Something to Tell You (12 page)

I just about got out of there intact, cursing his whole family.

“Come back soon,” Mustaq whispered.

“Nice time?” said Ajita, smiling. “I’m so happy you two really get on!”

I was so in love with her. The rest of the family I could have done away with.

I didn’t tell Ajita what her brother had attempted with me, but next time I took some books and magazines, mainly “outlaw” American stuff that I thought he wouldn’t have known about, Rechy, Himes, Algren, even Burroughs, all of which I handed over on condition he didn’t fondle me. “Fathers like boys who read,” I told him. “They think books are only a good thing. They have no idea how dangerous they can be.”

To my surprise, he read everything I gave him, talked about it and asked for more. I gave him
Tropic of Cancer
and
Quiet Days in Clichy,
and he wrote me a note, saying he’d never before come across such Surreal poetry, madness and stupidity in one book. (Then he began to read Céline.) I gave Mustaq my own worn copy of Lou Reed’s
Transformer
because I knew it too well, but continued to hear its dirty, decadent Bowie-sound every time I visited.

I liked to show off to him, to stir him up in an older-sibling, know-it-all, impressive way, as my sister did with me. If I’d wondered whether I could scandalise or even corrupt him, I soon saw he was more adventurous than me.

He did, from time to time, attempt a grope, and he was always changing his clothes in front of me—“All I want is to know if you like me in stripes” “Only if they’re embedded in your arse”—but he was a decent ally in the house, providing I talked to him. It was like having an annoying kid brother. He even stuck a photograph of me on the wall, beside boxers and actors and one of Bailey’s early pictures of Jagger, when Mick looked like a surly teenage mod.

Every time I saw him, Mustaq invited me to a gig or movie. I always refused, until he hit on the irresistible thing: three tickets for the Stones at Earl’s Court. We were sitting at the back and the tiny figures onstage resembled little puppets. It was like watching TV, except you couldn’t change channels. Ajita and I snogged while Mustaq was enthralled, leaning forward in his Mick Jagger tee-shirt. At the end, he said, “I want to be looked at like that. I want to do that every day of my life! Jamal, tell me, do you think I could achieve it?”

“Your father would be delighted,” I said.

The day their father came home early, he took no notice of me, but I did get a good look at him. He didn’t return to work, but lay on the sofa with a huge whisky, staring at the television and smoking continuously. He was tall, thin, severe-looking and almost bald. His face was brown, creased and pockmarked, as if a bomb had exploded near him.

Even though the 60s were over and feminism had become assertive, the old men still had, and were expected to have, most of the power. Fathers were substantial men; they had too much authority to get on the floor with the children. They were remote; they scared you. This man laughed with Ajita a couple of times, but he didn’t smile. He appeared to have no charm. I’d say he was terrifying. While I wanted Ajita to be my wife, I didn’t want to be related to her father.

Standing in the picket line as the car rushed through the factory gates, I also glimpsed Ajita in the backseat, crouching down, with her hands over her ears, or was it her head? What was she doing there? Why hadn’t she told me?

I shouted out and waved, but it was no use. The spectacle didn’t last long. People began to drift away.

“What an odd sight,” I said aloud.

“What do you mean?” said two students beside me, exhilarated by their activity.

“A handful of working-class Asians being abused by a bunch of white middle-class students.” I added, for good measure, “I bet your fathers are all doctors.”

They looked at one another and at me. “Whose side are you on?” they asked.

Later, Ajita came into college. We’d both seen the demonstration that morning, but neither of us mentioned it. I had a lot of questions. Do you love someone whatever they do, or does your love modify as your view of them changes, as you learn more about them? Love doesn’t keep still, there are always things you have to take in. Bored at home, I had craved the unknown, an experimental life, and that’s what I was getting, more than I could have imagined.

That night I was lying on my bed; Mother was downstairs watching TV; Miriam had gone to see Joan Armatrading at the Hammersmith Odeon. I was wondering what Ajita was doing at that exact moment. She must, I guessed, have been worrying about the strike. Then it occurred to me that this wasn’t the only source of her troubled manner.

For the first time I thought: Ajita is being unfaithful to me. Don’t all lovers worry about this? If you want someone, isn’t it obvious that someone else will want them too, as their desirability increases? But the second it occurred to me, the idea seemed more than a fantasy. What was puzzling me about her at the moment? I had intuited that she was hiding something from me. What was her strange mood about? Yes, concealment!

Soon the secret would not be concealed. I’d ask her about it when I saw her. I had to know everything.

Until recently Mother would go to Miriam’s house for birthdays and Christmas. She would fall asleep in an armchair, wake up with a dog dribbling in her lap and have Bushy take her home with her head “banging.” But now she never visited. It was “tiring,” she said, to which Miriam retorted, “Well, you’ll have to watch me on television like everyone else.”

Although it was difficult to prise Miriam from her neighbourhood, and she didn’t feel safe going far without some sort of entourage, Bushy and I insisted that every three months or so Miriam and I have lunch with Mother. It was usually at the Royal Academy in Piccadilly, where all elderly women went with their sons and which she considered her “club.” Mother also enjoyed a sedate tea at Fortnum’s, though Miriam had been turned away for being “inappropriately dressed.” I guess they’d never seen so many tattoos on a woman before. Mother felt Miriam had embarrassed her, and Miriam had seethed and cursed, Mother having called her “adolescent.”

Mum, after leaving the bakery, worked in the offices of a big company until she retired in her mid-fifties. She had been decently paid and received a pension. Once Miriam and I had both left home, Mother’s life continued in the same way for years. The old-woman walk to the shop trailing her wheeled basket; continuous TV soap operas,
Coronation Street
and
Emmerdale;
a stroll in the park if it wasn’t too windy; a worrying doctor’s appointment; a visit from a friend who’d only discuss her dead husband, the deaths of her nearby friends and neighbours, and their replacement by young, noisy families.

She had always made it clear that her life was a sacrifice—to us. Without such a burden she would be kicking up her legs in Paris, as she sometimes put it. Like a true hysteric, she preferred death to sex, and often insisted she was “waiting to die.” In fact, she’d add, with much sighing and many pathetic looks, she was “pining” for death; she was “ready.” As she’d spent her life hiding, or playing dead, Miriam and I can hardly be blamed for having taken our eyes off her. One day we realised that, far from hurrying towards the grave in the hope of finding that which she’d lacked in the world, she had made a revolution in her life. Now, wherever she went, Billie was with her.

As far as I was aware, Mother had devoted little time or attention to sexual passion. After Father, she never took up with another man. On a handful of occasions she stayed out all night, pretending to be with a friend. Miriam and I smirked and guessed she’d been with someone we called Mr. Invisible. Sometimes we found programmes for dance shows or theatre plays, as well as catalogues for art shows, but no one ever came to the house.

I should have realised something was stirring in Mother when one day she said she wanted to go to the cinema, to “a place called the ICA.” Did I know where it was? I had to admit I had spent some of my youth there, looking at shows, movies and girls in the bar. Mother could only admit how little she knew me or where I’d got to, but she was pleased I’d learned how to get about the city.

Now she wanted to see a film about a painter. When I looked it up in
Time Out,
it turned out to be
Andrei Rublev
. I had to warn her that a three-hour black-and-white film in Russian might be too much for us, but she was adamant. We were the only two in the cinema, and I thought how wonderful this city is that a man and his mother can sit in a building between Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament watching such a great work.

That was about three years ago. Since around that time, Mother had been living with Billie, a woman of the same age whom she’d known since she was eight. Mother had always seen a lot of Billie, and I’d talk to her when she came to the house. “You prefer her to me,” Mother said once. “She lives more in the world” was my reply, or something like it. What I couldn’t say to Mother was that, as a teenager, and even younger, I’d fancied Billie. She was aware of her body; she moved well, she was sensual.

For years after Miriam and I had gone, Mother talked about selling the family house and buying a small “granny” flat. It was what we expected her to do, as she liked to sit in the same place and do the same things every day, something I’d never understood until I read
Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
where Freud describes such repetition as “daemonic” and characterises it, simply, as “death.” And she did put the house on the market, and she did, to our surprise, sell it.

Miriam refused to visit the house for the last time. It was painful to have to pick up our toys, school reports and books, and remove them to London. I had to throw a lot of things away (and I love to clear out), but each loss was a blow. I think Mother thought we’d be more sentimental about the house itself; we’d grown up there, but for us it had no sentient life.

What Mother then did was go and live with Billie, telling us the flat she wanted wasn’t “ready.” Billie still lived in the house she’d grown up in, a huge place near the Common, a house I hadn’t visited for years but one I remembered as being full of drawings, paintings, sculptures and cats. Billie was “Mr. Invisible.”

For thirty years Billie had taught at a studio for artists in a rough part of South London, as well as organising photography, painting, drawing and sculpture courses for local people. Billie had had many boyfriends but never “found love” or had children. She still wore black eye shadow and gold sandals, had a Cleopatra haircut and dressed in some of the antique clothes and jewellery she’d always collected with Mum. She was intelligent and good to talk to. Now the two women got up early and went to the studio. They cooked, bought furniture and travelled, often spending their weekends in Brussels or Paris, or going there for lunch and an afternoon stroll. They were talking of renting an apartment in Venice or holidaying in Barcelona.

Mother didn’t want us to think her strange, individualistic or radical; she had just moved house. Whether they were lovers or not we didn’t ask. Certain words were not promoted here; Mother referred to Billie as her “friend.” Sometimes I called Billie her companion and she didn’t object. It was the best relationship of Mother’s life. Billie didn’t seem in the least bothered by Mother’s self-pity, anxiety and numerous fears, or her penchant for stasis. Mother didn’t make Billie as anxious as she made us. Billie was too busy for that.

Unfortunately, Mother, who had worried about Miriam all her life, now hardly concerned herself with her. Miriam felt abandoned, but I was more powerful now; I tried not to let her attack Mother.

At first, when Miriam and I saw Mum and Billie together, usually fresh from a pile-high book-buying spree at Hatchards, we couldn’t avoid their absorption in one another; it was a revelation, particularly when they showed off the rings or haircuts they’d bought each other. Then, one time at lunch, Billie asked whether Miriam “had” anyone. Certainly Mother had never had a high opinion of any of Miriam’s boyfriends; she considered them to be “boys”—immature, not worth the space they inhabited—rather than men. Miriam could only answer, “I am lucky enough to have several children to bring up.”

This time, when we met, Billie was polite to Miriam, but there was no doubt she considered her to be borderline cracked, which made sense in the circumstances. Like when Billie mentioned something “marvellous” going on at the Tate Modern, Miriam’s response was to say how stupid it was that the place was called Tate Modern rather than the Modern Tate, which, in her view, would have been less pretentious, more accurate. Billie said that would be like calling the Houses of Parliament the Parliament Houses.

As this tricky conversation developed, I could see that in such circumstances Miriam might easily revert to her teenage self, never far from the surface at the best of times, and I wondered whether she might seize some object and attempt to hurt the wall with it. As it was a cold day, the rising heat from her body almost warmed me, but the one thing I didn’t want was for her to have a stand-up row with Billie. Mother sat there almost oblivious, like a tortoise in front of a street parade.

I had thought about whether Miriam might say she had “met someone,” whether she and Henry might become official. But Miriam was not thinking like that; she was already too angry. What infuriated her was that not only had the two women been travelling and buying pictures—some of them costing 3,000 pounds—but that the women were designing an artists’ studio for their garden, which they were intending to have built as soon as they found an architect they liked. Mother and Billie seemed to think they could do it “for less than 15,000 pounds.”

Like everyone in Britain, Mother had made more money from property than she had from working. She had sold the house, paid off the mortgage and kept the rest of the cash, which she was now going through at a tremendous rate. “If I spend it all before I die, I won’t care,” she said to me. “I’ll borrow more, too, on my credit cards, if I need it.”

“Quite right,” I replied. Even more laudably, she gave none of her money to her children or grandchildren, even though Miriam complained with increasing volume that her house, which she had bought cheaply from the council, was falling apart. It hadn’t been decorated for years and the roof was rotten. For some reason which Miriam couldn’t fathom, Mother seemed to think her daughter should work for a living.

Miriam blamed Billie for being a “bad influence,” but Mother had changed too. When Miriam suggested the women might be too old to embark on such an adventurous building project, Billie refused to accept she was old.

“Old is over ninety,” she said defiantly. “Soon people will be living to three hundred.” “That’s right,” said Mother. “We’re not too old to sit through an opera, as long as it’s got two intervals and a nearby toilet.” She opened her bag, and the two women grabbed a bunch of “rejuvenating” pills, swallowed with rapid swigs of organic wine. “No one calls me Grandma, either,” said Billie threateningly.

I wondered whether, on the phone, Miriam had said something to Mother about being a neglectful grandmother, because Billie then informed us that, after marriage, domesticity was surely the lowest form of life. Certainly she abhorred anything which involved schools or bovine earth mothers, with their plastic bottles of milk and identical, filthy-faced children all called Jack and Jill.

Now the two women were off to the hairdressers for the afternoon, followed by more shopping and a party given by a local artist. If the women had to be helped to the street and into the taxi, it wasn’t because they were infirm but because they were so pissed and giggly.

On the way back in the car, Bushy was silent; me too. Miriam was sitting there trembling; we could hear her jewellery humming. She was tighter than a tuning fork. It had taken us a while to realise, but Mother was gone for good. She would always talk to us, but we were no longer at the centre of her life. She didn’t appear to even like us much, as though we were old friends she’d fallen out with. She had discharged her duty and gone AWOL.

Miriam said at last, “You sit there all Zen and beaming and I can’t stand it.”

“What can’t you stand about it?”

“You not saying anything! If you ever do that analyst’s shit with me, I’ll wring your neck.”

“Maybe I was quiet, but I was enjoying myself. What’s wrong with you? Didn’t you try out the loving-a-girl thing yourself?”

“You think I enjoyed it? Anyhow, those girls weren’t in their seventies, they had bodies. Mother is pissing away the family money. A studio…Sculpture. A box at the opera. Jesus—mostly all they do is drink.”

“The money’s hers,” I said. “It’s a pretty good thing those old girls have got going. What a decent way to go at the end, the two of them occupied and adoring one another.”

“Why doesn’t she want to give us anything? I’ve got a new man to feed now! He will take it for granted I will look after him!”

“Did you tell her about Henry?”

“She will think he’s the same as the others. To her they’re all no-good scum. But what about the grandchildren she now ignores?”

“We’re adults,” I said, tiring already of having to be the adult. “Soon the children will be. They can make their own way.”

“You’ve always been down on me, you and Mother.”

I said, “But I am the one with reason to complain, if you want to hear about it. When you were at home, Mother was arguing with you. When you were out, you made sure she was worrying about you. What room was there for me?”

“I had awful problems,” she said. “Made much worse by the fact you thought I’d lived a worthless life. You with your books and long-word talk, quoting poetry and pop songs, mocking me for my craziness. You do it less now, but you were always a sneery show-off! In Pakistan you didn’t back me up at all.”

“Fuck off.”

“Now you—”

She was holding my arm. I grabbed her other hand. I may be a talking specialist, but no one could argue with the fact that a cuff across the face would improve my sister’s temper, except she seemed to think a punch would advance mine.

In the traffic, Bushy slammed the brakes on and turned round. “You two—stop! No fighting in the car. That’s what I say to the children.”

Miriam was trying to hit me, but I’d grabbed her wrists, thereby increasing the danger that she’d head-butt me. After the cars behind us began to hoot, Bushy was driving with one hand and was in our faces yelling while trying to push us apart with the other.

“Any more of this and I’m going to stop the car right here and throw you both the fuck out! Jesus—you’re worse than kids!”

To calm herself down, Miriam decided to stop off at Henry’s flat. She wasn’t intending to go in and “bother” him, but stand outside and look up at his windows, “to think about him being in there not patronising me—not treating me like shit—unlike you and Mother and her bitch girlfriend!”

I could see Bushy’s eyes in the mirror. I shrugged; I’d long known it wasn’t worth arguing with Miriam. He parked the car not far from the river, we walked to Henry’s, and after watching Miriam stand there for a while, looking up, Bushy said, “Go on, Juliet, up you go! I’ll come back later,” and off we went.