Charlie was lying on his back on the attic floor. I took the joint from him, removed my boots and lay down.
‘Come and lie beside me,’ he said. ‘Closer.’ He put his hand on my arm. ‘Now, you’re not to take this badly.’
‘No, never, whatever it is, Charlie.’
‘You’ve got to wear less.’
‘Wear less, Charlie?’
‘Dress less. Yes.’
He got up on to one elbow and concentrated on me. His mouth was close. I sunbathed under his face.
‘Levi’s, I suggest, with an open-necked shirt, maybe in pink or purple, and a thick brown belt. Forget the headband.’
‘Forget the headband?’
‘Forget it.’
I ripped my headband off and tossed it across the floor.
‘For your mum.’
‘You see, Karim, you tend to look a bit like a pearly queen.’
I, who wanted only to be like Charlie – as clever, as cool in every part of my soul – tattooed his words on to my brain. Levi’s, with an open-necked shirt, maybe in a very modest pink or purple. I would never go out in anything else for the rest of my life.
While I contemplated myself and my wardrobe with loathing, and would willingly have urinated over every garment, Charlie lay back with his eyes closed and real sartorial understanding in his mind. Everyone in the house but me was practically in heaven.
I laid my hand on Charlie’s thigh. No response. I rested it there for a few minutes until sweat broke out on the ends of my fingers. His eyes remained closed, but in his jeans he was growing. I began to feel confident. I became insane. I dashed for his belt, for his fly, for his cock, and I took him out into the air to cool down. He made a sign! He twitched himself! Through such human electricity we understood each other.
I had squeezed many penises before, at school. We stroked and rubbed and pinched each other all the time. It broke up the monotony of learning. But I had never kissed a man.
‘Where are you, Charlie?’
I tried to kiss him. He avoided my lips by turning his head to one side. But when he came in my hand it was, I swear, one of the preeminent moments of my earlyish life. There was dancing in my streets. My flags flew, my trumpets blew!
I was licking my fingers and thinking of where to buy a pink shirt when I heard a sound that was not the Pink Floyd. I turned and saw across the attic Dad’s flaming eyes, nose, neck and his famous chest hoiking itself up through the square hole in the floor. Charlie swiftly put himself away. I leapt up. Dad hurried over to me, followed by smiling Eva. Dad looked from Charlie to me and back again. Eva sniffed the air.
‘You naughty boys.’
‘What, Eva?’ Charlie said.
‘Smoking home-grown.’
Eva said it was time for her to drive us home. We all climbed backwards down the ladder. Dad, being the first, trod on my watch at the bottom, trampling it to pieces and cutting his foot.
At the house we got out of the car and I said goodnight to Eva and walked away. From the porch I could see Eva trying to kiss Dad, while he was trying to shake her hand.
Our house was dark and cold as we crept in, exhausted. Dad had to get up at six-thirty and I had my paper-round at seven. In the hall Dad raised his hand to slap me. He was drunker than I was stoned and I grabbed the ungrateful bastard.
‘What the hell were you doing?’
‘Shut up!’ I said, as quietly as I could.
‘I saw you, Karim. My God, you’re a bloody pure shitter! A bum-banger! My own son – how did it transpire?’
He was disappointed in me. He jumped up and down in anguish as if he’d just heard the whole house had been burned to the ground. I didn’t know what to do. So I started to imitate the voice he’d used earlier with the advertisers and Eva.
‘Relax, Dad. Relax your whole body from your fingers to your toes and send your mind to a quiet garden where –’
‘I’ll send you to a fucking doctor to have your balls examined!’
I had to stop him yelling before we had Mum out and the neighbours round. I whispered, ‘But I saw you, Dad.’
‘You saw nothing.’ he said, with utter contempt. He could be very arrogant. It must have been his upper-class background. But I had him.
‘At least my mum has two tits.’
Dad went into the toilet without shutting the door and started to vomit. I went in behind him and rubbed his back as he threw up his guts. ‘I’ll never mention tonight again,’ I said. ‘And nor will you.’
‘Why did you bring him home like this?’ said Mum. She was standing behind us in her dressing-gown, which was so long it almost touched the floor, making her look square. She was tired. She reminded me of the real world. I wanted to shout at her: Take that world away!
‘Couldn’t you have looked after him?’ she said. She kept plucking at my arm. ‘I was looking out of the window and waiting for you for hours. Why didn’t you ring?’
Eventually Dad stood up straight and pushed right past us.
‘Make up a bed for me in the front room,’ she said. ‘I can’t sleep next to that man stinking of sick and puking all night.’
When I’d made the bed and she’d got herself into it – and it was far too narrow and short and uncomfortable for her – I told her something.
‘I’ll never be getting married, OK?’
‘I don’t blame you,’ she said, turning over and shutting her eyes.
I didn’t think she’d get much sleep on that couch, and I felt sorry for her. But she angered me, the way she punished herself. Why couldn’t she be stronger? Why wouldn’t she fight back? I would be strong myself, I determined. That night I didn’t go to bed but sat up listening to Radio Caroline. I’d glimpsed a world of excitement and possibility which I wanted to hold in my mind and expand as a template for the future.
For a week after that evening Dad sulked and didn’t speak, though sometimes he pointed, as at salt and pepper. Sometimes this gesticulation got him into some complicated Marcel Marceau mime language. Visitors from other planets looking in through the window would have thought we were playing a family guessing game as my brother, Mum and I gathered around Dad yelling clues to each other as he tried, without the compromise of friendly words, to show us that the gutters had become blocked with leaves, that the side of the house was getting damp and he wanted Allie and me to climb up a ladder and fix it, with Mum holding the ladder. At supper we sat eating our curled-up beefburgers, chips and fish fingers in silence. Once Mum burst into tears and banged the table with the flat of her hand. ‘My life is terrible, terrible!’ she cried. ‘Doesn’t anyone understand?’
We looked at her in surprise for a moment, before carrying on with our food. Mum did the washing-up as usual and no one helped her. After tea we all dispersed as soon as possible. My brother Amar, four years younger than me, called himself Allie to avoid racial trouble. He always went to bed as early as he could, taking with him fashion magazines like Vogue, Harper’s and Queen, and anything European he could lay his hands on. In bed he wore a tiny pair of red silk pyjamas, a smoking jacket he got at a jumble sale, and his hairnet. ‘What’s wrong with looking good?’ he’d say, going upstairs. In the evenings I often went to the park to sit in the piss-stinking shed and smoke with the other boys who’d escaped from home.
Dad had firm ideas about the division of labour between men and women. Both my parents worked: Mum had got a job in a shoe shop in the High Street to finance Allie, who had decided to become a ballet dancer and had to go to an expensive private school. But Mum did all the housework and the cooking. At lunchtime she shopped, and every evening she prepared the meal. After this she watched television until ten-thirty. The TV was her only area of absolute authority. The unspoken rule of the house was that she always watched what she wanted; if any of us wanted to watch anything else, we had no chance at all. With her last energy of the day she’d throw such a fit of anger, self-pity and frustration that no one dared interfere with her. She’d die for Steptoe and Son,Candid Camera and The Fugitive.