Authors: Jude Cook
Peterborough! Where I once came to collect a new passport. With its stationary Pullmans on curving tracks, its big-rippled river. Then a grid of buffers; a blue bridge; the dour frontage of the Great Northern Hotel; sooted chimneys and cylindrical silver tanks girded with ladders; a stalled recovery
u
nit yellow as a sunflower; floodlighting; rusted rails; tenacious heather trackside; dandelions and couch grass; unhappy houses with their weeping windows …
Unhappiness. If I had to isolate one defining feature of my marriage it would be its unhappiness. Why had the pursuit of happiness brought me unhappiness? Why had the pursuit of women, the universally accepted mission to find a mate, resulted in so much sorrow? Were the qualities I looked for in women the wrong ones? Most men, if the truth be known, just want a housekeeper who is also a good lay. But then I felt myself far from being a normal man. Maybe I even conceived of myself a favoured being, in Wordsworth’s phrase. So what were these qualities? Maybe it was all a project of fantastic narcissism. In reality, I wanted myself but with tits. A soulmate of such understanding that they were indistinguishable from
me,
though in female form. But I only managed to find parity in turbulence and hysteria, not in understanding. I mistook a mutual corruption of the psyche as proof that we were made for each other. We both intuited something similar: a hurt, a damage, a rebellion, a scar. The only exception to this pattern being Bea, and I hoped sincerely that she was now married to someone kind, sane and honest, and had two beautiful children with plum-coloured eyes.
I look across to Robin and Michelle, wanting very much to ask them why they chose each other; why they singled each other out over-and-above all the other human options on planet earth. They don’t appear to be unhappy. But I find myself unable to disturb their reading with such urgent, ludicrous questions. When the heart is full, as someone once said, you should keep your mouth shut.
The final place Mandy and I moved to, where our great unhappiness found its proper tenure, was on the Seaham Road, near Finsbury Park. This came after an interim flat rented from my old friend and landlord, Keenan Peach. Well, we arrived there after a whole string of addresses, each upheaval motivated by Mandy’s inability to be patient with a property. A whole saga of madness. Once we had decorated the latest pad from skirting board to ceiling and got to know which corner shops opened past midnight she was already perusing the papers for another place. Like I say, change gone mad. A whirlpool of depth and danger. Change for the sake of it. You could not invest in a volatile commodity such as Mandy. Maybe one day I will be able to rationalise this peripatetic episode, but at the time it felt like I was being led by the nose like an ass. Before the endgame played out on the rungs of the Haringey Ladder, I dialled Keenan’s number as a last resort. After all, he always said I could call him, even in the ‘direst of emergencies’. It just so happened that he was subletting a ground-floor place in east London complete with back garden for next to nothing.
Once we arrived, in early April, with all the meshed saplings on the Leytonstone High Road showing pastel eruptions of blossom, we realised why the rent was so low. The place was infested with cockroaches. Not only that, but the stink from the hairdresser s next door (Cut-Off Point) produced by the perming process was unendurable as the weather became hotter. Mandy took this to heart, blaming me for phoning my old Wottonesque landlord.
‘This is just your style, Byron,’ she scolded. ‘If I leave anything up to you it ends in disaster. You can’t be trusted with practical things. God knows how you managed to live on your own for eight years without a woman to wipe your bottom.’
We were awaiting the first visit from Rentokil. The phone call to the pest control agency had been delegated, as Mandy had been too busy recently with Fellatrix. They were at the crucial stage where everyone in the music industry had heard of them, or seen them, but no investment had materialised; presenting the real danger of the pot simmering off the boil, never to heat up again.
‘That’s not true. I managed to iron my clothes for almost a decade without you.’
‘You can’t even iron a shirt properly. I had to teach you that.’
‘Well, they were too busy forcing us to play rugby at Hamford Boys’ School. You never learnt any skill you might need in later life.’
The depredations caused by a year and a half of this sort of sparring (and much worse) had taken their toll on both of us. She had to make a quarrel, whether she could find one or not, every day. I found I was tense from morning till night in her company, always on my guard for the next conflagration or skirmish. My hair had started to exhibit white patches at the scanty temples, like the parched grass of summer.
‘Well, don’t let Rentokil palm us off with some pissy mousetraps. I know what a pushover you are.’
‘Hey—it’s not such a disaster. When I described our friends over the phone, they told me they were only German cockroaches. They’re half the size of the big bastards.’
‘I don’t care what nationality they are. It’s an infestage.’
‘You mean infestation.’
‘Don’t correct me all the time!’ she bawled. ‘How can we unpack anything into cupboards when they’re swarming over the walls? I can’t even eat in here without wanting to puke.’
It was true that the situation was urgent. The moment we had closed the door on the removal men, a small earwig-sized insect had scuttled across the work surface towards the kettle. On opening the big larder cupboards we were met with what looked like black paint. However, the disturbance of air caused the paint to start moving, like a layer of living tar. The entire wall was alive with them.
‘Leave the talking to me.’
‘Yeah, like I left you to talk to Quentin.’
‘It’s Keenan.’
‘Whatever.’
The man from Rentokil came and went, spraying all the floors with an evil-looking canister of poison, leaving hundreds of sticky traps. He would be back to perform this operation every month. But the cockroaches were not the worst of it. The most melancholy aspect of this new habitat was the ramshackle ugliness of east London, expanding into Essex like a malignant urban bacillus. There was something uncared for and jerry-built about every square inch. After a while I couldn’t bear to look at it: the long narrow rows of Victorian workmen’s tenements punctuated by neon kebab houses, always empty except for estate-dregs playing the gaming machines. The peeling old men’s boozers on every corner, with blacked-out windows, their long-antiquated advertisements for Choice Ales from the Hand Pump, or Fine Dining Upstairs. The phone boxes graffitied with swastikas. Something claustrophobic or lightless in the air. Whole districts without a post office or record shop or restaurant; the hordes of poor with their horrible buggies and clothes and nasty eyes. A Balkan feel to the area, with everything broken or useless or in short supply. Then the mournful sounds of the afternoon: distant ice-cream vans with their naive tinklings, or the squall of children playing at lunchtime from the nearby school. Or the sight of importunate commuters at tube-mouths shoving their way into the unfresh air; awful to observe in winter, always hurrying home with their animas of disconsolation or expedience. Stepney, Mile End, Stratford, Bow. A wasteland whose barren vistas worked on me in a terribly undermining way.
Spring didn’t seem to happen in east London. The meshed, nascent trees shed their blossom quickly, which rolled around like miniature pink tumbleweeds. The skies glowered angrily all May, occasionally crying a dank drizzle that seemed to hover in the air like mist. There was something blocked or obstructed about the whole enterprise of regeneration. Also, for the first time I found myself stranded miles away from Rock On. Since my only mode of transport was my battered bicycle, I would bike it over to Royal College Street whenever I had work; pedalling like a madman past the Lea Valley reservoirs, the wind slapping me and the distant water around with an easy hand. After dark, the return journey often took two hours. The dilapidation of the area, the sense of peripheral panic and boredom, was so different to the bright cosmopolitan hubbub of Camden. I felt as if I were living in some scoured dormitory town rather than a great metropolis. We were far out. But, at the same time, it all felt apposite. The movement, me and Mandy’s movement, was forever outwards, like some tremendous entropic unravelling.
The flat never saw the back of its cockroaches. After a brief abeyance, the oppressive blooming heat of late May saw their numbers escalate. They would show up everywhere: in the sugar bowl, the turn-up of a pair of jeans, Mandy’s handbag—a rank impediment to every day. It didn’t help that faithful Fidel was scared of them. He would circle their spasmodic movement for a curious moment before whimpering off to his stinky bed under the dining table. A fine and dashing Casanova he turned out to be. God knows how he would have reacted to the sinewy cat-burglar, crowbar in hand, crack-habit to feed. A budgerigar would have provided a better deterrent.
For most of our time out east I remember Mandy as either ill or swinging the lead under the cloud of one of her imagined ailments. I knew this to be a ruse to avoid the nasty and unedifying fact of work. Come eight in the morning, if it wasn’t a migraine, it was chronic back pain, or irritable bowel syndrome, or fever, or period cramps. The only shop I knew well on the high street was the chemist’s, as I was forever loitering under its fluorescent lights, dutifully scoring pills and remedies or repeat prescriptions. By the time it was established she wasn’t going in to whatever fly-by-night job she had at the time (so far that year she had evaded regular work as an estate agent, bargirl, canvasser and pharmaceutical guinea pig), she would beg me to call the indifferent employer and announce her incapacity as sincerely as I could manage. ‘This is a surefire way to get the sack, you know that?’ I would grumble while dialling the number. ‘Oh, but please, Byron, I’m sick, I can’t go in, I just can’t! Do it just this once.’ But it was never just the once. Then she would adopt her little-girl’s voice that had surely been effective with her father and numerous dupes in the past. Of course, I would always lose her the job. As every employer knows, only someone with lesions to the larynx and their neck in a brace would be incapable of calling themselves in sick. Then it would all be my fault. I often took the full broadside of her fulminating rage for not putting the correct note of plausibility into my voice during the call. ‘Couldn’t the fact that you’ve spent more days sick than you’ve actually worked have something to do with the situation?’ But that appeal always fell on deaf, half-Spanish, ears.
If I happened to be around on these days of malady she would always be up and about by midday, feeling much improved. Often, by five, when it was time for her to drive to rehearsal, her poorly condition would have been all but forgotten. Throughout the day I would have been playing the good doctor Byron, making her hot
caldo
with
fideos
or massaging the strange route her spine took up her back. How I hated wasting my time in this way. How I despised her epic malingering—it drained one of the will to live. Yet her self-enforced condition of passivity often gave me some peace. She couldn’t be her usual volatile self with a thermometer under her armpit. However, towards the end of our tenure in Cockroach Mansions, she spent a week in bed defiantly refusing to show her face at her new job, that of travel agent at the London offices of Iberia. Monday saw her placid with a fabricated concoction of migraine and aggravated muscle spasms. By Thursday she had become petulantly hopeless, crying, ‘I wish I was dead’ whenever I tried to persuade her to at least phone in herself. The receptionist had got to know my voice so well. She would say, ‘
Buenos dias,
Byron!’ after I cleared my throat. On the Friday I limped home exhausted from the shop after my bike had suffered a puncture on the Tottenham Hale gyratory system. Rainwater sprinkled from my cape as I forced the front door ajar. Once I had stamped my boots and stashed the maimed tubular steel frame in the hall I knew something was up. The lights were all off. There was a tense hush to the kitchen. I creaked open the bedroom door. Mandy was still on our low double futon where I had left her that morning. Tentatively, I approached her with a cup of tea. She turned over as quick as a cat, enormous eyeballs bulging, her long black hair dishevelled.
‘I’m dying,’ Mandy told me with panic in her voice.
‘Don’t be absurd. What’s the matter with you?’
‘These pains in my head,’ she grasped her temples melodramatically, tears streaming down her face. ‘They won’t go away’
‘It’s just a migraine. Have you taken those preventatives?’
‘Just a migraine!?’ she howled, sitting up in bed, her voice raised by ten decibels. ‘What the hell do you know? It’s probably a brain tumour. Call the hospital!’
We had been through all this many times before. Numerous brain scans had proved beyond doubt that she wasn’t suffering from a malignant cranial tumour. Irritation at this drama started to grow inside me. I was exhausted, soaked to the skin, hungry. I said,
‘I’m not calling the hospital again. Drink this and see how you feel in a couple of hours.’
She snatched the cup from me with the sort of noise wrestlers make when their hide hits the canvas in a double nelson. Then she catapulted it across the dimly lit bedroom and started banging her head against the wall.
‘Don’t’—
Bang!
—‘you’—
Bang!
—‘understand? I’m
dying!’
‘Please don’t do that, you’ll hurt yourself.’ I went to intervene, but she tore my hand from her shoulder. I could see blood on her crown; her thin but powerful arms trembling.
I surveyed the sad fountain of tea now indelibly decorating the recently painted walls. Great. Fantastic. Why don’t you just smear them with excrement too? Then I heard a faint noise like a child’s whimper from the back garden.
‘What on earth’s that?’ I demanded.
‘Don’t ask me.’
‘You must know. You’ve been here all day’