Recently I’d bought Rafi a new bike; at weekends I’d walk energetically to Barnes or Putney, and he’d cycle along with me. Or he’d persuade me to take him to a shopping mall—these were, strangely, his favourite places—or to the ice rink at Queensway, where he’d play killing and shooting games in the arcade; sometimes we’d spin across the grey ice, screaming. I liked to watch the teenagers gossiping or playing pool, the girls dressed up, the boys watching them. I preferred my son’s company to that of anyone else, but together, recently, we both felt some loneliness or absence.
“Hey, boys!” said Miriam as we came in, calling for some kid to bring us food. “Kiss me, Jamal, little brother.” She was leaning back with her arms held out. “No one kisses me now.”
“For fear of impalement?”
I was drawn to my sister’s face, but kissing it was perilous. You had to take care to mind the numerous rings and studs which pierced her eyebrows, nose, lips and chin. Parts of her face resembled a curtain rail. “Avoid magnets” was the only cosmetic advice I felt was applicable. I hated to think of her having to get on a plane, the airport alarms going berserk—not that piercings were likely to be a characteristic of terrorists.
In a corner of the kitchen, Bushy the driver was packing cigarettes into a suitcase. All over the house there were black sacks of contraband, like a giant’s droppings. Before he’d become a cabbie, Bushy had been a burglar. He’d considered himself a “mate” of mine ever since I told him that, as a young man, I myself had been torn between burglary and academia as careers. I had, in fact, even taken part in a burglary, about which I still felt ashamed.
Occasionally I ran into Bushy in the Cross Keys, a rough pub not far away where I used to drink, particularly in the long, bad days before and after the separation from Josephine, when she was still lying about her affair and destroying my dream of her, though I told her repeatedly I was aware of what was going on. None of my friends could see the pub’s charms, though they all found Josephine to be kind and sympathetic, a woman much exercised by my evasiveness and moods. Oddly, after the split from Josephine, it took me weeks to like music again, and I only listened to the records played in the Cross Keys.
“What’s up, doc?” Bushy said. He looked about before whispering, “How about some Viagra? A man without Viagra inside him is no good to anyone.”
“You know I can’t prescribe, Bushy. Not that a man like you would need any help.”
“I meant,” he said, “maybe you’d fancy obtaining a bunch? I got right here a brand-new installment of the naughty blue ones. This stuff will keep your pencil sharp for days—guaranteed, honest, straight-up pukka.”
“What’s the use of a pencil without nothing to write on? You’d be wasting it on him,” called Miriam, who heard a remarkable amount for someone who liked to claim to be deaf.
“Is that right?” said Bushy, looking me over with some surprise.
“Absolutely,” I said.
“Christ,” he said. “What is the world coming to when even a qualified doctor can’t dip his wick?”
Miriam had taken her place at the long kitchen table. Here she spent much of the day and night, in a sturdy, worn wooden chair from where she could reach her numerous pills, as well as her vitamins, cigarettes and dope. Without looking, she could locate her three mobile phones, a cup of tea, her address book, her tarot cards, a large box bursting with bling, several cats and dogs, as well as numerous packets of half-eaten biscuits, a dope cake, the TV changer, a calculator, a computer and a slipper she could throw—for the dogs—or use to whack either them or a kid with, if they had the misfortune to pass when she was “going off.”
Her laptop was always on, though she mostly used it at night. The unbounded anarchy of the Internet was ideal for crazies like her. She could create numerous different identities of various genders. Photographs of disembodied genitalia were exchanged with strangers after floating in cyberspace. “But whose balls are they?” I enquired. “They look a little peculiar with the man’s face scratched out.”
“Who cares? Those teabags are going to belong to some male, aren’t they?”
I hadn’t often seen her sitting there alone. One of her children might be waiting for an opportunity to speak, or there’d be at least one neighbour, usually with a baby, to whom Miriam would be giving advice, usually of a medical, legal, religious or clairvoyant nature. The table served as a kind of waiting room.
Bushy Jenkins, the minicab driver and her right-hand man, was of indeterminate age but could only be younger than he looked—and he looked like the almost dead Dylan, not Bob, but Dylan Thomas: ruddy, cherubic, with parts of his skin the texture and colour of tobacco leaf.
I had never seen Bushy in anything but a grey suit, and I had no reason to believe he’d ever removed it to be cleaned. Perhaps he just wiped it down sometimes, as people do a kitchen surface. Bushy spent a lot of time at Miriam’s, where he ate, drank, took an interest in the children, the animals and the piranhas, and sometimes lay down on the floor to sleep, when Miriam herself “dropped off” in the chair.
Bushy had, in fact, nowhere to live. He kept many of his possessions in his car; he stayed at Miriam’s but had never had a room or bed there. I am interested in how people prepare for their dream life, for their going to bed, and how seriously they take it, lying down to make a dream. But Bushy slept on the kitchen floor, with the cats. I’d seen him, with a sack stuffed under his head, snoring.
Miriam had often claimed that Bushy was a guitar player of some originality, better and more unusual than anyone she’d heard live. However, Bushy told me—when I suggested he might relieve our sorrow with a tune—that since quitting the booze he never touched the instrument. He couldn’t play sober. I said that often people couldn’t do anything well if they weren’t lost enough, if they couldn’t feel abandoned. “I’ve bin lost,” he said. “Oh yes. And ’bandoned.”
“Your talent will return, then,” I said.
“I dunno, I dunno,” he replied. “You really think so?”
A good deal of Bushy’s chauffeuring was on behalf of Miriam and her crew. He drove Miriam—usually accompanied by a caravan of neighbours, children and animals—to her fortune-teller, physiotherapist, aura reader, cigarette smuggler, veterinary surgeon, ten-pin bowling alley or tattooist. (None of her five children were allowed tattoos. I knew, though, from a passing interest in pornography—once, briefly, my profession—that Scarlett, the eldest girl, now pregnant, had a flying fish on her inner thigh.) Miriam herself, once she’d stopped cutting herself, had become a veritable illustration or mural, particularly as her size increased. “More pictures than the Tate,” I’d say to her after she tried to show me another fish or flag down her back.
Bushy would also deliver Miriam to what she called her “agonies,” the daytime TV shows she believed herself to be famous for appearing on. When it came to agony, she had a voluminous, flexible portfolio of complaints to exhibit. She could appear on any programme involving weight problems, drug addiction, domestic abuse, tattooing, teenagers, rape, rage, race or lesbianism—or any combination of the aforementioned.
If you wanted, and often if you didn’t, she’d show you videos of the programmes. There was no way you could sneer at any of it. If I wanted to talk about the original confessionalists—those I read as a young man, such as St. Augustine, Rousseau, De Quincey, Edmund Gosse—she would refer to her “agonies” as contemporary therapy for the nation. These presenters did what I did, except it was public, for the benefit of all, not snobby, and certainly more amusing.
Most recently, “with all this war going on,” Miriam had taken up with a wise wolf. There was a sanctuary Bushy drove her to, where she sat with an old wolf, and sometimes his relatives. These animals didn’t commune with just anyone, she believed. You had to have “the spirit.” There was no doubt that she did, of all people, have the spirit.
I say that I don’t know how Bushy made a living out of cab driving, but I suppose Miriam must have paid
him a percentage of her earnings. If anyone asked him, in the English manner, what he did, he would reply, “Nuffin’ without being paid.”
Miriam and I knew well enough that Bushy had something of our grandfather’s “ingenuity”; perhaps that’s why we liked him. But she had it too: certainly Miriam usually had some money moving in and out. Bushy was a trusted assistant in her numerous small-time “trades”: smuggled TVs, computers, iPods, phones, cigarettes, porno, alcohol and dope, as well as the leather jackets and DVDs she obtained and sold, via him and the older children, around the neighbourhood and, mostly, in the Cross Keys.
Not long ago she bought two hundred pairs of stolen Levi’s from a Polish builder. Having realised they were all size 46 waist, we had to spend a weekend ripping out the labels so she could sell them as various sizes, knowing that people at a car-boot sale wouldn’t want to try them on, being dazzled, we predicted, by the low price. She’d also obtained a consignment of stolen Turgeniev vodka, for which the price was 5,000 pounds. I helped her out with a loan, and soon the local pubs and clubs were awash with the lousy stuff. People might be bleeding from the stomach, but we had made, as Miriam put it, “a good honest profit.”
Miriam was a more capable criminal than my former pals and accomplices Wolfgang or Valentin, so much so that I liked to call her an “entrepreneur,” at which she scoffed. However, it was true that she had spent years building up her “business.” She knew when to sell, and who desired what. Her success had required cunning, tenacity and knowledge of others, and she kept herself, her family and several neighbours just about alive by it, quite a feat. She and the law, therefore, were not on good, or even respectful, terms. The law was naked Power, to be avoided and ignored. She liked to say she’d never appeared on any government computer, as though this liberated her.
Despite her generous description of me as a “doctor of the soul,” I wasn’t so respectable that, after leaving Josephine and returning to live in the two floors of the flat I used as a consulting room, the cramped, damp cellar was not already full of Bushy-delivered plastic bags containing “hot” goods Miriam was afraid to keep in her house, as well as rolls of Bubble Wrap, for which she had no room and hadn’t been able to secure a buyer. I was, however, glad to be keeping my transgressions alive, even in such a lowly capacity. I would, when I got round to it, use the Bubble Wrap to keep Rafi’s old shoes and football boots from getting damp, mementos of his fading childhood.
As a young man myself, studying movie and pop stars, I strove to make myself less nerdy, more hip. But I had always been the quiet, good, bookish one. There wasn’t room for two show-offs in our household, and I believed that, as long as I kept still, didn’t move, there would be less trouble around me. Father hadn’t protected me. He’d lived with his English wife, our mother, and us—his two half-and-half kids—for only a short time, eventually returning to the subcontinent where he’d been born, settling down in Karachi, Pakistan, which he called “the new country.” There, briefly, he found a new wife, though much of the time he was travelling as a journalist in China, America or Mexico.
Mother and Miriam were as furiously involved with each other as any married couple. Having little choice, I had always listened to Miriam, though I had learned that when I did wish to speak, I should just kick off, unintimidated and loud. As a result, Miriam and I still talk simultaneously, as though Mother, who had, after all, two ears, was still attempting to listen to us. Luckily, Mother, who was not only alive but very well, now had better things to do than pay us any attention.
Even as a teenager, usually pregnant and tripping—Janis Joplin was her heroine—Miriam had never been sullen. She believed our overheated blood made us talkative, restless and liable to fling things at people’s heads. Mother had been red-haired and, at one time, bohemian. So there we were as kids, this oddball Muslim-Christian mix, and single-parented too—which was unusual then—living in a straight white neighbourhood.
Now, sighing contentedly, I sat down at my sister’s table. One of the kids brought me dhal, rice and beer. “Uncle,” they called me, respectfully. I opened the paper, in the hope of reading about others’ sexual lives—politicians’ in particular. I had considered taking Rafi to the cinema or to a restaurant this evening, but this was where I liked to be, the only family home I had now.
Bushy sometimes ate with me. “I’m going to fuckin’ ’ave that!” he’d cry, assailing a pork pie like a half-starved goblin who’d just emerged from underground.
But now he was at the back door with his sack, saying, “Hey, Jamal, I had this weird dream about a guitar, a dog and a trampoline. And—”
Miriam interrupted. “Leave off. The doctor don’t do off-the-peg dreams—without being paid.”
“What’s the whack then, to have a dream read? Or d’you reckon it’ll be cheaper to lay off the cheese?”
“It’s a good question,” I said.
“It ain’t a long dream.” It had not occurred to me to charge per dream, or even for its duration. Perhaps, for a satisfying interpretation, I’d be rewarded with a tip. He said, “Or do yer only do posh people?”
“Bushy, if you want, I will hear one of your dreams when I have time.”
“Thank you, boss, I’d be grateful. I better get some sleep, then.”
“Off you trot now, Bushy,” Miriam said.
If I was surprised by her defence of me, it was because in certain moods Miriam found my work not so much risible as ridiculous. (She had said to me that the only other man of letters she knew was the postman.) She considered my “nutters” to be suckers, paying to hear me nod or say “So?”
If that weren’t bad enough, it was exclusively “egotists” and the morally weak who would part with large amounts of money in order to talk, to be heard, by only me. Nevertheless, it had been Miriam who encouraged me to charge my wealthy patients more, in order that I could see others for smaller fees. I might subvert someone’s deepest beliefs, but I didn’t mess with the market. Most people find it unbearable that money means so much to them; they don’t want what they want.
When Miriam herself decided to see an “adviser,” it was hard facts she was after: whether, for instance, a particular crystal healer would tell her if it would rain on Sunday when she was having a car-boot sale, or whether there was “hope”—in other words, would she get a good price for the Bubble Wrap and the new line of wraparound sunglasses she was hawking.
In the contemporary Freudian style, I liked to be modest. I would claim neither to predict nor even to “cure.” Sometimes, brashly, I might use the word modify or, more pompously, speak of “enlarging the patient’s capacity for pleasure by reducing inhibition.” Mostly, I believed in the efficacy of conversation—all Freud demanded of his patients was wilder words; they didn’t have to live differently—as a way to expose hidden conflicts.
Nevertheless, I was told by Bushy, as though it were a secret, that Miriam “looked up” to me. This might have been because her neighbours had started to come to me with child-care problems, eczemas, addictions, depressions, phobias. The working class were always the worst served in terms of mental health. But I was moved: at last I could impress her.
Miriam had been a terrible child, tantrummy, screaming and absolute. A girl who claimed to be neglected but who was at the centre of the house, shoving me aside, often physically. Yet she and I had once liked each other. This was when we were children, conspiring together in the bedroom we shared until she was ten. Mother had moved downstairs, into a box room, “the coffin,” we called it. Miriam and I would play tricks on the neighbours, go scrumping for apples and roam around the fields together, looking for trouble. Our fights had always been apocalyptic, though, and she would tear wildly at my face. I bore the ruts and tears even as a teenager, which was when I started to hate her, when everything she did was too grown-up for me to participate in.
Now, in Miriam’s house, I seemed to serve as some sort of symbolic authority. Thankfully it was a formal role, like some presiden
ts, and mainly involved me sitting down; at her place the world was my sofa. Until Henry, Miriam had only engaged with violent, stupid or addicted men. But here there were few actual men around, and none as bookwormy or word aware as me. Where were they? In the pub? In prison? Heaven only knows how the neighbourhood women and girls got to be perpetually pregnant. In creating a society of mothers and babies, it was as though the women believed that, if they got rid of the men entirely, they would no longer need them, they would forget about them, and about sex and the confusion which accompanied it.
There were many loose adolescent boys around, in white trainers and heavily gelled, shining, thorny hair, wearing, with their acne, chains they’d obtained, no doubt, from Miriam, both of whose arms, from wrist to elbow, were covered in metal bangles. If she continued with the metal, she might as well wear a suit of armour.
At times her kitchen was like a waiting room, as sullen boys, secure in gangs but lacking good-bad authorities, waited to see me, a part-time, suburban Godfather. They’d shuffle their feet, their eyes scatting about, barely able to speak. “Sir, if it’s okay, can I tell yer, this girl’s pregnant…” “Mister, I done this bad thing…”
Miriam said to me, “I’ve been speaking to Dad.”
“How is he?”
“He needs some human warmth.”
“Heaven’s a lonely place, eh?”
“It can be, you know. People have the wrong idea about it.”
Having failed to reach him in this world, Miriam thought she might have more luck contacting Dad in the “other” dimension. We had both parted from him in absurd and awful circumstances; and she still pursued his forgiveness and understanding.
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