Authors: Jude Cook
Then I see that the bony-buttocked Accountant woman opposite is holding something out towards me. An offering. I catch her eyes: they are ameliorative, weakly brave. I feel sudden surprise at this gesture, this
détente
. After all, I’ve insulted her husband, almost started a fight (twice), and demolished a game of dominoes beyond repair. I am unsure of what the object is at first. I examine it closer. It’s white, folded, very clean—an envelope perhaps? Surely not a Christmas card! My heart swells with unexpected love for all humanity. Then I realise. It’s a Kleenex.
They say we’re strongly attracted to those most likely to destroy us. Maybe we fatally desire punishment, self-negation, nullity. I had met women like Mandy before. I had her down as a self-loather, an attention-seeker, an hysteric, a sympathy-junkie and expert manipulator right from the start. Just as the most gregarious, bubbly people are often deeply sad individuals on the interior, life-and-soul Mandy proved no exception to this rule in the final analysis. But what can you do when you’re treated to the illegal, strawberries-and-cream frillage of someone’s knickers riding helplessly from the band of their hotpants on a fortnightly basis? What can you do when your interior damage seems to correspond? What can you do when you get on like an oil rig on fire?
It is both comforting and frightening to remember somebody in this nascent fashion, when you’re still bringing out the best in each other. Like imagining the wasp-humming, orange-squash sunshine of the English countryside in September 1939, tranquilly ignorant of all that’s to come.
Of course it was good in the beginning. It always
is
good in the beginning. Since that first encounter in the dust-trap of the rehearsal room, intrepid Mandy returned on a weekly basis with Fellatrix—a tattoo parlour of nose rings and dungaree-housed bosoms, who, to a woman, couldn’t tune their instruments. For this task I was frequently summoned mid-song, only to be admired and cooed at satirically—and, in the case of Mandy, maybe not so satirically, as she soon extracted my phone number and was calling me at all hours from her dull switchboard job, extrapolating in unnecessary detail her insane escapades in the clubs of Camden. Along with these three a.m. adventures, I also learnt who was suing whom; which lead singer was tooling a female journalist just to get a live review, which executive was scamming a band’s tour budget to fund his heroin habit, et cetera, et cetera. Though I feigned a weary disinterest in these stories, I would become unbearably excited when she phoned, and could usually time her call to the nearest minute. It was her energy that overwhelmed me initially—plus her sure conviction that Fellatrix were destined for Wembley Stadium, even if it meant posing naked on vintage motorcycles for the
News of the World
. But we were friends first—light and easy friends, too, albeit with her investing all the energy. And this, it seems, is always fatal, as the transition into a love affair can so often feel like a
capitulation
on the part of the passive exponent.
I remember one call in particular. A rainy Friday night in reading Yeats, trying to write, when the phone rang. Now, how could I tell it was her just by the ring?
‘Hello sweetheart!’
‘Shouldn’t you be out clubbing or something?’
‘Can’t do that when it’s raining. That would mean a cabbage.’
‘A what?’
‘A cab! Anyway. I’ve got two friends round—we’re all pissed on voddy and feeling a little fruity.’
Giggles and shufflings in the background. I let old William Butler slip onto the desk of my bed, knowing I would be in for the long haul. I suddenly felt like a pipe-smoking father castigating his errant daughter. But also glad of the company; flattered by her attention.
‘Fruity? Isn’t that that how they describe opera singing?’
A peal of laughter and a sound not dissimilar to a cat being sat upon.
‘Listen, the real reason we can’t go out is because of Johnny Radish.’
‘Who’s Johnny Radish? And why does his surname sound like a root vegetable?
‘That’s his band, you nutter! Don’t you read the music press? He’s been after me for months. Last week he just pushed me up against the wall at Club Dynamite and snogged me. Oh, Byron, you have to rescue me.’
The sound of hysterical laughter in the background. This is why ‘Kubla Khan’ is only fifty-four lines long, I mused.
‘I’m not the rescuing type. I don’t do rescuing. Specially if the men involved are bigger than me.’
‘Oh, he’s huge!’
This time the laughter almost burst my eardrum. And so it went on. She was a life-force: demanding, infuriating, instigating, inspiring. She told me her band was going to be enormous the following year; that she’d put so much into it any other outcome was unthinkable. I’d never met anyone with such an unshakeable determination and energy. Such fire-proof self-belief. And she always looked stunning, turning up at the battered door of Rock On, shades balanced on her middle-parting, immaculate white mini-dress and a black-blue feather boa trailing behind, like a magpie in flight. At the end of each conversation she would call me her ‘special friend’, tell me to ‘wrap up warm’ and blow a kiss down the phone. Without getting too Oedipal, that kind of maternal affection has its appeal.
March gave way to April, which buckled to the seething uncertainties of blossom-blown May, which in turn opened out into a blistering June. Summer. And not just any summer. It never is when two people find themselves uncontrollably, unfathomably in love; in dangerous, lethal balance.
It was after an unconquerable day in early June (the shadows cast by trees in Finsbury Park seemingly as solid as the objects themselves) that she invited me back to hers for a little wine. ‘Hers’ was two uneven floors above a bakery in Archway, patrolled by the wary watchfulness of her tomcats, all three of which had red, white and blue Fellatrix badges dangling unsettlingly from their collars. I was sweating like a wrestler by the time the expedition of her stairs had been completed. A door on the top landing was knocked open for me by the Trojan horse of her guitar case and I found myself standing in a spacious room reeking of fresh paint.
‘Deluxe, ain’t it?’ said Mandy, kicking off her creepers.
‘Blimey. Is this … is this all yours?’
‘It is now. I used to share the cupboard next door with my boyfriend until my breakdown.’
I let this sudden, significant revelation of her mental precarious-ness (so casually introduced) pass while attempting to digest the agoraphobic dimensions of her room.
It’s not often in London one sees rented accommodation, or a single room, that has any sense of
perspective
, but this candle-softened pad (no other word for it) almost had a vanishing point. To my right was a limo-length sofa counterpaned in ebony fleece fur. Then there were the spanned orange walls, teeming with posters, framed rock stars, flyers and a Polaroid-thicketed noticeboard. To my left were racks of clothes, books and rare vinyl. As my eyes acclimatised to the scarce light, I suddenly noticed the crouched figure of a man by one of the three open sash windows, the black apertures of which were letting in the exquisite June night air. He was holding a paintbrush.
Christ, I thought. She’s brought me back for an orgy.
‘Byron, this is Steve,’ said Mandy, turning on me with a corkscrew.
Steve cocked his head towards me, and my gaze met his booze-destroyed eyes.
‘Easy, mate,’ said the man, in a bass voice.
‘All right.’
Steve assessed me for a moment, sitting erect, like a bull mastiff in a painting smock. Then he spoke.
‘Byron. What kind of name is that for a bloke?’
For this, I didn’t have an answer. I never did. I had always thought the predictable and dreaded enquiry over my ludicrous name had no defendable riposte.
‘Shut up, Steve. I think it’s a fab name. Anyway, I thought I told you to have this done by the time I’d finished rehearsal.’
‘Sorry,’ growled Steve, plopping his brush into a jar of turps. ‘You’re the boss.’ He raised himself to his full height of five foot six and shouldered past me, his transit having that unmistakable masculine tang of staked territory, proffered violence. ‘Gloss takes a fucking aeon. You know that.’
Once Steve had disappeared through the doorway, candle flames trembling in his wake, the whole room seemed to relax tangibly.
‘Sorry about Steve. He’s one of my tenants.’
‘You’ve got tenants?’ I asked, overstressing my surprise, as I attempted to reclaim some lost masculinity by virtually smashing the cork out of a bottle of red wine.
‘Oh, yeah. I’m the landlady here. That’s how I got the biggest room. He’s a total nutter, Steve. I’ll have to go down in half an hour to put out his fag and turn off the telly. He always falls asleep pissed out of his mind. He’s a brickie; got loads of cash—see that?’ She pointed to a dinnerplate-sized gash in the plasterwork of the far wall. ‘He did that with a baseball bat when he thought Matt was getting out of hand with me. He’s very protective. Heart’s in the right place …’
‘Who’s Matt?’
‘Another tenant. The other bloke who lives here. A total hippy—wouldn’t harm a fly, but try telling Steve that.’
‘They weren’t fighting over you, were they?’
‘No, not over me. Over the microwave. Matt was using it when I wanted to. And to Steve that deserved a smack.’
‘Very protective, then?’
‘Yeah, and very drunk, though he’s great at disguising it.’
‘So, er, who else lives here?’
‘Harriet. Thinks she’s a photographer. Almost twenty-one and still a virgin. She told me blokes have got it in, but not up, if you see what I mean. Says she gets tense …’ At this point I realised there was something profoundly
wrong
about Mandy. Something that didn’t add up. Full of innuendos, but very definitely not a sexual woman. Bursting with banalities, but very certainly possessed of a resourceful cunning. I would have to watch my step. She continued on the subject of Harriet, all the while monitoring my reaction. ‘… I thought she was stuck-up at first ’cause her dads this journalist on the
Independent
, but she’s sound. In fact …’ Mandy suddenly patted a space on the limo-sofa, indicating that I should sit next to her; I grimly complied, bearing the heavy bottle and two glasses, ‘… he’s gonna help the band out. Write our first piece of journalage.’
‘You mean journalism.’
‘No,’ and she fixed me with the twin infernos of her stunning eyes. ‘I mean
journalage
.’
Easy does it, I found myself thinking. This is someone who always, even when they conclusively know they’re not,
has
to be right. Every time. Over the next three hours, as the empty bottles of gut-rot red queued up on her chaotic coffee table, I learnt about the terrible privations of her Windsor boarding school (tabbed by her flash dad), her phenomenally spoilt single-child upbringing in some leafy cul-de-sac (conducted by Granny Monsterrat and Aunt Leocadia), her aloof father’s maniacal passion for DIY over parental duty, and her drift towards ever more villainous and violent boyfriends culminating in a schizophrenic drug-dealer now doing time for ABH (the stolen credit card sprees down the King’s Road in a hotwired four-wheel-drive; the orgies of house-breaking).This was followed by the tale of her three-year relationship with a self-pitying madman, climaxing in her eventual breakdown and emergence as the Future of Rock ’n’ Roll.
Meanwhile, she (when I could get an epithet in edgeways) learnt about my estranged father; Delph and my mother; my ‘stalled’ literary career; my current diffident yet perplexing girlfriend, Bea; the years of heating my room by taping Bacofoil to the wall behind the electric ring of the cooker (still ongoing) and my current emergence into someone who was very eager to sleep with her indeed. That very night, if at all possible.
It was then that I noticed something, two things, on the sturdy Victorian mantelpiece that dominated the nearest wall: a pair of gilt-framed black-and-white prints on either side of an arch-shaped mirror. A sombre diptych. Not sepia photographs, but 1950s glossies. Hard to make out much detail, the light in Mandy’s room being a relentless, subterranean amber that made you feel as if you were in a cave, straining to make out Palaeolithic daubings. In each frame smiled a Mediterranean-looking woman, with grey flourishes streaking a Steinway-black cascade of hanks and tresses. Both head-shots had strongly memorable features—so reminiscent that I thought they must be of someone famous: Eva Peron or Maria Callas perhaps, though they appeared to be family portraits. I was studying them so hard that I forgot the hot proximity of the girl at my side, talking away to the deaf ear of my averted profile. Then I realised who the subject of the photos was. It was Mandy.
‘That’s you, isn’t it?’ I interrupted suddenly, pointing to the mantelpiece. Mandy followed my nicotine-jaded forefinger.
‘No! That’s my mother, Ramona. I wish it was me,’ said Mandy, beaming. I made eye contact with a younger, infinitely altered, yet morbidly similar version of Ramona. ‘She died when I was sixteen … in a car crash. Everybody loved her.’
‘You look more like—like sisters.’
‘Ah, she would’ve loved you.’
At that instant the door swung open and there stood Steve: ruffled, grossly panting; a gaseous nimbus of seventy-per-cent-proof air in front of his puckered mouth.
‘Ron. I need your help, mate. Gotta shift something.’ Mandy went to stand up. Steve held out a trembling, admonitory hand. ‘Nah, it’s a man’s job. Needs a strong pair of mitts.’
‘Steve, it’s three in the fucking morning. And it’s Byron, not Ron.’
You had to hand it to her: she had authority, as well as glamour, energy and great legs. Although I could have done without the emasculation of her correcting Steve on my behalf for the second time that evening.
‘Whatever,’ mumbled Steve.
I met Mandy’s eyes with a kind of mute desperation.
‘Go on, then,’ she sighed, exhaling a rich plume of cigarette smoke into the summer night. I followed the sweating rhinoceros of Steve’s back through the open doorway. Then her voice: ‘But don’t tire him out. He’ll need all the strength he’s got.’