Authors: Jude Cook
But you know all that. I remember the evening when it was all decided. Me and Rhianna in the rimey garden, nerves blazing after a cloudy bong, kissing those delicious kisses of sixteen. The emancipating feeling of knowing I would never return to the schoolhouse with its cast of gargoyles and perverts. By the time we pulled the patio doors to go in, snow was falling, gently at first, but seemingly dispensed by the hard bright moon above. Snow in October; the crescent of a Damocles cutlass dangling from the velvet cushion of the sky.
I am lying under a bush in Camden Square, an inch of snow in my ears. It is cold. Very, very cold. The latest Rhianna in my life is not a sweet, slightly corpulent sixteen-year-old, but a mad bitch named Mandy. Let me explain … A year after getting married, I too was also having a screaming row with my wife every night. I too was enduring the words, ‘I wish I’d never married you,’ spat in my face at the slightest provocation. The latest of these fights had seen me trudging the slush-banked streets of Holloway until midnight. A frozen January in London. I had taken in a movie. I had bought cans of strong lager. I had sat in the late-night café and eaten a fried-egg sandwich. But I still couldn’t contemplate going home. Because it didn’t feel like home. Just four walls and a lot of grief. Ah, the old familiar. Instead I had found myself in Camden Square by a sort of homing instinct—back at my old crash pad. I even looked in at the hushed curtains, but was unable to see the new occupants microwaving their midnight cups of cocoa. Lucky them. Instead, I made myself a bed on the hard ground, the big bare trees clashing overhead in the bitter wind. O! What a miserable night I passed! The cold stars shining above in their mockery. And in the morning, a fresh fall of snow: deep and crisp and even in the stunning sunlight. A spiritual stillness in the air. And frostbite threatening my toes. I brushed off my clothes, looking for the St Bernard, and made my weary way to A&E.
Just another average scene from a marriage … The previous month, Mandy and I had driven to Slough to have Christmas dinner with her father, the first since getting married. Progress reports were expected. Forced smiles were the order of the day. Nobody had any appetite for these deceptions, and anyway, Mandy had said her only motive for going was to borrow some money and visit her mother’s grave. Ian Haste had recently purchased a big black Labrador, to keep him company. The gaunt widower had never remarried, and spent his time slavishly redecorating the old family home. Of course, we still had Fidel, newly separated from his beloved Concepcion, so we took him along. Despite his traumatic severance, he was in a gregarious mood. By the end of the long afternoon, the two dogs were on more than friendly terms.
‘That is a
male
Labrador, isn’t it, Dad?’ Mandy suddenly enquired.
‘Of course. I don’t want litters of puppies around the house.’
No, that would mess up the immaculate cream carpets that swept regally from room to room, like an Arab potentate s love nest. The two dogs were merrily frolicking under the big, resinous Christmas tree, licking noses.
‘Mum never had dogs. She was a cat person. It won’t feel like home now.’
‘When did it ever feel like home, Mandy?’ said her father wearily. There were new smudges under his dark eyes, black baggage. ‘After she died you couldn’t wait to get out. To start the world.’ I was about to tell Mandy how lucky she was, having this palace to go back to if the going got tough, when Ian Haste turned to me, lighting a long Dunhill. ‘What about you, Byron. Are you getting any peace?’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ said Mandy, indignantly.
Mr Haste knew his daughter well. That much I had ascertained about my father-in-law over the past year. His evaluating eyes settled on me. He still considered me to be a waster and a loser, despite my stabilising influence on Mandy. On the mantelpiece, an early photo of his daughter watched us: she was sitting on a tin of Quality Street holding a rabbit. It was all there, the bossiness, the hauteur, the spoiled black bulbous eyes, the way she headlocked the forlorn bunny like a wanton boy.
‘Well, there’s been the odd disagreement,’ I sighed, catching Mandy’s admonitory glare, ‘but nothing that would make the papers.’ A lie, of course. Many of Mandy’s outrageous acts over the last year wouldn’t be out of place in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
This was a woman who would scream the house down when she couldn’t find a hairgrip. Who would hurl alarm clocks across the bedroom when she didn’t want to get up in the morning. Why did I stay with such a woman for more than five minutes, you may well ask? Well, it was hard to locate an answer to that at the time. Something to do with the permanence of marriage, the emotional investment one makes, the sorry fact that I still loved her. Because maybe Mandy was my last shot at love, my last chance of continuity, of forgiveness. After every eruption I would always place an inordinate value on the little cards we left for each other; cards of contrition, usually bearing favourite animals.
The circumspect father turned to his daughter. ‘It’s not easy setting up home together. Not when the roof over your head depends on the health of your relationship. That’s why I bought your mother’s half of the house out.’
‘When she was having her flings, you mean?’ said Mandy, eager-eared for information. Ian Haste paused, stretched his long drainpipe legs to let out the tension, and took off his orange party hat. Addressing us both, he said,
‘That’s right. If you can’t trust your wife with your friends, why should you trust her with your joint assets? Get out while you can. Now, I’m not saying you two are having any problems, but you have to watch what you get tied up in. Wait till you know how each other behaves. Under pressure, that is. Use a little nous.’ He pronounced the final word as if he were referring to Jack Ketch.
‘Well, at least she had her fun before she died,’ said Mandy, scornfully.
I reflected on Mr Haste’s cunning, some of which had obviously rubbed off on his daughter. Buying out your own wife while she’s still married to you. Not bad.
‘Plus a house is not a home,’ I volunteered. ‘Especially if all the love’s disappeared. It’s just four walls and a leaky ceiling.’
They both looked at me as if I had no right to comment upon the amount of love present in their household. Then a bark, from behind us. We all turned. Fidel, a dog a quarter of the size of Mr Haste’s black Labrador, was attempting to mount his new playmate on a marital bed of Christmas wrapping paper. The big dog turned to us with a mixture of panic and sorrow in his eyes. He gave another bark, this one louder, although he knew his pleading to be fruitless. As we were well aware, once Fidel had set his heart on someone, he had to complete the conquest, from bouquet to post-coital cigar.
All three of us began laughing, thankfully shifting the emphasis from the clotted reprisals of the dinner table. Mandy asked her dad,
‘Has he got a name yet?’
‘I’ve tried a few, but none of them fit his sad eyes.’
Fidel’s flying haunches, thrusting uselessly against the Labrador’s back legs, gained in speed. Oh, yes, he must have thought, I’m taking someone from behind whose name I don’t even know. And maybe I’ll never bother to ask!
‘How about Macca?’ suggested Mandy.
Macca
was Catalan for queer.
‘Now, what would your mother think?’ said Mr Haste.
‘Or JFK, perhaps?’ I said. But their blank looks told me no one got the joke.
On Boxing Day Mandy drove us to the graveyard outside Slough where Ramona had her final resting place. It was a blowy, brumal afternoon, the gales making our eyes smart and stream. I was glad to park up in the little enclosure before the chalky path that led to the graves. We had continued a sour argument about money for the whole journey. By the time Mandy ripped the handbrake from the floor of the car, neither of us were speaking.
We passed the gatekeepers stone house and the big bending yews on the outskirts of the cemetery. Ahead of us were mechanical diggers, then a few bedraggled women laying flowers at a new stone, the marble all black and glossy in the distance. But mainly there was the path. How long was that path to her mother’s plot! It was the first time I had made the journey. Mandy hadn’t visited in over three years. She walked slightly ahead, leading the way, her arms embracing the tired yellow-and-white chrysanthemums. All paths lead this way, I thought grimly. This is where the long and winding road terminates. This is our ultimate home, where we finally get some peace and quiet.
At last, we neared Ramona’s unprepossessing stone. Once before it, I could see her full name—Ramona Haste-Arias, and her dates, horribly close together in time. Below it a simple inscription: ‘To the Best Mother in the World.’ Mandy bent to lay the flowers, the wind taking on the edges of the wrapping paper.
‘Hold that,’ she said, passing me one of the bouquets as she wrestled the other from its constricting elastic bands.
‘I will,’ I said, in a reverent whisper; all past rancour vanished in the humbling, wind-torn no-man’s-land of the cemetery.
As she stooped to fan the blooms, I saw a sudden humanity in her, not witnessed before, or at least not in its entirety. She was a little girl again, needing her mummy. She took the other bunch from me and said softly to the stone, ‘You’re better off where you are. They never understood you up here.’
Up here. I thought about her statement for a moment. Yes, up here, one is still vulnerable to the daily slings and arrows. At least down there, posterity’s cruel judgement cannot harm you; that is something we have to administer, have to deal with. We all fear the cruelty of posterity. Its awful flippancy. Its retrospective shallowness about lives that had to be struggled through. Its reductive vocabulary that can only admit a man as having been one thing: a hero, a conqueror, a cuckold … I pondered what sort of woman Ramona really was. By all accounts, demanding, bossy, eccentric, beautiful. Much like her daughter, then. I thought of the two photos, the magical diptych, that Mandy had ground underfoot earlier in the year. Ramona in her flowing promiscuous prime, her warm skin alive to a lovers touch. Then the cruel desecration: once by the tomb; again by Mandy’s foot. Does anybody’s memory deserve that? Or do we deserve all that and more from the people we hurt, we disappoint or leave behind? Finally, I thought about the reality of down there. Whatever consciousness we had, if it survived, was perhaps facing the blue-void blankness of eternity. As hard as this life is, surely that must be harder?
Before me, Mandy was having a quiet moment, her back resolutely hunched. It was cold. I suffered all the pangs of up here. Soon it would be time to return to the car, to the deceptive warmth of Mandy’s childhood home.
I turned and looked about me. Death, finality, everywhere. The unsquareable notion that all these skeletons had once been breathers, had once visited others’ graves with flowers and pondered the same unimaginables. Well, they were out there somewhere, with all the mysteries solved—untameable as the breeze. And if they weren’t—if there was nothing to come—their remains, their obdurate relics rested underground: unappreciative of the florist’s shops that bloomed above them in the dark, shunting wind.
‘L
ADIES AND GENTLEMAN, THIS
train will shortly be arriving in Peterborough.’
We are past midway now. The Rubicon has been crossed. Too late to turn back. What has been embarked upon must be endured. If only I could feel the heavy weight of a revolver in my pocket! How placated must the suicidal farmer be, seeing the blunderbuss or shotgun above the mantelpiece every morning as he goes out to corral his dwindling herds. The comfort of knowing he can always turn back, and with a single quick and easy stroke, too. Back to the soul’s default state: free-floating, without its cumbersome cargo of flesh. No drawn-out drownings or excruciating overdoses of rat poison for Farmer Giles. With a gun, the potential is perpetually there, like a friend one can always turn to. The promise of merging with the wind. The gateway to a blue eternity. Ah, if only the Everlasting had not fixed his canon, et cetera.
I turn to my old friend the window. The far fields always melt my heart.
There you will find the grey rump of Lincolnshire in undecided weather, the thundering carriages numbing your ears; the fleeting flecks of poplars under talons of cloud; the bruised gradients, stippled and hacked; the
o
rdered patchwork created by the enclosures; the quick whoosh as you pass under a road bridge in the hermetically sealed tube; the long perspectives afforded by the sweep of the firmament
… I am writing again, unable to cap the flow or the pen. Unable to come to terms with the strange, emotional animal that I am. The curse of self-reflection! How different must be the consciousnesses of those who lack the habit of self-reflection. How alien is the poet to the normal man, with his easily met appetites for money, car, holiday and family; the management consultant, say, with his prosaic and easily satisfied aspirations; the cancelled visor of his suit and tie. And this is the man Mandy, deep down, dearly wanted me to be. How useless to the common good, to women especially, are my particular qualities of self-examination. And for sound biological reasons, too. The species little needs a man hell-bent on contemplating his own errors and infirmities, when he should be protecting his mate and providing for his young. Strange how one’s thinking reverts to these Darwinian modes. It makes me wonder what Mandy, or any woman, ever saw in me. Traditionally, the males compete for the female until the female takes her pick from the competing males—that’s how the majority of mammals go about it, and we are no different. And compete I did. Half of London seemed to be in pursuit of Mandy for a time. And pick she did, for obscure reasons of her own. No, I don’t have those qualities that a woman looks for: security, tenure, stability, muscly forearms, a cock that would honour a horse, et cetera. I am a strange, emotional, passionate, turbulent, stunted figure, just becoming loathsome to myself after all these years of self-deception.
The low fields in their coats of sere and rust; the telegraph poles, smaller cousins to the pylons, latticing the land; trees blown in an elemental wind; an airstrip; goalposts; toiling cars; broken birches and sad willows weeping tendrils into chilly streams; canals and causeways; the over-arching dome of the sky, grey as a sea lion.