Byron Easy

by Jude Cook

  ‘Precisely.’

  I sat opposite him over the big, wax-spattered kitchen table. The two croupiers had left for their evening shift and the viola player was working a wedding in Tunbridge Wells. I had made a rare foray into the kitchen, sadly cooking a meal-for-one of plain pasta and Tesco pesto mixed with olives, when Rudi had called round unexpectedly. His movements were becoming harder and harder to trace just recently. He had made an unusual number of enemies in a short period of time, and thought it best to be constantly on the go, like a shark patrolling the endless oceans. I had just wiped away my tears (precipitated by the olives you understand—they were, and still are, like onions to my soul) when the doorbell rang. Five minutes later and I was bending his poor Scottish ear off once more.

  ‘That was the problem. She took me for granted. Expected me to be always there. I don’t suppose my jealousy helped.’

  ‘Aye, the green-eyed marauder,’ said Rudi, and drained another beer from the bottle factory at the centre of the table. ‘The more you suspect, the more you push ’em away. It disnae matter how hard you try tae put a lid on it. It seeps out in the end.’

  ‘And they can sense this, can they?’

  ‘Aye. Witch telepathy. Developed over hundreds of years.’

  ‘But how else could I react? You saw how she behaved, towards the end, I mean.’

  It was true that the last months of my marriage had seen Mandy disappear on holiday without me three times. The first occasion was a jaunt to Italy with Antonia, leaving me and Nick behind to drink maudlin pints of Guinness in the Prince Regent, wondering what the hell they were getting up to. The other two trips were solo adventures in the Levant, during which she removed her wedding ring (and everything else, I imagine), probably becoming the busy adultress I always accused her of being. However, I will never know. She denied any impropriety on her return, even though men called Emilliano were constantly phoning the flat and asking in thick accents if Mandy was ‘en case?’ No, I had no way of ever finding out what abominations she had committed. She would deny everything until her face was the colour of a sailors uniform. The fault lay with me, I was confidently told—in my over-active imagination. How could I expect an attractive ‘single’ woman in the libidinous cities of northern Italy to be up to anything untoward behind her husband’s back? What a pathological fool I must be to suspect that! What a dribbling, misguided Leontes!

  ‘She was certainly putting it about a bit. Geographically, I mean,’ said Rudi, stroking his deep-pile chest hair.

  ‘But you think I overreacted?’ I asked, meeting his black eyes.

  ‘Not exactly. But it disnae mean she wasn’t up to something.’

  ‘She took pleasure in my not knowing. Of that I’m certain. She was probably being diddled by every Juan, Pepe and Carlos on the block. It was another way of exerting her power. Christ knows, it was her idea to get married in the first place. She loved seeing me twisting on the end of the line.’

  ‘Schadenfreude,’ Rudi said quickly. I was impressed by his sudden insight, his verbal resourcefulness. Rudi had watched so much porn in his time that, over the years, he’d become almost fluent in German. Although, it has to be said, his vocabulary was fairly limited. And I hardly think he’d acquired this word from Analnacht or Spermtroopers.

  ‘Spot on. She enjoyed my suffering—or rather, she allowed herself to enjoy it because she never believed in any rules of behaviour. I mean, why did she want to get married if she couldn’t make the necessary sacrifices, or play by the rules? Hold on—not the rules—the fucking vows!’

  I allowed the last word to resonate while feeling the concrete waders begin to exert their pressure on my chest. The truth was, I felt complicit in her abuse. I had lowered myself in making a union with her. Mandy had abused my good nature, my trust. I could comfort myself by imagining she knew she was worthless in comparison to me—a lesser human animal—and had sought to castigate me for choosing to be with her. Just like when a dog chases you if you’re stupid enough to show it fear. But it was cold comfort: I was to blame. I received a mug’s comeuppance. In this sense, I deserved all I got. I thought of all the fools undergoing the same treatment across London in that present moment; the goddess Hymen lynched and hanging from a tree in the garden. If only we could open the roof of every house and witness the pain of those marital bedrooms!

  ‘I was an attentive husband. Considerate. Patient. All the things you should be.’

  ‘That’s part of the problem. You were a wee doormat. I mean, maybe there were some things you couldn’t give her.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Diamond rings. Rough sex.’

  ‘She didn’t want any kind of sex, let alone rough!’

  Rudi was rubbing his temples. The melancholy crimson of the sky through the kitchen windows was the same colour as his shirt. He sighed, ‘There’s nae point obsessing over it. You have t’ move on. Believe it or not, I’ve got hassle of ma oon.’

  I looked accusingly at his handsome, ladykiller’s brow, wondering what problems he could have that compared to my cyclone of disgust and regret.

  ‘Like what? The taxman?’

  Rudi shifted evasively in his seat, then said: ‘Remember Suki? Well, that sleazy sugar daddy of hers is after me.’

  ‘What’s the worst that can happen? A broken nose? A scratch on your Hyundai?’

  ‘The bastard’s put a contract out on me. Two grand to maim me with a blunt instrument. Three if it’s a sexual injury.’

  ‘Like a crowbar to the tackle, that kind of thing?’

  ‘Exactly’

  I cracked another beer and passed it to my old friend. ‘That’s pretty … full-on.’

  ‘Aye, to be honest, that’s half the reason I called round. I couldn’t kip on your floor tonight, could I? Only I’m …’ He couldn’t get the word out. His sense of masculinity, his legitimacy, was compromised by it.

  ‘Scared?’ I ventured.

  ‘… Shitein’ it. To go home, that is.’

  ‘Hey, nothing’s too much for an old buddy.’

  We cheersed glasses with a hopeful chink.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said in a mealy-mouthed whisper, looking profoundly ashamed at my acceptance of his proposal.

  I am back in my seat watching Robin topple his king. Predictable. The capitulation of men to the will of women. So widespread these days that it barely merits comment. They always have their way in the end.

  ‘That was quick,’ says Michelle to me, a smile widening her pale face.

  ‘I couldn’t bear it for long,’ I reply, aware of the humming ashtray stink emanating from my clothes after five minutes in the smoking car.

  She gestures to her husband, ‘Robin’s seen sense and called it a day. You always want to play best of three if you lose, don’t you Robin?’

  He doesn’t reply. Instead he snatches up his book and settles back in his seat. I decide to ask a question that has been much on my mind.

  ‘So, er, who takes care of all the practical things between you two? Only, we could never agree on anything when I was married.’

  ‘He does all the DIY, the heavy lifting and takes the rubbish out,’ Michelle explains. ‘But if any calling needs to be done, that falls to me. You can never understand a word he says on the phone. He mutters.’

  ‘Not so,’ mutters Robin, from behind the pages of his lad-lit paperback, which bears the unpromising title, Salad? Chilli Sauce? Everything?

  ‘Only, I’m interested in how other couples operate. You know, where I went wrong and all that.’

  ‘I’m sure it wasn’t all your fault,’ says Michelle, with her deeply concerned therapy-face.

  ‘It’s always the man’s fault,’ sighs Robin, with good-humoured resignation.

  I digest the dynamic between Robin and Michelle as I sit before them, the soporific beat of the rails beneath us. A gently confrontational remark like the one Michelle just uttered would have caused an incendiary scene between Mandy and myself. I suppose that’s how
normal people do it—they let things go. It’s the only way. Otherwise the knives come out if the rubbish doesn’t go out, as they did many times for me. I observe them there, Michelle unpegging the travel chesspieces, Robin gurning over his knockers and kebabs yarn, and decide they have isolated an essential ingredient in the happiness recipe. To let things go. As young as they are, as simple and easily pleased, they are twenty times more sophisticated than me and Mandy ever were. Jesus, it was a wonder we could even feed ourselves. And Robin, for all his lairy deportment, his tepid soul, is twenty times the man that I am. He earns steady money, he puts up shelves, he slings the bins out without complaint. One day he will probably make a perfect father for Wayne or Robinetta. What good is existential angst and whining to any woman? Observing this happy couple, I think of myself, thirty years old, newly separated with divorce on the horizon, and know just how badly I blew it. I fucked up because I expected happiness to result from such meagre ingredients, such a paltry larder.

  Happiness? I had always thought people who expected happiness from life were deluded crackpots. Who told them that was on the menu? They look at the world with all its genocides and cruelties, its gassings and random murder and expect felicity? A pathological aspiration, surely. No, better to be content with just being lucky … and what do I expect from a visit to my mother’s, with all this weighty heart-baggage, this incapacitation of mine? Not happiness, surely? The whole project is dragging me into the earth, I think, as the train flies like an arrow into the night. How can I force my face into a smile after three months of grief-swallowed days? With my mother on her own too. I think of the last time we shared December the twenty-fifth. A pair of losers together around the cooling turkey; the clotted cranberry sauce. To spend Christmas at home with a family that has stayed together is to be part of, to be proximate to, success; or a success story of a kind. But to do the same in a broken family is always to take part in failure; and with weary reminders of that failure at every turn. The empty place at the head of the banquet, where the absent father should sit. The unpulled cracker. The missing relatives and their propitiatory cards hanging from the eaves, all of them having far happier Christmases elsewhere. It is a kind of anti-celebration that brings out the Scrooge in everyone. The sense of life becoming, year after year, ever more shallow—rather than deepening, or expanding like the concentric circles of an evergreen tree.

  I allow my notebook to fall open at random, and see the entry for the fifteenth of November. My heart races at what it discloses. I had forgotten her card. Mandy’s card. Not a Christmas card, oh no, but a slim missive pushed under the door of my shared flat; waiting innocently for me one evening. It depicted a trellised Mediterranean house overlooking the sea, an amateurish watercolour with sentimentalised hanging baskets of crimson bougainvillea swaying over mysterious windows. The heat of midday transforming the distant waves into a platinum shimmer. Vines looping the veranda and backs of benches. A settled calm in the dusty street winding up the mountainside. A frivolously daubed black cat, its tail in the air like a question mark, just exiting the front door. A slatted bench scattered with simple things: a loaf onions, a pitcher of olive oil, white wine, pescado fresh from the bay. A tangible sense of life moving slowly, incrementally, at its natural default pace; not the sick hurry of London and its soul-shaking ructions …

  ‘Excuse me,’ interrupts a voice. It is Michelle. I look up from the page to be met by her inquisitive smile. ‘Sorry, I couldn’t help noticing that you’ve been scribbling in that book since we set off. Are you a writer?’

  It takes a while to get my bearings, to orientate this question in my mind, what with my heart beating so fast at the memory of Mandy’s card. Well, am I? A writer, that is? If passports still declared vocations, is that what it would state? Excited, despairing, feeling dangerously righteous, I realise I cannot read another of my own words.

  ‘Writer? That’s pitching it a bit high. Here,’ I say, then rip the page from my notebook and pass it over to Michelle. ‘Take a look. It’s rubbish, really.’

  She flattens it on the table and reads with eager eyes.

  … But mainly the egregious red of the bougainvillea, their homely baskets; well-kept, tended daily no doubt. And not a soul around, not even a goatherd on the distant hillside rolling with pines. Wasps in the deleterious air; cicadas probably, if one were to go there. If one were to feel the warmth of that sun. Lastly a single white butterfly, a tiny smudge from the end of the brush, dancing weightlessly over the lintel.

  Why did she send me this card? With its impossible message? The message which consisted of two sentences:

  ‘Our little home. We’ll find it one day.’

  Michelle looks up from the crumpled page, and says: ‘That’s beautiful … the cow!’

  6

  Less Haste, More Speed

  ONLY WHEN YOU STOP moving do you realise just how fast you have been travelling. Like calm water in a sheltered ravine after the insanity of rapids. The bleak stillness of a platform after the berserk thunder of the train. The first day at home after a month on the run. Early in the spring of the second year of my marriage, after Mandy had irrevocably marked her card with my mother and my half-sister (not to mention with Antonia and Nick, both still seething after Mandy s unwitting telephone transmission of genuine spite), I stood outside the Hampstead flat-share that used to be occupied by Bea all those marquee moons ago. I say ‘used’, as I wasn’t sure she didn’t still sleep on that hard double bed in her raftered room; another hand peeling her Marks and Sparks knickers down her inexplicably erotic thighs. That lambent morning, I had a sudden feeling of stillness: as if, after long and violent movement, I had been brought short. Stopped dead.

  Misty Victorian footpaths. Elegant frontages. Children late for school, climbing from sparkling people-carriers. Toddlers in three-wheeled buggies. Wicker trees. The sun aperture colourless and infinite … Ah, the children we never had! The coherent and productive life we never made. Nostalgia and sentimentality curdling to make their bilious brew. On the one hand, I was confident that I sought to explicate the present by an examination of the past. On the other, I felt like a stalker standing there, with no particular errand, attempting to peek through the slatted pine blinds. No, the Expressionist prints didn’t appear to be on the walls. Little sign of the three out-of-work gallants, either. Most likely they all found posts in the City, in the theatre, on the grubby streets of London’s media land—I couldn’t be sure I didn’t see one of them reading the news the other night, but that might have been his father. I considered rapping on the door, but thought better of it. The idea of buttonholing passers-by and informing them that, once upon a time, here lived all love, all beauty was briefly entertained. It occurred to me then that I was still in mental contact with Bea, that I conducted imaginary conversations with her, or with her ghost. The people we have mind-conversations with—lovers or friends from the past, the dead, even—are very important. To our current coterie they seem like marginal, never-mentioned people; but to the inner life they are central. Long after Mandy had usurped Bea, she made a point of bringing her up in conversation, mainly for the purpose of ridicule. She said, ‘That name, Bea, it sounds like a dog’s name,’ or ‘I don’t know how you could’ve put up with somebody so dull: she never went to parties, looked like she bought her clothes from a charity shop.’ I would tolerate these snide, rampantly jealous attacks in silence. The subject of Bea was never ventured by me. Instead, I was the loving curator of her museum, visiting the gallery of our memories with increasing frequency, holding those imaginary conversations. It wasn’t as if Mandy’s thin drizzle of poisonous calumnies didn’t have an effect, though. I began to question whether I truly used to like everything about Bea: her reticence, her rather too-wide shoulders, the way she made me feel, in Austen’s phrase, the inferiority of my connections. Then I saw sense. Bea had that rarest of attributes in a woman: ultimate indifference to what people thought of her. Usually, women lose their self-consciousness o
nly when dealing with children: their habitual monitoring of their own behaviour and appearance disappears as another, stronger prerogative takes over. Sure, she used to swish her chestnut hair neurotically, lovably, from her eyes all the time, but her attitude to the whole package was: ‘Take it or leave it, baby.’ And, like a fool, I left it.

  The London morning was full of a stirring clarity: deli smells, the breath of filter coffee, frost on the rear windows of banked cars, the noisy shutters of a florist’s going up, the narcotic odour of petrol. I felt like a kid with his nose pressed up against the glass of my past, loitering there outside Bea’s old bedroom, with no particular place to go. I didn’t even know what had drawn me there that morning; there was no special anniversary to commemorate. I had just cycled blindly across the peeling vistas of the Haringey Ladder, up the strenuous Shepherd’s Hill and past the bracing heath, the February wind making my eyes pour. But, it appeared that Bea was no longer resident in her timber floored flat where we spent so many candlelit nights around the kitchen table, a fug of sweet smoke from her Silk Cut Ultra Lows in the air. And even if she had been there, what would I have said? Sorry for dumping you, for having no faith in myself or you or love? Sorry for relinquishing our nascent passion for marriage to a barratrous harpy? It was all too late, I concluded, and I should sit out my purgatory like a man. I crossed to the railings on the other side of the street, unshackled my bike, and cycled off down the big hill.

  I should stress this wasn’t an isolated incident.

  If the truth be told, after this initial visit I could be found there, once a month, for a whole year. My eventless morning vigils at Bea’s reminded me of a similar pilgrimage undertaken in the early nineties. Only this was a poetic pilgrimage, not just furtively hanging around an old girlfriend’s flat. On the morning of February the eleventh 1993, I walked briskly from my Camden crash-pad to Fitzroy Road near Primrose Hill. The weather conditions had been strangely similar to my first return to Bea’s: the same washed-out chilly watercolour sky, the same slicing freshness to the air, the same grey London dawn with the thousand hands raising a thousand shades in a thousand furnished rooms. The purpose of my visit had been to commemorate the suicide of Sylvia Plath thirty years to the day—the barefoot, perfected woman with her head on the oven’s floor, discovered by her children’s nurse on a routine visit. My heart raced as I rounded the corner, whistling posties oblivious to the significance of the date on their postmarks. I had expected coachloads of Japanese tourists, the dismal peanut-crunching crowd, or at least a few fey dawdlers in overcoats like myself. Instead—nothing. The street as bare and empty as a Chapel of Rest. I stood very still in front of the solid-looking house, with its plaque celebrating Yeats’ brief sojourn, and felt a thrilling solidarity with my fellow bards. But still no flutter of activity. For some reason I expected the front door to open. Maybe that would occur later, I thought, when the guided tours with megaphoned poetry recitals from open-topped buses showed up. But I doubted it. The dead require no extra effort from the living, just lip service to their ‘tragedy’. I took a last look, fixing the scene photographically in my mind, then walked on, pretending to have other pressing business. It had all been dramatically eventless, like the repose a family must feel after a relative’s fitful existence has come to an end. The speeding life suddenly stopped dead, brought short with a terrible finality. As I passed the great, blackened, unused drum of the Roundhouse I pondered all those artists who had taken their own life; who had left their beautiful pearls behind but found the life that bore them intolerable: Van Gogh, Woolf, Plath, Hart Crane, Hemingway, Berryman. When thinking about that odd morning mission I also reflect on those who checked out further down the line: Kurt Cobain, Richey Manic, Sarah Kane. Now just T-shirts on Camden High Street; the living, sentient human beings all gone into the dark.