The teachers looked the same as the pupils and everyone was equal, ha, ha, though I made a fool of myself by calling the male teachers sir and females miss. It was the first time, too, that I’d been in a classroom with girls, and I got in with a bad bunch of women. The ceremony of innocence was well drowned as far as they were concerned. They laughed at me all the time, I don’t know why; I suppose they thought I was immature. After all, I’d only just stopped doing my paper-round and I heard them talking about headlong stuff I never knew about before: abortions, heroin, Sylvia Plath, prostitution. These women were middle class but they’d broken away from their families. They were always touching each other; they fucked the lecturers and asked them for money for drugs. They cared little for themselves; they were in and out of hospital for drug addiction and overdoses and abortions. They tried to take care of each other and sometimes of me. They thought I was sweet and cute and pretty and everything, which I liked. I liked it all, because I was lonely for the first time in my life, and an itinerant.
I had a lot of spare time, and from leading a steady life in my bedroom with my radio, and with my parents downstairs, I now wandered among different houses and flats carrying my life-equipment in a big canvas bag and never washing my hair. I was not too unhappy, criss-crossing South London and the suburbs by bus, no one knowing where I was. Whenever someone – Mum, Dad, Ted – tried to locate me, I was always somewhere else, occasionally going to a lecture and then heading out to see Changez and Jamila.
I didn’t want to be educated. It wasn’t the right time of my life for concentration, it really wasn’t. Dad was still convinced I was trying to be something – a lawyer, I’d told him recently, because even he knew that that doctor stuff was a wind-up. But I knew there’d have to come a time when I broke the news to him that the education system and I had split up. It would break his immigrant heart, too. But the spirit of the age among the people I knew manifested itself as general drift and idleness. We didn’t want money. What for? We could get by, living off parents, friends or the State. And if we were going to be bored, and we were usually bored, rarely being self-motivated, we could at least be bored on our own terms, lying smashed on mattresses in ruined houses rather than working in the machine. I didn’t want to work in a place where I couldn’t wear my fur coat.
Anyway, there was plenty to observe – oh yes, I was interested in life. I was an eager witness to Eva and Dad’s love, and even more fascinated by Changez and Jamila, who were, can you believe, living together in South London.
Jamila and Changez’s flat, rented by Anwar, was a two-room box affair near the Catford dog track. It had minimal busted furniture, yellow walls and a gas fire. The one bedroom, which contained a double mattress covered by an Indian bedspread with swirling colours, was Jamila’s room. At the end of the bed was a small card-table which Changez bought for her as a wedding present; I’d carried it back from a local junk shop. There was a Liberty-pattern tablecloth over it, and I bought Jamila a white vase in which there were always daffodils or roses. She kept her pens and pencils in a peanut-butter jar. Also on the table and piled up around her on the floor were her post-Miss Cutmore books: the ‘classics’ as she called them – Angela Davis, Baldwin, Malcolm X, Greer, Millett. You weren’t supposed to stick anything on the walls, but Jamila had pinned up poems by Christina Rossetti, Plath, Shelley and other vegetarians, which she copied out of library books and read when she stretched her legs by taking a few steps around the tiny room. On a sticking-out piece of board nailed to the windowsill was her tape-recorder. From breakfast until the three of us cracked late-night beers, the place grooved to Aretha and the other mamas. Jamila never closed the door, so Changez and I drank and looked through at our Jamila’s concentrating-so-hard profile, head bowed, as she read and sang and wrote in old school exercise books. Like me, she’d run right out on all that ‘old, dull, white stuff’ they taught you at school and college. But she wasn’t lazy, she was educating herself. She knew what she wanted to learn and she knew where it was; she just had to shovel it all into her head. Watching Jamila sometimes made me think the world was divided into three sorts of people: those who knew what they wanted to do; those (the unhappiest) who never knew what their purpose in life was; and those who found out later on. I was in the last category, I reckoned, which didn’t stop me wishing I’d been born into the first.
In the living room there were two armchairs and a table to eat take-aways off. Around it were two steel chairs with putrid white plastic on the seats. Beside it was a low camp-bed covered in brown blankets on which, from the first, Jamila insisted, Changez slept. There was no discussion of this, and Changez didn’t demur at the crucial moment when something could – maybe – have been done. That was how it was going to be between them, just as she made him sleep on the floor beside their honeymoon bed in the Ritz.
While Jamila worked in her room, Changez lay joyously on the camp-bed, his good arm suspending a paperback above him, one of his ‘specials’, no doubt. ‘This one is very extra-special,’ he’d say, tossing aside yet another Spillane or James Hadley Chase or Harold Robbins. I think a lot of the big trouble which was to happen started with me giving Changez Harold Robbins to read, because it stimulated Changez in a way that Conan Doyle never did. If you think books don’t change people, just look at Changez, because undreamed-of possibilities in the sex line suddenly occurred to him, a man recently married and completely celibate who saw Britain as we saw Sweden: as the goldmine of sexual opportunity.
But before all the sex trouble got properly into its swing there was all the other trouble brewing between Anwar and Changez. After all, Changez was needed in the shop even more urgently now that Anwar had so enfeebled himself on the Gandhi-diet in order to get Changez to Britain in the first place.
To start off Changez’s career in the grocery business, Anwar instructed him to work on the till, where you could get by with only one arm and half a brain. And Anwar was very patient with Changez, and spoke to him like a four-year-old, which was the right thing to do. But Changez was far smarter than Anwar. He made sure he was hopeless at wrapping bread and giving change. He couldn’t manage the arithmetic. There were queues at the till, until customers started walking out. Anwar suggested he come back to till-work another time. Anwar would find him something else to do to get him in the grocery mood.
So Changez’s new job was to sit on a three-legged stool behind the vegetable section and watch for shop-lifters. It was elementary: you saw them stealing and you screamed, ‘Put that back, you fucking thieving tom-cat!’ But Anwar hadn’t catered for the fact that Changez had mastered the supreme art of sleeping sitting up. Jamila told me that one day Anwar came into the shop and discovered Changez snoring as he sat on his stool, while in front of his closed eyes an SL was shoving a jar of herrings down his trousers. Anwar blew up all over the place. He picked up a bunch of bananas and threw them at his son-in-law, hitting him so hard in the chest that Changez toppled off his stool and badly bruised his good arm. Changez lay writhing on the floor, unable to get up. Finally Princess Jeeta had to help Changez leave the shop. Anwar bellowed at Jeeta and Jamila and even yelled at me. I just laughed at Anwar, as we all did, but no one dared say the one true thing: it was all his own fault. I pitied him.
His despair became obvious. He was moody all the time, with a flashing temper, and when Changez was at home, nursing his bad arm, Anwar came to me as I worked in the store-room. He’d already lost any respect or hope he’d once had for Changez. ‘What’s that fucking fat useless bastard doing now?’ he enquired. ‘Is he better yet?’ ‘He’s recuperating,’ I said. ‘I’ll recuperate his fucking balls with a fucking flame-thrower!’ said Uncle Anwar. ‘Perhaps I will phone the National Front and give them Changez’s name, eh? What a good idea, eh!’