Byron Easy (20 page)

The train is slowing to a standstill. The thrilling sense of departure, present since we left King’s Cross, is at an end. As I survey the half-empty platform, I think about Mandy and me, tearing off into the proverbial sunset that December day in the white Rolls Royce. By the end of the evening, Martin and my mother were waltzing on the tables. It was a great night. Mandy in pink; me covered in Rudi’s old jizz, happy at last. With everything to live for. Even Montse and Leo buried the hatchet for the evening … The thought that it has come to this, that this is its inevitable destination, is nigh on unbearable.

The doors hiss asunder, letting in chilly, forbidding air.

Potters fucking Bar.

Looking back, I feel as if my battle wasn’t with Mandy, but with Time itself. Choose the biggest weapon you like, and time will always win. Will always reduce people to their worst possible components. Will always distil a human soul down to a set of appetites, paranoias, grievances. Yeah, that’s how those two glammed-up neophytes on the back seat of the white Silver Cloud ended up: a mere list of faults and dysfunctions. Powerless in the pull of the big river—barely human in their chains.

A
LLOW ME TO TELL
you something about an experience, a recent experience, that should have taken my mind off all this: I fell in love. For a week. Difficult to believe, I know. It’s hard to gauge whether I’m still in love or not, but the ancient Greek dramaturgical laws governing human emotional confluence, the fixed mysteries of astrology, the films of Woody Allen tell me that I probably never was in love: I was mental. That seems to be the state one emerges into after demolishing three years of marriage in one abysmal afternoon. One finds oneself—in all clinical reality—insane.

What happened was this. After the final flat-destroying screaming marathon with
her
, I found myself on the street struggling with an Elastoplast to stem the rich flow of blood from the fingertip she had all but sliced off with a kitchen knife. A meagre palliative, I agree, but that’s all I possessed, except twenty cigarettes and my hastily snatched notebooks. My first port of call was Rudi’s. His only words of wisdom were: ‘Life’s a bitch and then you marry one,’ although said with such Scottish certainty that I’ll only ever be able to hear that aperçu (and I hear it a lot, usually just before I go to sleep at night) in his accent. Over oily tea on the gentle gradient of his back garden he told me there just happened to be a room going in a croupiers flat in Kentish Town, a share with three others. By the end of the evening, as bruised and bloodied as I was, I had moved in.

That makes it all sound so easy. The
difficulty
, the tragedy, will have to wait. What’s important, startling even, is that within a week of separating from my wife I was in a state of unwanted emotional turbulence from a different source. The love-atoms, for the first occasion since I fell for
her
, had been disturbed. It did me good, it did me bad.

Her name was Haidee. Sporty, breeze-fresh Haidee; with her French-speaking Swiss father, her insouciant giggle and her drinking problem. She was tall, with rosy cheeks—a real lifesaver; ripe and real. And it was into her old room that I hurled my life’s accumulation of three cardboard boxes. She had already moved out to some stucco edifice in Notting Hill with her boyfriend, but was around the flat a fair amount as a valedictory gesture. She wasn’t beautiful, so I know it wasn’t lust. At least not conventionally beautiful … What is it about attraction? One minute you’re platonically negotiating a shared spaghetti, the next their very force-field, their twenty-paces proximity, is transporting you to a state of tremulous arrest. I fell, and I fell hard. Like a rock off a mountain. But then, I was mental.

Let me think about her for a moment: hooded, disappearing, expensively grey eyes under schoolgirl glasses. An exquisitely fine, thin upper lip baring symmetrically sexy teeth. A pinched, intelligent nose that descended almost vertically from her forehead, and (best of all) a swarm of natural auburn ringlets, an unruly explosion framing all of this. If I were to hear her bronchial cough again, or her clear, modulated tones grappling with her wonderful vocabulary (‘carnage’, ‘defiant’, ‘besotted’—as in, ‘Byron, you’re fucking besotted with me!’) I think my heart would snap like an ice-sculpture under a black-belt’s karate chop.

Jesus, this heart—multiply broken.

She was only around for a week, thank God. If I were to draw a chart or graph of that week’s emotional traffic it would look something like a straight vertical line: a one-way street. After we’d slept together for the first and only time she spoke to me in French: ‘
À demain,
’ she bronchially whispered, and she wasn’t to know I’d waited my whole life for a woman to speak to me in French after sex. Of course, the next morning she fitfully regretted it all. What about reality? The stucco mansion in Notting Hill? The doting boyfriend? The father, due to return any moment, expecting her to be married to a broker? What good was I, the half-crazed virtual
clochard
so recently separated?

I tried flattery, I tried humour, I tried putting my arm around her repeatedly, all to no avail. And I realised then how much we project into the future with new people, how we absent-mindedly imagine buggying their kids around the October-sunned park or opening the vast door to the shared Bayswater townhouse. Or at least people as desperate as me do.

Predictably, our natures conflicted wildly: she was a loose cannon, a hedonist of orgiastic proportions, maybe even an anarchist; I essentially a melancholic with a side-order of suicidal tendencies. But there she was: Haidee—five years my junior and a veteran of boarding, boating, backpacking, nannying in Cairo and the coconut-oiled Caribbean. Someone who met the morning face to face every day without trepidation or neurosis. A butterfly, a free spirit. To love her would be like attempting to bottle the breeze! And me the helpless onanist, the love-blind suitor, the hapless cuckold, the furrowed divorcee, incapable of joining the dance.

When she left it merely served to reinforce life’s cruelty. A repetitive pain, like hammer blows to a blacksmith’s anvil: again and again and again. As if I hadn’t brought enough pain with me in those three cardboard boxes—enough frigid pain to re-snow the French Alps.

O for a heart that pumps Evian water like all the rest, not this thick, soul-sour blood.

The flat, then. The shared flat whose walls I now wake up to every morning. Only intended as a temporary measure, like much else. But I’ve been here for almost three months. Does that count as temporary? When does something cease to be a stop-gap and become officially permanent? And anyway, who’s counting days, except me?

Once I moved in it struck me that I had never lived with anyone apart from Mandy. No college dorms or years of co-habiting had prepared me. This state of affairs, I find, requires many complicated and unwanted adjustments. There are three other human beings here, three ‘equivalent centres of self’, as George Eliot said. All demand a different approach to any interaction; all have their hopes, griefs, passions, love-affairs and job-worries to attend to in their little rooms. I try not to burden them with my woes. Meeting in the communal areas is, it’s understood, a highly artificial activity. The human animal naturally needs its space, mental as well as physical. More often than not, I leave them to it.

As for the place itself, it’s a four-storey monument to solid Victorian brickwork, now crumbling with a great deal of dignity into the Leighton Road. Could be worse, could be the YMCA (and it nearly was). Actually, there are three floors with a basement flat inhabited by a fetid loner who sometimes shares his whisky with me. But that’s another story. My room is on the top floor; Haidee’s old room, fifteen feet by fifteen, painted stark peeling-white with an oppressive ceiling and a view into the gardens out back. There is no furniture except a camping table and a folding chair. The bed I had to borrow. It is obvious that all four walls once bore posters. There are rectangles of lighter paint delineated like trunk-marks on a suntan; the pale spaces fringed by yellowing strips where sellotape probably held the grinning behind of that tennis player with her skirt hoicked up. Most of the time I try not to look at those empty spaces. Most of the time. Instead, I stare out of the window. It’s fair to say that the view has kept me alive for three months. I have spent many hours at the rattling sash window in contemplation. Directly below is an overgrown plot belonging to the loner, wild with tall grass and convolvulus. In mid-October, this ubiquitous vine still had some of its delicate lotus flowers attached: unimpeachable whites with mysterious interiors. At night, the stars can be seen in an unnaturally rich, blue sky. Just recently, the musty smell of bonfires has reached my room as I’ve lain on the mattress; window flung high, masochistically welcoming the raw autumn air. Mornings have arrived with a ravishing freshness; a pure, dank, peaty odour has risen to my high floor from a bed of mists below. Mellow fruitfulness indeed. But the centrepiece has to be the huge horse chestnut tree two gardens down. Almost as high as the house, I have watched it shed its leaves, bend defiantly in storms, shiver in the ransacking rain. It feels like an old friend. By the end of November I was sad to see the last leaves torn from its noble branches. The area below was a russet carpet; pure gold in the early sun, squirrels jumping in the yellow mulch. Strange how dying can look so beautiful.

On the first landing there’s a shared bathroom; a sunless, mouldy little cubicle with a startling lime-green blind that’s always kept drawn. Very different from the immaculate bathroom I shared with Mandy. The shelves are full of unfamiliar beauty products, forgotten cosmetics. I’m never sure as to which of the others they belong. There is a pile of blue disposable razors next to bottles of French shampoo, colourful unguents and bath salts. Who could need so many razors? Did a previous tenant leave them as a gift? Am I living with a werewolf? Certainly, the two croupiers keep unsociable hours, and I’ve only bumped into the classical musician once, when we fumbled good mornings on the stairs, but she didn’t look the type to howl at the moon. She seemed shocked that I was still alive. But that’s not so surprising. Since throwing my boxes across the maimed carpet of my upstairs room I’ve only used the kitchen twice. Ah, the kitchen—the best room in the house. The big light-filled kitchen with its three yawning sash windows, where I hear the others coming and going with rustling bags of shopping. Where certain nights I have heard the rumble of dancing, scraping chairs, spontaneous laughter, the odd shriek or familiar song; or have smelt the aroma of fried sausages or home-made popcorn. But I have been in no fit state to join them. No fit state at all.

Take last Wednesday, for example. Three in the afternoon found me crucified on the floor as the day diminished outside. A dripping yellow haze filled the screen of the window. I was trying to get several things straight in my mind, but to no avail. Overall, I felt close to how Nietzsche must have when he threw his arms around the neck of the horse. My main preoccupation, apart from how to deal with the terrible physical and spiritual lethargy that had descended on me in the past two months, was how richly I deserved my fate. No, really. Anyone who thought that people were generally trustworthy and good, were basically sane, deserved to be punished. Such naivety had to have its comeuppance. And here it was, in the shape of an abysmal room with nowhere to sit. A trusting, puerile nature such as mine (who ignored Pascal’s maxim and thought that everyone was fundamentally identical underneath) was heading for a severe hiding, a rigorous lesson, an education at some point in his life. The fact was, Mandy had stitched me up. She had come out of the maelstrom emotionally and financially intact. She had the flat, the car, the furniture and probably a clear conscience. That must have taken some planning—a process I was too innocent to observe at the time. Lying there in the sickly twilight I felt numb, stupefied, rejected, nauseous, abused. I also felt dangerously close to hysterical laughter or tears, or both. Really, one had to laugh at the audacity of it all. At my own risible gullibility, aged thirty and four months.

Downstairs, in the spacious kitchen, I could hear the whirr of the washing machine. This put me in mind of a task I had been deferring since nine o’clock that morning. Previously, after a breakup with a girlfriend, I have found myself strangely galvanised and purposeful: some life-instinct or survival mechanism always kicks in, forcing me to make lists of people to phone, tasks to undertake. I often thought this was symptomatic of having no immediate family to discuss my latest emotional catastrophe with. The Self magically takes control, knowing what’s best for the organism. But this time things are different. I find I no longer possess that open and artless soul necessary to move on. As Kurt sang, something’s in the way. Something to do with hitting thirty and discovering my marriage and nebulous career down the toilet simultaneously. These immovable facts have seized up all impetus towards practical activity. In three months I haven’t unpacked those cardboard boxes. And anyway, this place is only temporary, right? Until I find somewhere better. Sitting in the centre of the spattered carpet is a busted suitcase that once held all my books. Only these objects have I hauled out and stacked in dusty piles around the room in the absence of any shelf. Recently, reading has seemed too complex and demanding an act. When I have attempted a page of Descartes or Hardy’s poems the words have appeared to be in the wrong order. The more I persevered, the more they seemed to be written in Cyrillic—literally meaningless, the signified detached from the signifier. The same went for writing. I knew I should be fiercely hammering or weeping out a
Blood on the Tracks
or an
Ariel
, but the truth was, I couldn’t be fucked. The moment I stopped laughing at my own idiocy, I told myself, I would commence fixing this mess in words. But that moment never came. For once in my life, I let myself drift: blown with Neptune’s tides. A freefall without any self-preserving intervention from the Superego. For once, this felt like the right course of action. Besides, I was too depressed and tired to do anything else. Too suicidal to commit suicide.