Eleanor was not without her eccentricities. She didn’t like to go out unless the visits were fleeting and she could come and go at will. She never sat all the way through a dinner party, but arrived during it, eating a bag of sweets and walking around the room picking up various objects and enquiring into their history, before dragging me off after half an hour with a sudden desire to visit another party somewhere to talk to someone who was an expert on the Profumo affair.
Often we stayed in and she cooked. I was never one for education and vegetables, having been inoculated against both at school, but most nights Eleanor made me cabbage or broccoli or Brussels sprouts, steaming them and dunking them in frying butter and garlic for a few seconds. Another time we had red snapper, which tasted a little tough, like shark, in puff pastry with sour cream and parsley. We usually had a bottle of Chablis too. And none of this had I experienced before! Eleanor could sleep only if she was drunk, and I never cycled home before my baby was tucked up, half-cut, with a Jean Rhys or Antonia White to cheer her up. I would have preferred, of course, that I myself could be her nightcap.
It was clear that Eleanor had been to bed with a large and random collection of people, but when I suggested she go to bed with me, she said, ‘I don’t think we should, just at the moment, do you?’ As a man I found this pretty fucking insulting. There were constant friendly caresses, and when things got too much (every few hours) she held me and cried, but the big caress was out.
I soon realized that Eleanor’s main guardian and my main rival for her affection was a man called Heater. He was the local road-sweeper, a grossly fat and ugly sixteen-stone Scot in a donkey jacket whom Eleanor had taken up three years ago as a cause. He came round every night he wasn’t at the theatre, and sat in the flat reading Balzac in translation and giving his bitter and big-mouthed opinion on the latest production of Lear or the Ring. He knew dozens of actors, especially the left-wing ones, of whom there were plenty at this political time. Heater was the only working-class person most of them had met. So he became a sort of symbol of the masses, and consequently received tickets to first nights and to the parties afterwards, having a busier social life than Cecil Beaton. He even popped in to dress rehearsals to give his opinion as ‘a man in the street’. If you didn’t adore Heater – and I hated every repulsive inch of him – and listen to him as the authentic voice of the proletariat, it was easy, if you were middle class (which meant you were born a criminal, having fallen at birth), to be seen by the comrades and their sympathizers as a snob, an élitist, a hypocrite, a proto-Goebbels.
I found myself competing with Heater for Eleanor’s love. If I sat too close to her he glared at me; if I touched her casually his eyes would dilate and flare like gas rings. His purpose in life was to ensure Eleanor’s happiness, which was harder work than road-sweeping, since she disliked herself so intensely. Yes, Eleanor loathed herself and yet required praise, which she then never believed. But she reported it to me, saying, ‘D’you know what so-and-so said this morning? He said, when he held me, that he loved the smell of me, he loved my skin and the way I made him laugh.’
When I discussed this aspect of Eleanor with my adviser, Jamila, she didn’t let me down. ‘Christ, Creamy Fire Eater, you one hundred per cent total prat, that’s exactly what they’re like, these people, actresses and such-like vain fools. The world burns and they comb their eyebrows. Or they try and put the burning world on the stage. It never occurs to them to dowse the flames. What are you getting into?’
‘Love. I love her.’
‘Ah.’
‘But she won’t even kiss me. What should I do?’
‘Am I an agony aunt now?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Don’t attempt kissing until I advise. Wait.’
Vain and self-obsessed Eleanor may have been, as Jamila said, but she didn’t know how to care for herself either. She was tender only to others. She would buy me flowers and shirts and take me to the barber’s; she would spend all day rehearsing and then feed Heater, listening all evening to him as he whined about his wasted life. ‘Women are brought up to think of others,’ she said, when I told her to protect herself more, to think of her own interests. ‘When I start to think of myself I feel sick,’ she said.
Lately, Heater had been taken up by a polymath theatre director with an interest in the deprived. Heater met Abbado and (once) Calvino at his house, where the polymath encouraged Heater to speak of knife fights, Glasgow poverty and general loucheness and violence. After dinner, Heater would open the windows and let in the stench of the real world. And Heater gave these satisfactions, as he knew he had to, like Clapton having to play ‘Layla’ every time he performed. But Heater got through the slashings quickly in order to bring up Beethoven’s late quartets and something which bothered him in Huysmans.
One night Heater was at the Press night of La Bohème at Covent Garden, and Eleanor and I were sunk into her sofa all snug, watching television and drinking. This suited me: to be with just her, asking questions about the people whose houses we visited. They had histories, these top-drawers, and she told them as stories. Someone’s grandfather had had an argument with Lytton Strachey; someone else’s father was a Labour peer who’d had an affair with a Conservative MP’s wife; some other fortunate whore was an actress in a soon-to-be released film that everyone was going to a premiere of in Curzon Street. Someone else had written a novel about their former lover, and it was transparent who it was.
It must have been obvious that I wasn’t listening to her today, though, because she turned to me and said, ‘Hey, funny face, give me a kiss.’ That got my attention. ‘It’s been so long for me, Karim, you know, I can hardly remember what lips feel like.’
‘Like this.’ I said.
It felt hot and wonderful, and we must have kissed for half an hour. I’m not exactly sure how long it lasted, because I soon paid no attention to what in my book should have been the kiss of a lifetime. I was thinking of other things. Oh yes, I was overwhelmed by angry thoughts, which pushed themselves to the front of my mind, not so much numbing my lips as detaching them from me, as if they were a pair of glasses, for instance.
In the past few weeks circumstances had made me discover what an ignoramus I was. Lately I’d been fortunate, and my life had changed quickly, but I’d reflected little on it. When I did think of myself in comparison with those in Eleanor’s crowd, I became aware that I knew nothing; I was empty, an intellectual void. I didn’t even know who Cromwell was, for God’s sake. I knew nothing about zoology, geology, astronomy, languages, mathematics, physics.
Most of the kids I grew up with left school at sixteen, and they’d be in insurance now, or working as car-mechanics, or managers (radio and TV dept) in department stores. And I’d walked out of college without thinking twice about it, despite my father’s admonitions. In the suburbs education wasn’t considered a particular advantage, and certainly couldn’t be seen as worthwhile in itself. Getting into business young was more important. But now I was among people who wrote books as naturally as we played football. What infuriated me – what made me loathe both them and myself – was their confidence and knowledge. The easy talk of art, theatre, architecture, travel; the languages, the vocabulary, knowing the way round a whole culture – it was invaluable and irreplaceable capital.
At my school they taught you a bit of French, but anyone who attempted to pronounce a word correctly was laughed down. On a trip to Calais we attacked a Frog behind a restaurant. By this ignorance we knew ourselves to be superior to the public-school kids, with their puky uniforms and leather briefcases, and Mummy and Daddy waiting outside in the car to pick them up. We were rougher; we disrupted all lessons; we were fighters; we never carried no effeminate briefcases since we never did no homework. We were proud of never learning anything except the names of footballers, the personnel of rock groups and the lyrics of ‘I am the Walrus’. What idiots we were! How misinformed! Why didn’t we understand that we were happily condemn
ing ourselves to being nothing better than motor-mechanics? Why couldn’t we see that? For Eleanor’s crowd hard words and sophisticated ideas were in the air they breathed from birth, and this language was the currency that bought you the best of what the world could offer. But for us it could only ever be a second language, consciously acquired.
And where I could have been telling Eleanor about the time I got fucked by Hairy Back’s Great Dane, it was her stories that had primacy, her stories that connected to an entire established world. It was as if I felt my past wasn’t important enough, wasn’t as substantial as hers, so I’d thrown it away. I never talked about Mum and Dad, or the suburbs, though I did talk about Charlie. Charlie was kudos. And once I practically stopped talking at all, my voice choking in my throat, when Eleanor said my accent was cute.
‘What accent?’ I managed to say.
‘The way you talk, it’s great.’
‘But what way do I talk?’
She looked at me impatiently, as if I were playing some ridiculous game, until she saw I was serious.
‘You’ve got a street voice, Karim. You’re from South London – so that’s how you speak. It’s like cockney, only not so raw. It’s not unusual. It’s different to my voice, of course.’
Of course.
At that moment I resolved to lose my accent: whatever it was, it would go. I would speak like her. It wasn’t difficult. I’d left my world; I had to, to get on. Not that I wanted to go back. I still craved adventure and the dreams I’d desired that night when I had my epiphany on Eva’s toilet in Beckenham. But somehow I knew also that I was getting into deep water.
After the kiss, when I stood in the darkened room and looked out on the street, my knees gave way.
‘Eleanor, I won’t be able to cycle home,’ I said. ‘I think I’ve lost the use of my legs.’
She said, softly, ‘I can’t sleep with you tonight, baby, my head’s all messed up, you’ve no idea. It’s somewhere else and it’s full of voices and songs and bad stuff. And I’m too much trouble for you. You know why, don’t you?’
‘Please tell me.’
She turned away. ‘Another time. Or ask anyone. I’m sure they’ll be happy to tell you, Karim.’
She kissed me goodnight at the door. I was not sad to go. I knew I’d be seeing her every day.
When we’d found the characters we wanted to play, Pyke had us present them to the rest of the group. Eleanor’s was an upper-class English woman in her sixties who’d grown up in the Indian Raj, someone who believed herself to be part of Britain’s greatness but was declining with it and becoming, to her consternation, sexually curious just as Britain became so. Eleanor did it brilliantly. When she acted she lost her hair-twiddling self-consciousness and became still, drawing us towards her as a low-voiced story-teller, adding just enough satirical top-spin to keep us guessing as to her attitude towards the character.
She finished to general approval and theatrical kisses. It was my turn. I got up and did Anwar. It was a monologue, saying who he was, what he was like, followed by an imitation of him raving in the street. I slipped into it easily, as I’d rehearsed so much at Eleanor’s. I thought my work was as good as anyone’s in the group, and for the first time I didn’t feel myself to be lagging behind everyone else.
After tea we sat around to discuss the characters. For some reason, perhaps because she looked puzzled, Pyke said to Tracey, ‘Why don’t you tell us what you thought of Karim’s character?’
Now although Tracey was hesitant, she did feel strongly. She was dignified and serious, not fashionable like a lot of middle-class kids who fancied themselves as actors. Tracey was respectable in the best surburban way, honest and kind and unpretentious, and she dressed like a secretary; but she was also bothered by things: she worried about what it meant to be a black woman. She seemed shy and ill at ease in the world, doing her best to disappear from a room without actually walking out. Yet when I saw her at a party with only black people present, she was completely different – extrovert, passionate, and dancing wildly. She’d been brought up by her mother, who worked as a cleaning woman. By some odd coincidence Tracey’s mother was scrubbing the steps of a house near our rehearsal room one morning when we were exercising in the park. Pyke had invited her to talk to the group during her lunch-break.
Tracey usually said little, so when she did begin to talk about my Anwar the group listened but kept out of the discussion. This thing was suddenly between ‘minorities’.
‘Two things, Karim,’ she said to me. ‘Anwar’s hunger-strike worries me. What you want to say hurts me. It really pains me! And I’m not sure that we should show it!’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’ She spoke to me as if all I required was a little sense. ‘I’m afraid it shows black people –’
‘Indian people –’
‘Black and Asian people –’
‘One old Indian man –’
‘As being irrational, ridiculous, as being hysterical. And as being fanatical.’
‘Fanatical?’ I appealed to the High Court. Judge Pyke was listening carefully. ‘It’s not a fanatical hunger-strike. It’s calmly intended blackmail.’
But Judge Pyke signalled for Tracey to go on.
‘And that arranged marriage. It worries me. Karim, with respect, it worries me.’
I stared at her, saying nothing. She was very disturbed.
‘Tell us exactly why it worries you,’ Eleanor said, sympathetically.
‘How can I even begin? Your picture is what white people already think of us. That we’re funny, with strange habits and weird customs. To the white man we’re already people without humanity, and then you go and have Anwar madly waving his stick at the white boys. I can’t believe that anything like this could happen. You show us as unorganized aggressors. Why do you hate yourself and all black people so much, Karim?’
As she continued, I looked around the group. My Eleanor looked sceptical, but I could see the others were prepared to agree with Tracey. It was difficult to disagree with someone whose mother you’d found kneeling in front of a middle-class house with a bucket and mop.
‘How can you be so reactionary?’ she said.
‘But this sounds like censorship.’
‘We have to protect our culture at this time, Karim. Don’t you agree?’
‘No. Truth has a higher value.’
‘Pah. Truth. Who defines it? What truth? It’s white truth you’re defending here. It’s white truth we’re discussing.’
I looked at Judge Pyke. But he liked to let things run. He thought conflict was creative.
Finally he said: ‘Karim, you may have to rethink.’
‘But I’m not sure I can.’
‘Yes. Don’t unnecessarily restrict your range either as an actor or as a person.’
‘But Matthew, why must I do it?’
He looked at me coolly. ‘Because I say so.’ And added: ‘You must start again.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘Hey, Fatso, what’s happening?’
‘Same, same, big famous actor.’ Changez sneezed into the dust-ghosts he’d raised. ‘What big thing are you acting in now that we can come and laugh at?’
‘Well, let me tell you, eh?’
I made a cup of banana and coconut tea from the several tins I carried at all times in case my host had only Typhoo. I especially needed my own resources at Changez’s place, since he made tea by boiling milk, water, sugar, teabag and cardamom all together for fifteen minutes. ‘Man’s tea,’ he called this, or, ‘Top tea. Good for erections.’
Fortunately for me – and I didn’t want her to hear my request to Changez – Jamila was out, having recently started work at a Black Women’s Centre nearby, where she was researching into racial attacks on women. Changez was dusting, wearing Jamila’s pink silk dressing-gown. Tubes of brown fat gurgled and swayed as he dabbed his duster at cobwebs the size of paperbacks. He liked Jamila’s clothes: he’d always have on one of her jumpers or shirts,
or he’d be sitting on his camp-bed in her overcoat with one of her scarves wrapped around his head and covering his ears, Indian fashion, making him look as if he had a toothache.
‘I’m researching a play, Changez, looking all over for a character, and I’m thinking of basing mine on someone we both know. They’re going to be privileged and everything to be represented. Bloody lucky.’
‘Good, good. Jamila, eh?’
‘No. You.’
‘What? Me, hey?’ Changez straightened himself suddenly and ran his fingers through his hair, as if he were about to be photographed.
‘But I haven’t shaved, yaar.’
‘It’s a terrific idea, isn’t it? One of my best.’
‘I’m proud to be a subject for a top drama,’ he said. But his face clouded over. ‘Hey, you won’t show me in bad light, will you?’
‘Bad light? Are you mad? I’ll show you just as you are.’
At this assurance he seemed content. Now I’d secured his assent I changed the subject quickly.
‘And Shinko? How is she, Changez?’
The Buddha of Suburbia Page 21