‘Christ, Allie.’
‘There you are.’
I sighed. ‘Good for her. She deserves it.’
‘Jimmy’s OK. He’s respectable, he’s employed, he doesn’t put his prick around.’ Then this admiring look came over him again, and he shook his head and whistled. ‘A soap opera, eh? That’s class.’
‘You know,’ I said. ‘After Mum and Dad broke up, everything went crazy. I didn’t know where I was.’
He was looking at me. I felt guilty that I’d never discussed his feelings about this. ‘Don’t talk about it now,’ he said. ‘I can’t take it either. I know too well what you mean.’
He smiled reassuringly.
‘All right,’ I said.
Then he leaned towards me and said venomously, ‘I don’t see Dad. When I miss him I speak to him on the phone. I don’t have much time for people who run away from their wife and kids. I don’t blame you for going with him – you were young. But Dad was selfish. And what about him giving up his job? Don’t you think he’s insane? He’ll have no money. Eva will have to support him. Therefore Eva will have to support Mum. Isn’t that grotesque? And Mum hates her. We’ll all be parasites on her!’
‘Allie–’
‘What will he be doing, St Francis of Assisi, discussing life, death and marriage – on which he’s a world expert – with idiots who’ll think he’s a pompous old bore? God, Karim, what happens to people when they start to get old?’
‘Don’t you understand anything?’
‘Understand what?’
‘Oh, Allie, how stupid can you be? Don’t you see the way things happen?’
He looked hurt and deflated then: it wasn’t difficult to do that to him, he was so unsure of himself. I couldn’t think how to apologize and return to our former understanding.
He murmured, ‘But I’ve not looked at it from another point of view.’
Just then I heard a key in the door. A new sound, yet it was a noise I’d heard every day for years when Mum came home from the shop to get our tea. It was her now. I went out and hugged her. She was pleased to see me, but not that pleased, once she’d ascertained that I hadn’t been killed, and had a job. She was in a hurry. ‘A friend’s coining round later,’ she said without a blush, as Allie and I winked at each other. While she showered and dressed, we dusted and vacuumed the front room. ‘Better do the stairs, too,’ Allie said.
Mum spent ages preparing herself, and Allie told her what jewellery to wear, and the right shoes and everything. This was a woman who never used to have more than one bath a week. When we first moved into the house, in the late-1950s, there wasn’t even a bathroom. Dad used to sit with his knees up in a tin tub in the front room, and Allie and I ran to and fro with jugs of water heated on the stove.
Now Allie and I hung around the house as long as possible to torment Mum with the idea that Jimmy might turn up and see that we were both about forty years old. She was saying, ‘Haven’t you two lads got anywhere to go?’ when the front door bell rang. Poor Mum froze. I never thought she’d go as far as this, but she said, ‘You two go out the back door.’ She almost shoved us out into the garden and locked the door behind us. Allie and I hung around giggling and throwing a tennis ball at each other. Then we went round to the front of the house and peeped through the black outlined squares of the ‘Georgian’ windows she’d had installed, making the front of the house resemble a crossword puzzle.
And there was Jimmy, our father’s replacement, sitting on the sofa with Mum. He was a pale man and an Englishman. This was a surprise: somehow I’d expected an Indian to be sitting with her, and when there wasn’t I felt disappointed in her, as if she’d let us down. She must have had enough of Indians. Jimmy was in his late thirties, earnest, and dressed plainly in a grey suit. He was lower middle class like us, but handsome and clever-looking: the sort who’d know the names of all the actors in Vincent Minnelli films, and would go on television quizzes to prove it. Mum was opening a present he’d brought when she looked up and saw her two sons peering through the net curtains at her. She blushed and panicked, but in seconds she collected her dignity and ignored us. We slunk off.
I didn’t want to go home right away, so Allie took me to a new club in Covent Garden designed by a friend of his. How London had moved on in ten months. No hippies or punks: instead, everyone was smartly dressed, and the men had short hair, white shirts and baggy trousers held up by braces. It was like being in a room full of George Orwell lookalikes, except that Orwell would have eschewed earrings. Allie told me they were fashion designers, photographers, graphic artists, shop designers and so on, young and talented. Allie’s girlfriend was a model, a thin black girl who said nothing except that being in a soap opera could only lead to better things. I looked around for someone to pick up, but was so lonely I knew they’d smell it on me. I wasn’t indifferent enough for seduction.
I said goodbye to Allie and went back to the Fish’s. I sat there in his cavernous flat for a while; I walked around; I listened to a Captain Beefheart track, ‘Dropout Boogie’, until it drove me mad; I sat down again; and then I went out.
I drifted around the late streets for an hour, until I got lost and hailed a cab. I told the driver to take me to South London, but first, hurrying now, I got him to drive me back to the flat. He waited while I went in and searched the Fish’s place for a gift for Changez and Jamila. I would make up with them. I did love them; I would show them how much by giving them a huge tablecloth belonging to the Fish. On the way I stopped off to get an Indian take-away to extra-appease them, in case they were still cross with me about anything. We drove past Princess Jeeta’s shop, which at night was grilled, barred and shuttered. I thought of her lying upstairs asleep. Thank God I have an interesting life, I said to myself.
At the commune I rang the bell, and after five minutes Changez came to the door. Behind him the place was silent, and there was no sign of naked political discussion. Changez held a baby in his arms.
‘It’s one-thirty in the morning, yaar,’ was what he said in greeting, after all this time. He turned back into the house, and I followed him, feeling like a dog about to be kicked. In the shabby living room, with its filing cabinets and old sofa, I saw to my relief that Changez was unchanged, and I wouldn’t have to take any shit from him. He hadn’t become bourgeois and self-respecting. There was jam on his nose, he wore the bulging boiler suit with books poking from numerous pockets, and, I suspected, looking at him closely, he was developing full female breasts. ‘Here’s a present,’ I said, offering the tablecloth. ‘All the way from America.’
‘Shhh …’ he replied, indicating the baby buried in blankets. ‘This is the daughter of the house, Leila Kollontai, and she’s asleep at last. Our baby. Top naughty.’ He sniffed the air. ‘Is take-away in the offing?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Dal and all? Kebabs?’
‘Yeah.’
‘From the top curry house on the corner?’
‘Exactly.’
‘But they become cold dramatically. Open, open!’
‘Wait.’
I flapped the tablecloth and started to remove various papers, dirty plates and a head of Lenin from the table. But Changez was eager to get at the food, and insisted we fling the Fish’s tablecloth on top of everything else. ‘Hungry, eh?’ I said, as he sat down and plucked the slithery leaking cartons from the bag.
‘I’m on bloody dole, Karim. Full-time I am eating potatoes. If I’m not dodgy they’ll find me a job. How can I work and look after Leila Kollontai?’
‘Where is everyone else?’
‘Mr Simon the father is away in America. He’s been long gone, lecturing on the history of the future. He’s a big man, yaar, though you didn’t appreciate.’