The Buddha of Suburbia

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Spring. Some time after I’d said goodbye to Bagheera, Baloo and the others, and get fucked to Shadwell, and didn’t go to the last-night party, I was in a clean, bright rehearsal room with a polished wooden floor (so we could run around barefoot) in a church hall by the river, near Chelsea Bridge. There were six actors in Pyke’s group, three men and three women. Two of us were officially ‘black’ (though truly I was more beige than anything). None of us was over thirty. Only one woman, pinched-face Carol, also from the suburbs (so I had her ambitious little number right away), had worked with Pyke before. There was a red-haired woman called Eleanor, in her early twenties, who seemed experienced and sensible, and unlike Carol didn’t fancy herself as a bit of a star. And there was a nineteen-year-old black actress, Tracey, with firm but peculiar views. The other two men, Richard (gay) and Jon, were those solid, cynical, jobbing actors who’d been around the London fringe for years, acting in rooms above pubs for a share of the box-office, in basements, at festivals and in street theatre. They required little but a good part, a director who wasn’t a fool or a dictator, and a comfortable pub near the venue with authentic beer. There was also a writer in the group, Louise Lawrence, an earnest and self-satisfied northern woman with thick glasses who said little but wrote down everything you said, especially if it was stupid.

At ten every morning I cycled into Chelsea, with Eva’s mushrooms-on-toast fuelling me, and rode around the hall with no hands – in celebration of life. I’d never been so enthusiastic about anything. This was my big chance, in more ways than one.

Pyke, in his shiny blue tracksuit, with his athletic body and greying hair, usually sat at a table with his feet on a chair. He was surrounded by laughing actors and the two stage-managers, adoring young women who were like his personal servants. The stage-managers looked after his newspapers, his orange juice, and planned his trips to New York. One of them carried his diary, the other his pencils and sharpener. His car (which Richard referred to as ‘Pyke’s Penis’, as in ‘Pyke’s Penis is blocking the drive’ or ‘Pyke’s Penis can do nought to sixty in thirty seconds’) was a priority for them. And they spent many mornings on the phone arranging his dates with women.

The atmosphere Pyke created was in contrast to Shadwell’s tense and chaotic rehearsals, which were essentially an imitation of how Shadwell thought geniuses worked. Pyke’s morning began with breakfast and essential gossip around the table, the cruelty and extremity of which I’d never experienced before. My mother would never have let us talk about anyone like that. Pyke attacked other directors (‘He couldn’t direct air out of a puncture’); writers he didn’t like (‘I would gladly have handed him over to Stalin for re-education’); and critics (‘His face would make pregnant women abort on sight’). After this we’d get up and play tag, or have piggyback races, or play ‘What’s the time, Mr Wolf?’

None of this seemed like work to me, and I loved to think of what the suburban commuters in our street, who were paying for us through their taxes, would have made of a gang of grown-ups being pop-up toasters, surfboards and typewriters.

After lunch, to warm up again, Pyke had us play ‘feely’ games where we stood in the centre of a circle with our feet together and eyes closed and just let ourselves fall. Weak and relaxed, we’d be passed around the group. Everyone touched us; we embraced and kissed. This was how Pyke fused the group. It seemed to me during one of these games that Eleanor remained in my arms just that little bit longer than necessary.

On the fourth day, sitting there at ten in the morning with all of us gathered around him, Pyke played a game which disturbed me, which made me think there was a shadow side to him. Looking slyly around the group he said he would predict which of us would sleep together. He inspected each of us in turn and said, ‘I think I know which way pleasure’s course will run. I’ll write down my predictions, and on the last night of the show I’ll read them out. OK?’

During the second week the sun shone and we opened the doors. I wore an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt which I sometimes knotted on my stomach. One of the stage-managers almost stopped breathing when she saw me, I’m not kidding. We each sat in what Pyke called ‘the hot seat’ with the group arranged in a staring semi-circle around us. Each of us had to tell the rest of the group the story of our life. ‘Concentrate on the way you think your position in society has been fixed,’ said Pyke.

Being sceptical and suspicious, the English sort to be embarrassed by such a Californian display of self, I found the life-stories – accounts of contradiction and wretchedness, confusion and intermittent happiness – oddly affecting. I giggled all through Lawrence’s account of working in a San Francisco massage parlour (when she was stranded there), where the women were not allowed to proposition men directly in case they were cops. They had to say, ‘Is there any other muscle you’d like relaxed, sir?’ This was where Lawrence discovered socialism, for here, in a forest of pricks and pond of semen, ‘I soon realized that nothing human was alien to me,’ as she put it.

Richard talked about wanting to fuck only black men, and the clubs he cruised constantly in order to acquire them. And to Pyke’s delight and my surprise Eleanor told of how she’d worked with a woman performance artist who persuaded her to extract the texts of poems – ‘Cows’ teeth like snowdrops bite the garlic grass’ – from her vagina before reading them. The performance artist herself meanwhile had a microphone up her vagina and relayed the gurglings of her cunt to the audience. This was enough for me. I was hot on Eleanor’s trail. For the time being I gave up on Terry.

Every few days I rang Jamila to give her a full account of cows’ teeth like snowdrops, Pyke’s Penis, San Francisco, Hawaii and pop-up toasters. Everyone else was encouraging: Eva, having heard of Pyke, was very impressed; and Dad was happy that I was working. The only person I was certain would urinate on my flame was Jamila.

So I explained the games and the reasoning behind them. ‘Pyke’s a shrewd man,’ I told her. ‘By having us expose ourselves he’s made us vulnerable and dependent on each other. We’re so close as a group it’s incredible!’

‘Pah. You’re not close to each other. It’s fake, just a technique.’

‘I thought you believed in co-operation and all. Communist stuff like that.’

‘Karim, shall I tell you what’s been going on over here at the shop while you’ve been over there hugging strangers?’

‘Why, what?’

‘Νο, I’m not going to talk to you. Karim, you’re basically a selfish person, uninterested in anyone else.’

‘What?’

‘Go back to being a tree.’ And she put the phone down.

Soon, in the mornings, we stopped meeting at the rehearsal room: we all went our separate ways to research characters from different rungs of the social ladder. These people Louise Lawrence would eventually have to try and massage into the same play. In the afternoons we improvised around the characters and started to build scenes. Initially I thought I’d choose Charlie as my character, but Pyke discouraged me immediately. ‘We need someone from your own background,’ he said. ‘Someone black.’

‘Yeah?’

I didn’t know anyone black, though I’d been at school with a Nigerian. But I wouldn’t know where to find him. ‘Who do you mean?’ I asked.

‘What about your family?’ Pyke said. ‘Uncles and aunts. They’ll give the play a little variety. I bet they’re fascinating.’

I thought for a few minutes.

‘Any ideas?’ he said.

‘I’ve got just the thing,’ I said.

‘Excellent. I knew you’d be the right person to be in this show.’

After breakfast with Dad and Eva I cycled across the river, past the Oval cricket ground to Jeeta and Anwar’s shop. I was beginning to think of Anwar as the character I’d play, and I wanted to see how he’d changed since the advent of Changez, who was such a disappointment that Anwar – who had been counting on being given a life-transfusion by a son – had become an old man, his natural course of decay being accelerated, not delayed, by the fresh element which had turned out to be not-so-fresh.

When I arrived Jeeta got up from behind the till and hugged me. I noticed how grubby and gloomy Paradise Stores looked now: paint was peeling from the walls, the shelves were dirty, the lino on the floor was curling and cracking, and several lights seemed to have failed, leaving the place tenebrous. Outside, in their old orange-boxes, even the vegetables looked forlorn, and Jeeta had grown tired of scrubbing off the racist graffiti which reappeared on the walls every time you removed it. Other shops in the area, all over London in fact, were modernizing rapidly, as ambitious Pakistanis and Bengalis bought them up. Several brothers, say, would come to London; they’d get two jobs each, in an office during the day and a restaurant by night; they’d buy a shop, installing one brother as manager, with his wife behind the till. Then they’d get another shop and do the same, until a chain was established. Money flowed. But Anwar and Jeeta’s shop had not changed in years. Business was slack. Everything was going wrong, but I didn’t want to think about it. The play was too important.

I told Jeeta about the play and what I wanted – just to be around – knowing she’d barely understand or be interested. But she did have something to say.

‘Whatever you do,’ she said, ‘if you’re going to come here day after day, you must stop your uncle going out with his walking stick.’

‘Why, Auntie Jeeta?’

‘Karim, some thugs came here one day. They threw a pig’s head through the shop window as I sat here.’

Jamila hadn’t told me anything about this.

‘Were you hurt?’

‘A little cut. Blood here and there, Karim.’

‘What did the police do?’

‘They said it was another shop. A rival thing.’

‘Bollocks.’

‘Naughty boy, bad language.’

‘Sorry, Auntie.’

‘It made your uncle come very strange. He is roaming the streets every day with his stick, shouting at these white boys, “Beat me, white boy, if you want to!”’ And she blushed with shame and embarrassment. ‘Go to him,’ she said, and squeezed my hand.

I found Uncle Anwar upstairs in his pyjamas. He seemed to have shrunk in the past few months: his legs and body were emaciated, while his head remained the same size, perched on him like a globe on a walking stick.

‘You bastard,’ he said in greeting, ‘where have you been?’

‘I’m here with you every day now.’

He grunted his approbation and continued to watch television. He loved having me beside him, though he barely spoke and never asked me about myself. For a few weeks he’d been visiting the mosque regularly, and now I occasionally went with him. The mosque was a dilapidated terraced house nearby which smelled of bhuna gost. The floor was sprinkled with onion skins, and Moulvi Qamar-Uddin sat behind his desk surrounded by leather-bound books on Islam and a red telephone, stroking the beard which reached to his stomach. Anwar complained to the Moulvi that Allah had abandoned him despite regular prayers and a refusal to womanize. Hadn’t he loved his wife and given her a shop, and now wasn’t she refusing to go home to Bombay with him?

Anwar complained to me about Jeeta as we sat in the store-room like a couple of school truants. ‘I want to go home now,’ he said. ‘I’ve had enough of this damn place.’

But as the days passed I watched Jeeta’s progress. She certainly didn’t want to go home. It was as if Jamila had educated her in possibility, the child being an example to the parent. The Princess wanted to get a licence to sell liquor on the premises; she wanted to sell newspapers and increase the stock. She could see how it was all done, but Anwar was impossible, you couldn’t discuss anything with him. Like many Muslim men – beginning with the Prophet Mohammed himself, whose absolute statements, served up piping hot from God, inevitably gave rise to absolutism – Anwar thought he was right about everything. No doubt on any subject ever entered his head.

‘Why don’t you want to take up Jeeta’s ideas?’ I asked him.

‘For what? What will I do with the profit? How many shoes can I wear? How many socks? How better will I eat? Thirty breakfasts instead of one?’ And he always said, finally, ‘Everything is perfect.’

‘D’you believe that, Uncle?’ I asked one day.

‘No,’ he replied. ‘Everything gets worse.’

His Muslim fatalism – Allah was responsible for everything – depressed me. I was always glad to get away now. I had a far more exciting project heating up over the other side of the river. I had chosen Eleanor to fall in love with, and was making progress.

Almost every day after rehearsal Eleanor said, as I hoped she would, ‘Are you coming over later, then, to keep me company?’ And she watched my face anxiously, biting her nails and ripping the skin from around her fingernails with her teeth, and twisting her long red hair around her fingers.

From the start of rehearsal she had noticed my fear and inexperience, and offered consolation. Eleanor had already appeared in films, on TV and in the West End. I felt like a boy beside her, but there was something in her that needed me too, something weak rather than kind or passionate, as if I were a comfort during an illness, someone to touch, perhaps. As soon as I saw this weakness I closed in. I had never been seen with such a mature and beautiful woman before, and I encouraged her to go out with me so people would think we were a couple.

I started going to her flat in Ladbroke Grove, an area that was slowly being reconstituted by the rich, but where Rasta dope dealers still hung around outside the pubs; inside, they chopped up the hash on the table with their knives. There were also many punks around now, dressed, like Charlie, in ripped black. This was the acme of fashion. As soon as you got your clothes home you had to slash them with razor-blades. And there were the kids who were researchers and editors and the like: they’d been at Oxford together and they swooped up to wine bars in bright little red and blue Italian cars, afraid they would be broken into by the black kids, but too politically polite to acknowledge this.

But how stupid I was – how naïve. I was misled by my ignorance of London into thinking my Eleanor was less middle class than she turned out to be. She dressed roughly, wearing a lot of scarves, lived in Notting Hill and – sometimes – talked with a Catford accent. My mother would have been appalled by Eleanor’s clothes and manners, and her saying ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’ every ten seconds. This wouldn’t have perturbed Eva: she would have been disappointed and perplexed by Eleanor’s concealment of her social origins and the way she took her ‘connections’ for granted. Eva would have given much to edge her body into the houses Eleanor had played in as a child.

Eleanor’s father was American and owned a bank; her mother was a well-respected English portrait painter; one of her brothers was a university professor. Eleanor had been to country houses, to public school and Italy, and she knew many liberal families and people who’d flourished in the 1960s: painters, novelists, lecturers, young people called Candia, Emma, Jasper, Lucy, India, and grown-ups called Edward, Caroline, Francis, Douglas and Lady Luckham. Her mother was a friend of the Queen Mother, and when Ma’am turned up in her Bentley the local kids gathered round the car and cheered. One day Eleanor had to rush away from rehearsal because she was required by her mother to make up the numbers at a lunch for the Queen Mother. The voices and language of those people reminded me of Enid Blyton, and Bunter and Jennings, of nurseries and nannies and prep school, a world of total security that I’d thought existed only in books. They lacked all understanding of how much more than anyone else they had. I was frightened of their confidence, education, status, money, and I was beginning to see how important they were.

To my surprise, the people whose shabby houses I went to as I trailed around with Eleanor night after night, ‘looking after her’, were polite and kind and attentive to me, far more pleasant than the supercilious crowd Eva drew to her place. Eleanor’s set, with their combination of class, culture and money, and their indifference to all three, was exactly the cocktail that intoxicated Eva’s soul, but she could never get near it. This was unforced bohemia; this was what she sought; this was the apogee. However, I concealed this aspect of my social rise from Eva, saving it up for the perfect defensive or attacking occasion, though she and Dad had already heard that I’d set my sights on Eleanor. This was a relief to my father, I knew, who was so terrified that I might turn out to be gay that he could never bring himself to mention the matter. In his Muslim mind it was bad enough being a woman; being a man and denying your male sex was perverse and self-destructive, as well as everything else. When I could see Dad’s mind brooding on the subject I was always sure to mention Mum – how she was, what she was doing – knowing that this powerful anguish was sure to banish the matter of my sexual orientation.

Eleanor was not without her eccentricities. She didn’t like to go out unless the visits were fleeting and she could come and go at will. She never sat all the way through a dinner party, but arrived during it, eating a bag of sweets and walking around the room picking up various objects and enquiring into their history, before dragging me off after half an hour with a sudden desire to visit another party somewhere to talk to someone who was an expert on the Profumo affair.

Often we stayed in and she cooked. I was never one for education and vegetables, having been inoculated against both at school, but most nights Eleanor made me cabbage or broccoli or Brussels sprouts, steaming them and dunking them in frying butter and garlic for a few seconds. Another time we had red snapper, which tasted a little tough, like shark, in puff pastry with sour cream and parsley. We usually had a bottle of Chablis too. And none of this had I experienced before! Eleanor could sleep only if she was drunk, and I never cycled home before my baby was tucked up, half-cut, with a Jean Rhys or Antonia White to cheer her up. I would have preferred, of course, that I myself could be her nightcap.

It was clear that Eleanor had been to bed with a large and random collection of people, but when I suggested she go to bed with me, she said, ‘I don’t think we should, just at the moment, do you?’ As a man I found this pretty fucking insulting. There were constant friendly caresses, and when things got too much (every few hours) she held me and cried, but the big caress was out.

I soon realized that Eleanor’s main guardian and my main rival for her affection was a man called Heater. He was the local road-sweeper, a grossly fat and ugly sixteen-stone Scot in a donkey jacket whom Eleanor had taken up three years ago as a cause. He came round every night he wasn’t at the theatre, and sat in the flat reading Balzac in translation and giving his bitter and big-mouthed opinion on the latest production of Lear or the Ring. He knew dozens of actors, especially the left-wing ones, of whom there were plenty at this political time. Heater was the only working-class person most of them had met. So he became a sort of symbol of the masses, and consequently received tickets to first nights and to the parties afterwards, having a busier social life than Cecil Beaton. He even popped in to dress rehearsals to give his opinion as ‘a man in the street’. If you didn’t adore Heater – and I hated every repulsive inch of him – and listen to him as the authentic voice of the proletariat, it was easy, if you were middle class (which meant you were born a criminal, having fallen at birth), to be seen by the comrades and their sympathizers as a snob, an élitist, a hypocrite, a proto-Goebbels.

I found myself competing with Heater for Eleanor’s love. If I sat too close to her he glared at me; if I touched her casually his eyes would dilate and flare like gas rings. His purpose in life was to ensure Eleanor’s happiness, which was harder work than road-sweeping, since she disliked herself so intensely. Yes, Eleanor loathed herself and yet required praise, which she then never believed. But she reported it to me, saying, ‘D’you know what so-and-so said this morning? He said, when he held me, that he loved the smell of me, he loved my skin and the way I made him laugh.’

When I discussed this aspect of Eleanor with my adviser, Jamila, she didn’t let me down. ‘Christ, Creamy Fire Eater, you one hundred per cent total prat, that’s exactly what they’re like, these people, actresses and such-like vain fools. The world burns and they comb their eyebrows. Or they try and put the burning world on the stage. It never occurs to them to dowse the flames. What are you getting into?’

‘Love. I love her.’

‘Ah.’

‘But she won’t even kiss me. What should I do?’

‘Am I an agony aunt now?’

‘Yes.’

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Don’t attempt kissing until I advise. Wait.’

Vain and self-obsessed Eleanor may have been, as Jamila said, but she didn’t know how to care for herself either. She was tender only to others. She would buy me flowers and shirts and take me to the barber’s; she would spend all day rehearsing and then feed Heater, listening all evening to him as he whined about his wasted life. ‘Women are brought up to think of others,’ she said, when I told her to protect herself more, to think of her own interests. ‘When I start to think of myself I feel sick,’ she said.

Lately, Heater had been taken up by a polymath theatre director with an interest in the deprived. Heater met Abbado and (once) Calvino at his house, where the polymath encouraged Heater to speak of knife fights, Glasgow poverty and general loucheness and violence. After dinner, Heater would open the windows and let in the stench of the real world. And Heater gave these satisfactions, as he knew he had to, like Clapton having to play ‘Layla’ every time he performed. But Heater got through the slashings quickly in order to bring up Beethoven’s late quartets and something which bothered him in Huysmans.

One night Heater was at the Press night of La Bohème at Covent Garden, and Eleanor and I were sunk into her sofa all snug, watching television and drinking. This suited me: to be with just her, asking questions about the people whose houses we visited. They had histories, these top-drawers, and she told them as stories. Someone’s grandfather had had an argument with Lytton Strachey; someone else’s father was a Labour peer who’d had an affair with a Conservative MP’s wife; some other fortunate whore was an actress in a soon-to-be released film that everyone was going to a premiere of in Curzon Street. Someone else had written a novel about their former lover, and it was transparent who it was.

It must have been obvious that I wasn’t listening to her today, though, because she turned to me and said, ‘Hey, funny face, give me a kiss.’ That got my attention. ‘It’s been so long for me, Karim, you know, I can hardly remember what lips feel like.’

‘Like this.’ I said.

It felt hot and wonderful, and we must have kissed for half an hour. I’m not exactly sure how long it lasted, because I soon paid no attention to what in my book should have been the kiss of a lifetime. I was thinking of other things. Oh yes, I was overwhelmed by angry thoughts, which pushed themselves to the front of my mind, not so much numbing my lips as detaching them from me, as if they were a pair of glasses, for instance.

In the past few weeks circumstances had made me discover what an ignoramus I was. Lately I’d been fortunate, and my life had changed quickly, but I’d reflected little on it. When I did think of myself in comparison with those in Eleanor’s crowd, I became aware that I knew nothing; I was empty, an intellectual void. I didn’t even know who Cromwell was, for God’s sake. I knew nothing about zoology, geology, astronomy, languages, mathematics, physics.

Most of the kids I grew up with left school at sixteen, and they’d be in insurance now, or working as car-mechanics, or managers (radio and TV dept) in department stores. And I’d walked out of college without thinking twice about it, despite my father’s admonitions. In the suburbs education wasn’t considered a particular advantage, and certainly couldn’t be seen as worthwhile in itself. Getting into business young was more important. But now I was among people who wrote books as naturally as we played football. What infuriated me – what made me loathe both them and myself – was their confidence and knowledge. The easy talk of art, theatre, architecture, travel; the languages, the vocabulary, knowing the way round a whole culture – it was invaluable and irreplaceable capital.

At my school they taught you a bit of French, but anyone who attempted to pronounce a word correctly was laughed down. On a trip to Calais we attacked a Frog behind a restaurant. By this ignorance we knew ourselves to be superior to the public-school kids, with their puky uniforms and leather briefcases, and Mummy and Daddy waiting outside in the car to pick them up. We were rougher; we disrupted all lessons; we were fighters; we never carried no effeminate briefcases since we never did no homework. We were proud of never learning anything except the names of footballers, the personnel of rock groups and the lyrics of ‘I am the Walrus’. What idiots we were! How misinformed! Why didn’t we understand that we were happily condemning ourselves to being nothing better than motor-mechanics? Why couldn’t we see that? For Eleanor’s crowd hard words and sophisticated ideas were in the air they breathed from birth, and this language was the currency that bought you the best of what the world could offer. But for us it could only ever be a second language, consciously acquired.

And where I could have been telling Eleanor about the time I got fucked by Hairy Back’s Great Dane, it was her stories that had primacy, her stories that connected to an entire established world. It was as if I felt my past wasn’t important enough, wasn’t as substantial as hers, so I’d thrown it away. I never talked about Mum and Dad, or the suburbs, though I did talk about Charlie. Charlie was kudos. And once I practically stopped talking at all, my voice choking in my throat, when Eleanor said my accent was cute.

‘What accent?’ I managed to say.

‘The way you talk, it’s great.’

‘But what way do I talk?’

She looked at me impatiently, as if I were playing some ridiculous game, until she saw I was serious.

‘You’ve got a street voice, Karim. You’re from South London – so that’s how you speak. It’s like cockney, only not so raw. It’s not unusual. It’s different to my voice, of course.’

Of course.

At that moment I resolved to lose my accent: whatever it was, it would go. I would speak like her. It wasn’t difficult. I’d left my world; I had to, to get on. Not that I wanted to go back. I still craved adventure and the dreams I’d desired that night when I had my epiphany on Eva’s toilet in Beckenham. But somehow I knew also that I was getting into deep water.

After the kiss, when I stood in the darkened room and looked out on the street, my knees gave way.

‘Eleanor, I won’t be able to cycle home,’ I said. ‘I think I’ve lost the use of my legs.’

She said, softly, ‘I can’t sleep with you tonight, baby, my head’s all messed up, you’ve no idea. It’s somewhere else and it’s full of voices and songs and bad stuff. And I’m too much trouble for you. You know why, don’t you?’

‘Please tell me.’

She turned away. ‘Another time. Or ask anyone. I’m sure they’ll be happy to tell you, Karim.’

She kissed me goodnight at the door. I was not sad to go. I knew I’d be seeing her every day.

When we’d found the characters we wanted to play, Pyke had us present them to the rest of the group. Eleanor’s was an upper-class English woman in her sixties who’d grown up in the Indian Raj, someone who believed herself to be part of Britain’s greatness but was declining with it and becoming, to her consternation, sexually curious just as Britain became so. Eleanor did it brilliantly. When she acted she lost her hair-twiddling self-consciousness and became still, drawing us towards her as a low-voiced story-teller, adding just enough satirical top-spin to keep us guessing as to her attitude towards the character.

She finished to general approval and theatrical kisses. It was my turn. I got up and did Anwar. It was a monologue, saying who he was, what he was like, followed by an imitation of him raving in the street. I slipped into it easily, as I’d rehearsed so much at Eleanor’s. I thought my work was as good as anyone’s in the group, and for the first time I didn’t feel myself to be lagging behind everyone else.

After tea we sat around to discuss the characters. For some reason, perhaps because she looked puzzled, Pyke said to Tracey, ‘Why don’t you tell us what you thought of Karim’s character?’

Now although Tracey was hesitant, she did feel strongly. She was dignified and serious, not fashionable like a lot of middle-class kids who fancied themselves as actors. Tracey was respectable in the best surburban way, honest and kind and unpretentious, and she dressed like a secretary; but she was also bothered by things: she worried about what it meant to be a black woman. She seemed shy and ill at ease in the world, doing her best to disappear from a room without actually walking out. Yet when I saw her at a party with only black people present, she was completely different – extrovert, passionate, and dancing wildly. She’d been brought up by her mother, who worked as a cleaning woman. By some odd coincidence Tracey’s mother was scrubbing the steps of a house near our rehearsal room one morning when we were exercising in the park. Pyke had invited her to talk to the group during her lunch-break.

Tracey usually said little, so when she did begin to talk about my Anwar the group listened but kept out of the discussion. This thing was suddenly between ‘minorities’.

‘Two things, Karim,’ she said to me. ‘Anwar’s hunger-strike worries me. What you want to say hurts me. It really pains me! And I’m not sure that we should show it!’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’ She spoke to me as if all I required was a little sense. ‘I’m afraid it shows black people –’

‘Indian people –’

‘Black and Asian people –’

‘One old Indian man –’

‘As being irrational, ridiculous, as being hysterical. And as being fanatical.’

‘Fanatical?’ I appealed to the High Court. Judge Pyke was listening carefully. ‘It’s not a fanatical hunger-strike. It’s calmly intended blackmail.’

But Judge Pyke signalled for Tracey to go on.

‘And that arranged marriage. It worries me. Karim, with respect, it worries me.’

I stared at her, saying nothing. She was very disturbed.

‘Tell us exactly why it worries you,’ Eleanor said, sympathetically.

‘How can I even begin? Your picture is what white people already think of us. That we’re funny, with strange habits and weird customs. To the white man we’re already people without humanity, and then you go and have Anwar madly waving his stick at the white boys. I can’t believe that anything like this could happen. You show us as unorganized aggressors. Why do you hate yourself and all black people so much, Karim?’

As she continued, I looked around the group. My Eleanor looked sceptical, but I could see the others were prepared to agree with Tracey. It was difficult to disagree with someone whose mother you’d found kneeling in front of a middle-class house with a bucket and mop.

‘How can you be so reactionary?’ she said.

‘But this sounds like censorship.’

‘We have to protect our culture at this time, Karim. Don’t you agree?’

‘No. Truth has a higher value.’

‘Pah. Truth. Who defines it? What truth? It’s white truth you’re defending here. It’s white truth we’re discussing.’

I looked at Judge Pyke. But he liked to let things run. He thought conflict was creative.

Finally he said: ‘Karim, you may have to rethink.’

‘But I’m not sure I can.’

‘Yes. Don’t unnecessarily restrict your range either as an actor or as a person.’

‘But Matthew, why must I do it?’

He looked at me coolly. ‘Because I say so.’ And added: ‘You must start again.’