Byron Easy (41 page)

But Mandy wasn’t listening.

‘And Nick’s just as shallow. He’s such a poseur. All he’s bothered about is being seen with the correct pair of shoes.’

‘Okay. Whatever you say. She’s a slag and he’s a poseur. Where’s the phone?’

Mandy paused, and said, ‘I don’t know. I think it was on the bed.’

Our eyes met for a beat. Mandy rummaged around under the covers and sure enough produced the phone. She had been lying on it. The weight of her cellulite-free, non-flirtatious thighs had pressed the call button. She confirmed the worst. The number dialled had been Antonia’s, who, we later found out to our unlimited shame, had been crouched next to the phone with Nick for the past hour, listening to our real opinion of them both.

‘It’s like the Bromley PTA dinner and dance in here,’ said Martin Drift, sucking on a red Marlboro in the underground gloom. ‘What’s wrong with these young people? They all look like surfers or hippies. Not to mention those grave-robbers in the white make-up. In my day you had gobbing punks.’

We were standing in the patchouli and dry-ice melancholy of the Electric Ballroom watching a beyond-forty alcoholic finish her final song on stage. Even the band seemed to have become suddenly embarrassed by the strangely uninhibited hand movements and caterwauling with which this woman chose to climax her performance. The name of this band of risibly unsmiling Goths was Rose Masquerade. Unquestionably, this was a rose long overdue pruning. Without looking at Martin, whose skin I knew would be glowing in indignation under his salty beard, I shouted, ‘You were—sorry, are—a hippy, Martin. It was bands like yours they wanted to destroy.’

He shouted something back but it was drowned out. I couldn’t attack Martin on a point of cool for the simple reason that we had both capitulated. We had embarked on a night of barrel-scraping. On the unreliable advice of Pat Coffer we were, indeed, contemplating Eurovision. The great man himself was near the lip of the stage, attempting to hold a conversation with Mandy, whose features appeared and disappeared in a fog of dry ice. This was just as well, because nobody else wanted to talk to her. Anybody remotely connected with the music industry had either blanked her, smirked or frozen her out on first encounter. A few had ironically made the fellatio gesture behind her back, with a curled hand held to the mouth, tongue visibly in cheek. This, of course, was in tribute to her late unlamented band, named after an act that Mandy had never performed on me, and one which, she insisted, she never would even if the temperatures in hell dipped below zero. To be honest, I was glad she had taken Pat off our hands. I could sense Martin also dreaded delivering the final verdict that his Eurovision hopeful—Miss Moonstone, currently curled in the foetal position on stage as the last waves of feedback shredded ears—wasn’t up to scratch. In fact, so far from qualified was she for the job of singer, popstar, sane human being, that almost anyone with functioning limbs randomly picked from a crowd could have made a better go of it. In terms of talent, she made Martin and I look like Bacharach and David. Why such a comparison? Because ever since accepting Pat’s offer of the Eurovison songwriting gig we had been frantically thinking of ways to renege on our promise. The latest, cooked up while standing dumbstruck in front of the monitors, was to claim that we were both secretly illiterate. Write her songs? We would sooner sign our own certification for the madhouse.
Nul points
!

Pat Broke off from Mandy and began to search for us through the Waterloo of dry ice.

‘Quick,’ Martin said, ‘he’s coming our way. Let’s scarper to the bar. We might be able to lose him there.’

‘What about Mandy?’

‘She’ll do the same if she has any sense.’

Not sure by this stage of my marriage that she possessed any, I downed my diluted lager and left the plastic pint glass sticking to the venue’s floor. Martin tugged the sleeve of my jacket and started to force the milling punters aside, like Moses through a Black Sea of leather jackets. Once at the bar he stood with his curled fiver, demanding service with his peculiarly astringent grey eyes. He had determination, Martin, that I would grant him. Sometimes I thought he was the only sane person I knew. He was a compact, sinewy, elegantly evolved man who placed a high value on loyalty, diligence, grit—the old values. Quick to form opinions, he nevertheless proved to be quite shrewd about human behaviour. I couldn’t think of a single assessment he had made that hadn’t, over the years, proved correct. Mandy did indeed turn out to be Mad Spanish Mandy, with all the slavering suitors in the world. Pat did indeed turn out to be one of the most persistent lunatics in the asylum, not just a harmless old pisshead.

The very contemplation of writing a song for Pat’s Eurovision turkey had only arisen because of the sharp downturn in Rock On’s fortunes of late. By November, the apparently never-ending downward trajectory of the shop seemed to have reached a nadir; at which point it turned a corner and just continued in freefall during the run-up to Christmas. Little Johnny, it appeared, didn’t want that spangled Gretsch Country Gentleman with pearl inlays any more, he wanted a sampler and a digital mixing desk. December had seen tumbleweeds blowing across the dusty floors of the Royal College Street shop. I had been downsized to one afternoon a week. Desperation was in the air. Every time I arrived just after lunch-time, Martin would be stepping out into the bitter wind for a Londis chicken slice, like Oates leaving the godforsaken tent. But he was determined to see his family through this ‘lull in the performance’, as he liked to call it. With debts like his, he had to be. Plus, his wife had finally persuaded him to move the family from the crack and pitbull estate where they had resided since the eighties to a purpose-built council block in Belsize Park, thus unfortunately doubling the rent. Despite his limpet-like resistance to movement or change, he had reacted to this upheaval with a Senecan shrug. ‘You have to expect everything in this game,’ he would say, as another Thursday afternoon’s sale of three guitar picks was banked. I was surprised by his resilience. Somewhere Martin had hidden reserves. So, when Pat had marauded in on the last Friday before Christmas, invigorating us afresh with his Eurovision dreams, we had told him he could count us in. I may as well admit that I too was hoping beyond hope that Rose Masquerade’s singer was not the flapping festive dinner she turned out to be. I too was vainly dreaming of big paydays; Green Room nerves, Terry Wogan’s melting brogue, hairspray, glitter, and a ticket out of Sing-Sing. I hadn’t really believed that Mandy’s band would disappear down the great rock ’n’ roll khazi in the sky. It had been such a central plank of her—our—existence. I hadn’t known a time when she wasn’t living the dream day and night. I trembled to think how she would fill her days now.

Martin handed me a urine-coloured pint of warmish lager and asked, ‘Are you still using that wedding present?’

Up until that moment I had totally forgotten his gift of a phallic-shaped lava lamp, delivered personally on the evening before my wedding day. The undulating green and pink patterns in their joke-erection plastic tube had to be hidden when Montserrat and Leo visited the following spring. Not long after that, Mandy had belted it to the floor in one of her apopleptic rages. I felt a sudden chill of shame at this. It had been such a surprise to see Martin at our door (the first occasion he had visited), cold and hungry, on the way home from the shop, his car coughing exhaust at the kerb, green novelty-cock under his arm.

‘Yeah,’ I said shakily, ‘I think it’s still in a packing case somewhere.’

‘Only, I didn’t see it when I came over to see your new place. Now, if you didn’t like it, if you thought it was gaudy rubbish and belonged in a knocking shop—’

‘No, no,’ I said, knowing how easily his feelings were hurt. He really was a sensitive soul under that dense beard and grizzled skin.

‘—I just thought it would tickle your fancy. I burst out laughing when I saw it down the Lock Market.’ Martin glanced over my shoulder. ‘Aye, aye. Here comes trouble. Pretend we spent most of the set here.’

I turned to see Pat Coffer limping towards us, a rock ’n’ roll Long John Silver, dragging his unwilling right leg with a tattooed hand. His puce complexion and concrete-grey eyes shimmered under the distant strobes. He was an Irish mountebank or Covent Garden costermonger from the old tradition.

‘Gentlemen, I knew I’d find ya here, propping up the counter. She’s the dog’s, isn’t she?’

Martin suddenly had his business visor on. He said, ‘Who, Mandy?’

‘Nah, Moonstone. She’s got what it takes, eh? A real performer.’

‘I’m afraid we sat most of it out, Pat.’

‘Ah, but I saw you both spellbound for the grand finale, eh, eh?’ He slapped Martin on the shoulder and winked at me. ‘I don’t half fancy your missus, Bry. It does an old wanker good to be seen out with a pretty bird on his arm. Reminds me of the days down Studio 54 when—’

‘Pat,’ Martin said with icy finality, ‘she’s shit. I’ve never seen worse in thirty years of exposure to shit. She wouldn’t even make it on a cruise ship. And I think Byron might want his wife back at the end of the evening.’

Martin gave Pat a harsh look at this last statement. He knew the old carouser’s ways too well. For a small man, Martin could be enormously forceful and charismatic. But Pat refused to look crestfallen.

‘Give her a chance! I spent six months of giros on her singing lessons.’

Despite the fact that Moonstone was one of the worst singers in the world and of world-class ugliness, my soft sentimental nature, my innate easiness, made me feel sorry for Pat. He had been through the mill and had been spat out the other side with his gammy leg and his tormented enthusiasms. At that moment, I felt a strange affinity with him. As if we were brothers in adversity. Plus, I had been regaling Mandy with visions of a better life for a week, all flowing from the golden chalice of Eurovision victory. In the end I caved in, just like I did when Pat touched me for a twenty earlier, his unignorable confrontational eyes sparkling.

‘Okay, Pat, I’ll write a few lyrics.’

Martin rounded on me. ‘I won’t let you, Byron. I won’t let you waste your time. Pat’s made a career out of wasting people’s time.’

Surprised, I said, ‘Ah, what harm will it do, Mart? The man’s in need.’

Martin addressed Pat, his usually gentle and equanimous eyes steely. ‘Sorry, mate, but I won’t let him. He’s under contract to me.’

This last statement was ludicrous, and we all knew it. We stood there in the smoky blue-lit cavern of the ballroom, like a Mexican standoff.

‘But, why not?’ croaked Pat, his voice suddenly full of pebbles.

‘Cos he’s an old friend,’ said Martin.

To my surprise, my heart expanded at Martin’s words. Maybe I had been under great emotional strain of late, but tears smarted in my eyes, disabling me from further speech. This was a far cry from the knockabout badinage of the shop. I didn’t think he would defend me like this. I felt the sudden upheaval burn briefly inside me, like the ghost of an old wound.

Finally, Pat said, ‘And what am I, then?’

‘You’re just old,’ said Martin, and motioned for me to follow him in search of Mandy.

The day after my Eurovision dream crashed and burned, me and Martin went for a curry, and laughed off Pat’s desperate importuning. A year previously, I had sat in the same bijou balti house with Mandy, my mother, my half-sister, Sarah, and her boyfriend. I still tremble, sober reader, at the memory of this night, one of the most bloody battles ever recorded in domestic history. However, up until this watershed, Mandy’s deep eccentricity sometimes warmed me. This didn’t quite cancel out her periods of spectacular suffering, but it went some way towards it. I loved the evenings when she danced around the flat to salsa and mambo in front of the big mirror as a prelude to a night out, eye-shadow glittering on the exotic anemone-like bulges of her eyelids. Or when she cooked paella with cockles, still full of sand, from the market. Or when she bought me books for no particular reason, with effusive inscriptions on the fly-leaf. Yes, there were some good times. Brief moths that danced erratically before the light. Like the afternoon we watched
Casablanca
together under a duvet as the rain bucketed down outside. Or when we drove all the way to a Surrey village dog-show one July and Fidel picked up a rosette for third place. All the pastimes of a married couple: gilded rings on fingers declaring our exclusivity. Then there were the nights when we played cards around the big varnished dining table that I had spent the summer sanding and waxing. I still loved it when she spoke her fluent mellifluous Catalan or machine-gun fast Castilian. Or when she cooked with olives carefully picked out and weighed from the Cypriot grocer on Green Lanes. She was fiercely pragmatic in the wider world of getting and spending. Her fastidiousness sometimes had its upsides: only the best would do—for her wardrobe, her bathroom products; for her kitchen. I secretly admired this attitude—me, who would always settle for second best to avoid a fuss. Once upon a time this attitude had extended to her band and her three long-gone tomcats. To me, even.

Recalling that evening in the intimate mango-light of the Indian restaurant—my mother, sister and her boyfriend before me like an interview panel, Mandy sullen and playing with her food on my left—is like falling off into a troubled afternoon sleep. I feel as if I am walking through a house, each room deeper and darker and more dangerous to enter than the one before. The sight of us there is painful to the touch, to the very eyeball. I can see the waiter bringing over the poppadoms and laden tray of chutneys; smell the cigarette smoke curling into the incense air; feel the coolness of the lager on my tongue, cooler than the misty December night outside on the Holloway Road. I can see Sarah and her slightly dull, wary-eyed boyfriend making a start on the yoghurts and dills, holding hands on the linen table cloth, while Mandy looks contemptuously on. I can see my mother, Sinead, heroically preserved Sinead, slightly shrunken by the years, her sable hair dryer and more troublesome than I remember, the dewlaps of middle age just beginning to form under her chin. I can recall the feeling of troubled incipience; that we were all getting to know each other at last, with Sarah just about to finish her A levels, with mother living so far up north. The evening had commenced promisingly, with a drink at our flat in Seaham Road, Mandy putting on a brave face after a day of migraines, pills and explosions of temper. But some transformation had occurred in the cab over. My wife had reverted to type, or to the feline venom that seemed to be her default state. And she knew the evening meant a lot to me, that it had been long-organised, that I hardly saw Sarah and had never met her boyfriend before. Her new mood of barely concealed intolerance, boredom and spite didn’t make for an easy journey. I could see by the expressions of my companions that they were wondering what had gone down, what had changed her tide in a matter of moments; whether it was something they had said or done. But these were all fruitless questions with Mandy. It was rarely anything anyone had said or done. She would turn for deep childish reasons known only to herself. She hadn’t yet learnt how to behave. That evening, I would feel the full gravity of this diagnosis.