by Jude Cook
Martin gave Pat a harsh look at this last statement. He knew the old carouser’s ways too well. For a small man, Martin could be enormously forceful and charismatic. But Pat refused to look crestfallen.
‘Give her a chance! I spent six months of giros on her singing lessons.’
Despite the fact that Moonstone was one of the worst singers in the world and of world-class ugliness, my soft sentimental nature, my innate easiness, made me feel sorry for Pat. He had been through the mill and had been spat out the other side with his gammy leg and his tormented enthusiasms. At that moment, I felt a strange affinity with him. As if we were brothers in adversity. Plus, I had been regaling Mandy with visions of a better life for a week, all flowing from the golden chalice of Eurovision victory. In the end I caved in, just like I did when Pat touched me for a twenty earlier, his unignorable confrontational eyes sparkling.
‘Okay, Pat, I’ll write a few lyrics.’
Martin rounded on me. ‘I won’t let you, Byron. I won’t let you waste your time. Pat’s made a career out of wasting people’s time.’
Surprised, I said, ‘Ah, what harm will it do, Mart? The man’s in need.’
Martin addressed Pat, his usually gentle and equanimous eyes steely. ‘Sorry, mate, but I won’t let him. He’s under contract to me.’
This last statement was ludicrous, and we all knew it. We stood there in the smoky blue-lit cavern of the ballroom, like a Mexican standoff.
‘But, why not?’ croaked Pat, his voice suddenly full of pebbles.
‘Cos he’s an old friend,’ said Martin.
To my surprise, my heart expanded at Martin’s words. Maybe I had been under great emotional strain of late, but tears smarted in my eyes, disabling me from further speech. This was a far cry from the knockabout badinage of the shop. I didn’t think he would defend me like this. I felt the sudden upheaval burn briefly inside me, like the ghost of an old wound.
Finally, Pat said, ‘And what am I, then?’
‘You’re just old,’ said Martin, and motioned for me to follow him in search of Mandy.
The day after my Eurovision dream crashed and burned, me and Martin went for a curry, and laughed off Pat’s desperate importuning. A year previously, I had sat in the same bijou balti house with Mandy, my mother, my half-sister, Sarah, and her boyfriend. I still tremble, sober reader, at the memory of this night, one of the most bloody battles ever recorded in domestic history. However, up until this watershed, Mandy’s deep eccentricity sometimes warmed me. This didn’t quite cancel out her periods of spectacular suffering, but it went some way towards it. I loved the evenings when she danced around the flat to salsa and mambo in front of the big mirror as a prelude to a night out, eye-shadow glittering on the exotic anemone-like bulges of her eyelids. Or when she cooked paella with cockles, still full of sand, from the market. Or when she bought me books for no particular reason, with effusive inscriptions on the fly-leaf. Yes, there were some good times. Brief moths that danced erratically before the light. Like the afternoon we watched Casablanca together under a duvet as the rain bucketed down outside. Or when we drove all the way to a Surrey village dog-show one July and Fidel picked up a rosette for third place. All the pastimes of a married couple: gilded rings on fingers declaring our exclusivity. Then there were the nights when we played cards around the big varnished dining table that I had spent the summer sanding and waxing. I still loved it when she spoke her fluent mellifluous Catalan or machine-gun fast Castilian. Or when she cooked with olives carefully picked out and weighed from the Cypriot grocer on Green Lanes. She was fiercely pragmatic in the wider world of getting and spending. Her fastidiousness sometimes had its upsides: only the best would do—for her wardrobe, her bathroom products; for her kitchen. I secretly admired this attitude—me, who would always settle for second best to avoid a fuss. Once upon a time this attitude had extended to her band and her three long-gone tomcats. To me, even.
Recalling that evening in the intimate mango-light of the Indian restaurant—my mother, sister and her boyfriend before me like an interview panel, Mandy sullen and playing with her food on my left—is like falling off into a troubled afternoon sleep. I feel as if I am walking through a house, each room deeper and darker and more dangerous to enter than the one before. The sight of us there is painful to the touch, to the very eyeball. I can see the waiter bringing over the poppadoms and laden tray of chutneys; smell the cigarette smoke curling into the incense air; feel the coolness of the lager on my tongue, cooler than the misty December night outside on the Holloway Road. I can see Sarah and her slightly dull, wary-eyed boyfriend making a start on the yoghurts and dills, holding hands on the linen table cloth, while Mandy looks contemptuously on. I can see my mother, Sinead, heroically preserved Sinead, slightly shrunken by the years, her sable hair dryer and more troublesome than I remember, the dewlaps of middle age just beginning to form under her chin. I can recall the feeling of troubled incipience; that we were all getting to know each other at last, with Sarah just about to finish her A levels, with mother living so far up north. The evening had commenced promisingly, with a drink at our flat in Seaham Road, Mandy putting on a brave face after a day of migraines, pills and explosions of temper. But some transformation had occurred in the cab over. My wife had reverted to type, or to the feline venom that seemed to be her default state. And she knew the evening meant a lot to me, that it had been long-organised, that I hardly saw Sarah and had never met her boyfriend before. Her new mood of barely concealed intolerance, boredom and spite didn’t make for an easy journey. I could see by the expressions of my companions that they were wondering what had gone down, what had changed her tide in a matter of moments; whether it was something they had said or done. But these were all fruitless questions with Mandy. It was rarely anything anyone had said or done. She would turn for deep childish reasons known only to herself. She hadn’t yet learnt how to behave. That evening, I would feel the full gravity of this diagnosis.
As the main courses arrived, in sizzling iron urns borne on chocks of pine, I asked Sarah, ‘So tell me what they do for English A level nowadays.’
She smiled at me, her eyes as fjord-grey as my mother’s. She had also inherited some of some her vital, vibrant energies. Three years ago, before Bea, before Mandy, I had the heart-troubling notion that I was falling in love with her; my own half-sister, such a pure pebble in the clear stream of her youth, so vivid and in the moment. And so forbidden. I remember watching her sleeping on the sofa of my mum’s living room during a rare visit to Yorkshire. The down on her apple cheeks was like cotton-wool fibre, white and wispy, her chest rising and falling like the ocean. She had said one evening when Sinead was in the kitchen making mulligatawny soup that she loved me and wanted to marry me when she grew up. That was the moment I put a stop to it. I told her she was only fourteen and it was against the law. As the oval saucers of pilau rice were set down, her boyfriend David eyed me suspiciously. He was a pharmaceutical assistant, upright, pragmatic. The collar of his Marks and Spencer shirt, rising crisply from the navy pullover, advertised his sexless conservatism, his unbearable reliability. Maybe she had told him something of this outlawed love, though I doubted it. He had that close-set, circumspect look that passes as intelligence and attractiveness in men but is merely the vigilance of a dog.
‘We’re doing Moll Flanders at the moment,’ said Sarah, ‘It’s brilliant. She gets to go to America and sleep with all these men, and she’s still having babies in her forties.’
‘And that’s a good thing, is it?’ frowned David.
‘It’s brilliant. She’s so free—so emancipated! For the time, that is.’
Mandy looked coldly at my half-sister. I could tell she was examining the corpulence that always threatened Sarah’s upper arms, the bright sea-fresh gleam to her skin. I could tell she didn’t know what ‘emancipated’ meant.
‘Did you ever read that?’ I asked my mother.
Sinead paused before this familiar question. Her long, strai
ght nose twitched animatedly. Untouched by the depredations undergone by the rest of the body, it was the nose of a twenty-one-year-old girl. ‘Anything I read your father had looked at before me—he always explained the plot so I wouldn’t be lost with his snooty friends. To be honest it saved a lot of time.’
I thought I’d ask Sinead another familiar question. The question I always asked on the rare occasions we met. ‘Do you, er, ever see anything of Delph?’
My mother bristled at this. She looked frail, worn-out, ill. I wanted to ask her if she was poorly, but the company advised against it.
Instead, Sarah jumped to my rescue. Changing the subject, her sparkly voice said, ‘Let me tell you about what happened to Demjanjuk the dentist! I’ve been dying to tell you all day.’
‘Does it involve a slow and painful death?’
But my mother didn’t want the subject changed. To me she said emphatically, slowly, ‘I haven’t laid eyes on him for years.’ Then she turned to Sarah. ‘You’ll see your father at Christmas, won’t you?’ Sarah nodded in assent. For a beat there was a tense quiet around the table. ‘Now,’ my mother suddenly smiled gamely, ‘is everybody’s food here?’
Delph and Des. Fathers and the past. Subjects that were always off-limits during these meetings. I knew Sarah had her own book of grief concerning Delph, but it was a closed book. If she shared it with anyone she rarely opened its pages to me. Maybe this was because she sensed that, if I ever laid eyes oh Delph again, I would baseball bat his head into something resembling Sainsbury’s economy mince. These two men had become the unmentionables—they had been written out of history, like the butchers of Treblinka. I thought it best then to avoid the issue, or at least involve Mandy in the conversation, as long experience told me that her silence indicated she was going down fast, like a plane whose propeller had stopped.
‘Well, I only wanted an update,’ I muttered. ‘Nobody tells me anything any more.’ The previous night, my mother had paid a visit to Stevenage to see her friend—and my old nemesis—Babs. I longed to ask whether Babs was as fat as I remembered, but this seemed off-limits too. I turned to Mandy. ‘Surely your father’s not still on his own?’ She didn’t make eye contact, instead she merely continued trailing a fork in her untouched chicken jalfrezi. The peppery pickles and chillies were beginning to raise the temperature. She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Only he didn’t seem that happy with just a Labrador for company last Christmas. You know, there are plenty of dating agencies for the over-fifties.’
Mandy said, ‘Dunno.’
Perhaps unwisely, I pushed the matter. ‘But it’s been nine years since your mum died. It’s not natural. For a man.’
A pause. Then she mumbled, ‘You know he’s still on his own. You couldn’t replace my mother. Anyway, he deserves everything he gets.’
Sarah and David exchanged glances. They were probably wondering how the confident, friendly woman of an hour ago, so intent on showing them photographs of Tarragona and her family, had changed into a brooding and morose wielder of monosyllables. Sarah offered to bail her out: ‘No one deserves everything they get, don’t you agree, David?’
I could tell Mandy was thinking, What do you know? You’re only eighteen. But for the moment this went unvoiced. It was stored, like molten magma underground. The moment had arrived for David to demonstrate whether he had a sense of humour. After all, many people deserved all they got, and more. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Delph.
‘I think that all depends,’ said David, failing at his task of diffusing the situation with a well-turned bon mot or slicing apercu.
‘Depends on what?’ said my mother, not really interested. I could tell she gave no quarter to Mandy’s childish silent mood. Characteristically, she would only involve herself in conversation with those who were willing to talk. If Mandy bore grudges—against her father, against Sarah, against the world in general—then she wasn’t about to nurse it out of her against her own will. My mother’s arthritic knuckles closed around her napkin. She looked pale under the pastel lights of the restaurant; her ageless piccolo nose and dark eyes had gained in dignity over the years. She had the same aura of settled understanding, of calm engagement, as Goya’s portrait of Isabel de Porcel. Rearranging her white scarf around her frail collarbones she awaited David’s answer. He was on the spot now, against his volition, flailing in the strong waters of his own lack of spontaneity.
Finally, David said, ‘Well, it depends on how great their sin is.’ He turned to Mandy, who was rolling a crumb of rice around under her elegant forefinger. ‘Now I don’t know a thing about your father, but parents always get the blame for everything, don’t they?’
‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad,’ I interjected happily.
‘Thanks!’ said my mother in a stern bark.
Sarah’s champagne eyes glittered at this. She always delighted in me saying or doing the wrong thing, a talent lacking in her diplomatic boyfriend. Her throat showed whitely in the drab light. Framed by the velvet caresses of her black gown, it was sexual, scandalously exposed. Everyone had dressed up for the occasion. Even I had ironed and sewed buttons onto my only white shirt.
‘No, that was a misprint,’ smiled Sarah. ‘It was, they tuck you up, your mum and dad.’
Everyone, apart from Mandy, laughed at this. At last the icebreaker was on its way from the North Sea to the choppy waters of the Pole. My wife fixed Sarah with her basilisk stare, while I gazed lovingly at her. In my peripheral vision, I could sense that something volcanic was stirring, but I couldn’t think of a way to stop the eruption. We had tried to involve her in the conversation, but she had been resolutely opposed to any such banter. She looked gravely serious, as if we were all fools on a day out from the madhouse. All eyes were on Sarah now, and Mandy loathed this, loathed not being the bright centre of attention. More pertinently, my eyes were on Sarah. She couldn’t stand my engagement with anyone female other than her for more than a few seconds. At last, she pushed the table from her, winding Sarah in the folds of her voluptuous stomach.
‘You’re just a stupid fat whore,’ spat Mandy, very close to Sarah’s shocked and terrified face. Then she turned to me. ‘And I’m going home.’
Mandy grabbed her glitter bag and strode terrifyingly fast towards the door, barging smiling waiters asunder and eliciting glances from the surrounding diners as she did so. Then she was gone, her profile expressionless in the biting December air. A silence that actually felt medically dangerous descended over the table. Sarah looked first at my mother, then at me, then at David. But Sinead had fixed her attention on her cooling chicken korma, while David appeared to be pondering a tricky chemical equation. For a moment, nobody felt much like saying anything. Mandy’s words were too busy resonating in everyone’s ears. ‘Stupid’ (clearly Sarah was anything but unintelligent), ‘fat’ (she still bore traces of puppy fat around her chin, but all the same …), ‘whore’ (that was the clincher, the worst thing she could have said, and in front of my mother, too). The food was cold, inedible. My old spasm of disgust at unquiet scenes at the dinner table flashed through my guts. Except this time I was responsible. I had gathered everyone here for a pre-Christmas balti with high expectations of cordiality and tolerance. Instead, my beloved sister had been frozen to stone by this woman I had married, this incomparable tragedian.
‘I’m sorry,’ I muttered, ‘she hasn’t been feeling well.’
David looked up, the dog-like stance of defiance again present in his eyes. He said, ‘That’s not really good enough, is it?’
‘What else can I say? I’m sorry, sorry, sorry. Sorry that you had to be witness to that.’
My mother let out a long sigh, the sort that accepts a situation isn’t salvageable and that the fallout out will be long and complicated.
‘Sorry that you married her?’ said David, gleams of anger in the corners of his eyes. He was getting into his jacket. ‘I know I would be.’
‘Oh, come on,’ said Sarah in a voice softer than she had used all eve
ning. ‘She’s been ill. We all lose it from time to time. Where do you think you’re going?’
David was on his feet. He shoved the chair under the table. ‘To have a word. She’s out of order.’
‘It won’t do you any good.’
‘Nobody talks to my girlfriend like that.’
‘Hey,’ I said, ‘she’s my sister, too.’
Before I could stop him he was at the door of the restaurant. I looked briefly at my mother and Sarah, both on the verge of tears, then ran after him. By the time I had negotiated the deluge of cars streaming south in the frigid air, I could see David, a distant figure along the road, haranguing a tall woman by the tube station. I caught them up, only to hear the last sentence of David’s furious torrent.
‘Me and you—’ he shouted pointing at Mandy’s defiant nose, ‘—me and you aren’t talking. Understand?’
He turned, surprised to see me behind him, then took a step sideways and began to stride back to the warm glow of the restaurant. I stared at Mandy, and said,
‘You fool.’
She didn’t answer. Her eyes were completely unreadable: full of contradictory messages: contempt, surprise, arrogance. Then she disappeared into the dank entrance of the underground.
Question: when, during a relationship, does one know inwardly that it is doomed? When does that final straw crack the whinnying camel’s back? There is always a moment, a quiet interior voice that whispers home truths to your soul. It is the voice of self-preservation. The voice of ultimate sanity. It was this voice that became my secret interlocutor as I returned to the Indian restaurant that chilly night. It said: Get out now. This is going to keep happening again and again. You have married a nightmare, a walking incubus. A follower of Xantippe. An obstinate, meddling Circe. A domineering, controlling, feckless, wrong-headed fool. An abuser of others’ generosity. A person who absolutely has to spoil everything, whatever it is, everywhere. A deeply insecure, horrible human being. An erratic, emotional, theatrical, sadistic, self-destructive personality. She should have a sign around her neck that says: Unsafe Building—Do Not Enter. To witness her rage, my friend, is like having a brief glimpse of hell—every day. Oh, and, the voice added in joyful whisper: what a stupid person you are for marrying someone so stupid.