Something to Tell You (20 page)

“There’s no room for you?”

“I tell him, if you don’t sort this out I’m going to do something!”

“Here,” I said, as she gathered her things to leave. “Take this number. This therapist is a friend who writes well.”

She looked at the piece of paper, folded it and put it in her pocket. “You have remarkable faith in these people.”

I said, “The early analysts really thought about the structure of the human mind, about what it is to be a child, to be sexual, to be with others—to live in society, or civilisation, as a gendered animal, and to have to die. They knew that every hour of the past, as Proust puts it, is inscribed on the body, indeed, makes the body. There’s nothing more important or absorbing, is there?”

I picked up biographies of Melanie Klein and Anna Freud, and gave them to her. “They are fascinating women, pioneers. Radical intellectuals.”

“Thank you,” she said. “It’s been a long time since anyone’s given me direction. My parents just expected me to be successful.”

She went on: “Before our ‘clients’ see me, they visit their doctors, who prescribe medication which the patient may take for years.”

I said, “Someone splits up with their girlfriend and they’re given a pharmacological concoction, as though pain were unnatural.”

She said, “Doctors haven’t got time to take a history. They are with each patient for ten minutes. So I listen, but I am there all morning. Then I get into trouble for being slow.”

I said, “Freud’s revolution was in the fact he didn’t drug people, hypnotise them or give them advice, which would have infantilised them. He listened. He wrote down their stories.”

The next time I saw Henry I told him that Lisa had been to see me.

“Don’t you think I love to see Lisa too?” he said, worriedly. “Now she calls me a deluded bastard. I am only a fool because I want them all to get along. I am, I know, ignoring basic human nature.”

We both wanted to talk of other things, and we did, but that was not the end of it. I didn’t believe Lisa would see the therapist I’d recommended, but she was in a worse state than I’d thought.

The day after, Rafi and I went to visit Miriam. When Rafi was downloading ringtones with the other kids, I looked over at Miriam—sitting at the table—and could see her hands were shaking.

“Who’s bothering you, my love?”

“Lisa came over. She is a very naughty girl, that one. As she’s Henry’s daughter, I took it easy with her.”

“How easy?” I said, uneasily.

I wanted to eat and to relax, but Miriam was giving me a mephitic vibe. At least she poured me a drink.

I said, “Where is Lisa now?”

“In Casualty. I expect her parents are flapping around her.”

“How did she get there—Casualty?”

“How d’you think?” said Miriam. I got up to leave. She grabbed me. “Please stay, Brother. You know I need you tonight.”

After visiting me the second time, Lisa had rung Miriam and asked to see her. While Miriam was thinking over whether this was a good idea, as well as wondering whether she should talk to Henry first, Lisa walked in. She must have been on her bicycle in the street.

She came right into Miriam’s kitchen and sat down. “In my fucking face—right there!” Looking at Bushy and indicating the door, Lisa said the two of them needed to talk alone. So Bushy shuffled out to mess around with his car, but he was not far away, having an instinct.

Lisa started off by apologising for intruding and so on. But it wasn’t long before she told Miriam to lay off her father. She begged. She wept. She mentioned the heart attack. Then she made her first serious mistake, offering Miriam money. She offered her two grand not to see him again.

Miriam asked why Lisa thought she needed her money.

Lisa—who visited the poor and dispossessed every day—looked around at the falling-down house, bursting with animals and children, with some disdain, as her mother might have done. I knew what Miriam meant. Hearing this, even I got an electric jolt of very bad karma, and the taste of vomit on my tongue.

Lisa was, by now, testing Miriam’s patience, never a good idea. According to Miriam, Lisa was sweaty, hairy and probably dirty between her toes. “I should have asked her to weed the garden.”

Certainly, Lisa was making a mistake with Miriam, thinking she was a pushover. Lisa went further: she said that Miriam was only interested in her father’s fame and money. If Henry were nobody, Miriam would have no interest in him. She was implying that Miriam was a kind of groupie, a whore even.

Miriam was getting hot inside her head. But she loved Henry, she’d never adored a man so much. She didn’t want things to get too mad; after all, Lisa was his flesh and blood, and this fight would tear him apart. Just get the bitch out of here, she thought, that’s all I have to do.

She ordered Lisa to leave the house. She said this in a loud voice, giving her one minute to get out, with the rider that she would set the dogs on her. They were barking outside already, but Lisa tried to continue the conversation. However, Miriam isn’t one of those middle-class talky bitches who’ll go on and on until everyone’s paralysed. Inside her broiling head, a limit had been reached.

Her fingers were creeping towards one of her numerous mobiles and before she knew it, it was airbound. She had flung it at Lisa’s face, a lucky hit, which cracked her lover’s daughter’s cheekbone. Then Miriam threw other things—pill bottles, videos, books on astrology—which smacked Lisa in different places about the head.

Lisa turned round and came back at her. She’s strong: she rows, practises women’s boxing. The kids were screaming. Miriam had lost it. Lisa was going mad, taking up postures, her fists flashing. Bushy jammed himself in there, stopping a catfight, throwing his body between them before the knives were out.

He hustled Lisa out before anything worse happened—threw her out into the street in the direction of her bicycle, which, it being a bad neighbourhood, now had no wheels or saddle, was the skeleton of a bicycle. Bushy then took hold of a piece of wood and held it up, defending the house! Behind him, Miriam had come out with a knife and was threatening to rip up Lisa’s smug, middle-class face, reckoning she would look better with some ventilation!

I was twitching with agony over this when my mobile rang. It was Henry, whose calls I hadn’t had time to take that day. I could hardly make out what he was saying. He was stressed out, stoned on dope and trancs, and on top of this, somehow he’d mislaid his tickets for the Stones. He’d turned the flat upside down and didn’t know what to do. Lisa had been ringing him, screaming that she was at the hospital and then at the police station making a statement. She was trying to get Miriam arrested for abuse, assault and attempted murder, and Henry was trying to get her to lay off.

I did work out that Lisa had said to Henry, “You’re killing me!”

“I am killing you?”

“Yes!” And she added, “You wouldn’t like it if you found me strung up by the neck one night!”

During the day Miriam had been telling Henry that it was too much for her too. She loved Henry but would not see him until he chilled the daughter out. She was sorry that Henry had got caught between two women, but she felt at the moment that she wanted to separate. She couldn’t have that madwoman coming round her house scaring the children and animals.

She knew, too, that she was ugly and stupid and rank and worthless, and no man could get his head around her, but she couldn’t stomach any more rejection and she must not be insulted by Lisa again. After feeling loved for the first time in her life, she wasn’t strong enough to survive Lisa’s hatred.

At the other end of the phone, Henry didn’t know where he was, but he knew what he wanted, which was for her not to be hurt and for them to be together, continuing the life they had started. He started to weep and beg but he couldn’t make himself clear and the phone line went dead.

A little later I was watching the Champions League on TV, as well as taking some of this in, while waiting for Rafi to find his shoes and re-prepare his hair, when Henry came in, looking wild, as though he’d got caught in a storm.

He was in Miriam’s arms right away, and they were sobbing, apologising, squeezing each other’s buttocks and Henry wailing, “But I will never reject you, never! You know that! You are my sweet, my soul, my sausage! For you I would become an outlaw from everyone—from my entire family! How could you think I would let you down when I want us to marry!”

“You’re just trying to cheer me up—”

“No, no—”

Rafi came in and looked at them, amazed.

It wasn’t long before the two of them were making phone calls, working out where they’d go that night to “play.”

“By the way,” said Henry to me, patting his pockets as I was leaving, “I found the tickets for the Stones. We’re definitely going!”

Despite my sympathy for Henry’s suffering, I had to say, “What could be more gratifying to a man than to have two women fighting over him? It would be worse if they got along!”

He was shocked. “No pleasure without a price willingly paid? I hate to admit that you are right, but maybe you have a point,” he said, with some relief. “And at my age! All Lotharios cause chaos. None of them make a smoother world! These are the knock-ons of desire! As long as the women don’t go too far, how can I complain? Most people are far too well behaved,” he said confidently. “They go to their graves wondering whether they should have caused more harm to others, knowing they should. Jamal, thank you for your support! I’m sorry I brought such chaos to your sister’s life.”

Even though she had taken him back, he had been devastated by Miriam’s dismissal of him and was determined to bind her to him even more closely. That was why he wanted the Stones outing to be a success. Turned on by the Stones’ decadence—only a quarter century too late—Henry was more excited than I’d seen him for a while. He was ringing me all day. If I was with a patient, he’d talk to Maria, though she barely understood a word. She liked Puccini.

Henry had obtained the tickets from a costume designer he knew, who was now working with the group. The band was due to play the Astoria in Tottenham Court Road. I had seen the Stones with Ajita and Mustaq, but I knew Henry had never seen them before, though he claimed to have been “near” Hyde Park when Jagger wore an Ossie Clark dress, the first gig after Brian Jones died.

Marianne Faithfull had been in one of the productions he’d assisted on, as a young man in the late 60s, and they were still friends, difficult though she could be, like any diva. But Henry had always been a little snobbish about rock’n’roll, unable to make up his mind whether it was tat or the revolution. He hated to dance, disliked anything too loud and was ambivalent about the joys of “vulgarity,” until now, when he knew Miriam would be impressed. She was.

Henry had mislaid the tickets, found them, lost them, and finally found them. At last, when the day came, Miriam and Henry spent the afternoon in Camden market, buying black clothes. We all had our most impressive gear on, with comfortable shoes. Bushy drove Henry, me and Miriam up there, dropping us off in Soho Square. Soho was always crowded now, but tonight it was rammed.

“At the risk of sounding like someone’s aunt, can I say, do we really have to join that queue?” said Henry as we approached the line. “Don’t we have good tickets? Isn’t there a special entrance?”

“That is the special entrance.”

Crowds were already queuing around the block. Along the lines, numerous touts were buying and selling tickets. The atmosphere was vital, almost violent and riotous, in a way that theatre or opera never is. As Henry noted, “It’s not like this at my shows!”

Even after so many years, audiences were mad for the Stones, the essential London group, playing at home in a small venue. Scores of photographers strained behind barriers, snapping at soap stars in blinding bling. Miriam had to point out these people to Henry, as well as identifying the children of rock’n’rollers we’d worshipped in the 60s, now comprising a new dynasty, and resembling in their “social capital” the great noble families of the
ancien régime
.

Inside, on the way to the bar, I ran into the Mule Woman. Accompanied by a good-looking boy, she was wearing little black-rimmed glasses, like a model who’d become a librarian. We kissed on the cheek, and she asked about Henry. “He’s just the same,” I said. “Would you like to have supper with the two of us next week?”

She agreed, but before we could arrange it there was a roar: the band was about to come onstage. People rushed to their places.

Although they had been doing those tunes for thirty years, the Stones didn’t make their boredom obvious; they knew how to put on a good show, particularly Keef. Miriam’s rapture was enough for Henry, who was entranced by the excitement and the audience as much as by the band. (In the theatre he liked to sit at the back, keeping an eye on the audience. He claimed the women caressed themselves—their arms, legs and faces—as they watched. “How gentle they are with themselves,” he said. “I wonder if this is how their mothers caressed them as babies.”) At the Stones, the fact that he could sit down at a table at the front of the balcony was one of the main attractions. Despite the state of her knees, Miriam seemed temporarily resuscitated, and danced when they played “Street Fighting Man.”

As we were leaving, and with Bushy parked up behind Centre Point, Henry’s friend caught up with us and suggested we go to Claridge’s, where Mick had a suite and was “entertaining.” Tom Stoppard, an acquaintance of Henry’s, had suggested Henry might enjoy Mick. Bushy drove us there.

As we got closer, Miriam’s enthusiasm seemed to drain away; she started saying she’d be “out of her depth.” Having never been in the same room as a “knight of the realm” before—should she call him “Sir”?—she tried to get Bushy to take her home.

“What a lot of nonsense you talk, Miriam,” said Henry. “I won’t put up with it. Once you get there, you will see that Mick’s cool,” he said, as if he knew. “He’s a real person, like us. He’s not like—”

“Who?”

“Ozzy Osbourne.”

Henry and I wouldn’t go in without her, and we both said we’d do the talking. In the glittering lobby, PR girls and hangers-on clip-clopped about. Bushy had found a raggedy peaked cap in the boot of the car and insisted on accompanying us upstairs in the mirrored lift, putting on a deferential manner and nodding confidentially at Jagger’s security, while tapping his nose as if he had a secret inside it that he was trying to draw attention to. Bushy wanted to be considered “staff” in order to catch a glimpse of Mick, who he worshipped as a fellow bluesman.

There he was, Jagger, fit and lithe, and looking like a man who had seen everything and understood a lot of it. He had come out to greet his guests at the door, alongside his tall girlfriend. Inside, as we started to drink, Jagger ate, checked his email and looked at the newspapers, chatted to friends and to his daughter Jade. Henry was hungry by now and couldn’t believe Jagger was sitting there eating without offering him anything. In the end, Jagger cheerfully ordered Henry some sandwiches, which he scoffed gratefully.

Mick was glad to see Miriam’s tattoos. She claimed to have been influenced by
Tattoo You.
After, she was happy out on the balcony, looking across the city, chatting to a posh girl who turned out to be a Scientologist. While you could be sure that one of the things the wealthy and poor had in common was an interest in superstition, even Miriam couldn’t bring herself to worship someone called Ron.

We sat in a small circle discussing Blair, Bush, Clinton, about which Henry had much to say, though Jagger was more discreet. It was late for me, I told Jagger, who said he rarely went to bed before four but always had eight hours’ sleep. Jagger and Henry had a conversation about sleeping pills, Jagger being cautious about the whole thing, not wanting “to get addicted.” People continued to come and go as though this was what smart London did, drift in and out of each other’s apartments at one in the morning.

As one would with a rock god, I had an informative discussion with Jagger about good private schools in West London. When I decided to leave and was looking for my coat, a man I didn’t quite recognise who’d come in towards the end of the evening was brought across to me by Jagger.

“He wants to meet you,” said Mick, explaining that they were cricket pals, going to test matches around the world together. George knew everything about Indian cricket.

I was close enough to the modern world to recognise that this fellow, George Cage, was a songwriter and performer. To me he looked kind of shiny, with the sheen of health, success and vacuity which comfort and sycophancy gives people. Miriam, who had by now come in, seemed to know who George was and was thrilled. “My daughter likes you,” she told him cheerfully.

“That’s good,” he said. “Usually it’s the mothers.”

I said I had to go, I’d get a cab on the street. I noticed that George kept looking at me, and at last, when I was fetching my coat, he came over and asked me to show him my arm.

“This might seem odd to you, but something is making me quite curious,” he said. “Can I see that?”

He wanted to look at my watch.

I showed it to him. It was an old, heavy watch on a silver bracelet strap, with wide hands under thick, scratched glass. A watch with clear figures and the date, everything a man who needed to orient himself could require.

He bent over to study it. He wanted me to take it off so he could look at the back. I couldn’t think of a reason to refuse.

He put his glasses on and studied it. When he returned it, he said, “Can I ask where you got that?”

“I’ve had it a long time,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

“My father had one similar.”

“I don’t think they’re expensive. What did he do?”

“He had a factory. He was a businessman. In South London.”

I held his gaze. “Mustaq?” I said. He nodded. I said, “Ajita’s your sister?”

“That’s right.”

“My God,” I said. “Is she okay?”

“Oh yes. Did you think she wouldn’t be? She is living in New York with her two children. Or at least one of them. The other is at college.” He took out his phone and looked at it. “I’m going to ring her later. Would you like me to tell her I saw you?”

“Please.”

“A shock, eh?”

“Certainly.”

He said, “I’m going out dancing. Nowhere smart—awful dives, mainly. Would you like to join me? Perhaps we could talk. My driver will take you home.”

I told him that my work meant I started early in the morning. Then I asked, “Mustaq, how did the music stuff happen? Actually, I can remember you singing to me.”

“I am sorry. After my father died, when my sister and I were in India, in my uncle’s house, I stayed indoors for two years, learning the drums, tabla, guitar, piano. Anything that made a noise. Anything that Dad would have disliked. That’s how I was one of the first people to mix jazz, rock, Bollywood film tunes and Indian classical music.

“You know, I’d always wanted to be a young American, and in New York I found other boys to perform with. I loved being onstage and was never afraid. But you must be too tired to talk now.”

As I listened to him, I became aware that he was exactly as he had been, except that all his gestures were slightly exaggerated, as though he were a camp actor playing himself too seriously.

He said, taking out his BlackBerry, “Could I see you again? Would it be all right if I took your number?”

“Of course.”

Despite his graceful formality, before we left he took my arm once more, gently, as though he were going to stroke it, and put his face to the face of the watch, twice looking up quizzically at me. He may have amused me, but I recalled, from the time we’d wrestled, his tenacity.

On the way home in the car I said, “It was uncanny seeing Mustaq—or George Cage, as he’s called—again.”

“He was certainly giving you the eye,” said Henry. “I’d say he was freaked. Did you two have a passion for each other?”

“I preferred his sister.”

Miriam murmured, “He preferred you.”

“And still does,” Henry said, giggling.

I asked Miriam about George Cage. I’d heard of him, but he’d come to prominence when I was losing interest in pop and preferred the mid-period, chaotic, electric Miles.

“He and his boyfriend are always in the tabloids. How come you know him?” she asked.

“Miriam, his family lived close to us, across the park in Bickley. Have you forgotten I went out with his sister, Ajita?”

“Of course,” she said. “I knew I’d met him before.”

“I don’t think you did,” I said, recalling how ambivalent I’d felt about it at the time.

“Oh yes, I remember it—subliminally,” she insisted. “I trust myself in that intuitive area.”

“Were you really glad to see him?” Henry asked. “You both looked as though you’d been hit with bricks.”

“I will see him again, if he asks me. Will you come?”

Miriam turned and poked her finger at me. “Didn’t I instruct you, Brother, to look for the Indian girl?”

“Not that I followed your advice.”

“Somewhere she knew, and heard you. You better watch out—long-lost love is coming in your direction.”

“She might be right,” said Henry.

As Henry and Miriam snogged in the backseat, Miriam saying what a great night it had been, I wondered about Mustaq and how strange it was not only to see him at Jagger’s but in this new incarnation.

Even as I wondered what he wanted from me, and what I was getting back into, I knew I was going where I had to go.