by Jude Cook
What actually happens is that you do without the things that render life liveable and make do with only those that are vital to its continuance. The latter being little things like food, heating, shelter from London’s merciless Januarys. And that’s no life at all. It’s subsistence. That’s right, all carbohydrate and no cream—life loses its taste, its pop. It becomes as blank and as bland as plain potatoes boiled in their skins (a current favourite chez Easy), as tepid as tap water, as inanely void as a lunar landscape. I had come to London to write, but instead found myself fading to grey year after year in a bedsit. A burden on the public purse to boot. Some people were just born to make money, I concluded. The world was groaning with money, and they attracted it magnetically, or else it just fell out of the ether into their hands. Others, of course, were born into it, like Antonia with her trust fund browning nicely like a fat Norfolk turkey in an oven. Others still, like me, were born to feel money’s keen edge, its scarcity, its alarming absence their whole lives.
I’d been working at Rock On for five years, barely turning a penny. Most of the time I felt as if I were living in an Eastern Bloc city during the mid-seventies. And then … enter Mandy, my fatal, my future wife; though I didn’t know it at the time. Well, if you were up the Rhine-sized shit-creek I was and someone was foolish enough to throw you the paddle of marriage, you’d go for it, wouldn’t you?
I actively hated where I had ended up. Of course, the pavements are teeming with people who are doing one thing but would rather be doing another: postmen who’d rather be waiters, waiters who’d rather be actors, actors who’d rather be directors. There’s a community chest of dissatisfaction out there. So I wasn’t alone in this. I was toiling every day in the shop and every night over a hot fountain pen wishing I was elsewhere. And then there was the inertia of the ‘off periods. My average day going something like: surface midday, make five cups of tea, smoke twenty-five cigarettes, get depressed, return to bed, get up again, try to write, fail, cycle to the shop for seven, work till midnight in the little recording room and return a thwarted, smoking wreck of despair in the small hours. Occasionally I would work through the night, setting my own syllabic verse to torrents of feedback guitar (this, after all, being my pay cheque) and then send the results off to the indifferent money-men and scalpers of the publishing business. I was twenty-seven. I was sacrificing living for creating art that nobody gave a fuck about. I could have built a paper armada, a Nelson’s Column, a life-size papier mâché model of the White House from my rejection letters. I too yearned to be somewhere else, someone else, released from the intolerable and tiring bind of hope. I was fucked. I was suicidal. I was having that vision again: every night on the point of surrender to sleep I would mentally picture the snub barrel of a handgun crisply blowing my head off. I was penniless, smokeless, hopeless. And I was contemplating cheating on my girlfriend.
For the two weeks after I returned to Mandy’s orange opera-house of a room to collect my watch I’d seen her every night. Not almost every night, or five times a week, but every night. Our evenings followed a thrilling routine: the gauntlet of her six rotting staircases (a meeting with Steve being an ever-present danger), four bottles of wine, talking till three a.m., tarot cards and a cistern of strong tea in the morning, followed by the hollow-bellied scuttle home along the effulgent Holloway Road. Happy, happy days of love! I had been roped in to write the lyrics to all of Fellatrix’s songs. Well, every big writer had a money-gig, I thought—even Shakespeare. They were long, alcoholic, unforgettable nights. O how these words, these … facts don’t do them justice. How can they when what’s under discussion is the novelty of another human being? When shared bills and chihuahua ownership are a lifetime away. When two are embarking on a monstrous odyssey of love, of hate, of torment.
With July came greater lassitude, greater frustration. It wasn’t uncommon to finish a languorous afternoon of songwriting at Mandy’s and follow it with an evening of headachy culture and gravy-thick red wine at Bea’s. I would step into the late sun, abandoning the bakery smells and her three cats for the fully leaved trees of Hampstead, the wind inflating their flapping, verdant forms like hot-air balloons. When I wasn’t actually at Mandy’s she would ring me in the shop. Sacked from the switchboard job, she would often be sunbathing on her roof. One afternoon in late July her voice came on the line with a terrible groan. Martin had just ejected one of our regular drunks who posed as virtuoso guitarists in order to enjoy human contact and the chance to play abominable riffs on out-of-tune guitars. Shocked, I said, ‘Mandy, what’s the matter? Where are you?’
‘In hospital.’
The unbearable heat—the hottest summer for a hundred years, according to reports—suddenly increased by a couple of centigrade. I said, ‘Don’t mess around, Mandy.’
‘I’m not. I’m in the Whittington Casualty. Remember that pain in my leg? Well it’s totally paralysed.’
Terrible thoughts ranged through my mind. A fracture she doesn’t remember? Or something worse? Deep Vein Thrombosis? The onset of MS or a rare blood disorder? I was surprised at how anxious I had immediately become. But then it’s hard not to care for someone who calls you every day. She told me she had been there for four hours just waiting to be seen. By this time Martin had returned to his vigil behind the counter and was giving me an enquiring look.
To Mandy, I said, ‘Just hang on there. I’m finished in half an hour.’
‘Can’t you come now?’
‘Well, Martin needs me to lock up.’
There was a pause and what sounded like strangled sobbing. I knew I had said the wrong thing. With Mandy, it was instant gratification or nothing.
‘That’s all right. I’ll get Johnny Radish to drive over.’
‘No, no, don’t do that.’
Then the waters of her great sorrow broke. A cataract of weeping, very pitiful, hot and close into the receiver.
‘Oh, why haven’t I got a mother?’ she moaned.
Not knowing what to say, I said idiotically: ‘You’ve still got your father.’ This only seemed to increase her anguish. Then she told me that she wasn’t going to speak to him for twenty years after the previous night’s conversation in which he had ridiculed her plans for the band.
‘I’ll come over right away. Just stay there.’
She suddenly brightened. ‘Well, I’m not going very far in a wheelchair am I? You know—I just want you to be my friend.’
‘I am your friend,’ I said, with as much appeal as I could force into my voice. Then I heard someone whispering in the background: modulated female tones and something being opened, like the cassette drawer on a Walkman. ‘Hold on, is someone there with you?’
‘Yeh. Antonia. How do you think I got here? Air ambulance? You’re still coming, aren’t you?’ Then, in a little girl’s voice: ‘I miss you.’
How could I refuse? When I reached the vomit-stinking concourse of Accident and Emergency, Mandy and Antonia seemed to be having the time of their lives; pushing each other around in the wheelchair with Fellatrix demos detonating out of a compact little blaster. I never did find the cause of Mandy’s mysterious paralysis. I knew then that she was attracted to something strong and weak in me. She needed the strength (the understanding, the support, the rescue), but wanted to control and dominate the weak part. Once Antonia had gone she told me many things under the awful fluorescent lights of the casualty department. How she had had a comprehensive nervous breakdown after her previous boyfriend and had spent the last three years in therapy. How her therapist had asked her to write a letter to her dead mother. How all of her relationships had been violent (I could see why. It always happens to girls like Mandy—men feel threatened by them, by their immense need to be the boss). She showed me the talismanic photo of her mother she always carried in her wallet—an older version of Mandy on a sun-scorched Mediterranean seafront; the tautness of the skin in her brown forearms intensely alive. I remember thinking, where does that flesh go? It seems so important, so im
possible to eradicate, so eternal. Finally, she put her head on my shoulder, like a little child wanting its father, and related the one and only dream she’d had of her mother after the funeral. In this, Ramona had appeared by her bedside, mute but smiling, only to disappear after tucking her up. Then Mandy said: ‘For a long time after that, I used to think my mother was watching over me. But, you know … she’s not.’ With her muffled, tearful face buried in my neck and shoulder, I pondered the spirit world. Was her dead mother watching us there? In the terrible dramatic arena of a casualty room? Was there a spirit-life, or was there just the blue-blank void of eternity? Where nothing contemplates nothingness. For ever.
Two weeks later, we were back in the casualty department of the Whittington hospital, but this time for a genuine injury. That morning I had awoken after incessant, exhausting dreams of ringing telephones, only to find that the phone had indeed been ringing all night. Mandy had staggered home at three in the morning to discover the front door of the bakery caved-in, her two grand-and-a-half Gibsons stolen. In her fury she put her hand through one of the big sash windows and had spent the night having the wound incompetently dressed by a drunken Steve and a terrified Matt. I went round at once. And there she was, in the broken doorway, wearing a pink-print mini-dress, her intoxicating Spanish smile, and a black gouge on her hand that would need fifteen stitches. The scar, white and jagged, would never leave her in all the time we were married.
Once again, we sat on the orange bucket seats, her head on my shoulder. She told me how she hated hospitals because they reminded her of having to visit the morgue after her mother’s crash. How Ramona had said only a month before, ‘If something happens to me, you will bring me flowers, won’t you darling?’, and the terrible guilt she felt for not visiting the grave in two years. After the suspicious, recalcitrant nurses had ejected us from the surgery cubicle, I said to her, ‘You need a lot of love. More love than three cats and one man can give you.’ To this she just smiled. She knew I was hooked, like a twitching fish on a line.
Certain songs have a Proustian effect on me, and, for that summer, it has to be Edwyn Collins’ ‘A Girl like You’. Apposite, I know. All I have to do is hear the dark voodoo of that subterranean minor chord and I get the works, like poor Swann, in an involuntary rush. One afternoon in particular—one deep July interlude of coruscating heat and rare indium—will always be conjured up by that tune, and probably will be for ever until its tape is erased by whatever gunshot, multiple pile-up or agonising illness brings me the end I so richly deserve. We were lounging on Mandy’s spacious futon, an exquisitely gentle breeze fingertipping our foreheads; the champagne breakfast over with (she treated me so well!); the conversation stalled for the moment; her mother’s photos watching us sadly from the mantelpiece. And I remember thinking: this is as good as it gets. Yes, this really is as good as it (this life, this plane of being) ever gets—hold on to it, carry it with you down every street you wind, like a precious desiccated flower, like Bergman’s precariously brimming bowl of milk. And I remember hoisting myself up at the teeming open window by the bed to contemplate the stripes of sun on the chaotic Holloway Road. The cars zipping home or away from home; the glory of light in the fully borne, fully complected trees. And I knew that the moment would be fixed, branded, tattooed on the retinas by the glare along the windowsills and in the branches—a second or two of high balance: the leaves so sympathetic to the sun, the sun so sympathetic to the leaves.
Given the amount of time I was spending at Mandy’s it’s a wonder I didn’t feel worse, or more guilty, than I did. It wasn’t that I was mumbling to Bea about where the apple-red smudge of a lovebite on the throat originated from, or why my trousers were on back-to-front for the third weekend in a row. In fact, no explanations seemed required of me. We had been seeing less and less of each other. I suppose the answer was simple: I was falling in love. I was becoming enmeshed in that fatal balance, that feted curiosity that two can feel for each other; that doomed parity that has to be seen through.
I remember the exact moment I did fall in love with her. It was late on another sybaritic afternoon in August when Mandy leapt from the sofa with a sexy, unselfconscious scream to answer the phone. She rejoined me on the limo-settee and proceeded to speak crackling Catalan down the receiver to her aunt Leo in Tarragona. That’s it, I thought. I’m smitten, I’m under. I watched her there: me blissfully ignorant of every syllable; her all red dust and ochre thighs, liquorice eyebrows and taxi-black hair, midday matadors and snapping castanets.
Once she put the phone down she became melancholy, as was often the case after talking to her relatives in Spain. I gathered that she had asked for a loan and had been turned down.
‘If only my mum hadn’t gone and died on me,’ said Mandy, yanking her hair into a tight knot at the crown and searching for an elastic band.
‘She didn’t mean to,’ I offered pathetically.
I watched her ransack her dressing table with a kind of helpless admiration. A white summer butterfly flitted in briefly through the open window, then left.
‘She’d help me out, I know it. Leocadia and Gran—they’re okay, they’re over there, in the sun. They’re just bitches.’
And then she started to cry. You got that sometimes with Mandy: a sense of dangerous scorn, of almost psychotic venom. As far as I could make out, she’d had all the help money could buy: a bereavement counsellor, a full-time therapist, doting boyfriends whom she gleefully gave the push one after another, a flash father with dodgy loot coming out of his ears, friends who’d do anything for her, a loyal auntie and grandmother in Tarragona. Yes, you sometimes caught the breath of that, her viridian life-force coming back the other way, alchemised into hate, her natural and pragmatic energy now a black gust of negativity; an ill wind that would blow nobody any good.
‘You’re like me,’ I said, getting up to help her locate the box of Kleenex I knew she was searching for. ‘You get low in the afternoons.’ I felt newly uxorious, attentive.
‘The time of day has hardly got anything to do with it,’ she said bitterly. Then she smiled, accepting my tentative arm around her still-shaking shoulders. ‘Anyway, you don’t seem like the type to get depressed.’
‘See, that’s where you’d be wrong. I’m not a bright guy.’
At this she laughed; a high, gazelle-quick cackle that seemed to come at me along the doorway-wide strokes of sunlight pouring through the open sashes. We looked at each other and without any warning started kissing. The first one. The one you will always remember. The one that will, at some point in the future, return with Francesca’s terrible words: ‘The bitterest woe of woes is to remember in our wretchedness the happiest times.’ Then we embraced, so close I could feel the crackle of roots as I ran my fingers from her crown down the divide of her middle parting and onto the alien surfaces of her forehead scar.
‘What’s so funny?’ I asked, wanting only a kiss for an answer.
But she didn’t kiss me. Instead she made a kind of proposition, or bribe, one that I would always recall in the black nights of the future, when I would measure what I’d got with what had originally been promised.
‘Why don’t you leave that Bea? Out of both of us, I’d love you better. Come on—stay with me and you’ll have … lots of fun, lots of sex.’
And as she fixed me with her fully engrossed, fully dilated Latin stare I knew I was done for.
‘It’s great to see a man able to cry,’ announces the Accountant Woman to her husband. ‘You know—openly.’
I am sitting on the hurtling, fevered train, staring at the pale faces opposite me. Until a moment ago I had been lost in that first kiss, that epidemic summer. And, obviously, weeping. Oh, I forgot to tell you. I made friends with them. The Accountant Couple, that is. Well, they say it’s often the people closest to you that you fail to notice. They’re not accountants after all. She is a counsellor, and he is a mortgage advisor. They had to be, didn’t they? Or something similar, something crushingly
plausible. Where have all the artists gone? The chisellers and ink-dippers? The mad-haired prodigies of poetry? Michelle and Robin: happily married since last July, apparently. First baby planned for next year. After she offered me that Kleenex we got chatting. Now she’s looking back and forth between me and the sceptical face of her husband. I feel he needs to speak; to save my embarrassment, my smashed dignity. He rakes a hand through the brilliantined sweep of his hair.
‘Well, you can’t get much more open than that,’ says Robin, restoring some masculine straightforwardness to the slightly Californian atmosphere that has gathered over the intimate space of our table.
Michelle squeezes his hand, and he returns the gesture. I wince at this touching display. Her emaciated face turns towards me. ‘Well, I think it’s sweet. And very brave.’
‘I’m all right now,’ I manage to moan with a smile; childish snot on my T-shirt.