The Buddha of Suburbia

CHAPTER SEVEN

Life goes on tediously, nothing happens for months, and then one day everything, and I mean everything, goes fucking wild and berserk. When I got home Mum and Dad were in their bedroom together and poor little Allie was outside banging on the door like a five-year-old. I pulled him away and tried to get him upstairs in case he was traumatized for life, but he kicked me in the balls.

Almost immediately the heart-ambulance arrived: Auntie Jean and Uncle Ted. While Uncle Ted sat outside in the car Jean charged straight into the bedroom, pushing me aside as I tried to protect my parents’ privacy. She shouted orders at me.

Within forty minutes Mum was ready to leave. Auntie Jean had packed for her while I packed for Allie. They assumed I’d go to Chislehurst with them, but I said I’d turn up later on my bike; I’d make my own arrangements. I knew I’d be going nowhere near them. What could be worse than moving to Chislehurst? Even for two days I wouldn’t be able to bear the sight of Auntie Jean first thing in the morning, without her make-up on, her face blank as an egg, as she had prunes, kippers and cigarettes for breakfast and made me drink Typhoo tea. I knew she’d abuse Dad all day too. As it was, Allie was crying and yelling, ‘Bugger off, you Buddhist bastard!’ as he left with Mum and Jean.

So the three of them bundled out, their faces full of tears and fear and pain and anger and shouting. Dad yelled at them, ‘Where are you all going? What are you leaving the house for? Just stay here!’ but Jean just told him to shut his big gob.

The house was silent, as if no one had been there. Dad, who had been sitting on the stairs with his head in his hands, went into action. He wanted to get out too. He stuffed his shoes and ties and books into every plastic bag I could find before stopping himself, as he realized it was undignified to disfigure the house before deserting it.

‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘Let’s take nothing, eh?’

I liked that idea: it seemed aristocratic to me, just walking out empty-handed as if we were above all objects.

Eventually Dad phoned Eva to say the coast was clear. She came tentatively into the house, as warm and gentle as anything, and she took Dad out to the car. Then she asked me what I was going to do and I had to say I wanted to go with her. She didn’t flinch as I expected her to. She just said, ‘OΚ, get your things, it’ll be lovely to have you. We’re all going to have a terrific time together, you know that, don’t you?’

So I got about twenty records, ten packets of tea, Tropic of Cancer and On the Road, and the plays of Tennessee Williams, and off I went to live with Eva. And Charlie.

That night Eva put me in her clean little spare room. Before getting into bed I went into the large bathroom beside her bedroom, where I hadn’t been before. The bath was in the centre of the room, with an old-fashioned brass spigot. There were candles around the edge of it and an old aluminium bucket beside it. And on the oak shelves were rows of lipsticks and blushers, eye-make-up removers, cleansers, moisturizers, hair-sprays, creamy soaps for soft skin, sensitive skin and normal skin; soaps in exotic wrappings and pretty boxes; there were sweet-peas in a jam-jar and an egg-cup, rose-petals in Wedgwood saucers; there were bottles of perfume, cotton wool, conditioners, hair-bands, hair-slides and shampoos. It was confusing: such self-attention repelled me, and yet it represented a world of sensuality, of smell and touch, of indulgence and feeling, which aroused me like an unexpected caress as I undressed, lit the candles and got into the bath in this room of Eva’s.

Later that night she came into my room in her kimono, bringing me a glass of champagne and carrying a book. I told her she looked happy and luminous, which made her look even more happy and luminous. Compliments were useful tools of the friendship trade, I told myself, but in her case it was true. She said, ‘Thank you for saying that. I haven’t been happy for a long time but now I think I’m going to be.’

‘What’s that book?’ I said.

‘I’m going to read to you,’ she said, ‘to help you appreciate the sound of good prose. And because you’ll be reading to me in the next few months when I’m cooking and doing chores. You’ve got a good voice. Your dad said you’ve mentioned being an actor.’

‘Yes.’

‘Let’s think about that, then.’

Eva sat down on the edge of the bed and read me The Selfish Giant, dramatizing all the characters and imitating a smug vicar at the sentimental end of the story. She didn’t try overhard, she just wanted to let. me know I was secure with her, that the break-up of my parents’ marriage wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened, and that she had enough love to cover us all. She was strong and confident now. She read for a long time, and I had the bonus of knowing my father was waiting impatiently to fuck her again on this night of nights which was really their honeymoon. I thanked her gratefully, and she said, ‘But you’re beautiful, and the beautiful should be given everything they want.’

‘Hey, what about the ugly ones?’

‘The ugly ones.’ She poked her tongue out. ‘It’s their fault if they’re ugly. They’re to be blamed, not pitied.’

I laughed at this, but it made me think of where Charlie may have inherited some of his cruelty. When Eva had gone and I lay for the first time in the same house as Charlie and Eva and my father, I thought about the difference between the interesting people and the nice people. And how they can’t always be identical. The interesting people you wanted to be with – their minds were unusual, you saw things freshly with them and all was not deadness and repetition. I longed to know what Eva made of things, what she thought of Jamila, say, and the marriage of Changez. I wanted her opinion. Eva could be snobby, that was obvious, but if I saw something, or heard a piece of music, or visited a place, I wouldn’t be content until Eva had made me see it in a certain way. She came at things from an angle; she made connections. Then there were the nice people who weren’t interesting, and you didn’t want to know what they thought of anything. Like Mum, they were good and meek and deserved more love. But it was the interesting ones, like Eva with her hard, taking edge, who ended up with everything, and in bed with my father.

When Dad moved in with Eva, and Jamila and Changez moved into their flat, there were five places for me to stay: with Mum at Auntie Jean’s; at our now empty house; with Dad and Eva; with Anwar and Jeeta; or with Changez and Jamila. I finally stopped going to school when Charlie did, and Eva arranged for me to go to a college where I could finish my A levels. This college seemed as if it was going to be the best thing that happened to me.

The teachers looked the same as the pupils and everyone was equal, ha, ha, though I made a fool of myself by calling the male teachers sir and females miss. It was the first time, too, that I’d been in a classroom with girls, and I got in with a bad bunch of women. The ceremony of innocence was well drowned as far as they were concerned. They laughed at me all the time, I don’t know why; I suppose they thought I was immature. After all, I’d only just stopped doing my paper-round and I heard them talking about headlong stuff I never knew about before: abortions, heroin, Sylvia Plath, prostitution. These women were middle class but they’d broken away from their families. They were always touching each other; they fucked the lecturers and asked them for money for drugs. They cared little for themselves; they were in and out of hospital for drug addiction and overdoses and abortions. They tried to take care of each other and sometimes of me. They thought I was sweet and cute and pretty and everything, which I liked. I liked it all, because I was lonely for the first time in my life, and an itinerant.

I had a lot of spare time, and from leading a steady life in my bedroom with my radio, and with my parents downstairs, I now wandered among different houses and flats carrying my life-equipment in a big canvas bag and never washing my hair. I was not too unhappy, criss-crossing South London and the suburbs by bus, no one knowing where I was. Whenever someone – Mum, Dad, Ted – tried to locate me, I was always somewhere else, occasionally going to a lecture and then heading out to see Changez and Jamila.

I didn’t want to be educated. It wasn’t the right time of my life for concentration, it really wasn’t. Dad was still convinced I was trying to be something – a lawyer, I’d told him recently, because even he knew that that doctor stuff was a wind-up. But I knew there’d have to come a time when I broke the news to him that the education system and I had split up. It would break his immigrant heart, too. But the spirit of the age among the people I knew manifested itself as general drift and idleness. We didn’t want money. What for? We could get by, living off parents, friends or the State. And if we were going to be bored, and we were usually bored, rarely being self-motivated, we could at least be bored on our own terms, lying smashed on mattresses in ruined houses rather than working in the machine. I didn’t want to work in a place where I couldn’t wear my fur coat.

Anyway, there was plenty to observe – oh yes, I was interested in life. I was an eager witness to Eva and Dad’s love, and even more fascinated by Changez and Jamila, who were, can you believe, living together in South London.

Jamila and Changez’s flat, rented by Anwar, was a two-room box affair near the Catford dog track. It had minimal busted furniture, yellow walls and a gas fire. The one bedroom, which contained a double mattress covered by an Indian bedspread with swirling colours, was Jamila’s room. At the end of the bed was a small card-table which Changez bought for her as a wedding present; I’d carried it back from a local junk shop. There was a Liberty-pattern tablecloth over it, and I bought Jamila a white vase in which there were always daffodils or roses. She kept her pens and pencils in a peanut-butter jar. Also on the table and piled up around her on the floor were her post-Miss Cutmore books: the ‘classics’ as she called them – Angela Davis, Baldwin, Malcolm X, Greer, Millett. You weren’t supposed to stick anything on the walls, but Jamila had pinned up poems by Christina Rossetti, Plath, Shelley and other vegetarians, which she copied out of library books and read when she stretched her legs by taking a few steps around the tiny room. On a sticking-out piece of board nailed to the windowsill was her tape-recorder. From breakfast until the three of us cracked late-night beers, the place grooved to Aretha and the other mamas. Jamila never closed the door, so Changez and I drank and looked through at our Jamila’s concentrating-so-hard profile, head bowed, as she read and sang and wrote in old school exercise books. Like me, she’d run right out on all that ‘old, dull, white stuff’ they taught you at school and college. But she wasn’t lazy, she was educating herself. She knew what she wanted to learn and she knew where it was; she just had to shovel it all into her head. Watching Jamila sometimes made me think the world was divided into three sorts of people: those who knew what they wanted to do; those (the unhappiest) who never knew what their purpose in life was; and those who found out later on. I was in the last category, I reckoned, which didn’t stop me wishing I’d been born into the first.

In the living room there were two armchairs and a table to eat take-aways off. Around it were two steel chairs with putrid white plastic on the seats. Beside it was a low camp-bed covered in brown blankets on which, from the first, Jamila insisted, Changez slept. There was no discussion of this, and Changez didn’t demur at the crucial moment when something could – maybe – have been done. That was how it was going to be between them, just as she made him sleep on the floor beside their honeymoon bed in the Ritz.

While Jamila worked in her room, Changez lay joyously on the camp-bed, his good arm suspending a paperback above him, one of his ‘specials’, no doubt. ‘This one is very extra-special,’ he’d say, tossing aside yet another Spillane or James Hadley Chase or Harold Robbins. I think a lot of the big trouble which was to happen started with me giving Changez Harold Robbins to read, because it stimulated Changez in a way that Conan Doyle never did. If you think books don’t change people, just look at Changez, because undreamed-of possibilities in the sex line suddenly occurred to him, a man recently married and completely celibate who saw Britain as we saw Sweden: as the goldmine of sexual opportunity.

But before all the sex trouble got properly into its swing there was all the other trouble brewing between Anwar and Changez. After all, Changez was needed in the shop even more urgently now that Anwar had so enfeebled himself on the Gandhi-diet in order to get Changez to Britain in the first place.

To start off Changez’s career in the grocery business, Anwar instructed him to work on the till, where you could get by with only one arm and half a brain. And Anwar was very patient with Changez, and spoke to him like a four-year-old, which was the right thing to do. But Changez was far smarter than Anwar. He made sure he was hopeless at wrapping bread and giving change. He couldn’t manage the arithmetic. There were queues at the till, until customers started walking out. Anwar suggested he come back to till-work another time. Anwar would find him something else to do to get him in the grocery mood.

So Changez’s new job was to sit on a three-legged stool behind the vegetable section and watch for shop-lifters. It was elementary: you saw them stealing and you screamed, ‘Put that back, you fucking thieving tom-cat!’ But Anwar hadn’t catered for the fact that Changez had mastered the supreme art of sleeping sitting up. Jamila told me that one day Anwar came into the shop and discovered Changez snoring as he sat on his stool, while in front of his closed eyes an SL was shoving a jar of herrings down his trousers. Anwar blew up all over the place. He picked up a bunch of bananas and threw them at his son-in-law, hitting him so hard in the chest that Changez toppled off his stool and badly bruised his good arm. Changez lay writhing on the floor, unable to get up. Finally Princess Jeeta had to help Changez leave the shop. Anwar bellowed at Jeeta and Jamila and even yelled at me. I just laughed at Anwar, as we all did, but no one dared say the one true thing: it was all his own fault. I pitied him.

His despair became obvious. He was moody all the time, with a flashing temper, and when Changez was at home, nursing his bad arm, Anwar came to me as I worked in the store-room. He’d already lost any respect or hope he’d once had for Changez. ‘What’s that fucking fat useless bastard doing now?’ he enquired. ‘Is he better yet?’ ‘He’s recuperating,’ I said. ‘I’ll recuperate his fucking balls with a fucking flame-thrower!’ said Uncle Anwar. ‘Perhaps I will phone the National Front and give them Changez’s name, eh? What a good idea, eh!’

Meanwhile Changez was getting better and better at lying on camp-beds, reading paperbacks and strolling around town with me. He was always up to any adventure that didn’t involve working at tills or sitting on three-legged stools. And because he was slightly dim, or at least vulnerable and kind and easily led, being one of the few people I could mock and dominate with impunity, we became mates. He’d follow me where I fancied, as I avoided my education.

Unlike everyone else he thought me quite deviant. He was shocked when I took off my shirt in the street to get some damn sun on my tits. ‘You are very daring and non-conformist, yaar,’ he often said. ‘And look how you dress, like a gypsy vagabond. What does your father say? Doesn’t he discipline you very hard?’

‘My father’s too busy with the woman he ran off with,’ I replied, ‘to think about me too much.’

‘Oh God, this whole country has gone sexually insane,’ he said. ‘Your father should go back home for some years and take you with him. Perhaps to a remote village.’

Changez’s disgust at everyday things inspired me to show him South London. I wondered how long he’d take to get used to it, to become, in other words, corrupt. I was working on it. We wasted days and days dancing in the Pink Pussy Club, yawning at Fat Mattress at the Croydon Greyhound, ogling strippers on Sunday mornings in a pub, sleeping through Godard and Antonioni films, and enjoying the fighting at Millwall Football Ground, where I forced Changez to wear a bobble-hat over his face in case the lads saw he was a Paki and imagined I was one too.

Financially Changez was supported by Jamila, who paid for everything by working in the shop in the evenings. And I helped him out with money I got from Dad. Changez’s brother sent him money, too, which was unusual, because it should have been the other way round as Changez made his way in the affluent West, but I was sure celebrations in India at Changez’s departure were still taking place.

Jamila was soon in the felicitous position of neither liking nor disliking her husband. It amused her to think she carried on as if he weren’t there. But late at night the two of them liked to play cards, and she’d ask him about India. He told her tales of run-away wives, too-small dowries, adultery among the rich of Bombay (which took many evenings) and, most delicious, political corruption. He’d obviously picked up a few tips from the paperbacks, because he spun these stories out like a kid pulling on chewing-gum. He was good at them, linking all the stories together with more gum and spit, reintroducing the characters with, ‘You know that bad bad man who was caught naked in the bathing hut?’, as in a wild soap opera, until he knew that at the end of her day spent sucking on dusty brain juice, her maddening mouth would inevitably say, ‘Hey, Changez, husband or whatever you are, don’t you know any more about that politician geezer that got thrown into jail?’

In turn he made the polite mistake of asking her what she believed socially and politically. One morning she laid the Prison Notebooks of Gramsci on his chest, not realizing that his addiction to paperbacks wasn’t entirely undiscriminating. ‘Why haven’t you read this if you’re so interested?’ she challenged him weeks later.

‘Because I prefer to hear it from your mouth.’ And he did want to hear it from her mouth. He wanted to watch his wife’s mouth move because it was a mouth he’d come to appreciate more and more. It was a mouth he wanted to get to know.

One day, while we were roaming around junk shops and the Paperback Exchange, Changez took my arm and forced me to face him, which was never a pleasant sight. He made himself say to me at last, after weeks of dithering like a frightened diver on a rock, ‘D’you think my Jammie will ever go in bed with me? She is my wife, after all. I am suggesting no illegality. Please, you’ve known her all your life, what is your true and honest estimation of my chances in this respect?’

‘Your wife? In bed with you?’

‘Yes.’

‘No chance.’

‘What?’

‘No way, Changez.’

He couldn’t accept it. I elaborated. ‘She wouldn’t touch you with asbestos gloves on.’

‘Why? Please be frank, as you have been until now on every other matter. Even vulgar, Karim, which is your wont.’

‘You’re too ugly for her.’

‘Really? My face?’

‘Your face. Your body. The whole lot. Yuk.’

‘Yes?’ At that moment I glimpsed myself in a shop window and was pleased with what I saw. I had no job, no education, and no prospects, but I looked pretty good, oh yes. ‘Jamila’s a quality person, you know that.’

‘I would like to have children with my wife.’

I shook my head. ‘Out of the question.’

This children issue was not trivial for Changez the Bubble. There had been a horrible incident recently which must have remained on his mind. Anwar asked Changez and me to wash the floor of the shop, thinking that perhaps I could successfully supervise him. Surely this couldn’t go wrong? I was doing the scrubbing and Changez was miserably holding the bucket in the deserted shop and asking me if I had any more Harold Robbins novels he could borrow. Then Anwar turned up and stood there watching us work. Finally he made up his mind about something: he asked Changez about Jamila and how she was. He asked Changez if Jamila was ‘expecting’.

‘Expecting what?’ said Changez.

‘My bloody grandson!’ said Anwar. Changez said nothing, but shuffled backwards, away from the fire of Anwar’s blazing contempt, which was fuelled by bottomless disappointment.

‘Surely,’ said Anwar to me, ‘surely there must be something between this donkey’s legs?’

At this Changez started to explode from the centre of his vast stomach. Waves of anger jolted through him and his face seemed suddenly magnified while it flattened like a jellyfish. Even his bad arm visibly throbbed, until Bubble’s whole body shuddered with fury and humiliation and incomprehension.

He shouted, ‘Yes, there is more between this donkey’s legs than there is between that donkey’s ears!’

And he lunged at Anwar with a carrot that was lying to hand. Jeeta, who had heard everything, rushed over. Some strength or recklessness seemed to have been released in her by recent events; she had increased as Anwar had diminished. Her nose had become beaked and hawked, too. Now she placed the obstacle of her nose between Anwar and Changez so that neither could get at the other. And she gave Anwar a mouthful. I’d never heard her speak like this before. She was fearless. She could have shrivelled Gulliver with her breath. Anwar turned and went away, cursing. She sent Changez and me out.

Now Bubble, who hadn’t had much time to reflect on his England-experience, was obviously starting to think over his position. Conjugal rights were being denied him; human rights were being suspended at times; unnecessary inconvenience was happening everywhere; abuse was flying around his head like a spit-shower – and he was an important man from a considerable Bombay family! What was going on? Action would be taken! But first things first. Changez was searching in his pockets for something. He eventually hoiked out a piece of paper with a phone-number on it. ‘In that case –’

‘In what case?’

‘Of the ugliness you so helpfully mention. There is something I must do.’

Changez telephoned someone. It was very mysterious. Then I had to take him to a big detached house divided into flats. An old woman opened the door – she seemed to be expecting him – and as he went in he turned and instructed me to wait. So I stood around like a fool for twenty minutes. When he emerged I saw behind him at the door a small, black-haired, middle-aged Japanese woman in a red kimono.

‘Her name is Shinko,’ he told me happily as we walked back to the flat. The tail of Changez’s shirt was sticking out of his unbuttoned fly like a small white flag. I decided not to inform him of this.

‘A prostitute, eh?’

‘Don’t be not-nice! A friend now. Another friend in unfriendly cold England for me!’ He looked at me with joy. ‘She did business as described to the Τ by Harold Robbins! Karim, all my entire problems are solved! I can love my wife in the usual way and I can love Shinko in the unusual way! Lend me a pound, will you, please? I want to buy Jamila some chocolates!’

All this messing around with Changez I enjoyed, and I soon considered him part of my family, a permanent part of my life. But I had a real family to attend to – not Dad, who was preoccupied, but Mum. I rang her every day, but I hadn’t seen her during the time I’d been living at Eva’s; I couldn’t face any of them in that house.

When I did decide to go to Chislehurst, the streets were quiet and uninhabited after South London, as if the area had been evacuated. The silence was ominous; it seemed piled up and ready to fall on me. Practically the first thing I saw when I got off the train and walked along those roads again was Hairy Back and his dog, the Great Dane. Hairy Back was smoking his pipe and laughing with a neighbour as he stood at his gate. I crossed the road and walked back to examine him. How could he stand there so innocently when he’d abused me? I suddenly felt nauseous with anger and humiliation – none of the things I’d felt at the time. I didn’t know what to do. A powerful urge told me to return to the station and get on the train back to Jamila’s place. So I stood there for at least five minutes, watching Hairy Back and wondering which way to go. But how could I have explained my actions to Mum, having promised to turn up and see her? I had to carry on walking.

I knew it did me good to be reminded of how much I loathed the suburbs, and that I had to continue my journey into London and a new life, ensuring I got away from people and streets like this.

Mum had taken to her bed in Jean’s place on the day she left our house, and she hadn’t got up since. But Ted was OK: I was looking forward to seeing him. He had completely changed, Allie told me; Ted had lost his life in order to find it. So Ted was Dad’s triumph; he really was someone Dad had freed.

Uncle Ted had done absolutely nothing since the day Dad exorcized him as he sat with a record-player in his lap. Now Ted didn’t have a bath or get up until eleven o’clock, when he read the paper until the pubs were open. The afternoons he spent out on long walks or in South London attending classes on meditation. In the evenings he refused to talk – this was a vow of silence – and once a week he fasted for a day. He was happy, or happier, apart from the fact that nothing in life had much meaning for him. But at least he recognized this now and was looking into it. Dad had told him to ‘explore’ this. Dad also told Ted that meaning could take years to emerge, but in the meantime he should live in the present, enjoy the sky, trees, flowers and the taste of good food, and perhaps fix a few things in Eva’s house – maybe Dad’s bedside light and tape-recorder – if he needed any practical therapy. Ted said he’d go fishing if he needed therapy. Anything too technical might catapult him into orbit again. ‘When I see myself,’ Ted said, ‘I am lying in a hammock, just swinging, just swinging.’

Ted’s whole hammock behaviour, his conversion to Ted-Buddhism, as Dad called it, incensed Auntie Jean. She wanted to cut down his swinging hammock. ‘She’s wild with him,’ said Mum, with relish. This fight between Ted and Jean seemed to be her life’s single pleasure, and who could blame her? Jean raged and argued, and even went so far as to attempt tenderness in her effort to get Ted back to ordinary but working unhappiness. After all, they now had no income. Ted used to boast, ‘I’ve got ten men under me,’ and now he had none. There was nothing under him but thin air and the abyss of bankruptcy. But Ted just smiled and said, ‘This is my last chance to be happy. I can’t muff it, Jeanie.’ Once Auntie Jean did rip through to raw feeling by mentioning the numerous virtues of her former Tory boy, but Ted retaliated by saying (one evening during his vow of silence), ‘That boy soon saw the light as far as you’re concerned, didn’t he?’

When I got to the house Ted was singing a pub song and he practically bundled me into a cupboard to discuss his favourite subject – Dad. ‘How’s yer father?’ he said in a great whisper. ‘Happy?’ He went on dreamily, as if he were speaking of some Homeric adventure. ‘He just upped and went off with that posh woman. It was incredible. I don’t blame him. I envy him! We all want to do it, don’t we? Just cut and run. But who does it? No one – ‘cept your dad. I’d like to see him. Discuss it in detail. But it’s against the law in this house to see him. You can’t even talk about it.’ As Auntie Jean entered the hall from the living room Ted pressed a finger to his lips. ‘Don’t say a word.’ ‘About what, Uncle?’ ‘About any bloody thing!’

Even today Auntie Jean was straight-backed and splendid in high heels and a dark-blue dress with a diamond brooch in the shape of a diving fish pinned to her front. Her nails were perfect little bright shells. She shone so brightly she could have been freshly painted; you were afraid that if you touched her you’d smudge something. She seemed ready to attend one of those cocktail parties where she smeared her lips on cheeks and glasses and cigarettes and napkins and biscuits and cocktail sticks until barely a foot of the room was not decorated in red. But there were no more parties in that house of the half-dead, just the old place containing one transformed and one broken person. Jean was tough and liked to drink; she would endure for a long while yet. But what would she do when she realized that, with things as they were, she was on a life sentence, not just a temporary suspension of essential pleasure?

‘It’s you, is it?’ said Auntie Jean.

‘I s’pose it is, yeah.’

‘Where’ve you been?’

‘At college. That’s why I stay other places. To be near college.’

‘Oh yes, I bet. Pull the other one, Karim.’

‘Allie’s here, isn’t he?’

She turned away. ‘Allie’s a good boy, but he dresses up a lot, doesn’t he?’

‘Yeah, he was always one for the outré.’

‘He’s changing his clothes three times a day. It’s girlish.’

‘Very girlish.’

‘I think he plucks his eyebrows too,’ she said firmly.

‘Well, he’s hairy, Auntie Jean. That’s why they all call him Coconut at school.’

‘Men are supposed to be hairy, Karim. Hirsuteness is a characteristic of real men.’

‘You’ve been a big detective lately, haven’t you, Auntie Jean? Have you thought of applying for the police force?’ I said, as I went upstairs. Good old Allie, I thought to myself.

I never bothered much about Allie, and most of the time I forgot I even had a brother. I didn’t know him very well and I despised him for being well behaved and creeping around telling stories about me. I kept away from him so the rest of the family wouldn’t find out what I was up to. But for once I was grateful he was around, both as company for Mum and as an irritant for Auntie Jean.

I’m probably not compassionate or anything, I bet I’m a real bastard inside and don’t care for anyone, but I fucking hated treading up those stairs to Mum, especially with Jean at the bottom watching my every step. She probably had nothing else to do.

‘If you was down here,’ she said, ‘I’d bloody slap you for your cheek.’

‘What cheek?’

‘The bloody cheek you’ve got inside of you. All of it.’

‘Shut up, will you,’ I said.

‘Karim.’ She nearly strangled on her own anger. ‘Karim!’

‘Get lost, Auntie Jean,’ I said.

‘Buddhist bastard,’ she replied. ‘Buddhists, the lot of you.’

I went in to Mum. I could hear Auntie Jean shouting at me but I couldn’t make out anything she was saying.

Auntie Jean’s spare room, in which Mum lay curled up in her pink nightie, her hair unbrushed, had one entire wall made of mirrored cupboards which were stuffed with old but glittering evening dresses from the perfumed days. Beside the bed were Ted’s golf clubs and several pairs of dusty golfing shoes. They’d cleared nothing away for her. Allie told me on the phone that Ted fed her, coming in and saying,’ ‘Ere, Marge, have a nice bit of fish with some bread and butter.’ But he ended up eating it himself.

I was reluctant to kiss my mother, afraid that somehow her weakness and unhappiness would infect me. Naturally I didn’t think for a minute that my life and spirit could stimulate her.

We sat for a while, saying little, until I started into a description of Changez’s ‘specials’, his camp-bed and the bizarre spectacle of a man falling in love with his wife. But Mum soon lost interest. If other people’s unhappiness couldn’t cheer her up, nothing would. Her mind had turned to glass, and all life slid from its sheer aspect. I asked her to draw me.

‘No, Karim, not today,’ she sighed.

I went on and on at her: draw me, draw me, draw me, Mummy! I railed against her. I was pretty angry and everything. I didn’t want her to give herself over to the view of life that underlay all this, the philosophy that pinned her to the shadow-corners of the world. For Mum, life was fundamentally hell. You went blind, you got raped, people forgot your birthday, Nixon got elected, your husband fled with a blonde from Beckenham, and then you got old, you couldn’t walk and you died. Nothing good could come of things here below. While this view could equally have generated stoicism, in Mum’s case it led to self-pity. So I was surprised when at last she started to draw me, her hand moving lightly over the page once more, her eyes flickering with some interest at last. I sat there as still as I could. When she pulled herself out of bed and went to the bathroom, instructing me not to look at the sketch, I got the chance to examine it.

‘Sit still,’ she moaned, when she’d returned and started again. ‘I can’t get your eyes right.’

How could I make her understand? Maybe I should say nothing. But I was a rationalist.

‘Mum,’ I said. ‘You’ve been looking at me, your eldest son, Karim. But that picture – and if s a great picture, not too hairy – is of Dad, isn’t it? That’s his big nose and double chin. Those bags under his eyes are his suitcases – not mine. Mum, that’s just not anything like my face.’

‘Well, dear, fathers and sons come to resemble each other, don’t they?’ And she gave me a significant look. ‘You both left me, didn’t you?’

‘I haven’t left you,’ I said. ‘I’m here whenever you need me. I’m studying, that’s all.’

‘Yes, I know what you’re studying.’ It’s funny how often my family were sarcastic about me and the things I was doing. She said, ‘I’m all on my own. No one loves me.’

‘Yes they do.’

‘No, no one helps me. No one does anything to help me.’

‘Mum, I love you,’ I said. ‘Even if I don’t act like it all the time.’

‘No,’ she said.

I kissed her and held her and tried to get out of the house without saying goodbye to anyone. I crept downstairs and was outside and successfully making for the front gate when Ted sprinted around the side of the house and grabbed me. He must have been lurking, waiting.

‘Tell yer dad we all appreciate what ’e’s done. He’s done a big bucketful for me!’

‘All right, I’ll do that,’ I said, pulling away.

‘Don’t forget.’

‘No, no.’

I almost ran back to South London, to Jamila’s place. I made myself a pot of mint tea and sat silently at the living-room table. My mind was in turmoil. I tried to distract myself by concentrating on Jamila. She sat at her desk as usual, her face illuminated by the cheap reading light beside her. A big jar of purple wild flowers and eucalyptus stood on the top of a pile of library books. When you think of the people you adore there are usually moments you can choose – afternoons, whole weeks, perhaps – when they are at their best, when youth and wisdom, beauty and poise combine perfectly. And as Jamila sat there humming and reading, absorbed, with Changez’s eyes also poring over her as he lay on his bed surrounded by ‘specials’ covered in fluff, with cricket magazines and half-eaten packets of biscuits around him, I felt this was Jamila’s ultimate moment of herselfness. I, too, could have sat there like a fan watching an actress, like a lover watching his beloved, content not to be thinking about Mum and what we could do about her. Is there anything you can do about anyone?

Changez let me finish my tea; my anxiety dissipated a little. Then he looked at me.

‘OK?’ he said.

‘OK what?’

Changez dragged his body from his camp-bed like someone trying to walk with five footballs under their arms. ‘Come on.’ He pulled me into the tiny kitchen.

‘Listen, Karim,’ he whispered. ‘I must go out this afternoon.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yes.’

He tried to move his pompous features significantly. Whatever he did gave me pleasure. Irritating him was one of the guaranteed delights of my life. ‘Go out, then,’ I said. ‘There’s no guard stopping you, is there?’

‘Shhh. Out with my friend Shinko,’ he said confidentially. ‘She’s taking me to the Tower of London. Then there’s new positions I’ve been reading about, yaar. Pretty wild and all, with the woman on her knees. The man behind. So you stay here and keep Jamila distracted.’

‘Distract Jamila?’ I laughed. ‘Bubble, she doesn’t care if you’re here or not. She doesn’t care where you are.’

‘What?’

‘Why should she, Changez?’

‘OK, OK,’ he said defensively, backing away. ‘I see.’

I went on needling him. ‘Speaking of positions, Changez, Anwar has been in the asking-after-your-health-position recently.’ Fear and dismay came instantly into Changez’s face. It was heaven to see. This wasn’t his favourite subject. ‘You look shit-scared, Changez.’

‘That fucker, my father-in-law, will ruin my erection for the whole day,’ he said. ‘I better scoot.’

But I secured him by his stump and went on. ‘I’m sick of him whining to me about you. You’ve got to do something about it.’

‘That bastard, what does he think I am, his servant? I’m not a shopkeeper. Business isn’t my best side, yaar, not my best. I’m the intellectual type, not one of those uneducated immigrant types who come here to slave all day and night and look dirty. Tell him to remember that.’

‘OK, I’ll tell him. But I warn you, he’s going to write to your father and brother and tell them what a completely fat lazy arse you are, Changez. I’m telling you this with authority because he’s made me typing monitor in the matter.’

He grasped my arm. Alarm tightened his features. ‘For Christ’s sake, no! Steal the letter if you can. Please.’

‘I’ll do what I can, Changez, because I love you as a brother.’

‘Me too, eh?’ he said affectionately.

It was hot, and I lay naked on my back with Jamila beside me on the bed. I’d opened all the windows in the flat, drenching the atmosphere in car fumes and the uproar of the unemployed arguing in the street. Jamila asked me to touch her and I rubbed her between the legs with Vaseline according to her instructions, like ‘Harder’ and ‘More effort, please’ and ‘Yes, but you’re making love not cleaning your teeth.’ With my nose tickling her ear I asked, ‘Don’t you care for Changez at all?’

I think she was surprised that such a question could occur to me. ‘He’s sweet, Changez, it’s true, the way he grunts with satisfaction as he reads, and bumbles around the place asking me if I want some keema. But I was compelled to marry him. I don’t want him here. I don’t see why I should care for him as well.’

‘What if he loves you, Jammie?’

She sat up and looked at me. She thrust her hands at me and said passionately, ‘Karim, this world is full of people needing sympathy and care, oppressed people, like our people in this racist country, who face violence every day. It is them I sympathize with, not my husband. In fact, he irritates me intensely sometimes. Fire Eater, the man’s barely alive at all! It’s pathetic!’

But as I painted her stomach and breasts in the little kisses I knew she loved, biting and nibbling her all over, trying to relax her, she was still pondering on Changez. She said, ‘Basically he’s just a parasitical, sexually frustrated man. That’s what I think of him when I think of him at all.’

‘Sexually frustrated? But that’s where he’s gone now. To see his regular whore! Shinko, she’s called.’

‘No! Really? Is it true?’

‘Of course.’

‘Tell me, tell me!’

So I told her about Changez’s patron saint, Harold Robbins, about Shinko, and about the positions problem. This made us want to try numerous positions ourselves, as Shinko and Changez were no doubt doing as we spoke. Later, as we held each other, she said, ‘But what about you, Karim? You’re sad, aren’t you?’

I was sad, it was true. How could I not be when I thought of Mum lying there in that bed day after day, completely wrecked by Dad having run off with another woman? Would she ever recover? She had great qualities, Mum, of charm and kindness and general decency, but would anyone ever appreciate them and not hurt her?

Then Jammie said, ‘What are you going to do with your life now you’ve stopped going to college?’

‘What? But I haven’t stopped going. I just don’t turn up for lectures that often. Let’s not talk about it, it makes me depressed. What will you do now?’

She became fervent. ‘Oh me, but I’m not hanging around, though it may look like it. I’m really preparing for something. I just don’t know what it is yet. I just feel I have to know certain things and that one day they will be of great use to me in understanding the world.’

We made love again, and we must have been tired, because it can’t have been less than two hours later that I woke up. I was shivering. Jamila was fast asleep with a sheet over her lower half. In a fog I crawled out of bed to pick up a blanket which had fallen on the floor, and as I did so I glanced through into the living room and made out, in the darkness, Changez lying on his camp-bed watching me. His face was expressionless; grave if anything, but mostly vacant. He looked as if he’d been lying there on his stomach for quite a while. I shut the bedroom door and dressed hurriedly, waking Jamila. I’d often wondered what I’d do in such a position, but it was simple. I scuttled out of the flat without looking at my friend, leaving husband and wife to each other and feeling I’d betrayed everyone – Changez, Mum and Dad, and myself.