Byron Easy (33 page)

The other act of contrition was a trip to the park in Stevenage Old Town, at my mother’s behest most likely (Stevenage being a place I thought was so named because it contained so many Steves). We stayed for three hours, Delph pushing me on the swings in the seventies sunlight, snapping photographs which I still have. Byron Easy in his Six Million Dollar Man T-shirt, smiling in the sun that is young once only. I almost got to like him—after all, Des would never consider spending three hours in the park with his boy. The only object missing was a football … You may remember me saying I hated Delph. Well, there’s a problem with that: as a child whose real father had mysteriously disappeared to another country to work, I experienced a strong urge to love this
de facto
father. But he was ultimately unlovable. Just as shit is ultimately inedible. All attempts at affection were rebuffed—and my natural instincts were revulsion at his hot, showy, self-conscious, campy, aggressive behaviour and gestures. His egregious mix of sadism and sentimentality. His innate coarseness and bestial lack of sophistication. Bear in mind, he was first inculcated into my bloodstream at the age of six. I had to put up with this menacing, proud, ignorant man until I was almost eighteen. That’s an awful long time to dine on shit.

Oh yes: ‘ignorant’—Delph’s favourite word; a word beloved of profoundly stupid people everywhere. Deeply insecure about his lack of education or knowledge of virtually any subject except school caretaking (and on seeing Des’s massed living-room library, who wouldn’t be?), Delph used to append this word to everything he didn’t understand or was threatened by. Rude behaviour was ‘ignorant’. No, it wasn’t, it was rude. Me not finishing my cabbage was ‘ignorant’. No, it wasn’t, it was common sense. Me contradicting my mother or sneering at Delph (anything more vocal was answered by his hand cracking me across the forehead) was, apparently, ‘ignorant’. No, it wasn’t, you freak of nature, it was the natural reaction of a very scared little boy.

As promised, Des made his weary, chemical-smelling return every fortnight and we ate together unhappily as a family. But the house didn’t belong to him any more. During the week it vibrated to disco, to blood-curdling rows and other unnameable, uninhibited noises. My father had waived his authority to the oracle from Yorkshire. He had abdicated. Our jaunts to Granny at Yew Tree Close became rare. Instead, we began visiting
Delph’s
dim and blighted family up in Wakefied. The contrast was stunning. The long drive would find us on the outskirts of a rain-blasted wooltown: slag-heaps, impoverished pits, boarded-up working men’s clubs, flat caps, chippies. His parents’ house was a tiny miners’ terrace on a row that resembled Coronation Street. Instead of glowing Buddhas, oil paintings and stimulation, there were hours to kill by the damp fire, with Delph’s dying tubercular father in a continually made-up bed. He was still black from a lifetime down the pit. I couldn’t believe that the seams of soot in his mangled hands would never wash out. His phlegmy voice and accent were almost impossible to follow and his fits of dry coughing and retching frightened me. Overall, my dominant feeling during our stints up north was that of being a spare part; offloaded, as I often was, onto whatever cousin or inbred for a day of mischief on the wind-torn estates. I hated them and they hated me, little Lord Byron Fauntleroy,
a child from another relationship
. Central to these memories is the Saturday morning football. I remember enduring sub-Alaskan temperatures, my flimsy plastic coat covered in icy drizzle, my feet frozen solid. Then there was the torture of waiting for the ref’s final whistle, the charging boys, the strong conviction that I shouldn’t be there. In addition to this, Yorkshire seemed to free Delph to explore the full stupidity of his personality—he didn’t have to pretend to be cultured up there, with his own. The first time he was truly menacing towards me occurred after a wedding reception I was coerced into attending. We arrived at the half-finished barn of the social club to be met by the full desolation the north had to offer: gale-blown car park; sad confetti among chip forks; cold-looking ushers with draught-excluder moustaches. Then inside: seventies perms; Babycham; cheese nibbles (anything ‘foreign’ or with garlic left untouched). My mother in an awkward sequinned dress. Delph in black tie like an undertaker. And something disharmonious in the pickled-onion air: a sour argument between Delph and Mum had prevailed since our arrival, like the thin drizzle. Vicious whispering. Black looks. Delph’s raised hand and my mother’s flinch. In fucking company too, the madman. The stomach-upsetting fear all this aroused in me … Then it was time to be deposited back at his parents’ house as it was past my bedtime. Delph elected to drive me there, insulting my mother as he careered out onto the blowy street. I recall the palm-sweating anxiety of being alone with him, the pleasure he took in the violent slamming of the car door; the glorying in his own capacities, his
range
. Then … then it all goes blank and cloudy; occluded. A terrible event occurred, but I cannot remember what it was. It will have to wait. Yes, it will have to wait until the cloud cover lifts.

Once back in civilisation, a mooted trip with my father to France seemed like sweet manna from heaven. We finally made it over there one Easter, Des driving the two of us onto the ferry, eating toothpick-thin french fries with arterial ketchup. We stopped off in Paris first, and stayed in a hotel opposite Marie Curie’s house. Of course, Des knew all about her—with him you had the guided tour, the history of radium, her martyr’s death. And he wasn’t just reading it off the plaque outside her house. After my radioactive exposure to Delph, I had forgotten that adults
knew
things: they possessed know-how, working knowledges, facts and figures; code-breakers for the world at large. Then there was the Parisian soundtrack. My Proustian response to music probably began here with the tape that was never out of the new-fangled Philips cassette recorder. It was, I’m ashamed to admit,
Tubular Bells
. I only have to hear the pure, crystalline arpeggios of its opening bars, and I am back in Paris; hounds barking under a blue midnight sky, streetlamps gleaming off unfamiliar Citroëns, the smell of sweet refined chocolate that the French used for their Easter eggs. Strange that the hot, hopeful emotions that well up on hearing those notes are significant only to me—it feels they should have a bigger significance in the world: a transferable, communicable meaning.

In the end, me and Dad struck a deal—if I didn’t mention Delph, he would let me go to the patisserie every morning and order ‘
une baguette, s’il vous plait.
’ Also, take me to see
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
dubbed into French. This arrangement worked very well until we arrived at industrial Lille, where I let slip that Delph had been using his workbench and tools. At the time my father had been chopping vegetables for his one and only dish: spaghetti bolognese. This final indignity made my father’s shoulders shake. It was hard to tell whether this was down to the onions or the information, but I’m sure I saw globes of tears behind his glasses. Him being my dad and everything, I’d like to think it was the onions.

At the end of Delph and Sinead’s honeymoon period, something inadmissible occurred. A nocturnal fracas that only now puts me in mind of Mandy and the Archway flat, when the new tenants started to move in (and out) one after another. How I recreated an earlier hell in a different location, I don’t know, but the overpaid behavioural analysts always state that this is inevitable … It was an incident that reinforced my notion that a house is not a home if it vibrates to the dark forces of violence, maliciousness, hatred. Rather a narrow ledge for eternity, like the pad of Prometheus, than that shit.

Delph and Mum had taken the train to London to see the gruesome musical
du jour
, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s overblown
Evita
. They had played the album for months. I was as sick of ‘Don’t Cry for me Argentina’ as I was of disco. Deep beneath my disgust was the conviction that they were connoting the lyrics with their turbulent love: ‘All through my wild days, my mad existence, I kept my promise—don’t keep your distance.’ Anyway, they must have taken these melodramatic passions back to Hamford, because I was awoken very late not by my mother, but by the mother of all rows. Not just shouting, but the loud crashing of objects as they were hurled around the living room. I tiptoed onto the top landing, heart beating like crazy. Immediately, Mum appeared in an arc of light; her mauve headscarf askew, panda-eyed from her liquid mascara. ‘It’s all right. Just go back to bed. Do you hear me now? Go back to sleep. It’s all right.’ But it wasn’t all right. She returned to the jarring sound of bitter curses; the raised male voice like the auditory equivalent of a phallus. Dominant, accusatory, heedless. Of course, I didn’t go back to bed. I was too terrified. Like the clichéd child listening to his parents row, cowering behind the banisters, I waited in intolerable suspense for it to finish. Except these were not my parents. Just my mum and some lunatic. This added to the sense of danger. Anything might happen. It sounded like she was going ten rounds with Tyson down there. More gut-churning bangs and splinterings. The abominable sound of a table going over. Then sweeping lights outside, the policeman’s insistent knock. Delph, looking especially tall and equine, bolting down the corridor to intercept them. The blue arm pulling him out before he could start his mendacious explanation. My mother weeping, broken, shaking; a bruise over her left eye, her long straight nose quivering in anger and fear.

She took a look at me and vanished shamefully into the living room. I followed, and was met with an unbelievable sight. Every object in the room was upside down or destroyed. The coffee table on its back like a floored wrestler; pictures torn from the walls; broken flower vases on the drenched carpet; Des’s shelves of books staved in; a lampshade in the fireplace. And worst of all, a giant rip in the saffron blinds, like a huge eye letting in the night. My mother left for a moment to talk with the police, then returned. She came close into my personal orbit and knelt down before me. ‘Now, this didn’t happen, okay? This is our little secret. You won’t tell anyone, will you?’ She was trembling, an unusual look of fear in her rain-coloured eyes. I didn’t answer. She continued, ‘If you say yes, I’ll let you stay up and watch TV.’ She had never allowed me this privilege before, but I felt, for the first time ever, in control of an adult. To be honest, I could have named my price. I tremulously asked, ‘Is he coming back?’ She smoothed her hair and said quickly: ‘No, not tonight. He won’t be back tonight.’ So I sat in front of the monochrome screen for two hours. I watched
Match of the Day
and then some play about slum kids on a day-trip to the seaside, while my mother set about resurrecting the room. It was the emptiest pleasure I ever experienced.

Delph disappeared for six months after this outrage. My only glimpse of him was when my mother drove me to Stevenage swimming baths for our weekly dip. The return journey was always undergone in pitch darkness, the stars rich and abundant over the open fields of Hertfordshire, the car stinking of chlorine and damp towels. Often we passed the coaches leaving for northern destinations with forbidding names: Sunderland, Wetherby, Barrow-in-Furness, Wakefield. One ink-black evening I glanced out of the window as the illuminated flank of a coach swung past, and saw the ghostly face of Delph at the back. Unmistakably him, all pretence of shallow charm cancelled from his long Aryan face. A rare glimpse down the toilet of his other life away from my mother. There he was: solitary, brutish, unrepentant. I started shouting, ‘Mum, there’s Delph, there’s Delph! You’ve just missed him on that coach.’ She didn’t look at me.

‘Oh, I didn’t see,’ she said with forced insouciance. But I knew by the agitation of her fingers on the steering wheel and the way her teeth caught her lower lip that she had.

Entropy is a useful word. The autodidact is always on the lookout for useful words. I won’t patronise you by stating that it means the tendency of all systems to chaos. A ‘measure of the degradation and disorganisation of the universe’ (COD). From the Greek
trope
, meaning transformation. The centre cannot hold. It is an apt word for describing the union of Sinead Easy and Delph Tongue. Because marriage, or a relationship, is a system like any other. And it always felt as if the situation was close to spiralling out of control. That this was the direction it was fated to take. Over the years, the White House became just that, a house, not a home. A housing. A shell with a shaky centre. If anything defines home then it is stability. Things should not be in a constant state of flux and transformation; instead things should endure. A state of entropy could also describe the home I tried to build with Mandy. Living with an endless succession of tenants might help to pay the rent, but it dilutes any sense of permanence or peace. Nevertheless, you try to make places permanent because you can never make people permanent.

The big flat in Archway started to feel like a hotel, or rather, a B&B, a
pension;
the worst kind of flop-house. As I might have mentioned, the three pretenders who took our newly decorated rooms were soon unmasked. The female singer-songwriter was discovered fixing up heroin in our shower. She spent weeks dressed only in a scabrous flesh-coloured dressing gown, crying audibly in her room before Mandy was forced to eject her into the night. The IT consultant was also involved in Class As, only he was a coke courier, his mobile incessantly ringing, leaving at all hours to deliver his wraps to the youth of north London in pubs, tube stations and their private abodes. He also had to go. The so-called businessman was by far the oddest human being I had met up to that point in my life. A squashed-looking man of forty, Ukrainian or Macedonian, he once brought back two hundred eggs which he attempted to store in the communal fridge. We returned home one day to find defrosting pizzas in all the cupboards, and a sulphurous smell that didn’t leave the kitchen for weeks. Every morning he would leave the flat in his dry-cleaned suit for an unknown destination, carrying an expensive briefcase. Once, we surreptitiously opened this case to find it contained nothing but sand. As far as we knew he never used the bathroom once. Instead he would douse himself in scent. Then there was the moaning in the night. In the small hours he could be heard babbling in his native tongue, then gargling and whinnying. In the end we didn’t have to throw him out. He performed this task of his own volition. We heard him attempting to shoot the moon at four a.m., but were too late to catch his swarthy hands on the door-latch. All we found was his television set abandoned in the hall. In his room was the briefcase, still full of sand.