Byron Easy (28 page)

I was in no mood for a reminiscence about the home town. My life seemed to be unravelling by the hour in London, and all Rudi could think about was pointless nostalgia and his next conquest.

‘I can’t believe she’d do me like this,’ I said. ‘Everything’s down the khazi. I’m thirty.’

‘Aye, and I’m thirty-one, spunker. They’re all witches. They should be issued with broomsticks at birth.’

‘Throwing me out of a flat I was paying for while she gallivants around Europe with Italian men. Returning all my things covered in shit. Throwing away furniture that I restored. Using my name to scam the council!’

‘Well, that’s foreign birds for yuh,’ said Rudi, stoically.

‘She was only half-Spanish.’

‘Aye—half-Spanish, half-mad.’

I was spluttering by now, pure vitriol on my lips. ‘I mean, most of the time she behaved like a man. You know, with that masculine swagger. When she hit me, I used to ask her whether she thought she was an honorary bloke, or something. It’s not normal for women to have so many male hormones.’

‘As ah says, you’re gonnay come through this like a soldier. If you need any poppy, you just have tay ask.’

‘Thanks, but I already owe you enough. It’s not money I need. It’s … it’s clarity. I need to work out in my head what this disaster was all about so it never happens again.’

Rudi sighed and scratched the abundant chest hair that always seemed to be straining, werewolf-style, to escape from his shirt. He said, ‘You know, you always use such melodramatic language. A disaster. You were just the same in Hamford. It coulday been worse—you might’ve had a bairn, a mortgage.’

Again I saw a blood-flash of anger cross my vision. I was sick of Rudi’s devil’s advocate rap—and from a man who’d never committed himself emotionally and financially to another human being in his life. He probably thought he was telling me home truths that I badly needed to hear, rather than reciting page one from the Dictionary of Platitudes. What did he know? He wouldn’t have lasted an hour married to that destructive, venomous little tyrant.

‘She never wanted a child and I certainly wouldn’t trust her with one. She throws her weight around like a man—you’ve seen her! And no one would lend the pair of us any money for a mortgage in a million years.’

This cut no ice with Rudi. The barely visible pinpoints of his eyes had a look of circumspection. He was a self-made man. A determined achiever. He pulled a cheroot from its slim packet and readied it for lighting. I felt a junkie lurch at the sight of this. In his warm voice he said, ‘Mebbe that’s part ay the problem. If you don’t earn any money, they lose all respect for you. Endy story.’

‘Why are you standing up for her now?’ I shouted, incensed. ‘Why did nobody warn me about her?’

‘Cos nae bastard knew her except you and Nick! You makes your bed, you gottay lie in it.’

Rudi lit the cheroot and blew a smoke ring with his first puff; his glossy head leaning back at a critical angle. By this time of the night he always resembled some kind of gross Silenus—hairy, intoxicated, insatiable. I knew what was coming next. He opened his straining wallet and dropped a small wrap onto the sheeny coffee table.

‘You don’t understand,’ I gasped. I had begun to gesticulate again with my clumsy hands; dangerously fired up. ‘She was a nasty piece of work. A malicious shrew. A chronic moaner. A psychotic!’

Rudi shrugged. This squawking was altogether too unmanly for him; too much like the bleatings of a wronged wife. He merely said, ‘Marry in haste, repent at leisure. Fancy a line?’

I stood up. ‘No. I want revenge.’

‘You gottay move on, Bry. You know, I saw Antonia and Nick the other day. I don’t know why you didn’t try it on with Ant if Mandy was refusing you action for two years. The rack on the wee lassie! You could stack a dinner service on there and still have room for a toaster.’

Rudi lowered his left nostril onto the funnel of an immaculate twenty and did his line.

‘I don’t care about Antonia. What I care about is this,’ I said, and rolled up the sleeve to expose my right arm. Rudi stared at the mesh of deep diagonal scars for a moment. This was the only secret I had kept from him.

‘Cocks and arses! Did she do that? Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Because it’s pretty shameful, don’t you think?’

‘I knew she was a loony, but not capable of that.’ For the first time in the evening Rudi looked worried: genuinely engaged in what I had to say—as if the scars threatened him personally. ‘Sit down and finish this charlie.’

I did as he asked. By that point in the proceedings I didn’t care whether Rudi sympathised or not. The room was pitching like an argosy in a storm. The pastel lights seemed to stutter like oil-lamps as the juddering ship disappears into the tempestuous brine. In a quiet voice, he asked,

‘Did you ever hit her back?’

‘Never. Okay, just once.’

‘Aye. I’d never hit a woman either, no matter how crackers she was.’ I knew from deep experience that men who insisted they didn’t hit women always did or had done. Rudi, I was convinced, was a dark horse such as this. There was too much shame in his agitated look for this not to be true. The empty clanking from outside seemed to have picked up in frequency and volume. I hoovered up the line that Rudi had lovingly prepared (with one of his high-ranking credit cards) then snatched up my scarf. He said suddenly, ‘You’re nay going? The night is but an infant.’ Then he smiled to correct his concerned tone. I caught a beseeching look in his eyes. He would have done anything to share another bottle of wine. He was lonely. I said: ‘I need isolation, Rudi. Don’t take it personally. Thanks for dinner. And the rest.’

‘Ah well, when you gotta nash, you gotta nash.’ As I weaved towards the door I heard his voice. It was so quiet I wondered for a moment whether I was hearing things. ‘Bry, can I keep the gear?’

I turned and said, ‘How pissed are you? It’s your charlie.’ But he was pointing at the pile of lacy lingerie, still in the sad supermarket bag in which Mandy had returned it. ‘Sure. Who do you want it for? Suki?’

‘Aye,’ he nodded, ‘for Suki. It looks about her size.’

But my resolve for revenge didn’t last long. Immediately after I returned from Rudi’s I fell ill. Some kind of debilitating gastro bug. All I could do for three days was watch the crabbed old miser of a tree out back get slapped around in the bitter wind; its shed skin of leaves yellow, rust, beaten copper, sepia, brown. I longed to see it towering in its May glory, an unimaginable sight as November slid grimly into December. For two of those days I was up all night in the unfamiliar communal toilet with astonishing stomach cramps—an agony akin to having one’s abdomen excavated with a bread knife. I must’ve made thirty visits before each dawn. This was followed by cataracts of puking and the runs. I puked until I was retching stomach acid. Seventy-two hours of sweat-puddled amoebic gastroenteritis hell. I didn’t pass a solid for a week. But like the ancients or the American Indians, I took it for granted that my ordeal was some kind of divine comeuppance or punishment. It had to be. I had sinned against powerful, ordaining forces. My version of forgetting to make the correct libations to Apollo was neglecting to remember that not all people were nice and kind underneath. Some were twisted fuck-ups who were positively hellbent on your own downfall. For revenge; for recreation; for reasons known to themselves alone. Motiveless malignity. That was the only solution I could come up with for Mandy’s behaviour.

By the end of my sickness I managed some dry toast and water. On that morning, a pale sun was refracting through the gauze of horse-chestnut branches, making the tree appear to be made from shards of broken glass. This effect was achieved only if one squinted at the correct moment. As I practised this, I recalled an era when actual broken glass had been a daily fixture in my life. Windows, mirrors, bottles … all, over time, had been shattered. The first memorable incident was the summer after we were married. It was definitely summer because I remember Concepcion and Fidel playing in a square of sunlight in the big top-floor room before fleeing in terror as Mandy destroyed the twin icons of her mother’s photographs. These sacred objects had been hurled against a wardrobe on a balmy afternoon just as I was retreating from a pointless argument. Mandy had been crying hysterically on the sofa when she suddenly snatched the large double-frame and threw it with all her might. It exploded against the pine doors in the same way a champagne bottle disintegrates against the hull of a tanker. Then she jumped up to finish the job. As she ground splinters of glass into the cascades of her mother’s hair, the two slightly differentiated poses—one thoughtful, one more severe—disappeared like a dissident’s mementos under a jackboot. Finally, she picked up the frame and pulled apart the hinge that held the diptych together. The two faces of Ramona dropped to the floor. They would watch us no longer.

‘Ladies and Gentlemen, we are now approaching Stevenage. Please make sure you take all your belongings with you. Any luggage left behind will be taken away and destroyed. Please hand in anything suspicious.’

With the memory of Mandy destroying the images of the only person she ever loved still fresh in my mind, I seriously consider handing
myself
in, to enjoy the privilege of being painlessly destroyed for free. But then sense prevails. Outside the train window stand the blighted Iron Curtain concrete underpasses of Stevenage. How anyone could conceive of something so ugly beggars belief. And this is a place I spent half my teenage years.

The glowing orange carbuncle of the Gordon Craig Theatre rears up in the half-light, even shabbier than I remember it. There is a cry of brakes, strange grindings and clankings. A scattershot of rain against the window. The train is almost at a standstill. Behind my forehead a strange amalgamation of pains has taken hold—headache, throbs from the suitcase strike, twinges from the strain of recollection. There is a metallic taste on my carpeted tongue. I must be sobering up … and this will never do. Turning my head suddenly to see if the drinks trolley has disappeared, I rick my neck. O fuck fuck fuck! For a full minute there is no more physically demanding action I can perform than staring out onto the grey vista: chilly inland gulls; empty buses circling a roundabout; eye-watering wind bending the umbrellas of the few forlorn punters who wait on the platform. The doors sigh open. Not many people stepping off either. I don’t blame them. Christmas in Stevenage? I’d rather spend it in the Gulag … Then I recognise the swarthy slick-haired lover last seen at King’s Cross breaking the heart of his girl, the one with the umbrella. He struts along the concourse, his shoulders slightly hunched, the veins in his big hands bulging. Well, he would live in Stevenage. Where else? Abruptly he stops. He appears to be jamming something into his suitcase, hampered by the quick rain. No, he’s
extracting
something, with great difficulty. It’s a bunch of flowers, slightly bent and dilapidated, but still presentable in their purple paper and bow. Someone appears at his elbow. A woman. And not the woman he said goodbye to in London. This one is taller, more animated, a glossy redhead. She produces a sprig of mistletoe, and he bends forward unsmilingly to kiss her. My heart gives a sudden jump at this secretly observed infidelity. How do people manage to keep others perpetually in separate compartments? To have private lives within a private life? Is no one satisfied with what they’ve got? Why this pathological appetite for change, for novelty? As if they were scoring points off God by trying to move faster than the speed of life? Why doesn’t anything remain constant for more than a moment, when everything worthwhile in life seems to demand constancy as a prerequisite for its success? Love, for instance. Ah, gimme shelter from this chaos, this ever-turning wheel! I begin to feel the hot, familiar pain in my heart returning when I am distracted by a shrill noise. A mobile has gone off in someone’s pocket. The sound doubles in rude volume as it is extracted into the open air. It belongs to Robin, and the ring is the tune of ‘The Stripper’. The Wanker, more like.

‘Hello, mate. Yeah, only at Stevenage. How’s tricks? …’ Once again, I feel I must tune him out. For my own sanity. Why couldn’t he have switched the bastard thing off? It’s Christmas. The mobile—just one more example of the unwanted osmosis of information, of universal intrusion. If this is the Age of Information, there’s too much of it. You couldn’t say the same of the Enlightenment. You can never have too much light. Soon everyone will be having breakdowns from the stress of being
contactable
all the time, from being locatable; held answerable to another’s catechism. Soon we will all be razzed to death in the street, or in our studies, or in the bath. Or on the train. And you can’t just switch the damn thing off, oh no—that precipitates a whole host of other urgent enquiries: ‘Where were you? I’ve been calling all day.’ I know, I know, I JUST WANTED SOME PEACE.

Peace—I remember peace. If this is Stevenage the next stop must be Hamford. The location, for a few years of my life at least, of some kind of peace. Of stillness. The still point of the turning world. Before the mobile had been invented. Before the wider world had been embarked upon. When change constituted only predictable change—the slow revolution of the seasons; that pellucid illusion of permanence that is childhood.

I
REMEMBER HOME. AND
some days I remember it so vividly I am actually there, reliving each minute in consecutive detail. From time to time, one has to go deeper into memory to achieve this hallowed state, to visit places not usually accessed during the diurnal round. So where was peace to be located in my early life? Certainly, peace was present in my childhood bedroom—mother and father not yet up; early sun caressing the windowpanes with her gathered beams; the woo-wooing of wood pigeons unseen in the allotments out back. Heaven in all her glory shining. This combination, for me, equalled home, safety, predictability. Peace. Because children need predictability if they’re not to grow, well, a little wild. But peace of a kind could also be found at my grandmother’s house in Barnet: a thirties semi on verdant Yew Tree Close, a short drive from Hamford. I can recall the intense anticipation of lying on the rolling back seat as we approached the sooty car dealerships and synagogues of sprawling north London, the very intersection of city and shire. This was in the days when Des and Sinead were still nuclear, before the atom of our unit had been split by Delph. Once we had parked in the U-bend of the secluded cul-de-sac, I would race up the drive and part thick, tendrilling ivy to ring the deep-chiming bell. The door would tug open, allowing out the smell of furniture polish and burnt sugar. And there would be Granny Chloe, my father’s mother, a tall, snowy-haired widow, a beatific smile playing in the creases of her mouth, though mainly around the eyes. Gran would smile from her eyes. They were a kindly brown, resonant with sympathy and calm; though also present were the residues of struggle, make-do, bereavement. She often seemed rather elegant to me, much too graceful for the plodding commuters who infested the close with their newly waxed Humbers and Granadas. She also knew how to handle children—she had great sweetness and strength of character; her large hands liver-spotted with sizeable dashes of rust, her eyes hooded and patient. And she always had a present hidden for me on these visits—a toy car, a soldier, a spaceship: anything—she knew I wouldn’t care
what
it was as long as it was a present. I would race to the four or five known places of secretion in an ecstasy of suspense, often barrelling back in triumph before Des or Sinead were through the door.