The Buddha of Suburbia

CHAPTER TEN

That summer a lot happened quickly to both Charlie and me: big things to him; smaller but significant things to me. Although I didn’t see Charlie for months, I rang Eva almost every day for a full report. And, of course, Charlie was on television and in the newspapers. Suddenly you couldn’t get away from him and his blooming career. He’d done it. As for me, I had to wait the whole summer and into the late autumn for rehearsals of The Jungle Book to begin, so I went back to South London, happy in the knowledge that soon I’d be in a professional production and there’d be someone in the cast for me to fall in love with. I just knew that that was going to happen.

Allie had gone to Italy with his smart friends from school, looking at clothes in Milan, for God’s sake. I didn’t want Mum to be alone, now she’d left Ted and Jean, and moved back into our old house. Fortunately they’d given her the job back at the shoe shop, and she and I had to spend only evenings and weekends together. Mum was feeling much better, and she was active again, though she’d become very fat at Ted and Jean’s.

She still didn’t speak much, concealing pain and her wound from voices and trite expression. But I watched her transform the house from being their place – and it had been only a place, child-soiled, functional – into her home. She started to wear trousers for the first time, dieted, and let her hair grow. She bought a pine table from a junk shop and slowly sandpapered it down in the garden, and then sealed it, something she’d never done before, never even thought of doing before. I was surprised she even knew what sandpaper was; but I could be such a fool in not knowing people. There were shaky cane chairs to go with the table, which I carried home on my head, and there Mum sat hour after hour, doing calligraphy – Christmas and birthday cards on squares of lush paper. She cleaned as never before, with care and interest (this wasn’t a chore now), getting on to her knees with a scrubbing brush and bowl of water, behind cupboards and along skirting boards. She washed down the walls and repainted doors smudged with our fingerprints. She repotted every plant in the house and started listening to opera.

Ted came by with plants. He loved shrubs, especially lilac bushes, which Jean had consequently banned from her garden, so he brought them to our place. He also came by with old radios and plates, jugs and silver candlesticks, anything he picked up on his roaming trips around South London while he waited for Eva to continue work on the new flat.

I read a lot, proper books like Lost Illusions and The Red and the Black, and went to bed early, in training for love and work. Although I was only a few miles away over the river, I missed the London I was getting to know and played games with myself like: if the secret police ordered you to live in the suburbs for the rest of your life, what would you do? Kill yourself? Read? Almost every night I had nightmares and sweats. It was sleeping under that childhood roof which did it. Whatever fear of the future I had, I would overcome it; it was nothing to my loathing of the past.

One morning rehearsals started. I said goodbye to Mum sadly, left South London and went to stay with Dad and Eva once more. And every day I ran front the tube to the rehearsal room. I was the last to leave at night. I loved the hard work and being with the ten other actors, in the pub, in the café, belonging to the group.

Shadwell had obviously spent many weekends on the Continent observing European theatre. He wanted a physical Jungle Book made of mime, voices and bodily invention. Props and costumes would be minimal. The jungle itself, its trees and swamps, the many animals, fires and huts, were to be fashioned from our bodies, movements, cries. Yet most of the actors he’d assembled hadn’t worked in that way before. On the first day, when we all jogged five times around the rehearsal room to warm up, there were many exhausted lungs. One woman had worked only in radio – as a disc-jockey. One actor I became friendly with, Terry, had done only agit-prop before, touring the country in a van with a company called Vanguard in a music-hall pastiche about the miners’ strike of 1972 called Dig! Now he found himself playing Kaa, the deaf snake known for the power of his hug. And Terry did look as if he had a powerful hug. He was going to spend the show hissing and flinging himself across the scaffolding arch which ran up the sides and across the top of the stage, and from which monkeys dangled, taunting Baloo the bear, who couldn’t climb and groaned a lot. Terry was in his early forties, with a pale, handsome face – a quiet, generous, working-class Welsh man-boy. I liked him instantly, especially as he was a fitness fanatic and his body was solid and taut. I decided to seduce him, but without much hope of success.

I didn’t clash with Shadwell until the second week, at the costume fitting. At the start, everyone was respectful towards him, listening carefully to his soporific explanations. But he soon became a joke to most of us, because not only was he pedantic and patronizing, he was also frightened of what he’d started and disliked suggestions for fear they implied that he was going wrong. One day he took me aside and left me with the designer, a nervous girl who always wore black. She carried a yellow scarf and had a jar of shit-brown cream in her hand, which she was trying to conceal behind her back.

‘This is your costume, Mr Mowgli.’

I craned my neck to examine the contents of her hand.

‘Where is my costume?’

‘Take your clothes off, please.’

It turned out that on stage I would wear a loin-cloth and brown make-up, so that I resembled a turd in a bikini-bottom. I undressed. ‘Please don’t put this on me,’ I said, shivering. ‘Got to,’ she said. ‘Be a big boy.’ As she covered me from toe to head in the brown muck I thought of Julien Sorel in The Red and the Black, dissimulating and silent for the sake of ambition, his pride often shattered, but beneath it all solid in his superiority. So I kept my mouth shut even as her hands lathered me in the colour of dirt. A few days later I did question Shadwell about the possibility of not being covered in shit for my début as a professional actor. Shadwell was concise for once.

‘That’s the fucking costume! When you so eagerly accepted your first-ever part did you think Mowgli would be wearing a kaftan? A Saint-Laurent suit?’

‘But Mr Shadwell – Jeremy – I feel wrong in it. I feel that together we’re making the world uglier.’

‘You’ll survive.’

He was right. But just when I was feeling at home in the loin-cloth and boot polish, and when I’d learned my lines before anyone else and was getting as competent as a little orang-utan on the scaffolding, I saw that our conflicts hadn’t ended. Shadwell took me aside and said, ‘A word about the accent, Karim. I think it should be an authentic accent.’

‘What d’you mean authentic?’

‘Where was our Mowgli born?’

‘India.’

‘Yes. Not Orpington. What accent do they have in India?’

‘Indian accents.’

‘Ten out of ten.’

‘No, Jeremy. Please, no.’

‘Karim, you have been cast for authenticity and not for experience.’

I could hardly believe it. Even when I did believe it we discussed it several times, but he wouldn’t change his mind.

‘Just try it,’ he kept saying as we went outside the rehearsal room to argue. ‘You’re very conservative, Karim. Try it until you feel comfortable as a Bengali. You’re supposed to be an actor, but I suspect you may just be an exhibitionist.’

‘Jeremy, help me, I can’t do this.’

He shook his head. I swear, my eyes were melting.

A few days passed without the accent being mentioned again. During this time Shadwell had me concentrate on the animal noises I was to make between the dialogue, so that when, for instance, I was talking to Kaa the slithering snake, who saves Mowgli’s life, I had to hiss. Terry and I had to hiss together. When hissing, the thought of Dad lecturing to Ted and Jean at Carl and Marianne’s was an aid. Being a human zoo was acceptable, provided the Indian accent was off the menu.

Next time it was mentioned the entire cast was present.

‘Now do the accent,’ Shadwell suddenly said. ‘I trust you’ve been rehearsing at home.’

‘Jeremy,’ I pleaded. ‘It’s a political matter to me.’

He looked at me violently. The cast watched me too, most of them sympathetically. One of them, Boyd, had done EST and assertion-training, and primal therapy, and liked to hurl chairs across the room as an expression of spontaneous feeling. I wondered if he might not have some spontaneous feeling in my defence. But he said nothing. I looked towards Terry. As an active Trotskyite he encouraged me to speak of the prejudice and abuse I’d faced being the son of an Indian. In the evenings we talked of inequality, imperialism, white supremacy, and whether sexual experimentation was merely bourgeois indulgence or a contribution to the dissolution of established society. But now, like the others, Terry said nothing but stood there in his tracksuit waiting to slide hissingly across the floor once more. I thought: You prefer generalizations like ‘after the revolution the workers will wake up filled with unbelievable joy’ to standing up to fascists like Shadwell.

Shad well spoke sternly. ‘Karim, this is a talented and expensive group of highly trained actors. They are ready to work, hungry to act, full of love for their humble craft, keen, eager and centred. But you, only you I am afraid, yes, only you out of everyone here, are holding back the entire production. Are you going to make the appropriate concession this experienced director requires from you?’

I wanted to run out of the room, back to South London, where I belonged, out of which I had wrongly and arrogantly stepped. I hated Shadwell and everyone in the cast.

‘Yes.’ I said to Shadwell.

That night in the pub I didn’t sit at the same table as the others but moved into the other bar with my pint and newspaper. I despised the other actors for not sticking up for me, and for sniggering at the accent when I finally did it. Terry left the group he was sitting with and joined me.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘have another drink. Don’t take it so badly, it’s always crap for actors.’ ‘Crap for actors’ was his favourite expression. Everything always seemed to be crap for actors and you just had to put up with it – while the present corruption continued.

I asked if people like Shitwell, as we called him among other things, would shove me around after the revolution; whether there’d be theatre directors at all or whether we’d all get a turn at telling the others where to stand and what to wear. Terry didn’t appear to have thought about this before and he puzzled over it, staring into his bitter and a bag of smoky bacon crisps.

‘There will be theatre directors,’ he said eventually. ‘I think. But they’ll be elected by the cast. If they are a pain the cast will throw them out and they’ll return to the factory they came from.’

‘Factory? How will we get people like Shadwell into factories in the first place?’

Terry looked shifty now; he was on sloping ground.

‘He’ll be required to do it.’

‘Ah. By force?’

‘There’s no reason why the same people should do all the shit work, is there? I don’t like the idea of people ordering other people to do work they wouldn’t touch themselves.’

I liked Terry more than anyone I’d met for a long time, and we talked every day. But he did believe the working class – which he referred to as if it were a single-willed person – would do somewhat unlikely things. ‘The working class will take care of those bastards very easily,’ he said, referring to racist organizations. ‘The working class is about to blow,’ he said at other times. ‘They’ve had enough of the Labour Party. They want the transformation of society now!’ His talk made me think of the housing estates near Mum’s house, where the ‘working class’ would have laughed in Terry’s face – those, that is, who wouldn’t have smacked him round the ear for calling them working class in the first place. I wanted to tell him that the proletariat of the suburbs did have strong class feeling-It was virulent and hate-filled and directed entirely at the people beneath them. But there were some things it was hopeless to discuss with him. I guessed that he didn’t intervene in my dispute with Shadwell because he wanted the situation to deteriorate further. Terry didn’t believe in social workers, left-wing politicians, radical lawyers, liberals or gradual improvement. He wanted things to get worse rather than better. When they were at their nadir there would be a transformation. So for things to get better they had to get worse; the worse they were the better they’d be in the future; they couldn’t even start to get better before they’d started to go drastically downhill. This was how I interpreted his arguments. It exasperated him. He asked me to join the Party. He said I should join to prove that my commitment to the ending of injustice wasn’t all hot air. I said I would sign up with pleasure on one condition. He had to kiss me. This, I said, would prove his commitment to overcoming his inbred bourgeois morality. He said that maybe I wasn’t ready to join the Party just yet.

Terry’s passion for equality appealed to my purer mind, and his hatred of existing authority appealed to my resentments. But although I hated inequality, it didn’t mean I wanted to be treated like everyone else. I recognized that what I liked in Dad and Charlie was their insistence on standing apart. I liked the power they had and the attention they received. I liked the way people admired and indulged them. So despite the yellow scarf strangling my balls, the brown make-up, and even the accent, I relished being the pivot of the production.

I started to make little demands of Shagbadly. I required a longer rest; and could I be driven home by someone, as I felt so tired? I had to have Assam tea (with a touch of lapsang souchong) available at all times during rehearsal. Could that actor slide a little to the right; no, a little further. I began to see that I could ask for the things I needed. I gained confidence.

I spent little time at home now, so I was unable to be a detailed witness to the Great Love in the same account-keeping way as before. I did notice that Eva’s absorption in the particulars of Dad’s life had waned. They saw fewer Satyajit Ray films now, and went less to Indian restaurants; Eva gave up learning Urdu and listening to sitar music at breakfast. She had a new interest; she was launching a huge campaign. Eva was planning her assault on London.

At the fiat there were drinks parties and little dinners every week, which irritated me, as I had to wait for everyone to finish filling the air with their thoughts on the latest novel before I could go to bed on the sofa. And often, after a day’s rehearsal, I had to listen to Shadwell telling the dinner party how well his production of The Jungle Book was going, how ‘expressionistic’ it was. Fortunately Eva and Dad were often out, as Eva accepted all the numerous invitations she and Dad received from directors, novelists, editorial assistants, proof-readers, poufs, and whoever else it was she met.

I noticed that at these ‘do’s’, as I still called them, to rile her, Eva was constructing an artistic persona for herself. People like her loved artists and anything ‘artistic’; the word itself was a philtre; a whiff of the sublime accompanied its mention; it was an entrance to the uncontrolled and inspired. Her kind would do anything to append the heavenly word ‘artist’ to themselves. (They had to do it themselves – no one else would.) I heard Eva say once, ‘I’m an artist, a designer, my team and I do houses.’

In the old days, when we were an ordinary suburban family, this pretentious and snobbish side of Eva amused Dad and me. And it had seemed, for a time, to be in retreat – perhaps because Dad was its grateful recipient. But now the show-off quotient was increasing daily. It was impossible to ignore. The problem was, Eva was not unsuccessful; she was not ignored by London once she started her assault. She was climbing ever higher, day by day. It was fantastic, the number of lunches, suppers, dinners, picnics, parties, receptions, champagne breakfasts, openings, closings, first nights, last nights and late nights these London people went to. They never stopped eating or talking or looking at people performing. As Eva started to take London, moving forward over the foreign fields of Islington, Chiswick and Wandsworth inch by inch, party by party, contact by contact, Dad thoroughly enjoyed himself. But he wouldn’t recognize how important it all was to Eva. It was at a dinner party in the flat, when they were in the kitchen together fetching yogurt and raspberries, that I heard for the first time one of them turn on the other in anger. Eva said, ‘For Christ’s sake, can’t you cut down on the bloody mysticism – we’re not in Beckenham now. These are bright, intelligent people, they’re used to argument, not assertion, to facts, not vapours!’

Dad threw back his head and laughed, not feeling the force of her criticism. ‘Eva, don’t you understand one plain thing? They have to let go of their rationality, of their interminable thinking and bothering over everything. They have control mania! It’s only when we let go of life and allow our innate wisdom to flourish that we live!’

He picked up the desserts and hurried into the room, addressing the table in these terms, Eva becoming more furious until an intense discussion broke out about the importance of intuition in the breakthrough stage of science. The party flowered.

During this time Dad was discovering how much he liked other people. And, having no idea how important this or that person was, whether they worked for the BBC or the TLS or the BFI, he treated them all with equal condescension.

One night, after a rehearsal and drinks with Terry, I came into the flat to find Charlie getting dressed in Eva and Dad’s bedroom, prancing in front of a full-length mirror which leaned against the partition wall. At first I didn’t recognize him. After all, I’d seen only photographs of his new personality. His hair was dyed black now, and it was spiky. He wore, inside out, a slashed T-shirt with a red swastika hand-painted on it. His black trousers were held together by safety-pins, paperclips and needles. Over this he had a black mackintosh; there were five belts strapped around his waist and a sort of grey linen nappy attached to the back of his trousers. The bastard was wearing one of my green waistcoats, too. And Eva was weeping.

‘What’s the matter?’ I said.

‘Keep out of this,’ said Charlie, sharply.

‘Please, Charlie,’ Eva implored him. ‘Please take off the swastika. I don’t care about anything else.’

‘In that case I’ll keep it on.’

‘Charlie –’

‘I’ve always hated your fucking nagging.’

‘It’s not nagging, it’s for compassion.’

‘Right. I won’t be coming back here, Eva. You’re such a drag now. It’s your age. Is it the menopause that’s making you like this?’

Beside Charlie on the floor was a pile of clothes from which he pulled jackets, macs and shirts before throwing them aside as unsuitable. He then applied black eye-liner. He walked out of the flat without looking at either of us. Eva screamed after him, ‘Think of those who died in the camps! And don’t expect me to be there tonight, you pig! Charlie, you can forget my support for ever!’

As arranged, I went to Charlie’s gig that night, at a club in Soho. I took Eva with me. It didn’t take much to persuade her to come and nothing would have prevented me from seeing precisely what it was that had turned my schoolfriend into what the Daily Express called ‘a phenomena’. I even made sure we got there an hour early in order to take everything in. Even then the queue for the gig stretched around the block. Eva and I walked among the kids. Eva was excited and perplexed and intimidated by the crowd. ‘How has Charlie done this?’ she kept asking. ‘We’ll soon find out,’ I said. ‘Do their mothers know they’re here?’ she asked. ‘Does he really know what he’s doing, Karim?’ Some of the kids were as young as twelve; most were about seventeen. They were dressed like Charlie, mostly in black. Some of them had orange-or blue-streaked hair, making them look like cockatoos. They elbowed and fought and gave each other tongue-sandwiches, and spat at passers-by and in each other’s faces, there in the cold and rain of decaying London, with the indifferent police looking on. As a concession to the New Wave I wore a black shirt, black jeans, white socks and black suede shoes, but I knew I had uninteresting hair. Not that I was the only one: some older men in 1960s expensive casual clothes, Fiorucci jeans and suede boots, with Cuban heels for Christ’s sake, were chasing the band, hoping to sign them.

What, then, had Charlie done since that night in the Nashville? He’d got in with the punks and seen immediately what they were doing, what a renaissance this was in music. He’d changed the group’s name to the Condemned and his own name to Charlie Hero. And as the mood of British music snapped from one paradigm to another, from lush Baroque to angry garage, he’d forced and battered Mustn’t Grumble into becoming one of the hottest New Wave or punk bands around.

Eva’s son was continually being chased by national papers, magazines and semioticians for quotes about the new nihilism, the new hopelessness and the new music which expressed it. Hero was to explain the despair of the young to the baffled but interested, which he did by spitting at journalists or just punching them. He had a smart head, Charlie; he learned that his success, like that of the other bands, was guaranteed by his ability to insult the media. Fortunately, Charlie had a talent for cruelty. These insults were published widely, as were his other assaults on hippies, love, the Queen, Mick Jagger, political activism and punk itself. ‘We’re shit,’ he proclaimed one night on early evening television. ‘Can’t play, can’t sing, can’t write songs, and the shitty idiot people love us!’ Two outraged parents were reported as having kicked in their TV screens at this. Eva even appeared in the Daily Mirror under the headline: ‘PUNK MUM SAYS I’M PROUD OF MY SON!’

The Fish ensured that Charlie was in the news and firmly established as a Face. He was also ensuring that their first record, The Bride of Christ, would be out in a few weeks. Offence had already been caused. With luck the record would be vilified and banned, guaranteeing credibility and financial success. Charlie was well on his way at last.

That evening, as always, the Fish was polite and gentlemanly. He reassured Eva that he and Charlie knew exactly what they were doing. But she was anxious. She kissed the Fish and clutched his arm, and openly begged him, ‘Please, please, don’t let my son become a heroin addict. You’ve no idea how weak he is.’

The Fish got us a good position at the back of the club, where we stood on wooden beer crates holding on to each other as the floor seemed about to crack open with heat and stomping. I soon felt as if the entire audience were lying on top of me – and the band were still in the dressing room.

They came on. The place went berserk. The Condemned had thrown out everything of their former existence – their hair, clothes, music. They were unrecognizable.

And they were nervous, not quite at ease yet in their new clothes. They crashed through their set as if they were in a competition to see who could get through the most songs in the shortest time, sounding like an unrehearsed version of the group Charlie and I had seen in the Nashville. Charlie no longer played rhythm guitar but stood clutching a mike stand at the edge of the stage, howling at the kids, who pogoed like road drills, and spat and lobbed bottles until the stage was littered with broken glass. He got cut on the hand. Beside me, Eva gasped and covered her face. Then Charlie was smearing blood over his face and wiping it over the bass guitarist.

The rest of the Condemned were still nonentities, the clerks and Civil Servants of the music business. But Charlie was magnificent in his venom, his manufactured rage, his anger, his defiance. What power he had, what admiration he extorted, what looks there were in girls’ eyes. He was brilliant: he’d assembled the right elements. It was a wonderful trick and disguise. The one flaw, I giggled to myself, was his milky and healthy white teeth, which, to me, betrayed everything else.

Then a riot started. Bottles flew, strangers punched each other and a tooth flew down Eva’s cleavage. I had blood all over me. Girls passed out on the floor; ambulances were called. The Fish efficiently got us out.

I was thoughtful as we walked through Soho that night. Beside me, Eva, in her jeans and tennis shoes, stepped along lightly, trying to hum one of Charlie’s songs and keep up with my fast pace. Eventually she took my arm. We were so easy with each other, we could have been going out together. We said nothing; I presumed she was speculating about Charlie’s future. On my side, I burned with less envy of Charlie than I’d imagined I would. This was because one strong feeling dominated me: ambition. As yet it was unfocused. But I was completely impressed by Charlie’s big con trick, by his having knocked on the door of opportunity and its opening up to him, its goods tumbling out. Now he could take what he wanted. Until this moment I’d felt incapable of operating effectively in the world; I didn’t know how to do it; events tossed me about. Now I was beginning to see that it didn’t necessarily have to be that way. My happiness and progress and education could depend on my own activity – as long as it was the right activity at the right time. My coming appearance in The Jungle Book was meagre in comparison with Charlie’s triumph, but soon eyes would be on me; it was a start, and I felt strong and determined. It would lead upwards.

As we got into the car I looked at Eva and she smiled at me. I felt she hadn’t been thinking about Charlie at all – except as an inspiration – but that, like me, she’d been dwelling on what she might do in the world. Driving us back home, Eva banged the steering wheel and sang, and yelled out of the window.

‘Weren’t they great? Isn’t he a star, Karim!’

‘Yeah, yeah!’

‘They’re going to be big, Karim, really huge. But Charlie will have to jettison that group. He can make it on his own, don’t you think?’

‘Yeah, but what will happen to them?’

‘Those boys?’ She waved them away. ‘But our boy’s going up. Up! Up!’ She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. ‘And you too, OK?’

The dress rehearsal of The Jungle Book went well. We were all surprised by how smooth it was; no one forgot their lines, and technically all was fine. So we went into the first preview, in front of an audience, with plenty of confidence. The costumes were amusing and the audience applauded them. The naughty monkeys screeched their high-pitched calls as the Pack Council met to discuss the man cub’s future. But as Shere Khan growled from the distance in his Hamlet’s ghost voice, ‘The cub is mine. Give him to me. What have the Free People to do with a man’s cub?’ I heard a cracking noise above me. Unprofessionally, I looked up, to see the iron net of the scaffolding bending, swaying and finally tipping towards me as bolts snapped and lights crashed down on to the floor of the stage. Voices in the audience shouted out warnings to us. Most of the front row jumped to their feet and fled up the aisle away from the danger. I deserted the play, as did the other actors on stage, and leapt into the audience. I landed on Shadwell, who was already on his feet screaming at the technicians. The play was abandoned for that night and the audience sent home. The rows were horrific, Shadwell a monster. Two other previews were cut. There was to be only one preview before the first night.

Naturally, I wanted Mum to be at the first night, and Dad too. But as they hadn’t seen each other since the day they both left the house, I didn’t think my début in The Jungle Book was the best time for a reunion. So I invited Mum, with Uncle Ted and Auntie Jean, to the preview. This time nothing went wrong. Afterwards, Uncle Ted, who had his suit and Brylcreem on, announced a treat. He would take us all out to Trader Vies at the Hilton Hotel. Mum had dressed up, and was looking all sweet in a blue dress with a bow at the front. She was cheerful, too; I’d forgotten how happy she could be. In a fit of unshyness she’d left the shoe shop and was working as a receptionist at a doctor’s practice. She began to discuss illness with authority.

Mum wept with pride at my Mowgli. Jean, who hadn’t wept since the death of Humphrey Bogart, laughed a great deal and was good-tempered and drunk.

‘I thought it would be more amateur,’ she kept saying, obviously surprised that I could be involved in anything that wasn’t a total failure. ‘But it was really professional! And fancy meeting all those television actors!’

The key to impressing Mum and Auntie Jean, and the best way to keep their tongues off the risible subject of my loin-cloth, which inevitably had them quaking with laughter, was to introduce them to the actors afterwards, telling them which sit-coms and police programmes they’d seen them in. After dinner we went dancing in a night club in the West End. I’d never seen Mum dance before, but she slipped out of her sandals and danced with Auntie Jean to the Jackson Five. It was a grand evening.

However, I imagined that the praise I received that night was merely to be a preview of the steaming sauna of appreciation that I’d receive after the first night. So after the opening I ran out of the dressing room to where Dad, in his red waistcoat, was waiting with all the others. None of them looked particularly cheerful. We walked up the street to a restaurant nearby, and still no one spoke to me. ‘Well, Dad,’ I asked, ‘how did you enjoy yourself? Aren’t you glad I didn’t become a doctor?’

Like a fool, I’d forgotten that Dad thought honesty a virtue. He was a compassionate man, Dad, but never at the expense of drawing attention to his own opinions.

‘Bloody half-cocked business,’ he said. ‘That bloody fucker Mr Kipling pretending to whity he knew something about India! And an awful performance by my boy looking like a Black and White Minstrel!’

Eva restrained Dad. ‘Karim was assured,’ she said firmly, patting my arm.

Fortunately, Changez had chuckled all through the show. ‘Good entertainment,’ he said. ‘Take me again, eh?’

Before we sat down in the restaurant Jamila took me aside and kissed me on the mouth. I felt Changez’s eyes on me.

‘You looked wonderful,’ she said, as if she were speaking to a ten-year-old after a school play. ‘So innocent and young, showing off your pretty body, so thin and perfectly formed. But no doubt about it, the play is completely neo-fascist – ’

‘Jammie –’

‘And it was disgusting, the accent and the shit you had smeared over you. You were just pandering to prejudices – ’

‘Jammie –’

‘And clichés about Indians. And the accent – my God, how could you do it? I expect you’re ashamed, aren’t you?’

‘I am, actually.’

But she didn’t pity me; she mimicked my accent in the play. ‘Actually, you’ve got no morality, have you? You’ll get it later, I expect, when you can afford it.’

‘You’re going too far, Jamila,’ I said, and turned my back on her. I went and sat with Changez.

The only other significant event of the evening was something that happened between Eva and Shadwell at the far end of the restaurant, beside the toilet. Shadwell was leaning back against the wall and Eva was angry with him, making hard gestures with her fists. Many bitter shades of disgust and pain and dejection passed over his face. At one point Eva turned and gesticulated towards me, as if she were taking him to task for something he’d done to me. Yes, Shadwell had let her down. But I knew that nothing would ever discourage him; he’d never give up wanting to be a director, and he’d never be any good.

So that was it. The Jungle Book was not mentioned again by any of them, as if they weren’t ready to see me as an actor but preferred me in my old role as a useless boy. Yet the play did good business, especially with schools, and I started to relax on stage, and to enjoy acting. I sent up the accent and made the audience laugh by suddenly relapsing into cockney at odd times. ‘Leave it out, Bagheera,’ I’d say. I liked being recognized in the pub afterwards, and made myself conspicuous in case anyone wanted my autograph.

Sometimes Shad well came in to watch the show, and one day he started being nice to me. I asked Terry why this was. ‘I’m baffled too,’ he said. Then Shadwell took me to Joe Allen’s and offered me a part in his next production, which would be Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Terry, whose gentleness of heart so melted my own that I helped him sell his newspapers outside factories, on picket lines and outside East End tube stations at seven-thirty in the morning, was encouraging. ‘Accept it,’ he said. ‘It’ll do you good. ‘Course, it’s crap for actors, but it’s experience for you.’

Unlike the other actors – they’d been in the business much longer than I had – I had no idea what work I could get. So I accepted. Shadwell and I embraced. Eva said nothing about it.

‘What about you, Terry?’ I asked one evening. ‘Have you got any work lined up?’

‘Oh yeah.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing precisely,’ he said. ‘But I’m waiting for the call.’

‘What call?’

‘I can’t tell you that, Karim. But I can say confidently that the call is going to come.’

When I turned up at the theatre and Terry and I got changed next to each other, I frequently made a point of saying to him, ‘Well, Terry, has the call come yet? Has Peter Brook rung?’

Or one of us would rush into the dressing room just before curtain-up and tell Terry there was someone who urgently needed to talk to him on the phone. Twice he fell for it, running half-dressed out of the room and instructing everyone to hold the show for a few minutes. He wasn’t thrown by our malice. ‘I’m not bothered by your childish games. I know the call’s going to come. It’s not something that makes me anxious at all. I’m going to wait patiently.’

One night, half-way through the run, the box-office manager excitedly rang through to us back-stage and said that the theatre director Matthew Pyke had booked a ticket for The Jungle Book. Within fifteen minutes everyone in the cast – apart from me – was talking about this. I’d never seen such chatter, nervousness and exhilaration in the dressing room before. But I did know how crucial such visits by hot directors were to actors, who worried constantly about their next job. The Jungle Book they’d forgotten about: it was in the past. Now they sat in the tiny dressing room, their washing hanging on the radiators, eating health food and tirelessly sending information and soft-focus photographs of themselves to directors, theatres, agents, TV companies and producers. And when agents or casting directors deigned to see the show, and stayed to the end, which was rare, the actors crowded around them afterwards, buying them drinks and roaring with laughter at anything they said. They ached to be remembered: upon such memories an actor’s life depended.

This was why Pyke’s appearance was so exciting. He was our most important visitor ever. He had his own company. You didn’t have to go through him to get to someone who counted: he counted in his own right. But why had he come to see our pissy show? We couldn’t work it out, although I noticed that Terry was being very cool about the whole thing.

Before the show some of us crowded into the tiny lighting box as Pyke, in his denim dungarees and white T-shirt – he still had long hair – took his seat. He was accompanied by his wife, Marlene, a middle-aged blonde. We watched him consult the programme, turning each page and examining our faces and the oblong patch of biography beneath the photographs.

The rest of the cast stood outside and waited for their turn to get a look at Pyke. I said nothing, but I had no idea who Pyke was and what he’d done. Was it plays? Films? Opera? Television? Was he American? At last I asked Terry; I knew he wouldn’t be contemptuous of my ignorance. Terry eagerly gave me the whole picture; he seemed to know enough about Pyke to write his biography.

Pyke was the star of the flourishing alternative theatre scene; he was one of the most original directors around. He’d worked and taught at the Magic Theater in San Francisco; had therapy at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur with Fritz Perls; worked in New York with Chaikin and La Mama. In London, with a couple of contemporaries from Cambridge, he started his own company, the Movable Theatre, for which he did two ravishing productions a year.

These productions played in London at the end of their well-meant journey around arts centres, youth clubs and studio theatres. Fashionable people attended the London opening: there were bright rock-stars, other actors like Terence Stamp, politicos like Tariq Ali, most of the ordinary acting profession, and even the public. Pyke’s shows were also commended for their fantastic intermissions, dazzling occasions where the fashionable audience came dressed in such style they resembled Chinese peasants, industrial workers (boiler suits) or South American insurgents (berets).

Naturally Terry had hard-line views on all this, and as we changed for the show on that charged night he proclaimed them to the entire cast, as if he were addressing a meeting.

‘Comrades, what is Pyke’s stuff? What is it, after all – just think for a minute – but a lot of reformist and flatulent “left-wing” politics! It’s plump actors pretending to be working class, when their fathers are neuro-surgeons. It’s voluptuous actresses – even more beautiful than you all are – hand-picked and caressed by Pyke! Why do they always perform the whole show in the nude? Ask yourself these questions! It’s fucking crap for actors, comrades. Absolute crap for actors!’

The other actors shouted Terry down.

‘It’s not crap for actors!’ they cried. ‘At least it’s decent work after doing The Jungle Bunny and thrillers and beer commercials.’

Terry had taken off his trousers by now, and two women in the cast were looking through a gap in the curtain as he prepared to propagate his analysis of Pyke. Slowly he hung his trousers on a hanger, which he placed on the communal rail which ran through the dressing room. He liked girls looking at his muscly legs; he liked them hearing his muscly arguments, too.

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘You’re right. There’s truth in what you say. It’s better than fuck-all. Much better. That’s why, comrades, I sent Pyke my particulars.’

Everyone groaned. But with Pyke to impress in the audience we had good reason to spring energetically over the scaffolding. The show was the best it had ever been, and its proper length, for once. Recently we’d been taking ten minutes a night off it in order to have more time in the pub. After this show we changed quickly, without the usual bickering and jokes and attempts to pull each other’s underpants off. Naturally I was the slowest, having the most to remove. There wasn’t a working shower and I had to clean off my make-up with cold-cream and by splashing water from the sink over myself. Terry waited impatiently for me. When I’d finished and it was just the two of us left I put my arms around him and kissed his face.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’ s move. Pyke’s waiting for me.’

‘Let’s stay here for a while.’

‘Why?’

I said, ‘I’m thinking of joining the Party. I want to discuss various ideological problems I have.’

‘Bollocks,’ he said. He moved away from me. ‘I’m not against this,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Touching.’

But he was against it.

‘It’s just that I have to think about my future right now. My call has come, Karim.’

‘Yeah?’ I said. ‘Is this it? Is this the call?’

‘Yeah, this is fucking it,’ he said. ‘Please. Come on.’

‘Do up my buttons,’ I said.

‘Christ. You. You stupid boy. OK. Come on. Pyke’s waiting for me.’

We hurried to the pub. I’d never seen Terry look so hopeful about anything before. I really wanted him to get the job.

Pyke was leaning against the bar with Marlene, sipping a half of lager. He didn’t look the drinking type. Three of our company went up to him and chatted briefly. Pyke replied, but barely seemed bothered to move his lips. Then Shadwell came into the pub, saw Pyke, nodded contemptuously at us, and left. Instead of going over to Pyke, Terry led me to a corner table among the old men who drank alone every night, and there he calmly sucked his roll-ups as we sipped our usual pint with a whisky chaser.

‘Pyke’s not showing much interest in you,’ I pointed out.

Terry was confident. ‘He’ll be over. He’s very cold – you know what middle-class people are like. No feelings. I reckon he wants my working-class experience to give his puerile political ideas some authenticity.’

‘Say no,’ I advised him.

‘I bloody might. Critics always say his work’s “austere” or “puritanical” because he likes bare naked stages and theatres with their brickwork sticking out all over the place and no props. As if my mum and the working class like that. They want comfortable seats, french windows and sweets.’

Just then Pyke turned towards us and raised his glass a fraction of an inch. Terry smiled back.

‘’Course, Pykie’s got his virtues. He’s not self-promoting like those other cunt directors and conductors and producers who just live off other people’s talent. He never does interviews and he never goes on telly. He’s good like that. But,’ said Terry darkly, leaning towards me, ‘this is something you should know, if you’re lucky enough to work with him one day.’

He told me that Pyke’s private life wasn’t a desert of austere and puritanical practices. If the inevitably deformed critics who admired his work – and the critics who sat with their faces pointing up at us did seem to have the countenances of gargoyles, while the aisles were crammed with their wheelchairs – knew of certain weaknesses – certain indulgences, let us say – they would see Pyke’s work in a different light. ‘Oh yes, a very different light.’

‘What kind of light?’

‘I can’t tell you that.’

‘But, Terry, surely we hide nothing from each other?’

‘No, no, I can’t say. Sorry.’

Terry didn’t gossip. He believed that people were made by the impersonal forces of history, not by greed, malice and lust. And besides, Pyke was now walking straight towards us. Terry hurriedly stubbed out his roll-up, pushed his chair back and got up. His hand even went up to flatten his hair. He shook hands with Pyke. Then he introduced us to each other.

‘Nice to see you, Terry,’ Pyke said smoothly.

‘Yeah, and you, and you.’

‘You make an excellent snake.’

‘Thank you. But thank God someone’s doing some classy work in this crumby country, eh?’

‘Who do you mean?’

‘You, Matthew.’

‘Oh yes. Me.’

‘Yes.’

Pyke looked at me and smiled. ‘Come and have a drink at the bar, Karim.’

‘Me?’

‘Why not?’

‘OK. See you later, Terry,’ I said.

As I got up Terry looked at me as if I’d just announced I had a private income. He sank back into his chair as Pyke and I walked away from the table, and tossed the whisky down his throat.

As Pyke got me a half of bitter I stood there regarding the rows of inverted bottles behind the barman’s head, not looking at the other actors in the pub, who I knew were all staring at me. I meditated for a few seconds, concentrating on my breathing, immediately aware of how shallow it was. When we were set up with drinks, Pyke said, ‘Tell me about yourself.’

I hesitated. I looked at Marlene, who was standing behind us, talking to an actor. ‘I don’t know where to begin.’

‘Tell me something you think might interest me.’

And he looked at me with full concentration. I had no choice. I began to talk rapidly and at random. He said nothing. I went on. I thought: I am being psychoanalysed. I began to imagine that Pyke would understand everything I said. I was glad he was there; there were things it was necessary to say. So I told him things I’d never told anyone – how much I resented Dad for what he’d done to Mum, and how Mum had suffered, how painful the whole thing had been, though I was only now beginning to feel it.

The other actors, who were now gathered around Terry’s table with jars of yellow beer in front of them, had turned their chairs around to watch me, as if I were a football match. They must have been amazed and resentful that Pyke wanted to listen to me, of all people, someone who was barely an actor. When I faltered as the realization hit me that it wasn’t Mum who’d neglected me, but I who’d neglected Mum, Pyke said gently, ‘I think you may like to be in my next production.’

I woke from my introspective dream and said, ‘What kind of show will it be?’

I noticed that when Pyke was about to talk he put his head thoughtfully to one side and looked away into the distance. He used his hands flirtatiously, slowly, not flapping or pointing but caressing and floating, as if wiping his flat hand inches from the surface of a painting. He said, ‘I don’t know.’

‘What kind of part will it be?’

He shook his head regretfully.

‘I’m afraid I can’t begin to say.’

‘How many people will be in it?’

There was a long pause. His hand, with the fingers splayed and taut, waved in front of his face.

‘Don’t ask me.’

‘D’you know what you’re doing?’ I asked, more bravely.

‘No.’

‘Well, I don’t know if I want to work in that vague kind of way. I’m inexperienced, you know.’

Pyke conceded. ‘I think it may revolve around the only subject there is in England.’

‘I see.’

‘Yes.’

He looked at me as if I were sure of what this was.

‘Class,’ he said. ‘Is that OK for you?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

He touched me on the shoulder. ‘Good. Thank you for joining us.’ It was as if I were doing him a big favour.

I finished my drink, quickly said goodbye to the other actors and got out as fast as I could, not wanting to register their smirks and curiosity. I was walking across the car park when someone jumped on my back. It was Terry.

‘Leave it out,’ I said sternly, pushing him off.

‘Oh yeah.’

There were no laughs in his face. He looked very low. He made me feel ashamed of my sudden happiness. I walked to the bus stop in silence with him beside me. It was cold, dark and raining.

‘Has Pyke offered you a part?’ he said at last.

‘Yes.’

‘Liar!’

I said nothing. ‘Liar!’ he said. I knew he was so incensed he couldn’t control himself; I couldn’t blame him for the fury which inhabited him. ‘It can’t be true, it can’t be true,’ he said.

Suddenly I shouted out into the night air. ‘Yes, yes, yes, it is true!’ And now the world had some tension in it; now it twanged and vibrated with meaning and possibility! ‘Yes, yes, fucking yes!’

When I got to the theatre next day someone had laid a dirty red carpet from the dressing-room door to the spot where I normally changed. ‘Can I help you off with your clothes?’ one actor said. ‘Can I have your autograph?’ said another. I received daffodils, roses and an acting primer. The EST freak, Boyd, said, as he took off his trousers and shook his penis at me, ‘If I weren’t white and middle class I’d have been in Pyke’s show now. Obviously mere talent gets you nowhere these days. Only the disadvantaged are going to succeed in seventies’ England.’

For a few days I was too cowardly to tell Shadwell of Pyke’s offer, and that I was not going to do the Molière. I was happy and didn’t want the pleasure of anticipation soured by a row with him. So Shitvolumes started preparing his next show as if I were going to be in it, until one day, just before The Jungle Book was about to go up, he came into the dressing room.

‘Jeremy,’ I said, ‘I think I’d better tell you something.’

We went into the communal lavatory, the only private space backstage, and I broke the news to him. Shadwell nodded and said gently, ‘You’re being ungrateful, Karim. You shouldn’t just bugger off, you know, it’s not right. We all love you here, OK?’

‘Please understand, Jeremy – Pyke’s a big man. Very important. Surely there’s a tide in the affairs of men which taken – ’

Shadshit’s voice suddenly rose to rehearsal pitch and he walked out of the toilet and into the dressing room. Behind us in the auditorium the show was about to begin, and the audience were in their seats. They could hear every syllable. I felt particularly ridiculous hurrying along behind him in my loin-cloth.

‘What tide, you drowning prick?’ he said. ‘You haven’t the experience to deal with Pyke. You’ll be mincemeat within three days. You’ve got no idea what a tough fucking bastard Pyke is. He’s charming, all right. All interesting people have charm. But he’ll crucify you!’

‘Why would he want to crucify a little person like me?’ I said weakly. Boyd smirked and mouthed ‘exactly’ at Terry, who ignored him but seemed to be nodding in agreement with Shotbolt.

‘For fun, you idiot! Because that’s how people like that operate! They pretend they’re democrats but they’re little Lenins –’

Terry took offence at this. He glared at Shadwell and said, ‘They should be so lucky!’ But Shoddy was not to be deterred now he was going.

‘They’re cultural fascists and élitists who think they know better than anyone else how it is! They’re paranoid, frightened people!’

Some of the others in the cast were laughing behind their hands like schoolkids when one of them is being castigated by Teacher. I walked towards the stage on my red carpet.

‘I don’t care what you say. I can look after myself.’

‘Ha!’ he shouted. ‘We’ll fucking see – you little parvenu!’