These houses were built for another era, I thought, looking at Terry’s place. They were five-storey places; they overlooked pretty parks; and they were rotting as this part of the city was rotting even as it flourished in the cracks. The kids here were wilder than anywhere else in London. The hair which Charlie had appropriated and elaborated on – black, spiky, sculptural, ornamental, eveningwear not work-wear – had moved on: to the Mohican. The girls and boys wore solid rainbows of hairy colour on their otherwise tonsured skulls. The black kids had dreadlocks half-way down their back, and walking sticks and running shoes. The girls wore trousers which tapered to above the ankle; the boys wore black bondage trousers with flaps and buckles and zips. The area was full of shebeens, squats, lesbian bars, gay pubs, drug pubs, drug organizations, advice centres, and the offices of various radical political organizations. There wasn’t much work going on; people were hanging out; they asked you if you wanted black hash, which I did, but not from them.
The door of the house was open. The locks had been smashed. I went straight up and caught Terry at it. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt; he was barefoot, and he was working on a long padded seat in front of a large window. He held a weighted bar behind his neck as he stood up and sat down, stood up and sat down, and watched rugby on a black and white TV. He looked at me in amazement. I hunted around for somewhere to sit, an unbroken chair or unstained cushion. It was a dirty place and Terry was a well-off actor. Before I’d sat down he had seized me and hugged me. He smelled good, of sweat.
‘Hey, hey, it’s you, it really is you, just turning up like this. Where you been?’
‘Sergeant Monty,’ I said.
‘Where you been? Tell me. Where, Karim?’
‘Raising money for you.’
‘Yeah, really,’ Terry said. ‘I believe you.’
‘Didn’t you ask me to?’
‘yes, but –’ He rolled his eyes.
‘You asked me to. You fucking ordered me. Didn’t you? Are you saying you don’t remember?’
‘Remember? How could I fucking forget, Karim? That night. Wow. All that money and intelligence. Those smart people. University cunts. Fucking rich cunts. Fucking rot them. It can unsettle a boy like me.’
‘Don’t tell me,’ I said.
He gestured with his hands and blew hard through his mouth. ‘But I don’t feel too pleased about it.’
He went off and made some tea, but it was Typhoo and the cup had brown stains on the outside. I put it aside and gave him Pyke’s cheque. He glanced at it; he looked at me. ‘Bloody good work. I thought you were joking. This is terrific. Well done, mate.’
‘I only had to ask him. You know what liberals are like.’
‘Yeah, they can afford it, the bastards.’ He came over to me again after putting the cheque in his jacket pocket. ‘Listen, there’s other things you can do now for the Party.’
I said, ‘I’m going to America with Pyke.’
‘Fuck that. What for?’ It was good to see Terry keen and eager again. ‘This country’s the place to be. It’s on its knees. You can see that, can’t you?’
‘Yeah.’
‘’Course you can. Callaghan can’t last. It’ll be our turn.’
‘America is OK.’
‘Yeah. Great.’ He punched me on the arm. ‘Come on.’ I felt he wanted to touch me or something. Kiss me. He said, ‘Except it’s a fascist, imperialist, racist shithole.’
‘Yeah?’
‘It’s –’
I said, ‘Sometimes I feel disgusted by your ignorance. Your fucking stupid blindness to things. America. Where do you think the gay militancy has come from?’ Not that this helped my case. I thought a moment. He was listening, not yet sneering. ‘The women’s movement. Black rebellion. What are you talking about, Terry, when you talk about America? It’s crap! Idiocy! Christ!’
‘Don’t shout at me. What am I saying? I’m saying I’ll miss you, that’s all! And I’m saying it’s pretty damn weird, you an’ Pyke being such big close friends after what he’s done to you. Right? Right?’
‘What’s he done to me?’ I said.
‘You know. You were there.’
‘I know? What is it? Tell me.’
‘I’ve heard,’ he said. ‘Everybody talks.’
He turned away. He didn’t want to say any more. Now I’d never know what they were saying about me and Pyke and what he’d done to me.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘I don’t care.’
‘You don’t care about anything,’ he said. ‘You’re not attached to anything, not even to the Party. You don’t love. Stay here and fight.’
I walked around the room. Terry’s sleeping-bag was on the floor; there was a knife beside the bed. It was time to go. I wanted to loaf around this part of London. I wanted to ring Changez and have him walking beside me on his Charlie Chaplin feet. Terry was pacing; I was looking out the window trying to control myself. People who were only ever half right about things drove me mad. I hated the flood of opinion, the certainty, the easy talk about Cuba and Russia and the economy, because beneath the hard structure of words was an abyss of ignorance and not-knowing; and, in a sense, of not wanting to know. Fruitbat-Jones’s lover, Chogyam-Rainbow-Jones, had a rule: he’d only talk about things he had practical experience of, things he’d directly known. It seemed to be a good rule.
I opened my mouth to tell Terry again what a fool I thought he was, how rigid in his way of seeing he could be, when he said, ‘You can come and live here now that Eleanor’s chucked you out. There’s some good working-class girls in this squat. You won’t go short.’
‘I bet,’ I said.
I went to him and put my hand between his legs. I didn’t think he’d allow himself to like it too much; I didn’t think he’d let me take his cock out, but I reckoned you should try it on with everyone you fancied, just in case. You never knew, they might like it, and if not, so what? Attractive people were a provocation in themselves, I found, when I was in this mood.
‘Don’t touch me, Karim,’ he said.
I kept on rubbing him, pushing into his crotch, digging my nails into his balls, until I glanced up at his face. However angry I was with him, however much I wanted to humiliate Terry, I suddenly saw such humanity in his eyes, and in the way he tried to smile – such innocence in the way he wanted to understand me, and such possibility of pain, along with the implicit assumption that he wouldn’t be harmed – that I pulled away. I went to the other side of the room. I sat staring at the wall. I thought about torture and gratuitous physical pain. How could it be possible to do such things when there’d be certain looks that would cry out to you from the human depths, making you feel so much pity you could weep for a year?
I went to him and shook his hand. He had no idea what was going on. I said, ‘Terry, I’ll see you.’
‘When?’ he asked, concerned.
‘When I come back from America.’
He came to the door with me. He said goodbye, and then he said he was sorry. To be honest, I wouldn’t have minded moving in with him and living in Brixton, but the time for that had probably passed. America was waiting.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
After the opening night in New York we got out of the theatre and were taken in taxis to an apartment building on Central Park South, near the Plaza Hotel. We were on the nine-hundredth floor or something, and one wall was solid glass, and there was a view over the park and to the north of Manhattan. There were servants with silver trays, and a black man played ‘As Time Goes By’ on the piano. I recognized various actors, and was told that agents and journalists and publishers were there too. Carol went from person to person introducing herself. Pyke stood on one spot, just off-centre of the room, where, gladly and graciously, he received unsolicited praise, and no doubt hoped to meet hairdressers from Wisconsin. Being English provincials, and resentfully afraid of capitalist contamination, Tracey, Richard and I skulked in a corner and were nervous. Eleanor enjoyed herself talking to a young film producer with his hair in a pigtail. Looking at her now, after saying only a few words to her for three months, I realized how little I knew her, understood her, liked her. I’d wanted her, but not wanted her. What had I been thinking about all the time I’d been with her? I resolved to talk to her after a few drinks.