Byron Easy

by Jude Cook

  It started promisingly, however. There was a great feeling of life decelerating, of a tense string slackening, when we disembarked in the warm air of Argostoli’s airport. As Venus stepped onto the tarmac (Mandy was looking especially good in those last months: fragrant, sexual, magnetic) followed by her trusty bag-carrying Vulcan, the sun greeted us like a loving father. Helios, present in an unbroken sky for a week, his grand paternal gestures sweeping the glittering oceans, soon to infuse our limbs with a daily warmth. We sparked up by the luggage conveyer belt, sweat bubbling on the concave hotplate of my head. ‘This is paradise,’ said Mandy ‘Yeah,’ I concurred. ‘I feel I could even do some writing.’ But she didn’t like that last observation.

  The ramshackle coach to our apartment, high in the hills near Mount Aenos, creaked past monasteries ruined in the great earthquake of the fifties. Newly painted pastel churches now filled the old sites, with ornate iron gates casting detailed shadows on the sun-basking stucco. Cicadas sang in the early evening and great insects came in at the open windows of the coach, landing with a friendly softness on your knee before flying off. Everywhere was a scent of pine cones on the sea breeze. Our luggage followed behind on a flat-bed truck, like the entourage of an English lord. There was something about the quality of the light on the island that struck me immediately—a splintering clarity. I realised I hadn’t actually seen light so powerful and pellucid before. What I had witnessed during an English summer was merely a poor artist’s impression: soggy, cloudy, reluctant to hang around for more than a day at a time. We stashed our baggage in the marble-vaulted apartment, said hello to the maître d’ and his leering teenage son, and went for dinner on the high terrace. It was sunset, a blood-soaked sheen of dying light that infiltrated everything. With the smell of the sea and the potent herbs of the kitchen it felt like a perfect hour of existence.

  After coffee (which Mandy refused to drink because she claimed it tasted like sweet mud), she suggested we take a look at the night beach. This represented a reemergence of her old rebelliousness, as the beach was two miles down a steep dark road. With great trepidation, wanting Hectors courage, we descended the heady gradient in the star-hung darkness. As Mandy went ahead, we tiptoed down the wrong track for an age, past goats tethered silently in the blackness; then, retracing our steps, we began the hour-long hike towards the ever-louder sound of the sea. We encountered rabid-sounding dogs howling viciously, concealed in the bushes; also blind-eyed peasants seemingly watching us from terraces. Sleeping in ditches were cars that looked abandoned, but were merely evidence of Greek parking. At last we started to kick up sand from the approach-road, the big ebony horizon flat before us, breakers softly sighing up the pebbles. We slumped in two low deckchairs and a tense silence developed. I had registered fear of the dogs on the road down, and I knew she was deeply contemptuous towards me because of this. Sitting there, in front of the great Ionian Sea, felt like the adventure two newly-lovers undertake before returning to their hotel for a night of arduous passion, or, even better, sex on the fine sand itself. But I knew such thoughts couldn’t be further from Mandy s mind. Remembering the black night of our honeymoon in Tarragona, I said, ‘Shall we go now?’

  She paused for a moment before asking, ‘Are you happy?’

  This question astounded me. Never in nearly three years had she made such an enquiry. I felt quickly depressed; low as I’d ever been, the negative energy crawling back into me from nowhere. We were in the final stages, and we both knew it. However, it had to be gone through, endured.

  ‘Yes and no,’ I eventually replied.

  But she said nothing further on the matter. I knew by this that she wasn’t happy either. Instead she said: ‘Let’s go.’

  Back in the hotel room, exhausted, we retired wordlessly to bed. This was the cue for us to have our first argument, I thought. The brief harmony of the airport and the nocturnal beach were gone. A pitch night was showing through the taverna-style windows, an ancient night like the ones Odysseus must have known as he lay in wait outside the gates to his old kingdom—black, many-starred, sealed.

  ‘You know we haven’t had sex for a year and a half,’ I said from my single bed in the cell-like silence. My appeal sounded inert, impotent—almost as if it expected derision, rebuttal, laughter. Single beds had been Mandy’s idea. Just lately she was openly scornful of anything carnal or bodily. Once upon a time she called her sexual feelings ‘being amorous’, and I used to love the quaint innocence of the phrase. Now, in the moonlit room, my voice suddenly loud and echoey from the marble, I lay winded on my blanket brandishing my useless, unwanted hard-on. It also occurred to me then that every hotel room in every hotel in the world had been the location for an act of fellatio. Well, this one wasn’t going to see any tonight, I thought.

  ‘I don’t like it any more,’ she said.

  ‘Why is that? You used to.’

  Her voice came back from the other bed, small and clear: ‘I don’t know, it just grosses me out somehow.’ She rustled her sheets as if she were turning over to go to sleep.

  I waited for a while before asking, ‘Is there someone else?’ I hated feeling like this: rejected from every failed initiation and curdled with jealousy. My tongue felt suddenly too big for my mouth, bathing, as it was, in a moat of saliva.

  With a firm simplicity she said, ‘No. Now put it away and go to sleep. I want to get down to the beach as early as possible.’

  Ah, the beach: her great mission. The getting of a suntan. For months before going away Mandy would always take a bottle of Ambre Solaire frying oil and a towel to the sunbed shop that annexed the local hairdresser’s. Here she would swap ribald tales with the three hard-faced peroxide blondes who cut hair and pumiced nails all day. Tanning was an obsession with Mandy. If she began to get pale, she would grab the non-existent extra inches around her tummy and exhibit them to me with real disgust. ‘Look at this. I look like a pasty English person.’ In fact, before her visits to the fast-tanning shop and its weird sisters she had even bought a sunbed on the never-never from one of her many catalogues. This was installed, like some monolith from a Second World War operating theatre, above our futon, so she could irradiate herself every day. I tried it a few times myself, and enjoyed the peaceful, amniotic slumber it gave you. The plunge back into cold reality when it clicked off at the end of its cycle was like a death.

  So Mandy had to make the beach early. We stepped out onto the bougainvillea-hung terrace and contemplated the big purple mountains across the bay. The restorative light was a marvel. Descending the same cicada-singing roads as the previous night, the sound of Orthodox bells in the hot thick air, we marked our spot for a day of epic sun-worshipping. This, I gathered, was all Mandy wanted to do for a whole week. I flattened out my Rilke on the molten sun-recliner and gave in. Whatever she wanted, went.

  The evenings were similarly predictable. We would hike out into nearby Argostoli, past tiny, elaborate Byzantine churches, and sit on low walls in the amber squares eating Greek breads and drinking bottled beers. Often, Mandy wore her ankle-length denim coat, which raised a lot of heat from the Cephalonian boys on their guttural mopeds. Her charms struck their sight with unmistakable force. But then, she always did get the looks, with her stacked heels and swagger, her sweep of sable hair glossy under the pinkening evening sky. Back at the hotel, with the chicory smell of kebabs and meat pizzas from the barbecue, the maître d’s teenage son wolf-whistled her as we entered in under the ivory arch.

  Of course the clear skies couldn’t last. On the Wednesday, she smashed a jar of olives in the street. Thursday saw a horrible ruction that I tremble to revisit. A vicious, tempestuous fit, caused by nothing at all, in the sizzling heat of the hotel room. She tore up my Rilke. She spat in my face. She screamed. She threatened to get the first flight back by herself. The savagery of her outburst shook me considerably. At its height, she was like a cornered hellcat. It felt like the zenith of our misery. Concluding that all the tears cried in the history of mankind c
ould probably refill the oceans twice over, I decided to go down the long road to the beach on my own. In the heat, a pike in my heart, I cried so much I thought I would faint. Where do tears emanate from? How can the psychological produce such a physical result? If one is depressed one’s skin doesn’t turn black, so wherefore tears? For women they are a relief, for men, torture. Ever since we landed (apart from the first night) there had been the constant background hum of unrest, discord, depression, of the unsatisfactoriness of everything. Of the final stages. Even in paradise she couldn’t be happy, this woman coloured ill. I felt a panic come over me as I stood on a high crag overlooking the luminous waters, as if my soul were expanding to fill and burst my body. I had to close my eyes, like I was going out of my mind.

  The rest of the afternoon I paced out with solitary hours of swimming across a cove little frequented by tourists. The glass of the water felt good over my head as I dived to the golden grid of sunlight at the bottom. It resembled a baptism. I surfaced and looked at the hills with their intricate patterns of bushes and rocks, like tiny tight afro-curls. The sea was warm and supportive, the colour of agate or jade in the near shallows, deep navy further out. By five I had had enough and allowed myself to drift on the soporific currents. Mandy’s poison was leaving my system: I felt free, relaxed even, strangely indifferent to my fate. I could have drifted there, seagulls scattering overhead, until I reached the Pillars of Hercules. I closed my eyes—trying to squeeze out the salt along with the clotted pain—and kept them shut; the sun a white presence behind the lids. Quite gradually I became aware of a rocking motion to the water, the distant drone of a boat some way off. I flipped over and noticed at once how far out I’d drifted. The high crag where I had stood was a dot on the great curving sweep of the hillside. I began to swim for shore but the rocking motion increased, making it impossible. Ominously, the noise of gulls, from a nearby buoy, seemed very loud—I felt they were sizing me up as carrion.

  The faraway hum of an engine had belonged to a large pleasure cruiser that was producing a formidable rip-tide in the bay I felt a twist of fear. Trying to swim was so impeded it seemed I was doomed to stay treading water until it got dark—the rhythmic undulation of the pull was tugging me further out, dragging me down. I considered crying for help, but nobody would have heard me. The big cruiser now gone, its after-effects were causing havoc in the bay I could see foaming breakers hitting the beach in florid explosions. My head went under, and I opened my eyes foolishly to see the limitless blue beneath my struggling feet. I surfaced, heart pounding, and began an agonising front crawl that seemed to take me nowhere for two minutes. Quite calmly, another part of me was thinking: so, adios, then, Byron Easy. This is right on time, to drown aged twenty-nine like Shelley, on an ill-advised outing, my heart stung from foolish ructions—it all served me right. And anyway, what did I have to return to? Maybe old Percy Bysshe entertained such thoughts as the Don Juan went down, the volume of Keats still in his pocket, his heart strung out on another man’s wife.

  But eternity cannot have been ready to welcome me into its white radiance. Slowly, very slowly, I began to get somewhere. The beach became nearer, its unsuspecting figures running joyfully or kicking sand out of sandals on the tide wall. I wasn’t going to die after all. The colour of the water changed from a heavy navy to a welcoming turquoise. I thought then of the occasion I almost drowned during a desultory fortnight on the Norfolk Broads with Mum and Delph. I had stepped off the slimy stern of the barge, ratchet in hand, expecting to open the lock, only to find myself up to the top of my head in thick, green, dark, mossy canal water. I had experienced a second or so of high panic, a flash of the everlasting. The end: not later, but now. Then a strong hand fished me out.

  Closer still, and I managed to put a toe on the bottom. The relief felt like a homecoming. Then a foot. A web of dancing reflections surrounded it. In a moment I was dragging my trembling body up the steep gradient of the beach, face stinging and sun-struck, heart pounding but grateful.

  When I limped back to the hotel in the evening I found Mandy by the pool, slurping a piña colada and teaching Spanish to the priapic teenage boy. I sloped off to the shower. I never told her what happened that afternoon. Somehow, I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction.

  On the penultimate day I managed to persuade her to do something more active than lying like a piece of steel under the welding-torch glare of the sun. With my remaining drachmas, I had booked us a trip to the underground caves at Melissani. She reluctantly agreed to go, fixing her shades to her head, where they remained until well after nightfall. On the coastal road in the rotten reeking bus, I stared at Ithaca in the misty near distance, a glowing blue of promise and mystery. For the past few days I had had the strong intuition that Homer was born on Cephalonia. If he had been, the sight of that sister island across the bay must have seemed like some Elysian home, some final destination where a man would be glad to hang up the lyre. Of course, they say he was blind, but I found it hard to believe he never saw the world, in every sense of the word.

  After the inland drive, we finally reached the caves and spent a cooling hour underground slipping on stones and staring at the giant pendulous stalactites the Germans had used for target practice during the war. The ghosts of executed soldiers, the sites of forgotten pogroms, made me very melancholic. After this grim refreshment we walked to the underground lake where I had what can only be described as a peculiar, perplexing experience.

  As we queued for a free boat under the dome of dank rock, open at the top like a volcano, I thought I saw someone familiar disembarking from one of the rowing boats that ferried tourists around the caves. The Greek oarsmen were singing traditional songs, full of forced vitality from the strain of repetition. I focused and refocused my eyes in the rippling light and became convinced that, fifteen feet ahead of me, chaperoned by an Adonis-like boyfriend, was Bea, her chestnut hair glossy, hallucinatory. She was wearing a colourful top of a rich, subdued red. I was staggered at the serendipity of this: of all the places in the world to come face to face with Beatrice, standing in line for a pleasure boat with the woman I chose instead of her. I had travelled to the lofty peak of Hampstead and stood vigil outside her old window for a year and had returned disappointed. But here, in the death throes of a catastrophic marriage, I was to come face to face again with all love, all beauty. The girl was laughing and squeezing her boyfriends hand, heading up the narrow stone path to where we were standing. Closer. Then closer still. Yes, it was definitely Bea: the same steady intelligent eyes with their air of fragile intensity, of depth. I froze up, my heart in my mouth, having no conversation or explanation ready. I asked Mandy to swap places in the queue so I was on the inside. Bewildered, she complied. Mandy had never seen Bea in the flesh before, so there was little chance of her causing a scene. Bea was now a couple of paces away. I wished she would speak, so I could hear her voice and have final confirmation … then … then the woman passed and I saw it wasn’t her. Too tall, more Mediterranean in close-up, her hips swaying in that libration characteristic of Levantines. I felt breathless, relieved, off-balance. Grasping Mandy’s hand, I saw my wife was looking at me confrontationally. It had been a long time since we held hands.

  Ignoring her look of confusion as we pushed forward for the first available boat, I stammered, ‘I think I need my eyes testing.’

  On the final day, our baggage stored in the hotel’s kitchen, awaiting the flat-bed truck that would ferry it to the airport, we took the bus to Metaxata for a last swim. Away from the tourist trail, overlooked by the calm craggy mountainous outposts high above the bay (the ones that had almost witnessed my drowning a couple of days before), we spent the morning running into the surf. An hour before it was time to kick the sand from our towels and head for the airport, I heard Mandy shout excitedly from the shallows. ‘Byron, come quick!’ Her voice was shrill, like a cry, with a child’s excitement. ‘There are fish!’ I ran across the foot-torturing pebbles and waded out. The sea was the
temperature of a tepid bath. Sure enough, when I reached Mandy, there were currents of silver darting fearlessly between her legs. She stood there, thin and brown, her black bathing costume tight to her spine, her hair up, as the shoals came in eddies out of nowhere. The water was so clear, you could see their eyes. Some bigger creatures, a foot long with flexible green spines and delicate markings stayed with us longer. So friendly, familiar and curious were they, it was like being joined by one’s children. Mandy trailed a hand through the crystal Aegean and tried to touch one, but it proved elusive. It darted away under the glassy ripples. She smiled at me; a smile from long ago in the past, a smile I hadn’t seen since she asked me to marry her on Brighton pier. It made me very sad to see this smile after the scarring scenes of the week. I glanced over my shoulder at the two vacant stripes of our towels on the beach, then smiled back. I didn’t have to say anything. We both remembered the time.

  Darkness. The train is sighing relentlessly to a stop. The sun has finally dipped below the horizon. What a long time that took. We seem to be very far north. I can see Doncaster station half a mile away on a bend in the tracks. The amber sparkles of the town resemble Christmas-tree bulbs that no one bothered to spend much money on; uniform in colour, carelessly distributed. They glitter like those fish, silver and rapid; forming ever-dilating circles and shoals. I can still see them, feel their intimate touch against my bare legs, Mandy smiling that long-ago smile.

  Outside my window, even with such a lack of light (and I have to press my face very close to the glass in order to make anything out), I can see all the melancholy preparations for the festive season. I open my notebook and record: A cloud of rooks over the carrion of a starter-home estate; a six-foot inflatable snowman in a drive, huge-bellied and sad despite the smile under his phallic carrot; a Christmas tree in every window; flashing decorations like landing lights (holly, ivy, Santa, Rudolph, sleighs) probably visible from space … further on, wreaths of tawdry tinsel on doors; stars of David; meagre homes with their satanic satellite dishes.