As I had some spare time before rehearsals started again I borrowed Ted’s van and helped install Jamila and the Dildo Killer in their new house. Turning up with a truckful of paperbacks, the works of Conan Doyle and various sex-aids, I was surprised to see a big, double-fronted and detached place standing back from the main road, from which it was concealed by a thick hedge. There were rotting tarpaulins, old baths, disintegrating free magazines and sodden debris all over the garden; the stately house itself was cracking like an old painting. A pipe poured water down the walls. And three local skinheads, as respectable as Civil Servants, though one had a spider’s web tattooed on his face, stood outside and jeered.
Inside, the place was full of the most eager and hard-working vegetarians I’d ever seen, earnest and humorous, with degrees in this and that, discussing Cage and Schumacher as they dragged out the cistern in their blue dungarees and boiler suits. Changez stood in front of a banner which read ‘America, where are you now? Don’t you care about your sons and daughters?’ He looked like Oliver Hardy in a roomful of Paul Newmans, and was as frightened as a new boy at school. When someone hurried past him and said, ‘Civilization has taken a wrong turn,’ Changez looked as if he’d rather be anywhere than Utopia. I saw no tarot cards, though someone did say they were intending to ‘make love to the garden’. I left Changez there and rushed home to add new touches to his character.
There were few jobs I relished as much as the invention of Changez/Tariq. With a beer and notebook on my desk, and concentrating for the first time since childhood on something that absorbed me, my thoughts raced: one idea pulled another behind it, like conjurer’s handkerchiefs. I uncovered notions, connections, initiatives I didn’t even know were present in my mind. I became more energetic and alive as I brushed in new colours and shades. I worked regularly and kept a journal; I saw that creation was an accretive process which couldn’t be hurried, and which involved patience and, primarily, love. I felt more solid myself, and not as if my mind were just a kind of cinema for myriad impressions and emotions to flicker through. This was worth doing, this had meaning, this added up the elements of my life. And it was this that Pyke had taught me: what a creative life could be. So despite what he’d done to me, my admiration for him continued. I didn’t blame him for anything; I was prepared to pay the price for his being a romantic, an experimenter. He had to pursue what he wanted to know and follow his feelings wherever they went, even as far as my arse and my girlfriend’s cunt.
When I went back to the commune a few weeks later, to gather more ideas for Changez/Tariq and to see how Changez had settled in, I found the front garden had been cleared. There were piles of scaffolding ready to be erected around the house. There would be a new roof. Uncle Ted was advising on the renovation and had been over several times to help out.
I enjoyed seeing the vegetarians and their comrades working together, even if they did call each other comrade. I liked to stay late and drink with them, though they did go in for organic wine. And when he could persuade them to take off Nashville Skyline, Simon – the radical lawyer with short hair, tie and no beard, who seemed to run the place – played Charlie Mingus and the Mahavishnu Orchestra. He told me what jazz I might like because, to be frank, I’d become deadly bored with the new music I was hearing.
As we sat there they talked about how to construct this equitable society. I said nothing, for fear of appearing stupid; but I knew we had to have it. Unlike Terry’s bunch, this lot didn’t want power. The problem, said Simon, was how to overthrow, not those presently in power, but the whole principle of power-over.
Going home to Eva’s, or back to Eleanor’s for the night, I wished I could have stayed with Jamila and Changez. The newest ideas were passing through their house, I thought. But we were rehearsing a play, and Louise Lawrence had managed to compose a third of it. The opening was only weeks away. There was plenty to be done, and I was frightened.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It was while watching Pyke as he rehearsed in his familiar blue tracksuit, the tight bottoms of which hugged his arse like a cushion cover and outlined his little dick as he moved around the room, that I first began to suspect I’d been seriously let down. That prick, which had fucked me up the arse while Marlene cheered us on as if we were all-in wrestlers – and while Eleanor fixed herself a drink – had virtually ruptured me. Now, I began to be certain, the fucker was fucking me in other ways. I would look into it.
I watched him closely. He was a good director, because he liked other people, even when they were difficult. (He saw difficult people as puzzles to be solved.) Actors liked him because he knew that even they could discover for themselves the right way through a part if he gave them room. This flattered them, and actors love flattery. Pyke never got angry or shoved you in a direction you didn’t want to go; his manipulations were subtle and effective. All the same, these were painful days for me. The others, especially Carol, often became angry, because I was slower and more stupid than they were. ‘Karim’s got all the right qualifications for an actor,’ Carol said. ‘No technique, no experience, no presence.’
So Pyke had to go over every line and move of the first scene with me. My greatest fear was that when the final script was delivered Lawrence and Pyke would have allowed me only a small part, and I’d be hanging around back-stage like a spare prick. But when Louise delivered the play I saw to my surprise that I had a cracker of a part. I couldn’t wait to exhibit it.
What a strange business this acting is, Pyke said; you are trying to convince people that you’re someone else, that this is not-me. The way to do it is this, he said: when in character, playing not-me, you have to be yourself. To make your not-self real you have to steal from your authentic self. A false stroke, a wrong note, anything pretended, and to the audience you are as obvious as a Catholic naked in a mosque. The closer you play to yourself the better. Paradox of paradoxes: to be someone else successfully you must be yourself! This I learned!
We went north in winter, touring the play around studio theatres and arts centres. We stayed in freezing hotels where the owners regarded their guests as little more than burglars, sleeping in unheated rooms with toilets up the hall, places without telephones where they refused to serve breakfast after eight. ‘The way the English sleep and eat is enough to make you want to emigrate to Italy,’ Eleanor said every day at breakfast. For Carol, all that mattered was playing in London; the north was Siberia, the people animals.
I was playing an immigrant fresh from a small Indian town. I insisted on assembling the costume myself: I knew I could do something apt. I wore high white platform boots, wide cherry flares that stuck to my arse like sweetpaper and flapped around my ankles, and a spotted shirt with a wide ‘Concorde’ collar flattened over my jacket lapels.
At the first performance, in front of an audience of twenty, as soon as I walked out on stage, farting with fear, there was laughter, uncertain at first, then from the belly as they took me in. As I continued, gusts of pleasure lifted me. I was a wretched and comic character. The other actors had the loaded lines, the many-syllabled political analysis, the flame-throwing attacks on pusillanimous Labour governments, but it was me the audience warmed to. They laughed at my jokes, which concerned the sexual ambition and humiliation of an Indian in England. Unfortunately, my major scenes were with Carol, who, after the first performance, started to look not-nicely across the stage at me. After the third performance, in the dressing room, she yelled, ‘I can’t act with this person – he’s a pratt, not an actor!’ And she ran to ring Pyke in London.