Byron Easy (34 page)

So all three rooms were standing empty. Inevitably, the rent had to be lowered to below its previous rate. Then came the real scum of the earth. The rootless, itinerant flotsam and jetsam who answer small ads with all the unconvincing bullshit they can muster.
I’m just down from Liverpool and need a place for a couple of weeks.
Sure, no problem.
I don’t have a deposit, how about an eighth and a fake Rolex?
Fine, move in when you want.
People say I’ve got a dodgy face, but I’m honest, trust me!
I’m sure you have, and are: come and share all the intimate spaces of our life. Because that’s what sharing a flat amounts to. You cannot live with people you wouldn’t choose to stand next to on the tube. But that’s what Mandy and I ended up doing, just to make ends meet.

With these desperadoes came real disruption, discord, chaos. Human excrement left in the shower, and no one owning up to it. A lad from Manchester who split owing three months, leaving only a pair of jeans and a heartbreaking note to the effect that it was all he had of worth to give us. The teenager from a loaded family up in Highgate who neglected to tell us he’d been thrown out of his parents’ mansion, rather than leaving it of his own accord. After a while, his folks had our full sympathy. Every night his room, which was situated next to ours, would shake to the subterranean bass of techno, hardbag, ragga. A posse of pot-smoking trust-fund skankers would be over every night, swearing, whooping and farting until we unplugged the master fuse for the whole house. One by one, all our kitchen utensils started to disappear: cups, plates, corkscrews, the lot. Eventually they were discovered in his room like guilty errant children. Pans of week-old baked beans were uncovered under jazz mags, growing anemones of mould. Finally, one day when I was at the shop, he tried to behead Mandy with a baseball bat. Entropy had reached its full operational capacity, its disintegrative zenith. She was forced to break down his locked door after repeated appeals to turn his music off were ignored. The floppy-haired fool, stoned out of his mind, grabbed his bat and pursued Mandy around the house, destroying everything he could see, eventually overturning the coffee table in our room. I raced home from the shop, the familiar sight of a police car in the street outside. But it was the vision of the coffee table that arrested me, that welded me to the spot. Mandy, shrieking that she could have been killed, shook in the doorway, while I stood there distractedly, staring at the four legs upright in the air, like a dead animal. I couldn’t speak. I was back in Hamford, the night after
Evita,
the little boy behind the big banisters, walking in on that scene of unforgettable destruction; my mother’s rain-coloured eyes full of rain.

The restaurant car opens its smoked doors with a reassuring whisper, allowing me free passage to the bar. The buffet car. I have come in search of a drink. And not just any drink, oh no. Only a vat of wine or a distillery of whisky will do after recalling so much trauma, so much terrible beauty. Granny and her gallery. Delph and his straining dong. Des and his onion tears. The dead table, on its back with rigor mortis legs … The only problem I can foresee, as I wend my way through the baubled crowd with their double-bacon-and-brie combination sandwiches, is that Great North Eastern Railways don’t do proper drinks, they do improper drinks. They do excuses for drinks. Those Lilliputian miniatures with their silly clear-cup hats; the squat bottles of weak imitation Jerry beer; the minuscule shots and their rabbit droppings of ice … I park myself in the queue by the window and drink in the tearing fields instead. How shocking and tawdry the present day seems after all that recollection, that orgy of reminiscence. In the distance, past the boating lake with its outcrops of children, its simple sails, the bundling countryside seems lighter, more surreal the further towards the aft of the train you go. Almost as if it were daylight once more; the diurnal revolution somehow in reverse. The rain appears to have abated. Outlines of ruined abbeys—pale Elsinores—are visible on the horizon. A late shaft of divine sunlight, emitted from a troubled grey cloud, is strafing distant enclosures. The shadows of cringing trees seem suddenly otherworldly—as if the whole of Hertfordshire were lit from below by some seraphic arc-light … I rub my eyes. There are no sails, no children, no Danish castles. Of course there aren’t. It is only a trick of the failing light.

The only other problem I foresaw with scoring a drink, as I left my memory-booth in carriage B, was the smoking problem. I think I mentioned my slight accident with the unextinguished dog-end and the thankfully fire-retardant duvet. It’s been over a month now and I’m not sure of my resolve, my iron-in-the-soul. A month since I nearly immolated myself and my three patient flatmates. The thing the anti-smoking lobby tries not to emphasise is that cigarettes are one of life’s kingly pleasures. The fact that it is a pleasure never free from the shadow of death—the sovereign’s sovereign—seems all the more apposite. The notion they will never admit to is that nine out of ten cigarettes taste ambrosial and relieve a mental hospital’s worth of anxiety. They also give you something to do with yours hands, something to look forward to, and a stance of unanswerable cool. Christ, they’re good. In fact, the more this puritanical synod—the anti-snout zealots, the professional
smirkers—
tries to persuade you with phrases such as:
dirty little habit, makes you impotent, kills you in the end,
the more one longs to take up smoking as a vocation, to complete one’s PhD in advanced inhalation. They neglect to mention that a cigarette and a glass of whisky occupies a space in the higher echelons of sensual pleasure. Also the fact that, clinically, it’s easier to kick heroin.

Of course, none of this helps me, or the weakening tungsten of my resolve, as I sway in the Christmas queue. My body is screaming for nicotine, like a starved child. Then I notice something on the horizon. Or rather, it notices me. A familiar church spire, like a poniard in the sky’s murky underbelly. An icon from the past, so familiar, so condensed, it feels like it has been burnt onto the retinas for thirty years. But there it is: St Cecilia’s church, Hamford! A sick desire to return to my seat before the express shoots through the station grips my intestine. A disabling yearning for the companionship of my notebook. All thoughts of a drink and a soothing pipe of tobacco are jettisoned. I begin to barge my way out of the queue and towards the smoked-glass doors. ‘Excuse me please … Gangway! … Mind your backs!’

Through the bleared windows of carriage G, I can see that the train is making its approach to Hamford station. I search the fuddled Filofax of my mind to recall my carriage designation: B? Yes, I am definitely in B. B for Beatrice, my lost love. That means four more swaying gauntlets to run. Eight sets of smoked-glass doors. One thing’s for certain and that is we won’t be stopping. Because the express never stops for Hamford. It is a blur on life’s memory map. No, it won’t stop. I know it won’t stop because I have made this journey many times before, as passive passenger, as dumb interlocutor with the vast mouth of the past, its secrets held only in the bowed trees and glimpsed lanes now flashing by the windows of carriage G. Outside, a kind of vivid half-light, a crepuscular photo-negative, is illuminating the convex sweeps of Hertfordshire fields. I can see rooks, like heavy grapeshot, making fast patterns in the sky. A beached tractor on the perimeter of the ploughlines is beam-black and peopleless, as vacant as the scarecrow crucified against the dripping horizon. Then I see the silent mouth of the disused railway tunnel, and feel my own heart in my throat.

Carriage F.

The tunnel, lying between heavy banks of nettles and wild grasses, begins a grave excitement in me. The kind of excitement only felt when place and memory make their intersection. The deep, ungraspable disturbance—so amorphous, so slippery!—of the past happening in the present. The moment is tagged with a ticket: prepare to meet your past. One is powerless to disobey this notice. And it is never just a single recollection, but a compound containing many memories, all vying for examination, for primacy. As I trip over the dragnet knees and feet of carriage F, I see my sixteen-year-old self running towards the disused tunnel. A brittle, skeletal October day of mutable silver skies. The day I left school. The day I returned to find all the locks on my father’s house changed. Et tu, Des. I remember running without purpose to the edge of town, where the railway sends its looms of cables deep into the countryside, towards other towns, other futures. The afternoon had that crisply realised clarity of new and keenly felt suffering. The brown already-rotted leaves were shredded and dust-like underfoot. The leaves that were falling amounted to a snow shower of vivid crimson and angry yellow. The air was ice ingested into the lungs. My nightmare of being locked out had finally become a weighty reality, though the White House was long gone. At sixteen, I had been living in Des’s bungalow on the outskirts of Hamford. It was there I had decided not to bother turning up for school one day. He had responded by shutting me out with the aid of a master locksmith. Another door had been barred, deadlocked. And I was to live where, exactly? With my mother and Delph in their immaculately tasteless hutch on the blighted Barratt estate, with its nightly rows and vibrations of harm and violence? In Rudi’s hammock? On the streets? I ran on, with the autumn sun brave and yellow on the trunks of stripped trees. The leaf-carpeted macadam gave way to a farmers track of obdurate, uneven earth. The furrows of the old railway tracks were intermittently visible. And there it was: the sightless O of the tunnel, with its sewery vapours, scattered syringes and rich atmosphere of danger. A void. The kind of darkness you don’t encounter that often. A secretive and forbidding absence of light. I collapsed under the mossy putrescence of the tunnel wall; heavy with failure, even at that age. Out of breath, out of hope. Tears might have come, I don’t recall. Like Dickens and his sojourn in the blacking factory, this was the very worst thing that could possibly happen to me. I knew I would bear the scars a lifetime, with all the attendant self-pity and shame. I remained there for an hour, maybe more—at least until the trees had lost their tinge of sulphurous October yellow, and the light had dimmed. Yes, in the big O of the disused railway tunnel I sat down and wept.

Carriage E.

And now the tunnel is gone, disappeared into the dark backward abysm. As I vault the obstacles of stray suitcases I can see that the train has gained higher ground. We are shooting over a blackened bridge that reveals a mini-roundabout in the recess below. Hobhouse Road! How many years has it been since I saw Hobhouse Road? Like an old friend greeting me with open arms. The intersection of many drunken memories, many childhood journeys in Sinead’s Mini to the shops, to the school; inevitably to the hospital. The long straight gorge up a hill to the town centre is quickly effaced by the blur of a housing estate. The Barratt estate! Where my mother moved to set up home with the errant Delph; otherwise known as the Poets’ Estate, as every vacant cul-de-sac was named after a substantial versifier from days gone by. Keats Way. Byron Close. Mase Field. Ah, I always liked that last one.

Carriage D.

‘Oh, get out of the fu—’ I have to be in my seat when we whoosh through the station. Nothing else will calm my rattling nerves. The noise of the train fills my ears as another set of smoked doors makes way for me. I feel the rumble and tilt, the
Sturm und Drang,
the chatter of rails; like Saleem returning triumphant to Bombay, hearing the abracadabra made by the sleepers. I must get this down, this deluge of the past, all masticated by the churning wheels of the carriages. I must fix this horrid equinox in ink. A brief collision with a pensioner exiting the loos and I’m into …

Carriage C.

A bridge is fast looming up out of the sepulchral mist. But not one we will travel over. This one we will pass under. It is a flimsy footbridge suspended above the swaying cables. The same one I shivered over on all those three-mile treks to school from the Poets’ Estate. It is unnervingly unchanged from twenty years ago: the blue panelling with its streaks of birdshit; the iron railings cold with rain that I used to skid my finger through, schoolbag over hunched shoulders. We can’t be far from the station itself now. In fact, the station has to be the next thing. The next stop we never stop at. The final doors seethe open and I gain my writing desk.

The station! Hamford station, with its approach of chalk cliffs wreathed in rain. The pines and their dangerous tenure in the gradient. The sudden ramp of the platform, taking us up, up, up. The screech of the Intercity horn warning passengers that this train, this bullet through time, will not be stopping. Then the hanging baskets with their spectrum of petals, maintained even in the dead of winter. Purple, pink and yellow. Chrysanthemums and lilies. Those quaint hanging baskets swaying from the Victorian wrought iron; the ornate metalwork with its numberless coats of black paint. How they remind me of the day I boarded, all those years ago, the banal escape shuttle heading in the opposite direction—heading for the squall of London, its ice-ages of poverty, its semi-psychotic Spanish women. Then the sudden awning of the ticket office, with its drenched Christmas Eve stragglers; the berserk compression of air stopping their ears.

I used to love this town! And hate it, too. I couldn’t wait—as the cliché goes—to leave. For what kind of return is this? Certainly not some kind of Zionist’s Utopia? It’s not a homeland, an Israel or the African interior. This is no-place, some-place; the location of my own personal
f
orgotten boredom’, my childhood. Except that it isn’t forgotten. It lives—and vividly. Hamford is somehow equated with Spenser’s Cookham in my mind: the prosaic market town whose countryside—those haunts of ancient peace—could be reached if you continued walking in a straight line for three miles in any direction, a landscape which played host to strange, inexplicable events. Maybe not resurrections in churchyards, but an ineradicable myth system of its own. Spirits seen from the side of Water Hill; leylines under outlying wellheads; mysterious screams heard on July midnights. The old woman, Gemma Fernandez, dead in woodland at the end of our lane, felled by Pluto’s dart after escaping the Nazis. The surrounding fields alive with midsummer dryads and maenads. A secret spring of water near my old man’s bungalow where depressives came from miles around to drown themselves. The spinneys of trees on high hills that attracted summer Satanists, leaving behind their mysterious rings of ash. And all this enclosing a collection of residential streets, shops, car parks and timbered Tudor buildings. Ah, maybe that was it. Hamford was old, very old, an ancient settlement on the Icknield Way, with its river and Norman church. Groaning up from the ground were the ghosts of Alfred’s warriors and their code of wyrd; inoculated into the soil was the blood of strange sacrifices, offerings to Norse gods; or the passage of English kings and queens who hunted in the fertile woodland. And all the time the feral countryside impinging on the frail mead-hall, or what is now a shopping arcade. Chaos pressing its nose against the lit window. A silence that filled the town, especially after dark, after the bells of St Cecilia’s church had ceased on an August evening. Yes, when it was dark: that was when the rank blood of pagan slaughters welled up from the chalky soil! With no place of safety except the mind-constructed ones of religion, family, love.