The Buddha of Suburbia

CHAPTER ONE

My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost. I am often considered to be a funny kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having emerged from two old histories. But I don’t care – Englishman I am (though not proud of it), from the South London suburbs and going somewhere. Perhaps it is the odd mixture of continents and blood, of here and there, of belonging and not, that makes me restless and easily bored. Or perhaps it was being brought up in the suburbs that did it. Anyway, why search the inner room when it’s enough to say that I was looking for trouble, any kind of movement, action and sexual interest I could find, because things were so gloomy, so slow and heavy, in our family, I don’t know why. Quite frankly, it was all getting me down and I was ready for anything.

Then one day everything changed. In the morning things were one way and by bedtime another. I was seventeen.

On this day my father hurried home from work not in a gloomy mood. His mood was high, for him. I could smell the train on him as he put his briefcase away behind the front door and took off his raincoat, chucking it over the bottom of the banisters. He grabbed my fleeing little brother, Allie, and kissed him; he kissed my mother and me with enthusiasm, as if we’d recently been rescued from an earthquake. More normally, he handed Mum his supper: a packet of kebabs and chapatis so greasy their paper wrapper had disintegrated. Next, instead of flopping into a chair to watch the television news and wait for Mum to put the warmed-up food on the table, he went into their bedroom, which was downstairs next to the living room. He quickly stripped to his vest and underpants.

‘Fetch the pink towel,’ he said to me.

I did so. Dad spread it on the bedroom floor and fell on to his knees. I wondered if he’d suddenly taken up religion. But no, he placed his arms beside his head and kicked himself into the air.

‘I must practise,’ he said in a stifled voice.

‘Practise for what?’ I said reasonably, watching him with interest and suspicion.

‘They’ve called me for the damn yoga Olympics,’ he said. He easily became sarcastic, Dad.

He was standing on his head now, balanced perfectly. His stomach sagged down. His balls and prick fell foward in his pants. The considerable muscles in his arms swelled up and he breathed energetically. Like many Indians he was small, but Dad was also elegant and handsome, with delicate hands and manners; beside him most Englishmen looked like clumsy giraffes. He was broad and strong too: when young he’d been a boxer and fanatical chest-expander. He was as proud of his chest as our next-door neighbours were of their kitchen range. At the sun’s first smile he would pull off his shirt and stride out into the garden with a deckchair and a copy of the New Statesman. He told me that in India he shaved his chest regularly so its hair would sprout more luxuriantly in years to come. I reckoned that his chest was the one area in which he’d been forward-thinking.

Soon, my mother, who was in the kitchen as usual, came into the room and saw Dad practising for the yoga Olympics. He hadn’t done this for months, so she knew something was up. She wore an apron with flowers on it and wiped her hands repeatedly on a tea towel, a souvenir from Woburn Abbey. Mum was a plump and unphysical woman with a pale round face and kind brown eyes. I imagined that she considered her body to be an inconvenient object surrounding her, as if she were stranded on an unexplored desert island. Mostly she was a timid and compliant person, but when exasperated she could get nervily aggressive, like now.

‘Allie, go to bed,’ she said sharply to my brother, as he poked his head around the door. He was wearing a net to stop his hair going crazy when he slept. She said to Dad, ‘Oh God, Haroon, all the front of you’s sticking out like that and everyone can see!’ She turned to me. ‘You encourage him to be like this. At least pull the curtains!’

‘It’s not necessary, Mum. There isn’t another house that can see us for a hundred yards – unless they’re watching through binoculars.’

‘That’s exactly what they are doing,’ she said.

I pulled the curtains on the back garden. The room immediately seemed to contract. Tension rose. I couldn’t wait to get out of the house now. I always wanted to be somewhere else, I don’t know why.

When Dad spoke his voice came out squashed and thin.

‘Karim, read to me in a very clear voice from the yoga book.’

I ran and fetched Dad’s preferred yoga book – Yoga for Women, with pictures of healthy women in black leotards – from among his other books on Buddhism, Sufism, Confucianism and Zen which he had bought at the Oriental bookshop in Cecil Court, off Charing Cross Road. I squatted beside him with the book. He breathed in, held the breath, breathed out and once more held the breath. I wasn’t a bad reader, and I imagined myself to be on the stage of the Old Vic as I declaimed grandly, ‘Salamba Sirsasana revives and maintains a spirit of youthfulness, an asset beyond price. It is wonderful to know that you are ready to face up to life and extract from it all the real joy it has to offer.’

He grunted his approval at each sentence and opened his eyes, seeking out my mother, who had closed hers.

I read on. ‘This position also prevents loss of hair and reduces any tendency to greyness.’

That was the coup: greyness would be avoided. Satisfied, Dad stood up and put his clothes on.

‘I feel better. I can feel myself coming old, you see.’ He softened. ‘By the way, Margaret, coming to Mrs Kay’s tonight?’ She shook her head. ‘Come on, sweetie. Let’s go out together and enjoy ourselves, eh?’

‘But it isn’t me that Eva wants to see,’ Mum said. ‘She ignores me. Can’t you see that? She treats me like dog’s muck, Haroon. I’m not Indian enough for her. I’m only English.’

‘I know you’re only English, but you could wear a sari.’ He laughed. He loved to tease, but Mum wasn’t a satisfactory teasing victim, not realizing you were supposed to laugh when mocked.

‘Special occasion, too,’ said Dad, ‘tonight.’

This was obviously what he’d been leading up to. He waited for us to ask him about it.

‘What is it, Dad?’

‘You know, they’ve so kindly asked me to speak on one or two aspects of Oriental philosophy.’

Dad spoke quickly and then tried to hide his pride in this honour, this proof of his importance, by busily tucking his vest in. This was my opportunity.

‘I’ll come with you to Eva’s if you want me to. I was going to go to the chess club, but I’ll force myself to miss it if you like.’

I said this as innocently as a vicar, not wanting to stymie things by seeming too eager. I’d discovered in life that if you’re too eager others tend to get less eager. And if you’re less eager it tends to make others more eager. So the more eager I was the less eager I seemed.

Dad pulled up his vest and slapped his bare stomach rapidly with both hands. The noise was loud and unattractive and it filled our small house like pistol shots.

‘OK,’ Dad said to me, ‘you get changed, Karim.’ He turned to Mum. He wanted her to be with him, to witness him being respected by others. ‘If only you’d come, Margaret.’

I charged upstairs to get changed. From my room, the walls decorated ceiling to floor with newspapers, I could hear them arguing downstairs. Would he persuade her to come? I hoped not. My father was more frivolous when my mother wasn’t around. I put on one of my favourite records, Dylan’s ‘Positively Fourth Street’, to get me in the mood for the evening.

It took me several months to get ready: I changed my entire outfit three times. At seven o’clock I came downstairs in what I knew were the right clothes for Eva’s evening. I wore turquoise flared trousers, a blue and white flower-patterned see-through shirt, blue suede boots with Cuban heels, and a scarlet Indian waistcoat with gold stitching around the edges. I’d pulled on a headband to control my shoulder-length frizzy hair. I’d washed my face in Old Spice.

Dad waited at the door for me, his hands in his pockets. He wore a black polo-neck sweater, a black imitation-leather jacket and grey Marks and Spencer cords. When he saw me he suddenly looked agitated.

‘Say goodbye to your mum,’ he said.

In the living room Mum was watching Steptoe and Son and taking a bite from a Walnut Whip, which she replaced on the pouf in front of her. This was her ritual: she allowed herself a nibble only once every fifteen minutes. It made her glance constantly between the clock and the TV. Sometimes she went berserk and scoffed the whole thing in two minutes flat. ‘I deserve my Whip,’ she’d say defensively.

When she saw me she too became tense.

‘Don’t show us up, Karim,’ she said, continuing to watch TV. ‘You look like Danny La Rue.’

‘What about Auntie Jean, then?’ I said. ‘She’s got blue hair.’

‘It’s dignified for older women to have blue hair,’ Mum said.

Dad and I got out of the house as quickly as we could. At the end of the street, while we were waiting for the 227 bus, a teacher of mine with one eye walked past us and recognized me. Cyclops said, ‘Don’t forget, a university degree is worth £2,000 a year for life!’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Dad. ‘He’ll go to university, oh yes. He’ll be a leading doctor in London. My father was a doctor. Medicine is in our whole family.’

It wasn’t far, about four miles, to the Kays’, but Dad would never have got there without me. I knew all the streets and every bus route.

Dad had been in Britain since 1950 – over twenty years – and for fifteen of those years he’d lived in the South London suburbs. Yet still he stumbled around the place like an Indian just off the boat, and asked questions like, ‘Is Dover in Kent?’ I’d have thought, as an employee of the British Government, as a Civil Service clerk, even as badly paid and insignificant a one as him, he’d just have to know these things. I sweated with embarrassment when he halted strangers in the street to ask directions to places that were a hundred yards away in an area where he’d lived for almost two decades.

But his naïveté made people protective, and women were drawn by his innocence. They wanted to wrap their arms around him or something, so lost and boyish did he look at times. Not that this was entirely uncontrived, or unexploited. When I was small and the two of us sat in Lyon’s Cornerhouse drinking milkshakes, he’d send me like a messenger pigeon to women at other tables and have me announce, ‘My daddy wants to give you a kiss.’

Dad taught me to flirt with everyone I met, girls and boys alike, and I came to see charm, rather than courtesy or honesty, or even decency, as the primary social grace. And I even came to like people who were callous or vicious provided they were interesting. But I was sure Dad hadn’t used his own gentle charisma to sleep with anyone but Mum, while married.

Now, though, I suspected that Mrs Eva Kay – who had met Dad a year ago at a ‘writing for pleasure’ class in an upstairs room at the King’s Head in Bromley High Street – wanted to chuck her arms around him. Plain prurience was one of the reasons I was so keen to go to her place, and embarrassment one of the reasons why Mum refused. Eva Kay was forward; she was brazen; she was wicked.

On the way to Eva’s I persuaded Dad to stop off at the Three Tuns in Beckenham. I got off the bus; Dad had no choice but to follow me. The pub was full of kids dressed like me, both from my school and from other schools in the area. Most of the boys, so nondescript during the day, now wore cataracts of velvet and satin, and bright colours; some were in bedspreads and curtains. The little groovers talked esoterically of Syd Barrett. To have an elder brother who lived in London and worked in fashion, music or advertising was an inestimable advantage at school. I had to study the Melody Maker and New Musical Express to keep up.

I led Dad by the hand to the back room. Kevin Ayers, who had been with Soft Machine, was sitting on a stool whispering into a microphone. Two French girls with him kept falling all over the stage. Dad and I had a pint of bitter each. I wasn’t used to alcohol and became drunk immediately. Dad became moody.

‘Your mother upsets me,’ he said. ‘She doesn’t join in things. It’s only my damn effort keeping this whole family together. No wonder I need to keep my mind blank in constant effortless meditation.’

I suggested helpfully, ‘Why don’t you get divorced?’

‘Because you wouldn’t like it.’

But divorce wasn’t something that would occur to them. In the suburbs people rarely dreamed of striking out for happiness. It was all familiarity and endurance: security and safety were the reward of dullness. I clenched my fists under the table. I didn’t want to think about it. It would be years before I could get away to the city, London, where life was bottomless in its temptations.

‘I’m terrified about tonight,’ Dad said. ‘I’ve never done anything like this before. I don’t know anything. I’m going to be a fuck-up.’

The Kays were much better off than us, and had a bigger house, with a little drive and garage and car. Their place stood on its own in a tree-lined road just off Beckenham High Street. It also had bay windows, an attic, a greenhouse, three bedrooms and central heating.

I didn’t recognize Eva Kay when she greeted us at the door, and for a moment I thought we’d turned up at the wrong place. The only thing she wore was a full-length, multi-coloured kaftan, and her hair was down, and out, and up. She’d darkened her eyes with kohl so she looked like a panda. Her feet were bare, the toenails painted alternately green and red.

When the front door was safely shut and we’d moved into the darkness of the hall, Eva hugged Dad and kissed him all over his face, including his lips. This was the first time I’d seen him kissed with interest. Surprise, surprise, there was no sign of Mr Kay. When Eva moved, when she turned to me, she was a kind of human crop-sprayer, pumping out a plume of Oriental aroma. I was trying to think if Eva was the most sophisticated person I’d ever met, or the most pretentious, when she kissed me on the lips too. My stomach tightened. Then, holding me at arm’s length as if I were a coat she was about to try on, she looked me all over and said, ‘Karim Amir, you are so exotic, so original! It’s such a contribution! It’s so you!’

‘Thank you, Mrs Kay. If I’d had more notice, I’d have dressed up.’

‘And with your father’s wonderful but crushing wit, too!’

I felt that I was being watched, and when I looked up I saw that Charlie, her son, who was at my school in the sixth form and almost a year older, was sitting at the top of the stairs, partly concealed by the banisters. He was a boy upon whom nature had breathed such beauty – his nose was so straight, his cheeks so hollow, his lips such rosebuds – that people were afraid to approach him, and he was often alone. Men and boys got erections just being in the same room as him; for others the same effect was had by being in the same country. Women sighed in his presence, and teachers bristled. A few days ago, during the school assembly, with the staff sitting like a flock of crows on the stage, the headmaster was expatiating on Vaughan Williams. We were about to hear his Fantasia on Green-sleeves. As Yid, the religious-education master, sanctimoniously lowered the needle on to the dusty record, Charlie, standing along the row from me, started to bob and shake his head and whisper, ‘Dig it, dig it, you heads.’ ‘What’s going down?’ we said to each other. We soon found out, for as the headmaster put his head back, the better to savour Vaughan Williams’s mellow sounds, the opening hisses of ‘Come Together’ were rattling the speakers. As Yid pushed his way past the other teachers to re-take the record deck, half the school was mouthing the words ‘… groove it up slowly … he got ju-ju eyeballs … he got hair down to his knees …’ For this, Charlie was caned in front of us all.

Now he lowered his head one thirty-secondth of an inch in acknowledgement of me. On the way to Eva’s I’d deliberately excluded him from my mind. I hadn’t believed that he would be at home, which was why I’d gone into the Three Tuns, in case he’d popped in for an early-evening drink.

‘Glad to see you, man,’ he said, coming slowly downstairs.

He embraced Dad and called him by his first name. What confidence and style he had, as always. When he followed us into the living room I was trembling with excitement. It wasn’t like this at the chess-club.

Mum often said Eva was a vile show-off and big-mouth, and even I recognized that Eva was slightly ridiculous, but she was the only person over thirty I could talk to. She was inevitably good-tempered, or she was being passionate about something. At least she didn’t put armour on her feelings like the rest of the miserable undead around us. She liked the Rolling Stones’s first album. The Third Ear Band sent her. She did Isadora Duncan dances in our front room and then told me who Isadora Duncan was and why she’d liked scarves. Eva had been to the last concert the Cream played. In the playground at school before we went into our classrooms Charlie had told us of her latest outrage: she’d brought him and his girlfriend bacon and eggs in bed and asked them if they’d enjoyed making love.

When she came to our house to pick up Dad to drive him to the Writer’s Circle, she always ran up to my bedroom first thing to sneer at my pictures of Marc Bolan. ‘What are you reading? Show me your new books!’ she’d demand. And once, ‘Why ever do you like Kerouac, you poor virgin? Do you know that brilliant remark Truman Capote made about him?’

‘No.’

‘He said, “It’s not writing, it’s typing!”’

‘But Eva –’

To teach her a lesson I read her the last pages of On the Road. ‘Good defence!’ she cried, but murmured – she always had to have the last word: ‘The cruellest thing you can do to Kerouac is reread him at thirty-eight.’ Leaving, she opened her goody bag, as she called it. ‘Here’s something else to read.’ It was Candide. ‘I’ll ring you next Saturday to test you on it!’

The most thrilling time was when Eva, lying on my bed and listening to the records I wanted to play her, started to get pretty intimate and everything, telling me the secrets of her love life. Her husband hit her, she said. They never made love. She wanted to make love, it was the most ravishing feeling on offer. She used the word ‘fuck’. She wanted to live, she said. She frightened me; she excited me; somehow she had disturbed our whole household from the moment she entered it.

What was she up to now with Dad? What was going on in her front room?

Eva had pushed back the furniture. The patterned armchairs and glass-topped tables were up against the pine bookshelves. The curtains were drawn. Four middle-aged men and four middle-aged women, all white, sat cross-legged on the floor, eating peanuts and drinking wine. Sitting apart from these people with his back against the wall was a man of indeterminate age – he could have been anything between twenty-five and forty-five – in a threadbare black corduroy suit and old-fashioned heavy black shoes. His trouser bottoms were stuffed inside his socks. His blond hair was dirty; his pockets bulged with torn paperbacks. He didn’t appear to know anyone else, or if he did he wasn’t prepared to talk to them. He seemed interested, but in a scientific way, as he sat smoking. He was very alert and nervous.

There was some chanting music going on that reminded me of funerals.

Charlie murmured, ‘Don’t you just love Bach?’

‘It’s not really my bag.’

‘Fair ’nough. I think ‘I’ve got something that’s more your bag upstairs.’

‘Where’s your dad?’

‘He’s having a nervous breakdown.’

‘Does that mean he’s not here?’

‘He’s gone into a kind of therapy centre where they allow it all to happen.’

In my family nervous breakdowns were as exotic as New Orleans. I had no idea what they entailed, but Charlie’s dad had seemed the nervous type to me. The only time he came to our house he sat on his own in the kitchen crying as he mended Dad’s fountain pen, while in the living room Eva said she had to buy a motorcycle. This made Mum yawn, I remember.

Now Dad was sitting on the floor. The talk was of music and books, of names like Dvořák, Krishnamurti and Eclectic. Looking at them closely, I reckoned that the men were in advertising or design or almost artistic jobs like that. Charlie’s dad designed advertisements. But the man in the black corduroy suit I couldn’t work out at all. Whoever these people were, there was a terrific amount of showing off going on – more in this room than in the whole of the rest of southern England put together.

At home Dad would have laughed at all this. But now, in the thick of it, he looked as if he was having the highest time of his whole life. He led the discussion, talking loudly, interrupting people and touching whoever was nearest. The men and women – except for Corduroy Suit – were slowly gathering in a circle around him on the floor. Why did he save sullenness and resentful grunting for us?

I noticed that the man sitting near me turned to the man next to him and indicated my father, who was now in full flow about the importance of attaining an empty mind to a woman who was wearing only a man’s long shirt and black tights. The woman was nodding encouragingly at Dad. The man said in a loud whisper to his friend, ‘Why has our Eva brought this brown Indian here? Aren’t we going to get pissed?’

‘He’s going to give us a demonstration of the mystic arts!’

‘And has he got his camel parked outside?’

‘No, he came on a magic carpet.’

‘Cyril Lord or Debenhams?’

I gave the man a sharp kick in the kidney. He looked up.

‘Come up to my pad, Karim,’ said Charlie, to my relief.

But before we could get out Eva turned off the standard lamp. Over the one remaining light she draped a large diaphanous neckscarf, leaving the room illuminated only by a pink glow. Her movements had become balletic. One by one people fell silent. Eva smiled at everyone.

‘So why don’t we relax?’ she said. They nodded their agreement. The woman in the shirt said, ‘So why don’t we?’ ‘Yes, yes,’ someone else said. One man flapped his hands like loose gloves and opened his mouth as wide as he could, and thrust his tongue out, popping his eyes like a gargoyle.

Eva turned to my father and bowed to him, Japanese fashion. ‘My good and deep friend Haroon here, he will show us the Way. The Path.’

‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ I whispered to Charlie, remembering how Dad couldn’t even find his way to Beckenham.

‘Watch, watch closely,’ murmured Charlie, squatting down.

Dad sat down at the end of the room. Everyone looked keenly and expectantly at him, though the two men near me glanced at each other as if they wanted to laugh. Dad spoke slowly and with confidence. The nervousness he’d shown earlier appeared to have disappeared. He seemed to know he had their attention and that they’d do as he asked. I was sure he’d never done anything like this before. He was going to wing it.

‘The things that are going to happen to you this evening are going to do you a lot of good. They may even change you a little, or make you want to change, in order to reach your full potential as human beings. But there is one thing you must not do. You must not resist. If you resist, it will be like driving a car with the handbrake on.’

He paused. Their eyes were on him.

‘We’ll do some floor work. Please sit with your legs apart.’

They parted their legs.

‘Raise your arms.’

They raised their arms.

‘Now, breathing out, stretch down to your right foot.’

After some basic yoga positions he had them lying on their backs. To his soft commands they were relaxing their fingers one by one, then their wrists, toes, ankles, foreheads and, peculiarly, their ears. Meanwhile Dad wasted no time in removing his shoes and socks, and then – I should have guessed it – his shirt and clean string vest. He padded around the circle of dreamers, lifting a loose arm here, a leg there, testing them for tension. Eva, also lying on her back, had one naughty, slowly enlarging eye open. Had she ever seen such a dark, hard, hairy chest before? When Dad floated past she touched his foot with her hand. The man in black corduroy couldn’t relax at all: he lay there like a bundle of sticks with his legs crossed, a burning cigarette in his fingers, gazing reflectively at the ceiling.

I hissed to Charlie, ‘Let’s get out of here before we’re hypnotized like these idiots!’

‘Isn’t it just fascinating?’

On the upstairs landing of the house was a ladder which led up to Charlie’s attic. ‘Please remove your watch,’ he said. ‘In my domain time isn’t a factor.’ So I put my watch on the floor and climbed the ladder to the attic, which stretched out across the top of the house. Charlie had the whole space to himself. Mandalas and long-haired heads were painted on the sloping walls and low ceiling. His drum-kit stood in the centre of the floor. His four guitars – two acoustic and two Stratocasters – leaned against the wall in a line. Big cushions were flung about. There were piles of records and the four Beatles in their Sergeant Pepper period were on the wall like gods.

‘Heard anything good lately?’ he asked, lighting a candle.

‘Yeah.’

After the calm and silence of the living room my voice sounded absurdly loud. ‘The new Stones album. I played it at music society today and the lads went crazy. They threw off their jackets and ties and danced. I was on top of my desk! It was like some weird pagan ritual. You shoulda bin there, man.’

I knew immediately from the look on Charlie’s face that I’d been an animal, a philistine, a child. Charlie threw his shoulder-length hair back, looked at me tolerantly for some time, and then smiled.

‘I think it’s time you bathed your ears in something really nourishing, Karim.’

He put on a record by the Pink Floyd called Ummagumma. I forced myself to listen while Charlie sat opposite me and rolled a joint, sprinkling a dried leaf over the tobacco.

‘Your father. He’s the best. He’s wise. D’you do that meditation stuff every morning?’

I nodded. A nod can’t be a lie, right?

‘And chanting, too?’

‘Not chanting every day, no.’

I thought of the morning in our place: Dad running around the kitchen looking for olive oil to put on his hair; my brother and I wrestling over the Daily Mirror; my mother complaining about having to go to work in the shoe shop.

Charlie handed me the joint. I pulled on it and handed it back, managing to sprinkle ash down the front of my shirt and burn a small hole in it. I was so excited and dizzy I stood up immediately.

‘What’s going down?’

‘I have to go to the bog!’

I flew down the attic ladder. In the Kays’ bathroom there were framed theatre posters for Genet plays. There were bamboo and parchment scrolls with tubby Orientals copulating on them. There was a bidet. As I sat there with my trousers down, taking it all in, I had an extraordinary revelation. I could see my life clearly for the first time: the future and what I wanted to do. I wanted to live always this intensely: mysticism, alcohol, sexual promise, clever people and drugs. I hadn’t come upon it all like this before, and now I wanted nothing else. The door to the future had opened: I could see which way to go.

And Charlie? My love for him was unusual as love goes: it was not generous. I admired him more than anyone but I didn’t wish him well. It was that I preferred him to me and wanted to be him. I coveted his talents, face, style. I wanted to wake up with them all transferred to me.

I stood in the upstairs hall. The house was silent except for the distant sound of ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’ coming from the top of the house. Someone was burning incense. I crept down the stairs to the ground floor. The living-room door was open. I peered round it into the dimly lit room. The advertising men and their wives were sitting up, cross-legged, straight-backed, eyes closed, breathing regularly and deeply. The Corduroy Suit was sitting in a chair with his back to everyone, reading and smoking. Neither Eva nor Dad were in the room. Where could they have gone?

I left the hypnotized Buddhas and went through the house and into the kitchen. The back door was wide open. I stepped out into the darkness. It was a warm evening; the moon was full.

I got down on my knees. I knew this was the thing to do – I’d gone highly intuitive since Dad’s display. I crawled across the patio. They must have had a barbecue out there recently, because razor-sharp charcoal shards jabbed into my knees, but I reached the edge of the lawn without serious injury. I could see vaguely that at the end of the lawn there was a garden bench. As I crawled closer there was enough moonlight for me to see that Eva was on the bench. She was pulling her kaftan up over her head. If I strained my eyes I could see her chest. And I did strain; I strained until my eyeballs went dry in their sockets. Eventually I knew I was right. Eva had only one breast. Where the other traditionally was, there was nothing, so far as I could see.

Beneath all this hair and flesh, and virtually concealed from me, was my father. I knew it was Daddio because he was crying out across the Beckenham gardens, with little concern for the neighbours, ‘Oh God, oh my God, oh my God.’ Was I conceived like this, I wondered, in the suburban night air, to the wailing of Christian curses from the mouth of a renegade Muslim masquerading as a Buddhist?

With a harsh crack, Eva slapped her hand over my father’s mouth. This was a touch peremptory, I thought, and I almost jerked forward to object. But, my God, could Eva bounce! Head back, eyes to stars, kicking up from the grass like a footballer, her hair flying. But what of the crushing weight on Dad’s arse? Surely the impress of the bench would remain for days seared into his poor buttocks, like grill marks on steak?

Eva released her hand from his mouth. He started to laugh. The happy fucker laughed and laughed. It was the exhilaration of someone I didn’t know, full of greedy pleasure and self. It brought me all the way down.

I hobbled away. In the kitchen I poured myself a glass of Scotch and threw it down my throat. Corduroy Suit was standing in the corner of the kitchen. His eyes were twitching badly. He stuck out his hand. ‘Shadwell,’ he said.

Charlie was lying on his back on the attic floor. I took the joint from him, removed my boots and lay down.

‘Come and lie beside me,’ he said. ‘Closer.’ He put his hand on my arm. ‘Now, you’re not to take this badly.’

‘No, never, whatever it is, Charlie.’

‘You’ve got to wear less.’

‘Wear less, Charlie?’

‘Dress less. Yes.’

He got up on to one elbow and concentrated on me. His mouth was close. I sunbathed under his face.

‘Levi’s, I suggest, with an open-necked shirt, maybe in pink or purple, and a thick brown belt. Forget the headband.’

‘Forget the headband?’

‘Forget it.’

I ripped my headband off and tossed it across the floor.

‘For your mum.’

‘You see, Karim, you tend to look a bit like a pearly queen.’

I, who wanted only to be like Charlie – as clever, as cool in every part of my soul – tattooed his words on to my brain. Levi’s, with an open-necked shirt, maybe in a very modest pink or purple. I would never go out in anything else for the rest of my life.

While I contemplated myself and my wardrobe with loathing, and would willingly have urinated over every garment, Charlie lay back with his eyes closed and real sartorial understanding in his mind. Everyone in the house but me was practically in heaven.

I laid my hand on Charlie’s thigh. No response. I rested it there for a few minutes until sweat broke out on the ends of my fingers. His eyes remained closed, but in his jeans he was growing. I began to feel confident. I became insane. I dashed for his belt, for his fly, for his cock, and I took him out into the air to cool down. He made a sign! He twitched himself! Through such human electricity we understood each other.

I had squeezed many penises before, at school. We stroked and rubbed and pinched each other all the time. It broke up the monotony of learning. But I had never kissed a man.

‘Where are you, Charlie?’

I tried to kiss him. He avoided my lips by turning his head to one side. But when he came in my hand it was, I swear, one of the preeminent moments of my earlyish life. There was dancing in my streets. My flags flew, my trumpets blew!

I was licking my fingers and thinking of where to buy a pink shirt when I heard a sound that was not the Pink Floyd. I turned and saw across the attic Dad’s flaming eyes, nose, neck and his famous chest hoiking itself up through the square hole in the floor. Charlie swiftly put himself away. I leapt up. Dad hurried over to me, followed by smiling Eva. Dad looked from Charlie to me and back again. Eva sniffed the air.

‘You naughty boys.’

‘What, Eva?’ Charlie said.

‘Smoking home-grown.’

Eva said it was time for her to drive us home. We all climbed backwards down the ladder. Dad, being the first, trod on my watch at the bottom, trampling it to pieces and cutting his foot.

At the house we got out of the car and I said goodnight to Eva and walked away. From the porch I could see Eva trying to kiss Dad, while he was trying to shake her hand.

Our house was dark and cold as we crept in, exhausted. Dad had to get up at six-thirty and I had my paper-round at seven. In the hall Dad raised his hand to slap me. He was drunker than I was stoned and I grabbed the ungrateful bastard.

‘What the hell were you doing?’

‘Shut up!’ I said, as quietly as I could.

‘I saw you, Karim. My God, you’re a bloody pure shitter! A bum-banger! My own son – how did it transpire?’

He was disappointed in me. He jumped up and down in anguish as if he’d just heard the whole house had been burned to the ground. I didn’t know what to do. So I started to imitate the voice he’d used earlier with the advertisers and Eva.

‘Relax, Dad. Relax your whole body from your fingers to your toes and send your mind to a quiet garden where –’

‘I’ll send you to a fucking doctor to have your balls examined!’

I had to stop him yelling before we had Mum out and the neighbours round. I whispered, ‘But I saw you, Dad.’

‘You saw nothing.’ he said, with utter contempt. He could be very arrogant. It must have been his upper-class background. But I had him.

‘At least my mum has two tits.’

Dad went into the toilet without shutting the door and started to vomit. I went in behind him and rubbed his back as he threw up his guts. ‘I’ll never mention tonight again,’ I said. ‘And nor will you.’

‘Why did you bring him home like this?’ said Mum. She was standing behind us in her dressing-gown, which was so long it almost touched the floor, making her look square. She was tired. She reminded me of the real world. I wanted to shout at her: Take that world away!

‘Couldn’t you have looked after him?’ she said. She kept plucking at my arm. ‘I was looking out of the window and waiting for you for hours. Why didn’t you ring?’

Eventually Dad stood up straight and pushed right past us.

‘Make up a bed for me in the front room,’ she said. ‘I can’t sleep next to that man stinking of sick and puking all night.’

When I’d made the bed and she’d got herself into it – and it was far too narrow and short and uncomfortable for her – I told her something.

‘I’ll never be getting married, OK?’

‘I don’t blame you,’ she said, turning over and shutting her eyes.

I didn’t think she’d get much sleep on that couch, and I felt sorry for her. But she angered me, the way she punished herself. Why couldn’t she be stronger? Why wouldn’t she fight back? I would be strong myself, I determined. That night I didn’t go to bed but sat up listening to Radio Caroline. I’d glimpsed a world of excitement and possibility which I wanted to hold in my mind and expand as a template for the future.

For a week after that evening Dad sulked and didn’t speak, though sometimes he pointed, as at salt and pepper. Sometimes this gesticulation got him into some complicated Marcel Marceau mime language. Visitors from other planets looking in through the window would have thought we were playing a family guessing game as my brother, Mum and I gathered around Dad yelling clues to each other as he tried, without the compromise of friendly words, to show us that the gutters had become blocked with leaves, that the side of the house was getting damp and he wanted Allie and me to climb up a ladder and fix it, with Mum holding the ladder. At supper we sat eating our curled-up beefburgers, chips and fish fingers in silence. Once Mum burst into tears and banged the table with the flat of her hand. ‘My life is terrible, terrible!’ she cried. ‘Doesn’t anyone understand?’

We looked at her in surprise for a moment, before carrying on with our food. Mum did the washing-up as usual and no one helped her. After tea we all dispersed as soon as possible. My brother Amar, four years younger than me, called himself Allie to avoid racial trouble. He always went to bed as early as he could, taking with him fashion magazines like Vogue, Harper’s and Queen, and anything European he could lay his hands on. In bed he wore a tiny pair of red silk pyjamas, a smoking jacket he got at a jumble sale, and his hairnet. ‘What’s wrong with looking good?’ he’d say, going upstairs. In the evenings I often went to the park to sit in the piss-stinking shed and smoke with the other boys who’d escaped from home.

Dad had firm ideas about the division of labour between men and women. Both my parents worked: Mum had got a job in a shoe shop in the High Street to finance Allie, who had decided to become a ballet dancer and had to go to an expensive private school. But Mum did all the housework and the cooking. At lunchtime she shopped, and every evening she prepared the meal. After this she watched television until ten-thirty. The TV was her only area of absolute authority. The unspoken rule of the house was that she always watched what she wanted; if any of us wanted to watch anything else, we had no chance at all. With her last energy of the day she’d throw such a fit of anger, self-pity and frustration that no one dared interfere with her. She’d die for Steptoe and Son,Candid Camera and The Fugitive.

If there were only repeats or political programmes on TV, she liked to draw. Her hand flew: she’d been to art school. She had drawn us, our heads, three to a page, for years. Three selfish men, she called us. She said she’d never liked men because men were torturers. It wasn’t women who turned on the gas at Auschwitz, according to her. Or bombed Vietnam. During this time of Dad’s silence she drew a lot, putting her pad away behind the chair, with her knitting, her childhood diary of the war (‘Air-raid tonight’) and her Catherine Cookson novels. I’d often tried to oppress her into reading proper books like Tender is the Night and The Dharma Bums, but she always said the print was too small.

One afternoon, a few days into the Great Sulk, I made myself a peanut-butter sandwich, put the Who’s Live at Leeds under the needle at full volume – the better to savour Townshend’s power chords on ‘Summertime Blues’ – and opened Mum’s sketch pad. I knew I would find something. I flipped through the pages until I came to a drawing of my father naked.

Standing next to him, slightly taller, was Eva, also naked, complete with one large breast. They were holding hands like frightened children, and faced us without vanity or embellishment, as if to say: This is all that we are, these are our bodies. They looked like John Lennon and Yoko Ono. How could Mum be so objective? How did she even know they’d fucked?

No secrets were safe from me. I didn’t restrict my investigations to Mum. That’s how I knew that although Dad’s lungs were quiet his eyes were well exercised. I peeped into his briefcase, and pulled out books by Lu Po, Lao Tzu and Christmas Humphreys.

I knew that the most interesting thing that could happen in the house would be if the phone rang for Dad, thereby testing his silence. So when it rang late one evening at ten-thirty, I made sure I got there first. Hearing Eva’s voice, I realized that I too had been very keen to hear from her again.

She said, ‘Hallo, my sweet and naughty boy, where’s your dad? Why haven’t you called me? What are you reading?’

‘What do you recommend, Eva?’

‘You’d better come and see me, and I’ll fill your head with purple ideas.’

‘When can I come?’

‘Don’t even ask – just show.’

I fetched Dad, who just happened to be standing behind the bedroom door in his pyjamas. He snatched up the receiver. I couldn’t believe he was going to speak in his own house.

‘Hallo,’ he said gruffly, as if unaccustomed to using his voice. ‘Eva, if s good to talk to you, my love. But my voice has gone. I suspect bumps on the larynx. Can I ring you from the office?’

I went into my room, put the big brown radio on, waited for it to warm up and thought about the matter.

Mum was drawing again that night.

The other thing that happened, the thing that made me realize that ‘God’, as I now called Dad, was seriously scheming, was the queer sound I heard coming from his room as I was going up to bed. I put my ear against the white paintwork of the door. Yes, God was talking to himself, but not intimately. He was speaking slowly, in a deeper voice than usual, as if he were addressing a crowd. He was hissing his s’s and exaggerating his Indian accent. He’d spent years trying to be more of an Englishman, to be less risibly conspicuous, and now he was putting it back in spadeloads. Why?

One Saturday morning a few weeks later he called me to his room and said mysteriously, ‘Are you on for tonight?’

‘Tonight what, God?’

‘I’m appearing,’ he said, unable to reduce the pride in his voice.

‘Really? Again?’

‘Yes, they’ve asked me. Public demand.’

‘That’s great. Where is it?’

‘Location secret.’ He patted his stomach happily. This was what he really wanted to be doing now, appearing. ‘They are looking forward to me all over Orpington. I will be more popular than Bob Hope. But don’t mention anything to your mother. She doesn’t understand my appearances at all, or even, for that matter, my disappearances. Are we on?’

‘We’re on, Dad.’

‘Good, good. Prepare.’

‘Prepare what?’

He touched my face gently with the back of his hand. ‘You’re excited, eh?’ I said nothing. ‘You like all this getting-about business.’

‘Yes,’ I said, shyly.

‘And I like having you with me, boy. I love you very much. We’re growing up together, we are.’

He was right – I was looking forward to this second appearance of his. I did enjoy the activity, but there was something important I had to know. I wanted to see if Dad was a charlatan or if there was anything true in what he was doing. After all, he’d impressed Eva and then done the difficult thing – knocked Charlie out. His magic had worked on them and I’d given him the ‘God’ moniker, but with reservations. He wasn’t yet fully entitled to the name. What I wanted to see was whether, as he started to blossom, Dad really did have anything to offer other people, or if he would turn out to be merely another suburban eccentric.