by Jude Cook
Predictably, our natures conflicted wildly: she was a loose cannon, a hedonist of orgiastic proportions, maybe even an anarchist; I essentially a melancholic with a side-order of suicidal tendencies. But there she was: Haidee—five years my junior and a veteran of boarding, boating, backpacking, nannying in Cairo and the coconut-oiled Caribbean. Someone who met the morning face to face every day without trepidation or neurosis. A butterfly, a free spirit. To love her would be like attempting to bottle the breeze! And me the helpless onanist, the love-blind suitor, the hapless cuckold, the furrowed divorcee, incapable of joining the dance.
When she left it merely served to reinforce life’s cruelty. A repetitive pain, like hammer blows to a blacksmith’s anvil: again and again and again. As if I hadn’t brought enough pain with me in those three cardboard boxes—enough frigid pain to re-snow the French Alps.
O for a heart that pumps Evian water like all the rest, not this thick, soul-sour blood.
The flat, then. The shared flat whose walls I now wake up to every morning. Only intended as a temporary measure, like much else. But I’ve been here for almost three months. Does that count as temporary? When does something cease to be a stop-gap and become officially permanent? And anyway, who’s counting days, except me?
Once I moved in it struck me that I had never lived with anyone apart from Mandy. No college dorms or years of co-habiting had prepared me. This state of affairs, I find, requires many complicated and unwanted adjustments. There are three other human beings here, three ‘equivalent centres of self’, as George Eliot said. All demand a different approach to any interaction; all have their hopes, griefs, passions, love-affairs and job-worries to attend to in their little rooms. I try not to burden them with my woes. Meeting in the communal areas is, it’s understood, a highly artificial activity. The human animal naturally needs its space, mental as well as physical. More often than not, I leave them to it.
As for the place itself, it’s a four-storey monument to solid Victorian brickwork, now crumbling with a great deal of dignity into the Leighton Road. Could be worse, could be the YMCA (and it nearly was). Actually, there are three floors with a basement flat inhabited by a fetid loner who sometimes shares his whisky with me. But that’s another story. My room is on the top floor; Haidee’s old room, fifteen feet by fifteen, painted stark peeling-white with an oppressive ceiling and a view into the gardens out back. There is no furniture except a camping table and a folding chair. The bed I had to borrow. It is obvious that all four walls once bore posters. There are rectangles of lighter paint delineated like trunk-marks on a suntan; the pale spaces fringed by yellowing strips where sellotape probably held the grinning behind of that tennis player with her skirt hoicked up. Most of the time I try not to look at those empty spaces. Most of the time. Instead, I stare out of the window. It’s fair to say that the view has kept me alive for three months. I have spent many hours at the rattling sash window in contemplation. Directly below is an overgrown plot belonging to the loner, wild with tall grass and convolvulus. In mid-October, this ubiquitous vine still had some of its delicate lotus flowers attached: unimpeachable whites with mysterious interiors. At night, the stars can be seen in an unnaturally rich, blue sky. Just recently, the musty smell of bonfires has reached my room as I’ve lain on the mattress; window flung high, masochistically welcoming the raw autumn air. Mornings have arrived with a ravishing freshness; a pure, dank, peaty odour has risen to my high floor from a bed of mists below. Mellow fruitfulness indeed. But the centrepiece has to be the huge horse chestnut tree two gardens down. Almost as high as the house, I have watched it shed its leaves, bend defiantly in storms, shiver in the ransacking rain. It feels like an old friend. By the end of November I was sad to see the last leaves torn from its noble branches. The area below was a russet carpet; pure gold in the early sun, squirrels jumping in the yellow mulch. Strange how dying can look so beautiful.
On the first landing there’s a shared bathroom; a sunless, mouldy little cubicle with a startling lime-green blind that’s always kept drawn. Very different from the immaculate bathroom I shared with Mandy. The shelves are full of unfamiliar beauty products, forgotten cosmetics. I’m never sure as to which of the others they belong. There is a pile of blue disposable razors next to bottles of French shampoo, colourful unguents and bath salts. Who could need so many razors? Did a previous tenant leave them as a gift? Am I living with a werewolf? Certainly, the two croupiers keep unsociable hours, and I’ve only bumped into the classical musician once, when we fumbled good mornings on the stairs, but she didn’t look the type to howl at the moon. She seemed shocked that I was still alive. But that’s not so surprising. Since throwing my boxes across the maimed carpet of my upstairs room I’ve only used the kitchen twice. Ah, the kitchen—the best room in the house. The big light-filled kitchen with its three yawning sash windows, where I hear the others coming and going with rustling bags of shopping. Where certain nights I have heard the rumble of dancing, scraping chairs, spontaneous laughter, the odd shriek or familiar song; or have smelt the aroma of fried sausages or home-made popcorn. But I have been in no fit state to join them. No fit state at all.
Take last Wednesday, for example. Three in the afternoon found me crucified on the floor as the day diminished outside. A dripping yellow haze filled the screen of the window. I was trying to get several things straight in my mind, but to no avail. Overall, I felt close to how Nietzsche must have when he threw his arms around the neck of the horse. My main preoccupation, apart from how to deal with the terrible physical and spiritual lethargy that had descended on me in the past two months, was how richly I deserved my fate. No, really. Anyone who thought that people were generally trustworthy and good, were basically sane, deserved to be punished. Such naivety had to have its comeuppance. And here it was, in the shape of an abysmal room with nowhere to sit. A trusting, puerile nature such as mine (who ignored Pascal’s maxim and thought that everyone was fundamentally identical underneath) was heading for a severe hiding, a rigorous lesson, an education at some point in his life. The fact was, Mandy had stitched me up. She had come out of the maelstrom emotionally and financially intact. She had the flat, the car, the furniture and probably a clear conscience. That must have taken some planning—a process I was too innocent to observe at the time. Lying there in the sickly twilight I felt numb, stupefied, rejected, nauseous, abused. I also felt dangerously close to hysterical laughter or tears, or both. Really, one had to laugh at the audacity of it all. At my own risible gullibility, aged thirty and four months.
Downstairs, in the spacious kitchen, I could hear the whirr of the washing machine. This put me in mind of a task I had been deferring since nine o’clock that morning. Previously, after a breakup with a girlfriend, I have found myself strangely galvanised and purposeful: some life-instinct or survival mechanism always kicks in, forcing me to make lists of people to phone, tasks to undertake. I often thought this was symptomatic of having no immediate family to discuss my latest emotional catastrophe with. The Self magically takes control, knowing what’s best for the organism. But this time things are different. I find I no longer possess that open and artless soul necessary to move on. As Kurt sang, something’s in the way. Something to do with hitting thirty and discovering my marriage and nebulous career down the toilet simultaneously. These immovable facts have seized up all impetus towards practical activity. In three months I haven’t unpacked those cardboard boxes. And anyway, this place is only temporary, right? Until I find somewhere better. Sitting in the centre of the spattered carpet is a busted suitcase that once held all my books. Only these objects have I hauled out and stacked in dusty piles around the room in the absence of any shelf. Recently, reading has seemed too complex and demanding an act. When I have attempted a page of Descartes or Hardy’s poems the words have appeared to be in the wrong order. The more I persevered, the more they seemed to be written in Cyrillic—literally meaningless, the signified detached from the signifier. The same went for writing. I
knew I should be fiercely hammering or weeping out a Blood on the Tracks or an Ariel, but the truth was, I couldn’t be fucked. The moment I stopped laughing at my own idiocy, I told myself, I would commence fixing this mess in words. But that moment never came. For once in my life, I let myself drift: blown with Neptune’s tides. A freefall without any self-preserving intervention from the Superego. For once, this felt like the right course of action. Besides, I was too depressed and tired to do anything else. Too suicidal to commit suicide.
The bare spaces on the walls where posters once hung remain empty. Honestly, you get so beaten down by failure and humiliation that you can’t even assert your own character on your own surroundings. You don’t feel entitled to. Besides, it takes energy to put posters up, and that I reserved for thought. Circuitous, exhausting thought; pinning the fat-torsoed moths of memory in their appropriate glass cases.
So, lying there in the diminishing light, tangled up in blue, I felt like a communications centre of intersecting thoughts, intense impulses. Yet paradoxically impotent, unable to act. A rain started up in the gardens out back, spattering the blackened undergrowth. This reminded me again of my task. My great shame. To wash my borrowed bedsheets, preferably unobserved by anyone in the flat. This, I knew, would necessitate a visit to the laundrette. Because in the early hours of that morning, as astonishing as it may seem, and for the first time since childhood, I had wet the bed.
Yes, go on and have a good laugh, ungentle reader.
Maybe it was the rain in the middle of the night that did it. That set me off. That set it off. First a soft purring against the sash window, like hoarse ghosts trying to gain access to the room; then a furious vertical hammering into the barren gardens. That old sound-association must have triggered a hot hosing into my mattress and mould-dappled duvet at three in the morning. I had tried in my half-sleeping, half-conscious state to find a part of the bed that wasn’t intimately damp, that wasn’t a swimming pool of now-cooling piss, but to my fuddled dismay the whole area seemed to be immersed. I was wet, wet, wet, right up to the armpits of Mandy’s dressing gown, an item of clothing which I had taken to sleeping in, as I had snatched hers by mistake in my hasty exit from the flat. But this was too much. I must have staggered out of bed and thrown off the robe only to return and find the mattress much, much damper; the rain still cat-o’-nine-tailing the panes. What was once steamy, almost luxurious, was now cold, grimly alien. Yes, it must have been the rain that caused me to piss the bed, aged thirty, in the middle of the night.
Of course, it wasn’t the rain. It was the booze. I had made my way home from Rudi’s place in the small hours like a blind forest animal, feeling my way from lamp post to lamp post. We’d had a few to say the least. Just the sheer cc volume would have burst Henry the Eighth’s bladder. I remember Martin, that old road-hound, telling me a cast-iron way of deceiving hotel staff if such an accident occurred while on tour. The clever, seasoned boozer would heat a kettle of water in the morning and then upend it on the bed, leaving the whole apparatus lying there innocently for the maids to find when they did their rounds. The band would be long out of town before they discovered the sheets were saturated with a more bodily fluid, thus avoiding a hefty cleaning bill charged to the room. However, this ruse was not of much use to me. The only observer of the sad sight of my drenched bed was me. How did this happen? Was this the summit of my degradation, or was there more to come? I remembered reading an article by a child psychologist citing emotional upset as the chief cause for infantile incontinence, but surely this cannot have contributed to my nocturnal disaster. Was I so fucked up to be experiencing a second childhood? But regardless of the aetiology, something told me I had to act fast, otherwise I would be sleeping under my coat on the floor later that evening. The classical musician, who occupied the room next door to mine, had just returned, sighing audibly as she gained the top of the staircase. Minutes later I heard the muted sound of a viola through the walls: stark and beautiful—rich down the bottom end, full of serpiginous melancholy. It was now or never. I jumped to my feet and stuffed the duvet into a bin-liner. Then I hauled the mattress into the centre of the room, to give it a better airing. The rain had begun to step up, so I closed the window. The downpour started to thunder against the panes; the last light glowing gold in the murky distance. Making sure my sleeves were rolled down (a necessary ritual, as I had been trying to keep the scars inflicted by Mandy a secret from my flatmates) I bolted downstairs and out onto the street.
Luckily, the laundrette was nearby. I opened the smeared door of my machine under the accusing eyes of a gaggle of mums with pushchairs, then bundled the reeking bedclothes inside. The cocktail of those intent watchers and the furtive sense of my own humiliation told me I couldn’t stay. Standing there in the dead light, I suddenly realised I was ravenous; that I hadn’t eaten for twenty-four hours. I checked my pockets for coins, then fled for the caff over the road, my sad sheets revolving in their drum.
Predictably, the place was almost full. Didn’t people have jobs to go to? All these busted losers with days to kill; or workmen reading whole tabloids from breasts to betting tips. How did they get away with it? Having said that, I wasn’t in a position to judge. I seemed to have plenty of time on my scarred hands just lately, Martin having downsized me to one day a week. Even this made me count my blessings, because, until I split with Mandy, I hadn’t been working for him at all. A sense of pity must have encouraged him to offer me some paid employment. In fact, only Martin had called regularly to see how I was bearing up over the last couple of months. Unlike Rudi, unlike Antonia and Nick, he knew what the end of a marriage felt like.
I took my seat at the window. The artery-clogging air was dense with the pungent aromas of frying. After ten minutes a Macedonian waiter sullenly took my order for egg and chips—without the toast, as I couldn’t stretch to that. I stared at the harried bums and jakeys of Kentish Town, shivering in their sleeping bags outside the tube station. This compelling sight always acted as a reminder of the next rung on the ladder: the bottom rung. My chest felt heavy with the weight of this knowledge; with the intolerable weight of my loathsome self. In fact, I felt as if I had slipped down the biggest ladder on the snakes-and-ladders board. One moment I was snoring under our laundered duvet, the next pissing into a mouldy, semen-streaked sheet purloined from my neighbour’s cellar. How had it come to this? I also felt vulnerable, self-conscious, sitting there; as if something terrible were about to happen. Eating solo in the caff had been an unsettling experience to begin with. One felt like a virtual advertisement for the bachelor life, a living, breathing poster of what’s in store for the hopeless divorcee. There was also the acute shame I felt at the scars on my forearms, the hunted, desperate look I must always be wearing; and also the fact I only ever ordered the cheapest things on the board. But, after a while, I realised there were other men (nearly always men, apart from the obese bag-lady who sat for hours over a cooling cup of tea) doing exactly the same. I had joined the club. The losers’ club. Any age welcome. The newly separated or the mentally ill specially catered for. At first, the hum and noise of the place had been disturbing. The croupier’s flat, despite its ramshackle ambience, had served as a sanctuary for me. There was a merciful quiet there most days; a lack of turbulence, raised voices, slammed doors, smashed objects. In contrast, the caff was a zoo of belching brickies, yapping cruel misogynist horseshit in coarse voices. Just lately, I had been unable to overhear anyone talking in an aggressive manner. It made me sick to my very soul. A curious phenomenon. I had to have silence, otherwise my centre was upset for days. Like Keats in his tubercular dilapidation, I could only contemplate beauty. Anything else, I felt, might finish me off for good.
The egg and chips arrived: two yolks of orange pus bathing in an Exxon Valdez of oil. Grimly, I forced myself to eat, though I felt too hungover to get much down. There was also the noise pollution of the radio to deal with. Constantly tuned to an MOR station, last week it had played, consecutively,
‘She’s Gone’ by Hall and Oates, ‘One More Night’ by Phil Collins and ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ by Sinead O’Connor. Yeah, they must’ve have seen me coming. The sad-sack with his drooping antlers. How I moaned inwardly at the monstrous irony. Some gleeful playlister must have compiled that little selection specifically for the likes of me, buckled over my plate of cholesterol in a greasy spoon somewhere. And I was especially not in the mood that morning. As I had crossed the road to the caff, a vintage red VW had nearly run me over at the lights, tearing off into the traffic with a guttural roar. It was Mandy’s car. It had to be. There was only a handful of the same model in the country. Hadn’t she seen me there, about to cross? Or maybe she had, and that was the point. She was merely attempting what she had always threatened to do: wipe me from the face of the earth. Confirmation that it had been her came ten minutes later: there was the same Volkswagen, with Mandy at the wheel—terse-looking, patrician—driving back in the opposite direction. This, as you can imagine, didn’t serve as an aide-digestif.
I returned in the tooling rain to the laundrette and rescued my sheets. Inside, the mothers and pushchairs had been replaced by a group of teenage girls; tracksuited, gum-chewing, supremely arrogant. They didn’t give me a second look as I wrestled with the ripped bin-liner. This added another cut to my heart. But why should they have checked me out? They had their cool to take care of, their conceited splendour to attend to. Who was I to yearn for attention from teenage girls? Me, balding, just turned thirty, egg on my unshaven chin. I was back on the shelf, and I had better get used to it. Slightly shop-soiled, with a ‘reduced’ price tag stamped on my forehead. Going cheap in the sales.