by Jude Cook
‘At least she didn’t do the dirty on you,’ grins Robin, warming to his subject. ‘Now, my uncle—’
‘Don’t tell him about all that!’
‘No, go ahead. I need cheering up.’
Robin continues, a certain relish now present in his voice. ‘—my uncle, he got hitched at the ripe old age of fifty-five to this younger bird. Asking for trouble. Anyway, he was a joiner, so he was at his workshop all the hours God sent. What does his missus start doing? Having all these blokes round, fellas she’s been to college with …’
I begin to tune his voice out. It’s necessary. Some things are necessary to one’s survival. I start to wipe the mucus from my chest, then give up and glance at the dark window. Outside I can see the ring of the horizon and its veil of rain; cold showers on steep streets and roofs; the hum of raw weather. Inside, this terrible pain in my heart. Mandy or Bea—what a choice I had to make. I watch the mysterious distances slowly revealing themselves with a stately motion: telegraphed, pyloned, oaked and copsed, with silver birches flashing close to the mad chatter of the rails. How does the song go? Crashing headlong into the heartland … in a night that’s full of soul! All of England seen at once, as if viewed from the air, or in section; or in every epoch, its secrets quiet within the rings of ancient trees, incontinent hedgerows. ‘… Anyway, while he’s holed up at his workshop waiting for this hurricane or storm that never happens, she’s having it away with this student …’ Late gulls on thermals escort us effortlessly, suddenly peeling off and dive-bombing a lake—streaking Stukas in the winter dusk. There’s the movement of wind in skeletal trees; as old a movement as you could hope to observe. Then the sudden disruption of a sewage works. At this speed, the landscape has the power to change within seconds; from broadly plotted squares of farmland to concave valleys hiding steeples amid the tops of rotting elms. ‘… and then when this other fella tries it on, he gets a right kick up the arse. My poor old uncle didn’t even get a look-in …’ The towns tumbling past show the last of England; what was once Saxon woodland tamed into arable sweeps dominated by the six-armed kings of the pylons. ‘… Terrible, ain’t it …?’
Mandy or Bea? That decision, as I remember, couldn’t be deferred for a moment longer.
‘Yeah,’ I mumble distractedly. ‘It’s the old story.’
September. A gloomy morning of showers. The second of September, six months after meeting Mandy, and I was rendezvousing with Bea to tell her goodbye. It had to be done. We sat together on a bench in Regent’s Park as the sun came out briefly over the branches and the rain-puddled walkways. It was the saddest morning of my life.
‘We didn’t promise each other anything, did we?’ I asked, looking at her pale profile. Her brow wrinkled slightly at this; her plum-coloured eyes deep-set, full of what I thought was thwarted feeling. But it was always hard to tell with Bea.
‘No, we didn’t. I suppose that was partly my fault, most of the time. So you’re in love with this—what’s her name again?’
‘Mandy,’ I mumbled, and felt the full error of what I was doing in the utterance of those two awful syllables.
I had told her all about Mandy, about my infatuation, how I thought the weekend-thing between myself and her was going nowhere. Or rather, I had rehearsed the plain transmission of these facts beforehand, but had garbled them out backwards in the last half hour between bursts of rain. Now I merely felt abysmal, like a murderer; the abortionist of our nascent love. The sun had just come out, turning all the walkways white with early autumn glitter.
‘So I’ll have no one then,’ she said, with a steady voice.
I had no answer to this. I saw all her loneliness then, in her upturned chin, her delicate Adam’s apple under its precious film of skin. I immediately felt, in my sternum, in my faithless loins, how close we had become, mentally and physically. Putting an end to our relationship felt like killing something inside us both. A brutal act. Sometimes it is only when you cross an invisible line that you precipitate the disclosure of another’s feelings, not to mention your own. Now her look was imploring, vulnerable, impossibly alive. I thought I would have to split up with her every day in order to arouse these emotions. Only years later did I recall sentences of hers that took on greater significance. One evening, as we lay naked on my crocheted bed-spread, my feather fingers lightly stroking her pussy, she said, ‘I think I’m going to start purring.’ Then, in a quiet voice, ‘I do like you, you know … more than you know.’ She said no such sentence in Regent’s Park, but it was immediately manifest in her eyes.
‘You’ll be okay. There’s your master’s, all those new friends up in Hampstead. You know, despite all this, I think we’ll always be friends.’
I looked far into the middle distance at these words. The classic words. I badly wanted this outcome, but I didn’t see how it would be possible with brash, aggressive Mandy around. The sun disappeared suddenly behind a rearing, bruised cloud. The indifferent squirrels with their spasmodic watchfulness, gnawing on their acorns, were only witnessing another couple split up in their park, unaware of the flames that consume human hearts.
‘Yes,’ she said, and I felt true assent, true hope and feeling in her voice. ‘We will always be friends. Maybe what we had was just sex.’ And her eyes reverted to their abstract, unreadable depths.
The rain started again. Pelting drops hit the bench, the size of amulets. Bea put her brolly up, and I walked her back to the road; finally unable to give her the protection I had vainly offered. Within the church-like sanctum of the umbrella, sheltering us both from the drumming downpour, I said, ‘You will always mean everything to me. All love, all beauty.’
Unsurprisingly, this rankled more than anything.
‘That’s just someone else’s poetry, Byron. I’m only a girl you met at a party who’s doing a post-graduate course. That’s part of the problem. You had me on a pedestal.’ But she was wrong (as well as one hundred per cent correct). I looked at her then and she seemed to show a God-like bearing—the raindrops dripping from the brim of the brolly instead of tears; her level, candid gaze: a stillness at the centre of a world turning in futile revolutions.
At the road junction we stopped and she kissed me on the lips. Please, no more, I thought. She gave my hand a warm squeeze and asked,
‘So you want a clean break then?’
‘A clean break. Yes.’
‘That’s really horrible,’ she said quietly. I apprehended at once a crucial difference between people. Not everyone needed to pick up the megaphone when undergoing intense pain. I had attributed to her a lack of feeling in the absence of my own glib, hysterical displays, but I had got her all wrong. I felt chastened that someone could have a subtler sensibility than me. Fundamentally, I had misunderstood her mechanism. Some people express titanic emotions, grave loss, in unostentatious, unobtrusive language. In no way does it diminish their depth of feeling. But then her behaviour was always understated, always impeccable. Here was a woman, I thought, who would never strike me, never say a sour word without mitigating it with love, who only wanted a steady man to provide her with protection, warmth, children, romance. And here I was throwing it away. As I returned her hand-squeeze, the words of the Soft Cell song swarmed into my head: ‘Take a look at my face, for the last time. I never knew you, you never knew me. Say hello, wave …’
‘Goodbye, Byron.’
My older, present-day self watches this, tears of remorse on my stupid chin, like crabbed Albert Finney in Scrooge, crying, ‘You fool!’ at the young Ebenezer. Indeed, if this were a movie, the crowd would be screaming in their seats: ‘Don’t leave her, you madman!’
‘Goodbye, Bea.’
I thought of all the things she had given me. In February, I had sent her a large Valentine’s card with a bad poem inscribed inside. She, meanwhile, had delivered a plain card with a quick message. But I now realise that it demonstrated a simple link of love. It was one of those optical illusion cards; just a pixelated blur until you catch it at th
e right angle, then all is revealed. In Bea’s card, the revelation was the male and female symbols, discreetly linked together. Subtle, but worth the effort of investigation. Later, in August, she had given me a copy of Camus’ short monograph, Summer. I thought then, in the wanton oven-like heat, with Mandy calling me every day, that the summer didn’t belong to her, but in retrospect I was wrong. It would always belong to my chestnut-haired darling.
Bea let go of my hand. We both turned simultaneously and disappeared into the fuming crowds. At a corner, I craned my head around to take a last look at Carthage and its tragic flames, but she was gone. I never saw her again.
Lots of fun, lots of sex.
Well, for a while, Mandy was right. Newly separated from Bea, September turned into an Indian summer of rare magnificence. The rain had lifted. Strange that combination: unimpeachable blue skies and a heart as heavy as a ship’s anchor. But somehow I managed the struggle of sharing Mandy’s bed. Within a fortnight I had virtually moved in. A visit to Brighton with her dissolute tenants had long been mooted providing the weather held up. I kept putting it off, the anchor too weighty to dredge on board, but eventually a date was set. A fine Saturday saw Mandy’s chrome Peugeot rattling towards the coast under incoming Jumbos and a scalding sun; the back seat bulging with Steve, Matt and Harriet; Mandy up front with me, looking like the cat that had just got the cream.
It was one of those unforgettable days. The sieve of memory is unpredictable: what it chooses to retain or lose. Nothing momentous happened … until it was time to go home. I can still feel the hotplate of canvas car-seat under my jeans; still see the plastic of the boxless cassettes fed one after another into the whirring slot of the stereo; still anticipate Mandy’s hand reaching for mine to place a burnished kiss on my knuckles—one of her few gestures that I always loved.
Steve had been told that I worked in Martin’s music shop and spent the entire journey screaming ‘Rock on, Ron!’ into my right ear. He had started early: the plastic bag of freezing cans diminishing by the mile. Brought up in care, then borstal, then onto a career of petty thieving, Steve had worked as a cabbie until he had blown it by becoming a professional alcoholic. Fifteen of his thirty-five years had been spent behind bars. Another ten pissed. Now a brickie, he was, for a while, one of the most dangerous men in north London. I didn’t know this at the time, and neither did Mandy, otherwise we might not have let him loose onto the scorching back seat. Still, he was handy—in every sense—to have around. He was going to be Mandy’s bodyguard when fame arrived in its golden chariot.
Harriet and Matt sat huddled together, obviously alarmed to be within Steve’s vomiting-range, as The Who’s ‘5.15’ rang out along the Surrey Downs. Harriet at that time had an uncontrollable helmet of corkscrew ginger hair which blew free through the open rear window. She was afflicted by hirsute moles, some of them facial, though she had the newly coined beauty of anyone pushing twenty-one. She was so excited, she said, to be going to the seaside. Matt, meanwhile, never said much anyway. Goateed and pony-tailed, a gentle six-foot-two pipe-cleaner, he sat silently with an expression of half-formed mirth on his chops for the entire journey.
Once parked, we all hurtled along the broad perspectives of the seafront—singing, piggy-backing, taking photos. Ahead of us was the dazzling sea, the twin piers; one vibrant with a funfair, the other crumbling fabulously (like a seedy old soak at kicking-out time) into the waves. After fish and chips in vinegar-sodden newspaper, Mandy and I escaped from the others, leaving them to skinny-dip in the foaming shallows.
There we were, two semi-educated idiots, whose inner damage just happened to correspond, with the world all before us. We kissed in the holiday heat, lips already tanging with salt, in the sultry dregs of an exceptional English summer. Then we made our way to the slatted running boards of the Palace Pier with its dodgems, coin-clanking arcades and candy-floss parlours, all wallowing in the day’s dizzying centigrades.
Mandy took my hand again and pressed it to her lips. This courtly gesture in reverse always fascinated me. She said,
‘Why don’t we get married?’
I laughed and looked into the sun, into the light, then pulled away half-blinded.
‘Why? I know why. It’s because getting married isn’t the sort of thing people like us do. Straights and suits do it to please their parents.’
And this was the truth: I didn’t know anyone my age who had tied the Gordian knot. For many people, marriage and children was just the next thing, requiring the full approbation of their folks, their bank accounts. But not for the likes of us. My mother was merely a voice on the phone, my father on the other side of the world. As for bank accounts, Mandy was a near-penniless musician, I a scribbler of non-remunerative doggerel. My attempts at self-improvement, at further education, at forging a career, had been hilarious. All the same, I felt a warm uncoiling in my stomach, a sense of rightness, of being at the centre of something for once in my life. It was such a ludicrous suggestion. Is this how grown-ups got married? On a daytrip to the coast? It was obviously unworkable. We hardly knew each other, although love deludes you otherwise. And me with no dough, no tenure, no hair. Mandy with her brazen ambition, her recklessness, her changeability. Yes, a ludicrous suggestion. Because it was such a bad idea it started, in the Brighton sun, to look like a good one.
‘Did you say, I do?’ grinned Mandy.
She wasn’t without humour sometimes. And not without conventional notions, either, within all the brittle waywardness, the capricious flutter that was her life. Under all that glitter she was just a regular gal. I decided to take the plunge.
‘I think it’s the best idea you’ve ever had.’
‘Oh, deluxe! I’ve told my dad you can meet him next week. If that’s all right.’
‘Hey, that doesn’t mean yes! I just said it was your best idea. Anyway, I thought you two had fallen out.’
‘That happens every week. Gran and Auntie are coming from Spain, too.’
This evidence of prior planning unsettled me slightly. But she seemed overjoyed. At the back of her mind, I could perceive the shade of her mother, absent from any wedding day she would ever have, smiling an Andalusian smile. And at the back of mine there was a pair of welcoming angel’s wings, bringing salvation. My tacit acceptance had something to do with death and time, too; with the train of my years screaming through its stations. I was knocking on. Most of the time I felt like milk on the turn. I was also romantically convinced that I would die young, like Keats, like Shelley, like Raphael. If I didn’t marry now, then when? There is a sense that people without a family get married because they are trying to become each other’s family. And this is a dangerous, regressive notion; a dependent merger that can only bring misery. But I needed a family. As Madonna sang, one is such a lonely number. She still had her hand on mine. Abruptly she yanked me forward and raced me to the end of the pier, her black hair blazing with surface reflections from the toiling ocean.
There is a photo of us from that day, that season of unforced laughter. It was taken by Harriet, who had sneaked up behind us with her heavy Nikon, her red locks wild in the sea wind. The pale grey-and-white reproduction of Mandy and me, arm in arm, wearing summer pumps and shades on the Brighton Palace Pier hung in all the flats we subsequently shared and she subsequently destroyed. The two lovers, soon to be married, walking off into the sunset.
Lots of fun, then.
And lots of sex, too. At least when we returned to the generous ceilings of her top-floor flat. We sat on her futon, as I remember it, the sash windows flung high; pebble-filled pumps scattered about. And she hugged me. A deep, double-enclosed embrace. The first time I had been properly held, it seemed, since childhood. It appeared unthinkable then that we would ever do each other harm. Eventually I opened my eyes and, with my chin on the warm shelf of her shoulder, I could see a gravid slowness in the movement of the horse chestnut trees outside. Late summer butterflies, white as Arctic snow, flitted about weightlessly. A brittle opa
city in the lemon light of evening held swarms of hysterical midges, distinct as stars or satellites. And, as she undid my belt, I noticed that every sill in the perspective of windows out back was brushstroked with a stripe of delicious yellow. If there had been woods beyond Tufnell Park, they would surely have echoed to our ring.
The meeting with a girlfriend’s father is always a decisively male moment. If all goes well, the acceptance of a cigarette from the peacock-fanned pack counts as an unspoken bonding between Y chromosomes. Talk should then move onto the re-laying of lawns, the grouting of tiles, the size of a car’s engine specific to litres and numbers of pistons. Despite one’s best efforts, one becomes acutely aware of how one is walking—too much mince and he’ll think you’re a woofter, too much aggression he will give you that ‘lay one finger on her’ look. And all the while, there it is in blazing neon, on sandwich boards along his street, on tannoyed address systems: ‘This man is fucking your daughter’. Yes, a male moment, and one corrosive to the nervous system. Anyway, I hadn’t actually said yes to marriage yet—and hey, I thought it was my job to ask—this was merely an exploratory visit, a relaxing rendezvous. By the end of the week it seemed all was decided. Mandy did indeed drive us to meet her old man, her wizened granny and her aunt from Tarragona, the following Sunday.
Her little Peugeot dipped between the banks of the circuitous country lanes surrounding Windsor. A day in very late September—the fulcrum of the year. One of those days when, after a good summer, the soil, the sky, the leaves on a blazing row of maples, seem fully permeated with the sun’s benevolence. Total satiation: nature at full capacity, with the insidious whispers of a cool October kept at bay, like attendant devils in the wings. A late September afternoon: the hot sky an ocean of breathing azure. The hedgerows persisting in their plenty a little while longer.
The tree-canopies dispersed light in a continual dervish flicker across our faces; a zoetrope of gold, like blinking very fast. Although I had spoken briefly to Mandy’s aunt Leo on the phone, I had only seen a smudged black-and-white photo of her father. Significantly, this was taken on his wedding day. There was Ramona in all the flamenco finery of her dress, and there was Ian Haste—tall as a telegraph pole and, as I would later find out, only slightly more talkative. Yes, I had been keenly dreading the meeting for seven days. Why do we tremble over such introductions? There is nothing one can do to prepare oneself except jump straight in, naked. A baptism by etiquettes and rules not yet known. Best behaviour won’t get you through, only a kind of instinct; the intuition of the Davy-lamped miner feeling his way along the dripping seam. One is there, whether one likes it or not, to be evaluated. And you better have had a substantial breakfast, or risen early enough, to get you through, to emerge intact. To emerge like a man.