Byron Easy (7 page)

‘I’ve been as depressed as the next man, I suppose,’ I lied, with refreshing simplicity.

And as the sentence left my desert-dry lips I felt two awful and conflicting things at once. The first was a galactic sense of enfolding warmth, like a heroin-surge; a blanket of childhood safety engulfing the nerves and bloodstream. Merely the interest from another human being, a stranger, an unconditional hand of heated care reaching out from the squalid sea of indifferent inscrutable faces one encounters on any given day in London, was enough to lift my spirits. How long had it been? How long since anyone had shown any curiosity over my suffering, into what had fucked up this Grand Old Man of Misery? How many aeons had it been since anyone had taken a look at my black-box recorder to see what had gone wrong, what had malfunctioned? Nobody had. At least not for a long time. Not my mother, nor Rudi, nor Antonia and Nick, nor the rest of my sleazily ambitious acquaintances. Not my increasingly malicious wife. No, certainly not
her
.

The second and simultaneous reaction went something like this: where to begin? Oh, where, where in the universe to begin? I know a lot of life-sentence depressives and, not to diminish their anguish—cold posterity will decide whether what they endured was worth the effort, was worth sticking it out to the bitter end for—nearly all of them have been through some form of counselling, of therapy. I never have. For the simple reason that I know what the root, the core, the cause of the malaise to be. The problem, unfortunately folks, is
me
. No traumas of hypnotism-induced total recall, no mornings spent baseball-batting chunky pillows in anger-catharsis classes, no costly hours dangling my feet from leather sofas and pouring out histories of incests and primal-woundings will ever resolve it, will ever clear the mess up, relieve the weight, the pure tonnage. Because
I
am the problem. The problem is me. In essence, my essence is to blame. That thing that crystallises hard into all you’ve got after the world ceases to be a horizon-wide playground of possibilities—one’s very
quiddity
—is the culprit. In the end,
I
have done all the damage.

And this is not unusual. It’s just that most depressives haven’t reconciled themselves to the fact. They’re still looking outside themselves for a cause, as if the contingent world really had an effect on the Self. Human beings are pervious to things, to the great shit-storm of occurrence that awaits them after the soft bay of childhood, in different ways. For instance, one individual’s mother could die and leave him or her with nothing much more than a sweet absence, a sentimental vulnerability to any talk of mothers and their passing away. But nothing that would prevent them from leading a productive, coherent life. On the other hand, for another individual, it could spell a life sentence of bereavement; of perpetual howling after the loved-one; of feeling the raw hole of loss in just about everything they ever attempt, as they hurl themselves through one destructive personal relationship after another, like those iron wrecking balls they use to bring down tower blocks. This was the case with
her
, as it happened. With her, the woman I married.

I filled in the form inaccurately and left. Dr Amir’s sapling-brown eyes would never understand. But the process of confession, of being probed in the very interior by such a simple sentence, had left me high; vulnerable as a peeled egg.

I gained the street and stood in the cornea-slicing sunlight. And then they came, the hot tears, like a sneeze, like a sudden, churning faultline split in the soul. I moved off among the indifferent faces; the rib-cracking weight on my chest doubled, if not almost trebled.

In case you’re wondering whether the train has moved or not, it hasn’t. Tracksuit Man is still sitting in his Santa hat, bellicose with booze. A third game of dominoes has just commenced before me. The tensed carriage is still putrid with the stink of pasties, whisky-breaths, wet cattle, hot leather, sweaty fabrics, migrainey perfumes and burps.

Think I’ll take a look outside.

Stationary, abandoned luggage-buggies crouch forlornly on the concourse. A smattering of leather-smocked desperadoes and tubercular grans are sucking whey-faced at last-minute cigarettes (how I long to join them!). A porter with his porter-hands clasped trimly behind his back like a beat-copper perambulates unsteadily, close to the crouched carriages, disguising his six lunchtime shots with a practised ease. Further off, where no people go, a ragged T-shirt caught in a bulging wire-mesh fence flaps madly on the whippet-quick wind. No blessing in that ungentle breeze.

Getting dark out there.

The blood-crimson ribbons of cloud seem to have been cowed, demoted somehow to the bottom of the sky’s three-tier colour hierarchy. Red, hospital-white, then boiling storm-blue; like a judgement hand unclosing over sewery, dogshitty London. A quick look around. Everyone seems glad to be getting out. Brightly relieved to be heading off, departing, travelling from station to station. Released from the cage of work or school, or penurious debasement, they all appear lighter than perhaps they would if one encountered them in the street or job uniform; as if they’d all been given an extra lung or a transfusion of new blood. See them smiling: exalted and helium-light. Getting out of the smoke. The dirty old town. Leaving Old Father Thames to receive its Christmas suicides, unobserved by the writhing directional hordes that batter its bridges by day.

Rattle-tattle-spattle.

The rain has picked up from nowhere, announcing itself like a spew of gravel against my smeary window. An hysterical rivulet of water in the corner of the frame, like a mad artery, pulsates and quivers—endlessly replenished. It must be time to go. I need to go. Every stasis-yellowed nerve in my body yearns for movement, extradition. I’ve never wanted anything more in my life. To convert the present quickly and painlessly into the past. To slide away amnesic, the chromium rails diminishing to nothing behind.

Go, go, go. Please—let’s get out of here.

I suppose I should tell you more about her. No. She can wait. She made
me
wait enough, over the three tarnished, nightmare-vivid years of our marriage. I must have clocked up a thousand man-hours in attendance for her. Not just the usual bum-numbing sojourn outside the women’s changing rooms in the alarmingly populous department store. Not just the nervy, tenterhooks evening by the phone wondering whether to ring around the hospitals and enquire about recent traffic accidents. Not just the pregnant millennium it always took her to decide on tea as opposed to coffee in the greasy spoon before quickly reversing her decision. But the season, the lifetime, the
fourth dimension
spent waiting for her to change. To reach her emotional first birthday. To grow out of her scarily psychotic temper tantrums. To stop taking everyone she encountered up and down in her emotional elevator. To cease being a habitual liar and truth-strangler. To take her first faltering, nappy-free steps on the road to having any insight into anything at all, anywhere. To stop being what psychologists amusingly call an ‘adult baby’. To learn how to
behave
.

There. I’ve already started telling you about her. She’s burst through what I originally intended to report and established herself centre stage, grossly unavoidable—forcing everyone, through sheer might of personality, to be somehow contingent upon her. She’s here now—not physically with me, of course, on this train of pain, but with me nonetheless. And even that’s in character: affrontingly omnipresent, she always got her own way. And she never did change.

Which all makes it sound like I hate her. That I despise and reject every wretched facet of her five-note emotional range. And I do. If I heard on whatever grimly whispered grapevine that my estranged wife had been murdered I would turn myself in at the nearest police station, convinced I was guilty on grounds of mere thought-transference. That she’d perished telekinetically, as it were. But all this doesn’t explain why, on a daily basis, for the past three months, as regular as the milkman, I have been poleaxed, soul-hindered, by the most innocuous of phenomena. A vintage VW outside the post office near my Kentish Town flat can cause untold internal disturbance. A tall jar of pimento olives in the supermarket as I make my grisly bachelor rounds is a morning-sabotaging obstacle. A cause of shrill physical pain and panic, like the moment of childhood drama when you realise you’ve let slip your mother’s hand in a crowd. The wife introduced me to olives. By the end of our three-year tenure I was an olive gourmet; an expert on shape, size, contour and colour in the multifarious universe of the olive. I was an honorary Spaniard, or, at the very least, an honorary Greek, since it was at the orange-tumbling all-night Cypriot grocers that we embarked on our odyssey of olives. I’m certain that their bitter, briny, delectable tang will eternally conjure the potent myths of her cooking; her mother-learnt spice-knowledge, pulse-knowledge, olive-knowledge. I am convinced that, at eighty, the insatiable saltiness of an olive (mostly green, sometimes black) will rein me back to our three varnished, vanished dream-vivid years of marriage; with all chronology lost—every day at once in photographic detail.

And that, I suppose, is a terrible thing. If a jar of olives in a shop can do this to me now, what damage is it going to exact in the future, when the raw edge of memory is submerged? When the soul waits for an object, a perfume, a snapshot to stir a scene from the past, like a focus-puller zooming a blurred frame into crisp, clarified profile.

I am powerless in the face of these impingements. And it’s not just olives, those madeleines with a stone at their centre.

Only the other morning, for instance, I was on the lower deck of the unfamiliar bus to the shop, i.e. to work (you thought I made money from writing? Are you mad?); un-breakfasted, separation-crippled, bloodstream ninety per cent cheap red wine from the previous night’s saturnalia, when I whooshed past the park where we used to walk the dogs. And I got it all, right between the eyes, all at once. A Nagasaki of recall, and of helpless insight into that recall.

O mister bus driver, if I knew you were going to do this to me, I surely would have walked …

We used to have two little dogs. Well, we fostered over the years what seemed like a vast zoo of animals great and small, but these two—two chihuahuas—were, how can I put it, lovers. Like humans, their love was initially courtly, then fantastically, detailedly carnal. And it’s these two satanic rodents I remember most potently. Their names were Concepcion and Fidellino, or Fidel for short. I had no choice in their naming, as I had no input into holiday destination, TV channel, emulsion colour, gas versus electric, white versus red as a choice for alcoholic imbibition, side-of-bed-to-sleep-on, variety of supermarket, or what to wear in any given weather. They had to be
her
names. They had to be Spanish names, too. Unsuitable, unpronounceable, unmemorable to even the most fastidiously tuned canine ear. No Rover or Growler for
her
.

Of course, they never came when you called them. She claimed it was in the nature of the breed to be disobedient, a fallacy she had gleaned from the cornucopia of dog books borrowed from the library during our preamble to buying a mutt (the furthest she read in the time I knew her). I, meanwhile, was convinced it was because they couldn’t understand what the hell you were yelling at them, their names lacking the single smart consonant necessary to catch a playing dog’s attention.

We acquired Concepcion first. I can still picture the sun-settled May afternoon we zipped through Shepherd’s Bush to collect her from a gay Chinese dentist who was, apparently, an eminent and respectable breeder of smooth-coat chihuahuas. A spring snowstorm of blossom was everywhere: on the streets and in the breeze, every shade of Japanese pink and cherry. We whisked illegally through the junctions’ plenteous ambers in whatever Sierra or banger she had at the time before she developed a profligate taste for sports cars and the slavering, stubbled mechanics who would later sell them to her. My hand-wringing disapprobation of the very idea of getting a dog, let alone ruining ourselves with a costly pedigree, had of course fallen on deaf, impatient little ears. It was all arranged, so I was told. I was merely along to restrain the vomiting, shitting, whinnying bastard on the return journey in the absence of a suitable travel-box.

I sat in the passenger seat in the choicely conifered Close, wearily watching privileged brats act out some urban drive-by fantasy on spankingly minted BMX bikes, while she vanished with great purpose through the dentist’s front door.

A last, dog-free fifteen minutes elapsed, during which I gloomily tried to convince myself that dogs only smell if they’re not
your own
dog. Then the car door opened.

And then I fell in love.

Into my unready hands was placed squirming, smooth-coated, hot-pawed Concepcion. The dinkiest, most beautiful rat-faced little yapper you ever saw in your life. The engine growled into throbbing anticipation of take-off and the car—me, the wife, and Concepcion cradled like a hot pie in the crook of my arm—yanked backwards in reverse.

If you can still love someone after they’ve puked and defecated on you (twice) then I reckon you can call it true love. Poor Concepcion. Her maiden voyage in a motorised vehicle certainly didn’t agree with her. After five, dumb-struck, trembling minutes cowering under my fatherly palm she looked at me, her pupils zigzagging wildly, with a kind of pleading abattoir-fear. Then she started to foam greenly at the mouth, the shakes coming at regular intervals, like the spasms of an exposure-victim. After this she remained still, as if contemplating (like a seasick drunk) whether she could make it to the toilet in time. Then it was all over. Pigeon-like retching was followed by massive fumbling for the kitchen towel we had presciently taken along.

As her most recent meal dried sadly and wetly on my newly laundered lap (just not slick enough on the draw with the old kitchen towel), a rank, excretal honk, an ordural cloud, began to fill the car, requiring swift window-windings on both sides. By this time even the driver had begun to have serious reservations about dog-ownership. A few nippy corners, and another whimpering voidance later, and we were home; me staggering with guano-spattered flanks passenger-side, the wife aborting the driver’s seat, all five senses fairly blotted out by the pungent flavour of cacation.