Byron Easy

by Jude Cook

  Later, I would add sanity

  I should say something here about girls whom everyone wants, girls who are an index of male desire, of the metropolitan erection. Not the sheer-silk sirens of Berkeley Square (too costly) or the bosomy, broad-bummed secretaries that buckle whole offices while bending over the photocopier (too easily identifiable in the porn-hoard of most men’s sock drawers) but the unknown quantities, the streamlined brunettes in Avengers’ boots one sees queueing for clubs, usually with two male companions. The shadowy epicentres of temptation one catches lighting up murky parties with a flashbulb of heartbreakingly sexy teeth. The glowing Amazons one suicidally notes on the tube-seat opposite, off to liaisons with men far richer, funnier and taller than you’ll ever be. Those girls. West End girls. Girls fully occupied with their own fantastic desirability under the big, randy Saturday night of their early twenties.

  Mandy was one of those girls: brisk, knowing, and just scratching the surface, just beginning to digest how much power her looks could exert over the helpless male world. The democratising effect of her looks was a great leveller. It precipitated wood in every male from seventeen to seventy. She had a face that held many hours of love and admiration from total strangers. Sometimes, one observes a man’s face (the scowling rough-sleeper, for example) and concludes the only person who ever loved him was, in all reality, his mother. And that love was proffered in the distant past, before his three consecutive prison terms and a prostration before hard spirits. In the same way one looks at the faces of plain girls and is forced to surmise that nobody has ever fantasised over them; one notices the tremendous absence of sexual investment. But not Mandy. She was, at that time, literally everyone’s. The male gaze, for Mandy, acted like an expensive moisturiser: nourishing, empowering. Ah, the difference between women … And doesn’t the beauty know it; know exactly what she’s got. And doesn’t the size-sixteen on her exercise bike with her square, ruddy knees know exactly what she lacks.

  I remember during our last holiday together, a week in Cephalonia punctuated by terrible arguments in the hot cell of the hotel room, noting something about Mandy that had always been innate. She shared, with supermodels and the big cats, a certain physical nobility; a grace or astuteness of movement. To the hotel owner’s swarthy teenage son this merely resulted in his glueing his eyes to her arse for a week, or practising showy dives whenever we were in the vicinity. But I, fool that I was, had to locate the centre of her erotic fascination mentally. I was compelled to intellectualise her lines, almost from afar, as if she were an exhibit. Paradoxically, I noticed this phenomenon most acutely when she was covered up. When she wrapped the startling orange sarong around her hips, with an intent concentration on the knot. When she swayed along the holiday street in an ankle-length denim coat, the greedy eyes from the gift-shops guzzling her down. Or when her devilish black hair swung like dual pendulums over her high and happy breasts. It wasn’t just the cliché that concealment is more exciting than exposure. It was more to do with ownership. As her husband, I was supposed to own, or have exclusive access to, all this. This is what got me going: the impossibility of possessing something one should already possess. On our final evening, by the pool with the teenager doing furious lengths of front crawl, with the parsley smell of shish kebabs in the air, I remember telling her she was, ‘at the height of her beauty’. And for once it wasn’t a phrase I’d acquisitioned from film or literature. She really was a glowing Venus to my timeserving Vulcan. It might have been the last sincere sentiment I expressed to her, there on that barbecued veranda, as every filament of her ebony hair absorbed the ambers of the tragic, setting, ocean-bound sun.

  On that June morning (the morning after the night before with Mandy), I returned home to my scarred, shrouded bedsit in time to see the gleeful postman deposit another polar-white, windowed sheath from the bank onto my doormat. I ripped it open with ochre fingers—fingers that smelt of Mandy’s scent, Mandy’s hair, Mandy’s bedsheets. My rent cheque had bounced yet again (what do they put in chequebooks these days? Rubber balls? Old lilos? Bouncy castles?). This unforgivable act, I understood, would set me back twenty-five pounds plus five pounds for ‘letter advice’. In more understandable language, I was paying for their gluttonous pleasure in telling me the obvious. ‘Oh, you tossers!’ I allowed the words to echo in the junk-mail graveyard of the sooty vestibule, then let myself in.

  Now, this room—this Camden crash-pad I was barely hanging on to when I met Mental Mandy—well, I wish you could’ve seen it. For many long and sexually arduous winters I convinced myself that it was pretty good, all told. Convinced myself that I was lucky to have a roof, even a leaky one, over my head. I mean, compared with where I am now (Rudi’s bare matchbox; the two croupiers; the classical musician I never see), it was a sumptuous pied-à-terre, a tyrant’s winter palace, a ranch at the very least. Forgetting for a moment the bread-mould rash of rising damp that greeted you on first inspection, the relationship-ending chairbacks of tattered drying underpants, the mounds of termite-sawdust under the ransacked furniture, the smell of sewerage and the rat problem, I always thought the joint was pretty ritzy myself. Others, especially women, as time went by, seemed to differ in this opinion. To the extent that, when I met Mandy, I was only bringing back girls who were, if not actually blind, then at least partially sighted, very fat or very desperate. ‘I’ve had worse in the past,’ I always lied to them. Or, ‘Beats a cardboard box and a can of Kestrel.’ For some reason this never proved very persuasive, as they myopically gathered their belongings the following morning in front of the guttering gas fire, muttering phrases like, ‘Place should be condemned’, ‘Fucking hypothermia’ or ‘Writer’.

  I had first rented the flat five years ago from a compact little queen called Keenan Peach. ‘Keeney’ was a fleshy-faced man in his mid-thirties with a permanent suntan. He used to wear the kind of waistcoats that even a vaudevillian would reject as a little outré. With his magpie eyes that alighted on the most personal possessions during his infrequent visits, Keeney would still be ‘there’ an hour after departure, his cologne being of a grandiose, almost radioactive virulence. I would come to dread his whiny, workaday, cat’s arse of a voice on the phone uttering opening shots such as: ‘Byron—rent,’ or ‘Ah, you’re in!’ I waited in vain for the inevitable, backwardly-put cruise of ‘If you can’t pay me, Mr Easy, there are always other ways of …’ But it never came. Jesus, was I that ugly? That short? That bald? He must have had some kind of lover, some form of granite-abdomened Sex Führer, or lust-bandit boyfriend to resist penniless, button-arsed me almost winking and panting at him when he came over to collect his wad (which I never had). I would have done it for poetry, for England … I like to think he just preferred the money.

  The place was in pretty good shape when Keenan first dropped the perfumed keys into my liar’s fist. Neglect and seasons spent penning ineptly metred sonnets on semeny bedspreads had left the corners full of forgotten things. It was I who had invited the rats and the termites over, if the truth be told. It turned out he was subletting the place, anyhow, which obstructed all forms of maintenance even further. When the immersion heater gave its yearly last-throttled-gasp it was Keenan, sitting behind the till of his Bond Street boutique, whom I had to phone, not a landlord who might possess something useful like a new boiler. Nothing ever got done. The curtain rail dropped terminally from the wall (the puckered plaster too far gone for drilling), forcing me to black-out the windows with newspaper. Tiles avalanched from around the bath, revealing soily brick-dust, giving you the impression that you were taking a soak in a trench or some kind of dugout. The toilet seat came away in your hand. Rotted carpet sprang from the skirting boards like an unrolled poster that wants to regain its initial centrifuge. Stains widened like North Sea oil disasters until a flood two years in replaced the distressed beige with black carpet tiles. It was a mess. A dump. The glaucomatous women were right: I had let it go to seed.

  So, that morning—which would lead to
love, marriage, separation and eventually you reading about it—found me in the kitchen. I snapped on the electric kettle and tossed a tea bag into a tomb-brown mug. I pondered, as I often did and do, the existence of the man who lives to create art instead of answering life’s relentless imperative to earn cold hard cash on a daily basis. Art versus commerce, that old saw. The more time you spent on one, the more it seemed to dilute the time required for the other. My inability to earn proper money—to support myself—had made me feel emasculated, ridiculous, useless. Or maybe it was the world, with its money mania, that had made me feel ridiculous, useless; an idiot. It felt as if I had spent seven years in London making little headway in either endeavour: a minimum-wage job in a music shop (‘seasonal’, as Martin’s ad had emphasised) and, apart from the solitary pamphlet, not so much as a couplet published in a greetings card. Why couldn’t I make poetry pay? Well, all further attempts at getting into print had failed. After the initial giddy rush provided by my good reviews, I found the usual-suspect magazines strangely obdurate in taking on any more of my work. Even a rinky-dink Mickey Mouse operation called Verbose, specialising in the syllabic verse of Ipswich écrivailleurs, refused to run so much as a squib, let alone a sestina. Listening to the kettle boil, I recalled the evening when—frustrated with the grand peut-être that is the immortality of the soul, feeling masochistic—I collated together all the straining sonnets and verbless terza rimas I had slaved over for what seemed like a decade and folded them lovingly (with full footnotes, preface and critical apparatus) into a Jiffy bag; kissing its gummy hinge for luck, which hurt my lips. This I deposited in the main post office on Camden High Street, after spending my last pennies on stamps. I then sat back and awaited my bays by return of post … But even Verbose sent me their standard rejection letter. Not only did poetry not pay, it seemed, but it cost you an arm and a leg (and a soul) to write it. And yes, they really did italicise those last three letters.

  I glanced around me. In my kitchen I had suffered extreme cold, and the kind of sexual, emotional, intellectual and spiritual privations that Solzhenitsyn could have romanticised if he were writing about Camden and not the Gulag. I surveyed the square of Formica where I had prepared meals whose hideous collision of tastes made me clean my teeth immediately afterwards. Potatoes smeared with an onion. Pace mixed with a single stale fishcake. Porridge and soy sauce. I took a peek inside the impoverished fridge which held, hilariously, a single egg. I reconnoitred the murderous corners of the flat for anything I could sell in order to afford breakfast. Did anyone else live like this? I thought. Did anyone else remember whole years as the one they once ate at McDonald’s? Okay, I could’ve been born in Ethiopia, or on a dollar a day in a rancid Indonesian sweatshop, holding my urine for seventeen hours at a stretch, but this was Camden, the 1990s, for God’s sake! Not much at that time made me laugh out loud, but the translated title of a Japanese film, glimpsed in a listings magazine, had been the most recent cause of this phenomenon: Life Is Cheap but Toilet Roll Is Expensive. Says it all, really. Says all you need to know about the degraded, pauperised, eked-out, tuppence-hoarding nuclear winter of the terminally skint. The grisly hand-to-hand combat of it. The title encompassed the boredom of it too. I mean, you don’t really want to hear about this, O cool and media-literate reader, do you? Surely you’d rather immerse yourself in the priapic gallivantings of some public schoolboy methadone-fixer on his first trip to New York? Or the labyrinthine tale of erudite Hampstead wife-swappers? Or a snappy hit of sex and smoking credit cards? Or even the sober saga of eight generations of frugal, hardworking Black Country folk? Anything, really (I know I would). But the story of a man who moans about the price of toilet roll? How diseasedly banal.

  Ah, how wretched and all-too-believable is the tiring rhetoric of the bottom-line broke merchant. How void are the days of the grindingly boracic, as enervating to observe as the film that would be produced by pointing a camera at a brick wall for a month. Nothing goes on, really. Life’s opportunities, its love affairs, its fast-forward button, are always cruelly out of reach. On a Friday night I would watch the sleek movers and groovers on the corner of Delancey Street and feel as if I were living in some kind of penniless parallel universe. Where did they get their dough? Did they inherit it, steal it, earn it? Or a bit of all three? Their bronzed confidence, their sense of entitlement, was at once revolting and spellbinding. Every fortnight, like Lazarus at the house of Dives, I would pass the mansion of a well-known media magnate which was unhappily situated on the route to the dole office. Often I would spend so long searching his bins that I’d miss signing on. Scarcity was the keyword. It’s a condition one notices only in the absence of its opposite: plenty or enough. Most of my contemporaries from Hamford were either making sackloads of cash as builders or plumbers, or installed in the spacious accommodation of the successful graduate, their lives stimulated and rich. Even Rudi, that tax-free tool, had his business.

  And then there was the inertia to deal with. The days of leaving the house only to score ten Benson and nick a bottle of milk from a doorstep. And then the moral dilemma: the self-imposed cage of the starving man who lives within the law; the straightjacket of the man who doesn’t feel entitled to don the balaclava and do a few sub-post offices when the money runs out. The curse of the man who doesn’t dare explode a whole dole cheque on a weekend’s bender, thus losing his gaff and ending his days gargling and trembling under the Waterloo Bull Ring. This would describe me, who dutifully husbanded his meagre resources for years, always deferring the present to some imagined future of God knows what. I knew then that money really was ‘the purchaser of life’. I should’ve busted out. Grabbed the rope and swung away. I’d been too good, too steadfast, too easy, all along. A pushover for the poverty gods. Only the privately moneyed or the very villainous, I reflected, could be chance-takers, could live in any way recklessly. Ah, flat treason ’gainst the kingly state of youth!

  I threw the tea bag back in the jar. There was, after all, no fucking milk. And no money with which to buy any I went for a little lie down. Even though it was barely midday, I found myself anticipating another friendless, foodless, fagless Saturday night in … Then I thought about Bea, and felt a bilious twinge of guilt. Through the haze of my queasy grief I thought about how good she had been to me. Not in a financial sense, oh no. Not even in a giving, loving, emotionally opulent sense either. No, the way in which Bea had been good to me, had been heedlessly altruistic, was by being sane. And by being female at the same time. Over the years I hadn’t been able to pull that combination off, or find the two phenomena co-extant, if you see what I mean. And something told me—experience, intuition, radar, call it what you will—that Mandy was seriously unsane, imbalanced, needy; critically brittle.

  I had bumped into Bea at Rudi’s birthday party six months back and had spent the entire evening gripped by the possibility that the black electrical sheen of her thighs belonged to stockings, not tights. I say bumped into, because I had known Bea before, in another life, in Hamford; though from a great distance. Rudi had kept in contact with her, but then he always did with friends, especially if they were female. In fact, it would be true to say that Bea had been the great unrequited love of my life, if people still talk about unrequited love. What they refer to, I suppose, is a love felt so intensely that the suffering becomes heroic; with the grim side effect that the sufferer becomes sickly fascinating to himself.

  O Beatrice! Provider of agony! Burgundy rose of my fevered youth! I was fourteen when I first glimpsed her plum-coloured eyes flickering abstractedly under glossy lashes; her holiday-brown forearms disappearing into mysteriously deep pockets. Had I been Petrarch, I could have panegyrised her as my Laura. Every day I would be treated to the same banquet. She would be swaying home from school, leather satchel trailing among the surreal purples of the violets. I would be sweating with Lucozade-sticky hands, accidentally present at every street corner she might happen to pass—you know, the usual. It was one of those summers whe
re the July skies turn all the road surfaces white in the mid-afternoon—an eternal summer in the memory, and she was all love, all beauty. She must have been thirteen: awkward, pole-shouldered, chestnut-haired and with that air of vague abstractedness that drives the male of the species crazy. Girlish dimples would appear on her clear face when she was amused; lips twitching outwardly in nervous anticipation of wryness or teenage irony. Often her attention would be everywhere at once—a devastating smile shared ecumenically among her schoolfriends—yet focused inwardly somehow; involved in her own mysterious interior. Impenetrable, self-contained, yet vulnerable. It is a quality that invites a man to take care of a woman; to assume the role of patriarch, provider, protector, life-giver. By the time I roused the courage to approach her she was leaving Hamford for university (Yes, five years later! Five years of suffering felt so intensely it becomes heroic! Five years of a form of meta-procrastination; five years of addictive stasis). Of course, it wasn’t to be. I remember the fateful phone call. Forget the sorrows of Young Werther, this was more like the suicide of a young wanker. I stood in the secluded, pissy phone box for half an hour, praying to the courage gods. Then with a berserk alacrity I snatched up the receiver and dialled. Her mother answered in a sweetly tinctured, cultivated voice, telling me her daughter had already taken the coach for her first term, and who was I exactly? Then a male voice. Her father (whom I knew to be an irascible chartered surveyor, as I had followed him to work one morning on my bike) was suddenly on the line. He told me the police knew where I lived. Then the receiver went dead. It was too late. I no longer felt sickly fascinating to myself, merely physically sick.