The pink Vauxhall Viva had quadrophonic speakers from which roared the Byrds’s ‘Eight Miles High’. In the back were two girls, driven by Charlie’s manager, the Fish, a tall, straight-backed and handsome ex-public school boy whose father was rumoured to be a Navy admiral. They said his mother was a Lady. The Fish had short hair and wore uninspired clothes, like a white shirt, crumpled suit and tennis shoes. He made no concessions to fashion, yet somehow he was hip and cool. Nothing confused that boy. And this enigma was all of nineteen, not much older than us, but he was posh, not common like us, and we considered him to be superior, just the right boy to be in charge of our Charlie. Almost every afternoon when Charlie was at school he turned up to take him to the studio to rehearse with his band.
‘Want a lift anywhere?’ Charlie shouted to Helen.
‘Not today! See you!’
Charlie strolled to the car. The closer he got the more agitated the two girls became, as if he’d sent a wind on before him which made them flutter. When he climbed in beside the Fish they leaned forward and kissed him enthusiastically. He was rearranging his hair in the rear-view mirror as the monster moved out into the traffic, scattering small boys who’d gathered at the front of the car to try and open the bonnet, for God’s sake, and examine the engine. The crowd dispersed quickly as the vision floated away. ‘Wanker,’ boys said despondently, devastated by the beauty of the event. ‘Fucking wanker.’ We were going home to our mothers, to our rissoles and chips and tomato sauce, to learn French words, to pack our football gear for tomorrow. But Charlie would be with musicians. He’d go to clubs at one in the morning. He’d meet Andrew Loog Oldham.
But at least for now I was with Helen.
‘I’m sorry about what happened when you came to the house,’ she said. ‘He’s usually so friendly.’
‘Fathers can get moody and everything.’
‘No, I mean the dog. I don’t approve of people being used just for their bodies, do you?’
‘Look,’ I said, turning sharply on her and utilizing advice I’d been given by Charlie about the treatment of women: Keep ’em keen, treat ’em mean. ‘I’ve got to walk to the bus stop. I don’t want to stand here all afternoon being laughed at like a cunt. Where is the person you’re waiting for?’
‘It’s you, silly.’
‘You came to see me?’
‘Yes. D’you have anything to do this afternoon?’
‘No, ’course not.’
‘Be with me, then?’
‘Yeah, great.’
She took my arm and we walked on together past the schoolboy eyes. She said she was going to run away from school and go to live in San Francisco. She’d had enough of the pettiness of living with parents and the irrelevance of school was smothering her head. All over the Western world there were liberation movements and alternative life-styles – there had never been a kids’ crusade like it – and Hairy Back wouldn’t let her stay out after eleven. I said the kids’ crusade was curdling now, everyone had overdosed, but she wouldn’t listen. Not that I blamed her. By the time we had heard of anything you could be sure it was over. But I hated the idea of her going away, mainly because I hated the idea of staying behind. Charlie was doing big things, Helen was preparing her escape, but what was I up to? How would I get away?
I looked up and saw Jamila hurrying towards me in black T-shirt and white shorts. I’d forgotten that I’d agreed to meet her. She ran the last few yards and was breathing heavily, but more out of anxiety than exhaustion. I introduced her to Helen. Jamila barely glanced at her but Helen kept her arm in mine.
‘Anwar’s getting worse and worse,’ Jamila said. ‘He’s going the whole way.’
‘D’you want me to leave you two together?’ Helen asked.
I quickly said no and asked Jammie if I could tell Helen what was happening.
‘Yes, if you want to expose our culture as being ridiculous and our people as old-fashioned, extreme and narrow-minded.’
So I told Helen about the hunger-strike. Jamila butted in to add details and keep us up to date. Anwar hadn’t compromised in the slightest, not nibbling a biscuit or sipping a glass of water or smoking a single cigarette. Either Jamila obeyed or he would die painfully, his organs failing one by one. And if they took him to hospital he’d just do the same thing again and again, until his family gave in.
It was starting to rain, so the three of us sat in a bus shelter. There was never anywhere to go. Helen was patient and attentive, holding my hand to calm me. Jamila said, ‘What I’ve agreed with myself is that it’s going to be tonight, at midnight, when I decide what to do. I can’t carry on with this indecision.’
Every time we talked about Jamila running away from home, where she could go and how we could get money to help her survive, she said, ‘What about my mother?’ Anwar would blame Jeeta for everything Jamila did. Jeeta’s life would be living death and there was nowhere she could escape to. I had the brilliant idea that both Jamila and Jeeta should run away together, but Jeeta would never leave Anwar: Indian wives weren’t like that. We went round and round until Helen had a brain-wave.
‘We’ll go and ask your father,’ she said. ‘He’s a wise man, he’s spiritual and –’
‘He’s a complete phoney,’ said Jamila.
‘Let’s at least try it,’ Helen replied.
So off we went to my house.
In the living room, with her almost translucent white legs sticking out of her dressing-gown, Mum was drawing. She closed her sketch-book quickly and slipped it behind her chair. I could see she was tired from her day in the shoe shop. I always wanted to ask her about it but could never bring myself to say something as ridiculous as, ‘How was your day?’ Consequently she never discussed her work with anyone. Jamila sat down on a stool and stared into space as if happy to leave the subject of her father’s suicide to others.
Helen didn’t help herself or increase the possibility of peace on earth by saying she’d been at Dad’s Chislehurst gig.
‘I didn’t see it,’ said Mum.
‘Oh, what a shame. It was profound.’ Mum looked self-pitying but Helen went on. ‘It was liberating. It made me want to go and live in San Francisco.’
‘That man makes me want to go and live in San Francisco,’ said Mum.
‘But then, I expect you’ve learned everything he has to teach. Are you a Buddhist?’
It seemed pretty incongruous, the conversation between Mum and Helen. They were talking about Buddhism in Chislehurst, against a background of mind-expansion, freedom and festivals. But for Mum the Second World War was still present in our streets, the streets where she’d been brought up. She often told me of the nightly air-raids, her parents worn out from fire-watching, houses in the familiar streets suddenly plunged into dust, people suddenly gone, news of sons lost at the Front. What grasp of evil or the possibilities of human destruction could we have? All I materially knew of the war was the thick squat block of the air-raid shelter at the end of the garden which as a child I took over as my own little house. Even then it contained its rows of jam-jars and rotten bunk-beds from 1943.
‘It’s simple for us to speak of love,’ I said to Helen. ‘What about the war?’
Jamila stood up irritably. ‘Why are we discussing the war, Karim?’
‘It’s important, it’s –’
‘You idiot. Please –’ And she looked imploringly at Mum. ‘We came here for a purpose. Why are you making me wait like this? Let’s get on with the consultation.’
Mum said, indicating the adjoining wall, ‘With him?’
Jamila nodded and bit her fingernails. Mum laughed bitterly.
‘He can’t even sort himself out.’
‘It was Karim’s idea,’ Jamila said, and swept out of the room.
‘Don’t make me laugh,’ Mum said to me. ‘Why are you doing this to her? Why don’t you do something useful like clearing out the kitchen? Why don’t you go and read a school book? Why don’t you do something that will get you somewhere, Kar
im?’
‘Don’t get hysterical,’ I said to Mum.
‘Why not?’ she replied.
When we went into his room, God was lying on his bed listening to music on the radio. He looked approvingly at Helen and winked at me. He liked her; but then, he was keen for me to go out with anyone, as long as they were not boys or Indians. ‘Why go out with these Muslims?’ he said once, when I brought a Pakistani friend of Jamila’s home with me. ‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘Too many problems,’ he said imperiously. ‘What problems?’ I asked. He wasn’t good at being specific; he shook his head as if to say there were so many problems he didn’t know where to begin. But he added, for the sake of argument, ‘Dowries and all.’
‘Anwar is my oldest friend in the world,’ he said sadly when we told him everything. ‘We old Indians come to like this England less and less and we return to an imagined India.’
Helen took Dad’s hand and patted it comfortingly.
‘But this is your home,’ she said. ‘We like you being here. You benefit our country with your traditions.’
Jamila raised her eyes to heaven. Helen was driving her to suicide, I could see that. Helen just made me laugh but this was sober business.
I said, ‘Won’t you go and see him?’
‘He wouldn’t listen to Gandhi himself,’ Jamila said.
‘All right,’ said Dad. ‘You come back in ninety-five minutes, during which time I will have meditated. I’ll give you my answer at the end of this thought.’
‘Great!’
So the three of us left the cul-de-sac which was Victoria Road. We walked through the gloomy, echoing streets to the pub, past turdy parks, past the Victorian school with outside toilets, past the numerous bomb-sites which were our true playgrounds and sexual schools, and past the neat gardens and scores of front rooms containing familiar strangers and televisions shining like dying lights. Eva always called our area ‘the higher depths’. It was so quiet none of us wanted to hear the sound of our own embarrassing voices.
Here lived Mr Whitman, the policeman, and his young wife, Noleen; next door were a retired couple, Mr and Mrs Holub. They were socialists in exile from Czechoslovakia, and unknown to them their son crept out of the house in his pyjamas every Friday and Saturday night to hear uncouth music. Opposite them were another retired couple, a teacher and his wife, the Gothards. An East End family of birdseed dealers, the Lovelaces, were next to them – old Grandma Lovelace was a toilet attendant in the Library Gardens. Further up the street lived a Fleet Street reporter, Mr Nokes, his wife and their overweight kids, with the Scoffields – Mrs Scoffield was an architect – next door to them.
All of the houses had been ‘done up’. One had a new porch, another double-glazing, ‘Georgian’ windows or a new door with brass fittings. Kitchens had been extended, lofts converted, walls removed, garages inserted. This was the English passion, not for self-improvement or culture or wit, but for DIY, Do It Yourself, for bigger and better houses with more mod cons, the painstaking accumulation of comfort and, with it, status – the concrete display of earned cash. Display was the game. How many times on a visit to families in the neighbourhood, before being offered a cup of tea, had we been taken around a house – ‘The grand tour again,’ sighed Dad – to admire knocked-through rooms, cunning cupboards and bunk-beds, showers, coal bunkers and greenhouses.
In the pub, the Chatterton Arms, sat ageing Teddy Boys in drape coats, with solid sculpted quiffs like ships’ prows. There were a few vicious Rockers too, in studded leather and chains, discussing gang-bangs, their favourite occupation. And there were a couple of skinheads with their girls, in brogues, Levi’s, Crombies and braces. A lot of them I recognized from school: they were in the pub every night, with their dads, and would be there for ever, never going away. They were a little startled to see two hippies and a Paki walk in; there was some conversation on the subject and several glances in our direction, so I made sure we didn’t eyeball them and give them reason to get upset. All the same, I was nervous they might jump on us when we left.
Jamila said nothing and Helen was eager to talk about Charlie, a subject on which she was obviously preparing for an advanced degree. Jamila wasn’t even contemptuous, as she abstractedly poured pints of bitter into herself. She’d met Charlie a couple of times at our house and wasn’t thrilled by him, to say the least. ‘Vanity, thy name is Charlie’, was her conclusion. Charlie made no effort with her. Why should he? Jamila was no use to him and he didn’t want to fuck her. Jamila saw right through old Charlie: she said there was iron ambition under the crushed-velvet idealism which was still the style of the age.
Helen gladly confirmed that not only was Charlie a little star at our school but he was illuminating other schools too, especially girls’ schools. There were girls who followed Mustn’t Grumble from gig to gig just to be near the boy, recording these concerts on reel-to-reel tape-recorders. Rare photographs of Charlie were passed around until they were in tatters. Apparently he’d been offered a record contract which the Fish had turned down, saying they weren’t good enough yet. When they did get good they’d be one of the biggest bands in the world, the Fish predicted. I wondered if Charlie really knew this, felt this, or whether his life as he lived it from day to day was as fucked-up and perplexed as everyone else’s.
Later that night, with Jammie and Helen behind me, I rapped on the door of Dad’s room. There was no response.
‘Perhaps he’s still on another level,’ said Helen. I looked at Jammie and wondered if she, like me, could hear Dad snoring. Obviously: because she banged loudly and impatiently on the door until Dad opened it, his hair standing on end, looking surprised to see us. We sat around his bed and he went into one of the formidable silences which I now accepted as the concomitant of wisdom.
‘We live in an age of doubt and uncertainty. The old religions under which people lived for ninety-nine point nine per cent of human history have decayed or are irrelevant. Our problem is secularism. We have replaced our spiritual values and wisdom with materialism. And now everyone is wandering around asking how to live. Sometimes desperate people even turn to me.’
‘Uncle, please –’
Dad raised his index finger a fraction of an inch and Jamila was reluctantly silent.
‘I’ve decided this.’
We were all concentrating so much that I almost giggled.
‘I believe happiness is only possible if you follow your feeling, your intuition, your real desires. Only unhappiness is gained by acting in accordance with duty, or obligation, or guilt, or the desire to please others. You must accept happiness when you can, not selfishly, but remembering you are a part of the world, of others, not separate from them. Should people pursue their own happiness at the expense of others? Or should they be unhappy so others can be happy? There’s no one who hasn’t had to confront this problem.’
He paused for breath and looked at us. I knew he was thinking of Eva as he said all this. I suddenly felt desolate and bereft, realizing he would leave us. And I didn’t want him to leave, because I loved him so much.
‘So, if you punish yourself through self-denial in the puritan way, in the English Christian way, there will only be resentment and more unhappiness.’ Now he looked only at Jamila. ‘People ask for advice all the time. They ask for advice when they should try to be more aware of what is happening.’
‘Thanks a lot,’ said Jamila.
It was midnight when we took her home. Her head was bowed as she went in. I asked her if she’d made her decision.
‘Oh yes,’ she said, starting up the stairs to the flat where her parents, her tormentors, were lying awake in separate rooms, one trying to die, the other no doubt wishing for death. The meter in the hall which regulated the lights was ticking loudly. Helen and I stared at Jamila’s face in the gloom for a due as to what she was going to do. Then she turned, was shrouded in darkness, and went up to bed.
Helen said Jamila would marry the boy. I said no, she’d turn him down. But it was
impossible to tell.
Helen and I climbed into Anerley Park and lay down on our backs on the grass by the swings, and looked at the sky, and pulled our clothes down. It was a good fuck, but hurried, as Hairy Back would be getting anxious. I wondered if we were both thinking of Charlie as we did it.
CHAPTER SIX
The man walking towards England, towards our curious eyes, and towards the warm winter overcoat that I held in my hands, was not Flaubert the writer, though he had a similar grey moustache, two double chins, and not much hair. Not-Flaubert was smaller than me, about the same size as Princess Jeeta. But unlike her – and the exact shape of her body was difficult to determine because of her roomy salwar kamiz – Changez had a stomach that rode out before him, with a dark-red stringy knitted jumper stretched over it. The hair that God had left him was sparse, dry and vertical, as if he brushed it forward every morning. With his good hand he shoved a trolley loaded with two rotting suitcases, which were saved from instant disintegration only by thin string and fraying pyjama cord.
When Not-Flaubert spotted his name on the piece of cardboard I was holding, he simply stopped pushing the trolley, left it standing among the shoving airport crowd and walked towards Jeeta and his wife-to-be, Jamila.
Helen had agreed to help us out on this day of days, and she and I rescued the trolley and staggered around, heaving Changez’s junk into the back of the big Rover. Helen wouldn’t hold on to anything properly in case mosquitoes jumped out of the suitcases and gave her malaria. Not-Flaubert stood by us, not getting into the car until, sanctioned by his regal nodding approval, I finally locked the boot, ensuring his sacred suitcases were safe from dacoits and thuggees.
‘Maybe he’s used to servants,’ I said to Helen in a loud voice, as I held the door open for him to slide in next to Jeeta and Jamila. Helen and I got in front. This was a delicious moment of revenge for me, because the Rover belonged to Helen’s dad, Hairy Back. Had he known that four Pakis were resting their dark arses on his deep leather seats, ready to be driven by his daughter, who had only recently been fucked by one of them, he wouldn’t have been a contented man.
The Buddha of Suburbia Page 9