Byron Easy Read Online Free

that the wife used to go for.
    Enough! Enough about her . I had better tell you about me first while there’s still time, while it’s still light. We’ll get to her later. To understand me you’d better know something about my mum and dad. Yes, that David Copperfield crap. Because these are confessions, right? You might have already identified the slightly hysterical tone, rich with grievances. St Augustine, Rousseau, Philip Roth—those whinging bastards all had a record to set straight. It will come as no surprise, then, to learn that I am an only child, the only child of Sinead and Desmond Easy (Des for short). I have a half-sister, born when I was eleven, but she can wait. My father, who also suffered the trauma of early baldness always—to my mind at least—had a strange way of looking at me. He would stare under the heavy, shrouded lids of his eyes, as if squinting, or trying to figure out a particularly tricky equation. Apparently, I just didn’t add up. Or balance out. In fact, he had a brilliant mathematical, or rather scientific, mind. Unfortunately, he instilled in me a hatred of the sciences by his very proselytising of them as academic subjects. ‘God is dead,’ he would proclaim while burning lamb chops under the grill in the white house where I grew up. ‘And science will prove it—probably in your lifetime. So stop wasting your eyesight on poetry.’ Precociously, I would answer that, for God to be dead, he must once have been alive. My father’s squint would then become even warier. His path in life, his golden route to the threadbare carpet of his early thirties and beyond, was as unsystematic, as unscientific, as could be. Evacuated from the blighted terraces and V2 craters of Barnet during the war, he grew up on the Isle of Wight. I’ve often wondered whether those years on an island, surrounded by incurious sheep and paedophiles, weren’t the crucible for his strangely insular and reactionary views later in life. I can still hear his pedagogic voice holding forth to a schoolfriend who had just discovered Marxism: ‘There are either winners or losers in this life, and giving your money away is the sure route to becoming the latter!’ I remember asking him whether he considered Gandhi a loser, only for him to reply that Gandhi didn’t count on the Isle of Wight after the war: the only things that did were the price of butter and the availability of primitive condoms. He certainly made me never want to visit the place, the Isle of off-White—a chunk of Great Britain that, once detached, should have just sunk quietly into the Channel, volunteering, as it were, its own superfluousness. At seventeen, and very pleased with himself (with an ingenuous self-confidence that never left him his whole life), he won a scholarship to Cambridge to study chemistry. The old grammar-school boy-at-sea-in-an-ocean-of-toffs scenario. From this pinnacle, it was downhill all the way—on graduating he found a post as a rank-and-file research chemist for a French laxative and cosmetics company based in Bedfordshire called Diatrix, where he remained until … You may have noticed I’m talking about my father in the past tense, as if he had already joined the Dead, those watchers and hand-wringers on their plinths of stone. But he’s not dead. I just haven’t spoken to him for ten years. Or rather, we haven’t spoken to each other for ten years. The feeling, and it makes me short of breath and bewildered to admit it here, is woundingly mutual. I know where to find him. He knows where to find me. But neither of us have found the other, for over a decade.
    A psychiatrist could probably make much of this, along with the head-blowing-off daydream(which isn’t my only persistent hallucination, I should stress. I have another—of solvency and spiritual calm—involving a spacious timber-floored flat, its bookshelves rich in reference works, its walls punctuated by framed charcoal sketches; a piano, upright or grand,