Something to Tell You (37 page)

The room took up the whole of the floor and had sloping attic windows which seemed Parisian to me. Visible were a range of Soho rooftops, aerials and chimneys; nearby, a waiter leaned out of a window, smoking.

At the end of Ajita’s bed was a broad flat-screen television and a sound system playing an iPod. My ex-girlfriend was listening to some quiet girl funk, Lauryn Hill or some such, and dancing a little, good-humouredly, in her bare feet and dressing gown, with wet hair.

I asked, “Are you in bed already?”

“Just getting up. I eat late. You know both Mushy and I do.”

“Is he here?”

“Is it him you want to see? He’s gone back to America to try to find help for Alan, who is very ill.” I seemed to irritate her; perhaps she really hadn’t wanted to see me. She said, “Jamal, I’m sorry for being so flaky the last few days. I’ve been busy with lawyers.”

“How come?”

She hesitated. “I’ve been talking to the children every day, and to my husband. I kept saying I was going back, but each time I almost bought the ticket I thought, What for?

“Mark is furious and wants me to come home. So I’ve told him I have decided to divorce. He’s kind, he doesn’t deserve it. But I have brought up our children and done my duty. Now there are other things.”

“What does Mustaq think?”

“Why the hell do you have to ask that? Of course, he’s agitated. He was keen on the marriage. He keeps saying I have to be secure. But there are things I absolutely need to do here.”

“You’ve been in London a while.”

“Aren’t you taking your turn now to make me feel rotten?”

“Your absence reminds me of your mother’s absence when you and I started to go out. She was always not there, which was when your father first began to use you.” Unsurprisingly, she was furiously silent. I said, “But you have good things to do here—with your lover. You told me in Venice.”

“Exactly.”

“Are you going to marry him?”

She snorted. “It’s not a relationship. It’s an encounter—of some sort. He gives me…I can tell you this, can’t I? For some reason I’ve always trusted you. And how could you be shocked? He…he—” I was watching her lips; she almost said his name. “He adores me, ties me, worships me, hits me—but very nicely. And all the time we are talking about everything, about him, me, the past and the future, about our dreams and fantasies. He gets me, intuitively. Jamal, it’s on a level, religious and spiritual, that I’ve never experienced before.”

“We should celebrate.”

“You mean it? Yes, why not? That hadn’t occurred to me, party boy.”

She rang down; soon the housekeeper appeared with champagne and glasses. Then she brought in a selection of clothes. I helped Ajita dress for the evening, finishing the joint she’d left in the ashtray beside the bed.

I said, “I hope all this is for me. Give me a hug.”

She wore a short black dress, high heels and a black choker at her throat; she put her hair up. She held me and kissed my face.

“You missed your chance, baby, you know you did. I haven’t felt like this since I met you at college.” Then she said, “Darling sweetie, I almost forgot. Before we split tonight, will you watch something?”

“But what is it?”

She went to the TV with the DVD, opened it and dropped the disc into the player. “There you are,” she said. “Watch to the end.”

“Won’t you sit with me?”

“I’ll be back.”

When she left the room, I thought I might just walk out. But I settled down in the cushions, still annoyed that, although she’d invited me over, it was only to observe her preparing to go out with a man—whose name she couldn’t say—who wanted to ruin my life.

If the joint she’d given me was strong, the DVD was stronger, as she had known.

I watched a good deal of the programme—the past, suddenly tangible, with its jumble of familiar faces unspooling in front of my eyes, a dream I couldn’t crash out of. I became confused and then dizzy. If I saw any more, the world might break apart entirely.

I stood up and made it across the floor. Soon my head was over the toilet. I opened the windows and stuck my gasping mouth out into the roar of Soho.

I took a cool shower. Ajita returned as I was drying myself. She didn’t seem surprised by my condition, but fetched me a dressing gown and some aspirin.

“Okay? So you saw it, then?”

“More than enough of it,” I said.

“Hardcore?”

“Yes, very.”

“A revelation, even?” she said.

“Maybe.” I asked, “Who else has looked at it?”

“Mustaq. He watched it on his own,” she said. “Then he turned it off and went on one of his wild walks without saying anything, but flapping his arms, no doubt. Why should I give a flying fuck what he thinks?”

“Why do you say that?”

“He makes me angry, Jamal. He flies back to London for the weekend, sits me down and starts complaining about my life and what I do. He doesn’t want me to be independent. I have to go to him like a teenager, and ask for a flat and for money to start a business with a friend.”

“Which friend? The man?”

“Now you start! Why does it matter which fucking friend? For years I helped and advised Mustaq, and still he says to me, ‘Aren’t you actually going to do anything serious, Ajita? Are you going to be a spoiled little rich girl exploited by any friend?’”

“What did you say?”

“I slapped him hard across the face—boy, I enjoyed that!—and told him I was going to leave. While I was packing, he came into this room and threw my clothes out of my bag onto the floor, telling me I had to stay. Then he grabbed me and held me. I stamped on his foot. ‘What are you going to do,’ I screamed at him, ‘imprison me as Dad would?’

“He let me go, but he was furious. He’s got enough problems as it is. I agreed to stay, but one more word from him and I’m out of here.”

Outside, Ajita accompanied me to Dean Street, where the taxi she’d ordered would pick me up. She took my arm.

“Don’t you miss the ridiculous mesmerism of love?” she said, coming close to me and pulling up her skirt to give me a final look at her legs. “What do you think?” She was mocking me now. She knew I envied her; she was freer than me and more satisfied.

We embraced, and I watched her walk away, towards Wolf. In the car I told the driver to take me home. After five minutes I decided to go to the Cross Keys. I could have a drink and a long think there without being alone. One of the Somalis could drop me at my flat later.

I shoved at the familiar door and walked through the bar. My blonde, Slovakian Lucy was about to perform. She waved in my direction, the men turning to look at me. I watched her dance, watched the men watching her. At the end she came over and put her arms around me. Wolf had left a while ago. When she was done, we went upstairs to his room.

“I like see you,” she said. “I like when you come in.”

I lay down on the mattress and smoked, asking her to join me. She undressed, wearing nothing but a cross on a chain around her neck. Getting under a blanket, she kissed me on the mouth. “I’m not prostitute,” she said. “Just dancer. Next time I work with children, once I have money for English lesson.”

Semi-hard, I entered her and moved a little, shoving, it seemed to me, against a wall within me of indifference and deadness. She gave me enough encouragement, smiling and showing me her tongue.

In the end I pulled out and lay there with her, listening to her talk about her life in London, wondering whether this might be some sort of end for me. Had I seen through everything and now lacked passion, curiosity, interest? The fact we liked one another, and that she was kind, made it worse.

“Don’t you like me?” she said.

“But I do,” I said. “You are wonderful.”

I asked her about Communism, saying apologetically that many of my generation and older had more or less believed in it.

“But I am too young to remember anything like that. Only the lazy and the Jews liked it,” she said. “Now we have market, but still few people have money. We will stay in this country five years, or ten, until we can buy house there.”

We stroked one another; I began to relax, able, at last, to consider what I had seen earlier, and how Mustaq’s people had obtained the television documentary in which Ajita’s father had appeared, made in the mid-70s, just before the strike.

Tatty old buildings and old-fashioned cars on empty roads; workers with 70s layered and feathered hair, wearing wide-lapelled jackets and brown flares; everyone smoking, as people did then, on buses, trains, aeroplanes, even on television. A voice-over: the upper-class “Communist” explaining the exploitation—“As always it is the workers who bear the burden of others’ ambition.”

There he was, the old man, Ajita’s father, with his son’s mouth, and looking younger than me, with darker hair, and with a touching enthusiasm and belief in the opportunities and equality here. A man talking about his family and wanting to do well in England.

In the background of one of the shots inside the factory, I could see Ajita and Mustaq—not yet twenty—talking with an employee. At one moment the father turned to the camera and seemed to gaze through it innocently, into my eyes, those of his killer—as if he already knew I was waiting for him with a knife.

The mousetrap had slammed down on me: the whole picture had darkened in front of my eyes until I believed there was a fault with the TV. But the weakness had been in me, and I couldn’t take anymore.

Lucy and I were almost asleep when the Harridan barged into the room. She recognised me and moderated her tone.

“But this ain’t no knockin’ shop,” she said as we were hurried downstairs.

“No,” I said sleepily. “At least there you’d know the price.”

“Why, what has happened?” I asked on the telephone. “Is it serious?”

There had been a power surge, I was told by a patient who phoned to explain why she would be late. The Underground system had broken down; the buses had stopped anywhere. The city had come to a standstill. Outside, apparently, it was chaos.

Between patients I sat in front of the TV, waiting for news. The truth was slow to emerge, but we learned it later that day. Four explosives, hidden in plastic food containers in backpacks, had been set off by suicide bombers in central London, three on the tube and one on a bus in Tavistock Square. The number of dead and injured was yet to be counted.

That beautiful London square was where Ajita, Valentin and I had attended many philosophy lectures. We drank wine and ate sandwiches there, on the grass, discussing the idiosyncrasies of the lecturers. It was where Dickens wrote
Bleak House,
and Woolf
Three Guineas;
where Lenin stayed, and the Hogarth Press published James Strachey’s Freud translations in the basement of number 52. There is also a plaque to commemorate conscientious objectors in the First World War, as well as another for the victims of Hiroshima, along with a statue of Gandhi.

My patients referred to the events as “our 9/11.” The hospitals began to accept the legions of injured even as unspeakable infernos blazed beneath the city. That day and night we were haunted by TV images of sooty injured figures with bloodied faces, devastated in their blamelessness, being led through dark, blasted tunnels under our pavements and roads, while others screamed. Who were they? Did we know any of them?

Two days later I learned that the Mule Woman—who Henry’s son, Sam, still saw occasionally—had been killed in the King’s Cross bomb.

Henry was on the phone continually. I didn’t mention my little passion for the Mule Woman, but in my mind I went over the evening we’d spent together. Henry insisted we go together to “the Cross” to lay flowers. “Oh, England, England,” he moaned. I had never heard him use those words unironically. He was very gloomy and agitated about the deaths, and also about the attitude of Lisa.

“I can’t bear to hear what she has to say.”

“Like what?”

“‘Why would a young articulate kid, from a decent family, well-educated and intelligent, with everything in front of him, become a zealot destroying thousands of lives? I’m thinking of Tony Blair, of course.’” He went on: “It must be the first joke she has made. Otherwise, she is almost triumphalist over the bombing. Not only does she claim to have predicted it, not only does she see it as just retribution, but she seems to think Bush-Blair will learn his lesson at last. And if he doesn’t, there’ll be more bombs.

“But I am different, Jamal. For years when we were young and not so young we worshipped revolutionaries, anyone who had the courage to act authentically. We weren’t the only ones. Nietzsche, Sartre and Foucault—who idealised the Iranian revolution—were our exemplars. But there’s nothing glorious about any of it to me, now.

“For our convenience, wars are usually held far away. But remember the Falklands, and how foul this land was with jingoism—the pubs covered in flags, the landlords crowing? This is worse. Like you, I am bitterly disillusioned and confused, Jamal. Didn’t we grow up on radical Third World movements, from Africa and South America—and now the rebels, the oppressed, are killing us, from the far religious Right! Don’t you ever feel you don’t know what’s going on in the world?

“How can I stop thinking about the horror of those bomb-blasted trains, the ruined bodies, the cries and moans and screams, which segue, in my head at least, into the diabolical killing of civilians in Baghdad—severed heads, blood underfoot, children eviscerated, limbs blown into trees. Could only Goya grasp it? Why are we making this happen?”

He wanted to do something. Henry and Miriam were planning to visit the Mule Woman’s parents in the country, if Sam gave permission. “We’re going to weep with them,” Miriam informed me. “Will you join us?”

“I’m already weeping.”

In the week after the attacks Henry insisted I join him on long walks about the chaotic, almost apocalyptic capital, taking pictures and looking at others who were also frightened, dismayed, angry. Police cars and ambulances rushed about; the sound of the sirens was abysmal. All day and night police helicopters thrashed above the damaged metropolis.

During those demon days, it was difficult for me to work. Many tubes were closed and buses not running. Patients turned up late or not at all. It was tough and unpleasant to move about. Huge police in body armour—looking like pumped-up characters from video games—cradled machine guns at railway stations and outside the tubes.

I was aware of others’ eyes on me as I entered tube trains wearing a backpack. Opening it to take out my book was invariably entertaining. Dark-skinned people were searched at random; an innocent man was pursued through a tube station and shot—was it six, seven or eight times?—in the head at point-blank range, by our defenders. Everyone was frightened, the patients disturbed. If there was a bang outside, they jumped on the couch.

Not that I saw any signs of hatred, or even of antagonism, myself. Mosques were not torched, though they were protected by the police; Muslims were not attacked. Nor were there any flags, as there would have been in the US. Being bombed didn’t stimulate British patriotism. The city was neither united or disunited. Londoners were intelligently cynical and were quite aware—they always had been—that Blair’s deadly passion for Bush would cost them. They would wait for Blair to go—after many more deaths—and then they would sweep the front step.

Henry was incensed that Blair refused to accept that his own “massive acts of violence” had anything to do with the murderous response; another example, according to Henry, of Blair refusing to bear responsibility for what he had done. Henry called it “moral childishness.”

Bush-Blair’s efforts to prosecute a “virtual” war, in which no one on our side was killed, had proved impossible, and the Mule Woman, along with many others, had died. Henry had been wanting to forget about politics and get back to work, but during this period, politics wouldn’t forget about us. Everyone in our circle was speaking about difficult and abstract questions, arguing about religion, liberalism and integration.

Oddly, the person whose behaviour altered the most was Ajita.

Mustaq, who had returned to London, had had his secretary call me, saying he’d be grateful if I could come to visit him in Soho. He sent a car, which dropped me off in Dean Street, where he was waiting, which made me think he hadn’t told Ajita we were meeting. He wanted to walk around Soho.

He had donned a baseball cap and dark glasses for the stroll there, saying how ironic it was that when young he’d wanted to be recognised and praised as a star, whereas having become older, he yearned for his original anonymity, having realised that fame—a handful of snow—didn’t bring you understanding from others but somehow rendered you abstract, even to yourself. Soon, he said, newspapers would be running “Whatever happened to George?” pieces, though even those would stop eventually.

“Why is the British press so vile? I hate the version of me they present. But I wouldn’t give the money back, of course,” he added. “Though it was easy to make. I could hardly believe it when the dosh started dropping into my account—so much of it, and so often! But I should have been a doctor.”

“Are you sick?”

“Not me, no.” Mustaq told me, as he’d had to tell a lot of people, that he hadn’t been in London much because Alan had been ill. Like many ex-junkies, Alan had hepatitis C and had been refused a liver transplant since his cancer had spread. “Alan will die in the next year. I have to accompany him on this journey. That is my work. But I do envy you your work.”

“What about it do you envy?”

“Its seriousness. Fatuous, limitless narcissism can’t be what we homosexuals fought for. Can’t we think about anything else but our hair?”

“You sound like your father.”

“He was a serious man.”

I said, “So are you, and you are engaged in a great love. We heterosexuals are more frivolous—all we want is sex. You gays get married for life! The next step, of course, will be for a man legally to take three wives.”

“And a woman three husbands?”

“Equality is everything.” Then I said, “What did you think of the documentary about the factory?”

“I missed him, my father, all over again. Whoever removed him did me a considerable disservice. And I kept thinking how much like him I was.” He went on, “Ajita’s been living here, as you know. I don’t like it—this city is far too dangerous.”

“New York is safer?”

“From one point of view, yes. A man has started to visit her. He comes about four times a week, late at night, at five in the morning sometimes. Of course the house and the street are covered by cameras. You know this guy?”

“Late middle-aged, stocky, short hair, determined-looking?” When he nodded, I said, “He was a friend of ours, from the time we were at university.”

“Is he reliable?”

“He lives and works in a bar in West London. He’s hardworking and not a drunk or even a cokey. She likes him, but I wouldn’t have thought he’s trying to exploit her.”

“Are you sure? She tells me she wants to buy a little flat in London. She asked for money—about a million, if you can believe it! She wants to start an antiques business too, with a friend of hers, someone who knows how to do such things—she claims. Jamal, she’s coming alive, at last, and how can I refuse her?”

He went on, “God knows we’re all strange, and it’s not for me to judge or say anything about the kind of sex she likes. Passion is the only interesting thing, of course. I did think, though, that the two of you might make something together.”

“Sorry about that,” I said. “My wife and I parted. I’m not ready to see anyone else yet.”

“When we went back to India after Dad died, and she was mourning him, she had no one but me to take care of her. Blasted Mother was preoccupied with her boyfriend.

“Ajita went to the market, helped in the kitchen. She had groovy Bombay girlfriends called Boomi and Mooni. But she spent a lot of time alone, and then she started to disappear in the car. It was rumoured she was going with a lot of people. The aunties wanted her to marry. After the first few candidates, she said to me, ‘The only person I ever wanted to marry was Jamal.’

“The aunties were closing in. She was thinking of marrying one of those eligible turkeys in dire ties. She didn’t want to go back to London, though she talked about you a lot.”

“She did?”

“She’d say, ‘I want to know what he’s doing at this exact moment!’ She wondered whether you had a lot of girlfriends or just one. But so much time had passed, she couldn’t come back and reclaim you.

“I took her to America and got her a job in the fashion business. She met Mark, who she now says she wants to divorce. He found her a handful, but he stuck by her, and in my view she should be grateful. The guy’s in pieces and I’ve begged her, but she refuses to comfort him.” He said, “I found…I saw recently—I looked in her bag—I wish I hadn’t, I regret it—that she is reading books about abuse.”

“A growing genre.”

“I’ve been wondering—do you think anything like that happened to her?”

“It’s not impossible.”

He said, “I’ll take that to be a yes. How much did you know about it? Did you know then—or later?” I didn’t reply. “The poor girl. And I did nothing. We both stood by and did nothing, eh?

“I have to reinterpret my whole family history in the light of this. But, Jamal, it must have been hard on you.” He was staring at me. “Now I have to go to America to plan a tour. I want to make music again and play live. I will set up a music foundation somewhere in the Third World. Ajita can help me. I am nervous about leaving her alone in London with this guy.”

“On the other hand, you don’t want to turn into a Muslim father.”

“You think I am?”

“When you said you resembled your father, I thought you meant that you both have bullying natures.”

He went on, sharply, “You see someone you love making a mistake and you don’t warn them?”

I said, “Who’s to say she’s making a mistake?”

He embraced me and said, “Sorry, you’re right. I’m too used to people doing what I say.”

We parted, Mustaq and I, as we always did, with some puzzlement and dissatisfaction, as if neither of us was quite sure we were friends.