Anwar was unmoved. I’d always liked him because he was so casual about everything; he wasn’t perpetually anxious like my parents. Now he was making a big fuss about a mere marriage and I couldn’t understand it. I know it made me sad to see him do this to himself. I couldn’t believe the things people did to themselves, how they screwed up their lives and made things go wrong, like Dad having it away with Eva, or Ted’s breakdown, and now Uncle Anwar going on this major Gandhi diet. It wasn’t as if external circumstances had forced them into these lunacies; it was plain illusion in the head.
Anwar’s irrationality was making me tremble, I can tell you. I know I kept shaking my head everywhere. He’d locked himself in a private room beyond the reach of reason, of persuasion, of evidence. Even happiness, that frequent pivot of decision, was irrelevant here – Jamila’s happiness, I mean. Like her I wanted to express myself physically in some way. It seemed to be all that was left to us.
I kicked Uncle Anwar’s piss-pot quite vigorously so that a small wave of urine splashed against the overhanging bed-sheets. He ignored me. Jamila and I stood there, about to walk out. But now I was making my uncle sleep in his own piss. Suppose he later clutched that piece of sheet to his nose, to his mouth. Hadn’t he always been kind to me, Uncle Anwar? Hadn’t he always accepted me exactly as I was, and never told me off? I bolted into the bathroom and fetched a wet cloth, returning to soak the pissy sheet until I was sure it wouldn’t stink any more. It was irrational of me to hate his irrationality so much that I sprayed piss over his bed. But as I scrubbed his sheet I realized he had no idea what I was doing on my knees beside him.
Jamila came outside while I unlocked my bike.
‘What are you going to do, Jammie?’
‘I don’t know. What do you suggest?’
‘I don’t know either.’
‘No.’
‘But I’ll think about it,’ I said. ‘I promise I’ll come up with something.’
‘Thanks.’
She started unashamedly to cry, not covering her face or trying to stop. Usually I get embarrassed when girls cry. Sometimes I feel like clouting them for making a fuss. But Jamila really was in the shit. We must have stood there outside Paradise Stores for at least half an hour, just holding each other and thinking about our respective futures.
CHAPTER FIVE
I loved drinking tea and I loved cycling. I would bike to the tea shop in the High Street and see what blends they had. My bedroom contained boxes and boxes of tea, and I was always happy to have new brews with which to concoct more original combos in my teapot. I was supposed to be preparing for my mock A levels in History, English and Politics. But whatever happened I knew I would fail them. I was too concerned with other things. Sometimes I took speed – ‘blues’, little blue tablets – to keep me awake, but they made me depressed, they made my testicles shrivel up and I kept thinking I was getting a heart attack. So I usually sipped spicy tea and listened to records all night. I favoured the tuneless: King Crimson, Soft Machine, Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa and Wild Man Fisher. It was easy to get most of the music you wanted from the shops in the High Street.
During these nights, as all around me was silent – most of the neighbourhood went to bed at ten-thirty – I entered another world. I read Norman Mailer’s journalism about an action-man writer involved in danger, resistance and political commitment: adventure stories not of the distant past, but of recent times. I’d bought a TV from the man in the chip shop, and as the black-and-white box heated up it stank of grease and fish, but late at night I heard of cults and experiments in living, in California. In Europe terrorist groups were bombing capitalist targets; in London psychologists were saying you had to live your own life in your own way and not according to your family, or you’d go mad. In bed I read Rolling Stone magazine. Sometimes I felt the whole world was converging on this little room. And as I became more intoxicated and frustrated I’d throw open the bedroom window as the dawn came up, and look across the gardens, lawns, greenhouses, sheds and curtained windows. I wanted my life to begin now, at this instant, just when I was ready for it. Then it was time for my paper-round, followed by school. And school was another thing I’d had enough of.
Recently I’d been punched and kicked to the ground by a teacher because I called him a queer. This teacher was always making me sit on his knee, and when he asked me questions like ‘What is the square root of five thousand six hundred and seventy-eight and a half?’, which I couldn’t answer, he tickled me. Very educational. I was sick too of being affectionately called Shitface and Curryface, and of coming home covered in spit and snot and chalk and wood-shavings. We did a lot of woodwork at our school, and the other kids liked to lock me and my friends in the storeroom and have us chant ‘Manchester United, Manchester United, we are the boot boys’ as they held chisels to our throats and cut off our shoelaces. We did a lot of woodwork at the school because they didn’t think we could deal with books. One day the woodwork teacher had a heart attack right in front of our eyes as one of the lads put another kid’s prick in a vice and started to turn the handle. Fuck you, Charles Dickens, nothing’s changed. One kid tried to brand my arm with a red-hot lump of metal. Someone else pissed over my shoes, and all my Dad thought about was me becoming a doctor. What world was he living in? Every day I considered myself lucky to get home from school without serious injury.
So after all this I felt I was ready to retire. There was nothing I particularly wanted to do. You didn’t have to do anything. You could just drift and hang out and see what happened, which suited me fine, even more than being a Customs Officer or a professional footballer or a guitarist.
So I was racing through South London on my bike, nearly getting crushed several times by lorries, head bent over the dropped handlebars, swiftly running through the ten Campagnola gears, nipping through traffic, sometimes mounting the pavement, up one-way streets, breaking suddenly, accelerating by standing up on the pedals, exhilarated by thought and motion.
My mind was crawling with it all. I had to save Jamila from the man who loved Arthur Conan Doyle. She might have to run away from home, but where could she go? Most of her friends from school lived with their parents, and most of them were poor; they couldn’t have Jamila with them. She definitely couldn’t stay with us: Dad would get in shit with Anwar. Who could I discuss it with? The only person I knew who’d be helpful and objective and on my side was Eva. But I wasn’t supposed to like her because her love for my father was buggering up our entire family. Yet she was the only sane grown-up I knew now that I could cross Anwar and Jeeta off my list of normals.
It was certainly bizarre, Uncle Anwar behaving like a Muslim. I’d never known him believe in anything before, so it was an amazing novelty to find him literally staking his life on the principle of absolute patriarchal authority. Through her mother’s staunch and indulgent love (plus the fibbing extravagances of her wonderful imagination), but mainly because of Anwar’s indifference, Jamila had got away with things some of her white counterparts wouldn’t dream of. There had been years of smoking, drinking, sexual intercourse and dances, helped by there being a fire escape outside her bedroom and the fact her parents were always so exhausted they slept like mummies.
Maybe there were similarities between what was happening to Dad, with his discovery of Eastern philosophy, and Anwar’s last stand. Perhaps it was the immigrant condition living itself out through them. For years they were both happy to live like Englishmen. Anwar even scoffed pork pies as long as Jeeta wasn’t looking. (My dad never touched the pig, though I was sure this was conditioning rather than religious scruple, just as I wouldn’t eat horse’s scrotum. But once, to test this, when I offered him a smoky bacon crisp and said, as he crunched greedily into it, ‘I didn’t know you liked smoky bacon,’ he sprinted into the bathroom and washed out his mouth with soap, screaming from his frothing lips that he would burn in hell.)