Marlene did most of the talking, and to keep silence at bay I asked so many questions I began to feel like a television interviewer. She told us of the separate entrances prostitutes had to the House of Commons; and as we ate our turkey there was the story of the Labour MP who liked to watch chickens being stabbed to death while he was having sex.
Marlene had some Thai sticks, and we were having an after-dinner joint when Percy, Pyke’s son, came in, a pale and moody-looking boy with a shaved head, earrings and filthy clothes, far too rough and slovenly to be anything other than a member of the liberal middle class. My Terry antennae went up, trembling in anticipation.
‘By the way,’ Pyke said to the boy, ‘d’you know who Karim’s stepbrother is? It’s Charlie Hero.’
The boy was suddenly riveted. He started to wave his body around and ask questions. He had more life than his father. ‘Hero’s my hero. What’s he like?’
I gave him a brief character-sketch. But I couldn’t let Terry down. Now was my chance.
‘What school d’you go to?’
‘Westminster. And it’s shit.’
‘Yeah? Full of public-school types?’
‘Full of media fuck-wits with parents who work at the BBC. I wanted to go to a comprehensive but these two wouldn’t let me.’
He walked out of the room. And for the rest of the evening, from upstairs, we heard the muffled sound of the Condemned’s first album, The Bride of Christ, playing again and again. When Percy had gone I gave Pyke and Marlene my most significant look, as if to say, ‘You have betrayed the working class,’ but neither of them noticed. They sat there smoking, looking utterly bored, as if this evening had already lasted a thousand years and nothing whatsoever could interest them or, more important, turn them on.
Except that suddenly Pyke got up, walked across the room and threw open the doors to the garden. He turned and nodded at Eleanor, who was talking to Marlene. Immediately, Eleanor broke off the conversation, got up and tripped out into the garden after Pyke. Marlene and I sat there. With the doors open the room grew rapidly cold, but the air smelled sweet, as if the earth were breathing perfume. What were they doing out there? Marlene behaved as if nothing had happened. Then she fetched herself another drink and came and sat beside me. She had her arm around me, which I pretended wasn’t there. I tensed, though, and gave my opinions. I began to get the distinct impression that I was a marvellous person, what with concentrating on me and all. But there was something I had to know, something I felt sure she could help me with.
‘Marlene, will you tell me something that no one’s actually told me? Will you tell me what happened to Eleanor’s boyfriend, Gene?’
She looked at me sympathetically, but with slight disbelief.
‘Are you sure no one’s told you?’
‘Marlene, I know for sure that no one’s told me nothing. It’s driving me up the wall, too, I can tell you. Everyone acts as if it’s some kind of ultimately big secret anyway. No one says anything. I’m being treated like a wanker.’
‘It’s not a secret, just raw and painful still for Eleanor. OK?’ She shifted closer to me. ‘Gene was a young West Indian actor. He was very talented and sensitive, thin and kind and raunchy, with this beautiful face. He knew a lot about poetry, which he’d declaim wonderfully aloud at parties. And African music was his speciality. He worked with Matthew once, a long time ago. Matthew says he was the best mime he ever met. But he never got the work he deserved. He emptied bed-pans in hospital programmes. He played criminals and taxi-drivers. He never played in Chekhov or Ibsen or Shakespeare, and he deserved to. He was better than a lot of people. So he was very angry about a lot of things. The police were always picking him up and giving him a going over. Taxis drove straight past him. People said there were no free tables in empty restaurants. He lived in a bad world in nice old England. One day when he didn’t get into one of the bigger theatre companies, he couldn’t take any more. He just freaked out. He took an overdose. Eleanor was working. She came home and found him dead. She was so young then.’
‘I see.’
‘That’s all there is to it.’
Marlene and I sat there a while. I thought about Gene and what he’d been through; what they’d done to him; what he’d allowed to happen to himself. I saw that Marlene was scrutinizing me.
‘Shall we have a kiss?’ she said, after a while, stroking my face lightly.
I panicked. ‘What?’
‘Just a little kiss to start with, to see how we get along. Do I shock you?’
‘Yes, because I thought you said kid, not kiss.’
‘Perhaps that later, but now …’
She brought her face close to mine. There were wrinkles around her eyes; she was the oldest person I’d kissed. When we broke apart and I gulped back more champagne she raised her arms in a sudden dramatic gesture, like someone celebrating an athletics victory, and pulled off her dress. Her body was thin and brown, and when I touched it I was surprised by how warm she was, as if she’d been lightly toasted. It aroused me, and with my arousal came a little essential affection, but basically I was scared and I liked being scared.
The dope made me drowsy and held back sensation and reaction. I don’t know why, but the Thai sticks floated me back to the suburbs and Eva’s house in Beckenham, the night I wore crushed velvet flares and Dad didn’t know the way, and how I led him to the Three Tuns, where Kevin Ayers was playing and my friends that I loved were standing at the bar, having spent hours in their bedrooms preparing for the evening, their gladdest moment being when a pair of knowing eyes passed over their threads. Later, there was Charlie sitting at the top of the stairs, perfectly dressed, just observing. There were meditating advertising executives, and I crawled across the lawn to find my father was sitting on a garden bench, and Eva sitting on him, with horizontal hair. So I went to Charlie for comfort, and now his record was playing upstairs, and he was famous and admired, and I was an actor in a play in London, and I knew fashionable people and went to grand houses like this, and they accepted me and invited no one else and couldn’t wait to make love to me. And there was my mother trembling with pain at her soul being betrayed, and the end of our family life and everything else starting from that night. And Gene was dead. He’d known poetry by heart and was angry and never got any work, and I wished I’d met him and seen his face. How could I ever replace him in Eleanor’s eyes?
When I sat up I had to search my mind for a due to where I was. I felt as if the lights in my mind had been turned off. But I did see a couple on the far side of the room, illuminated only by the light from the hall. And by the door an Irish girl stood as if by invitation, watching the strange couple kiss and rub their hands on each other. The man was pushing the woman back on the sofa. She had taken off the black suit and red shirt, for some reason, though she looked her loveliest in them.
Marlene and I tumbled on the floor. I had been in her already, and noticed odd things, like how she had strong muscles in her cunt, which she utilized to grip the end of my prick as professionally as my own pinkies. When she wanted to stop me moving inside her she merely flexed her cunt muscles and I was secured for life.
Later, when I looked up, the couple had separated and Pyke’s body was carrying his erection in my direction, like a lorry sustaining a crane.
‘That looks fun,’ his voice said.
‘Yes, it –’
But before I could complete the sentence, England’s most interesting and radical theatre director was inserting his cock between my speaking lips. I could appreciate the privilege, but I didn’t like it much: it seemed an imposition. He could have asked politely. So I gave his dick a South London swipe – not viciously, nor enough to have my part in the play reduced – but enough to give him a jolt. When I looked up for his reaction it was to see him murmuring his approval. Fortunately, Pyke pulled away from my face anyway. Something important was happening. His attention moved elsewhere.
Eleanor came over to Pyke; she came over to him quick
ly and passionately, as if he were of infinite value at this moment, as if she’d heard that he had a crucial message for her. She took his head in her hands as if it were a precious pot, and she kissed Pyke, pulling his somewhat corrugated lips towards her, as she’d pulled my head spontaneously towards her that morning when we were eating our grapefruit in the front room of her flat. His hand was between her legs now, his fingers up to the knuckle pushing inside her. As he frigged her she spoke to him in incantatory fashion. I strained to catch everything, and heard for my pains Eleanor whisper how much she wanted to fuck him, how she’d always wanted it since she first admired him and then spotted him in the foyer of a theatre – the ICA, was it, or was it the Royal Court, or the Open Space, or the Almost Free, or the Bush? – but anyway, however much she wanted him then, she was too intimidated by his renown, by his talent, by his status, to approach him; but at last she’d come to know him precisely the way she’d always wanted to know him.
Marlene was transfixed by all this. She moved around them for a better look. ‘Oh yes, yes,’ she was saying. ‘It’s so beautiful, so beautiful, I can’t believe it.’
‘Stop talking,’ Pyke snapped, suddenly.
‘But I can’t believe it,’ Marlene went on. ‘Can you, Karim?’
‘It’s unbelievable,’ I said.
This distracted Eleanor. She looked at me dreamily, and then at Pyke. She withdrew his fingers from her cunt and put them in my mouth.
‘Don’t let me have all the fun,’ she said to Pyke, pleadingly. ‘Please, why don’t you two touch each other?’
Marlene nodded vigorously at this constructive suggestion.
‘Yes?’ Eleanor said. But it was difficult for me to reply with a mouthful of Pyke’s fingers.
‘Oh yes, yes,’ said Marlene.
‘Calm down,’ said Pyke to her.
‘I am calm,’ Marlene said. She was also drunk.
‘Christ,’ said Pyke to Eleanor. ‘Bloody Marlene.’
Marlene fell back on to the couch, naked, with her legs open.
‘There’s so much we can do tonight! ‘she cried. ‘There’s hours and hours of total pleasure ahead of us. We can do whatever we want. We’ve only just begun. Let me freshen our drinks and we’ll get down to it. Now, Karim, I want you to put some ice up my cunt. Would you mind going to the fridge?’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I was in my usual state; I had no money. Things were so desperate it had become necessary for me to work. We were in the middle of a few weeks’ break while Louise went away and tried to construct a single coherent drama around the improvisations and characters we’d created. The whole process of putting on a show with Pyke took months and months. We started in the early summer and now it was autumn. And anyway, Pyke had gone away to Boston to teach. ‘We’ll work on it for as long as it takes,’ he said. ‘It’s the process and not the result that matters to me.’ During this waiting time, instead of going on holiday like Carol, Tracey and Richard, I started to work as a wheel-barrow merchant – as I was called by Eva – on the transformation of the flat. Reluctantly, I started to shift the debris myself. It was hard, filthy work, so I was surprised when one night Eleanor suddenly said that she’d like to share the job with me. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to get out of the house. Being here I start to think.’
Not wanting Eleanor to think, and wanting to draw her to me after that evening with Pyke (which we never discussed), I went to Eva and told her to employ Eleanor as well. ‘Of course, she’ll have to be paid the same as me. We’re a co-operative,’ I said.
By this time Eva had acquired a new sharpness, in all senses. She’d started to get as well organized as any managing director; she even walked more quickly; she was sleeker, crisper. There were lists of everything. No mystical vapours obscured the way things like clearing flats were actually done. Flowing and sensual intuition didn’t mean practical foolishness. Eva spoke directly, without dishonesty. And this frightened people, especially plumbers, to whom it was a new idea. They’d never had anyone say to them, ‘Now tell me exactly why it is you’ve made such a mess of this simple job? Do you always want to be fifth-rate? Is your work always shoddy?’ She’d also added cachet to herself by being Charlie’s mother. Twice she’d been interviewed by Sunday newspaper supplements.
Now she was getting sniffy with me. ‘I can’t afford to hire Eleanor too. Anyway, you told me she’s mad,’ she said.
‘So are you.’
‘Actors, Karim, are convivial company. They put on funny voices and do imitations. But they have no personality.’
‘I’m an actor, Eva.’
‘Oh yes, I forgot. So you are. But I don’t think of you as one.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘Don’t look so severe, darling. It’s only that you don’t have to throw yourself at the first woman to open her legs for you.’
‘Eva!’
Since The Jungle Bunny Book I’d learned to fight back, though it cost me a lot to take on Eva. I didn’t want to frighten off my new mummy. But I said, ‘Eva, I won’t work for you unless Eleanor does too.’
‘All right, it’s a deal, if you insist. The same wages for both of you. Except that now your wages are reduced by twenty-five per cent.’
So Eleanor and I did all the shitwork in that big roomful of white dust, ripping the place apart and tipping volcano-shaped piles of the past into skips outside. It was a busy time for Eva, too. She’d been commissioned to redesign the flat of a television producer who was away in America. This was Ted and Eva’s first big outside job, so while Eleanor and I worked on our place, she and Ted would be at this other flat in Maida Vale, working on the plans. Eva and Dad slept there, as did I, occasionally.
While we worked, Eleanor and I listened to the new music, to the Clash, Generation X, the Condemned, the Adverts, the Pretenders and the Only Ones; and we drank wine and ate sausages carpeted with onions and lit up by mustard. At the end of the day we got the 28 bus to Notting Hill, always sitting at the front of the top deck as it cruised through the Kensington High Street traffic. I looked at the secretaries’ legs down below and Eleanor worked out from the Evening News which play we’d see that night.
Back at her place we showered, put sugar-water in our hair so we looked like porcupines, and changed into black clothes. Sometimes I wore eye-liner and nail varnish. Off we went to the Bush, a tiny room above a pub in Shepherd’s Bush, a theatre so small that those in the front row had their feet on the stage. The famous Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square had plusher seats, and the plays were stuff to make your brain whirl, Caryl Churchill and Sam Shepard. Or we would go to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Warehouse in dark, run-down Covent Garden, sitting among students, Americans and Brainys from North London. As your buttocks were being punished on steel and plastic chairs you’d look across grey floorboards at minimal scenery, maybe four chairs and a kitchen table set among a plain of broken bottles and bomb-sites, a boiling world with dry ice floating over the choking audience. London, in other words. The actors wore clothes just like ours, only more expensive. The plays were three hours long, chaotic and bursting with anarchic and defiant images. The writers took it for granted that England, with its working class composed of slags, purple-nosed losers, and animals fed on pinball, pornography and junk-food, was disintegrating into terminal class-struggle. These were the science-fiction fantasies of Oxford-educated boys who never left the house. The middle class loved it.
Eleanor always emerged flushed and talkative. This was the kind of theatre she liked; this was where she wanted to work. She usually knew a few people in the audience, if not in the plays, and I always asked her to tell me how many among them she’d slept with. Whatever the number and whatever the play, sitting in the warm dark next to her inevitably gave me an erection, and at the interval she’d remove her tights so I could touch her the way she liked me to.
These were the best days: waking up and finding Eleanor hot as a pie; sometimes she’d sweated a puddle o
n her chest which seemed to have risen up through the width of her body as she slept. I remembered my father saying drunkenly to the Mayor at one of Auntie Jean’s parties, as Mum nervously ate through most of a cake the size of a lady’s hat, ‘We little Indians love plump white women with fleshy thighs.’ Perhaps I was living out his dreams as I embraced Eleanor’s flesh, as I ran the palms of my hands lightly over her whole body, then kissed her awake and popped my tongue into her cunt as she opened her eyes. Half asleep, we’d love each other, but disturbing images would sometimes enter my head. Here we were, a fond and passionate pair, but to reach climax I found myself wondering what creatures men were that saw rapes, massacres, tortures, eviscerations at such moments of union. I was being tormented by devils. I kept feeling that terrible things would happen.
When Eleanor and I finished gutting the flat, and before Ted and Eva could get started on it, I spent some time with Jeeta and Jamila. All I wanted was to work in the shop in the evening and earn a bit of money. I didn’t want to get myself involved in any serious disintegration. But things had changed a lot.
Uncle Anwar didn’t sleep at all now. At night he sat on the edge of his chair, smoking and drinking un-Islamic drinks and thinking portentous thoughts, dreaming of other countries, lost houses, mothers, beaches. Anwar did no work in the shop, not even rewarding work like watching for shoplifters and shirtlifters. Jamila often found him drunk on the floor, rancid with unhappiness, when she went by to see her mother in the morning before work. Anwar’s hunger-strike hadn’t endeared him to his family, and now no one attended to him or enquired into the state of his cracking heart. ‘Bury me in a pauper’s grave,’ he said to me. ‘I’ve had it, Karim, boy.’ ‘Right you are, Uncle,’ I said. And Princess Jeeta was becoming stronger and more wilful as Anwar declined; she appeared to be growing an iron nose like a hook with which she could lift heavy boxes of corned beef. She’d leave him drunk on the floor now, maybe wiping her feet on him as she passed through to raise the steel shutters on her domain of vegetables. It was Jamila who picked him up and put him in his chair, though they never spoke, looking at each other with bemused and angry love.
The Buddha of Suburbia Page 24