Byron Easy (52 page)

The
coup de grace
came during a bust-up over her first planned holiday to Italy with the newly reconciled Antonia. I couldn’t believe she had the funds for another trip after Greece, but one of anything was never enough for Mandy. That evening, our customary row had been going round in tedious circles for an hour: me imploring her to travel when she could afford it, her telling me to stay out of her ‘private life’, when she suddenly rose from the sofa with Amazonian purpose and punched me hard in the mouth. I felt a sharp pain, like a razor cut, then saw a gout of blood dollop onto the carpet. My errant incisor, the one that had prevented me pronouncing many Spanish words over the previous years, had gone clean through my lower lip.

As I sat in a green cubicle at Accident and Emergency getting stitched up, I reflected on how Mandy had performed the same action on me. Private life? It seemed like an oxymoron at the time, but Mandy the moron could not see this. A married couple, I lectured her, were a publicly and legally recognised social unit. To do anything in ‘private’ (especially something sexual, and it was this that I was afraid of when Mandy was in Italy) equalled adultery. After her attack, I resolved to allow her to pursue this illegitimate ‘private life’ and not give a damn. But I was suffering, all the same. Something obdurate on the interior wanted to have a loyal wife, even a crazy one—or no wife at all.

I still have the scar from that punch. It hurts sometimes to drink anything too hot or too cold. More poignantly, I still have the tan, in both senses of the word, from that week in Cephalonia. It smarts more as time progresses—nowadays I can’t get through twenty-four hours without crying. It also strikes me (as the train sighs regretfully to another stop), with the guilt and shame of the puritan who has succumbed to the dissolute life, that I wasn’t drinking back then. What a fall from grace I have undergone since! A vision of a particular morning a couple of weeks back confronts me, seizing up the ventricles. This, surely, was rock bottom.

I had been up all night at Rudi’s, downing gallons of red wine and vacuuming up the copious charlie that was always magically replenished on his coffee table. A villainous chaos of dice and drinking. We had talked, we had broken bread, we had gone through the whole tedious saga of my marriage one more time. By nine in the morning I was back at the Heartbreak Hotel, still flying at thirty-five thousand feet, with that keen, invincible, garrulous sensation one has after a night on the Posh. I remember somnambulantly divesting myself of my clothes and sliding into the paltry bedding, first making sure I left the curtains open, as I had to be at Rock On for ten-thirty. An hour’s sleep should suffice, I thought, as I caught sight of the big chestnut tree out back strafed in December light. Its trembling branches were bare as wires; its leaves now a dead mulch of browns and greys at its feet. The metallic sky allowed brief visitant flushes of sunlight through, momentarily turning the tree silver. I must have sat for a while watching this sublime sight, naked, my knees up under my chin against the cold. A million ideas and connections prevented me from sleep, my nose dripping coke-filled tears onto my borrowed bedspread. Downstairs I heard the two croupiers letting themselves in from a hard night at the casino. There was the sound of the kettle going on, jangling keys, stentorian coughing. Then something forgotten occurred—a lost interregnum. Time change. Something must have happened in this interim, because when I next looked at my watch it was eleven in the morning and I was locked in the TV room at the front of the house, my trousers around my ankles. In front of me was a wrap of charlie that Rudi had evidently slipped into my jacket pocket for luck. The fact that it contained only a few crumbs of white powder told me that I had been at it for a while. The fact that my limbs fizzed and ached with a directionless erotic energy also vouched for the fact that I hadn’t just been drinking coffee in preparation for a hard day’s work.

Worse than this, on the silent screen before me, three satyr-buttocked Germans were humping the same woman in the usual orifices. She appeared to be in considerable pain, but, with the sound turned down, it was hard to tell. Her face was contorted into a rigor mortis grimace, her teeth slightly blurred by the bad quality of the video. Yes, this video was the other item Rudi shoved into my pocket as I tripped from his front porch into the weird light of dawn. With what implacable force were these Jerries going for it! It was hard to countenance that this ridiculous involuntary movement of the hips had brought us all into being. The endlessly involving sight of other people screwing, all tenderness absent, just the animal seeking pleasure and satisfaction from its fellow animal. It held me spellbound. How simultaneously familiar and alien were her beseeching hand gestures and intimate contortions. Did all women look like this while making the beast with two (or in this case, four) backs? And the male of the species? Did we all use such uncontrollable violence, such main force? Obviously, in more ways than one, these humping Huns were not as other men. Not every bloke is possessed of a schlong that would win first rosette in a village Prize Marrow Competition. But I guess we must all resemble them in some intrinsic way. I tried to recall, with averted eyes, the last time … It must have been the night with Haidee, her whispering French nothings into my ear, me inexplicably guilty that Mandy would find out, even though she had dumped me the previous week. Those old, uxorious habits die hard. No, we had not resembled these Teutonic porno fiends with their greedy needs, their furious faces. That night—our one and only night after the shipwreck of my separation—Haidee had sweetly cut the lights and lowered her strawberry-spotted underwear before climbing into bed. There was a degree of awkwardness, which I found surprising, having just turned thirty. There was also something strange and thrilling about a new intimacy, the unlearnt language of her flesh, the shaky esperanto of the somatic dance. There was certainly no gymnastic ramming, no brutal wheelbarrowing around my tiny room. Maybe she would have liked or expected this, I didn’t ask. No, it wasn’t one of those nights when you can reflect, after the twenty-sixth position, that you’re no longer in it for the sex—more as a researcher for the
Guinness Book of Records.

Afterwards, she brushed a swipe of hair over my balding crown and murmured,
‘A demain’
a fine valedictory phrase from a lover. The moment resembled a French film whose lithe heroine spends most of the time unclothed behind pale, jaundiced blinds. I almost expected to see a subtitle to appear on my misted window. Then, when it was finally morning, I awoke with a start to find her watching me, her head on one side, an intent childish look on her face, like a toddler mesmerised by a flame. An unseasonal glow of sunshine illuminated the peeling walls. Her clustered curls fanned the pillows like golden coins. She smiled at me, baring perfect orthodonture, small and heartbreakingly white. And I, in turn, smiled at her, thinking: there lies the thing I love, with all her errors and her charms; her Gallic vivaciousness, her endearing bronchial cough the result of too many Marlboro Reds. Ah, she could have saved me but she chose not to! With this vision before my eyes I slipped into unconsciousness. When I jolted awake again at midday, she had gone.

I switched off the sweating Germans and pulled my trousers up my tingling legs. I had supp’d full with squalor. Feeling like a cliché—the dumped husband who turns to the bottle—or drugs—I buckled my belt and noticed the white seam of the scar on my left thumb where, years ago, helping my father to chop wood, I had almost amputated my hand. Arrested there, I could see it all vividly before me: the whipping winter wind; my dad furious that his glasses had been knocked off (why so angry? Because he had been momentarily rendered myopic?); the swaying of the red-hot pokers in the back yard. I remembered the moment I forgot his careful instructions; my panic, my eager desire to please him; that strange need for approbation that all sons feel in the presence of their fathers. The next instant: a shocking gash, with its revealed knob of bone, the quick bloom of blood.

Feeling stirred and hot around the neck, I slumped down again on the tissue-strewn cushions. The glass of water that held the wrap—which I had been soaking to extract the last dregs of coke—looked suddenly nauseating, undrinkable. My jaw ached from two hours of grinding my teeth. Outside, an ice-cream van miles away played ‘The Camptown Races’, curdling with the austere sound of the viola from next door. Then nothing. The viola was gone, but I still heard its maudlin vibrations. Unheard music … It had been ten years since I spoke to my father, ten bewildering winters. I wondered what he would make of this scene, this debauch, if he could witness it: his only son watching porn, coked off his face at eleven in the morning, recently separated from the wife he never met. A vortex of dissipation. I pictured the look of censure from his hooded eyes, the finger and thumb of his right hand massaging his temples in vexation. I imagined he would conclude that this was ‘always where I was destined to end up’: a bad end in a freezing north London rooming house. Hard as it was, I attempted to see it from his point of view. I also tried desperately to visualise him, after his years down under, with anorexic Emmanuelle at his side, tending the barbie on the beach for his new family. Maybe his skin would be a rich leathery brown; the remainder of his hair grey, alpine white even. Possibly he was even shorter, with that curious shrinking that accompanies age, despite the expansion of paunch and jowl. Quite probably he hadn’t shifted in his inflexible views. Despite this I realised that, for what seemed like the first time in ten years, I missed him. Other people had fathers, why didn’t I? We both knew where to find each other, so why hadn’t we?

There is something about cocaine that makes one contemplate communicating with people one really knows better than to communicate with. Something about the gregarious intensity of one’s own perceived wonderfulness forces phone calls or letters that should remain strictly unventured. At that moment I felt an uncontrollable desire to get in touch with my old man. I seized my notebook and began scribbling, in an illegible hand, words that I once heard at the start of a record:
Dear Dad, things didn’t turn out quite like I wanted them to …
But I was too wired to continue. An impenetrable scrawl would only make him despise me more, if despise me he did, though I wasn’t so sure of that. The feelings weren’t so grand and classical between us as to accommodate hate. Instead, there was banal evidence of indifference … No, a phone call would be better, while I still felt up to it, while I still felt confident enough to confront him. I remembered my mother had given me his Australian number years ago. Unlocking the door to the television room and barging back into my lair, I began ransacking my old diaries and address books. The chestnut tree in the back garden looked strangely surreal. It was full of magpies, full of light. Alone in the cuboid space, the loquacious sparrows expressive in the gutters, the deep smell of the damp garden intensifying the beiges and muted ochres of the walls, I finally located the number on a yellowing strip of Rizla and descended downstairs to the communal phone, first listening on the landing for a moment to check the coast was clear. Sitting at the rickety phone table, the number quivering in my hand, I began to dial, a giddy recklessness inside me. It felt like the kamikaze moment before coming face to face with a blind date, the heart full of a Dutch courage that it knows it cannot sustain. Far away, on the other side of the world, a world where the water disappears in a different direction down the plughole, I heard a ringing.

Then the door to the kitchen was shoved open. Standing there was the elder of the two croupiers, looking haggard, unshaven. He said,

‘Shit, Byron, aren’t you at work? Martin’s been ringing the phone off the hook all morning wondering where on earth you’d got to.’

A voice on the other end of the line—the other end of the world—was now saying in a heavily French-accented trill, ‘Allo? Allo?’ Emmanuelle. My father’s wife. His second wife. It was the first time I had heard her voice.

I put the receiver down. I had completely forgotten about work. Sliding the piece of Rizla into my pocket, I thought: Goodbye, Old Man—it was never meant to be.

‘Did he sound angry?’ I said quickly, hoping nobody had blundered into the television room and discovered the troglodytic scene. I swallowed hard to prevent the gnashing of my teeth.

The croupier laughed with a horrible knowingness: ‘No, but I’d be surprised if you still had a job.’ Leaving the room, he added, ‘By the way—did you know you’ve got a nosebleed?’

Not surprisingly, Martin had been less than elated that morning, waiting, as he was, to hop out and visit his missus in hospital after a gallstone operation. I remember the walk to the shop, through strange insidious-looking trees and jarring perspectives. Even the rubbish piled up on the Camden Road made me paranoid. Being wired to the eyeballs indoors is a different experience to dealing with the great swarming, super-real population of London. I was aware that I was grinding my jaw and giving quick shakes of my head, like a chaffinch taking nuts from a bird table. I was vaguely conscious of an all-encompassing inability to do anything competently. Crossing the road was fraught with danger and something approaching inexplicable despair. My lungs felt as if they were cased in lead, so heavy was my descent, my come-down anguish. By the time I made it to Royal College Street and the lacerated frontage of Rock On, I felt as if I were losing my soul. However, once I had been there for five minutes, and had put up with Martin’s ostentatious frostiness (he found it impossible to lose his temper), I quickly sensed his attitude change. He looked me square in the face and went off to fix me the strongest cup of coffee ever made. This he followed by producing a litre bottle of water from the fridge and insisting I drink it if I ever wanted to work at Rock On again. As he monitored me in this task, despite his brisk annoyance, I was aware of a generosity behind his gestures. His hand went back to scratch his grizzled ponytail as he watched me there in the empty shop, drinking like a man who’d staggered halfway across the Sahara. He had seen enough casualties in his time to know that I was fucked; done-for; off-my-tits; a stretcher-case. If he hadn’t had to go and rattle his wife’s stones in the pewter dish, I’m sure he would have stayed to talk it all over—man to so-called man.