Byron Easy (12 page)

With this shocking statement jangling in my ears like a fire alarm, I accompanied Steve to the lair-like opening of his pauperised room. Suddenly he turned. I saw at once how evolution had beautifully developed the short man to give him the optimum height and range for delivering a headbutt.

‘Don’t get me wrong,’ said Steve, as I ingested, with the torrent of his breath, what amounted to a virtual
short
, a whisky chaser. ‘I like you, Ron. I’m a good judge of a geezer’s character. But I’ve become very—how shall we say—protective of Mandy over the last few months. She’s a sweet girl. Sweet girl.’

‘You’re not wrong there, Steve,’ I said, as neutrally as my temple-throbbing fear would allow.

‘A lot of people like her a lot. A great many chase after her. Fuck—’ And he nudged me with the freckled haunch of pork that was his right arm. ‘Sometimes it seems like half of north London is trying to get into her knickers. Know what I mean?’

He was smiling now, his very blue, very drunk eyes flecked with light. But still he seemed to be occupying the entire corridor, his bulked obduracy like an invitation to do or say the wrong thing; his leer full of pre-emptory menace.

‘Last week she got alcohol poisoning. Spent the whole day in bed, me bringing her little soups and things—her chocolates of choice. That’s what friends are for, ain’t it, Ron?’

‘She speaks very highly of you, Steve,’ I said, with an increasingly strangulated cadence as I reached his name. He clapped me on the shoulders, abruptly and without warning. I jumped, and realised that I had been expecting his forehead to be the first part of his anatomy to make contact with mine.

‘You do right by her, mate, and you do right by me, ’kay?’

‘Okay.’

‘Take good care of her. She’s a fucking diamond.’ I turned to go but a blood-curdling shout stopped me dead: ‘Oi!’

This is where it gets nasty, I thought. This is where I start a long and unhappy intimacy with X-rays and hospital radio. When I turned around, Steve wasn’t even looking at me. He was fixated on the floor with full sadness, as if he had been trepanned by some terrible insight into life’s futility, or merely alcoholically winded. There was a long edgy silence. He left such a lengthy pause after his barked imperative that I assumed the sad piss-artist had forgotten what he wanted to say. Then his aqua eyes found mine.

‘I haven’t finished speaking yet.’

‘Sorry, I thought—’

‘Shut it,’ said Steve; though now in a ridiculously high and gentle voice.

‘Was there something you wanted me to lift?’

‘Nah, nah, nah.’ Then he paused. ‘Ron?’

‘Yes, Steve?’

‘Do you want to listen to my new CD? I bought it today. It’s fucking amazing.’

So, there was nothing for it but to listen to Steve’s Fucking Amazing heavy-metal CD at window-splintering volume, while Mandy, alone upstairs, was probably wondering if I’d gone home—or maybe even died. Eventually I escaped, my jaw aching after having to feign an appreciative smile for so many stomach-convulsing minutes. I re-entered her room, like a haggard veteran of Korea, Vietnam and at least two Pacific campaigns.

But her room was in darkness. Groping my way for the light switch, I softly eased her door to; trying to conceal, with gulps of alcohol-free air, my bilious rage. A vivifying smell of fresh paint started to make my head spin. I found the switch. Then I saw that the big room was empty. About to leave and search for her downstairs, I heard a voice.

‘I’m here.’

I squinted into the distant corner that contained the low, flat play-pen of her futon. There was a person-shaped bulge under a colourful Latina bedspread, at the end of which were Mandy’s pyjama-shrouded shoulders and serene face; her eyes intently closed. Without opening them, she said, ‘You can get in if you want. It’s cold with the windows up.’

I needed—in the phrase so beloved of cheap (usually British) pornography—no further encouragement.

‘Tickets please!’

Ugh. The whoosh of the smoked-glass door announces the stout inspector. He cranes over the huddled passengers in his brisk, speechless interrogation. The cord of the past is broken. I must engage with the present. Oh, Mandy! How sweet a proposition you seemed before you disgraced the ring you wore.

Still pissed, I fumble for the documents as the inspector approaches. The man seems to have been born in his nasty navy British Rail suit. I sometimes wonder about the wearers of uniforms, or rather, about the identities beneath the uniforms. How do these individuals appear so happy to be housed in the pressed serge, the crisp white collars? How do they contentedly button themselves up virtually every day of their lives? These actors, these dissemblers! I would feel as if I were wearing a giant conspicuous clown outfit. The man bends over the adjacent seat, though manages to keep me in the corner of his eye for the duration of his brisk ritual. How do officials of all types manage this feat? And why do I always feel a surge of guilt and sickness in the moments before my ticket is scanned? A memory of childhood transgression, of authority evasion? No, I only ever skanked the fare twice when I was sixteen, and on both occasions I felt calmer than I do now. It must be the deep sense that I am not entitled to share the carriage with my fellow passengers, my fellow homo sapiens. That they have more right to this warm seat than I. Or maybe it’s consciousness-guilt; a fear that every straight-talking, straight-backed citizen can read my corroded thoughts, and is scandalised by their perversity, their lack of engagement with the present. A panic descends on me, an intimation that everyone in the vicinity has been sharing that breeze-fragrant June night I spent with Mandy.

The inspector takes my ticket from its wallet, a wary look on his fringed face. He scrutinises it for a long moment. I feel all the tension of the double agent at the border crossing. Then he hands it back with an intimate waft of some hideous scent. What is it about Christmas and bad scent? Surely there’s enough opportunity to wear it after the twenty-fifth. Aniseed? Bad lemons? I hold my breath for a full ten seconds, then let out a grateful sigh.

Outside, I can see the dripping hedgerows of deep midwinter under vapour-heavy air. A ploughed field, brown as a chocolate cake, tears past. In it stand pylons, like cowboys on the draw, huge and distinct in the rolling dusk. Above them the sky seems drained of light, of the very property itself; dismal, defeated. Heavy with last days, last things. In the near distance the soil is a weltering sponge, at capacity. Soaked, bogged, downpour-logged, exuding steamy emanations at the very deadest hour of the year.

The very antithesis of that night in June, in fact. The following morning I awoke to sunshine exploding in fierce pellucid patterns on her orange walls. That big room: even more surprising in daylight. The surly weight of three tomcats, curled upon the radiator of my chest, heaved up and down with my breathing. I was aware that the slightest movement might tip me from the hard mattress into the narrow gap between the bedframe and the skirting board, as Mandy was occupying ninety-five per cent of the space, arms splayed like a starfish. Cramped and confined as I was, I enjoyed the slow, man-of-the-world, you-old-devil crinkly smile that always appears on one’s face after ratcheting up another conquest.

Except that I hadn’t ratcheted up anything.

We had spent the whole night talking, interrupted only by hysterical police sirens on the Holloway Road below. When the blackness framed in the big sash windows had begun to alter imperceptibly into the rich holy-blue of dawn, she had produced tarot cards. The Death card had made repeated appearances in my readings, but she assured me it only signified change. Smart girl. Lately I had been doing much thinking on what constituted intelligence. Mandy, with her direct soft brown eyes certainly seemed to sparkle, but she didn’t have what you could call any formal learning. She was quick, adaptable, resourceful, practical. She knew how to get by in certain company But the autodidact is always aware of knowledge as a commodity. How much have you got? How much did it cost to obtain? Put Mandy in a discussion on, say, existentialism, or ask her who Clement Attlee was and she would be at sea. She may try to bluff it with her substantial charm, but that’s no substitute for knowing what people are talking about. In many ways her candour provided her legitimacy. In a similar fashion, Martin got through life with only the knowledge of electronics and the family trees of rock bands. But did this make him unintelligent? It was, at that time, a hard quality for me to gauge. It had nothing to do with Mensa or heavy-reading. It had more to do with how knowledge impacted on the psyche. My conclusion was, the more you knew, the more complicated it was to act. When thinking about the future, the questioning mind hits the wall of determinism versus free will before anything else. To the unquestioning mind, everything is
que sera
. For Mandy, everything about her future was graspable, readable. Everything about her past mental instability regrettable but unavoidable. As she shuffled the deck and then merged the two bricks of cards with an expert thrum, I could see lines of strain on her thorax; visible stress from the effort of independence, from being motherless. I could see she wanted us to merge somehow, but not on a deeper level. She was sizing me up. Her brashness concealed a core of people-fear. She certainly didn’t have any notions of taking her clothes off. Although at one point I suggested we formulate a game of strip tarot, an idea that was deliciously refused as I gazed into the liquidity of her Catalan eyes.

I later learnt that most of Mandy’s friends, male and female, had received the talking-and-tarot-card treatment. With the men, it was her way of neutralising them, of allowing intimacy only up to an invisible, heavily armed perimeter fence. This accounted for her considerable reputation as a cock-tease among the aviator-shaded predators of London’s club scene; and as sexually strange among the women.

The smell of yeasty cooking from the bakery below and the summer pollen breezing through the big windows gave me the impetus to make a quick exit. I left as rapidly as I could; unshaven, wine-tongued, with outpatient hair, onto the hot tarmac of the Holloway Road. As I made a list of objects I’d accidentally left behind in my haste to leave (and my even greater haste not to encounter Steve on his way to whatever chimp-house of a building site he worked on), guilt, confusion, and shabby regret vied for prominence in the polluted traffic of my emotional bloodstream. What was I doing in this woman’s bed all night when I had Bea to soothe my mortal brow? I counted four things missing: wrist-watch, diary, jacket and cigarette lighter.

Later, I would add sanity

I should say something here about girls whom everyone wants, girls who are an index of male desire, of the metropolitan erection. Not the sheer-silk sirens of Berkeley Square (too costly) or the bosomy, broad-bummed secretaries that buckle whole offices while bending over the photocopier (too easily identifiable in the porn-hoard of most men’s sock drawers) but the unknown quantities, the streamlined brunettes in Avengers’ boots one sees queueing for clubs, usually with
two
male companions. The shadowy epicentres of temptation one catches lighting up murky parties with a flashbulb of heartbreakingly sexy teeth. The glowing Amazons one suicidally notes on the tube-seat opposite, off to liaisons with men far richer, funnier and taller than you’ll ever be.
Those
girls. West End girls. Girls fully occupied with their own fantastic desirability under the big, randy Saturday night of their early twenties.

Mandy was one of those girls: brisk, knowing, and just scratching the surface, just beginning to digest
how
much power her looks could exert over the helpless male world. The democratising effect of her looks was a great leveller. It precipitated wood in every male from seventeen to seventy. She had a face that held many hours of love and admiration from total strangers. Sometimes, one observes a man’s face (the scowling rough-sleeper, for example) and concludes the only person who ever loved him was, in all reality, his mother. And that love was proffered in the distant past, before his three consecutive prison terms and a prostration before hard spirits. In the same way one looks at the faces of plain girls and is forced to surmise that nobody has ever fantasised over them; one notices the tremendous absence of sexual investment. But not Mandy. She was, at that time, literally
everyone’s
. The male gaze, for Mandy, acted like an expensive moisturiser: nourishing, empowering. Ah, the difference between women … And doesn’t the beauty know it; know exactly what she’s got. And doesn’t the size-sixteen on her exercise bike with her square, ruddy knees know exactly what she lacks.

I remember during our last holiday together, a week in Cephalonia punctuated by terrible arguments in the hot cell of the hotel room, noting something about Mandy that had always been innate. She shared, with supermodels and the big cats, a certain physical nobility; a grace or astuteness of movement. To the hotel owner’s swarthy teenage son this merely resulted in his glueing his eyes to her arse for a week, or practising showy dives whenever we were in the vicinity. But I, fool that I was, had to locate the centre of her erotic fascination mentally. I was compelled to intellectualise her lines, almost from afar, as if she were an exhibit. Paradoxically, I noticed this phenomenon most acutely when she was covered up. When she wrapped the startling orange sarong around her hips, with an intent concentration on the knot. When she swayed along the holiday street in an ankle-length denim coat, the greedy eyes from the gift-shops guzzling her down. Or when her devilish black hair swung like dual pendulums over her high and happy breasts. It wasn’t just the cliché that concealment is more exciting than exposure. It was more to do with ownership. As her husband, I was supposed to own, or have exclusive access to, all this. This is what got me going: the impossibility of possessing something one should already possess. On our final evening, by the pool with the teenager doing furious lengths of front crawl, with the parsley smell of shish kebabs in the air, I remember telling her she was, ‘at the height of her beauty’. And for once it wasn’t a phrase I’d acquisitioned from film or literature. She really was a glowing Venus to my timeserving Vulcan. It might have been the last sincere sentiment I expressed to her, there on that barbecued veranda, as every filament of her ebony hair absorbed the ambers of the tragic, setting, ocean-bound sun.