Charlie had a pinch of all this; he was an all-round player. But his strength was his ability to make you marvel at yourself. The attention he gave you, when he gave you attention, was absolute. He knew how to look at you as if you were the only person who’d ever interested him. He asked about your life, and seemed to savour every moment of your conversation. He was excellent at listening, and did it without cynicism. The problem with this was that neurotics flocked to him. No one else would listen to them, but Charlie had done so once, say, and they couldn’t forget him; perhaps he’d fucked them too. But Eva had to keep them away from him, saying if it was very urgent they could leave a note. And he’d escape the house by climbing over the back fence while they waited out the front all day.
After seeing it work for so long, I began to perceive Charlie’s charm as a method of robbing houses by persuading the owners to invite you in and take their possessions. I was in no doubt: it was robbery; there were objects of yours he wanted. And he took them. It was false and manipulative and I admired it tremendously. I made notes on his techniques, for they worked, especially with girls.
Ultimately none of this was innocuous. No; Charlie was the cruellest and most lethal type of seducer. He extorted, not only sex, but love and loyalty, kindness and encouragement, before moving on. I too would gladly have exercised these master-skills, but there was one essential ingredient I lacked: Charlie’s strong will and his massively forceful desire to possess whatever it was that took his fancy. Make no mistake, he was unusually ambitious. But he was getting nowhere and felt frustrated. He could see that it was getting late, and ultimately he was only in a rotten rock ’n’ roll band called Mustn’t Grumble which sounded like Hawkwind.
Charlie rarely saw his own father when he’d been a patient and sad character living with his mother. But when Charlie was staying at Eva’s house he spent hours with my father, to whom he told the truth. Together they divined for Charlie’s talent. Dad drew him maps to the unconscious; he suggested routes and speeds, clothing for the journey and how to sit at the wheel when approaching the dangerous interior. And for days and days, under the full moon of high expectation, Charlie laboured to wrench a fragment of beauty from his soul – in my view (and to my relief), to no avail. The songs were still shit.
It took me some time to work this out, for I still had such sympathy for Charlie that I couldn’t look at him coolly. But when I had recognized his weakness – his desire to join a club called Genius – I knew I had him. If I wanted I could take some revenge on him, which would also – some puny power – be a bitter reproach to my own pointless life.
Sometimes I told Eva I wanted to be a photographer or an actor, or perhaps a journalist, preferably a foreign correspondent in a war zone, Cambodia or Belfast. I knew I hated authority and being ordered around. I liked working with Ted and Eva, and they let me come and go more or less as I wished. But my aim was to join Mustn’t Grumble as a rhythm guitarist. I could play a little, after all. When I put this to Charlie he almost choked with laughter. ‘But there is a job that’s just right for you,’ he said.
‘Oh yeah, what is it?’
‘Start Saturday,’ he said.
And he gave me a job as Mustn’t Grumble’s occasional roadie. I was still a nothing, but I was in a good position to get at Charlie when the time was right.
And it was right one evening, at an art college gig where I was helping lug the gear to the van. I’d heard Dad and Eva in the bar analysing the performance as if it were Miles Davis’s farewell appearance. Charlie strolled past me, his arm around a girl who had her tits hanging out, and he said, to make her laugh, ‘Hurry up, Karim, you great girl’s blouse, you friend of Dorothy. Bring my acid to the dressing room and don’t be late.’
‘But what’s the hurry?’ I said. ‘You’re not going anywhere – not as a band and not as a person.’
He looked at me uncertainly, fondling and patting his hair as usual, unsure if I was joking or not. ‘What d’you mean?’
So: I had him. He’d walked right into it.
‘What do I mean?’
‘Yeah,’ he said.
‘To go somewhere you gotta be talented, Charlie. You got to have it upstairs.’ I tapped my forehead. ‘And on present evidence a backdoor man like you hasn’t got it up there. You’re a looker and everything, a face, I’ll concede that. But your work don’t amaze me, and I need to be amazed. You know me. I need to be fucking staggered. And I’m not fucking staggered. Oh no.’
He looked at me for a while, thinking. The girl dragged at his arm. At last he said, ‘I don’t know about that. I’m breaking up the band anyway. What you’ve said isn’t relevant.’
Charlie turned and walked out. The next day he disappeared again. There were no more gigs. Dad and I finished packing his things.
In bed before I went to sleep I fantasized about London and what I’d do there when the city belonged to me. There was a sound that London had. It was, I’m afraid, people in Hyde Park playing bongos with their hands; there was also the keyboard on the Doors’s ‘Light My Fire’. There were kids dressed in velvet cloaks who lived free lives; there were thousands of black people everywhere, so I wouldn’t feel exposed; there were bookshops with racks of magazines printed without capital letters or the bourgeois disturbance of full stops; there were shops selling all the records you could desire; there were parties where girls and boys you didn’t know took you upstairs and fucked you; there were all the drugs you could use. You see, I didn’t ask much of life; this was the extent of my longing. But at least my goals were clear and I knew what I wanted. I was twenty. I was ready for anything.
PART TWO In the City
CHAPTER NINE
The flat in West Kensington was really only three large, formerly elegant rooms, with ceilings so high that I often gaped at the room’s proportions, as if I were in a derelict cathedral. But the ceiling was the most interesting part of the flat. The toilet was up the hall, with a broken window through which the wind whipped directly up your arse. The place had belonged to a Polish woman, who’d lived there as a child and then rented it to students for the past fifteen years. When she died Eva bought it as it was, furniture included. The rooms had ancient crusty mouldings and an iron-handled bell-pull for calling servants from the basement, now inhabited by Thin Lizzy’s road manager, a man who had the misfortune, so Eva informed me, to have hair growing out of his shoulders. The sad walls, from which all colour had faded, were covered by dark cracked mirrors and big sooty paintings which disappeared one by one when we were out, though there were no other signs of burglary. Most puzzling of all was the fact that Eva wasn’t perturbed by their disappearance. ‘Hey, I think another picture’s disappeared, Eva,’ I’d say. ‘Oh yes, space for other things,’ she’d reply. Eventually she admitted to us that Charlie was stealing them to sell and we were not to mention it. ‘At least he has initiative,’ she said. ‘Wasn’t Jean Genet a thief?’