Byron Easy (2 page)

Newly and thrillingly aware of the teeming variety inside the carriage, I take out my black notebook, one of many that I never leave the house without. It falls open to reveal the skeleton of a poem, in spidery longhand, on the facing page. The Accountant Couple glance away as if I’ve just produced pornography. Verse? Scandalous! What did they expect, a ledger? I uncork my favourite fountain pen only to witness their ears virtually humming with embarrassment. Fuck ’em—I’ve always written in these things, especially on trains. And one day I will throw them all on the bonfire, like all good writers should. I commence with a short, if adjectivally challenged, description of my fellow inmates.

Fat, thin, tall, short
…

Ah, it’s no good. There’s too much to take in—an overwhelming tidal wave of diversity in search of a seat; an anthropologist’s gang-bang. Pascal said only stupid people thought everybody was fundamentally alike; referring of course to the interior, not the deceptive carapace we spend our lives lugging around. Giving up, I let the pen drop and simply stare. The man who just bustled past, letting in the cold air, turns out to be a priest; the egregious white band like a pure strip of snow between his black cassock and triple chin. Beyond him there are frowning fathers and slickly hipped girls (all undoubtedly younger than me); patrolling lads in knee-length Saturday night pulling-shirts; giggling sari’d Bengalis; a pair of Upper-Street Sapphic sisters; a septuagenarian dressed entirely in blue denim; a supermarket-shoed fashion-catastrophe bending under the logged and straining luggage racks (O, the varieties of luggage!). Then there are the cuff-linked ex-aviators; the desperate frauds and baldies; trophy wives next to unspeakably smeared infants; faded neckerchiefed blondes, their crisp-packet faces trowelled with slap; Suit-and-Ties reeking from work; growling misfits; teenagers with heads square as televisions; girls with intelligent continental mouths who will incongruously disembark at Grantham; cheeky mites with gurning fissogs; wind-blasted aunts; solemn-jawed Christians smelling of new laundry; hippy mums in earth-brown rollnecks; acne-beasts; sunlamp survivors; once-successful Lotharios chinking under bazaars of catalogue-bought gold …

I pick up my pen.

Waistcoated wankers, passage-staggerers, nippers and grippers, seal-bark coughers, self-pitying snifflers, hawkers, tutters, scratchers, groaners, verbal diarrhoeics, carol-hummers, dribblers, tongue-lollers (the proximity of all this hot blood!), balls-rearrangers, piles sufferers, dye-jobs, stroke victims, syrup-apologists, recently suntanned showoffs, cold sores, frowners and debt-drowners, blackheads and smackheads, sad Jacks and six-packs, Johnny-no-mates and fashion plates, cancelled beefcake, vacuum-eyed jailbait, bitter-guts, sweating gluttons, pee-desperate ten-year-olds, furtive scribblers, diddlers, con-men, strongmen and me.

Bosh!
The cornice of a suitcase on its way to the angled luggage racks scores a direct hit on my right temple. A gross lardball in a rippling, seething tracksuit is leaning monstrously into my personal space; sharing his body odour—like an olfactory festive gift—with seats thirty-seven to forty-two. He looks oddly familiar. He looks gross. And he certainly hasn’t noticed that he’s injured a fellow human. Pain, like thumb-pressure to the actual brain itself, enters the right side of my face and vibrates along the lines of my jaw and skull. In clinical close-up I watch the man’s T-shirt reveal a vast, pubicly forested space-hopper belly as he berths his case. Then, with a burp, he rejoins his two incredibly bolshy and stupid-looking children further down the aisle, pausing only to clip one of them over the crown.

I huff and I puff and feel a prickling in my nuts. Oh, you shithouse! Oh you clumsy—If it wasn’t Christmas (and he wasn’t bigger, badder, exponentially
more
than me) I would’ve definitely called him a …

‘Kant!’

The man turns in full movie slow-mo to face me. Again that familiar snarl. Oh dear. I’ve done it now. The word, as a word so often will when you’re drunk, just slipped out.

‘What did you call me?’

I see at once that his face—lopsided with venom and ovoid under a lawn of bristle—has murder written across it. As he advances, I become aware of the Accountant Couple, now crimson with shame and stress, physically diminishing in their seats; probably wishing they’d cabbed it or chartered a helicopter to Leeds instead. With a burger-waft of bad armpits, the big man is once again back in my personal force field, closer (if that were humanly possible without him actually
penetrating
me) than before. His deceptive height really is something of a phenomenon: taller at a distance, up close he is Danny DeVito as Napoleon. I see that his eyes are deranged with afternoon alcohol. I note the mottled blue of a swift tattooed on his grilled neck. Then my voice appears from nowhere.

‘I didn’t call you anything. I said
don’t!
’

The man’s children watch this terrible, thrilling scene like two orphans on a sinking ship. It is surely something they have witnessed before. Just daddy doing his stuff.

‘That’s not what you said …’ The big man’s voice is graphically deep, an Essex gravel pit of menace and harm. Our stares are now locked like antlers.

‘I meant don’t hit him. The kid. I was hit when I was a child …’ (I think the pale woman opposite coughs at this sentence, shifting her weight to the other bony buttock) ‘… and look how I turned out.’ He remains impassive. For some reason he doesn’t seem impressed by this. I try another tack. ‘Okay, I’m lying. I’ve got Tourette’s, which makes me shout out the names of dead German philosophers.’

Hopeless, I know.

An electric pause. Then he leans forward, the tracksuit scrunching in the bends of his limbs. Poking an oil-stained finger at my third eye (almost touching it) he says this to me:

‘You—fuck nuts—
you
, I never want to see again.
Capiche
?’

I nod vigorously, hypnotised by how long these moments always seem to take. Then he’s off, down the carriage to corral his children; a thousand eyes feasting on my face. Glancing up at the Accountant Couple, I give them my best, my largest smile. They look down instantly at the scratched Formica, as if it held information of great importance.

Ah, well. At least it’s taken my mind off the past for a moment and forced me to focus on the journey. And that can only be a good thing. As with any journey, one begins at Point A, things occur (and the really significant things are always thoughts, memories, insights, terrors—not the quotidian narrative of events), and eventually one arrives, some time later, at Point B; usually with fizzing limbs and hospitalising indigestion. The mental journey is always richer, for it contains recollection, fascination; though not much tranquillity in which to contemplate them. Despite the much-vaunted psychopathic state known as ‘living in the present’, one doesn’t want to lose the precious stones of the past. One doesn’t want to forget them, to see them drop away through the mind’s vast sieve of worthy and unworthy keepsakes. There they go: the good and the bad; the treasured and the negligible; the love and the hate. One becomes a loving curator of a self-important myth. A hero in one’s own epic drama. An uncommon desire, maybe, but then these are uncommon times. Above all, one wants to remember before one forgets, before one jumps to faulty conclusions. To remember in order to comprehensively understand all one has undergone, or endured. Quick now! Remember, record, embark. Quick now, before they go; before it’s too late.

It always takes something like this—present pain, present smell, present occurrence—to fix one firmly in the horrific Now. Of course, Now is not where I’d want to be if I had the choice. If I could be anywhere in time I’d be anywhere but Now, with its tiresome demands and shrieking infants and blade-cold dusks and suitcase-strikes—that stuff that masquerades as real life but isn’t really; that great battalion of distraction ranged against one with its weapons drawn at any given moment of the day. Real life always seems to occur in the past, qualified by perspective. Existence is a mosaic of moments. And one wants to pin down those moments, those memories, like fat-torsoed moths under milky glass, as if one were the soul’s lepidopterist. The present, meanwhile, is still too hot to the touch, too raw, too
evolving
for us to call it real. Can you honestly say, gentle reader, that what’s going on around you now is real? Or is it the projection of some giant celestial panopticon; God’s dream. Perhaps, come New Year’s Eve, we will all find out. Overrated, to say the least, is the Now. Living in the present? For people with too much time on their hands, if you ask me. But, for a split-second, being whacked in the face took my mind off her (thank you, Tracksuit Man, and Happy Christmas).

Oh yeah,
her
. In case I forget to mention it later, this half-drunk writer has recently separated from his wife. From his half-Spanish wife of three years. That was the special trouble I was telling you about earlier. The exploding of lawful, awful wedlock. Not unusual for a modern marriage, I suppose. We met when the present century was in its staggering, senile nineties (and it still is, of course, for a couple of high-anxiety days). Yes, we met, fell in love, got hitched, and somewhere along the line became separated. Some vital component was lost. The wife should really understand this better than me, what with her career of bereavement following her mother s death, but something tells me she doesn’t understand any of it; not one little bit. Christ, three years of marriage! Three years of microscopic London flats, of shouting and ducking airborne crockery, of sitting opposite each other during a million sweltering meals. All those carrots, those carbohydrates, those trawler-nets of spaghetti, paddy fields of rice, lakes of gravy, Thameses of tea … Where did those evenings disappear to? What did we talk about during them? And then there are the friends and family, people who I will never see again, people she is probably scornfully indoctrinating with lies as I sit here, gassy and humiliated on this bristling train seat. People such as her father, vertiginous and patrician Ian Haste with his air of past financial indiscretion, who never thought much of me anyway and had me fingered as a penniless loser from the start. Or her dizzy old bat of a grandmother—Montserrat, monstrous Montserrat—with her beaked Castilian nose; her melanotic skin the texture of beige silk, a result of going to bed every night with her face slicked in olive oil. I can still hear her haranguing voice in our many kitchens: ‘
Ay, ay, ay! Qué pasa? Qué pasa?
’ The outrageous pronouncements that needed delicate translation: ‘
No hay coño que no está en venta.
’ Her! Still going strong at eighty-four; still amoral, manipulative and selectively deaf at that indecent age! And then there’s Leocadia, the long-suffering aunt who had to look after the old war-horse. Leocadia, Leo for short; withdrawn, subjugated, meek; the veins on her hands distended and liquorice-coloured from years of domestic service. Leo with her spick-and-span stone-floored apartment by the aromatic Mediterranean where we spent our honeymoon. Yes, they’re all hating me now, in that uniquely proud Spanish way. Hating me for that zenith of sin, that ultimate deviation of being a husband who couldn’t provide financially, who didn’t sire grandchildren … As for the others, the others were my friends too, but I suppose they’ll cross the street or jump behind parked cars to avoid me now. Antonia and Nick, for instance, the swinging scenesters who were our closest friends; a pair of sixties throwbacks with the finery of their buckled clothes; their amnesiac, sybaritic lifestyle. Nick with his gracious limbs and foppish cuffs, who tried so hard to interest me in the names of footballers over pints of his beloved Guinness. Or Antonia, who grew up on a farm; a heavy-chested
naif
with her intensely nurturing nature; her rustic hands and lactic, silk-screen complexion … And then there’s the wife herself: tall and physically intimidating, with her charcoal brows and centrifugal radiance (and who, according to her osteopath, could have grown to over six feet if a curvature of the spine hadn’t lowered her shoulders into a witch-like arch before the age of ten). Yeah, the wife—another ghost I will never see again, unless it’s within the dusty cell of the divorce court. I can picture her now if I close my tired eyes: the wife with her white plastic-rimmed shades, her showy snakeskin knee-boots, her cobalt ring. Her unforgettable pupils, like droplets of ink on a chestnut. The wife with her many coats, her many cats. The wife and her many ailments that mysteriously came and went when it suited her. The wife at full throttle with her Pearl Harbors of vitriol, her dictionaries of prejudice. The wife.
Her
.

‘
Welcome to Great North Eastern Railways. The restaurant car will be serving hot tea and coffee, fresh soup, gourmet sandwiches and a range of crisps and snack products.
’

The nasal, infiltrating whine snaps me out of my lamentable meditation. All around people are hoisting travel bags; marshalling wallets of Christmas cash. Then a nauseating list: ‘
Hot baguettes with fillings of roast beef, roast chicken, roast turkey and stuffing; toasted bacon and tomato sandwiches plus a wide range of home-made cakes, biscuits, pastries, hot drinks as well as a fully licensed bar. The buffet trolley will also be passing through Standard Accommodation. Thank you—we look forward to seeing you and hope you have a pleasant journey.
’

Standard Accommodation. That must be me.

I close my notebook, re-cap my pen and turn to the rain-sullied window. We are still stationary. Outside, under the cathedral-dome of an umbrella, a woman is kissing her lover goodbye. I notice immediately that she is crying; her generously lashed lids blinking every time the wind sends a gust of drizzle her way; the long runnels forming kohl-black roads in her foundation. She looks small, forlorn, sinister even, among the equidistant lamp posts and agoraphobia-inducing concrete walkways of the platform. A dark, gale-blasted survivor of some terrible saga of love; one purse-like hand pursuing the folds of her lover’s overcoat. Why do women cry so much? The world must hurt women more than it hurts men for them to cry so much. Her face turns upwards now to receive the last kiss, the important kiss, the one that needs to hold the correct note of gravity, of poised farewell, of future intent. Then her man turns rapidly and walks towards the glowing interior of the train. In close-up, his face is creased and orange; reflecting the sad ambers of the dusk lights, the bullying wind. He’s hunched, swarthy, slick-haired and dry-eyed—just the type, I note abysmally, that the wife used to go for.