Byron Easy

by Jude Cook

  I heard him out, then pushed past him, ravenous for fresh air. I intended to stand in the golden kingdom of fallen autumn until the wind turned my hair white. I would run like an abandoned dog to the wide ‘O’ of the railway arch where I would sit down and cry.

  ‘Stuff it,’ my voice said in a strange treble. It sounded pipey and unbroken after my father’s fulminations.

  The following morning, all the locks were changed on his house.

  Let me tell you about the last times I saw my fathers. Yes, fathers, plural. I got rid of one and the other got rid of me. The wrong father, as it turned out, did the leaving. But what is youth for if not for fucking everything up in grand style?

  A year after that autumn evening, my father called at my mother’s place. I had just turned seventeen. There was no particular errand that Des had to run—maybe he desired more of the punishment the cuckold secretly relishes, the saga of self-pity that it becomes legitimate to publicise once you become a rejected man. He would have seen the depressing hump of the caravan that Delph—still grimly married to my mother—had purchased so they could ‘get away at the weekends’. He would have observed the ‘his and hers’ tea mugs, the bookless shelves, the prissy banality of the home Delph had stolen from him. The ambrosial waft of high culture a world away. He would also have been aware of the rotten atmosphere, like an undetectable smell of bins, pervading everything. The odour of things rank and gross in nature had obviously risen to the surface. For months prior to this occasion, an escalating tension like the whistling of an unattended kettle on the hob had filled the house. Until a week ago I had been signing on, shuttling between my mum’s and my old man’s whenever he was absent in France (he had let me back in, conditional on searching for employment). Unwanted at both houses, I endured this situation as I was too cowardly to grab the rope and swing away. Despite my grand plans of a year ago, I still wasn’t in London. Instead, I was broiling in a stew of drugs and booze, vacillating as my middle-class friends flew their loving coops to university halls of residence, or (the working-class) started jobs that saw them owning powerful cars in a horrifically short time. I knew I was malingering, clinging to a domestic situation that I vaguely hoped would improve. But it didn’t improve. In fact, the shrieking kettle had become unbearable. A week before, I had blagged a job hulking crates at a garden centre, only to discover that Sinead wanted the vast majority of my insulting ‘pay’. I was informed that I was ‘in Delph’s way’, and I felt his cold choked animus on the back of my neck every time we crossed paths. A mass murder, or a coup at the very least, felt imminent.

  The night of Des’s visit, I had been uncharacteristically delirious with joy. This was because my job had provided a solution to the whole problem. With work, I discovered, the world suddenly allowed you in, with time-honoured stupidity, to its exclusive club. The winners’ club. Regardless of whether you’re a junkie or a serial killer, the overweening powers-that-be react to the fact of one being in paid employment by opening their legs and begging for it. As many times a night as you want; no orifice a problem. To my amazement, a visit that morning to an estate agent had produced a breakthrough. They (the world, to whom membership is always subject-to-status) had allowed me to rent a small bedsit in Station Road for twenty-five pounds a week. Carumba. A month previously they had scooped me from their offices like a turd when I had admitted that I was on the dole. So my happiness, which knew no theoretical bounds, was intruded upon by Des. The knocker and moaner. The arch deflater of every plan or aspiration, threatening notions which illustrated to him just how safe he had played his life. Gore Vidal’s maxim about dying every time a friend succeeds was personified by my father that night. He seemed personally offended when told that I had got myself together and found a job and a flat.

  ‘What? You’re going to live on your own in a stinking bedsit?’ he guffawed. ‘That’s the outcome I always predicated for you.’

  As he stood on the landing, I saw all the gloating charmlessness he could exhibit when he wanted to. Not as unattractive as Delph’s psychotic rages, but disappointing all the same. Hopefully, Des was feeling my withdrawal sharper than a serpent’s tooth in his buttocks. As he laughed I found it hard to share his sense of humour. Inscrutably, I watched him twitch at the foot of the stairs. My mother felt she should say something.

  ‘Well, that can’t be so bad for you.’ Her voice was conciliatory as she addressed my father. ‘You’ll have the place to yourself at weekends. No more funny people calling round day and night.’

  By funny people she meant the dealers and weirdos who seemed to gravitate towards anyone with a bit of blow. I looked back and forth between my mother and father—the weary, subordinated woman, her dramatically black hair now seamed with grey; the chuckling old man, bald as a ballpoint. I couldn’t comprehend that they were my parents, that they had ever had anything to do with each other, let alone me. So this used to be a family, then, I thought—once upon a time when I was too young to remember. Did they envisage that this day would come? They were referring to me as if I were some sort of chattel to be disposed of. I broke my silence.

  ‘No thanks to you,’ I said to my old man, ‘I’ve sorted something out.’ My earlier euphoria had dissolved into anxiety and antipathy. Anxiety that he was right (and it’s hard to ignore the testimony of a father, no matter how distant they have made themselves), and antipathy towards his attitude, which seemed to view my future with a satiric smirk, or at least as a target for assassination. I felt alone, without help; scorned and burdensome, like the grandparent staggering through the first strange seas of Alzheimer’s. My sudden comprehension of my father’s emotional frailty was not present this time. I said, ‘You’ve got what you both wanted—me out of the way.’

  My mother wailed pitifully, ‘None of us can help the things life has done to us, Brian!’

  ‘Don’t call me Brian!’ I snapped back.

  My father was still laughing.

  ‘And—and, this job,’ he sneered. ‘Shifting crates for a bloody horticulturalist—is that the best you can come up with?’

  ‘It’s better than nothing, Des,’ said my mother, her pale eyes showing the first signs of tears.

  I remained silent at this. My heart-sore vulnerability had hardened to something nastier. Here was this man, my own father, laughing in my face at my humble station in life; flagrant, full of self-pity and scorn, insane with self-righteousness, with no other solution than to turn my struggles into some sort of charade that he found amusing. I was an outcome that he found offensive to even look at. He was pissing his pants. Presume not that I am the thing I was!

  ‘You’re a loser,’ he laughed.

  ‘Maybe so,’ I said, fixated on his hooded eyes, trying to read subsidiary emotions beside that of anger. I felt all my violence, Delph’s violence, well up inside me like a shamefully powerful infusion.

  ‘It’s not that bad a job,’ said my mother.

  I went to barge past him, but he restrained me. The only other components in his shrouded eyes were surprise and fear.

  ‘Just you try it,’ he threatened, impotently.

  In a firm voice, I said: ‘Hurry up and die,’ and pushed his head out of the way with the flat of my palm.

  Seconds later I was in the street, the night fresh as the inside of a fridge, the stars puncturing the firmament in a blaze of diamonds.

  And that was the last time I saw one of my fathers.

  The last time I saw my other father, the big-veined oracle, wasn’t as dramatic, but just as shameful. An autumn evening. I had just stepped out of my Station Road bedsit to check on my laundry as it made its mournful turns in the blackened doorless cabin across the street, when a big car shot past, stopped, then reversed up to where I was standing.

  The passenger-side window wound down, and there was Delph Tongue. I hadn’t seen him for a year. Occasionally I would visit my mum, and see the caravan, that symbol of dull marital togetherness, parked stolidly in the drive—but my stepfather ha
d been mercifully absent from the vicinity every time.

  ‘Thou s out late,’ said Delph through a big-lipped sneer. He had aged too, like the rest of us, the skin tighter below the eyes, sprigs of grey at the temples. He still had those high convex cheekbones and eyes like two dark currants stuck in the head of a gingerbread man. And still that dynamic charmlessness, the machine-like energy of the eloper or cavalier servente.

  It was an awkward moment. We had always hated the very sight of each other.

  ‘Just checking on my laundry,’ I muttered, as if this was knowledge he was already aware of and I was updating him.

  ‘Aye, it’s not much fun with no machine of your own,’ he ventured tritely.

  The man in the car, this Belial from past, this kerb-crawler, was suddenly a stranger to me. Here was a presence who had dominated my life for almost two decades, and yet there we were, like shits that pass in the night. His was just another car heading home, or away from home. I looked around at the puddled neons of the road, the evening traffic ferociously pushing through, the commuters walking wearily back to their soap operas of debt and failed marriage. Certain women, dressed in shell-suits, who I knew to be prostitutes, pulled up their leg-warmers impatiently as they loitered on the corner.

  ‘No, I suppose you’re right,’ I said, bowing, as ever, to his supremacy.

  ‘Your mother says thou hasn’t called for a month. I think she deserves more, don’t you?’

  I didn’t answer this. I could tell he was aggrieved at the loss of his authority. For years that kind of comment would set off a churning sea of bile. I merely shrugged. He had lost his mark.

  ‘Where you off to?’ I asked, not interested. I knew that his marriage to my mother was practically over. It existed in all but name, within the antiseptic walls of their house. I hoped secretly that he was leaving town for good and that his boot was stuffed full of his meagre possessions, the unread gilt-tooled books, the statue of Rodin’s lovers.

  ‘To ’t dump,’ he said in his bludgeoning Yorkshire tones, his equivocal smirk still registering with me as a sneer.

  There was nowhere else for the conversation to go but its grave.

  ‘Okay, then,’ I said, as I saw him put the car into first gear, ready for the off. I observed his hands and tried to comprehend that they were the hands that had once hit me, sexually interfered with me. But this knowledge did me no good. It enlightened me no further, gave no answers to the mysteries of consciousness, morality or our eventual destination. Without thinking, I said: ‘Take care.’

  As soon as the words left my lips I knew he had me. He would pounce without mercy. The strong desire to love this de facto father was never far from the surface. And Delph knew it. I had said something generous and he would have to rebut it, trample on it, piss on it.

  ‘Sod off,’ he snarled, his lips curling into a leer, a look of all-encompassing derision on his horrible face. That look, that disyllable retort of maximum animadversion, was an apt peroration to the whole sorry affair.

  Then he wound up the window and drove off into the night.

  The layer of fumes in the smoking carriage judders slightly as the train pulls away. Like a gust of cannon smoke after the firing of ordnance. Amazing that a body of chemical emission can behave as one, in concert or unison. I take a last drag and watch the carriage expel itself from Wakefield station. Glad to be gone. Wouldn’t you, delicate reader, be glad to be gone from this region of endless cold and everlasting night? From the soiling admissions of the last twenty pages?

  Of course it wasn’t Delph in the train seat earlier. Just someone who looked like him. His doppelganger. I had hallucinated Delph, just as I had hallucinated Bea in the Missolonghi caves. The man I asked for a cigarette was an ice-hockey player from Wombwell. He informed me, for ten eye-searing minutes, of all the fun a young man can get up to when on tour with a sporting team. His high Germanic cheekbones jutting out, almost into the aisle it seemed, like the very image of my stepfather. But it wasn’t him. Ten minutes? It felt like more, somehow.

  On unsturdy legs, longing for a drink, I wend my way back to carriage B. Despite the strong probability that I would have swung for him, had the hockey player indeed turned out to be Delph, the one burning question on my lips had been a curious one. Who was that mystery woman in Wakefield that night after the wedding reception? I never did find out. Somehow this fact had multiplied in importance over the years—it felt like the lost piece of a jigsaw. Was Delph being unfaithful to my mum at the same time as she was being unfaithful to my father? This was important to know. For a long time, the only comfort, the one redeeming feature of the whole saga had been the notion that at least, out of all the destruction, true love had triumphed over the suburban oblivion of a dead marriage. But was the adulterer, in turn, cheated on? Was this shady woman some fancy piece that Delph had locked away in the rainy wastes of Yorkshire? As I stumble through the hissing vents of the train, the outskirts of Wakefield rocket past, just as they did that night twenty years before. I can recall the chained collieries, sunken in darkness, some flattened by bulldozers, the old wool mills, the clinging estates, the moon like an eye at the end of the street. That song … But, in the distance, all I can see is a coral reef of amber streetlamps under a fog of drizzle. The year starting its long recuperation from its darkest night: the dreadful equinox of the twenty-second of December.

  I reach my seat and nod to Robin, who seems startled that I’m still alive.

  ‘Only been for a fag,’ I say, buoyantly. But his response is a dismissive snarl. I feel suddenly full of chronic nausea and weariness. His sneer of non-acknowledgement recalls Delph’s last look from his car window. I had intended to open my notebook and write up my North Yorkshire odyssey. But now I feel almost unable to pick up the pen. Is this what ages us, what hardens us? The aggregate of all those times we said something generous or naively informative to people who secretly despise us for our daily beauty? Those disparaging Malvolios, Angelos, Iagos.

  Perspiration, not inspiration, I think, and open the black covers at random. The entry for the second of October confronts me. The day I left the marital home: I’m so angry I can barely hold the fucking pen. I’ve been fooled, I’ve been had. She pretended she was someone she wasn’t. So this is it. Starting again at thirty with nothing, absolutely nothing to my name. Feel small and useless. Today my wife told me she hated me and hated having sex with me. That all her orgasms had been faked. ‘Even on our honeymoon?’ I asked. ‘Especially on our honeymoon’ she said, triumphantly. The bitch! A whole summer living beyond her means in a flat that I’ve grafted to. pay the rent on, running around like La Belle Dame Sans Merci in Italy with God knows what winking, cheaply lascivious Romeo …

  Enough already! I cannot continue. Let me tell you instead, while we are on the subject of last meetings, about the last time I saw my wife. The mesmerising presence who had turned up at Rock On three and a half years previously displaying the white frill of her knickers over the waistband of her trousers, who had given off all those uneasy vibrations from under her canvas of butter-coloured skin, who had finally turned into my worst nightmare. A woman impossible to deal with: stern, obdurate, flinty, rough, remorseless. Whereas I had foolishly expected all the qualities of the good wife to emerge as I administered the cure to her troubled soul—a wife who was dutiful, attentive, faithful, supportive, gentle. In the final analysis, my marriage had been a Grand Guignol; a Spanish tragedy.

  The last flat-destroying marathon took place one night three months ago. A terrible nightfall. After an hour of deadlocked verbal combat, she had reiterated the sentence (‘I wish I’d never,’ et cetera) that had come to seem like a mantra. Only this time she added a chilling caveat. After repeatedly punching me in the head, turning over the bookcases—which went down like collapsing tower blocks—Mandy screamed: ‘I want you out of my flat! Do I have to call the police to get you out?’