Something to Tell You (5 page)

Josephine liked to be flirted with while pretending to ignore the sub-text. For devoted parents, there were opportunities for such fun. Many of our neighbours had strenuous shared lives organised around the school; lovers could meet at the gates twice a day. If the children were busy with one another, the parents were more so. As Josephine would come to learn, the school playground being an emotional minefield, with the Muslim parents keeping their kids away from white homes. In bed, in the days when we shared one, Josephine would give me the gossip. I was reminded of a book, Updike’s
Couples,
that Dad had passed on to me and which seemed, at the time, deliciously corrupt in its banal everyday betrayals. As then, it was the betrayals—and the secrets they engendered—which were the most delectable transgressions.

Of all the perversions, the strangest was celibacy, the desire to cancel all desire, to hate it. Not that you could abolish it once and for all. Desire, like the dead or an unpleasant meal, would keep returning—it was ultimately indigestible. Rafi’s mother had insisted on, indeed clung to, her own innocence. The badness was always only in me. It was, from her point of view, a rational division of labour. What she didn’t see was that the innocent have everything—integrity, respect, moral goodness—except pleasure. Pleasure: vortex and abyss—that which we desire and fear simultaneously. Pleasure implies dirtying your hands and mind, and being threatened; there is fear, disgust, self-loathing and moral failure. Pleasure was hard work; not everyone, perhaps not most people, could bear to find it.

The sex show was over. The boy threw his clothes down and went to bed. Through the open doors, I could watch him sleep. He was wearing headphones and the music was loud enough for me to experience a familiarity with 50 Cent I could have forfeited. When Rafi’s long lashes fluttered less and less, like a butterfly settling, I turned the music off.

I sat at my desk with part of my inheritance: Father’s favourite and now mine, a glass of almost frozen vodka and a carton of Häagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream. A slug and a slurp, and the cat sitting on my papers. I was all set. I would write with a fountain pen before typing everything into my new Apple G4. I could listen to music on it; when I was bored I would look at the photographs and pictures I was currently interested in. Unable to sleep and with bursts of obsessive energy—and this was a new thing with me—I had been thinking of the phrase Henry had quoted from Ibsen, “We sail with a corpse in the cargo.”

For some reason it made me recall the line which had occurred to me earlier and which I kept hearing in my head: “She was my first love, but I was not hers.”

Oh, Ajita, if you are still alive, where are you now? Do you ever think of me?

So, I must begin this story-within-a-story.

One day a door opened and a girl walked into the room.

It was the mid-1970s.

The first time I saw Ajita was in our college classroom, an airless, dry box in the depths of a new building on the Strand, down the street from Trafalgar Square. I was at university in London, reading philosophy and psychology. Ajita was pretty late for the discussion on St. Anselm’s arrow; the class that day was nearly over; anyhow, it had been going for two months. She must have had good reason for them to let her join the course at such a late stage.

It was as hot in those college classrooms as it was in any hospital, and Ajita’s face was flushed and uneasy as she came in half an hour after the class had started and put down her car keys, cigarettes, lighter and several glossy magazines, none of which had the word
philosophy
in the title.

There were about twelve students in the class, mostly hippies, down-at-heel, hardworking academic types—the sort my son would refer to as “geeks”—a Goth, and a couple of punks wearing safety pins and bondage trousers. The hip kids were turning punk; I’d been to school with some of them, and I’d still see them when I was out with my friend Valentin in the Water Rat or the Roebuck, and sometimes the Chelsea Potter in the King’s Road. But I found them dirty and dispirited, thuggish and always spitting. The music was important, but no one would want to listen to it.

I’d always been a neat kid; talentlessness, to which the punks subscribed as a principle, didn’t inspire me. I knew I was talented—at something or other—and my own look had become black suits and white shirts, which was both counter-hippy and too smooth to be punk, though it might have passed as New Wave. You wouldn’t catch William Burroughs in beads or safety pins.

Now the Indian girl was at one of those chairs with a swivelling flat piece of wood attached, for writing on. She was pulling off her hat, removing her scarf and trying to lay them on the flat surface. They slid off. I picked them up and put them back; they fell off again. Soon we were smiling at all this. Her coat came off next, followed by her jumper. But where would she put them, and what would be next?

This performance, which was embarrassing her, seemed to go on for a long time, with everyone watching. How much clothing, perfume, hair, jewellery and other frills could there be on the relatively small surface of a girl? A lot.

Suddenly philosophy and the search for “truth,” which until that moment I had adored, seemed a dingy thing. The grimacing professor in a wrecked pullover and corduroy trousers, old to us (my age now, or perhaps younger) and in a Valium stupor, as he insisted on informing us, seemed like a clown. We smirked at one another whenever he said, with emphasis, “Cunt!”, which he assured us was the correct pronunciation for Immanuel Kant. And to think, only the other day the university was at the centre of intellectual ferment, dissent and even revolution!

Truth was one thing, but beauty, beside me now, was clearly another. Though this girl’s arms were full, she wasn’t carrying any accessory as routine as a notebook or a pencil. I had to lend her some writing paper and my pen. It was the only pen I had on me. I pretended I had more in my bag. I’d have given her all the pens and pencils I had or, indeed, anything she asked for, including my body and soul, but that was to come later.

After the seminar, she was sitting alone in the refectory. I needed to retrieve that pen, but did I dare speak to her? I’ve always preferred listening. Tahir, my first analyst, would say: people speak because there are things they don’t want to hear; they listen because there are things they don’t want to say. Not that I thought I had a talent for listening then, or realised you could make a profession of it. I was just worse at talking. I spoke all the time, of course, but only to myself. This was safe.

For years I perplexed women with my listening habit. Several of them were tired out by it, talking until they were shattered by the strain of trying to find the words which would do the trick. I remember one girl screaming I had listened to her all afternoon before she ran for the door: “You’ve been ripping me off! I feel utterly stolen from!”

I didn’t realise, until my first analyst told me, that it was my words rather than my ears they wanted. But with Ajita, I could not even sit down next to her and say, “Can I listen to you?” I still find it difficult to sit down with strangers, unless I’m analysing them. People have such power; the force field of their bodies, and the wishes within them, can knock you all over the place.

Playing for time, and perhaps hoping she’d go away forever, I went to get some coffee. When I turned back, I saw that my closest friend, the handsome tough guy Valentin, had followed me in. He had gone to sit down right next to her with his coffee. God knows what the coffee tasted like in those days. It was probably instant, like the mashed potatoes and puddings we consumed: all you did was add water. There wouldn’t have been much else about, but we always had water. My father liked to point out, having experienced British power as a child in occupied India, the war had been over for thirty years, but Britain still seemed to be recovering from an almost fatal illness—loss of power, depression and direction-lessness. “The sick man of Europe,” our country was called. The end of empire was not even tragic now but squalid.

It was lucky for me, and unusual for Valentin, to be there that morning. He didn’t turn up much for lectures. They began too early for him, particularly if he’d been working in the casino the night before. He did come into college eventually, to meet girls and to see me, but mostly because the refectory food was cheap.

Valentin was Bulgarian. Often I asked him to describe his escape from Bulgaria, and he would tell me more details each time. I’d heard no other “real life” story as exciting. He’d done National Service and been on the Olympic cycling team; he could fence and box too. He’d conformed so well that he was able to become an air steward, one of the few jobs in the Eastern Bloc in which ordinary people were allowed to travel. He’d worked on the airline for a year, telling no one of his plans to escape. But someone had become suspicious. Intending to flee to America, his last trip was to be to London. As he and the rest of the crew were boarding the plane to Sofia, he turned and fled, running wildly through the airport until he found a policeman. Various refugee organisations helped him. A woman who worked for one of these organisations was married to a philosophy professor to whose house he went, which was how he turned up in my college class.

Valentin could never return home, could never see his parents, siblings or friends again. The trauma rendered him incapable of the success he could have had. In England, where he was supposed to be studying, he was just hanging around, mostly with me and our German pal, Wolf, all of us trying to get into interesting trouble.

It was within my abilities to sit with Valentin and Ajita; and even to hear him boasting, as he liked to, about how close his room was to the college, how it only took him five minutes to get to a lecture. In comparison, I had to take a bus, an overground train and a tube. It took an hour and a half, but courtesy of British Rail, I did get to read
Philosophical Investigations
and
The Interpretation of Dreams
. It was during this time that I began to read properly for the first time, and it was like finding a satisfying lover you’d never part from.

With Valentin’s assistance, Ajita and I had begun to talk. She was an Indian who, it turned out, didn’t live far from Miriam, Mum and me, in the suburbs. Apparently Ajita’s mother hadn’t approved of England, which she considered a “dirty place,” sexually obsessed, corrupt, drug-ridden, the families broken. Six months ago, she had packed her numerous trunks and gone to Bombay, my father’s original home, leaving her husband and two children to be looked after by an aunt, the father’s eldest sister. Ajita’s mother didn’t like living in the white suburbs without servants or friends. In Bombay she lived in her brother’s house. He owned hotels; there were movie stars all around; help was cheap.

Ajita said, “There it is like being on holiday all the time. But my father is a proud man. He could never live off others.” The mother had lovers, Ajita seemed to think, but would return, she implied, if circumstances were more to her liking. As a result, Ajita pitied her lonely father, who owned sweatshops somewhere in North London and was rarely at home.

After coffee, Ajita offered me a lift back to the suburbs. Although I wasn’t intending to go home, indeed I’d just arrived in London and was intending to spend the rest of the day with Valentin and Wolf, I would have gone anywhere with her. This girl had many virtues: money, a car—a gold-coloured Capri, in which she played the latest funk—a big house and a rich father. When Valentin asked “What does your boyfriend do?” she replied, “But I don’t have one, really.”

What more could anyone want?

“She’s yours,” Valentin whispered as I left.

“Thank you, my friend.”

He was generous like that. Or maybe it was because he had so many women buzzing around him, one more or less didn’t matter. He took them for granted. Or perhaps he was indifferent to most human exchange. He could sit for hours, just staring, smoking, hardly moving, without any of the anxious shifting about and intermittent desiring that I, for instance, was prone to.

This stable attitude, I imagined, would be an asset. The other night I was talking with a screenwriter friend who is working on a “tough guy” film, about why men like gangsters. Strong guys aren’t exercised by the subtleties; they’re not moved, or bothered by guilt. They’re narcissists, in the end, and as ruthless about their rights as children. To me they were as self-sufficient, complete and impermeable as someone reading a book forever.

That was what I wanted then. Why? Perhaps it was because as a kid, when Miriam and I fought, or when she tickled me—she was heavier, rougher and altogether meaner than me; she liked to punch or hit me with sticks, something, now I think of it, which Josephine liked to do—I felt I was the girl and she the male. As so many others have discovered in their own case, my particular body didn’t appear to quite coincide with my gender. As I was thin and slight with wide hips, I believed my form to be that of a small, weak, presexual girl. Mother called me “beautiful” rather than handsome. I suffered from extreme emotional states—screaming inside—which left me low, depleted, weeping on the bed. Often I dreamed I was Michelin Man, full of air rather than grandeur or gravity; one day I might float away, unanchored by male weight. What did “men” do? They were gangsters, making their way in the world with decision and desire. With Ajita now, didn’t I have that?

Ajita and I talked all the way through South London. The closer we came to my “manor,” as we called it then, the more anxious I became. I was delighted when she asked if I wanted to see her house.

“There it is,” she said a little later, turning off the engine.

If I always thought of Ajita’s house as being American, it was because it was in a new close and was the sort of thing you might see on
I Love Lucy.

The building was low and light and open, with large areas of glass. To the side there was a wide garage and, out front, a crew-cut lawn surrounded by a low picket fence. Inside, there were Indian carpets, wall hangings and tapestries, wooden elephants, bowls, latticed furniture. Otherwise there wasn’t much there. They might just as well have been renting it, complete with “ethnic” fittings, though they had, in fact, bought the place four years before, after leaving Uganda with few possessions.

I liked her house and wanted to be there not only because of her but because the houses in the suburbs I knew were old: the furniture was ancient, from before the war. It was heavy brown stuff, from which, as a child, I would scrape brown varnish with my fingernails. My maternal grandfather, who left his house to Mum, had owned a secondhand furniture shop, or junk shop as Miriam and I called it, from which we had filled our house. There were fireguards, clocks that ticked and chimed, ruched curtains, picture rails and pelmets, chamber pots and narrow beds, over which Mother had begun to overlay, after she met Dad, dozens of Eastern pictures, swirly cloth and lacquered objects.

As a child and young man, I was left often in the care of my grandfather, who wore, apart from a hat, which was conventional then, long white underwear, a tie, voluminous trousers held up by braces and huge boots, which he cut into with razor blades to give his corns “space.” He never tried to think of what I might be entertained by but just took me along with him. When he had the shops, I’d play there all day, jamming screwdrivers into clocks. Later, I got to spend a lot of lunchtimes sitting with him in the pub—his club and office—as he “studied form” in the newspaper, drank Guinness, smoked roll-ups and ate steak-and-kidney pie, usually at the same time.

For entertainment I would be handed the
Daily Express
or
The People
. My newspaper addiction has never diminished. But that wasn’t all: we would go to Epsom for the races, to Catford for the dogs and to Brighton by “charabanc” to see someone about a pigeon. On Saturdays we visited football grounds in the vicinity. The nearest was Crystal Palace, but Mill-wall—“The Den”—was the most feared. As we walked about the neighbourhood, Grandad pointed out bombsites where his former school friends had been killed, and bomb shelters where he’d hidden with Mum as a child.

Pubs, for me, particularly if they had a piano player, always had a Dickensian exaggeration: overdressed, perfumed landladies pinching your cheek and giving you crisps and lemonade; red-faced men in ties in the “private” bars, and always a frisson between Grandad and some waiting woman, a subtle acknowledgement of available pleasure that made me wonder when it might be my turn.

You might consider my later penchant for the low life an affectation, but most days I’ve popped into some pub or other, hoping to find the characters from my childhood, the original white working class of London.