I liked Terry more than anyone I’d met for a long time, and we talked every day. But he did believe the working class – which he referred to as if it were a single-willed person – would do somewhat unlikely things. ‘The working class will take care of those bastards very easily,’ he said, referring to racist organizations. ‘The working class is about to blow,’ he said at other times. ‘They’ve had enough of the Labour Party. They want the transformation of society now!’ His talk made me think of the housing estates near Mum’s house, where the ‘working class’ would have laughed in Terry’s face – those, that is, who wouldn’t have smacked him round the ear for calling them working class in the first place. I wanted to tell him that the proletariat of the suburbs did have strong class feeling-It was virulent and hate-filled and directed entirely at the people beneath them. But there were some things it was hopeless to discuss with him. I guessed that he didn’t intervene in my dispute with Shadwell because he wanted the situation to deteriorate further. Terry didn’t believe in social workers, left-wing politicians, radical lawyers, liberals or gradual improvement. He wanted things to get worse rather than better. When they were at their nadir there would be a transformation. So for things to get better they had to get worse; the worse they were the better they’d be in the future; they couldn’t even start to get better before they’d started to go drastically downhill. This was how I interpreted his arguments. It exasperated him. He asked me to join the Party. He said I should join to prove that my commitment to the ending of injustice wasn’t all hot air. I said I would sign up with pleasure on one condition. He had to kiss me. This, I said, would prove his commitment to overcoming his inbred bourgeois morality. He said that maybe I wasn’t ready to join the Party just yet.
Terry’s passion for equality appealed to my purer mind, and his hatred of existing authority appealed to my resentments. But although I hated inequality, it didn’t mean I wanted to be treated like everyone else. I recognized that what I liked in Dad and Charlie was their insistence on standing apart. I liked the power they had and the attention they received. I liked the way people admired and indulged them. So despite the yellow scarf strangling my balls, the brown make-up, and even the accent, I relished being the pivot of the production.
I started to make little demands of Shagbadly. I required a longer rest; and could I be driven home by someone, as I felt so tired? I had to have Assam tea (with a touch of lapsang souchong) available at all times during rehearsal. Could that actor slide a little to the right; no, a little further. I began to see that I could ask for the things I needed. I gained confidence.
I spent little time at home now, so I was unable to be a detailed witness to the Great Love in the same account-keeping way as before. I did notice that Eva’s absorption in the particulars of Dad’s life had waned. They saw fewer Satyajit Ray films now, and went less to Indian restaurants; Eva gave up learning Urdu and listening to sitar music at breakfast. She had a new interest; she was launching a huge campaign. Eva was planning her assault on London.
At the fiat there were drinks parties and little dinners every week, which irritated me, as I had to wait for everyone to finish filling the air with their thoughts on the latest novel before I could go to bed on the sofa. And often, after a day’s rehearsal, I had to listen to Shadwell telling the dinner party how well his production of The Jungle Book was going, how ‘expressionistic’ it was. Fortunately Eva and Dad were often out, as Eva accepted all the numerous invitations she and Dad received from directors, novelists, editorial assistants, proof-readers, poufs, and whoever else it was she met.
I noticed that at these ‘do’s’, as I still called them, to rile her, Eva was constructing an artistic persona for herself. People like her loved artists and anything ‘artistic’; the word itself was a philtre; a whiff of the sublime accompanied its mention; it was an entrance to the uncontrolled and inspired. Her kind would do anything to append the heavenly word ‘artist’ to themselves. (They had to do it themselves – no one else would.) I heard Eva say once, ‘I’m an artist, a designer, my team and I do houses.’
In the old days, when we were an ordinary suburban family, this pretentious and snobbish side of Eva amused Dad and me. And it had seemed, for a time, to be in retreat – perhaps because Dad was its grateful recipient. But now the show-off quotient was increasing daily. It was impossible to ignore. The problem was, Eva was not unsuccessful; she was not ignored by London once she started her assault. She was climbing ever higher, day by day. It was fantastic, the number of lunches, suppers, dinners, picnics, parties, receptions, champagne breakfasts, openings, closings, first nights, last nights and late nights these London people went to. They never stopped eating or talking or looking at people performing. As Eva started to take London, moving forward over the foreign fields of Islington, Chiswick and Wandsworth inch by inch, party by party, contact by contact, Dad thoroughly enjoyed himself. But he wouldn’t recognize how important it all was to Eva. It was at a dinner party in the flat, when they were in the kitchen together fetching yogurt and raspberries, that I heard for the first time one of them turn on the other in anger. Eva said, ‘For Christ’s sake, can’t you cut down on the bloody mysticism – we’re not in Beckenham now. These are bright, intelligent people, they’re used to argument, not assertion, to facts, not vapours!’
Dad threw back his head and laughed, not feeling the force of her criticism. ‘Eva, don’t you understand one plain thing? They have to let go of their rationality, of their interminable thinking and bothering over everything. They have control mania! It’s only when we let go of life and allow our innate wisdom to flourish that we live!’
He picked up the desserts and hurried into the room, addressing the table in these terms, Eva becoming more furious until an intense discussion broke out about the importance of intuition in the breakthrough stage of science. The party flowered.
During this time Dad was discovering how much he liked other people. And, having no idea how important this or that person was, whether they worked for the BBC or the TLS or the BFI, he treated them all with equal condescension.
One night, after a rehearsal and drinks with Terry, I came into the flat to find Charlie getting dressed in Eva and Dad’s bedroom, prancing in front of a full-length mirror which leaned against the partition wall. At first I didn’t recognize him. After all, I’d seen only photographs of his new personality. His hair was dyed black now, and it was spiky. He wore, inside out, a slashed T-shirt with a red swastika hand-painted on it. His black trousers were held together by safety-pins, paperclips and needles. Over this he had a black mackintosh; there were five belts strapped around his waist and a sort of grey linen nappy attached to the back of his trousers. The bastard was wearing one of my green waistcoats, too. And Eva was weeping.
‘What’s the matter?’ I said.
‘Keep out of this,’ said Charlie, sharply.
‘Please, Charlie,’ Eva implored him. ‘Please take off the swastika. I don’t care about anything else.’
‘In that case I’ll keep it on.’
‘Charlie –’
‘I’ve always hated your fucking nagging.’
‘It’s not nagging, it’s for compassion.’
‘Right. I won’t be coming back here, Eva. You’re such a drag now. It’s your age. Is it the menopause that’s making you like this?’
Beside Charlie on the floor was a pile of clothes from which he pulled jackets, macs and shirts before throwing them aside as unsuitable. He then applied black eye-liner. He walked out of the flat without looking at either of us. Eva screamed after him, ‘Think of those who died in the camps! And don’t expect me to be there tonight, you pig! Charlie, you can forget my support for ever!’
As arranged, I went to Charlie’s gig that night, at a club in Soho. I took Eva with me. It didn’t take much to persuade her to come and nothing would have prevented me from seeing precisely what it was that had turned my schoolfriend into what the Daily Express called ‘a phenomen
a’. I even made sure we got there an hour early in order to take everything in. Even then the queue for the gig stretched around the block. Eva and I walked among the kids. Eva was excited and perplexed and intimidated by the crowd. ‘How has Charlie done this?’ she kept asking. ‘We’ll soon find out,’ I said. ‘Do their mothers know they’re here?’ she asked. ‘Does he really know what he’s doing, Karim?’ Some of the kids were as young as twelve; most were about seventeen. They were dressed like Charlie, mostly in black. Some of them had orange-or blue-streaked hair, making them look like cockatoos. They elbowed and fought and gave each other tongue-sandwiches, and spat at passers-by and in each other’s faces, there in the cold and rain of decaying London, with the indifferent police looking on. As a concession to the New Wave I wore a black shirt, black jeans, white socks and black suede shoes, but I knew I had uninteresting hair. Not that I was the only one: some older men in 1960s expensive casual clothes, Fiorucci jeans and suede boots, with Cuban heels for Christ’s sake, were chasing the band, hoping to sign them.
What, then, had Charlie done since that night in the Nashville? He’d got in with the punks and seen immediately what they were doing, what a renaissance this was in music. He’d changed the group’s name to the Condemned and his own name to Charlie Hero. And as the mood of British music snapped from one paradigm to another, from lush Baroque to angry garage, he’d forced and battered Mustn’t Grumble into becoming one of the hottest New Wave or punk bands around.
Eva’s son was continually being chased by national papers, magazines and semioticians for quotes about the new nihilism, the new hopelessness and the new music which expressed it. Hero was to explain the despair of the young to the baffled but interested, which he did by spitting at journalists or just punching them. He had a smart head, Charlie; he learned that his success, like that of the other bands, was guaranteed by his ability to insult the media. Fortunately, Charlie had a talent for cruelty. These insults were published widely, as were his other assaults on hippies, love, the Queen, Mick Jagger, political activism and punk itself. ‘We’re shit,’ he proclaimed one night on early evening television. ‘Can’t play, can’t sing, can’t write songs, and the shitty idiot people love us!’ Two outraged parents were reported as having kicked in their TV screens at this. Eva even appeared in the Daily Mirror under the headline: ‘PUNK MUM SAYS I’M PROUD OF MY SON!’
The Fish ensured that Charlie was in the news and firmly established as a Face. He was also ensuring that their first record, The Bride of Christ, would be out in a few weeks. Offence had already been caused. With luck the record would be vilified and banned, guaranteeing credibility and financial success. Charlie was well on his way at last.
That evening, as always, the Fish was polite and gentlemanly. He reassured Eva that he and Charlie knew exactly what they were doing. But she was anxious. She kissed the Fish and clutched his arm, and openly begged him, ‘Please, please, don’t let my son become a heroin addict. You’ve no idea how weak he is.’
The Fish got us a good position at the back of the club, where we stood on wooden beer crates holding on to each other as the floor seemed about to crack open with heat and stomping. I soon felt as if the entire audience were lying on top of me – and the band were still in the dressing room.
They came on. The place went berserk. The Condemned had thrown out everything of their former existence – their hair, clothes, music. They were unrecognizable.
And they were nervous, not quite at ease yet in their new clothes. They crashed through their set as if they were in a competition to see who could get through the most songs in the shortest time, sounding like an unrehearsed version of the group Charlie and I had seen in the Nashville. Charlie no longer played rhythm guitar but stood clutching a mike stand at the edge of the stage, howling at the kids, who pogoed like road drills, and spat and lobbed bottles until the stage was littered with broken glass. He got cut on the hand. Beside me, Eva gasped and covered her face. Then Charlie was smearing blood over his face and wiping it over the bass guitarist.
The rest of the Condemned were still nonentities, the clerks and Civil Servants of the music business. But Charlie was magnificent in his venom, his manufactured rage, his anger, his defiance. What power he had, what admiration he extorted, what looks there were in girls’ eyes. He was brilliant: he’d assembled the right elements. It was a wonderful trick and disguise. The one flaw, I giggled to myself, was his milky and healthy white teeth, which, to me, betrayed everything else.
Then a riot started. Bottles flew, strangers punched each other and a tooth flew down Eva’s cleavage. I had blood all over me. Girls passed out on the floor; ambulances were called. The Fish efficiently got us out.
I was thoughtful as we walked through Soho that night. Beside me, Eva, in her jeans and tennis shoes, stepped along lightly, trying to hum one of Charlie’s songs and keep up with my fast pace. Eventually she took my arm. We were so easy with each other, we could have been going out together. We said nothing; I presumed she was speculating about Charlie’s future. On my side, I burned with less envy of Charlie than I’d imagined I would. This was because one strong feeling dominated me: ambition. As yet it was unfocused. But I was completely impressed by Charlie’s big con trick, by his having knocked on the door of opportunity and its opening up to him, its goods tumbling out. Now he could take what he wanted. Until this moment I’d felt incapable of operating effectively in the world; I didn’t know how to do it; events tossed me about. Now I was beginning to see that it didn’t necessarily have to be that way. My happiness and progress and education could depend on my own activity – as long as it was the right activity at the right time. My coming appearance in The Jungle Book was meagre in comparison with Charlie’s triumph, but soon eyes would be on me; it was a start, and I felt strong and determined. It would lead upwards.
As we got into the car I looked at Eva and she smiled at me. I felt she hadn’t been thinking about Charlie at all – except as an inspiration – but that, like me, she’d been dwelling on what she might do in the world. Driving us back home, Eva banged the steering wheel and sang, and yelled out of the window.
‘Weren’t they great? Isn’t he a star, Karim!’
‘Yeah, yeah!’
‘They’re going to be big, Karim, really huge. But Charlie will have to jettison that group. He can make it on his own, don’t you think?’
‘Yeah, but what will happen to them?’
‘Those boys?’ She waved them away. ‘But our boy’s going up. Up! Up!’ She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. ‘And you too, OK?’
The dress rehearsal of The Jungle Book went well. We were all surprised by how smooth it was; no one forgot their lines, and technically all was fine. So we went into the first preview, in front of an audience, with plenty of confidence. The costumes were amusing and the audience applauded them. The naughty monkeys screeched their high-pitched calls as the Pack Council met to discuss the man cub’s future. But as Shere Khan growled from the distance in his Hamlet’s ghost voice, ‘The cub is mine. Give him to me. What have the Free People to do with a man’s cub?’ I heard a cracking noise above me. Unprofessionally, I looked up, to see the iron net of the scaffolding bending, swaying and finally tipping towards me as bolts snapped and lights crashed down on to the floor of the stage. Voices in the audience shouted out warnings to us. Most of the front row jumped to their feet and fled up the aisle away from the danger. I deserted the play, as did the other actors on stage, and leapt into the audience. I landed on Shadwell, who was already on his feet screaming at the technicians. The play was abandoned for that night and the audience sent home. The rows were horrific, Shadwell a monster. Two other previews were cut. There was to be only one preview before the first night.
Naturally, I wanted Mum to be at the first night, and Dad too. But as they hadn’t seen each other since the day they both left the house, I didn’t think my début in The Jungle Book was the best time for a reunion. So I invited Mum, with Uncle Ted an
d Auntie Jean, to the preview. This time nothing went wrong. Afterwards, Uncle Ted, who had his suit and Brylcreem on, announced a treat. He would take us all out to Trader Vies at the Hilton Hotel. Mum had dressed up, and was looking all sweet in a blue dress with a bow at the front. She was cheerful, too; I’d forgotten how happy she could be. In a fit of unshyness she’d left the shoe shop and was working as a receptionist at a doctor’s practice. She began to discuss illness with authority.
Mum wept with pride at my Mowgli. Jean, who hadn’t wept since the death of Humphrey Bogart, laughed a great deal and was good-tempered and drunk.
‘I thought it would be more amateur,’ she kept saying, obviously surprised that I could be involved in anything that wasn’t a total failure. ‘But it was really professional! And fancy meeting all those television actors!’
The key to impressing Mum and Auntie Jean, and the best way to keep their tongues off the risible subject of my loin-cloth, which inevitably had them quaking with laughter, was to introduce them to the actors afterwards, telling them which sit-coms and police programmes they’d seen them in. After dinner we went dancing in a night club in the West End. I’d never seen Mum dance before, but she slipped out of her sandals and danced with Auntie Jean to the Jackson Five. It was a grand evening.
However, I imagined that the praise I received that night was merely to be a preview of the steaming sauna of appreciation that I’d receive after the first night. So after the opening I ran out of the dressing room to where Dad, in his red waistcoat, was waiting with all the others. None of them looked particularly cheerful. We walked up the street to a restaurant nearby, and still no one spoke to me. ‘Well, Dad,’ I asked, ‘how did you enjoy yourself? Aren’t you glad I didn’t become a doctor?’
The Buddha of Suburbia Page 18