Charlie gave me money when I needed it, and he encouraged me to stay in New York. But after six months I told him it was time to go. I was afraid he found me a burden, a nuisance, a parasite, though he’d never complained. But now he was insistent and paternal. ‘Karim, you stay here with me where you belong. There’s a lotta bastards out there. You got everything you need, haven’t you?’
‘Sure I have.’
‘What’s your problem, then?’
‘None,’ I said. ‘It’s just that I –’
‘That’s fine. Let ‘s go shopping for clothes, OK?’
He didn’t want me to leave. It was eerie, our growing dependency on each other. He liked having me there as a witness, I suspected. With other people he was restrained, enigmatic, laconic; he had the magazine virtues and wore jeans well. But he liked to tell me everything in the old schoolboy way. With me, he could be dazzled by the people he met, the places he was invited, the gifts that were thrown at him. It was I, Karim, who saw him stepping into the stretch-limo; it was I who saw him sitting in the Russian Tea Room with movie-stars, famous writers and film producers. It was I who saw him going upstairs with women, in debate with intellectuals, and being photographed for Italian Vogue. And only I could appreciate how far he’d come from his original state in Beckenham. It was as if, without me there to celebrate it all, Charlie’s progress had little meaning. In other words, I was a full-length mirror, but a mirror that could remember.
My original impression that Charlie had been released by success was wrong, too: there was much about Charlie I wasn’t able to see, because I didn’t want to. Charlie liked to quote Milton’s ‘O dark, dark, dark’; and Charlie was dark, miserable, angry. I soon learned that fame and success in Britain and America meant different things. In Britain it was considered vulgar to parade yourself, whereas in America fame was an absolute value, higher than money. The relatives of the famous were famous – yes, it was hereditary: the children of stars were little stars too. And fame gained you goods that mere money couldn’t obtain. Fame was something that Charlie had desired from the moment he stuck the revered face of Brian Jones to his bedroom wall. But having obtained it, he soon found he couldn’t shut it off when he grew tired of it. He’d sit with me in a restaurant saying nothing for an hour, and then shout, ‘Why are people staring at me when I’m trying to eat my food! That woman with the powder puff on her head, she can fuck off!’ The demands on him were constant. The Fish ensured that Charlie remained in the public eye by appearing on chat shows and at openings and galleries where he had to be funny and iconoclastic. One night I turned up late to a party and there he was, leaning at the bar looking gloomy and fed up, since the hostess demanded that he be photographed with her. Charlie wasn’t beginning to come to terms with it at alclass="underline" he hadn’t the grace.
Two things happened that finally made me want to get back to England and out of Charlie’s life. One day when we were coming back from the recording studio, a man came up to us in the street. ‘I’m a journalist,’ he said, with an English accent. He was about forty, with no breath, hair or cheeks to speak of. He stank of booze and looked desperate. ‘You know me, Tony Bell. I worked for the Mirror in London. I have to have an interview. Let’s make a time. I’m good, you know. I can even tell the truth.’
Charlie strode away. The journalist was wretched and shameless. He ran alongside us, in the road.
‘I won’t leave you alone,’ he panted. ‘It’s people like me who put your name about in the first place. I even interviewed your bloody mother.’
He grasped Charlie’s arm. That was the fatal move. Charlie chopped down on him, but the man held on. Charlie hit him with a playground punch on the side of the head, and the man went down, stunned, on to his knees, waving his arms like someone begging forgiveness. Charlie hadn’t exhausted his anger. He kicked the man in the chest, and when he fell to one side and grabbed at Charlie’s legs Charlie stamped on his hand. The man lived nearby. I had to see him at least once a week on the street, carrying his groceries with his good hand.
The other reason for my wanting to leave New York was sexual. Charlie liked to experiment. From the time we’d been at school, where we’d discuss which of the menstruating dinner ladies we wanted to perform cunnilingus on (and none of them was under sixty), we wanted to fuck women, as many as possible. And like people who’d been reared in a time of scarcity and rationing, neither of us could forget the longing we’d had for sex, or the difficulty we once had in obtaining it. So we grabbed arbitrarily at the women who offered themselves.
One morning, as we had bagels and granola and OJs on the rocks in a nearby café, and talked about our crummy school as if it were Eton, Charlie said there were sexual things he’d been thinking about, sexual bents he wanted to try. ‘I’m going for the ultimate experience,’ he said. ‘Maybe you’d be interested in looking in too, eh?’
‘If you like.’
‘If you like? I’m offering you something, man, and you say if you like. You used to be up for anything.’ He looked at me contemptuously. ‘Your little brown buttocks would happily pump away for hours at any rancid hole, pushing aside toadstools and fungus and –’
‘I’m still up for anything.’
‘Yeah, but you’re miserable.’
‘I don’t know what I’m doing,’ I said.
‘Listen.’ He leaned towards me and tapped the table. ‘It’s only by pushing ourselves to the limits that we learn about ourselves. That’s where I’m going, to the edge. Look at Kerouac and all those guys.’
‘Yeah, look at them. So what, Charlie?’
‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘I’m talking. Let me finish. We’re going the whole way. Tonight.’
So that night at twelve a woman named Frankie came over. I went down to let her in while Charlie hastily put on the Velvet Underground’s first record – it had taken us half an hour to decide on the evening’s music. Frankie had short, cropped hair, a bony white face, and a bad tooth, and she was young, in her early twenties, with a soft rich voice and a sudden laugh. She wore a black shirt and black pants. When I asked her, ‘What do you do?’, I sounded like a drip-dry at one of Eva’s Beckenham evenings so long ago. I discovered that Frankie was a dancer, a performer, a player of the electric cello. At one point she said, ‘Bondage interests me. Pain as play. A deep human love of pain. There is desire for pain, yes?’
Apparently we would find out if there was desire for pain. I glanced at Charlie, trying to kindle some shared amusement at this, but he sat forward and nodded keenly at her. When he got up I got up too. Frankie took my arm. She was holding Charlie’s hand, too. ‘Maybe you two would like to get into each other, eh?’
I looked at Charlie, recalling the night in Beckenham I tried to kiss him and he turned his face away. How he wanted me – he let me touch him – but refused to acknowledge it, as if he could remove himself from the act while remaining there. Dad had seen some of this. It was the night, too, that I saw Dad screwing Eva on the lawn, an act which was my introduction to serious betrayal, lying, deceit and heart-following. Tonight Charlie’s face was open, warm; there was no rejection in it, only enthusiasm. He waited for me to speak. I never thought he would look at me like this.
We went upstairs, where Charlie had prepared the room. It was dark, illuminated only by candles, one on each side of the bed, and three on the bookshelves. For some reason the music was Gregorian chanting. We’d discussed this for hours. He didn’t want anything he could listen to when he was being tortured. Charlie removed his clothes. He was thinner than I’d ever seen him, muscly, taut. Frankie put her head back and he kissed her. I stood there, and then I cleared my throat. ‘Are you both sure you want me here and everything?’