Byron Easy (51 page)

Of course the clear skies couldn’t last. On the Wednesday, she smashed a jar of olives in the street. Thursday saw a horrible ruction that I tremble to revisit. A vicious, tempestuous fit, caused by nothing at all, in the sizzling heat of the hotel room. She tore up my Rilke. She spat in my face. She screamed. She threatened to get the first flight back by herself. The savagery of her outburst shook me considerably. At its height, she was like a cornered hellcat. It felt like the zenith of our misery. Concluding that all the tears cried in the history of mankind could probably refill the oceans twice over, I decided to go down the long road to the beach on my own. In the heat, a pike in my heart, I cried so much I thought I would faint. Where do tears emanate from? How can the psychological produce such a physical result? If one is depressed one’s skin doesn’t turn black, so wherefore tears? For women they are a relief, for men, torture. Ever since we landed (apart from the first night) there had been the constant background hum of unrest, discord, depression, of the unsatisfactoriness of everything. Of the final stages. Even in paradise she couldn’t be happy, this woman coloured ill. I felt a panic come over me as I stood on a high crag overlooking the luminous waters, as if my soul were expanding to fill and burst my body. I had to close my eyes, like I was going out of my mind.

The rest of the afternoon I paced out with solitary hours of swimming across a cove little frequented by tourists. The glass of the water felt good over my head as I dived to the golden grid of sunlight at the bottom. It resembled a baptism. I surfaced and looked at the hills with their intricate patterns of bushes and rocks, like tiny tight afro-curls. The sea was warm and supportive, the colour of agate or jade in the near shallows, deep navy further out. By five I had had enough and allowed myself to drift on the soporific currents. Mandy’s poison was leaving my system: I felt free, relaxed even, strangely indifferent to my fate. I could have drifted there, seagulls scattering overhead, until I reached the Pillars of Hercules. I closed my eyes—trying to squeeze out the salt along with the clotted pain—and kept them shut; the sun a white presence behind the lids. Quite gradually I became aware of a rocking motion to the water, the distant drone of a boat some way off. I flipped over and noticed at once how far out I’d drifted. The high crag where I had stood was a dot on the great curving sweep of the hillside. I began to swim for shore but the rocking motion increased, making it impossible. Ominously, the noise of gulls, from a nearby buoy, seemed very loud—I felt they were sizing me up as carrion.

The faraway hum of an engine had belonged to a large pleasure cruiser that was producing a formidable rip-tide in the bay I felt a twist of fear. Trying to swim was so impeded it seemed I was doomed to stay treading water until it got dark—the rhythmic undulation of the pull was tugging me further out, dragging me down. I considered crying for help, but nobody would have heard me. The big cruiser now gone, its after-effects were causing havoc in the bay I could see foaming breakers hitting the beach in florid explosions. My head went under, and I opened my eyes foolishly to see the limitless blue beneath my struggling feet. I surfaced, heart pounding, and began an agonising front crawl that seemed to take me nowhere for two minutes. Quite calmly, another part of me was thinking: so, adios, then, Byron Easy. This is right on time, to drown aged twenty-nine like Shelley, on an ill-advised outing, my heart stung from foolish ructions—it all served me right. And anyway, what did I have to return to? Maybe old Percy Bysshe entertained such thoughts as the
Don Juan
went down, the volume of Keats still in his pocket, his heart strung out on another man’s wife.

But eternity cannot have been ready to welcome me into its white radiance. Slowly, very slowly, I began to get somewhere. The beach became nearer, its unsuspecting figures running joyfully or kicking sand out of sandals on the tide wall. I wasn’t going to die after all. The colour of the water changed from a heavy navy to a welcoming turquoise. I thought then of the occasion I almost drowned during a desultory fortnight on the Norfolk Broads with Mum and Delph. I had stepped off the slimy stern of the barge, ratchet in hand, expecting to open the lock, only to find myself up to the top of my head in thick, green, dark, mossy canal water. I had experienced a second or so of high panic, a flash of the everlasting. The end: not later, but now. Then a strong hand fished me out.

Closer still, and I managed to put a toe on the bottom. The relief felt like a homecoming. Then a foot. A web of dancing reflections surrounded it. In a moment I was dragging my trembling body up the steep gradient of the beach, face stinging and sun-struck, heart pounding but grateful.

When I limped back to the hotel in the evening I found Mandy by the pool, slurping a piña colada and teaching Spanish to the priapic teenage boy. I sloped off to the shower. I never told her what happened that afternoon. Somehow, I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction.

On the penultimate day I managed to persuade her to do something more active than lying like a piece of steel under the welding-torch glare of the sun. With my remaining drachmas, I had booked us a trip to the underground caves at Melissani. She reluctantly agreed to go, fixing her shades to her head, where they remained until well after nightfall. On the coastal road in the rotten reeking bus, I stared at Ithaca in the misty near distance, a glowing blue of promise and mystery. For the past few days I had had the strong intuition that Homer was born on Cephalonia. If he had been, the sight of that sister island across the bay must have seemed like some Elysian home, some final destination where a man would be glad to hang up the lyre. Of course, they say he was blind, but I found it hard to believe he never saw the world, in every sense of the word.

After the inland drive, we finally reached the caves and spent a cooling hour underground slipping on stones and staring at the giant pendulous stalactites the Germans had used for target practice during the war. The ghosts of executed soldiers, the sites of forgotten pogroms, made me very melancholic. After this grim refreshment we walked to the underground lake where I had what can only be described as a peculiar, perplexing experience.

As we queued for a free boat under the dome of dank rock, open at the top like a volcano, I thought I saw someone familiar disembarking from one of the rowing boats that ferried tourists around the caves. The Greek oarsmen were singing traditional songs, full of forced vitality from the strain of repetition. I focused and refocused my eyes in the rippling light and became convinced that, fifteen feet ahead of me, chaperoned by an Adonis-like boyfriend, was Bea, her chestnut hair glossy, hallucinatory. She was wearing a colourful top of a rich, subdued red. I was staggered at the serendipity of this: of all the places in the world to come face to face with Beatrice, standing in line for a pleasure boat with the woman I chose instead of her. I had travelled to the lofty peak of Hampstead and stood vigil outside her old window for a year and had returned disappointed. But here, in the death throes of a catastrophic marriage, I was to come face to face again with all love, all beauty. The girl was laughing and squeezing her boyfriends hand, heading up the narrow stone path to where we were standing. Closer. Then closer still. Yes, it was definitely Bea: the same steady intelligent eyes with their air of fragile intensity, of depth. I froze up, my heart in my mouth, having no conversation or explanation ready. I asked Mandy to swap places in the queue so I was on the inside. Bewildered, she complied. Mandy had never seen Bea in the flesh before, so there was little chance of her causing a scene. Bea was now a couple of paces away. I wished she would speak, so I could hear her voice and have final confirmation … then … then the woman passed and I saw it wasn’t her. Too tall, more Mediterranean in close-up, her hips swaying in that libration characteristic of Levantines. I felt breathless, relieved, off-balance. Grasping Mandy’s hand, I saw my wife was looking at me confrontationally. It had been a long time since we held hands.

Ignoring her look of confusion as we pushed forward for the first available boat, I stammered, ‘I think I need my eyes testing.’

On the final day, our baggage stored in the hotel’s kitchen, awaiting the flat-bed truck that would ferry it to the airport, we took the bus to Metaxata for a last swim. Away from the tourist trail, overlooked by the calm craggy mountainous outposts high above the bay (the ones that had almost witnessed my drowning a couple of days before), we spent the morning running into the surf. An hour before it was time to kick the sand from our towels and head for the airport, I heard Mandy shout excitedly from the shallows. ‘Byron, come quick!’ Her voice was shrill, like a cry, with a child’s excitement. ‘There are fish!’ I ran across the foot-torturing pebbles and waded out. The sea was the temperature of a tepid bath. Sure enough, when I reached Mandy, there were currents of silver darting fearlessly between her legs. She stood there, thin and brown, her black bathing costume tight to her spine, her hair up, as the shoals came in eddies out of nowhere. The water was so clear, you could see their eyes. Some bigger creatures, a foot long with flexible green spines and delicate markings stayed with us longer. So friendly, familiar and curious were they, it was like being joined by one’s children. Mandy trailed a hand through the crystal Aegean and tried to touch one, but it proved elusive. It darted away under the glassy ripples. She smiled at me; a smile from long ago in the past, a smile I hadn’t seen since she asked me to marry her on Brighton pier. It made me very sad to see this smile after the scarring scenes of the week. I glanced over my shoulder at the two vacant stripes of our towels on the beach, then smiled back. I didn’t have to say anything. We both remembered the time.

Darkness. The train is sighing relentlessly to a stop. The sun has finally dipped below the horizon. What a long time that took. We seem to be very far north. I can see Doncaster station half a mile away on a bend in the tracks. The amber sparkles of the town resemble Christmas-tree bulbs that no one bothered to spend much money on; uniform in colour, carelessly distributed. They glitter like those fish, silver and rapid; forming ever-dilating circles and shoals. I can still see them, feel their intimate touch against my bare legs, Mandy smiling that long-ago smile.

Outside my window, even with such a lack of light (and I have to press my face very close to the glass in order to make anything out), I can see all the melancholy preparations for the festive season. I open my notebook and record:
A cloud of rooks over the carrion of
a
starter-home estate; a six-foot inflatable snowman in a drive, huge-bellied and sad despite the smile under his phallic carrot; a Christmas tree in every window; flashing decorations like landing lights (holly, ivy, Santa, Rudolph, sleighs) probably visible from space … further on, wreaths of tawdry tinsel on doors; stars of David; meagre homes with their satanic satellite dishes.

Then the approaching station: trackside always belching up the worst and most depressing objects, as if God had emptied an ashtray from on high. Corroded drums; forgotten bales of fencing; plastic bags caught in sharp branches; upturned chemical containers; wheel-spares; buffers embedded in the ubiquitous sea of volcanic pebbles; isolated signals; coils of steel cable; scorched warning signs, bumble-bee yellow; dripping flagstones and capstans upended in a wilderness of couch grass; a rank of floodlights disbursing an icy blue-and-white glow; a lunar illumination for a peopleless wasteland.

I settle back in my seat and try to meditate on why my marriage had to end. It seems important to get this straight before I alight from the train. There might be awkward questions, after all. There are only another couple of stops before Leeds and time is most certainly cracking on.

Once back in England after Cephalonia, I remember something snapped in Mandy. There were no more smiles like the one she gave me in the sunlit bay below Metaxata. Back were the mood swings of a toddler. Her inner recklessness, her genius for fits, her true ugliness, found its full expression. Miss Haste had become Mrs Hurtle. Did this mean it was finally over? How much more of this spirit-destroying nonsense could I put up with? Did I have the energy to cut and run? No, I stood still and endured it all—everything she had to throw at me. And a lot got thrown, I can tell you, during her blind tantrums, the scorching disruptions that appeared out of a clear blue sky.

In early summer, when my bank account was finally shut down after years of overdraft abuse, I persuaded Mandy to make the journey to the Holloway Road and open a joint one. We were refused, prompting Mandy to hurl the account documents at the cashier. Once outside, she propelled the jam tarts she had been carrying at a woman innocently queueing for the cashpoint. O, that Knave of Hearts! Within the space of a month, she kicked in the glass kitchen door at Seaham Road, pummelled the video recorder to pieces, threw a Walkman through the kitchen window, smashed up all our wedding photos, then, out of pure impatience at having to queue so long, hurled a tin of dog food at a cashier in Tesco. Not content with this, she attacked me twice in one evening with her Struwwelpeter nails and flung my bike down the hall because I came in late. The following day she threatened to stab me to death with a knife and then bit me in the neck. Unwilling to go to work one morning, she decimated the clock radio I had replaced after its predecessor’s destruction, then broke a plate over her own head during a hysterical screaming fit brought on by a migraine (yes, I also told her that it wouldn’t make it any better). Unforgivably, she ruined my thirtieth birthday by coming home from the restaurant and slamming the front door ten times, later lashing out at me with a fork. Finally, she smashed the telephone to pieces.
Three times.

Thank God for the invention of the mobile, is all I can say. Mandy: an adult with the emotional equipment of a child. Turbulent as a Ruisdael landscape, she was what anger-management therapists term the classic ‘exploder’. She couldn’t sit in the discomfort of her own feelings for more than a moment without lashing out.