Byron Easy (19 page)

After the abortive dinner (which Mandy found grimly comical), there followed a few brief months of frenetic bliss in London. There was a wedding to be organised, for instance. I had previously thought that people just turned up at a church to get married, like in the movies. I didn’t know you had to apply for such things as a
licence
. For three weekends in a row we met with the slight, heavily bespectacled woman who would be marrying us at an Islington registry office. There we would go over the words that were to be uttered at the ceremony. Our brief but significant meetings took place with hailstones beating the windows, the weather having deteriorated into a turbulent autumn of dark, dank evenings. Mad, Carel Weight wind blew in the trees outside as we spoke the sacred sentences. I was also unaware that you could say virtually anything in your marriage vows as long as it didn’t allude to international terrorism or leave out the bit about ‘any lawful impediment’. Our registrar seemed to spend half her time underlining the seriousness of the union, the other half attempting, so I thought, to dissuade us from the whole idea. You had to believe in every word, she said. At that point, we did.

The date was set for December the twenty-second, allowing us to escape to Mandy’s beloved Barcelona (‘my city!’) for the honeymoon. I hadn’t been as far as Great Yarmouth in the previous seven years, so the pleasure and the privilege was mine. Every morning, as I leapt out of Mandy’s shower, I would feel a liberating sense of increasing life; its boundaries, its possibilities, its aqueous intoxication. Her favourite band at the time was The Who, and ‘Love, Reign O’er Me’ would greet my ears as I dressed for a day’s toil in the shop. Often, when I was stuck behind the counter alone, she would turn up with a full roast dinner under a lid of tinfoil, a gesture I found immensely touching. When not at Rock On, our days were filled with intense activity, most of it centred around Fellatrix. Many a pink-and-gold October morning did I spend with scissors, adhesive and Letraset, collaging together flyers for her gigs, or helping scour directories of A&R men for suitable mailshot targets. The phone in her flat rang incessantly. Friends, prospective managers, promoters; strange liggers she had met in whatever fetid den of leather she’d spent the previous night networking. A hecatomb of panting suitors. Then there was the elusive drummer problem. As Fellatrix was an all-girl band, Mandy had deliberately recruited chicks
less
good-looking than herself. When her regular drummer left upon realising that a rhythm section didn’t receive a penny in songwriting royalties, Mandy began an exhaustive season of auditions. I would stand at the back, ushering in the hopefuls for their strictly timed fifteen minutes, only for Mandy to shake her head, ‘Nah, much too pretty … Way too blonde … Tits too big.’

When not in the malodorous rehearsal and recording studios of north London, we would market for vegetables and fish on the Seven Sisters Road. She was a spectacular cook; all learnt from Ramona, so I was told. On our forays, we often encountered the same toothless lecher flogging lighters from a ripped cardboard tray. He would hiss and purr every time my lovely shimmied past. I sometimes think about this lunatic and why I didn’t paste him to within an inch of his life. The reason, apart from me being no good at fighting, was that Mandy gave the impression of being able to take care of herself. In a physical way. She just looked dangerous, rangy, unpredictable. Five-ten of slinky hips, lips, tits and power. After scoring
merluza
and tiger prawns for her Mediterranean concoctions, we would drive into Camden and scour the markets for clothes: skinny-rib T-shirts, velvet flares, vintage party dresses. My favourite top of hers read ‘Psychobitch’, rendered in the Harley Davidson logo on crenellated pink and silver. She had a genuinely impulsive nature. Anything she saw and loved she had to have. I would feel energised, emancipated, just from being in her company. I often asked her why she liked me, let alone loved me. She would answer simply, her rich brown eyes full of engagement: ‘Because you’re different. Because you make me laugh.’ This made my chest fill with a strange, hot, expanded feeling. It was almost frightening; an unpleasant upheaval. I had been so used to unhappiness that the idea of happiness made me miserable. Rummaging through those clothes shops, those troughs of decaying paperbacks, those furriers with nineteenth-century stained glass over the lintel, I felt as if
I
was the object that had been located in life’s junkshop. After seven years of getting lost in London, I had been found.

There were also some tremendous parties in the big top-floor room. One raucous bacchanal seemed to have every popstar, music-biz ligger and journo in London present: all dangling from the banisters, flying on Es and wizz. Mandy had dressed Steve, Harriet and Matt in surreal cabin-crew fancy-dress, and persuaded them to replenish everyone’s palate with champagne or charlie borne on silver trays. The three cats, with their Fellatrix badges swinging from their collars, watched the guests come and go with a Rhadamanthine scrutiny, as Mandy’s demos splintered eardrums.

By the end of squalling November I had moved into her capacious flat above the bakery. Mandy had picked up my laughably meagre possessions in a single visit with her Peugeot. I really wish I could tell you that it required a second or third relay, but it’s strange how little one has that’s worth keeping. We clashed over throwing away the tottering stacks of jaundiced newspapers and magazines I had been hoarding for years, but this was quickly resolved by the cunning method of backing down. I had learnt to tread easy with Mandy, very easy. An incident the previous week had given me pause for much thought and doubt. We had stepped out to Club Dynamite with Antonia and Nick, Mandy deciding to bring along her Danish cleaning girl, a fluffy blonde tomboy of twenty named Rikke. From the moment we arrived at the heavily policed doors, there was trouble. Our names couldn’t be found on the list; Mandy said she was ill—a migraine coupled with stomach cramps and a cold. Once inside, Mandy and her friends cruelly ignored the poor Scandinavian waif. At midnight, I turned around to find they had all disappeared, except Rikke. Feeling deserted and not a little sorry for her, we trawled the club. It was hard work: her with little English, me less Danish. Half an hour later we were back where we started, the antiaircraft strobes whiting out recognisable features. Then I was hit in the face. A glass tumbler of vodka, bitter-lemon and ice had smacked me snappily under the left eyebrow, leaving me feeling, after a couple of seconds, as if somebody were trying to force out my eyeball with a spoon. I was stunned. Before me stood Mandy, shaking with rage. She obviously thought I had been trying it on with her cleaning lady, who was now staring at her trainers, mortally embarrassed.

Mandy stormed out, leaving Antonia and Nick to nurse my wound with an ice-pack from the bar. It wasn’t the fact of her jealousy that surprised me, it was more that the punishment in no way fitted the crime. The force with which she threw that glass was deeply disturbing—all anger loosed; uncaring of the consequences. The old pint of beer over the head would have been far preferable: a comedy comeuppance for a crime never committed. A panto or a Noël Coward ending. But this? It crossed that unwritten line of respect present in all relationships. I began to wonder at her capacities. I felt humiliated, uncertain of everything.

For the next couple of days I had serious doubts about marriage. These were immediately followed by a list of plausible excuses I made for her. It was only the Spanish temperament, I told myself. I should be flattered that she could be so jealous. Her with half of Holloway drooling on her doorstep. Me so bald and prospect-less. Also, she had been ill, stressed out. But then reason prevailed.
She
was the one who had vanished. I had gone looking for
her
. It was, I mused with what now seems a quaint naivety, completely unreasonable. And I had said goodbye to sweet, sane Bea for this? Mandy turned up at my rickety Camden crash-pad the following morning in tears—the first time I’d seen her really upset. But I immediately wondered whether they were equivocal, crocodile crawlers. I’d known girls over the years who could turn on the sobs, a trick they’d learnt in order to manipulate men from daddy downwards. I looked deep into her bereft eyes, into her soul, trying to divine whether they were genuine or not. It was important for me to know; much depended upon it. I began asking questions, fundamental questions that I’d never asked before. Who was Mandy? What did she do with experience, how did she assimilate it? Was she in control of it, or did she let it rule her? Did she ever want children? Did she believe in a God? Was she capable of loving anyone or thing apart from her cats and her band? I eventually asked her these crucial questions over the years, but her answers were evasive, indistinct; non-answers. I also had a catechism prepared for myself. Did I really love her, or just the way she looked in silver tights and black underwear? Did I really think we had a future? And how much exactly did a divorce cost these days?

But a date had been set. And two people newly in love can blind themselves to virtually anything, so immense are their delusions about one another. There was also the very real notion that I didn’t deserve anything better than being whacked in the face with a full glass of vodka in a packed nightclub, but let the shrinks get rich on that one.

The night before I was to be married I took a brief walk around the block. The sky was a turbulent sea of black and blue. Deep December, with a nip of ice in the zippy wind. The cars on the Holloway Road were still relentlessly pouring past, just as they had in those high summer days. Some heading home, some away from home. I pondered my last hours of freedom, thinking: this time tomorrow I will be a married man. Well, well, well. What a turn up for the books, Byron, you old devil! Who would have thought it? Yes, I agree. Some deeper meditation at this juncture might have brought me greater happiness in the future.

A white Roller, hired by Mandy’s father, picked us up at nine in the morning. The boot was full of champagne. We had decided it was going to be a glam wedding, like Mick and Bianca’s, like David and Angie’s. Her in peach and me in black. Actually, I had borrowed Rudi’s ill-fitting pinstripe suit complete with outrageous chalky stains on the inside leg, whereas Mandy had eschewed traditional white for a shocking pink turtle-neck and six-inch glitter heels. Rudi, the best man in every sense, met us outside the murky entrance to the registry office. I felt strangely calm. The future didn’t exist. Just Mandy and me and the crisp December morning.

Inside, on collapsible wooden chairs, were Harriet, our official photographer, Ian Haste, Montse and Leo. We had resolved to keep it a quiet affair: no band members, no clubbers, dealers, skankers or schmoozers. Finally, at the end of the row, sat my mother, Sinead, on a rare trip down from Yorkshire. I had only told her the week before that I was getting hitched. She seemed initially bewildered that I wasn’t marrying a nice Catholic Irish dairymaid, but then she had long given up offering me advice. I kissed her on the cheek, and she asked me how I was. I whispered in her ear: ‘I’m happy, Mum, for the first time in my life.’ Her long oval face flowered into a smile at this, the pain of two divorces present in her etched brow. As I spoke the vows I thought I could perceive the ghosts of my father and stepfather on opposite sides of the room. Des and Delph hovering palely in facing corners, as transparent and weightless to me as they had been in real life. Also supernaturally present was Ramona, her taut brown skin looped with silver bangles, an impetuous smile on her face. As I said, ‘I do’, Mandy turned and kissed the bare knuckles of my hand. I believed every word.

After the book had been signed, Rudi approached and gave me a generous Scottish bearhug. He shot Mandy an admiring glance as he spoke into my ear: ‘You made the right choice, spunker.’ And it was only then that I remembered Bea and her imploring plum-coloured eyes. He linked one arm, and Mandy linked the other, and together we strolled through the gates of ivory.

We walked straight out into a snowstorm of confetti. It was everywhere, in the eyes, the hair, the ears. Blinding, freezing. Only when we climbed onto the rear seat of the Roller did I realise that it was mixed with real snow; the London skies emptying their desultory icy shards on our newly married heads. But I couldn’t have cared less: in my heart it was May in January. We roared off along Upper Street to a Spanish restaurant where Antonia, Nick and Martin Drift were waiting, already insensible on cocktails. I was twenty-seven. Mandy only twenty-three.

We’re decelerating. Reverse thrust. Descent, but a kind of horizontal descent, as emotionally deflating as the clogged, unresolved end of a bad film. I can see the waxy ghouls of passengers at Potters Bar station. They look like rain-embittered penguins on an outcrop of Arctic rock. And then more: fevered movement in the tired light of the station entrance.

There seems to be ice in the rain, just like on that day in December, illuminated in detail by the spectral platform arc-lights.

What is it with railway stations? Is it the draining sense of purpose everyone seems to exhibit? The conflicting speeds of the concourse-walkers, each with his brolly, tabloid, laden golf-cart. Big stations are nerve-centres of nothing-at-all. Conduits for incognito humanity: dirty and grave. Just apexes, faceless connections, with everyone thrown outwards, centrifugally, once the centre has been achieved. Outwards to the dormitory towns, suburbs of lock-knife pubs and mirrorball clubs with names like
Reflections
or
Manhattans
. Or further out, to the Shires, the shaded cottages, farms, maypole villages, enclaves of serene Middle England. But the stations themselves? Just toilets. Once grand and Victorian, with wrought awnings and spanned arches designed to enshroud the noble slip-streams of coal-burning steam engines, now they seemed merely magnets for every pimp, hustler, pickpocket, scrubber, clipper and scrounger on the planet. The averted eyes of the trussed traveller betray unsavoury contemplations and outright fear as he traverses the piss-river of the main entrance and the flickering letter boxes of the departures board. From station to station. Once trapped within their prison-like perimeters, you just want to escape.