its squalor. There are industrial plants and peopleless waterworks. Articulated lorry crates stacked like surreally huge bricks. Glimpsed streets of kebab houses and blackened boozers. Then the sudden strangeness of greenery: verdant geometric patches interspersed with estates of shivering semis, all framed by the sighing umbilical powerlines, with their tireless lifting and sagging. One-porter stations are flashing past in a blur of concertinaed posters, their chained bicycles packed like biscuits. The ear-plugging gust of another tunnel cancels any view for a couple of seconds, until I am looking in at the lit windows of a train passing the other way: a parallel world in reverse time. Then we’re out again into the sorry sprawl of the dwindling conurbations—sudden perspectives allowed then blocked; a white house uniquely isolated: glimpsed then gone, replaced by a zoetrope of willows or a flashing row of stripped poplars.
I take out my notebook. This has to be captured, caught—set down (and one day I will fashion it into a poem in the smithy of my bedsit): A deserted golf course. Half-built houses surrounded by stacked timber. The low sun in its dizzying death throes. Flatlands of arable earth, paths, spinneys, quarries, copses. Sinister hags of trees. Greenhouses. Flying clubs. Leisure parks. Lakes. A trackside stretch of gravel, arcade-game-fast, bisected by the even strokes of telegraph poles. Hacked waste ground. The glittering coin of a reservoir. A distant graveyard; headstones dense as dandruff. Squat cottages with conspiratorial outhouses. The reaching arms of alders under immense cloud formations—fingers and quays and spits, evolving and separating. A horse bending to graze, unicorn-white. Distant, argumentative weathers over parish spires. Darkness descending. Cul-de-sac streetlamps like gannets with their opposing amber beaks. Geese on a path, cherry-winged in the sunset. Rolling-stock on browning rails. Scrapyards of flex-coiled wooden barrels. Rising ropes of hedgerows split by the thread of a canal. A ditched Sierra growing grasses from exploded seats. Broken birches. Gulls over clogged fields of refuse sacks. A private pond bearing a puffed swan; a royal dinghy in the threatening twilight. A barren field, the blasphemous rooks peppering the ploughlines …
Hold it—running out of space. By chance I notice the date at the top of the page. December the twenty-second. Two days ago. But, more significantly, more potently, our wedding anniversary. I let the pen settle on the paper, aslant my almost illegible scribble. I sigh gravidly: a bellows exhausting its chamber of air. December the twenty-second—three days before Christmas; chosen so we would ‘never forget it’. Three years ago to the (almost) day. A date that also coincides with the year’s nadir: the shortest, darkest day. The winter solstice; the year’s true midnight—although I didn’t know that fact at the time. Maybe it would have helped to have known that.
Then I see that the bony-buttocked Accountant woman opposite is holding something out towards me. An offering. I catch her eyes: they are ameliorative, weakly brave. I feel sudden surprise at this gesture, this détente. After all, I’ve insulted her husband, almost started a fight (twice), and demolished a game of dominoes beyond repair. I am unsure of what the object is at first. I examine it closer. It’s white, folded, very clean—an envelope perhaps? Surely not a Christmas card! My heart swells with unexpected love for all humanity. Then I realise. It’s a Kleenex.
They say we’re strongly attracted to those most likely to destroy us. Maybe we fatally desire punishment, self-negation, nullity. I had met women like Mandy before. I had her down as a self-loather, an attention-seeker, an hysteric, a sympathy-junkie and expert manipulator right from the start. Just as the most gregarious, bubbly people are often deeply sad individuals on the interior, life-and-soul Mandy proved no exception to this rule in the final analysis. But what can you do when you’re treated to the illegal, strawberries-and-cream frillage of someone’s knickers riding helplessly from the band of their hotpants on a fortnightly basis? What can you do when your interior damage seems to correspond? What can you do when you get on like an oil rig on fire?
It is both comforting and frightening to remember somebody in this nascent fashion, when you’re still bringing out the best in each other. Like imagining the wasp-humming, orange-squash sunshine of the English countryside in September 1939, tranquilly ignorant of all that’s to come.
Of course it was good in the beginning. It always is good in the beginning. Since that first encounter in the dust-trap of the rehearsal room, intrepid Mandy returned on a weekly basis with Fellatrix—a tattoo parlour of nose rings and dungaree-housed bosoms, who, to a woman, couldn’t tune their instruments. For this task I was frequently summoned mid-song, only to be admired and cooed at satirically—and, in the case of Mandy, maybe not so satirically, as she soon extracted my phone number and was calling me at all hours from her dull switchboard job, extrapolating in unnecessary detail her insane escapades in the clubs of Camden. Along with these three a.m. adventures, I also learnt who was suing whom; which lead singer was tooling a female journalist just to get a live review, which executive was scamming a band’s tour budget to fund his heroin habit, et cetera, et cetera. Though I feigned a weary disinterest in these stories, I would become unbearably excited when she phoned, and could usually time her call to the nearest minute. It was her energy that overwhelmed me initially—plus her sure conviction that Fellatrix were destined for Wembley Stadium, even if it meant posing naked on vintage motorcycles for the News of the World. But we were friends first—light and easy friends, too, albeit with her investing all the energy. And this, it seems, is always fatal, as the transition into a love affair can so often feel like a capitulation on the part of the passive exponent.
I remember one call in particular. A rainy Friday night in reading Yeats, trying to write, when the phone rang. Now, how could I tell it was her just by the ring?
‘Hello sweetheart!’
‘Shouldn’t you be out clubbing or something?’
‘Can’t do that when it’s raining. That would mean a cabbage.’
‘A what?’
‘A cab! Anyway. I’ve got two friends round—we’re all pissed on voddy and feeling a little fruity.’
Giggles and shufflings in the background. I let old William Butler slip onto the desk of my bed, knowing I would be in for the long haul. I suddenly felt like a pipe-smoking father castigating his errant daughter. But also glad of the company; flattered by her attention.
‘Fruity? Isn’t that that how they describe opera singing?’
A peal of laughter and a sound not dissimilar to a cat being sat upon.
‘Listen, the real reason we can’t go out is because of Johnny Radish.’
‘Who’s Johnny Radish? And why does his surname sound like a root vegetable?
‘That’s his band, you nutter! Don’t you read the music press? He’s been after me for months. Last week he just pushed me up against the wall at Club Dynamite and snogged me. Oh, Byron, you have to rescue me.’
The sound of hysterical laughter in the background. This i
s why ‘Kubla Khan’ is only fifty-four lines long, I mused.
‘I’m not the rescuing type. I don’t do rescuing. Specially if the men involved are bigger than me.’
‘Oh, he’s huge!’
This time the laughter almost burst my eardrum. And so it went on. She was a life-force: demanding, infuriating, instigating, inspiring. She told me her band was going to be enormous the following year; that she’d put so much into it any other outcome was unthinkable. I’d never met anyone with such an unshakeable determination and energy. Such fire-proof self-belief. And she always looked stunning, turning up at the battered door of Rock On, shades balanced on her middle-parting, immaculate white mini-dress and a black-blue feather boa trailing behind, like a magpie in flight. At the end of each conversation she would call me her ‘special friend’, tell me to ‘wrap up warm’ and blow a kiss down the phone. Without getting too Oedipal, that kind of maternal affection has its appeal.
March gave way to April, which buckled to the seething uncertainties of blossom-blown May, which in turn opened out into a blistering June. Summer. And not just any summer. It never is when two people find themselves uncontrollably, unfathomably in love; in dangerous, lethal balance.
It was after an unconquerable day in early June (the shadows cast by trees in Finsbury Park seemingly as solid as the objects themselves) that she invited me back to hers for a little wine. ‘Hers’ was two uneven floors above a bakery in Archway, patrolled by the wary watchfulness of her tomcats, all three of which had red, white and blue Fellatrix badges dangling unsettlingly from their collars. I was sweating like a wrestler by the time the expedition of her stairs had been completed. A door on the top landing was knocked open for me by the Trojan horse of her guitar case and I found myself standing in a spacious room reeking of fresh paint.
‘Deluxe, ain’t it?’ said Mandy, kicking off her creepers.
‘Blimey. Is this … is this all yours?’