Byron Easy (15 page)

The problem was that with sanity comes stability, and with stability comes normality. Bea was no virago, termagant, lunatic. But at the time some self-destructive gene threw me in the path of such women. Of course, as with everything else that’s malfunctioned in my life, I blamed myself. It was my fault, I thought, for being so crazy about her, for allowing the current to flow in only one direction, for enforcing this obdurate emotional template, this dynamic on the relationship from day one. Obviously she would play it cool, exercise some reticence. For six months, apart from the occasional demonstrative display of emotion, Bea had remained resolutely neutral and restrained in the treacherous arena of commitment. After all, we hadn’t promised each other monogamy. We hadn’t even promised to exchange birthday cards. It was all implicit in the intense, precious, high-value feel of our nights together. In fact, we hadn’t even promised to phone each other after our last meeting. Surely if I, if Mandy and I, wanted to … Ah, the self-deluding crap that men feed themselves when thinking about fucking another woman.

I bolted up from the bed, tripping on the bolas of my trousers which were now around my febrile ankles (all those thoughts about Bea, her hard double bed, her indolent alabaster thighs, you understand). I crawled across the pungently minging black carpet-tiles and picked up the phone. I dialled Mandy’s number.

‘Mandy, it’s me. Byron.’

A pause, long enough for her to take Steve’s or Jake’s or John’s or whoever’s hand out of her knickers. Oh, the leprous jealousies of the newly ensnared!

Then her bright Spanish voice.

‘Hello, lover!’

At least she remembered me without consulting her bible-sized Filofax.

‘I left my watch at yours.’

‘Yeah, and the rest. Why don’t you come round tonight to collect it?

‘Okay.’

Now, you may have been wondering why, if I met Mandy at my place of work (and work being the kind of activity that’s usually rewarded with hard cash, usually of the folding variety and usually monthly), why I never had any money. Well, you’d be right to be curious. Let me tell you the circumstances of a desolate state. I’ve been lying to you. Or rather, I’ve been less than generous with the truth. I did work, I did put in the hours, but only when Martin could afford to employ me. When I first phoned his shop, the kippered husk of Martin’s voice had repeated the ominous word seen in his job ad. The word was ‘seasonal’. When I asked him to expand, he told me that my employment would be ‘on and off’. I found out, over the years, that it would be mainly ‘off’. And sometimes, just to keep my foot in the door when Rock On was undergoing one of its periodic stretches of ‘asset sharing’ (Martin putting all his old guitars in the window out of desperation), I would work for free. That’s right, I did it for free. A mug’s game, you’d rightfully announce. Well, maybe. It’s no accident that one of my distant ancestors was given the name Easy. It must be in the genes, the gene-memory. He must have been one pushover, one crumbling tower block, if the end result was me. Because, allowing for the female side of the family’s dalliance with short, bald, spinally defective window cleaners, I am his DNA descendant, his cellular culmination.

The fact was, for a lot of the time, Martin paid me in fresh air. Well, I did get unlimited free studio time in the cramped eight-track facility in the converted toilets, but I was no musician, and messing around with reel-to-reels and old mixing desks begins to lose its attraction on a hollow stomach. For months at a time there was no cash transaction. I suffered—to use Disraeli’s splendid phrase—from extreme pecuniary embarrassment. My only other income was the Rock ’n’ Roll, or rather, its totally un rock ’n’ roll phoneme, the dole. Forty quid a week and half the scandalous rent paid. Forty fucking quid. Doesn’t go far. In fact it goes nowhere. The stripey-shirted graduate ghouls who fix these figures must have conducted their research during late 1950s Great Britain—when tea bags cost one and six and bread was a shilling a loaf. The Great Britain where the mail was delivered by whistling posties and no one stole your bike from outside the dole office using fence-cutters and a blow torch. How could they be so far-off-the-mark, so deliriously out of touch with the actual price of things nowadays? Like, not thirty years ago, guys, but nowadays. Not last April, but now, after the latest hefty inflationary hike on fags, spirits, pornography, volumes of poetry—all the things that made life tolerable at the time. And what was the net result of struggling through life on forty quid a week? Predictably, a life not worth living.

What actually happens is that you do without the things that render life liveable and make do with only those that are vital to its
continuance
. The latter being little things like food, heating, shelter from London’s merciless Januarys. And that’s no life at all. It’s subsistence. That’s right, all carbohydrate and no cream—life loses its taste, its pop. It becomes as blank and as bland as plain potatoes boiled in their skins (a current favourite chez Easy), as tepid as tap water, as inanely void as a lunar landscape. I had come to London to write, but instead found myself fading to grey year after year in a bedsit. A burden on the public purse to boot. Some people were just born to make money, I concluded. The world was groaning with money, and they attracted it magnetically, or else it just fell out of the ether into their hands. Others, of course, were born into it, like Antonia with her trust fund browning nicely like a fat Norfolk turkey in an oven. Others still, like me, were born to feel money’s keen edge, its scarcity, its alarming absence their whole lives.

I’d been working at Rock On for five years, barely turning a penny. Most of the time I felt as if I were living in an Eastern Bloc city during the mid-seventies. And then … enter Mandy, my fatal, my future wife; though I didn’t know it at the time. Well, if you were up the Rhine-sized shit-creek I was and someone was foolish enough to throw you the paddle of marriage, you’d go for it, wouldn’t you?

I actively hated where I had ended up. Of course, the pavements are teeming with people who are doing one thing but would rather be doing another: postmen who’d rather be waiters, waiters who’d rather be actors, actors who’d rather be directors. There’s a community chest of dissatisfaction out there. So I wasn’t alone in this. I was toiling every day in the shop and every night over a hot fountain pen wishing I was elsewhere. And then there was the inertia of the ‘off periods. My average day going something like: surface midday, make five cups of tea, smoke twenty-five cigarettes, get depressed, return to bed, get up again, try to write, fail, cycle to the shop for seven, work till midnight in the little recording room and return a thwarted, smoking wreck of despair in the small hours. Occasionally I would work through the night, setting my own syllabic verse to torrents of feedback guitar (this, after all, being my pay cheque) and then send the results off to the indifferent money-men and scalpers of the publishing business. I was twenty-seven. I was sacrificing living for creating art that nobody gave a fuck about. I could have built a paper armada, a Nelson’s Column, a life-size papier mâché model of the White House from my rejection letters. I too yearned to be somewhere else,
someone
else, released from the intolerable and tiring bind of hope. I was fucked. I was suicidal. I was having that vision again: every night on the point of surrender to sleep I would mentally picture the snub barrel of a handgun crisply blowing my head off. I was penniless, smokeless, hopeless. And I was contemplating cheating on my girlfriend.

For the two weeks after I returned to Mandy’s orange opera-house of a room to collect my watch I’d seen her every night. Not almost every night, or five times a week, but
every night
. Our evenings followed a thrilling routine: the gauntlet of her six rotting staircases (a meeting with Steve being an ever-present danger), four bottles of wine, talking till three a.m., tarot cards and a cistern of strong tea in the morning, followed by the hollow-bellied scuttle home along the effulgent Holloway Road. Happy, happy days of love! I had been roped in to write the lyrics to all of Fellatrix’s songs. Well, every big writer had a money-gig, I thought—even Shakespeare. They were long, alcoholic, unforgettable nights. O how these words, these … facts don’t do them justice. How can they when what’s under discussion is the
novelty
of another human being? When shared bills and chihuahua ownership are a lifetime away. When two are embarking on a monstrous odyssey of love, of hate, of torment.

With July came greater lassitude, greater frustration. It wasn’t uncommon to finish a languorous afternoon of songwriting at Mandy’s and follow it with an evening of headachy culture and gravy-thick red wine at Bea’s. I would step into the late sun, abandoning the bakery smells and her three cats for the fully leaved trees of Hampstead, the wind inflating their flapping, verdant forms like hot-air balloons. When I wasn’t actually at Mandy’s she would ring me in the shop. Sacked from the switchboard job, she would often be sunbathing on her roof. One afternoon in late July her voice came on the line with a terrible groan. Martin had just ejected one of our regular drunks who posed as virtuoso guitarists in order to enjoy human contact and the chance to play abominable riffs on out-of-tune guitars. Shocked, I said, ‘Mandy, what’s the matter? Where are you?’

‘In hospital.’

The unbearable heat—the hottest summer for a hundred years, according to reports—suddenly increased by a couple of centigrade. I said, ‘Don’t mess around, Mandy.’

‘I’m not. I’m in the Whittington Casualty. Remember that pain in my leg? Well it’s totally paralysed.’

Terrible thoughts ranged through my mind. A fracture she doesn’t remember? Or something worse? Deep Vein Thrombosis? The onset of MS or a rare blood disorder? I was surprised at how anxious I had immediately become. But then it’s hard not to care for someone who calls you every day. She told me she had been there for four hours just waiting to be seen. By this time Martin had returned to his vigil behind the counter and was giving me an enquiring look.

To Mandy, I said, ‘Just hang on there. I’m finished in half an hour.’

‘Can’t you come now?’

‘Well, Martin needs me to lock up.’

There was a pause and what sounded like strangled sobbing. I knew I had said the wrong thing. With Mandy, it was instant gratification or nothing.

‘That’s all right. I’ll get Johnny Radish to drive over.’

‘No, no, don’t do that.’

Then the waters of her great sorrow broke. A cataract of weeping, very pitiful, hot and close into the receiver.

‘Oh, why haven’t I got a mother?’ she moaned.

Not knowing what to say, I said idiotically: ‘You’ve still got your father.’ This only seemed to increase her anguish. Then she told me that she wasn’t going to speak to him for twenty years after the previous night’s conversation in which he had ridiculed her plans for the band.

‘I’ll come over right away. Just stay there.’

She suddenly brightened. ‘Well, I’m not going very far in a wheelchair am I? You know—I just want you to be my friend.’

‘I am your friend,’ I said, with as much appeal as I could force into my voice. Then I heard someone whispering in the background: modulated female tones and something being opened, like the cassette drawer on a Walkman. ‘Hold on, is someone there with you?’

‘Yeh. Antonia. How do you think I got here? Air ambulance? You’re still coming, aren’t you?’ Then, in a little girl’s voice: ‘I miss you.’

How could I refuse? When I reached the vomit-stinking concourse of Accident and Emergency, Mandy and Antonia seemed to be having the time of their lives; pushing each other around in the wheelchair with Fellatrix demos detonating out of a compact little blaster. I never did find the cause of Mandy’s mysterious paralysis. I knew then that she was attracted to something strong and weak in me. She needed the strength (the understanding, the support, the rescue), but wanted to control and dominate the weak part. Once Antonia had gone she told me many things under the awful fluorescent lights of the casualty department. How she had had a comprehensive nervous breakdown after her previous boyfriend and had spent the last three years in therapy. How her therapist had asked her to write a letter to her dead mother. How all of her relationships had been violent (I could see why. It always happens to girls like Mandy—men feel threatened by them, by their immense need to be the boss). She showed me the talismanic photo of her mother she always carried in her wallet—an older version of Mandy on a sun-scorched Mediterranean seafront; the tautness of the skin in her brown forearms intensely alive. I remember thinking, where does that flesh go? It seems so important, so impossible to eradicate, so eternal. Finally, she put her head on my shoulder, like a little child wanting its father, and related the one and only dream she’d had of her mother after the funeral. In this, Ramona had appeared by her bedside, mute but smiling, only to disappear after tucking her up. Then Mandy said: ‘For a long time after that, I used to think my mother was watching over me. But, you know … she’s not.’ With her muffled, tearful face buried in my neck and shoulder, I pondered the spirit world. Was her dead mother watching us there? In the terrible dramatic arena of a casualty room? Was there a spirit-life, or was there just the blue-blank void of eternity? Where nothing contemplates nothingness. For ever.

Two weeks later, we were back in the casualty department of the Whittington hospital, but this time for a genuine injury. That morning I had awoken after incessant, exhausting dreams of ringing telephones, only to find that the phone had indeed been ringing all night. Mandy had staggered home at three in the morning to discover the front door of the bakery caved-in, her two grand-and-a-half Gibsons stolen. In her fury she put her hand through one of the big sash windows and had spent the night having the wound incompetently dressed by a drunken Steve and a terrified Matt. I went round at once. And there she was, in the broken doorway, wearing a pink-print mini-dress, her intoxicating Spanish smile, and a black gouge on her hand that would need fifteen stitches. The scar, white and jagged, would never leave her in all the time we were married.