Every few days I rang Jamila to give her a full account of cows’ teeth like snowdrops, Pyke’s Penis, San Francisco, Hawaii and pop-up toasters. Everyone else was encouraging: Eva, having heard of Pyke, was very impressed; and Dad was happy that I was working. The only person I was certain would urinate on my flame was Jamila.
So I explained the games and the reasoning behind them. ‘Pyke’s a shrewd man,’ I told her. ‘By having us expose ourselves he’s made us vulnerable and dependent on each other. We’re so close as a group it’s incredible!’
‘Pah. You’re not close to each other. It’s fake, just a technique.’
‘I thought you believed in co-operation and all. Communist stuff like that.’
‘Karim, shall I tell you what’s been going on over here at the shop while you’ve been over there hugging strangers?’
‘Why, what?’
‘Νο, I’m not going to talk to you. Karim, you’re basically a selfish person, uninterested in anyone else.’
‘What?’
‘Go back to being a tree.’ And she put the phone down.
Soon, in the mornings, we stopped meeting at the rehearsal room: we all went our separate ways to research characters from different rungs of the social ladder. These people Louise Lawrence would eventually have to try and massage into the same play. In the afternoons we improvised around the characters and started to build scenes. Initially I thought I’d choose Charlie as my character, but Pyke discouraged me immediately. ‘We need someone from your own background,’ he said. ‘Someone black.’
‘Yeah?’
I didn’t know anyone black, though I’d been at school with a Nigerian. But I wouldn’t know where to find him. ‘Who do you mean?’ I asked.
‘What about your family?’ Pyke said. ‘Uncles and aunts. They’ll give the play a little variety. I bet they’re fascinating.’
I thought for a few minutes.
‘Any ideas?’ he said.
‘I’ve got just the thing,’ I said.
‘Excellent. I knew you’d be the right person to be in this show.’
After breakfast with Dad and Eva I cycled across the river, past the Oval cricket ground to Jeeta and Anwar’s shop. I was beginning to think of Anwar as the character I’d play, and I wanted to see how he’d changed since the advent of Changez, who was such a disappointment that Anwar – who had been counting on being given a life-transfusion by a son – had become an old man, his natural course of decay being accelerated, not delayed, by the fresh element which had turned out to be not-so-fresh.
When I arrived Jeeta got up from behind the till and hugged me. I noticed how grubby and gloomy Paradise Stores looked now: paint was peeling from the walls, the shelves were dirty, the lino on the floor was curling and cracking, and several lights seemed to have failed, leaving the place tenebrous. Outside, in their old orange-boxes, even the vegetables looked forlorn, and Jeeta had grown tired of scrubbing off the racist graffiti which reappeared on the walls every time you removed it. Other shops in the area, all over London in fact, were modernizing rapidly, as ambitious Pakistanis and Bengalis bought them up. Several brothers, say, would come to London; they’d get two jobs each, in an office during the day and a restaurant by night; they’d buy a shop, installing one brother as manager, with his wife behind the till. Then they’d get another shop and do the same, until a chain was established. Money flowed. But Anwar and Jeeta’s shop had not changed in years. Business was slack. Everything was going wrong, but I didn’t want to think about it. The play was too important.
I told Jeeta about the play and what I wanted – just to be around – knowing she’d barely understand or be interested. But she did have something to say.
‘Whatever you do,’ she said, ‘if you’re going to come here day after day, you must stop your uncle going out with his walking stick.’
‘Why, Auntie Jeeta?’
‘Karim, some thugs came here one day. They threw a pig’s head through the shop window as I sat here.’
Jamila hadn’t told me anything about this.
‘Were you hurt?’
‘A little cut. Blood here and there, Karim.’
‘What did the police do?’
‘They said it was another shop. A rival thing.’
‘Bollocks.’
‘Naughty boy, bad language.’
‘Sorry, Auntie.’
‘It made your uncle come very strange. He is roaming the streets every day with his stick, shouting at these white boys, “Beat me, white boy, if you want to!”’ And she blushed with shame and embarrassment. ‘Go to him,’ she said, and squeezed my hand.
I found Uncle Anwar upstairs in his pyjamas. He seemed to have shrunk in the past few months: his legs and body were emaciated, while his head remained the same size, perched on him like a globe on a walking stick.
‘You bastard,’ he said in greeting, ‘where have you been?’
‘I’m here with you every day now.’
He grunted his approbation and continued to watch television. He loved having me beside him, though he barely spoke and never asked me about myself. For a few weeks he’d been visiting the mosque regularly, and now I occasionally went with him. The mosque was a dilapidated terraced house nearby which smelled of bhuna gost. The floor was sprinkled with onion skins, and Moulvi Qamar-Uddin sat behind his desk surrounded by leather-bound books on Islam and a red telephone, stroking the beard which reached to his stomach. Anwar complained to the Moulvi that Allah had abandoned him despite regular prayers and a refusal to womanize. Hadn’t he loved his wife and given her a shop, and now wasn’t she refusing to go home to Bombay with him?
Anwar complained to me about Jeeta as we sat in the store-room like a couple of school truants. ‘I want to go home now,’ he said. ‘I’ve had enough of this damn place.’
But as the days passed I watched Jeeta’s progress. She certainly didn’t want to go home. It was as if Jamila had educated her in possibility, the child being an example to the parent. The Princess wanted to get a licence to sell liquor on the premises; she wanted to sell newspapers and increase the stock. She could see how it was all done, but Anwar was impossible, you couldn’t discuss anything with him. Like many Muslim men – beginning with the Prophet Mohammed himself, whose absolute statements, served up piping hot from God, inevitably gave rise to absolutism – Anwar thought he was right about everything. No doubt on any subject ever entered his head.
‘Why don’t you want to take up Jeeta’s ideas?’ I asked him.
‘For what? What will I do with the profit? How many shoes can I wear? How many socks? How better will I eat? Thirty breakfasts instead of one?’ And he always said, finally, ‘Everything is perfect.’
‘D’you believe that, Uncle?’ I asked one day.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘Everything gets worse.’
His Muslim fatalism – Allah was responsible for everything – depressed me. I was always glad to get away now. I had a far more exciting project heating up over the other side of the river. I had chosen Eleanor to fall in love with, and was making progress.
Almost every day after rehearsal Eleanor said, as I hoped she would, ‘Are you coming over later, then, to keep me company?’ And she watched my face anxiously, biting her nails and ripping the skin from around her fingernails with her teeth, and twisting her long red hair around her fingers.
From the start of rehearsal she had noticed my fear and inexperience, and offered consolation. Eleanor had already appeared in films, on TV and in the West End. I felt like a boy beside her, but there was something in her that needed me too, something weak rather than kind or passionate, as if I were a comfort during an illness, someone to touch, perhaps. As soon as I saw this weakness I closed in. I had never been seen with such a mature and beautiful woman before, and I encouraged her to go out with me so people would think we were a couple.