Byron Easy

by Jude Cook

  ‘Is the guitar okay?’

  She said: ‘And fuck you, too.’

  Dios mio. If that wasn’t prickly enough, things became substantially hotter back at Seaham Road. The van journey resembled a funeral cortege. Each member of the band solemnly dropped off with their gear, hopeless expressions on faces. Few words had been exchanged; maybe the odd conciliatory pat on the back had passed among musicians unsure of when, if ever, they would see each other again. Once through our front door, the high stack of her flightcased amp blocking the passage, Mandy produced the guestlist; a long printed roll-call of all those absentee VIPs. She took out her lighter and held it under the paper.

  In the gloom of the hall I asked, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘What does it look like? I’m burning rubbish.’

  The flames spread through the paper, soaring upwards as if the thing had been doused with petrol. Then she disappeared up the stairs to our flat, still holding the flambeau. I followed, only to find her calmly walking through the rooms, applying the flame to curtains, clothes and wall posters, which took immediately. My heart, always unsteady around Mandy, started to rattle like a fire bell. This done, she flung the torch into the recycling box which was full of tinder-dry newspapers. It flared up at once.

  ‘You’re crazy,’ I said. ‘You’re going to kill us all!’ But Mandy wasn’t listening. She went to sit sulkily on her big limousine-length sofa, awaiting immolation, like an impassive sati widow.

  I raced out to the hall for a non-existent fire extinguisher. Panicking, I barged back and was forced to improvise with a wet tea-towel instead. By the time I had smothered the curtains, the recycling box was a towering inferno. By the time the recycling box had been doused in the bath, the posters were scorching the ceilings, leaving sooty circles the size of car tyres. By the time the last flames had been mastered the whole flat reeked like a gutted factory after an arson attack. I crumpled to the floor in front of Mandy, exhausted, waiting for her to speak harsh words. But, to my surprise, I found her face unexpectedly gentle. She stared at me beatifically; stared a hole right through me. In the low light, tears dripped steadily from her chin, like jewels from an icicle.

  There were other ways of living, but I couldn’t envisage them at the time. On every occasion I tried to picture this better life, it shifted shape or ran beyond my peripheral vision, where it hunkered down and waited. In the absence of this modifying spirit I made the best of things, on a day to day basis. You can’t just get up and walk away from a hellish marriage. It isn’t that easy, as anyone who has been in the same tiring predicament will testify. Instead, you make amends. The mind, if it is reflective at all, constantly circles the pros and cons: the reason the union happened in the first place; the daunting consequences of breaking the Gordian knot. The ramifications. A great deal of time is spent in not wanting to seem a failure in other people’s eyes. Also, not wanting to look into their eyes. A marriage is different from the common or garden relationship. It is supposed to be holy in the eyes of the Invisible Man. It has legal implications. Parents get involved. Children, if there are any, have to be taken into account. Friends wish you well and are always enquiring about the health of your marriage, as if it were a living third party, dependent on the correct nutrients and vitamins. You feel obliged to produce a progress report every couple of months. Then there are the intimations, forwarded by others, that your partner is less than faithful. There’s nothing worse than the jealousy between two people who have started to despise each other. Not the noble loving ‘not wisely, but too well’ of the Moor, but a corrosive covetousness that one clings to, as it supposedly produces evidence that—despite burning flats and flying fists—you still love each other. This non-nutritious and possessive jealousy is hard to walk away from.

  The day after Mandy’s band went up in smoke, she retired to bed with a high temperature. Not as high as that produced by the flaming curtains of the previous night—the thermometer indicated nothing above normal—but high in the sense of highly strung. Ready to snap. By six, I was locked into an argument over the subject of Antonia, whose lovely twins had graced The Dome in a melon-coloured tank top, which seemed to produce a measurable tensile stress (on the material and on the men). Apparently, my tongue had been on the floor all night. An hour of attacking my behaviour had degenerated into general swipes at women and personal-level abuse aimed at Antonia herself.

  Mandy raised herself from the futon (her semi-permanent home) to deliver her peroration: ‘… Then there’s all those putas in their tight tops giving people’s boyfriends—or worse, husbands—the eye! Whores! They’re all whores!’

  She slumped back down again, shaking from the strain of so much concentrated pejorative thought.

  ‘Well, you’ve really put your cards on the table now,’ I countered. ‘It’s not my fault Antonia was wearing that top.’

  ‘That silly slut! She should have her stupid page-three tits removed. Surgically removed.’

  ‘I thought she was your best friend.’

  ‘Not if she’s wiggling about in front of everything in a pair of trousers all night she’s not.’

  ‘Christ, if she could hear you now.’

  ‘She’s too busy flirting.’

  ‘And you’ve never flirted in your life, right?’

  ‘Plus she’s got cellulite. Can you believe it? At twenty-four!’

  ‘Oh, who cares!?’

  I thought it curious that, taking into account the fact that Mandy and I were no longer sleeping with each other, she seemed to want to exercise all her wifely privileges of sexual possessive-ness. I knew she was innately competitive with anything female (Jesus, she even used to become jealous over poor Concepcion when I cradled her in my arms), but this was an incoherent attitude of hers. Obviously, this was in the days when I still expected some kind of logic to her insane views, some consistency or integrity. After the vodka-glass incident, her rank jealousy had manifested itself in gentler ways. A joke developed between us where, if we found an unknown but wholly innocent phone number the back of a cigarette packet, we would comically interrogate each other in silly voices. ‘Whose number is that?’ ‘Ve haff vays of making you …,’ et cetera. This had the effect of diffusing the troublesome unexploded bomb of jealousy. Only, just recently, her old termagant edge was back. If I mentioned any other woman, whether a customer in the shop or someone seen on an escalator, she would become Cleopatra, demanding to know her competitor’s age, height, the sound of her voice or whether there was ‘majesty in her gait’. At a Fellatrix gig in the spring she had thrown a lit cigarette at a girl I just happened to be asking for a light in the audience. A subtle shift of emphasis from throwing objects at me, but worrying nonetheless.

  And, true to form, there was a double-standard at the heart of this. While I wasn’t allowed to so much as glance at another woman, she could have all the handjob-fatigued suitors she wanted. There used to be a queue of them after every gig, insisting she autograph their spotty buttocks. However, just recently her fury had been newly directed towards her own gender, her fellow sisters. I put this down to the delayed influence of the old señora, Montserrat. Largely brought up by her dotty grandmother, who never hesitated to pronounce a woman a puta for the slightest transgression, Mandy seemed to be turning into the bitter old dame at a rate of knots. But she had never accused Antonia of being a whore before now. Maybe she only thought it. This was a new development. She was slowly alienating herself from her own sex. In fact, if I examined the situation, Antonia was her only female friend. There was no getting away from the fact that Mandy was that most terrifying of female quantities, a man’s woman. She gloried in the intense and seedy attention of the men, a natural sunlamp to her ego and vanity, but spurned the knotty Sisterhood.

  I could no longer tolerate this high bitchery. I made to leave the room in order to search for the mobile, that we shared.

  ‘… Not only that, but she was fluttering her eyelashes and talking in that fake Mari
lyn Monroe baby voice. I can’t stand that husky shit. You know that’s a put-on voice, don’t you? Just for the benefit of men? If you ever visited her parents’ farm you wouldn’t hear her using that silly accent. She sounds like a bumpkin up there.’

  ‘Can’t you give it a rest? Anyway, where’s the mobile? I need to call Rudi before he’s kneecapped. He’s been mixed up in all sorts recently’

  But Mandy wasn’t listening.

  ‘And Nick’s just as shallow. He’s such a poseur. All he’s bothered about is being seen with the correct pair of shoes.’

  ‘Okay. Whatever you say. She’s a slag and he’s a poseur. Where’s the phone?’

  Mandy paused, and said, ‘I don’t know. I think it was on the bed.’

  Our eyes met for a beat. Mandy rummaged around under the covers and sure enough produced the phone. She had been lying on it. The weight of her cellulite-free, non-flirtatious thighs had pressed the call button. She confirmed the worst. The number dialled had been Antonia’s, who, we later found out to our unlimited shame, had been crouched next to the phone with Nick for the past hour, listening to our real opinion of them both.

  ‘It’s like the Bromley PTA dinner and dance in here,’ said Martin Drift, sucking on a red Marlboro in the underground gloom. ‘What’s wrong with these young people? They all look like surfers or hippies. Not to mention those grave-robbers in the white make-up. In my day you had gobbing punks.’

  We were standing in the patchouli and dry-ice melancholy of the Electric Ballroom watching a beyond-forty alcoholic finish her final song on stage. Even the band seemed to have become suddenly embarrassed by the strangely uninhibited hand movements and caterwauling with which this woman chose to climax her performance. The name of this band of risibly unsmiling Goths was Rose Masquerade. Unquestionably, this was a rose long overdue pruning. Without looking at Martin, whose skin I knew would be glowing in indignation under his salty beard, I shouted, ‘You were—sorry, are—a hippy, Martin. It was bands like yours they wanted to destroy.’

  He shouted something back but it was drowned out. I couldn’t attack Martin on a point of cool for the simple reason that we had both capitulated. We had embarked on a night of barrel-scraping. On the unreliable advice of Pat Coffer we were, indeed, contemplating Eurovision. The great man himself was near the lip of the stage, attempting to hold a conversation with Mandy, whose features appeared and disappeared in a fog of dry ice. This was just as well, because nobody else wanted to talk to her. Anybody remotely connected with the music industry had either blanked her, smirked or frozen her out on first encounter. A few had ironically made the fellatio gesture behind her back, with a curled hand held to the mouth, tongue visibly in cheek. This, of course, was in tribute to her late unlamented band, named after an act that Mandy had never performed on me, and one which, she insisted, she never would even if the temperatures in hell dipped below zero. To be honest, I was glad she had taken Pat off our hands. I could sense Martin also dreaded delivering the final verdict that his Eurovision hopeful—Miss Moonstone, currently curled in the foetal position on stage as the last waves of feedback shredded ears—wasn’t up to scratch. In fact, so far from qualified was she for the job of singer, popstar, sane human being, that almost anyone with functioning limbs randomly picked from a crowd could have made a better go of it. In terms of talent, she made Martin and I look like Bacharach and David. Why such a comparison? Because ever since accepting Pat’s offer of the Eurovison songwriting gig we had been frantically thinking of ways to renege on our promise. The latest, cooked up while standing dumbstruck in front of the monitors, was to claim that we were both secretly illiterate. Write her songs? We would sooner sign our own certification for the madhouse. Nul points!

  Pat Broke off from Mandy and began to search for us through the Waterloo of dry ice.

  ‘Quick,’ Martin said, ‘he’s coming our way. Let’s scarper to the bar. We might be able to lose him there.’

  ‘What about Mandy?’

  ‘She’ll do the same if she has any sense.’

  Not sure by this stage of my marriage that she possessed any, I downed my diluted lager and left the plastic pint glass sticking to the venue’s floor. Martin tugged the sleeve of my jacket and started to force the milling punters aside, like Moses through a Black Sea of leather jackets. Once at the bar he stood with his curled fiver, demanding service with his peculiarly astringent grey eyes. He had determination, Martin, that I would grant him. Sometimes I thought he was the only sane person I knew. He was a compact, sinewy, elegantly evolved man who placed a high value on loyalty, diligence, grit—the old values. Quick to form opinions, he nevertheless proved to be quite shrewd about human behaviour. I couldn’t think of a single assessment he had made that hadn’t, over the years, proved correct. Mandy did indeed turn out to be Mad Spanish Mandy, with all the slavering suitors in the world. Pat did indeed turn out to be one of the most persistent lunatics in the asylum, not just a harmless old pisshead.

  The very contemplation of writing a song for Pat’s Eurovision turkey had only arisen because of the sharp downturn in Rock On’s fortunes of late. By November, the apparently never-ending downward trajectory of the shop seemed to have reached a nadir; at which point it turned a corner and just continued in freefall during the run-up to Christmas. Little Johnny, it appeared, didn’t want that spangled Gretsch Country Gentleman with pearl inlays any more, he wanted a sampler and a digital mixing desk. December had seen tumbleweeds blowing across the dusty floors of the Royal College Street shop. I had been downsized to one afternoon a week. Desperation was in the air. Every time I arrived just after lunch-time, Martin would be stepping out into the bitter wind for a Londis chicken slice, like Oates leaving the godforsaken tent. But he was determined to see his family through this ‘lull in the performance’, as he liked to call it. With debts like his, he had to be. Plus, his wife had finally persuaded him to move the family from the crack and pitbull estate where they had resided since the eighties to a purpose-built council block in Belsize Park, thus unfortunately doubling the rent. Despite his limpet-like resistance to movement or change, he had reacted to this upheaval with a Senecan shrug. ‘You have to expect everything in this game,’ he would say, as another Thursday afternoon’s sale of three guitar picks was banked. I was surprised by his resilience. Somewhere Martin had hidden reserves. So, when Pat had marauded in on the last Friday before Christmas, invigorating us afresh with his Eurovision dreams, we had told him he could count us in. I may as well admit that I too was hoping beyond hope that Rose Masquerade’s singer was not the flapping festive dinner she turned out to be. I too was vainly dreaming of big paydays; Green Room nerves, Terry Wogan’s melting brogue, hairspray, glitter, and a ticket out of Sing-Sing. I hadn’t really believed that Mandy’s band would disappear down the great rock ’n’ roll khazi in the sky. It had been such a central plank of her—our—existence. I hadn’t known a time when she wasn’t living the dream day and night. I trembled to think how she would fill her days now.

  Martin handed me a urine-coloured pint of warmish lager and asked, ‘Are you still using that wedding present?’

  Up until that moment I had totally forgotten his gift of a phallic-shaped lava lamp, delivered personally on the evening before my wedding day. The undulating green and pink patterns in their joke-erection plastic tube had to be hidden when Montserrat and Leo visited the following spring. Not long after that, Mandy had belted it to the floor in one of her apopleptic rages. I felt a sudden chill of shame at this. It had been such a surprise to see Martin at our door (the first occasion he had visited), cold and hungry, on the way home from the shop, his car coughing exhaust at the kerb, green novelty-cock under his arm.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said shakily, ‘I think it’s still in a packing case somewhere.’

  ‘Only, I didn’t see it when I came over to see your new place. Now, if you didn’t like it, if you thought it was gaudy rubbish and belonged in a knocking shop—’

  ‘No, no,’ I sa
id, knowing how easily his feelings were hurt. He really was a sensitive soul under that dense beard and grizzled skin.

  ‘—I just thought it would tickle your fancy. I burst out laughing when I saw it down the Lock Market.’ Martin glanced over my shoulder. ‘Aye, aye. Here comes trouble. Pretend we spent most of the set here.’

  I turned to see Pat Coffer limping towards us, a rock ’n’ roll Long John Silver, dragging his unwilling right leg with a tattooed hand. His puce complexion and concrete-grey eyes shimmered under the distant strobes. He was an Irish mountebank or Covent Garden costermonger from the old tradition.

  ‘Gentlemen, I knew I’d find ya here, propping up the counter. She’s the dog’s, isn’t she?’

  Martin suddenly had his business visor on. He said, ‘Who, Mandy?’

  ‘Nah, Moonstone. She’s got what it takes, eh? A real performer.’

  ‘I’m afraid we sat most of it out, Pat.’

  ‘Ah, but I saw you both spellbound for the grand finale, eh, eh?’ He slapped Martin on the shoulder and winked at me. ‘I don’t half fancy your missus, Bry. It does an old wanker good to be seen out with a pretty bird on his arm. Reminds me of the days down Studio 54 when—’

  ‘Pat,’ Martin said with icy finality, ‘she’s shit. I’ve never seen worse in thirty years of exposure to shit. She wouldn’t even make it on a cruise ship. And I think Byron might want his wife back at the end of the evening.’