Authors: Jude Cook
When I finally reached the crest of Seaham Road I realised something was wrong with the street. In fact, something was wrong with the whole area, it just hadn’t struck me until I rounded an all-too-familiar bend in the road. There were no lights anywhere. Not a streetlamp or a glow from behind a curtain. There had obviously been a powercut, a regular occurrence in that crumbling nook of north London. The houses stood in eerie silence. What was everyone doing? Crouching by candlelight indoors? Engaged in seances or exorcisms? I looked to the skies, but cloud cover allowed no light. As I approached our old place, a feeling of panic began to rise at the back of my throat. I felt engulfed, threatened. I quickened my step until I reached the front door last seen during my bloodied exit three months ago. As quiet as the grave. I looked up at our old bedroom window. Nothing stirring. I glanced around for Mandy’s car. Not present. She must be elsewhere—probably out, spending money, laughing; accepting the lecherous hands of strangers on her superlative behind. No, there was nobody home at our old address. Just blackness, the void. How strange to return and find this funereal emptiness. I had thought the flat was for ever, just as I had thought marriage was for ever. But these were just other examples of my childishness. Naive notions that I must yield to experience, must accept my punishment for. I shoved the keys through, and ran as fast as I could towards the light.
Three Decembers ago it was all very different. The day after our wedding found Mandy and me thirty-thousand feet over the grey English Channel. The plane touched down at Barcelona’s great airport with something like a long seraphic sigh. On the flight, they had played ‘Silent Night’ the whole way. The terminal was on the city’s outskirts, close to the Olympic Village. I felt intolerably euphoric to be out of London. Once on the tarmac, the air itself carried good vibrations: warm, sweet; slightly scented with intimations of the sea. Mandy kissed the still trembling knuckles of my hand (my first flight in seven years) as she welcomed Spain. So this was what a honeymoon felt like, a holiday from the tired commercial extravaganza that was Christmas in England. A glutted suburb of shanty towns and ghostly buses was the first thing that met our eyes as we cabbed it to the hotel Mandy’s father had stumped up for. The journey took half an hour, the streets becoming gradually more salubrious. A black Mercedes here, a Gaudi building there. Eventually we arrived at the gold-thronged entrance. The Royal on the Plaça Catalunya, high as the smudged offices of
La Vanguardia
opposite; with a mini Christmas tree in its own little tub on every balcony We threw our cases onto the plump double bed, deliriously in love. Later, I went out onto the cramped terrace, fifteen storeys above the street, and breathed deep of life, the future; marriage. I could see couples out late strolling arm in arm; the illuminated ants of cars tearing around the square. My wedding ring felt strange on my finger. It caught gleams from the hooded nineteenth-century streetlamps. Down below, Las Ramblas was festooned with green neon Christmas lights, proclaiming
Bon Nadal, Si, Sí, Sí, Las Ramblas, Sí!
I thought briefly about Matt Arnold and his desultory honeymoon at Dover, all twisted up over blind armies clashing by night, mourning the sound Sophocles once heard on the Aegean. That old misery guts! He obviously didn’t have Mandy with him, slipping into a pink baby-doll nightdress on the big bed behind, cooing his name. Now, that might have cheered him up.
We stayed for five days, high on each other’s company, on the mere change of scenery. I felt as if my blood had been cleaned and re-transfused into my body. On Christmas Day itself, we found a number of shops and restaurants open. I remember walking past a jewellers and having a sudden impulse to buy a crucifix, to have the icon next to my mortal skin. I asked Mandy to purchase it for me, as she said she wanted me to choose my present. I explained, as we walked around the ancient sanctity of the Gothic Quarter, that even tortured agnostics had urges for religious symbolism, had intimations that they should
make a start
on the big questions before it was too late. We spent the rest of the day in the Parc Güell, with Gaudí’s kaleidoscopic mosaics blue in the wintry sun, the sound of a flute from the catacombs below. Orpheus playing for the recently united couple.
Every night we ate at the same restaurant on the Passeig de Gràcia, as it had been so exquisite the first time. Every night we had the same dish:
merluza a la plancha
with the best chips this side of Brussels, Mandy talking flirtatious Catalan to the gimlet-eyed waiters. On the last day, before we caught our train for Tarragona, and the flat of that dynamic duo Montserrat and Leo, I persuaded Mandy to wear
my
Christmas present to her. Stridently secular in contrast to her gift, my offering was a top-dollar black-and-scarlet basque, a suspender belt, sheer silk stockings and a pair of virtual knickers that probably weighed less than a Kleenex. Why are men smitten by such vulgar visual stimuli? I had spent many hours pondering this question, often reaching a conclusion that was more physical than intellectual, and had made the deduction that men are conditioned by pornography from an early age. A vast repertoire of sexual images has been assimilated by the time a boy reaches fifteen. All a woman has to do is provide some of these images in the correct context and bingo, he’s yours for eternity. It really is that simple, girls, that Pavlovian.
All day we dodged mopeds and overdressed Barças as Mandy fought to pull the hem of her skirt over the stocking tops; or stopped vexedly on road islands to re-clip the garter belt or yank the thong from between her outraged buttocks. Yes, it takes a lot of getting used to this clobber, a lot of maintenance, but in the end the results are worth the effort (for me at least). Later, on the plump double bed, joined sweetly at the pelvis, Mandy undulating beneath me in a brothel’s worth of black, I made a mental note to thank the ghost of Franco for allowing Montserrat’s family to live when Barcelona fell in 1939. As our rhythm increased, Mandy holding me by the stem as I slid effortlessly into her, she gently tugged on my lower lip with her teeth. I noticed her eyes were fixed in concentration behind their lids, as if willing some primeval alchemy within. A series of trapped, high-pitched noises made an effort to be vocalised, her shoulders jumping with every thrust. Then she came with a heavenly expulsion of air from the throat, the sensual woman at last central in her sometimes sexually awkward persona. Yes, no matter what else you can say about our marriage, she always came in the end, did Mandy.
Tarragona was different. I had been fearing a repeat of the fireworks witnessed at Slough. In the end, no such nonsense occurred. We arrived at Leo’s sea-facing apartment in the early hours, having taken the late train. There we were welcomed by both the dutiful aunt and Montse, the old woman gesticulating and congratulating us in a mixture of Catalan, English and Castilian. She looked as if she were conducting Rachmaninov. They had touched down from their visit to London only the night before, so we had to endure endless dramatic replays of their six unfortunate hours spent with a mob of England fans in the Heathrow departure lounge. ‘Pigs, all of them! I always said British men were pigs,’ spat Montserrat. ‘Except you,
guapo
,’ she smiled at me. Mandy always found these demonstrations amusing, like voices from another era. The puce stone floors of the flat echoed to our every footstep. At night, bats could be seen swooping through the Moorish arches of the patio, the ocean distant and salt-flavoured. One evening, towards the end of our stay, Leo put her excitable mother to bed early, after preparing for her the regular meal of nuts and
Caballa del norte
, part of a special diet insisted upon by her doctor. Leo, Mandy and me sat around the simple kitchen table drinking Calvados, the stiff greying aunt appreciably relaxed for a moment. Although thin-shouldered, she was stout in the hips. Pear-shaped and slightly ungainly. If one were unkind, one would describe the flesh moving like blobs in a lava lamp. Her hirsute upper lip—common in Spanish women, and over which they expend so much self-conscious anguish—was also striking, although I never minded this sight, reminding me, as it did, of Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits. In her mumsy voice, Leo said, ‘Well, I suppose the next thing will be children.’
Mandy and I looked at each other, wondering who should answer this. Of course, Mandy got there first.
‘Come on. You know I’ve got my three babies, and anyway the band comes first. I have to do this while there’s still time. Look at Mum, running around for everyone else until it killed her.’
By her three babies, she meant her three sullen tomcats. Leo understood this before Mandy had completed her sentence, and allowed a sigh to whisper from her prim nose.
‘Cats don’t count,’ said Leo, studying Mandy’s face.
‘Yeah, and your mum still managed the time to have you,’ I volunteered.
Mandy flashed her irresistible smile. ‘Don’t tell me you want kids! Anyway, I’m too young. Help me out here, Byron!’
Leo was thinking how to reply. The mention of Ramona didn’t help either. I could see a certain extra-sensitivity in her brown eyes. Some people wear their souls on the exterior; any incremental change or undermining is immediately made manifest in a physical tremor or tic. They are emotional weathervanes, tilting in response to deeply felt suffering.
‘But every woman wants children,’ said Leo, faintly smiling, emphasising the word ‘every’.
I thought about this assertion for a while. Yes, in theory, every woman had her biological destiny to fulfil, a desire that should come naturally. But with Mandy I wasn’t so sure. Something told me that, like Lady Macbeth, she had the capacity to suppress her womanly impulses, had unsexed herself somehow. One only notices the milk of human kindness in its absence. More than once she had brashly proclaimed that she hated screaming tots. Not a good start, I thought. And her stock answer about the cats was, I knew, a cop-out. They weren’t so much her children as her toys, her underlings, something to control.
‘Not every woman wants kids under their feet,’ persisted Mandy. ‘Some take care of their careers first. And you know the problems I’ve had. I get too ill. The doctors said I had an eighty per cent chance of being infertile.’
It was true that Mandy had been treated for endometriosis in her teens, hospitalising her for weeks. It was quite possible that she was barren. But this fact, I suspected, was a source of relief for her; a good reason to avoid the issue of whether she
wanted
a child. Also, somewhere among Mandy’s rebuttals, I knew she was alluding to Leo’s childless state. It only occurred to me later that Leo’s question might have cost her some anguish to ask. After all, her marriage ended mysteriously in the sixties, and she never had any children. One didn’t like to ask why. At the time of this conversation, I thought of Leo as an almost comically timid presence. Transparent and vulnerable. But now I see her as very brave—another example of my people-blindness.
I addressed both of them, in an effort to allay the waves of Spanish passion that were beginning to stir in the night air. ‘Kids are expensive. I don’t think either of us could afford all that at the moment. Plus it’s a difficult question when your family background has been so … disrupted. You think twice about bringing another life into the world. It’s not a given that you automatically want to continue the species. Perhaps you don’t want them to go through the same trials, the same rubbish.’
‘Exactly,’ said Mandy in triumph. ‘Look at my old man and what he did. This—’ she pointed to the erratic white scar on her forehead, ‘—will last a lifetime.’
Mandy often griped about her father hitting her and, once, pushing her through a glass door, causing the scar she was so self-conscious about. For some reason, I never quite bought this. I waited to see if Leo’s response confirmed the accusation.
‘Well, that was an accident. Your father did what he had to do to bring you up. You were spoilt from an early age—a spoilt only child. That’s why you’re so pushy. You think the world owes you something. Well, it does not. I can tell you all about that. As you get older, it’s what you owe other people that matters. Duty is the most important thing, especially in families. Look at your grandmother: if she didn’t have me to cook, clean, tidy up after her, she’d be in a home. You remember that one we saw in Valencia. It was like a Nazi camp. Now, would you like to see your granny there?’
Leo was the only person who could genuinely subjugate Mandy. Perhaps some of that motherly authority hit the spot. Montserrat, on the other hand, didn’t receive such latitude from my pushy darling. This was because, for a large period of Mandy’s childhood, the old señora has been in charge of her upbringing. She had moved to England during the seventies to allow Ramona to get on with
her
career. They had installed her in a semi in Slough with a little Mini, a necessary move, as she had clashed with Mandy’s father over virtually everything from the start. ‘That evil man!’ she would moan. And the car was a mistake. Shortsighted and short-fused, she was possibly one of the most dangerous drivers this side of a blind paraplegic.
‘Of course we couldn’t dump her there,’ said Mandy. ‘But she runs rings around you. This special diet thing. I’m sure she only does it to give you more work, to make herself feel important. Like a popstar. Did you ever check with the doctor that she needs any of that stuff?
Caballa del norte en aceite vegetal!
Almonds from Africa! It’s so expensive.’
‘That’s as may be,’ said Leo firmly ‘But when I’m dead and gone, you’ll have the pleasure of looking after her. She’s bound to outlive us all.’
Mandy poured the Calvados and lit another cigarette, expelling the first puff like a whale spouting water. The candles trembled as a breeze made its way through the apartment. She had no answer for Leo at the moment. Plus she had to exercise caution—Leo and Montse had bequeathed a substantial cash wedding gift, after all. But I saw something of the virulence of Mandy’s female rivalry, how personally she took other women’s attitudes towards her, their mere presence. In her mind they were all jealous: of her looks, her youth, her band; or were trying to coerce her into dull, dutiful lives like their own. She really liked to throw her weight around, especially with other women. More than once, I noticed that other females were slightly scared of her, this stormy spitfire, this untameable firebrand. Also, behind all the talk of biological destinies, and my own exhortations about unstable families and money, there was the intuition that I could never trust Mandy with one of our children. I, too, was secretly relieved that a Harley Street doctor had pronounced Mandy almost certainly infertile. She was far too capricious, aggressive, irresponsible. Her attention span was too short for the lifetime’s task of bringing up a child with diligence and love. I could imagine her coming back from the supermarket saying that she knew she’d forgotten something, but she couldn’t quite remember what. Olive oil … pasta … oh, yes, the kid! Or stabbing the poor child in the head with a fork because it chewed its food too loudly, a pet hate that caused her almost psychotic exasperation.