Byron Easy

by Jude Cook

  I think I told you, generous and patient reader, that there was some kind of altercation on the beach during my honeymoon. Now that it’s dark I feel I can revisit the scene and tell you what really happened. It’s hard to continue while keeping such a heavy burden to myself—we are arrested and trepanned by the past while attempting to function and deal with the present. That midnight, terrible words were exchanged, contemptuous words that should not pass between man and wife after twenty years, let alone seven days. Words that cause intense suffering at their recollection.

  Let me share them without restraint.

  We had decided to take a walk on the sand. The horn-tooting Barcas had fled into the night on their tinny mopeds, hollering Feliz año nuevo! and guzzling wine from goatskin gourds. We were both drunk: me with a tottering unsureness of foot, Mandy under the gathering black cloud that always accompanied her inebriation. Far out to sea, the dark breakers shot white foam up the beach under a scroll of fog. A constant, rhythmic threshing sound accompanied these waves, the low foghorn honking somewhere near the harbour. Mandy walked apart for a moment, then started swaying towards the shoreline. By this I knew something was up.

  ‘Hey—can’t you slow down?’ I called. ‘Why are you always walking off?’

  I caught her up, and tried to peer into her face. The lash of her forehead scar seemed to glow in the moonlight.

  ‘I’ve got my headache back.’

  ‘What, the migraine?’ I asked.

  ‘What do you think?’

  The alcohol had made me less than patient with her. Somewhere within, I felt anger at her stubborn determination to be true to her moods, to be obstinately herself. I also felt scorn for myself: the base anger a tourist feels when he buys something shoddy at a bazaar. My patient approach hadn’t ameliorated her caustic moods over the nine brief months I had known her, and I still wanted reparation for the glass in the face, the tea thrown over the studio.

  ‘I don’t know, I’m just asking,’ I said with rising heat. I was concerned. ‘Shouldn’t we go back now? You can’t go for a swim at this time of night.’

  ‘Do what you like,’ she snapped, and tossed her hair back with the quick dynamic movements she used when she was approaching boiling point.

  ‘Why don’t you tell me what’s the matter?’

  Without looking at me, she said: ‘You were thinking about Bea earlier, I could tell by your silly expression as we did the grapes.’

  Astounded at this telepathy, I said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Come on, let’s go back now. It’s cold, it’s dark.’

  But she continued walking. ‘Don’t bother lying to me, Byron. It was written all over your fat face. You haven’t stopped pining since I told you to dump her. What’s the point of marrying me if you’re constantly mooning over some silly cow, with her stupid university degrees? With that dog’s name, too. God, that would’ve sounded good in the church with her mother looking on—Beatrice and Byron, I do thee wed.’

  I was stung by this, as I always was by any mention of Bea. And I knew the jealous reference to Bea’s mother arose because she was thinking of Ramona, dead now for many a New Year’s Eve. It struck me that this may have been the very beach where Mandy’s mother played as a child, tearing along, brown as a walnut under the coruscating heat of a Spanish August. The beach where Mandy may have played herself, Ramona proudly observing behind caramel shades. I changed my tone, ashamed that I had been so insensitive not to predict this delicate area. Why the hell had I said yes to a walk on this tainted sand in the first place?

  ‘Come on, I love you, Mandy Don’t be so venomous, we’ve only been married a week.’

  ‘And what fun that’s been. You haven’t even bothered to learn two words of Spanish. What are you like, giving my Gran dirty looks every time her back’s turned—all that awkwardness with Leo? They won’t bite your head off, you know. They’re only human beings.’

  ‘Come off it, Mandy! People’s relatives are hard work.’

  ‘I’m a sociable person. It’s not my fault you’re a hermit who hasn’t seen the light of day for seven years.’

  ‘Wait a minute, you clammed up when you met my mum at the wedding.’

  ‘Only cause she hated me.’

  ‘She did not hate—for Christ’s sake—I hadn’t even seen her myself for a couple of years. She was nervous. She was shy. Weddings aren’t her favourite thing, you know. She’s twice divorced, or did you forget that?’

  It felt odd defending my mother there, on the vast expanse of nocturnal sand, the foghorn sounding far out to sea. Mandy had taken a course parallel to the waves now, and they were loud and furious in our ears, a gush of salty spray spattering our faces.

  ‘It was obvious she hated me, Byron. I can read people, you know. I’ve always prided myself on that. Antonia tells me I’m good at that. Your mother took one look at me and wrote me off as a Spanish floozy. I could tell she was wondering why I was getting married in a miniskirt and why I didn’t have my own mother there.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake! She knew your mother was dead.’

  Mandy span round, her brown eyes now crimson in the difficult light. ‘Don’t talk about my fucking mother like that!’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I said, scared of her shaking shoulders and feline countenance, as if she were ready to pounce. As yet, I was unaware of her capacities, her boundaries. She hadn’t actually hit me thus far, but I realised she dearly wanted to. I decided the best form of defence was attack, always a terrible error with Mandy I continued, ‘I can’t stand around on a beach in the middle of the night being screamed at by you. It’s not my idea of fun, you know! I’ve tried my best with your crazy grandmother and Leo lecturing us day and night about children and earning money and God knows what else. I put up with them at each other’s throats last year when I first met them, what more do you want? And another thing—so what if I was thinking about Bea? Is that an offence now? We went out with each other for almost a year. She was a good person. A well-meaning, gentle person. What did she ever do to you? You got what you wanted, didn’t you? You got me. It doesn’t show you in a very good light when you’re always laying into her with both barrels blazing. You know, why do you hate people so much? I can’t stand to hear it—it poisons the air. And I can’t help mentioning mothers now and again, you know. People have mothers, they’re everywhere if you look hard enough! And it’s not those people’s fault if your mother’s dead.’

  The night had taken on a surreal quality, with the aerodrome noise of the waves, the strange fog and the desert-like vistas of sand. We were dangerously far out. I was afraid of tides, of being cut off, of strange wanderers in the darkness, of Mandy punching me in the face. I noticed that both her fists had remained clenched during my rant. I also noticed that her face was dripping with tears. But not sorrowful tears: instead a cataract of loathing and thwarted supremacy.

  ‘You’re full of shit,’ hissed Mandy.

  I went to touch her, badly wanting contact, but she pulled away viciously. ‘Don’t say things like that, it breaks my heart.’

  Every memory of Barcelona, of the recent glorious days, slowly soiled by her sentence as it lingered in the brutally fresh air; as if a fundamental barrier of respect had been crossed. It was as if she desired the destruction of everything beautiful she ever encountered. I couldn’t believe so many cracks had appeared so quickly. She had her game, combative, ready-for-anything face on now. Neither of us was very drunk any more. Yet, the world felt turned upside down. When I glanced towards the water, the sky seemed to be the sea and vice versa, so disorientating was the fog and the blackness of the waves.

  ‘You’re just a short-arsed little prick!’ she spat, like a haggard regurgitating a kill. ‘What do you know about people dying? About real life. You go around in your own head all day, with your useless books. Sometimes I can’t bear to look at you. Like tonight, eating those grapes like a pig, one after another. You’re welcome to that fat-arsed Beatrix or whatever her name was.’

>   ‘Please don’t be like this!’ I said pitifully, and went to touch her again. But she threw my hand off with superhuman violence. I felt as if I’d touched an electric current.

  ‘I wish I’d never married you,’ she sneered, and strode off into the black, obscure night.

  Full of booze and tired beyond reason, I watched her walking away; her shoulders hunched, pushing her diminishing head forward at an angle. I sat down in the sand and grabbed great handfuls of moist gravel and shells. It felt good to make contact with the cold wet ground. Letting the handfuls go like sand through an hourglass, I smelt the stirring female odours left by the tide. The foghorn sounded, low and mysterious, like an unearthly valediction. The waves were so close now they began to seethe over my trainers, drawing back with a shush like a giant intake of breath. My heart was full of stones. Of intolerable disappointment and anger. The tide was coming in. I tried hard not to fall asleep, though part of me wanted to float out on the great black current, through the Pillars of Hercules and out into the open Atlantic. It seemed like days before I stood up on prickly limbs and made my way to the tide wall, where I walked for an hour before the yellow light of Mandy’s cab appeared.

  If you had to come up with a defining characteristic of human beings, then it would be mental suffering—not physical suffering. All creatures great and small undergo physical pain, and I hope my portion of it on this earth is small, but … there, I’ve just illuminated my point: that ‘hope’ is a kind of suffering too, a phenomenon not experienced by the dog about to be drowned, or the monkey waiting in the vivisectionist’s lab. In terms of pain, anticipation forms the larger part of the burden. Claudio couldn’t be absolute for death—he had too many visions of nothingness to contend with. It is a mercy, I suppose, that a dog or a monkey doesn’t have to prepare its soul for the Everlasting, doesn’t have to imagine the agony of those it leaves behind. Until the murder or torture commences, it is blissfully ignorant. If you have to identify the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, it probably involved mental suffering. A bereavement. A separation. Physical torture is rare. Not many of us have undergone six hours of having our fingernails pulled out while drops of water batter our foreheads from a pipe in the ceiling—unless you count the Eurovision Song Contest, which Martin and I foolishly declined to enter, as Rose Masquerade eventually made the heats. Of all the love-disasters, a separation that occurs while you’re still ostensibly together is probably in the top five of the mental suffering hit parade. The water is all around but not a drop of it is drinkable. When she’s in, you make sure you are out. And vice versa. It’s hard to be pragmatic about the realisation that your marriage is a catastrophe, but that’s what I was forced to contemplate after returning from our honeymoon. What to do? All the top manuals advise you to ‘work on it’. But what course of action is there, when working on it makes it worse?

  Mandy didn’t hit me during that Stygian night on the beach—that came later, after the noisy debacle following the soiree at Stringfellows with Ant, Nick and Victor Moore. That was the night the genie really sprang free of its bottle. Maybe I should tell you what really happened.

  Of course, after the first punch, it’s all over. You can never return after that firebreak is irreversibly crossed. Things are never really the same again. Strange, because hitting is everywhere—in Western saloon-bar brawls, in books, on TV. They make it look so effortless, balletic, free from comeuppance. But they don’t deal with the aftermath, with what the heart feels after the body is struck by another human being. After that first blow it was open season as far as Mandy was concerned. And she used that awful phrase on me a number of times. Not that echo of Mariana’s, ‘I wish I was dead.’ That was merely her daily mantra. No, after her first swing, ‘I wish I had never married you!’ rang out along Shaftesbury Avenue in the February night. Those seven words seemed to go straight to some essential core, reminding me, as they did, of my stepfather and his peevish, rancorous tirades at my mother. They are, of course, the exact words Delph had used on Sinead, heavy with all the ingratitude and meanness of spirit, all the lowness and spoilt nastiness that it is possible for a human being to summon.

  That night, waiting at the bus stop after Strings, me out of puff, Mandy furious that I had spent the night mesmerised by Antonia’s heaving bosoms, the cat of violence was allowed to come spitting and scratching out of its bag. She punched me so hard I went back against the phone box, eliciting a terrified look from a Japanese girl inside calling Tokyo. Mandy’s expensive watch catapulted into the filthy gutter, where it lay in a trench of rain, the water the colour of despair. She stared at it for a long while, her eyes bulging psychotically, as if the watch was to blame. Then she turned to me.

  ‘Look what you’ve done.’

  I wiped a smear of blood from just above my ear. It looked black on the back of my hand, like soy sauce.

  Tike that was my fault, yeah?’ I said, feeling nauseous, fractured somehow from the adrenalin shooting around my system. I motioned to pick up the watch, but she went for me again, kicking and scratching and pushing until at last I fell into the gutter. At this, I had to laugh. I lay there as a number twenty-nine rounded the corner and began to bear down on me, laughing into her face at her ludicrous scene, her imitation of a prize-fighter.

  ‘I wish I’d never married you!’ she screamed. And it seemed like the whole street turned around to see just who this man could be, unwanted in matrimony, lying, as he was, in the road with a bus heading straight for his head.

  You may well ask, stern critic, what I was looking for in such experiences. After all, they tell us that we secretly hang around what is bad for us, drawn like moths to terrible flames, when every self-preserving instinct informs us to get out fast. Like the battered wife who keeps returning for her monthly black eye because she finds the insecurity of freedom terrifying. They also hint that such women wouldn’t be able to survive without the thrill of having their self-esteem lowered by a total bastard on a regular basis, but that never finds its way explicitly into the textbooks. That would be outright misogyny. But there is something tiresome about the banal central strut of psychotherapy—the doctrine that, if you state something one way, you secretly desire it the other. If you claim to abhor violence you covertly desire it, feeling, as one really does, in need of such punishment or abuse. That to protest too much equals a cast-iron case of guilty as charged. All I can say to that is—absolute balls. Protesting too much more often means that something terrible has been perpetrated against you. Where does one put the full stop in this protesting? At what point does legitimate protest turn into superfluous protest?

  So there I was on the London street after dark, decked by my wife. And it didn’t end there, either, as you can probably guess. I’m ready to tell you about Mandy’s piece de resistance, her defining atrocity. You may well recall the night I visited her after work by surprise. The Hairdressers’ Ball. She had just left, so I ran the gauntlet of the Centre Point junkies until catching up with the world’s angriest woman. What was I after? Why did I persevere? Well, part of my inability to act derived from a deep sense of pity that anyone could be so lost, so completely incontinent when it came to their aggressive impulses. Amend that. I mean that any woman could be so incontinent. Violent women are always fascinating, an anomaly. And I suppose part of me wanted to play the anthropologist, the therapist, while I helped her on the long road to knowing how to behave. Why do we quake in the irresistible glare of the violent woman, the virago, the tornado of female spite? Because they’re not supposed to behave like that, of course. Programmed as they are to bring us into the world, to nurture us, to give suck and buy us toys, to keep us from harm, there is something contradictory, counter-intuitive about women swinging like street fighters and swearing like sailors. To find a tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide is a self-replenishing form of astonishment.

  And it was with the anthropologists steady gaze that I observed her on that tube train, sharing our personal strife with a hu
ndred disgruntled passengers. Or at least I tried to keep my head analytical. I think I mentioned that I did something I had never attempted before with Mandy: ignored her. Stepping insouciantly from the carriage at Camden Town just as her voice attained the velocity of an automated bacon-slicer, I resolved for once not to give a damn. According to her, taking in a movie while she was doing that rare thing (a day of work) was some kind of war crime. So take me to the United Nations, I thought. Drag me to the Hague in an armoured car. What are you, my mother? Do you have to dictate my every-fucking-breath? Do I have to consult you when I go to the khazi, just to check the flush doesn’t coincide with one of your migraines? Do I really have to apologise for enjoying myself? Haven’t I spent the last year of my life trying to get your wretched band off the ground? (Oh, and before we leave the subject—as you might have guessed, Fellatrix were shit. They virtually defined the substance. Despite my valiant attempt to improve them with my lyrics, they were one of the three most talentless bands to have arisen in the northern hemisphere over the past decade, barring the French ones. What else could they have been?) Do I really have to listen to your hysterical voice—like a knife chopping vegetables very fast—laden with threats and personal-level abuse when I have just spent two hours in the divine company of Bergman’s solemnly lisping Swedes?

  It was with these righteous and pertinent thoughts that I alighted from the tube carriage, recklessly believing that it would put an end to the argument. I had worked up the courage to ignore her, to blank her, to snub her, to freeze her out. And this did take a degree of courage with Mandy. She could be terrifying. I could see the fear in the uneasy eyes of our fellow tube passengers. There was something very ancient in her rages, her spitting onslaughts—a deep pan-gender fear that apprehended the ghosts of Clytemnestra, Medusa, Procne. But I defied all this for a moment. Turn me to stone if you dare then, I thought, as the tube doors clanked shut behind me.