Something to Tell You

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

In the car, when he was driving me back home after lunch, Bushy said, “Doctor, I hope you don’t mind me saying this to yer now, but Bushy’s got a funny feeling.”

“Is it affecting your driving?”

“Na. It’s about you.”

“Me?”

“Sir, I have to tell you-you’re being well looked at. Perceived. You know.”

“Perceived, you say. Perceived by whom?”

“A man.”

“A man? What sort of perceiving man? What are you talking about, Bushy?”

“I got this feeling-a freshness, a tingle-in me nose, which don’t betray me.”

“Go on, tell me about it.” As he was about to open his mouth, I said, “Hold on, Bushy. Are you absolutely certain I really need to know this stuff?”

Bushy was examining his nose in the mirror, running his nicotine finger down the centre of it. “Nothing strange about me today is there, boss?” He turned round. “Look into my face. At my…nose.”

I peered into a coarse landscape of blackheads, whiteheads, redheads, broken capillaries and holes. “All in order.”

“Yeah, right.” He went on, “I was saying, this guy who’s perceiving you-I reckon he might be dangerous.”

“Dangerous?”

“Very, very much so,” Bushy said, with some relish.

I had been enjoying the journey. Bushy knew the route I preferred, knew I liked to see what was happening in the Harvey Nichols window, keeping left at the Knightsbridge junction and swinging past Harrods until the V & A came into view on the right, and I could see what the latest exhibition was. The V & A was a place I’d go to relax sometimes. Being in a building-perhaps in any beautiful building which wasn’t a shop-where you could stroll about looking at art, enabled me to have good thoughts, even if I had Josephine with me: we liked to go there often.

After the V & A there wasn’t anything of much interest until we reached Gloucester Road. If I had the time, I’d get Bushy to drop me off outside the Gloucester Road bookshop, a secondhand place just up from the tube. I could spend half an hour in the basement there, and then go to Coffee Republic next door to read. My excitement and appetite for books-and the ideas they contained-hadn’t modified over the years. My shoulder bag was always weighed down with the numerous volumes I couldn’t wait to get inside me.

Like many taxi drivers, Bushy considered a journey an opportunity to express himself to a captive audience, but we’d been around enough together for him to know I wouldn’t listen or reply.

He said, “You’re off on one, I know. But I think you need to know this stuff. A man without this knowledge inside him could suffer consequences.”

“Is that right?”

It was a while before I could turn my brain round to concentrate on what he was saying, if anything. I was still thinking of what Karen had said over lunch.

Almost first thing in the morning, she had rung to invite me to the Ivy. There was some strange news she just had to give me. A reputation for listening to others can ruin your life. You can begin to feel like the village whore or, worse, a priest. But I hated to turn down an invitation to the Ivy.

Usually lunch there took too much time out of the day, as it was thirty-five minutes away by tube or car. However, on Mondays I had a patient who came to my door, gave me a cheque and shuffled away, head down, buying my time but not my presence. This gave me an extra hour. Bushy had turned out to be free; he drove me up to the Charing Cross Road and would pick me up later.

I was on time, and had a good nosy around the restaurant as I waited to be shown to the table. One of the assets of the Ivy was that the room was ideal: everyone could see everyone else without seeming intrusive. Today there was a good mixture of pop stars, actors, media executives, TV comedians and a couple of writers.

Karen had downed most of a bottle of wine by the time I arrived. I ordered a cappuccino and began to hear about Karen’s husband, Rob; their girls; and Rob’s girlfriend, Ruby, who had been to Disneyland while we were at Mustaq’s.

“I think I might have told you they were all at Disneyland, Jamal, but you won’t remember.”

“Won’t I?”

“You were pretty much out of it at George’s. I haven’t seen you that way for years.”

“Oh, Christ, I hope I didn’t make a fool of myself. I don’t much like to be drunk now.”

“Despite that, Jamal, you do tend to remember the details of a lot of things. They just cling to the underside of your sticky head.” She went on: “Now, this girl Ruby is at the LSE doing political science. She plays in a women’s football team, and makes documentaries about asylum seekers in her spare time. She wants to be a film director. Maybe she will be. She’s completely uninhibited and hip when it comes to sex. I asked him one time, What can she do that I can’t? A stupid question, don’t you think? Well, she takes her girlfriends along to join my husband in bed, a story which flustered me for days.”

“You wanted to be the friend?”

“How can I compete with this Ruby?”

“What else?”

“My youngest girl mentioned that Ruby was putting on weight. ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ I said. The other daughter then said, ‘It’s not fat, it’s a bump.’” Karen’s eyes must have either narrowed or widened here, and rapidly. “‘A bump?’ I asked. ‘A bump? Did you really say that? We’re fucked. That’s it. He’s never coming back now. Give me a minute, I have to take two of my pills.’ Pour me a drink, darling Jamal.”

I emptied the bottle for her. She leaned across the table and said to me, “The bastard’s starting again. Maybe he didn’t like it the first time. Now he’s going to be happy. The girls and I, and the family life we had for years, mean nothing to him. I have to admit that we imagined for ages that one day he’d walk back in through the door he went out of.”

“The girls are growing up,” I said. “You’ll have to find new things to do.”

She looked around the restaurant helplessly. “There are no men available, you know that. I won’t go with some urine-stained git on Viagra. And the girls, they’re teenage trouble, seeing their first boyfriends, they’re on the phone even more than me. They don’t want to see me bringing some bastard his tea on a tray.”

Not having time to look at the menu, I had one glass of champagne and ordered my favourites, the potted shrimps to start, followed by the fish cakes with chips. I didn’t notice what Karen was eating, but it wasn’t much.

I mentioned Henrietta, an acquaintance of ours, who made no secret of her liking for men and sex. I said, “Think how much pleasure she has. Far more than either of us. Men are in and out of her place all night, and she’s got three daughters.”

Karen said, “Henrietta? She’s got a big house. There are still men walking around in there lost, unable to find the front door. Anyhow, the other day she was sleeping with some political fool. She woke up, went downstairs and looked at his phone. He had messages from eight other women. He was no Adonis, of course.”

“She makes sure she gets what she needs.”

“You know what she said to me the other day? She’d trade it all in for someone who just wants to be with her. Oh, Jamal, what’s wrong with an alpha female like me apart from the fact that I’m old, fat and alcoholic? Who’s going to care for me, listen to me, make love to me?”

“You’re humiliated, you poor thing.”

She was sobbing. “Was I ever like Ruby? I was never that brilliant. There were always more intelligent and beautiful women in London.”

Karen had eaten little, but we did share a dessert. I despatched a double espresso. “What about Karim?”

“I didn’t hear from him, obviously. I called him a few times. He said he was busy preparing for his appearance on I’m a Celebrity…Get Me out of Here.”

“Have you thought of getting a therapist?”

“Don’t fucking say that to me!” she said wildly, as though we were still a couple. “Can’t we go to a hotel this afternoon? I’ll do anything you want.”

I got up and kissed her. “I have to work.”

She said, “It’s okay for you, you’ve got your girl back. Ajita,” she said slowly and with some scorn. “Are you dating her again? George told me she’s installed herself at his place. She came for a few days but now just refuses to go home. He doesn’t know what to do with her. She’s making him crazy.”

“Really?”

“Is that because of your influence?” She was holding my hand tightly. “Jamal, don’t you ever think about our son?”

“Sorry?”

“The one you wanted me to get rid of.”

She wouldn’t let me extricate myself. “Karen, please,” I said.

“What age would he be today, so big and strong and handsome?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I have no idea.”

“He could be having lunch with us! The parents of a murdered child are still its parents. I am absolutely certain you would have wanted more children!”

I was late already. When I managed to get away from her, she was looking around the restaurant for another table to join. Bushy was outside with the other drivers, and we took off, the car fragrant with air freshener.

After all this, and the champagne, I wanted to nap, but hearing of Bushy’s suspicions, I said, “Okay, let me have it. What’s going on with this perceiving man?”

“Yesterday, right, I’m parked up the street waiting to pick Miriam up from lunch with you when I noticed this bloke nosin’ yer from a car. An oldish man, kinda strange looking, well built. Your manor’s full of weirdos, but when I came back he was still there. Then he followed us-I know because I took an odd route especially. He’s been having a good look at you. You wouldn’t mess with him-”

“Maybe it’s one of my patients,” I said. “Or a patient’s spouse. When people start therapy, they sometimes separate from their partners, and the therapist is blamed. I’ve had people throw bricks through my window.”

I didn’t mention the fact that for a while Josephine would stand outside the flat when I was seeing patients, convinced I was having affairs with them. I could hear her yelling: “You’re not allowed to touch them, you know! You’ll be reported and struck-if not struck off!” I did also have a psychotic therapist colleague-not a patient but someone I’d attended conferences with-who began, after the publication of my first book, to stand outside my door handing out a written statement to my patients, saying what a phoney I was.

“Maybe,” Bushy said. “A man without a stalker is a nobody. But this one could be like that song-you know the one.”

“Which one? What are you saying?”

“‘Psycho Killer.’”

He started to sing it.

I said, “Right, right. Because?”

“Because he’s not spontaneous. We should check him out-now.”

“How can I check him out?”

Bushy told me what he required me to do and then said, “It would be to yer advantage.”

“Bushy, I have to see a patient now.”

“Shrinky, I’m insisting you better do what Bushy says.”

I did what he said. He dropped me at the corner of my street, and I walked to my flat with him driving behind. My patient was waiting outside the building.

After she’d gone, I phoned Bushy. “So?”

“When you came along the street as per advised, our character hid-sliding down in the car. I think it’s a rented motor. I’ll check him out and let you know what’s what.”

“You’re going to a lot of trouble, Bushy.”

“I’m worried. Miriam ordered me to keep an eye on you.”

“I don’t want her to know about this. She’ll get in a flap and start casting spells.”

I woke at four in the morning, wondering who was out there watching me. I wondered whether Mustaq had employed someone to keep an eye on me. He was the only person who had the money, as well as the motive, to do that. But what would he hope to see? Occasionally I’d go to the window and look out, but I saw no one.

My first patient was at seven the next morning: an Old Etonian in his fifties whose relationships with women had been wretched. Haunted by the idea that he will find the one who will complete him, therefore rejecting all others as wrong. The founding myth of heterosexuality: completion, the ultimate fulfillment.

My second patient was at eight: a woman who had been phobic about drinking water since childhood, after hearing a story about a dead bird in a water tank. Reaching the stage when she was unable to drink anything she thought had contaminated water in it, her life was being gradually annulled, until it was almost impossible for her to be with others socially.

At nine I had some toast and made another pot of coffee. I rang Bushy. “How’s my stalker?”

“Boss, as I speculated, it is a rented car. I followed him all the way into Kent. I thought we were going to end up in damned Dover. He kipped in a deserted street near a park.”

“Which part of Kent?”

He named the street, and I knew it, though not well. That part of Kent was close to the city and not far from the coast, and had plenty of the sort of houses favoured by criminals and pop stars. The street he mentioned was in the area where I’d grown up. That puzzled me. Why would he go there? Then it occurred to me that the street was closer to Ajita’s than to my old house. If it was one of Mustaq’s men, why would he sleep in a car there?

I asked, “What should we do?”

“I can’t bring him in and ask him questions meself,” Busy said. “I’d have to get geezers. That would cost yer.”

“I don’t want men,” I said. “I can’t afford it and I can’t get involved in anything lunatic.”

He could only laugh at my naivety. “You might already be up to the throat in the lunatic, Jamal. I reckon he’ll make his moves in the next twenty-four hours. He can’t hang around much longer. He’s perceived what he wants to perceive.”

There was a silence, then I said, “It sounds as though I’ll have to start taking this seriously. What we need is a photo.”

“I can do that.”

Bushy borrowed my Polaroid camera and later dropped by with the picture he’d taken. It was difficult to make out who it was, as Bushy was no Richard Avedon. Someone was asleep in a car. I could see a shoulder and an ear, but had no notion who they might belong to.

“I can’t wait anymore,” I said to Bushy on the phone. “I’m going to approach this guy. If I know him and he’s not scary, I’ll take him into the flat and try to talk to him. If I raise the blind, you come in.”

“Jesus no, there’s no way I’d advise that!”

“Don’t worry.”

Bushy said, “You don’t know what goes on half the time.”

“I don’t?”

“You think you can X-ray people with your eyes, but you can’t always.” He went on: “When I see you on the street, I always think: there goes the student.”

“Student?”

“With your worn jacket and uptight look, and always carryin’ books, head down, as if you don’t want to talk to no one…”

I put the phone down, a worried man with a worried mind, and went out of the house and approached the car.

The man was asleep, or at least his eyes were closed. I was about to knock on the window when he opened his eyes. He seemed to surge into life and wound down the window.

“Ah, Jamal! At last! Did you know it was me?”

“Hello, Wolf. My eyes are open,” I said, looking up the street to where Bushy’s car was parked.

“Can I come in?”

I said, “Let’s go to a café.”

“We have so much to talk about!”

“Why have you been hanging around out here?”

“I was afraid, nervous,” he said. “It’s been so long. But you do remember me?”

He was out of the car, embracing, kissing me and looking me over, as though wanting to see what remained after so many years.

He said, “I thought this moment would never come. Hallo, and hallo again, my dear, my most missed, friend. What an important moment this is-for both of us! The moment I’ve been waiting years for!”

I was looking at him too and said, “Perhaps like me you look the same, apart from your hair. My son says I get more and more hairy, except on my head, where it counts.”

“Your son?” he said. “I’m so glad for you. Is he here?”

“I hope he’s at school.”

“I’ve got to hear all about him. Will you tell me everything? Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

“Yes,” I said. “I am. Come right in.”

“Thanks,” he said. “This is beautiful. A beautiful moment.” He was looking up at my building. “London is so great. It feels like I’ve come home. This is where I belong-here with you again, my dear friend! You know, I’ve got the feeling it’s going to be like the old days again!”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Wolf refused a beer, and while I waited for the kettle to boil, he walked around taking everything in, “with the concentration of a bailiff” I might have said.

“You’ve done well,” he said. Suddenly he had become serious. “Since that night.”

“Which night, Wolf?”

“You’ve forgotten? I don’t believe you have. But people can put these little things aside if they are busy.” I was staring at him. He said, “The suburbs. We were in the Indian’s garage with Val.”

“Right.”

“A girl’s father.” His fist smashed into the palm of his other hand. “Pow! We got him! He took it-right?-and went down begging and crying.”

“Yes, yes.”

“Do you think about it?”

“Not often now, no.”

“But you did once?”

“Yes,” I said. “A lot.”

“What conclusion did you come to?”

“That it would be pointless to torment myself over it.”

“That’s it? That is all you think about it?”

“There was no possible resolution. I quit the useless questions. They were a vice costing me time and money.”

He said, “As a young man, you were intelligent and sure of yourself. Now you’re a doctor.”

I said, “Only a talking one, I’m afraid.”

“I could do with some of that talking.”

“Why’s that?”

He hung his head like an ashamed child. “Jamal, I have come to you for a reason, and not only because of the depth of our friendship. Things have not gone well for me.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It was my first murder. It started me off. Since then I’ve been murdering others.”

“You liked it that much?”

He looked up at me and shook his head. His father had been a German cop, his mother was English. Brought up in Munich, he’d been living in London for five years when I met him, speaking English without an accent.

Now, a man almost worn out, he had the head of a middle-class respectable man but with a powerful, desperate, bitter aspect which I recognised from juvenile thieves I’d seen: those who were looking to take that which no one would give them. As he had the assassin’s sunken eyes and the direct but confused look of a psychotic, I thought I should decide whether he would become violent. But Wolf had a cringing side which suggested he’d rather get something from me than hurt me.

Maria, who had come by to drop off the shopping, looked into the room. “Maria, this is an old friend from my student days.” She nodded at him. She knew that, if he were a patient, I’d have shut the door.

“Who’s that?” he asked. “What is she doing?”

“She looks after me and the patients,” I said. “She shops and washes too.”

“You’re professional,” he said. “Has she gone now?”

“I don’t know. But carry on, please.”

“She’s made me nervous. Is she watching us? Where did she get those eyes from?”

“Her mother.”

I sat down opposite him. It was a while before he began again. “Okay,” he said at last.

He told me he had been living with a rich widow for years, a woman older than him who had become senile. A month ago her relatives had had strong-arm guys remove him when he attempted to get his name on her properties, including small hotels, which she owned and he’d maintained, even rebuilding some of them. The family considered him a sponger, though he’d looked after her better than they had, doing every-thing for her. Since then he’d been living in a room in Berlin and was in a bad way.

“You must be furious.”

He said, “I’m a man who’s been robbed and left with nothing.”

“How did that come to be? You were always intelligent and resourceful. I liked your initiative.”

There was no doubt I’d long been fascinated by certain sorts of psychotics. I liked their focus and certainty, their lack of symptoms, the way they shrugged off the neurotic fears and terrors which made life so difficult for the rest of us. Psychotics appeared unworried; they could take a lot of criticism and made good politicians, leaders, generals. Unfortunately, their weakness was paranoia, which could become very severe.

And with someone like Wolf, there was conversation; there was even fine intelligence. But, after a short time, about half an hour, you’d begin to feel restless, irritable, registering the fact that your emotional world is not really present to the other person. Not only that, they seem to be bearing down on you with demands you cannot answer. You begin to feel suffocated, assaulted even. You might want to run away.

Wolf told me that after “the garage incident,” he and Val had worked on boats in the South of France. Val had also worked in casinos. They had found that everyone there was rich, or wanted to be; it was expensive. The place was awash with criminals full of large ideas.

“We needed a big coup. Then we put all our money together. I went to Syria. I’m driving the car, it’s full of hash-the pure stuff-which I’m going to smuggle into Europe in tins of pineapple-I know how to do that-when I’m arrested. When they say they think I’m an Israeli spy, I know I’m fucked, and I am.”

“Why would they think you were a spy?”

“I had cameras and a citizens band radio. Jamal, I can tell you, three years in a Syrian jail doesn’t make anyone feel attractive.”

Sometimes he was kept in a hole in the ground, as well as in a small box. He was beaten and given electric shocks. He began to believe in God. He thought about grass and birds. He had a heart attack, murdered a Syrian in a fight over food (this, it turned out, was his only other murder) and, following pressure from the German government, was eventually released.

He went back to Germany, broken. During his rehabilitation he had taken up with different women. He said his one gift was to tell his story and induce sympathy. He had made the most of it.

Wolf and I had been talking for ninety minutes.

“Wolf,” I said, tapping my watch, “I have to go and see my son.”

“London’s the most expensive city in the world,” he said.

“Blame the government.”

He made no move to leave. He was restive. He wanted to stay. He said he’d sleep on the floor, he only needed a blanket, the car was cold and he had nowhere else to go. I said it wasn’t possible. I didn’t want to spend a night with him in the flat, not being convinced he’d leave the next day.

He was watching me. I couldn’t help thinking: the present drags us back into the past, where all the trouble began, and which returns with its debt, wanting to be repaid. But who owes what to whom?

“Okay, my friend, if that’s how you feel,” he said and, at last, got up. “It’s been good to see you again.”

As he was almost at the door, he put his hand on my arm and asked me for 50,000 pounds. I couldn’t stop myself snorting loudly and saying, “I wish I had that kind of money myself.” Then I asked, “Why is it you want money so much?” He seemed confused by the question. “Not that I’m trying to put you off.”

Suddenly he became angry and held my arm tightly, which was more painful than I’d have imagined. He said that if I didn’t make at least a decent instalment-around 10,000 pounds would be “courteous”-he would see that “the right people” learned about my murdering.

He emphasised that the amount wasn’t random. He was intending to buy a derelict house, decorate it himself and rent out rooms. If I could only give him “a start,” he wouldn’t ask for more, in fact he would then help me. Wolf may have had a strange mind, but he knew the housing market was where the money was.

I didn’t know what to do or say, apart from, “But that’s ridiculous. Anyway, you won’t get a house for 50,000 pounds. You’d be lucky to get a front door.”

“It will be a deposit. You know I’m not afraid to work. I could build a house from the dirt up if need be. All I ask is for that initial start.”

I shoved him away. I thought he was going to come back at me, but he stood there watching me.

I said, “I haven’t got any more time to discuss it. Never touch me again.”

“You’re going to have to make time. This is important.” At the door he said, “Why didn’t you ask about Val?”

“Why, is he outside too, waiting to come in and ask for money?”

“You really want to know?”

“All right.”

He said, “He did himself in.”

“He did?”

“While I was in jail. I found out about it from one of his women.”

“Was he depressed?”

“Always. The killing made him more so. He dwelled on it. He was more sensitive than us, and not so strong. He didn’t blame you, but he might as well have. It was his turning point, sending him into hell.”

I said, “I liked him. Lots of women liked him.”

“They couldn’t save him.” Wolf was looking at me. “The whole murder-I feel like my soul has been dyed black by it. Don’t you?”

I realised I was whispering, though no one could overhear us. “It was an accident. We wanted to scare him. We might have been young fools, but we were on the side of the angels.”

“The Hells Angels?” He laughed bitterly. “It doesn’t matter. It comes back. No one told me that. I was naive, but made into a fool. Jamal, I need to get it out, you know. Better in than out.”

“Why invite punishment? You’ve been in jail. You liked it enough to go back?”

“What do they say over here? You can do the time if you’ve done the crime.”

I asked, “Who have you told?”

My phone rang. It was Rafi. Wolf looked at me and smiled. “You’re afraid. I must have scared you. You’re shaking.”

I could hear Rafi saying, “Dad, Dad, you’re coming, aren’t you?”

I was watching Wolf while saying to my son, “Yes, of course. I’m on my way.”

Rafi said, “We’ve been working all day on this thing for you. I was thinking about it all night.”

“Rafi, I wouldn’t miss it for anything.” I turned off the phone and said to Wolf, “What we’ve been talking about-it’s not something I’d want my son to know. It wouldn’t help him to think of me that way.”

“As a murderer?”

“You see that, don’t you?”

“You’re lying to him.”

I said, “He’s not entitled to know everything about me. I don’t consider myself to be a murderer.”

“In your heart you wanted to kill that man and you dragged me into it. You hated him and wanted him out of the way so you could have the daughter for yourself.”

I repeated, “Who have you told?”

“Not many. Don’t worry so much. A few women. You?”

“I have no desire to confess.”

“Not even to the mother of your son? What is her name?”

“Josephine.”

“You were with her more than ten years.”

I said, “I’ve told her nothing.”

“Was that difficult?”

“Honesty is always a temptation. But no.”

“You must have thought you’d covered your tracks. Then I turn up, bringing it all back.” He said forcefully, “Where’s the girl now? Have you seen her? The Indian one?”

“Ajita?”

“Where does she live? Is she still alive? What does she think of it all?”

I was shaking my head. “I haven’t seen her since then. She went to India. I lost all of you. It was terrible for me. My mind wasn’t my own for some time.”

He interrupted. “But if you did see her, would you tell Ajita the truth, would you confess?”

“No.”

“But surely you believe you should, that it will release you?” He went on: “We were a tight group, a little gang of four. In prison I thought about it often, to keep myself alive, reliving the good times in West London, the meals, the laughter, the drinks, the card games, the cinema, with everything ahead of us. Jamal, I want to see her again.”

“Why?”

“I tried to spend time with her alone, away from you. She came with me, twice. Don’t worry, I didn’t sleep with her. You were too young for her, and immature. You didn’t understand how much she wanted you. You seemed to turn away. But she refused me. She loved you.”

I’d walked him to the door, but now he was back in the room, striding about as though looking for someone else to tell the story to. I picked up a pair of jeans from a pile on the floor; I found some money in my pocket, pulled it out and went to the front door with it, knowing he’d follow me.

As he was leaving, I gave him the jeans plus a hundred pounds I had received from a patient earlier, told him to find a cheap hotel, and asked him to phone me and arrange a time to come back.

I watched him drive away. I’d imagined he might calm down, and be easier to deal with on another day. But now I wasn’t so sure. As Eric Cantona memorably said, “When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.”

I rang Bushy and asked him if he’d come over. He said, “You sound panicked. Is he hurting you yet?”

“I need to talk tonight.”

He said he wouldn’t be in my neighbourhood but in his office and local, the Cross Keys, in Acton, attending to company matters. It was a bit of a walk for me, but I needed time to think.

I tucked my iPod into my shirt pocket; with my hood up, street robbers wouldn’t be able to see the white wire or the telltale headphones.

First, however, I had to see Rafi. The boy had promised me a treat.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Rafi had decided to cook me a meal. When he and I had played football in the park a few days earlier, he had said, looking me over, “Man, you don’t look right. It’s not that your hair’s funny or your clothes more strange than usual. But you’re lonely-looking and thin, and I’ve never said that about you before. Old man, you’re not going to die, are you?”

If his generosity surprised me, it was because I’d noticed he was about to become a teenager. He loved mirrors, as I once did. His upper lip was dark now; soon he’d be shaving. Whereas before he was happy to talk, indeed to chatter away interminably, now he kept his words sullenly to himself. But not all of them. He could be cruel, abusive even, trying to hurt, as though trying to make a space between us. How I’d been missing his younger self, when he’d let me read to him and kiss him, and he slept between us, taking up most of the bed. When he needed me more.

I arrived at the house in the early evening to find my prodigal hot, his face shining and luminous with enthusiasm. I could smell burning.

“Hello, old man. Still alive?” he said, leading me in. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt under a pinny with the words THE MOTHER written on it. “Did you know-you can sniff my hair if you want?”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t disarray it. It’s punked-up specially.”

I pressed my nose into the fragrant spikes. “What is it?”

“Banana shampoo.”

“Yummy.”

“It doesn’t mean I’m gay because I like fashion.”

“But you like pink too.”

“Not as much as I used to. Is that a sign of gayness too?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t joke me, Dad. You know I kissed a girl.”

“Which girl?”

“You will never know that.”

Josephine had helped Rafi with the shopping and chopping before going for a run in the park. On a brightly patterned tablecloth, a place was set for one, along with the best, heaviest cutlery.

I noticed a folded piece of paper with the word menu written on it in wavy writing. I read: “Omelette du jour (omelette of the day). Fresh tomato and courgette. Very good quality eggs and butter (fresh). Fresh avocado and potatoes. Shallot (fresh) and fresh good quality cooking oils.” Under “pudding” he’d written “pistachio ice cream”; under “drinks” he was offering “water, cider.” He’d signed it, or rather, autographed it, at the bottom.

I was supposed to be having a serious talk with him, and wondered if this was the right time for it. Recently Josephine and I had met in a nearby deli with long tables and the papers spread all over them, a place full of mothers who’d just dropped their kids off at school. After, she was off to be interviewed for a job in a college psychology department.

I’d got there early to read the papers and hear the women’s voices. When I looked up and she was walking towards me, I was glad to see her; it was still her beauty and vulnerability I was drawn to, and the love in her eyes.

Though it was warm, I noticed she was wearing one of my scarves; she would always borrow my clothes, particularly the expensive ones-the raincoats she liked-though she was taller and thinner than me.

She wanted to talk because Rafi had been upsetting her, calling her, several times, “a fucking bitch and a ho.” He’d pointed his fingers at her and threatened to “blow her away” if she insisted he went to bed at a certain time.

She said, “As if America hasn’t done enough damage in the world! He takes these rap lyrics seriously. I hate all the aggressive gestures and shouting. What is it with boys and gangsters? You would say the boy has to move away from the mother. But why would they think that being a man is being a bastard?”

“It’s cartoon. The bling and posing is no more real than a pantomime dame in costume.”

“Not all those kids can tell the difference. I’ve decided to throw his CDs out. That stuff is now banned from the house! I don’t care that you hate censorship.”

I said. “It’s too late already. But I am sorry he spoke to you like that. Perhaps he’s anxious about you going to work. He thinks you’ll have less time for him.”

“Oh God,” she said, getting up and gathering her things. “Perhaps that’s it. I knew you’d make me feel worse. How did I ever waste ten years with you?”

Now, as I sat there looking at the evening newspaper, he came in and out of the kitchen. “Are you looking forward to it, dude?”

“I can’t wait.”

“It’s cooking up beautifully. There’s a lot of things I can cook now. Some of my dishes are legendary.”

“You’re lucky to have a good mother who taught you. Miriam and I ate bread and dripping, and later, burgers, chips and cakes.”

“D’you feel a fool for leaving here?”

“Sometimes.”

“Come back then. Don’t you love Mum?”

“I like her a lot. She’s looked after you brilliantly.”

“That’s not love.”

“It’ll happen to you,” I said. “Marriage, separation, kids here and there, the whole disintegrated thing. No one gets married at twenty-five and stays with their partner until they’re seventy unless they are deficient in imagination. May you have many wives, son. And that’s a curse!”

“Thanks, punk and role model.”

Eventually, like someone carefully carrying a birthday cake into a crowd, he brought the omelette out on a huge plate. He opened the napkin in my lap and gave me the knife and fork. He didn’t sit at the table with me but stood with his elbow on my shoulder.

“Start before it gets cold.” As I took each mouthful, he offered advice. “Put some salad with it, Dad.” “Mix up the things more. Here’s some bread.” “Don’t you like cucumber? Salad is good for you.”

The omelette was filled with melted cheese and a mixture of chopped tomatoes and courgette. Thus supervised, I was taking my last mouthful when he ducked back into the kitchen and came out with a bowl of pistachio ice cream. As it was, I could barely move.

“Deep, eh?”

“Not only deep but heavy too,” I said.

“Have you ever had a better meal?”

“How could I have had?”

“You’ll love this,” he said, putting the spoon in my hand. He went to a shelf, removed a bottle and poured me about half a glass of his mother’s vodka. Catching a whiff of it, he said, “Smells like petrol. But this ice cream is your favourite. Mum and I had to go out specially to get it.”

When I was eating my ice cream and finishing the vodka, he sat down and ate his own omelette, pouring ketchup over it until it was a red mess.

After the meal I lay down on the floor and slept briefly, while beside me Rafi sat cross-legged, attached to the TV by wires, clicking away like a widow at her knitting. Isolated figures murdered one another in what resembled the deserted Roman cityscapes of de Chirico.

I was woken up by his mother caressing my shoulder. “Did you enjoy it?”

I got to my feet slowly. “It was the best meal of my life.”

She and I still considered one another warily, like kids after a fight, both wondering which one will restart the conflict. But our fury with one another was diminishing; I felt reluctant to leave right away.

My favourite thing had always been to watch her in the house as she walked about, sat, combed her hair, showered, dressed, read. All day she was different, her numerous moods transforming her look, and I followed them, indeed lived in them, as a child lived with its mother. At night, as she slept, I’d listen to her breathing and I would kiss her hair. We had our difficulties and disputes, but I believed at least she wanted to be here with me, that I was always everything to her.

I became a connoisseur of her body-transfixed, obsessed even; like a child, I needed her company, her reassurance and presence, and to escape into the world at the same time.

“Can I see what you’ve been doing?” I said. “Your new work?”

She fetched her folder and spread her recent drawings on the floor. Friends often asked to buy them, but she rarely sold her work, preferring to give it away. I had one of her nudes, framed, in my consulting room. Next to it was André Brouillet’s famous engraving of Charcot-the P. T. Barnum of hysteria-in the lecture hall at the Salpêtrière clinic in Paris, exhibiting one of his most famous hysterics, the somnambulist Blanche Wittman. Freud always had a copy in his office. It was in this hospital, years later, that the latest supermodel of hysteria, Princess Diana, had died.

I padded among Josephine’s drawings, telling her how much she continued to improve. She told me about her new daylong life class and about her art teacher, who was, inevitably, encouraging her to become a nude model as well as an artist. It was being an artist that she loved. She admired the ferociously weird and tender imagination of Paula Rego, particularly her prints.

Art was all Josephine wanted to do, but as well as not yet developing her own vision-as if she didn’t know who she was-she felt guilty about it. Guilty that she didn’t have a career and earned little money.

She felt herself to be a failure compared to other “executive” women in their smart suits, with their computers and fast cars. I replied that, unfortunately for these women, no man considered a woman to be more of a woman because she was successful. For some reason, that criterion applied only to men.

So I praised Josephine’s art and her mothering, and watched her eyes for a gathering brightness, and then for an explosion of self-loathing. “But I can be lazy, I don’t work enough or earn enough. I still take to my bed for days, hugging the pillow-”

She interrupted herself by asking me if I was writing. I began to tell her about an idea which I was still uncertain about. Henry had never been a great reader of my work, seeing anything I said as an opportunity to entertain his own thoughts. Josephine read little, but her remarks were always pertinent.

I said I wanted to try to move analysis away from technical obscurity and “scientism”-analysts writing for one another, and for students-to a more popular area, where it might become again, as it had been with Freud’s lucid writing, about the stuff which concerns everyone: childhood, sexuality, illness, death, the problem of pleasure. Otherwise the public would be left with only self-help books and the authors putting “Ph.D.” on the cover, somehow a guarantee of stupidity.

“You’re good at those little essays,” she said. “Keep them odd and quirky. That’s their uniqueness, their unconventionality. No one else can do it.” She was looking at me and said, “Is something bothering you? You’ve got that sad, hurt face on.”

“I have?”

“Won’t you tell me why? Are you in trouble? Is it a patient?”

I said, “Will you look at what I’ve been writing? You know, sometimes I listen to you.”

She laughed suddenly and said, “I had a thought the other day: we must not forget that people do most of their reading while defecating.”

“Indeed.”

“Oh, Jammie, please, I don’t want to be mean, bring it over and I’ll make some suggestions. We could try lunch again.”

“Yes, let’s do that,” I said. “I like taking you out-if you’re not being argumentative.”

She reached out to tweak my nose. “If you’re not being unkind…”

“If you’re not playing the victim…”

We stopped; we were laughing. Silently, as if holding his breath, Rafi had been watching us. He’d only said, at one point, “Well, of course, Plato is a great thinker,” and he’d imitated my voice, surprisingly deep, upper-middle-class at last, and pompous.

Now, as I was leaving-“Was it really deep? Do you feel better? Will you come back?”-he pressed the menu into my hand and his nose into my sleeve. “Booze, fags, piss. Your smell.”

“You’ll never forget it.”

“I feel really close to you, Dad,” he said. “We’re almost like family.”

“Very funny. Kiss your beautiful mummy for me-lots.”

“Can’t you do anything yourself?”

During the walk I stopped to look at the menu, which I would never throw away.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

If you had the misfortune to pass the Cross Keys without being familiar with it, you’d think it was derelict. The windows were boarded over and graffitied. There was rusty scaffolding around the side of the pub, wreathed in barbed wire, but no other evidence of building work, which made me wonder whether the scaffolding was in fact holding everything up. Surely if it wasn’t soon knocked down, it would fall down. Despite not even having a pub sign, the place was always busy and often heaving.

The Cross Keys stood on the corner of a desolate street lined with low-rise industrial buildings, the sort of places that would, in a more likely part of town, be converted into art galleries and lofts. Meanwhile the doorways were scattered with drug debris.

Dodging past a group of tall Africans on the street corner touting for minicab work, I shoved at the busted door. It had been a while since I’d been here, but nothing had changed. Just inside there was a small bar, and behind it a larger back room with a tiny stage, the windows blacked out. In here there were nonstop strippers, each undressing to one record.

There were pretty girls, pretty nasty ones, young and old, black, Indian, Chinese. It had been months since I’d last been to the Keys. I knew at least I was unlikely to run into any of my patients; or indeed into anyone I knew, apart from Bushy. A man could read the newspaper, have a pint and, from a distance of a few yards, stare between the legs of a high-heeled woman.

There could be commotions. Usually the two bars were occupied by rough, loud men-or respectable men with briefcases and umbrellas soon turned into rough, loud men-and girls in flimsies trotting around with beer glasses, collecting change. The men gathered at the base of the tiny stage and, as the evenings progressed, were liable to collapse onto it, which was dangerous, as a springy Salome might be tempted to kick you in the head.

In the Cross Keys there were no bouncers or remixed music, no cameras, and, inevitably, there was broken glass on the floor of the toilets, where when you peed, the cistern dripped cold water onto your head. On the bar was a handwritten sign saying SHIRTS MUST BE WORN AT ALL TIMES.

This dive was overseen by a loudmouthed harridan with whom no one messed, apart from Bushy. “Leave my fucking dancers alone!” she’d yell, if anyone touched a girl. Oddly enough, the Czech barmaid, in her mid-twenties, was more beautifully angelic than the strippers, and would glance at the nude girls without emotion. It was ironic, of course, that she was the only person there you’d want to see undressed.

The Harridan was the woman Bushy had been “going with” for a while, an upstairs room being used for their trysts. Now, while she was trying to persuade him to stay with her in her beach hut in Whitstable-“Oh, Bushy, dear, let’s get far away from all this, I have a place by the sea!”-he wanted to let her know he was less wholehearted than his initial passion might have led her to believe.

The women who were waiting to perform sat inside a wooden pen beside the bar, doing their make-up, abusing or flirting with the men who leaned over the side to talk to them. Now, one of them was shaving her legs. I liked strippers of any age, the rougher the better. I could watch them for hours while wondering, each time, whether the outcome might be different, like watching the replay of a football match, where one had the strange experience of knowing more than the players. Such squalid privacy was dying out in London, particularly as, with the development of CCTV-encouraged by a blind home secretary-everyone now watched everyone else, as though the whole country were under suspicion.

I’d taken Henry to the Cross Keys a couple of times, but he didn’t like it. “Even Christopher Marlowe would have given this greasy strip a miss,” he complained. “Shit, I think I’ve got spit and spunk up to my ankles! Doesn’t the zoo stink bother you? The only thing to be said for it is that one gets to learn something about contemporary fashions in pubic hair-who has, and has not, for instance, mown the lawn-an opportunity not to be sniffed at, as it were.”

The Cross Keys was a market where Bushy did many transactions, selling jackets, drugs, cigarettes, phones. I’d also seen him buying stuff. Various shuffling characters, some of them Korean or Chinese, would approach him, concealing something-usually bootleg DVDs-under their coats, or carrying suitcases.

“Wolf came into the flat. I talked to him.”

“What did he say? You don’t look good, man,” said Bushy, sitting at his usual table. “You ain’t shaved in a while. An’ I got a sensitive nose. Is it the vodka you still on?”

“It was pressed on me by my son.”

“Jeez, and him such a decent, bright kid too!”

I caught a glimpse of myself in one of the pub mirrors and gave myself a nod. I looked no worse than anyone else on the premises.

I said to Bushy, “I know Wolf from the old days, when I was a student. He’s come back because he wants to blackmail me.” I hesitated before saying, “He’s got something on me.”

“What sort of something?”

“I won’t tell you.”

“One of those no-details things. Shit, it could be filthy.” I had impressed him at last. “Bushy don’t need to know whether you done a person or not. You’re a man of integrity and dignity, and I don’t care how many people you’ve offed. We’re family, Jamal,” he said. “I hate to see a good doctor like you in trouble. You’re a gentleman and a scholar, but where will it get you these days, financially? Those books have put you in a dreamworld.”

“Have they really?”

I was wondering if he was right when he said, “You know I can say something like that without meaning nothing by it.”

I said, “Bushy, I’ve been thinking about this and don’t know what to do. I can’t go to the police. Wolf’s after money, and he has a lot of power over my good name, such as it is. The other day I was offered a weekly column on a national newspaper. Unlike a lot of people, I do, regrettably, need my reputation, otherwise I’d have few patients and no income. It’s a big deal for me, and decent money. So, you see, I am inclined to give him some money.”

Across the bar, a young Indian woman squatted down and spread her legs, her genitalia looking as though they were pinned together by a silver ring. She turned over and showed three old men-unshaven toothless grotesques who occupied the same position all day most days-the shrivelled eye of her anus, the gentlemen leaning forward with their hands on the edge of the stage, as though to examine a rare object which had turned up after a long time.

Considering Wolf, I was reminded of that time at school when all through the lunch break the bully who used to be your best friend has been following you, and is now approaching. You’re in the cloakroom; everyone else has returned to their classrooms; the school is temporarily quiet. He is stepping slowly towards you with a smile on his face, and what do you do? Fight and suffer more damage, or roll up in a ball and beg for mercy? I was tempted by the “rolling up in a ball position”-to let Wolf speak, and allow everything to come down which could come down, at least for the pleasure of seeing where it fell.

To be punished, in other words. Wouldn’t I be in a similar position to Ajita’s father when his life was collapsing before he died, a man about to lose everything? Except that, unlike him, I would be playing with degrees of suicide. What gains would there be, except in fantasy? If I were one of my own patients, I’d recommend a longer-term strategy of silence and cunning. Perhaps the only way to not be eaten by a wolf is to cling to its back. But would it get me anywhere in the end?

Bushy said, “Don’t give him nothing. I’m sayin’ you’ll never escape it. Can you inform me of this, though, boss? The thing you didn’t do but are in trouble about…Were there any other witnesses?”

“One. He’s dead.”

“Good.”

I hadn’t enjoyed hearing that Valentin had killed himself.

Bushy said, “Is the dude coming to see you again?”

“Without a doubt.”

“Let’s see what he say when you turn him down. If he gets nasty, I’ll be right outside your house. Measure ’im artfully-otherwise we can’t deal with him.” Then Bushy said to me, “I’m not saying you might not have to off him. That’s the only way to deal with some of these people. I can’t do him myself, mind.” He shuddered. “There’s blokes here who might be able to manage the job.”

“How much might it cost?”

“I’ll look into it for yer.”

I’d already lied to Mustaq about his father. Now this new matter was hurting me. I needed to discuss it. But I didn’t want to worry Miriam, and it was a matter too explosively intimate for my present relationship with Josephine. The only other candidate was Henry, a gossip: there was little he’d keep from the general discourse. It wouldn’t occur to him that I was in any real danger. With him, my secret would go no further than West London, which was too far for me.

I said, “But maybe I can charm him.” Bushy raised his long eyebrow at me. “Or offer him something else.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. I’ll let you know what he says.”

I finished my drink and was about to tell Bushy that I needed to get going when he put his hand on my arm and said, looking round the place, “Boss, there’s a little thing I want to ask you-”

“Yes?” I said. “If there’s anything I can do in return.”

“I wouldn’t come to you for nothing, you’re a professional man with ultra-high standards. But I been having these dreams. They keep coming back. They’re tripartite.”

“Sorry?”

“In threes. You want me to sit down?”

“You’re going to tell me the dream now?”

“Why not?”

“Okay,” I said. “Do it wherever you feel comfortable. It’s the words that count, not the seating.”

All societies, like all lives, are sewn together by the needle of exchange, and I was amused by the idea of being a dream-dealer, interpreting dreams in exchange for detective work, though under these conditions I’d have to say his work was probably of a higher standard than mine. I had never heard a dream-that daily dose of madness-in such peculiar circumstances. Though parts of it disappeared in the uproar of a dispute over whether a customer had put twenty pence or a pound coin in a stripper’s beer glass, I was able to take his associations too, and attempt an interpretation.

“You think I’ve got a problem?” he said when I’d finished. Normally I would give an analytic grunt here, but I said, “I think you need to play the guitar. You miss it more than you know.”

“Bushy can’t do it sober.”

“I bet you weren’t drunk when you learned to play the guitar.”

“I was a kid.”

“There you are. Miriam says you give a lot of pleasure to people when you play.”

“She said that?”

He was thinking about this and smiling to himself when Miriam herself phoned. Bushy had to leave. She and Henry were going out that night.

“One more thing,” said Bushy before we parted. “Haven’t you noticed nothing peculiar about me?”

He was standing directly in front of me, as though on parade. I looked him up and down. “I haven’t, no.”

“You sure?”

“Is there anything peculiar about you?”

“My nose. Can’t you see, there’s a groove in it.” He ran his finger down his nose. “That’s pretty deep, innit?”

“It’s not an unusual feature, if that’s what you mean. It doesn’t stand out. You are a fine man, Bushy.”

“My nose is turning into a backside. That’s not unusual-to have a pair of buttocks screwed to the front of your face?”

“Is it getting worse?”

“I’m telling you, soon I’ll be shitting out of me nose. What can I do about it? Is there an operation I can have?”

“Like plastic surgery?”

“Kind of.”

“How much is it worrying you?”

“How much would it worry you,” he asked, “if you had shit dribbling out yer face?”

“A lot,” I said, feeling as he intended me to, that I was either stupid or mad not to grasp such a simple truth.

“Don’t mention the hooter to Henry,” he said. “We likes each other. I wouldn’t want him thinking I’m batty.”

I said, “Bushy, you wouldn’t want to be too sane. How dull is that? The sane are the only ones that can’t be cured. My first analyst used to say, ‘Our work is to heal the well, too.’”

The Harridan, who had been collecting glasses across the bar, trotted towards Bushy, pinched his gut and kissed him on the cheek. “Hallo, Bushy dear, you farting ol’ pygmy dick, gonna come and have a drink and more with me?”

He almost turned his back on her. “When I’m in a business meeting?”

“Oh dear,” she said. The Harridan succeeded in being tiny and voluminous at the same time. She didn’t move-was she on casters rather than legs?-so much as bustle. “You didn’t used to be too busy for yer little yum-yum baby.”

“This man here’s a high-flying doctor, one of the top men in the West.”

“Why’s he in here?”

“To partake of your watered vodka!”

“Always nice to have a doctor in the house, just in case.” She made a face. “Mind you, some of my girls could do with some looking into.”

“He’s a head doctor!” said Bushy impatiently, tapping his forehead and circling his finger. “A shrinker.”

“Even better!”

When she’d gone, I said, “Let’s see how the nose develops. We’re going to keep talking anyway.”

“Will you keep an eye on it?”

“Sorry?”

“My nose?”

“I will,” I said. “I will.”

“Thank God, boss, you saving me only life.”

One madman, Bushy, looking after another madman, Wolf. And neither of them heroes of desire, the sort of madmen that R. D. Laing idealised: their craziness not making an increase of life but, rather, consternation, despair, isolation. I felt as though I’d just stuck my tongue through the flimsy cigarette paper which separates sanity and madness.

Before we left, Bushy said, “Thanks, boss, for hearing me. If I have any other dreams, will you have a look at them? There won’t be too many-I can’t sleep much.”

“Okay.”

“I like you, boss. Henry’s a good geezer as well. Man, he can chat! Was he always like that?”

“Yes.”

“He won’t let her down, will he? It would destroy Miriam. You put them together-now she’s a different person, really happy. An’ she wildly pleased with you for taking care of her. She say you never did before. No one did. That’s why she got such a close family round her.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

As I hurried home-thinking of myself bent forward, like a fleeing question mark-a section from Dante’s Purgatory came to me: “Accurst be thou, / Inveterate wolf! whose gorge ingluts more prey, / Than every beast beside, yet is not fill’d; / So bottomless thy maw.”

I rang Ajita and arranged to see her. She was the person I wanted to see, the person I felt least anxious with at the moment. Then I thought how much I admired Bushy’s curiosity about his inner world, and the fact that he realised the benefit of becoming acquainted with it, recognising, too, that he couldn’t do this alone.

I’d been considering Ralph Waldo Emerson and his essay “Circles,” the first words of which are: “The eye is the first circle.” For the next few days I could look at a door and imagine an eye at the keyhole-an eye followed by a head, by a body, a man. A man who had come to hunt me down, arrest me, condemn me. For what? For being a criminal; for committing the most monstrous crime of all. Things are always what they seem.

I suspected Wolf was watching me, but he didn’t come to the flat. Perhaps he was only my dream. Echoes of echoes, and nothing known for sure.

Yet if I felt paranoid, it wasn’t without reason. Murdering someone is no way to get rid of them. Speaking from experience for once, I’d say it’s a guarantee of their repeated return. At the same time, I was hoping that Wolf had decided that persecuting me was a futile idea and had gone away. Not that I really believed or expected this. Our own wishes are no guide to reality. As far as I could work out, he had come to London only to find me and to remind me, over and over, of my crime.

At lunchtime a few days later the door bell rang, and I knew I hadn’t succeeded in keeping the Wolf from the door.

I asked, as he came in, “By the way, how did you find me?”

“I’d been thrown out of my home. My clothes, my collection of antique swords, everything was gone. During the day, in the library where I’d keep warm, I saw a book by you, in German. It was a sign you were asking to see me. It wasn’t difficult to get an address. Don’t forget my father was a cop. Now, I’m dirty.”

“Sorry?”

“Please, will you let me wash here?” He was unshaven and dishevelled. “You cannot refuse a man a little water.”

He wanted me to cook him scrambled eggs while he took a shower and freshened up. At this point he was only asking for things it would be difficult to refuse. He was trying to make his way further into my life, and I was getting used to him again.

However, when he’d washed and eaten, I told him, in my firmest voice, that financially I was on the run and always had been-every month I was one step ahead of what I owed. I had given Josephine my stake in the house, but she constantly requested more money. These days reparation for the crime of leaving your lover was limitless. Money had become the substitute for love. On top of that I had to pay for Rafi’s education for another ten years. Henry blamed Thatcher; I blamed Blair for being unable to provide good state schools for the over-eleven.

I said, “No one becomes an analyst for the money. There are scores of therapies and not enough sick people, if you can believe it. In London you fall over wealthy people everywhere, most of them without much natural intelligence or talent. It makes me crazy that I didn’t think about my financial situation as a younger man, instead of walking around depressed and arguing with myself.”

“What you say makes me unhappy. Couldn’t we do something?”

“It’s too late.”

“Yes, why would you bother when you’re all set? I am not. You know why.”

Everything bad which had happened to him since the night in the garage was my fault. If he hadn’t volunteered-out of sincere goodness-to help a mate whose girlfriend was being mistreated, he wouldn’t be in this position now: a man who had been persuaded into a murder that had stained his entire life.

He said, “I had a drink with Ajita. Lovely house she’s got there.”

“You went in?” He didn’t reply. I said, “How did you find her?”

He enjoyed watching me consider the question.

“I followed you,” he said.

The day before, she and I had met for lunch in a Moroccan place in South Kensington that I liked. Ajita was wearing a white trouser-suit and looked, in the modern style, more or less ageless. She was carrying numerous shopping bags, as well as books on psychology and Freud she’d picked up at Blackwell’s. She was eager to learn about my work and how I became involved in it. “That whole chunk of your life, truly I know nothing of,” she said.

It wasn’t transference, the unconscious or the Other that Ajita wanted to hear about. It was the guy who loved to shit himself in public, and wanted to do it more; the woman who stuck needles in her breasts and thighs until she bled, and orgasmed, and the man who covered his penis with insects and said he wanted literally to fuck my brain.

“But I’m normal, compared to this. Why am I so dull! I feel free in this city,” she went on. “I want to stay here. America’s at war. It’s horrible for people like us. I’d forgotten how wickedly realistic Londoners are.”

She wanted us to spend the afternoon together, but I had patients to see. Then she asked me to go away with her for a few days. “We can shop, sleep, talk, walk.” I had wondered whether, if she was in the mood for passion, it was a good idea. But now I was warming to the notion. I had good reason to want to get out of London, and perhaps in Venice, Ajita and I might go further with each other. I had always been a cautious and nervous fellow; maybe it was time I changed.

What I didn’t know was that Wolf had trailed me, and followed her home. How stupid of me not to have been more alert. When it came to crime, despite my efforts, I’d always be an amateur; clearly, transgression was a calling that not anyone could assume.

I told him, “She hasn’t got any money. It’s her brother’s. He collects houses. He’s got them all over the place.”

“He has? Where exactly?”

“I don’t know. Wolf, he’s tough like his father, and more powerful and brutal.”

“Thanks. I’ll be careful.” He said, “Ajita took me to a bar and ordered champagne. We drank two bottles, and ate oysters. Then we had smoked salmon and toast. She gave me a little something to help me settle into a lovely warm hotel, not far from her. I walked her back home. I didn’t go in, though she asked me. I’m not one to impose.”

“No.”

“What makes you think I’m interested in her money? It’s worse. I like her.”

“You told her your story-the time in jail?”

“It’s all I have. I can tell she’s been unhappy for a long time. Now she’s looking for something.”

He went on, “Oh, Jamal, she is still good-natured, kind and beautiful. I said to her, you are without doubt one of those women who will become more beautiful and attractive as you get older, with a sophistication younger women can only envy.” I recalled this as a recommended leg-opener of his, for use on any woman over forty. Its time had surely arrived. “Jamal, you made us knock out her father and then you let her go. Why didn’t you marry her?”

“She went away, like you and Valentin. The gang was broken up. I didn’t see her again until recently.”

“You lied to me about that, too.”

“It was private.”

“Maybe. But didn’t she want you?”

“She did, very much. She said she still liked me.”

“And you turned such a girl away?”

“I haven’t said that. We get on well.”

“Is that all?”

I continued, “From my point of view, when I met you, you were already a criminal, Wolf. I was a kid whose father had left. I was easily impressed by tough guys.”

“You call me a criminal!” he shouted. “I was never a murderer till I met you! Let the judge decide which of us was the ringleader-the one who gathered us together to commit the dirty work!”

“The judge? You’ll go down too, you know.”

He shook his head and drew his finger across his throat. “Valentin and I would be playing together in the great casino in the sky. I’ve got nothing to lose. You’ve got everything. Your wife, son, friends-everyone will be devastated by what you did. You will never escape the shame.” He then said suddenly, “Is life worth living? Is it worth the trouble, the suffering?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Listen, Wolfgang. We were good friends. We could still be friends. But you’ve got to drop the bullshit threats, okay?” He smiled. I carried on. “It’s important that Ajita doesn’t hear about what happened to her father. I’m going to be upset, I may even get into trouble. But she will be more than devastated, particularly if it comes from you. She might want to hurt herself.”

“I can’t worry about all of you when no one’s worrying about me.”

“Why don’t you go back to Berlin?”

“There’s nothing there for me!”

“Your knees are bouncing. In a fury?”

He said, “They’d taken Ulrike away to one of their houses, and then they came for me, three in the morning. Minutes later I was on the street with only the clothes I could carry. I’d considered barricading myself in and shooting at them. They were ahead of me in everything. So you see, Jamal, friend, I need a little help. I want to stay in London. I don’t care if I have to sleep on the street. I’ve done it before.”

“I will try to stop that happening to you,” I said.

“How?”

I told him again I couldn’t give him any money and that if he stopped frightening me I’d be in a better position to think about how to help him. Meanwhile, even as he had been following me, I had been trying to find him work.

Bushy had asked the Harridan to let Wolf work behind the bar at the Cross Keys. Wolf could sleep in the room upstairs where the strippers changed, the one he and the Harridan used for their lovemaking; Wolf would, no doubt, be face down in the same fuck-stained sheets. At night there was no one there, and as local boys were always trying to break into the pub, he could keep an eye on it. If he was lucky he’d get to hurt someone, and with moral impunity, always the nicest way.

“What do you think of the job?” I waited while he wondered about it. He didn’t seem delighted. “Wolf, you know how to take your chances. I’ve got to go away for a few days, and you can’t stay here. Give it a try.”

“Sleeping in a bar-is that my worth?”

“Pretty much. There are many friendly girls and dozens of scams going down. Tonight you’ll be in a better position than last night. You should leave Ajita alone.”

He laughed mirthlessly. “Who said I was going to see her again? She and I said a lot to each other. She needed to talk, she couldn’t stop. I think I was her therapy, but there’s nothing else going on, don’t worry.” He gave me his mobile number. “When do I start?”

I was pleased to see I’d startled him when I said “Right away.” I drew him a map, led him gently to the door and celebrated when I shut it behind him.

That evening I went to Miriam’s for a drink. Bushy was out front, cleaning the car. “It’s working,” he said. “Relieved?”

Wolf had successfully arrived at the Cross Keys; the Harridan had already pinched his arse and evaluated his muscles. I said I couldn’t help wondering whether it was wretched for Wolf to work in such a place. Were we humiliating him? Would it make him more pissed off? On the other hand, the Wolf I remembered was interested in most people. He’d like the girls; he’d soon be sleeping with one of them and helping the others.

It had been Bushy’s idea. He must have been hoping that the Harridan, being keen on men, would fancy Wolf, thus releasing Bushy, who’d be able to trade at the Cross Keys without harassment from her. At the same time, Bushy would be able to “have a look” at Wolf, sussing out how bad and desperate he might turn out to be.

“Good,” I said. “Let’s park Wolf there for a while and see what happens. He might settle down. Thanks, Bushy, for sorting this out for me. I appreciate it. Do you have any more dreams? It’s a fair exchange, I think.”

“Bushy don’t want that,” he said, looking around as though to ensure we weren’t being observed. “Bushy want something else now.”

“What is it?”

“I bin getting itchy fingers. I’m going to play again,” he said. “I got to do it sober, like I got to do everything sober now, otherwise Miriam will cut me off, she already threatened. I had a group, a few years ago, but we fighted onstage. One night they all walk off and only me left there. Since then I done just the one gig. What I want…”

“Yes?”

“Will you come with me? I get nervous, I sweat buckets, my nose starts to run. And you know what it means if that happens.”

“What?”

“With diarrhoea comin’ out me nose? I’ll ’ave to get outta there. I’ll be so embarrassed I could hurt myself. But if you’re there, doctor in the house, I’ll be good.”

If he’d been my patient, I’d have said no, it was something he had to get through himself. Since he wasn’t, I could go and see him play guitar, while drinking and talking with Henry and Miriam.

“Sure,” I said.

“Now you’ve agreed, I’ll arrange it for definite-at the Caramel Sootie.”

“The Kama Sutra?”

“They know me there personally. I never have to give my name: I helped them with their heating. You can imagine, they were grateful.”

“Can’t it be a more ordinary venue? Why not the Cross Keys?”

“It’s dark, innit, at the Sootie? They’re screwing. They won’t be interested in me.”

“Or your nose.”

“That’s it. An’ what’s that Woody Allen joke Henry told me? If sex between two people is great, sex between five people is even better!”

“But what could be worse,” I replied, “than to feel desire and have it satisfied immediately?”

“Shrinky, don’t be alarmed up. It ain’t compulsive to screw if you don’t wanna. Meself, I wouldn’t touch some of them people with asbestos gloves on. But Henry and Miriam rate it better than sex. There’s this twenty-stone guy who lies there, and birds dressed as schoolgirls-”

“They’ve told me about the Sootie, thanks.”

“You’ll do it?”

“I’ll have to ask Henry and Miriam.”

“Let me embrace you, man.”

He held on to me before saying, “You knows you’ll ’ave to look right, dress up an’ all. The only other way they’ll let you in is bollock naked, and I can tell you, there’s draughts in there which will cut you in two. Henry and Miriam will help you. I’m looking forward to it,” he said. “My comeback and your come-out.”

“Indeed.”

He tapped the side of his nose. “You an’ me, eh-pals!”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Luckily, before this humiliation, I’d have a break. Ajita and I had finally decided to go away.

The holiday was Mustaq’s birthday present to her. For a long time Ajita had wanted to go to Venice, and she asked me to accompany her. She was nervous about my response, imagining I would refuse her, that I was still angry about the way she’d deserted me after her father died. Or worse, that I was disappointed with her now she had reappeared. It was more likely, of course, that I had disappointed her.

I could only make three nights away, but I told her I would be delighted. She and I had been talking on the phone regularly-about her brother, my work and what there was for her to see in London-but we’d met only once in the city since finding one another again. I was nervous. During the weekend we spent at Mustaq’s, I’d felt as though she were already interviewing me for a position as her lover, a situation I was incapable of fulfilling with her, or anyone, while Josephine was still on my mind. Perhaps Mustaq was keen to help Ajita find someone, for both their sakes. He often looked irritated with her.

Mustaq’s secretary booked two rooms in the Danieli. Ajita came to the flat to pick me up on the way to the airport. There were two taxis, one for us and the other for her luggage. She made coffee while I finished packing. “You know, I’ve never seen anywhere you’ve lived as an adult,” she said. “Does it smell of toast all the time? It needs work, this flat, it’s coming apart. If you don’t do it, it’ll lose value. I’ll find a builder for you.”

She asked permission before opening drawers, looking in cupboards, picking up things and asking where I’d got them. She wanted to see Josephine’s drawings, as well as photographs of her and of Rafi, which she looked at for a long time.

“A happy family, all of you quite pleased to be together,” she said. “We seem to know each other, you and I, and yet we’re strangers. Who are you really, Mr. K?”

Now the shock of our meeting again had worn off, we were easier with each other. She was less of the care-laden older woman and more as she had been at university, laughing and enthusiastic, expecting the best of the world, despite everything. I, perhaps, was less suspicious.

Having tea in the Danieli is lovely; the view is one of the most calming I have seen. Arm in arm, Ajita and I went on boat trips, consulted guidebooks, visited the Lido and looked at Tiepolos and Tintorettos in deserted churches. It was cold; she wore a fur coat, fur hat and boots, but the sun was bright in the morning. It was the most peace I’d experienced in a long time.

Ajita insisted on buying me new clothes, dressing me up and parading me around expensive shops, informing me my wardrobe needed “help.” We found watches with pictures, on the face, of Nixon meeting Elvis in 1970: Presley in his big collar and huge belt phase, with much bling. Ajita bought me one, as I had, as she put it, “lost the last one.” It was true I hadn’t obtained a new watch; I had the time on my phone, and in my consulting room there was a clock on the shelf above the couch. She got one for Mustaq too, more amused than I by our identical watches.

In the afternoon, when she napped, I wrote in her room and read Tanizaki for the first time, amazed by his view of the tenacity of desire, particularly in the old, whom it can still grasp by the throat, refusing to let them go.

Uncharacteristically, Ajita had brought some grass with her. Not wanting to get kicked out of the hotel, we smoked out of the windows of café toilets, like schoolkids.

“This is fun, Ajita.”

“Isn’t it? As soon as I stopped leading a conventional life, I cheered up. At home, after a smoke, I dance like a madwoman.”

“You mean home in Soho?”

“Yes. My temporary new home in London. The place I’ve absconded to, like the teenage runaway I nearly became.”

We giggled about how well we got on, saying that if we’d stayed together, we’d have married, divorced and become friends like this. I told her about Josephine, and how much there still was between us, saying that the furious disputes I had with her were the ones I preferred.

When I asked Ajita about Mark, her husband, she said he was a good man and a decent liberal American. I guessed his days were numbered.

She said, “Mark and I married when Mustaq was worried about me, when his music career was starting. At the same time, Mark worked hard to build up the business. He manufactured clothes in the Far East, where he spent a lot of time. I brought up the kids in a good apartment in Central Manhattan. One day they were gone. My husband was in L.A., in our other place. I knew I had to return to London, which I’d avoided for years. There was too much there-it was an unhealed wound. But I had to restart my life.”

On the last morning, we were to have brunch in Harry’s Bar. Coming down to the lobby, Ajita cried out: it was under a foot of greasy water. It was not a tsunami; the sea was slowly rising. This happened three times a month.

We were given galoshes and clambered out of the hotel. St. Mark’s was a trembling lake. Submerged tables and chairs stood in the street like objects in an installation, with drowned pigeons bobbing around them. Tourists squeezed past one another on trestles; shopkeepers attempted to pump out their premises. I looked out past the bursting waves towards the Lido, wondering how hobbling Byron swam so far. Even as a kid I wouldn’t have been able to do half that distance.

We waded to Harry’s, and after we’d downed too many Bellinis, I was about to reach across the table to take her hand. I wanted to tell Ajita how easy we seemed with each other. Perhaps something might develop between us. We had one night left; couldn’t we try more kisses and conversation, and see where they took us?

“Ajita-”

“I don’t want to interrupt,” she said, “but I need to! I’ve been meaning to tell you-I’ve met someone.” She was laughing. “I just knew it would happen in London, my lucky city. It’s extremely early days.”

“I see.”

“He’s tender and makes me feel beautiful. That’s all I’m saying-certainly not his name. I can hardly say it to myself, let alone to you or my husband. It was you, though, Jamal, who gave me the confidence.”

Disappointment winded me. She had returned and I had let her go. At least age had taught me that the pain would not last, that I would even feel relieved.

“That’s wonderful,” I said. “What a great thing to happen.”

“Do you really think so?” She was watching me. “We’ll see. I can’t tell you any more about it,” she said. “It might be bad luck, and I’ll make a fool of myself. Don’t think it’s only pleasure.”

“Why not?”

“For the first time, I’ve been talking about Dad. He’s interested, this man, in what happened to Papa.”

“That’s good.”

“You know, Jamal, I noticed an odd thing.”

“Where?”

“Mustaq’s people-who have been investigating the matter-found a press picture of Dad driving into his workplace the day he was murdered. We’ve studied it on a computer. We are almost certain he is wearing the watch you gave to Mustaq. Isn’t that strange? What happened?”

“I wish I could remember,” I said. “I was really knocked over by the abuse story. I do recall your dad coming to my house once, on his way home, asking if I wanted a lift to yours-to see Mustaq.”

“He touched you then?”

“I thought he liked me. A lot of people seemed to fancy me. I didn’t know what to make of it.”

“I know it was a long time ago, but Mustaq and I aren’t going to give up on trying to find out the truth about Dad.” She was looking at me. “You okay?”

“It’s still difficult for me to think about that time.”

She grasped my hand, which I’d omitted to withdraw properly, and kissed it. “It was me! I made you so unhappy, Jamal! I was unfaithful! I haven’t faced that properly.”

“How could you know what you were doing?”

“Can’t you forgive me?”

“Yes.” I called the waiter. “Let’s just drink to you-to your return, and to your happiness.”

“Thank you, darling.”

I said, I hope without sarcasm, “Your new man doesn’t object to you going away with me?”

“He knows what a valuable friend you are now.”

“I can’t wait to meet him. Can we get together with him when we’re back home?”

“I’m not sure about that. We’ll see. Don’t make me go too fast.”

We drank a lot that day, and my hope increased that though I, the eternal vacillator, didn’t feel capable of claiming her, she might claim me, by inviting me to her room. Then her boyfriend called. Her face seemed to open, and she laughed, hurrying outside the hotel to speak to him.

I left her to it, once more forfeiting love for a novel. Unable to concentrate, I called Rafi on his mobile. He was watching The Simpsons and was too busy to gossip. “Phone back in a year,” he suggested.

I put my coat on and walked those lugubrious, echoing Venetian alleys, passages, bridges and archways for more than three hours.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

“So?” said my sister, almost as soon as I walked in the following night, on my way to visit Wolf at the Cross Keys. Kids and corpulent neighbours drifted in and out of the kitchen as usual, cats jumped out of windows, and there was always a stinking, dribble-jawed dog farting on any chair you wanted to sit on.

“What so?”

“Don’t fuck with me!” she said, suddenly attempting to throw me on the ground. The two of us struggled; I fought her off-no, I didn’t, I couldn’t-and the dogs barked.

“Bitch, maybe one day I’ll be stronger than you,” I said, getting up. I wasn’t too pleased about being attacked and thrown down by her. No one would want unnecessary contact with Miriam’s floor.

We stood apart, out of breath, hair and laughter over her face. I was convinced she’d dislocated my shoulder again. For a while my differences with Miriam usually ended with my arm in a sling. Kids stepped around us disapprovingly, talking about eBay.

Miriam said, “You and Ajita. Is it on?” In Venice I’d bought Miriam a black-and-white carnival mask to wear on “the scene.” She kissed me and said, “Henry and I have been frantic for it to work out between you two. He told me you were keen on her again.”

“Who’s asking you two meddlers? You know these things take a lot of time with me.”

“Time? When you met her, the Beatles were still together.”

“They weren’t, actually.”

I took off my sweater and tee-shirt. She fetched a clean blanket, spreading it out on the sofa. I lay down, and she stroked, tickled and scratched my back, something she knew I loved. I turned round and she did the same on my stomach, her nails raking my bulging stomach, not as grand as Henry’s “waterbed” but heading that way.

I was drifting off when she said, “You staying for supper? I’m making some dhal, and Henry’s coming by later. I’ve hardly seen him. There’s a crisis: Valerie’s been insisting that he go over there all the time.”

“He goes?”

“I guess you don’t know this, but Lisa went into the house when there was no one home and stole a hand from her mother’s bedroom wall.”

“A what?”

“I dunno. A hand.”

“What was a hand doing on the wall?”

“It’s a picture, for fuck’s sake. A famous drawing by some old guy. She’s hidden it and won’t give it back. Bushy’s been trying to help Henry find it. But she’s a cunnin’ one.”

“What,” I sighed, “is she intending to do with this hand?”

“Apart from trying to make her family crazy, you mean? Who knows? It’s like a hostage.”

I was mystified by the story of the stolen hand but didn’t want to hear any more about Lisa.

I said, “Bushy wants me to come to the Sootie.”

“I noticed you two have become pretty close, talking together outside on the street rather than in my kitchen. Still, I’ve never seen him so excited. Is it true you’re giving him the inspiration to play live again?”

“I may be the fuel, but he has to be the rocket. I said I would have to ask you, but wouldn’t it spoil your evening to have your brother hanging around that fuckery the Sootie as, you know, a spare prick?”

I got up and put my tee-shirt on.

She was laughing. “Oh no, don’t worry about me and Henry. We know how to take care of ourselves. Looks like you’re going to have to come, bro.” She pinched my cheek and poked me in the stomach. “I can’t wait to see what you’ll wear. You want me to help you choose something unsuitable?”

“No fear.”

“Have you done anything like this before?”

“Not even in the privacy of my own bedroom. There’s no reason why you would have noticed, but analysts and therapists always dress oddly, the men looking uncomfortable in the sort of jackets that provincial academics wear while the women resemble wealthy hippies, in bolts of velvet with flowing scarves.”

“I can’t wait to see you at the Sootie,” she said. “I’m so going to laugh my big tits off. You’ve always been timid, a mincing little thing.”

“Thank you.”

“Actually, you’ve got better,” she said. “You were shy and quiet before, terrified of people, mooching in your room for days, not talking, miserable. In Karachi your nickname was Sad Sack. But you did change-when you went to live in that house in London.”

“I found my first analyst then, after we came back from Pakistan. You’d be reluctant to recall it, but I was in a mess.”

“We both were, thanks. You and Dad trotted off together like long-lost lovers, expecting me to spend every minute with the boring, well-behaved women, like I was in purdah.”

“A position you rightly refused.”

“I was channelling Dad this afternoon and remembered that the last words he said to me were, ‘No one will ever marry a whore like you.’ Wasn’t he right?”

“He didn’t say no one would ever love you,” I said. “My analyst was a Pakistani, you know, with a cute accent, like Dad’s. I was lucky to meet him when I did. Otherwise I’d have ruined my life before it started.”

She said, “I could have done with someone to save my life. Why didn’t you send me there?”

“It was my thing.”

“He converted you?”

“Something like that. To a life of enquiry, perhaps.”

She said, “Josephine used to wonder whether you were gay.”

“Thanks for reminding me.”

“She did come to me one time, at a family Christmas, got me in a corner and asked me if you were that way. My instinct was to give the cow a backhander-for being so unobservant. Then I nearly told her, ‘He’s my brother, and a woman with your problems is enough to make Casanova gay.’ But I zipped it-for you.”

“Thank you, my dear.” I went on: “She had this bizarre theory that because I liked her arse I was gay.”

“Even a sexual dyslexic like her can see you’re not a boy-bummer.”

I said, “No, I’m a married man with a married mind. There was a film premiere we went to, a few months ago, even though Josephine and I weren’t together. Miriam, she looked great in her heels and black dress and red wrap, with bare legs. All evening I wanted to fuck her. For a while I wasn’t bored.”

“She’s a striking woman, being so tall.”

“Yes, I used to think one didn’t so much go down on her as go up on her.”

“You can be sulky and moody, but you’re also nervous and very evasive, Jamal.”

“Am I still?”

“Look at your bitten nails and the way your eyelashes flap.”

“They do?”

“But you got on by not throwing everything away like me. You knew there was a future.” She was tickling me. “Now, you therapists are always talking about sex. Maybe you should see some for once. It’ll be good for you to hang out at the Sootie.”

I said, “I never knew whether you were glad Josephine and I separated.”

“I quite liked her, mainly because she liked you. Loved you, I mean. She never stopped loving you, Jamal, though you must have tested her hard.”

“Don’t remind me of that, Miriam.”

We embraced; I told her I had to go. Wearily I walked to the Cross Keys to have a look at my parallel man, Wolf. While I was in Venice, Bushy had phoned to say he’d popped into the pub several times to see how Wolf was doing. Now I was wondering whether they might have been getting on too well.

Bushy was smoking at the bar. Wolf was in the cellar, changing the barrels. After my trip to Venice, the place looked less salubrious than I remembered it. Maybe it was time to find a new local.

Bushy indicated the Harridan. “That’s a smile on her gob. She’s happy with ’im,” he said.

“How come?”

Wolf was physically strong and hardworking. When men tumbled onto the stage, or tried to dance with the girls, Wolf would pull them off and have them outside in seconds. The girls liked him, he involved himself in their problems, but he wasn’t “up an’ all over ’em. He don’t touch ’em. I think he’s got someone.”

“One of the girls here?”

“No, he after something bigger. I’ll find out soon as I can.”

Wolf came up out of the cellar and saw me. He wore a tight white tee-shirt and looked fit and toned, as though he’d been exercising. Unfortunately his jeans were too big, his belt just about holding them up.

He was subdued, and didn’t shake my hand. Not that he appeared to be unhappy. He had requested one big thing and received a smaller thing-a job. It was, as Bushy put it, “a hopeful opening,” into which Wolf had moved.

Wolf said, “Let’s speak. Not here.” He added, “What’s with these jeans? Why are they so big?”

“They’re knockoffs,” I said. “Blame my sister.”

He took me up to the room in which he slept, a small dressing room for the girls containing a mirror and dressing table covered with discarded thongs and spangled bras. There was a single mattress under a rattling window covered with a soiled piece of net curtain. Through a tear in the curtain I could see, on the corner, tall Somalians, their busted Primeras lined up on the street outside the cab office.

He said, “These African boys are busy up West all night. They take me with them. You’ve dumped me far out here.”

“What have you got going in town?”

He shrugged. “Ventures.”

As we talked, one of the girls-an Eastern European-came in to fix her hair. Before leaving she changed her thong: naked, she bent forward and dragged the cheeks of her backside open. “Check me being clean, Wolfie, if that’s good,” she said.

Having inspected her, he kissed her on the arse. “Juicy as ever, Lucy.”

She looked at me. “Punter here?”

“I’m a pal of Wolf’s.”

“Sir, you like show?”

“I did the first time I saw it.”

“Next time I make it extra-spicy for you special.”

After she’d gone, Wolf said, “She likes you, didn’t you notice? You still look decent for your age. But you wouldn’t go for a girl like that, would you?” I shrugged. He said, “You know that when I go to any city I want to be with the lowest, the whores, hustlers, criminals. To me these are the finest people. You and I are similar like that.”

“In what way?”

“You must have something like that in you, spending every day with the mentally diseased.”

“The sane are much worse. As you know, calling someone sane isn’t much of a compliment.” I said, “Wolf, I want to know about Val,” and sat down with the joint Miriam had given me as I left.

Wolf told me that he and Valentin had been looking for an excuse to leave London for a while. They’d even considered taking me with them, but decided I should finish at university. I wondered whether I might have been tempted to accompany them. Probably I would have.

In the South of France, Valentin worked in casinos. He was well paid and respected enough to be trusted to train the new recruits. He considered this work to be worthless, but he kept himself together, cycling for miles across the mountains on icy roads.

Wolf said, “Back in his sparse room, he read those huge philosophical books, like a madman always with the Bible, trying to find the truth.” At night, when he left work, women, rich and poor, old and young, would be waiting for him. They wanted to sleep with him. Once they’d done that, they wanted to help him. “They wanted to send him to doctors, to find him a drug to make him well. But he refused. He wanted to be one of the lost ones. He never found a place. We should remember him a moment.”

Wolf bowed his head. I did so too, recalling Valentin earnestly advising me to take up his diet, which was Heinz tomato soup, two slices of bread with margarine spread on them, and an apple-twice a day. He’d sometimes walk five miles across London, wearing only tennis shoes, rather than taking the tube-an even more mephitic hole then-though most people used it for free, easily sneaking past the somnolent staff. Valentin’s ambition had always been to reduce his desire to almost zero; there would be no excess of pleasure. But where did a lifetime of self-punishment get him?

I opened my eyes. Wolf had been looking at me. I got to my feet, not entirely sure where I was.

“But you must still sit down.”

His fists were clenched. But I was heading for the door, wherever that might be. God knows what Miriam had dropped into that joint. She liked a mixture of hash and grass and menthol tobacco, an unpredictable blend. Not only was I feeling paranoid, I seemed to be viewing Wolf down the wrong end of a telescope, an excellent way to shrink him.

He got up too, grasped me by the shoulders and pushed me down again. He drew his hand back, as if to strike me. He was easily more powerful than me, but not as angry. For a moment I thought I’d let him beat me up, as if that would be a solution.

“I haven’t finished with you,” he said, sitting in a chair opposite me. “There’s an odour that chases me in my dreams, dragging me into that dirty night. What do garages smell of? Oil, petrol, wood, rubber. I can see how angry you were with that father. You were trembling.”

“I was afraid.”

“You didn’t appear to be. We were there to give him a warning, and suddenly you had a knife. What are you going to do with that? I keep thinking. Only the business, surely? No one said anything about knives, not me, not Val. Where did you get that idea from? Why didn’t you ask us first?”

“I was a young fool. Friend, you should have taken care of me a bit. I was like your little brother, and you let me go ahead with a wild and stupid scheme.”

“Are you going to cry? Will you kiss my feet and beg forgiveness? What you did made me see-right in front of my eyes-a dying man. If we’d been caught, I’d have done a lot of time.” He went on, “Now you say you regret it. If you could take back that night, you would. But there’s one thing you have never said. One thing I want to hear you say.”

“What is that?”

He said, “That you got it wrong and deserved to be punished. You thought it was noble to save the girl. You should have gone to the police. You should have talked with her more. I don’t know what you should have done. You’re the person who is supposed to know what to do in such situations.”

He was still staring steadily at me. I said, “I didn’t know how to listen. I misunderstood Ajita. I acted too soon and stole her initiative. But what can we do?”

“This,” he said. “We could both apologise to the family. To the girl. So she knows what went on, so she can have-what’s that stupid word they use?-closure, yes. You think about that.”

I said, “I am not convinced that an apology will cause more good than harm.”

“I am,” he said. “You consider it and get back to me. Otherwise I’ve been thinking it’s something I should do myself-on your behalf.” He paused. “Got something to say?”

“Yes,” I said. “Unlike some famous procrastinators I could name, I took action and killed the man. You will only ever be a minor villain. What a shame you never did anything so brave or honourable. Any fucker can be innocent. I’m way ahead of you, man, and always will be. Have some fucking respect!”

“You’re mad.”

I got up. He got up. I went downstairs. He followed me. Wolf returned to work at the other end of the bar, and I stood with Bushy, who was passing over various items from inside his coat to some local characters. Wolf had turned up the music; I watched the naked grinders opening and closing their legs for the devoted regulars. Behind the stage, the different coloured lights Wolf had rigged up were pulsating. I ordered a double vodka and drank it quickly. I ordered another.

When Bushy was alone, I said, “What news of the Hand?”

He shrugged. “Lisa’s a socialist worker with a lot of people to visit. My guess is the Hand’s in one of their houses. What am I going to do-search everywhere for it?”

“Why should you?”

“Because I feel sorry for ’im, a good un, with that crazy daughter.”

I asked, “How’s the dreaming?”

“Dr. Shrinky, my friend, your advice has been on my mind. I nearly ready to come out. I been rehearsing at Miriam’s, in front of the kids. Your boy Rafi there one day thought I was deep and boom. Henry says I’m good enough for the Sootie. Miriam must have told you-it’s next week.”

“No, but she has now.”

“Made up your mind ’bout what you wanna wear?” I shrugged. Another customer approached Bushy, who looked across towards Wolf; he, in his turn, nodded cooperatively. Bushy said, “Wolfie’s not so bad after all. He’s just like us, on the hustle. He lets me sell what I like, as long as I give him a good bit.”

“I better go,” I said.

“See you at the Sootie, then,” said Bushy. “I’ll take you all there. Don’t be nervous.”

The walk home was further than I could cope with in one go, so I popped into the Bush Hall, a small ballroom next to the mosque on the Uxbridge Road where Rafi, as a child, had appeared in a carol service. I wanted to catch the end of M. Ward’s set. He was a sombre singer-songwriter Henry’s son had recommended, whose melancholic version of Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” never failed to move me. Ward was accompanied by a bass player, a girl drummer and another guitarist. The place was only three quarters full; I hadn’t had so much personal space at a concert in years.

I left, cheerful, after an exquisite version of Willie Dixon’s “Spoonful.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

I had too much to think about. I was anxious and not sleeping. I had said I would visit the Sootie, and it would be difficult to avoid; Miriam would insist. But there was no way I’d let her dress me.

At the end of the Shepherd’s Bush Road, going towards Olympia, was a circus shop where I took Rafi to buy his bling. Next door there was a sex shop, with dummies in the window clothed in what looked like 70s punk gear, now worn by the middle class at play, perversion as style. I went in and had a quick look around, but had no idea what was suitable dress for watching Bushy strum the banjo while others copulated.

I went outside. “Goddess, can you come with me?” I pleaded on the phone.

“It’s a strange request,” she said, between clients.

“You must have heard weirder. I’m a bit stuck here and a little embarrassed.”

“Oh, you poor dear. I’ll have to ask Madame. We can’t go behind her back.”

Madame seemed to think it was okay, as I was a “good, clean, respectable customer.” The Goddess, who would offer her body but not the intimacy of her name to anyone, met me by the tube station and we walked along to the shop. I guessed she was wearing her college clothes: jeans, a black polo-neck sweater, black boots.

Asking her to help was a good idea. She went straight to the black guy who ran the place and he showed her the gear. Knowing that I didn’t want anyone to see much of my body, and would only wear black and nothing too tight, she had me try on various items.

“Any silk or lace?”

“No thanks, Goddess. Think of me as a repressed Englishman.”

I posed around half-naked in a corner of the shop until I was well covered up in rubber and some sort of sticky plastic. Apart from my face, the only part of my body anyone would see would be my arms.

We were coming out of the shop with the stuff in anonymous bags when the Goddess touched my arm. I was saying I wished the clothes were rentable, as they were expensive and I was broke. She was laughing and telling me I’d like “the scene” and would want to return, “knowing your taste.”

She said, “Someone’s looking at you.”

“What?”

“Over there.” I assumed it was Wolf, the hellhound on my trail, clearly getting madder. It wouldn’t be long before the police picked him up, and then we’d both be done for. The Goddess said, “There she is.”

It was one of my patients, hurrying away. She was very paranoid, often telling me she’d seen me in different parts of the country, places I’d never visited. Now that she’d actually seen me, and coming out of a sex shop too, what would it do to her?

I took the Goddess for a drink, and she asked me what I did. I told her we both sold our time for money and were in the “intimacy with strangers” business. In fact, I said, I had never counted the number of times I had been compared, by my patients, to a prostitute. “Perhaps we are both rubbish dumps. People put into us what they don’t want to understand. We’re supposed to carry it for them.”

She was fascinated and horrified by what I did. “Who wants to know what’s in there?” she said, tapping her head. “If you start poking about, who knows what you’ll find?”

“It comes out anyway,” I replied. “You live it out, in your body, in your actions, in your choice…of career. What we all need, as my friend Henry says, are more words and less action.”

She seemed horrified. But when we parted, the Goddess gave me a plastic bag. “Open it,” she said.

It contained a half-mask with gold eye sockets, made of turquoise, blue and purple feathers, with silver and blue stars sewn into it.

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

“Yes, good luck!” She kissed me on the nose.

Having got the gear together, on the appointed night I went over to Henry’s with the stuff in a bag. Miriam would get changed at home; Bushy would bring her over and then drive us all to the Caramel Sootie.

It took me ten minutes to get ready and another two minutes to fight hopelessly with my hair, while wondering that if everything that gives pleasure is unhealthy, immoral or forbidden, would the evening be enough of each?

Henry was in his boxers, having shaved his genitals, flinging things down and stamping drunkenly around in front of a mirror while listening to Don Giovanni.

I was happy sitting in his chair, drinking, and smoking one of the joints Miriam had made for him. But the joint tired me, and I went to the bathroom for a little dab of speed to keep me going for the night. I was soon unaware of what I was wearing, but whenever Henry looked at me, he giggled.

“If only your patients could see you,” he said. “You look too good to have got that together yourself. Who helped you?”

“A friend.”

He was looking at me. “How come I tell you everything and you tell me nothing?”

We might have a long evening ahead of us, but at least Henry and I could have a conversation before Bushy arrived. Henry philosophising about his desire always entertained me. I said to him, “This orgy idea-”

“Yes, what about it? Hey-d’you think I should wear lipstick?”

“Only a little.” I went on: “Isn’t it a dream of merging? Of there being no differences between people? No one is left out. Sexually, it’s a totalitarian idea. Isn’t the orgy where people lose their individuality rather than find it?”

“I’m telling you this. You might feel a fool in those clothes, but who gives a fuck? This is an important and radical freedom.”

“At a time of harsh controls-indeed of terror-this represents liberation, man?”

“I am aware of your amusement, but all this bullshit about the conflict between civilisations, Islam and the West, is only another version of the same conflict between puritans and liberals, between those who hate the imagination and those who love it. It’s the oldest conflict of all, between repression and freedom.” He was standing in front of me. “How am I looking?”

“I can’t begin to describe it.”

“A couple of generous words, my friend?”

“Only to confirm that make-up and facial hair don’t go together.”

“They do now.” He went on, “I like London being one of the great Muslim cities. It’s the price of colonialism and its only virtue. At the same time, London is full of people with their heads covered-either in hoods, like your son, or Muslim women. I have to say I hate that and even glare at the women, no doubt adding to their sense of persecution.”

I said, “It shows that we are fascinated and disturbed by our bodies-covering, uncovering, the whole thing. We can never get it right, never be finished with this body business. Tattoos, weight, clothes…”

“You want to know why I’m listening to this opera? I’m trying to find something subversive and lubricious, a work that might speak to our condition. Want a Viagra?”

“Yeah, okay. Thanks.” He handed me the blue pill, and I swallowed it with vodka. “You’re going to stage Don Giovanni?”

“It’s too puritanical for me. He goes to hell in the end.”

“Doesn’t he refuse to recant? His is an ethical position, at least.”

I was aware of how powerful Henry’s connection with his work still was when he tapped his watch and said, “It’s seven-fifteen. Every day at this time it occurs to me that all over this city, throughout the country in fact, there are actors preparing for a show tonight, sitting in dressing rooms, putting on their slap, doing warm-ups and vocal exercises, terrified and exhilarated. Performers. The people I have spent my life with-those who can do difficult things in front of people who have travelled to see them.”

A couple of weekends before, Miriam and Henry, accompanied by one of her own kids, had driven down to a pop festival in a borrowed caravan, with Bushy driving. Henry had insisted on accompanying them, not wanting to be alone. But he had become restless, hating the caravan and, after a couple of hours, hating the music. It was “just white” and not as “authentic” as the hip-hop he liked to discuss with Rafi. Miriam and the others had started to call him Grandad.

I was surprised, therefore, when not long after, they started out on another short jaunt, this time to Paris, where Henry had been invited to a conference on culture. Naturally Henry despised “official” culture, but saw the trip as an excuse to see his friends-gallery directors, producers, writers, actors.

While he and Miriam were eating well with Marianne Faithfull, Bushy’s contacts in the Cross Keys had put him onto some Africans who hung around the Gare du Nord. Bushy also picked up some hot hip-hop in various African lingos for Rafi. On the way back, they filled up the car with booze and fags to sell to neighbours and in the Cross Keys. If there was anything left over, Wolf could offload it “up West.”

Henry had told me he’d been “offered something” at the Comédie-Française, but had turned it down. He seemed both flattered and tempted. I wondered when he’d go back to work and how Miriam would react to not having him around.

He said, “You say to me, why don’t I think about working again? What have I accomplished anyway? I have staged the work of others, but I am not the originator. What value do I have? The actors I respect. What they do is dangerous. Have I achieved anything original or worthwhile myself? One time someone called me a facilitator, and I nearly killed myself.”

“Aren’t you just tormenting yourself?”

“Chekhov’s characters are always going on about work. We must work, they repeat. I’ve never understood why he would consider work such a virtue.”

“Work is the price of guilt.”

He looked at me. “Come on, we’d better go.”

Bushy had rung. He and Miriam were nearby, waiting in the car.

Watching Henry prepare for the evening, and envying his commitment to the far-out-“To know sex,” he had said, “you have to risk being destroyed by it”-I’d decided not to be so uptight. Along with the gear the Goddess had arranged for me, I was wearing lipstick, slap, a blond wig belonging to one of Sam’s girlfriends-I hoped it was the Mule Woman-a black hat and dark glasses.

“Evenin’, doctor, if it really is you,” said Bushy as I opened the car door. “Lookin’ good, lookin’ good. You made the right choices, the pukka decisions.”

“Thank you, Bushy, my friend,” I said. “I can always rely on you for an accurate review. What do you think?” I asked Miriam, who was wearing a combination of black spiders’ webs in various materials, more or less her everyday look, apart from the miniskirt. “Miriam?”

“I’ve lost the power of speech.”

“Put that camera down!” I said, trying to grab the phone she was holding up.

“Get off! Just one for the kitchen wall!”

“No-no!”

“Girls, girls!” cried Henry as he got into the car. “Save your excitement for later.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Not far across the river at Vauxhall, we came to a line of railway arches which were used as motor workshops. One of the doors was painted black, and there were a few people gathered around it. Pushing through three thick curtains, we were greeted inside by a middle-aged couple who had known Bushy when he worked in a warehouse nearby.

We helped Bushy unpack his stuff and carry it into the crepuscular Sootie. Henry found a way to light Bushy on a little raised stage at the back of the place. Miriam was attempting to powder his sweating face; Bushy was shy about having his nose overilluminated. He was nervous and oblivious to the fact that everyone around him was dressed in unusual clothes, and even that they were beginning to kiss and caress one another.

The place was filling up. Bushy sat down in his position, tuned up and began to play a quiet blues. To encourage him, Henry and Miriam cheered and whistled as they did while watching trash TV. “All I need is me guitar, an amp, a joint and my doctor,” Bushy said, pointing at me.

I donned my mask and walked through the numerous tunnels and rooms of the Sootie, wondering at the people and their lives.

I turned a corner, and she walked past me. My wife was tall in the heels I’d bought her years ago, when I still believed in our love. Her legs were long and she looked good in her clothes. I was surprised to see her but not unhappy. Often, when we met outside the house, we found we got on. We wouldn’t speak all day at home, but then, in the evening, at a party, we’d ignore everyone else and begin talking as if we were friends who hadn’t seen one another for a year. But tonight she seemed to be in a hurry, walking about alone, looking for something or someone, and I didn’t want to follow her.

I could hear that Bushy had begun in earnest, and I wanted to see him. By now his foot was bouncing, his muscles pulsing, his voice like dirty metal and Captain Beefheart.

He was competent in most styles, with great technique, but he couldn’t complete a tune, as though he wanted to play everything at once, like some kind of psychotic jukebox. As he switched among complicated jazz chords, bits of blues and popular tunes, he talked or rambled. He had studied the bluesmen and remembered the dates, saying this song was written in March 1932 or whenever. Sensing some interest, he’d give you more: Did you know John Lee Hooker was a Jehovah’s Witness? He’d do an impression of Hooker, almost a skit-the voice, the whole thing-coming to your house with his Bible, a copy of the Watchtower and a tune.

Bushy was compelling, keeping people from sex. What higher compliment could there be for an artist? Henry stood there proudly, leaning against a pillar. When a man approached to ask whether he was Bushy’s manager, Henry said yes. The man gave Henry his card, took Henry’s number and promised to get in touch. “Bushy will always work now,” Henry said to me. “I wish it had occurred to me before to represent talent for a living.”

Later, beyond a heaving pile of what looked like colourfully decorated slugs, I came upon a screen with slits and holes in it, and a chair behind it. I was looking through it as two men led her in. She seemed determined now in her search for the holy grail of pleasure, the paradigm of luxurious abandonment.

I sat to watch as Josephine lay down, with her face turned towards me. I was so startled-it was as though she could see me. I thought for a moment that my ears might burst-I almost fled. I was more than tempted to lie in her arms again. To do it anonymously would be one of the oddest things I’d done.

I walked towards her as she lay there with her throat exposed, the other figures rising and falling in the mirrored wall, reminding me of how she liked sex in front of a mirror, with one leg up on a chair; little of me would be visible, just my dark hands moving over her fair skin as she watched herself.

I thought: in an opera, at this moment, someone would kill her. I was trembling, and wondered if I might fall down.

She was excited: her face appeared to be glowing. She lived in fear of blushing-“an erection of the face, along with the desire to be looked at,” as someone described it, which made her even more self-conscious. At times she didn’t want to go out because of what she saw as her “embarrassment.” Shame would have been the better word. When she became angry her face seemed to pulsate with blood pushing to the surface. “An exploding strawberry,” I called her, helpfully.

Now it was my turn; she whispered in my ear as though she knew me. “Hallo,” she said, and “Please” and “Yes, yes.” I said nothing, smelling the other men on her, wondering if she’d know me by my flickering eyelashes, which she’d often commented on.

In the low light, I was able to see, in her hair on the back of her neck, a mole I hadn’t noticed before, which I kissed. Not far away Bushy was singing a Mavis Staples song, “I’ll take you there…I’ll take you there…” I could almost have fallen in love with her again as I thought: a better man than me would announce himself, pick her up, cover her, and carry her out of here, to a cleaner place. I wasn’t sure anymore what it was to love an adult, but looking at her familiar white limbs, I knew I preferred her to anyone else.

I noticed Bushy was no longer playing. I was going to the bar when Henry found me.

“I’ve been looking all over for you,” he said, pulling anxiously at his beard. “Bushy won’t come out.” He pointed at the disabled toilet. “The Security here can force him, but it would be easier if he heard your voice.”

I knocked on the door. “Can I come in?”

“Git out!”

“Can I talk to you-about the music?”

There was a silence. The door opened, and I entered the lighted box, Bushy locking the door behind us. The taps were running and the strip light was buzzing. The dryer had jammed and sounded, in that space, like a motor mower. It was hot in there. Perhaps I was stoned: Bushy’s body was almost anamorphically distorted. I had interrupted this dirty Orpheus naked in front of the mirror, examining his scabrous hooter with a razor blade in his hand. His eyes, wide and unblinking, appeared in the strange light to be buried in one yellow socket and one that was lurid blue.

“Don’t get the wrong idea.” He had suspended the blade over his nose, as though looking for the ideal spot. “I’m not cutting it off. I’m going to nick into a section of it. I’m going to prune it-that way it won’t toilet me no more.”

“You can’t slash your snout. You’ll get blood everywhere.”

“Why else would I be undressed?” He glanced at me and tapped his nose. “You think this is the right place?”

“It’s not the right place and this is not the right time. You’ll make a mistake,” I said, coming up behind him with his clothes gathered up under one arm.

He said, “Keep off!”

“I can’t help it, friend, we’re in a toilet together. People are backed up out there, waiting to pee.” I put my other hand out. “Don’t let everyone down now you’ve got them interested.”

He dropped the blade into my palm. He took the clothes and began to dress. “You haven’t said anything about the music.”

“It’s heavy.”

“I’ll give ’em my Latin.” He checked himself in the mirror and looked at me. “Your wig’s crooked.”

“Can you adjust it for me?”

“A pleasure, man of leisure. You’re looking good, man, fully expressed. I told you I needed you here with me.”

Bushy went out before me, back to the stage area. Henry was waiting outside, with so much sweat coming off him I thought a pipe had burst over his head.

I showed him the blade before putting it in my pocket. “A close shave.” Henry could see from my face that something bad had happened. “I need a drink. Christ, Henry, some people are really crazy.”

Bushy’s second appearance was indeed quieter, mostly Latin tunes accompanied by some gruff crooning. The music became so smooth and serious that people began to make love around him, on sofas and cushions; as they copulated, Bushy adjusted his time and rhythm. “I was the illustrator of fuck,” he told me later. “As their rhythm changed so did mine, in fuck-adjustment. Then I saw I could influence their fuck movement, making ’em do different fucking things.”

A couple lying on a sofa invited me to join them. I was left in no doubt, in such a place, where other mundane norms were suspended, of how polite and courteous everyone was.

“He likes to watch,” she whispered. I just about managed to fuck the woman while the man looked on, idly stroking his flaccid penis, smiling and nodding at me as though I were doing him a great favour. After a time I felt I was. Occasionally, the woman attempted to suck him, but otherwise he left all the love work to me. “Thanks,” he said as I rested breathlessly in his wife’s arms. When I left, we shook hands.

It was late when Bushy drove us back. Henry and Miriam were asleep in the back of the car. I wanted to shower.

“Thanks for my tune, Bushy,” I said.

“Pleasure,” he replied. “Enjoyed it, sir.”

As an encore, and to thank me, Bushy had played Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads.” One time in the car, when he’d been humming it, I told him it was one of my favourite songs. It was, after all, at a place where three highways meet-a crossroads-where Oedipus kills his father, the paedophile Laius, after which Jocasta, his wife and mother, says, “Have no more fear of sleeping with your mother. / How many men, in dreams, have lain with their mothers! / No reasonable man is troubled by such things.” Bushy considered this founding myth a little soap-opera-like for his tastes. He replied by saying that Robert Johnson, who had bad eyesight and was rumoured to have sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his talent, was poisoned by a jealous husband in a bar called Three Forks.

Now Bushy said, “People don’t realise how difficult it is to play that song properly, using Johnson’s fingering. But I learned it for you, because you helped me.”

“Thank you again, Bushy,” I said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

I found Miriam washing up the next time I went to her house to watch the football. She didn’t turn round to address me but said, over her shoulder, “You’ve been keeping away from me.”

“I’ve had new patients. I’ve been asked to lecture. You know, I really enjoy my work.”

“So what? You didn’t like the Sootie. You’ve told everyone but me.”

“Didn’t I look funky in the wig? Even you admitted I made an effort.”

“You were taking the piss, calling them the clusterfuckers and stuff. You were acting superior that night and you know it.”

“Not only me.”

“Who?”

I said, “Henry was like an officious parent commanding his children to enjoy their holiday. ‘You must like this or else!’” I added, “It reminded me of our society’s implausible commitment to optimism, and how much the depressed are hated.”

She turned and threw water at me. “Snob-nob! What did you actually say to Henry?”

“I told him it wasn’t a real orgy. The real orgy is elsewhere.”

“Where?”

“Baghdad.” I went on: “It suddenly became my job to calm Bushy down, while you sat with a group of women discussing animals and tattoos, just as you would at home. The men and their penises didn’t appear to inject much zing into your ming.”

“I may have been quiet, but I was having a lookout,” she said. “There’s a masked woman Henry always goes for.”

“Is she there often?”

Miriam shrugged. “I’m not certain which one she is. People look similar with their clothes off, and I never wear my glasses in there.”

I raised Miriam’s cat above my head. “Of course not. Are you jealous?”

“He fucks the women, but he always comes in me. That’s the rule. He’s mine and he bloody well knows it, otherwise I’ll tattoo my name onto his arse myself.” She said, “Jamal, I’m warning you, if anyone annoys me today, I’m in one of my moods, they’re gonna get it, okay? By the way, that cat’s about to piss on you.”

Now I was laughing, and she was shaking her head darkly. I knew that any dismissiveness of the Sootie was a sore subject for Miriam because she and Henry had recently been in deep dispute about “the scene.”

After I had mentioned the Sootie to Karen-this was a while ago-she had gone to investigate with Miriam, wrapped in an acre of sticky plastic, looking not unlike a potato in clingfilm, as Henry put it. She had decided to make three programmes for TV about what she liked to describe, in “tab-speak,” as “the underbelly-or potbelly, more like-of British suburban sexuality”: swapping, dogging, fetishism and the like. She had already taken Miriam out to lunch to discuss it.

Miriam was excited not only by the idea of appearing on TV, but of working as an “adviser.” Karen had suggested that Miriam would be the right person to persuade potential participants in the programme to take part. Miriam saw it as an “opportunity”; it would make her “a professional” in the media, like Henry’s friends. Miriam had even said that Karen was planning to feature me on the programme, as a “psychological expert.” “She promised you’d get paid,” Miriam had added. “What do you think?”

“Was Karen cheerful?”

“Oh yes. When I saw her, she was about to go out on a date with an American TV producer. I gave her great advice about what to wear.”

But when Miriam had put Karen’s proposition to Henry as something they could do together, without any hesitation he’d trashed Karen and “her ilk,” delivering an intense monologue about “the end of privacy.” If everyone could become a celebrity, and no celebrity could control how they were seen, there could be no more heroes or villains: we were living in a democracy of the mad, of the victim and the exhibitionist. The media had become a freak show.

“What’s the alternative?” asked Miriam, exasperated.

Henry argued that such intimacy, such a close-up of the individual, had always been the privilege of the novel and the drama. That was how, until recently, we examined the Other, through the imagination and intelligence of an artist like Ibsen or Proust. Now everyone revealed everything but no one understood anything. Being gawped at on television would not give him pleasure, nor would it provide one watt of illumination for the public.

Most of this Miriam characterised as “overbrainy bollocks,” but she understood Henry found her desire to work on the programmes as “vulgar and idiotic.” It wasn’t something she wanted to do alone, and it wasn’t something he could participate in.

“I’ve never felt so different to him,” she said. “We do everything together. Until he announces he’s a superelitist, too grand to go along with a ditch pig like me. The other day he said, ‘Miriam, how did you live so long and yet manage to pick up so little?’”

“What did you say?”

“‘I haven’t had fucking time! I’ve had five children and more abortions than you’ve had orgies! While you people were nancying around in theatres, I was in a psychiatric hospital!’”

“That’s no excuse,” Henry had replied blithely. “So was Sylvia Plath.”

I said, “Henry makes some people feel ignorant. But he doesn’t want to do that to you.”

The odd thing was that, despite Henry’s contempt for television, he wasn’t too grand, after the night at the Sootie, to refer to Bushy as his “client” while trying to set up another gig for him. “I should have been a pimp,” Henry had told me. “The perfect job for an artist. Even William Faulkner thought so. Failing that, I’ve become an agent.”

“For Chrissakes, Henry,” I said. “What are you doing?”

He told me that, after the Sootie gig, Bushy had had a few requests for private parties-straight and bent-which Henry was “processing.” Henry said the odd thing was how “being in management” wasn’t any less compelling than anything else he’d done. But he asked me this: “Do you think Bushy’s mental health will hold up?”

“You mean, do I think it could be like the last days of Edith Piaf? Or that you yourself could end up in a locked cage, screaming naked?”

“That’s what I was wondering. But he’s asked me to do this stuff. It’s not me pushing him into it. I blame you entirely. You’ve given him the confidence.”

My guess was that Henry was becoming bored with his “retirement.” He had been with Miriam for more than a year, and had spent a lot of time sitting around in her house, talking, cooking, walking the dogs in the grounds of Syon House or by the river, just being with his new love. One evening he had plunged into the chaos of the garden, digging, pulling weeds and planting. With his new predilection for exposing his body, he wore only gloves, boxer shorts and Wellington boots.

Whatever Henry did, of course, he’d do obsessively. To him it was all work-digging the garden, directing Hamlet in Prague-except that you didn’t get abused in the newspapers for digging the garden. “Nor do you get international recognition,” I pointed out.

Now Miriam came to sit with me on the sofa as I watched the match, taking my arm. I told her that Henry’s fascination with Bushy’s career was because he had always been intrigued by performance. Once the sexual side of “the scene” had become exhausted-which, in my view, hadn’t taken long-Henry had become interested in the images, metaphors and ideas that the Sootie inspired in him.

I said, “I saw Henry watching the proceedings in the Sootie, and he had his director’s face on. He presses his fingertips together and looks over the top of them with huge concentration.” I made the gesture for her. “I bet a good deal of what he’s seen will eventually turn up in the production of Don Giovanni he’s not planning. Bushy will be his Leporello. Fucking artists, that’s what they do.”

There was some sort of trade-off with Bushy too, because in exchange for Henry helping him with his career, Bushy was clearing out and rebuilding the shed at the end of Miriam’s garden. This was where Henry was intending to work. Not only did he want to become a sculptor but, to prove it, he was determined to sell at least one of his works. This new direction had occurred to him after I’d taken Henry and Miriam to lunch with Billie and Mum.

The two women no longer wanted to lunch at the Royal Academy, which they considered too “old women,” so we went to a place they’d read about in The Independent, at the bottom of the Portobello Road, not far from the Travel Bookshop. Billie and Mum liked the nearby market, which was less crowded during the week. The restaurant might have been expensive, but they had no interest in saving money. Spending seemed to have become proof of their existence.

Over lunch Henry had conceived the idea that it would be a good idea for him to work seriously with clay. Billie would give him lessons, once the studio they were having built was ready.

During and after this lunch-Mum, Henry and Billie discussing their favourite sculptors, Miriam texting-Miriam had kept her temper, despite an early setback. On arrival, she had shown off her latest tattoo, a little dove on her foot, which failed to create the interest she’d anticipated. Indeed, Billie said, “Apparently Freddie Ljungberg-the Arsenal football god, for those who know nothing-was poisoned by his tattoos.” “He can’t have been using Mike the artist,” said Miriam. “Where’s he based?” Billie asked. “Hounslow,” Miriam replied.

Mother was gazing at Billie, smiling a little bit, which she did a lot of the time. Billie was smirking. This new, bright side of Mother-something dark had slowly been scraped off, or fallen away of its own accord-was independent, self-absorbed and dismissive of anything that didn’t immediately concern her.

It can’t have been a coincidence that a few days later, when Bushy began work on the sculpture shed, Miriam decided that Henry had to marry her. She had said this before but now she began to insist, saying that, until she had a new rock on her finger, she couldn’t believe he loved her.

I had endured years of this whiney self-righteous side of Miriam and had grown no fonder of it, but Henry took it seriously, as he had to. The two of them spent the night together at least twice a week, either at his place or hers, but she still had children at home, at least some of the time. So it wasn’t possible for them to live together, even if they wanted to. Though it would be an infinite regress of impossible confirmation, she required proof of his commitment, particularly now, when he was spending hours on the phone to Lisa and Valerie.

As far as Henry was concerned, he didn’t want to marry anyone-“Jesus, I don’t want to get back into that, unless it’s for a very good reason, like tax avoidance”-but Miriam interpreted this as rejection. Not only that, but from her point of view he was still married to Valerie: it was she he considered to be his “main” wife.

As I was leaving after the football, Miriam came after me. “Brother, you’ve got to speak to him for me. I can feel myself getting wild. The other night I had a razor blade in my hand, ready to start cutting again. Help me, bro.”

The next day I met Henry for lunch. When he eventually turned up, I said to him, “Your hair’s everywhere, you haven’t shaved, there’s dribble on your tee-shirt. You look a little manic, man, and my sister wants to marry you.”

“You’d be crazy, bro, in my circumstances,” he said. “I think I need a dozen oysters. Will you have some?”

“I will indeed,” I said. “Is there news of the famous Hand?”

He looked up from the wine list and removed his glasses. “Jamal, I know Miriam’s a mouth, but I am continuing to urge everyone to keep it zipped. I don’t want this story carried around town-or in the newspapers.” He went on, “It is amusing. Except the thing’s worth a lot of money.”

“A hand? Is this the Hand of God?”

He said, “A fucking Ingres. It’s a drawing. Brown crayon, a woman in profile. Valerie’s room is so crammed with art I hated to go in there. Her father was a collector. The very rich are insouciant about such things.”

“I guess Lisa can keep it.”

“What the hell for? It’s not insured and she can’t sell it. Only a criminal would buy it, and she likes criminals even less than her own family. The stupid thing is, Valerie lives in such a fog of self-preoccupation that she didn’t notice it was gone. Lisa must have been sitting in her digs waiting for her mother to explode.

“Lisa lost her temper and went round and jabbed at the bare patch. It’s some sort of protest. Now Lisa’s getting a lot of attention, and so is Valerie, who makes me have lunch with her. Then she starts.” Henry enjoyed doing her brittle English accent, like a female radio announcer circa 1960. “‘Christ Almighty Henry, we rip up masterpieces around here? Is that our relation to culture? I am on the board of the Tate Modern! They’ve asked me to help at the Hay Festival! I’m helping save all kinds of fucking art for the nation, fighting to keep culture alive in these dirty times, and our own daughter does this! If it gets in the papers we’re going to look like fools.’ On and on. And you think I get the chance to say anything?”

“What does she want you to do?”

He leaned towards me. “Valerie does have an idea. Don’t scream-it involves you.”

Henry, I knew, rather sensibly liked to pass his problems on to others in order that he didn’t have to think about unpleasant subjects. This was a good compromise with regard to Valerie, as there were many occasions when he needed her.

He said, “You know she respects you, man.”

“She considers me an arse and a pretender. My social credit’s flat. It’s been too long since I’ve had a nice review, or any kind of review.”

“You are rather floundering about. Why don’t you just publish something?”

“Why don’t you?”

He went on, “But Valerie is respecting you right at this moment, because Lisa will listen to you. My daughter has a thing about your books, she underlines stuff in them for some reason, and knows what abreaction and cathexis mean. I’m not asking you for a favour, I’m just saying the bitch has got a loft in New York where you can stay. Consider the West Village before you say no. You know you like nosing around the little bookshops and cafés there.”

“I attempt to take care of your daughter’s mental health and in exchange I get free accommodation in New York?”

“As if I were the only one with woman problems. You know I was watching you in the Sootie.”

“You saw me watching my ex. What did you think?”

He said, “I was wondering what such a sight would do to someone’s head. I only hope you’ve been seeing Ajita.”

I told Henry that the last time I’d been to the house, to see Rafi, I’d stroked Josephine’s hair in the kitchen. Not only because I wanted to, or because she had a headache, but because I’d been in search of the mole I’d seen in the Sootie. Of course I wasn’t able to find it. Then I realised I’d been looking on the wrong side. But had it really been her there? Had it really been me?

Henry touched my hand. “Old chap, I know she’s an agony, but do what you can for my daughter. If I don’t get that picture back, or if it gets damaged, I’m going to be hurting in the nuts.”

Not long after I’d said goodbye to Henry-he would stay in the bar, read the paper and finish the bottle-Valerie rang.

She was keen to invite me to dinner but, of course, wanted to talk about Lisa and the Hand. I could take some of her talk but turned down the party-for which she had gathered a stellar cast of American film agents-as I suspected she’d use it as an opportunity to get me into one of her “little rooms,” where she’d go on more about Lisa.

Now she was saying to me, “Of course, with Lisa, there’s no reason for all that combing through the past you usually do. There just isn’t time for that nonsense. This is an emergency situation, as she slips away from us into insanity.”

I told Valerie I would consider her request to help Lisa-help her what?-but added that I didn’t believe there was much I could do personally. Not that I believed that saying no meant anything to this family.

Nevertheless, I didn’t expect to hear from any of them quite so soon.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

The doorbell rang.

That evening, when my last patient had gone, I was preparing to have dinner with Ajita. She had rung earlier and said she had a free evening; would I join her at the Red Fort in Dean Street? When I turned my phone on, I saw she had texted me to say she was tired and was going to bed. I was disappointed: Hadn’t she dreamed and yearned for me tirelessly for years, as I had about her? Now, probably in response to my diffidence, she could hardly get out of bed for me.

Restless and horny, I was considering a visit to the Goddess; later, maybe I could go and find Henry and Bushy. I wanted, at least, to see whether Bushy had been able to perform without me.

So I thought it might be Wolf at the door. But it was Lisa standing there, holding her bicycle and-unusually for her-smiling.

“Ready?”

“Was I expecting you?”

She shrugged and continued to smile under her damp woolly hat. I wasn’t ready for anything except for a walk, despite the rain. I didn’t want to invite her in as, no doubt, she’d have stayed until Tuesday. I grabbed my coat and went out.

“You ride it,” she said, pushing the bicycle towards me. “We’re going on a journey.” Some of the way I rode the bike, which was big and heavy, particularly when she sat on the rack, this ungainly, two-bodied burden heaving itself up the Fulham Palace Road. The rest of the way she trotted behind me.

“Where to?”

“Somewhere calming,” she said. “You’ll like it.”

Beside Bishops Park we came to a locked gate-and, after opening it, to what appeared to be a field. There were lights in a couple of sheds, but otherwise it was dark in a way it rarely is in London.

“Come on,” said my tour guide.

What could I do but follow her across, trying to avoid puddles? It was hopeless; my feet sank into the mud, and my beloved green Paul Smith loafers, which I’d got in a sale, were waterlogged. I was furious, but what was the point of stopping or complaining now?

At the end of the allotment, not far from the river, we came to a shed and she led me in, using a torch. She lit candles. We sat on wooden crates, and she rolled a cigarette. I noticed an old picture of her father pinned to the wall, ripped from a newspaper. Water dripped on our heads.

“I love to sit here,” she said. “It’s meditative. But it gets damp.” She was quiet for a bit. “What do you think of me taking the Ingres?”

“It’s your inheritance. What difference does it make whether it’s today or another day?” Picking up a candle, I peered at the shelves. “This is more interesting. What are these things?”

“Objects I picked out of the river mud and cleaned.”

Half-crushed Coke cans; shards of crockery; rusted keys; glass; a plastic bottle stuffed with mud; a showerhead; a length of metal pipe. Some had been cleaned; other pieces were enshrouded in a skin of grey mud. Here these broken pieces had some uncanny, compelling force, making you want to look more closely at them and wonder about their provenance.

“I’m impressed.”

“Anyone can do it. All you need is a bucket and a toothbrush. Oh, and a river.”

There was a pile of books: Plath, Sexton, Olds, Rich. “You’ve been reading.”

For some reason I was thinking of the library my father had made in Pakistan, and wondering whether anyone used it now.

She said, “My parents don’t know I do it. They’d get too excited.”

“You’re writing too.” I was looking at a pad with slanted writing on it.

“Don’t tell. You understand why I don’t want them to know?”

“Your secret is how much you resemble your parents,” I said. “But you’re entitled to your privacy. As they are to theirs. Did you see your father’s piece in the paper?” She almost nodded. “What did you think?”

Last weekend Henry had written an open letter to Blair, saying he was resigning from the Party he’d joined in the mid-60s because Labour had become dictatorial, corrupt and unrepresentative. Apart from the egregious lying, there had been insufficient debate over Iraq. Dissent was not encouraged in the Party, which was now run for television rather than with the aim of redistributing wealth and power. What had Blair achieved, apart from the minimum wage and the proposed extension of pub opening hours? For Henry, the Labour Party, along with other organisations, including corporations, had moved towards the condition of being cults, a project which not only claimed your loyalty but your inner freedom.

Henry had brought the piece round to me for discussion. It was strong polemical writing, penned in a fury, and was given half a page in a liberal Sunday paper by the editor, a friend of Valerie’s. What surprised Henry was the number of friends and colleagues who rang to say how much they admired his stand and what he’d said.

After the piece appeared, he was asked onto Newsnight; he spoke on the radio and wrote again to the paper. He had plenty to say, and found that people considered him intelligent and eloquent. He’d taught, but he’d never much talked about politics, or even the theatre, in public, because he feared losing his temper and saying something insulting or crazy. I told him he was respected because he wasn’t some penny-a-line hack or raddled politician. I hated to say the word, it had become so devalued by pomposity and contempt, but Henry was an intellectual, and doing what they were supposed to do.

I said to Lisa, “A lot of people admire your father. If we’re in a war, he’s rebelling with his words.”

“Great, he’s telling everyone he’s against the war. How brave. He’s leaving a party he should never have joined.” She was speaking quickly. “Why doesn’t he actually support the insurgents in Iraq, and the bombers and resisters around the world? Why doesn’t he accept the idea of the struggle moving to Britain? Everyone says-even the government-that the response is coming, that we’re going to get it here, in London. Blair has brought retribution on himself and on us. Even one of your politicians, Robin Cook, said we’d have been better advised bringing peace to Palestine than war to Iraq.

“Why doesn’t Dad say that our corruption and materialism are so decadent that we have actively earned all that we have coming?” She was shaking her head, as though to clear her mind of fury. At last she said, “I’m sick of what I have to say. Why don’t you tell me what you are doing at the moment?”

“I was just writing, for months,” I said. “About a girl. But going nowhere, you know.” She seemed to nod. “Then I found a subject. It emerged. Or it was there all the time. Guilt.”

“Yes?”

“The notion of. How it works. Or what it does. The Greeks. Dostoevsky. Freud. Nietzsche. “There is no feast without cruelty,” Nietzsche writes. Guilt and responsibility. Conscience. All the important things.”

“Why such a subject? Do you have a lot on your mind?”

“Well, yes. It’s difficult to escape. Among other things I had an argument with my son.”

I told her about it. The previous Sunday, Rafi had reluctantly come to spend the day with me. I was lying on the sofa reading the paper; we were listening to music; Rafi was on the floor, sitting at my feet. He’d been sitting there sullenly, playing with one of his lighted machines. Occasionally he gave me the finger or, if I was lucky, two fingers. When he walked past me, he liked to give me a shove, pretending it was an accident. Was I like this? Probably. Miriam certainly was. Being a good parent means bearing this, up to a point.

Now he began to pinch me, hard. I was either ignoring him or paying him too much attention. I told him to stop, several times, but he was enjoying it, giggling and smirking. “You can’t take it, eh?” he said. “Weak man. I’m never coming here again, you haven’t even got Sky. We have to go to the pub or to your sister’s to watch football. It’s shit here. Can’t you get a girlfriend?” Pinch, pinch.

I drew back my foot and kicked him on the top of his head, hard. He didn’t make a sound, his head just dropped. He looked up at me, his brown eyes uncomprehending, as if he’d suffered the most tragic betrayal possible. “My head is numb,” he said. He got up and screamed. “I can’t feel my head!”

He ran to lock himself in the bathroom. He was hurt, but not enough to forget his mobile. He phoned his mother many times. When I got him out of there, he spent the rest of the day in a cupboard, and I had to stand outside, begging him to come out, muttering to myself, “Once, you little fucker, for years I gave up my sexuality to be with you, now be nice to me!”

In the end, I left him to it and went back to the newspapers. That evening, when he went home, I saw he’d pissed in the cupboard. He informed Josephine I’d stamped on his head, trying to kill him.

I rang Josephine to apologise and explain, anticipating a thrashing. I told her the boy had learned what fathers can do, what monsters they might turn into, when pushed. He had sought my limit and had found it. I said I was ashamed; at the same time I was defensive. She was sympathetic. Since she had been working-and she was sure this was the reason-he had attacked her on a few occasions, pulling her hair and frightening her. Other times he ran away into the street, not returning for an hour, giving her a fright. Now that he was becoming difficult, we had to stand together. If she and I were to speak again-and we both wanted to, I was sure of it-he had to be the conduit; we could only love one another through him.

It gratified me, this solidarity. I had been rendered sleepless by hurting him. But he had a strong ego. He didn’t bear grudges; he was too interested in the world. The next time I saw him he was trying to learn to play his electric guitar, which I had to tune for him. Meanwhile he wanted me to hear the new music he liked, which he played through his computer while giving me little glances to gauge my approval.

Lisa said, “And here’s me-still arguing with my father.”

I said, “Lisa, why don’t you cheer me up by reading to me?”

“Are you sure?”

“I want to hear the poem. Now you’ve dragged me all this fucking way in the rain, you might as well do something for me.”

She spat out her cigarette, ground it into the floor and began to read without enthusiasm or emphasis; her face twitched and her tongue flicked. After about ten minutes she stopped.

I thanked her and said, “Haven’t you published before? I have some vague memory of you saying you had.”

At Oxford, I seemed to recall, she read English and wrote a thesis on “Madness and Women’s Poetry.”

“Yes, in student papers. No one noticed.”

I said, “You want me to show these to someone?”

“Suppose they want to publish them? I can’t be an artist.”

“You might be one already.”

“My parents are snobs. So-called artists came to the house all the time. I refuse to worm my way into Mummy and Daddy’s affections that way.”

“Loving you has to be difficult?”

“Why not? They didn’t even want me to become a social worker. And when I became one, they took no interest, they never asked me about my cases.”

I said, “Use a pseudonym.”

“For my cases?”

“I didn’t mean that, but it’s a good thought.” I sighed and stood up. “I’m going.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve asked too much of you. I’m interested in what you think. I can’t find anyone to talk to-someone who hears me right. I dream of the sea, over and over.”

“You want a child?”

“Shit, you foolish man, I hope not. You’ve gone too far.”

I was laughing and I could see she wanted to kiss me, and I let her, tasting this stranger standing in front of me with her tongue in the front of my mouth. When she pushed her body against mine and I reached for her breast, I wondered if I might respond, if there might be something there. She slid down my body. I let her blow me, which I considered some recompense for my doomed shoes.

She said, “I didn’t think the poem would be enough for you. We’re both lonely. Sleep here, you can smell the river and hear the rain.”

“Not tonight.”

She got up. “I’m not young or pretty enough for you.”

“And vice versa.”

She dropped the writing pad in a large plastic bag and gave it to me. I had opened the door when she said, “Take this as well.” I guessed it was the Hand, wrapped in several layers of newspaper, still in its frame. I shoved it into the side of the bag.

The rain fell like nails. The sludge had thickened. Lisa’s was the only shed now lighted, and it was a desolate place. I wondered whether the bag might be porous in some way, thus destroying the Hand.

With mud sucking at my feet and my trousers soaked up to the knee, I was trudging across a waterlogged allotment in the dark, hauling a masterpiece and some poems in a Tesco carrier. It was also the night Henry was accompanying Bushy to his second gig, a private party. A rich man was entertaining some business associates with a bunch of hookers. Henry had been afraid Bushy would play too much of the “mad stuff,” which he had been sure to warn him against.

Bushy wanted to do the gig without my help, but they’d suggested I join them. Earlier, I’d considered getting a cab and going over for a drink, but I would resemble a drowned jackass. By the time I’d walked home, I was exhausted.

I woke up at two. At three I unwrapped the Hand and looked at it, placing it here and there in the room. It wasn’t large, about 14 by 16 inches, and on grey paper, luminous with intelligence, tenderness and beauty. Ingres, for one, hadn’t been wasting his time. I placed it on the mantelpiece next to the whore’s Christmas card.

Just before I went to bed, I checked my phone. There was a peculiar message from Bushy, who should have had better things to do that night. “Info arrived,” it said.

Next morning Wolf came to collect his washing, which he’d put in my machine. He came in and out of my place as though we were close friends. I should have stopped it; but I’d thought he wouldn’t return. He had said he didn’t like to visit me, since the first thing you saw, on entering the hall, was yourself, in the coffin of a full-length mirror.

It wasn’t until almost lunchtime, when I was in the middle of a particularly troublesome case-a woman had taken to punching herself, like the guy in Fight Club-that I realised the Hand had gone.

Wolf, of course, had some instinct for these things. He’d have known it was a good picture; how good, I’m not sure. I rang him and wondered whether he might be intending to return it anytime soon.

Even as I put the phone down, he was cackling.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

I had been intending to ring Henry to say I’d got the Hand for him. He would be relieved, and we would continue with our friendship as normal. Now it was my duty to explain that I had indeed retrieved the picture-and had spent some time helping his daughter, at Valerie’s request. Except that there had been a glitch.

I explained, “The Hand has been taken from my flat by a psychotic patient.”

“Taken? You say taken?”

“Yes, taken. Sorry about that, pal.”

“Taken for good?”

“Maybe. How would I know? Do the mad explain their long-term intentions?”

“Taken by which madman, for God’s sake?” He began to yell. “Who was it?”

“That’s confidential.”

“Are you serious? You are telling me there is a lunatic running about London with my wife’s best Ingres stuffed in his backpack?”

“Exactly.”

“And you let them? Is this your rebellion-your hatred-of me? You’ve finally turned, have you?”

“Certainly the Hand has been severed.”

“Is it coming back?”

“Who knows? As Lenin might have said,” I added, “one step forward, two steps back.”

The noises on the other end of the line were extraordinary. I turned off the phone.

After I’d finished for the day, Henry came by. We had argued often, and sulked and disputed vigorously, enjoying much of it, but not all. Both of us relished a good rumble, though we had never fallen out. Now I didn’t want to hear another word about the Hand.

I must have come to the door with some leery belligerence, because he laid his hand on my shoulder and said quickly, “Don’t worry, cool it, I’m not going to bring it up. There are more important things than pencil marks on a piece of paper.”

We strolled past the line of busy pubs, with drinkers sitting outside in the sun, towards the bridge at Barnes and then back along the towpath towards Hammersmith Bridge. On the opposite side of the river path was a deserted bird sanctuary with a bench on a bank high above it. We sat there for a while.

“I wanted to see you. I’d have joined you last night,” I said, “if I hadn’t been dealing with your family.”

“I’m grateful for that,” he said. “It was fun. There was a panic early on because the man holding the party phoned to call it off. As always in life, there weren’t enough girls. But being in the agent business, I could be of assistance.”

“You?”

“Bushy called in at the Cross Keys, and he came along to the party with three Eastern European grinders who were more than willing to have money put their way. But what do you know, they were accompanied by their manager-a Mr. Wolf.”

“Big Bad?”

“You know him. Mr. Wolf stayed for the evening, feeling his charges needed security. He was extremely pleased by the way it went.”

“In what way?”

“He had a briefcase full of charlie, and there were plenty of takers. Soon the girls and the guys were lost in a blizzard of it. If I hadn’t called a halt to the whole thing around three, I think we’d still be there.”

“How was Bushy?”

“He wasn’t convinced he could play without you on hand. I had to tell him he was helping me out, that he was a staff member rather than a star. That seemed to do it.

“But he was-for reasons he wouldn’t elaborate-wearing a white plaster on his nose, which made him resemble Jack Nicholson in Chinatown. At one point, his face turned red and his eyes started to pulsate. I don’t think anyone noticed until he started shutting one eye and letting the other pop and bulge. One of the girls went into a hyperventilation and had to be taken out and slapped, but she was a write-off for the rest of the night.” Henry went on, “Wolf’s one of your oldest friends, if not the oldest, and I’d never met him before.”

“What did he say?”

“As the evening went on, he told me about Valentin and Ajita and her father’s factory. I’d forgotten that you’d been involved in that. I remember reading about it at the time. I’d say that Wolf’s rather obsessed with you, isn’t he? He wants to meet up with me to talk more. Would that be okay?”

“No.”

“I did hear about the unsolved murder and the whole three-years-in-a-Syrian-jail thing. Don’t look so worried, none of us is clean.”

Henry finished his drink. He was going to Miriam’s. One of the dogs was sick; she needed him there. Miriam was on her own more than she liked to admit. The children, teenagers now, stayed where they could, often with friends. One of the sweeter boys, needing to escape, had even gone to stay with Mum and Billie in the suburbs.

I saw a lot of Miriam, particularly as she had the Sky football package I hadn’t got round to renting, but I would never sleep under her roof. She was still more than capable of “insane” behaviour: screaming, rolling around on the floor, punching the wall. At times, in her house, I could feel as though I’d been lobbed through the looking-glass and whirled back into my childhood.

I did think of accompanying Henry, but Bushy had called me earlier. “I got the information,” he repeated. “I’m waiting for you.”

I wondered whether it was a good idea for us to discuss this in Wolf’s workplace. But Bushy wasn’t concerned. He had other business on at the same time.

Henry and I parted, and I walked along to Hammersmith bus station and caught a bus inside the shopping centre. It was slow progress, particularly along the Uxbridge Road. The bus, low and long, was noisy with kids playing music on their phones. It stank, with every nation seemingly represented, and I wondered if anyone would have been able to identify the city just from the inhabitants of the bus.

Bushy, without a wrap on his nose, was at a table in the corner. Wolf, working tonight, was at the other end of the bar. The Harridan brought me over a vodka. She wanted to sit down, but I told her Bushy and I were in a meeting.

I said, “You and Wolf had a good night, I hear.”

“Shrinky, you’re right,” Bushy said. “That man jus’ don’t keep still.”

Bushy moved his chair closer to me, whispering; two old men in a pub, talking.

I asked, “What information are you referring to?”

He glanced around and then at me. “Don’t yer know? I bin researching around for you. Listen.”

Bushy told me chucking-out time at the Cross Keys was still 10:30. It opened at midday and was always busy, particularly in the early evening, but it closed before most of the other local pubs. Like other dubious local businesses-minicab offices, porno shops, lap-dancing clubs and corner shops which sold alcohol out of hours-the Harridan paid off the local police but didn’t want unruly behaviour to draw unnecessary attention. At closing time, one of the Africans would drive Wolf up West.

I learned from Bushy that, in Soho, Wolf had been working as a doorman at a fashionable club, Satori. As a natural hustler, in ten days he’d soon discovered that such work was lucrative, mainly because of the tips the door staff earned from the clamorous photographers who moved from club to club around the West End all night, earning top sums for the right picture. The photographers needed to know who was in the club-which footballer, soap star, pop singer or movie actor, the price of whose fame was a transparent life-and whether they were coked-up, drunk, copulating or all three.

This information was passed rapidly through the club’s ecosystem, beginning with the bathroom attendants-the Africans whose night’s work it was to clean the toilets, offer towels to the celebs, clean up their shit and pick up meagre tips. They appeared to be almost invisible but were quite aware of who was smoking or snorting what. Aboveground, the bar staff, security and managers were part of this chain of associates: every drink, pass or glance was intensively monitored by numerous unnoticed eyes. Wolf and his pals also had access to the club’s CCTV system, selling the right piece of tape to the right Net dealer.

I said, “What I’ve heard doesn’t surprise me, Bushy. I think it’s good for our friend over there to keep busy and make a living.”

“But do you know this? He pimping after something bigger. He cunnin’ to the core. There’s some rich Indian bird up West. After work he goes into her. She got a fine house in a quiet Soho street. You personally acquainted with the girl, Jamal?” He was prodding me on the arm. “Are yer?”

“Yes, yes. Ajita.”

“That’s the name, I think. You said it.”

“You know this for sure?”

Bushy tapped his nose. “Everything go round the Cross Keys line. The drivers outside talk, all the girls natter. But it was me who put all them pieces together, like you do with a dream.”

“But, Bushy, I’m getting confused as well as annoyed. You told me Wolf had started on something hot with the Harridan.”

“Look at her! It didn’t last. You can see why. The Harridan guess Wolf goes to someone else. She don’t like it, but she don’t want to lose him. He do the electrics, the plumbing, he can paint and all that. You know, I work for Miriam, not her. We’re family. Harridan weren’t ever my employer. I only did favours for her.”

“What are the rumours about Wolf and this girl?”

“He’s risking it.”

“In what way?”

“If he want to get his name on the contract to the pub and all that, and be on the same level with Jenny Harridan, he shouldn’t annoy her by going with other women.”

So Wolf had wanted to take over the Cross Keys; indeed, he had started work on the upstairs rooms, which the Harridan was keen to rent out for private functions. But the rumour was, and it seemed inevitable, that the Cross Keys would be sold and converted into a pub selling basil risotto and Spanish bottled beers with diced limes jammed in the top. It was the end for ordinary street-corner pubs, and certainly for rough and cheap places. The Cross Keys didn’t seem the kind of hostelry that could survive. London was being decorated; perhaps the city would be rebranded “Tesco’s.”

I said, “Wolf’s more than a little crazy. If the Harridan refuses to let him run the place with her, or if she chucks him out altogether, he might go nuts. He’s on the edge as it is.”

Bushy said, “Doctor, don’t get me wrong, but have you thought you might be the crazy one? Paranoias an’ all that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Wolf’s getting laid at least. Sorry to tell you, but they’re at it a lot, he’s told the girls. He’s going to be chilled.”

“Is he? Nothing helpful follows from that. It might be even worse. Crazies are always being let out of institutions because they’re chilled. A week later they’re sitting down to a plate of toasted balls.”

“You’re the doc,” he said casually, making me wonder whether I was.

“About Ajita, I should have guessed,” I said. “Perhaps I did, unconsciously. Now I can only worry about what he will tell her.”

“About yer dirty crime?”

“My dirty crime, yes.”

“Is it going round and round yer head?”

“At times.”

“I hate that,” he said.

I noticed Bushy was looking in a mirror at his nose and stroking it. I thanked him for the information and went round to the side of the bar where the girls worked.

I ordered a drink from Wolf and said, “Wolf, please. I need that picture back. You stole it from me, an old friend. How could you do that to me? What sort of man are you?”

“Don’t raise your voice. I’m not a thief,” he said. He leaned across the bar. “It was borrowed in lieu of other payments.”

“You’re doing well,” I said. “I set all this up for you. Isn’t that recompense enough?”

“A job in a bar?” He looked as though he wanted to spit at me. “You smoked my whole life like a cigarette, until it was ash.”

I was almost out the door of the pub when I turned, nipped through a door marked “Private” and ran upstairs to Wolf’s room. His corner was characteristically neat: his jackets and trousers were on hangers, his shirts organised by colour, his shaving gear on a shelf above the sink. The rest of the room was such a mess of broken furniture, ripped curtains and cardboard boxes I wouldn’t have known where to start searching for the Hand.

“Can you help me?”

One of the girls was behind me, half-dressed in pink high heels with a flimsy dressing gown over her shoulders, backlit and looking like a woman in a movie by Fassbinder, one of my favourite directors.

She said, “You the psychiatrist and me you don’t recognise.”

“Hello, Miss Lucy, how you doing?” She shrugged. I asked, “Any chance of a quickie?”

“Quick? You think I that sort?” she said, approaching me. At least she grinned before she pretended to slap me. “What you wanting up here?”

I said, “I think Wolf might have something of mine.”

As she appeared not to grasp a word I said, I kissed her and held her hand. We were looking at one another curiously.

Wolf came in suddenly, looking annoyed and agitated, as though convinced he’d caught me at last, as he knew he would, and now would have to deal with me.

I said, “Just looking for a G-string to floss with.”

“Hi, Lucy.” He winked at me and said, “Up to your old tricks?” and went out.

“He was bad temper today,” she said.

I was laughing when I gave her my mobile number. I thought of Valentin and his charm and facility with women he didn’t know: it was a rare man who wasn’t afraid of women. How odd it was that I still identified with that part of him, after so many years.

I followed her downstairs and watched her for one dance. At the end, I went over, kissed her and said, “I can’t wait to see you with your clothes on.”

CHAPTER FORTY

I rang Ajita that night, but there was no reply. I decided to leave it a few days to see whether she called me. She didn’t. The following week I rang and again asked if she had time to meet. She sounded sleepy but at least said she’d been thinking about me “a lot.” We arranged lunch twice, but she cancelled each time, saying she had a cold.

Finally I left a message with her saying I would be in the neighbourhood at the end of the week. I’d call by and see her, making sure it was early evening, when I knew Wolf would be working at the Cross Keys, a few hours before his evening excursions.

I wanted to see her, I was ready for it, and she, apparently, for me-at last. She had sent me a text saying there was “something” she wanted me to look at as soon as possible. It was “urgent.”

Before I could begin to think about what she might mean-whether she was going to tell me about Wolf, or about something he had told her-I received a frantic call from Miriam saying that Henry had disappeared.

“Where’s he gone? What are you talking about?”

I managed to grasp that she had had one of the dogs put down, at home. During what she called “the ceremony,” Henry had walked out of the house. He had gone to his flat-or wherever-and stayed away for three days, not ringing once.

“Have you called him?” I said.

“I’m afraid to. Well, I did a few times, but I turned the phone off when I heard his voice on the answering machine. I know he hates to talk on the phone. But what is he hiding-is it bad news, do you think? What if he’s been blown up?”

“What? Why should he be?”

“If he goes on a train, like in the Madrid bombings! Two hundred people killed! It could happen here, couldn’t it?”

“He probably has more chance of winning an Oscar.”

“What if he’s left me? It would finish me off.”

“Has he said he’s left you?”

“He only muttered something about not wanting to think about the Dalmatian.” I sighed. She began to cry. “It was bad enough having to have it put down. But it’s that daughter who has put him against me. You know where she lives? I’ll get her address and I’ll have her again-this time for good!”

On my way to visit Ajita later, I called around at Henry’s, not really expecting him to be there. He might have taken off, as he did sometimes, to stroll around some foreign city, like Budapest or Helsinki, for a couple of days, sketching, reading and visiting museums.

But the window opened and his head popped out. He came down straightaway, in his slippers, and was agreeable, indeed excited, not appearing to be in crisis.

“Was it the dog that did it?” I asked as we walked under Hammersmith Bridge, towards the station.

“It was a damn good dog. I walked it often. The ‘ceremony’ was unusual.”

“It was?”

Miriam had invited some of the neighbours, the children, other friends, and of course Henry to be there when the vet injected the stricken dog with the fatal fluid.

Henry said, “As I got down on my knees and took my place on the floor, lying there with my ear at the dying dog’s heart-the dog that didn’t know it was going to die-I enacted the goodbye with love, rolling about with all the shamelessness I could muster, even making appropriately agonising noises. No way can I be accused of shirking on my dog duties.”

“I can’t wait to see the video.”

“But when the others took their turn, it occurred to me that I couldn’t spend any more time with people who want to hug expiring mutts. The abyss of boredom is my phobia. I’m terrified of being enveloped and destroyed by it. I’ve never stopped running from it.”

“Or towards it.”

He was quiet, then said, “Miriam and I had decided to go clubbing later to a new place, the Midnight Velvet.” I must have made a face; he said, “You didn’t like the Sootie?”

“Not at all, no. It made me feel wretchedly depressed, particularly seeing Josephine. I was annoyed that I allowed myself to be talked into going.”

“You blame me?”

“Partly, but mostly myself.”

“I’m really sorry, Jamal. I tend to agree with you now.” He said, “For months I’d wanted to follow my desire to the limit, all along the razor’s edge. But those places no longer haunt or attract me either. Didn’t my own daughter call me a stupid, stoned fool? I hadn’t faced up to its exhausted decadence. I felt unclean, repelled by myself. I had become that dying dog. And there was something in my old life I missed.

“I left Miriam without disturbing her-she was with her loved ones-and went home. The world of bloodied, shredded bodies under Bush-Blair had been making me angry and sick. I’ve been feeling more and more hopeless.

“But on the night of the dying dog, I was up until dawn, reading poetry, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, running from book to book while listening to Mahler, Bach. Isn’t art the still point-a spot of sense-in a thrashing world? I wrote ideas down and emailed actors I wanted to use in the documentary. I outlined my ideas for Don Giovanni.”

I said, “I’d been wondering recently whether you really are beyond one of the more useful male vanities-that of reputation,” I said.

“I do think about it. I want to have been of little harm,” he said. “And of some use. I wouldn’t want to have betrayed my intelligence or my talent, such as it is. Talent exists, you know, and is inexplicable. I used to write, in my end-of-year diary roundup, ‘Thank God, nothing to be ashamed of.’ But this year I’ve done no work at all.”

I said, “Why would it not be good for you to vegetate, to lie fallow for a while?”

“Like some Chekhov character who wants to work but doesn’t know where to start, I believed my artistic ambition had run down. Now some sort of energy has come back.”

“Lucky you, with a surge of new life. Miriam will be pleased.”

“I’ll see her, and try to find some clarity. Will you come by later?”

“I’m going to see Ajita.”

He said quietly, “Is there any hope there?”

“My guess is we’ll meet up for a bit tonight and then she’ll go out.”

“Jesus, Jamal, how terrible. I know now you waited and waited for that woman and then-what? It just didn’t work out?”

“Who said it won’t, in time?”

“But there’s something sad there, aren’t I right?”

“Something impossible.”

We embraced; he went back to his flat. I got on the train, where at least I had the chance to read. Like Henry, I still had some impulse to learn, to understand.

At Ajita’s, the housekeeper wore a crisp white uniform like a servant in the Edwardian children’s novels I used to read to Rafi. She led me to Ajita’s bedroom, right at the top of the house, knocked and said, “Miss-your visitor.”

“Thank you,” said Ajita, coming out and kissing me. She almost knocked my ear off with a thin unmarked box. “It’s only a DVD. But it’ll interest you, I think. I know how much you like to be interested in things.”

“Do I? But I thought you had something to tell me.”

“To show you,” she said. “It’ll certainly surprise you, I know that for sure.”

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

The room took up the whole of the floor and had sloping attic windows which seemed Parisian to me. Visible were a range of Soho rooftops, aerials and chimneys; nearby, a waiter leaned out of a window, smoking.

At the end of Ajita’s bed was a broad flat-screen television and a sound system playing an iPod. My ex-girlfriend was listening to some quiet girl funk, Lauryn Hill or some such, and dancing a little, good-humouredly, in her bare feet and dressing gown, with wet hair.

I asked, “Are you in bed already?”

“Just getting up. I eat late. You know both Mushy and I do.”

“Is he here?”

“Is it him you want to see? He’s gone back to America to try to find help for Alan, who is very ill.” I seemed to irritate her; perhaps she really hadn’t wanted to see me. She said, “Jamal, I’m sorry for being so flaky the last few days. I’ve been busy with lawyers.”

“How come?”

She hesitated. “I’ve been talking to the children every day, and to my husband. I kept saying I was going back, but each time I almost bought the ticket I thought, What for?

“Mark is furious and wants me to come home. So I’ve told him I have decided to divorce. He’s kind, he doesn’t deserve it. But I have brought up our children and done my duty. Now there are other things.”

“What does Mustaq think?”

“Why the hell do you have to ask that? Of course, he’s agitated. He was keen on the marriage. He keeps saying I have to be secure. But there are things I absolutely need to do here.”

“You’ve been in London a while.”

“Aren’t you taking your turn now to make me feel rotten?”

“Your absence reminds me of your mother’s absence when you and I started to go out. She was always not there, which was when your father first began to use you.” Unsurprisingly, she was furiously silent. I said, “But you have good things to do here-with your lover. You told me in Venice.”

“Exactly.”

“Are you going to marry him?”

She snorted. “It’s not a relationship. It’s an encounter-of some sort. He gives me…I can tell you this, can’t I? For some reason I’ve always trusted you. And how could you be shocked? He…he-” I was watching her lips; she almost said his name. “He adores me, ties me, worships me, hits me-but very nicely. And all the time we are talking about everything, about him, me, the past and the future, about our dreams and fantasies. He gets me, intuitively. Jamal, it’s on a level, religious and spiritual, that I’ve never experienced before.”

“We should celebrate.”

“You mean it? Yes, why not? That hadn’t occurred to me, party boy.”

She rang down; soon the housekeeper appeared with champagne and glasses. Then she brought in a selection of clothes. I helped Ajita dress for the evening, finishing the joint she’d left in the ashtray beside the bed.

I said, “I hope all this is for me. Give me a hug.”

She wore a short black dress, high heels and a black choker at her throat; she put her hair up. She held me and kissed my face.

“You missed your chance, baby, you know you did. I haven’t felt like this since I met you at college.” Then she said, “Darling sweetie, I almost forgot. Before we split tonight, will you watch something?”

“But what is it?”

She went to the TV with the DVD, opened it and dropped the disc into the player. “There you are,” she said. “Watch to the end.”

“Won’t you sit with me?”

“I’ll be back.”

When she left the room, I thought I might just walk out. But I settled down in the cushions, still annoyed that, although she’d invited me over, it was only to observe her preparing to go out with a man-whose name she couldn’t say-who wanted to ruin my life.

If the joint she’d given me was strong, the DVD was stronger, as she had known.

I watched a good deal of the programme-the past, suddenly tangible, with its jumble of familiar faces unspooling in front of my eyes, a dream I couldn’t crash out of. I became confused and then dizzy. If I saw any more, the world might break apart entirely.

I stood up and made it across the floor. Soon my head was over the toilet. I opened the windows and stuck my gasping mouth out into the roar of Soho.

I took a cool shower. Ajita returned as I was drying myself. She didn’t seem surprised by my condition, but fetched me a dressing gown and some aspirin.

“Okay? So you saw it, then?”

“More than enough of it,” I said.

“Hardcore?”

“Yes, very.”

“A revelation, even?” she said.

“Maybe.” I asked, “Who else has looked at it?”

“Mustaq. He watched it on his own,” she said. “Then he turned it off and went on one of his wild walks without saying anything, but flapping his arms, no doubt. Why should I give a flying fuck what he thinks?”

“Why do you say that?”

“He makes me angry, Jamal. He flies back to London for the weekend, sits me down and starts complaining about my life and what I do. He doesn’t want me to be independent. I have to go to him like a teenager, and ask for a flat and for money to start a business with a friend.”

“Which friend? The man?”

“Now you start! Why does it matter which fucking friend? For years I helped and advised Mustaq, and still he says to me, ‘Aren’t you actually going to do anything serious, Ajita? Are you going to be a spoiled little rich girl exploited by any friend?’”

“What did you say?”

“I slapped him hard across the face-boy, I enjoyed that!-and told him I was going to leave. While I was packing, he came into this room and threw my clothes out of my bag onto the floor, telling me I had to stay. Then he grabbed me and held me. I stamped on his foot. ‘What are you going to do,’ I screamed at him, ‘imprison me as Dad would?’

“He let me go, but he was furious. He’s got enough problems as it is. I agreed to stay, but one more word from him and I’m out of here.”

Outside, Ajita accompanied me to Dean Street, where the taxi she’d ordered would pick me up. She took my arm.

“Don’t you miss the ridiculous mesmerism of love?” she said, coming close to me and pulling up her skirt to give me a final look at her legs. “What do you think?” She was mocking me now. She knew I envied her; she was freer than me and more satisfied.

We embraced, and I watched her walk away, towards Wolf. In the car I told the driver to take me home. After five minutes I decided to go to the Cross Keys. I could have a drink and a long think there without being alone. One of the Somalis could drop me at my flat later.

I shoved at the familiar door and walked through the bar. My blonde, Slovakian Lucy was about to perform. She waved in my direction, the men turning to look at me. I watched her dance, watched the men watching her. At the end she came over and put her arms around me. Wolf had left a while ago. When she was done, we went upstairs to his room.

“I like see you,” she said. “I like when you come in.”

I lay down on the mattress and smoked, asking her to join me. She undressed, wearing nothing but a cross on a chain around her neck. Getting under a blanket, she kissed me on the mouth. “I’m not prostitute,” she said. “Just dancer. Next time I work with children, once I have money for English lesson.”

Semi-hard, I entered her and moved a little, shoving, it seemed to me, against a wall within me of indifference and deadness. She gave me enough encouragement, smiling and showing me her tongue.

In the end I pulled out and lay there with her, listening to her talk about her life in London, wondering whether this might be some sort of end for me. Had I seen through everything and now lacked passion, curiosity, interest? The fact we liked one another, and that she was kind, made it worse.

“Don’t you like me?” she said.

“But I do,” I said. “You are wonderful.”

I asked her about Communism, saying apologetically that many of my generation and older had more or less believed in it.

“But I am too young to remember anything like that. Only the lazy and the Jews liked it,” she said. “Now we have market, but still few people have money. We will stay in this country five years, or ten, until we can buy house there.”

We stroked one another; I began to relax, able, at last, to consider what I had seen earlier, and how Mustaq’s people had obtained the television documentary in which Ajita’s father had appeared, made in the mid-70s, just before the strike.

Tatty old buildings and old-fashioned cars on empty roads; workers with 70s layered and feathered hair, wearing wide-lapelled jackets and brown flares; everyone smoking, as people did then, on buses, trains, aeroplanes, even on television. A voice-over: the upper-class “Communist” explaining the exploitation-“As always it is the workers who bear the burden of others’ ambition.”

There he was, the old man, Ajita’s father, with his son’s mouth, and looking younger than me, with darker hair, and with a touching enthusiasm and belief in the opportunities and equality here. A man talking about his family and wanting to do well in England.

In the background of one of the shots inside the factory, I could see Ajita and Mustaq-not yet twenty-talking with an employee. At one moment the father turned to the camera and seemed to gaze through it innocently, into my eyes, those of his killer-as if he already knew I was waiting for him with a knife.

The mousetrap had slammed down on me: the whole picture had darkened in front of my eyes until I believed there was a fault with the TV. But the weakness had been in me, and I couldn’t take anymore.

Lucy and I were almost asleep when the Harridan barged into the room. She recognised me and moderated her tone.

“But this ain’t no knockin’ shop,” she said as we were hurried downstairs.

“No,” I said sleepily. “At least there you’d know the price.”