Something to Tell You (21 page)

I wasn’t convinced, however, that I would hear from George Cage again. I imagined that, like most celebrities, his life had become a matter of keeping people away. Meanwhile, there were questions which had been going through my mind. Did Ajita want to see me? And did I want to see her?

George Cage had his secretary call me a week later, inviting me to a drinks party. Although it wouldn’t just be the two of us, I realised George was trying to talk to me about the past. I could have refused to meet Mustaq—as I still thought of him—but I had been thinking about his father, whose face had appeared in several of my dreams recently. The dead man not only names his murderer, he whispers it throughout eternity, waiting to be heard.

Nor had Ajita disappeared from my life, as I’d thought she had. She was alive in the real world, existing outside my mind. Really, she was the one I wanted to connect with again. Once more it seemed pressing. I needed her brother’s help in some way. Perhaps some sort of resolution might be possible.

I agreed to go over, asking if it was okay if I brought a friend. I’m happy going to places I haven’t been before if Henry is with me.

George Cage’s house in Soho was tall and narrow, in an alley off Wardour Street, sandwiched between a film-cutting studio and a walk-in brothel offering Russian, Oriental and black women. “Even the brothels are multicultural now,” Henry noted.

Despite its location, George’s house had a luxurious hush, as though it were soundproof. The decor was white; Oriental staff offered trays of drinks and sushi. Expensive dogs sniffed the guests’ crotches. There were good prints on the walls. Be-ringed queens from the East End mingled with upper-class young men in priceless suits, pop stars, painters, Labour Party researchers and, to my surprise, a couple of black Premiership foot-ballers—one in a white fur coat—who stirred more excitement than the pop stars.

George Cage introduced Henry and me to Alan, his “future wife” and boyfriend of five years, the man he was intending to “marry” when civil partnerships became legal. In his late forties, Alan was wearing a sleeveless tee-shirt and shorts, with white socks and sandals. He used one hand to carry, at all times, a glass of wine and a thin joint. He was muscly and wanted you to acknowledge it. He was good-looking, with a seductive decadence that stated there were few experiences he had eschewed.

I learned almost immediately that he’d been a fascist, a tube driver, a junkie alcoholic and drug dealer; he’d done his “bird.” As a consequence, he seemed to suggest, he was suspicious of “con men” like us, who seemed to survive in a talky, false world whose violence was unacknowledged. When he told me where he was from, I was pleased to tell him I’d been brought up a couple of miles away. Miriam and I, as kids, would go on the bus to Ladywell Baths and spend all day there.

“What do you do, then?” he asked. “You in the politics too?”

“I’m a therapist.”

“I got a therapist,” he said. “An aromatherapist. Do you use scents?”

“Nope.”

“Not even vanilla candles?”

While I wondered whether Freud might have had a view on vanilla candles, Alan looked at me sceptically, as though he’d been about to recommend several people to me for therapy but was now thinking better of it.

He and Mustaq had met in a bar, he said. They still sometimes went to bed at ten and got up at two to trawl rough gay bars in the early hours. One place they’d gone to at four in the morning, only to be told they were “too early.” Alan had always felt at home in these places, with what he considered to be his “people,” the aimless, lost, unfulfilled and “perverted,” and Mustaq had found a place there too.

There didn’t seem to me to be any reason why Alan should feel alienated in Mustaq’s world, but as more of Mustaq’s friends came over, Alan would suddenly start into an upper-class accent, pinched, absurd, superior; a stoned Lady Bracknell. Mustaq seemed used to it, and no one else took any notice, aware perhaps that this was always the risk you ran with rough trade.

Mustaq said he was keen to introduce me to another of “our people.” I wasn’t sure what he meant; it turned out to be a plump Asian in a Prada suit with a lot to smile about. This was Omar Ali, the well-known owner of laundrettes and dry cleaners, who’d sold his flourishing business in the mid-90s to go into the media.

Now, as well as being a stalwart of the antiracist industry, Omar Ali made television for, by and about minorities. The “Pakis” had always been considered socially awkward, badly dressed, weirdly religious and repressed. But being gay, Omar was smart enough to know how hip and fashionable minorities—or any outsiders—could become, with the right marketing, as they made their way up the social hierarchy.

After Blair was elected in 1997, Omar had become Lord Ali of Lewisham, which was the raw part of town he was from. His father, a radical Pakistani journalist who’d been critical of Bhutto’s various deals with the mullahs—a man who had, it turned out, known my own father as a student in India—had drunk himself to death in a dingy room there. As is often the case in families, it had been the uncle who’d saved Omar in those Thatcherite times, letting him run one of his laundrettes and telling him, despite his father’s fatal integrity, to run out of the ghetto in pursuit of money, which had no colour or race.

Omar’s lifelong penchant for skinheads, childhood friends who’d kicked him around, had got him into less trouble than it might have done at an earlier time. It was ironic to think of how Omar meshed with his times. His commendable antiracism had made him into the ideal committeeman. Now, as an Asian, gay millionaire with an interest in a football club, he was perfect leadership material. He was disliked by Muslims for his support of the government’s fondness for bombing Muslims, and hated by the Left and Right for good reasons I was unable to remember. But he was protected by a political ring fence. No one could bring him down but himself.

If Lord Ali was smug, it was because he had long been ahead of the game. He’d never had any scruples about combining cunning business practices with Labour Party socialism. Now, of course, many ex-leftists were turning—or trying to turn—towards business and the Thatcherite enterprise culture they had so despised. It had become acceptable to want more money than you could sensibly use, to enjoy your greed. With retirement coming up, the ex-leftists saw they had only a few years to make “proper” money, as so many of their friends had done, mostly in film, television and, occasionally, the theatre.

“Still supporting the war?” Henry asked him. Henry had been drinking champagne quickly, as he did when he attended such functions. By the time we came to leave, he’d be ready for a monologue. “You must be the only one left.”

Omar was used to this. “But of course. Removing dictators is a good thing. You want to argue with that?” He looked at me. “I know who you are, though I find your stuff difficult to read.”

“Excellent.”

“We both have Muslim backgrounds, and wouldn’t we agree that our brothers and sisters have to join the modern world or remain in the dark ages? Haven’t we done the Iraqis a favour?” I could see Henry becoming annoyed, and so could Omar, who had a cheeky face and liked Henry’s annoyance so much he went on: “As a gay Muslim, I believe other Muslims must have the opportunity to enjoy the liberalism we do. I won’t be hypocritical—”

Henry interrupted. “So you urged Blair to kick the shit out of as many innocent Iraqis as he could?”

“Look, these Iraqis, they have no science, no literature, no decent institutions and only one book. Can you imagine relying on just that?…We must give them these things, even if it means killing a lot of them. Nothing worthwhile was ever done without a few deaths. You know that. I told Tony, once you’ve done Baghdad, you can start on some of those other places. Like Bradford.” Omar made a camp gesture and said, “I don’t know why I’m saying all this. I’m a moderate, and I always have been.”

Alan, who was standing nearby, said, “Only politically.”

“All I’ve ever wanted was to relieve the condition of the working class.”

“Oh yeah, that’s all we need—someone who came up the hard way.”

Henry said, “Blair’s problem is self-deception. It doesn’t help that he’s surrounded by people like you who only tell him what a good guy he is.”

Omar said, “You old Communist lefties, you can’t let it go, can you?”

Later I would remind Henry that he hadn’t always been as anti-Blair as he—and many of our friends—liked to make out. In fact, Henry and Valerie had been invited to Chequers, the prime minister’s country place, early on in his first term. It had said “casual” on the invitation, and Henry wore a suit and open-necked shirt. The other guests included a well-known but dull ex-footballer, a female newsreader and either a runner or a rower, Henry wasn’t sure. Blair, who to Henry’s surprise told him he’d once considered becoming an actor, was wearing what looked like overtight Lee Cooper jeans and an unbuttoned purple shirt, with ruffles, and shiny black shoes. Henry had expected a tribune of the working class, not a tribute to Brian May.

While Omar Ali and Henry were arguing, I noticed that Mustaq, the practised party host, was moving among the guests, introducing people, keeping an eye on things. Not that he had forgotten about me. I became aware that one of my purposes there was to be present when Mustaq told Alan—something I imagined he must have known already—that he and I had been brought up in the same neighbourhood, and that I’d known his father and sister.

Alan didn’t seem fascinated and drifted away. But Mustaq told me he wanted to continue, leading me into a neat sitting room and shutting the door.

As he uncorked more champagne, I said, “Does Ajita ever come to London?”

“Would you like to see her?”

“I would.”

“I think she and her husband are planning to come later this year. What’s that look—is it scepticism?”

I said, “It means opening a door I tried to close a long time ago.”

“Why close it in the first place?”

“I was in love with your sister, but one day she went away for good.”

“I can see why you’d want to reject that,” he said. “It was only recently that I was able to get interested in the past. Because of my ‘pop’ name and fair skin, I haven’t been mistaken for a Paki for years—not unlike Freddie Mercury, another who ‘disappeared’ into fame.

“I never talked about the factory and the strike, even when it was brought up by journalists. I didn’t try to hide it, but I never advertised it. I just said it had been a ‘bad time’ and anyhow I’d been young. Weren’t all those pop boys, like Bowie, trying to reinvent themselves?”

I asked, “Now you want to go back?”

“Did you ever see the factory while the strike was on?”

“I remember Ajita being taken inside—in the back of your father’s car.”

“He made me do that, a few times. I would cry and shit myself before we set out. It was terrifying, the screams, bricks, lumps of wood flung at us.”

“Why did he do it?”

“We were supposed to take over the business when the time was right, so he wanted us to know what went on in the real world.” Mustaq got up. “I want to talk more, but I must get back to the party.” I thought he was going to shake my hand, but he wanted to look at my wrist. “You’ve taken the watch off.”

“I don’t wear it all the time.”

“I’m not going to let this go,” he said.

“It is obviously important to you.”

“I’m thinking about my father a lot. I tried to be someone without a childhood. But there’s something I need to get to the bottom of. He was murdered, after all, and no one was punished for it. Didn’t you keep up with the case?”

“I tried to, but I wasn’t aware of any outcome.”

“There was no closure. He was just another Paki, and the strike was causing a nuisance to the politicians.”

I said, “I thought some men were arrested.”

“It was the wrong men, of course. The killers are still out there. But not for much longer.” He was leading me to the door, where Henry was waiting for me to join him for a curry. Mustaq said, “The men who were picked up were nowhere near our house. So who was it? Why would they do it? What would be the motive?” Then he said, “I have a place in Wiltshire. Not an English country house—my crib is comfortable and warm. Will you come? We will have time to talk.” He looked at Henry. “Will you both come?”

“Yes,” said Henry. “We will.”

I said, “Mustaq, will you give Ajita my number?”

“Of course. But she will be as nervous of speaking to you as you are of her. Please—will you go easy on her?”

“Oh, my darling Jamal, it’s been so long, kiss me and kiss me again.”

“Better keep your hands on the wheel, Karen.”

“I can drive one-handed. You know there’s a lot I can do one-handed.”

I said, “I didn’t know you were coming to George’s this weekend.”

“You didn’t? But I haven’t been out for absolutely ages.”

“You’ve been hiding at home?”

She said, “Things haven’t been good. They’ve been bloody rotten and down on me. Can’t we stop for a drink?”

“No.”

“Just a little one in a country pub?”

“It’s a different decade now, I’m afraid.”

“Haven’t we become too sensible?”

“The world has, but I’m sure you haven’t. It’s terrific to see you, Karen.”

“Is it? Is it really, Jamal?”

Karen was driving me to Mustaq’s.

Miriam had become determined to live her own life, even though she still felt guilty about leaving the kids and the house. Nonetheless, she and Henry were looking for the opportunity to get away together. As there was a club they were reluctant to miss on Friday night, they would come to the country after lunch on Saturday morning. I could have waited for them or gone down on the train.

It was a surprise then, when my old girlfriend Karen Pearl, the “TV Bitch,” offered me a lift. I wasn’t aware that she knew Mustaq, but it turned out that over the years he had appeared several times on her TV shows. Now and again she went to his house to recuperate from her life.

She turned up outside my place in a tiny red car, which roared when she pressed the accelerator. She’d asked her husband to buy it as compensation for leaving her, which he considered a more than fair exchange. If I was already anxious about seeing Mustaq and answering his inevitable questions, being squashed in a small space with Karen while being hurled down the motorway certainly made me breathe more rapidly.

“I am delighted and totally chuffed to be getting away,” she said. “You?”

I felt unnaturally close to the road; Karen played loud music, mostly ABBA, and, for my benefit, Gladys Knight as well as the Supremes, while smoking the entire time, as we always used to. Twice she opened the roof to demonstrate how it worked.

“Groovy top.”

“Isn’t it? We’re so old now, Jamal. My two girls are growing up,” she said. “It’s all slammed doors and lost mobile phones. But we have a grand girly time—like being back at boarding school. Otherwise, contrary to your corrupt view of me, I don’t have much of a laugh these days. Tom”—her ex-husband—“has taken the girls, along with his more or less teenage girlfriend, to Disneyland, Paris. As they are all of the same mental age, they’ll have a great time.”

“You having anyone?”

“I’m an untouchable,” she said. “This will make you laugh—I know exactly the kind of thing which will appeal to you.”

“Tell me.”

“Well, a few weeks ago I thought I’d give myself a treat. I tried it on with a potential toy boy. I’d heard that’s what all the old girls were doing. I strong-armed this moody, well-built kid into a ruinously expensive hotel room. There was champagne, drugs and what you used to describe as my vast arse, in silk red panties, all ready. And the boy so fit and sweet—”

“Famous?”

“On his way there. At the moment, an extra—a speaking extra, mind, but words rather than sentences—from a soap opera. At some cost to the little dignity I have left, I removed a good deal of my clothing, presenting said panties in what I considered to be a provocative way.”

“Oh wow.”

“He sat on the edge of the bed holding my hand, looking, I think, at how withered it was. Either that or my nail varnish had hypnotised him. Within half an hour he was on the tube home. I sat there for a while crying—”

“Oh, Karen—”

“Ready for my overdose, Mr. DeMille. Then I went home and got into bed with the girls. Oh, Jamal, think of all the nights you and I wasted not making love.”

“There were many,” I said. “But I enjoyed every one of them with you.”

“You’ve got sweeter in your old age, Jamal. It’s nice to talk to you again. Why do you never call me now? Oh, forget it, I’m going to think positive today. Isn’t that what you psychologists tell us?”

“No.”

“What do you tell us, then?” After a while she said. “Henry’s coming down, isn’t he? Will you put in a word for me?”

“You fancy Henry now? You two can’t spend ten minutes together without falling out.”

“Darling, haven’t you known desperation? He’s a man, isn’t he? At least below the waist, and he’s free.”

“He just got occupied,” I said.

“Who grabbed the old fox?”

“My sister.”

“Isn’t he trying to put her in the documentary?”

“Yes.”

“Fucking artists with their spontaneous ideas, I hate them. Remind me to kill him when I see him.” She said, “Is your sister going to be around this weekend?”

“On Saturday.”

“They in love?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t think he’d last long on the open market. That’s my hope accounted for, then. You still single?”

“There’s nothing doing. These days there’s rarely a twitch.”

She turned and looked down at my crotch. “Yeah, right.”

I said, “The idea of all that seems very far away from me. Josephine was hard work. Sometimes I think I miss being in love, or being loved. A little passion now and again would be a thrill.”

“You’re too objective about love. You can see through it. I was thinking…you said this thing to me once. That you hated to fall in love, it was like being sucked down the plughole. You lost control, it was madness.”

“Did I say that?”

“Did you feel that about Josephine?”

“Sucked into some elemental state of need, overidealising the other, drifting in illusion and then one day waking up and wondering how you got there? Yes…But—”

I didn’t want to say it to her for fear of upsetting myself, but I had liked being in a family, liked having Rafi and Josephine around me, hearing their voices in the house, their shoes all over the hall.

I had met Josephine at a lecture I was giving, “How to Forget.” She was a psychology student but was bored by the “rats on drugs” approach. We had only been together for a few months when she fell pregnant. My father had died about eighteen months before, and I was keen to replace him with another father: myself. I was living in the flat where I saw patients, and beginning to make a decent living.

Josephine had her own place, which her mother had left her, and we bought a small house near what became my office. We hadn’t been together long when I lost her almost immediately to another man, my son. Or, rather, we lost each other to him, and neither of us bothered to come back. Of course, many relationships require a “third object” to work: a child, house, cat; some sort of shared project. He was that, but also the wedge. Josephine knew how to be a mother; being a woman was far more difficult. She waited a long time before trying to find out what that might mean.

When he was little, I kissed Rafi continuously, licked his stomach, stuck my tongue in his ear, tickled him, squeezed him until he gasped, laughing at his beard of saliva, his bib looking like an Elizabethan ruff. I loved the intimacy: the boy’s wet mouth, the smell of his hair, as I’d loved that of various women. “Toys,” he called his mother’s breasts. “What is thinking?” he’d ask. “Why do people have noses?”

Around the age of six, Rafi would wake up early, as I tended to, while Josephine slept. I’d sit at the table downstairs, making notes on my patients, or I’d prepare a paper or lecture I was giving. He brought me his best pens to borrow, to help make my writing “neater,” as he put it. He’d sit with me—indeed, often, on me; or on the table—listening to music on my CD player, through headphones bigger than his cheeks. He liked Handel, and when he got excited he said, “Daddy, I feel as if I’ve got people dancing in my tummy.”

We bought identical green coats from Gap, with fur-lined hoods, which we wore with sunglasses and trainers. Big Me and Pigmy, I’d call us, thinking we looked great. When he was smaller, I’d walk fast for miles across London, with him in his pushchair, stopping off at coffee shops to feed and change him. It’s easy to speak to women if you have a baby with you. It was like being the companion of a celebrity. Strangers greeted him; people constantly gave and bought him things; women fed him, talked to him. He disappeared into their midst like a rugby ball into a scrum, and returned reeking of numerous perfumes, his hair standing up and his eyes staring, his face covered in biscuit.

I liked playing Monopoly, and having paint, toys, videos and footballs over the floor; I liked eating fish-finger sandwiches, and the kid sneaking into our bed at night because he “didn’t have anyone to talk to,” drinking hot chocolate in his bottle, stopping only to say, “I want to kiss you lots of times.” I liked him holding on to my ear as he went to sleep; even liked the cat patting my face with his paw while I was napping. I liked reading to him in the bath, as he sat there talking to numerous plastic men attached by pegs to the washing line above his head.

Rafi was a desire machine, his favourite hobby being shopping. At school, when asked to name his favourite book, he chose the Argos catalogue, which he would pore over, ticking everything he wanted. Fortunately, like him, I enjoyed anything to do with Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, Power Rangers and the Lion King. I liked kicking a football around with him in the street, and hearing him play Beethoven’s Ninth on the harmonica. I liked arm wrestling, chasing and fighting with him, and holding him upside down by the ankles, sometimes over the toilet. We liked, among many other things, jokes, swearing and hitting women on the arse.

We would spend whole weekends hanging around, eating pizza, swimming at Acton baths, kicking a ball to one another, watching
Star Wars
or
Indiana Jones
movies; the sorts of days when, in the evening, if you asked yourself, did anything happen to me today?—and I did keep a diary of this sort at one time—the only answer could be no, nothing. Except we were enjoying one another’s company, and no one could ask here, where is the meaning?

When it ended, and I had to go—I still don’t know if it was the right thing to do—the loss seemed immeasurable; but all I could do was carry on living, as best as I could, seeing him every day, wondering what I’d missed of him. “Are you another boy’s daddy now?” he asked.

“I won’t pity you,” Karen said, as we sped to Mustaq’s. “Tempting though it is. The chances are that a man as successful and well connected as you will find someone—and someone young too. But I will not. Maybe we should get back together—just for a bit?” All I could do was laugh. “I’m sure you don’t tell your patients you were a pornmonger. I know your secrets, and I still love you a little, you know,” she said. “When we were together, I felt all the time that you were too smashed up over Ajita to notice me much.”

“I’m always all smashed up over someone.”

“But you cared for me some, didn’t you, although I was awful and stupid?”

She leant across and kissed me, brushing my crotch with the back of her hand.

“Oh God yes,” I said, sentimentally. “Jesus, I’ve always loved you more than a little bit, Karen.”

“I always felt that you were just passing the time. You know, you’re afraid of letting anyone near you. You want them, and then you disappear.”

She started to cry, which she did easily. She’d taken off her heels and was driving barefoot, her skirt riding up around her thighs. In her twenties she’d been sexy, but even then her weight went up and down and she called herself “the potato.” Whatever size she was, she knew I still found her attractive; it was the familiarity, but not only that.

“It’s not too late, Jamal. Can’t we do it properly?”

I kissed her again, pressing my tongue against hers. Beyond the cigarettes, alcohol and perfume, I could smell someone I knew and liked a lot.