Authors: Jude Cook
‘Anything to drink, sir?’
The benign eyes of the trolley girl stare into mine. Robin and Michelle look up, readying their wallets and placing their books flat on the table.
‘No thanks. No …’ My gaze has fallen on the black plastic bin-liner sagging from the back of the drinks wagon, into which all the spent miniatures and styrofoam cups will eventually be thrown. Something in this tableau makes me start to tremble. Perhaps it’s the aesthetic distance between the shiny trolley, its cargo of inviting booze, and the quotidian household object stuck on the end. The promise and the fulfilment co-extensive, or something. (I think I may have swallowed the same dictionary as my Islington friend.) Or maybe it’s because there is no more depressing sight in the world than a black bin-liner. Perhaps this is because they are the traditional receptacle for severed heads and torsos, sadly discovered on seagull-swarming landfill sites. Or because they are utilised by rough sleepers as makeshift duvets on punishing December nights … But this isn’t enough, and I know it. I am well aware of what makes me shudder so. Three weeks ago, two bin-liners turned up in my hallway. I don’t know who let them in, but there they were one evening as I returned from a solitary pint in the Prince Regent. And what they contained was, for me, worse than severed heads.
Inside the fullest sack was a sizeable selection of the books I had left behind at our marital home: mainly hardbacks, some with inscriptions from her (‘to the sexiest Byron in the world, Happy Valentine’s 199-’), nestling in what appeared to be a gunk of cat shit and litter. The second bag, though smaller, seemed to be heavier. It contained old vinyl, the onyx chess set we had bought together in Cephalonia less than a year before, Rudi’s wedding gift of
The Illustrated Kama Sutra
, and many of my presents to her that she obviously didn’t deem worth keeping. There was a wok, a flower vase, jewellery, the greatest hits of The Carpenters and (most painfully) the underwear she had worn on our honeymoon but had subsequently refused to even look at. Finally, my only remaining copy of
Hours of Endlessness
, the verse smudged by a substance I trembled to identify. This stuff must have been cluttering up the flat, the space she had long coveted as an abode for herself and her ‘private life’; the latter a phrase she ludicrously used on a number of occasions. I would always holler back, ‘You’re married, for God’s sake, this
is
your private life!’ But Mandy was convinced she had another one, elsewhere.
I dragged the groaning sacks up to the hateful hutch of my room. The larger one split on the ascent, leaving an acrid trail of cat crap. Did she deliberately throw this shit in with my books? Or were the bags lying around for days while the cats used them as a latrine? Either way, I sensed that the zenith of my humiliation had been scaled. I crumpled onto my bed and began to feel choked from the very interior. I fell on the thorns of life. I bled! How could she? … How could she cold-heartedly return books with personal inscriptions, telling of our love, our long involvement? I instinctively reached for my cigarettes, then remembered I’d given up the week before after an incident where I had passed out drunk on my bed with a lighted fag, only to wake up the next morning with a tyre-sized scorch mark in the fire-retardant duvet and mattress. The shock of almost killing myself and everyone in the flat from such stupidity had scared me into quitting—and I was still undergoing the berserk tumours of cold turkey during every waking minute. The visit to the pub for a drink without a cigarette had been a hurdle I had just about managed. Instead of smoking, I set about placing all the callously returned objects around my room. After half an hour I gave up. Populating the tiny space was the debris of a married life—things cruelly transplanted to a location they were never intended to inhabit: videos in a hole in the wall; the chess set on the camping table, not the lacquered shelving we’d shopped for together and that I’d put up. I quickly returned everything to the grotesque ebony bags, then threw myself on the bed in the hope that sleep would come and behead the day.
The following morning, I surfaced with the curtains still open, the chestnut tree outside bare to its bones: a shrivelled autumn skeleton. At its feet was a waterfall of pale rust, the large paddle-shaped leaves in knee-deep piles. The wind shook its branches at rhythmic intervals—it looked like an old codger standing in a gale, every conceivable hue of decay around its battered shoes. Time had beaten it again.
There was a muffled knock at my door. One of the haggard croupiers, just returned from his shift, informed me there was a message on the communal answerphone. It was a woman’s voice saying: ‘The table is outside.’ I knew at once that it was Mandy, and that the table she referred to was our large oval pine dining table I had spent weeks diligently sanding and varnishing. How considerate of her to return it. My heart felt giddy at this minuscule mercy. Maybe she still loved me. Maybe there was a slim chance that … I stepped out into the brisk November air to find no table. Then I realised she meant outside the flat
we
used to share. A flying visit to Seaham Road confirmed within the hour that it was no longer there. It had been nicked. Of course it had been nicked. If you left a coffee mug outside in that area it would be filled up in somebody else’s kitchen in the time it took to boil a kettle. This, as you can imagine, felt like some kind of meta-zenith of humiliation. She had surpassed herself. Derision had made its masterpiece. You don’t get up off the floor after a blow like that. You don’t get up easily. And the fear is that you may
never
get up. There was nothing for it but to go and get drunk. And the venue for this pastime had been, for an entire month, Rudi’s place.
That night it was Arctic under the stars. It was just as well I had packed in smoking, as Rudi’s first gesture on arrival was usually to open all the doors and windows of his ground-floor flat and direct you outside. And this was a man who smoked the occasional cheroot himself. Yes, it was a freezing night, with long cumuli of steam issuing from the mouth of every damp commuter. The lengthy trudge to his bachelor lair always required a cigarette at the end of it. But this time I just walked straight in and threw myself and my scarf down on his leather sofa. Outside, the wind was raking leaves in the early darkness; also clanking something hollow in his back yard.
Rudi said, ‘Come on in, spunker. Accept a pew and a wee tipple.’ He squared his meaty shoulders to take a look at me. His rhinestone eyes seemed to say, yes you’re the same self-pitying arsehole as last night and the night before. But his smile couldn’t suppress relish at having company, or rather, a drinking buddy over on such a regular basis. He grinned like a Rubens satyr, then handed me a bottle of red to pour. ‘What lies has she been telling you now? A lot ay shite, I expect.’
I took a plastic bag from my pocket and tossed it onto the icy stainless-steel coffee table. I said, ‘She sent all my stuff back. In two big bin-liners.’
‘Is that it?’ said Rudi, and joined me on the sofa.
‘Of course not. Open it.’
Out fell the basque and stockings from my honeymoon. Rudi’s eyes brightened. ‘Ah, the old returning underwear as ay gesture of contempt. Still, she could be wearing it for some other shite. It isnae that bad.’
‘No, it’s worse. She only left my table out for the Turks to nick off the street. The one we used to eat off every night.’
‘Now that is pish, I have tae say. You don’t fuck with a man’s table. Here, have some more. In vino veritas.’
He made a lunge for the bottle and refilled both our glasses. I observed Rudi as his soft corpulent hands handled the silky lingerie. The glossy black of his eyebrows. The slightly pursed greedy mouth. The swirls of body hair escaping from a rift at the top of his red shirt. Rudi Buckle always wore red. Red and black. In his supple voice he suggested I was exaggerating my predicament: ‘Like I say, Bry, the whole fiasco could be a lot worse. You’ve got a room, half a job. You’ll make it through this, I guarantee you.’
I knew immediately that it had been a mistake to go over. In my condition, I should have been alone in a straightjacket or in a monastery. I knew my whole opera of disgust was boring to Rudi, and that he had nothing of any perspicacity to say on the subject. Yet still I went over. Night after bacchanalian night. And he always mentioned the room he had located for me as early as possible in the conversation. He obviously thought I should be grateful to him for evermore. Christ, I should have taken that room at the Y. His way of life frightened me too, after marriage. The selfish bachelor round of cooking for one, chasing women and caning it till God knows when … It all seemed as empty as the hull of a playboy’s yacht. I could feel the furred tongue and fangs of the Singleton Existence closing around my aorta.
‘She wouldn’t even come to the door to explain herself,’ I said.
‘But you did talk to her?’
‘Yeah, on her mobile. She said I’d once asked her to put all my stuff in the bin, just like she’d done with me. She implied she was only following my instructions.’
‘Aye, in a battle of wits be sure to bring a weapon,’ mused Rudi, sagely. ‘Did she tell you what she’d been up to since she threw you out?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ I said, feeling a hot alcoholic tiredness behind my eyes as the first bottle of red found its mark. ‘She’s been holding parties for all her Spanish friends, renting the spare room out to Japanese students to pay my part of the rent. Doing all those things I inhibited her from doing, apparently. And get this. She even wants me to pretend to the council that I’m still living there so she can pull off some kind of benefits scam. The final indignity!’ My blood was up now. I looked at Rudi, that self-styled playboy and carouser of Kentish Town. His black, needy eyes, full of their strange appetites, had narrowed—as if listening to information anyone wise knew already. Yes, it was always me—the puny ingenue—who was the last to know the truth about the human condition.
‘That’s only to be expected,’ whispered Rudi in his mellow, velvety, versatile undertone.
‘From a psychopath like her, yes.’
‘And are you gonna play ball? She already owes you two hundred and fifty bar from the last rent.’
‘What else can I do?’ I was on my feet now, making a Christ-like gesture with my arms. I knew Rudi found these emotional demonstrations intolerable. ‘She’s like an unbeatable force. She just steamrolls everyone and everything in her path. The double-dealing bitch!’
‘Calm down, old fella,’ said Rudi, and raised himself from the creaking leather. I could see evidence of the sunlamp on his flushed face and scorched neck. ‘Since that last baby went down in a rather splendid fashion, I suggest you find another and get stuck intae the bevvy. Meanwhile, Rudolino here is gonna reheat a magnificent spag bol he cooked earlier. Are ye having a wee bit? It’s choice.’
‘I’m not hungry,’ I said, and sat down.
‘I take it that’s an affirmative. You gotta eat. Strength is life. Howa y’ever gonna get stuck into some serious fanny looking like a pipe-cleaner?’
After dinner, Rudi made a big deal of clearing away the plates and saucers of Parmesan cheese. I could hear him throwing the debris into the dishwasher behind the polished expanse of his breakfast bar. I surveyed the pastel lighting of his bachelor den. The walls were invaded by framed Japanese posters of impeccable vulgarity. Comic-strip cartoon characters; futuristic blondes coiled in pythons; Akira with a machine gun—the sort of thing even Athena wouldn’t carry. Then there was the cream rug of Tsarist luxury placed before an open fire, the grate of which always held a mound of amber embers. The location for his many seductions, no doubt. I shivered at the prospect of sexual contact with another woman. My night with Haidee had only left me feeling inept and out of practice; even more vulnerable to that dowry of smiles that is love. Despite the fact that the last two years of my marriage had been entirely without sex, Mandy had somehow inoculated me against intimacy and affection for ever.
Rudi sat down heavily and refilled both our glasses with dense red wine. He said, ‘Now Bry, I was wondering whether you could teach me a wee bit about poetry. There’s this—’
‘—Bird you want to pull. What a surprise.’
‘Aye, and she’s a real classy number. Blonde, twice my height. Her last fella was a porn baron, but all she really wants is for a man to recite poems to her. In bed.’
‘Give her Robbie Burns. That’ll get her going.’
‘Doesn’t he play for Celtic?’
‘He’s your national poet, you maniac.’
‘I just need pointing in the right direction. I’m shitein it for the next time she comes over. I told her I had a degree in politics and philosophy. She’s a choice bit o’ posh, I’m tellin’ yuh.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Suki.’
‘Well, that fucking says it all.’
‘Well, you married a Mandy!’ countered Rudi, suddenly defensive, his considerable shoulders flexing aggressively. The wine was beginning to clot my eyesight. I felt suddenly incoherent; angry beyond words. At that moment, I would have killed all of Rudi’s family and pets just for a cigarette. The sure knowledge that I should be on my own returned again to mock me; scorning my dire laxity of purpose, my deficit of discipline. Why did I need this? Every night drinking myself into a stupor, sick with bitterness and regret?
I said, ‘Tell her about your business and forget the poetry, Rudi. Drop the names of your latest big clients.’
‘I cannae waffle about that all night. Anyway, I’m not getting the popstars and footballers any more, just these fuckin’ high-rollers who look like they’d do you in if you clocked ’em funny, like. I mean, last week, one of my wee boys found a fuckin’ machine gun under the back seat of this guy’s Merc. Nae just an ordinary shooter, but a fuckin’ Heckler and Koch nutter wiy ay silencer.’
‘It probably belonged to the porn baron.’
‘Aye, he’s after me an’ all, apparently.’ Rudi looked at his feet for a moment, then turned to me, his dark eyes sparkling in the light of the rotund candle on the coffee table. ‘Still, it’s a million miles from radge old Hamford, eh? I remember the best we could do was go down the Duke of Wellington and drink pish-weak lager till we puked every night.’