Byron Easy

by Jude Cook

  But we didn’t get the chance to answer. Mandy was on her feet, wielding a champagne bottle in one hand and the arm of the bestubbled Victor Moore in the other. They were heading our way.

  ‘Guys!’ said Mandy expansively. ‘Help me out. Tell this man he’s wrong about everything. He’s the most cynical person I’ve ever met.’

  I located Nick’s eyes briefly. Had she pissed this plugger off already? No, she was merely proving my point that the recklessly impudent always make new friends. Victor and Mandy sat down heavily next to us. Nick nodded hello to Victor. To be hip held the ultimate social cachet for him; to be at ease in all company. He said, ‘All right, Vic. How’s the bitterness coming along?’

  ‘It ain’t bitterness or cynicism. It’s realism,’ said Victor with his mugger’s smile.

  ‘What’s realistic about telling me to keep my day-job?’ gushed Mandy ‘I don’t even have a fucking day-job. The band is my day-job.’

  ‘Okay, you got a lot going for you. Fellatrix, yeah? Cool name. That’ll get ’em hot under the collars, those that get it. An all-bird band. The press are interested. You’re seen at all the right knees-ups, and that, but …’ Here I knew Victor was going to allow Mandy into a secret. He was about to let her know that the music business was a far bigger, nastier, more nepotistic beast than she had made provision for. He locked stares with her. ‘… You have to bear in mind that all the journos writing about your band in a fanzine now will be reviewing fiction for the Guardian in ten years’ time. It’s doubtful you’ll be still making records. They will come on full of high-principle, oh yes! Be prepared for that. If you suggest that you want to make any money or have any longevity they will call it “selling out”, while they’ve got their big media careers all planned out. Today the Cardiff Chronicle, tomorrow the Independent and a TV presenter’s contract. Same with the record companies. Today’s scout is tomorrow’s CEO. Always remember the artist is at the bottom of the pyramid—just sausage mixture for the big machine; fodder for other people’s glittering careers.’

  Mandy stared down her nostrils at this debunker of dreams, this heretic, and jeered, ‘Well, if you look like me, you ain’t got a problem.’ Victor smiled back. He would remember her arrogance. Make a note of it in his mental Rolodex for when Mandy came running in search of a favour. He merely held up his hands before him, as if he’d been stopped by Dick Turpin, and said,

  ‘More champagne?’

  Victor disappeared into the melee of freeloaders and returned with an armful of bottles. The remainder of the evening passed through its expected stages of increasing oblivion, all gauged by one’s trips to the Gents. The first, a quick, dizzy visit. The second, a heavy gauntlet of stubbed toes and slurred apologies. The third, a swirling phantasmagoria of triple-vision and projectile puking down the express-tunnel of the khazi. Luckily, the third didn’t occur. By visit number three, I had sobered up and just wanted to leave. But Mandy insisted on a ruse that demonstrated just how flippantly she treated Nick and Antonia. Somebody revealed that the exec whose party it was, far from being a visitor of prostitutes, was a happy bandit. All evening, it hadn’t escaped our notice that he’d been doffing his cap at Nick. First a shy glimpse, then a languorous stare every fifteen minutes. Nick, by this time feeling like Dorian Gray, played up to it, to the great amusement of the girls. Then Mandy hit on the idea of seducing this man in order to land a deal with his new label. Nick would be his houseboy, like Bogarde in The Servant. He would bring this captain of industry lightly toasted snacks wearing a floral pinny. He would vacuum in his boxer shorts. He would work out before breaking the glazed meniscus of this guy’s pool with an Olympic dive. After these suggestions, Nick’s look was now more Alan Shearer than Dorian Gray. But by this time it was too late: the big man had begun his long cruise over. Nick was positively pale under his fringe by the time he was engaged by his combatant. He knew he’d have to make a go of it. That’s just how things worked. Mandy would blank them both for ever if he didn’t. Then came the cruel part. Mandy turned around, grabbed her glittery bag, and left the club.

  I ran after her, into the February air, all the way up Shaftesbury Avenue. Eventually, I caught up with her at a bus stop. Panting, I said, ‘What’s wrong with you? You can’t leave Nick in there with him! You didn’t even say goodbye to Antonia.’

  ‘I couldn’t stand it all any longer. That queer. That prick who thought he knew it all.’ She flung her deadly nightshade hair back from her shoulders. ‘And you were giving Antonia the eye.’

  ‘Come on, I only have eyes for—’

  ‘Ah, shut up.’

  ‘You flirt with Nick all the time.’

  ‘Bollocks.’

  I knew some kind of savage spasm was on its way.

  ‘Anyway, what about trying to run your ex over?’

  Her fist caught me on the left temple, causing her watch to fly off into the street. I crumpled into a nearby phone booth. That wasn’t a girl’s punch. That was a right-hand jab worthy of McGuigan. I stood facing the woman I had married two months before. But she wasn’t looking at me, she was staring at her broken watch in the gutter. Her blue lips thinned and trembled. She looked as if she were concentrating on a tricky manual task, like the desperate act of forcing a big object back into a small bottle.

  Now, many would conclude that I asked for it. That I deserved my first punch from mercenary Mandy. And to an extent I submit my mea culpa. After three bottles of champagne, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from Antonia’s bust. But no one could say that Harriet, our wedding photographer and trusted tenant, got what she deserved. One evening in late February, as I returned from the shop, I caught a glimpse of Harriet marching down the Holloway Road towards me. Among the evening crowd of scarf-wrapped, steam-breathing commuters I could see the poor girl clutching a handkerchief to her forehead and crying. Her topaz locks were fanned like a bird in flight, or a Rossetti dreamer. I was shocked to see her in this state. She seemed to be walking somewhere with great purpose. I caught her by the shoulder and asked, ‘Harriet, what happened? Have you been attacked? There’s blood on your face …’ She seemed surprised and embarrassed to find me there, her eyes swimming with a kind of childish grief. She pulled away, though not roughly, accepting my concern but with an insistence that I could be of no help. The one sentence she spoke was uttered more with regretful anguish than anger. ‘Ask your fucking wife,’ she sobbed, then tumbled off into the human stream.

  I climbed to the first landing of our Archway flat. Scattered on the stairs were Harriet’s possessions. The awful sight of destroyed things. There were the hand-embroidered cushions that I knew she spent evenings making, a broken-spined book, an upturned ashtray, a camera or two. I picked up one of the Nikons to inspect the damage, and called out, ‘Mandy?’ There was no reply. Pushing open a door, I found her in the cramped communal kitchen, alone, smoking, with a cup of tea before her. Her white shirt seemed to be stained with brown dribbles. ‘What the hell’s been going on?’

  She didn’t like this interrogation. Didn’t feel the need to answer to anybody. She said, ‘I told her she had to go, and we had a fight.’

  ‘I saw her on the street, she was bleeding.’

  ‘That’s her fault, the stuck-up bitch. I told her ages ago that I was raising the rent.’

  ‘You can’t just give people ultimatums. You can’t just declare, “Get out now, I want to raise the rent.”’

  Mandy stood up with regal pomposity and ground the butt under her leather boot. She pushed past me onto the landing, shouting over her shoulder. ‘She asked for it.’

  ‘Asked for what?’

  I followed her out and stood in front of the gaping door to Harriet’s room. Inside I could see the flashing lime eyes of one of the cats cowering under a table. It struck me that I had never seen the interior of Harriet’s room. The air seemed musty, long lived in. Since I had entered the house five minutes before, I had shared in the feral fear of the cat. Some invisible pall lay over the whole area, like
the quiet that descends on a physical space after violent activity; the serenity of a battlefield after surrender. Mandy took no time in replying to me. She said, ‘A kick in the head, that’s what.’

  I slumped down on the stairs, and rubbed my brow, maybe in some kind of subconscious sympathy with Harriet. My own left temple was still giving out unpredictable throbs from the punch Mandy had given me the week before.

  ‘You know that’s assault, don’t you?’ I asked, wearily. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s back with the police.’

  ‘She’s too much of a wimp to do that. Anyway, she said her dad was coming tomorrow with his big posh Volvo to pick up her stuff.’

  ‘You can’t just go around kicking people in the head!’

  Yes, the genie was well and truly out of the bottle. I often made an analogy between Mandy’s escalating violence and the increasing recklessness of dictators or serial killers. Like Saddam and Aileen Wuornos, she acquired a taste for blood and found she couldn’t stop.

  I looked directly into her face. Amid the strident self-regard I caught a glimmer of guilt. From the start, Mandy had used her mother’s death as a kind of carte blanche for acts of astonishing nastiness. I was only then beginning to see this clearly. Unfortunately, it was my nature to be placatory, appeasing. I didn’t want further conflict. I just wanted, like the social worker with the delinquent, to understand, and use that understanding in some kind of cure. I also recognised that Harriet had served her purpose in Mandy’s overall scheme, in her fantastic ambition. She had been chewed up and spat out. The previous summer, when I first started seeing Mandy, Harriet was about to be apprenticed to one of the leading London fashion smudges. Plus, her father was going to write about Fellatrix in the Independent. Neither the apprenticeship nor the piece had materialised. In Mandy’s mind, she could afford to kick her dissenting tenant in the head. Harriet, as an instrument of advancement, had run her course. There would be no dire consequences. Even the police didn’t worry her. I noticed Mandy’s eyes were bulging slightly as they stared fixedly at my face. There was something dreamlike about the situation—the crimson-eyed stranger of a wife screaming at me in an empty house. Just recently, when I watched her sleeping, I observed that the eyeballs themselves were unnaturally distended from the sockets, like Popeye or cartoon representations of an angry man. Everything about her seemed suddenly engorged, vitalised, on edge.

  In a voice that couldn’t disguise her guilt and self-hatred, she said: ‘What’s it to you anyway? I have to hold onto this flat, and she can’t afford to stay here.’

  I felt a queasy melange of emotions: disgust, regret, fear, sadness; even a kind of sick admiration that anyone could be so outrageous. That anyone could reach adulthood with so little idea of how to behave. Her actions always reminded me of the spittle-faced toddler in its high-chair throwing rusk at the wall when induced, against its infantile will, to eat. Bea’s face came to me then: calm, forgiving, exquisite. I had exchanged my dove for a raven.

  ‘What about all this?’ I gestured at the scattered belongings, lying sadly where they had fallen. Mandy had probably thrown them at Harriet’s retreating back as she made her escape into civilisation. The sight of broken possessions, the type of scene one witnesses after a burglary, always filled me with a gut-churning sense of dismay. A kind of meta-melancholy for the forlorn objects themselves.

  ‘It’s her rubbish. She can deal with it. Anyway, she left the door open and two of the cats have disappeared.’

  With these words, she pulled her red leather mac over her white shirt and disappeared into the icy street to look for them.

  Three days later the police were indeed called to the flat, but this time it was Mandy doing the calling. The two remaining tenants, Steve and Matt, had been found one morning in the kitchen locked in mortal combat. It turned out that tension between them had been high for months, largely over Matt’s propensity to linger in the bathroom Timoteing his Viking locks. When Steve decided to take his weekly shower—usually in his brief moments of sobriety—he had to take it there and then. Steve’s repeated poundings and threats had been ignored for a full ten minutes. When the scrubbed and refreshed New-Ager emerged, Steve immediately placed him in the sort of headlock that turns your face blue. Mandy responded to this commotion by calling the cops. Even when the squad car arrived and removed Steve from the premises, Matt’s face still resembled a grape about to explode under a wine-press. He vowed—in a voice surprisingly higher than normal—that he was leaving at the weekend. This suited Mandy fine. In her mind, Steve was never seeing his soiled room again either. Within two hours, Mandy had placed adverts for the three rooms in all the local papers and newsagents, the rent raised to a ridiculous level. This was to be countenanced, so I was told, by radical decorating.

  When I heard about these bold moves, I realised one thing about Mandy: she was in motion all the time. Nothing lasted for long with her: friends, jobs, pets, ideas. Most of the time it seemed like change for change’s sake. Change gone berserk. What was one way in the morning would always be different by the evening. The mood you left her in at midday would almost certainly be another by midnight. The decorating was completed during two intense weeks. This involved me being largely airborne, lying on planks balanced between two ladders as I reglossed the windows and stippled over the foul mushroom cloud of gunk on Steve’s ceiling. A Puerto Rico of tobacco leaves must have gone into creating such a gargantuan stain. The two errant tomcats were never found, so the remaining moggie was divested of its Fellatrix badge and exchanged for three others at the Pet Rescue Centre. As grumpy and downright vicious as the three dismissed cats were, I was sad to see them go. Mandy claimed I was just being a sentimental fool who couldn’t abide change, and there was a degree of truth in this. But the joy with which she welcomed the (admittedly slightly better tempered) new arrivals was unsettling. Did she feel no remorse for her three old musketeers? Her astringent smile would follow the new cats about the room as they gambolled in a spaghetti of guitar leads. She would spoil them with roast chicken and slivers of salmon. Christ, we were hardly eating more than boiled vegetables ourselves at the time. But it was pointless appealing to Mandy. She was too singular, too zealous. And change really turned her on. It filled her with a zest for more change. Made her think she was pushing the world around, instead of the world pushing her.

  With the adverts for tenants came the usual identity parade of rapists and panty-wearing loners. A lot of these, believe it or not, were put off by Mandy. We finally settled on a female singer-songwriter, an IT consultant, and a businessman. The singer-songwriter turned out to be a junkie, the IT consultant a coke dealer and the ‘businessman’ one of the strangest individuals I have ever met, but all that came later, much later. The surface of people is all we have to deal with in the early stages. Human beings go to great lengths to conceal their real proclivities, processes, perversions.

  One afternoon, around the time these jokers moved in with their false-bottomed suitcases and electronic scales, I found myself in central London with a couple of hours to kill. Martin had closed the shop at lunchtime in despair, saying it would cost more to heat and light the place than the pitiful trade we were sure to do. That week, Mandy had been forced to start part-time at a hairdressers on Denmark Street, the elusive deal further away than ever. Funny how all girls seem to know how to cut hair. Even if they don’t, they feign deep knowledge of scissors, basins and dyes. It must be a point of pride. Mandy was no exception, although she wasn’t saving me much on haircuts as, increasingly, I didn’t need them. I had been in the habit of surprising her after work, the two of us taking long wanders in the Aladdin’s cave of shopfront windows, filled with spangled Gibsons, streamlined Stratocasters, glittering vintage Gretsches. Often we would go for a beer at the Twelve Bar club and then blag our way in to check out the latest band. That afternoon, with hours to go before Mandy finished, I thought I’d take in a movie with my last guineas, a rare occurrence at the time. The film was Berg
man’s Wild Strawberries. It was a guilty pleasure of the highest order slumping down into the plush red chair; solitary, sans popcorn, and waiting for the first subtitles to appear on the screen. Much handwringing and religious doubt later, also feeling slightly disturbed, I exited into the freezing street and made my way to the hairdresser’s only to find Mandy had just left. I belted up St Martin’s Lane in pursuit. Then I ran around the shadowy back of the Centre Point building, a horrible London spot—I always imagined the ghosts of the poor from the demolished St Giles’ Circus crying from the ground. In the February night, the black tower seemed to absorb the frayed light of the Tottenham Court Road: phallic, somnambulant, unanswering—a giant tombstone for the collective dead. Finally, I vaulted the railings and descended into the tube. At the ticket barriers I spotted her at once: only, from the scowl on her face, I rightly concluded she wasn’t pleased to see me.