Eva turned to my father and bowed to him, Japanese fashion. ‘My good and deep friend Haroon here, he will show us the Way. The Path.’
‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ I whispered to Charlie, remembering how Dad couldn’t even find his way to Beckenham.
‘Watch, watch closely,’ murmured Charlie, squatting down.
Dad sat down at the end of the room. Everyone looked keenly and expectantly at him, though the two men near me glanced at each other as if they wanted to laugh. Dad spoke slowly and with confidence. The nervousness he’d shown earlier appeared to have disappeared. He seemed to know he had their attention and that they’d do as he asked. I was sure he’d never done anything like this before. He was going to wing it.
‘The things that are going to happen to you this evening are going to do you a lot of good. They may even change you a little, or make you want to change, in order to reach your full potential as human beings. But there is one thing you must not do. You must not resist. If you resist, it will be like driving a car with the handbrake on.’
He paused. Their eyes were on him.
‘We’ll do some floor work. Please sit with your legs apart.’
They parted their legs.
‘Raise your arms.’
They raised their arms.
‘Now, breathing out, stretch down to your right foot.’
After some basic yoga positions he had them lying on their backs. To his soft commands they were relaxing their fingers one by one, then their wrists, toes, ankles, foreheads and, peculiarly, their ears. Meanwhile Dad wasted no time in removing his shoes and socks, and then – I should have guessed it – his shirt and clean string vest. He padded around the circle of dreamers, lifting a loose arm here, a leg there, testing them for tension. Eva, also lying on her back, had one naughty, slowly enlarging eye open. Had she ever seen such a dark, hard, hairy chest before? When Dad floated past she touched his foot with her hand. The man in black corduroy couldn’t relax at alclass="underline" he lay there like a bundle of sticks with his legs crossed, a burning cigarette in his fingers, gazing reflectively at the ceiling.
I hissed to Charlie, ‘Let’s get out of here before we’re hypnotized like these idiots!’
‘Isn’t it just fascinating?’
On the upstairs landing of the house was a ladder which led up to Charlie’s attic. ‘Please remove your watch,’ he said. ‘In my domain time isn’t a factor.’ So I put my watch on the floor and climbed the ladder to the attic, which stretched out across the top of the house. Charlie had the whole space to himself. Mandalas and long-haired heads were painted on the sloping walls and low ceiling. His drum-kit stood in the centre of the floor. His four guitars – two acoustic and two Stratocasters – leaned against the wall in a line. Big cushions were flung about. There were piles of records and the four Beatles in their Sergeant Pepper period were on the wall like gods.
‘Heard anything good lately?’ he asked, lighting a candle.
‘Yeah.’
After the calm and silence of the living room my voice sounded absurdly loud. ‘The new Stones album. I played it at music society today and the lads went crazy. They threw off their jackets and ties and danced. I was on top of my desk! It was like some weird pagan ritual. You shoulda bin there, man.’
I knew immediately from the look on Charlie’s face that I’d been an animal, a philistine, a child. Charlie threw his shoulder-length hair back, looked at me tolerantly for some time, and then smiled.
‘I think it’s time you bathed your ears in something really nourishing, Karim.’
He put on a record by the Pink Floyd called Ummagumma. I forced myself to listen while Charlie sat opposite me and rolled a joint, sprinkling a dried leaf over the tobacco.
‘Your father. He’s the best. He’s wise. D’you do that meditation stuff every morning?’
I nodded. A nod can’t be a lie, right?
‘And chanting, too?’
‘Not chanting every day, no.’
I thought of the morning in our place: Dad running around the kitchen looking for olive oil to put on his hair; my brother and I wrestling over the Daily Mirror; my mother complaining about having to go to work in the shoe shop.
Charlie handed me the joint. I pulled on it and handed it back, managing to sprinkle ash down the front of my shirt and burn a small hole in it. I was so excited and dizzy I stood up immediately.
‘What’s going down?’
‘I have to go to the bog!’
I flew down the attic ladder. In the Kays’ bathroom there were framed theatre posters for Genet plays. There were bamboo and parchment scrolls with tubby Orientals copulating on them. There was a bidet. As I sat there with my trousers down, taking it all in, I had an extraordinary revelation. I could see my life clearly for the first time: the future and what I wanted to do. I wanted to live always this intensely: mysticism, alcohol, sexual promise, clever people and drugs. I hadn’t come upon it all like this before, and now I wanted nothing else. The door to the future had opened: I could see which way to go.
And Charlie? My love for him was unusual as love goes: it was not generous. I admired him more than anyone but I didn’t wish him well. It was that I preferred him to me and wanted to be him. I coveted his talents, face, style. I wanted to wake up with them all transferred to me.
I stood in the upstairs hall. The house was silent except for the distant sound of ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’ coming from the top of the house. Someone was burning incense. I crept down the stairs to the ground floor. The living-room door was open. I peered round it into the dimly lit room. The advertising men and their wives were sitting up, cross-legged, straight-backed, eyes closed, breathing regularly and deeply. The Corduroy Suit was sitting in a chair with his back to everyone, reading and smoking. Neither Eva nor Dad were in the room. Where could they have gone?
I left the hypnotized Buddhas and went through the house and into the kitchen. The back door was wide open. I stepped out into the darkness. It was a warm evening; the moon was full.
I got down on my knees. I knew this was the thing to do – I’d gone highly intuitive since Dad’s display. I crawled across the patio. They must have had a barbecue out there recently, because razor-sharp charcoal shards jabbed into my knees, but I reached the edge of the lawn without serious injury. I could see vaguely that at the end of the lawn there was a garden bench. As I crawled closer there was enough moonlight for me to see that Eva was on the bench. She was pulling her kaftan up over her head. If I strained my eyes I could see her chest. And I did strain; I strained until my eyeballs went dry in their sockets. Eventually I knew I was right. Eva had only one breast. Where the other traditionally was, there was nothing, so far as I could see.
Beneath all this hair and flesh, and virtually concealed from me, was my father. I knew it was Daddio because he was crying out across the Beckenham gardens, with little concern for the neighbours, ‘Oh God, oh my God, oh my God.’ Was I conceived like this, I wondered, in the suburban night air, to the wailing of Christian curses from the mouth of a renegade Muslim masquerading as a Buddhist?
With a harsh crack, Eva slapped her hand over my father’s mouth. This was a touch peremptory, I thought, and I almost jerked forward to object. But, my God, could Eva bounce! Head back, eyes to stars, kicking up from the grass like a footballer, her hair flying. But what of the crushing weight on Dad’s arse? Surely the impress of the bench would remain for days seared into his poor buttocks, like grill marks on steak?
Eva released her hand from his mouth. He started to laugh. The happy fucker laughed and laughed. It was the exhilaration of someone I didn’t know, full of greedy pleasure and self. It brought me all the way down.
I hobbled away. In the kitchen I poured myself a glass of Scotch and threw it down my throat. Corduroy Suit was standing in the corner of the kitchen. His eyes were twitching badly. He stuck out his hand. ‘Shadwell,’ he said.