Byron Easy (60 page)

End, please
end,
I thought helplessly.

Delph’s voice cut in, suddenly loud, as he stood up in the posture of the jailer eager to return the prisoner to his cell. He could sense the game was up. ‘That’s enough now,’ he barked coldly ‘Get thee to bed.’

‘Sorry Mr Postlethwaite,’ I said quickly, my tears now pathetically obvious. And I was genuinely sorry for him. Sorry he’d been so generous with his time for a little heathen whose mouth, like young Oliver’s, would one day get him hung. ‘Thank you for a lovely evening. Maybe one day we can go fishing together.’

Like Hyperion to a satyr, Des and Delph. Ah, if only it were that simple. If only Delph were that glamorous, Des that noble. The fact was, my mother didn’t find a man such as my father useful after a while. It always boils down to utility value in the end. And what did women want, after all? Moses Herzog reckoned they all ate green salad and drank human blood. Ultimately, once the sexual obsession has worn off, they want security. So what went wrong if Des was more able to provide this? There lies the rub. Delph probably perceived his handicap atavistically. This was perhaps his Achilles heel. Unfortunately I was too young to pierce it with my arrows. The vain fool certainly tried to improve himself over the years, with pointless evening classes and failed forays into the air of higher culture. He must have been terrified of losing my mother when she discovered his only future was painting white lines on playing fields. So why
did
she choose a barbarous ram over Apollo? Perhaps it all boils down to excitement. My father could offer her financial security, a house on leafy Dovecote Lane, steadiness, exposure to classical music, chess. But he couldn’t offer her excitement. That was too much of a tall order. And Delph certainly came with a spurious promise of it, the sort guaranteed to lower a woman’s self-esteem in the end. He, after all, could offer gross physicality, height, disco dancing, unpredictability and a good slap if you crossed him. Maybe that’s the crux, the perverted truth, about human love. Delph was physically bigger than my father his hands, his shoulders and probably his cock. Ultimately, it seems what women want—what they will sacrifice a family for is heft. Bigness. They must need this male bigness in order to feel protected, or, logically, on the other side of the coin, threatened. In the animal kingdom, the female chooses her mate based on body-size and aggressiveness. The Alpha male. The leader of the pack. Someone to throw them around the bedroom, to protect their young. Physical power is unanswerable. Brute force, main force, will always triumph in the end. As the years plunged that agreeable evening of chat about fishing tackle further into the abyss of time, I thought about the relative sizes of my two surrogate fathers. If Des had discovered the truth of that brutal beating, would he have challenged Delph? (Because I wanted him to.) Was he big enough? Spiritually, I mean. If he had done, it would have served very little purpose. Every fact indicated that the bigger man, this posturing ignoramus who usurped a rightful father, would have given Des the pasting of his life. Those big-veined hands (calloused from grafting at the school, from working out with dumbbells kept behind our sofa) would have made mincemeat of Des s frail and balding scalp. He would, in Wall Street parlance, have out-dicked him.

So when it came time for my father to throw me out of his house, I knew he wasn’t up to the job. Physically, I mean. Though I had just turned sixteen, I was a good two inches taller than him. The flashpoint was my decision to leave school. What was the purpose, I thought, with the arrogance of youth, of continuing the academic grind when there was no one at the tiller to steer the ship? The October Saturday evening I announced this—the air still sickly soft with summer, the big trees slow to shed their load of leaves—I found myself surprised at the vehemence of his reaction. Sequestered in Lille for weeks at a time, oblivious to my life, or the tyranny of Delph, he suddenly seemed very concerned for my future. Though this manifested itself in a kind of cowed, distracted, spitting rage. Not for him the grand physical gesture; instead he crackled impotently in my bedroom as the maples lost their red leaves outside. At the time my hair was unfashionably very long, and this seemed to form the crux of his argument, the focus of his recoil.

‘You bloody shaggy-haired fool!’ he railed, shaking his fists like a pint-sized Popeye. ‘You’re a
fool,
that’s what you are! Thinking you can disappear to London and live off the state. Taxpayers like your mother and myself.’

‘Since when did you care so much?’ I countered, shaken by the strength of his scorn, his Richter-scale reading. ‘For the last ten years you’ve been getting on with your lives as if I didn’t exist, as if I was a burden.’

‘Get your hair cut!’

That morning I had been looking at photos of my younger self, gathered on the tatty yellow bedspread. There before me was the abortive camping trip to Cornwall with my mother and Delph. A snap of their car recalled the vicious argument they had chosen to have on the way, lasting two hundred miles. Another evoked the flummoxed tent, the two weeks of torrential rain, the dire fish and chips eaten from soggy newspaper every night. Each tableau held some kind of heavy pain. That morning I saw clearly how
in the way
I was, on those expedient holidays, to all concerned. I could perceive the strain in adult faces; everyone wanting to be somewhere else, with someone else. The final picture of my father, vexed parallels scoring his brow as he posed awkwardly on the steps of Dovecote Lane, me smiling over his shoulder, told only one story: kids are a life-sentence, and adults are really only killing time before the little buggers leave home. So why he reacted like he did when I announced I was jacking in school was mystifying. My father shook with rage as he informed me of the error of my ways: ‘You’ll come to nothing! You’re a loser! There are only winners and losers in this life, and you’re starting to fall into the latter category.’

I stood dumbstruck at this, the red and saffron maple leaves toiling in the strong wind outside. ‘I’m only doing what you’ve all wanted for a long time.’

‘And what’s that?’ he bellowed, finger and thumb massaging his temples like pincers.

‘To get out from under your feet.’

‘Don’t play the burning martyr with me!’

As the day darkened outside, as my father held forth savagely against youth, time, folly and Mick Jagger’s hair, I pondered the subject of winners and losers. I tried, in my jejune way, to see it from his point of view. The discarded cuckold, with all that heavy humiliation to bear, must have keenly felt what it was to fail. It was amazing that the plane that took him to France every fortnight didn’t ditch in the Channel under the weight of this heavy knowledge. Here was a man whose marriage had failed, who, from financial imperatives or his own desire, had no relationship with his only son, and who had been usurped by a man who thought Paris was the capital of Italy. What a loser! It must have felt like a medieval pressing to carry that axle-load around. This hissy fit he was having, as the unequalled beauty of autumn leaves gloried in their decay, was merely a momentary lifting of that tonnage. All his thwarted scorn for my mother, for Delph—for everything he found impossible to express or shoulder—was now working its way out in his righteous spasmodic rage. His self-hatred was awe-inspiring in its power to intimidate. Because Des had been true to his name—he had been way too easy with everybody. Unable to keep his wife in his own bed (or another man out of it) he had allowed the world to walk over him, like an Old Testament trampling. As if he had stood before the hordes exiting Egypt and invited them to use him as a carpet. And now he had had enough. I was certainly impressed by this unexpected assertiveness. I knew its value, its weight-shedding importance. But I had to let it run its course. Though he was shooting the messenger, I found myself overcome with emotion that I had provided such an outlet. It was necessary, to let him have his say one last time. It was also necessary to conceal my feelings of love, or to convert them into aggression, just as I knew he was doing as he staggered around the room castigating me without shame. We were male, after all. In the wake of Delph’s drubbing—his emasculation—of us both, it was good to finally learn this. I wondered how he would remember this moment, years down the line. Saying what you most want to say relieves you of a weight, but it also has the habit of coming back to crush you in later life. Moreover, the outcome he desired—my capitulation and return to school—was not going to happen. He had lost that battle already. Fatherly authority had for many years been passed, through the loving hands of my mother, to Delph. Des was no longer the parental oracle. In fact, neither was Delph. From then on, I was to be my own oracle, for better, for worse.

I heard him out, then pushed past him, ravenous for fresh air. I intended to stand in the golden kingdom of fallen autumn until the wind turned my hair white. I would run like an abandoned dog to the wide ‘O’ of the railway arch where I would sit down and cry.

‘Stuff it,’ my voice said in a strange treble. It sounded pipey and unbroken after my father’s fulminations.

The following morning, all the locks were changed on his house.

Let me tell you about the last times I saw my fathers. Yes, fathers, plural. I got rid of one and the other got rid of me. The wrong father, as it turned out, did the leaving. But what is youth for if not for fucking everything up in grand style?

A year after that autumn evening, my father called at my mother’s place. I had just turned seventeen. There was no particular errand that Des had to run—maybe he desired more of the punishment the cuckold secretly relishes, the saga of self-pity that it becomes legitimate to publicise once you become a rejected man. He would have seen the depressing hump of the caravan that Delph—still grimly married to my mother—had purchased so they could ‘get away at the weekends’. He would have observed the ‘his and hers’ tea mugs, the bookless shelves, the prissy banality of the home Delph had stolen from him. The ambrosial waft of high culture a world away. He would also have been aware of the rotten atmosphere, like an undetectable smell of bins, pervading everything. The odour of things rank and gross in nature had obviously risen to the surface. For months prior to this occasion, an escalating tension like the whistling of an unattended kettle on the hob had filled the house. Until a week ago I had been signing on, shuttling between my mum’s and my old man’s whenever he was absent in France (he had let me back in, conditional on searching for employment). Unwanted at both houses, I endured this situation as I was too cowardly to grab the rope and swing away. Despite my grand plans of a year ago, I still wasn’t in London. Instead, I was broiling in a stew of drugs and booze, vacillating as my middle-class friends flew their loving coops to university halls of residence, or (the working-class) started jobs that saw them owning powerful cars in a horrifically short time. I knew I was malingering, clinging to a domestic situation that I vaguely hoped would improve. But it didn’t improve. In fact, the shrieking kettle had become unbearable. A week before, I had blagged a job hulking crates at a garden centre, only to discover that Sinead wanted the vast majority of my insulting ‘pay’. I was informed that I was ‘in Delph’s way’, and I felt his cold choked animus on the back of my neck every time we crossed paths. A mass murder, or a coup at the very least, felt imminent.

The night of Des’s visit, I had been uncharacteristically delirious with joy. This was because my job had provided a solution to the whole problem. With work, I discovered, the world suddenly allowed you in, with time-honoured stupidity, to its exclusive club. The winners’ club. Regardless of whether you’re a junkie or a serial killer, the overweening powers-that-be react to the fact of one being in paid employment by opening their legs and begging for it. As many times a night as you want; no orifice a problem. To my amazement, a visit that morning to an estate agent had produced a breakthrough. They (the world, to whom membership is always subject-to-status) had allowed me to rent a small bedsit in Station Road for twenty-five pounds a week. Carumba. A month previously they had scooped me from their offices like a turd when I had admitted that I was on the dole. So my happiness, which knew no theoretical bounds, was intruded upon by Des. The knocker and moaner. The arch deflater of every plan or aspiration, threatening notions which illustrated to him just how safe he had played his life. Gore Vidal’s maxim about dying every time a friend succeeds was personified by my father that night. He seemed personally offended when told that I had got myself together and found a job and a flat.

‘What? You’re going to live on your own in a stinking bedsit?’ he guffawed. ‘That’s the outcome I always predicated for you.’

As he stood on the landing, I saw all the gloating charmlessness he could exhibit when he wanted to. Not as unattractive as Delph’s psychotic rages, but disappointing all the same. Hopefully, Des was feeling my withdrawal sharper than a serpent’s tooth in his buttocks. As he laughed I found it hard to share his sense of humour. Inscrutably, I watched him twitch at the foot of the stairs. My mother felt she should say something.

‘Well, that can’t be so bad for you.’ Her voice was conciliatory as she addressed my father. ‘You’ll have the place to yourself at weekends. No more funny people calling round day and night.’

By funny people she meant the dealers and weirdos who seemed to gravitate towards anyone with a bit of blow. I looked back and forth between my mother and father—the weary, subordinated woman, her dramatically black hair now seamed with grey; the chuckling old man, bald as a ballpoint. I couldn’t comprehend that they were my parents, that they had ever had anything to do with each other, let alone me. So this used to be a family, then, I thought—once upon a time when I was too young to remember. Did they envisage that this day would come? They were referring to me as if I were some sort of chattel to be disposed of. I broke my silence.

‘No thanks to you,’ I said to my old man, ‘I’ve sorted something out.’ My earlier euphoria had dissolved into anxiety and antipathy. Anxiety that he was right (and it’s hard to ignore the testimony of a father, no matter how distant they have made themselves), and antipathy towards his attitude, which seemed to view my future with a satiric smirk, or at least as a target for assassination. I felt alone, without help; scorned and burdensome, like the grandparent staggering through the first strange seas of Alzheimer’s. My sudden comprehension of my father’s emotional frailty was not present this time. I said, ‘You’ve got what you both wanted—me out of the way.’