Byron Easy (26 page)

She didn’t like this interrogation. Didn’t feel the need to answer to anybody. She said, ‘I told her she had to go, and we had a fight.’

‘I saw her on the street, she was bleeding.’

‘That’s her fault, the stuck-up bitch. I told her ages ago that I was raising the rent.’

‘You can’t just give people ultimatums. You can’t just declare, “Get out now, I want to raise the rent.”’

Mandy stood up with regal pomposity and ground the butt under her leather boot. She pushed past me onto the landing, shouting over her shoulder. ‘She asked for it.’

‘Asked for what?’

I followed her out and stood in front of the gaping door to Harriet’s room. Inside I could see the flashing lime eyes of one of the cats cowering under a table. It struck me that I had never seen the interior of Harriet’s room. The air seemed musty, long lived in. Since I had entered the house five minutes before, I had shared in the feral fear of the cat. Some invisible pall lay over the whole area, like the quiet that descends on a physical space after violent activity; the serenity of a battlefield after surrender. Mandy took no time in replying to me. She said, ‘A kick in the head, that’s what.’

I slumped down on the stairs, and rubbed my brow, maybe in some kind of subconscious sympathy with Harriet. My own left temple was still giving out unpredictable throbs from the punch Mandy had given me the week before.

‘You know that’s assault, don’t you?’ I asked, wearily. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s back with the police.’

‘She’s too much of a wimp to do that. Anyway, she said her dad was coming tomorrow with his big posh Volvo to pick up her stuff.’

‘You can’t just go around kicking people in the head!’

Yes, the genie was well and truly out of the bottle. I often made an analogy between Mandy’s escalating violence and the increasing recklessness of dictators or serial killers. Like Saddam and Aileen Wuornos, she acquired a taste for blood and found she couldn’t stop.

I looked directly into her face. Amid the strident self-regard I caught a glimmer of guilt. From the start, Mandy had used her mother’s death as a kind of
carte blanche
for acts of astonishing nastiness. I was only then beginning to see this clearly. Unfortunately, it was my nature to be placatory, appeasing. I didn’t want further conflict. I just wanted, like the social worker with the delinquent, to understand, and use that understanding in some kind of cure. I also recognised that Harriet had served her purpose in Mandy’s overall scheme, in her fantastic ambition. She had been chewed up and spat out. The previous summer, when I first started seeing Mandy, Harriet was about to be apprenticed to one of the leading London fashion smudges. Plus, her father was going to write about Fellatrix in the
Independent
. Neither the apprenticeship nor the piece had materialised. In Mandy’s mind, she could afford to kick her dissenting tenant in the head. Harriet, as an instrument of advancement, had run her course. There would be no dire consequences. Even the police didn’t worry her. I noticed Mandy’s eyes were bulging slightly as they stared fixedly at my face. There was something dreamlike about the situation—the crimson-eyed stranger of a wife screaming at me in an empty house. Just recently, when I watched her sleeping, I observed that the eyeballs themselves were unnaturally distended from the sockets, like Popeye or cartoon representations of an angry man. Everything about her seemed suddenly engorged, vitalised, on edge.

In a voice that couldn’t disguise her guilt and self-hatred, she said: ‘What’s it to you anyway? I have to hold onto this flat, and she can’t afford to stay here.’

I felt a queasy melange of emotions: disgust, regret, fear, sadness; even a kind of sick admiration that anyone could be so outrageous. That anyone could reach adulthood with so little idea of how to behave. Her actions always reminded me of the spittle-faced toddler in its high-chair throwing rusk at the wall when induced, against its infantile will, to eat. Bea’s face came to me then: calm, forgiving, exquisite. I had exchanged my dove for a raven.

‘What about all this?’ I gestured at the scattered belongings, lying sadly where they had fallen. Mandy had probably thrown them at Harriet’s retreating back as she made her escape into civilisation. The sight of broken possessions, the type of scene one witnesses after a burglary, always filled me with a gut-churning sense of dismay. A kind of meta-melancholy for the forlorn objects themselves.

‘It’s her rubbish. She can deal with it. Anyway, she left the door open and two of the cats have disappeared.’

With these words, she pulled her red leather mac over her white shirt and disappeared into the icy street to look for them.

Three days later the police were indeed called to the flat, but this time it was Mandy doing the calling. The two remaining tenants, Steve and Matt, had been found one morning in the kitchen locked in mortal combat. It turned out that tension between them had been high for months, largely over Matt’s propensity to linger in the bathroom Timoteing his Viking locks. When Steve decided to take his weekly shower—usually in his brief moments of sobriety—he had to take it there and then. Steve’s repeated poundings and threats had been ignored for a full ten minutes. When the scrubbed and refreshed New-Ager emerged, Steve immediately placed him in the sort of headlock that turns your face blue. Mandy responded to this commotion by calling the cops. Even when the squad car arrived and removed Steve from the premises, Matt’s face still resembled a grape about to explode under a wine-press. He vowed—in a voice surprisingly higher than normal—that he was leaving at the weekend. This suited Mandy fine. In her mind, Steve was never seeing his soiled room again either. Within two hours, Mandy had placed adverts for the three rooms in all the local papers and newsagents, the rent raised to a ridiculous level. This was to be countenanced, so I was told, by radical decorating.

When I heard about these bold moves, I realised one thing about Mandy: she was in motion all the time. Nothing lasted for long with her: friends, jobs, pets, ideas. Most of the time it seemed like change for change’s sake. Change gone berserk. What was one way in the morning would always be different by the evening. The mood you left her in at midday would almost certainly be another by midnight. The decorating was completed during two intense weeks. This involved me being largely airborne, lying on planks balanced between two ladders as I reglossed the windows and stippled over the foul mushroom cloud of gunk on Steve’s ceiling. A Puerto Rico of tobacco leaves must have gone into creating such a gargantuan stain. The two errant tomcats were never found, so the remaining moggie was divested of its Fellatrix badge and exchanged for three others at the Pet Rescue Centre. As grumpy and downright vicious as the three dismissed cats were, I was sad to see them go. Mandy claimed I was just being a sentimental fool who couldn’t abide change, and there was a degree of truth in this. But the joy with which she welcomed the (admittedly slightly better tempered) new arrivals was unsettling. Did she feel no remorse for her three old musketeers? Her astringent smile would follow the new cats about the room as they gambolled in a spaghetti of guitar leads. She would spoil them with roast chicken and slivers of salmon. Christ, we were hardly eating more than boiled vegetables ourselves at the time. But it was pointless appealing to Mandy. She was too singular, too zealous. And change really turned her on. It filled her with a zest for more change. Made her think she was pushing the world around, instead of the world pushing her.

With the adverts for tenants came the usual identity parade of rapists and panty-wearing loners. A lot of these, believe it or not, were put off by
Mandy
. We finally settled on a female singer-songwriter, an IT consultant, and a businessman. The singer-songwriter turned out to be a junkie, the IT consultant a coke dealer and the ‘businessman’ one of the strangest individuals I have ever met, but all that came later, much later. The surface of people is all we have to deal with in the early stages. Human beings go to great lengths to conceal their real proclivities, processes, perversions.

One afternoon, around the time these jokers moved in with their false-bottomed suitcases and electronic scales, I found myself in central London with a couple of hours to kill. Martin had closed the shop at lunchtime in despair, saying it would cost more to heat and light the place than the pitiful trade we were sure to do. That week, Mandy had been forced to start part-time at a hairdressers on Denmark Street, the elusive deal further away than ever. Funny how all girls seem to know how to cut hair. Even if they don’t, they feign deep knowledge of scissors, basins and dyes. It must be a point of pride. Mandy was no exception, although she wasn’t saving me much on haircuts as, increasingly, I didn’t need them. I had been in the habit of surprising her after work, the two of us taking long wanders in the Aladdin’s cave of shopfront windows, filled with spangled Gibsons, streamlined Stratocasters, glittering vintage Gretsches. Often we would go for a beer at the Twelve Bar club and then blag our way in to check out the latest band. That afternoon, with hours to go before Mandy finished, I thought I’d take in a movie with my last guineas, a rare occurrence at the time. The film was Bergman’s
Wild Strawberries
. It was a guilty pleasure of the highest order slumping down into the plush red chair; solitary, sans popcorn, and waiting for the first subtitles to appear on the screen. Much handwringing and religious doubt later, also feeling slightly disturbed, I exited into the freezing street and made my way to the hairdresser’s only to find Mandy had just left. I belted up St Martin’s Lane in pursuit. Then I ran around the shadowy back of the Centre Point building, a horrible London spot—I always imagined the ghosts of the poor from the demolished St Giles’ Circus crying from the ground. In the February night, the black tower seemed to absorb the frayed light of the Tottenham Court Road: phallic, somnambulant, unanswering—a giant tombstone for the collective dead. Finally, I vaulted the railings and descended into the tube. At the ticket barriers I spotted her at once: only, from the scowl on her face, I rightly concluded she wasn’t pleased to see me.

Deadpan, she said, ‘I didn’t think you were going to bother.’

My first instinct was always to appeal to a reasonableness I was convinced every human being possessed. Wrong move. I replied, upbeat, ‘Don’t be like that. Anyway, it can’t be a surprise any more if you expect to see me.’

‘Where have you been?’

‘Oh, I saw a film. Nothing you’d like.’

This, evidently, was the worst thing I could possibly say.

‘You’ve been lounging around in a cinema when I’ve been working my fingers to the bone! When this fucking band needs all the help it can get! When you haven’t even finished decorating the rooms for the new tenants! When we haven’t got a penny between us!’

Ah, the woe that is in marriage. I tried to answer, but the words, for once, didn’t arrive. And anyway, there wasn’t a suitable gap in which to say those words had they been available. The eye-bulging tirade didn’t let up when we were past the ticket barriers. Nor did it abate as we waited for the earth-trembling train (what a long wait that seems now, in the memory). Nor when we were sitting in the jammed rush-hour carriage. There we were, three months married, screaming like council-house residents in a public place. As the choked train squealed into Camden, passengers delivering us their blackest looks, I made a risky decision. I would do something I had never done before. Because I could take it no longer. Mandy’s voice at full throttle always sounded, to me at least, like a knife cutting vegetables very fast: chop, chop, chop, chop, chop. And it was this noise, and our personal life, that she was sharing with a hundred murderous commuters. As her slicing-machine reached banshee pitch I calmly got up, dusted the spittle from my collar, and stepped off the train.

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

Not again! It dawns on me that I will have to listen to this excruciating announcement after every station. Eternal recurrence. Nietzsche, that walrus-tached sack of shit, would have understood.

‘… These include hot baguettes with fillings of roast beef, roast chicken, Christmas 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 should also be passing through standard accommodation shortly. Thank you!’

The platform of Welwyn Garden City, with its decrepit Nabisco breakfast cereal factory opposite, is disappearing into the gloom. The works, a big, tumbling, brooding building, with its never-lit neon sign, stands next to a vast car park, big enough for a medium-sized airport. I know all these landmarks by heart. I am getting closer to the place where I misspent my childhood, my adolescence. Closer to home. The train will pass Hamford, where I grew up. I’m not sure if I’m looking forward to this or not. Why does this provide no comfort? More a kind of excitement or dread. A moment ago, sitting rocking slightly in my seat, I saw all those awful scenes from the early days of my marriage with a knifing clarity. Nick’s terrible disclosure; the punch in the face after Stringfellows; Harriet’s forlorn cushions on the landing; the bulging asinine eyes of my wife; the disparaging looks of the tube commuters as we headed back to what was supposed to be our happy home. The shame and the disturbance it all caused to my soul. That daily rancour now seems like a half-forgotten nightmare. How did I put up with it without stepping off the train—metaphorically speaking—every day? I must have been out of my mind. And I never did see Harriet again. Many times, from the top deck of a bus or at a lonely all-night garage, I thought I spotted her knotty orange hair flying in the London wind, but it was always someone else. A student or a young mum with a pushchair.

I can hear the clanking of the drinks trolley behind me as it makes its slow approach. People are straining to find the correct change; lining up the miniatures, with their plastic sun-hat cups, on little pull-down tables. There is the hiss of an uncapped bottle of Schweppes; a whiff of malt whisky. The fluorescent lights seem suddenly heavy on the eyes. Two seats in front of me, the Islington lesbian couple, loquacious since we set off, are having an intense discussion about a play they have recently seen. The stridently middle-class voice of the dominant partner has started to blot out all thought. In fact, it has blotted out the responses of her lover. This is a monologue she is subjecting us all to. I open my notebook and attempt to read back my last entry. This proves to be surprisingly hard work. There must be an orchard of plums in that voice. ‘… But of course the audience
en masse
weren’t receptive. They didn’t realise they were watching a representation of some kind of cultural epoch …’ Cultural fucking epoch? How does she get away with that in normal conversation? Doesn’t she realise how embarrassing she is? Look, she’s even embarrassing her friend … Christ, I’ve been stuck on the same sentence for a full minute. And her voice. That accent. How did it get that way? I glance around to check if anyone else is sharing my outrage. Not a soul. Even Robin and Michelle both seem to be concentrating on their books without too much trouble. ‘… all the ideas were marvellous; so intellectually risky …’ Jesus, she’s reviewing it for the
Guardian
out loud, here and now. ‘… but it was the second act that struck me; it really turned all that post-post-modern revisionism on its head …’ Maybe I should try to sleep, close my eyes. No, that will make me concentrate even more on her voice. I must persevere with this sentence. Nope, it’s meaningless, she’s blotting out the meaning. ‘… Yes, the second act was nuanced in a marvellously vigorous way, so fully achieved in comparison with the …’ Fuck, if she mentions the second act again, I’m going to have to take someone’s hot coffee and pour it all over her. Or at least ask her what play she’s talking about. ‘… the total
specificity
of the role …’ Okay, that does it.