Authors: Jude Cook
And still it got worse. Only recently, just before the separation, I checked myself into the Eastman Dental Hospital in an attempt to clear up the matter once and for all. It was a blindingly bright, rare July day of sunshine. An embarrassment of amber glories and vibrating symphonies of light. It just so happened to coincide with a sudden deepening of my lifelong melancholy. That’s right: lifelong. I’m a writer, what did you expect? I suffer from mild depression, like all writers, comics, crazies, depressives. It is their
modus operandi
. Except many writers oscillate in their misery, have manic phases of credit-card spreeing and street-shouting—dizzy epiphanies followed by curtained afternoon bed-residencies where their manservants have to hide the shotgun cartridges. And they’re the lucky ones, those bipolar popularities. No, for me it set in for life at around thirteen, that magic age. I don’t go on about it for reasons I might elaborate later. Suffice to say that no Lithium or Prozac or self-help doorstopper will snap me out of it, will lift the malaise or provide the heaven-sweet analgesic. It’s there, like rolling, chasing thunder clouds in a spasmodically disturbed sky; a constant like tinnitus, a background hum. It deepens, it expands, it multiplies like cancerous cells, but it never
lifts
. And it’s especially heavy on blindingly bright, rare July days of sunshine with their obligation, their hot imperative, to fun and shorts and ice-creams and loose times in loose clothing.
That morning, the sudden deepening had manifested itself as a weight, almost a physical sensation, like somebody standing on my chest in concrete waders. The weight of accumulated stress, accumulated knocks to one’s self-esteem, accumulated failures. Ten years of London-damage, money-damage, all distilled into each dreadful sigh that unsettled my fellow tube passengers. Plus the weight of
her
, of what was happening with the wife, even though I was trying to deny it, bypass it. The sour tang of our daily argument had been fresh on my tongue as I journeyed towards the hospital, thinking about the twin subjects of metempsychosis and divorce. Earlier that morning, as she rocketed through her bathroom ritual, I had walked into the narrow galley of the kitchen to discover it under a fog of smoke from a grillpan of burning sausages. I must have forgotten about them as I sat in the living room, engrossed in Raymond Williams’
Culture and Society
. On extinguishing the blue jets of gas I could hear her calling from the bathroom, her voice carrying the assertive edge that forecasted fireworks: ‘Byron—what the hell is that smell?’
‘It’s under control,’ I shouted back, throwing a dripping cloth over the blazing grillpan, somehow sustaining a third-degree burn to my thumb in the process. ‘Fuck!’ Instinctively, I dropped the whole apparatus. Oil, molten bangers and shards of charcoal flew to the four corners of the kitchen lino. I yelled, ‘Would you like the window open a little?’ Then she was in the room.
‘I don’t believe it. Can’t you smell? Can’t you smell burning?’ Unsurprisingly, she wasn’t concerned that I had my thumb under the blast of the cold tap, a lip of crimson skin hanging from the knuckle. ‘As if I’m not late enough for that crappy place as it is.’
She barged past me, hurling windows open. Then she began shovelling the sausages from the floor and depositing them in the bin. I watched her carefully as she did this, trying to gauge her true Richter-scale reading. She sometimes moved with a fantastic hauteur, that terrible conceited scorn for the
watcher
you occasionally see in the outraged faces of paparazzi-snapped celebrities. It was both frightening and magnetic at the same time. An awful cynosure. I observed her silently, my thumb now without feeling under the deep-cold water being drawn from the tap. I began cooking up excuses for myself, any excuse other than the sin of reading. But instead I opted for attack—always the best method of defence with her.
‘You’re not throwing those away are you? They’ve only been on the floor. We can’t afford to chuck ’em away’
She span round, her eyes full of cat-like venom, a sneer on her wonderfully thin, crisply outlined lips.
‘
You
can’t afford to. I’m paying all the fucking bills.’
‘And I’m paying the fucking rent.’ I slammed the tap off and wrapped my hand in a tea towel, tourniquet-tight. ‘All you do is spend, spend, spend.’
In the last fortnight alone she’d taken delivery of four new pairs of trousers, a climbing frame and mischief-centre for her beloved Siamese cats, and an in-car CD-system for her vintage VW, a car she couldn’t afford in the first place. She stood before me, a shaking wall of perdition, her impressively ironed and coordinated work clothes almost trembling with righteousness.
‘It’s my money!’ she cried, and sent a coffee cup skidding across the surface until it exploded against the toaster.
‘It’s never just
your
money when you’re married!’
I started to search for a dustpan and brush for the shards of the cup; always my first instinct when objects were smashed, regardless of the perpetrator.
‘And what were you doing to set the house on fire? You’re an idiot!
Cabrón
!’
‘I was cooking your breakfast.’
‘No you weren’t—you were reading.’ She disappeared into the living room, returning a moment later brandishing the copy of
Culture and Society
. ‘Why don’t you make some real money instead of filling your head with this shit?’ She was screaming now, at full-philistine-throttle; hurling the book into the bin to join the still-fuming sausages. ‘If you’re not
reading
…’ (she pronounced the word like some sort of religious curse) ‘… then you’re getting pissed with that idiot Rudi.’
‘Oh, so now we’re going to hear all this Rudi crap again, are we? He’s my childhood friend. My best friend. I’m entitled to have at least one, or is that against the bloody law now?’
Rudi Buckle—hirsute, stocky, early-thirties swordsman and all-round good guy—had been at school with me in Hamford. My oldest pal, as I think I mentioned earlier. Although six months my senior, and a pragmatic Scot of Italian extraction, I would always consider him my closest friend. His folks had moved down from Glasgow to nearby Stevenage when his old man had been transferred to the huge British Aerospace plant that provided most of the work in the area. Rudi was effortlessly charismatic, with a kind of swashbuckling confidence, and initially my wife had warmed to him. But gradually he’d become a
bête noire
, probably through every fault of his own. He’d turned up in London five years ago to start a car valeting business after a similar operation had failed in backwards, provincial Hamford. A year down the line and it had become a thriving monster—he was always meeting crooks and casino owners with their needy Bentleys and voluminous Mercs. He never left the house with less than five hundred quid in his wallet, just in case he met some near-autistic dolly bird still impressed by flash Scotsmen with pockets full of dough. But Rudi’s pragmatism covered a strong streak of flakiness. He always had money, but he owed a fortune too. And I was always borrowing from him. And, just recently, drinking a bottle of whisky well into the night at his place to avoid the barren Sahara that was now my marriage bed. He called it ‘hard drinking’, and it certainly was hard to imbibe that much every night without dying. I love that adjective:
hard
. No one describes gluttony as hard-eating. It’s that macho qualification—hard rock, hard porn. Hard drinking.
‘He’s a pisshead—strutting around like he owns everything. Someone should cut his balls off.’
A familiar deranged look appeared in the black points of her eyes. She was one of the few women I’d known mad enough to carry out such a threat. I shouted back,
‘Well, that’s something you know all about!’
‘And you’re just a loser. I’m too good for you, and you know it. My mother—God rest her soul—made the same mistake with Dad. She could’ve married ten millionaires! They were offering her yachts, jewellery, just to have an affair with them. And she ended up with him.’
‘Oh, Christ—not this now!’
Her mother Ramona, a beautiful Spanish immigrant who’d arrived at Victoria station in the early sixties with no more than a suitcase and her stunning looks, had worked her way up the ranks in the hotel business until she was manager of one of the largest Bayswater international stopovers. She, like Rudi, was always encountering the dangerously glamorous, rich or unscrupulous in the course of her work—except in this case they were valeting
her
, usually on stolen weekday afternoons in one of the deluxe, white-carpeted suites. Ramona had died in a car crash when my wife was only sixteen, and, to deal with the grief of this defining disaster, she’d devoted her life to
becoming
her mother; mimicking her profligate habits, her clothes, ambitions, qualities. A modest inheritance, wrested from her father, helped her in this costly endeavour. As I watched my wife—that concentration of fluent vitriol—seethe in front of me, I opened my mouth and said the only thing I knew would end the argument swiftly: ‘You’re not your mother.’
‘Drop dead.’
And, with that
bon mot
, she snatched her embossed VW keys and stormed out, slamming the front door with such ferocity that the living-room lampshade plummeted to the ground in a hail of plaster, like a hanged man through a trapdoor.
At that moment I became aware of the smell of burning. Then I looked at the bin. It was on fire—the pages of
Culture and Society
curling among greedy orange flames.
So, that morning, by the time I reached the sun-carved, chalk-white edifice of the Eastman, I was almost drunk on the lethal Black Dog. Like mustard gas, I felt it was jaundicing my face, adding a sickly lime-pallor to my ears and throat. I wasn’t even sure I could make it through the richly timbered, impressively slow revolving door without the unendurable weight of Time and Self pushing me out into the street again, like a gravitational force.
I stopped in the vaporising heat, in blinking disbelief that I could sink so low. Poleaxed by the ponderous millstone, the axle-load, the great sum of Self.
‘Mr Easy? If you’d like to follow me.’
Well, she’s pretty, I thought, the weight decreasing appreciably by a couple of kilograms.
I followed my glamorous, flat-shoed Burmese nurse into a spare, fluorescent-lit cubicle, pausing to reflect that heels, though impractical on the disinfectant-slippery tiles of the Eastman hospital, might have lifted my depression for ever.
‘I’m Dr Amir. We’re just going to conduct a couple of experiments and then look at the possible analyses.’
Doctor! And I thought she was only … Christ, they’re getting younger by the hour, just like coppers. Dr Amir could only have been twenty-six and was possessed of the kind of heartbreaking, leather-dark, make-up-free complexion that Gauguin drank himself to death over. Her mouth, as richly lipsticked as a London bus, shimmered and concentrated the bright glosses of the overhead striplights. I glanced around: no winey blood-furrowed parlour carpet like Dr Demjanjuk’s converted Chamber of Horrors, just the immaculate chessboard tiles. White, black, white, black.
She handed me a specimen bottle. I had to spit into it for fifteen minutes.
When she returned, clutching a clipboard to her bust, I had only managed a pitiful amount of bone-dry froth. But that’s life, isn’t it? When put to the test, very few of us can rise to the grand occasion, can do what we promised, let alone surpass ourselves. On any other morning that month I could have filled three bathtubs to the brim with spittle, doused house fires with phlegm, flooded high streets with saliva. On any other morning …
As I apologised, hoping she wouldn’t read my parlous performance as a sign of any sexual inadequacy, Dr Amir suggested that my problem was maybe only subjective, a perceived problem. After all, how much is too much? Too much saliva? Too little hair? Too much depression? Aren’t all complaints, apart from the obvious tangible ones like severed limbs and terminal illnesses, subjective? It was all about putting up with it, adaptation, I was briskly and sexily told. There
was
an operation, she revealed, but this was expensive, risky and usually only performed on slavering schizophrenics or multiple sclerosis sufferers. I was just about to ask whether it was not simply possible to buy a whole new mouth from reception when she said this to me:
‘Mr Easy, sometimes dental problems such as yours are psychosomatic; are brought on by stress or depression. If you like we can refer you to the Eastman’s dental psychiatrist. Would you like that?’
Apparently, such a thing as a dental psychiatrist existed. I wondered briefly if, the night before, she hadn’t been a participant in one of those epic benders that junior doctors legendarily enjoy after their sixteen-hour shifts, and whether this might be clouding her professional judgement somewhat. I also pondered the possibility that, after the conveyer belt of vodkas and pricey bottled beers, some strapping-armed hospital porter hadn’t lifted her coffee-creamy thighs around his waist and banged her remorselessly against the bedroom door, her jet, incensey hair and pillar-box lips wet with the reflected light from her studious standard lamp.
‘I’m not sure,’ I replied, my mouth suddenly full of spit.
‘Well, if you do decide, you’ll have to fill out one of these.’
She unhooked a form from her clipboard, moving thrillingly close as she did so.
‘There’s space to list any psychiatric problems or stressful events you may have experienced over the last eight years. I’m afraid the amount of saliva you produced is pretty standard for a man of your age.’
Age.
My
age. Oh God, to be young enough for her, to not be this frazzled car-wreck of doomy neuroses and nightly death-dreams. To be a strapping-armed hospital porter. To have money. To not be shackled to the black ball and chain of writing. To not feel the weight of Self, like someone in concrete waders standing on my chest. To not be married.
‘Have you any history of depression, Mr Easy?’ asked Dr Amir as I dithered with my ballpoint. A sententious expression appeared on her face. She looked candidly through me, right back to the cot I bawled in, aged one, when I was still unaware that, as bad as this being-a-hungry-baby caper is, there’s worse, much worse, much
more
to bawl about coming later.