The man who ran the theatre, Dr Bob, was a former academic and critic, an enthusiast for the ‘ethnic arts’. His room in the theatre was full of Peruvian baskets, carved paddles, African drums and paintings. I knew he’d sensed I was looking into the abyss because as we rehearsed for the opening he said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll fix you up with some decent music,’ as if he knew this was what I required to feel at home.
Now he sat Tracey and I in two somewhat exposed seats at the front of the room and hushed everyone behind us. They thought there was going to be a speech or announcement. Suddenly three dark-skinned men ran into the room, banging some sort of wooden hook on hand-held drums. Then a black man, wearing bright-pink trousers and naked from the waist up, started to fling himself, his arms outstretched, around the room. Two black women joined him, and fluttered away with their hands. Another man in sparkly trousers flew into the room, and the four of them did a kind of mating dance barely a foot from Tracey and me. And Dr Bob squatted in a corner yelling, ‘Yeah’ and ‘Right on’ as the Haitians danced. It made me feel like a colonial watching the natives perform. At the end there was rapturous applause and Dr Bob made us shake hands with all of them.
I didn’t see Eleanor again that evening until most of the guests had gone and Eleanor, Richard, Carol and I were sitting around Pyke in a bedroom. Pyke was frisky and laughing. He was in New York with a successful show and was surrounded by admirers. What more could he want? And he was playing one of his favourite games. I could smell the danger. But if I left the room I’d be among strangers. So I stayed and took it, though I didn’t feel up to it.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘all of you – if you could fuck any one person in this apartment, who would it be?’ And everyone was laughing, and looking around at each other, and justifying their choices, and trying to be daring and point at one another and say, ‘You, you!’ One glance told Pyke how volatile I was that night, so he excluded me. I nodded and smiled at him and said to Eleanor, ‘Can we go outside to talk for a while?’ but Pyke said, ‘Just a minute, wait a while, I’ve got to read something.’
‘Come on,’ I said to Eleanor, but she held my arm. I knew what was going to happen. Pyke was getting out his notebook now. And he started to read out the predictions he’d written down when we first started to rehearse, in that room by the river where we were honest for the sake of the group. God, I was drunk, and I couldn’t see why everyone was being so attentive to Pyke: it was as if Pyke were reading out reviews, not of the play, but of our personalities, clothes, beliefs – of us. Anyway, he read out stuff about Tracey and Carol, but I lay on my back on the floor and didn’t listen; it wasn’t interesting, anyway. ‘Now, Karim,’ he said. ‘You’ll be riveted by this.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I know.’
He started to read the stuff about me. The faces around him were looking at me and laughing. Why did they hate me so much? What had I done to them? Why wasn’t I harder? Why did I feel so much?
‘Karim is obviously looking for someone to fuck. Either a boy or a girclass="underline" he doesn’t mind, and that’s all right. But he’d prefer a girl, because she will mother him. Therefore he’s appraising all the crumpet in the group. Tracey is too spiky for him, too needy; Carol too ambitious; and Louise not his physical type. It’ll be Eleanor. He thinks she’s sweet, but she’s not blown away by him. Anyway, she’s still fucked-up over Gene, and feels responsible for his death. I’ll have a word with her, tell her to take care of Karim, maybe get her to feed him, give him a bit of confidence. My prediction is that Eleanor will fuck him, it’ll basically be a mercy fuck, but he’ll fall hard for her and she’ll be too kind to tell him the truth about anything. It will end in tears.’
I went into the other room. I wished I was in London; I just wanted to be away from all these people. I rang Charlie, who was living in New York, but he wasn’t there. I’d spoken to him several times on the phone but not seen him as yet. Then Eleanor had her arm round me and she was holding me. I kept saying, ‘Let’s go, let’s go somewhere, and we can be together.’ She was looking at me pityingly and saying, no, no, she had to tell the truth, she’d be spending the night with Pyke, she wanted to know him as deeply as she could. ‘That won’t take a whole night,’ I said. I saw Pyke coming out of the bedroom surrounded by the others, and I went to destroy him. But I didn’t get a clean punch in. There was a tangle; I threw myself about; arms and legs were everywhere. But whose were they? I was in a frenzy, kicking and scratching and screaming. I wanted to chuck a chair through the glass window, because I wanted to be on the street watching it come through the window in slow motion. Then I seemed to be in a kind of box. I was staring up at polished wood and I couldn’t move. I was pinned down. Almost certainly I was dead, thank God. I heard an American voice say, ‘These English are animals. Their whole culture has fallen through the floor.’
Well, the cabs in New York City had these bullet-proof partitions to stop you killing the driver, and they had slidy seats, and I was practically on the floor. Thank God Charlie was with me. He had his arms around my chest and kept me from the floor. He refused to let me stop at a topless bar. What I did see were the Haitians walking down the street. I wound down the window, ordered the driver to slow down and shouted at them; ‘Hey, guys, where are you going?’
‘Stop it, Karim,’ Charlie said gently.
‘Come on, guys!’ I yelled. ‘Let’s go somewhere! Let’s enjoy America!’
Charlie told the driver to get going. But at least he was good-humoured and pleased to see me, even if, when we got out of the cab, I did want to lie down on the pavement and go to sleep.
Charlie had been at the show that night, but after the play he went out to dinner with a record producer and came on late to the party. On finding me passed out under the piano and surrounded by angry actors, he took me home. Tracey later told me she’d been loosening my shirt when she looked up and saw Charlie moving towards her. He was so beautiful, she said, that she burst into tears.
I woke up with a blanket around me in a lovely, bright room, not large, but with sofas, numerous old armchairs, an open fireplace, and a kitchen through the open partition doors. On the walls were framed posters for art exhibitions. There were books: it was a classy place, not the usual rock-star’s hang-out. But then, I couldn’t consider Charlie a rock-star. It didn’t seem of his essence, but a temporary, borrowed persona.
I vomited three or four times before going upstairs to Charlie with coffee, and jam on toast. He was alone in bed. When I woke him there wasn’t his usual snarl. He sat up smiling and kissed me. He said a lot of things I didn’t believe were coming from his mouth.
‘Welcome to New York. I know you feel like shit, but we’re going to have fun like you’ve never known it. What a great city this is! Just think, we’ve been in the wrong place all these years. Now just go over there and put on that Lightnin’ Hopkins record. Let’s start off as we intend to go on!’
Charlie and I spent the day together walking around the Village, and had a milkshake thick with Italian ice-cream. A girl recognized him and came over to leave a note on the table. ‘Thank you for giving your genius to the world,’ she wrote. Her phone-number was on the bottom. Charlie nodded at her across the café. I’d forgotten how intimidating it was walking around with him. People recognized him everywhere, yet his hair was covered by a black woolly hat and he wore blue cotton overalls and workmen’s boots.