Byron Easy

by Jude Cook

  Deadpan, she said, ‘I didn’t think you were going to bother.’

  My first instinct was always to appeal to a reasonableness I was convinced every human being possessed. Wrong move. I replied, upbeat, ‘Don’t be like that. Anyway, it can’t be a surprise any more if you expect to see me.’

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Oh, I saw a film. Nothing you’d like.’

  This, evidently, was the worst thing I could possibly say.

  ‘You’ve been lounging around in a cinema when I’ve been working my fingers to the bone! When this fucking band needs all the help it can get! When you haven’t even finished decorating the rooms for the new tenants! When we haven’t got a penny between us!’

  Ah, the woe that is in marriage. I tried to answer, but the words, for once, didn’t arrive. And anyway, there wasn’t a suitable gap in which to say those words had they been available. The eye-bulging tirade didn’t let up when we were past the ticket barriers. Nor did it abate as we waited for the earth-trembling train (what a long wait that seems now, in the memory). Nor when we were sitting in the jammed rush-hour carriage. There we were, three months married, screaming like council-house residents in a public place. As the choked train squealed into Camden, passengers delivering us their blackest looks, I made a risky decision. I would do something I had never done before. Because I could take it no longer. Mandy’s voice at full throttle always sounded, to me at least, like a knife cutting vegetables very fast: chop, chop, chop, chop, chop. And it was this noise, and our personal life, that she was sharing with a hundred murderous commuters. As her slicing-machine reached banshee pitch I calmly got up, dusted the spittle from my collar, and stepped off the train.

  ‘Welcome to Great North Eastern railways. The restaurant car will be serving hot tea and coffee, fresh soup, gourmet sandwiches, and a wide range of crisps and snack products …’

  Not again! It dawns on me that I will have to listen to this excruciating announcement after every station. Eternal recurrence. Nietzsche, that walrus-tached sack of shit, would have understood.

  ‘… These include hot baguettes with fillings of roast beef, roast chicken, Christmas turkey and stuffing; toasted bacon and tomato sandwiches plus a wide range of home-made cakes, biscuits, pastries, hot drinks as well as a fully licensed bar. The buffet trolley should also be passing through standard accommodation shortly. Thank you!’

  The platform of Welwyn Garden City, with its decrepit Nabisco breakfast cereal factory opposite, is disappearing into the gloom. The works, a big, tumbling, brooding building, with its never-lit neon sign, stands next to a vast car park, big enough for a medium-sized airport. I know all these landmarks by heart. I am getting closer to the place where I misspent my childhood, my adolescence. Closer to home. The train will pass Hamford, where I grew up. I’m not sure if I’m looking forward to this or not. Why does this provide no comfort? More a kind of excitement or dread. A moment ago, sitting rocking slightly in my seat, I saw all those awful scenes from the early days of my marriage with a knifing clarity. Nick’s terrible disclosure; the punch in the face after Stringfellows; Harriet’s forlorn cushions on the landing; the bulging asinine eyes of my wife; the disparaging looks of the tube commuters as we headed back to what was supposed to be our happy home. The shame and the disturbance it all caused to my soul. That daily rancour now seems like a half-forgotten nightmare. How did I put up with it without stepping off the train—metaphorically speaking—every day? I must have been out of my mind. And I never did see Harriet again. Many times, from the top deck of a bus or at a lonely all-night garage, I thought I spotted her knotty orange hair flying in the London wind, but it was always someone else. A student or a young mum with a pushchair.

  I can hear the clanking of the drinks trolley behind me as it makes its slow approach. People are straining to find the correct change; lining up the miniatures, with their plastic sun-hat cups, on little pull-down tables. There is the hiss of an uncapped bottle of Schweppes; a whiff of malt whisky. The fluorescent lights seem suddenly heavy on the eyes. Two seats in front of me, the Islington lesbian couple, loquacious since we set off, are having an intense discussion about a play they have recently seen. The stridently middle-class voice of the dominant partner has started to blot out all thought. In fact, it has blotted out the responses of her lover. This is a monologue she is subjecting us all to. I open my notebook and attempt to read back my last entry. This proves to be surprisingly hard work. There must be an orchard of plums in that voice. ‘… But of course the audience en masse weren’t receptive. They didn’t realise they were watching a representation of some kind of cultural epoch …’ Cultural fucking epoch? How does she get away with that in normal conversation? Doesn’t she realise how embarrassing she is? Look, she’s even embarrassing her friend … Christ, I’ve been stuck on the same sentence for a full minute. And her voice. That accent. How did it get that way? I glance around to check if anyone else is sharing my outrage. Not a soul. Even Robin and Michelle both seem to be concentrating on their books without too much trouble. ‘… all the ideas were marvellous; so intellectually risky …’ Jesus, she’s reviewing it for the Guardian out loud, here and now. ‘… but it was the second act that struck me; it really turned all that post-post-modern revisionism on its head …’ Maybe I should try to sleep, close my eyes. No, that will make me concentrate even more on her voice. I must persevere with this sentence. Nope, it’s meaningless, she’s blotting out the meaning. ‘… Yes, the second act was nuanced in a marvellously vigorous way, so fully achieved in comparison with the …’ Fuck, if she mentions the second act again, I’m going to have to take someone’s hot coffee and pour it all over her. Or at least ask her what play she’s talking about. ‘… the total specificity of the role …’ Okay, that does it.

  ‘Anything to drink, sir?’

  The benign eyes of the trolley girl stare into mine. Robin and Michelle look up, readying their wallets and placing their books flat on the table.

  ‘No thanks. No …’ My gaze has fallen on the black plastic bin-liner sagging from the back of the drinks wagon, into which all the spent miniatures and styrofoam cups will eventually be thrown. Something in this tableau makes me start to tremble. Perhaps it’s the aesthetic distance between the shiny trolley, its cargo of inviting booze, and the quotidian household object stuck on the end. The promise and the fulfilment co-extensive, or something. (I think I may have swallowed the same dictionary as my Islington friend.) Or maybe it’s because there is no more depressing sight in the world than a black bin-liner. Perhaps this is because they are the traditional receptacle for severed heads and torsos, sadly discovered on seagull-swarming landfill sites. Or because they are utilised by rough sleepers as makeshift duvets on punishing December nights … But this isn’t enough, and I know it. I am well aware of what makes me shudder so. Three weeks ago, two bin-liners turned up in my hallway. I don’t know who let them in, but there they were one evening as I returned from a solitary pint in the Prince Regent. And what they contained was, for me, worse than severed heads.

  Inside the fullest sack was a sizeable selection of the books I had left behind at our marital home: mainly hardbacks, some with inscriptions from her (‘to the sexiest Byron in the world, Happy Valentine’s 199-’), nestling in what appeared to be a gunk of cat shit and litter. The second bag, though smaller, seemed to be heavier. It contained old vinyl, the onyx chess set we had bought together in Cephalonia less than a year before, Rudi’s wedding gift of The Illustrated Kama Sutra, and many of my presents to her that she obviously didn’t deem worth keeping. There was a wok, a flower vase, jewellery, the greatest hits of The Carpenters and (most painfully) the underwear she had worn on our honeymoon but had subsequently refused to even look at. Finally, my only remaining copy of Hours of Endlessness, the verse smudged by a substance I trembled to identify. This stuff must have been cluttering up the flat, the space she had long coveted as an abode for herself and her ‘private life’; the latter a
phrase she ludicrously used on a number of occasions. I would always holler back, ‘You’re married, for God’s sake, this is your private life!’ But Mandy was convinced she had another one, elsewhere.

  I dragged the groaning sacks up to the hateful hutch of my room. The larger one split on the ascent, leaving an acrid trail of cat crap. Did she deliberately throw this shit in with my books? Or were the bags lying around for days while the cats used them as a latrine? Either way, I sensed that the zenith of my humiliation had been scaled. I crumpled onto my bed and began to feel choked from the very interior. I fell on the thorns of life. I bled! How could she? … How could she cold-heartedly return books with personal inscriptions, telling of our love, our long involvement? I instinctively reached for my cigarettes, then remembered I’d given up the week before after an incident where I had passed out drunk on my bed with a lighted fag, only to wake up the next morning with a tyre-sized scorch mark in the fire-retardant duvet and mattress. The shock of almost killing myself and everyone in the flat from such stupidity had scared me into quitting—and I was still undergoing the berserk tumours of cold turkey during every waking minute. The visit to the pub for a drink without a cigarette had been a hurdle I had just about managed. Instead of smoking, I set about placing all the callously returned objects around my room. After half an hour I gave up. Populating the tiny space was the debris of a married life—things cruelly transplanted to a location they were never intended to inhabit: videos in a hole in the wall; the chess set on the camping table, not the lacquered shelving we’d shopped for together and that I’d put up. I quickly returned everything to the grotesque ebony bags, then threw myself on the bed in the hope that sleep would come and behead the day.

  The following morning, I surfaced with the curtains still open, the chestnut tree outside bare to its bones: a shrivelled autumn skeleton. At its feet was a waterfall of pale rust, the large paddle-shaped leaves in knee-deep piles. The wind shook its branches at rhythmic intervals—it looked like an old codger standing in a gale, every conceivable hue of decay around its battered shoes. Time had beaten it again.

  There was a muffled knock at my door. One of the haggard croupiers, just returned from his shift, informed me there was a message on the communal answerphone. It was a woman’s voice saying: ‘The table is outside.’ I knew at once that it was Mandy, and that the table she referred to was our large oval pine dining table I had spent weeks diligently sanding and varnishing. How considerate of her to return it. My heart felt giddy at this minuscule mercy. Maybe she still loved me. Maybe there was a slim chance that … I stepped out into the brisk November air to find no table. Then I realised she meant outside the flat we used to share. A flying visit to Seaham Road confirmed within the hour that it was no longer there. It had been nicked. Of course it had been nicked. If you left a coffee mug outside in that area it would be filled up in somebody else’s kitchen in the time it took to boil a kettle. This, as you can imagine, felt like some kind of meta-zenith of humiliation. She had surpassed herself. Derision had made its masterpiece. You don’t get up off the floor after a blow like that. You don’t get up easily. And the fear is that you may never get up. There was nothing for it but to go and get drunk. And the venue for this pastime had been, for an entire month, Rudi’s place.

  That night it was Arctic under the stars. It was just as well I had packed in smoking, as Rudi’s first gesture on arrival was usually to open all the doors and windows of his ground-floor flat and direct you outside. And this was a man who smoked the occasional cheroot himself. Yes, it was a freezing night, with long cumuli of steam issuing from the mouth of every damp commuter. The lengthy trudge to his bachelor lair always required a cigarette at the end of it. But this time I just walked straight in and threw myself and my scarf down on his leather sofa. Outside, the wind was raking leaves in the early darkness; also clanking something hollow in his back yard.

  Rudi said, ‘Come on in, spunker. Accept a pew and a wee tipple.’ He squared his meaty shoulders to take a look at me. His rhinestone eyes seemed to say, yes you’re the same self-pitying arsehole as last night and the night before. But his smile couldn’t suppress relish at having company, or rather, a drinking buddy over on such a regular basis. He grinned like a Rubens satyr, then handed me a bottle of red to pour. ‘What lies has she been telling you now? A lot ay shite, I expect.’

  I took a plastic bag from my pocket and tossed it onto the icy stainless-steel coffee table. I said, ‘She sent all my stuff back. In two big bin-liners.’

  ‘Is that it?’ said Rudi, and joined me on the sofa.

  ‘Of course not. Open it.’

  Out fell the basque and stockings from my honeymoon. Rudi’s eyes brightened. ‘Ah, the old returning underwear as ay gesture of contempt. Still, she could be wearing it for some other shite. It isnae that bad.’

  ‘No, it’s worse. She only left my table out for the Turks to nick off the street. The one we used to eat off every night.’

  ‘Now that is pish, I have tae say. You don’t fuck with a man’s table. Here, have some more. In vino veritas.’

  He made a lunge for the bottle and refilled both our glasses. I observed Rudi as his soft corpulent hands handled the silky lingerie. The glossy black of his eyebrows. The slightly pursed greedy mouth. The swirls of body hair escaping from a rift at the top of his red shirt. Rudi Buckle always wore red. Red and black. In his supple voice he suggested I was exaggerating my predicament: ‘Like I say, Bry, the whole fiasco could be a lot worse. You’ve got a room, half a job. You’ll make it through this, I guarantee you.’

  I knew immediately that it had been a mistake to go over. In my condition, I should have been alone in a straightjacket or in a monastery. I knew my whole opera of disgust was boring to Rudi, and that he had nothing of any perspicacity to say on the subject. Yet still I went over. Night after bacchanalian night. And he always mentioned the room he had located for me as early as possible in the conversation. He obviously thought I should be grateful to him for evermore. Christ, I should have taken that room at the Y. His way of life frightened me too, after marriage. The selfish bachelor round of cooking for one, chasing women and caning it till God knows when … It all seemed as empty as the hull of a playboy’s yacht. I could feel the furred tongue and fangs of the Singleton Existence closing around my aorta.

  ‘She wouldn’t even come to the door to explain herself,’ I said.

  ‘But you did talk to her?’

  ‘Yeah, on her mobile. She said I’d once asked her to put all my stuff in the bin, just like she’d done with me. She implied she was only following my instructions.’

  ‘Aye, in a battle of wits be sure to bring a weapon,’ mused Rudi, sagely. ‘Did she tell you what she’d been up to since she threw you out?’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ I said, feeling a hot alcoholic tiredness behind my eyes as the first bottle of red found its mark. ‘She’s been holding parties for all her Spanish friends, renting the spare room out to Japanese students to pay my part of the rent. Doing all those things I inhibited her from doing, apparently. And get this. She even wants me to pretend to the council that I’m still living there so she can pull off some kind of benefits scam. The final indignity!’ My blood was up now. I looked at Rudi, that self-styled playboy and carouser of Kentish Town. His black, needy eyes, full of their strange appetites, had narrowed—as if listening to information anyone wise knew already. Yes, it was always me—the puny ingenue—who was the last to know the truth about the human condition.

  ‘That’s only to be expected,’ whispered Rudi in his mellow, velvety, versatile undertone.

  ‘From a psychopath like her, yes.’

  ‘And are you gonna play ball? She already owes you two hundred and fifty bar from the last rent.’

  ‘What else can I do?’ I was on my feet now, making a Christ-like gesture with my arms. I knew Rudi found these emotional demonstrations intolerable. ‘She’s like an unbeatable force. She just steamrolls everyone and everything in her path.
The double-dealing bitch!’

  ‘Calm down, old fella,’ said Rudi, and raised himself from the creaking leather. I could see evidence of the sunlamp on his flushed face and scorched neck. ‘Since that last baby went down in a rather splendid fashion, I suggest you find another and get stuck intae the bevvy. Meanwhile, Rudolino here is gonna reheat a magnificent spag bol he cooked earlier. Are ye having a wee bit? It’s choice.’

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ I said, and sat down.

  ‘I take it that’s an affirmative. You gotta eat. Strength is life. Howa y’ever gonna get stuck into some serious fanny looking like a pipe-cleaner?’

  After dinner, Rudi made a big deal of clearing away the plates and saucers of Parmesan cheese. I could hear him throwing the debris into the dishwasher behind the polished expanse of his breakfast bar. I surveyed the pastel lighting of his bachelor den. The walls were invaded by framed Japanese posters of impeccable vulgarity. Comic-strip cartoon characters; futuristic blondes coiled in pythons; Akira with a machine gun—the sort of thing even Athena wouldn’t carry. Then there was the cream rug of Tsarist luxury placed before an open fire, the grate of which always held a mound of amber embers. The location for his many seductions, no doubt. I shivered at the prospect of sexual contact with another woman. My night with Haidee had only left me feeling inept and out of practice; even more vulnerable to that dowry of smiles that is love. Despite the fact that the last two years of my marriage had been entirely without sex, Mandy had somehow inoculated me against intimacy and affection for ever.