Authors: Jude Cook
But the question, or problem, of Byron Easy s self-respect had begun early on, in Wakefield, during a night I am working up the courage to share with you. In fact, there are many heart-troubling incidents that I am working up to. I feel as if I have only told you half the story so far, dear reader, that I have stopped short at the vital moment, a kind of coitus interruptus of the psyche. I feel duty-bound to dish the dirt, to push on with my journey into darkness. To share with you the nasty, perverted truth about these so-called human beings.
Believe me, I wish this didn’t all sound like condemnation. I have looked repeatedly for redeeming features, mitigating circumstances—Mandy’s bereavement, Delph’s impoverished upbringing. My, they all had it so bad. And didn’t I get to know about it! There is another tenet of psychotherapy (a course of aid that I have never undertaken, I should again stress), that urges the patient to forget about the past. To forgive the abuser, because if you don’t, QED, they have won. You are still, in effect, being abused. Only then can one proceed to that great abstract notion, that laughable chimera, self-love. A cute idea, nevertheless. And attractive too, in one’s optimistic moments. It’s comforting to believe that you can relinquish the past by a sort of mental trompe l’oeil; eradicate the pollution from your mind by the simple act of forgetting it all. But wholly wrong, and dangerous too. The past, as we all know, is part of the present. Where else can we experience the past except in the present? Memory is a function of the present, of current consciousness. The unwarranted memory is the worst—the unpleasant and arresting reminder of former abuse that makes the heart pound, appears without invitation as you are walking down the street, doing the laundry, watching television. We are open to these assailants no matter what mental regime of amnesia we exert. If it was all so easy, Macbeth would have been able to turn his back on the air-drawn dagger and gone for a taco.
How weary all that ‘get a life’, ‘stop living in the past’ rhetoric makes me! That one-cure-fits-all nonsense. Dangerous nonsense, too. ‘Stop perpetuating the pain by remembering it,’ the mantras read. I recall Rudi, that king of mindless bon mots, once insisting that I got some kind of vicarious thrill out of recounting episodes of violence.
‘Admit it, Bry,’ he had said while uncorking another costly bottle of red. ‘You get a kick when you go over this stuff with me. I can see the excitement in your wee eyes.’
Yeah, right. Would he say the same to a rape victim; that they derived a kick from recounting their ordeal? He stated this with arrogant confidence one epicurean night at his place. As if I was there for my own amusement! As if I was some guinea pig for his shallow psychological systems! And Rudi, of all people, pontificating in his carmine shirt like some kind of world authority on pain. Rudi and his purportedly ‘happy’ childhood. (I am always suspicious of people who announce that they had a perfectly ‘happy’ childhood, thanks very much. I mean, how did Rudi turn out like he did if he had such a blissful upbringing?) All this irked me, as what we do with pain is very important. Sure, say the textbooks, pain only lasts a second—it is up to us to decide whether we want to sustain it by moping and blaming our parents or past lovers for the rest of our lives. But that doesn’t take into account what the writer does with his pain—the man whose response to life is to write it, investigate it, dissect it, like a curse. He doesn’t want to forget, he wants to enter areas most are too scared to even approach. Fundamentally the writer, the ‘man of imagination’ as Coleridge put it, is interested in the nature of violation. He wants to examine it for his own rehabilitation, granted, but he is also journeying, torch in hand, into the darkness for all our sakes. Creation being an act that is at once both supremely selfish and altruistic. The writer demands an answer, not just happiness (that great misleading goal of all psychotherapy—who the hell said happiness was ever on the menu?). He wants to explore the human transaction that has taken place. He doesn’t want to listen to platitudes such as Rudi’s. That would be a double violation. And, that night, I became angry with him; forcing him to grin sagely. ‘That proves you ken what I’m saying!’ he hollered. Again, absolute balls! Of course, legitimate affrontedness looks the same as the anger produced by recognising a bad truth about yourself. But how can the observer tell? They cannot! And the more one protests, the bigger the hole beneath one’s feet appears. As easily influenced as I was (and as pissed), I remember checking myself for the verity of Rudi’s allegation that I enjoyed being a victim and, almost at once, found it lacking.
‘I’m trying to believe in higher human conduct …’ I struggled, knowing that Rudi had already made up his mind. ‘Not the world you believe in.’ Which was, I knew, a world of deception and perversity. A world reduced to a mesh of submissive and dominant relationships, an index of cruelty.
‘You’re just living in the past, Bry. You gottay move on.’
‘Maybe, but I stand by the legitimacy of feeling my own pain till I die. Good for you if you’ve mastered your own anguish—though I thought you didn’t have any. But I don’t believe it for a moment. Good for you if you’re not perpetuating your own pain by morbid memories. It’s just not the best method for me.’
Ah, Roman times! And I don’t mean the carousing at Rudi’s, but the epoch when we were nearer bestiality, in a historical sense. Human excoriation at the coliseum. Sacrifices to Apollo. I can see the atavistic residue of this in Rudi’s conception of the world. A theatre of cruelty and emotional blood-lust. Throw me to the lions, why don’t you! Tell me I spend most of my time dwelling on violence and revenge. Much more time than my timid face would suggest. If he had been the victim of such violence, then he might not be so quick to make careless pronouncements about me ‘getting a thrill from receiving it’. Because this is the saddest thing about those really in denial: their refusal to believe they were ever victims. The Californian rhetoric utilised by the self-help guru (greying, pony-tailed, with moist beaming eyes) attempts to convince these spineless fools that nothing was ever done to them. But, of course, it was. They were all victims of another’s appetite, sexual or otherwise. At least I could admit I was a victim. And the world would be a healthier place if everyone else could too. As for the thrill bit: of course, cathartic violence is thrilling, but only for its progenitor. I could tell Mandy was deriving much pleasure from pistol whipping me up that escalator, just as I enjoyed hurling that bottle through the window the night she refused my kind offer of cunnilingus. But being on the receiving end a thrill? I don’t think so, somehow.
Against the brutalities of ancient Rome, of current psychoanalytical thinking, I offer the innocence of my first five years. Things were better then, when I was boy eternal. Everything was right. Everything was forgivable. And how the human animal demonstrates altruism or forgiveness was of great importance to me just after the split. Even though we are the only species to exact revenge, we also have the capacity to swing the other way: some people seem to have a forgiveness that is meta-Christian. Unfortunately, it is the Nietzschean view that has inculcated us against so-called weak and foolish reactions to violation, the ‘slave-morality’ that tells us to turn the other cheek. And maybe he had something. All the evidence indicates that the meek will not inherit the earth, oh no. The meek shall get the shit kicked out of them and then get told by their best friend (and probably their greying, pony-tailed, moist-eyed therapist) that they enjoyed it.
That night of tears and madness in Camden didn’t conclude with White Van Man’s wonderful aperçu about teaching me to punch. There was a dire postscript. As I walked up the Kentish Town Road, turning the other cheek, I felt the intensity of her blows and verbal onslaught increase. Gone was the teeming life of the station, replaced by the charcoal portal of the Devonshire Arms, a Goth pub that always seemed livelier than the spartan old men’s boozers dotted along that strip of road. The cumin and garlic stinks of the noodle bars had been replaced by the odours of wet sand, dust and sewage from the building works near the lock. The stars were dazzling in the sky, throwing down their spears on the fighting fools below. Once on the hump-backed bridge, where the canal slithers sullenly below the road, with its moored barges and glittering vistas of reflected light, I became aware that Mandy had stopped following me. I turned and was met with the sight of my wife stretched out in the centre of the road, her sheeny blue mac beneath her, like Joan of Arc waiting for the first torch to set light to the kindling. Luckily, there had been a lull in the traffic, but a stream of cars had broken away from the distant lights, heading straight for her.
‘For Christ’s sake!’ I shouted. ‘Is that what you really want?’ She didn’t reply. It was too late to quibble. I ran over and dragged her, kicking and struggling like a toddler, to the safety of the kerb before the first car swept over the hump of the bridge. So she had finally gained my attention by offering to kill herself. For a long time afterwards I wondered what would’ve happened if I had just let that car roll over her. That would have taught her a lesson, I thought. But, of course, like most lessons given to the stupid, the pedagogue is the main beneficiary.
The fall-out from that appalling night resulted in a week of noncommunication. I felt, bruised, ill, anguished, confused … You are the first person I’ve shared this with, and I’m still not sure I can trust you with the knowledge. This of course is part of the special trouble I referred to earlier, that you might have difficulty understanding. Not the usual writers trouble, money-trouble, soul-trouble; but crazy scenes such as these. I mean, have you ever experienced anything similar? And if you have, what did you do with such moments? Under what heading did you classify them? What taxonomy can encompass such unleashed spite, mania, martyrdom? Even Hazlitt, in his
Liber Amoris,
would struggle to write up this sort of stuff and keep his sense of humour.
So, did I ever learn to punch? Well, later that year, as Mandy lay on the bed after the abysmal scene in the curry house, I had my first lesson. Terrible to admit it, but it felt quite natural, hitting a woman. It all came easily, as it does to many men, programmed as they are for violence. I think I mentioned that evening witnessed one of the most bloody battles ever recorded in domestic history. Well, there was blood and for once it wasn’t mine. After my bottle of lager had sent shards of glass over her Latina bedspread she looked up at me with bored scorn. Then she turned contemptuously away. Her words to Sarah from earlier resonated in my head. ‘You—are—a—stupid—fat—whore.’ No, there was no way she was getting away with that, I thought, as the red mist descended before my eyes. No way she could flagrantly insult people dear to me. It was at that moment that I realised I really did have people dear to me—strange how the saying of vile, forbidden things should clarify one’s own thoughts. I really did love my sister; unspotted and undeserving of such calumny. And my mother too, sitting there patiently in black, as if, like Chekhov’s Masha, in mourning for life itself. I really didn’t want Sinead exposed to such perverse hatred, not at her time of life, after all she had gone through, after all she had done for me. This finally pushed me over the edge.
Approaching Mandy on the bed, I thought I saw a gratifying flinch of fear in her face. This, after all, was just what she had counted on me never doing. As she rolled over, she laughed at me. Then I smacked her in the face.
My heart is pounding at the recollection of all this. I didn’t like the man I had become that night, full of curry and beer, knocking the missus about. No, I didn’t expect such things in my life … The train is rollicking through the dark enclaves of the North—Dales gates and low cottages. It really is impossible to see any detail outside the smeary window, just the racing cables rising and falling. Beyond that, nothing. Darkness visible. Forcing one to peer inward. The darker it gets beyond my window as the train hurtles towards Wakefield, the more, paradoxically, I find I can see.
Michelle is still sitting before me, writing text messages (most probably effusive Christmas greetings to her friends and family), while Robin has vacated his seat to ‘spruce up’, as he termed it. We are getting closer to the end, closer to the final destination. The feeling of warm incipience at King’s Cross has been replaced by contemplation of final things. We are all saying goodbye somehow. I take out my battered notebook and balance it on my knees so Michelle cannot sneak a peek at what I’m writing. That was a bad move to show her the passage about Mandy’s card earlier on. Pearls before swine, and all that.
That card—the corny but touching bougainvillea curling from well-kept window boxes, the simple Mediterranean light evoked by a wash of powder-blue from the watercolourist’s palette. And that heart-rending message, in my wife’s all-too-familiar hand (I hadn’t seen it for a couple of months, but I recognised it instantly: from birthday cards, inscriptions on flyleafs, cheques written for goods we couldn’t afford).
‘Our little home. We’ll find it one day’.
And which day was that to be? Why did she give me such false hope? Such final cruelty. My heart thunders when I think of that last card. ‘Our little home’—admitting to the dream of safety, of permanence, of becoming each other’s family (in the absence of parents) that we had both secretly entertained before getting married. How could she so be so arrantly contradictory? How could she leave me, deceive me, then write such nonsense? She must hate me very much, I concluded, to send this masterpiece of contradiction. What perversity! ‘We’ll find it one day …’
It is getting late now, late in my curve or journey: it is now a question of racing time to its inevitable conclusion. An idiot-check on the Self. What do I have left? Thirty years at the most. The best is past. I am closer to the end than to the beginning. Why not put an end to it now, the sad and sorry dance, the flicker of shadows on a screen that passes for this life. I could get off at the next station and put my head on the line. No, too much anticipation, too much mental suffering. And way too much blood. What about pills? My mother is sure to still have her apothecary’s kitchen cupboard full of potions. Why wouldn’t she? Yeah, pills would do the trick; to flow out gently on the current—through the Pillars of Hercules, shaking hands with Thanatos as darkness descends before my eyes. Hold on, I really don’t want my mother to find me dead in her house! Now that would be an insult. No, somewhere private where I won’t be disturbed. And a gun. If only I could find one! A gun is always the best option. Swift and clean. The quick gesture with the tensed finger and the longed-for oblivion. Hopefully.