Byron Easy

by Jude Cook

  This was not the case, however, with a nasty incident I was unfortunate enough to bystand a month ago. It was a few weeks after my final split from Mandy. Battered and bruised as I was, I had agreed to accompany Rudi on some mission of skulduggery in W5. A London night with all the winners and losers on the street, along with those that slip in between—the inconspicuous ones like me who appeared to have neither won nor lost, but were just suspended in perpetual stasis. A freezer-interior night in West Ealing. (Night—why do these things kick off at night? It’s as if daylight, simple common-sense lunch-hour daylight, has a curbing, limiting effect on men’s always startling capacity for violence.) A vault-like, breezeless midnight with me waiting in Rudi’s car as he bullied a couple of take-outs from the ‘Time Gentlemen’—yelling barman. Then a bustle of activity: three six-foot-plus lads exit the tenebrous portal of the pub’s saloon door followed by a fourth, slightly shorter, Algerian-caste man. I thought, quite naturally, that he was their friend. I was wrong. Within seconds, quick fists were flailing inaccurately The Algerian took a punch and crumpled to the frost-forming concrete, his hands outstretched in supplication, contrition, surrender. But that wasn’t sufficient for the tallest attacker in his puke-orange puffa jacket. Oh no, not nearly enough. From the muffled interior of the car I overheard a terrible sentence, a verbal detail that would be as hard to erase from the memory as what happened next. What the tall man said was:

  ‘Do you want to fucking die?’

  Then his boot flashed out—the right foot, with enough range and acceleration to suggest he’d somehow taken a run-up. He kicked the Algerian as hard as you would kick a football from the halfway line, connecting with the fiercely vulnerable bullseye of his right temple. A death blow, really—had to be. Reckless, caution-less force. I would like to say that the man’s head went back instantly, like a catapult sling, and met the flagstones with the crisp retort of a rifle shot, like in the movies. But, amazingly, it didn’t. Something far worse happened: it juddered slightly (and the surprise for me was that, from contact with a blow of that velocity, the pounds-per-square-inch impact, that his head was still on his shoulders). It quivered with a game resistance until his disembodied voice emitted a groan, an almost feminine sigh of disappointment. And only then did his skull ricochet back, taking his shoulders and white-flag-waving arms with him.

  The three big men walked off. Casually, defiantly. A queasy aftermath silence in the air. And then I noticed that the street was absolutely empty—I was the only witness to what was surely coldblooded murder. Slipping from the car, I tripped on the kerb in my alacrity to reach the starfished figure dramatically alone on the wide pavement. It suddenly seemed even colder under the black midnight sky. London after dark is full of street-kickings, squalling domestics, wino-pastings, tired altercations, but this was something quite different. This was something else. It was only when I was a foot away from his quiescent bulk, close enough to see the stitching on his flying jacket, that any kind of timidity or caution entered my approach. ‘You all right, mate?’ I found myself asking once, twice, maybe three times. With a lurch of my colon, I noted that his face, which I had taken to be quite still, was actually in rapid, detailed motion. It was trembling as if a low-level electric current was being passed through it via a socket in the back of his neck. I could hear, also, that his tongue was making a phlegmy, staccato, gargling noise against his upper palate. But it was the eyes, his eyes, that really got to me. As I stared down into his face, like a surgeon over a patient in some hellish field hospital, I became aware that he couldn’t see me. Even though he was making full eye contact, the lids alert and taut under his North African brows, his gaze plangent, demanding, he couldn’t see me. For him, I didn’t exist. He was somewhere else entirely. Not on this scarred, time-suspended November street, but on some vivid plain—infancy, childhood, love-life, all zipping past like antelope on a screen behind his eyes. I prodded him. No reaction. Dully, the realisation began to immerse me, like a sweat of ice across my back: he couldn’t feel anything either. Seconds later, he was convulsing—fitting; epileptically energised. And there we both were, on the Godless, solitary, ransacked street—him dying, me watching. Slowly, a fleck of blood appeared on his protruded lips, like a Levi’s tag or the red ladybird that globes up after a needle is withdrawn. That’s all I needed to see. I was into the pub like a shot fired from a cannon, smacking spectacularly into the exiting Rudi and scattering his hard-bargained-for take-outs over the step.

  ‘What thay fu—’

  I hollered for an ambulance, assistance, a doctor. The barman pointed to a fat Irish woman in the ambered snug who was apparently a nurse. Then we were back on the street, the fast-deteriorating man on his side, now shrouded with the weak placebo of somebody’s jacket. The next twenty minutes were a fuzz of lime-jerkinned paramedics and radio-crackling cops; all demanding statements, unrecallable details. Intermittently, I glanced at the Algerian surrounded by the many feet of onlookers, helpers, officers, and thought how apart he was, locked in the drama of his own mortal crisis. I thought of the cadaver of Gemma Fernandez in the childhood lane, surrounded by people, but immaculately isolated. He was slipping in and out of consciousness, two crimson scars now apparent under the crew of bristly hair: one where the toe cap had made awful contact, the other a present from the unforgiving paving stones. The fat Irish nurse kept asking him: ‘What’s your name, love? Do you know your name? Come on, tell me your name and we’ll laugh about this over a drink next week. Please tell us your name?’ Over and over like a mantra. But no name, no sound of any sort, was forthcoming.

  A stretcher appeared, and he was shoehorned on to it; the throng parting to allow the catastrophe, the goner, through.

  Next thing I remember I was in Rudi’s car, silently watching the flashing night-time stripes of Shepherd’s Bush—the razed, rubbish-tip streets whipping past like a movie beyond the windscreen. Towards Marylebone, I asked him, ‘Did you get your business done?’

  ‘That was the business, big man,’ said Rudi in his silky voice.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I turned to him, shaken. ‘You had someone done in?’

  ‘Aw, naw,’ he chuckled. ‘That bloke, the Moroccan. That should’ve been me.’

  The fracas on the platform is over, only a few jeers and shouts can be heard under the steely lights. Very soon we will be heaving off into the blackness … That kick, that boot in the head, the crucial death-dealing blow, had been intended for Rudi. Whatever he had got mixed up in was murky indeed; a black well of coshings, garrottings and pay-offs in dodgy Ealing boozers. Recalling that incident put the platform jousting in a different light. There were levels of violence, and I had witnessed, or been on the receiving end, of many of them; had felt that unique typhoon of adrenalin. Only, Rudi currently seemed to be an intrepid explorer into a new and frightening arena. An uncharted midnight.

  A whistle blows. Silently, the train begins to move off, towing us all into the dark.

  7

  Night

  NOVEMBER. THE MACBETH OF months. When night s black agents descend at three-thirty in the afternoon; when feeble, propitiatory, citrine streetlights flicker into life on misty streets. A month before I married, there was a particular November night Mandy and I spent in the tiny recording studio at Rock On putting the finishing touches to Fellatrix’s new demos. Strange that this should come back to me now, but something unexpectedly nasty occurred that I have blanked out or erased over time. Curious. I had thought that the vodka-glass incident was the only outrage that gave me reason for concern in those ebullient pre-nuptial days. But this was worse, somehow. More unprovoked, more depressing. I can see it all clearly before me: Mandy’s languorous legs hooked under her PVC miniskirt as she sat listening on the studio sofa; the Starship Enterprise constellation of the red lights, the sweet smell of scented candles and incense burning in the corner; and me struggling with the electronic gadgets, eager to please.

  It was one of those nights when even the firew
ork terrorists and banger-bandits find it too miserable to venture out. Scything cold. Green-coloured rain descending in a kind of freezing gauze. Shuddering winos. The streets of Camden black as bin-liners. Add to this the disorientating effect of London darkness lasting twice as long as London day. A day in November which never really brightens from dawn onwards. It may even have been Bonfire Night itself, the troops of party-goers sodden and melancholy on the cold pavements, some waving sparklers against the big wind. But I can’t be sure—those days seem to blend and disappear together into an oblivion. There was a closeness between us that evening, the unique closeness of two who have decided to relinquish all others, to take the fatal leap.

  ‘Funny,’ I said, in the snug glow of the studio as the tape whirred back to the start of the final track. ‘It usually sounds like the Blitz outside at this time of year.’ Mandy smiled at me from the couch, her big brown Catalan eyes even larger and moister in the candlelight. She lit a cigarette and allowed a hoop of smoke to ascend over her head.

  ‘Much too cold to be out on a night like this,’ she murmured, her voice suddenly quiet in the new silence. ‘How long will it take to mix this? We’ve been here since Martin locked up.’

  ‘Oh, we’ll be here all night,’ I said, with the confident authority of past experience. ‘You can’t rush art.’ Many times in the past I had curled up to sleep on the sofa on which she was amorously reclining, wrapping the unzipped sleeping bag around me like a winding sheet.

  Mandy seemed surprised at this. Her expression darkened. ‘We can’t kip here! There’s no bedding. It’s getting cold.’

  It was true that the temperature of the night was trying the skylight with its icy fingers. Condensation had formed, which dripped dangerously close to the electrical equipment. I yanked the burn-pocked sleeping bag from beneath the mixing desk and tossed it over to her. ‘Here, you have this. I don’t suppose I’m going to get much sleep.’

  ‘Whatever you say, lover,’ said Mandy, but I could tell she resented roughing it. Nobody had prepared her for the fact that life in a rock ’n’ roll band may not be as straightforward as going into the office five days a week and collecting your salary at the end of the month. The hours were anti-social, to say the least. There was no security, no pension-plan, no paid holiday, no degree or certificate you could produce to say that you had finally qualified, now-give-me-a-job, please. No, the CD-rack browsers had no idea that the music they played in their car, that they danced to, or used for the purposes of seduction or hoovering, came to them via the most mangled and circuitous route imaginable. It was a miracle anything got to them at all. Mandy was affronted by any endeavour that didn’t provide an immediate return: like a child she demanded instant gratification. There would be many things, I told her, that wouldn’t pay off for years; many gambles, many things taken on trust, much taking of two steps back in order to make the vital one forwards. Much sleeping under the mixing desk and touring the Highlands in a broken van. Maybe even much sleeping with the producer. After these lectures she would always smile knowingly, as if I were the dogmatic voice of enforced drudgery, as if she knew better. Her hidden weapon, she always insisted, was that she could be a bitch. I sighed at this bravado, thinking how many bitches had been kennelled over the years in the pursuit of fame and fortune. Better to be a lap-dog for the strutting patriarchal powers-that-be than have your teeth removed one by one. Submission to the beast was what brought success, for a woman, at least. Madonna included. But her smiles turned to worrying sneers when I voiced this. At first, I secretly hoped her belligerent attitude towards the grim realities of the music industry would somehow fast-track her to the top. She was too impatient to do the obligatory five years of starvation on the dole before The Man condescended to putting his hand into his voluminous back pocket. But now I could see she was merely unrealistic, a work-shirker, a something-for-nothing merchant. I didn’t mind mixing her recordings, cold and tired as I was after a long day in the shop. She had recruited me into her schemes, as usual, without me realising it. And it felt good, just the two of us there in the creamy candlelight, me happy as the old maid who has just been married off to the county squire. I was, after all, doing it for love.

  ‘Why don’t you put your head down for a bit,’ I suggested tenderly. ‘Tomorrow’s another day.’

  But I could see her eyes were already closed; the high-domed lids, glitter-covered, tense and occasionally trembling. Breath from her slightly arrogant, dinted nostrils evaporated in the dank air. I crossed the room and gently wrapped the sleeping bag around her bony brown shoulders and tucked her long legs up under a couple of cushions. She was sleeping soundly. Something about her snoring there defencelessly made me suddenly paternal—worse, made me want to have children with her. I fondly imagined her there with our future offspring, a touching pieta under a tarry fog of fag-smoke.

  It was indeed a long cold night. My feet went dead in my shoes, which felt water-logged somehow. By five, with the darkness still sealing up north London outside, I finished the final mix and sought the small kitchen to empty the ashtrays and fill the kettle. My face looked surprisingly white in the tall mirror. The curlicues of age were trying the corners of my eyes, drying my scalp which once grew luxuriant hair in the days of Dovecote Lane. I found it hard to believe that I was on the verge of marriage. The events of my own childhood should have inoculated me against it somehow, but there I was, aged twenty-seven, with my wife-to-be sleeping like an infant in the next room. How did I get here? Whatever route had led me to this November dawn, I felt almost euphoric as I washed two foul tea cups under the cold tap. I smiled to myself as I dried them, and caught my own foolish face in the big bright mirror. No, I shouldn’t smile so much, I thought. I look gormless and big-cheeked when I smile, like a hamster at feeding time. The kettle reached its steamy climax and clicked off. I stirred three spoons of sugar lovingly into Mandy’s tea and took it through.

  Bending over her recumbent form, which had assumed a tight embryo ball during the night, I gently shook her shoulders and said, ‘Tea up. Your mixes are done.’

  Her big eyes flipped open with a look of unsteady confusion. She didn’t seem happy to be there. She didn’t seem happy to see me. In fact, she looked furious. A change had come over her while sleeping. Her bedraggled cascade of hair was stuck under her left shoulder, and she rooted it free angrily, like a horse tossing its mane. She paused for a moment, scratched her head, then took a swipe at the offered cup with the back of her hand. Hot tea arced across the room, painting the already spattered walls and falling into the precious circuits of the mixing desk. The cup clattered to rest, unseen. I was stunned.

  ‘Why the fuck did you make me sleep here?’ she seethed and got up violently.

  ‘We had to finish your mixes! Jesus, look at what you’ve done. You’ve probably ruined Martin’s equipment.’

  ‘I don’t give a damn. I’m going home.’ And she lurched past me, arms wrapped tightly around her—shivering exaggeratedly as if she had just been retrieved from the deep-freeze like a leg of lamb. This was probably our first or second disagreement or falling out. So I decided to tread very carefully. To give her the benefit of the doubt. Ah, how naive I was to think it was merely a temporary aberration, the time of the month maybe. Then I began to feel hot-headed myself. I was angry that I might lose my job. The desk was probably destroyed—not from the liquid, I knew, but from the sugar (which only Mandy took), which would gum up the components, making it impossible to repair.

  ‘Well, you’d better explain the mess to him,’ I asserted as her back disappeared through the door. ‘You know—I need this work.’

  All I heard from the kitchen was an echoey complaint; soul-deadening in its bleakness. It was the first of many occasions when she used the same sinful phrase to end an argument. Five words which I would grow to hate and fear. She said:

  ‘I wish I was dead.’

  Tarragona. New Year’s Eve. The last night of our honeymoon. Another long day’s journey
into night. Why do ructions, gross scenes, fights, always occur under the cover of darkness? Not many people have arguments at sunset or dawn—maybe we are poetic animals after all, receptive to beauty even when we’re hating each other. I might as well let you in on the full story, unburden my marriage secrets. What have I got to lose? You’ve seen us both at our worst, full of sour hatred, wishing each other not divorced but dead. The first inclination I had that Mandy hated me, really despised me, came a week after we married. Far too soon! you might exclaim. But maids are May when they are maids—the sky changes when they are wives.