Byron Easy (61 page)

My mother wailed pitifully, ‘None of us can help the things life has done to us, Brian!’

‘Don’t call me Brian!’ I snapped back.

My father was still laughing.

‘And—and, this job,’ he sneered. ‘Shifting crates for a bloody horticulturalist—is that the best you can come up with?’

‘It’s better than nothing, Des,’ said my mother, her pale eyes showing the first signs of tears.

I remained silent at this. My heart-sore vulnerability had hardened to something nastier. Here was this man, my own father, laughing in my face at my humble station in life; flagrant, full of self-pity and scorn, insane with self-righteousness, with no other solution than to turn my struggles into some sort of charade that he found amusing.
I
was an outcome that he found offensive to even look at. He was pissing his pants. Presume not that I am the thing I was!

‘You’re a loser,’ he laughed.

‘Maybe so,’ I said, fixated on his hooded eyes, trying to read subsidiary emotions beside that of anger. I felt all my violence, Delph’s violence, well up inside me like a shamefully powerful infusion.

‘It’s not that bad a job,’ said my mother.

I went to barge past him, but he restrained me. The only other components in his shrouded eyes were surprise and fear.

‘Just you try it,’ he threatened, impotently.

In a firm voice, I said: ‘Hurry up and die,’ and pushed his head out of the way with the flat of my palm.

Seconds later I was in the street, the night fresh as the inside of a fridge, the stars puncturing the firmament in a blaze of diamonds.

And that was the last time I saw one of my fathers.

The last time I saw my other father, the big-veined oracle, wasn’t as dramatic, but just as shameful. An autumn evening. I had just stepped out of my Station Road bedsit to check on my laundry as it made its mournful turns in the blackened doorless cabin across the street, when a big car shot past, stopped, then reversed up to where I was standing.

The passenger-side window wound down, and there was Delph Tongue. I hadn’t seen him for a year. Occasionally I would visit my mum, and see the caravan, that symbol of dull marital togetherness, parked stolidly in the drive—but my stepfather had been mercifully absent from the vicinity every time.

‘Thou s out late,’ said Delph through a big-lipped sneer. He had aged too, like the rest of us, the skin tighter below the eyes, sprigs of grey at the temples. He still had those high convex cheekbones and eyes like two dark currants stuck in the head of a gingerbread man. And still that dynamic charmlessness, the machine-like energy of the eloper or
cavalier servente.

It was an awkward moment. We had always hated the very sight of each other.

‘Just checking on my laundry,’ I muttered, as if this was knowledge he was already aware of and I was updating him.

‘Aye, it’s not much fun with no machine of your own,’ he ventured tritely.

The man in the car, this Belial from past, this kerb-crawler, was suddenly a stranger to me. Here was a presence who had dominated my life for almost two decades, and yet there we were, like shits that pass in the night. His was just another car heading home, or away from home. I looked around at the puddled neons of the road, the evening traffic ferociously pushing through, the commuters walking wearily back to their soap operas of debt and failed marriage. Certain women, dressed in shell-suits, who I knew to be prostitutes, pulled up their leg-warmers impatiently as they loitered on the corner.

‘No, I suppose you’re right,’ I said, bowing, as ever, to his supremacy.

‘Your mother says thou hasn’t called for a month. I think she deserves more, don’t you?’

I didn’t answer this. I could tell he was aggrieved at the loss of his authority. For years that kind of comment would set off a churning sea of bile. I merely shrugged. He had lost his mark.

‘Where you off to?’ I asked, not interested. I knew that his marriage to my mother was practically over. It existed in all but name, within the antiseptic walls of their house. I hoped secretly that he was leaving town for good and that his boot was stuffed full of his meagre possessions, the unread gilt-tooled books, the statue of Rodin’s lovers.

‘To ’t dump,’ he said in his bludgeoning Yorkshire tones, his equivocal smirk still registering with me as a sneer.

There was nowhere else for the conversation to go but its grave.

‘Okay, then,’ I said, as I saw him put the car into first gear, ready for the off. I observed his hands and tried to comprehend that they were the hands that had once hit me, sexually interfered with me. But this knowledge did me no good. It enlightened me no further, gave no answers to the mysteries of consciousness, morality or our eventual destination. Without thinking, I said: ‘Take care.’

As soon as the words left my lips I knew he had me. He would pounce without mercy. The strong desire to love this
de facto
father was never far from the surface. And Delph knew it. I had said something generous and he would have to rebut it, trample on it, piss on it.

‘Sod off,’ he snarled, his lips curling into a leer, a look of all-encompassing derision on his horrible face. That look, that disyllable retort of maximum animadversion, was an apt peroration to the whole sorry affair.

Then he wound up the window and drove off into the night.

The layer of fumes in the smoking carriage judders slightly as the train pulls away. Like a gust of cannon smoke after the firing of ordnance. Amazing that a body of chemical emission can behave as one, in concert or unison. I take a last drag and watch the carriage expel itself from Wakefield station. Glad to be gone. Wouldn’t you, delicate reader, be glad to be gone from this region of endless cold and everlasting night? From the soiling admissions of the last twenty pages?

Of course it wasn’t Delph in the train seat earlier. Just someone who looked like him. His doppelganger. I had hallucinated Delph, just as I had hallucinated Bea in the Missolonghi caves. The man I asked for a cigarette was an ice-hockey player from Wombwell. He informed me, for ten eye-searing minutes, of all the fun a young man can get up to when on tour with a sporting team. His high Germanic cheekbones jutting out, almost into the aisle it seemed, like the very image of my stepfather. But it wasn’t him. Ten minutes? It felt like more, somehow.

On unsturdy legs, longing for a drink, I wend my way back to carriage B. Despite the strong probability that I would have swung for him, had the hockey player indeed turned out to be Delph, the one burning question on my lips had been a curious one. Who was that mystery woman in Wakefield that night after the wedding reception? I never did find out. Somehow this fact had multiplied in importance over the years—it felt like the lost piece of a jigsaw. Was Delph being unfaithful to my mum at the same time as she was being unfaithful to my father? This was important to know. For a long time, the only comfort, the one redeeming feature of the whole saga had been the notion that at least, out of all the destruction, true love had triumphed over the suburban oblivion of a dead marriage. But was the adulterer, in turn, cheated on? Was this shady woman some fancy piece that Delph had locked away in the rainy wastes of Yorkshire? As I stumble through the hissing vents of the train, the outskirts of Wakefield rocket past, just as they did that night twenty years before. I can recall the chained collieries, sunken in darkness, some flattened by bulldozers, the old wool mills, the clinging estates, the moon like an eye at the end of the street. That song … But, in the distance, all I can see is a coral reef of amber streetlamps under a fog of drizzle. The year starting its long recuperation from its darkest night: the dreadful equinox of the twenty-second of December.

I reach my seat and nod to Robin, who seems startled that I’m still alive.

‘Only been for a fag,’ I say, buoyantly. But his response is a dismissive snarl. I feel suddenly full of chronic nausea and weariness. His sneer of non-acknowledgement recalls Delph’s last look from his car window. I had intended to open my notebook and write up my North Yorkshire odyssey. But now I feel almost unable to pick up the pen. Is this what ages us, what hardens us? The aggregate of all those times we said something generous or naively informative to people who secretly despise us for our daily beauty? Those disparaging Malvolios, Angelos, Iagos.

Perspiration, not inspiration, I think, and open the black covers at random. The entry for the second of October confronts me. The day I left the marital home:
I’m so angry I can barely hold the fucking pen. I’ve been fooled, I’ve been had. She pretended she was someone she wasn’t. So this is it. Starting again at thirty with nothing, absolutely nothing to my name. Feel small and useless. Today my wife told me she hated me and hated having sex with me. That all her orgasms had been faked. ‘Even on our honeymoon?’ I asked. ‘Especially on our honeymoon’ she said, triumphantly. The bitch! A whole summer living beyond her means in a flat that I’ve grafted to
.
pay the rent on, running around like
La Belle Dame Sans Merci
in Italy with God knows what winking, cheaply lascivious Romeo …

Enough already! I cannot continue. Let me tell you instead, while we are on the subject of last meetings, about the last time I saw my wife. The mesmerising presence who had turned up at Rock On three and a half years previously displaying the white frill of her knickers over the waistband of her trousers, who had given off all those uneasy vibrations from under her canvas of butter-coloured skin, who had finally turned into my worst nightmare. A woman impossible to deal with: stern, obdurate, flinty, rough, remorseless. Whereas I had foolishly expected all the qualities of the good wife to emerge as I administered the cure to her troubled soul—a wife who was dutiful, attentive, faithful, supportive,
gentle.
In the final analysis, my marriage had been a Grand Guignol; a Spanish tragedy.

The last flat-destroying marathon took place one night three months ago. A terrible nightfall. After an hour of deadlocked verbal combat, she had reiterated the sentence (‘I wish I’d never,’ et cetera) that had come to seem like a mantra. Only this time she added a chilling caveat. After repeatedly punching me in the head, turning over the bookcases—which went down like collapsing tower blocks—Mandy screamed: ‘I want you out of my flat! Do I have to call the police to get you out?’

I was on the sofa. She was towering over me, like some awful Clytemnestra. ‘Your flat? Suddenly it’s all yours, is it?’

‘Right, I’m calling the police.’

‘Do what you want! You’ve already ruined my life.’

I could see this baiting would get me nowhere. Almost stoically, she disappeared into the narrow kitchen and returned brandishing two knives, like a martial arts fighter.

‘Put them down,’ I said as calmly as I could.

‘Now—are you going to get out?’

Though pretending not to care about the sudden escalation of threat, I retorted, ‘And where will I go? You know I’ve got nowhere.’

‘I don’t care!’ she screamed, with an unhinged intensity almost turning her cross-eyed. ‘Go to that prick Rudi’s, you’re virtually a couple as it is!’

‘That’s pretty fucking low!’

Then she lunged forward with deadly accuracy. My hands went up before my face to protect my eyes from the flashing blade, but she caught my middle finger, slicing off a chunk like the tip of a carrot. I yelled out, horrified to see my own blood on the sofas we had chosen together at Ikea. I remember thinking: this is as bad as it gets, a life, a marriage.

‘See what happens if you don’t get out?’ she taunted.

‘You’ve lost your fucking mind!’

‘Get up, you wretched idiot!’

The knives flashed out again, slicing patterns on my right forearm, creating the wounds that I would have to hide from Rudi and my future flatmates. Aware that there was a real danger I could die, seeing the tawdry headline in the Sunday red-tops (Mad Spanish Bride Knife Frenzy—Chihuahua Witnesses Husband’s Murder), I grabbed both her wrists at once and yanked her forward, the descending blades narrowly missing my chest. A strange sense of timelessness descended during this pivotal struggle. There was no going back from this—everything was being decided at once. Noting quietly her scar from when she put her hand through the window during our first months of love, I saw again how strangely proportioned she was—both physically and mentally. At that moment, with Mandy twisted across the sofa as I grappled for the blades, for my own life, her bottom half didn’t seem like it belonged with her top half. The two sections of her body seemed as anomalous as her punishments that never fitted the crime. In those suspended seconds, I thought about how much she resembled Ramona in the two long-gone photographs; how Mandy had evolved to her destined maximal condition: the unstoppable Spanish fury—her mother. To put a stop to her, I administered a fierce Chinese burn to both her wrists. Shrieking, she dropped the knives but managed to grasp my T-shirt, ripping it diagonally, as if pulling up something by the roots.

I had disarmed her. The moment of shimmering equilibrium had passed.

Mandy collapsed on the floor and started screaming hysterically. Panting, I examined my wounds. Staunching the blood with what remained of my T-shirt, I decided that I would live. Then I felt a sudden absence around my neck. Something was missing. Not my head, but my chain, bearing the cross that Mandy had bought me in Barcelona. My only piece of jewellery, it had never left my chest since that day. Now I saw the crucifix lying on the floor next to its severed silver chain, drops of my own blood surrounding it like spilt Eucharist wine on an altar. The wreckage of the bookcases, of the cats’ mischief-centre, of our marriage, suddenly melancholy in attendance.

A knock at the door silenced Mandy’s awful imam-like wailing. I heard the crackle of a radio. There was no need for her to phone the cops. The neighbours had saved her the trouble. Outside, a cold blue light oscillated in the darkness.

S
OME DEATHS ARE TOO
horrible to go through with sober. One, I imagine, is blowing your head off. Despite the ubiquitous vision that has assailed me for the past three months, the weighty barrel entering the delicate, infant flesh of the mouth (like a morbid act of fellatio), the reality would require a great deal of courage. Or whisky. Or both. If discretion forms the greater part of valour, then inebriation forms the greater part of suicide. Only world-class ascetics and the insane have managed to top themselves sober. This I conclude as I peer through the thick windows of the bucking carriage, the train racing towards its final stop.