The Last Word

Five

Every morning, once upon a time, Harry’s mother got up early to make him a cooked breakfast, before taking him to school. Whenever they were in the kitchen together, she’d talk over her shoulder about films, politics, men, poltergeists, neighbours, feminism, dreams — a surreal stream of hard-to-follow continuous conversation for which, it was understood, he would be the link man.

She kissed him a lot, or would suddenly sob. She had a mad laugh which could be alarming, or would suddenly say, ‘You have no idea how I hate this middle-class shit!’ Sometimes, to illustrate a point, she’d enact a scene, doing the voices. Or she’d sing: pop, folk, opera, with, a good deal of the time, a joint burning in the ashtray. She’d quote Lautréamont so often he remembered the words even now, ‘Silent, foul spiders/spin their webs in the base of our brain.’

Most evenings she went to see friends, or to parties or the theatre or dance. Apparently she hated boredom, as well as the tyranny of possessiveness and control. Harry’s father had once said, with some irony, that she considered sexual opportunity to be the vanguard of political liberation. She also condemned her husband for not believing in the sixties’ idea that madness brought wisdom. For her, it was not the purpose of living to be as sane as possible, and she believed her husband to be ‘a policeman of the soul’, since he considered it his work to make people sane, as others might want to free people from the tyranny of alcohol. But it could only make them duller, she believed. How many people was she? How many people could we be?

Harry didn’t know what he thought about any of this. He did remember, though, that most nights, at the end of her life, she crept into his bedroom, and he slept in her arms, almost like a young lover, until morning. Was that love, or madness? Later, a friend of his mother’s said: Harry, you are very much like her; of high intelligence, you can understand anything. Both of you are bright but brittle — and you’ll go down under the slightest knock, worrying and fearing failure.

When he was twelve, she died. It seemed that after she was gone he was alone for ten years. He had to get up in the dark, feed himself and cycle to school without his mother offering him a pear, cutting the crusts from his sandwiches or running after him with books and football boots. His identical brothers, four years older, were at Latymer, while he was at St Paul’s. Where the other boys had much more of their mother, he was forced, too early, into independence. And the twins had always had one another: they bickered, disputed and had bloody fist fights around the house, but there was barely a moment when they were not in resentful or eager contact with each other, almost, but not quite a closed circle.

Harry cared for himself by reading in his room, while playing his siblings’ records and tapes, and speaking constantly to his mother in his mind. The family had disposed of her other clothes, but when Harry took over her wardrobe for himself, many of her shoes remained at the back of the cupboard. It occurred to him to lie with his ear on the carpet and speak to them. Harry would make films in his mind of her choosing them and putting them on; he would wonder where she had gone in each pair, who she had been with, and what they had talked about.

He saw now that the idea of isolation he had had about himself was only partly true, a myth he’d made. He was motherless, and his father might have been at work, or attending to the house, or dating. But his brothers had never been awkward or shy. At school they were rugby and soccer stars who earned money modelling and later formed a band, the Ha-Ha Fish, playing at the opening of hip shops in Carnaby Street and the sticky back rooms of Camden pubs in front of school friends. They said if he learned bass, he could perform with them, and so he did.

A teenage girl with a mass of dark hair, in a short skirt, T-shirt and black tights, opened a bedroom door to see a little boy, younger than her, sitting on his bed blinking over a book, scratching and twisting with anxiety, a plate of food untouched. Harry’s brothers’ pals, and their numerous girl friends, were in the house constantly, and from the beginning the boy was the object of much pity and attention from young women. There’s nothing like a blond motherless child to bring the girls running with kisses, sweets and more. Who would want to give that up? The twins began to refer to the pretty little pasha’s ‘harem’, the girls who were keen to assist him with his homework, cook for him, select his clothes and cut his hair, and accompany him to the cinema, the shops and other treats at the weekend and during holidays.

A girl beginning to move away from her parents and wanting to grow up can be persuaded into appalling acts of love. Once Harry hit thirteen and began to sweat and shower, a relay of fragrant teenagers were kissing, petting and spending the night with him on sleepovers. The motherless boy hated to sleep alone; sometimes he crashed on the floor in one of his brothers’ rooms. Soon he learned that numerous girls were susceptible to his pleas for them to care for him. He needed to replace one woman with a horde of other women. From the age of fourteen he was seducing more of them than those amateurs his brothers. It would cheer his father up, when he came home, to find the house garlanded with girls in flower. ‘St Trinian’s’, he called it, or ‘the Kingdom of Pubescent Girls’. He made sure to warn Harry that he’d be envied — hated, he meant — for his gifts, charm and ease, as he got older, and that he should conceal but not suppress his virtues. Harry didn’t then understand what his father meant.

His father had a superb library: philosophy, psychology, fiction, art. That was that, for Harry; he developed himself there. Not that he didn’t miss his mother; he was still angry with her, to say the least, which was how she remained alive and active in his mind. What he didn’t want was her sitting at the end of his bed when he was alone in the country.

Now he sped through the dark winding lanes, and then ran from the car. Soon he was at the warm bar of a busy pub, and others were turning to him, the stranger, the curiosity that everyone seemed to know about. People gathered round. Apparently the locals — farmers and ageing rock stars who lived in the big houses, and their fans who lived in smaller places — were keen to hear about ‘the writer’.

Was it true Mamoon had no friends? Was he cruel to his wife, violent even? Was he a devil-worshipper? More importantly, was he really broke? And wasn’t it true that he had certainly made the most of the country which had welcomed him, and where his talent had been allowed to flourish? Hadn’t he complained too much? Had he ever been sufficiently grateful?

Nothing can be still while it lives in the minds of others, including, of course, a character and reputation. It didn’t take long, Harry saw, for a personality to enlarge and inflate, as the subject became what others preferred him to be. Like Harry’s mother, Mamoon had travelled beyond and above himself, a process Harry himself was now correcting but also abetting, in his own way. What was a person then, but a self which travelled between private fantasy and public creation?

Hadn’t Mamoon been in that place for Harry when he read and reread Mamoon’s interviews, profiles and essays in Playboy, Rolling Stone and Esquire as a young man? That Mamoon had willingly journeyed into the darkness of the contemporary world itself, and returned with testimony, witness and thought, revealed an intrepid man who was a conquistador, determined to expose and explain the harshest truths. Wasn’t he the first to track, in the dark cities of northern Britain, the change in the Muslim community from socialist anti-racism to a radicalism built around a new worldwide form, a reactionary idea of Islam? His essay ‘The Axe of Ideology’ had been crucial. Didn’t his analysis then go further, as he followed the trajectory of Islam from a form of liberation theology to a death cult demanding sacrifice, built around obedience to the law of the Absolute father?

Where was Harry in this now? Like Mamoon, Harry couldn’t just hold up the mirror; he had to explain why he was there, and what this man meant. His words had to keep the writer alive in the history of literature, however much he might want to kill him personally.

Glad to be out of the house, and to have alcohol in him, Harry felt more buoyant. The less he said to the locals the more he’d enjoy his evening. He did make the mistake of suggesting, to the irritation of those around him, and at the risk of appearing superior, that a good way to make contact with a writer might be to pass one’s eyes over his sentences. After this faux pas he thought it best to settle himself in a secluded corner of the bar where he could keep a look out for the local interest: the ardent young wife of a farmer bored by dipping sheep in antiseptic, or dragging on the udders of recalcitrant animals; or perhaps the partner of a long-distance lorry driver eternally delayed by a French strike.

Then he looked up; it was dim in the pub, but he saw what he wanted. His instinct had been correct. The skin game was on. He finished his drink. Before fetching another one, he went into the toilet, popped some money into the condom machine and pushed the button for plain rubbers. The girl who had been smiling and flicking her long hair at him appeared to be younger than he’d wanted. He didn’t need a scandal. But she had sent her friends away. Sensibly, she was standing up. She would lead him.

He was keen to follow this siren, even into a crepuscular corridor which led to the pub’s back room, an undecorated and unheated grave fragrant with urine and worse, as if the toilet was parked under a table. The drinkers were here. A hairy man with the face of a pit bull, wearing only boxer shorts and tattoos, played pool under a flickering striplight. A couple of Medusas, pulling on chained dogs, waited, squinted and cursed. Harry was afraid. He went to the girl.

They sat close together. When, quite soon, the words ran out, she licked her fingers and extinguished the candles on the table, rubbing hot wax into his hands, and onto his arms. She was plain and lovely, and not too young at all, a dramatically dark-haired busty girl in her mid-twenties or perhaps older, with black eyes, her thick legs packed into a tight, if not straining miniskirt. She introduced herself as Julia. He followed her out, and indicated his car.

They drove for half an hour, until she told him to stop in a wide street of old council houses. It was otherwise quiet in the misty rain, but dogs barked.

‘Follow me,’ she said.

But Harry wondered if he might be getting too old for the dispiriting adventure that seemed to inevitably accompany the need for human contact. Did he want to creep half drunk into a damp-walled council house at midnight in the countryside, particularly since, as the girl hauled him along the dim downstairs corridor, he glimpsed, through an open door, a scene of Hogarthian dissipation.

A late middle-aged woman with her shirt open and arms in the air and three older rough men in clothes they must have slept in for weeks were dancing. They punched their arms in the air, and shouted with drunken violence.

Julia would not let him linger. She jerked him away. Soon he was two floors up in an attic room, perhaps deluded, but certainly crammed into a single bed clinging to a thin pillow and what appeared, now, to be a fat-faced proletarian girl in her early twenties. Still, once she’d finished her cigarette, and — if he hurried — before she lit another one, he’d have her again, this time on her knees on the floor, clearing a space amongst the cups and clothes, while regarding the underwear hanging from the mirror.

Not that anything important could be achieved without inconvenience, if not suffering; and he was happy to see she was more than he’d imagined. As was often the case, he feared he might become afraid and lost in his own mind, and might begin to dwell, once more, on the fact that he and his brothers could have made their mother crazy. His father had said, not long ago, ‘There’s no ambivalence: children make their parents die. The three of you were much too much for her.’ Thinking of this, Harry required a night’s comfort and companionship. A girl is an umbilical cord, a lifeline to reality. His mother wouldn’t have wanted him to be alone.

Despite the thud of music and the occasional shock of abrupt yells from elsewhere in the house, he relaxed. As she stroked him and he kissed her hair, he could consider how things were going with the book. There had at last been progress; Harry believed he’d been asking the right questions. He’d pressed on.

That afternoon, passing the library on his way back from the barn, he’d spotted his foe through the window. The old man was halfway up a ladder searching for a book, and appeared particularly vulnerable. Harry, with a burst of spontaneous confidence, and, by now, a certain amount of desperation, had hurried into the house. ‘There you are, sir,’ he said, and peppered Mamoon with queries until even he became curious about himself.

The writer had, at last, come gingerly down the ladder, made himself comfortable in a chair and said almost mournfully, ‘I must give you more, dear man. You seem upset, and even angry, now.’

Mamoon talked about his father with respect and affection; his mother he hardly mentioned, but when pushed was kind. As for his siblings, again Mamoon talked of how much he liked them, having supported one through college in America. The sister he hadn’t spoken to for thirty years he said nothing about. ‘It’s not an interesting dispute.’ About Peggy he didn’t add much, claiming he’d repressed the details but that it was ‘all in the diaries’.

‘What’s your view of it now?’ Harry asked. ‘Of her. Your lover.’

‘You know, Harry, I loved her for a long time,’ Mamoon said. ‘But, once intelligent and attractive, the poor woman became increasingly distressed. She made herself so very ill with the drinking. She was even unwashed at times. Born for disappointment, she only wanted what I couldn’t give. The drink made her aggressive — mostly with herself.’

Harry said, ‘Would a more ruthless man have removed her?’

‘How could even a more ruthless man have removed her from her own house? I could have moved somewhere else. But there is a lot I love here — the quiet to write. The long story, the novel, is an old-fashioned and, people say, defunct form. Perhaps it resembles oil painting, in that its creation is labour-intensive and enjoins an iron discipline, patience and forbearance. It is all I can do. As for Peggy, you can’t just let people down, dammit. That’s the hell of compassion. But I did think, next time I must marry a real woman.’

‘As opposed to?’

‘A case history.’

‘You are compassionate, sir. That is well known,’ said Harry. ‘But did you go with other women?’

‘Much less than you might like to imagine.’

‘Didn’t you say that no one has been truly married until they’ve committed adultery?’

‘I hope so.’ Mamoon went on, ‘She and I always worked together on my manuscripts. That was our intimacy and the purpose of our conversations.’

‘It was your love for one another?’

‘Many artists have had a muse. The idea confuses idiotic people as to art’s origins. They want to believe it springs from a single pure source. It has been said that my work hasn’t been up to much since Peggy died.’

‘Do you agree with that?’

Mamoon shrugged and began to head for the door. ‘I work on, when I can. What the hell else could I do all day — talk to you? An artist, you must remember, is at his best in his art.’

This was duller than the much gossiped idea of a diabolic intransigent Indian driving devoted women mad. Rob’s late-night calls — he hollered into the phone, saying everything at least twice and with exclamation marks: ‘What have you got on him? What have you got? You got it yet? Make sure you tell me!’ — were making Harry so anguished he was beginning to wonder whether he could write a first book at all about a man about whom there would be many books, eventually. And if he didn’t have the book, he explained to Julia now, he wouldn’t have a career. His brothers were doing nicely, but could be very damning, while he, Harry, would be nothing.

Harry awoke when the light came up and peered about the dark blue-walled room he had landed in.

Stroking and smelling the lovely, plain woman beside him, he then recalled a lashing rant he’d received from Liana the previous afternoon, just after he’d spoken to Mamoon. She had dashed from the kitchen and into a field where he believed he was safe, reclining for a breather with a notebook in the shade of an old apple tree.

‘Why did you insult Mamoon so?’

‘Oh God, I’m sorry.’ He sat up. ‘What was it?’

‘Wasn’t it something about your father being a real man — and an example to you — because he had had three sons and brought them up alone?’

‘Dad educated us. He called it his only duty. It’s commendable. I want to do the same, Liana.’

Liana stared at him. ‘How almost impossible it must be for you to imagine what it was like for a shy, precocious Indian boy to come here and not only make a life, but a triumphant one, among such strangers, enemies even — certainly amongst people who didn’t encourage him. He showed people his stories and they literally said to him, “Why would you think anyone could be interested in these bloody Indians!”’

‘How could I not understand that?’

‘Do I need to remind you repeatedly that you have flown through life on a magic carpet of privilege? The world has always been the private garden of tall, blond, good-looking men who can stroll anywhere and ask for anything.’ She went on, ‘And never forget that whatever Mamoon and I are like, and however snobbish you think we are, if we’d failed, we’d have been left with nothing. How many so-called coloured writers were there before my husband? People didn’t even believe the blacks could spell Tchaikovsky!’

He was considering what sort of lesson this might be when he said goodbye to Julia early the next morning.

She put her arms around his neck and said, ‘It’s like being struck by lightning. I’ve fallen in love. I will love you now, Harry, and never let you go. Do you remember my name?’

‘Julia. Is that right?’

‘I won’t forget yours. I could have kissed you when I poured the Earl Grey.’

‘What Earl Grey?’

‘Don’t you remember? The first time in the garden at Mamoon’s. You sat there looking so beautiful and worried. I wanted you then. I’ve seen you in the yard. I know you’ve been concentrating. Your mind always seems to be somewhere else. But something eternal passed between us. Didn’t you feel it?’

‘A bit,’ he said. ‘It was you.’

‘Yes. I’m confused. Didn’t you know that?’

‘Sort of.’

‘You don’t remember? I offered you a digestive biscuit and a Jaffa.’

‘I would never forget a Jaffa. But I must have been wondering if I’d ever be able to write the book.’

She whispered, ‘Your penis is my dog. I love the taste of you in my mouth.

‘Bon appétit.’

He was surprised but gratified by her love. He guessed he was a novelty in the town, where the gene pool was limited; the ecstasy would soon wear off. He would enjoy it while it lasted.