by Jude Cook
So when Rudi tapped me on the shoulder at his party (Hawaiian shirt rent to the navel, cocktail-stick cheroot proceeding from his grin) and motioned his head towards the quiet chestnut-haired girl in the corner, I knew life had offered me one of its rare second chances. Despite a momentary twinge about my male-pattern baldness (reversed by recalling that I was receding at fifteen), I strode purposefully over to Bea and her group of friends.
‘Hi, you probably don’t remember …’
She turned. All love, all beauty.
‘Of course. You phoned me after I’d left.’
The same calm interiority. The same plum-coloured eyes, though womanly now, sexually aware. Her adolescent hips had broadened to produce an arousing female enclosure; her moley bust, heavy and compressed, caused me untold upheaval. Her accent betrayed impeccable middle-class manners—a childhood of ponies, holidays in the Auvergne, Weetabix and Jackanory. Then it struck me that this was the first time she had addressed me directly. She smiled that collusive smile I had seen her use so many times with her schoolfriends. ‘I’m sorry about my father. He thought I needed protecting.’ Oh, but you do! It was also apparent that adulthood had exacted a toll on her insouciance, had instilled in her a need to explain. I noticed she had the expected raft of feminine insecurities and anxieties about her attractiveness. She also seemed nervous, intent to make a good impression. This was unexpectedly flattering. As she swished her hair from her eyes I thought I could detect a faint odour of rose water: unostentatious, subtle, grown-up, sane. She said, ‘So how are you?’
‘Oh, you know—well you probably don’t—going bald. Trying to write. One thing seems to go with the other.’
‘A writer!’ said Bea, her sudden animation holding both surprise and delight. ‘I always thought you’d end up doing something like that. I used to see you riding around on your bike, looking mysterious.’
‘That’s because I was always lost.’
‘Oh, no!’
It’s hard to convey how the way her voice abruptly rose to a pinched, concerned squeak on the word ‘no’ almost caused my legs to buckle, once and for all, underneath me. I tried for a moment to concentrate my gaze on her kneecaps (stockinged? Please, no!). I was undermined, unstable. An instinct told me I should admit to having been suddenly taken ill and leave the conversation at once. She didn’t really believe I had been lost any more than I did, but she had a strong impulse to express concern. This is a rare quality in anyone. She had an altruism that was proffered naturally, almost with greedy interest. And towards me, her virtual stalker for five years. She swished her hair again, her one vain affectation, and touched my arm with two fingertips. I felt a static charge. A textbook couldn’t improve on this, I thought. Make her laugh, for God’s sake, and you may not have to die alone in an old people’s home after all.
I said, ‘No, actually I was following you.’
She laughed. Now, that wouldn’t embarrass me in a restaurant. Feel free to use that laugh any time you want.
‘Yeah, my friends all thought the same thing. So, where did you study?’
I felt a cold constriction at the back of my neck.
‘Oh, that didn’t plan out as panned. I mean …’
‘The University of Life, then.’ We both winced at this expression. Except I alone felt the jeer of class as a wounding caveat. ‘You know, Rudi dragged me here and I don’t know anyone. Maybe you can show me around London some time.’ Her eyes found mine; slowly, shyly. She needed help.
In the surroundings of Rudi s party, with glammed-up groovers and unsmiling Turkish hardmen fondling their untouched drinks, Bea looked positively ordinary, homely even. She seemed relieved to talk to me. It turned out the characters I thought were her friends were Rudi’s cleaning lady and husband. She was on her own, newly single, still awkward and abstracted after all these years, and strangely brave to be there somehow. Standing next to her was, for me, like standing next to deep water. Cool, unfathomable, frightening, delicious. I scribbled her phone number down on my hand (the hand that, so many times, had lovingly—no, you don’t want to know) and agreed to meet her the following week. As the front door banged in the small hours, spewing revellers onto the frosty street, Rudi approached me with a smirk and put a hot hairy arm around my shoulder. ‘You okay, spunker?’
I stared at the Bea-shaped space she had just vacated, then said slowly, pseudo-profoundly, ‘Now is my bliss made manifest.’
Rudi raised an eyebrow, a practised tic. He’d given up asking who I was quoting.
‘Looks different now, eh? And she was the lassie you spent your teenage years greetin’ over! She’s no all that. What you’d call a handsome woman.’
I couldn’t reply for a moment. I was still drowning in the deep water.
‘Rudi, do I look bald to you?’
‘Aye. As a tatty.’
But this cannot have significantly deterred her. One carefully orchestrated week later and she was in the lair of my freezing bedsit, begging me to allow her to sleep with her pop-socks on due to a very real danger of frostbite. And then … and then the next morning, snow delicately tornadoing outside, the Busy Old Fool a pale aperture in the sky, the novelty of a new body warming mine and none of the poised, gently demanding enquiries: So, are we an item, then? What shall we name our three children and Gloucestershire cottage? All she asked, in a quiet, level voice, was: ‘I’m not too moley, am I?’ ‘No, your moles are Godlike,’ I replied. ‘If God had moles, they would resemble yours.’ She didn’t seem to care that I had no money, no clothes, no perceivable friends or future. She was merely interested (lunatic that she was) in me. She was at the opposite end of the Richter scale to the castrating harridans, the triple-breakdown survivors, the hurricanes of female scorn I had thus far attracted my entire life.
Within another week I was crazy about her. More so, if that’s possible, than when I was fourteen. But, true to the Bea I had once swooned over from a distance, she kept something in reserve. She was laissez-faire to the point of polite detachment. It was her nature. But also, I think, she had been hurt before (how I longed to repair that hurt!). Nevertheless, there was something obdurate, interior about her. Deep water moves slowly, it takes its time. Calm down. But that’s always the dynamic, isn’t it? The more neutral and reserved one party is, the more fervent and obsessed (despite themselves) the other becomes. It’s an impregnable law, a facet of Nature’s spirit-level. My notebooks became crammed with imaginary conversations with her, rhetoric on who her favourite poet was, absolute conviction that they were stockings and not tights. I commenced an ambitious sonnet sequence: Astrobyron and Bea. To die in her arms under the Camden moon would have been heaven indeed. I attempted to play it cool in her company, but privately her pedestal stretched eight miles high—a dangerous altitude, I know.
The strong, sweet poison of her diamondy complexion and classically auburn hair would be at work in my belly for days after each meeting. Her plum-coloured eyes a banquet that lasted a week. The sense-memory of her indolent creamy thighs, wonderfully broad enclosing hips and geometrically beautiful chin would be imprinted in the fingertips. But, above all, she became associated in my mind with London. The London (I’m ashamed to say) that reads like a Time Out lonely-hearts ad: cinema, walks, theatre, restaurants, galleries … The London from which I’d been ostracised during seven years of living there. The London where the cultured and the moneyed cherry-pick their leisure options from a seemingly never-ending vista of riches. Not that we experienced all of these things in our time together, you understand. I had just survived another Christmas on ten quid and a tin of baked beans. But the crucial thing is that we tried, we did things, like lovers are supposed to do. Meeting on a work-exodus Friday night or scintillatingly frosty Saturday, I would actually take her out. We saw many subtitled films. The day we visited the Whispering Gallery of St Paul’s was, I knew, the closest I’d ever get to heaven. So I may have had to pay for a few meals with a smashed piggy-bank of tuppences and chose only th
e exhibitions that admitted us free, but the objective was always the same: to step out, to get the most from London and our brief planetary time.
Often, before I ran into Bea, when reading those celebrity questionnaires in the sodden evening papers (listing a star’s cherished bistros, choice markets to rummage in, favourite shopping-spree routes, et cetera), I would be struck with the sure knowledge that, not only was I not living London to the max, but if I were called upon to answer those same questions I would surely be officially pronounced dead. I had to be. Only a dead man did less with his weekends. My column would wretchedly read something like: Favourite London Restaurant—my bedsit kitchen (or, when really pushing the boat out, Kebab Magic, Turnpike Lane). Favourite London Department Store—Meg’s Fags and Mags, Tottenham Lane. Favourite London View—my navel … But not after Bea. No, with her I really made the effort, even if it meant selling my record collection every time we hit the town.
Level-headed, sane Beatrice moved into a flat with three perpetually out-of-work male friends from university. I was pretty sure she wasn’t fucking any of them, but then that was the arrogant naivety of the twentysomething relationship-novice. In retrospect, she was probably fucking all of them, every night, comparing my performance unfavourably with theirs between little, sexy, submissive gasps of air. Their timber-floored Hampstead flat-share fairly reeked of art, of a greedy immersion in high culture. There were bookshelves of erudite criticism, Expressionist prints on the walls, scripts cracked open on stolen university armchairs, racks of fine wine, the Telegraph crossword done as a flat on a Saturday morning, and (the really impressive thing) real Sumatran filter coffee. All so refreshingly novel, so perturbingly other in comparison to the knicker-littered mantraps, cosmetics-obsessed bathrooms and citadels of cretinous women’s mags I was used to visiting. Bea would spend three days at a time in her thrillingly austere bedroom ignoring the phone, just thinking. In other words, my kind of girl. She’d had her summers of nannying, teaching English in the south of France, sailing with (I imagined) ruddy, big-cocked ex-public school boys and was now doing a master’s in something fiendishly obscure (genetic theory? differential particle physics? oh, the pain of being half-stupid!) about which I ruined my eyesight trying to mug up on.
But hush … these are the surface details. They don’t accurately relay or pinpoint the value of what we had in those months. Those few months we spent together before Mandy shoulder-barged into my life. Those languorous Sunday mornings in the wide, hard arena of her double bed; like children sleeping, her inky hair honouring the pillowcases. Or the deliquescent dawns that woke us with the usual epiphanies: the old insight that this warmth was as antithetical to the cold of the grave as you could get; or the certainty that lovers had lain like this since Donne’s time and long, long before, in search of affection from each other in the possible absence of a God’s unconditional love. And with those epiphanies, the usual confidences: the revelation of unbelievable sexual histories (aren’t all our love-histories beyond belief if we’re honest, if we speak them aloud?)—my quota of partners doubled, hers undoubtedly halved; though this still left her with enough casual liaisons to inspire a rabid, operational jealousy. They included encounters in France, the Himalayas, at university in Edinburgh and the tale of the Lothario she met in a laundrette with whom she ‘flirted like mad’ before taking him home to endure the most richly comic carnal experience of her life (the shared sherry; his jeans reluctantly dropped at the last moment; the microscopic penis).
It was those Sunday mornings that I remember and cherish the most. Although we had a lot of sex, I was never sure I was her sexual ‘type’. The spectre of the Alpha male seemed forever present in the boudoir (manly, but not moustachioed). There was always the male anxiety that I wasn’t tall, rich, dominant, confident, secure, male enough for her. Also, I was always too impatient for emotional demonstration. I didn’t have the diligence to swim to the bottom of that deep water.
These love snapshots are the only ones I choose to take with me to the desert island of the present. I cannot picture Mandy’s face without tears, resentment, nausea. (And we do choose. Even at the moment a caressing hand leaves us we are looking back on it from afar, thinking: I will remember this for ever.) At the time, these pockets of calm, these lacunae, brought with them the unshakeable conviction that, for Bea and me, floating on the lake of post-orgasmic satiety, time had stopped, and all around us the mad, acquisitive world was hurtling headlong in its revolutions—until we reluctantly stepped back on. These are the moments that will remain in the black-box recorder marked ‘Bea’.
So why was I jeopardising all this by spending the night with a known runaround, a glitzy, gold-digging self-promoter like Mandy? Simple: she had better legs. (Oh, and it turned out, sanely enough, that they were tights, not stockings.) If you were to distil down, to boil off all the concrete-sounding, persuasive nonsense men spout to explain away an infidelity (‘Our inner paths have diverged,’ ‘Our spiritual space is conflicting,’ ‘She never puts the special bay leaf in the boeuf bourguignon any more …’), you would arrive at the same answer. The new woman has better legs. Or better tits. Or a better arse. No, scratch that: Mandy didn’t have better legs than Bea, merely the newest legs, the latest legs; they were not actually empirically better. It’s a novelty thing, you see.
Bea and I had been rendezvousing every weekend for six months, and it was all getting a little predictable, a little inert. A sense of déjà vu hung over our late-night kitchen confessionals (post flickery US indie movie, or ascetically backdropped fringe production), surrounded by the verbal jousting of the three out-of-work gallants. It was all a little stale, a little out of puff. At least it felt that way then. With the hindsight of three years and one failed marriage I can put my hands to my faultlined face and howl into the November night about not-knowing-what-I-had, about throwing it all away, like the Base Indian, like Bob Dylan on Nashville Skyline. Also like a fool. I underestimated the quiet value of our time together. And then I squandered it for a psychotic bitch. I threw away all love, all beauty. That awful expression about being careful of dreams because they may well come true became the defining maxim of my life … But back then our relationship was beginning to feel like a stalled car: there are only so many times you can turn the ignition before you magnanimously admit defeat, hop out and go to the dealership for a new one. And yes, I would live to regret this glib analogy.
The problem was that with sanity comes stability, and with stability comes normality. Bea was no virago, termagant, lunatic. But at the time some self-destructive gene threw me in the path of such women. Of course, as with everything else that’s malfunctioned in my life, I blamed myself. It was my fault, I thought, for being so crazy about her, for allowing the current to flow in only one direction, for enforcing this obdurate emotional template, this dynamic on the relationship from day one. Obviously she would play it cool, exercise some reticence. For six months, apart from the occasional demonstrative display of emotion, Bea had remained resolutely neutral and restrained in the treacherous arena of commitment. After all, we hadn’t promised each other monogamy. We hadn’t even promised to exchange birthday cards. It was all implicit in the intense, precious, high-value feel of our nights together. In fact, we hadn’t even promised to phone each other after our last meeting. Surely if I, if Mandy and I, wanted to … Ah, the self-deluding crap that men feed themselves when thinking about fucking another woman.
I bolted up from the bed, tripping on the bolas of my trousers which were now around my febrile ankles (all those thoughts about Bea, her hard double bed, her indolent alabaster thighs, you understand). I crawled across the pungently minging black carpet-tiles and picked up the phone. I dialled Mandy’s number.
‘Mandy, it’s me. Byron.’
A pause, long enough for her to take Steve’s or Jake’s or John’s or whoever’s hand out of her knickers. Oh, the leprous jealousies of the newly ensnared!
Then her bright Spanish voice.
At least she remembered me without consulting her bible-sized Filofax.
‘I left my watch at yours.’
‘Yeah, and the rest. Why don’t you come round tonight to collect it?
‘Okay.’
Now, you may have been wondering why, if I met Mandy at my place of work (and work being the kind of activity that’s usually rewarded with hard cash, usually of the folding variety and usually monthly), why I never had any money. Well, you’d be right to be curious. Let me tell you the circumstances of a desolate state. I’ve been lying to you. Or rather, I’ve been less than generous with the truth. I did work, I did put in the hours, but only when Martin could afford to employ me. When I first phoned his shop, the kippered husk of Martin’s voice had repeated the ominous word seen in his job ad. The word was ‘seasonal’. When I asked him to expand, he told me that my employment would be ‘on and off’. I found out, over the years, that it would be mainly ‘off’. And sometimes, just to keep my foot in the door when Rock On was undergoing one of its periodic stretches of ‘asset sharing’ (Martin putting all his old guitars in the window out of desperation), I would work for free. That’s right, I did it for free. A mug’s game, you’d rightfully announce. Well, maybe. It’s no accident that one of my distant ancestors was given the name Easy. It must be in the genes, the gene-memory. He must have been one pushover, one crumbling tower block, if the end result was me. Because, allowing for the female side of the family’s dalliance with short, bald, spinally defective window cleaners, I am his DNA descendant, his cellular culmination.
The fact was, for a lot of the time, Martin paid me in fresh air. Well, I did get unlimited free studio time in the cramped eight-track facility in the converted toilets, but I was no musician, and messing around with reel-to-reels and old mixing desks begins to lose its attraction on a hollow stomach. For months at a time there was no cash transaction. I suffered—to use Disraeli’s splendid phrase—from extreme pecuniary embarrassment. My only other income was the Rock ’n’ Roll, or rather, its totally un rock ’n’ roll phoneme, the dole. Forty quid a week and half the scandalous rent paid. Forty fucking quid. Doesn’t go far. In fact it goes nowhere. The stripey-shirted graduate ghouls who fix these figures must have conducted their research during late 1950s Great Britain—when tea bags cost one and six and bread was a shilling a loaf. The Great Britain where the mail was delivered by whistling posties and no one stole your bike from outside the dole office using fence-cutters and a blow torch. How could they be so far-off-the-mark, so deliriously out of touch with the actual price of things nowadays? Like, not thirty years ago, guys, but nowadays. Not last April, but now, after the latest hefty inflationary hike on fags, spirits, pornography, volumes of poetry—all the things that made life tolerable at the time. And what was the net result of struggling through life on forty quid a week? Predictably, a life not worth living.