‘What if he loves you, Jammie?’
She sat up and looked at me. She thrust her hands at me and said passionately, ‘Karim, this world is full of people needing sympathy and care, oppressed people, like our people in this racist country, who face violence every day. It is them I sympathize with, not my husband. In fact, he irritates me intensely sometimes. Fire Eater, the man’s barely alive at all! It’s pathetic!’
But as I painted her stomach and breasts in the little kisses I knew she loved, biting and nibbling her all over, trying to relax her, she was still pondering on Changez. She said, ‘Basically he’s just a parasitical, sexually frustrated man. That’s what I think of him when I think of him at all.’
‘Sexually frustrated? But that’s where he’s gone now. To see his regular whore! Shinko, she’s called.’
‘No! Really? Is it true?’
‘Of course.’
‘Tell me, tell me!’
So I told her about Changez’s patron saint, Harold Robbins, about Shinko, and about the positions problem. This made us want to try numerous positions ourselves, as Shinko and Changez were no doubt doing as we spoke. Later, as we held each other, she said, ‘But what about you, Karim? You’re sad, aren’t you?’
I was sad, it was true. How could I not be when I thought of Mum lying there in that bed day after day, completely wrecked by Dad having run off with another woman? Would she ever recover? She had great qualities, Mum, of charm and kindness and general decency, but would anyone ever appreciate them and not hurt her?
Then Jammie said, ‘What are you going to do with your life now you’ve stopped going to college?’
‘What? But I haven’t stopped going. I just don’t turn up for lectures that often. Let’s not talk about it, it makes me depressed. What will you do now?’
She became fervent. ‘Oh me, but I’m not hanging around, though it may look like it. I’m really preparing for something. I just don’t know what it is yet. I just feel I have to know certain things and that one day they will be of great use to me in understanding the world.’
We made love again, and we must have been tired, because it can’t have been less than two hours later that I woke up. I was shivering. Jamila was fast asleep with a sheet over her lower half. In a fog I crawled out of bed to pick up a blanket which had fallen on the floor, and as I did so I glanced through into the living room and made out, in the darkness, Changez lying on his camp-bed watching me. His face was expressionless; grave if anything, but mostly vacant. He looked as if he’d been lying there on his stomach for quite a while. I shut the bedroom door and dressed hurriedly, waking Jamila. I’d often wondered what I’d do in such a position, but it was simple. I scuttled out of the flat without looking at my friend, leaving husband and wife to each other and feeling I’d betrayed everyone – Changez, Mum and Dad, and myself.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘You do nothing,’ said Dad. ‘You’re a bloody bum. You’re destroying yourself wantonly, d’you know that? It sickens my whole heart.’
‘Don’t shout at me, I can’t stand it.’
‘I’ve got to, boy, to get it into your thick head. How did you manage to fail all those exams? How is it possible to fail every single one?’
‘It’s easy. You don’t show up for any of them.’
‘Is that what you did?’
‘Yes.’
‘But why, Karim, especially as you pretended to me you were going off to take the damn exams. You left the house so full of the confidence I gave you. Now I see why,’ he said bitterly. ‘How could you do it?’
‘Because I’m not in the right mood for studying. I’m too disturbed by all the stuff that’s happening. You leaving Mum and all. It’s a big deal. It affects my life.’
‘Don’t blame me if you’ve ruined your life,’ he said. But his eyes filled with tears. ‘Why? Why? Why? Don’t interfere, Eva,’ he said, as she came into the room, alarmed by our shouting. ‘This boy is a complete dead loss. So what will you do, eh?’
‘I want to think.’
‘Think, you bloody fool! How can you think when you haven’t got any brains?’
I knew this would happen; I was almost prepared for it. But this contempt was like a typhoon blowing away all my resources and possessions. I felt lower than I’d ever felt before. And then Dad ignored me. I couldn’t sleep at Jamila’s place any more for fear of having to face Changez. So I had to see Dad every day and have him deplore me. I don’t know why he took it so fucking personally. Why did it have to bother him so much? It was as if he saw us as having one life between us. I was the second half, an extension of him, and instead of complementing him I’d thrown shit all over him.
So it was a big cheering surprise when I opened the front door of Eva’s house one day to find Uncle Ted standing there in his green overalls, a bag of tools hanging from his fist, smiling all over his chopped face. He strode into the hall and started to peer expertly at the walls and ceiling. Eva came out and greeted him as though he were an artist returning from barren exile, Rimbaud from Africa. She took his hands and they looked into each other’s eyes.
Eva had heard from Dad what a poet among builders Ted was. How he’d changed and refused to go on and now was wasting his talent. This alerted Eva, and she arranged for them all to go out for supper. Later they went to a jazz club in the King’s Road – Uncle Ted had never seen black walls before – where Eva slyly said to Dad, ‘I think it’s about time we moved to London, don’t you?’
‘I like the quiet of Beckenham, where no one bothers your balls,’ said Dad, thinking that that was the end of the matter, as it would have been had he been talking to Mum.
But business was going on. Between jazz sets Eva made Ted an offer: come and make my house beautiful, Ted, we’ll play swing records and drink margheritas at the same time. It won’t be like doing a job. Ted jumped at the chance to work with Eva and Dad, partly out of nosiness – to see what freedom had made of Dad, and could perhaps make of Ted – and partly out of the returning appetite for labour. But he still had to break the news to Auntie Jean. That was the difficult bit.
Auntie Jean went into turmoil. Here was work, paid work, weeks of it, and Ted was delighted to do it. He was ready to start, except that the employer was Jean’s enemy, a terrible, man-stealing, mutilated woman. Jean pondered on it for a day while we held our breath. Finally she solved the problem by agreeing to let Ted do it provided none of us told Mum and as long as Ted gave Jean a full report at the end of each day on what precisely was going on between Dad and Eva. We agreed to these conditions, and tried to think of salacious things for Ted to tell Jean.
Eva knew what she wanted: she wanted the whole house transformed, every inch of it, and she wanted energetic, industrious people around her. We got down to it immediately. With relief, I abandoned any pretence at being clever and became a mystic assistant labourer. I did the carrying and loading and smashing, Eva did the thinking, and Ted ensured her instructions were carried out. Dad fastidiously avoided the whole muck of building, once spitting an Arab curse at us: ‘May you have the builders.’ Ted replied with an obscurity he thought would delight Dad. ‘Haroon, I’m kissing the joy as it flies,’ he said, laying into a wall with a hammer.
The three of us worked together excellently, elated and playful. Eva had become eccentric: when a decision was needed Ted and I often had to wait while she retired upstairs and meditated on the exact shape of the conservatory or the dimensions of the kitchen. The way forward would emerge from her unconscious. This was not wildly different, I suppose, to what went on in a book I was reading, Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son, in which the father would pray before any crucial decision and await God’s direction.