Byron Easy (43 page)

It was true that Mandy dreaded the day when she would no longer feel the enrichment provided by the male gaze—when it would disappear overnight (when men would look right through her to the ripe teenage blonde behind), causing her to shrivel like a date in its absence. Hearing my own blood thumping in my temples, I took another swig of beer. I felt suddenly like the worm that turned. But Mandy maintained her ominous silence. Usually she would have responded to a tirade such as this by screaming the house down. Yes, the empty vessel certainly makes the louder sound, I thought, as I watched her pathetic shoulders heave up and down. And I had exchanged deep water for this shallow pool? I shuddered at the reality … There were two plain facts in the electric air at that moment. One: she didn’t give a toss, and two: she wasn’t scared of me. Or not enough to do me the decency of acknowledging my presence. Why would she be scared of me, standing five-nine in my Converse trainers, balding, reasonable, easy? And she the big hitter, the terroriser of tenants and small animals, the fearless verbal sadist. I had never hated another human being more in my life.

Instead of saying another word on the matter I threw my newly opened bottle of Hofmeister at the bedroom window. It went clean through, with a deafening spew of glass, landing in the street below (in the morning I would find it on a patch of grass, intact). But it had the desired effect. She looked up from the bed, craning her incurious head over one shoulder, her eyes dark with scorn.

Obviously, her violence had taken its toll. Usually passive and compliant, it had infected me. I had performed a similar act of mindless destruction about a year into our marriage. It had become clear that there were certain things, sexual things, that Mandy refused to even contemplate. We’re not talking about anal ticklers and hotplates here—just wholesome oral sex. Like a 1950s prude, she said these acts were ‘dirty’. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve never read
Cosmopolitan!’
I had exclaimed on learning this. Thus, after a drunken evening of sexual frustration, Mandy had become outraged when I had tried to go down on her after our formularised, missionary-position, post-pub lovemaking. Thinking she would have liked it, thinking that I’d never slept with such a puritanical woman, thinking that I was too pissed to care, I threw a bottle of red wine against the wall. She was stunned, not imagining I had such rage in me. ‘Most women would be delighted!’ I shouted. But it was a pale imitation of her behaviour, and we both knew it. I was so aggrieved that I slept half the night on the floor naked, as if someone had died.

But this time was different. I would make her pay for what she had said to my sister. As I approached Mandy’s figure on the bed, I thought just once, just this once, I saw a flicker of fear in her face—as gratifying a sight as I had seen all year. Then the red mist descended before my eyes.

London town. The very late 1980s. I don’t think I finished telling you how I found myself in a situation envenomed with irrevocable wrong. Back then, I felt myself to be moving at a considerable pace. Despite the fact that I was living a life of Communist Bloc scarcity (clothes washed so many times they were almost transparent, et cetera), there was quick-moving fire in my soul. The carbon-monoxide-leaking red buses and grand canyon thoroughfares of the city were a galvanising wonder. They carried me along on their steel streams. I felt stirred by the hammer and shimmer, the impersonal variety, the heterogeneous maze. Oxford Street! That boulevard of broken bards, that (in De Quincey’s words) stony-hearted stepmother. I had just moved to my first bedsit in Harlesden, with its nightly police chases and streets that resembled, on a Sunday morning, a landfill site. That spring, I had left my job in a steel-casting factory in Hamford for the brittle uncertainties of the big city. I felt small, scared, sociopathic, fast-travelling. I wasn’t yet twenty. The factory had calloused my hands and filled my lungs with metal dust. My blue overalls stank with manly odours after ten-hour shifts of fettling and pouring molten aluminium into pig-casts and dies. I eventually found these mysterious ingots were destined for the Ministry of Defence. Shamefully, it turned out, I had been involved in making objects intended to destroy other human beings. I left behind a world of tea, tabloids, cloying canteen dinners, farts and round-nosed files. A provincial subculture of sub-normalised men, many of whom still lived with their mothers until well into their thirties on the outlying estates.

So London was a big deal. I knew no one, but at first that didn’t bother me. I felt like the incognito hero of
The Day of the Jackal,
or all those Raskolnikovs and superfluous men that had lurked unhealthily in rickety rooms before me. I read Colin Wilson’s
The Outsider
and got myself a job on a building site. I stood on those open-air tube platforms of west London: Queens Park, Willesden Junction, Kensal Green; feeling volubly poetic, my dusty boots spotted with spring rain, the sky overhead blue as a movie star’s eyes. Though I was still toiling with men who looked as if they wanked three or four times a day, and who introduced me to the bookies and roll-up cigarettes, nothing could beat working outdoors. The site was on top of one of the big Park Lane hotels, with sheened limousines pulling up every thirty seconds to be attended by a squadron of obsequious doormen. Apart from shifting huge chunks of masonry into a service lift, one of our tasks was to carry scaffolding over vertiginous gangplanks at the very top of the building. At that altitude, all it took was the wind to catch on the bending ends of the poles and your balance was fatally lost. We had to time our forays between gusts, like crack soldiers waiting for a break in enemy fire. Unsurprisingly, a delicate petal like Byron Easy lasted all of a fortnight under such conditions. Hard as it was to say goodbye to my work chums, Gibbo, Tosser and Irish Danny, the danger money didn’t compensate. I told them that my death by falling from the twenty-seventh floor would be a serious loss to world literature and took my last pay packet. Its bulk of notes and coins in the green-windowed mini-envelope felt good in my hands.

If I did get sentimental over the old home town it was only to ring Rudi, already powering ahead with his valeting business, and possessed of that innocent-sounding deviousness essential for climbing the greasy pole of commerce. Mother and Sarah had moved up north. There was no reason to physically return. The town slowly became mythologised in my memory, halted, as it were, in my teenage years; caught in the bird lime of time. My next job had the attraction of being both dangerous and boring simultaneously. After reading Henry Miller’s exploits at a dispatch office in New York, I found myself working as a bicycle courier on the fast and mean streets of the City. Houndsditch, Cornhill, Poultry, Old Jewry. The very names are impossibly evocative to me now. That freeing, scary, headlong whistle down Fleet Street, satchel on back, radio crackling your call-sign, nostrils full of black gunge. Ah, I could regale you for hours, patient reader, with the dangers I passed. But I shall spare you that particular summer of loneliness and Lucozade. I fast felt that I was wasting my time, skating over pavements on two wheels for promised bucks that never materialised. It wasn’t exactly demanding, mentally, after all. To be honest, they hadn’t asked for many qualifications, just a bike and two functioning arms and legs. My greatest Hamford fear had been realised—that of making a living as a glorified postman.

This led to my one and only brush with higher education, the vain attempt to infiltrate academia already alluded to. For a long time I had kicked around the idea of bettering myself. Despite the negative evidence of my O levels, I had managed to wangle an interview in the English department at one of the major London colleges. A degree. A new life. This rite of passage was set for the spring.

The first thing that struck me about the cosy, book-infested office was the heat. Whew, they keep ivory towers hot, I thought. How do they manage all that stringent mental effort, all that translation of Old Icelandic under such conditions? I took off my leather jacket and secured it on the back of the uncomfortable green-cushioned chair and awaited the arrival of Professor Valerie Organ and her co-interviewer, Dr Schnitz. I was tired and anxious, and not a little nervous. My hour-long sojourn in the common room hadn’t been promising, I must say. The proliferation of impeccable middle-class accents, the students coming and going with takeout coffees and volumes of Kierkegaard in duffle-coat pockets hadn’t served to bolster my confidence. For some reason I expected bearded youths playing acoustic guitars on the campus steps, an atmosphere of welcoming liberalism. But they all stared at me in a most condescending way! As if I had ‘intellectual leper’ felt-penned on the sweating dome of my head. What’s the matter, never seen a balding mature student before? Eventually, the last kids filtered from the common room, Hampshire vowels rolling in the rarefied air. One hearty quarterback shouted to his girlfriend, ‘I’ll see you in theory.’ This puzzled me for a while, not to say impressed me mightily I spent five minutes marvelling at the cerebral force of students who were satisfied with
virtual
meetings, until it dawned on me that ‘theory’ was a lesson, or lecture, or seminar—I didn’t know the lingo yet. The only other intrusion, as I stole as many books as I could stuff into my courier’s satchel, was the appearance of two equine female undergraduates in the de rigueur uniform of black overcoat, square shoes and pinching, daunting spectacles. They idly checked their pigeonholes while I watched furtively from the far corner. Their names, I gathered, were (you couldn’t make this up), Emily and Pippa. As they made to leave, Emily, the most insufferably confident of the two, began to issue orders into her mobile phone.

‘Can I have the usual table … Yah, it’s just for the six of us … and Daddy’s favourite wine? … Oh, splendid, Juan. We’ll see you Tuesday.’

Emily had a theatrical voice, so low and cello-deep it resembled none other than that of the possessed teenager in
The Exorcist.
Then Pippa piped up. ‘Won’t that conflict with reading week?’

‘You mean skiing week? Not bloody likely!’

Giggling like cockatoos, they left me to ugly thoughts. Jesus … I was barely twenty-three, but I felt twice their age. Though paradoxically, I also felt younger, like their stable boy or butler. These two, I pondered, have done everything that it’s taken me years
not
to accomplish. They probably possessed banners of credit cards in their bulging wallets, their own cars back home in the Shires, sexual partners in double figures. They could ski! Christ,
you don’t book restaurant tables by mobile phone when you are a supposedly penniless student of nineteen years of age!
I reflected on my gruesome past. These were two girls who probably returned at every opportunity to the bosom of the affluent thatched villages from whence they originated, with parents who adored each other, never raised their voices (let alone hands) in anger, and resolved arguments by talking things through calmly. I felt suddenly sick and sour in the quiet of the common room. I was singularly unfit for the job of student, for competing with these hot-housed whizz-kids, these garglers with silver spoons. Convinced I should leave, I stood up and swung the satchel over my shoulder. Who was I kidding, thinking I could walk in here and—

‘Mr Easy?’ a voice broke in from the doorway. It was the admissions secretary. ‘If you’d like to follow me.’

Too late. In minutes I was sitting in the stultifying office, waiting for the entrance of Professor Valerie Organ and her sidekick, or brain-colleague, Dr Schnitz. I glanced at the heaving monuments to erudition that were the bookshelves. At least, I reflected, the academic world being what it was, if the worst came to the worst, Professor Organ could always open a second-hand bookshop.

The door yawned open and two women walked in, one small with brutally short greying hair, the other much younger, awkwardly tall and conspicuous. The older woman held out her hand with an impersonal smile, and said, ‘You must be Brian.’

No, vigilant reader, she hadn’t made a mistake. I’ve been lying to you again. In fact, I’ve been lying to you for a considerable amount of time; since you began reading, unfortunately. My real name
is
Brian. You didn’t really believe that I was honoured with the name Byron by my mother did you? The story goes like this: when Sinead was eventually informed that the author of ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ was in fact William Wordsworth and not Lord Byron, she gave up the idea of naming me after the great Regency swordsman. My father thought it would be compensation enough to be called after his father, Brian Easy. So Brian I became, on my birth certificate, until mother told me the whole saga of the mix-up. Naturally, I was outraged. How could she exchange the noble ‘Byron’ for the less than rakish ‘Brian’ without first consulting me? So, I simply changed it back. But, for the purposes of my National Insurance number, the Inland Revenue, the medical profession and institutions such as universities I am Brian. It just makes things so much easier, for them at least. Still, I think first ideas are usually the best, don’t you? First ideas identify the essence before the mind gets too bogged down with existence, or second thoughts. A friend of mine at Hamford Boys’ School was called Terry. His surname was Towel. It took his dim parents a number of years to realise they had saddled the poor boy with the name T. Towel. But by that time he was a Terry, through and through. He had grown into his name with consummate assurance. Every time he closed in on the box with his superlative halfway-line sprint, the cries of ‘Terry, Terry, over here!’ or ‘On the head, Terry!’ would’ve sounded completely wrong had his name been Philip.

Anyway … I’m sorry, okay?

I stood. ‘Yes, that’s me. Brian Easy.’

‘I’m Professor Organ,’ said the older woman in an exaggeratedly quiet voice, so quiet that I had to bend forward slightly not to miss anything. ‘And this is my colleague, Dr Schnitz. We just want to ask you a few questions about what you’ve been up to, what you’ve been reading,
et ceterah.
Oh, do sit down.’