by Jude Cook
Bad move.
Like in all the worst horror films, the pursuer had pursued me into what I imagined to be my place of safety, the platform. In retrospect, I must have been foolish to think Mandy would take that snub on the chin in front of all those people. No, she would have to save face, have to exact retribution, have to bake my children in a pie. I immediately felt two claw-like hands grasp my hair from behind: two haggard falcons alighting on my head simultaneously.
‘You fucking bastard!’ her voice raged behind me.
Then the toecap of a boot made contact with my arse. At that point I should have turned and put a stop to it—a stop to her. Instead, I kept on walking. I remember thinking, why do these aberrations always happen at night? Is it true that women are really moon-controlled; that terrible unmanageable energies are unleashed? Still fresh in my mind was the eager sprint I had made behind the Centre Point building in order to catch her up. Past the great dead needle of the tower itself, sentinel over the charred ground of St Giles: the voices of the poor wailing from the palimpsest of paving stones. Strong night forces were at work in the blackened alleys and concrete arches, littered, as they were, with syringes and the humps of dossers in sleeping bags, like rocks at low tide. Once trapped there, you truly knew the bright day was done. The shadow of the great building seemed to suck everything under it into a void. A deathly stillness pervaded among the junkies and clippers. Despite the distant sound of sirens, theatre-goers, boisterous lads on a night up West, I could hear my own heart beat strongly in my temples as I half-ran, half-marched towards the mouth of the tube. And now I was walking calmly up the escalator, with my wife of two months viciously kicking and rabbit-punching me from behind, trying to make me turn, to acknowledge her awful anger. But I didn’t turn.
I kept on walking. I almost felt calm as I took these blows. Not that they didn’t hurt, they did. They were directed with fearsome accuracy, each kick and right-hook like a featherweight’s well-placed jab. Even when I caught the astonished eyes of the rush-hour hordes pouring down the opposite escalator in their raincoats and well-cut suits I kept my countenance. It was only when I neared the crest of the escalator that a wave of panic swept over me. What if she didn’t stop? I didn’t mean then, in the immediate future, but ever? What if this was her true nature, her true colours? What if everything that had come before was an elaborate ruse, an undercover operation to ensnare a man so she could enact her pathological fantasies of revenge. Because this punishment in no way fitted the crime. This, for watching a film? Even though I hadn’t met her eye since we stepped off the train, I knew she was enjoying herself; that this represented a primal release, with all guns blazing, the very thing she had longed to do to all males from childhood onwards. Maybe because I sensed the great catharsis she was obtaining from this I continued to participate in it for so many unendurable minutes. She knew I wouldn’t retaliate, after all. In retrospect, it must have been wonderful for her—it combined the three things she had always craved in a single prolonged act: public recognition, revenge upon men, and proof of her physical strength, all at once. Because she always had a big Amazonian thing about physical strength. She became affronted if things were lifted for her or doors held open. Even her father said she drove like a man, and this was intended as no kind of compliment. She also had a score to settle. Specifically with men. And there I was taking the rap on behalf of every male who had hurt her, left her, mistreated her. As the ticket barriers came into sight, I made a number of mental notes: to seek professional help on her behalf the moment she calmed down; to call her old man and tell him she also punched like a man; and to buy a gum shield in case anything like this occurred again.
I slipped my ticket into its slot, with Mandy still using my rear as an archery butt, noting the wary looks of the station personnel. Domestic. I read their thoughts. Best leave them to it.
‘That’s fine, guys,’ I said in passing. ‘I can handle it.’
But the fury at my back didn’t let up.
‘Had enough yet?’ she shrieked, ‘You lazy bastard!’ And hurled another punch my way.
An irrational thought struck me as I exited the station, and that was: I’m not dressed for this. Ever since Mandy had started on me, I was aware that I had chosen to sport some of the clothes she had picked out before the wedding in order to transform me from a sartorial joke into someone she could tolerate being seen with in public. I had on blue cord flares, a dagger-collared shirt and an even bigger, half-size suede jacket with fur lining and a chunky zip. Adorning this was a neck tie, borrowed from Nick, tied in a kind of Noel Coward knot, fashionable (believe it or not) in the mid-nineties. It struck me as I ascended the escalator that I must look like some kind of dandy, inscrutably taking my punishment for a bad gambling debt.
Effeminately dressed, too full of forgiveness, not up for this kind of combat, I stepped into the rich navy night of Camden. The smell of onions and peppers and char-grilled meat smacked me in the face. These odours emanated from the risky-pizza stalls opposite the World’s End, where mid-week revellers and winos were tumbling past. Gelid, fluorescent light gave the post-work crowd a cadaverous look as they bought their evening papers, grinned into mobiles, or clasped tight the hands of their loved ones. Black cabs swung through the lights of the big intersection, followed by buses lit up like aquariums, the ghostly fish of commuters staring with bored curiosity at an overdressed man getting beaten up by a woman. At that moment, a white van with three bum-crack cowboys sitting up front halted at the pedestrian crossing. The wag nearest to my side of the road pulled the window down, tore the bacon sandwich from his grinning mouth and yelled,
‘Oi! I’ll teach you how to punch, mate!’
Ah, how that sentence has resonated down the years. I will never forget it, his kind offer of tuition. Almost paternal in its comforting supportiveness. Many aspects of it have struck me as inherently wise, almost philosophically acute, in the ensuing months and years. I will teach you how to punch, mate. Apart from its trenchant humour, its mordant drollery, its utterly apposite comment on the situation, I found it referred to a hidden standard of male behaviour that I had somehow neglected to assimilate over the years. It seemed to imply, not only is a man’s pride intimately connected with his ability to dish out violence, to handle himself but to handle himself with women. You know, when the old lady gets a bit uppity, a bit out of line. A bit above herself. When she starts (God forbid) swinging punches at you. Because that’s just not on, is it? That’s out of order. That would mean you were some kind of punch-bag. Or woofter. Somehow less than a man—a boy that was still getting his hair pulled by the girls in the playground. That would imply that she has requested entry to (and been admitted by you) into an elite club: that of assumed physical parity, of a kind that exists only between men. Because all men have to assume they have parity—every prompt to fight is a challenge to this assumption: ‘Outside, then’; ‘Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough’; and, best of all, ‘Do you want some?’ In other words, prove it. All refer to an essential eliciting of proof, of putting one’s fist where one’s mouth is. Prove it, or stay a poof, is what is generally assumed by this nostrum. Of course, no bird, the leering chippie would assert, could ever win a fight with a bloke. She would be foolish to even try. Inferior strength and all that, let alone deficient brain wattage. And if she did, she knows what she can expect. No, there is no admittance to that exclusive male club of violence, because who knows where it would end? They’d be off fighting wars next, or flying planes, when they should be at home furthering the human race with a baby’s bottle in one hand and a new nappy in the other. In fact, that Neanderthal in the white van looked like the sort of bloke who winced whenever he heard the phrase, ‘the men and women of the armed forces’. Or saw books with titles such as, Sacred Autonomy: Radical Feminist Readings of the Policing of Female Behaviour. Nevertheless, he undoubtedly had a point. As the van sped off towards Kentish Town in a rodeo of beeps and jeers, I considered how u
tterly right and wrong his statement was simultaneously. Wrong, because the liberal consensus is that you should never hit women, and wrong again because I didn’t need to learn how to punch—I needed to learn how to avoid getting involved with this type of maniac ever again. But the statement was right in the respect that, by letting it happen, I had lost my self-respect. There I was—being pasted by a woman in the middle of a London street. Where the fuck was my self-respect? And did I ever have any? These were important questions for me at the time. Yes, along with the sincere urge never to encounter any of the people from the platform, the escalator, the station, or the van ever again in my life, I really had to look into the issue of self-respect.
But the question, or problem, of Byron Easy s self-respect had begun early on, in Wakefield, during a night I am working up the courage to share with you. In fact, there are many heart-troubling incidents that I am working up to. I feel as if I have only told you half the story so far, dear reader, that I have stopped short at the vital moment, a kind of coitus interruptus of the psyche. I feel duty-bound to dish the dirt, to push on with my journey into darkness. To share with you the nasty, perverted truth about these so-called human beings.
Believe me, I wish this didn’t all sound like condemnation. I have looked repeatedly for redeeming features, mitigating circumstances—Mandy’s bereavement, Delph’s impoverished upbringing. My, they all had it so bad. And didn’t I get to know about it! There is another tenet of psychotherapy (a course of aid that I have never undertaken, I should again stress), that urges the patient to forget about the past. To forgive the abuser, because if you don’t, QED, they have won. You are still, in effect, being abused. Only then can one proceed to that great abstract notion, that laughable chimera, self-love. A cute idea, nevertheless. And attractive too, in one’s optimistic moments. It’s comforting to believe that you can relinquish the past by a sort of mental trompe l’oeil; eradicate the pollution from your mind by the simple act of forgetting it all. But wholly wrong, and dangerous too. The past, as we all know, is part of the present. Where else can we experience the past except in the present? Memory is a function of the present, of current consciousness. The unwarranted memory is the worst—the unpleasant and arresting reminder of former abuse that makes the heart pound, appears without invitation as you are walking down the street, doing the laundry, watching television. We are open to these assailants no matter what mental regime of amnesia we exert. If it was all so easy, Macbeth would have been able to turn his back on the air-drawn dagger and gone for a taco.
How weary all that ‘get a life’, ‘stop living in the past’ rhetoric makes me! That one-cure-fits-all nonsense. Dangerous nonsense, too. ‘Stop perpetuating the pain by remembering it,’ the mantras read. I recall Rudi, that king of mindless bon mots, once insisting that I got some kind of vicarious thrill out of recounting episodes of violence.
‘Admit it, Bry,’ he had said while uncorking another costly bottle of red. ‘You get a kick when you go over this stuff with me. I can see the excitement in your wee eyes.’
Yeah, right. Would he say the same to a rape victim; that they derived a kick from recounting their ordeal? He stated this with arrogant confidence one epicurean night at his place. As if I was there for my own amusement! As if I was some guinea pig for his shallow psychological systems! And Rudi, of all people, pontificating in his carmine shirt like some kind of world authority on pain. Rudi and his purportedly ‘happy’ childhood. (I am always suspicious of people who announce that they had a perfectly ‘happy’ childhood, thanks very much. I mean, how did Rudi turn out like he did if he had such a blissful upbringing?) All this irked me, as what we do with pain is very important. Sure, say the textbooks, pain only lasts a second—it is up to us to decide whether we want to sustain it by moping and blaming our parents or past lovers for the rest of our lives. But that doesn’t take into account what the writer does with his pain—the man whose response to life is to write it, investigate it, dissect it, like a curse. He doesn’t want to forget, he wants to enter areas most are too scared to even approach. Fundamentally the writer, the ‘man of imagination’ as Coleridge put it, is interested in the nature of violation. He wants to examine it for his own rehabilitation, granted, but he is also journeying, torch in hand, into the darkness for all our sakes. Creation being an act that is at once both supremely selfish and altruistic. The writer demands an answer, not just happiness (that great misleading goal of all psychotherapy—who the hell said happiness was ever on the menu?). He wants to explore the human transaction that has taken place. He doesn’t want to listen to platitudes such as Rudi’s. That would be a double violation. And, that night, I became angry with him; forcing him to grin sagely. ‘That proves you ken what I’m saying!’ he hollered. Again, absolute balls! Of course, legitimate affrontedness looks the same as the anger produced by recognising a bad truth about yourself. But how can the observer tell? They cannot! And the more one protests, the bigger the hole beneath one’s feet appears. As easily influenced as I was (and as pissed), I remember checking myself for the verity of Rudi’s allegation that I enjoyed being a victim and, almost at once, found it lacking.
‘I’m trying to believe in higher human conduct …’ I struggled, knowing that Rudi had already made up his mind. ‘Not the world you believe in.’ Which was, I knew, a world of deception and perversity. A world reduced to a mesh of submissive and dominant relationships, an index of cruelty.
‘You’re just living in the past, Bry. You gottay move on.’
‘Maybe, but I stand by the legitimacy of feeling my own pain till I die. Good for you if you’ve mastered your own anguish—though I thought you didn’t have any. But I don’t believe it for a moment. Good for you if you’re not perpetuating your own pain by morbid memories. It’s just not the best method for me.’
Ah, Roman times! And I don’t mean the carousing at Rudi’s, but the epoch when we were nearer bestiality, in a historical sense. Human excoriation at the coliseum. Sacrifices to Apollo. I can see the atavistic residue of this in Rudi’s conception of the world. A theatre of cruelty and emotional blood-lust. Throw me to the lions, why don’t you! Tell me I spend most of my time dwelling on violence and revenge. Much more time than my timid face would suggest. If he had been the victim of such violence, then he might not be so quick to make careless pronouncements about me ‘getting a thrill from receiving it’. Because this is the saddest thing about those really in denial: their refusal to believe they were ever victims. The Californian rhetoric utilised by the self-help guru (greying, pony-tailed, with moist beaming eyes) attempts to convince these spineless fools that nothing was ever done to them. But, of course, it was. They were all victims of another’s appetite, sexual or otherwise. At least I could admit I was a victim. And the world would be a healthier place if everyone else could too. As for the thrill bit: of course, cathartic violence is thrilling, but only for its progenitor. I could tell Mandy was deriving much pleasure from pistol whipping me up that escalator, just as I enjoyed hurling that bottle through the window the night she refused my kind offer of cunnilingus. But being on the receiving end a thrill? I don’t think so, somehow.
Against the brutalities of ancient Rome, of current psychoanalytical thinking, I offer the innocence of my first five years. Things were better then, when I was boy eternal. Everything was right. Everything was forgivable. And how the human animal demonstrates altruism or forgiveness was of great importance to me just after the split. Even though we are the only species to exact revenge, we also have the capacity to swing the other way: some people seem to have a forgiveness that is meta-Christian. Unfortunately, it is the Nietzschean view that has inculcated us against so-called weak and foolish reactions to violation, the ‘slave-morality’ that tells us to turn the other cheek. And maybe he had something. All the evidence indicates that the meek will not inherit the earth, oh no. The meek shall get the shit kicked out of them and then get told by their best friend (and probably their greying, pony-tailed, mois
t-eyed therapist) that they enjoyed it.
That night of tears and madness in Camden didn’t conclude with White Van Man’s wonderful aperçu about teaching me to punch. There was a dire postscript. As I walked up the Kentish Town Road, turning the other cheek, I felt the intensity of her blows and verbal onslaught increase. Gone was the teeming life of the station, replaced by the charcoal portal of the Devonshire Arms, a Goth pub that always seemed livelier than the spartan old men’s boozers dotted along that strip of road. The cumin and garlic stinks of the noodle bars had been replaced by the odours of wet sand, dust and sewage from the building works near the lock. The stars were dazzling in the sky, throwing down their spears on the fighting fools below. Once on the hump-backed bridge, where the canal slithers sullenly below the road, with its moored barges and glittering vistas of reflected light, I became aware that Mandy had stopped following me. I turned and was met with the sight of my wife stretched out in the centre of the road, her sheeny blue mac beneath her, like Joan of Arc waiting for the first torch to set light to the kindling. Luckily, there had been a lull in the traffic, but a stream of cars had broken away from the distant lights, heading straight for her.
‘For Christ’s sake!’ I shouted. ‘Is that what you really want?’ She didn’t reply. It was too late to quibble. I ran over and dragged her, kicking and struggling like a toddler, to the safety of the kerb before the first car swept over the hump of the bridge. So she had finally gained my attention by offering to kill herself. For a long time afterwards I wondered what would’ve happened if I had just let that car roll over her. That would have taught her a lesson, I thought. But, of course, like most lessons given to the stupid, the pedagogue is the main beneficiary.