Byron Easy

by Jude Cook

  The new place showed pitiful evidence of an attempt at cultural betterment. This was the satanic work of Delph, pathologically insecure that my mother would miss her weekly dose of Mozart and Radio 4. Though, in Des’s absence, this was always doomed to failure. One day I braved the Arctic bathroom to find myself pissing in front of a mini Michelangelo’s David. Worse still, next to it was a ten-quid repro of Rodin’s Lovers, a vile token of Delph’s affection for my mother, no doubt. I shuddered at the muscular hand of Paolo on her thigh, the awful submission in the curve of Francesca’s back. Not only this, he had invested in a set of leather-bound classics (Mrs Trollope, Gaskell, Fanny Burney, G. B. Shaw’s plays), cassettes of classical music and a Matisse throw. But Delph had got it all wrong, as people with no innate cultural bearings always will. The books (ordered from a coupon on the back of a Sunday tabloid) were mainly stodgy nineteenth-century melodrama at its worst—all destined to remain unread during his tenure; the classical tapes were monstrous low-fi compilations of marching-band staples; and the Matisse throw was—to anyone with a pair of eyes—gruesomely at odds with mother’s delicate William Morris cushion covers, then back in fashion. How I remember my father guffawing at this very definition of vulgarity when I described it to him. He was sitting in front of his log fire at Dovecote Lane, listening to the Winter adagio from The Four Seasons. In full petit-bourgeois effect. Often at these times his hooded eyes and lunar pate would look profoundly solemn, until I began to relate the arrival of each new grossly tasteless objet d’art. ‘Last week, they got a poster of two people kissing. It was sickening.’

  Des looked up absentmindedly from his toilet of despond and asked, ‘Who was it by?’

  ‘I don’t know, but it was kind of like wallpaper—like a pattern made of gold. And he was holding her head at a funny angle, like he was trying to break her neck. It didn’t look comfortable at all.’

  ‘Klimt?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s the bloke. But it wasn’t signed by him, it was signed by someone called Athena.’

  At this Des took off his glasses and exploded into hoarse laughter. His tearful shaking had a strange effect on me—it made my heart leap to see him smile, but it also bequeathed a lifetime of cultural confusion. As much as I despised Delph’s cack-handed attempts to embrace Art, to breathe higher air, to imbibe a beaker of something other than Dr Pepper, I hated my old man’s easy, self-satisfied, lower-middle-class elitism. It is a legacy I still feel today when reading a tabloid: hatred and guilty pleasure combined. Hatred at their salacious reporting of the latest nonce trial at the Old Bailey, replete with gym-knicker snapshots intended only for a jury, but joy over a liberating editorial attacking the funding of a nobs’ opera house ‘when people are dying from want of a hospital bed’. Still, these cultural faux pas of Delph’s raised a chuckle from Dad, and that’s all an eleven-year-old wants when he thinks his father doesn’t give a shit whether he lives or dies on a distant housing estate. Eventually, my fortnightly visits would bring forth a tissue of lies and exaggerations. I started making things up just to see him in a mood that wasn’t irritable or clinically depressed. In fact, marital separation and moving house didn’t seem to have made either Des or Sinead any happier. Often, I would finish the three-mile walk from school to find Mum sitting alone in the darkening kitchen, staring off into space. When I asked her what she was up to she would reply, ‘Thinking’. If I put the light on, she would rise to turn it off, then continue sitting until the yellow beaks of the streetlamps threw sad paths of sulphur over her face and the cheap linoleum.

  All this struck me as quite odd, because two events at the White House the previous year had led me to believe that her liaison with Delph and the subsequent move would make her deliriously happy. The first occasion I will never forget. I was sitting on the cushions in front of the black-and-white set, watching Jackanory when she crouched down before me, obscuring the view as she uttered the immortal words, ‘There’s something I have to tell you …’ I remember the shock of seeing her eyes full of strangled compassion, or something approaching the difficulty of explaining an adult and complex fact to a simple and childish mind. Besides which, she had been crying: the tropical-lime seventies eye-shadow was smudged into the dark pits of her eye sockets; her peacock headscarf loose over its cargo of ebony hair. She went on: ‘Your father and I don’t love each other any more.’ I felt a burst of adrenalin at this statement of the absolute obvious. O my prophetic soul! She had been seeing Delph for five years, for Christ’s sake! The man had been a permanent fixture of the house for the last two. But to hear her articulate it, in an unusually gentle voice (a voice which excluded the harsh tones of ‘Get down here at once and finish your greens!’ or ‘Right! Bedtime, young man!’) was indescribably stirring. I knew I would remember this for the rest of my days. The official announcement. I hesitated before finally saying,

  ‘That’s pretty obvious, Mum.’

  She straightened slightly at this, allowing me to catch a glimpse of the TV screen. She was spoiling Jackanory, after all.

  ‘Well, it means we’ll be moving to another house.’

  ‘With Uncle Delph?’

  ‘Yes, with Uncle Delph.’

  Something like panic or anguish or shame appeared in her face now, emotions I hadn’t seen before and didn’t want to see again in a hurry.

  ‘What about Dad?’

  ‘Your father is going to stay here. You can see him whenever you like.’

  She paused slightly after this statement, as we both knew it was inaccurate. I would not be seeing him ‘whenever I liked’ because he was never around. Filling the room now were her imploring, tear-ruined, green-rimmed eyes. The million objections I had to this plan, this caper of hers, seemed to lodge in my larynx. They remained there without the extra aid of effort needed to make thought into audible speech. Instead, I just said,

  ‘Okay’

  And went back to watching the patient storyteller on the screen. To me, not loving someone was not a good enough reason for upping sticks and enduring the stultifying boredom of a Starter Home estate for the rest of your life. Hating someone, perhaps. Hating someone, and loving someone else—however erroneously—yes. But not just the absence of something. Love then, for me, became merely an abstract noun. After all, what was love? I didn’t feel it. I just felt kind of in the way. So I simply said, ‘Okay.’ It wasn’t as if my opinion on the matter would have made any difference. The decision had been taken. They just wanted to run it past me before the removal van crunched and wobbled down the unmade lane, and the tea-drinking men in their tea-brown overalls entered the familiar white house to dismantle my childhood.

  Like I said, always too easy.

  The second bombshell arrived when I had just turned eleven, in the back of Sinead’s Mini, ferrying a bootful of rubber plants to the new address. A bright morning in early September, the birch trees on Dovecote Lane resembling a New England fall. Apropos of nothing, my mother said to me from the driving seat, ‘Now, how would you feel if you had a little brother or sister?’

  Ooh, I don’t know, how about … Horrified? Scandalised? Sick to the very pit of my stomach? I knew at once with childish intuition (and the weary tone of her voice) that this wasn’t her idea. It was Delph’s. This Caliban, this pig with no talent for his lover s existing child, wanted one of his own, and sought to coerce my mother-the unfortunate owner of a womb—into bearing it. I would have felt better if she had admitted, on that pellucid morning of falling leaves, to be carrying the very progeny of Satan himself. Because any nipper of Delph’s would surely have the number of the beast tattooed somewhere on its cranium. If the child were a boy, it would have to be named Damian; if a girl, Rosemary, after its mother. How could she contemplate carrying the devil’s own spawn for nine months? Let’s look at the facts. Delph was almost certainly a confused latent homosexual. His family were white trash gargoyles who spoke in funny accents with an archaic vocabulary of ‘thees’ and ‘thous’. The man himself was a glorifie
d handyman with no prospects this side of the circus. What’s more, this being the late seventies, all the evidence pointed firmly to the fact that Delph Tongue was the Yorkshire Ripper.

  Now, fragile reader, you are probably sighing that this reaction marked what Portnoy termed the culmination of my Oedipal drama, but the suspicion that Delph was in fact the most wanted man in England had firm roots in reality. For the simple reason that, after the wrenching move to number nine Southey Close, he was never around. He deposited his horrid droppings of cheap repro sculpture in our bathroom, then fucked off into the night. For months at a time. ‘Up north’, apparently. I was never sure where, or when, if ever, he would return. And Sinead didn’t know either, unless she was keeping facts from me, which was always a possibility in those turbulent days. And ‘up north’ was where the eyes of the country’s many police forces were focused. Inevitably, it was the tape recording of the suspect’s voice that confirmed my worst fears. At that tender age, I somehow confused the glottal Geordie tones of this hoaxer with the soft wide gormless vowels of Wakefied. A northern accent was a northern accent, after all. Too scared to phone the police, I would tremble with anxiety as I made my way home after school, expecting to find Delph in the kitchen, ineradicable bloodstains on his hands, the now familiar look of feigned innocence on his murderous chops. It also occurred to me that Delph might have murdered Gemma Fernandez, and that I might be sitting on important evidence … So my mother was to bear the child of the most wanted pervert and killer in the country. Oh, how I wished I had stayed in that womb! But this wasn’t the worst aspect of those dark days. The worst thing was a place I started to think of as my third house, the Stevenage council slum owned by an obese friend of my mother’s called Barbara, or Babs as she was hideously abbreviated.

  Babs was probably the largest homo sapiens I had ever laid eyes on. Her colossal folds of flesh seemed to be somehow regenerating: the existing mass producing more pulpy cellulite by the hour. Every time I was left overnight in the cramped, sick-smelling bedroom with her two infants I expected to find her exploded over the kitchen walls come morning. The reason for this residency was that Delph had begun working nights as a security guard, and needed total quiet to get his serial killer’s shuteye. Or that was the story, anyhow. After a single night there I knew I never wanted to return. But return I would, unexpectedly and often, whenever Delph’s work required him. I hated the wretched cardboard house this strange woman laboured in—husband in the nick or at sea, I never did find out. I loathed being abandoned in the baby-smelling bedroom, juggling the two emotions of badly wanting to return to Southey Close and never wanting to return there, with its rows and bolt-holed Rippers. I gagged on the curdled Weetabix I was expected to eat every morning, sunk in warm milk (that I imagined had come straight from Babs’ Krakatoan breasts) and topped with barnacles of cheap white sugar. Plus, I missed my mum.

  In the end, circumstances prevailed. My sojourn at Babs’s coincided with two unfortunate events: I began wetting the bed, and my mother announced she was pregnant. I don’t know which was the most harrowing, but within less than a year I had used up a department store of linen (Babs fitting a plastic incontinence sheet to my camp bed) and I had a little sister, who they named Sarah. Instead of the spawn of Satan, she turned out to be a solitary star, and—I tremble to admit it—the inaugural love of my life.

  The first day at an all-boys comprehensive school is an experience that all bedwetters should undergo. It certainly put an end to one form of nocturnal emission, though happily coincided with the commencement of another. One hundred and twenty pallid First Years all gathered on a concrete playground in their starchy blue uniforms, like the trembling internees of a concentration camp. Nobody knowing where to go. Farts and burps and kicks in the balls. The awful thought you might have to play rugby. Not what a young poet needs, I can tell you … There is an inescapable air of the messdeck or the barrack hall about all-male institutions. This in itself wasn’t surprising. What was a constant source of wonder during my five years at this establishment was how many individuals (boys and teachers) liked it, sought it out, revelled in it. Yes, those bluff Taffy games masters and crooked-backed sadists thought there was nothing strange about spending the lion’s share of every day in the company of so much testosterone and male hormonal panic. They were in clover! Didn’t any of these perverts long for the confection of perfume, the brush of female hair in a corridor, a high voice? Something in a skirt? No, it seemed the entire staff relished this socially implausible situation. And the boys too, after a couple of years, began to fear and hate anything feminine. The conditioning had worked. Of course, there were a couple of women on the staff, but they were harassed out or grossed-out within a couple of years. Two terms of being asked for a blow-job every morning or coming in to find the board chalked with a hundred spurting erections was enough to deter even the most broad-minded French mistress or buxom P. E. beauty. And, of course, there was the obligatory paedophile for a head. Mr Cave or the Reverend Cave as he was known, since he regularly preached pious bullshit in a stentorian voice every Sunday at St Cecilia’s church was an egregiously confident boy-fiddler. This danger-to-society had a pinched nose that flared his nostrils to the width of an anteater’s. His stiff upper lip was constantly moist with a film of sweat. In retrospect, I wonder how he lasted so long in the job. Why didn’t anyone blow the whistle on him? Didn’t the parents, our supposed protectors, suspect anything? Perhaps it was his brisk and plausible manner, his advocacy of cold-shower discipline, his dog collar, that kept him in the job for decades. Maybe everyone knew about it, but the etiquette of the time forced parents to wave their hands and look the other way. It came with the territory, I suppose. The funniest thing was that Mr Cave seemed to think nobody knew he was sticking his hand down kids’ pyjamas on school excursions. What is it about the nonce that makes him imagine nobody knows what he’s up to? With the Reverend Cave it was screamingly obvious to anyone half-awake that he had a feverish and frothing interest in young boys’ bottoms.

  It was at this sewer of chalk-dust and thrashings that I first encountered Rudi. A burly boy with brilliantined hair, and a dark look in the points of his pupils. He approached me in the playground on a sun-sliced morning in January. I immediately felt the need to impress him, so I said,

  ‘Hi. My stepdad’s the Yorkshire Ripper.’

  The big boy shot back: ‘Well, mine owns British Aerospace.’

  Nonplussed by this, though slightly perturbed by his garrulous Glasgow accent, I allowed a silence to develop, as many would in the years to come. But Rudi always seemed more than able to fill these lacunae. The icy rink of the playground was blue in the early light, the cries of boys mingling with the sound of inland gulls. Stretching before us both was the prospect of double maths and a cross-country run of unimaginable brutality. Rudi said,

  ‘Fancy a wee bunk-off this afternoon?’

  ‘Wee—that’s rude.’

  ‘No it’s not, spunker, it’s just the way I talk.’

  He appeared to be slightly affronted at my suggestion. Rudi was about the same height as me, but wider and stronger; with more meat all round.

  ‘So is that word,’ I said, seeing how far I could push him. I had witnessed other kids rag the swarthy boy in this way. He seemed to accept a degree of this as legitimate, his family having just moved from Scotland.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You, know … spunk.’

  ‘D’ yuh want a burst mooth?’

  But there wasn’t time to answer. In a flash we were rolling around on the diamond-hard tarmac, crowds of boys surrounding us shouting, ‘Bundle! Bundle! Bundle!’ Once we had been separated, my mouth indeed burst and bleeding, and had been forced to shake hands in the sinister presence of Mr Cave, we became buddies. Rudi and Byron—inseparable friends for the next five years.

  We went through a lot, me and the hirsute Scotsman, when we were young and full of grace. Truancy, drugs, rock ’n’ roll, girls, failed exams. My f
irst gig, first draw on a Camberwell carrot, first fumblings with the unopenable bras of pneumatic fourth-formers were all experienced with Rudi somewhere in the background, his tremendous nose throwing a shadow well worth casting in bronze. When he began wearing the knot of his school tie in a fat, insolent triangle that obscured his shirt, I followed suit. When he ditched his Adidas schoolbag for a skinny leather satchel stencilled with the logos of rock bands, I slavishly copied him. Only when he started shaving the comical bumfluff from his upper lip a year ahead of everyone else was I unable to imitate his initiative. And what did he gain from me? Cultural instruction, I suppose. A Virgil to guide him through the inferno of the third form; an advisor on the right books to read and the cool films to see. Because, when all was said and done, Rudi was not terrifically bright. He had spirit, spark, a certain entrepreneurial savvy, maybe even a devious cunning, but he was no Newton. So Rudi got to look more intellectual than he actually was when hanging around me (always a major point-scorer with girls he asserted—‘Just look at Arthur Miller’) and I had a burly Scottish bodyguard to fend off the bullies that plagued this skinny boy who was already showing signs of losing his hair.

  A couple of years after this, towards the end of the long, baking O level summer, Sinead and Delph decided to move house. My kid sister Sarah was five years old, about to start school, and the house on the Poets’ Estate was getting too small. Small for what? you may ask. For a sensitive, already receding boy who loathed his volatile stepfather? For the daily rows that startled the neighbours behind the cardboard walls? For the all-engulfing aura of sadness that surrounded the project of my mother’s affair? Yes, for all these reasons. And for one other that I wasn’t informed about: Sinead and Delph were planning to get married. They wanted to move up in the world: to a bigger house, to bourgeois respectability, like people born into fuck-all always do. Only, this was doomed to failure. You can take the man out of Wakefield, but not the Wakefield, et cetera. Once we did shift our tea chests (some still not unpacked from the last move) half a mile up the road, Delph performed his usual trick of permanently disabling us from meeting the neighbours’ eyes with any degree of confidence. He achieved this by immediately causing a public scene. This time it was over my first real girlfriend, roly-poly Rhianna, who I had brought back for an hour of furtive fumbling and spliff-smoking in my bedroom. Once Rhianna had cycled off unsteadily into the summer night, Delph approached my door and knocked rapidly He was still terrifying, even at the age I was—his features atavistic and gouged with indignation, his voice suddenly loud. ‘What’s going on?’ he shouted. When I had frantically dispersed the smoke and opened up, he confronted me: ‘Did you ask if you could bring someone back here?