Byron Easy by Jude Cook Read Free Book Online

the ordeal of labour. She chose the line ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, which she mistakenly thought was written by Byron. Thus I became Byron Easy: retailer and poet.
    A writer, then. Of largely unpublished poems, as it happens, as you already know. If you, dear friend, are a scribbler and happen to have a bundle of poems you want out there you could do worse than publish a pamphlet. My magnum opus was entitled Hours of Endlessness . It was my first (and only) foray into print. And it was well received, though a pamphlet hardly turns one into a lion of society. You will, on the morning of publication, awake, as I did, to find yourself dramatically un-famous. But, as Virginia Woolf said, for a writer, it’s not what you’ve done or read that counts, but what you’ve thought and felt. That’s the most important thing. Also to write it all down. Not everybody does that.
    If, say, another writer were called upon to describe me he might draw attention to my banister-thin legs, the weakly sensual lopsided lips inherited from my father or the unassertive nose. Oh, God—my nose. That great drawback of my adult life. As time has elapsed I’ve made comparisons between myself and those proud possessors of Roman, equine, or boxers’ noses and been almost fanatically certain you could take my sexual history and double it to reach their number of partners purely on account of their strong, male probosces. It’s a ski-jump nose, really. Boyish, tweaked at the end like the victim of a Beverly Hills scalpel-job. It photographs satisfactorily only from the dead-centre front, any other angle giving the impression of a third earlobe rising like a pale pimple from my upper lip. It’s not a nose that demands to be punched, but it has trouble getting served in pubs or throwing a shadow, or creating a profile that would be worth casting in bronze. It would certainly be no good in a fight.
    My hair (what little of it there is left) is black, and—since growing it long gives the impression of wearing a kind of permed, pubic hedge—currently very short. This other writer would be quick to point out that it’s a dye-job, tapering to thin, daringly spare sideburns that terminate an inch above my now-aching jaw. Sideburns, not mutton chops, he would hasten to add, as Dino my Italian barber has laboured years with clipper, razor and cuticle scissors to create the ultimate masterpiece sideburn while quite ignoring the fact that he’s got the neckline wrong or taken too little from the back. I reassure myself that this is merely the Sicilian way.
    Then the eyes. He would say they were always too girlishly wide and long-lashed, too under-evaluating, too easy on others to be the eyes of a man who had just turned thirty. Those emotional peepers of mine: too demonstrative, too candid … Distressingly, I have always looked younger than my years. Maybe there’s an oil painting of me somewhere that’s horribly aged. This writer would note that the strong brows occasionally push the lids down, producing a somnambulant, half-awake look, as if a photographer had forgotten to ask for a stare or a ‘cheese’ or a ‘shit’. And my domey forehead would also be singled out, its convex bulge evidence of too much brain in too small a skull or of the fact that I’m a distant relative of John Merrick.
    I suppose my only redeeming feature, if he were called upon to provide one, would be my strong jawline: arrow-straight and non-parallel with the singed sideburns, its powerful line regrettably undermined by my button-nose and lunar forehead.
    For the rest of it, I’m not a hunchback or a one-thumbed survivor of a factory accident, or a eunuch, but I am thin. As thin as a Giacometti. And short with it—the booby-prize combination for any man. The wife always told me that I was too short and thin to wear a suit; that I looked like a schoolboy on his first day outside the intimidating gates. Oh, that castrating bitch! In addition to this, my spine, like