I said this as innocently as a vicar, not wanting to stymie things by seeming too eager. I’d discovered in life that if you’re too eager others tend to get less eager. And if you’re less eager it tends to make others more eager. So the more eager I was the less eager I seemed.
Dad pulled up his vest and slapped his bare stomach rapidly with both hands. The noise was loud and unattractive and it filled our small house like pistol shots.
‘OK,’ Dad said to me, ‘you get changed, Karim.’ He turned to Mum. He wanted her to be with him, to witness him being respected by others. ‘If only you’d come, Margaret.’
I charged upstairs to get changed. From my room, the walls decorated ceiling to floor with newspapers, I could hear them arguing downstairs. Would he persuade her to come? I hoped not. My father was more frivolous when my mother wasn’t around. I put on one of my favourite records, Dylan’s ‘Positively Fourth Street’, to get me in the mood for the evening.
It took me several months to get ready: I changed my entire outfit three times. At seven o’clock I came downstairs in what I knew were the right clothes for Eva’s evening. I wore turquoise flared trousers, a blue and white flower-patterned see-through shirt, blue suede boots with Cuban heels, and a scarlet Indian waistcoat with gold stitching around the edges. I’d pulled on a headband to control my shoulder-length frizzy hair. I’d washed my face in Old Spice.
Dad waited at the door for me, his hands in his pockets. He wore a black polo-neck sweater, a black imitation-leather jacket and grey Marks and Spencer cords. When he saw me he suddenly looked agitated.
‘Say goodbye to your mum,’ he said.
In the living room Mum was watching Steptoe and Son and taking a bite from a Walnut Whip, which she replaced on the pouf in front of her. This was her rituaclass="underline" she allowed herself a nibble only once every fifteen minutes. It made her glance constantly between the clock and the TV. Sometimes she went berserk and scoffed the whole thing in two minutes flat. ‘I deserve my Whip,’ she’d say defensively.
When she saw me she too became tense.
‘Don’t show us up, Karim,’ she said, continuing to watch TV. ‘You look like Danny La Rue.’
‘What about Auntie Jean, then?’ I said. ‘She’s got blue hair.’
‘It’s dignified for older women to have blue hair,’ Mum said.
Dad and I got out of the house as quickly as we could. At the end of the street, while we were waiting for the 227 bus, a teacher of mine with one eye walked past us and recognized me. Cyclops said, ‘Don’t forget, a university degree is worth £2,000 a year for life!’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Dad. ‘He’ll go to university, oh yes. He’ll be a leading doctor in London. My father was a doctor. Medicine is in our whole family.’
It wasn’t far, about four miles, to the Kays’, but Dad would never have got there without me. I knew all the streets and every bus route.
Dad had been in Britain since 1950 – over twenty years – and for fifteen of those years he’d lived in the South London suburbs. Yet still he stumbled around the place like an Indian just off the boat, and asked questions like, ‘Is Dover in Kent?’ I’d have thought, as an employee of the British Government, as a Civil Service clerk, even as badly paid and insignificant a one as him, he’d just have to know these things. I sweated with embarrassment when he halted strangers in the street to ask directions to places that were a hundred yards away in an area where he’d lived for almost two decades.
But his naïveté made people protective, and women were drawn by his innocence. They wanted to wrap their arms around him or something, so lost and boyish did he look at times. Not that this was entirely uncontrived, or unexploited. When I was small and the two of us sat in Lyon’s Cornerhouse drinking milkshakes, he’d send me like a messenger pigeon to women at other tables and have me announce, ‘My daddy wants to give you a kiss.’
Dad taught me to flirt with everyone I met, girls and boys alike, and I came to see charm, rather than courtesy or honesty, or even decency, as the primary social grace. And I even came to like people who were callous or vicious provided they were interesting. But I was sure Dad hadn’t used his own gentle charisma to sleep with anyone but Mum, while married.
Now, though, I suspected that Mrs Eva Kay – who had met Dad a year ago at a ‘writing for pleasure’ class in an upstairs room at the King’s Head in Bromley High Street – wanted to chuck her arms around him. Plain prurience was one of the reasons I was so keen to go to her place, and embarrassment one of the reasons why Mum refused. Eva Kay was forward; she was brazen; she was wicked.
On the way to Eva’s I persuaded Dad to stop off at the Three Tuns in Beckenham. I got off the bus; Dad had no choice but to follow me. The pub was full of kids dressed like me, both from my school and from other schools in the area. Most of the boys, so nondescript during the day, now wore cataracts of velvet and satin, and bright colours; some were in bedspreads and curtains. The little groovers talked esoterically of Syd Barrett. To have an elder brother who lived in London and worked in fashion, music or advertising was an inestimable advantage at school. I had to study the Melody Maker and New Musical Express to keep up.
I led Dad by the hand to the back room. Kevin Ayers, who had been with Soft Machine, was sitting on a stool whispering into a microphone. Two French girls with him kept falling all over the stage. Dad and I had a pint of bitter each. I wasn’t used to alcohol and became drunk immediately. Dad became moody.
‘Your mother upsets me,’ he said. ‘She doesn’t join in things. It’s only my damn effort keeping this whole family together. No wonder I need to keep my mind blank in constant effortless meditation.’
I suggested helpfully, ‘Why don’t you get divorced?’
‘Because you wouldn’t like it.’
But divorce wasn’t something that would occur to them. In the suburbs people rarely dreamed of striking out for happiness. It was all familiarity and endurance: security and safety were the reward of dullness. I clenched my fists under the table. I didn’t want to think about it. It would be years before I could get away to the city, London, where life was bottomless in its temptations.
‘I’m terrified about tonight,’ Dad said. ‘I’ve never done anything like this before. I don’t know anything. I’m going to be a fuck-up.’
The Kays were much better off than us, and had a bigger house, with a little drive and garage and car. Their place stood on its own in a tree-lined road just off Beckenham High Street. It also had bay windows, an attic, a greenhouse, three bedrooms and central heating.
I didn’t recognize Eva Kay when she greeted us at the door, and for a moment I thought we’d turned up at the wrong place. The only thing she wore was a full-length, multi-coloured kaftan, and her hair was down, and out, and up. She’d darkened her eyes with kohl so she looked like a panda. Her feet were bare, the toenails painted alternately green and red.
When the front door was safely shut and we’d moved into the darkness of the hall, Eva hugged Dad and kissed him all over his face, including his lips. This was the first time I’d seen him kissed with interest. Surprise, surprise, there was no sign of Mr Kay. When Eva moved, when she turned to me, she was a kind of human crop-sprayer, pumping out a plume of Oriental aroma. I was trying to think if Eva was the most sophisticated person I’d ever met, or the most pretentious, when she kissed me on the lips too. My stomach tightened. Then, holding me at arm’s length as if I were a coat she was about to try on, she looked me all over and said, ‘Karim Amir, you are so exotic, so original! It’s such a contribution! It’s so you!’
‘Thank you, Mrs Kay. If I’d had more notice, I’d have dressed up.’
‘And with your father’s wonderful but crushing wit, too!’