Mum was waiting for us in the hall, her face partly hidden in the telephone. She was saying little, but I could hear the tinny sound of Jean on the other end. No time had been wasted. Dad scarpered into his room. I was about to run upstairs when Mum said, ‘Wait a minute, smart-arse, someone wants to talk to you.’
‘Who?’
‘Come here.’
She shoved the phone at me and I heard Jean say just one thing. ‘Come and see us tomorrow. Without fail. Do you understand?’
She always shouted at you, as if you were stupid. Fuck you, I thought. I didn’t want to go near her in that mood. But, of course, I was the nosiest person I’d ever met. I’d be there – that I knew for sure.
So the next morning I cleaned my bike and was soon bumping along the unmade roads, following the route Dad and I had taken the previous evening. I rode slowly and watched the men hoovering, hosepiping, washing, polishing, shining, scraping, repainting, discussing and admiring their cars. It was a lovely day but their routine never changed. Women called out that dinner was on the table. People in hats and suits were coming back from church and they carried Bibles. The kids had clean faces and combed hair.
I wasn’t quite ready to be brought down by Ted and Jean, so I decided to drop in and see Helen, who lived nearby. Earlier that morning I’d popped into Dad’s room and whipped one of his dusty Durex Fetherlites – just in case.
Helen lived in a big old place set back from the road. Everyone I knew, Charlie and the rest, seemed to live in big places, except for us. No wonder I had an inferiority complex. But Helen’s place hadn’t been painted in aeons. The bushes and flowerbeds were overgrown, there were dandelions coming out of the path. The shed had half collapsed. Uncle Ted would have said it was a crying shame.
I parked the bike outside, chaining it to the fence. When I tried to open the gate I discovered it was jammed. I couldn’t fiddle about; I climbed over. In the porch I pulled the bell and heard it ring somewhere deep in the house. It was spooky, I can tell you. There was no reply, so I strolled around the side.
‘Karim, Karim,’ Helen said quickly, in an anxious voice, from a window above my head.
‘Hiya,’ I called. ‘I just wanted to see you.’
‘Me too, yeah?’
I got irritated. I always wanted everything to happen immediately. ‘What’s wrong, then? Can’t you come out? What’s this Juliet business you’re doing?’
At this her head seemed to have been jerked back into the house. There was some muffled arguing – a man’s voice – and the window banged down. Then the curtains were drawn.
‘Helen, Helen!’ I called, suddenly feeling quite attached to her.
The front door opened. Helen’s dad stood there. He was a big man with a black beard and thick arms. I imagined that he had hairy shoulders and, worst of all, a hairy back, like Peter Sellers and Sean Connery. (I kept a list of actors with hairy backs which I constantly updated.) And then I went white, but obviously not white enough, because Hairy Back let go of the dog he was holding, a Great fucking Dane, and it padded interestedly towards me, its mouth hanging open like a cave. It looked as though a jagged wedge had been ripped from the lump of its head to form its yellow-toothed, string-spittled mouth. I put my arms out in front of me so the dog wouldn’t rip my hands off. I must have looked like a sleepwalker, but as I wanted my hands for other purposes I didn’t care about this Baroque pose, though as a rule I cared fanatically about the way I looked, and behaved as if the entire world had nothing better to do than constantly observe me for slips in a very complicated and private etiquette.
‘You can’t see my daughter again,’ said Hairy Back. ‘She doesn’t go out with boys. Or with wogs.’
‘Oh well.’
‘Got it?’
‘Yeah,’ I said sullenly.
‘We don’t want you blackies coming to the house.’
‘Have there been many?’
‘Many what, you little coon?’
‘Blackies.’
‘Where?’
‘Coming to the house.’
‘We don’t like it,’ Hairy Back said. ‘However many niggers there are, we don’t like it. We’re with Enoch. If you put one of your black ‘ands near my daughter I’ll smash it with a ’ammer! With a ’ammer!’
Hairy Back slammed the front door. I took a couple of steps back and turned to go. Fucking Hairy Back. I badly wanted to piss. I looked at his car, a big Rover. I decided to let his tyres down. I could do it in a few seconds, piss in the window, and if he came out I’d be over the fence quicker than a cat through a window. I was moving towards the Rover when I realized that Hairy Back had left me alone with the dog, which was sniffing at turds only a few yards away. It started to move. I stood there pretending to be a stone or a tree until, gingerly, I turned my back on the dog and took a couple of steps, as if I were tip-toeing across a dangerous roof. I was hoping Helen would open the window and call my name, and call the dog’s name too. ‘Oh, Helen, Helen,’ I murmured.
My soft words obviously affected the dog, for suddenly there was a flurry and I felt something odd on my shoulders. Yes, it was the dog’s paws. The dog’s breath warmed my neck. I took another step and so did the dog. I knew by now what the dog was up to. The dog was in love with me – quick movements against my arse told me so. Its ears were hot. I didn’t think the dog would bite me, as its movements were increasing, so I decided to run for it. The dog shuddered against me.
I flew to the gate and climbed over, catching my pink shirt on a nail as I jumped. Safely over, I picked up some stones and let the dog have a couple of shots. One cracked off its nut but it didn’t seem bothered. As I climbed on to my bike I took off my jacket and discovered dog jissom.
I was fucking bad-tempered when I finally pedalled up Jean’s front path. And Jean always made everyone take off their shoes at the front door in case you obliterated the carpet by walking over it twice. Dad said, when we went in once, ‘What is this, Jean, a Hindu temple? Is it the shoeless meeting the legless?’ They were so fastidious about any new purchase that their three-year-old car still had plastic over the seats. Dad loved to turn to me and say, ‘Aren’t we just in clover in this car, Karim?’ He really made me laugh, Dad.
That morning when I set off I’d been determined to be suave and dismissive, a real Dick Diver, but with dog spunk up the back of my tonic jacket, no shoes, and dying for a piss, I found the Fitzgerald front an effort. And Jean led me straight into the living room, sat me down by the innovative method of pressing on my shoulders, and went out to find Ted.
I went to the window and looked out over the garden. Here, in the summer, in the heyday of Peter’s Heaters, Ted and Jean had magnificent parties, or ‘do’s, as Ted called them. My brother Allie, Ted and I would put up a big marquee on the lawn and wait breathlessly for the arrival of all South London and Kent society. The most important builders, bank managers, accountants, local politicians and businessmen came with their wives and tarts. Allie and I loved running among this reeking mob, the air thick with aftershave and perfume. We served cocktails and offered strawberries and cream and gâteaux, and cheese and chocolates, and sometimes, in exchange, women pinched our cheeks, and we tried to stick our hands up their daughters’ skirts.
Mum and Dad always felt out of place and patronized on these grand occasions, where lives were measured by money. They were of no use to anyone and there was nothing they sought from any of the guests. Somehow they always seemed to wear the wrong clothes and look slightly shabby. After a gallon of Pimms Dad usually tried to discuss the real meaning of materialism, and how it was thought that we lived in a materialistic age. The truth was, he said, we didn’t genuinely appreciate the value of individual objects, or their particular beauty. It was greed our materialism celebrated, greed and status, not the being and texture of things. These thoughts were not welcomed at Jean’s parties, and my mother would covertly mouth and flap at Dad to shut up: he became rapidly depressed. Mum’s ambition was to be unnoticed, to be like everyone else, whereas Dad liked to stand out like a juggler at a funeral.