Byron Easy (45 page)

‘Yeah, my speech wasn’t up to scratch either,’ I say. ‘Still, you only have to do it once. Hopefully.’

‘Well I couldn’t go through the hangover again,’ observes Michelle brightly. She was absent-mindedly twisting her wedding band on her finger as she spoke. Yes, I used to do that, I admit to myself with a simultaneous plummeting of my spirits. The ring. My Argos-bought wedding ring. That golden emblem of exclusivity. I remember how it felt on the finger itself, heavy and solid; how people looked at you and treated you differently; how inwardly altered you felt. As if one of life’s great hurdles had been finally vaulted. And now there is a pale welt where it used to be, like the ring a vase of flowers leaves when you remove it from a table to throw the dead blooms away.

Robin’s face has darkened again on contemplating the board. You’re up Crap Creek without your mobile, Robin—just admit it. I feel I should ask his wife about the unmentionable that everyone keeps mentioning: the Millennium. Everyone seems willing to talk about the forty-eight-hour rave they’re planning to attend, but no one wants to go into the unspoken fear that this could be it. This could be the end of the world as we know it. Fuck your Cuban Missile Crisis or the eclipses of 1605 or Cassandra wailing about the fall of Troy. This is the day of judgement. The long-awaited global catastrophe. Let’s hope we’ve all settled the tab with the Big Man upstairs and packed our souls. The thought that has
definitely
crossed everybody’s mind is this one: what if, when they release the balloons on the twelfth stroke, the heavens are suddenly rent apart and a Pythonesque hand reaches earthward for all the ant-like sinners, like in some nightmare by Fuseli? The earth groaning under its own weight of humanity, malignant and benign alike. Molten streams of people, like a second flood. Except it won’t be Pythonesque. It will be unthinkable. We are standing, after all, on the brink of the unknown. Great and terrifying forces may be released.
Twothousandzerozeropartyover,
and all that. But nobody, apart from cranks, Seventh-Day Adventists and children under ten, is actually talking about it. They’re just thinking it. Extraordinary.

‘So, what have you got planned for the big night?’ I ask, forgetting that, if they interrogate me, I have no satisfactory answer.

‘New Year’s? Oh, we’re having a quiet one with Robin’s mum.’

I nod, and allow myself a glance at the train window. I can see my own broad forehead, projected with the image of three looming pylons, the dark countryside beyond. So everything’s going to be just the same as we left it come January the first? Christ, I’d like you to be right, Michelle.

‘I might have a quiet night in myself,’ I tell her. ‘Anyhow, I’m just off to the smoking car.’

I excuse myself and rise on jelly legs. Oh yes, another thing that slipped my mind—I have capitulated to smoking. Some time after we rumbled out of Peterborough I snapped. I couldn’t handle the bleakness, the sensory deprivation. With no proper booze on offer and this song sung blue on constant replay in my head there seemed little alternative. The ambrosial fire of a Rizla full of cadged Old Holborn marked my fall from grace. Abstinence was just too much like purgatory. I guess I don’t have that iron in the soul, that strength of character that holds out to the death under enemy torture. What a depressing fact to learn about oneself.

The smoked-glass door opens obsequiously before me, like a mechanical courtier. I find an empty seat among my fellow chortling chokers, those other deferrers of reality. Flattening my notebook out on the Formica, I try to recall the last evening Rudi Buckle visited the shared flat. It was only three weeks ago, but it feels like the previous century. The sunset over the gardens behind the house had been much like the jagged, apocalyptic cataract of colour that is streaking the skies outside my train window. I remember writing,
it won’t last long—it never does. The pale pink of a late November afternoon as it slides into dusk. The shivering, transitory sky and its canopy of tiny clouds, its billows of birds. The leaf-graveyards of the gardens out back with their mulch of wet yellow, peaty bronze. Woodsmoke smells; plumes of white above the huddled terraces. Everywhere a sense of oncoming and increasing emptiness; the terrible firmament full of metal and last light … The big chestnut stripped down to fibres, its hardy skeleton—its leaves filling the whole garden like a deflated parachute. It stands in a kind of agony: a hand-wringing mother shaking in a winter gale, all night grieving for her dead children; like a Niobe of the urban forest.

Five minutes later, and a startling new palette in the heavens. A glowing salmon sun behind the fixed spires of poplars; a stripe of gold dotting the high clouds. Forlorn bushes and early lights coming on in windows … steady change: minute by minute; the light sucked down from the sky to a fluorescent horizon. Elsewhere, that strange greyness unique to late November. Whatever is present in the sky will not last long. No, it won’t last long—it never does.

Rampant Rudi sat in my kitchen in a slippery red shirt, lighting a cheroot from a candle stuck in an old whisky bottle. He had been growing his hair long, and looked like a chubby version of Salvator Rosa’s
Self-Portrait.
With his suede-soft voice, he said, ‘In my experience, Bry, when a woman is sure of her man, that’s when she starts behaving badly.’

‘They take advantage, you mean? Once you’ve fully committed?’

‘Precisely.’

I sat opposite him over the big, wax-spattered kitchen table. The two croupiers had left for their evening shift and the viola player was working a wedding in Tunbridge Wells. I had made a rare foray into the kitchen, sadly cooking a meal-for-one of plain pasta and Tesco pesto mixed with olives, when Rudi had called round unexpectedly. His movements were becoming harder and harder to trace just recently. He had made an unusual number of enemies in a short period of time, and thought it best to be constantly on the go, like a shark patrolling the endless oceans. I had just wiped away my tears (precipitated by the olives you understand—they were, and still are, like onions to my soul) when the doorbell rang. Five minutes later and I was bending his poor Scottish ear off once more.

‘That was the problem. She took me for granted. Expected me to be always there. I don’t suppose my jealousy helped.’

‘Aye, the green-eyed marauder,’ said Rudi, and drained another beer from the bottle factory at the centre of the table. ‘The more you suspect, the more you push ’em away. It disnae matter how hard you try tae put a lid on it. It seeps out in the end.’

‘And they can sense this, can they?’

‘Aye. Witch telepathy. Developed over hundreds of years.’

‘But how else could I react? You saw how she behaved, towards the end, I mean.’

It was true that the last months of my marriage had seen Mandy disappear on holiday without me three times. The first occasion was a jaunt to Italy with Antonia, leaving me and Nick behind to drink maudlin pints of Guinness in the Prince Regent, wondering what the hell they were getting up to. The other two trips were solo adventures in the Levant, during which she removed her wedding ring (and everything else, I imagine), probably becoming the busy adultress I always accused her of being. However, I will never know. She denied any impropriety on her return, even though men called Emilliano were constantly phoning the flat and asking in thick accents if Mandy was
‘en case?’
No, I had no way of ever finding out what abominations she had committed. She would deny everything until her face was the colour of a sailors uniform. The fault lay with me, I was confidently told—in my over-active imagination. How could I expect an attractive ‘single’ woman in the libidinous cities of northern Italy to be up to anything untoward behind her husband’s back? What a pathological fool I must be to suspect that! What a dribbling, misguided Leontes!

‘She was certainly putting it about a bit. Geographically, I mean,’ said Rudi, stroking his deep-pile chest hair.

‘But you think I overreacted?’ I asked, meeting his black eyes.

‘Not exactly. But it disnae mean she wasn’t up to something.’

‘She took pleasure in my not knowing. Of that I’m certain. She was probably being diddled by every Juan, Pepe and Carlos on the block. It was another way of exerting her power. Christ knows, it was her idea to get married in the first place. She loved seeing me twisting on the end of the line.’

‘Schadenfreude,’
Rudi said quickly. I was impressed by his sudden insight, his verbal resourcefulness. Rudi had watched so much porn in his time that, over the years, he’d become almost fluent in German. Although, it has to be said, his vocabulary was fairly limited. And I hardly think he’d acquired this word from
Analnacht
or
Spermtroopers.

‘Spot on. She enjoyed my suffering—or rather, she allowed herself to enjoy it because she never believed in any rules of behaviour. I mean, why did she want to get married if she couldn’t make the necessary sacrifices, or play by the rules? Hold on—not the rules—the fucking
vows!’

I allowed the last word to resonate while feeling the concrete waders begin to exert their pressure on my chest. The truth was, I felt complicit in her abuse. I had lowered myself in making a union with her. Mandy had abused my good nature, my trust. I could comfort myself by imagining she knew she was worthless in comparison to me—a lesser human animal—and had sought to castigate me for choosing to be with her. Just like when a dog chases you if you’re stupid enough to show it fear. But it was cold comfort: I was to blame. I received a mug’s comeuppance. In this sense, I deserved all I got. I thought of all the fools undergoing the same treatment across London in that present moment; the goddess Hymen lynched and hanging from a tree in the garden. If only we could open the roof of every house and witness the pain of those marital bedrooms!

‘I was an attentive husband. Considerate. Patient. All the things you should be.’

‘That’s part of the problem. You were a wee doormat. I mean, maybe there were some things you couldn’t give her.’

‘Like what?’

‘Diamond rings. Rough sex.’

‘She didn’t want
any
kind of sex, let alone rough!’

Rudi was rubbing his temples. The melancholy crimson of the sky through the kitchen windows was the same colour as his shirt. He sighed, ‘There’s nae point obsessing over it. You have t’ move on. Believe it or not, I’ve got hassle of ma oon.’

I looked accusingly at his handsome, ladykiller’s brow, wondering what problems he could have that compared to my cyclone of disgust and regret.

‘Like what? The taxman?’

Rudi shifted evasively in his seat, then said: ‘Remember Suki? Well, that sleazy sugar daddy of hers is after me.’

‘What’s the worst that can happen? A broken nose? A scratch on your Hyundai?’

‘The bastard’s put a contract out on me. Two grand to maim me with a blunt instrument. Three if it’s a sexual injury.’

‘Like a crowbar to the tackle, that kind of thing?’

‘Exactly’

I cracked another beer and passed it to my old friend. ‘That’s pretty … full-on.’

‘Aye, to be honest, that’s half the reason I called round. I couldn’t kip on your floor tonight, could I? Only I’m …’ He couldn’t get the word out. His sense of masculinity, his legitimacy, was compromised by it.

‘Scared?’ I ventured.

‘… Shitein’ it. To go home, that is.’

‘Hey, nothing’s too much for an old buddy.’

We cheersed glasses with a hopeful chink.

‘Thanks,’ he said in a mealy-mouthed whisper, looking profoundly ashamed at my acceptance of his proposal.

I am back in my seat watching Robin topple his king. Predictable. The capitulation of men to the will of women. So widespread these days that it barely merits comment. They always have their way in the end.

‘That was quick,’ says Michelle to me, a smile widening her pale face.

‘I couldn’t bear it for long,’ I reply, aware of the humming ashtray stink emanating from my clothes after five minutes in the smoking car.

She gestures to her husband, ‘Robin’s seen sense and called it a day. You always want to play best of three if you lose, don’t you Robin?’

He doesn’t reply. Instead he snatches up his book and settles back in his seat. I decide to ask a question that has been much on my mind.

‘So, er, who takes care of all the practical things between you two? Only, we could never agree on anything when I was married.’

‘He does all the DIY, the heavy lifting and takes the rubbish out,’ Michelle explains. ‘But if any calling needs to be done, that falls to me. You can never understand a word he says on the phone. He mutters.’

‘Not so,’ mutters Robin, from behind the pages of his lad-lit paperback, which bears the unpromising title,
Salad? Chilli Sauce? Everything?

‘Only, I’m interested in how other couples operate. You know, where I went wrong and all that.’

‘I’m sure it wasn’t all your fault,’ says Michelle, with her deeply concerned therapy-face.

‘It’s always the man’s fault,’ sighs Robin, with good-humoured resignation.

I digest the dynamic between Robin and Michelle as I sit before them, the soporific beat of the rails beneath us. A gently confrontational remark like the one Michelle just uttered would have caused an incendiary scene between Mandy and myself. I suppose that’s how normal people do it—they
let things go.
It’s the only way. Otherwise the knives come out if the rubbish doesn’t go out, as they did many times for me. I observe them there, Michelle unpegging the travel chesspieces, Robin gurning over his knockers and kebabs yarn, and decide they have isolated an essential ingredient in the happiness recipe. To let things go. As young as they are, as simple and easily pleased, they are twenty times more sophisticated than me and Mandy ever were. Jesus, it was a wonder we could even feed ourselves. And Robin, for all his lairy deportment, his tepid soul, is twenty times the man that I am. He earns steady money, he puts up shelves, he slings the bins out without complaint. One day he will probably make a perfect father for Wayne or Robinetta. What good is existential angst and whining to any woman? Observing this happy couple, I think of myself, thirty years old, newly separated with divorce on the horizon, and know just how badly I blew it. I fucked up because I expected happiness to result from such meagre ingredients, such a paltry larder.