Byron Easy (5 page)

Then the door exploded open. It was, I’m not happy to relate, Tracksuit Man.

At this point my memory gets a little hazy, but I remember feeling something like the sudden disintegration of all my limbs at once, as if they were filled with hot washing-up water. Simultaneous to this was the sensation of a sweat instantly covering my entire head, like an icy tea cosy. The huge man searched my face until our eyes met with a dismal familiarity His intensely blue, mine intensely afraid. I was about to say, ‘Haven’t we met somewhere be—,’ when he pushed past me, knocking me into the obstructive suitcase for the second time.

Then I was throwing up.

I’m back in my booth now. The game of dominoes continues at a cracking pace. Tracksuit Man is fifteen seats away down the carriage. He still looks familiar somehow, like the Ghost of Beatings Past. His brutally shorn head is now wearing a Santa hat—at the insistence of his delightful children, no doubt. I’m hoping we can co-exist for the duration of the journey without me actually dying. For the moment we seem to have a fragile symbiosis—like Chamberlain’s with Hitler, like Antony’s with Octavius. Ah, the respect that comes from facing down the oppressor. I bet mine was the
last
face he expected or wanted to see as he pulled open that toilet door! My first playful thought was: we must stop meeting like this. Admittedly this was before I fell backwards over the suitcase (sustaining injuries to both arms—the pain of which has now joined the throbbing in my head). But, all in all, I’m feeling relatively spruce after throwing up. There’s nothing better for lifting the spirits than a good yodel.

I should tell you that there was another catalyst for puking, aside from my encounter with Tracksuit Man and the considerable quantity of red wine I’ve put away since breakfast. There was a poster in a sealed frame, advertising life insurance, on the way to the loo. It featured a psychotically healthy Nordic-looking woman and her gurning companion; a man with one of the most punchable faces in late twentieth-century advertising. They were both sporting the kind of grins usually achievable only after dropping three tablets of ecstasy. The simple tag-line read: ‘Getting Hitched?’

As you might expect, this brought me quite low. And made me not a little nauseous. Yes, it was the poster that really did it.
That
finally uncorked the bottle.

Well, my thirteenth birthday came and went. It was around this time that I realised I was a writer. I hadn’t actually
written
anything at this point, but, to my mind, this was merely a technicality. I’ll fill you in on what happened after that epiphany a little later; suffice to say that I had the usual single-child, commuter-town adolescence—shitty comprehensive; innumerable and astonishingly barbaric beatings outside Burger King on the midnight High Street; Saturday jobs; a parental divorce followed by ten years starving in London. Just the usual. The usual transition from provincial to urban. The predictable fate of the connectionless, gormless hick who comes to the big city to seek his fame and fortune with seventy-five pence in his pocket, and no firm understanding that talent is only two per cent of the equation, if that. I’d like to lie to you and declare I’m a teacher of foreign languages, or an oil-rig worker or a postman and this is my story covering three dynasties of stoic Royal Mail Operatives (as the dole-office computer sinisterly likes to term them now). But I hate those phoney heroes. No, I’m a writer. Why else would I be noticing the long-married grandparents or going on about what’s inside my head? Other people, normal people,
postmen
, are safe from the impingements of these things; of the subtleties, of the increments; the nuance and tone of daily life. Unmanageable thoughts, in other words. They don’t need to write it down. That’s how they can be postmen without donning a baldric of bullet belts and spraying down the occupants of 28a every morning. You just wouldn’t believe me if I said I was anything else. Other people, normal people, would get over this trauma—this vicious separation—with a combination of mates, spirits and that great counterfeit healer, Time. Above all, they would display an innate negative capability—capable, as Keats had it, of ‘being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. But, with writers, things hang around. The chronology is lost. Writers don’t want to forget, to be healed by time. Writers want to write it down. Writers want to remember before it goes.

I also work in a shop, but that can wait for the moment.

So, something went wrong with my family at a crucial age, and I didn’t manage to get an education. Though not for want of trying. My one attempt at scaling the towers of ivory, which I may share with you later, was soiling in the extreme. Instead, I suffered the trials of the autodidact. For years I bluffed it on wit alone, mispronouncing a sizeable lexicon of words, including heterogeneous and Goethe. I was twenty-eight before I understood a fifth of the evening news. What saved me was the English public-library system. After ten years of sharing hushed tables with reeking job-shirkers and Italian language students I was able to get by. And anyway, my birthright demanded that I take up the pen. When my mother was heaving me about in antenatal classes she was instructed to find a mantra suitable for getting through the ordeal of labour. She chose the line ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, which she mistakenly thought was written by Byron. Thus I became Byron Easy: retailer and poet.

A writer, then. Of largely unpublished poems, as it happens, as you already know. If you, dear friend, are a scribbler and happen to have a bundle of poems you want out there you could do worse than publish a pamphlet. My magnum opus was entitled
Hours of Endlessness
. It was my first (and only) foray into print. And it was well received, though a pamphlet hardly turns one into a lion of society. You will, on the morning of publication, awake, as I did, to find yourself dramatically un-famous. But, as Virginia Woolf said, for a writer, it’s not what you’ve done or read that counts, but what you’ve thought and felt. That’s the most important thing. Also to write it all down. Not everybody does that.

If, say, another writer were called upon to describe me he might draw attention to my banister-thin legs, the weakly sensual lopsided lips inherited from my father or the unassertive nose. Oh, God—my nose. That great drawback of my adult life. As time has elapsed I’ve made comparisons between myself and those proud possessors of Roman, equine, or boxers’ noses and been almost fanatically certain you could take my sexual history and
double it
to reach their number of partners purely on account of their strong, male probosces. It’s a ski-jump nose, really. Boyish, tweaked at the end like the victim of a Beverly Hills scalpel-job. It photographs satisfactorily only from the dead-centre front, any other angle giving the impression of a third earlobe rising like a pale pimple from my upper lip. It’s not a nose that demands to be punched, but it has trouble getting served in pubs or throwing a shadow, or creating a profile that would be worth casting in bronze. It would certainly be no good in a fight.

My hair (what little of it there is left) is black, and—since growing it long gives the impression of wearing a kind of permed, pubic hedge—currently very short. This other writer would be quick to point out that it’s a dye-job, tapering to thin, daringly spare sideburns that terminate an inch above my now-aching jaw. Sideburns, not mutton chops, he would hasten to add, as Dino my Italian barber has laboured years with clipper, razor and cuticle scissors to create the ultimate masterpiece sideburn while quite ignoring the fact that he’s got the neckline wrong or taken too little from the back. I reassure myself that this is merely the Sicilian way.

Then the eyes. He would say they were always too girlishly wide and long-lashed, too under-evaluating, too
easy
on others to be the eyes of a man who had just turned thirty. Those emotional peepers of mine: too demonstrative, too candid … Distressingly, I have always looked younger than my years. Maybe there’s an oil painting of me somewhere that’s horribly aged. This writer would note that the strong brows occasionally push the lids down, producing a somnambulant, half-awake look, as if a photographer had forgotten to ask for a stare or a ‘cheese’ or a ‘shit’. And my domey forehead would also be singled out, its convex bulge evidence of too much brain in too small a skull or of the fact that I’m a distant relative of John Merrick.

I suppose my only redeeming feature, if he were called upon to provide one, would be my strong jawline: arrow-straight and non-parallel with the singed sideburns, its powerful line regrettably undermined by my button-nose and lunar forehead.

For the rest of it, I’m not a hunchback or a one-thumbed survivor of a factory accident, or a eunuch, but I am thin. As thin as a Giacometti. And short with it—the booby-prize combination for any man. The wife always told me that I was too short and thin to wear a suit; that I looked like a schoolboy on his first day outside the intimidating gates. Oh, that castrating bitch! In addition to this, my spine, like my father’s, failed to grow straight and strong and is now resigned to its agonising curvature under my shoulders. I used to spend hours coveting the supple, pooltable-flat backs of men on beaches, wondering just where their vertebrae had got to. How easy, I thought, must it be for them to sit erect on buses and bar-stools. How their girlfriends must love to pull tarty nails over that expanse of non-deformed flesh. How pleasurable for them to bend over from the waist and not feel that dangerous whip of pain from coccyx to cerebellum. But at my age—at this altitude; this great distance from childhood, from the maelstrom of adolescence—one puts up with such deformities. At my age you get the body you deserve. Or the body you paid for (the latter never being an option).

Which would bring our writer onto teeth. My lower-deck is dangerously overcrowded, like a teetering rush-hour bus crammed to capacity. This state of affairs is more than vaguely connected with my childhood dentist’s vast talent for incompetence. I can still remember the doomsday visits there as a teenager with my half-sister, Sarah—across Hamfords green and undulating Payne’s Park (how apt a name). Even then, at six years old, she had that defiant look in her champagne eyes that made her a fabulous squabbling partner. After the hour-long fight over who would go first, we would arrive at the scrotum-tightening suburban address. Together we would tremble up the shovelly, crunchy gravel to a door bearing a plaque the bastard had screwed there to ensure he inflicted agony on only the very highest class of toothache sufferer:
DR DEMJANJUK—DENTAL SURGEON. NO WORKMEN’S BOOTS OR SOILED SHOES PLEASE
. Well, that disqualified two-thirds of the town’s population straight away. And you’re just talking about the women: the puffa-jacketed, gum-chomping, scarily confident
spreads
who did men’s jobs on the labyrinthine industrial estates. How he ever got any work I’ll never know. He had the same unassailable conviction in his own purpose as does a serial killer. And then there was his suspiciously Eastern European name: Dr Demjanjuk. Was he the distant cousin of one of Ceaus̩escu’s blood-drunk henchmen? Or the son of an exiled Nazi? One almost expected to see the arrows of an SS ensign peeking from under his fumey white gown as he greeted us at the gates of his torture den; lime-green mask dangling beneath his smile. From a tender age, his jaunty manner didn’t fool me for a moment. He was always a little
too
pleased to see me shaking there, engulfed by the springy sofa in the converted downstairs parlour of his house. Years later I discovered that other tooth-surgeons had
practices
with computers, clinic-style waiting rooms and fragrant nurses in fantasy costumes. But, with Dr Demjanjuk, one was never sure anyone else knew he was involved in this, this dental lark—as if he’d cobbled together all the necessary drills and equipment, nailed his stupid sign in front of his gravel path, stuffed some initials after his name and settled down to a day-job of fulfilling sadism after night-shifts in an abattoir. For years afterwards I would check the latest tabloid exposure of some House of Dismemberment or other to see if it wasn’t
his
impenetrably netted sash windows in the innocuous photograph.

Anyway, he systematically failed in his task of draining my lower field. Once, after eight extractions in a single morning, I messily spat a mouthful of alarmingly black blood into his bidet or sink or whatever makeshift apparatus he’d stolen for such a purpose, only for Commandant Demjanjuk to grin: ‘Would you normally do that at home?’ To which my strangled, pipe-voiced reply was: ‘I never have teeth taken out at home.’ Now that—that
really
put a smile on his face.

So it came to pass that I have two rogue incisors in the basement: one pointing out to catch my lower lip and one leaning in at a ridiculous angle that has snagged on my tongue for ten misery-filled years. Nothing they can do about it, so I’m told. It’s giving me a speech impediment. It’s
given
me a speech impediment. Only thousands of pounds of costly Harley Street orthodontia will enable me to speak Spanish now. The best the tooth-quacks could offer was to grind down the inwards-facing offender, but that brought unsettling visions of medieval torture.

I’m stuck with them. No Californian beach-grins for me. That’s what the extractions were for: so I wouldn’t have fucked-up teeth. So I wouldn’t have to spend my teenage years in an anguish of enforced celibacy, a railway-track brace deterring every fourth-form carpark-wench from hoisting her navy hockey skirt up her moley thighs. In retrospect this was clearly a double disaster. I didn’t get to see any moley thighs and I’ve still got terrible teeth.

As time passed I became convinced that the continual erosion of my tongue’s cells by my shark’s fang was giving me too much saliva. By twenty I habitually found myself with a mouthful of spit, a gobful of gob. For no good clinical reason. Talking became an obstacle course of headachy swallowing and avoidance of any sibilant word or experiments with languages that required rolling Rs. I was arrested three times for spitting in the street. The noise of my hawking in the early hours precipitated a petition from my neighbours. I lost out on three absolutely cast-iron nights of debauchery by half-blinding newly acquainted girls with drool. Any friends with glasses had to invest in windscreen wipers.