Authors: Jude Cook
So the bus took me past the park where we used to walk the dogs. I think it even did a stop there, by the shielding trees that confuse the perspective of what’s behind. The park was still extant under the low mirage-mist of a November morning, its concave curves of dogshit lawn extending to blurred boundaries. Yes, the park was still there, but something was missing—us. We, the wife and I, and our tearaway chihuahuas. We were absent. A skeleton park, with all the flesh and warmth and life removed. The view from the bus—the present moment—had struggled manfully to contain the past. And it choked me up, I can tell you. It made me shudder. It throttled the ventricles to get that old conker right between the eyes again; the useless insight that a space takes on meaning only if we, human beings (and in my sorry case, chihuahuas), invest it with something. Without that investment it’s just space: concrete, grass, litter bins, climbing frame, goalposts,
air
. Oh, to know the raw edge of that blinder once more! To see Concepcion bulleting after strangers’ footballs like a dog-track whippet in the smelting August sun. To witness Fidel, fiddling pornographically with himself on a rich knoll of sunburnt grass. To see Mandy, the glosses of her hair unbearably raven around her delicate collar bones.
How could she wantonly split that closeness, that symbiosis, that cell of love? How could she detonate a whole marriage? Sheer recklessness—like burning a diary. Like cutting apart Siamese twins. Like halving Aristophanes’ original homo sapiens. Is that what she really wanted? Because that’s what she really got.
Why is it we remember the bad times as if they were better? When you look back rationally, that glowing childhood holiday was in reality an opera of recrimination and cockroach-ridden campsite toilets. That first date was really an agony of suppressed colonic torture, being, as you were, too embarrassed to visit the Gents for longer than it took to piss. Those knockabout schooldays really a Stalag 18 of solitary confinement and beatings. I seem to remember there’s a photograph of me from one of those blissful August days with the dogs. Byron Easy asprawl the sun-warmed park bench: grotty pillar-box-red T-shirt; a scowl on his face. I was, I seem to recall—after the bitter day-long argument over money and the dire possibility of moving to Spain for work—in a foul mood.
Hold it … we’re moving! At last! Or at least I think we are. After a long stationary wait it’s sometimes hard to tell if it isn’t just the scenery, the
world
, gracefully evolving into motion rather than sore-arsed you—as when the cross-Channel ferry begins to ease out of port and the quayside starts shifting. Like two wide ribbons being unwound, as Frederic observed at the start of his sentimental education. Maybe life bears an echo of this: we assume we are in motion, forging ahead through time and space, from station to station, when in reality we are static,
stationary
, and it’s time that is active, operational around us; fraying us, distorting us. With all the millennial panic in the air, it’s hard to tell.
This living in the past—this lepidoptery—it can play terrible tricks with the light.
The rivulet of rainwater, still vivid through the breath-steamed palette of glass, has gone into nervous hyperdrive—shivering centrifugally and threatening to break like a stretched chromium worm. We’re definitely off. A whistle blows long and shrill. The train is sighing away from its mark, its carbon-black buffers; leaving the squalling neon burger-counters of King’s Cross to their cast of Christmas drifters, their men with nowhere and no one to go to. It makes you feel good and warm inside; hot, like after a bellyful of coffee, to know your mother has left some money for a ticket home at Christmas. Makes you thankful not to be one of those Yuletide Nowhere Men spitting and swearing their way through the shopping hordes, crackling with bitterness. Those losers. Those swimmers of Acheron. It makes
me
feel good because I have been one of their number, in my time.
I watch the tapering platform pick up speed as I swirl a kitchen-sink of saliva around the basin of my mouth. Goodbye ragged, mad T-shirt caught in wire-mesh fence. Goodbye porters. Goodbye platform-wavers in Santa hats. Goodbye seedy corrupted London. Goodbye Mandy.
The ribbons of horizon cloud now seem lit from within: diaphanous streaks in the dusk over a population of chimneys. There’s a sudden, raw noise. A groaning shudder of machinery-squeak announces the trains effort to find its centre of gravity. The carriages lurch: a sausage-string of heavy metal on a tightrope. Then we’re released into a ranged arena of points and sidings; a confluence of tracks and overhead cables petering out to low, graffitied brick walls. Open space. Unreadable aerosol-artist tags on an approaching iron-riveted bridge; the rain bulleting down with a sadistic vengeance. Then darkness. A tunnel.
I take a brief gander around. The exterior blackness seems to have concentrated the feverish glare of the striplights. Everyone appears to be absorbed in a paper, a card game, a sandwich, a private life. The septuagenarian in the denim jacket is playing Space Invaders; the white plastic console bleeping and cooing in his frail hands. The Islington lesbian couple, wearing weightless peacock-hued silk scarves, are bickering good-naturedly. Tracksuit Man (whose suitcase smack is still causing me pain) is joyously spanking his defiant daughter across the back of her bare legs. The colourless, office-tanned Accountant Couple opposite me are now engrossed in terrible fiction … But I’m thinking about
her
, and what she’s doing now—now, in this exact moment, whether it be her insisted-upon twenty stirs of sugar in her beloved tea or her groans of submission with some Italian on the futon we shared for three years.
And I’m thinking about the still unfamiliar sights and sounds I awoke to yesterday morning in my comically empty room; the room in a shared flat that Rudi found for me after the split. The folding chair. The blighted, peeling crust of wallpaper. The daydream of my exploding cranium spattering the carpet with crimson. The commotion of the two haggard croupiers letting themselves in downstairs after an arduous night. The sound of distant, muffled chamber music from the jobbing classical musician behind pitifully slender walls. The low, sinuous sustains of a viola as the rain chucked its buckets against the flimsy panes: bare baroque etudes—a melancholy concoction at nine in the morning.
And I’m thinking about the view from my high window: a strange, barren, blowy panorama. The stripped chestnut in the garden two doors down, now fully naked almost three months on from its October glory of copper and rust, the day I first flung my three cardboard boxes across my square of carpet.
And I’m thinking about thirty and how the hell I arrived at this famous summit with so little achieved: how royally I’ve failed in my chosen endeavours of art and love. And I’m thinking about my mother and my estranged father in Sydney, Australia, playing with the step-siblings I’ve never met while Emmanuelle looks feebly and Frenchly on. And I’m thinking about all those I’ll never see again, like Antonia and Nick or Fidel and Concepcion. And I’m thinking how each disappearing year seems like a station left behind, becoming smaller as the tracks thin to a pencil point; how these years come to resemble alien countries or continents, each with their capitals of pain, counties of sorrow, small hamlets of joy.
And I’m thinking about
her
: Mandy. I’m trying to remember in order to forget. Before her image slides unrecallably away into that lost land of the past, like decaying Finsbury Park is now beyond my rain-refracted window. I’m thinking about her face with its almond symmetries and glossy brows; her strongly bridged nose as flat as a ruler; the Mediterranean heat of her leather-brown eyes; the squiggly white childhood scar on her forehead that her fringe used to hide before she settled for a straight parting like her dead mother’s. And I’m thinking about her appurtenances of richly raven hair that tendrilled to her swift, exciting waist. Her fashion-model legs. Her quick, uncontrollable smile. Her look that once held love for me.
But mostly I’m thinking about that other
her
—Mandy, the adult baby, the evil little emotional-mongrel who never learnt to share, who almost did for me with two kitchen knives on the day we split for ever (and on other numerously dark occasions). I’m thinking about her, her, her. I don’t recall telling you how we met, how our two souls became entangled, fatally enmeshed.
Let me fill you in.
I
T WAS AT WORK
. My work. The shop. A music shop on two crumbling, dust-decorated floors in Royal College Street, where I had slaved for five years before Mandy blew glamorously into my life; trembling the strings on the wall-hung instruments. A chance meeting on a snowy morning. Ah, if only the plumber hadn’t cancelled his appointment to fix my ruptured heating pipes that day I would only have had to endure a morning of mild racism. Instead, I got the Spanish Inquisition.
At the time the place called itself Rock On, although it had evolved through many incarnations (
Strings ’n’ Things
, Stacks ’n’
Racks
) due mainly to the fascist and unforgiving attentions of the taxman. It was, and still is, the brainchild of an old rocker named Martin Drift—a low-shouldered, astute-eyed survivor who wore his hair in a tight grey ponytail raked back from an embattled forehead. A lovely, gentle man, with delicate fine-knuckled hands, Martin was from the Old School—the
lycée
that sent its pupils out into the slipstream of the Home Counties Guitar Gods, through the coffee bars and sweat-toilets of early sixties Soho. Martin had endured this breathtakingly exciting time of overnight fame and fortune, white Jags and scandalous skirts (a time when Making It seemed so much
easier
) to find himself living with an obese Hare Krishna and an acid-addled poet in a Chalk Farm squat. It was the dog-end of the decade and he was, like so many others from the Old School, bewilderingly unfamous and exactingly unfortunate. Out of desperation he formed one last band. And they—a soft-rock combo he christened Drifter, who sported the requisite Old Testament beards and albescent denim—
almost
made it. Why are tales of almost-success more heartbreaking than abject, gruel-subsisting failure? Why is number fifty-nine in the charts always more pitiful than number-nothing in the charts? Why is a support tour that
almost
happened with world-famous rock outfit (insert name here) more calamitous than a self-funded tour of East Anglian mental homes? Is it that parlous proximity to the Holy Grail? Or just proof of the unpalatable parental wisdom that it all comes down to luck in the end?
Anyway, it was Drifters turn to rocket to number fifty-nine during the hot August of ’75 with their immortal summer stomper, ‘Bell-Bottomed Belle’. It was then, at the height of his fame, that Martin went and had an accident, the legacy of which is still visible on his face today. He electrocuted himself onstage in front of ten thousand baying Dutch rock fans at a festival in Rotterdam. And, on this occasion, nobody in the audience thought it was just ‘part of the act’. The way Mart tells it, he was thrown back into the drum riser with such force that it appeared someone had yanked him from the wings with an industrial pulley. ‘It was like being hit by a six from Viv Richards, man. Total impact!’ What remained of the right side of his charred face was painstakingly reconstructed by Dutch surgeons over the following year. The modified plateaus of artificially wax-textured skin under his grey stubble testify to this feat of dermatological engineering. Whenever a customer commented on his scars, the saga would be trotted out—lavishly embellished, of course (helicopter air-ambulance from the stadium, Mick Jagger weeping at his hospital bedside), after which Martin would conclude: ‘Hey, could be worse—I could still be living in Bromley.’ Ah, Mart and Bromley. Bromley and Mart. The place
he
escaped from. The place that made him the man he is today, with his two floors of bargain Stratocasters and budget recording and rehearsal facilities in the converted toilets. Nothing, according to Martin, could be worse than originating from Bromley. The way he told it, nowhere was geographically further from the epicentre of rock ’n’ roll in the sixties than Bromley. No conurbation could be more banal, no town centre more unlike downtown New Orleans than Bromley’s in 1965. I once put it to him that Hamford was worse. He said,
‘Nah, man. I think you’ll find that Bromley had the edge. Even the lettering on the street signs was depressing.’
‘Street signs are depressing everywhere. Think of Russia,’ I said, thinking instead of Hamford.
‘Yeah, but their alphabet looks so exotic.’
‘Not when you’ve queued six hours for a single egg.’
‘True,’ conceded Martin thoughtfully, lighting his fifteenth Marlboro of the morning.
‘And I bet you had a cinema.’
‘Yeah, but it got all the films a year late. And no bands. I mean, apart from us and the Thin White Duke, who came out of Bromley?’
‘
Us
?’ I replied, as if I didn’t know who he was referring to. I used to love baiting him in this fashion—he was too equanimous to ever get really angry.
‘Us … you know …’ Martin was now looking pleadingly into my eyes, a veil of smoke soft-focusing his features; waiting for me to complete his sentence with—
‘Ah, you mean Snifter.’
‘Drifter, you bastard—now, there was a band …’ And he would be off, usually concluding on a sordid tale of rampaging Copenhagen call girls as our sole lunchtime customer made his purchase-free rounds.
So rock ’n’ roll almost killed Martin Drift, just as it successfully killed a host of others. After reconstructive surgery he opened a record shop on Camden High Street with his first wife. But drinking soon put paid to that venture, as it did his first marriage. His last chance was an eighties initiative called the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, a Thatcher brainwave that lent you just enough money to start a small business, but—deviously enough—not enough to make it worth drinking away in style. With this cash, Martin opened Rock On, and kept his second wife safely at home with the children. It was his last chance, and he knew it, which explained his obsessive fiscal caution over the years I worked for him. To Martin, expansion equalled danger: ‘Tick along and you can’t go wrong,’ he used to instruct me in his tobacco-torn husk of a voice.