Byron Easy (67 page)

‘Looking forward to turkey and all the trimmings?’ says Michelle with an ingratiating smile. ‘Your mum will be pleased to see you.’

I smile back. A smile doesn’t cost anything after all, as Grandma Chloe was fond of telling me. ‘I’ve got to find her first. It’s been a while since I paid a visit.’

The bony woman stands up, constricted by the table, and thrusts her paperback inside her rather formal handbag. The dominoes and travel chess have long been stashed. ‘I hope it all works out for you in the end. It’s good to get things off your chest now and again.’ She smiles once more and looks for Robin who seems preoccupied with his phone, one hand readied on his case which he has just dragged down from the luggage racks.

The train is at quarter speed now, the machinery crackling, undercarriage grumbling as if in the wrong gear. Sheets of rain can be heard lashing the tracks.

‘Well, thanks,’ I mutter, still in my seat. ‘Have a good Christmas. Both of you.’

At this Robin looks at me and thrusts out his hand, his oiled hair mobile as the legs on a spider.

‘Cheers, mate. Mind how you go.’

I shake his hand.

‘Yes, life has but one entrance and a thousand exits.’

Awkwardly, by way of consolation, and perhaps feeling the need to match my maxim, he adds, ‘Remember, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’

‘Nietzsche,’ I mumble.

‘Who?’

‘Never mind, safe journey.’

The aisle is now full of passengers. Aunties and uncles, long-married grandparents, stroppy teenagers wearing clothing I don’t understand. My, my, if anything makes you feel thirty, then it’s not knowing why certain trousers look like they’re on back to front, let alone the name of the popstar who made the aberration fashionable in the first place. Everybody seems awfully anxious to get off the train, to not be in motion any longer. How wrong is that saying, ‘It’s better to travel than arrive.’ It’s
always
better to arrive! Human beings are waiting to arrive their whole lives. When really travelling, getting there is everything. And most people spend their existence merely commuting—just another form of stasis after all—while under the illusion that they are going somewhere. These weary travellers certainly look happy and relieved; though mixed with this is the anxiety that accompanies Christmas, with maybe a twist of urgency provided by the Millennium and the thought that it may be their last. The boisterous crush has taken the form of a daisy-chain down the whole length of the carriage. Then the sudden static of the tannoy. I brace myself for the anodyne message.

‘Ladies and Gentlemen, we are now approaching Leeds. Please make sure all your luggage is with you before departing the train. On behalf of GNER we wish you a very merry Christmas and hope you’ve had a very pleasant journey also that you travel with us again in the near future. Thank you.’

It didn’t disappoint. Suddenly heartsick, I pull my single shoulder-bag from under my seat and push out into the queue. Ten passengers ahead of me, beyond the bobbing heads of Michelle and Robin (his hand touchingly linking hers) I see the rearing bulk of Tracksuit Man tugging his case from the luggage pens. Silent since Stevenage (I had hoped he had disembarked somewhere—anywhere—along the way), he now appears horrifically active and awake. His two children minister around him in obedient silence. With a sough of brakes, the train reaches virtual-zero speed, inching up to its buffers, the rain outside monsoon-like in its intensity. A growl from the engine, making the floor shudder. Then a gentle shunt. It is over! The long ordeal is finally at an end. Umbrellas are flourished as all the doors open at once. The queue starts to move.

But there’s an obstacle. This is not good. Tracksuit Man cannot find his luggage. I shake the prickles from my toes as the snake of people takes me closer to him. Hopefully he’s had a skinful and doesn’t remember his old adversary. Or maybe he does and will take out his frustration at his lost or stolen belongings on me. A flush of fear makes me suddenly sensitised, wide-awake. We seem to be on a collision course. Hold it, his daughter has found his bag. A smile breaks his face, like a rip on a rugby ball. He’s off. I am out of danger.

Once on the platform, I realise this is not quite the case: ahead of me, a hunched obdurate form is taking up half the thoroughfare. I see Tracksuit Man has abruptly stopped. At five foot six he still looks formidable. My goodness, what is he doing? He appears to be petting a small dog held in the arms of a tweed-jacketed lady. The dog, I notice is a chihuahua. He seems more familiar than ever. Then it hits me, with the force of a bullet, where I have seen Tracksuit Man before. He’s—he’s Steve, from the flat in Archway. The builder. The nutter. Memory, I have the key! Older, with flecks of grey in his savagely razed number-one crop, but none other than the same man. It is too late to avoid him now. His children notice me staring and tug his arm. He turns. His look, diligent reader, is not initially welcoming. Slowly, a weird transformation morphs his trademark moronic snarl into a smile.

‘Hey!’ he calls in his deep voice, clicking his fingers as if to aid his memory. ‘It’s Rock On, it’s whatsyourname.’

‘Byron’ I say, moving forward.

‘Ron, me old mate, from the shared flat!’

‘Steve—thought you looked familiar.’

‘Yeah, I thought I’d seen you inside, or something … Pentonville nick.’

Simultaneously, the shame of our earlier enmity enters our faces.

‘Well, er, what have you been up to?’ I offer awkwardly.

‘You know, bit of this bit of that. No hard feelings eh, about earlier.’

‘God, no,’ I say, and smile at his petulant daughter who received the back of his hand in what seems like another lifetime. Before me is the deeper past: the trip to Brighton, with Steve emptying the plastic bag of cans one after another on the back seat. The tremendous waves against the pier. The offer of marriage from the beautiful girl with the flying ebony hair. Further back still, the first evening in Mandy’s room with Steve’s paintbrush thrust out like a weapon towards me, the stink of paint in the June night air, the twin photos of Ramona on the mantelpiece.

‘How’s it going with mad Mandy?’

‘Oh, we—we separated. Not long ago actually’

‘Ah, well. Times change,’ he says, fixing me with his surprising ultra-blue eyes. And there was nothing more to say. We never did have anything to say to each other.

‘Nice to see you again, Ron. Take it steady’

‘You too, Steve,’ I say, already heading for the ticket barriers.

Then a roar at my back. Deadly, full of accusation and anger.

‘Oi!’

Jumping spontaneously at this shout, I turn and see Steve’s beaming face.

‘Only joking, Ron!’

We wave and walk on.

And I didn’t even know he had kids. Well, well, well—all around you, unseen, people’s lives have been evolving, hurtling to their conclusions, then you encounter them again. And it’s never who you really want to see, is it? The ghosts of old lovers or enemies always turn out to be just that: ghosts. Bea in Greece and Delph on the train: apparitions—chimerical projections both. What else could they have been? And now I bump into a man I spent most of my life avoiding when I was shacked up with his landlady. Who gave me a sock on the forehead with his case which is still smarting dully. Who once subjected me to his Fucking Amazing Heavy Metal CD on a summer night when I was falling in love. Time, coincidence, serendipity: all meaningless.

My passage into the square main area of Leeds station (obstructed by a two-sided glass box with an official operating each barrier to allow the crowds through) was brisk and unfettered. Alone in my dangerous state of excitement and despair I witnessed many scenes of repatriation—tall, virile young men swamping tiny girlfriends in huge arms; rucksacked grandparents receiving kisses from in-laws and dawdling children. All that family! All that meaningful exchange! Under the soupy lights, feeling the breath of winter on my neck after the soporific interior of the train, I struggle to extract the map from my meagre bag. The automatic doors hiss open before me as I catch a final glimpse of Robin and Michelle disappearing into the off-licence cubicle for some last-minute yuletide tipple … And now the rain-torn expanse of the shopping plaza. Midnight. That makes it Christmas Day. With street plan in hand I step from the station awning and brave the full violence of the weather.

Oh, you didn’t really think I shot Rudi through the head did you? It was tempting, I must admit. He looked so contrite there, his head bowed, out for the count. The thought of Mandy letting herself in with the key she surely has and discovering his headless corpse was also a strong incentive to go through with it. But the strong disincentives of sewing mailbags and completing my PhD on a government-issue manual typewriter didn’t appeal. The plan was always to wait, to lie in wait for her to come, to meet her lover boy, only to find
me
there. Waiting with a Browning automatic in my hand. Determined, confident, sick. I might have made her kneel, I wasn’t decided. Or take the gun into her mouth in an act of mock fellatio before I pulled the trigger. But you didn’t expect me to be capable of such perversity, did you? To have that capacity? A poet and a seer; a boy who wet the bed until age eleven, and started again aged thirty. No, in the end I spared them both, though they didn’t deserve it, the clowns. I decided to leave Mandy to live her life—her private life. As for Rudi, he’s probably only coming to consciousness now. My croupier friends said the effects of Rohypnol can last up to eighteen hours. Round about now he will see the champagne bottles arraigned like skittles on his coffee table. He will go to his safe and discover that his gun is missing. He will take up the religious life, like the penitent Henry II after his slaughter of Becket … There was always the thought of turning the gun on myself, as they say in news reports of mass shootings. Was I capable of that? Am I capable of that?

I must never get my hands on a gun.

Anyway, Mother’s house. Turning from the shopping plaza into the deserted, grilled and boarded-up Commercial Street, I feel the weight of the pistol through my shoulder-bag. I am afraid I lied to you, again, stern critic or reader. My last lie. I promise this time. I told you I didn’t have a gun. But I do. Kurt sang that he didn’t have a gun, but he most certainly did. He had plenty of guns. Shotguns, pistols, bazookas, you name it. But I have just the one. Big and unwieldy and yet to be used. Sheltering in a doorway, the rain showering in rivulets from my scalp down the back of my neck, I transfer Rudi’s pistol from its Jiffy bag to my coat pocket. I walk out into the downpour. It produces a pleasing heaviness as it sways.

Twenty paces up the street, I decide the rain is too intense and return to my shelter. In the nook of the doorway, I flatten the street plan on a wheelie bin and use my cigarette lighter to make sense of it. Skinner Street, Skinner Street. Somewhere east of the town hall, museum and art gallery. Ah, there it is—across a motorway bridge. I always remember the motorway bridge. I traversed it in the summer when I last visited. On the way, the sun had been strong in the big canopies of the chestnut trees, the air hot and spore-filled, with the old tram lines in the city centre gleaming like scimitars in the light. Children had swarmed fish-like to the convoy of three ice-cream vans parked up next to an expanse of green. Characteristically, with their headlong shrieks and cries, they made me think of death—or rather, how children are the torch-bearers of life in the face of adult decay. Once you get to a certain age, I mused, all one has to look forward to are deaths: ones parents’, then one’s friends’, eventually one’s own. I remember stopping there in the grandstanding sunlight, and writing these useless thoughts in my notebook, more sure than ever of the pointlessness of my so-called insights; convinced that they were quite possibly the symptoms of some mental illness.

Even with the gun in pocket, my bag still feels too heavy. I take out my black notebook and decide that it feels a lot lighter without it. Then something turns in me—a tumour of self-derision, of ridicule. How I ever thought those morbid musings, would be of worth to myself or anyone I don’t know. In a shaking fury, I go to the entry for that summer day and tear it cleanly out, the fast rain making the ink bulge and run in a matter of seconds. Hold on—why not the whole sorry lot? Why not drown your stillborn sons? Opening the domed lid of the wheelie bin, I hold the notebook trembling in my hand … then let it fall. A cloud of gruesome-smelling refuse detritus erupts in my face. That I didn’t need.

Once I move off, the sheets of rain like stage curtains shifting and churning rapidly, I see the signs for my mother’s district. Great puddles holding blurred neon reflections block my way. A small course of rapids seems to be flowing in the gutters, the drains greedily drinking the foaming water. Not a soul around. Where did the exodus from the train disappear to? Into snug cabs and family saloons most likely. I note the sadness of the Christmas lights festooned over the barren streets. And the silent shops, which probably began their onslaught of festive advertising two weeks before Halloween. Jesus, in the future it will be Christmas
all year round.
Walking purposefully now, I hope it’s not too late for mother when I arrive. In the past she would leave out a light snack downstairs, maybe a beer or two. She’s good that way. Thoughtful. But then she was a teacher. You have to be thoughtful when you’re devoting your sanity and your life to taking care of other people’s futures, to that noble profession—like the fire service or nursing, a dirty job most people pray someone else will risk their lives doing.

Hold it, I’ve read the map incorrectly. This may take a while to fix …

It is much later. Some time has passed. It feels like I’ve been walking for hours. I
have
been walking for hours. You take one wrong turning and then never find your way back. The funniest dead end I wandered into in the last God knows how long was the industrial estate cul-de-sac which held, amazingly, a shackled pit pony shivering on the blackened earth. I gingerly approached it with a tube of sugar taken from the train, half expecting a shaft of incandescent light over a manger and the Three Wise Men to appear. Its tongue felt hot and rough on my freezing hands. Then it licked my face in one big sloppy swipe. It was probably the most affectionate gesture I have received from another mammal in the past six months … My watch tells me four in the morning. Jesus, what have I been up to? At least the rain seems to have let up. Strange comings and goings in my head, thoughts I cannot account for have been assailing me for a while. I think I shared a few with you. Did I? I honestly cannot remember. At some point during the night I passed the town hall, the museum and the blackened Royal Infirmary, the latter doing a brisk trade by the looks of it, with its Christmas Eve ambulances pulling up every five minutes or so. I must have spent a while there because I remember counting twenty-five, their revolving lights flashing under the troubled skies. Something curious has happened to time. I cannot remember when my train got in. Something odd must have happened because everything feels present. Everything is happening at once, simultaneously, inside my head. There is no past tense. Everything is now. Eternally now … So when did my train get in? It seems a long while ago now. I hope Mum is still waiting up.