‘Her name is Shinko,’ he told me happily as we walked back to the flat. The tail of Changez’s shirt was sticking out of his unbuttoned fly like a small white flag. I decided not to inform him of this.
‘A prostitute, eh?’
‘Don’t be not-nice! A friend now. Another friend in unfriendly cold England for me!’ He looked at me with joy. ‘She did business as described to the Τ by Harold Robbins! Karim, all my entire problems are solved! I can love my wife in the usual way and I can love Shinko in the unusual way! Lend me a pound, will you, please? I want to buy Jamila some chocolates!’
All this messing around with Changez I enjoyed, and I soon considered him part of my family, a permanent part of my life. But I had a real family to attend to – not Dad, who was preoccupied, but Mum. I rang her every day, but I hadn’t seen her during the time I’d been living at Eva’s; I couldn’t face any of them in that house.
When I did decide to go to Chislehurst, the streets were quiet and uninhabited after South London, as if the area had been evacuated. The silence was ominous; it seemed piled up and ready to fall on me. Practically the first thing I saw when I got off the train and walked along those roads again was Hairy Back and his dog, the Great Dane. Hairy Back was smoking his pipe and laughing with a neighbour as he stood at his gate. I crossed the road and walked back to examine him. How could he stand there so innocently when he’d abused me? I suddenly felt nauseous with anger and humiliation – none of the things I’d felt at the time. I didn’t know what to do. A powerful urge told me to return to the station and get on the train back to Jamila’s place. So I stood there for at least five minutes, watching Hairy Back and wondering which way to go. But how could I have explained my actions to Mum, having promised to turn up and see her? I had to carry on walking.
I knew it did me good to be reminded of how much I loathed the suburbs, and that I had to continue my journey into London and a new life, ensuring I got away from people and streets like this.
Mum had taken to her bed in Jean’s place on the day she left our house, and she hadn’t got up since. But Ted was OK: I was looking forward to seeing him. He had completely changed, Allie told me; Ted had lost his life in order to find it. So Ted was Dad’s triumph; he really was someone Dad had freed.
Uncle Ted had done absolutely nothing since the day Dad exorcized him as he sat with a record-player in his lap. Now Ted didn’t have a bath or get up until eleven o’clock, when he read the paper until the pubs were open. The afternoons he spent out on long walks or in South London attending classes on meditation. In the evenings he refused to talk – this was a vow of silence – and once a week he fasted for a day. He was happy, or happier, apart from the fact that nothing in life had much meaning for him. But at least he recognized this now and was looking into it. Dad had told him to ‘explore’ this. Dad also told Ted that meaning could take years to emerge, but in the meantime he should live in the present, enjoy the sky, trees, flowers and the taste of good food, and perhaps fix a few things in Eva’s house – maybe Dad’s bedside light and tape-recorder – if he needed any practical therapy. Ted said he’d go fishing if he needed therapy. Anything too technical might catapult him into orbit again. ‘When I see myself,’ Ted said, ‘I am lying in a hammock, just swinging, just swinging.’
Ted’s whole hammock behaviour, his conversion to Ted-Buddhism, as Dad called it, incensed Auntie Jean. She wanted to cut down his swinging hammock. ‘She’s wild with him,’ said Mum, with relish. This fight between Ted and Jean seemed to be her life’s single pleasure, and who could blame her? Jean raged and argued, and even went so far as to attempt tenderness in her effort to get Ted back to ordinary but working unhappiness. After all, they now had no income. Ted used to boast, ‘I’ve got ten men under me,’ and now he had none. There was nothing under him but thin air and the abyss of bankruptcy. But Ted just smiled and said, ‘This is my last chance to be happy. I can’t muff it, Jeanie.’ Once Auntie Jean did rip through to raw feeling by mentioning the numerous virtues of her former Tory boy, but Ted retaliated by saying (one evening during his vow of silence), ‘That boy soon saw the light as far as you’re concerned, didn’t he?’
When I got to the house Ted was singing a pub song and he practically bundled me into a cupboard to discuss his favourite subject – Dad. ‘How’s yer father?’ he said in a great whisper. ‘Happy?’ He went on dreamily, as if he were speaking of some Homeric adventure. ‘He just upped and went off with that posh woman. It was incredible. I don’t blame him. I envy him! We all want to do it, don’t we? Just cut and run. But who does it? No one – ‘cept your dad. I’d like to see him. Discuss it in detail. But it’s against the law in this house to see him. You can’t even talk about it.’ As Auntie Jean entered the hall from the living room Ted pressed a finger to his lips. ‘Don’t say a word.’ ‘About what, Uncle?’ ‘About any bloody thing!’
Even today Auntie Jean was straight-backed and splendid in high heels and a dark-blue dress with a diamond brooch in the shape of a diving fish pinned to her front. Her nails were perfect little bright shells. She shone so brightly she could have been freshly painted; you were afraid that if you touched her you’d smudge something. She seemed ready to attend one of those cocktail parties where she smeared her lips on cheeks and glasses and cigarettes and napkins and biscuits and cocktail sticks until barely a foot of the room was not decorated in red. But there were no more parties in that house of the half-dead, just the old place containing one transformed and one broken person. Jean was tough and liked to drink; she would endure for a long while yet. But what would she do when she realized that, with things as they were, she was on a life sentence, not just a temporary suspension of essential pleasure?
‘It’s you, is it?’ said Auntie Jean.
‘I s’pose it is, yeah.’
‘Where’ve you been?’
‘At college. That’s why I stay other places. To be near college.’
‘Oh yes, I bet. Pull the other one, Karim.’
‘Allie’s here, isn’t he?’
She turned away. ‘Allie’s a good boy, but he dresses up a lot, doesn’t he?’
‘Yeah, he was always one for the outré.’
‘He’s changing his clothes three times a day. It’s girlish.’
‘Very girlish.’
‘I think he plucks his eyebrows too,’ she said firmly.
‘Well, he’s hairy, Auntie Jean. That’s why they all call him Coconut at school.’
‘Men are supposed to be hairy, Karim. Hirsuteness is a characteristic of real men.’
‘You’ve been a big detective lately, haven’t you, Auntie Jean? Have you thought of applying for the police force?’ I said, as I went upstairs. Good old Allie, I thought to myself.
I never bothered much about Allie, and most of the time I forgot I even had a brother. I didn’t know him very well and I despised him for being well behaved and creeping around telling stories about me. I kept away from him so the rest of the family wouldn’t find out what I was up to. But for once I was grateful he was around, both as company for Mum and as an irritant for Auntie Jean.
I’m probably not compassionate or anything, I bet I’m a real bastard inside and don’t care for anyone, but I fucking hated treading up those stairs to Mum, especially with Jean at the bottom watching my every step. She probably had nothing else to do.
‘If you was down here,’ she said, ‘I’d bloody slap you for your cheek.’
‘What cheek?’
‘The bloody cheek you’ve got inside of you. All of it.’
‘Shut up, will you,’ I said.
‘Karim.’ She nearly strangled on her own anger. ‘Karim!’