Now, as they aged and seemed settled here, Anwar and Dad appeared to be returning internally to India, or at least to be resisting the English here. It was puzzling: neither of them expressed any desire actually to see their origins again. ‘India’s a rotten place,’ Anwar grumbled. ‘Why would I want to go there again? It’s filthy and hot and it’s a big pain-in-the-arse to get anything done. If I went anywhere it would be to Florida and Las Vegas for gambling.’ And my father was too involved with things here to consider returning.
I was working on all this as I cycled. Then I thought I saw my father. As there were so few Asians in our part of London it could hardly have been anyone else, but the person had a scarf over most of his face and looked like a nervous bank robber who couldn’t find a bank. I got off my bicycle and stood there in Bromley High Street, next to the plaque that said ‘H. G. Wells was born here’.
The creature with the scarf was across the road in a crowd of shoppers. They were fanatical shoppers in our suburbs. Shopping was to them what the rumba and singing is to Brazilians. Saturday afternoons, when the streets were solid with white faces, was a carnival of consumerism as goods were ripped from shelves. And every year after Christmas, when the sales were about to begin, there’d be a queue of at least twenty idiots sleeping in the winter cold outside the big stores for two days before they opened, wrapped in blankets and lying in deckchairs.
Dad normally wouldn’t have been out in such madness, but there he was, this grey-haired man just over five feet tall, going into a phone-box when we had a working telephone in our hall. I could see he’d never used a public phone before. He put on his glasses and read through the instructions several times before putting a pile of coins on top of the box and dialling. When he got through and began to speak he cheered up as he laughed and talked away, before becoming depressed at the end of the call. He put the phone down, turned, and spotted me watching him.
He came out of the phone-box and I pushed my bicycle beside him through the crowds. I badly wanted to know his opinion on the Anwar business, but obviously he wasn’t in the mood for it now.
‘How’s Eva?’ I asked.
‘She sends her love.’
At least he wasn’t going to pretend he hadn’t been talking to her.
‘To me or to you, Dad?’ I said.
‘To you, boy. Her friend. You don’t realize how fond she is of you. She admires you, she thinks –’
‘Dad, Dad, please tell me. Are you in love with her?’
‘Love?’
‘Yes, in love. You know. For God’s sake, you know.’
It seemed to surprise him, I don’t know why. Maybe he was surprised that I’d guessed. Or maybe he hadn’t wanted to raise the lethal notion of love in his own mind.
‘Karim,’ he said, ‘she’s become close to me. She’s someone I can talk to. I like to be with her. We have the same interests, you know that.’
I didn’t want to be sarcastic and aggressive, because there were certain basic things I wanted to know, but I ended up saying, ‘That must be nice for you.’
He didn’t appear to hear me; he was concentrating on what he was saying.
He said, ‘It must be love because it hurts so much.’
‘What are you going to do, then, Dad? Will you leave us and go away with her?’
There are certain looks on certain faces I don’t want to see again, and this was one of them. Confusion and anguish and fear clouded his face. I was sure he hadn’t thought much about any of this. It had all just happened in the random way things do. Now it surprised him that he was expected to declare the pattern and intention behind it all in order that others could understand. But there wasn’t a plan, just passion and strong feeling which had ambushed him.
‘I don’t know.’
‘What do you feel like?’
‘I feel as if I’m experiencing things I’ve never felt before, very strong, potent, overwhelming things.’
‘You mean you never loved Mum?’
He thought for a while about this. Why did he have to even think!
‘Have you ever missed anyone, Karim? A girl?’ We must have both been thinking of Charlie, because he added kindly, ‘Or a friend?’
I nodded.
‘All the time I am not with Eva I miss her. When I talk to myself in my mind, it is always her I talk to. She understands many things. I feel that if I am not with her I will be making a great mistake, missing a real opportunity. And there’s something else. Something that Eva just told me.’
‘Yeah?’
‘She is seeing other men.’
‘What sort of men, Dad?’
He shrugged. ‘I didn’t ask for specifications.’
‘Not white men in drip-dry shirts?’
‘You snob, I don’t know why you dislike drip-dry shirts so much. These things are very convenient for women. But you remember that beetle Shadwell?’
‘Yeah.’
‘She is with him often. He is in London now, working in the theatre. He will be a big shot one day, she thinks. He knows those artistic types. She loves all that art-fart thing. They come to her house for parties.’ Here Dad hesitated. ‘She and the beetle don’t do anything together in that way, but I am afraid that he will romantically take her away. I will feel so lost, Karim, without her.’
‘I’ve always been suspicious of Eva,’ I said. ‘She likes important people. She’s doing it to blackmail you, I know she is.’
‘Yes, and partly because she’s unhappy without me. She can’t wait for me for years and years. Do you blame her?’
We pushed through the throng. I saw some people from school and turned my head away so as to avoid them. I didn’t want them to see me crying. ‘Have you told Mum all this?’ I said.
‘No, no.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I’m so frightened. Because she will suffer so much. Because I can’t bear to look at her eyes as I say the words. Because you will all suffer so much and I would rather suffer myself than have anything happen to you.’
‘So you’ll be staying with Allie and me and Mum?’
He didn’t reply for a couple of minutes. Even then he didn’t bother with words. He grabbed me and pulled me to him and started to kiss me, on the cheeks and nose and forehead and hair. It was crazy. I nearly dropped my bike. Passers-by were startled. Someone said, ‘Get back in yer rickshaw.’ The day was closing in on me. I hadn’t bought any tea and there was an Alan Freeman radio programme on the story of the Kinks that I wanted to listen to. I pulled away from Dad and started to run, wheeling my bike beside me.
‘Wait a minute!’ he shouted.
I turned. ‘What, Dad?’
He looked bewildered. ‘Is this the right bus stop?’
It was strange, the conversation Dad and I had, because when I saw him at home later and over the next few days he behaved as if it had never happened, as if he hadn’t told me he’d fallen in love with someone else.
Every day after school I rang Jamila, and every day the reply to my question, ‘How are things?’ was always, ‘The same, Creamy,’ or, ‘The same but worse.’ We agreed to have a summit meeting in Bromley High Street after school, where we’d make a decision on what to do.
But that day I was leaving the school gates with a group of boys when I saw Helen. It was a surprise because I’d barely thought of her since I was fucked by her dog, an incident with which she had become associated in my mind: Helen and dog-cock went together. Now she was standing outside my school in a black floppy hat and long green coat, waiting for another boy. Spotting me, she ran over and kissed me. I was being kissed a lot lately: I needed the affection, I can tell you. Anybody could have kissed me and I’d have kissed them right back with interest.