Something to Tell You

CHAPTER TWENTY

“Oh, my darling Jamal, it’s been so long, kiss me and kiss me again.”

“Better keep your hands on the wheel, Karen.”

“I can drive one-handed. You know there’s a lot I can do one-handed.”

I said, “I didn’t know you were coming to George’s this weekend.”

“You didn’t? But I haven’t been out for absolutely ages.”

“You’ve been hiding at home?”

She said, “Things haven’t been good. They’ve been bloody rotten and down on me. Can’t we stop for a drink?”

“No.”

“Just a little one in a country pub?”

“It’s a different decade now, I’m afraid.”

“Haven’t we become too sensible?”

“The world has, but I’m sure you haven’t. It’s terrific to see you, Karen.”

“Is it? Is it really, Jamal?”

Karen was driving me to Mustaq’s.

Miriam had become determined to live her own life, even though she still felt guilty about leaving the kids and the house. Nonetheless, she and Henry were looking for the opportunity to get away together. As there was a club they were reluctant to miss on Friday night, they would come to the country after lunch on Saturday morning. I could have waited for them or gone down on the train.

It was a surprise then, when my old girlfriend Karen Pearl, the “TV Bitch,” offered me a lift. I wasn’t aware that she knew Mustaq, but it turned out that over the years he had appeared several times on her TV shows. Now and again she went to his house to recuperate from her life.

She turned up outside my place in a tiny red car, which roared when she pressed the accelerator. She’d asked her husband to buy it as compensation for leaving her, which he considered a more than fair exchange. If I was already anxious about seeing Mustaq and answering his inevitable questions, being squashed in a small space with Karen while being hurled down the motorway certainly made me breathe more rapidly.

“I am delighted and totally chuffed to be getting away,” she said. “You?”

I felt unnaturally close to the road; Karen played loud music, mostly ABBA, and, for my benefit, Gladys Knight as well as the Supremes, while smoking the entire time, as we always used to. Twice she opened the roof to demonstrate how it worked.

“Groovy top.”

“Isn’t it? We’re so old now, Jamal. My two girls are growing up,” she said. “It’s all slammed doors and lost mobile phones. But we have a grand girly time-like being back at boarding school. Otherwise, contrary to your corrupt view of me, I don’t have much of a laugh these days. Tom”-her ex-husband-“has taken the girls, along with his more or less teenage girlfriend, to Disneyland, Paris. As they are all of the same mental age, they’ll have a great time.”

“You having anyone?”

“I’m an untouchable,” she said. “This will make you laugh-I know exactly the kind of thing which will appeal to you.”

“Tell me.”

“Well, a few weeks ago I thought I’d give myself a treat. I tried it on with a potential toy boy. I’d heard that’s what all the old girls were doing. I strong-armed this moody, well-built kid into a ruinously expensive hotel room. There was champagne, drugs and what you used to describe as my vast arse, in silk red panties, all ready. And the boy so fit and sweet-”

“Famous?”

“On his way there. At the moment, an extra-a speaking extra, mind, but words rather than sentences-from a soap opera. At some cost to the little dignity I have left, I removed a good deal of my clothing, presenting said panties in what I considered to be a provocative way.”

“Oh wow.”

“He sat on the edge of the bed holding my hand, looking, I think, at how withered it was. Either that or my nail varnish had hypnotised him. Within half an hour he was on the tube home. I sat there for a while crying-”

“Oh, Karen-”

“Ready for my overdose, Mr. DeMille. Then I went home and got into bed with the girls. Oh, Jamal, think of all the nights you and I wasted not making love.”

“There were many,” I said. “But I enjoyed every one of them with you.”

“You’ve got sweeter in your old age, Jamal. It’s nice to talk to you again. Why do you never call me now? Oh, forget it, I’m going to think positive today. Isn’t that what you psychologists tell us?”

“No.”

“What do you tell us, then?” After a while she said. “Henry’s coming down, isn’t he? Will you put in a word for me?”

“You fancy Henry now? You two can’t spend ten minutes together without falling out.”

“Darling, haven’t you known desperation? He’s a man, isn’t he? At least below the waist, and he’s free.”

“He just got occupied,” I said.

“Who grabbed the old fox?”

“My sister.”

“Isn’t he trying to put her in the documentary?”

“Yes.”

“Fucking artists with their spontaneous ideas, I hate them. Remind me to kill him when I see him.” She said, “Is your sister going to be around this weekend?”

“On Saturday.”

“They in love?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t think he’d last long on the open market. That’s my hope accounted for, then. You still single?”

“There’s nothing doing. These days there’s rarely a twitch.”

She turned and looked down at my crotch. “Yeah, right.”

I said, “The idea of all that seems very far away from me. Josephine was hard work. Sometimes I think I miss being in love, or being loved. A little passion now and again would be a thrill.”

“You’re too objective about love. You can see through it. I was thinking…you said this thing to me once. That you hated to fall in love, it was like being sucked down the plughole. You lost control, it was madness.”

“Did I say that?”

“Did you feel that about Josephine?”

“Sucked into some elemental state of need, overidealising the other, drifting in illusion and then one day waking up and wondering how you got there? Yes…But-”

I didn’t want to say it to her for fear of upsetting myself, but I had liked being in a family, liked having Rafi and Josephine around me, hearing their voices in the house, their shoes all over the hall.

I had met Josephine at a lecture I was giving, “How to Forget.” She was a psychology student but was bored by the “rats on drugs” approach. We had only been together for a few months when she fell pregnant. My father had died about eighteen months before, and I was keen to replace him with another father: myself. I was living in the flat where I saw patients, and beginning to make a decent living.

Josephine had her own place, which her mother had left her, and we bought a small house near what became my office. We hadn’t been together long when I lost her almost immediately to another man, my son. Or, rather, we lost each other to him, and neither of us bothered to come back. Of course, many relationships require a “third object” to work: a child, house, cat; some sort of shared project. He was that, but also the wedge. Josephine knew how to be a mother; being a woman was far more difficult. She waited a long time before trying to find out what that might mean.

When he was little, I kissed Rafi continuously, licked his stomach, stuck my tongue in his ear, tickled him, squeezed him until he gasped, laughing at his beard of saliva, his bib looking like an Elizabethan ruff. I loved the intimacy: the boy’s wet mouth, the smell of his hair, as I’d loved that of various women. “Toys,” he called his mother’s breasts. “What is thinking?” he’d ask. “Why do people have noses?”

Around the age of six, Rafi would wake up early, as I tended to, while Josephine slept. I’d sit at the table downstairs, making notes on my patients, or I’d prepare a paper or lecture I was giving. He brought me his best pens to borrow, to help make my writing “neater,” as he put it. He’d sit with me-indeed, often, on me; or on the table-listening to music on my CD player, through headphones bigger than his cheeks. He liked Handel, and when he got excited he said, “Daddy, I feel as if I’ve got people dancing in my tummy.”

We bought identical green coats from Gap, with fur-lined hoods, which we wore with sunglasses and trainers. Big Me and Pigmy, I’d call us, thinking we looked great. When he was smaller, I’d walk fast for miles across London, with him in his pushchair, stopping off at coffee shops to feed and change him. It’s easy to speak to women if you have a baby with you. It was like being the companion of a celebrity. Strangers greeted him; people constantly gave and bought him things; women fed him, talked to him. He disappeared into their midst like a rugby ball into a scrum, and returned reeking of numerous perfumes, his hair standing up and his eyes staring, his face covered in biscuit.

I liked playing Monopoly, and having paint, toys, videos and footballs over the floor; I liked eating fish-finger sandwiches, and the kid sneaking into our bed at night because he “didn’t have anyone to talk to,” drinking hot chocolate in his bottle, stopping only to say, “I want to kiss you lots of times.” I liked him holding on to my ear as he went to sleep; even liked the cat patting my face with his paw while I was napping. I liked reading to him in the bath, as he sat there talking to numerous plastic men attached by pegs to the washing line above his head.

Rafi was a desire machine, his favourite hobby being shopping. At school, when asked to name his favourite book, he chose the Argos catalogue, which he would pore over, ticking everything he wanted. Fortunately, like him, I enjoyed anything to do with Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, Power Rangers and the Lion King. I liked kicking a football around with him in the street, and hearing him play Beethoven’s Ninth on the harmonica. I liked arm wrestling, chasing and fighting with him, and holding him upside down by the ankles, sometimes over the toilet. We liked, among many other things, jokes, swearing and hitting women on the arse.

We would spend whole weekends hanging around, eating pizza, swimming at Acton baths, kicking a ball to one another, watching Star Wars or Indiana Jones movies; the sorts of days when, in the evening, if you asked yourself, did anything happen to me today?-and I did keep a diary of this sort at one time-the only answer could be no, nothing. Except we were enjoying one another’s company, and no one could ask here, where is the meaning?

When it ended, and I had to go-I still don’t know if it was the right thing to do-the loss seemed immeasurable; but all I could do was carry on living, as best as I could, seeing him every day, wondering what I’d missed of him. “Are you another boy’s daddy now?” he asked.

“I won’t pity you,” Karen said, as we sped to Mustaq’s. “Tempting though it is. The chances are that a man as successful and well connected as you will find someone-and someone young too. But I will not. Maybe we should get back together-just for a bit?” All I could do was laugh. “I’m sure you don’t tell your patients you were a pornmonger. I know your secrets, and I still love you a little, you know,” she said. “When we were together, I felt all the time that you were too smashed up over Ajita to notice me much.”

“I’m always all smashed up over someone.”

“But you cared for me some, didn’t you, although I was awful and stupid?”

She leant across and kissed me, brushing my crotch with the back of her hand.

“Oh God yes,” I said, sentimentally. “Jesus, I’ve always loved you more than a little bit, Karen.”

“I always felt that you were just passing the time. You know, you’re afraid of letting anyone near you. You want them, and then you disappear.”

She started to cry, which she did easily. She’d taken off her heels and was driving barefoot, her skirt riding up around her thighs. In her twenties she’d been sexy, but even then her weight went up and down and she called herself “the potato.” Whatever size she was, she knew I still found her attractive; it was the familiarity, but not only that.

“It’s not too late, Jamal. Can’t we do it properly?”

I kissed her again, pressing my tongue against hers. Beyond the cigarettes, alcohol and perfume, I could smell someone I knew and liked a lot.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I had been living with the lefties in Barons Court Road, where the Piccadilly and District Line trains ran alongside my room, rattling the windows. I first saw Karen upstairs, in the communal area, where I’d sit after returning from the library, or in the morning, having breakfast, with some serious book-maybe The Ego and the Id or the Ecrits-propped up in front of me.

This was a vegan kitchen packed with pulses and gluten-free pasta, with chickpeas bubbling on the hob and the yeasty smell of wholemeal bread rising from underneath a tea towel. Imagine this level of earnestness and then, one Saturday morning, suddenly you see a young woman wearing nothing but lipstick, high heels and a Silk Cut, hunting about for something to throw on-which, in the end, was someone’s old greatcoat. It was like spotting a movie star getting out of a taxi in Bromley High Street. Of course, other people walked about the place naked, except that they (men and women alike) only wanted to exhibit their honesty.

A woman in the house had been at university with Karen, who had stayed over after a party. When one of the rancorous female lawyers referred to her as “the TV Bitch”-a new genus, though I didn’t know it then, but some clever cunt had intuited that Karen represented something about the future-it occurred to me that she and I might have something in common.

She stayed for the rest of the weekend, and nobody since Ajita had made me laugh like Karen. It cheered me that everyone else in the house disliked her on principle. When she wasn’t walking about talking into the phone, Karen watched soap operas with a pile of Cosmopolitan magazines in front of her, painting her nails. After all the shit I’d been through, her brashness, vulgarity and loudness gave me a kick. What she saw in me I have no idea, you’d have to ask her. How could it not have ended badly?

At one time girls wanted to be actresses, but in the 80s they wanted to be TV presenters. During that period Karen was a reporter on a local station outside London. I had to buy a television and carry it home in order that, if the aerial was facing in the right direction, I could see her talking about small-time politics, robberies, even the weather.

She didn’t earn much, but she knew she would. She was aware that she had entered, early on, an industry capable of inexhaustible expansion. If Britain was being deindustrialised-it no longer made cars, boats or clothes-what would people do for a living? Would they be waiters, make computers, sell tourism? Karen seemed to realise there would be little limit on how much TV the public would be able to tolerate in the future. We had four television channels; soon there would be hundreds.

For the numerous unemployed, she had no sympathy. Taking good advice from her family, she put her salary into property near Canary Wharf and rented it. Meanwhile, as she had done as a student, she kept a room in a flat in Chelsea, where I stayed sometimes. All manner of girls Karen had been at school and university with would come by, often several at a time, but only those with names ending in a-Lavinia, Davina, Delia, Nigella, Bella, Sabrina, Hannah-sitting on the carpet with their legs out, talking of what they would do now, the world having been opened to women like them. Would they make money in the City or be artists, before becoming mothers?

Most nights Karen took me out into the fast London she knew through her university set. We went to the new clubs, the Groucho in particular, room upon room and floor upon floor of grown-up decadence. It was the hippest place, full of writers, fashionable publishers, pop-promo directors, producers from The Late Show and the young movie people working at Channel Four, which had just started making low-budget movies. Often someone would lead us to Derek Jarman’s place, a small flat in an old block on the Charing Cross Road. He liked to read from his handwritten journals, and I wanted to be like that, so self-absorbed, as people came and went.

There was, of course, the “new” kind of shopping. Where my mother would make a list and return with the items on it (perhaps bringing home a treat like chocolate or biscuits), Karen would spend every Saturday shopping because she liked being in shop “environments,” returning with numerous artfully packaged objects she didn’t know she needed. People were beginning to buy “names”-brands-rather than things.

In the evenings there were other parties and new restaurants-with desirable names-where Karen drank ferociously until she staggered. She liked me to be there to help her out the door, into the cab, and into bed, where I’d sit beside her with a bowl awaiting the inevitable upchuck and the sleep which would follow it.

“Tender is the night,” she’d moan, quoting neither Keats nor F. Scott Fitzgerald but the pop song. She may have been out drinking until two in the morning, but she’d be up for work early the next day, arriving at her desk at eight and staying there for twelve hours. Women had to “prove” themselves then.

She didn’t have a boyfriend, though I think she had quite a lot of bad sex with older men-the bosses-or with cameramen or others in the crew, as she was often travelling, spending about three nights a week out of London. I can see her now, idly throwing her legs open and looking away, out of the window or across the room, biting her nails and thinking of what she’d wear the next day. When she was away, she worried that I was missing her, or lonely. If I spent the evening with someone else, she’d ask if I’d had sex with them. If she and I were at a party, she’d tell me who was attractive and who was a likely conquest, and she’d even chat them up for me.

Although Karen and I were together as some sort of couple, it soon became a more or less celibate relationship. Like many people, she didn’t really like sex but would go through with it if she thought the other person badly wanted it. I find it odd now, but I did believe then-without, I admit, having much considered it-that the ideal of the exclusive couple was one which still compelled me, that this unchosen template suited everyone. Even when I was unfaithful to Karen, it seemed right I should experience the correct sum of guilt.

But perhaps our relationship was without passion because, after Ajita, I had no desire to suffer sexual jealousy again. I asked for no power over Karen; her life and body were her own. I wanted to be with a woman I didn’t want. If love is the only intensity in town, what sort of love was that?

We did spend many nights together. In bed it would be me, her and an ashtray, the TV always on and her eating ice cream from the tub. We’d read the same magazines, both being interested in the same thing, women and how they became themselves. And we talked simultaneously, because she liked coke. With Karen there was no vulgar chopping with credit cards or snorting through rolled-up fivers from toilet seats. The gear she bought came in cute little bottles with a tiny spoon at the top. It was expensive, but she and the other girls who went to her flat in Chelsea Manor Street had lived in a world-quite different to mine and Miriam’s-in which there had always been money, and always would be.

I say we didn’t touch or kiss. Maybe we were trying to forget about sex because there was too much of it around. As well as studying psychology, philosophy and psychoanalysis, I was developing into a pornographer.

I had left Mother and replaced her with books. At least in my work, I had discovered something I wanted. Whatever I did in life, I was usually bored, always feeling insufficiently used or stretched. At this time I liked to study, I loved to read and I enjoyed my training, but it was expensive.

I was still seeing Tahir, as well as attending lectures on dreams, the Oedipus complex and the unconscious. I was reading Freud’s early disciples, Ferenczi, Adler, Jung, Theodor Reik, and the later analysts, Klein, Winnicott, Lacan. It wasn’t a long tradition, about a hundred years’ worth, but there was a ton of it, and almost every word in abominable prose. This discourse, saturated in talk of pleasure, provided no enjoyment in itself. If the best thing to be said for reading is that you can do it lying down, Karen would lie with me, watching videos and reading fat, shiny paperbacks about people shopping, waiting for her own face to appear on TV.

Then it started: I began to see my first patients, and I soon learned that listening to another person was almost the hardest task you could attempt. Tahir had taught me that the truth wasn’t hidden behind a locked door in a dungeon called “the unconscious,” but that it was right there, in front of the patient and analyst, waiting to be heard. The lost object was the key to the language. Freud said one should attend to the unconscious with “evenly suspended attention.” The therapist’s unconscious was the useful tool here, along with the free play of his associations and fantasy. The interpretation, when it came, had to be like a surgeon’s incision, in the right place at the right time.

Listening is not only a kind of love, it is love. But, sitting with my first analysands, trying to bear the anxiety of hearing someone unknown, whose dreams and ramblings I could not comprehend, I felt, at times, as though I were trying to decode The Waste Land at a first reading. I’d even hate the patients and my own clumsiness, as I became dragged into the vortex of their passion, of the spume and irruption of their unconscious. I’d want to flee the room, wondering who was more afraid, analysand or analyst. I was having to learn that this fear-on both sides-was part of the anxiety of hearing the new. It was patient work, learning patience, developing my analytic instinct, creating the time and space so the analysand could hear, or meet, herself. This was how, in the end, I trained myself.

I would go and talk to Tahir about it, and although he was drinking then, and often argumentative-he could be infuriated by the theories of other analysts, particularly Lacan, Freud’s most significant heir-he had important and urgent things to pass on. Unintentionally, during a recent session, because I was tired, I’d found myself in more of a reverie than I was used to. Yet this hadn’t made anything worse. Tahir said I’d hit on something useful: my unconscious was more closely in touch with that of the other if I didn’t try too hard to understand. I had a tendency, he said, to overtheorise, and to decide too quickly what was going on.

He made me aware, too, that I was part of a tradition of listening. As Schoenberg had gone to Mahler for instruction and guidance, as T. S. Eliot had turned to Pound, so the analysts had handed down learning and procedure. Tahir had been trained by the great child-analyst Winnicott, who in his turn had been analysed by James Strachey and Joan Riviere, both of whom had been analysed by Freud. Having so little knowledge of my sub-continental family history-the Indian threads being severed by Father’s death-I had little sense of my connection to the past. Being an analyst joined me to another tradition, to another family, which would “hold” me during the insecurity of my training.

As my career started, Karen’s faltered. It was a bad day for her when it became obvious she was no good on television, being too nervy. Her big eyes made her look homicidal. Even when she wasn’t on cocaine, she was like someone on cocaine, about to burst out of the screen and bite into your windpipe. She was quick enough to know that power in the media rested with the producers, not the presenters, and began to work as an associate producer on a youth programme. I even went along to the studio a few times. What was happening to the world? Young presenters virtually naked, teenage bands, puerile jokes, pranks, interviews with idiots.

“Don’t you like it?” she said. “Perhaps you weren’t stoned enough to relax.”

I’d used LSD in my teens, but found the effects of an acid inferno lasted too long, a horror movie you couldn’t walk out of. I’d had more than enough adventures in my own head. But working on youth programmes, Karen heard of a new, less solipsistic drug being used in New York clubs, called Ecstasy or E. It took us a while to track some down; it was hard to get in London then. We started to hold Ecstasy parties in her flat, where she had a large circular bath. She liked the new pop: Sade, Tina Turner, the Police, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Eurythmics. I didn’t wake up wanting to hear a new record until later, when Massive Attack released Blue Lines-“you’re the book I have open”-during the first Gulf War.

Nights and nights on E, our pupils spinning in what I considered pure hedonism, with the guilt and anxiety it brought-for which I would compensate with days of heavy study-had me thinking about the uses and difficulties of pleasure, the whole question of jouissance in a person’s life. Ecstasy connected me with others; it made me want to talk, as I disappeared into the dreadful voice of ultimate pleasure, a cheap ticket to the place mystics and psychotics have always headed for.

The music was loud, and the talk facile. Not only that, to prolong the buzz we’d take cocaine, which messed us up. Big new clubs were opening, with huge sound systems, run and owned by public school boys who were turning the “underground” into the Thatcherite market overnight. After a time I realised that Karen had more tolerance for these places than I did. Unlike most of the kids there, Karen wasn’t committed to the project of unwinding and losing the self. She was at work: observing the clothes, the attitude, while going to the bathroom to note down the words being used. She wanted to turn it all into television.

We went to New York for “meetings.” I stood on the roof of the hotel looking out at the glittering city for the first time. We began a frantic round of clubs, bars and the famous Knitting Factory. While I wanted to hunt through the numerous secondhand bookshops on the Upper West Side for obscure psychoanalytic books, she was buying us cocaine and trying to get us invited to parties with what she called “atmosphere.” Londoners, being more cynical and knowing then, were less gullible when it came to celebrity. I began to dislike her; I felt dragged along, like a recalcitrant child, and, back in London, made it clear I didn’t want to live with her.

Karen was becoming tougher, someone you wouldn’t want to work for, as she developed a flair for sacking people. “Had to be done,” she’d say as another loser limped out the door. For Karen, if anyone suffered, it was their own fault; even if you were a persecuted black South African with no human rights, you had somehow brought the badness on yourself. After a while her callousness stopped bothering me because I saw how unbearable it was to her that anyone would hurt anyone else. For her, because it was unbearable it was untrue, and she didn’t have to look at it.

The part of the day we most enjoyed together was breakfast, which we’d have in a Soho café, usually the Patisserie Valerie in Old Compton Street, after picking up the tabloids. The shameless Sun was in its prime-the royal family helpless before it-and the other papers imitated it. We’d read bits out to one another, screaming with laughter at the prose. This was before most people realised that the person who’d have the most influence over our time would be Rupert Murdoch-the author of the celebrity culture we inhabit, and clever enough to avoid it himself.

The newspapers were the first to turn wholeheartedly to trash. It hadn’t yet reached TV, except through youth programming, where Karen and her pals encouraged nonentities to eat maggots-“faggots gobbling maggots: What could be more entertaining?”-or share a bath with eels or-why not?-with animal and human faeces. The next day these newly minted celebs would appear in the newspapers, having spent the night with a soap star. Television was now watching us, rather than the other way round.

The papers would celebrate and then desecrate the new stars. I had never liked the punks, but this kind of anarchistic, republican amorality appealed to me at times-I guess it was the lack of respect for authority, its destructiveness. At the same time it fitted with the liberal economics of Thatcher. Who could not be amused by the fact that the capitalism unleashed by the Conservatives under Thatcher was destroying the very social values the party espoused?

As we ate our croissants and drank a new thing in London, caffe lattes, Karen would fill her notebook with mad ideas for game shows, suitable for breakfast and daytime TV, which had just started. At that time daytime was a huge vacant space, soon to become even more vacant. Programmes were beginning to be made quickly and cheaply; cameras got smaller, and recording tape was of better quality. The contents were cut-price too, since the participants were not movie or even TV stars but “real” people discovered by researchers, who could become enviable just by appearing on TV. To me it sounded like music hall: television versions of the mad variety shows my grandparents used to take Miriam and me to on our holidays. At the end of the pier at the seaside, we’d watch jugglers, knife throwers and fat comedians telling risqué jokes. After, we’d scoff “hot sandwiches in gravy.”

For me all this was an amusement, but for Karen it was a kind of calling, an opportunity that few people realised was there. I guess I realised the extent of her cultural terrorism when I suggested we might go to see a film which happened to be subtitled. “No-never!” she cried. “Not a foreign film you have to read! Are they in slow motion? Can’t you feel yourself ageing?”

When I recommended the theatre or a gallery, it wasn’t that she refused to go; it was not that attending such things made her feet ache-which wouldn’t have surprised me, as she wore stilettos most of the time: even her slippers were four inches from the ground. It was that she considered art to be showing off, empty, worthless, an insult to the public, and if subsidised, a waste of public money. “Tchaikovsky’s Crime and Punishment, Chekhov’s Last Symphony-yuck, fuck, muck!”

As a Thatcherite, she wanted to be rid of it. Here, at “the end of history,” the television ruling class, the old sensitive if not effete Oxbridge mob along with the monarchy and the Church, would be replaced by “the people,” by which she seemed to mean the ignorant and wildly coarse. I wasn’t the only one killing fathers. In the 60s and 70s, there was a cult of it, as patriarchy and the phallus were attacked. And what did we end up with, at the end of that iconoclastic decade? Thatcher: a fate worse than a man.

Now, of course, we live in Thatcher’s psyche if not her anus, in the world she made, of competition, consumerism, celebrity and guilt’s bastard son, charity: bingeing and debt. But then, these views were a novelty.

At least, with Karen, I learned to make no distinction between high and low art. I guess I’d been something of a snob before, wondering whether it was healthy to be so moved by Roy Orbison and Dusty Springfield. But Karen unintentionally showed me the futility of such distinctions.

Not that I could interest Karen much in what I was doing; although she left me alone to study, she considered analysis “unconvincing” as a profession, as though I’d decided to become an astral channeller or soothsayer. I realised this not only when she had difficulty-and showed considerable reluctance, if not embarrassment-in explaining to people what it was I did but also when she decided, without asking me, that I’d be better off as a TV presenter.

There were few black or brown faces on TV; my fate was to correct this imbalance. I informed her it was hopeless, but she insisted I endure two auditions for the job of presenter on a new TV media show entitled Television/Television.

In front of a camera and wearing a borrowed Armani jacket, I had to sit at a desk (on a cushion, as it happened, being little) or on the desk itself. Then I would be instructed to walk around this desk, while saying repeatedly, “Hallo, good evening and welcome to Television/Television. Tonight we have an exclusive interview with Sviatoslav Jarmusch, who claims that digitalisation is the future of this medium. To discuss this, we have in the studio…”

I guess I could have done it, and I’d be someone recognisable in TV now, but I fucked it up beautifully. I was bafflingly disappointing, like someone who’d never spoken before.

It wasn’t, however, the end of my media career. Karen and I had talked of making porno films to earn money: her producing, me directing, neither of us starring. But she knew enough about the media to realise making such films took too much time; it wasn’t a part-time job. It was less of a palaver to write the stuff. I had bought a fast electric typewriter-with a “golf ball,” which flew madly about like a bird caught in a chimney-and I liked writing. After becoming a murderer, was there nothing I considered beyond my talents?

At first I sent in stories to magazines at the low end of the market. When they were published, the editors started asking me to write more. Initially it was fun, trying to organise the story, the rise and fall of which represented coitus itself. I learned to write them quickly.

There’s nothing more conventional than the sly prophylactic of pornography, with the end a foregone conclusion. Anna Freud, the eternal virgin, said that in fantasy you can have your eggs cooked any way you like, except you can’t eat them. Relying on fantasies is like trying to devour the menu rather than the meal. For those who want the same thing over and over, that is more than enough. Indeed, it was the same words: I made a list of them, the basic ingredients of word-porn, spicy and resonant-harder, harder, come, come!-and was sure to salt the text with them each time.

However, the magazines also let me work on semi-pornographic material, articles on de Sade, Beardsley, Hugh Hefner, the history of pornographic pictures, for which I enjoyed the reading.

One time I was sent to meet a sleazy guy in a dirty hotel who asked me to write short novels with titles like The Disciplinarian. It was big work-almost everything is, I was discovering-though if I got into the groove I could do a dirty book in a weekend. But not for long. If pornography is the junk food of love, I couldn’t swallow any more. Being young, I was tempted to add, digress and generally express myself. What did the couples do after sex? Did they find it difficult, embarrassing, boring? What did they do at home? What did they say to their parents? They were bar-maids, businessmen, hotel maids, people meeting casually for one reason only, a reason that wasn’t compelling enough. The whole pornography scam collapsed when I wrote a novel about a couple married to other people who met only to talk.

“Talk! Anyone can talk! Where the fuck is the fucking fucking?” my man in the hotel yelled, rifling hopelessly through the manuscript and finally frisbeeing it across the room. “What is this-Plato? It’s certainly not Plato’s Retreat!”

The line between literature and pornography was uncrossable. Breaking the porno spell was like that moment at a party when the lights came on and all you saw were haunted faces and debris. Now pornography is getting emotional, and straight movies more sexual.

It was a strange business, being in a celibate relationship while thinking of sex continuously. I’d discuss the stories with Karen, and she’d suggest ideas, often from her own life. This was where our sexual relationship was, in this talk and in my work.

For me, everything was “good enough” between Karen and me until she became pregnant. Such an event might seem awkward to achieve in a celibate relationship but not, as I discovered, impossible. Platonic love is a gun you don’t know is loaded. At her place, going to bed drunk, as we did more often than I’d like to admit, we copulated in our sleep. I remembered enough to know it happened. We both took it for granted that she’d have an abortion. They knew her down at the clinic, and I joked that she had an account there; one morning she set off with her overnight bag.

Karen was as tough as any artist with their vision. Occasionally she had to take a lot of contempt from artists and talented people, but it didn’t stop her thinking of what they did as rubbish. But the abortion, used by most of her friends as a means of contraception, seemed to smash her.

I was waiting at her flat when she returned, ashen and unable to stand. For two days she lay on the sofa wrapped in a dressing gown. I knew she was ill because she didn’t smoke or drink. I was blamed, but I sat it out with her, looking out of the window when I could, until she stood up and began to scream, telling me that I hadn’t grasped what this meant to her.

“It was my only chance to have a child! Suppose I don’t meet anyone else! Suppose I have to go it alone! And don’t you realise I’ll have to live with the murder of this child for the rest of my life?”

I was too immature to understand her. From my point of view, she was in her mid-twenties and had plenty of time to breed. I had taken it for granted that for her sex was a business transaction, or a way of spending time with her superiors. It hadn’t occurred to me to think about children. As far as I was concerned I was still recovering from my childhood, and thought you might as well call adults recovering children.

She went on, “The other day I thought: he only likes me because I’m silly, a kind of entertainment. Why would a man want that from a woman? Why were you with me?”

“It never occurred to me not to be with you. We always had a nice time.”

“Except you never loved me. You’ve been in love with Ajita all this time. You can’t accept she’s gone,” she said. “Don’t you understand the simplest things? Me, the woman, wants to be wanted-wanted more than other women! Without that there’s nothing. You think we’re friends?”

“Aren’t we?”

“I have been in love with you.”

I apologised and I listened to her; at least I knew how to do that. But I sickened her, and my restlessness caused her to banish me. None of this pleased me. She’d wanted me to give her a baby but had no thought for what I wanted. Indeed, so little had I impressed my desire on her that I appeared to be hardly in the equation.

I wasn’t doing well. Two relationships and two murders. I was on the way to becoming a serial killer. Karen had been an attempted treatment for the hurt I’d suffered with Ajita, which had made me phobic of romantic proximity. But I discovered that just because you don’t love a woman it doesn’t follow that she can’t hurt you, that you won’t suffer, particularly if you hurt her. Yet it was still a loss, and all losses, even when there are gains, leave their traces, reminding you of other losses, and all must be mourned, always incompletely.

After the split, I had wanted to remain friends with her, but for a long time we were rarely in touch. She began a relationship with, and later married, a TV producer who was envious of me, but we never entirely fell out.

“Wakey-wakey,” Karen was saying to me. “We’re nearly there.” We had been driving for miles through narrow lanes; at last we turned onto a rough, unmade road. “I’ve got a feeling,” she said, “one of us is going to get laid this weekend.”

“Goodie,” I said. “Let’s hope it’s you.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

We had come to a high wall topped with barbed wire that we followed until we arrived at a big gate. Karen wound down the window and spoke into a grille beside the gate, which, when it rolled slowly open, revealed a country house.

In the yard outside was standing Mustaq’s boyfriend, Alan, not quite on both feet but successfully holding a joint and a glass of wine. He was giggling to himself and examining a large black iron cobweb with an iron spider-painted red-in the middle of it. “I made that sculpture!” he shouted. “That’s art, that is! Hi, guys! Welcome! Enjoy!”

Moments later Karen was in his arms. Soon, in the living room, Alan was opening a bottle, before asking a member of the staff-who I recognised from London-to show me to my room in the converted barn, which was where the guests stayed. Barn, of course, gave no clue to the luxury Mustaq could afford and liked to show his guests.

Karen and I had arrived early; we’d both wanted to get away from London. As I’d hoped, this gave me time to tramp across the fields which surrounded Mustaq’s house. He’d told me, when he came in to meet us, “As far as you can see, I own it. Everything else belongs to Madonna. My fields are rented to local organic farmers, but please feel free to trudge through them as you wish.”

After two hours in the fields I returned to the house, where I looked at the luxuriant garden. This was Alan’s domain: he did everything himself-flowers, herbs, grasses, ponds-and then put his iron sculptures out, dotted about the place like huge paperclips. He had become an artist; in London he would have a show in a major gallery; everyone would come, including Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones.

Mustaq had suggested I might like a swim after my walk. I had already noticed the pool, enclosed in a glass building to the side of the main house. Now, as I walked towards it, something I saw through the glass doors made me stop.

I had spotted a head above water, wearing a black swimming cap. I watched the woman climb from the pool and put on a dressing gown and flip-flops. For a moment she was looking towards me. Whether it was shortsightedness or because she didn’t recognise me-so old or changed was I-she stared in my direction and I stared back. Neither of us made a gesture.

Not wanting her to think I’d turned away-if, indeed she had recognised me, which I doubted-I stood there, gazing at her indistinct outline through the thick glass beaded with moisture. Eventually she went down the steps towards the showers and changing rooms under the house. There it went, the body I had loved and wanted more than any other.

I was aware that Mustaq would want to have intense and fervent discussions. I needed to talk to him too. But I had not even guessed that the weekend was going to include Ajita. The moment I’d waited for had arrived. Soon we would be able to say everything we had yearned to say. But where would we begin, and where would the talk take us?

Nothing, now, would be as simple as it had been during those years when all I had to do was miss her.

I went to my room and sat at the window. In the courtyard, one of Mustaq’s staff was brushing the tyres of his employer’s Mustang. In the distance were fields bounded by a motorway, beyond which was the outline of the town. The clothes I’d driven down in, which I’d flung on the floor as I did at home, had been folded on a chair. The contents of my holdall had been hung up in closets, and my old trainers, not the most pristine, had been cleaned.

In an attempt to calm myself, to stop pacing, I lay down for a while, only to be woken by a loud, disembodied voice. It wasn’t paranoia: Mustaq had had speakers installed in the rooms, and I was being called to supper.

I showered and changed, thinking of Ajita’s eyes on me at last. Regarding myself in the mirror-and the lines and flaws I had become indifferent to: now when I looked at myself, I saw nothing of interest-I wondered what she would see.

Crossing from the barn to the main house with Karen, who had been napping in the next room to me, I saw that the forecourt now resembled a car showroom. We were passing Alan’s sculpture and I was beginning to tell Karen that one of Freud’s disciples, Karl Abraham, had written a paper on the spider as symbol of the female genitalia: it represented the woman with a penis and therefore the possibility of castration. Naturally Karen didn’t show much interest in this.

She did perk up when she noticed that the iron gates were closing once more. In the yard, two self-regarding stars were now getting out of a sports car, looking around as though trying to make out where they were and how they’d got there. Karen slapped both hands to her face to make a “Beatle scream.”

“Who is that?” I whispered. I learned that it was the Asian actor Karim Amir, fresh from a rehab near Richmond. I said, “Isn’t that Stephen Hero, getting out of the car after him?”

“Not Stephen Hero, for fuck’s sake,” Karen said, striking me on the arm. “Who the hell’s that? It’s Charlie Hero. Charlie. He’s a Charlie, and don’t you forget it, this evening or ever!”

I was delighted to see Karen had retained her integrity and was still capable of being impressed by the famous. Years ago she had, of course, been wildly impressed by anyone famous-indeed, by anyone who knew anyone famous-and still the celebrated had not disappointed her.

Karen led me into the kitchen for a glass of champagne and a cigarette.

“What’s wrong? Are you nervous?” she said, brushing down my jacket.

“Terrified,” I said. “I don’t know why. You’re the one who’s good on these occasions.”

She was giggling. “Are my breasts too on show?”

“You are virtually topless and indeed,” I said, looking her over, “virtually bottomless. The heels are great. Make the most of it, I say.”

“That’s what I thought. Jamal, I’m glad you like it. A lot of the other men here will be shortsighted.” She held up a bottle. “Let’s not waste all this fucking drink-there’s buckets of the juice here.”

“Pour me another.”

“Get it down you.” She was looking around the big kitchen. “It is true, the rich are different. They don’t have any clutter. They have people to throw things away for them, ruthlessly. I always thought I’d be rich,” she said. “I took it for granted in the 80s. Didn’t you?”

I said, “I was too foolish to understand the real pleasure of money. You’ve done okay, though.”

“That’s not enough. We’ve both let ourselves down, Jamal.”

We watched Mustaq’s staff moving about quickly and silently, up and down the stairs, in their smart but casual uniforms. Not only did they not look at the guests, they lowered their heads as we passed.

Fifteen minutes later Karen and I entered the dining room together. At the end of the room was a grand piano; on the wall hung gold discs, photographs and guitars. Karen spotted Charlie and Karim immediately and went over to sit with them.

I was holding back, hesitating until I knew for certain-until I could see it was true. Ajita was at supper.

She wore a black dress; her arms were bare, apart from a silver bracelet. I looked for her wedding ring but was too far away to see. She’d always worn expensive clothes and still seemed to, with a hint of ostentation, looking like a woman you’d glance twice at in a Milan restaurant. Her hair was shining, black; it was unchanged, but her head was half-turned away from me, and she was laughing.

Karen was gesturing at me to come and sit down. I had my own excitement to deal with and stood where I was, wanting this moment to last, waiting for Ajita to look at me, knowing quite well that, when she did, there would certainly be trouble. Of which kind, I had no idea, but how could the world not trip a little, after such a sight?

When she did glance over, I saw her start suddenly and then take me in, her lips parting and her eyes widening. She watched me looking at her. I could feel the readjustment of perspective between us, as fantasy and reality crashed together and began to realign. Neither of us were students now; we were more than middle-aged.

She began to smile, and so did I. She got up then. One of us had to do something. We were kissing and embracing, and swinging one another around until we were embarrassed.

When we were done her brother, not the only one watching but the most attentive, came and stood behind us, leaning down on both our shoulders as we dabbed at our eyes.

“My darling sweety sweets, I’m sorry I didn’t tell either of you that you might meet tonight. I was afraid that one of you would change your mind. Was that wrong of me?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I think we’ll be fine.”

“Yes,” said Ajita. She turned to me with a determined smile. “So, how have you been? What’s been going on?”

“Quite a lot, actually,” I said. “There’s years of it.”

“And with me too,” she said. “Years of it.” We picked up our glasses and touched them together. She laughed. “You always said actually. I’m so glad you haven’t changed.”

“How have you changed?”

“I guess you’ll find out soon enough,” she replied, leaning over and kissing me on the cheek.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

It was a long table; I guessed that thirty people could sit around it. There were half that number present, but more Londoners kept arriving, driving up for the evening or weekend and coming in to eat.

Karen was sitting opposite Ajita, and she talked continuously, as she did when nervous. This didn’t prevent her trying to get a good look at Ajita.

Omar Ali came and sat beside me. Charlie and Karim were further down the table, with people I didn’t know. Knighthoods-that prosthetic for the middle-aged-were being discussed, and whether it was a good idea to accept one. Then the subject was whether Karim should appear on I’m a Celebrity…Get Me out of Here!

Charlie argued against it, saying Johnny Rotten had lost more than his mystique by appearing. But as Karim, after acting in British soaps, had been living in America for years, mostly playing either torturers or the tortured in bad movies, he didn’t have any mystique to lose. Charlie had, of course, already said no, and was unsure whether to regret it or not.

Meanwhile, I turned to Ajita. When, years ago, Ajita was about to masturbate me-one of our favourite pastimes-she would rub her tongue on the palm of her hand as a preparation for the work ahead, a gesture I found unconscionably exciting. Later, when we were in a class together, we’d make the gesture to one another, and giggle. Now, when she turned to me, I repeated the sign. For a moment there was no recognition, before she began to laugh, and gave me her own demonstration of the long-lost lick of love.

After supper, but while most people were taking coffee and beginning on the brandy, Mustaq joined me. “Come,” he said. “Can we talk a little?”

Mustaq and I went upstairs to a large room with a long window over-looking his land. While Mustaq gave instructions to the staff, I noticed that there were, on a side table, numerous photographs. Looking closer I realised they weren’t what I expected: George with Elton John, George with Bill Clinton and Dolce and Gabbana, the stuff everyone had in their house. No, they were family photographs, pieces of frozen time which seemed, at that moment of the uncanny, to freeze me. As I picked one up, I noticed Mustaq looking at me.

“That’s Mother.” He came over. “Did you meet her?”

“She was in India when Ajita and I were together. I wish I had met her.”

“She’s still alive, and still beautiful, though lashingly bad-tempered,” he said. “She’s been here a couple of times.”

Less than a year after her first husband’s murder, their mother had remarried in India, to the rich executive she’d been having an affair with. She often came to London, where they had a flat in Knightsbridge. She was one of those foreign women floating about Harrods and Harvey Nichols for consumables unavailable in the Third World. Did she ever go back to the house in Kent? No; she didn’t like it the first time. She didn’t suffer from nostalgia, either.

Another photograph: one I’d never expected to see again. It was me, in Mushy Peas’s bedroom in the mid-70s, before our wrestle, I guessed. I had some kind of embarrassed smirk on my face, but at least I had plenty of dark hair. I supposed that Mustaq had displayed the photograph just for me.

“Yes, you,” he said. “Fresh young meat, eh?”

“I wish I’d made more of it.”

He picked up another picture. “Him-you cannot see.”

It was Ajita I noticed first in the photograph, a little younger than when I first met her; she was standing arm-in-arm with the father I had murdered, a massive dose of adrenaline in the heart stunning him.

I could feel Mustaq looking at me as I recalled that night in the garage, trying to picture the father’s face and compare it to what I had in front of me. I had no photographs of Ajita, or of Wolf or Valentin. The only photograph I had was one of the father, cut from the newspaper, which I hadn’t seen for years, and which must have been thrown out when Mother moved.

“Do you miss him?” I asked.

Mustaq replaced the picture. “He would have hated all that I am. I can’t imagine him having supper with Alan. But maybe he’d have appreciated my wealth and success.”

“That normally brings people around.”

“Are you pleased to see my sister?”

“Thank you, Mustaq. Yes-delighted, though we haven’t spoken much yet.”

“You’ve certainly been looking at one another.”

“Indeed. Is she with her husband and children?”

“I took them all to dinner in New York. When I told her I had seen you in London, and that you were coming to the country for the weekend, she came to life. She phoned me continuously, and began to move very quickly. Though she hates to leave the house, she brought no one with her. I suspect she might be ready for an encounter. Jamal, you lucky guy, you’re all she’s been waiting for.”

“I’d better not let her down.”

Mustaq lifted my wrist and looked at it, stroking my arm ironically. “You’ve taken the watch off. What I want now is information. I know it was a long time ago, but how in God’s name did you really get that thing?”

I reached into my pocket and drew out the watch. I couldn’t look at it now without wishing I could wind it back until before the moment it was given to me. My attempted good deed had brought more hell into my life than I could handle. Mustaq’s father was a ghost who still wouldn’t take his hands from my throat and, I feared, never would. The one thing you can never kill is a name. I wanted to cry out, Will the dead never leave us alone?

I gave it to him and sighed. “You can take it.”

He looked surprised. “It’s not mine, really.”

“Nor mine, I guess. Please.”

He removed his own watch and replaced it with his father’s. Tapping it, he said, “Thank you. I have to ask you this. Why did you deny that it was my father’s?”

“I wasn’t able to say how I got it.”

“Why not?”

“It’s a painful subject, Mustaq, going back a long time.”

“Painful for you or for me?”

“I will tell you. It may change your view of your father.”

“You don’t know what my view is. I don’t know what my view is. And I am almost an adult.”

“Okay.” I said. “Now?”

“Yes, if you don’t mind. Think how many years I’ve waited.”

The others were coming upstairs and quickly picking glasses of champagne from silver trays. Mustaq followed me across the room to a quieter spot, where we sat down together. The story took only a moment to make up.

I said, “This was not long before he died. I was at your house with your sister when your father came home. I couldn’t let on that I was her boyfriend, so I said I was waiting for you. He laughed and told me I was wasting time.”

“He said that a lot.”

“He wanted me to help him with a box of papers he couldn’t carry himself. Upstairs in your bedroom, in that small dressing room just off it, full of suitcases, he took off the watch. He told me it was valuable, it was a gift, he was giving it to me. I said I didn’t want it, but he insisted on stuffing it into my pocket. I noticed his trousers were open. He was touching himself. He took hold of me and forced me to caress him. Then we brought the box downstairs. That’s all,” I said. “I’m sorry I had to tell you.” While he was thinking, I said, “Mustaq, did he touch you?”

“No! Me-never. Why are you saying that? He didn’t go that way. He hated homos!” He stood up suddenly and stared out of the window. “For fuck’s sake-why are you telling me this! I have to consider it all now!” He was staring at me; his tone became absurdly gracious. “And I have to apologise to you. On behalf of my family, I am sorry for what my father did to you.”

“Will you speak to Ajita about it?”

“She’s fragile. She has a lot of depression, at least two weeks a month she is almost catatonic, and I really worry about her.” Then he said, “Do you know whether he did this to anyone else?” I said nothing. “Jamal, in your professional experience, do people who do these things do them to others?”

“My answer will be of no use to you. It depends on the subject’s history. Often, people do it for a particular period in their lives, after a separation or when they are depressed, and never again. I think we’re talking about a version of incest rather than paedophilia. They are different.”

He wasn’t listening. “The damned filthy man, with his bloody secrets. Do you hate him?”

“Me? No. It did disturb me. It shook me up. I guess it might have helped me in the direction I was going-to analysis. It spoiled my week but not my life.”

“Now I’m suffocating!” he said. I noticed his hands were on his own throat, as though he was trying to strangle himself. “I need to get out. I must walk freely for a bit.”

I watched him hurry out of the room. Alan went to him, but Mustaq brushed him aside. Alan looked at me and shrugged. I took another glass of champagne and wondered where Ajita was.

She wasn’t outside. From the window I could see Mustaq in the illuminated grounds, pacing, his arms thrashing. After a while he seemed to make up his mind about something and disappeared into another part of the house.

“Look,” he said, when he reappeared. He was tapping his arm.

“What is it?”

“I’ve already had an allergic reaction to the watch. My wrist is red and a little swollen. There’s a…throbbing!” I looked closely but could see nothing. He took the watch off and put it in his pocket. He said, “I went to Ajita’s room and opened up to her. I couldn’t stop myself. I told her what you said about our father. I wanted her to know. I asked what she thought. You’re lucky.”

“In what way?”

“She believed you, saying you were always a trustworthy person, with no reason to make up a story about our father.”

He went on, “The weird thing was: I thought it would devastate her, to learn Father was like that. Wouldn’t such knowledge do that to a person? To me it was an explosion. I watched her closely, and she didn’t seem shocked or even surprised.”

“Do you know why?”

“Sorry?”

I said, “What sort of man was your father?”

“He was strict. I think I mean stern. There was always reason to be afraid of him. But he wasn’t religious and never prayed. He’d have despised those mad mullahs and extreme Islam fascist wallahs. When Papa was alive, intelligent people thought superstition was dying out. Of course he hated the whites, particularly after his experience with the documentary. They were tricky, and their racism was deep.

“But there was a barrier between him and me. Since before I was eleven I suspected I might be gay.”

“You did?”

“The other boys called me a fat Paki bummer. I guess that just about clarified everything. One of our cousins told Papa I wanted to be a dancer or hairdresser. Papa had already noticed I had a weak handshake. So his response-that fags should be killed-made it obvious that this was not only unacceptable but a crime.

“I expect you know it, but I was in love with you and couldn’t wait for you to visit. I wondered what you wanted me to wear, what you wanted me to be. I read all those books thinking you might decide to test me on them. At the same time, whenever I was alone with Papa-only when we watched cricket or boxing together-I asked his advice about women. ‘How do you get a girl to be nice to you? Should you kiss her on the first date? What about marriage, should you bring it up sooner or later?’ I knew he liked to talk about such things. The stupid, indirect shit the straights have to go through. What’s it laughably called-seduction? At least it made my father feel like a big man.”

“But never enough of one?”

“How could he be? All the time we lived in that house he was anxious about keeping the factory going. He said his only ambition outside work was to walk across Africa. But the strike made him so crazy he started to do weird stuff.”

“What sort?”

“I’d hear him walking about at night. Doors banging, groans, shouts even-”

“Do you know why?”

“He was drinking. Staggering around blotto. He’d drink half a bottle of Jack Daniel’s when he came home after work, and finish the rest by morning. When I opened my door in the morning, he’d be on the floor. I was scared to come out of my room. Ajita and I had to pull off his dressing gown and pyjamas and drag him into the shower. It was hard for her, she had to do everything.” He wiped his eyes. “Did she tell you about it?”

“A little.”

“I’d throw the bottle away before I went to school. No wonder all I learned was how to masturbate. It was worse for Ajita.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Ajita adored her father, Jamal. I’ve never seen two closer people. As a girl she’d wait by the door for him to come home. In the evenings, while Mum was cooking, she’d oil and comb his hair, walk on his back, wash him in the bath. He’d tell her stories about India and Africa. I’m telling you, I was left out. When he was killed, I’ve never seen anyone more devastated. She hardly spoke for three months.”

“And your mother had already gone away.”

“Yes.”

“Had she left your father?”

He said, “No one said that. But how could she be with him? She considered him a failure. He thought if he made enough money she’d come back. One day, according to Father, we’d be free of anxiety, because we’d be rich. Before then he had no time for anything else, for sport, culture, nature-love, even. He didn’t know what we were doing at school.” He leaned towards me. “I had a voodoo doll-of Father-which I stuck little nails into. I was convinced I’d killed him!”

“You wanted all the credit.”

“If he were alive today, he would disapprove of everything about me. I have to be glad he’s dead-which is difficult…”

I said, “You remember when you asked me to go away with you?”

“Oh, Jamal, I’m so embarrassed!”

“Why don’t we run away?” Mustaq said to me the next time I went to the house. Last time we’d wrestled; now he told me there was something he just had to show me in his bedroom. “What is it?” I asked. “My haircut,” he replied. “David Jones would be proud of you,” I said.

He was standing close to me, as he liked to, touching, if not rubbing, my arm. “I know where my father keeps his money. He’s got thick wads of it in an envelope under his socks.”

“What for?”

“He often says we may need to leave in a hurry again. The racists might come for us.”

“You’re the one who wants to leave in a hurry. But why?”

“It’s not much good here, is it?”

He said this with such sadness I’d have kissed him if I hadn’t feared he’d kiss me.

“Why with me?” I asked.

“You’re the most exciting person I’ve met.”

“Look,” I said, startled, “let me give you something-

I went to my college bag. Apart from books on philosophy, I was carrying music magazines, a couple of novels and an anthology of Beat poets. I gave them to him.

“Feed your head, man,” I said. “I know you already have music, but I’ll drop more books and mags off tomorrow. You know what you want to do when you grow up?”

“A fashion designer,” he said. “But don’t tell anyone.”

“Like who? Your sister?”

“She knows already.”

“Your father, then. I think I will tell him.” I pretended to move off.

He grabbed me, “Don’t do that. Keep quiet, please! I’ll do anything for you-”

“Only joking,” I said. “Why are you so afraid? Does he hurt you?”

In the weeks after this conversation, I took a lot of stuff to Mustaq. He read so quickly and gratefully I was soon ransacking my bedroom for books I’d bought in London. It gave me a reason to visit Ajita, to sit around in her house, but Mustaq was so pleased by everything I took him I began to see that helping others was a pleasure.

“Jamal,” he said now, “I am unbelievably angry with Papa. He did an inexcusable thing, and tried to give you a watch in exchange!”

He went on, “But I am not innocent. I have sinned too. I will think of it when I want to hit Papa in the face.”

“What did you do?”

Mustaq was approaching the top of his arc as a drama queen, being both amused and almost rigid with self-pity at the same time, as he compulsively rubbed his eyes and caressed his forehead, his voice an urgent whisper.

“The night Father was killed I was having sex for the first time. One of my cousins, sleeping in the next room, came in to initiate me. I was ashamed it had taken me so long. She thought I should see a pussy, which I was curious about. It did nothing for me, and was like trying to force a slug into a slot machine. Of course I felt guilty. Of all possible nights…why did it have to be that one?

“Ajita and I talked about going home that evening. But she was too tired to make the journey. If we’d returned, we might have caught the murderers at their work. We might have saved Dad. We might even have been killed.”

“Yes.”

“I lost my virginity at last, but not really. Apart from with you, I hadn’t felt a passion for anyone yet. That didn’t happen until later, when we were in India, and the very, very bad thing occurred.”

“What was it?”

“I fell in love with a composer, a songwriter, older than me, in his mid-twenties, well dressed, good-looking, elegant. Jamal, note this: he knew how to be. He made music for films, discos, fashion shows. Really he was a genius. Far more talented than me, writing music as easily as others speak. Like some heterosexuals, he liked being admired by a gay man. I was his groupie, and he enjoyed my questions, my fascination with him. But it went too far…” He went on, “I loved him so much I married his sister.”

“Great idea.”

“It was an astonishing Indian wedding, paid for by my uncle, and went on longer than the marriage. That night, when I tried to make love to the woman, and she was lying there so hot in her desire-women really feel fierce pleasures, don’t they?-I had to think of her brother to make myself hard. The two of them looked similar, and she became a sort of aide-mémoire.” He shivered. “Naturally, she wanted to have sex with me, her husband, and bear children. When I told her the truth, she was devastated, she had a breakdown, she put a rope around her neck and had to be cut down.”

“What were you thinking?”

“That my homosexuality would go away. I didn’t want to be different or unusual. It was a secret.”

As though he had temporarily forgotten where he was, Mustaq stopped to survey the room-his friends, and who they were chatting with. Seeing us talking, they had kept away. Then he touched me on the shoulder and caressed me a little. I could see he was about to become formal again; he had remembered who he had to be.

I looked at him, the awkward, eager, dumpy kid who had rebuilt himself, becoming attractive and glamorous. Of course, just being a famous pop star gave him that hip edge, all the time. He mattered, and was envied, at last. He had become one of those people who knew they were constantly observed. But whether he enjoyed it much now, I couldn’t tell.

“Jamal, I hope you enjoy the weekend. I’m delighted we’re friends again. Please, may I ask you one more thing? Otherwise I will believe I’m mad.”

“Go on.”

“Didn’t you, sometimes, wait outside our house at night? My bedroom was at the front, overlooking the road, and I’d stay up, dancing to the Thin White Duke. Was it you, just standing, looking, a few times?”

“Yes. It was me.”

“Why did you do that? I used to think, which one of us is he in love with? Can it be me?”

“I knew who I wanted.”

“Why were you there?”

“I was a fool in love.”

“Me too. Did you know I wrote ‘Everyone Has Their Heart Torn Apart, Sometime’ when I was still living at home? Years later it went to number one around the world virtually unchanged. I can tell you now where I stole the tune, not that anyone was bright enough to notice.”

“It takes talent to steal the right tune.”

“The song was about you, Jamal.”

He was sitting close to me. At times he took my hand, and I took his, as though we needed to comfort one another while the past rolled through us.

He said, “The only window which overlooked the garden was in my sister’s bedroom. When I was home, I’d sit just behind the curtain, with my elbows on the sill, looking out. You smoked roll-ups all the time, and always wore black. You looked smooth in suits, particularly with the baseball boots.

“But in my view, you looked best with nothing on and your lovely cock out. You were thin then, with a fine tanned body, and boy could you do it a lot-you guys were horny!” He went on. “Other times I’d sit with you in the kitchen when Ajita was upstairs changing or on the phone. I loved it when you talked to me.

“But I couldn’t have expected you to guide me. I should have been a doctor. That’s what my father wanted.”

He was looking at me, smiling; I was trying to take all this in. Then he stood up, gave me a long look, as if wondering himself about the strangeness of our conversation, and excused himself, going to join the others, most of whom had now come into the room.

I watched Ajita with a friend of Mustaq’s, laughing as she used to, putting her hand over her mouth as though she’d just said something outrageous, perching here and there to talk, helping her brother and Alan run the weekend.

When I rejoined the group, I discovered from Alan, who did a good imitation of him, that Omar had decided to drive into town “to see who was around,” adding, “You see, I never lost the common touch!”

It turned out that Omar had rung to say he was “stuck” in town and needed to be rescued. He wouldn’t be able to make it back alone. Alan asked for volunteers “to go in.” Apparently the town, a triumph of postwar socialist planning, was a sewer, full of tattooed beasts and violent zombies, with vomit and blood frothing in the gutters. I couldn’t wait to see it.

There was a pub Omar liked to visit when he came up, where the local lost children, most of them junkies, listened to savagely loud music. At least one of these kids would be fuckable.

Omar was too drunk to return to Mustaq’s and didn’t want to leave his car behind. Of all his crimes, drunk driving might turn out to be the most viably punishable. Also, he had to get up early in the morning to fulfill one of his duties, which was to sit in a large black car surrounded by motorcycle outriders and greet some foreign dignitary at Heathrow on behalf of the queen and the government, and then accompany this variety of murderers and torturers to their hotel while making small talk.

Omar said, “I have to be quite careful. I’m always getting the words dignitary and dictator mixed up.” He was, apparently, often in bad shape for some of this “meeting and greeting.”

Alan required one of us to drive Omar’s car back. So, fancying a change, I went into town with Karen, following Alan, who knew the pub. On the way out I said to Mustaq, “Why don’t you come with us?” He shook his head and smiled. As we got in the car, Karen told me that the price Mustaq paid for his wealth was the fact that he couldn’t walk on the street, go to the shop or pub without being mobbed, questioned, photographed.

We drove past a lurid building called the Hollywood Bowl, a multiplex featuring a drive-through McDonald’s, security guards and hooded kids wandering around windswept, concrete spaces.

“Why so fast, Karen? We won’t get lost. Are you drunk?”

“Yeah. You want to get out?” she said. “I should have killed you five minutes ago.”

“What stopped you?”

“So that is Ajita. The one you really loved and were faithful to. The one you kept expecting to return. You would lie there, my darling, ‘thinking,’ with a book open on your chest, and you’d smile to yourself. I knew that’s when you were with her in your mind. I absolutely totally hated you then.”

“Are you now pleasantly disappointed?”

“She’s an ordinary woman of a certain age. The age of desperation. But I can see it,” she said, “if I put my glasses on and look hard-what she had. The cuteness, the girly voice, the desire to please. Unfortunately, I was supposed to feel sorry for her all that time. What sadness you moped about in, which I had to endure! Even to me she seemed mystically important. Wasn’t her damned father murdered during a strike?”

“Something like that.”

“I only married the wrong person because of the whole mess. You made me feel second-best for so long I ended up with the first person who gave me their attention.”

“It would have to be my fault,” I said.

“Nothing cheered you up, even when you went to see that bloody analyst the whole time. After a session you’d spend hours writing it down. Didn’t you ever see that analysis doesn’t make people kinder or funnier or more intelligent? It makes them more self-absorbed. They start using all those awful words like transfer and cathartic. Did I want to hear about your dreams, about your mother and sister, when we were in the middle of a disaster? Didn’t that occur to you?”

“It was my vocation, and it interested me more than anything.”

“I hate to say this, Jamal, but you are intelligent and you’ve done nothing with it but learn to say all those words which are no use to anyone.”

“Shit, you are in a bad mood.”

“I am now.”

I said, “I’m definitely not going to fuck you tonight.”

“Bastard, it’ll be the Indian girl, won’t it? Why do you have to be so cruel, Jamal? Doesn’t it matter to you, cunt-teaser?”

We discovered Lord Ali, with his jacket and shoes off and shirt half open, lying across several chairs in the back room of the pub, “holding court.” This kinglike position wasn’t only due to his personal magnetism, or to curiosity among the poor about the lord’s work relieving the condition of the proletariat, but owed much to the fact he was buying drinks for everyone in the pub.

“Oh, fucking Christ!” said Alan, as we approached. The lord’s eyes, as Alan put it, were like “two pools of inky semen.”

We caught Omar telling the assembled drinkers, many of them already slumped, that he’d met the queen on three occasions and sat in her carriage once. Last week he’d found himself alone in a room with her. She was concerned that Labour was going to attempt to ban shooting as well as hunting. “‘We had a lovely shoot the other day,’” he said, fruitily. Lord Omar said this several times, louder and louder, until it started to sound not only pornographic but an arrestable offence.

Alan was ready to pull him out of there before he said anything else that might turn up in the News of the World, or bring information about their weekends to the wider world, but Omar wasn’t ready to leave. He hadn’t managed any physical contact. Alan spoke to one of the kids and came away with some decent weed, and while the cock-drunk good lord was satisfied in the toilet, Alan and Karen played pool.

I sat at the bar lining up vodka shots. The barman knew we were friends of George and told me what spoiled, overprivileged rats we were “up at the big house,” compared to the people around here. “What we need,” he said, as though it had never occurred to anyone before, “is a revolution. Look at that,” he said, pointing at Lord Ali, who was emerging from the toilet with wet knees and a pasty-faced kid while murmuring “Such, such were the boys…”

The barman went on: “Some of these people work up there. We know how to get in. One day we’ll all charge up there in a mob and pull it down and burn the lot of yer!”

“It’s a good idea,” I said. “But sadly, you’re all too stoned to do anything like that.”

“Outta my pub, how dare you!” he said. “Stoned? Who? You’re barred for life!”

I had called the others and was already stepping over someone in a move towards the door. Omar was being dragged along by Karen and Alan while singing “Land of Hope and Glory” and yelling, “Thank you so much, my darling subjects, for a lovely shoot! A lovely shoot is all one wants!”

The landlord was spitting with fury and threatening us with the police.

Karen squashed Alan and the lord into her car; I drove the lord’s motor back, tearing up the lanes.

At the house, people were talking in the living room, but most had moved to what Alan referred to as the “Brian Jones” pool. It was fashionable for rich people like Mustaq to buy art and photography. The corridor between the pool and the changing area was full of decent photographs, including one of a woman standing up to piss against a bridge.

Around the pool, people were smoking; others were dancing, or swimming naked. Those vile bodies had cost a fortune to maintain and were made to be exhibited. Charlie Hero was in good shape; even his scars glowed, and the slim bolt through his cock brought out its veiny contours.

Other friends of Alan and Mustaq had turned up by now, dancers, hairdressers, make-up artists, camp young black men, angelic boys, some in overtight or shiny clothing, others keen to show off their nipple clips. Some of these characters looked as though they hadn’t seen daylight for some years. Few women would get laid tonight, I thought. This might be my chance to see whether I really was still uninterested, or whether I’d just been through a discouraging time.

Charlie had attached his iPod to the pool sound system, and suddenly a record came on from my youth, the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Do You Believe in Magic?”, so full of musical sunshine and optimism that Karim and I both began to laugh, glancing at one another and laughing again. Like him, I’d been a little too young to be independently active at that time, but the mid-60s were where I was formed, and what did any of that love mean now, in these dirty days?

I swam a little, looking out for Ajita, but couldn’t see her. While I dried off, Karim, his earnest brown eyes peering out from between the parentheses of his hair, offered me some coke. Although I fancied it, I wanted to sleep tonight. I smoked a joint, then someone gave me a double espresso and a chunk of chocolate. I took a diazepam and decided to go to bed, a relatively early night but with plenty to think about.

I was lying down, wondering what I’d listen to on my iPod-words can go so far, and then there is music-when there was a knock on the door.

“Hello,” I called.

“Can I come in?”

It was Ajita in a satin dressing gown. She came over and sat on the edge of the bed.

I took her hand. “So you found me, then.”

“At last,” she said. “Just you and me. Now we have some time together. All night, I hope. Will you stay awake? Do you want to hear me now?”

“Of course,” I replied. “It’s you I’ve been waiting for.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

She took my hand. “Earlier today, I believed I saw you from the pool. Then I thought, No, it’s a ghost and I’ve gone mad. In New York, Mustaq asked me if I wanted to see you again, but said he couldn’t guarantee that you’d show up. But you did. Was that for me? Or shouldn’t I ask?”

“Your American accent is charming.”

“Oh, don’t say that. I’ve been trying to get rid of it and seem more Indian again, particularly since Indians have become so hip.”

“Yes, there can’t be one of them who hasn’t written a novel.”

“And it’s embarrassing to be American when people my colour are under such constant suspicion. Going through airports is a nightmare for all of us, even for Mustaq. We all feel a step away from Guantánamo. Orange doesn’t suit me.”

“Nor most people.”

“It’s been so bad I’m thinking of staying in London for a while. I loved London, when you would take me about. I haven’t been back since. I couldn’t bear to see it again.” Her hand was on my shoulder. “You don’t need to get up, Jamal. Don’t do anything. We don’t need more light on. I’ll pull the curtains.” She said, “I know you’re there, and that’s all I need. Mustaq told me what he knew of your story, and I have read your books.”

“Did you tell him your story?”

“What d’you mean, mine?” I said nothing. She went on, “Jamal, you’re the person who really knows me. You were always my true love,” she said. “Even my husband knew that. He used to say, ‘There is someone else stopping us from being close.’” She leaned over me, kissing me on each cheek and on the lips, pressing her fingers through my hair. “You’ve hardly changed. Your hair’s grey, but it still stands on end, like a fluffy chick. You’re a little lined and no longer all skin and bone. But you’re distinguished-looking, a man who’s lived an important life.”

“Christ, no!”

She said, “I was watching you at supper. You’re even more good-looking than I remembered. What an attractive, smart man, he is, I thought. One who has been loved and wanted.”

“That is a kind thing to say. If it is true, it means a lot. I will try to be more grateful.”

“I think you probably are,” she said. “Who was the woman sitting opposite me? We were introduced, but I didn’t catch her name. She was observing you like a hawk, when she wasn’t glaring at me. Was she one of your wives?”

“I have been married, but just the once, unusually. Not to her, though. I am still married-or rather, not yet divorced. But I did go out with the woman you’re talking about-Karen-after you went away.”

“Was it a successful love?”

“Not from her point of view. I was still getting over you, I guess. It took a long time-probably because I always thought you’d be coming back in a little while.”

She was quiet. “Jamal?”

“Yes?”

“Please don’t say it’s too late. We’re not old. Or am I too far gone for you? Look.” She stood up and opened her dressing gown, then let it drop to the floor. “This is me. Where I am.”

I looked at her, both familiar and unfamiliar now. “What would your husband say?” I said quietly, before regretting it.

She put her gown on again and lay down on the bed. I stood up and took off my clothes.

While she looked at me, I said, “I don’t know what I want to happen between us. It’s been a long time. All we can do is give it space.”

“There is still time, we have that. I will wait for you, as you waited for me.” She pulled the sheets over her. “How I need to sleep with someone again. After years of trying to get my daughter out of my bed, she will no longer keep me company. My husband and I have our own rooms, in fact our own countries now. So to spend a night with a man…It moves me so.”

We lay there in the dark, not touching. Certainly people of our age, unless they are narcissists, wouldn’t want anyone to see their bodies. I’d seen Ajita in the pool, of course. Her flesh hadn’t aged badly, but she seemed to have shrunk into herself, as though she wanted to make herself smaller, like a younger actress playing the part of an older woman.

“Yes,” she said, “I know I am like an old woman now. I could see that in your eyes. My sexual charm, beauty-all gone.”

“Mine, too. I was just thinking of how much we loved to sunbathe in your garden at the side of the house. You were almost black. Now no one does that. You remember how I had to pretend to be Mushy Peas’s best friend?”

“What I want is that the four of us-you, me, Wolf and Valentin-meet again. Can you organise a reunion?”

“They disappeared soon after you did-to make their fortunes in France.”

“How did they do?”

“They didn’t tell me.”

“What a shame,” she said. “In New York I buy furniture, or clothes. I give something to charity every day, and I buy something new every day. It’s a simple system-in and out.

“I walk in the park, visit friends, and when my brother’s on tour or doing a TV show I design the costumes. It’s a lot of work, a proper job. I do yoga, Kabbalah, anything that doesn’t involve touching. If I don’t feel fabulous within a few weeks, I try something else. All suicides kill others too, I am aware of that, so there is no way out for me. In the end my doctor gave me something-”

“An antidepressant?”

“Whatever. It keeps massive anxiety away. I want to feel normal.”

“It’s more normal to experience anxiety than it is to be blank.”

“What I feel most of the time is dread,” she said. “As though some catastrophe is about to befall me.”

“It has. Do you remember what you told me your father did to you?”

“Why shouldn’t I remember that? I don’t hate him. He was having a terrible time. It’s not your family.”

“At college once you told me how much you loved him. ‘He’s so tender,’ you said.”

She said, “Is that so strange? He always kissed and petted me. He’d lose his temper and call us stupid, but he was never not a fond father.” She was lying back on the pillow. “You wanted me to be a feminist and gave me those books. It was new then. You remember that woman-Fiona? She was one of the organisers against my father. I saw her on the picket line and then at college. She was hugely fat with her breasts wobbling everywhere, wearing dungarees and big earrings.”

“She was on TV last night, defending a bill to keep people without trial.”

“Is she thin? Jamal, did you want me to be a different kind of woman?”

I said, “We were a dissenting generation. People like your father-we called them capitalists then-we hated on principle. In other European cities, people like us were kidnapping and killing capitalists.”

“You didn’t want to do that. You couldn’t kill anyone.”

I said, “I was always furious with my parents, my father in particular. It seemed odd to me that you loved your parents without any hatred.”

We were silent; I thought she’d fallen asleep. “Jamal,” she said, “earlier this evening my brother told me what my father did to you. Why didn’t you say anything to me? I told you everything, but you didn’t reciprocate.”

“How could I have added to your troubles?” I went on, “When you were in India, I was frantic missing you. My first thought in the morning was: Will this be the day she rings? It was a terrible separation. For a while it broke me.”

She ran her hands over her face and through her hair. “No, no, Jamal! You’re saying I didn’t think of you? I even wrote you letters-you remember those thin blue airmail letters?-which I never posted. I loved London, but how could I go back there after the strike?

“My nightmares weren’t about my father raping me night after night but about that screaming mob outside the factory, students like us hurling lumps of wood and bricks. They reduced my dad to despair. He was a hardworking man expelled from Africa, trying to make everything all right for his family.” She went on: “I went to America with Mustaq for a fresh start. I worked in fashion, designing clothes. That was my family trade.”

We lay there without speaking for a while. Occasionally, we heard laughter and voices in the yard; otherwise there was silence.

“I knew, Jamal, you didn’t want to marry me. You were just beginning to move into the world; you were assured and energetic, keen to get on. In India I was going mad, I can’t tell you how mad. What I needed was stability, a husband. I couldn’t do that with you.”

“Did you get a husband?”

“I found a good man, probably too good. It was impossible to do him wrong without hurting. But Mustaq was keen on him, and paid for everything. He set him up in business.”

She spoke more of her children, work, daily life. I stayed awake for as long as I could, listening for her words, then her breath, thinking of Wolf, Valentin and our life together, and of what Ajita and I might want from each other tomorrow; and I thought of the presence standing between us, her father.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

It was late morning when I made it downstairs. Ajita had long left my bed.

Wearing a tracksuit, Mustaq was sitting at the table with his computer, eating strawberries and melon with his fingers. A couple of people sat at the other end of the table in silence, looking as though they’d just walked out of an explosion.

Mustaq poured me some juice. “I won’t speak too loudly,” he said. “It was a good night for me too. I haven’t been to bed. I called my trainer at four and got him to drive up for an early-morning session. Then I told my manager to prepare my studio. I haven’t enjoyed playing music for years. You know, Dad hated me playing the piano. One time, when I was at school, he had my keyboards removed and dumped. Do you think that could have inhibited me later?”

“Very likely.”

“Our conversation yesterday turned me on, Jamal. I have a nutritionist and a life coach. Now I have you to inspire me.”

“You do?”

“The great new bands are British, and they sing in English. Help me to write again, friend, about my childhood and my father. There aren’t that many rock stars whose fathers have been murdered. Where should I begin?”

“With whatever occurs to you.”

“Okay, thanks.” He began to type, saying, “It begins with you-walking into our house one day, looking at my sister with extreme happiness and smiling across at shy me, as if you understood everything about me, and whatever I did was okay.”

I poured coffee inside me but couldn’t keep any food down. Leaving Mustaq to gesticulate and hum at the computer screen, I walked across the fields for an hour, and then waited for lunch.

Champagne was brought round. Repeatedly lifting a glass might well have exhausted the last of my strength, but there were many places to lie down. That dreamy afternoon it occurred to me, as my eyes flickered, that to lie on a chaise longue at Mustaq’s, while others talked and drank, or played cards and listened to music, as gentle staff moved among you with trays of this and that, was the most perfect condition anyone could inhabit.

“Why hasn’t this occurred to me before?” I said. “That this is what money is for?” I had opened my eyes and noticed Henry standing above me, grinning. “This is what we’ve been expostulating about for years, my friend. Capitalism unfurled. Here it is, and here we are. This is the life!”

He bent down to kiss me. “Take it easy! Nothing’s ever that good!”

“Don’t say that!”

“Couldn’t George have afforded anything cheaper?” This was Miriam, rattling over me, laughing and chattering. For a moment she lay down beside me, her face close to mine, whispering frantically in my ear, “Oh, thank you so much, Brother, for bringing me here. You’ve changed my life completely and forever in the last year. You’ve been kinder to me than Father ever was. I had to let you know that, and now you know it.”

She kissed me and went to join Ajita, who had just got up. Watching my sister cross the room, in a long-sleeved tee-shirt, tight embroidered jeans and high heels, I realised how much weight she’d lost, at least three stone. Her face was almost gaunt and heavily lined, but now it was no longer studded with nuts and bolts, her eyes appeared larger, and her face shone with enthusiasm. She seemed to have retired from motherhood to become a man’s woman, or “partner.” Adopting some of Valerie’s grandiosity, she now liked to begin her sentences with phrases like “As the girlfriend of a leading theatrical producer…”

Henry sat with me. “You didn’t tell me Ajita would be so beautiful.”

“Is she the most beautiful of my girlfriends?”

“She might well turn out to be, but it’s still early days for you. Why don’t we go for a stroll?”

“I’m well embedded here.”

“I’ve got something to tell you,” he said. “It isn’t a secret I want to keep.” He put his arm around me. “Show me where to go.”

I followed him. At the door of the kitchen we put on Wellington boots. Outside, I laughed as he stared at the sculptures. Before he could say anything, I said, “They’re Alan’s art.”

I noticed, beside another barn, a studio made of glass and new wood. The doors were open and I could see two drawing boards; on the floor there were pieces of cut and uncut metal, some of them painted-Alan’s workshop.

“That looks good,” I said. “Maybe I should suggest the architect to Mum and Billie. They’re looking to get a studio built in their garden. Did they tell you?”

“Yes, I heard about it,” said Henry.

Miriam had taken him to lunch with Billie and Mum not long ago; and Henry had taken the two older women to the opera on another occasion, when he had been offered tickets. Far from being the anticipated and necessary wedge between parent and child, Henry, the new lover, characteristically failed Miriam-to her irritation. He not only liked Mum and Billie and shared their interest in the visual arts, he didn’t take Miriam’s complaints seriously. “Oh, she’s far better than most mothers,” he’d say. “You can talk to her about anything! You should have met my mother, a woman whose hysteria and depression could have infected Europe!”

Now Henry said to me, “I saw a woman last night, at Kama Sutra, a place we’ve started to go to. It was dark. She attracted me, I have to admit. But I couldn’t stop thinking that I recognised her. She was wearing heels and a mask and some other skimpy stuff. She was thinner than I remembered, but it was her posture, her hair that reminded me of Josephine.”

I sighed. “My Josephine?”

“Jamal, I had no idea what she was doing there, whether it was her first time or whether she was a regular.”

Josephine had always had a leisurely walk, daydreaming as she went, swinging her arms. I had often wondered, How can anyone walk so slowly and still move forward? We would go separately to parties, so as not to have to walk at different speeds.

I said, “It’s quite a change for Josephine, to go to a place like that. But most of her friends are just people she feels sorry for, and her boyfriend dumped her. At least that’s what I guessed. He was around for a while, then seemed to disappear. I asked Rafi, who said she found him boring.”

Henry said, “I went into a bit of a panic. Miriam was busy. I lost my excitement. I knew it would be a big deal for you-for anyone. I followed her from room to room. She seemed completely distracted.”

“Did you talk to her?” He shook his head. “Did she recognise you or Miriam?”

“God, no. Even I haven’t spoken to anyone about it. I tell Miriam everything and hope for the same from her. But this was private.”

Like most people in the house, I’d been drinking since before lunch. There had been coke too, brought around by the staff with drinks, which sobered me up briefly and enabled me to keep on drinking. The wind was fresh and the day was clear. I was beginning to take to the countryside. I had a joint in my pocket, which Henry and I smoked as we trod across the fields. By the time Henry had finished, I was pretty gone, feeling as sad and empty as I had when Ajita, Valentin and Wolf all left me.

He said, “I guess there’s no going back now-if you ever thought about that. And I suspect you did.”

“Yes, I did. My wife still fascinates me.”

“Jamal, I’m worrying about you!”

“You’re a good friend, but don’t let it spoil your day. I guess I should be looking after her. It’s what she always wanted, but she made sure I failed at it, over and over.”

“Will you say something to her?”

“I doubt it. All I heard was that she was speed-dating.”

He laughed. “Thank Christ you never worked as a therapist with couples.”

“It’s lucrative work, I hear. Plenty of demand.”

Henry said, “Mind you, what am I saying? A cursory glance at the early analysts and their disciples and colleagues will show what a bunch of perverts, suicides and nutters they were, apart from Freud. Completely human, then. But at least they knew one true thing.”

“What’s that?”

“You either love or fall sick.”

That night most of us were too coked up to eat much, but Miriam and Henry were hungry, and I sat with them and Ajita at supper. Henry hardly noticed that he was being served by uniformed staff, but Miriam insisted on helping with the washing up.

That Saturday evening, in one of the barns a low stage had been constructed. The staff had set up lights and brought in numerous instruments. Crates of wine and beer as well as bottles of vodka and tequila were placed at the bottom of the stage. People sat around on chairs, and those, like me, who found it difficult to stay upright lay on cushions on the floor.

However close to unconsciousness I might be, I didn’t want to miss Charlie Hero playing an acoustic version of “Kill for Dada,” which he’d first recorded in the 70s with the Condemned.

Alan pushed Mustaq forward. There was much applause and excitement. Mustaq didn’t want to play, but he would obey Alan. So Mustaq, now becoming George, sat at the piano. He was quiet for a moment and then began to doodle, waiting to see what might come. When the notes took shape, they became a terrifyingly honest and personal account of Neil Young’s “Helpless,” as good as the version of that song I preferred, sung by k. d. lang. I was beginning to see why the former Mushy Peas was a famous pop star.

Ajita, now in a little denim skirt, joined him for the chorus with a tambourine, swaying and laughing. When she pulled me up to join her, even I couldn’t resist. My dance moves hadn’t evolved since the 70s. The difference between then and now was the ghost standing between us, her father.

Later, after Ajita and I had smooched-“Smooch, my darling, is a word I haven’t used for some time”-Karim and Charlie harmonised on “Let’s Dance,” Karim playing some groovy bass, and Karen throwing her thong and then her Manolos at him. I think I saw her later with a servant, trying to retrieve a Manolo from a tangle of wires behind the stage.

Ajita had danced with Henry and Miriam, and we shared a bottle of champagne on the lawn as we smoked and cooled down. Then we went back to hear Mustaq play “Everyone Has Their Heart Torn Apart, Sometime,” which he dedicated to me, its only begetter.

Don’t ask me when, but the party turned into a rock’n’roll session with anyone who could play anything jamming, and Mustaq beating the piano like Jerry Lee Lewis. Henry couldn’t wait to get naked, dancing as though swatting away killer bees, as if he’d wasted the 60s and needed to catch up. Miriam danced next to the speakers in bra and pants, wanting everyone to see her tattoos. She’d shown them to Ajita, explaining the idea and provenance of each one. Ajita, appalled and fascinated, had seemed to think, by the end, that her life would be improved by the addition of a “tat.”

I can remember watching Mustaq help his sister out of the room and upstairs, and seeing a haunted, exhausted look on her face, one I’d never seen before. I cannot recall what time the staff carried me up to bed. Apparently, they were busy with bodies all night. I know I couldn’t even spark up my lighter to hold it aloft.

“It was a major catastrophe,” Mustaq laughed, the next day.

I do remember getting up to pee an hour or so after I’d passed out and seeing, as I walked past Karen’s door, her and Karim Amir fucking. At least I thought it was Karen, and maybe it was Karim. Someone else was asleep on the floor at the end of the bed, or maybe they weren’t asleep, because there was moaning from elsewhere in the room.

I stood there a moment, took a quick shower, cleaned my teeth and the blood out of my nose, and went in there with them, falling into a pit of bodies. I can remember sitting propped up against a wall naked, smoking and talking with Karim about South London and the Three Tuns in Beckenham High Street, which now apparently had a Bowie plaque but not a Charlie Hero one.

Charlie himself was going at someone, perhaps one of the waitresses from the town. I can even remember, with some gratitude, Charlie caressing my back from behind when it was my turn, though I’d rather he hadn’t said, “Go on, old fella, ’ave it,” as I knew he was certainly posher than both Karim and me.

The next day, when Karen and I left for London, Ajita was standing in the yard, waving to us. She would stay in the country for a few more days before going to Mustaq’s London house.

While Karen sat in the car, Ajita and I embraced and promised to phone each other later. Then she kissed me on the mouth; I could feel her tongue waiting for me. She pinched and tickled me, as she used to.

“Why are you laughing?”

“You,” she said. “It can’t only be a hangover. You look as though you’ve just seen a ghost. But then I guess you have.”

Karen was gunning the engine irritably and banging her hands on the steering wheel.

As soon as I got in she said, “At least you have the decency to leave with me.”

“What?”

“I know how tricky you are. I sleep with the door open and I saw that woman sneaking out of your room, the first night. You were quick. Busy weekend, eh?”

“Karen, you are crazy.”

“You waited for her all that time and now don’t you like her?”

“You can’t go back.”

“And you don’t want to go forward?”

“I wish we didn’t have to leave this house.”

“You get any rest?”

“Rest?” I said. “I’m ready for rehab.”

“Excellent.”

I asked her not to give me her account of the previous night; I didn’t want to recall it. She said she’d pin her lips, which was unusual for her, but she giggled a little. “Impotent, eh?”

Mostly, though, she was worrying about Karim and whether he would get in touch again. If he was going to appear on I’m a Celebrity…, he’d be in demand from other females, and she wanted to make the most of him before this.

However much you dislike the country, you drive back into the city on a Sunday night after a weekend away and your heart sinks: the dirt, the roughness, the closeness of everyone and everything, so much so that you can almost believe you like leaving London.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

On Sunday mornings most of the population of Britain, teenagers aside, can be found in the park, strolling, jogging, walking the dog. On Sundays, Rafi and I played football with other fathers-actors, film directors, novelists-and their sons, ranging in age from five to twelve. The wives and girlfriends sat on benches on the touchline, drinking lattes, distracting their girls and helping the boys with their boots and laces.

The fathers didn’t want to embarrass themselves by appearing to have made an effort, but the kids came dressed for the match even though the goal at one end was two trees and, at the other, bags and discarded tops. The pitch was muddy and broken, with a pool of water to one side, into which numerous children plunged, kicking out and usually falling over.

Rafi trotted across this in the full Christmas-present Manchester United kit, sweatbands on each wrist as well as a captain’s armband, shin pads and immaculate Nike Total 90s in silver. Occasionally, he sported other shirts, those of Juventus or Barcelona, which I had picked up for him when attending conferences in Europe, but apart from the unrepeated “Arsenal incident,” he would not wear the shirt of another British club. His hair was glued up like a stiff brush, and he wouldn’t head the ball for fear of mussing it. If he did score-which he often did, being quick, persistent and surprisingly strong-we relived it repeatedly, acting it out in the kitchen.

It’s well known that you have to be wary when telling people you support the Red Devils. If you can’t give a convincing reason, you risk being accused of merely following a successful and fashionable club. My reasons were impeccable, and nicely obscure. I’d liked football as a boy and played most days in the park, but lost interest as a teenager when I realised girls preferred music to football.

I became interested again only when Eric Cantona, a Frenchman then playing for Leeds, joined Manchester United in 1992, “transforming the fortunes of the club,” as they say on the sports pages. Man United began to win cups again. Cantona was the only footballer I’d heard of who’d had psychoanalysis; not only that, it was a Lacanian analysis. When he was playing for Nîmes and was then transferred to Leeds, he suffered much anxiety at leaving his analyst. He said, “When I am in analysis, it is like an oil change. I am in my best form, I play my best. Yes, I must start again. It is no longer a curiosity but a necessity. As a matter of fact, everyone should have the courage to have done one. Everyone should at the very least read Freud and Groddeck.”

A psychoanalysed midfielder who once inflicted, during a match, a vicious two-footed kung fu kick on an abusive Crystal Palace supporter, as well as reading the crazy Groddeck-the “wild” analyst who Freud admired, and one of the first to investigate psychosomatic medicine-was too much to resist. I was Man United for life, and so would be my flesh and blood.

I had wondered whether I might have asked Ajita to join us in the park; she and I had been chatting on the phone every day, getting to know one another again. But she had invited Rafi and me to the country, where she had returned with Mustaq “to relax,” after only a brief visit to his house in Soho. I had considered returning to Mustaq’s country place; although I was nervous of the relationship with Ajita going too fast, I did have plenty to say to her. But Rafi had refused, not wanting to spend the weekend with “only lame grown-ups,” even if one of them was a rock star.

All the fathers were enthusiastic about the Sunday-morning game, and competitive too. The other families socialised with each other, the kids in and out of each other’s houses. Rafi and I didn’t do that, but when I ran into any of the other fathers, I was pleased to see them. It was hard to dislike anyone you played football with, though all the boys would get upset or even feel rejected if no one passed to them. Like me, Rafi was a bad loser. As a younger boy he was the sort to pick up his ball and walk off if a goal was scored against him.

I was looking forward to getting back to my place, where I would sigh and sink down like an exhausted dog. Football was the only physical exercise I got or wanted; by the end, I felt as though I’d been rolled down the side of a hill in a barrel. Still, I considered a goal I’d headed from a corner taken by Rafi to be the second greatest moment of my life. (The first was his birth, of course.) I had lumbered in from outside the box, catching the ball on the forehead and briefly blinding myself. Light returned, with cheering. The ball had flown between the two trees, actors were ruffling my hair and Rafi had climbed onto my back.

After the match, the adults and kids sat on benches outside the tea-house, eating crisps and drinking hot chocolate. Going into the public toilet, I discovered three semi-undressed Polish men having a stand-up wash. One perched on one leg with his foot out while another man soaped it. Scattered around, there were clothes and bags. Lots of Poles slept rough in the area; if they could survive for three years, they’d become entitled to state benefits. As I left, two policemen were rushing towards the toilets.

Outside, four pretty girls-two of them from Rafi’s school-had appeared and gathered around the boy. Dressed in boots, miniskirts and numerous bits of bright bling, they stood close to one another, chattering about mobile phones. They were dressed a little extravagantly for the park, but one of them had rung Josephine earlier, who’d told them where Rafi was. He was a favourite among the girls at school. They’d come to see him play football.

“Did you see my goal?” he said.

He wasn’t looking at them but was aware, from the little amused smile on his face-which reminded me of my father-that they were looking at him. As they talked about his goal, he shook his head, as if at the daftness of all they had to say.

His pose was cool, his mussed hair looked good. His jewellery and clothes were always carefully chosen in H &M. The previous weekend we’d gone to the sales, where I’d been looking for clothes for myself, and returned with bags full of boy gear. He looked better than me in every way, more hip and stylish, and more handsome. That was how it had to be. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help feel a pang of both bitterness and regret. Sometimes, all you wanted was to be fancied. Why had I always been less confident and far more anxious than he appeared to be? I couldn’t resist envying him the years of pleasure with women he had ahead of him.

The girls wanted to leave; they were nervous, convinced a man was watching them through the trees. They arranged to meet up later with Rafi at the shopping centre, their favourite place, where they’d help him choose new trainers.

“I know how to be cool,” he said to me on the way home. “And I don’t even wear designer, apart from the D and G belt, unless I’m really in the mood.”

I rang the bell of Josephine’s place, the house I’d lived in but never much liked. It was on three floors, with two rooms on each and a decent-size garden. At the back was the shed where Rafi played his drum kit and guitars, and where he held sleepovers. Regarding the place, I remembered one of my favourite jokes, which went: Why marry? Why not just find a woman you hate and give her your house?

“What are you giggling at, fat-old-man-now-out-of-breath?” Rafi asked.

“I can’t tell you. Didn’t I play well today?”

“You should be with the disabled.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re losing your hair, too. When you bend over, I can see your skull. It’s pretty horrible, bringing deep shame on our family.”

Today, as we’d left the park, he’d asked how much longer I thought he and I would be able to play football together, in the same team. The question surprised me: this sense of the future, of transience, seemed unusual in kids his age.

“You see, I’m twelve and have to start playing more seriously,” he told me. “I want to join a proper team. You can drive me there, but you’ll only be able to watch.” He adopted an American accent: “Punk, will you be sorry for what you’ve done, and will you live to regret it?”

As he waited on the doorstep in his football socks, banging his muddy boots against the wall, eager to tell his mother about the volley and knockin he’d scored, I decided to go into the house, if she didn’t stop me, to see whether anything peculiar was happening with her.

Occasionally I wondered whether I might start liking her again, but it wasn’t an idea I was enthusiastic about. The thought that occurred to me most regularly was that, if it weren’t for Rafi, we wouldn’t need to see one another. Of course I hated myself for wishing the boy away, as I wondered who I’d be and what other mistakes I’d have made if he hadn’t been born.

Josephine opened the door, and I stepped into the hall and followed her down the stairs, into the basement. She turned to look at me but said nothing.

Josephine and I had been arguing on the phone over Rafi’s education, and I have to admit I’d become a little agitated. He’d failed the entrance exams to two schools. These were highly academic places, and as Josephine said, the children there looked anaemic and stressed. I could only agree with her that these schools were expensive machines for turning out smart-white-boy clone drones. All the same, I had cursed the kid. Josephine pointed out that I hadn’t gone to such a place myself and refused to physically enter such schools. She also claimed I was being snobbish. I knew many parents whose kids had gone to those schools and couldn’t believe my own son hadn’t sauntered effortlessly through the gates. Apparently my competitiveness was making the boy rage and fume at home. He’d pulled his mother’s hair and argued about everything.

Josephine was right to emphasise that this was about his future rather than my own self-esteem, adding that I seemed to have turned into my father, who hadn’t been around and yet still expected us to be brilliant and successful. For my part, I had decided to stop my reproaches after asking Rafi rather aggressively, “So, what are you the best at in your class?” He’d thought about this a while before replying, “I’m the best looking.”

As a child, he’d liked his food separated on his plate. The beans couldn’t touch the potatoes, the potatoes couldn’t touch the fish fingers. Now I saw how pleased he was to see his mother and me in the same room, as he watched us closely, eager to see what was going on-investigating a marriage.

I sat at the dining-room table; Josephine brought me some tea. When she went to sit down, I noticed that Rafi had pulled her chair over, so that we were close together. He was making childish noises and gestures, as though pretending to be a baby for our benefit, to remind us that we were a family.

Josephine was a woman who said little; she had no small talk nor much big talk. As I was comfortable with silence, we might as well have been statues.

Her father the abuser: drunk, crazy, run over trying to cross a motorway, some poor fucker carrying the memory of this madman rearing up in front of him. And the daughter, petrified for life, burning with anxiety, as though a car were coming at her forever.

Left with the exhibitionist mother, what Josephine liked-and hated in herself-was to be anonymous and silent, as though she’d never been able to grow out of the idea that the well-behaved are the most rewarded. Many of my friends forgot her name. Both of her therapists did that, and she’d angrily left therapy almost as soon as she’d started. It was inevitable that someone like Miriam, who Josephine liked to call an “attention seeker,” would make her annoyed. This, I liked to point out, was how she recognised how competitive the world was, and that, by making yourself more attractive, or noisy, you might be able to arouse more curiosity in others.

I was looking at her, the silence standing in for all that we might say. As ever, her fingers were not silent, but they drummed on the table, almost frantically, as though there was something inside herself she was trying to make dance.

Meanwhile, a mob of enquiring voices babbled in my head. Perhaps we had both hoped, as it ended, for some explanation, for a day when the knot of every misunderstanding would be combed out, strand by strand.

“Why don’t you hold hands?” Rafi said, grinning.

“I don’t want to drop my tea,” I said.

We were both anxious about him growing up. Me, because I wished I’d had more children and lived with them-I liked it when he brought his friends to my flat-and her because she feared his growing independence and sexuality, which she’d encouraged in him even as it programmed him to move away from us.

I asked her, “Been going out? Seen anyone?”

If there was a pause before she answered, I knew she had taken a tranquilliser. Usually she took them in the evening with wine, reading the label aloud: “Do not operate heavy machinery,” “Keep away from children.” “That’s good advice,” I’d say. Anything with -pam on the end, as in temazepam, lorazepam or diazepam, she liked. Polythene Pam, I called her. But as she didn’t like to be dependent on anything or anyone, she had begun to ration herself.

“Not really,” she said eventually. “I’m looking after Rafi, aren’t I? You went to Ajita’s brother’s place. Rafi showed me George’s autograph.”

“Yes, with Henry and Miriam.”

“They’re together, are they? Good of you to help them.”

I said, “If you need a babysitter in the evenings, I can always come over here and work. It would be a pleasure to see Rafi-and to see you, however briefly.”

“Yes? Thank you,” she said. “That’s kind.”

It wasn’t long before I stood up.

“Let me make you another cup of tea,” said Rafi.

“That would be a first,” I said, kissing his head. “But I have to go.”

As I was leaving, he slipped a CD into my hand. “For you, Dad.” It was one he’d burned for me, of some of his current favourites, Sean Paul, Nelly, Lil Jon. What I had once done for him, he was now doing for me.

The door closed behind me like a gunshot. Unconsciousness on a Sunday afternoon was one of the few pleasures of middle age. When I began to see my first patients, I’d learned to sleep between appointments. I could lie on my back on the floor and sleep immediately, sometimes for twenty minutes, or even for ten.

But today I felt so moved and desperate after leaving Rafi and Josephine-him waving at me from the window, after holding me and saying, “Daddy, don’t die today. If you lived here you’d be safe”-that I went home, showered and made a phone call.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

No other country has anything quite like a London basement. You turn sharply off the street and clamber down slippery and narrow steps into an echoey chamber, go through a door and find yourself separate from the clamour, underneath the city, where everything is cooler. It is like crossing a border from a maelstrom into an easy country.

I was in a dark, narrow hallway with several doors off it. I said to Madame Jenny, who had let me in, “I had a feeling that the Goddess might need help with her homework.”

“She does, dear, she does.” She took my coat. “How are you, Doctor? We haven’t seen you for a while. We even got you a Christmas card. Do you still want it?”

“I’d be delighted.”

The turbulent turn of the century-from the nineteenth to the twentieth-had been giving the Goddess some difficulty. In my view she spent too long on her essays and in the end got muddled and upset. Madame Jenny was proud of all her girls and was chuffed when I called them “intellectuals.” “Yes,” she said, “the girls in other places are not so bright as ours.”

“Nor as sexy.”

As I walked through the hallway, Madame Jenny said, “She’s expecting you.” I had phoned earlier, of course; like me, they only worked by appointment. “Otherwise it’s a madhouse rather than a whorehouse.”

“Here she is, sir,” said Madame Jenny, leading me into the room.

It was fittingly dim, the walls painted maroon. I held the Goddess for a moment, kissing her blond ringlets and stroking her face.

I paid her and said, “I’ve been looking forward to seeing you, Goddess.”

“Where have you been? I hope you haven’t been seeing any other tarts.”

“I wouldn’t even dream of it.”

“How do you want me?” she asked, thrusting out a hip and showing me the end of her tongue.

I contemplated the wall, which was covered in costumes on hangers; on the other wall were the whips. I asked her to dress as an air hostess. My father, of course, had spent a lot of time on planes, which seemed exotic to me then. Once he gave me a BOAC shoulder bag.

She asked, “Which airline?”

“British Airways, I think.”

“Patriotic as ever.”

She went off with the costume. Sex was niche marketing at its best. At least they didn’t stick the prices on the wall, as they did in some establishments, on brightly coloured pieces of paper, charging separately for “hand,” “oral,” “position,” “69” and my favourite, “complete.” I recalled that apparently, in the old days, brothels liked to feature a one-legged woman. I did have, a while ago, a patient who masturbated over his mother’s prosthetic leg. But I wasn’t here to think about work.

I removed my Converse All Stars, my trousers and my shorts. It was a little cold to take off my shirt. While I waited, hoping the Viagra and the painkillers were kicking in, I almost fell asleep, so contented did I feel, here where no one could reach me. I couldn’t think of a better way to squander time and money.

She returned, telling me that for her M.A. she was “doing” decadence and apocalypse, always a turn-of-the-century preoccupation, along with calls for a “return to the family.” Unfortunately, this millennium, our fears had turned out to be realities. It had been worse than we imagined.

Not that I could take in everything she said, as she was trussing my balls with a stocking, the house speciality-“tighter! tighter!”-and securing a vibrator to my dick with another one. No one could ever say she wasn’t good at what she did. She knew that, at my age, I needed all the stimulation I could get. Then she secured me to the bed with handcuffs. In the corner of the room was a cross to which you could also be tied, but I preferred the bed. I was keen to try most perversions, provided you could sit down for them.

She sat on me, flinging her hair across my face. She showed me her breasts, of which she was proud. They were “au naturel,” as she put it, which was unusual here and had become, in contemporary sexual life, something of a boon. “Enjoy them,” she said. “They’re yours.” She stood on the bed above me, bending forward, showing me her legs and butt, one of my favourite outlooks, I had to admit, along with the sight of the Thames from Hammersmith Bridge.

Untying me, she ordered me to kiss and lick her cunt and arsehole. I didn’t require much encouragement. This was where I loved to be and felt at home, as it were, with my face in the posterior of a whore, “a window on the world.” I wondered how many others had been in the same position with her today. Perhaps the only advantage of being older was that it took me a while to become aroused, and once so, it took me a long time to come.

Not that it mattered to me. I fucked her until I was tired, kissing her neck and ear and cheek, and she kissed the corners of my mouth. We adjusted easily to one another’s rhythm; mercifully forgoing a show, she made the quiet and slightly surprised noises of normal lovemaking. When I did eventually come-it was hard work; I felt as if I’d shoved a heavy train through a long tunnel-she raked my back with her nails.

We lay together. The Goddess was kissing my neck, cheeks and lips with her own full lips. I stroked and kissed her, as she told me I was a gentleman. She lay on me; I liked to feel the weight of her body, wondering not about the anonymity or dehumanisation that Lisa had talked about, but the abstract tenderness, which was more disturbing. The bewildering thing about anonymous sex was, as a lot of adults knew, not the alienation but, on the contrary, the intimacy and strong feeling. I can remember Dad reading Harold Robbins’s Never Love a Stranger. Only love strangers, more like…At least I had seen, a few years ago, that I was a naturally promiscuous person. I had realised this late, but not too late. Then something Paul Goodman had written came into my mind: “There is no sex without love, or its refusal.”

I considered Josephine walking around the Kama Sutra club, like a figure from Dante’s Purgatory. Ravenous, insatiable, perhaps bewildered, but pursuing something: the human desire to embody and manifest itself. Even then she doesn’t hurry. I still love her grace. I thought of my sister and best friend playing with the bodies of anonymous others. I felt as mystified as ever about the multiplicity and importance of human desire, and of how destructive and fulfilling it could be, with, often, the destructiveness sponsoring the achievement.

Josephine’s presence at Kama Sutra had surprised me: usually anxious and persecuted by unwanted thoughts, she kept away from extreme situations. Safety and stability suited her. She was ultrahygienic, too, with a cat’s narcissism, forever examining her body and rubbing unguents into it, like someone polishing the shell of a car with no engine. I had come to dread the trauma of sex with her. Her orders-faster, slower, harder, softer, more, less, in between, up, down-could only ever preclude abandonment. The need for love and its ultimate refusal-endless torment. I was angry with her anyway, as the relationship had successfully frustrated me for more time than I wanted to misuse. I put it to her once, “Are you sure love is supposed to be this kind of work?” She had not realised, and perhaps never would, how funny sex could be. Ajita and I used to laugh and laugh.

Yet now something must have moved in Josephine. I was curious to know what it was, but it was probably too late for me to find out. I had always thought she would make some kind of progress, though not with me.

“You’re not asleep?” asked the Goddess.

“Not quite.”

I thought: with a whore you pay for the right not to speak, not to have to give the most valuable thing-your words-to the woman.

She said, “You’re an eager, good little fucker-for an Englishman.”

“Thanks,” I murmured, mostly to myself. “Wanna hear a joke?”

“Oh yes!”

Her bright face was near mine, listening. All I wanted was to make her laugh. It occurred to me that I wanted my wife to be a whore, and my whores to be my partners.

I said, “A prostitute and a psychoanalyst spend the afternoon together. At the end each turns to the other and says, ‘That’s three hundred pounds, please!’”

She almost laughed. With the Goddess, what was almost as moving as the sex was the way, at the end, she removed the condom and cleaned your prick with a Kleenex-the care she took. Most whores didn’t bother with that; once you’d come, they wanted you out of there. It was a lazy Sunday, though, a quiet day for hookers. Any whore would tell you-and I saw two as patients-that Monday was their busiest day. After a weekend with their family, how many men couldn’t wait to rejoin their favourite paid slut?

I kissed her goodbye and tipped Madame Jenny, who was-as madams are everywhere in the world tonight-watching television while filling in a crossword. “Here, darlin’,” she said, handing me my Christmas card.

I swaggered out like a cowboy, sniffing my pussy fingers, full of laughter and disgrace.

I was also scared, but without knowing why.