Byron Easy (40 page)

‘Darling,’ the muffled voice rasped, ‘don’t panic. I’ll send my father round this weekend to advise.’

Antonia’s father ran a big farm out in Suffolk. He would know the practical measures that should be taken in such a situation. Infestations were his bread and butter. I suddenly felt a deficit of male know-how. Surely, as a husband, I should be the one exterminating vermin and putting up shelves. Not for the first time, I felt complicit in my own emasculation. Christ, outdone by the father of your wife’s best friend! With Mandy as circus master, as per usual. If I had possessed hair to cut off, this Delilah would have exercised the shears. Being a constant passenger in Mandy’s car (literally and metaphorically) didn’t help either, nor did the fact that she seemed to organise everything with her extravagant energies. Why didn’t I learn to drive and take the helm in these masculine matters? These were pressing questions at the time. I suppose the answer was that I was too involved in my own inner life, and its metaphysical demands. The need to respond to life by the perverse and non-remunerative act of writing poetry. Post-pamphlet, I had been hit by a writer’s block that was threatening to be terminal. But these were not legitimate ways, in Mandy s eyes, to spend one’s time. If I did write in those days, it would necessitate creeping from our futon in the small hours and settling myself by the small, cat-shaped table lamp, where I could allow my thoughts to soar and fly. I would never reveal in the morning what I had been up to all night. This was another iron curtain to any intimacy that might have feebly arisen between us. I had my own world of inner concerns, of wrestling with strong mental opponents like the existence of a deity or the possibility of an afterlife, whereas Mandy s world was all outward engagement. And boy, did she engage. In our first month at Seaham Road, she sold the Peugeot and bought a vintage Triumph Stag from the dealership round the corner. The fact that the oily-vested mechanics delighted in her flirtatious and slinkily dressed presence had nothing to do with the massive discount she received, or so she insisted. Other mad profligate escapades saw her acquire a laptop, a new mobile and the complete recordings of Paco de Lucia in a lavish boxset. All in the space of a weekend. Who tabbed all this? Ramona’s bequest, mainly. I knew she felt a rich sense of entitlement about these purchases. It was her money, after all, she argued. The wisdom that it’s never your own money in a marriage was dismissed with a curl of her Catalan lips. We immediately fell behind with the rent. A pink Fender Stratocaster was purchased in anticipation of the big showcase gig at The Dome pencilled in for the end of September, for which Fellatrix were vigorously rehearsing, seemingly day and night. I, meanwhile, plodded on with my midnight metaphysical ministries and barren days in Martin’s shop.

The gig didn’t go well, to say the least. Fellatrix were headlining, though you wouldn’t have guessed by the numbers in attendance. I stood at the back of the half-empty venue watching executive after executive head for the exit. The guitars were out of tune. Mandy looked nervous but defiant behind the big pink Stratocaster. A lone plastic glass smacked into the drum kit as the last chord rang out. Tears appeared in Mandy’s darkening eyes as she hurled the Strat into her amp and stormed off the stage. If a week is a long time in politics, a year is an ice age in the music business. Nobody was interested: the band were, if not checkmated then zugzwanged, washed up, finished. Nervously, I headed backstage. I found Mandy in conference with the sly and unshaven figure of Victor Moore, one of the few people on the guestlist who had demeaned themselves by showing up.

‘Told you she was a fickle mistress,’ I heard Victor drawl, on nearing Mandy. ‘You should change your name. Write a new set of songs. And sack that drummer—my daughter keeps better time on the saucepans in our kitchen.’

‘I don’t care about your daughter,’ said Mandy, brushing her tears away fiercely with her sleeve.

‘That’s just a random example,’ added Victor with a self-satisfied air, his cunning eyes doing a once-over of the dressing room for any signs of coke.

‘I thought you liked the songs!’ Mandy said imploringly.

I took this criticism of Victor’s to heart, as I had sweated blood in writing all the lyrics.

‘Yeah, well,’ he muttered, and stared at his big, practical Caterpillar orienteering boots.

‘Anyway,’ countered Mandy, high malice in her voice, ‘what do you know about music? You’re just a plugger. And why should we change the name just to satisfy those idiots who walked out? I thought you liked the name.’

‘But it’s past its sell-by date! If you’re not careful you’re gonna have that loser dust all over your shoulders,’ smirked Victor. ‘It’s deadly dandruff.’

Mandy could take it no more. She stood up and pushed Victor out of the way.

‘Fuck you, weasel,’ she hissed.

I felt immediate admiration for this outrageous act of defiance. Go, girl! But it was obviously suicidal. Victor held his hands up in surrender, a grin on his face. He didn’t care that much anyway. He had another three bands to check out that night, all with guitarists less volatile than Mandy. He wouldn’t have to exercise his power of making Fellatrix music-business pariahs—they had performed that task themselves, by hanging around for too long, by being generally surplus to requirements, by telling a well-known industry professional to fuck himself. They were off the radar, dead in the water, shut down for good, banished for ever from the vanity fair of the London scene. Mandy would take a while to digest this information, weeks and months in fact. But the damage had been done. I tentatively went to put an arm round her shaking shoulders.

‘Is the guitar okay?’

She said: ‘And fuck you, too.’

Dios mio.
If that wasn’t prickly enough, things became substantially hotter back at Seaham Road. The van journey resembled a funeral cortege. Each member of the band solemnly dropped off with their gear, hopeless expressions on faces. Few words had been exchanged; maybe the odd conciliatory pat on the back had passed among musicians unsure of when, if ever, they would see each other again. Once through our front door, the high stack of her flightcased amp blocking the passage, Mandy produced the guestlist; a long printed roll-call of all those absentee VIPs. She took out her lighter and held it under the paper.

In the gloom of the hall I asked, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

‘What does it look like? I’m burning rubbish.’

The flames spread through the paper, soaring upwards as if the thing had been doused with petrol. Then she disappeared up the stairs to our flat, still holding the flambeau. I followed, only to find her calmly walking through the rooms, applying the flame to curtains, clothes and wall posters, which took immediately. My heart, always unsteady around Mandy, started to rattle like a fire bell. This done, she flung the torch into the recycling box which was full of tinder-dry newspapers. It flared up at once.

‘You’re crazy,’ I said. ‘You’re going to kill us all!’ But Mandy wasn’t listening. She went to sit sulkily on her big limousine-length sofa, awaiting immolation, like an impassive sati widow.

I raced out to the hall for a non-existent fire extinguisher. Panicking, I barged back and was forced to improvise with a wet tea-towel instead. By the time I had smothered the curtains, the recycling box was a towering inferno. By the time the recycling box had been doused in the bath, the posters were scorching the ceilings, leaving sooty circles the size of car tyres. By the time the last flames had been mastered the whole flat reeked like a gutted factory after an arson attack. I crumpled to the floor in front of Mandy, exhausted, waiting for her to speak harsh words. But, to my surprise, I found her face unexpectedly gentle. She stared at me beatifically; stared a hole right through me. In the low light, tears dripped steadily from her chin, like jewels from an icicle.

There were other ways of living, but I couldn’t envisage them at the time. On every occasion I tried to picture this better life, it shifted shape or ran beyond my peripheral vision, where it hunkered down and waited. In the absence of this modifying spirit I made the best of things, on a day to day basis. You can’t just get up and walk away from a hellish marriage. It isn’t that easy, as anyone who has been in the same tiring predicament will testify. Instead, you make amends. The mind, if it is reflective at all, constantly circles the pros and cons: the reason the union happened in the first place; the daunting consequences of breaking the Gordian knot. The ramifications. A great deal of time is spent in not wanting to seem a failure in other people’s eyes. Also, not wanting to
look
into their eyes. A marriage is different from the common or garden relationship. It is supposed to be holy in the eyes of the Invisible Man. It has legal implications. Parents get involved. Children, if there are any, have to be taken into account. Friends wish you well and are always enquiring about the health of your marriage, as if it were a living third party, dependent on the correct nutrients and vitamins. You feel obliged to produce a progress report every couple of months. Then there are the intimations, forwarded by others, that your partner is less than faithful. There’s nothing worse than the jealousy between two people who have started to despise each other. Not the noble loving ‘not wisely, but too well’ of the Moor, but a corrosive covetousness that one clings to, as it supposedly produces evidence that—despite burning flats and flying fists—you still love each other. This non-nutritious and possessive jealousy is hard to walk away from.

The day after Mandy’s band went up in smoke, she retired to bed with a high temperature. Not as high as that produced by the flaming curtains of the previous night—the thermometer indicated nothing above normal—but high in the sense of highly strung. Ready to snap. By six, I was locked into an argument over the subject of Antonia, whose lovely twins had graced The Dome in a melon-coloured tank top, which seemed to produce a measurable tensile stress (on the material and on the men). Apparently, my tongue had been on the floor all night. An hour of attacking my behaviour had degenerated into general swipes at women and personal-level abuse aimed at Antonia herself.

Mandy raised herself from the futon (her semi-permanent home) to deliver her peroration: ‘… Then there’s all those
putas
in their tight tops giving people’s boyfriends—or worse, husbands—the eye! Whores! They’re all whores!’

She slumped back down again, shaking from the strain of so much concentrated pejorative thought.

‘Well, you’ve really put your cards on the table now,’ I countered. ‘It’s not my fault Antonia was wearing that top.’

‘That silly slut! She should have her stupid page-three tits removed. Surgically removed.’

‘I thought she was your best friend.’

‘Not if she’s wiggling about in front of everything in a pair of trousers all night she’s not.’

‘Christ, if she could hear you now.’

‘She’s too busy flirting.’

‘And you’ve never flirted in your life, right?’

‘Plus she’s got cellulite. Can you believe it? At twenty-four!’

‘Oh, who cares!?’

I thought it curious that, taking into account the fact that Mandy and I were no longer sleeping with each other, she seemed to want to exercise all her wifely privileges of sexual possessive-ness. I knew she was innately competitive with anything female (Jesus, she even used to become jealous over poor Concepcion when I cradled her in my arms), but this was an incoherent attitude of hers. Obviously, this was in the days when I still expected some kind of logic to her insane views, some consistency or integrity. After the vodka-glass incident, her rank jealousy had manifested itself in gentler ways. A joke developed between us where, if we found an unknown but wholly innocent phone number the back of a cigarette packet, we would comically interrogate each other in silly voices. ‘Whose number is that?’ ‘Ve haff vays of making you …,’ et cetera. This had the effect of diffusing the troublesome unexploded bomb of jealousy. Only, just recently, her old termagant edge was back. If I mentioned any other woman, whether a customer in the shop or someone seen on an escalator, she would become Cleopatra, demanding to know her competitor’s age, height, the sound of her voice or whether there was ‘majesty in her gait’. At a Fellatrix gig in the spring she had thrown a lit cigarette at a girl I just happened to be asking for a light in the audience. A subtle shift of emphasis from throwing objects at
me,
but worrying nonetheless.

And, true to form, there was a double-standard at the heart of this. While I wasn’t allowed to so much as glance at another woman, she could have all the handjob-fatigued suitors she wanted. There used to be a queue of them after every gig, insisting she autograph their spotty buttocks. However, just recently her fury had been newly directed towards her own gender, her fellow sisters. I put this down to the delayed influence of the old señora, Montserrat. Largely brought up by her dotty grandmother, who never hesitated to pronounce a woman a
puta
for the slightest transgression, Mandy seemed to be turning into the bitter old dame at a rate of knots. But she had never accused Antonia of being a whore before now. Maybe she only thought it. This was a new development. She was slowly alienating herself from her own sex. In fact, if I examined the situation, Antonia was her only female friend. There was no getting away from the fact that Mandy was that most terrifying of female quantities, a man’s woman. She gloried in the intense and seedy attention of the men, a natural sunlamp to her ego and vanity, but spurned the knotty Sisterhood.

I could no longer tolerate this high bitchery. I made to leave the room in order to search for the mobile, that we shared.

‘… Not only that, but she was fluttering her eyelashes and talking in that fake Marilyn Monroe baby voice. I can’t stand that husky shit. You know that’s a put-on voice, don’t you? Just for the benefit of men? If you ever visited her parents’ farm you wouldn’t hear her using that silly accent. She sounds like a bumpkin up there.’

‘Can’t you give it a rest? Anyway, where’s the mobile? I need to call Rudi before he’s kneecapped. He’s been mixed up in all sorts recently’