Authors: Jude Cook
Mandy didn’t hit me during that Stygian night on the beach—that came later, after the noisy debacle following the soiree at Stringfellows with Ant, Nick and Victor Moore. That was the night the genie really sprang free of its bottle. Maybe I should tell you what really happened.
Of course, after the first punch, it’s all over. You can never return after that firebreak is irreversibly crossed. Things are never really the same again. Strange, because hitting is everywhere—in Western saloon-bar brawls, in books, on TV. They make it look so effortless, balletic, free from comeuppance. But they don’t deal with the aftermath, with what the heart feels after the body is struck by another human being. After that first blow it was open season as far as Mandy was concerned. And she used that awful phrase on me a number of times. Not that echo of Mariana’s, ‘I wish I was dead.’ That was merely her daily mantra. No, after her first swing, ‘I wish I had never married you!’ rang out along Shaftesbury Avenue in the February night. Those seven words seemed to go straight to some essential core, reminding me, as they did, of my stepfather and his peevish, rancorous tirades at my mother. They are, of course, the exact words Delph had used on Sinead, heavy with all the ingratitude and meanness of spirit, all the lowness and spoilt nastiness that it is possible for a human being to summon.
That night, waiting at the bus stop after Strings, me out of puff, Mandy furious that I had spent the night mesmerised by Antonia’s heaving bosoms, the cat of violence was allowed to come spitting and scratching out of its bag. She punched me so hard I went back against the phone box, eliciting a terrified look from a Japanese girl inside calling Tokyo. Mandy’s expensive watch catapulted into the filthy gutter, where it lay in a trench of rain, the water the colour of despair. She stared at it for a long while, her eyes bulging psychotically, as if the watch was to blame. Then she turned to me.
‘Look what you’ve done.’
I wiped a smear of blood from just above my ear. It looked black on the back of my hand, like soy sauce.
Tike that was my fault, yeah?’ I said, feeling nauseous, fractured somehow from the adrenalin shooting around my system. I motioned to pick up the watch, but she went for me again, kicking and scratching and pushing until at last I fell into the gutter. At this, I had to laugh. I lay there as a number twenty-nine rounded the corner and began to bear down on me, laughing into her face at her ludicrous scene, her imitation of a prize-fighter.
‘I wish I’d never married you!’ she screamed. And it seemed like the whole street turned around to see just who this man could be, unwanted in matrimony, lying, as he was, in the road with a bus heading straight for his head.
You may well ask, stern critic, what I was looking for in such experiences. After all, they tell us that we secretly hang around what is bad for us, drawn like moths to terrible flames, when every self-preserving instinct informs us to get out fast. Like the battered wife who keeps returning for her monthly black eye because she finds the insecurity of freedom terrifying. They also hint that such women wouldn’t be able to survive without the thrill of having their self-esteem lowered by a total bastard on a regular basis, but that never finds its way explicitly into the textbooks. That would be outright misogyny. But there is something tiresome about the banal central strut of psychotherapy—the doctrine that, if you state something one way, you secretly desire it the other. If you claim to abhor violence you covertly desire it, feeling, as one really does, in need of such punishment or abuse. That to protest too much equals a cast-iron case of guilty as charged. All I can say to that is—absolute balls. Protesting too much more often means that something terrible has been perpetrated against you. Where does one put the full stop in this protesting? At what point does legitimate protest turn into superfluous protest?
So there I was on the London street after dark, decked by my wife. And it didn’t end there, either, as you can probably guess. I’m ready to tell you about Mandy’s
piece de resistance,
her defining atrocity. You may well recall the night I visited her after work by surprise. The Hairdressers’ Ball. She had just left, so I ran the gauntlet of the Centre Point junkies until catching up with the world’s angriest woman. What was I after? Why did I persevere? Well, part of my inability to act derived from a deep sense of pity that anyone could be so lost, so completely incontinent when it came to their aggressive impulses. Amend that. I mean that any
woman
could be so incontinent. Violent women are always fascinating, an anomaly. And I suppose part of me wanted to play the anthropologist, the therapist, while I helped her on the long road to knowing how to
behave.
Why do we quake in the irresistible glare of the violent woman, the virago, the tornado of female spite? Because they’re not supposed to behave like that, of course. Programmed as they are to bring us into the world, to nurture us, to give suck and buy us toys, to keep us from harm, there is something contradictory, counter-intuitive about women swinging like street fighters and swearing like sailors. To find a tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide is a self-replenishing form of astonishment.
And it was with the anthropologists steady gaze that I observed her on that tube train, sharing our personal strife with a hundred disgruntled passengers. Or at least I tried to keep my head analytical. I think I mentioned that I did something I had never attempted before with Mandy: ignored her. Stepping insouciantly from the carriage at Camden Town just as her voice attained the velocity of an automated bacon-slicer, I resolved for once not to give a damn. According to her, taking in a movie while she was doing that rare thing (a day of work) was some kind of war crime. So take me to the United Nations, I thought. Drag me to the Hague in an armoured car. What are you, my mother? Do you have to dictate my every-fucking-breath? Do I have to consult you when I go to the khazi, just to check the flush doesn’t coincide with one of your migraines? Do I really have to apologise for enjoying myself? Haven’t I spent the last year of my life trying to get your wretched band off the ground? (Oh, and before we leave the subject—as you might have guessed, Fellatrix were shit. They virtually defined the substance. Despite my valiant attempt to improve them with my lyrics, they were one of the three most talentless bands to have arisen in the northern hemisphere over the past decade, barring the French ones. What else could they have been?) Do I really have to listen to your hysterical voice—like a knife chopping vegetables very fast—laden with threats and personal-level abuse when I have just spent two hours in the divine company of Bergman’s solemnly lisping Swedes?
It was with these righteous and pertinent thoughts that I alighted from the tube carriage, recklessly believing that it would put an end to the argument. I had worked up the courage to ignore her, to blank her, to snub her, to freeze her out. And this did take a degree of courage with Mandy. She could be terrifying. I could see the fear in the uneasy eyes of our fellow tube passengers. There was something very ancient in her rages, her spitting onslaughts—a deep pan-gender fear that apprehended the ghosts of Clytemnestra, Medusa, Procne. But I defied all this for a moment. Turn me to stone if you dare then, I thought, as the tube doors clanked shut behind me.
Bad move.
Like in all the worst horror films, the pursuer had pursued me into what I imagined to be my place of safety, the platform. In retrospect, I must have been foolish to think Mandy would take that snub on the chin in front of all those people. No, she would have to save face, have to exact retribution, have to bake my children in a pie. I immediately felt two claw-like hands grasp my hair from behind: two haggard falcons alighting on my head simultaneously.
‘You fucking bastard!’ her voice raged behind me.
Then the toecap of a boot made contact with my arse. At that point I should have turned and put a stop to it—a stop to her. Instead, I kept on walking. I remember thinking, why do these aberrations always happen at night? Is it true that women are really moon-controlled; that terrible unmanageable energies are unleashed? Still fresh in my mind was the eager sprint I had made behind the Centre Point building in order to catch her up. Past the great dead needle of the tower itself, sentinel over the charred ground of St Giles: the voices of the poor wailing from the palimpsest of paving stones. Strong night forces were at work in the blackened alleys and concrete arches, littered, as they were, with syringes and the humps of dossers in sleeping bags, like rocks at low tide. Once trapped there, you truly knew the bright day was done. The shadow of the great building seemed to suck everything under it into a void. A deathly stillness pervaded among the junkies and clippers. Despite the distant sound of sirens, theatre-goers, boisterous lads on a night up West, I could hear my own heart beat strongly in my temples as I half-ran, half-marched towards the mouth of the tube. And now I was walking calmly up the escalator, with my wife of two months viciously kicking and rabbit-punching me from behind, trying to make me turn, to acknowledge her awful anger. But I didn’t turn.
I kept on walking. I almost felt calm as I took these blows. Not that they didn’t hurt, they did. They were directed with fearsome accuracy, each kick and right-hook like a featherweight’s well-placed jab. Even when I caught the astonished eyes of the rush-hour hordes pouring down the opposite escalator in their raincoats and well-cut suits I kept my countenance. It was only when I neared the crest of the escalator that a wave of panic swept over me. What if she didn’t stop? I didn’t mean then, in the immediate future, but ever? What if this was her true nature, her true colours? What if everything that had come before was an elaborate ruse, an undercover operation to ensnare a man so she could enact her pathological fantasies of revenge. Because this punishment in no way fitted the crime. This, for watching a film? Even though I hadn’t met her eye since we stepped off the train, I knew she was enjoying herself; that this represented a primal release, with all guns blazing, the very thing she had longed to do to all males from childhood onwards. Maybe because I sensed the great catharsis she was obtaining from this I continued to participate in it for so many unendurable minutes. She knew I wouldn’t retaliate, after all. In retrospect, it must have been wonderful for her—it combined the three things she had always craved in a single prolonged act: public recognition, revenge upon men, and proof of her physical strength, all at once. Because she always had a big Amazonian thing about physical strength. She became affronted if things were lifted for her or doors held open. Even her father said she drove like a man, and this was intended as no kind of compliment. She also had a score to settle. Specifically with men. And there I was taking the rap on behalf of every male who had hurt her, left her, mistreated her. As the ticket barriers came into sight, I made a number of mental notes: to seek professional help on her behalf the moment she calmed down; to call her old man and tell him she also punched like a man; and to buy a gum shield in case anything like this occurred again.
I slipped my ticket into its slot, with Mandy still using my rear as an archery butt, noting the wary looks of the station personnel.
Domestic.
I read their thoughts.
Best leave them to it.
‘That’s fine, guys,’ I said in passing. ‘I can handle it.’
But the fury at my back didn’t let up.
‘Had enough yet?’ she shrieked, ‘You lazy bastard!’ And hurled another punch my way.
An irrational thought struck me as I exited the station, and that was: I’m not dressed for this. Ever since Mandy had started on me, I was aware that I had chosen to sport some of the clothes she had picked out before the wedding in order to transform me from a sartorial joke into someone she could tolerate being seen with in public. I had on blue cord flares, a dagger-collared shirt and an even bigger, half-size suede jacket with fur lining and a chunky zip. Adorning this was a neck tie, borrowed from Nick, tied in a kind of Noel Coward knot, fashionable (believe it or not) in the mid-nineties. It struck me as I ascended the escalator that I must look like some kind of dandy, inscrutably taking my punishment for a bad gambling debt.
Effeminately dressed, too full of forgiveness, not up for this kind of combat, I stepped into the rich navy night of Camden. The smell of onions and peppers and char-grilled meat smacked me in the face. These odours emanated from the risky-pizza stalls opposite the World’s End, where mid-week revellers and winos were tumbling past. Gelid, fluorescent light gave the post-work crowd a cadaverous look as they bought their evening papers, grinned into mobiles, or clasped tight the hands of their loved ones. Black cabs swung through the lights of the big intersection, followed by buses lit up like aquariums, the ghostly fish of commuters staring with bored curiosity at an overdressed man getting beaten up by a woman. At that moment, a white van with three bum-crack cowboys sitting up front halted at the pedestrian crossing. The wag nearest to my side of the road pulled the window down, tore the bacon sandwich from his grinning mouth and yelled,
‘Oi! I’ll teach you how to punch, mate!’
Ah, how that sentence has resonated down the years. I will never forget it, his kind offer of tuition. Almost paternal in its comforting supportiveness. Many aspects of it have struck me as inherently wise, almost philosophically acute, in the ensuing months and years.
I will teach you how to punch, mate.
Apart from its trenchant humour, its mordant drollery, its utterly apposite comment on the situation, I found it referred to a hidden standard of male behaviour that I had somehow neglected to assimilate over the years. It seemed to imply, not only is a man’s pride intimately connected with his ability to dish out violence, to
handle himself
but to handle himself with women. You know, when the old lady gets a bit uppity, a bit out of line. A bit above herself. When she starts (God forbid) swinging punches at you. Because that’s just not on, is it? That’s out of order. That would mean you were some kind of punch-bag. Or woofter. Somehow less than a man—a boy that was still getting his hair pulled by the girls in the playground. That would imply that she has requested entry to (and been admitted by
you
) into an elite club: that of assumed physical parity, of a kind that exists only between men. Because all men have to assume they have parity—every prompt to fight is a challenge to this assumption: ‘Outside, then’; ‘Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough’; and, best of all, ‘Do you want some?’ In other words,
prove it.
All refer to an essential eliciting of proof, of putting one’s fist where one’s mouth is. Prove it, or stay a poof, is what is generally assumed by this nostrum. Of course, no bird, the leering chippie would assert, could ever win a fight with a bloke. She would be foolish to even try. Inferior strength and all that, let alone deficient brain wattage. And if she did, she knows what she can expect. No, there is no admittance to that exclusive male club of violence, because who knows where it would end? They’d be off fighting wars next, or flying planes, when they should be at home furthering the human race with a baby’s bottle in one hand and a new nappy in the other. In fact, that Neanderthal in the white van looked like the sort of bloke who winced whenever he heard the phrase, ‘the men and
women
of the armed forces’. Or saw books with titles such as,
Sacred Autonomy: Radical Feminist Readings of the Policing of Female Behaviour.
Nevertheless, he undoubtedly had a point. As the van sped off towards Kentish Town in a rodeo of beeps and jeers, I considered how utterly right and wrong his statement was simultaneously. Wrong, because the liberal consensus is that you should never hit women, and wrong again because I didn’t need to learn how to punch—I needed to learn how to avoid getting involved with this type of maniac ever again. But the statement was right in the respect that, by letting it happen, I had lost my self-respect. There I was—being pasted by a woman in the middle of a London street. Where the fuck
was
my self-respect? And did I ever have any? These were important questions for me at the time. Yes, along with the sincere urge never to encounter any of the people from the platform, the escalator, the station, or the van ever again in my life, I really had to look into the issue of self-respect.