The Buddha of Suburbia

CHAPTER FIVE

I loved drinking tea and I loved cycling. I would bike to the tea shop in the High Street and see what blends they had. My bedroom contained boxes and boxes of tea, and I was always happy to have new brews with which to concoct more original combos in my teapot. I was supposed to be preparing for my mock A levels in History, English and Politics. But whatever happened I knew I would fail them. I was too concerned with other things. Sometimes I took speed – ‘blues’, little blue tablets – to keep me awake, but they made me depressed, they made my testicles shrivel up and I kept thinking I was getting a heart attack. So I usually sipped spicy tea and listened to records all night. I favoured the tuneless: King Crimson, Soft Machine, Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa and Wild Man Fisher. It was easy to get most of the music you wanted from the shops in the High Street.

During these nights, as all around me was silent – most of the neighbourhood went to bed at ten-thirty – I entered another world. I read Norman Mailer’s journalism about an action-man writer involved in danger, resistance and political commitment: adventure stories not of the distant past, but of recent times. I’d bought a TV from the man in the chip shop, and as the black-and-white box heated up it stank of grease and fish, but late at night I heard of cults and experiments in living, in California. In Europe terrorist groups were bombing capitalist targets; in London psychologists were saying you had to live your own life in your own way and not according to your family, or you’d go mad. In bed I read Rolling Stone magazine. Sometimes I felt the whole world was converging on this little room. And as I became more intoxicated and frustrated I’d throw open the bedroom window as the dawn came up, and look across the gardens, lawns, greenhouses, sheds and curtained windows. I wanted my life to begin now, at this instant, just when I was ready for it. Then it was time for my paper-round, followed by school. And school was another thing I’d had enough of.

Recently I’d been punched and kicked to the ground by a teacher because I called him a queer. This teacher was always making me sit on his knee, and when he asked me questions like ‘What is the square root of five thousand six hundred and seventy-eight and a half?’, which I couldn’t answer, he tickled me. Very educational. I was sick too of being affectionately called Shitface and Curryface, and of coming home covered in spit and snot and chalk and wood-shavings. We did a lot of woodwork at our school, and the other kids liked to lock me and my friends in the storeroom and have us chant ‘Manchester United, Manchester United, we are the boot boys’ as they held chisels to our throats and cut off our shoelaces. We did a lot of woodwork at the school because they didn’t think we could deal with books. One day the woodwork teacher had a heart attack right in front of our eyes as one of the lads put another kid’s prick in a vice and started to turn the handle. Fuck you, Charles Dickens, nothing’s changed. One kid tried to brand my arm with a red-hot lump of metal. Someone else pissed over my shoes, and all my Dad thought about was me becoming a doctor. What world was he living in? Every day I considered myself lucky to get home from school without serious injury.

So after all this I felt I was ready to retire. There was nothing I particularly wanted to do. You didn’t have to do anything. You could just drift and hang out and see what happened, which suited me fine, even more than being a Customs Officer or a professional footballer or a guitarist.

So I was racing through South London on my bike, nearly getting crushed several times by lorries, head bent over the dropped handlebars, swiftly running through the ten Campagnola gears, nipping through traffic, sometimes mounting the pavement, up one-way streets, breaking suddenly, accelerating by standing up on the pedals, exhilarated by thought and motion.

My mind was crawling with it all. I had to save Jamila from the man who loved Arthur Conan Doyle. She might have to run away from home, but where could she go? Most of her friends from school lived with their parents, and most of them were poor; they couldn’t have Jamila with them. She definitely couldn’t stay with us: Dad would get in shit with Anwar. Who could I discuss it with? The only person I knew who’d be helpful and objective and on my side was Eva. But I wasn’t supposed to like her because her love for my father was buggering up our entire family. Yet she was the only sane grown-up I knew now that I could cross Anwar and Jeeta off my list of normals.

It was certainly bizarre, Uncle Anwar behaving like a Muslim. I’d never known him believe in anything before, so it was an amazing novelty to find him literally staking his life on the principle of absolute patriarchal authority. Through her mother’s staunch and indulgent love (plus the fibbing extravagances of her wonderful imagination), but mainly because of Anwar’s indifference, Jamila had got away with things some of her white counterparts wouldn’t dream of. There had been years of smoking, drinking, sexual intercourse and dances, helped by there being a fire escape outside her bedroom and the fact her parents were always so exhausted they slept like mummies.

Maybe there were similarities between what was happening to Dad, with his discovery of Eastern philosophy, and Anwar’s last stand. Perhaps it was the immigrant condition living itself out through them. For years they were both happy to live like Englishmen. Anwar even scoffed pork pies as long as Jeeta wasn’t looking. (My dad never touched the pig, though I was sure this was conditioning rather than religious scruple, just as I wouldn’t eat horse’s scrotum. But once, to test this, when I offered him a smoky bacon crisp and said, as he crunched greedily into it, ‘I didn’t know you liked smoky bacon,’ he sprinted into the bathroom and washed out his mouth with soap, screaming from his frothing lips that he would burn in hell.)

Now, as they aged and seemed settled here, Anwar and Dad appeared to be returning internally to India, or at least to be resisting the English here. It was puzzling: neither of them expressed any desire actually to see their origins again. ‘India’s a rotten place,’ Anwar grumbled. ‘Why would I want to go there again? It’s filthy and hot and it’s a big pain-in-the-arse to get anything done. If I went anywhere it would be to Florida and Las Vegas for gambling.’ And my father was too involved with things here to consider returning.

I was working on all this as I cycled. Then I thought I saw my father. As there were so few Asians in our part of London it could hardly have been anyone else, but the person had a scarf over most of his face and looked like a nervous bank robber who couldn’t find a bank. I got off my bicycle and stood there in Bromley High Street, next to the plaque that said ‘H. G. Wells was born here’.

The creature with the scarf was across the road in a crowd of shoppers. They were fanatical shoppers in our suburbs. Shopping was to them what the rumba and singing is to Brazilians. Saturday afternoons, when the streets were solid with white faces, was a carnival of consumerism as goods were ripped from shelves. And every year after Christmas, when the sales were about to begin, there’d be a queue of at least twenty idiots sleeping in the winter cold outside the big stores for two days before they opened, wrapped in blankets and lying in deckchairs.

Dad normally wouldn’t have been out in such madness, but there he was, this grey-haired man just over five feet tall, going into a phone-box when we had a working telephone in our hall. I could see he’d never used a public phone before. He put on his glasses and read through the instructions several times before putting a pile of coins on top of the box and dialling. When he got through and began to speak he cheered up as he laughed and talked away, before becoming depressed at the end of the call. He put the phone down, turned, and spotted me watching him.

He came out of the phone-box and I pushed my bicycle beside him through the crowds. I badly wanted to know his opinion on the Anwar business, but obviously he wasn’t in the mood for it now.

‘How’s Eva?’ I asked.

‘She sends her love.’

At least he wasn’t going to pretend he hadn’t been talking to her.

‘To me or to you, Dad?’ I said.

‘To you, boy. Her friend. You don’t realize how fond she is of you. She admires you, she thinks –’

‘Dad, Dad, please tell me. Are you in love with her?’

‘Love?’

‘Yes, in love. You know. For God’s sake, you know.’

It seemed to surprise him, I don’t know why. Maybe he was surprised that I’d guessed. Or maybe he hadn’t wanted to raise the lethal notion of love in his own mind.

‘Karim,’ he said, ‘she’s become close to me. She’s someone I can talk to. I like to be with her. We have the same interests, you know that.’

I didn’t want to be sarcastic and aggressive, because there were certain basic things I wanted to know, but I ended up saying, ‘That must be nice for you.’

He didn’t appear to hear me; he was concentrating on what he was saying.

He said, ‘It must be love because it hurts so much.’

‘What are you going to do, then, Dad? Will you leave us and go away with her?’

There are certain looks on certain faces I don’t want to see again, and this was one of them. Confusion and anguish and fear clouded his face. I was sure he hadn’t thought much about any of this. It had all just happened in the random way things do. Now it surprised him that he was expected to declare the pattern and intention behind it all in order that others could understand. But there wasn’t a plan, just passion and strong feeling which had ambushed him.

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do you feel like?’

‘I feel as if I’m experiencing things I’ve never felt before, very strong, potent, overwhelming things.’

‘You mean you never loved Mum?’

He thought for a while about this. Why did he have to even think!

‘Have you ever missed anyone, Karim? A girl?’ We must have both been thinking of Charlie, because he added kindly, ‘Or a friend?’

I nodded.

‘All the time I am not with Eva I miss her. When I talk to myself in my mind, it is always her I talk to. She understands many things. I feel that if I am not with her I will be making a great mistake, missing a real opportunity. And there’s something else. Something that Eva just told me.’

‘Yeah?’

‘She is seeing other men.’

‘What sort of men, Dad?’

He shrugged. ‘I didn’t ask for specifications.’

‘Not white men in drip-dry shirts?’

‘You snob, I don’t know why you dislike drip-dry shirts so much. These things are very convenient for women. But you remember that beetle Shadwell?’

‘Yeah.’

‘She is with him often. He is in London now, working in the theatre. He will be a big shot one day, she thinks. He knows those artistic types. She loves all that art-fart thing. They come to her house for parties.’ Here Dad hesitated. ‘She and the beetle don’t do anything together in that way, but I am afraid that he will romantically take her away. I will feel so lost, Karim, without her.’

‘I’ve always been suspicious of Eva,’ I said. ‘She likes important people. She’s doing it to blackmail you, I know she is.’

‘Yes, and partly because she’s unhappy without me. She can’t wait for me for years and years. Do you blame her?’

We pushed through the throng. I saw some people from school and turned my head away so as to avoid them. I didn’t want them to see me crying. ‘Have you told Mum all this?’ I said.

‘No, no.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I’m so frightened. Because she will suffer so much. Because I can’t bear to look at her eyes as I say the words. Because you will all suffer so much and I would rather suffer myself than have anything happen to you.’

‘So you’ll be staying with Allie and me and Mum?’

He didn’t reply for a couple of minutes. Even then he didn’t bother with words. He grabbed me and pulled me to him and started to kiss me, on the cheeks and nose and forehead and hair. It was crazy. I nearly dropped my bike. Passers-by were startled. Someone said, ‘Get back in yer rickshaw.’ The day was closing in on me. I hadn’t bought any tea and there was an Alan Freeman radio programme on the story of the Kinks that I wanted to listen to. I pulled away from Dad and started to run, wheeling my bike beside me.

‘Wait a minute!’ he shouted.

I turned. ‘What, Dad?’

He looked bewildered. ‘Is this the right bus stop?’

It was strange, the conversation Dad and I had, because when I saw him at home later and over the next few days he behaved as if it had never happened, as if he hadn’t told me he’d fallen in love with someone else.

Every day after school I rang Jamila, and every day the reply to my question, ‘How are things?’ was always, ‘The same, Creamy,’ or, ‘The same but worse.’ We agreed to have a summit meeting in Bromley High Street after school, where we’d make a decision on what to do.

But that day I was leaving the school gates with a group of boys when I saw Helen. It was a surprise because I’d barely thought of her since I was fucked by her dog, an incident with which she had become associated in my mind: Helen and dog-cock went together. Now she was standing outside my school in a black floppy hat and long green coat, waiting for another boy. Spotting me, she ran over and kissed me. I was being kissed a lot lately: I needed the affection, I can tell you. Anybody could have kissed me and I’d have kissed them right back with interest.

The boys, the group I hung around with, had stinking matted hair down to their shoulders and wore decomposing school jackets, no ties, and flares. There had been some acid, some purple haze, going round the school recently, and a couple of boys were tripping. I’d had half a tab at prayers in the morning but it had worn off by now. Some of the boys were exchanging records, Traffic and the Faces. I was negotiating to buy a Jimi Hendrix record – Axis: Bold as Love – from a kid who needed money to go to an Emerson, Lake and Palmer concert at the Fairfield Hall, for fuck’s sake. I suspected this fool was so desperate for money that he’d concealed the bumps and scratches on the disc with black shoe polish, so I was examining its surface with a magnifying glass.

One of the boys was Charlie, who’d bothered to turn up to school for the first time in weeks. He stood out from the rest of the mob with his silver hair and stacked shoes. He looked less winsome and poetic now; his face was harder, with short hair, the cheekbones more pronounced. It was Bowie’s influence, I knew. Bowie, then called David Jones, had attended our school several years before, and there, in a group photograph in the dining hall, was his face. Boys were often to be found on their knees before this icon, praying to be made into pop stars and for release from a lifetime as a motor-mechanic, or a clerk in an insurance firm, or a junior architect. But apart from Charlie, none of us had high expectations; we had a combination of miserable expectations and wild hopes. Myself, I had only wild hopes.

Charlie ignored me, as he was ignoring most of his friends since he’d appeared on the front page of the Bromley and Kentish Times with his band, Mustn’t Grumble, after an open-air gig in a local sports ground. The band had been playing together for two years, at school dances, in pubs and as support at a couple of bigger concerts, but they’d never been written about before. This sudden fame impressed and disturbed the whole school, including the teachers, who called Charlie ‘Girlie’.

Charlie brightened at the sight of Helen and came over to us. I had no idea that he knew her. On tip-toe she kissed him.

‘How are the rehearsals?’ she asked, her hand in his hair.

‘Great. And we’re doing another gig soon.’

‘I’ll be there.’

‘If you’re not, we won’t play,’ he said. She laughed all over the place at this. I intervened. I had to get a word in.

‘How’s your dad, Charlie?’

He looked at me with amusement. ‘Much better.’ He said to Helen, ‘Dad’s in the head hospital. He’s coming out next week and keeps saying he’s going home to Eva.’

‘Really?’

Eva living with her own husband again? That surprised me. It would surprise Dad too, no doubt.

‘Is Eva pleased?’ I said.

‘As you well know, you little pouf, she nearly died. She’s interested in other things now. Other people. Right? I reckon Dad’ll be getting the bum’s rush to his mum as soon as he steps in our door. And that’ll be that between them.’

‘Oh God.’

‘Yeah, but I don’t like him too much anyway. He’s sadistic. There’ll be room in our house for someone else. Everything in our lives is going to change pretty soon. I love your old man, Creamy. He inspires me.’

I was flattered to hear this. I was about to say, If Eva and Dad get married you’ll be my brother and we’ll have committed incest, but I managed to shut my trap. Still, the thought gave me quite a jolt of pleasure. It meant I’d be connected to Charlie for years and years, long after we left school. I wanted to encourage Dad and Eva to get together. Surely it was up to Mum to get on her feet again? Maybe she’d even find someone else, though I doubted it.

Suddenly the suburban street outside the school was blasted by an explosion louder than anything heard there since the Luftwaffe bombed it in 1944. Windows opened; grocers ran to the doors of their shops; customers stopped discussing bacon and turned; our teachers wobbled on their bicycles as the noise buffeted them like a violent squall; and boys sprinted to the school gates as they came out of the building, though many others, cool boys, shrugged or turned away in disgust, gobbing, cursing and scuffling their feet.

The pink Vauxhall Viva had quadrophonic speakers from which roared the Byrds’s ‘Eight Miles High’. In the back were two girls, driven by Charlie’s manager, the Fish, a tall, straight-backed and handsome ex-public school boy whose father was rumoured to be a Navy admiral. They said his mother was a Lady. The Fish had short hair and wore uninspired clothes, like a white shirt, crumpled suit and tennis shoes. He made no concessions to fashion, yet somehow he was hip and cool. Nothing confused that boy. And this enigma was all of nineteen, not much older than us, but he was posh, not common like us, and we considered him to be superior, just the right boy to be in charge of our Charlie. Almost every afternoon when Charlie was at school he turned up to take him to the studio to rehearse with his band.

‘Want a lift anywhere?’ Charlie shouted to Helen.

‘Not today! See you!’

Charlie strolled to the car. The closer he got the more agitated the two girls became, as if he’d sent a wind on before him which made them flutter. When he climbed in beside the Fish they leaned forward and kissed him enthusiastically. He was rearranging his hair in the rear-view mirror as the monster moved out into the traffic, scattering small boys who’d gathered at the front of the car to try and open the bonnet, for God’s sake, and examine the engine. The crowd dispersed quickly as the vision floated away. ‘Wanker,’ boys said despondently, devastated by the beauty of the event. ‘Fucking wanker.’ We were going home to our mothers, to our rissoles and chips and tomato sauce, to learn French words, to pack our football gear for tomorrow. But Charlie would be with musicians. He’d go to clubs at one in the morning. He’d meet Andrew Loog Oldham.

But at least for now I was with Helen.

‘I’m sorry about what happened when you came to the house,’ she said. ‘He’s usually so friendly.’

‘Fathers can get moody and everything.’

‘No, I mean the dog. I don’t approve of people being used just for their bodies, do you?’

‘Look,’ I said, turning sharply on her and utilizing advice I’d been given by Charlie about the treatment of women: Keep ’em keen, treat ’em mean. ‘I’ve got to walk to the bus stop. I don’t want to stand here all afternoon being laughed at like a cunt. Where is the person you’re waiting for?’

‘It’s you, silly.’

‘You came to see me?’

‘Yes. D’you have anything to do this afternoon?’

‘No, ’course not.’

‘Be with me, then?’

‘Yeah, great.’

She took my arm and we walked on together past the schoolboy eyes. She said she was going to run away from school and go to live in San Francisco. She’d had enough of the pettiness of living with parents and the irrelevance of school was smothering her head. All over the Western world there were liberation movements and alternative life-styles – there had never been a kids’ crusade like it – and Hairy Back wouldn’t let her stay out after eleven. I said the kids’ crusade was curdling now, everyone had overdosed, but she wouldn’t listen. Not that I blamed her. By the time we had heard of anything you could be sure it was over. But I hated the idea of her going away, mainly because I hated the idea of staying behind. Charlie was doing big things, Helen was preparing her escape, but what was I up to? How would I get away?

I looked up and saw Jamila hurrying towards me in black T-shirt and white shorts. I’d forgotten that I’d agreed to meet her. She ran the last few yards and was breathing heavily, but more out of anxiety than exhaustion. I introduced her to Helen. Jamila barely glanced at her but Helen kept her arm in mine.

‘Anwar’s getting worse and worse,’ Jamila said. ‘He’s going the whole way.’

‘D’you want me to leave you two together?’ Helen asked.

I quickly said no and asked Jammie if I could tell Helen what was happening.

‘Yes, if you want to expose our culture as being ridiculous and our people as old-fashioned, extreme and narrow-minded.’

So I told Helen about the hunger-strike. Jamila butted in to add details and keep us up to date. Anwar hadn’t compromised in the slightest, not nibbling a biscuit or sipping a glass of water or smoking a single cigarette. Either Jamila obeyed or he would die painfully, his organs failing one by one. And if they took him to hospital he’d just do the same thing again and again, until his family gave in.

It was starting to rain, so the three of us sat in a bus shelter. There was never anywhere to go. Helen was patient and attentive, holding my hand to calm me. Jamila said, ‘What I’ve agreed with myself is that it’s going to be tonight, at midnight, when I decide what to do. I can’t carry on with this indecision.’

Every time we talked about Jamila running away from home, where she could go and how we could get money to help her survive, she said, ‘What about my mother?’ Anwar would blame Jeeta for everything Jamila did. Jeeta’s life would be living death and there was nowhere she could escape to. I had the brilliant idea that both Jamila and Jeeta should run away together, but Jeeta would never leave Anwar: Indian wives weren’t like that. We went round and round until Helen had a brain-wave.

‘We’ll go and ask your father,’ she said. ‘He’s a wise man, he’s spiritual and –’

‘He’s a complete phoney,’ said Jamila.

‘Let’s at least try it,’ Helen replied.

So off we went to my house.

In the living room, with her almost translucent white legs sticking out of her dressing-gown, Mum was drawing. She closed her sketch-book quickly and slipped it behind her chair. I could see she was tired from her day in the shoe shop. I always wanted to ask her about it but could never bring myself to say something as ridiculous as, ‘How was your day?’ Consequently she never discussed her work with anyone. Jamila sat down on a stool and stared into space as if happy to leave the subject of her father’s suicide to others.

Helen didn’t help herself or increase the possibility of peace on earth by saying she’d been at Dad’s Chislehurst gig.

‘I didn’t see it,’ said Mum.

‘Oh, what a shame. It was profound.’ Mum looked self-pitying but Helen went on. ‘It was liberating. It made me want to go and live in San Francisco.’

‘That man makes me want to go and live in San Francisco,’ said Mum.

‘But then, I expect you’ve learned everything he has to teach. Are you a Buddhist?’

It seemed pretty incongruous, the conversation between Mum and Helen. They were talking about Buddhism in Chislehurst, against a background of mind-expansion, freedom and festivals. But for Mum the Second World War was still present in our streets, the streets where she’d been brought up. She often told me of the nightly air-raids, her parents worn out from fire-watching, houses in the familiar streets suddenly plunged into dust, people suddenly gone, news of sons lost at the Front. What grasp of evil or the possibilities of human destruction could we have? All I materially knew of the war was the thick squat block of the air-raid shelter at the end of the garden which as a child I took over as my own little house. Even then it contained its rows of jam-jars and rotten bunk-beds from 1943.

‘It’s simple for us to speak of love,’ I said to Helen. ‘What about the war?’

Jamila stood up irritably. ‘Why are we discussing the war, Karim?’

‘It’s important, it’s –’

‘You idiot. Please –’ And she looked imploringly at Mum. ‘We came here for a purpose. Why are you making me wait like this? Let’s get on with the consultation.’

Mum said, indicating the adjoining wall, ‘With him?’

Jamila nodded and bit her fingernails. Mum laughed bitterly.

‘He can’t even sort himself out.’

‘It was Karim’s idea,’ Jamila said, and swept out of the room.

‘Don’t make me laugh,’ Mum said to me. ‘Why are you doing this to her? Why don’t you do something useful like clearing out the kitchen? Why don’t you go and read a school book? Why don’t you do something that will get you somewhere, Karim?’

‘Don’t get hysterical,’ I said to Mum.

‘Why not?’ she replied.

When we went into his room, God was lying on his bed listening to music on the radio. He looked approvingly at Helen and winked at me. He liked her; but then, he was keen for me to go out with anyone, as long as they were not boys or Indians. ‘Why go out with these Muslims?’ he said once, when I brought a Pakistani friend of Jamila’s home with me. ‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘Too many problems,’ he said imperiously. ‘What problems?’ I asked. He wasn’t good at being specific; he shook his head as if to say there were so many problems he didn’t know where to begin. But he added, for the sake of argument, ‘Dowries and all.’

‘Anwar is my oldest friend in the world,’ he said sadly when we told him everything. ‘We old Indians come to like this England less and less and we return to an imagined India.’

Helen took Dad’s hand and patted it comfortingly.

‘But this is your home,’ she said. ‘We like you being here. You benefit our country with your traditions.’

Jamila raised her eyes to heaven. Helen was driving her to suicide, I could see that. Helen just made me laugh but this was sober business.

I said, ‘Won’t you go and see him?’

‘He wouldn’t listen to Gandhi himself,’ Jamila said.

‘All right,’ said Dad. ‘You come back in ninety-five minutes, during which time I will have meditated. I’ll give you my answer at the end of this thought.’

‘Great!’

So the three of us left the cul-de-sac which was Victoria Road. We walked through the gloomy, echoing streets to the pub, past turdy parks, past the Victorian school with outside toilets, past the numerous bomb-sites which were our true playgrounds and sexual schools, and past the neat gardens and scores of front rooms containing familiar strangers and televisions shining like dying lights. Eva always called our area ‘the higher depths’. It was so quiet none of us wanted to hear the sound of our own embarrassing voices.

Here lived Mr Whitman, the policeman, and his young wife, Noleen; next door were a retired couple, Mr and Mrs Holub. They were socialists in exile from Czechoslovakia, and unknown to them their son crept out of the house in his pyjamas every Friday and Saturday night to hear uncouth music. Opposite them were another retired couple, a teacher and his wife, the Gothards. An East End family of birdseed dealers, the Lovelaces, were next to them – old Grandma Lovelace was a toilet attendant in the Library Gardens. Further up the street lived a Fleet Street reporter, Mr Nokes, his wife and their overweight kids, with the Scoffields – Mrs Scoffield was an architect – next door to them.

All of the houses had been ‘done up’. One had a new porch, another double-glazing, ‘Georgian’ windows or a new door with brass fittings. Kitchens had been extended, lofts converted, walls removed, garages inserted. This was the English passion, not for self-improvement or culture or wit, but for DIY, Do It Yourself, for bigger and better houses with more mod cons, the painstaking accumulation of comfort and, with it, status – the concrete display of earned cash. Display was the game. How many times on a visit to families in the neighbourhood, before being offered a cup of tea, had we been taken around a house – ‘The grand tour again,’ sighed Dad – to admire knocked-through rooms, cunning cupboards and bunk-beds, showers, coal bunkers and greenhouses.

In the pub, the Chatterton Arms, sat ageing Teddy Boys in drape coats, with solid sculpted quiffs like ships’ prows. There were a few vicious Rockers too, in studded leather and chains, discussing gang-bangs, their favourite occupation. And there were a couple of skinheads with their girls, in brogues, Levi’s, Crombies and braces. A lot of them I recognized from school: they were in the pub every night, with their dads, and would be there for ever, never going away. They were a little startled to see two hippies and a Paki walk in; there was some conversation on the subject and several glances in our direction, so I made sure we didn’t eyeball them and give them reason to get upset. All the same, I was nervous they might jump on us when we left.

Jamila said nothing and Helen was eager to talk about Charlie, a subject on which she was obviously preparing for an advanced degree. Jamila wasn’t even contemptuous, as she abstractedly poured pints of bitter into herself. She’d met Charlie a couple of times at our house and wasn’t thrilled by him, to say the least. ‘Vanity, thy name is Charlie’, was her conclusion. Charlie made no effort with her. Why should he? Jamila was no use to him and he didn’t want to fuck her. Jamila saw right through old Charlie: she said there was iron ambition under the crushed-velvet idealism which was still the style of the age.

Helen gladly confirmed that not only was Charlie a little star at our school but he was illuminating other schools too, especially girls’ schools. There were girls who followed Mustn’t Grumble from gig to gig just to be near the boy, recording these concerts on reel-to-reel tape-recorders. Rare photographs of Charlie were passed around until they were in tatters. Apparently he’d been offered a record contract which the Fish had turned down, saying they weren’t good enough yet. When they did get good they’d be one of the biggest bands in the world, the Fish predicted. I wondered if Charlie really knew this, felt this, or whether his life as he lived it from day to day was as fucked-up and perplexed as everyone else’s.

Later that night, with Jammie and Helen behind me, I rapped on the door of Dad’s room. There was no response.

‘Perhaps he’s still on another level,’ said Helen. I looked at Jammie and wondered if she, like me, could hear Dad snoring. Obviously: because she banged loudly and impatiently on the door until Dad opened it, his hair standing on end, looking surprised to see us. We sat around his bed and he went into one of the formidable silences which I now accepted as the concomitant of wisdom.

‘We live in an age of doubt and uncertainty. The old religions under which people lived for ninety-nine point nine per cent of human history have decayed or are irrelevant. Our problem is secularism. We have replaced our spiritual values and wisdom with materialism. And now everyone is wandering around asking how to live. Sometimes desperate people even turn to me.’

‘Uncle, please –’

Dad raised his index finger a fraction of an inch and Jamila was reluctantly silent.

‘I’ve decided this.’

We were all concentrating so much that I almost giggled.

‘I believe happiness is only possible if you follow your feeling, your intuition, your real desires. Only unhappiness is gained by acting in accordance with duty, or obligation, or guilt, or the desire to please others. You must accept happiness when you can, not selfishly, but remembering you are a part of the world, of others, not separate from them. Should people pursue their own happiness at the expense of others? Or should they be unhappy so others can be happy? There’s no one who hasn’t had to confront this problem.’

He paused for breath and looked at us. I knew he was thinking of Eva as he said all this. I suddenly felt desolate and bereft, realizing he would leave us. And I didn’t want him to leave, because I loved him so much.

‘So, if you punish yourself through self-denial in the puritan way, in the English Christian way, there will only be resentment and more unhappiness.’ Now he looked only at Jamila. ‘People ask for advice all the time. They ask for advice when they should try to be more aware of what is happening.’

‘Thanks a lot,’ said Jamila.

It was midnight when we took her home. Her head was bowed as she went in. I asked her if she’d made her decision.

‘Oh yes,’ she said, starting up the stairs to the flat where her parents, her tormentors, were lying awake in separate rooms, one trying to die, the other no doubt wishing for death. The meter in the hall which regulated the lights was ticking loudly. Helen and I stared at Jamila’s face in the gloom for a due as to what she was going to do. Then she turned, was shrouded in darkness, and went up to bed.

Helen said Jamila would marry the boy. I said no, she’d turn him down. But it was impossible to tell.

Helen and I climbed into Anerley Park and lay down on our backs on the grass by the swings, and looked at the sky, and pulled our clothes down. It was a good fuck, but hurried, as Hairy Back would be getting anxious. I wondered if we were both thinking of Charlie as we did it.