The Buddha of Suburbia

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Sensational, I thought, looking across the carriage of the Bakerloo Line train at my face reflected in the opposite window. You little god. My feet danced and my fingers did the hand-jive to imaginary music – the Velvettes, ‘He was Really Saying Something’ – as the tube train rushed beneath my favourite city, my playground, my home. My baby was humming too. We’d changed at Piccadilly and were heading north-west, to Brainyville, London, a place as remote to me as Marseilles. What reason had I had to go to St John’s Wood before? I looked fit and well; it must have been the vegetables. The press-ups and ‘I must, I must increase my bust’ exercises which Eva had recommended were also achieving their aim of sharpening my profile and increasing my confidence. I’d had a haircut at Sassoon in Sloane Street and my balls, recently talcum-powdered, were as fragrantly dusted and tasty as Turkish Delight. But my clothes were too big as usual, mainly because I was wearing one of Dad’s dark-blue jackets and one of his Bond Street ties over a Ronettes T-shirt, with, obviously, no collar, and a pink jumper of Eva’s on top of this. I was nervy, too, shaken up, I must admit, after Heater had threatened me with a carving knife in Eleanor’s flat about an hour earlier, saying, ‘You look after that woman, eh? If anything happens to her I’ll kill ya!’

Eleanor sat beside me in a black suit and dark-red silk shirt with a high collar. She’d put her hair up, but a couple of ringlets had escaped, just right for me to slip my finger through. ‘I’ve never seen you looking so beautiful,’ I told her. I meant it. I couldn’t stop kissing her face. I just wanted to hold her all day and stroke her, tickle her, play with her.

Up we strolled to the mansion, cheerful and excited. The house Pyke shared with Marlene had to be a four-storey place in a quiet street, with a recently watered front garden smothered in flowers, and two sports cars outside, the black and the blue. Then there was the incriminating basement in which lived the nanny who looked after Pyke’s thirteen-year-old son by his first marriage.

I’d been briefed up to the hilt on all this by Terry, who investigated the crimes of the rich middle class with the vigour of a political Maigret. Terry was now employed; the call had come. He was playing a police sergeant in a police-station drama. This proved ideologically uncomfortable, since he’d always claimed the police were the fascist instrument of class rule. But now, as a policeman, he was pulling a ton of money, much more than I was, more than anyone else in the commune in which he lived, and he was constantly getting recognized in the street. He was also asked to open firework displays, judge play competitions and appear on celebrity game shows. In the street it was like walking around with Charlie, the way people called out to him and turned and stared, except that Terry’s fans didn’t know him as Terry Tapley, but as Sergeant Monty. These ironies made Sergeant Monty especially virulent about Pyke, the man who’d denied him the only job he’d really wanted.

Terry had taken me to a political meeting recently, after which, in the pub, a girl had spoken about life after the revolution. ‘People will be reading Shakespeare on the bus and learning the clarinet!’ she’d cried. Her commitment and hope impressed me; I wanted to do something myself. But Terry didn’t think I was ready. He gave me a small task first. ‘Keep an eye on Pyke for us,’ he said, ‘as you’re so well in with him. His type are good for cash. There might be something up that street you can do one day. We’ll let you know. But this time just look around – see what we might take him for when the time comes to call him in politically. In the short term you can help us by meeting his son.’

‘Meeting his son? OK, Sergeant Monty.’

He went to slap my face.

‘Don’t call me that. And ask the boy – in front of all the guests – which school he goes to. And if it isn’t one of the most expensive and exclusive in England, in the whole of the Western world for that matter, I’ll change my name to Disraeli.’

‘OK, Sergeant Monty – I mean, Disraeli. But I can’t believe you’re right about this. Pyke’s radical, man.’

Terry snorted and laughed scornfully. ‘Don’t tell me about these fucking radicals. They’re just liberals’ – practically the worst thing, in his view, anybody could be. ‘And their only use is in giving money to our party.’

It was the servant, a deferential Irish girl, who let us in. She brought Eleanor and me champagne and disappeared into the kitchen – to make ‘supper’, I presumed. She left us sitting nervously on the leather sofa. Pyke and Marlene were ‘dressing’, we’d been told. ‘Undressing, more like,’ I murmured. There was no one else there. The house was eerily quiet. Where the hell was everyone?

‘Isn’t it brilliant that Pyke’s asked us over,’ Eleanor said. ‘D’you think it’s supposed to be a secret? He doesn’t usually hang out with actors, does he? I don’t think he’s invited anyone else from the cast, has he?’

‘No.’

‘Why us, then?’

‘Because he loves us so much.’

‘Well, whatever happens, we mustn’t deny each other experience,’ she said, in a haughty way, as if my whole purpose in life were to try and deny Eleanor experience. And she looked at me as if she wanted to press a hard grain of rice down the end of my penis.

‘What experience?’ I said, getting up and pacing around. She wouldn’t reply, but sat there, smoking away. ‘What experience?’ I repeated. Now she was ruining my whole evening and I was getting more and more nervous. I seemed to know nothing, not even the facts of my girlfriend’s life. ‘Maybe the sort of experience you had with your last boyfriend? The one you loved so much. Is that what you mean?’

‘Please don’t talk about him,’ she said softly. ‘He’s bloody dead.’

‘That’s not a reason not to talk about him.’

‘It is to me.’ She got up. ‘I must go to the toilet.’

‘Eleanor,’ I cried for the first time in my life, but not the last. ‘Eleanor, why don’t we talk about this stuff?’

‘But you don’t know how to give. You don’t understand other people. It would be dangerous for me to lay myself open to you.’

And off she went, leaving me that way.

I looked around. I was being a class detective. And Terry had seriously underestimated the sort of wealth we were dealing with here. I would have to have a word with him about the quality of his snooping sources. It was an impressive house, with dark-red and green walls and modern portraits hanging from them – a couple of Marlene, a photograph of her by Bailey – and 1960s furniture: low coffee tables with Caulfield and Bacon catalogues on them, and the two hard-back volumes of Michael Foot’s biography of Nye Bevan. There were three couches in pastel shades, with Indian friezes on the wall above them; and a plaster sculpture with strings and lightbulbs, also attached to the wall: it looked like a large cunt. Leaning casually against another wall were three of Pyke’s framed awards, and standing on the table were a couple of statuettes and a cut-glass bowl with Pyke’s name on it. There were no posters or photographs from any of his productions. Apart from the awards, an outsider would have no clue to his profession.

Eleanor returned as the two Ms walked silkily down the wide staircase, Pyke in black jeans and black T-shirt, Marlene more exotic in a short white dress, bare arms and legs, and white ballet shoes. She was glamorous, Marlene, giving off a rough and uncompromising sexuality with her many smiles. But, as my mother would have said, she was no spring chicken.

The Irish maid served the four of us turkey salad and we sat and ate on our laps and drank more champagne. I was hungry, and had deliberately missed lunch in order to enjoy ‘supper’, but now I couldn’t eat much. Marlene and Matthew didn’t look as if food interested them either. I kept watching the door, expecting more people to turn up, but none did. Pyke had lied. He was quiet and distant tonight, as if he couldn’t be bothered with the performance of conversation. He spoke only in murmured clichés, as if to underline the banality of the evening.

Marlene did most of the talking, and to keep silence at bay I asked so many questions I began to feel like a television interviewer. She told us of the separate entrances prostitutes had to the House of Commons; and as we ate our turkey there was the story of the Labour MP who liked to watch chickens being stabbed to death while he was having sex.

Marlene had some Thai sticks, and we were having an after-dinner joint when Percy, Pyke’s son, came in, a pale and moody-looking boy with a shaved head, earrings and filthy clothes, far too rough and slovenly to be anything other than a member of the liberal middle class. My Terry antennae went up, trembling in anticipation.

‘By the way,’ Pyke said to the boy, ‘d’you know who Karim’s stepbrother is? It’s Charlie Hero.’

The boy was suddenly riveted. He started to wave his body around and ask questions. He had more life than his father. ‘Hero’s my hero. What’s he like?’

I gave him a brief character-sketch. But I couldn’t let Terry down. Now was my chance.

‘What school d’you go to?’

‘Westminster. And it’s shit.’

‘Yeah? Full of public-school types?’

‘Full of media fuck-wits with parents who work at the BBC. I wanted to go to a comprehensive but these two wouldn’t let me.’

He walked out of the room. And for the rest of the evening, from upstairs, we heard the muffled sound of the Condemned’s first album, The Bride of Christ, playing again and again. When Percy had gone I gave Pyke and Marlene my most significant look, as if to say, ‘You have betrayed the working class,’ but neither of them noticed. They sat there smoking, looking utterly bored, as if this evening had already lasted a thousand years and nothing whatsoever could interest them or, more important, turn them on.

Except that suddenly Pyke got up, walked across the room and threw open the doors to the garden. He turned and nodded at Eleanor, who was talking to Marlene. Immediately, Eleanor broke off the conversation, got up and tripped out into the garden after Pyke. Marlene and I sat there. With the doors open the room grew rapidly cold, but the air smelled sweet, as if the earth were breathing perfume. What were they doing out there? Marlene behaved as if nothing had happened. Then she fetched herself another drink and came and sat beside me. She had her arm around me, which I pretended wasn’t there. I tensed, though, and gave my opinions. I began to get the distinct impression that I was a marvellous person, what with concentrating on me and all. But there was something I had to know, something I felt sure she could help me with.

‘Marlene, will you tell me something that no one’s actually told me? Will you tell me what happened to Eleanor’s boyfriend, Gene?’

She looked at me sympathetically, but with slight disbelief.

‘Are you sure no one’s told you?’

‘Marlene, I know for sure that no one’s told me nothing. It’s driving me up the wall, too, I can tell you. Everyone acts as if it’s some kind of ultimately big secret anyway. No one says anything. I’m being treated like a wanker.’

‘It’s not a secret, just raw and painful still for Eleanor. OK?’ She shifted closer to me. ‘Gene was a young West Indian actor. He was very talented and sensitive, thin and kind and raunchy, with this beautiful face. He knew a lot about poetry, which he’d declaim wonderfully aloud at parties. And African music was his speciality. He worked with Matthew once, a long time ago. Matthew says he was the best mime he ever met. But he never got the work he deserved. He emptied bed-pans in hospital programmes. He played criminals and taxi-drivers. He never played in Chekhov or Ibsen or Shakespeare, and he deserved to. He was better than a lot of people. So he was very angry about a lot of things. The police were always picking him up and giving him a going over. Taxis drove straight past him. People said there were no free tables in empty restaurants. He lived in a bad world in nice old England. One day when he didn’t get into one of the bigger theatre companies, he couldn’t take any more. He just freaked out. He took an overdose. Eleanor was working. She came home and found him dead. She was so young then.’

‘I see.’

‘That’s all there is to it.’

Marlene and I sat there a while. I thought about Gene and what he’d been through; what they’d done to him; what he’d allowed to happen to himself. I saw that Marlene was scrutinizing me.

‘Shall we have a kiss?’ she said, after a while, stroking my face lightly.

I panicked. ‘What?’

‘Just a little kiss to start with, to see how we get along. Do I shock you?’

‘Yes, because I thought you said kid, not kiss.’

‘Perhaps that later, but now …’

She brought her face close to mine. There were wrinkles around her eyes; she was the oldest person I’d kissed. When we broke apart and I gulped back more champagne she raised her arms in a sudden dramatic gesture, like someone celebrating an athletics victory, and pulled off her dress. Her body was thin and brown, and when I touched it I was surprised by how warm she was, as if she’d been lightly toasted. It aroused me, and with my arousal came a little essential affection, but basically I was scared and I liked being scared.

The dope made me drowsy and held back sensation and reaction. I don’t know why, but the Thai sticks floated me back to the suburbs and Eva’s house in Beckenham, the night I wore crushed velvet flares and Dad didn’t know the way, and how I led him to the Three Tuns, where Kevin Ayers was playing and my friends that I loved were standing at the bar, having spent hours in their bedrooms preparing for the evening, their gladdest moment being when a pair of knowing eyes passed over their threads. Later, there was Charlie sitting at the top of the stairs, perfectly dressed, just observing. There were meditating advertising executives, and I crawled across the lawn to find my father was sitting on a garden bench, and Eva sitting on him, with horizontal hair. So I went to Charlie for comfort, and now his record was playing upstairs, and he was famous and admired, and I was an actor in a play in London, and I knew fashionable people and went to grand houses like this, and they accepted me and invited no one else and couldn’t wait to make love to me. And there was my mother trembling with pain at her soul being betrayed, and the end of our family life and everything else starting from that night. And Gene was dead. He’d known poetry by heart and was angry and never got any work, and I wished I’d met him and seen his face. How could I ever replace him in Eleanor’s eyes?

When I sat up I had to search my mind for a due to where I was. I felt as if the lights in my mind had been turned off. But I did see a couple on the far side of the room, illuminated only by the light from the hall. And by the door an Irish girl stood as if by invitation, watching the strange couple kiss and rub their hands on each other. The man was pushing the woman back on the sofa. She had taken off the black suit and red shirt, for some reason, though she looked her loveliest in them.

Marlene and I tumbled on the floor. I had been in her already, and noticed odd things, like how she had strong muscles in her cunt, which she utilized to grip the end of my prick as professionally as my own pinkies. When she wanted to stop me moving inside her she merely flexed her cunt muscles and I was secured for life.

Later, when I looked up, the couple had separated and Pyke’s body was carrying his erection in my direction, like a lorry sustaining a crane.

‘That looks fun,’ his voice said.

‘Yes, it –’

But before I could complete the sentence, England’s most interesting and radical theatre director was inserting his cock between my speaking lips. I could appreciate the privilege, but I didn’t like it much: it seemed an imposition. He could have asked politely. So I gave his dick a South London swipe – not viciously, nor enough to have my part in the play reduced – but enough to give him a jolt. When I looked up for his reaction it was to see him murmuring his approval. Fortunately, Pyke pulled away from my face anyway. Something important was happening. His attention moved elsewhere.

Eleanor came over to Pyke; she came over to him quickly and passionately, as if he were of infinite value at this moment, as if she’d heard that he had a crucial message for her. She took his head in her hands as if it were a precious pot, and she kissed Pyke, pulling his somewhat corrugated lips towards her, as she’d pulled my head spontaneously towards her that morning when we were eating our grapefruit in the front room of her flat. His hand was between her legs now, his fingers up to the knuckle pushing inside her. As he frigged her she spoke to him in incantatory fashion. I strained to catch everything, and heard for my pains Eleanor whisper how much she wanted to fuck him, how she’d always wanted it since she first admired him and then spotted him in the foyer of a theatre – the ICA, was it, or was it the Royal Court, or the Open Space, or the Almost Free, or the Bush? – but anyway, however much she wanted him then, she was too intimidated by his renown, by his talent, by his status, to approach him; but at last she’d come to know him precisely the way she’d always wanted to know him.

Marlene was transfixed by all this. She moved around them for a better look. ‘Oh yes, yes,’ she was saying. ‘It’s so beautiful, so beautiful, I can’t believe it.’

‘Stop talking,’ Pyke snapped, suddenly.

‘But I can’t believe it,’ Marlene went on. ‘Can you, Karim?’

‘It’s unbelievable,’ I said.

This distracted Eleanor. She looked at me dreamily, and then at Pyke. She withdrew his fingers from her cunt and put them in my mouth.

‘Don’t let me have all the fun,’ she said to Pyke, pleadingly. ‘Please, why don’t you two touch each other?’

Marlene nodded vigorously at this constructive suggestion.

‘Yes?’ Eleanor said. But it was difficult for me to reply with a mouthful of Pyke’s fingers.

‘Oh yes, yes,’ said Marlene.

‘Calm down,’ said Pyke to her.

‘I am calm,’ Marlene said. She was also drunk.

‘Christ,’ said Pyke to Eleanor. ‘Bloody Marlene.’

Marlene fell back on to the couch, naked, with her legs open.

‘There’s so much we can do tonight! ‘she cried. ‘There’s hours and hours of total pleasure ahead of us. We can do whatever we want. We’ve only just begun. Let me freshen our drinks and we’ll get down to it. Now, Karim, I want you to put some ice up my cunt. Would you mind going to the fridge?’