Byron Easy (54 page)

‘Why don’t you put your head down for a bit,’ I suggested tenderly. ‘Tomorrow’s another day.’

But I could see her eyes were already closed; the high-domed lids, glitter-covered, tense and occasionally trembling. Breath from her slightly arrogant, dinted nostrils evaporated in the dank air. I crossed the room and gently wrapped the sleeping bag around her bony brown shoulders and tucked her long legs up under a couple of cushions. She was sleeping soundly. Something about her snoring there defencelessly made me suddenly paternal—worse, made me want to have children with her. I fondly imagined her there with our future offspring, a touching pieta under a tarry fog of fag-smoke.

It was indeed a long cold night. My feet went dead in my shoes, which felt water-logged somehow. By five, with the darkness still sealing up north London outside, I finished the final mix and sought the small kitchen to empty the ashtrays and fill the kettle. My face looked surprisingly white in the tall mirror. The curlicues of age were trying the corners of my eyes, drying my scalp which once grew luxuriant hair in the days of Dovecote Lane. I found it hard to believe that I was on the verge of marriage. The events of my own childhood should have inoculated me against it somehow, but there I was, aged twenty-seven, with my wife-to-be sleeping like an infant in the next room. How did I get here? Whatever route had led me to this November dawn, I felt almost euphoric as I washed two foul tea cups under the cold tap. I smiled to myself as I dried them, and caught my own foolish face in the big bright mirror. No, I shouldn’t smile so much, I thought. I look gormless and big-cheeked when I smile, like a hamster at feeding time. The kettle reached its steamy climax and clicked off. I stirred three spoons of sugar lovingly into Mandy’s tea and took it through.

Bending over her recumbent form, which had assumed a tight embryo ball during the night, I gently shook her shoulders and said, ‘Tea up. Your mixes are done.’

Her big eyes flipped open with a look of unsteady confusion. She didn’t seem happy to be there. She didn’t seem happy to see me. In fact, she looked furious. A change had come over her while sleeping. Her bedraggled cascade of hair was stuck under her left shoulder, and she rooted it free angrily, like a horse tossing its mane. She paused for a moment, scratched her head, then took a swipe at the offered cup with the back of her hand. Hot tea arced across the room, painting the already spattered walls and falling into the precious circuits of the mixing desk. The cup clattered to rest, unseen. I was stunned.

‘Why the fuck did you make me sleep here?’ she seethed and got up violently.

‘We had to finish your mixes! Jesus, look at what you’ve done. You’ve probably ruined Martin’s equipment.’

‘I don’t give a damn. I’m going home.’ And she lurched past me, arms wrapped tightly around her—shivering exaggeratedly as if she had just been retrieved from the deep-freeze like a leg of lamb. This was probably our first or second disagreement or falling out. So I decided to tread very carefully. To give her the benefit of the doubt. Ah, how naive I was to think it was merely a temporary aberration, the time of the month maybe. Then I began to feel hot-headed myself. I was angry that I might lose my job. The desk was probably destroyed—not from the liquid, I knew, but from the sugar (which only Mandy took), which would gum up the components, making it impossible to repair.

‘Well, you’d better explain the mess to him,’ I asserted as her back disappeared through the door. ‘You know—I need this work.’

All I heard from the kitchen was an echoey complaint; soul-deadening in its bleakness. It was the first of many occasions when she used the same sinful phrase to end an argument. Five words which I would grow to hate and fear. She said:

‘I wish I was dead.’

Tarragona. New Year’s Eve. The last night of our honeymoon. Another long day’s journey into night. Why do ructions, gross scenes, fights, always occur under the cover of darkness? Not many people have arguments at sunset or dawn—maybe we are poetic animals after all, receptive to beauty even when we’re hating each other. I might as well let you in on the full story, unburden my marriage secrets. What have I got to lose? You’ve seen us both at our worst, full of sour hatred, wishing each other not divorced but dead. The first inclination I had that Mandy hated me, really despised me, came a week after we married. Far too soon! you might exclaim. But maids are May when they are maids—the sky changes when they are wives.

I think I told you, generous and patient reader, that there was some kind of altercation on the beach during my honeymoon. Now that it’s dark I feel I can revisit the scene and tell you what really happened. It’s hard to continue while keeping such a heavy burden to myself—we are arrested and trepanned by the past while attempting to function and deal with the present. That midnight, terrible words were exchanged, contemptuous words that should not pass between man and wife after twenty years, let alone seven days. Words that cause intense suffering at their recollection.

Let me share them without restraint.

We had decided to take a walk on the sand. The horn-tooting Barcas had fled into the night on their tinny mopeds, hollering
Feliz año nuevo!
and guzzling wine from goatskin gourds. We were both drunk: me with a tottering unsureness of foot, Mandy under the gathering black cloud that always accompanied her inebriation. Far out to sea, the dark breakers shot white foam up the beach under a scroll of fog. A constant, rhythmic threshing sound accompanied these waves, the low foghorn honking somewhere near the harbour. Mandy walked apart for a moment, then started swaying towards the shoreline. By this I knew something was up.

‘Hey—can’t you slow down?’ I called. ‘Why are you always walking off?’

I caught her up, and tried to peer into her face. The lash of her forehead scar seemed to glow in the moonlight.

‘I’ve got my headache back.’

‘What, the migraine?’ I asked.

‘What do you think?’

The alcohol had made me less than patient with her. Somewhere within, I felt anger at her stubborn determination to be true to her moods, to be obstinately herself. I also felt scorn for myself: the base anger a tourist feels when he buys something shoddy at a bazaar. My patient approach hadn’t ameliorated her caustic moods over the nine brief months I had known her, and I still wanted reparation for the glass in the face, the tea thrown over the studio.

‘I don’t know, I’m just asking,’ I said with rising heat. I was concerned. ‘Shouldn’t we go back now? You can’t go for a swim at this time of night.’

‘Do what you like,’ she snapped, and tossed her hair back with the quick dynamic movements she used when she was approaching boiling point.

‘Why don’t you tell me what’s the matter?’

Without looking at me, she said: ‘You were thinking about Bea earlier, I could tell by your silly expression as we did the grapes.’

Astounded at this telepathy, I said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Come on, let’s go back now. It’s cold, it’s dark.’

But she continued walking. ‘Don’t bother lying to me, Byron. It was written all over your fat face. You haven’t stopped pining since I told you to dump her. What’s the point of marrying me if you’re constantly mooning over some silly cow, with her stupid university degrees? With that dog’s name, too. God, that would’ve sounded good in the church with her mother looking on—Beatrice and Byron, I do thee wed.’

I was stung by this, as I always was by any mention of Bea. And I knew the jealous reference to Bea’s mother arose because she was thinking of Ramona, dead now for many a New Year’s Eve. It struck me that this may have been the very beach where Mandy’s mother played as a child, tearing along, brown as a walnut under the coruscating heat of a Spanish August. The beach where Mandy may have played herself, Ramona proudly observing behind caramel shades. I changed my tone, ashamed that I had been so insensitive not to predict this delicate area. Why the hell had I said yes to a walk on this tainted sand in the first place?

‘Come on, I love you, Mandy Don’t be so venomous, we’ve only been married a week.’

‘And what fun that’s been. You haven’t even bothered to learn two words of Spanish. What are you like, giving my Gran dirty looks every time her back’s turned—all that awkwardness with Leo? They won’t bite your head off, you know. They’re only human beings.’

‘Come off it, Mandy! People’s relatives are hard work.’

‘I’m a sociable person. It’s not my fault you’re a hermit who hasn’t seen the light of day for seven years.’

‘Wait a minute, you clammed up when you met my mum at the wedding.’

‘Only cause she hated me.’

‘She did not hate—for Christ’s sake—I hadn’t even seen her myself for a couple of years. She was nervous. She was shy. Weddings aren’t her favourite thing, you know. She’s twice divorced, or did you forget that?’

It felt odd defending my mother there, on the vast expanse of nocturnal sand, the foghorn sounding far out to sea. Mandy had taken a course parallel to the waves now, and they were loud and furious in our ears, a gush of salty spray spattering our faces.

‘It was
obvious
she hated me, Byron. I can read people, you know. I’ve always prided myself on that. Antonia tells me I’m good at that. Your mother took one look at me and wrote me off as a Spanish floozy. I could tell she was wondering why I was getting married in a miniskirt and why I didn’t have my own mother there.’

‘For fuck’s sake! She knew your mother was dead.’

Mandy span round, her brown eyes now crimson in the difficult light. ‘Don’t talk about my fucking mother like that!’

‘I’m sorry.’ I said, scared of her shaking shoulders and feline countenance, as if she were ready to pounce. As yet, I was unaware of her capacities, her boundaries. She hadn’t actually hit me thus far, but I realised she dearly wanted to. I decided the best form of defence was attack, always a terrible error with Mandy I continued, ‘I can’t stand around on a beach in the middle of the night being screamed at by you. It’s not my idea of fun, you know! I’ve tried my best with your crazy grandmother and Leo lecturing us day and night about children and earning money and God knows what else. I put up with them at each other’s throats last year when I first met them, what more do you want? And another thing—so what if I was thinking about Bea? Is that an offence now? We went out with each other for almost a year. She was a good person. A well-meaning, gentle person. What did she ever do to you? You got what you wanted, didn’t you? You got me. It doesn’t show you in a very good light when you’re always laying into her with both barrels blazing. You know, why do you hate people so much? I can’t stand to hear it—it poisons the air. And I can’t help mentioning mothers now and again, you know. People have mothers, they’re everywhere if you look hard enough! And it’s not those people’s fault if your mother’s dead.’

The night had taken on a surreal quality, with the aerodrome noise of the waves, the strange fog and the desert-like vistas of sand. We were dangerously far out. I was afraid of tides, of being cut off, of strange wanderers in the darkness, of Mandy punching me in the face. I noticed that both her fists had remained clenched during my rant. I also noticed that her face was dripping with tears. But not sorrowful tears: instead a cataract of loathing and thwarted supremacy.

‘You’re full of shit,’ hissed Mandy.

I went to touch her, badly wanting contact, but she pulled away viciously. ‘Don’t say things like that, it breaks my heart.’

Every memory of Barcelona, of the recent glorious days, slowly soiled by her sentence as it lingered in the brutally fresh air; as if a fundamental barrier of respect had been crossed. It was as if she desired the destruction of everything beautiful she ever encountered. I couldn’t believe so many cracks had appeared so quickly. She had her game, combative, ready-for-anything face on now. Neither of us was very drunk any more. Yet, the world felt turned upside down. When I glanced towards the water, the sky seemed to be the sea and vice versa, so disorientating was the fog and the blackness of the waves.

‘You’re just a short-arsed little prick!’ she spat, like a haggard regurgitating a kill. ‘What do you know about people dying? About real life. You go around in your own head all day, with your useless books. Sometimes I can’t bear to look at you. Like tonight, eating those grapes like a pig, one after another. You’re welcome to that fat-arsed Beatrix or whatever her name was.’

‘Please don’t be like this!’ I said pitifully, and went to touch her again. But she threw my hand off with superhuman violence. I felt as if I’d touched an electric current.

‘I wish I’d never married you,’ she sneered, and strode off into the black, obscure night.

Full of booze and tired beyond reason, I watched her walking away; her shoulders hunched, pushing her diminishing head forward at an angle. I sat down in the sand and grabbed great handfuls of moist gravel and shells. It felt good to make contact with the cold wet ground. Letting the handfuls go like sand through an hourglass, I smelt the stirring female odours left by the tide. The foghorn sounded, low and mysterious, like an unearthly valediction. The waves were so close now they began to seethe over my trainers, drawing back with a shush like a giant intake of breath. My heart was full of stones. Of intolerable disappointment and anger. The tide was coming in. I tried hard not to fall asleep, though part of me wanted to float out on the great black current, through the Pillars of Hercules and out into the open Atlantic. It seemed like days before I stood up on prickly limbs and made my way to the tide wall, where I walked for an hour before the yellow light of Mandy’s cab appeared.

If you had to come up with a defining characteristic of human beings, then it would be mental suffering—not physical suffering. All creatures great and small undergo physical pain, and I hope my portion of it on this earth is small, but … there, I’ve just illuminated my point: that ‘hope’ is a kind of suffering too, a phenomenon not experienced by the dog about to be drowned, or the monkey waiting in the vivisectionist’s lab. In terms of pain, anticipation forms the larger part of the burden. Claudio couldn’t be absolute for death—he had too many visions of nothingness to contend with. It is a mercy, I suppose, that a dog or a monkey doesn’t have to prepare its soul for the Everlasting, doesn’t have to imagine the agony of those it leaves behind. Until the murder or torture commences, it is blissfully ignorant. If you have to identify the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, it probably involved mental suffering. A bereavement. A separation. Physical torture is rare. Not many of us have undergone six hours of having our fingernails pulled out while drops of water batter our foreheads from a pipe in the ceiling—unless you count the Eurovision Song Contest, which Martin and I foolishly declined to enter, as Rose Masquerade eventually made the heats. Of all the love-disasters, a separation that occurs while you’re still ostensibly together is probably in the top five of the mental suffering hit parade. The water is all around but not a drop of it is drinkable. When she’s in, you make sure you are out. And vice versa. It’s hard to be pragmatic about the realisation that your marriage is a catastrophe, but that’s what I was forced to contemplate after returning from our honeymoon. What to do? All the top manuals advise you to ‘work on it’. But what course of action is there, when working on it makes it worse?