Authors: Jude Cook
‘Goodbye, Byron.’
My older, present-day self watches this, tears of remorse on my stupid chin, like crabbed Albert Finney in
Scrooge
, crying, ‘You fool!’ at the young Ebenezer. Indeed, if this were a movie, the crowd would be screaming in their seats: ‘Don’t leave her, you madman!’
‘Goodbye, Bea.’
I thought of all the things she had given me. In February, I had sent her a large Valentine’s card with a bad poem inscribed inside. She, meanwhile, had delivered a plain card with a quick message. But I now realise that it demonstrated a simple link of love. It was one of those optical illusion cards; just a pixelated blur until you catch it at the right angle, then all is revealed. In Bea’s card, the revelation was the male and female symbols, discreetly linked together. Subtle, but worth the effort of investigation. Later, in August, she had given me a copy of Camus’ short monograph,
Summer
. I thought then, in the wanton oven-like heat, with Mandy calling me every day, that the summer didn’t belong to her, but in retrospect I was wrong. It would always belong to my chestnut-haired darling.
Bea let go of my hand. We both turned simultaneously and disappeared into the fuming crowds. At a corner, I craned my head around to take a last look at Carthage and its tragic flames, but she was gone. I never saw her again.
Lots of fun, lots of sex.
Well, for a while, Mandy was right. Newly separated from Bea, September turned into an Indian summer of rare magnificence. The rain had lifted. Strange that combination: unimpeachable blue skies and a heart as heavy as a ship’s anchor. But somehow I managed the struggle of sharing Mandy’s bed. Within a fortnight I had virtually moved in. A visit to Brighton with her dissolute tenants had long been mooted providing the weather held up. I kept putting it off, the anchor too weighty to dredge on board, but eventually a date was set. A fine Saturday saw Mandy’s chrome Peugeot rattling towards the coast under incoming Jumbos and a scalding sun; the back seat bulging with Steve, Matt and Harriet; Mandy up front with me, looking like the cat that had just got the cream.
It was one of those unforgettable days. The sieve of memory is unpredictable: what it chooses to retain or lose. Nothing momentous happened … until it was time to go home. I can still feel the hotplate of canvas car-seat under my jeans; still see the plastic of the boxless cassettes fed one after another into the whirring slot of the stereo; still anticipate Mandy’s hand reaching for mine to place a burnished kiss on my knuckles—one of her few gestures that I always loved.
Steve had been told that I worked in Martin’s music shop and spent the entire journey screaming ‘Rock on, Ron!’ into my right ear. He had started early: the plastic bag of freezing cans diminishing by the mile. Brought up in care, then borstal, then onto a career of petty thieving, Steve had worked as a cabbie until he had blown it by becoming a professional alcoholic. Fifteen of his thirty-five years had been spent behind bars. Another ten pissed. Now a brickie, he was, for a while, one of the most dangerous men in north London. I didn’t know this at the time, and neither did Mandy, otherwise we might not have let him loose onto the scorching back seat. Still, he was handy—in every sense—to have around. He was going to be Mandy’s bodyguard when fame arrived in its golden chariot.
Harriet and Matt sat huddled together, obviously alarmed to be within Steve’s vomiting-range, as The Who’s ‘5.15’ rang out along the Surrey Downs. Harriet at that time had an uncontrollable helmet of corkscrew ginger hair which blew free through the open rear window. She was afflicted by hirsute moles, some of them facial, though she had the newly coined beauty of anyone pushing twenty-one. She was so excited, she said, to be going to the seaside. Matt, meanwhile, never said much anyway. Goateed and pony-tailed, a gentle six-foot-two pipe-cleaner, he sat silently with an expression of half-formed mirth on his chops for the entire journey.
Once parked, we all hurtled along the broad perspectives of the seafront—singing, piggy-backing, taking photos. Ahead of us was the dazzling sea, the twin piers; one vibrant with a funfair, the other crumbling fabulously (like a seedy old soak at kicking-out time) into the waves. After fish and chips in vinegar-sodden newspaper, Mandy and I escaped from the others, leaving them to skinny-dip in the foaming shallows.
There we were, two semi-educated idiots, whose inner damage just happened to correspond, with the world all before us. We kissed in the holiday heat, lips already tanging with salt, in the sultry dregs of an exceptional English summer. Then we made our way to the slatted running boards of the Palace Pier with its dodgems, coin-clanking arcades and candy-floss parlours, all wallowing in the day’s dizzying centigrades.
Mandy took my hand again and pressed it to her lips. This courtly gesture in reverse always fascinated me. She said,
‘Why don’t we get married?’
I laughed and looked into the sun, into the light, then pulled away half-blinded.
‘Why? I know why. It’s because getting married isn’t the sort of thing people like us
do
. Straights and suits do it to please their parents.’
And this was the truth: I didn’t know anyone my age who had tied the Gordian knot. For many people, marriage and children was just the next thing, requiring the full approbation of their folks, their bank accounts. But not for the likes of us. My mother was merely a voice on the phone, my father on the other side of the world. As for bank accounts, Mandy was a near-penniless musician, I a scribbler of non-remunerative doggerel. My attempts at self-improvement, at further education, at forging a career, had been hilarious. All the same, I felt a warm uncoiling in my stomach, a sense of rightness, of being at the centre of something for once in my life. It was such a ludicrous suggestion. Is this how grown-ups got married? On a daytrip to the coast? It was obviously unworkable. We hardly knew each other, although love deludes you otherwise. And me with no dough, no tenure, no hair. Mandy with her brazen ambition, her recklessness, her changeability. Yes, a ludicrous suggestion. Because it was such a bad idea it started, in the Brighton sun, to look like a good one.
‘Did you say, I do?’ grinned Mandy.
She wasn’t without humour sometimes. And not without conventional notions, either, within all the brittle waywardness, the capricious flutter that was her life. Under all that glitter she was just a regular gal. I decided to take the plunge.
‘I think it’s the best idea you’ve ever had.’
‘Oh, deluxe! I’ve told my dad you can meet him next week. If that’s all right.’
‘Hey, that doesn’t mean yes! I just said it was your best idea. Anyway, I thought you two had fallen out.’
‘That happens every week. Gran and Auntie are coming from Spain, too.’
This evidence of prior planning unsettled me slightly. But she seemed overjoyed. At the back of her mind, I could perceive the shade of her mother, absent from any wedding day she would ever have, smiling an Andalusian smile. And at the back of mine there was a pair of welcoming angel’s wings, bringing salvation. My tacit acceptance had something to do with death and time, too; with the train of my years screaming through its stations. I was knocking on. Most of the time I felt like milk on the turn. I was also romantically convinced that I would die young, like Keats, like Shelley, like Raphael. If I didn’t marry now, then when? There is a sense that people without a family get married because they are trying to become each other’s family. And this is a dangerous, regressive notion; a dependent merger that can only bring misery. But I needed a family. As Madonna sang, one is such a lonely number. She still had her hand on mine. Abruptly she yanked me forward and raced me to the end of the pier, her black hair blazing with surface reflections from the toiling ocean.
There is a photo of us from that day, that season of unforced laughter. It was taken by Harriet, who had sneaked up behind us with her heavy Nikon, her red locks wild in the sea wind. The pale grey-and-white reproduction of Mandy and me, arm in arm, wearing summer pumps and shades on the Brighton Palace Pier hung in all the flats we subsequently shared and she subsequently destroyed. The two lovers, soon to be married, walking off into the sunset.
Lots of fun, then.
And lots of sex, too. At least when we returned to the generous ceilings of her top-floor flat. We sat on her futon, as I remember it, the sash windows flung high; pebble-filled pumps scattered about. And she hugged me. A deep, double-enclosed embrace. The first time I had been properly
held
, it seemed, since childhood. It appeared unthinkable then that we would ever do each other harm. Eventually I opened my eyes and, with my chin on the warm shelf of her shoulder, I could see a gravid slowness in the movement of the horse chestnut trees outside. Late summer butterflies, white as Arctic snow, flitted about weightlessly. A brittle opacity in the lemon light of evening held swarms of hysterical midges, distinct as stars or satellites. And, as she undid my belt, I noticed that every sill in the perspective of windows out back was brushstroked with a stripe of delicious yellow. If there had been woods beyond Tufnell Park, they would surely have echoed to our ring.
The meeting with a girlfriend’s father is always a decisively male moment. If all goes well, the acceptance of a cigarette from the peacock-fanned pack counts as an unspoken bonding between Y chromosomes. Talk should then move onto the re-laying of lawns, the grouting of tiles, the size of a car’s engine specific to litres and numbers of pistons. Despite one’s best efforts, one becomes acutely aware of how one is walking—too much mince and he’ll think you’re a woofter, too much aggression he will give you that ‘lay one finger on her’ look. And all the while, there it is in blazing neon, on sandwich boards along his street, on tannoyed address systems: ‘This man is fucking your daughter’. Yes, a male moment, and one corrosive to the nervous system. Anyway, I hadn’t actually said yes to marriage yet—and hey, I thought it was my job to ask—this was merely an exploratory visit, a relaxing rendezvous. By the end of the week it seemed all was decided. Mandy did indeed drive us to meet her old man, her wizened granny and her aunt from Tarragona, the following Sunday.
Her little Peugeot dipped between the banks of the circuitous country lanes surrounding Windsor. A day in very late September—the fulcrum of the year. One of those days when, after a good summer, the soil, the sky, the leaves on a blazing row of maples, seem fully permeated with the sun’s benevolence. Total satiation: nature at full capacity, with the insidious whispers of a cool October kept at bay, like attendant devils in the wings. A late September afternoon: the hot sky an ocean of breathing azure. The hedgerows persisting in their plenty a little while longer.
The tree-canopies dispersed light in a continual dervish flicker across our faces; a zoetrope of gold, like blinking very fast. Although I had spoken briefly to Mandy’s aunt Leo on the phone, I had only seen a smudged black-and-white photo of her father. Significantly, this was taken on his wedding day. There was Ramona in all the flamenco finery of her dress, and there was Ian Haste—tall as a telegraph pole and, as I would later find out, only slightly more talkative. Yes, I had been keenly dreading the meeting for seven days. Why do we tremble over such introductions? There is nothing one can do to prepare oneself except jump straight in, naked. A baptism by etiquettes and rules not yet known. Best behaviour won’t get you through, only a kind of instinct; the intuition of the Davy-lamped miner feeling his way along the dripping seam. One is there, whether one likes it or not, to be evaluated. And you better have had a substantial breakfast, or risen early enough, to get you through, to emerge intact. To emerge like a man.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t to be the case that September afternoon. I had taken the precaution of drinking three bottles of Spanish sack the night before (and most of a bottle of Famous Grouse as a nightcap) just to get in the mood. To be frank, I was hungover. In fact, I felt titanically wasted. There was a slim possibility that I might have to do some talking later on. This was doubly unfortunate, as ninety per cent of my vocabulary was fiercely marinating in an evil broth of red wine. All verbal agility was lost. Not only that, but the afternoon was shaping up to be a scorcher. By two o’clock, the viscid booze had begun to osmose through every pore of my body, basting my forehead with a sheen of toxic, seventy-per-cent-proof sweat. I could see it was going to be a long day.
Once we emerged from the country lanes (a wisp of straw, blown in from the late summer fields, lodged in Mandy’s hair), we took the turn for Slough instead of Windsor. Mandy sheepishly admitted that she’d been economical with the truth about the town of her origin. Soon we were on the outskirts of Betjeman’s dystopia. We span fast through the demoralising concrete boulevards, the office blocks that appeared to be made from tarmac, the scarred pubs and fried-chicken outlets. Fast was the operative word. I’d say we averaged seventy for the entire journey. But then she performed everything rapidly, did Mandy, my meretricious marvel. The only thing Ian Haste and I would eventually agree upon was that she drove like a
man
. Finally, we reached an outlying suburb, with gated residences that surely held sentimental Monet and Renoir reproductions in appalling frames. Sure enough, the house of Mandy’s father was one of these.
As soon as the car had been parked—and I had scooped my sick and shaking frame from the vehicle—I became aware of foreign voices, screaming. Through a window I could see two hunched shadows inflicting insults upon each other.
‘What the hell’s that noise?’
‘Oh, that’s only Gran telling Leo off for letting her down. It’s happened every day for the last thirty years. First she blames her for not looking after her. Then for squandering her savings. Then for not being as good-looking as my mother. You’ll get used to it.’
I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Smoothing the tears of sweat from my brow, I turned towards Mandy, who already had her finger on the doorbell.
‘How do I look?’