Byron Easy (47 page)

‘Well, they won’t be very sympathetic at your next job when they find out how you left this one,’ I volunteered, fearing her volcanic anger. I was getting dangerously used to her ways by now—the ostentatious scorn, the wallowing in the pejorative.

‘I’m not getting another job. Here—’ she spat angrily, ‘help me with these.’

Mandy was attempting to zip her legs into her favourite pair of leather boots, lying flummoxed on the kitchen lino while Fidel wagged his tail in her face wanting to play. ‘And get rid of that stupid mutt.’

‘Fidel!’ I said sharply, pleased to have any authority in my own house. He ceased flailing his tail and looked penitently in my direction. ‘Outside.’ At this command he trotted towards the dog-flap I had installed in the back door, his ears flattened to his head. After two years he had finally begun to respond to his name. I approached Mandy and tugged the obstinate zipper. ‘So what the hell do we do now? You know Mart can’t afford me at the moment.’

‘That was only ever
pocket money
,’ she sneered. ‘I tell everyone I know that you’re a kept man.’

I felt the sharp incision of this comment. It was true Mandy had been paying for almost everything recently to help my cash-flow crisis. Her many mysterious accounts held funds I could only guess at. This certainly increased my sense of helpless emasculation. Since the start of the year we had been choked with money problems: ulcer-giving, cancer-forming dough-headaches that would challenge Houdini to find an escape. I felt cornered, checkmated to the nth degree. Most days I couldn’t afford the carfare into town or a pint of milk. The balance in my account stood at £1.75. As a punishment I was relegated my own separate shelf in the fridge until I started earning again. This often held the elliptic form of a single egg. What with the sex embargo, the situation worryingly resembled my bachelor hell of a couple of years previously. I felt embarrassed and humiliated if I ever had to beg money from Mandy, like a trembling wife approaching her husband for the housekeeping. Although she rolled her globular eyes when I did, I knew she secretly revelled in wearing the trousers. However, it wasn’t a situation I did enough to question or remedy. Possibly this was a legacy of the all-pervasive rampant feminism of the 1970s. Any boy growing up in this decade was subjected to the most indoctrinating epistemology concerning the emancipation of women. They were at least equal, if not superior beings, the mantra went. They deserved to be treated with greater respect, remuneration, sympathy and reverence than they had been for the previous two millennia. They demanded—no, deserved—houses, jewellery, cars, holidays, childcare, skincare, promotion and regular orgasms. And this was everywhere: on the news, in sitcoms, on savagely defaced patriarchal advertising hoardings. Coming to consciousness in this environment allowed me to think that it was never otherwise—who were these hypothetical creatures, these sympathetic Eves, who soothed babies to sleep in 1950s sweaters, or cooked a man a hot meal when he returned from the pit? All I could see were brassiere-burning furies, and the insolent, intelligent face of Germaine Greer exhorting her sisters to drink their own menstrual blood. This was coupled with a corrosive negativity towards the male gender. According to the new nostrums of radical, militant feminism, we were all worms, scum, potential rapists. And these ideas went in, travelled deep to the centre of the psyche, waiting to be proved correct on the battlefields of the sex war. So it didn’t seem odd, when the going became financially choppy, to allow Mandy to take the reins for a while. After all, the buried indoctrination said that is what all women secretly desired. Not parity, but
supremacy.
However, it’s strange when confronted with financial catastrophe how quickly men and women revert to primitive type. What was I, the supposed breadwinner, doing sitting on my arse all day writing poetry? she would scream. Are you a man or a mouse? Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you wanted some equality, some liberation from those tired gender stereotypes.
Excuse
me.

‘I won’t be a kept man for ever, though,’ I offered limply.

‘No,’ she said, rising to her full height, ‘and I’ll tell you why …’ I noticed how much she loved talking to me from this position. Her favourite spot to start an argument was when I was lying on the bed reading. Apart from this activity being tantamount to having a handjob in public for her, she revelled in the height advantage, scorning me along the twin barrels of her flared Catalan nostrils. ‘… Because we’re getting together all the crappy clothes in both our wardrobes and going down Camden market to flog ’em to the Japs.’

I sighed at this latest escapade. Not only did it sound like hard graft to me (and I tried to hoard my precious gold-dust writing time in the knowledge that all other activities were chaff on the breeze), but it was doomed to failure with her as mastermind. I said,

‘Okay, who’s got you a pitch there?’

‘Your pal Rudi, if you must know.’

‘Rudi? I thought he was king of pricks in your eyes.’

‘Yeah, well, he’s got his head screwed on when it comes to money.’

I had been surprised the previous week, on coming home from Martin’s depressing redundancy meeting, to find Rudi sitting in my kitchen playing ball with Fidel while Mandy did the washing up. Rudi was always adept at finding something manly to do when in the company of women. If they complained about the car, his head was under their bonnets within moments; if the garden was overgrown, he would drop by with his turbo-charged diesel Flymo to perform the favour of cutting their lawn. This he would do stripped to the waist if at all possible, beefy shoulders swarming with fuliginous hair. In fact, he had done just such a service for Antonia a number of times the previous summer when Nick complained haughtily that he wasn’t born to be her groundsman. That evening last week, I was met by the sight of Rudi tickling Fidel’s tummy with one hand while wrestling a ball from his snarling jaws with the other. Both males were growling. He had popped over to pick up the battery charger he had lent Mandy (ignorant as I was of cars, I imagined they had to be hotwired like in the movies). But there had been no mention of any market project.

‘Don’t tell me,’ I said, ‘he’s owed a favour by one of the goons who run the stalls and is bequeathing it to us. He’ll never let us forget his gratitude if we accept, you realise. I know Rudi, that’s how he operates.’

‘So what? At least he can pay for a roof over his own head like a man.’

‘You always bring it down to a slur on masculinity.’

‘Whatever. Anyway, I want to go on holiday. I’m going to save up for it. I want to go to Cuba, get away from this pissy island with its pissy weather, and all you dull
English
people.’

I knew it was pointless arguing; a waste of time to oppose her Niagara of bile. When she made up her mind to do something she was invincible, haranguing as many people as possible into the bargain. She was an inveterate recruiter. As with the band, everyone in her orbit would be called upon to help out, to join her cause. If they malingered or implied they had better things to do with their time or their own lives to lead, Mandy would subtly ostracise or punish them. Or not so subtly, in my case. If I didn’t conform to her schemes, she would make my life a daily hell. Thus I always capitulated, from writing all her lyrics, to rent scams, to moving house every other month, and now the market and her cockamamie idea of going to Cuba.

I had other objections to her plans. One was that she gave up on everything, abandoned every endeavour. Despite the protestations from everyone (usually people like myself who had worked long and hard to support her) not to forgo her band, she just chucked it all away at the first obstacle. Taking Victor Moore’s cynicism to heart, she thought his Confucian utterances demanded she give up for good. Secretly, I was disappointed by this surrender: if she gave up at the first hurdle on her lifelong ambition, how would she treat her marriage? It revealed a hitherto unseen weakness to her character, a hairline fracture in her iron will. It is only when you spend time with such a person that you realise how much we invest in ‘sticking it out’ or ‘seeing things through’ in life. How much of our general fibre is built upon the age-old values of endurance, the protestant work ethic. Also, how corroding the reverse of these values can be: to be around someone who
gives up
all the time breeds feelings of futility and emptiness. If they, the instigators of these schemes, cannot be bothered with them, where does that leave us, the loyal supporters?

Then there was her devout hatred of anything English, despite the fact that she was half-English herself. The market caper was merely a means to the end of escaping the British Isles. Somehow, Ramona’s genetic legacy seemed to be the only one operative in her body. For her, this sceptred isle was full of rude, gloomy, spendthrifts who had no idea how to
fiesta,
and who could only use their summer holidays to spread ugliness on the beautiful coastlines of southern Spain—‘her’ coastlines. Normally, I let this rank xenophobia go; I knew her father and myself were implicated in this slander: we were the pasty remnants of empire, of everything sunless and morally lax (the Catholic Church coming in for much praise when it suited her, even though she didn’t understand a word she was crowing about). To her, we bulldog Brits stood for washout summers, lying tabloids, career politicians, caravan holidays, unvirile men, and inedible meat teas with suet pudding. We were the unsexy impediment to every avenue of fun that she pursued. We couldn’t dance, cook, make love, make films or treat a señorita the way she should be treated. Our very hairstyles thwarted her enjoyment of walking down the street. This pathology grew over the years. It began as merely noting that English men were ‘unfriendly’ and ‘cold’ in comparison to their grinning Levantine counterparts. She neglected to observe that these Lotharios, after their Castilian courtships, often insisted their women become chaste, baby-producing kitchen-drudges, forbidden to so much as say
que tal
to another man. Her mania culminated in rubbishing everything English or North European on a daily basis, reserving a special opprobrium for any woman with ginger hair—or ‘ginger minges’ as she unfunnily called them. I finally sympathised with her madman ex-boyfriend who had repeatedly begged her to ‘fucking move over there’ if she hated Blighty so much.

So it didn’t surprise me that she wanted to do this market job in order to escape the isle of dogs for good. To Cuba, where she foolishly imagined there would be a fiesta every night in the street, with the joyous populace (proudly wearing their multi-coloured Che T-shirts) all smoking cigars and rattling their ration of rice in honour of Castro.

Hoping to swiftly put an end to her unrealistic ambitions, I said, ‘Mandy, you do know that Cuba is still a communist country?’

To which she answered (I shit you not): ‘What does that mean?’

A fortnight later, we were trundling up Buck Street in a secondhand Bedford Rascal, the back bulging with flares, coats, boots and heavy clothing-rails. The kick-off for the markets was usually six a.m., five-thirty for the die-hards or the old crooks who had flogged their leather belts and Harringtons there for twenty years. Even in late May it was freezing at that hour, the recalcitrant pigeons picking their way through a detritus of noodle cartons and frosty fag ends, the sheepskinned regulars blowing steam into their takeout cappuccinos. It took us a while to get set up. By midday, I was still struggling to pin home-made handbags to the canvas roof of our stall or re-erect the clothing-rail that collapsed at the very touch of a tourist. For the first week we made the grand total of thirty-five quid. This I saw as vindication of the idiocy of the whole enterprise. I would sit there for hypothermic hours, stamping my feet in time to the discordant hardbag then in vogue, while attempting to plough on with J. M. Bradawl’s
The Nexus of Unstable Definitions,
a book which I was currently reading at the rate of a sentence per day. Against all expectations, Mandy, far from wanting to throw in the hand-embroidered Mexican towel, insisted we persevere and try a second week. After all, the pitch was free, and the weather threatened to get warmer. Sure enough, week two saw a crazy reversal of fortune, with an influx of the hallowed Japanese buying Levi flares at our absurdly optimistic prices. The yen they had to burn was incredible. By Friday we had cleared three hundred quid. Mandy celebrated by bringing Fidel down to the stall, as he had been confined to the garden for a whimpering fortnight.

Fidel became a fixture of our business from then on, his lovable big brown eyes and powerfully masculine charm helping us to shift many a gold and pink
Charlie’s Angels
T-shirt. He was tethered to the clothes-rail, a constantly replenished bowl of water under his busy tongue. I was newly impressed with his strength as, when any female dog appeared within a half-mile radius, the clothes-rail would start to move as if by a poltergeist, Fidel tugging it in her direction with a carnal determination. It also surprised me how many people you run into when you become a barrow boy. I suppose it’s akin to standing still for any length of time in London—you’re bound to encounter someone you know. Six degrees of stagnation, I think they call it. For one, I didn’t think all these faces from the past would be interested in seventies suede overcoats with fun-fur collars, but there they all were: square old schoolfriends, girlfriends, ex-friends, customers from Rock On, distant relatives, even old teachers back from hippy odysseys in Goa. One day Martin drifted past, and did a double take, surprised to see us there, shovelling hats into bags, and banknotes into our pendulous bumbags. I didn’t want him to think I was doing too well, just in case he refused to give me the old job back when things ‘came right’. Inevitably, Rudi was a regular visitor, often looking over his shoulder for fellow shafters that he didn’t want to bump into. Occasionally, he and Mandy would disappear to sort out some business with the major-domo who ran the place, leaving me with Fidel for company This annoyed me, as Rudi was my old chum, though Mandy would always ridicule his clothes and accent on her return. Then, also inevitably, Antonia and Nick showed up, the latter exchanging polite greetings, while Antonia hurried past with her home-counties nose in the air. This produced a stream of scorn from my wife. She seemed somehow proud of her orgy of bridge burning. Mandy didn’t know that I had been secretly meeting with Nick for the past few weeks, usually in the lightless snug of the Prince Regent for a pint of Guinness. Nick had managed a stall himself, after all, and it was he who was instrumental in the success of our operation. For example, he had advised me to visit all the charity shops in Kentish Town on a Monday morning, as that was where you usually found pairs of cool trousers going for nothing, which you could mark up to make a six hundred per cent profit. He also alerted me to a wholesale place near the Brent Cross flyover that had warehouses full of leather jackets bound for Amsterdam, and whose owners were willing to cut favourable deals. After months of fiscal emasculation at Mandy’s hands, I enjoyed playing the shrewd operator, stuffing fivers under my Fagin’s coat.