Byron Easy by Jude Cook Read Free Book Online Page B

ten misery-filled years. Nothing they can do about it, so I’m told. It’s giving me a speech impediment. It’s given me a speech impediment. Only thousands of pounds of costly Harley Street orthodontia will enable me to speak Spanish now. The best the tooth-quacks could offer was to grind down the inwards-facing offender, but that brought unsettling visions of medieval torture.
    I’m stuck with them. No Californian beach-grins for me. That’s what the extractions were for: so I wouldn’t have fucked-up teeth. So I wouldn’t have to spend my teenage years in an anguish of enforced celibacy, a railway-track brace deterring every fourth-form carpark-wench from hoisting her navy hockey skirt up her moley thighs. In retrospect this was clearly a double disaster. I didn’t get to see any moley thighs and I’ve still got terrible teeth.
    As time passed I became convinced that the continual erosion of my tongue’s cells by my shark’s fang was giving me too much saliva. By twenty I habitually found myself with a mouthful of spit, a gobful of gob. For no good clinical reason. Talking became an obstacle course of headachy swallowing and avoidance of any sibilant word or experiments with languages that required rolling Rs. I was arrested three times for spitting in the street. The noise of my hawking in the early hours precipitated a petition from my neighbours. I lost out on three absolutely cast-iron nights of debauchery by half-blinding newly acquainted girls with drool. Any friends with glasses had to invest in windscreen wipers.
    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