Byron Easy by Jude Cook

Author:Jude Cook
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781480447585
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2013-11-27T00:40:00+00:00

5

Asmodeus

‘LADIES AND GENTLEMAN, THIS train will shortly be arriving in Peterborough.’

We are past midway now. The Rubicon has been crossed. Too late to turn back. What has been embarked upon must be endured. If only I could feel the heavy weight of a revolver in my pocket! How placated must the suicidal farmer be, seeing the blunderbuss or shotgun above the mantelpiece every morning as he goes out to corral his dwindling herds. The comfort of knowing he can always turn back, and with a single quick and easy stroke, too. Back to the soul’s default state: free-floating, without its cumbersome cargo of flesh. No drawn-out drownings or excruciating overdoses of rat poison for Farmer Giles. With a gun, the potential is perpetually there, like a friend one can always turn to. The promise of merging with the wind. The gateway to a blue eternity. Ah, if only the Everlasting had not fixed his canon, et cetera.

I turn to my old friend the window. The far fields always melt my heart. There you will find the grey rump of Lincolnshire in undecided weather, the thundering carriages numbing your ears; the fleeting flecks of poplars under talons of cloud; the bruised gradients, stippled and hacked; the ordered patchwork created by the enclosures; the quick whoosh as you pass under a road bridge in the hermetically sealed tube; the long perspectives afforded by the sweep of the firmament … I am writing again, unable to cap the flow or the pen. Unable to come to terms with the strange, emotional animal that I am. The curse of self-reflection! How different must be the consciousnesses of those who lack the habit of self-reflection. How alien is the poet to the normal man, with his easily met appetites for money, car, holiday and family; the management consultant, say, with his prosaic and easily satisfied aspirations; the cancelled visor of his suit and tie. And this is the man Mandy, deep down, dearly wanted me to be. How useless to the common good, to women especially, are my particular qualities of self-examination. And for sound biological reasons, too. The species little needs a man hell-bent on contemplating his own errors and infirmities, when he should be protecting his mate and providing for his young. Strange how one’s thinking reverts to these Darwinian modes. It makes me wonder what Mandy, or any woman, ever saw in me. Traditionally, the males compete for the female until the female takes her pick from the competing males—that’s how the majority of mammals go about it, and we are no different. And compete I did. Half of London seemed to be in pursuit of Mandy for a time. And pick she did, for obscure reasons of her own. No, I don’t have those qualities that a woman looks for: security, tenure, stability, muscly forearms, a cock that would honour a horse, et cetera. I am a strange, emotional, passionate, turbulent, stunted figure, just becoming loathsome to myself after all these years of self-deception.

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