‘Jeremy,’ I said, ‘I think I’d better tell you something.’
We went into the communal lavatory, the only private space backstage, and I broke the news to him. Shadwell nodded and said gently, ‘You’re being ungrateful, Karim. You shouldn’t just bugger off, you know, it’s not right. We all love you here, OK?’
‘Please understand, Jeremy – Pyke’s a big man. Very important. Surely there’s a tide in the affairs of men which taken – ’
Shadshit’s voice suddenly rose to rehearsal pitch and he walked out of the toilet and into the dressing room. Behind us in the auditorium the show was about to begin, and the audience were in their seats. They could hear every syllable. I felt particularly ridiculous hurrying along behind him in my loin-cloth.
‘What tide, you drowning prick?’ he said. ‘You haven’t the experience to deal with Pyke. You’ll be mincemeat within three days. You’ve got no idea what a tough fucking bastard Pyke is. He’s charming, all right. All interesting people have charm. But he’ll crucify you!’
‘Why would he want to crucify a little person like me?’ I said weakly. Boyd smirked and mouthed ‘exactly’ at Terry, who ignored him but seemed to be nodding in agreement with Shotbolt.
‘For fun, you idiot! Because that’s how people like that operate! They pretend they’re democrats but they’re little Lenins –’
Terry took offence at this. He glared at Shadwell and said, ‘They should be so lucky!’ But Shoddy was not to be deterred now he was going.
‘They’re cultural fascists and élitists who think they know better than anyone else how it is! They’re paranoid, frightened people!’
Some of the others in the cast were laughing behind their hands like schoolkids when one of them is being castigated by Teacher. I walked towards the stage on my red carpet.
‘I don’t care what you say. I can look after myself.’
‘Ha!’ he shouted. ‘We’ll fucking see – you little parvenu!’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Spring. Some time after I’d said goodbye to Bagheera, Baloo and the others, and get fucked to Shadwell, and didn’t go to the last-night party, I was in a clean, bright rehearsal room with a polished wooden floor (so we could run around barefoot) in a church hall by the river, near Chelsea Bridge. There were six actors in Pyke’s group, three men and three women. Two of us were officially ‘black’ (though truly I was more beige than anything). None of us was over thirty. Only one woman, pinched-face Carol, also from the suburbs (so I had her ambitious little number right away), had worked with Pyke before. There was a red-haired woman called Eleanor, in her early twenties, who seemed experienced and sensible, and unlike Carol didn’t fancy herself as a bit of a star. And there was a nineteen-year-old black actress, Tracey, with firm but peculiar views. The other two men, Richard (gay) and Jon, were those solid, cynical, jobbing actors who’d been around the London fringe for years, acting in rooms above pubs for a share of the box-office, in basements, at festivals and in street theatre. They required little but a good part, a director who wasn’t a fool or a dictator, and a comfortable pub near the venue with authentic beer. There was also a writer in the group, Louise Lawrence, an earnest and self-satisfied northern woman with thick glasses who said little but wrote down everything you said, especially if it was stupid.
At ten every morning I cycled into Chelsea, with Eva’s mushrooms-on-toast fuelling me, and rode around the hall with no hands – in celebration of life. I’d never been so enthusiastic about anything. This was my big chance, in more ways than one.
Pyke, in his shiny blue tracksuit, with his athletic body and greying hair, usually sat at a table with his feet on a chair. He was surrounded by laughing actors and the two stage-managers, adoring young women who were like his personal servants. The stage-managers looked after his newspapers, his orange juice, and planned his trips to New York. One of them carried his diary, the other his pencils and sharpener. His car (which Richard referred to as ‘Pyke’s Penis’, as in ‘Pyke’s Penis is blocking the drive’ or ‘Pyke’s Penis can do nought to sixty in thirty seconds’) was a priority for them. And they spent many mornings on the phone arranging his dates with women.
The atmosphere Pyke created was in contrast to Shadwell’s tense and chaotic rehearsals, which were essentially an imitation of how Shadwell thought geniuses worked. Pyke’s morning began with breakfast and essential gossip around the table, the cruelty and extremity of which I’d never experienced before. My mother would never have let us talk about anyone like that. Pyke attacked other directors (‘He couldn’t direct air out of a puncture’); writers he didn’t like (‘I would gladly have handed him over to Stalin for re-education’); and critics (‘His face would make pregnant women abort on sight’). After this we’d get up and play tag, or have piggyback races, or play ‘What’s the time, Mr Wolf?’
None of this seemed like work to me, and I loved to think of what the suburban commuters in our street, who were paying for us through their taxes, would have made of a gang of grown-ups being pop-up toasters, surfboards and typewriters.
After lunch, to warm up again, Pyke had us play ‘feely’ games where we stood in the centre of a circle with our feet together and eyes closed and just let ourselves fall. Weak and relaxed, we’d be passed around the group. Everyone touched us; we embraced and kissed. This was how Pyke fused the group. It seemed to me during one of these games that Eleanor remained in my arms just that little bit longer than necessary.
On the fourth day, sitting there at ten in the morning with all of us gathered around him, Pyke played a game which disturbed me, which made me think there was a shadow side to him. Looking slyly around the group he said he would predict which of us would sleep together. He inspected each of us in turn and said, ‘I think I know which way pleasure’s course will run. I’ll write down my predictions, and on the last night of the show I’ll read them out. OK?’
During the second week the sun shone and we opened the doors. I wore an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt which I sometimes knotted on my stomach. One of the stage-managers almost stopped breathing when she saw me, I’m not kidding. We each sat in what Pyke called ‘the hot seat’ with the group arranged in a staring semi-circle around us. Each of us had to tell the rest of the group the story of our life. ‘Concentrate on the way you think your position in society has been fixed,’ said Pyke.
Being sceptical and suspicious, the English sort to be embarrassed by such a Californian display of self, I found the life-stories – accounts of contradiction and wretchedness, confusion and intermittent happiness – oddly affecting. I giggled all through Lawrence’s account of working in a San Francisco massage parlour (when she was stranded there), where the women were not allowed to proposition men directly in case they were cops. They had to say, ‘Is there any other muscle you’d like relaxed, sir?’ This was where Lawrence discovered socialism, for here, in a forest of pricks and pond of semen, ‘I soon realized that nothing human was alien to me,’ as she put it.
Richard talked about wanting to fuck only black men, and the clubs he cruised constantly in order to acquire them. And to Pyke’s delight and my surprise Eleanor told of how she’d worked with a woman performance artist who persuaded her to extract the texts of poems – ‘Cows’ teeth like snowdrops bite the garlic grass’ – from her vagina before reading them. The performance artist herself meanwhile had a microphone up her vagina and relayed the gurglings of her cunt to the audience. This was enough for me. I was hot on Eleanor’s trail. For the time being I gave up on Terry.
Every few days I rang Jamila to give her a full account of cows’ teeth like snowdrops, Pyke’s Penis, San Francisco, Hawaii and pop-up toasters. Everyone else was encouraging: Eva, having heard of Pyke, was very impressed; and Dad was happy that I was working. The only person I was certain would urinate on my flame was Jamila.
So I explained the games and the reasoning behind them. ‘Pyke’s a shrewd man,’ I told her. ‘By having us expose ourselves he’s made us vulne
rable and dependent on each other. We’re so close as a group it’s incredible!’
‘Pah. You’re not close to each other. It’s fake, just a technique.’
‘I thought you believed in co-operation and all. Communist stuff like that.’
‘Karim, shall I tell you what’s been going on over here at the shop while you’ve been over there hugging strangers?’
‘Why, what?’
‘Νο, I’m not going to talk to you. Karim, you’re basically a selfish person, uninterested in anyone else.’
‘What?’
‘Go back to being a tree.’ And she put the phone down.
Soon, in the mornings, we stopped meeting at the rehearsal room: we all went our separate ways to research characters from different rungs of the social ladder. These people Louise Lawrence would eventually have to try and massage into the same play. In the afternoons we improvised around the characters and started to build scenes. Initially I thought I’d choose Charlie as my character, but Pyke discouraged me immediately. ‘We need someone from your own background,’ he said. ‘Someone black.’
‘Yeah?’
I didn’t know anyone black, though I’d been at school with a Nigerian. But I wouldn’t know where to find him. ‘Who do you mean?’ I asked.
‘What about your family?’ Pyke said. ‘Uncles and aunts. They’ll give the play a little variety. I bet they’re fascinating.’
I thought for a few minutes.
‘Any ideas?’ he said.
‘I’ve got just the thing,’ I said.
‘Excellent. I knew you’d be the right person to be in this show.’
After breakfast with Dad and Eva I cycled across the river, past the Oval cricket ground to Jeeta and Anwar’s shop. I was beginning to think of Anwar as the character I’d play, and I wanted to see how he’d changed since the advent of Changez, who was such a disappointment that Anwar – who had been counting on being given a life-transfusion by a son – had become an old man, his natural course of decay being accelerated, not delayed, by the fresh element which had turned out to be not-so-fresh.
When I arrived Jeeta got up from behind the till and hugged me. I noticed how grubby and gloomy Paradise Stores looked now: paint was peeling from the walls, the shelves were dirty, the lino on the floor was curling and cracking, and several lights seemed to have failed, leaving the place tenebrous. Outside, in their old orange-boxes, even the vegetables looked forlorn, and Jeeta had grown tired of scrubbing off the racist graffiti which reappeared on the walls every time you removed it. Other shops in the area, all over London in fact, were modernizing rapidly, as ambitious Pakistanis and Bengalis bought them up. Several brothers, say, would come to London; they’d get two jobs each, in an office during the day and a restaurant by night; they’d buy a shop, installing one brother as manager, with his wife behind the till. Then they’d get another shop and do the same, until a chain was established. Money flowed. But Anwar and Jeeta’s shop had not changed in years. Business was slack. Everything was going wrong, but I didn’t want to think about it. The play was too important.
I told Jeeta about the play and what I wanted – just to be around – knowing she’d barely understand or be interested. But she did have something to say.
‘Whatever you do,’ she said, ‘if you’re going to come here day after day, you must stop your uncle going out with his walking stick.’
‘Why, Auntie Jeeta?’
‘Karim, some thugs came here one day. They threw a pig’s head through the shop window as I sat here.’
Jamila hadn’t told me anything about this.
‘Were you hurt?’
‘A little cut. Blood here and there, Karim.’
‘What did the police do?’
‘They said it was another shop. A rival thing.’
‘Bollocks.’
‘Naughty boy, bad language.’
‘Sorry, Auntie.’
‘It made your uncle come very strange. He is roaming the streets every day with his stick, shouting at these white boys, “Beat me, white boy, if you want to!”’ And she blushed with shame and embarrassment. ‘Go to him,’ she said, and squeezed my hand.
I found Uncle Anwar upstairs in his pyjamas. He seemed to have shrunk in the past few months: his legs and body were emaciated, while his head remained the same size, perched on him like a globe on a walking stick.
‘You bastard,’ he said in greeting, ‘where have you been?’
‘I’m here with you every day now.’
He grunted his approbation and continued to watch television. He loved having me beside him, though he barely spoke and never asked me about myself. For a few weeks he’d been visiting the mosque regularly, and now I occasionally went with him. The mosque was a dilapidated terraced house nearby which smelled of bhuna gost. The floor was sprinkled with onion skins, and Moulvi Qamar-Uddin sat behind his desk surrounded by leather-bound books on Islam and a red telephone, stroking the beard which reached to his stomach. Anwar complained to the Moulvi that Allah had abandoned him despite regular prayers and a refusal to womanize. Hadn’t he loved his wife and given her a shop, and now wasn’t she refusing to go home to Bombay with him?
Anwar complained to me about Jeeta as we sat in the store-room like a couple of school truants. ‘I want to go home now,’ he said. ‘I’ve had enough of this damn place.’
But as the days passed I watched Jeeta’s progress. She certainly didn’t want to go home. It was as if Jamila had educated her in possibility, the child being an example to the parent. The Princess wanted to get a licence to sell liquor on the premises; she wanted to sell newspapers and increase the stock. She could see how it was all done, but Anwar was impossible, you couldn’t discuss anything with him. Like many Muslim men – beginning with the Prophet Mohammed himself, whose absolute statements, served up piping hot from God, inevitably gave rise to absolutism – Anwar thought he was right about everything. No doubt on any subject ever entered his head.
‘Why don’t you want to take up Jeeta’s ideas?’ I asked him.
‘For what? What will I do with the profit? How many shoes can I wear? How many socks? How better will I eat? Thirty breakfasts instead of one?’ And he always said, finally, ‘Everything is perfect.’
‘D’you believe that, Uncle?’ I asked one day.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘Everything gets worse.’
His Muslim fatalism – Allah was responsible for everything – depressed me. I was always glad to get away now. I had a far more exciting project heating up over the other side of the river. I had chosen Eleanor to fall in love with, and was making progress.
Almost every day after rehearsal Eleanor said, as I hoped she would, ‘Are you coming over later, then, to keep me company?’ And she watched my face anxiously, biting her nails and ripping the skin from around her fingernails with her teeth, and twisting her long red hair around her fingers.
From the start of rehearsal she had noticed my fear and inexperience, and offered consolation. Eleanor had already appeared in films, on TV and in the West End. I felt like a boy beside her, but there was something in her that needed me too, something weak rather than kind or passionate, as if I were a comfort during an illness, someone to touch, perhaps. As soon as I saw this weakness I closed in. I had never been seen with such a mature and beautiful woman before, and I encouraged her to go out with me so people would think we were a couple.
I started going to her flat in Ladbroke Grove, an area that was slowly being reconstituted by the rich, but where Rasta dope dealers still hung around outside the pubs; inside, they chopped up the hash on the table with their knives. There were also many punks around now, dressed, like Charlie, in ripped black. This was the acme of fashion. As soon as you got your clothes home you had to slash them with razor-blades. And there were the kids who were researchers and editors and the like: they’d been at Oxford together and they swooped up to wine bars in bright little red and blue Italian cars, afraid they would be broken into by the bl
ack kids, but too politically polite to acknowledge this.
But how stupid I was – how naïve. I was misled by my ignorance of London into thinking my Eleanor was less middle class than she turned out to be. She dressed roughly, wearing a lot of scarves, lived in Notting Hill and – sometimes – talked with a Catford accent. My mother would have been appalled by Eleanor’s clothes and manners, and her saying ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’ every ten seconds. This wouldn’t have perturbed Eva: she would have been disappointed and perplexed by Eleanor’s concealment of her social origins and the way she took her ‘connections’ for granted. Eva would have given much to edge her body into the houses Eleanor had played in as a child.
Eleanor’s father was American and owned a bank; her mother was a well-respected English portrait painter; one of her brothers was a university professor. Eleanor had been to country houses, to public school and Italy, and she knew many liberal families and people who’d flourished in the 1960s: painters, novelists, lecturers, young people called Candia, Emma, Jasper, Lucy, India, and grown-ups called Edward, Caroline, Francis, Douglas and Lady Luckham. Her mother was a friend of the Queen Mother, and when Ma’am turned up in her Bentley the local kids gathered round the car and cheered. One day Eleanor had to rush away from rehearsal because she was required by her mother to make up the numbers at a lunch for the Queen Mother. The voices and language of those people reminded me of Enid Blyton, and Bunter and Jennings, of nurseries and nannies and prep school, a world of total security that I’d thought existed only in books. They lacked all understanding of how much more than anyone else they had. I was frightened of their confidence, education, status, money, and I was beginning to see how important they were.
To my surprise, the people whose shabby houses I went to as I trailed around with Eleanor night after night, ‘looking after her’, were polite and kind and attentive to me, far more pleasant than the supercilious crowd Eva drew to her place. Eleanor’s set, with their combination of class, culture and money, and their indifference to all three, was exactly the cocktail that intoxicated Eva’s soul, but she could never get near it. This was unforced bohemia; this was what she sought; this was the apogee. However, I concealed this aspect of my social rise from Eva, saving it up for the perfect defensive or attacking occasion, though she and Dad had already heard that I’d set my sights on Eleanor. This was a relief to my father, I knew, who was so terrified that I might turn out to be gay that he could never bring himself to mention the matter. In his Muslim mind it was bad enough being a woman; being a man and denying your male sex was perverse and self-destructive, as well as everything else. When I could see Dad’s mind brooding on the subject I was always sure to mention Mum – how she was, what she was doing – knowing that this powerful anguish was sure to banish the matter of my sexual orientation.
The Buddha of Suburbia Page 20