“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.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I had been living with the lefties in Barons Court Road, where the Piccadilly and District Line trains ran alongside my room, rattling the windows. I first saw Karen upstairs, in the communal area, where I’d sit after returning from the library, or in the morning, having breakfast, with some serious book—maybe The Ego and the Id or the Ecrits—propped up in front of me.
This was a vegan kitchen packed with pulses and gluten-free pasta, with chickpeas bubbling on the hob and the yeasty smell of wholemeal bread rising from underneath a tea towel. Imagine this level of earnestness and then, one Saturday morning, suddenly you see a young woman wearing nothing but lipstick, high heels and a Silk Cut, hunting about for something to throw on—which, in the end, was someone’s old greatcoat. It was like spotting a movie star getting out of a taxi in Bromley High Street. Of course, other people walked about the place naked, except that they (men and women alike) only wanted to exhibit their honesty.
A woman in the house had been at university with Karen, who had stayed over after a party. When one of the rancorous female lawyers referred to her as “the TV Bitch”—a new genus, though I didn’t know it then, but some clever cunt had intuited that Karen represented something about the future—it occurred to me that she and I might have something in common.
She stayed for the rest of the weekend, and nobody since Ajita had made me laugh like Karen. It cheered me that everyone else in the house disliked her on principle. When she wasn’t walking about talking into the phone, Karen watched soap operas with a pile of Cosmopolitan magazines in front of her, painting her nails. After all the shit I’d been through, her brashness, vulgarity and loudness gave me a kick. What she saw in me I have no idea, you’d have to ask her. How could it not have ended badly?
At one time girls wanted to be actresses, but in the 80s they wanted to be TV presenters. During that period Karen was a reporter on a local station outside London. I had to buy a television and carry it home in order that, if the aerial was facing in the right direction, I could see her talking about small-time politics, robberies, even the weather.
She didn’t earn much, but she knew she would. She was aware that she had entered, early on, an industry capable of inexhaustible expansion. If Britain was being deindustrialised—it no longer made cars, boats or clothes—what would people do for a living? Would they be waiters, make computers, sell tourism? Karen seemed to realise there would be little limit on how much TV the public would be able to tolerate in the future. We had four television channels; soon there would be hundreds.
For the numerous unemployed, she had no sympathy. Taking good advice from her family, she put her salary into property near Canary Wharf and rented it. Meanwhile, as she had done as a student, she kept a room in a flat in Chelsea, where I stayed sometimes. All manner of girls Karen had been at school and university with would come by, often several at a time, but only those with names ending in a—Lavinia, Davina, Delia, Nigella, Bella, Sabrina, Hannah—sitting on the carpet with their legs out, talking of what they would do now, the world having been opened to women like them. Would they make money in the City or be artists, before becoming mothers?
Most nights Karen took me out into the fast London she knew through her university set. We went to the new clubs, the Groucho in particular, room upon room and floor upon floor of grown-up decadence. It was the hippest place, full of writers, fashionable publishers, pop-promo directors, producers from The Late Show and the young movie people working at Channel Four, which had just started making low-budget movies. Often someone would lead us to Derek Jarman’s place, a small flat in an old block on the Charing Cross Road. He liked to read from his handwritten journals, and I wanted to be like that, so self-absorbed, as people came and went.
There was, of course, the “new” kind of shopping. Where my mother would make a list and return with the items on it (perhaps bringing home a treat like chocolate or biscuits), Karen would spend every Saturday shopping because she liked being in shop “environments,” returning with numerous artfully packaged objects she didn’t know she needed. People were beginning to buy “names”—brands—rather than things.
In the evenings there were other parties and new restaurants—with desirable names—where Karen drank ferociously until she staggered. She liked me to be there to help her out the door, into the cab, and into bed, where I’d sit beside her with a bowl awaiting the inevitable upchuck and the sleep which would follow it.
“Tender is the night,” she’d moan, quoting neither Keats nor F. Scott Fitzgerald but the pop song. She may have been out drinking until two in the morning, but she’d be up for work early the next day, arriving at her desk at eight and staying there for twelve hours. Women had to “prove” themselves then.
She didn’t have a boyfriend, though I think she had quite a lot of bad sex with older men—the bosses—or with cameramen or others in the crew, as she was often travelling, spending about three nights a week out of London. I can see her now, idly throwing her legs open and looking away, out of the window or across the room, biting her nails and thinking of what she’d wear the next day. When she was away, she worried that I was missing her, or lonely. If I spent the evening with someone else, she’d ask if I’d had sex with them. If she and I were at a party, she’d tell me who was attractive and who was a likely conquest, and she’d even chat them up for me.
Although Karen and I were together as some sort of couple, it soon became a more or less celibate relationship. Like many people, she didn’t really like sex but would go through with it if she thought the other person badly wanted it. I find it odd now, but I did believe then—without, I admit, having much considered it—that the ideal of the exclusive couple was one which still compelled me, that this unchosen template suited everyone. Even when I was unfaithful to Karen, it seemed right I should experience the correct sum of guilt.
But perhaps our relationship was without passion because, after Ajita, I had no desire to suffer sexual jealousy again. I asked for no power over Karen; her life and body were her own. I wanted to be with a woman I didn’t want. If love is the only intensity in town, what sort of love was that?
We did spend many nights together. In bed it would be me, her and an ashtray, the TV always on and her eating ice cream from the tub. We’d read the same magazines, both being interested in the same thing, women and how they became themselves. And we talked simultaneously, because she liked coke. With Karen there was no vulgar chopping with credit cards or snorting through rolled-up fivers from toilet seats. The gear she bought came in cute little bottles with a tiny spoon at the top. It was expensive, but she and the other girls who went to her flat in Chelsea Manor Street had lived in a world—quite different to mine and Miriam’s—in which there had always been money, and always would be.
I say we didn’t touch or kiss. Maybe we were trying to forget about sex because there was too much of it around. As well as studying psychology, philosophy and psychoanalysis, I was developing into a po
rnographer.
I had left Mother and replaced her with books. At least in my work, I had discovered something I wanted. Whatever I did in life, I was usually bored, always feeling insufficiently used or stretched. At this time I liked to study, I loved to read and I enjoyed my training, but it was expensive.
I was still seeing Tahir, as well as attending lectures on dreams, the Oedipus complex and the unconscious. I was reading Freud’s early disciples, Ferenczi, Adler, Jung, Theodor Reik, and the later analysts, Klein, Winnicott, Lacan. It wasn’t a long tradition, about a hundred years’ worth, but there was a ton of it, and almost every word in abominable prose. This discourse, saturated in talk of pleasure, provided no enjoyment in itself. If the best thing to be said for reading is that you can do it lying down, Karen would lie with me, watching videos and reading fat, shiny paperbacks about people shopping, waiting for her own face to appear on TV.
Then it started: I began to see my first patients, and I soon learned that listening to another person was almost the hardest task you could attempt. Tahir had taught me that the truth wasn’t hidden behind a locked door in a dungeon called “the unconscious,” but that it was right there, in front of the patient and analyst, waiting to be heard. The lost object was the key to the language. Freud said one should attend to the unconscious with “evenly suspended attention.” The therapist’s unconscious was the useful tool here, along with the free play of his associations and fantasy. The interpretation, when it came, had to be like a surgeon’s incision, in the right place at the right time.
Listening is not only a kind of love, it is love. But, sitting with my first analysands, trying to bear the anxiety of hearing someone unknown, whose dreams and ramblings I could not comprehend, I felt, at times, as though I were trying to decode The Waste Land at a first reading. I’d even hate the patients and my own clumsiness, as I became dragged into the vortex of their passion, of the spume and irruption of their unconscious. I’d want to flee the room, wondering who was more afraid, analysand or analyst. I was having to learn that this fear—on both sides—was part of the anxiety of hearing the new. It was patient work, learning patience, developing my analytic instinct, creating the time and space so the analysand could hear, or meet, herself. This was how, in the end, I trained myself.
I would go and talk to Tahir about it, and although he was drinking then, and often argumentative—he could be infuriated by the theories of other analysts, particularly Lacan, Freud’s most significant heir—he had important and urgent things to pass on. Unintentionally, during a recent session, because I was tired, I’d found myself in more of a reverie than I was used to. Yet this hadn’t made anything worse. Tahir said I’d hit on something useful: my unconscious was more closely in touch with that of the other if I didn’t try too hard to understand. I had a tendency, he said, to overtheorise, and to decide too quickly what was going on.
He made me aware, too, that I was part of a tradition of listening. As Schoenberg had gone to Mahler for instruction and guidance, as T. S. Eliot had turned to Pound, so the analysts had handed down learning and procedure. Tahir had been trained by the great child-analyst Winnicott, who in his turn had been analysed by James Strachey and Joan Riviere, both of whom had been analysed by Freud. Having so little knowledge of my sub-continental family history—the Indian threads being severed by Father’s death—I had little sense of my connection to the past. Being an analyst joined me to another tradition, to another family, which would “hold” me during the insecurity of my training.
As my career started, Karen’s faltered. It was a bad day for her when it became obvious she was no good on television, being too nervy. Her big eyes made her look homicidal. Even when she wasn’t on cocaine, she was like someone on cocaine, about to burst out of the screen and bite into your windpipe. She was quick enough to know that power in the media rested with the producers, not the presenters, and began to work as an associate producer on a youth programme. I even went along to the studio a few times. What was happening to the world? Young presenters virtually naked, teenage bands, puerile jokes, pranks, interviews with idiots.
“Don’t you like it?” she said. “Perhaps you weren’t stoned enough to relax.”
I’d used LSD in my teens, but found the effects of an acid inferno lasted too long, a horror movie you couldn’t walk out of. I’d had more than enough adventures in my own head. But working on youth programmes, Karen heard of a new, less solipsistic drug being used in New York clubs, called Ecstasy or E. It took us a while to track some down; it was hard to get in London then. We started to hold Ecstasy parties in her flat, where she had a large circular bath. She liked the new pop: Sade, Tina Turner, the Police, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Eurythmics. I didn’t wake up wanting to hear a new record until later, when Massive Attack released Blue Lines—“you’re the book I have open”—during the first Gulf War.
Nights and nights on E, our pupils spinning in what I considered pure hedonism, with the guilt and anxiety it brought—for which I would compensate with days of heavy study—had me thinking about the uses and difficulties of pleasure, the whole question of jouissance in a person’s life. Ecstasy connected me with others; it made me want to talk, as I disappeared into the dreadful voice of ultimate pleasure, a cheap ticket to the place mystics and psychotics have always headed for.
The music was loud, and the talk facile. Not only that, to prolong the buzz we’d take cocaine, which messed us up. Big new clubs were opening, with huge sound systems, run and owned by public school boys who were turning the “underground” into the Thatcherite market overnight. After a time I realised that Karen had more tolerance for these places than I did. Unlike most of the kids there, Karen wasn’t committed to the project of unwinding and losing the self. She was at work: observing the clothes, the attitude, while going to the bathroom to note down the words being used. She wanted to turn it all into television.
We went to New York for “meetings.” I stood on the roof of the hotel looking out at the glittering city for the first time. We began a frantic round of clubs, bars and the famous Knitting Factory. While I wanted to hunt through the numerous secondhand bookshops on the Upper West Side for obscure psychoanalytic books, she was buying us cocaine and trying to get us invited to parties with what she called “atmosphere.” Londoners, being more cynical and knowing then, were less gullible when it came to celebrity. I began to dislike her; I felt dragged along, like a recalcitrant child, and, back in London, made it clear I didn’t want to live with her.
Karen was becoming tougher, someone you wouldn’t want to work for, as she developed a flair for sacking people. “Had to be done,” she’d say as another loser limped out the door. For Karen, if anyone suffered, it was their own fault; even if you were a persecuted black South African with no human rights, you had somehow brought the badness on yourself. After a while her callousness stopped bothering me because I saw how unbearable it was to her that anyone would hurt anyone else. For her, because it was unbearable it was untrue, and she didn’t have to look at it.
The part of the day we most enjoyed together was breakfast, which we’d have in a Soho café, usually the Patisserie Valerie in Old Compton Street, after picking up the tabloids. The shameless Sun was in its prime—the royal family helpless before it—and the other papers imitated it. We’d read bits out to one another, screaming with laughter at the prose. This was before most people realised that the person who’d have the most influence over our time would be Rupert Murdoch—the author of the celebrity culture we inhabit, and clever enough to avoid it himself.
The newspapers were the first to turn wholeheartedly to trash. It hadn’t yet reached TV, except through youth programming, where Karen and her pals encouraged nonentities to eat maggots—“faggots gobbling maggots: What could be more entertaining?”—or share a bath with eels or—why not?—with animal and human faeces. The next day these newly minted celebs would appear in the newspapers, having spent the night with a soap star. Television was now watchin
g us, rather than the other way round.
The papers would celebrate and then desecrate the new stars. I had never liked the punks, but this kind of anarchistic, republican amorality appealed to me at times—I guess it was the lack of respect for authority, its destructiveness. At the same time it fitted with the liberal economics of Thatcher. Who could not be amused by the fact that the capitalism unleashed by the Conservatives under Thatcher was destroying the very social values the party espoused?
As we ate our croissants and drank a new thing in London, caffe lattes, Karen would fill her notebook with mad ideas for game shows, suitable for breakfast and daytime TV, which had just started. At that time daytime was a huge vacant space, soon to become even more vacant. Programmes were beginning to be made quickly and cheaply; cameras got smaller, and recording tape was of better quality. The contents were cut-price too, since the participants were not movie or even TV stars but “real” people discovered by researchers, who could become enviable just by appearing on TV. To me it sounded like music hall: television versions of the mad variety shows my grandparents used to take Miriam and me to on our holidays. At the end of the pier at the seaside, we’d watch jugglers, knife throwers and fat comedians telling risqué jokes. After, we’d scoff “hot sandwiches in gravy.”
For me all this was an amusement, but for Karen it was a kind of calling, an opportunity that few people realised was there. I guess I realised the extent of her cultural terrorism when I suggested we might go to see a film which happened to be subtitled. “No—never!” she cried. “Not a foreign film you have to read! Are they in slow motion? Can’t you feel yourself ageing?”
When I recommended the theatre or a gallery, it wasn’t that she refused to go; it was not that attending such things made her feet ache—which wouldn’t have surprised me, as she wore stilettos most of the time: even her slippers were four inches from the ground. It was that she considered art to be showing off, empty, worthless, an insult to the public, and if subsidised, a waste of public money. “Tchaikovsky’s Crime and Punishment, Chekhov’s Last Symphony—yuck, fuck, muck!”
Something to Tell You Page 22