“It was an astonishing Indian wedding, paid for by my uncle, and went on longer than the marriage. That night, when I tried to make love to the woman, and she was lying there so hot in her desire—women really feel fierce pleasures, don’t they?—I had to think of her brother to make myself hard. The two of them looked similar, and she became a sort of aide-mémoire.” He shivered. “Naturally, she wanted to have sex with me, her husband, and bear children. When I told her the truth, she was devastated, she had a breakdown, she put a rope around her neck and had to be cut down.”
“What were you thinking?”
“That my homosexuality would go away. I didn’t want to be different or unusual. It was a secret.”
As though he had temporarily forgotten where he was, Mustaq stopped to survey the room—his friends, and who they were chatting with. Seeing us talking, they had kept away. Then he touched me on the shoulder and caressed me a little. I could see he was about to become formal again; he had remembered who he had to be.
I looked at him, the awkward, eager, dumpy kid who had rebuilt himself, becoming attractive and glamorous. Of course, just being a famous pop star gave him that hip edge, all the time. He mattered, and was envied, at last. He had become one of those people who knew they were constantly observed. But whether he enjoyed it much now, I couldn’t tell.
“Jamal, I hope you enjoy the weekend. I’m delighted we’re friends again. Please, may I ask you one more thing? Otherwise I will believe I’m mad.”
“Go on.”
“Didn’t you, sometimes, wait outside our house at night? My bedroom was at the front, overlooking the road, and I’d stay up, dancing to the Thin White Duke. Was it you, just standing, looking, a few times?”
“Yes. It was me.”
“Why did you do that? I used to think, which one of us is he in love with? Can it be me?”
“I knew who I wanted.”
“Why were you there?”
“I was a fool in love.”
“Me too. Did you know I wrote ‘Everyone Has Their Heart Torn Apart, Sometime’ when I was still living at home? Years later it went to number one around the world virtually unchanged. I can tell you now where I stole the tune, not that anyone was bright enough to notice.”
“It takes talent to steal the right tune.”
“The song was about you, Jamal.”
He was sitting close to me. At times he took my hand, and I took his, as though we needed to comfort one another while the past rolled through us.
He said, “The only window which overlooked the garden was in my sister’s bedroom. When I was home, I’d sit just behind the curtain, with my elbows on the sill, looking out. You smoked roll-ups all the time, and always wore black. You looked smooth in suits, particularly with the baseball boots.
“But in my view, you looked best with nothing on and your lovely cock out. You were thin then, with a fine tanned body, and boy could you do it a lot—you guys were horny!” He went on. “Other times I’d sit with you in the kitchen when Ajita was upstairs changing or on the phone. I loved it when you talked to me.
“But I couldn’t have expected you to guide me. I should have been a doctor. That’s what my father wanted.”
He was looking at me, smiling; I was trying to take all this in. Then he stood up, gave me a long look, as if wondering himself about the strangeness of our conversation, and excused himself, going to join the others, most of whom had now come into the room.
I watched Ajita with a friend of Mustaq’s, laughing as she used to, putting her hand over her mouth as though she’d just said something outrageous, perching here and there to talk, helping her brother and Alan run the weekend.
When I rejoined the group, I discovered from Alan, who did a good imitation of him, that Omar had decided to drive into town “to see who was around,” adding, “You see, I never lost the common touch!”
It turned out that Omar had rung to say he was “stuck” in town and needed to be rescued. He wouldn’t be able to make it back alone. Alan asked for volunteers “to go in.” Apparently the town, a triumph of postwar socialist planning, was a sewer, full of tattooed beasts and violent zombies, with vomit and blood frothing in the gutters. I couldn’t wait to see it.
There was a pub Omar liked to visit when he came up, where the local lost children, most of them junkies, listened to savagely loud music. At least one of these kids would be fuckable.
Omar was too drunk to return to Mustaq’s and didn’t want to leave his car behind. Of all his crimes, drunk driving might turn out to be the most viably punishable. Also, he had to get up early in the morning to fulfill one of his duties, which was to sit in a large black car surrounded by motorcycle outriders and greet some foreign dignitary at Heathrow on behalf of the queen and the government, and then accompany this variety of murderers and torturers to their hotel while making small talk.
Omar said, “I have to be quite careful. I’m always getting the words dignitary and dictator mixed up.” He was, apparently, often in bad shape for some of this “meeting and greeting.”
Alan required one of us to drive Omar’s car back. So, fancying a change, I went into town with Karen, following Alan, who knew the pub. On the way out I said to Mustaq, “Why don’t you come with us?” He shook his head and smiled. As we got in the car, Karen told me that the price Mustaq paid for his wealth was the fact that he couldn’t walk on the street, go to the shop or pub without being mobbed, questioned, photographed.
We drove past a lurid building called the Hollywood Bowl, a multiplex featuring a drive-through McDonald’s, security guards and hooded kids wandering around windswept, concrete spaces.
“Why so fast, Karen? We won’t get lost. Are you drunk?”
“Yeah. You want to get out?” she said. “I should have killed you five minutes ago.”
“What stopped you?”
“So that is Ajita. The one you really loved and were faithful to. The one you kept expecting to return. You would lie there, my darling, ‘thinking,’ with a book open on your chest, and you’d smile to yourself. I knew that’s when you were with her in your mind. I absolutely totally hated you then.”
“Are you now pleasantly disappointed?”
“She’s an ordinary woman of a certain age. The age of desperation. But I can see it,” she said, “if I put my glasses on and look hard—what she had. The cuteness, the girly voice, the desire to please. Unfortunately, I was supposed to feel sorry for her all that time. What sadness you moped about in, which I had to endure! Even to me she seemed mystically important. Wasn’t her damned father murdered during a strike?”
“Something like that.”
“I only married the wrong person because of the whole mess. You made me feel second-best for so long I ended up with the first person who gave me their attention.”
“It would have to be my fault,” I said.
“Nothing cheered you up, even when you went to see that bloody analyst the whole time. After a session you’d spend hours writing it down. Didn’t you ever see that analysis doesn’t make people kinder or funnier or more intelligent? It makes them more self-absorbed. They start using all those awful words like transfer and cathartic. Did I want to hear about your dreams, about your mother and sister, when we were in the middle of a disaster? Didn’t that occur to you?”
“It was my vocation, and it interested me more than anything.”
“I hate to say this, Jamal, but you are intelligent and you’ve done nothing with it but learn to say all those words which are no use to anyone.”
“Shit, you are in a bad mood.”
“I am now.”
I said, “I’m definitely not going to fuck you tonight.”
“Bastard, it’ll be the Indian girl, won’t it? Why do you have to be so cruel, Jamal? Doesn’t it matter to you, cunt-teaser?”
We discovered Lord Ali, with his jacket and shoes off and shirt half open, lying across several chairs in the back room of the pub, “holding court.” This kin
glike position wasn’t only due to his personal magnetism, or to curiosity among the poor about the lord’s work relieving the condition of the proletariat, but owed much to the fact he was buying drinks for everyone in the pub.
“Oh, fucking Christ!” said Alan, as we approached. The lord’s eyes, as Alan put it, were like “two pools of inky semen.”
We caught Omar telling the assembled drinkers, many of them already slumped, that he’d met the queen on three occasions and sat in her carriage once. Last week he’d found himself alone in a room with her. She was concerned that Labour was going to attempt to ban shooting as well as hunting. “‘We had a lovely shoot the other day,’” he said, fruitily. Lord Omar said this several times, louder and louder, until it started to sound not only pornographic but an arrestable offence.
Alan was ready to pull him out of there before he said anything else that might turn up in the News of the World, or bring information about their weekends to the wider world, but Omar wasn’t ready to leave. He hadn’t managed any physical contact. Alan spoke to one of the kids and came away with some decent weed, and while the cock-drunk good lord was satisfied in the toilet, Alan and Karen played pool.
I sat at the bar lining up vodka shots. The barman knew we were friends of George and told me what spoiled, overprivileged rats we were “up at the big house,” compared to the people around here. “What we need,” he said, as though it had never occurred to anyone before, “is a revolution. Look at that,” he said, pointing at Lord Ali, who was emerging from the toilet with wet knees and a pasty-faced kid while murmuring “Such, such were the boys…”
The barman went on: “Some of these people work up there. We know how to get in. One day we’ll all charge up there in a mob and pull it down and burn the lot of yer!”
“It’s a good idea,” I said. “But sadly, you’re all too stoned to do anything like that.”
“Outta my pub, how dare you!” he said. “Stoned? Who? You’re barred for life!”
I had called the others and was already stepping over someone in a move towards the door. Omar was being dragged along by Karen and Alan while singing “Land of Hope and Glory” and yelling, “Thank you so much, my darling subjects, for a lovely shoot! A lovely shoot is all one wants!”
The landlord was spitting with fury and threatening us with the police.
Karen squashed Alan and the lord into her car; I drove the lord’s motor back, tearing up the lanes.
At the house, people were talking in the living room, but most had moved to what Alan referred to as the “Brian Jones” pool. It was fashionable for rich people like Mustaq to buy art and photography. The corridor between the pool and the changing area was full of decent photographs, including one of a woman standing up to piss against a bridge.
Around the pool, people were smoking; others were dancing, or swimming naked. Those vile bodies had cost a fortune to maintain and were made to be exhibited. Charlie Hero was in good shape; even his scars glowed, and the slim bolt through his cock brought out its veiny contours.
Other friends of Alan and Mustaq had turned up by now, dancers, hairdressers, make-up artists, camp young black men, angelic boys, some in overtight or shiny clothing, others keen to show off their nipple clips. Some of these characters looked as though they hadn’t seen daylight for some years. Few women would get laid tonight, I thought. This might be my chance to see whether I really was still uninterested, or whether I’d just been through a discouraging time.
Charlie had attached his iPod to the pool sound system, and suddenly a record came on from my youth, the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Do You Believe in Magic?”, so full of musical sunshine and optimism that Karim and I both began to laugh, glancing at one another and laughing again. Like him, I’d been a little too young to be independently active at that time, but the mid-60s were where I was formed, and what did any of that love mean now, in these dirty days?
I swam a little, looking out for Ajita, but couldn’t see her. While I dried off, Karim, his earnest brown eyes peering out from between the parentheses of his hair, offered me some coke. Although I fancied it, I wanted to sleep tonight. I smoked a joint, then someone gave me a double espresso and a chunk of chocolate. I took a diazepam and decided to go to bed, a relatively early night but with plenty to think about.
I was lying down, wondering what I’d listen to on my iPod—words can go so far, and then there is music—when there was a knock on the door.
“Hello,” I called.
“Can I come in?”
It was Ajita in a satin dressing gown. She came over and sat on the edge of the bed.
I took her hand. “So you found me, then.”
“At last,” she said. “Just you and me. Now we have some time together. All night, I hope. Will you stay awake? Do you want to hear me now?”
“Of course,” I replied. “It’s you I’ve been waiting for.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
She took my hand. “Earlier today, I believed I saw you from the pool. Then I thought, No, it’s a ghost and I’ve gone mad. In New York, Mustaq asked me if I wanted to see you again, but said he couldn’t guarantee that you’d show up. But you did. Was that for me? Or shouldn’t I ask?”
“Your American accent is charming.”
“Oh, don’t say that. I’ve been trying to get rid of it and seem more Indian again, particularly since Indians have become so hip.”
“Yes, there can’t be one of them who hasn’t written a novel.”
“And it’s embarrassing to be American when people my colour are under such constant suspicion. Going through airports is a nightmare for all of us, even for Mustaq. We all feel a step away from Guantánamo. Orange doesn’t suit me.”
“Nor most people.”
“It’s been so bad I’m thinking of staying in London for a while. I loved London, when you would take me about. I haven’t been back since. I couldn’t bear to see it again.” Her hand was on my shoulder. “You don’t need to get up, Jamal. Don’t do anything. We don’t need more light on. I’ll pull the curtains.” She said, “I know you’re there, and that’s all I need. Mustaq told me what he knew of your story, and I have read your books.”
“Did you tell him your story?”
“What d’you mean, mine?” I said nothing. She went on, “Jamal, you’re the person who really knows me. You were always my true love,” she said. “Even my husband knew that. He used to say, ‘There is someone else stopping us from being close.’” She leaned over me, kissing me on each cheek and on the lips, pressing her fingers through my hair. “You’ve hardly changed. Your hair’s grey, but it still stands on end, like a fluffy chick. You’re a little lined and no longer all skin and bone. But you’re distinguished-looking, a man who’s lived an important life.”
“Christ, no!”
She said, “I was watching you at supper. You’re even more good-looking than I remembered. What an attractive, smart man, he is, I thought. One who has been loved and wanted.”
“That is a kind thing to say. If it is true, it means a lot. I will try to be more grateful.”
“I think you probably are,” she said. “Who was the woman sitting opposite me? We were introduced, but I didn’t catch her name. She was observing you like a hawk, when she wasn’t glaring at me. Was she one of your wives?”
“I have been married, but just the once, unusually. Not to her, though. I am still married—or rather, not yet divorced. But I did go out with the woman you’re talking about—Karen—after you went away.”
“Was it a successful love?”
“Not from her point of view. I was still getting over you, I guess. It took a long time—probably because I always thought you’d be coming back in a little while.”
She was quiet. “Jamal?”
“Yes?”
“Please don’t say it’s too late. We’re not old. Or am I too far gone for you? Look.” She stood up and opened her dressing gown, then let it drop to the floor. “This is me. Where I am.”
She put her gown on again and lay down on the bed. I stood up and took off my clothes.
While she looked at me, I said, “I don’t know what I want to happen between us. It’s been a long time. All we can do is give it space.”
“There is still time, we have that. I will wait for you, as you waited for me.” She pulled the sheets over her. “How I need to sleep with someone again. After years of trying to get my daughter out of my bed, she will no longer keep me company. My husband and I have our own rooms, in fact our own countries now. So to spend a night with a man…It moves me so.”
We lay there in the dark, not touching. Certainly people of our age, unless they are narcissists, wouldn’t want anyone to see their bodies. I’d seen Ajita in the pool, of course. Her flesh hadn’t aged badly, but she seemed to have shrunk into herself, as though she wanted to make herself smaller, like a younger actress playing the part of an older woman.
“Yes,” she said, “I know I am like an old woman now. I could see that in your eyes. My sexual charm, beauty—all gone.”
“Mine, too. I was just thinking of how much we loved to sunbathe in your garden at the side of the house. You were almost black. Now no one does that. You remember how I had to pretend to be Mushy Peas’s best friend?”
“What I want is that the four of us—you, me, Wolf and Valentin—meet again. Can you organise a reunion?”
“They disappeared soon after you did—to make their fortunes in France.”
“How did they do?”
“They didn’t tell me.”
“What a shame,” she said. “In New York I buy furniture, or clothes. I give something to charity every day, and I buy something new every day. It’s a simple system—in and out.
“I walk in the park, visit friends, and when my brother’s on tour or doing a TV show I design the costumes. It’s a lot of work, a proper job. I do yoga, Kabbalah, anything that doesn’t involve touching. If I don’t feel fabulous within a few weeks, I try something else. All suicides kill others too, I am aware of that, so there is no way out for me. In the end my doctor gave me something—”
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