My best friend, Valentin, was Bulgarian and his other best mate, Wolf, was German. Neither of them resembled the average student; they weren’t overgrown public school boys. Wolf was ten years older than me, and Valentin at least five. My father had numerous older brothers, who I idealised. I figured Dad always had someone to look after him, and that’s what I wanted for myself.
Wolf, who was neither employed nor a student, was renting a room in the same house as Valentin. That’s how they had met, and how I got to know him. Wolf wore a Bogart raincoat, black brogues and black leather gloves. The only time he seemed to take off his gloves was when he played tennis on the council courts on Brook Green, not far from where I live now, and where I take Rafi for his tennis lessons with a lithe South African.
Valentin and I would sit on benches outside the pub opposite and laugh as Wolf trounced someone. Wolf didn’t find himself, or the rest of the world, absurd and risible, as Valentin and I did. It would have been too much had we all been like that.
We were amused by the fact that Wolf carried a smart, smooth leather briefcase, which he opened, with a key, against his chest so no one could see in. What did he keep in there? Guns, money, drugs, knives, paperclips? Having half-opened it, he then glanced about suspiciously, to ensure no one was watching, which they were, of course, now that he had engaged their curiosity.
Wolf and Valentin both had rooms in a dank boardinghouse on Gwendwr Road, off North End Road in West London, owned by an old widow. Valentin, who read Kierkegaard and Simone Weil for what he described as “pleasure,” liked to say, winking towards the widow, “Raskolnikov would have felt at home here.”
“Everyone feels at home here,” she’d reply as we laughed.
We’d sit around the kitchen table to debate philosophy, talk about sport, drink beer and smoke weed. There was curling lino and the smell of gas and cat piss. There was an iron stove and oilcloths on the spavined tables. The armchairs were greasy, the sofas seemingly bottomless. The toilets didn’t always flush, the windows didn’t close and it was usually cold; as the oil heaters smelled but didn’t heat, we got used to wearing our coats indoors.
A favourite conversation with Valentin concerned moral absolutes and ideas he’d found in Balzac, Nietzsche, Turgenev and Dostoevsky about nihilism and murder, and how or when it might be legitimate to rid the world of the weak, stupid or evil in order that others might flourish. Who had the right to kill? It was, after all, only the most perversely pacifistic who could not accept killing in any circumstances. To supplement this speculation, Valentin and Wolf watched crime or Sylvester Stallone movies on TV; they’d never miss anything with Steve McQueen in it. “Career guidance,” I called them. Ajita would lie around with us, before running away squealing, “Too many electric chairs!”
“That’s where he’s going to be sitting,” I’d murmur to Valentin, nodding at Wolf, Valentin looking sharp in his dark suit, bow tie and shiny shoes, ready to go to the casino where he worked at night. That must have been where I got my black-suit style from, now I think about it. Val was Eastern European, educated to be a Commie; he had good manners and was worldly, way beyond Western hippy frippery.
Wolf was an adventurer, and his stories—of spanking air hostesses and waitresses, and of fucking Playboy bunnies—never failed to pick me up. I admired his boys’-own style: smuggling diamonds out of South Africa up his arse; seeing Idi Amin and Kim Philby—together—in Tripoli, before being arrested, suspected of being American. Running drugs into Mexico, and being poisoned by a dirty needle when visiting a doctor; discussing the quality of brothels in Ipanema, Brazil. He was a man often suspected of not being a criminal but, worse, a cop!
Like a lot of gangsters, he had a smear—more than that, a large patch—of psychosis. He wasn’t neurotic like me, or most people I knew, but supernormal, rational, intense, convincing, great at lying. He’d be up early in the morning making breakfast for everyone. Or we’d find him doing press-ups and lifting weights. Extra-organised: he loved making plans and getting everyone involved.
In contrast, Valentin liked to be amused. He was attractive; you’d say he was elegant or chic, particularly if he was wearing a dark polo shirt and black jacket. But he was Kierkegaard dark; being so wounded, he lacked Wolf’s endearing self-belief, boastfulness and earnestness.
How I loved being with the unassailable men. Me, the eager little kid, they would patronise as I tried to please them with jokes, tough talk and a swaggering walk. Often Wolf and Valentin spoke in French or German, but so what? I was used to being surrounded by people whose language I didn’t understand.
When Father was in London—he visited at least twice a year and stayed some weeks—it was only occasionally that he would see Miriam and me alone. His many male friends, his “chumchas,” speaking Urdu and Punjabi, in suits or salwar kameez, drinking and telling political jokes, were always with him, in the service flats near Marble Arch or Bayswater which Dad rented.
Sometimes he would take just us out to lunch, and talk politics. He was left-wing, probably a Communist, an anti-imperialist—naturally—and also a supporter of Mao, the Vietcong and students. In India, as a child, Father explained, being the son of a rich landowner, he had felt as alienated from the Indian masses in the villages as he did in any English village. But, having been bullied by his father, an army colonel, he’d always felt some identification with those who were called, in those days, the “downtrodden.”
On the evenings of these visits, when Miriam and I would be thinking of returning to the suburbs on the train (or at least I would; she’d often go to parties in London, staying in the city for a couple of days), Dad’s girlfriends, amazing beauties with brains, would turn up.
I was happy to see Father, whether he was alone or not, but Miriam, either on speed or trancs or both, could feel very disappointed. She had imagined the two of them sitting together for hours, exchanging their secrets and their despair. Her father would want to know her; how could he not be fascinated? His kind words would stop her “acting out.” Not only had he not protected her from racism, it was he who had flung her into it, according to her.
So she waited for Dad to speak, to tell her how proud he was of her. But he was incapable of this kind of relationship with a girl. After leaving him, we’d drift down the King’s Road together, and I would ask her questions I already knew the answers to. “What did Dad say?” “Nothing.” “Really?” “Absolutely nothing.” “Did you tell him you were pregnant?” “Nope.” “Did he ask what you were doing?” “Yes.” “What did you say?” “Nothing much.”
My parents met when Dad was at the LSE, studying international relations. A friend of Mum’s, Billie, had taken her to a dance there, thinking Mum would “get along” better with an intellectual than she did with the local boys. They all went for a meal at the India Club in the Strand. Mum said she’d never met anyone who could talk like Dad, who could so enthrall you with his stories.
She didn’t talk often about him, but if you poked her hard enough at the right time, she might suddenly burst out with something like “Oh, Jamal, you’re so much like him.” “In what way?” “Oh, you know. Dismissive. A man capable of jaw-dropping rudeness and imperious demands. A man used to having servants, or turning women into them. A man who could make you feel stupid and dull.” On other occasions she’d say, “You’ll never know what a fine man your father was when young and sober. Good-looking and intelligent, he had that more-than-witty thing. What do they call it? Class. He had that: he had glamour.” Looking at me, she said, “You don’t entirely lack his arrogance, as I’m sure people will tell you in the future. But unlike you, he absolutely knew he had it. And you know what, he didn’t give a damn!
“I was dazzled,” she said, making me wonder whether she still loved him. She added this wonderful thing, “He was a like a light shining in your eyes. Heaven knows why he was interested in me. I was a suburban girl and always felt sort of low-wattage in front of him. When he wasn’t kissing me, he’d ta
ke me to restaurants to meet his brothers and friends. I preferred Pakistanis to English people. I liked their food and their good manners. I was never one of those feminists, I couldn’t afford to be, but I took exception when they expected me to cook and wash up, and stay in the kitchen. But my parents never said a bad word about your dad. I’d told them he was an Indian prince.”
While Dad was studying in London, his eight brothers removed the rest of the family from India to Pakistan, imagining the new country—brutally sliced from the old one like an afterthought, as the British vandal fled, taking a last swipe—would be a new beginning. During this time, although Dad was living in the London suburbs with the family he had made, he began to feel he had no home, as well as no vocation.
As Mum said, “The suburbs weren’t to be his place. We were living in my parents’ house; we’d got engaged; we were married; we made babies. But he was still in transit. What was he doing? Sitting in the pub. Playing cricket out in Kent, wherever he could get a game.
“He would never stop talking to me about politics, sport, his family, while I was feeding you both. In the end I’d say to him ‘This is wasted on me, write it down! Put it in a column!’ He did; he began to write for papers in India and Pakistan. He realised he had to be there, that he wanted to be involved. He was ready to work. He wanted to participate.”
So he went back to the subcontinent. There was no official parting but Mum suspected “something had upset him.”
At home, sitting in front of the TV eating Vesta curries, the closest we came to the subcontinent, we kept him with us by saying things like “Dad wouldn’t like you doing that” or “Dad would laugh at that.” He became a made-up father, a collage assembled from bits of the real one. Each of us had our own notion or fantasy of him, while he stood in the shadows, like Orson Welles in The Third Man, always about to step into our lives—we hoped. If Mother referred to him as “that man” or “your damned father,” this at least kept him in the network. But he could be used for unpleasant purposes.
One time, irate with Mother, Miriam said to her, “You say Dad was an alcoholic and could be badly behaved, insulting and cutting, but he’s had a successful life. Where did taking care ever get anyone?” “I wouldn’t call him successful,” Mum replied. “Deserting your family isn’t successful.” Then Miriam said, “Dad had to leave you.” “What do you mean?” “Because you’re so nasty, stupid and fascistic!”—which made Mother put her hands around Miriam’s throat. When they fought physically, I would run out of the house and sit in the shed in the park, smoking, dreaming of the future and moaning to myself, “There must be some way out of here…”
I had always been unsure of what job I’d get. Dad rarely gave us instructions or prohibitions. You could say he refused to give Miriam his ideas of how he wanted her to be. He gave me more, often pulling me to him and kissing my cheeks, ruffling my hair, physically demonstrating his adoration and telling me I worried too much about everything. I could persuade him to buy me clothes and books; I knew how to get round him. It was passionate and always tender, our love. I guess Miriam had our mother, and sometimes I had Father, but I did feel guilty that he seemed to like me more.
There was another thing he gave me, for which I never thanked him. One time I went alone to Dad’s hotel and, waiting for the lift at his floor, I saw a woman, small and plainly dressed, as if for an interview, in her mid-thirties—not one of the amazing ones. Dad’s door hadn’t yet shut, and pushing into the room, I saw he was asleep or passed out. The smell of her perfume remained.
I rushed downstairs and into the street, calling her. She hesitated before stopping. I thought she might flee, but although surprised by me, she didn’t. Nervous and disappointed, chipped and gin-soaked, like a Jean Rhys heroine in worn-out shoes, she joined me for a drink in the pub across the road, where I asked her one question and then another, until I had her story, told in a low, croaky voice.
When the conversation ran down, I had the cheek to put an adolescent’s direct enquiry: How much did she charge? She laughed and offered me a price. Naturally I had nothing like that kind of money on me, nor did I have anywhere to take her. I couldn’t compete with Dad. Perhaps if I’d had more nerve, I might have enquired about a family discount. Nevertheless, I retained a passion for whores—as they say in the commercials, when in doubt use a professional—though, as with ordinary girls, you were always waiting for the right one, for the one you liked, or who liked you.
Father had once said to me that he’d wanted to be a doctor, like his own father, and wouldn’t object if that’s what I did. Unlike a lot of the early Freudians, who had been physicians, I had no aptitude for biology or chemistry, but I discovered that that didn’t prevent me becoming a surgeon of the soul. “Whatever you do,” Dad said in his backhandedly well-intentioned way, “don’t let me down and turn out to be a bloody fool.” I guess being an analyst solved a lot of problems for me, at least giving me the opportunity to spend time with people who made me think about what a human being was.
Ajita and I were able to see a lot of each other because her aunt had been told that college was a nine-to-five job, with occasional evening lectures. Her father was rarely home; he came back from his factory at ten at night and left early in the morning, six days a week. On Sunday the family visited relatives in Wembley, where Ajita danced with her cousins in their bedroom.
What a pleasant late adolescence it was. Being at university in those days was a mixture of extended holiday and finishing school. Unlike school, there was no bullying or cramming, and there was little of the concern about careers and money there is now. It didn’t matter to me whether I got a third or a two-one; no one would ever ask me about it.
I read more then than I’d ever read before, and with a passion that was new and surprising to me. I was like someone previously sedentary discovering suddenly that they could run or jump. One of my lecturers said, “Write about whatever interests you.” I worked on the first of my favourite Viennese thinkers, Wittgenstein, and the idea of private language. The questions he asked were satisfyingly strange. It would be a while before I reached Freud properly.
When we were not at lectures, which was most of the time, I took Ajita to see Valentin and Wolf. She shopped and cooked us steak and chips. We were a little family. If I say she was my first love, I’d be saying she was the first woman I couldn’t just pull away from; who stayed in my mind when I wasn’t with her, and that I thought about continuously. When she was gone, I minded very much.
We’d use Valentin’s bed to make love while the guys smoked outside. “Go on, lie down together,” Wolf would say. “You two can’t keep your fingers out of each other’s pies.”
An odd sexual thing had begun to happen to me. There was no longer any discontinuity between orgasm and foreplay. The flutterings, surges, pulsations were whole-body experiences, taking place inside me rather than only in my genitals, so that my orgasms were multiple. They didn’t end with a bang, they didn’t stop suddenly, but seemed almost continuous, like a series of diminishingly powerful shots.
What is a criminal? Someone pursued—wanted!—by the police. I wasn’t wanted by the police, yet. Were my friends? I can’t say I knew what “crimes” Valentin and Wolf actually committed, if any. They would talk about fights, telling me how Romeo hit someone over the head with a chair. They would mention bent policemen and solicitors, and speak of how simple it was to bribe a judge or buy a passport.
There were numerous antique or junk shops in the area, which I would tour with Wolf. I was used to such places, and could help him find bargains. This was not easy, because as soon as Wolf walked into one of these shops, he’d begin to distribute five-pound notes to the staff. They were certainly impressed, and moved about as if inspired, bringing him vases. Whether he was rewarded in any other way I doubted; prices would go up rather than down. The deference might have been enough for him. It was enough for me. At this stage, I still was intending to be an academic, doing the criminal stuff
on the side. I liked the contrast. Plato the thief.
One time, though, something extreme did happen to Valentin. There was a guy he met in the Water Rat who wanted Valentin to fuck his wife while the guy beat off. Val needed the money, and he got paid for doing this a couple of times. The wife seemed to find it moderately interesting, but what she really wanted was to see Val on his own, for dinner followed by the theatre. She’d pay him too. Then the guy came back to Valentin and said he’d pay him a lot more, a considerable amount, if he would tie the woman up, “knock her about and slap her a bit.”
Valentin was sick, disgusted by the idea, though Wolf and I seemed to think that he had a pretty good thing going there; the money available, he could have asked for more. What did happen was that, when the man made this proposal to Valentin, Valentin hit him, knocking him down. Valentin was already depressed, liable to catatonic absences, and this made him worse. He didn’t want to be a whore and he didn’t want to be violent; why did these things happen to him? Oddly enough, I remember suggesting therapy to him, though I knew little about it, but he said that when he wanted to talk, he’d talk to me in the pub. A man could deal with it.
It came back to talking, then, the thing most people do a lot of. The whole family liked stories. My grandmother, who had lived with us before moving to a little flat nearby, read Agatha Christie and Catherine Cook-son. There were piles of them, under the bed, in the corner, next to the toilet; my mother watched soaps, and Dad read Henry Miller on aeroplanes. I adored James Bond.
But the words in books weren’t as hazardous as those that someone might suddenly say. Like the words Ajita said to me one day, and I almost missed, but which stuck in my head, returning to me over and over, the devil’s whisper.
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