Something to Tell You (23 page)

Karen was becoming tougher, someone you wouldn’t want to work for, as she developed a flair for sacking people. “Had to be done,” she’d say as another loser limped out the door. For Karen, if anyone suffered, it was their own fault; even if you were a persecuted black South African with no human rights, you had somehow brought the badness on yourself. After a while her callousness stopped bothering me because I saw how unbearable it was to her that anyone would hurt anyone else. For her, because it was unbearable it was untrue, and she didn’t have to look at it.

The part of the day we most enjoyed together was breakfast, which we’d have in a Soho café, usually the Patisserie Valerie in Old Compton Street, after picking up the tabloids. The shameless
Sun
was in its prime—the royal family helpless before it—and the other papers imitated it. We’d read bits out to one another, screaming with laughter at the prose. This was before most people realised that the person who’d have the most influence over our time would be Rupert Murdoch—the author of the celebrity culture we inhabit, and clever enough to avoid it himself.

The newspapers were the first to turn wholeheartedly to trash. It hadn’t yet reached TV, except through youth programming, where Karen and her pals encouraged nonentities to eat maggots—“faggots gobbling maggots: What could be more entertaining?”—or share a bath with eels or—why not?—with animal and human faeces. The next day these newly minted celebs would appear in the newspapers, having spent the night with a soap star. Television was now watching us, rather than the other way round.

The papers would celebrate and then desecrate the new stars. I had never liked the punks, but this kind of anarchistic, republican amorality appealed to me at times—I guess it was the lack of respect for authority, its destructiveness. At the same time it fitted with the liberal economics of Thatcher. Who could not be amused by the fact that the capitalism unleashed by the Conservatives under Thatcher was destroying the very social values the party espoused?

As we ate our croissants and drank a new thing in London, caffe lattes, Karen would fill her notebook with mad ideas for game shows, suitable for breakfast and daytime TV, which had just started. At that time daytime was a huge vacant space, soon to become even more vacant. Programmes were beginning to be made quickly and cheaply; cameras got smaller, and recording tape was of better quality. The contents were cut-price too, since the participants were not movie or even TV stars but “real” people discovered by researchers, who could become enviable just by appearing on TV. To me it sounded like music hall: television versions of the mad variety shows my grandparents used to take Miriam and me to on our holidays. At the end of the pier at the seaside, we’d watch jugglers, knife throwers and fat comedians telling risqué jokes. After, we’d scoff “hot sandwiches in gravy.”

For me all this was an amusement, but for Karen it was a kind of calling, an opportunity that few people realised was there. I guess I realised the extent of her cultural terrorism when I suggested we might go to see a film which happened to be subtitled. “No—never!” she cried. “Not a foreign film you have to read! Are they in slow motion? Can’t you feel yourself ageing?”

When I recommended the theatre or a gallery, it wasn’t that she refused to go; it was not that attending such things made her feet ache—which wouldn’t have surprised me, as she wore stilettos most of the time: even her slippers were four inches from the ground. It was that she considered art to be showing off, empty, worthless, an insult to the public, and if subsidised, a waste of public money. “Tchaikovsky’s
Crime and Punishment,
Chekhov’s Last Symphony—yuck, fuck, muck!”

As a Thatcherite, she wanted to be rid of it. Here, at “the end of history,” the television ruling class, the old sensitive if not effete Oxbridge mob along with the monarchy and the Church, would be replaced by “the people,” by which she seemed to mean the ignorant and wildly coarse. I wasn’t the only one killing fathers. In the 60s and 70s, there was a cult of it, as patriarchy and the phallus were attacked. And what did we end up with, at the end of that iconoclastic decade? Thatcher: a fate worse than a man.

Now, of course, we live in Thatcher’s psyche if not her anus, in the world she made, of competition, consumerism, celebrity and guilt’s bastard son, charity: bingeing and debt. But then, these views were a novelty.

At least, with Karen, I learned to make no distinction between high and low art. I guess I’d been something of a snob before, wondering whether it was healthy to be so moved by Roy Orbison and Dusty Springfield. But Karen unintentionally showed me the futility of such distinctions.

Not that I could interest Karen much in what I was doing; although she left me alone to study, she considered analysis “unconvincing” as a profession, as though I’d decided to become an astral channeller or soothsayer. I realised this not only when she had difficulty—and showed considerable reluctance, if not embarrassment—in explaining to people what it was I did but also when she decided, without asking me, that I’d be better off as a TV presenter.

There were few black or brown faces on TV; my fate was to correct this imbalance. I informed her it was hopeless, but she insisted I endure two auditions for the job of presenter on a new TV media show entitled
Television/Television
.

In front of a camera and wearing a borrowed Armani jacket, I had to sit at a desk (on a cushion, as it happened, being little) or on the desk itself. Then I would be instructed to walk around this desk, while saying repeatedly, “Hallo, good evening and welcome to
Television/Television.
Tonight we have an exclusive interview with Sviatoslav Jarmusch, who claims that digitalisation is the future of this medium. To discuss this, we have in the studio…”

I guess I could have done it, and I’d be someone recognisable in TV now, but I fucked it up beautifully. I was bafflingly disappointing, like someone who’d never spoken before.

It wasn’t, however, the end of my media career. Karen and I had talked of making porno films to earn money: her producing, me directing, neither of us starring. But she knew enough about the media to realise making such films took too much time; it wasn’t a part-time job. It was less of a palaver to write the stuff. I had bought a fast electric typewriter—with a “golf ball,” which flew madly about like a bird caught in a chimney—and I liked writing. After becoming a murderer, was there nothing I considered beyond my talents?

At first I sent in stories to magazines at the low end of the market. When they were published, the editors started asking me to write more. Initially it was fun, trying to organise the story, the rise and fall of which represented coitus itself. I learned to write them quickly.

There’s nothing more conventional than the sly prophylactic of pornography, with the end a foregone conclusion. Anna Freud, the eternal virgin, said that in fantasy you can have your eggs cooked any way you like, except you can’t eat them. Relying on fantasies is like trying to devour the menu rather than the meal. For those who want the same thing over and over, that is more than enough. Indeed, it was the same words: I made a list of them, the basic ingredients of word-porn, spicy and resonant—harder, harder, come, come!—and was sure to salt the text with them each time.

However, the magazines also let me work on semi-pornographic material, articles on de Sade, Beardsley, Hugh Hefner, the history of pornographic pictures, for which I enjoyed the reading.

One time I was sent to meet a sleazy guy in a dirty hotel who asked me to write short novels with titles like
The Disciplinarian.
It was big work—almost everything is, I was discovering—though if I got into the groove I could do a dirty book in a weekend. But not for long. If pornography is the junk food of love, I couldn’t swallow any more. Being young, I was tempted to add, digress and generally express myself. What did the couples do after sex? Did they find it difficult, embarrassing, boring? What did they do at home? What did they say to their parents? They were bar-maids, businessmen, hotel maids, people meeting casually for one reason only, a reason that wasn’t compelling enough. The whole pornography scam collapsed when I wrote a novel about a couple married to other people who met only to talk.

“Talk! Anyone can talk! Where the fuck is the fucking fucking?” my man in the hotel yelled, rifling hopelessly through the manuscript and finally frisbeeing it across the room. “What is this—Plato? It’s certainly not Plato’s Retreat!”

The line between literature and pornography was uncrossable. Breaking the porno spell was like that moment at a party when the lights came on and all you saw were haunted faces and debris. Now pornography is getting emotional, and straight movies more sexual.

It was a strange business, being in a celibate relationship while thinking of sex continuously. I’d discuss the stories with Karen, and she’d suggest ideas, often from her own life. This was where our sexual relationship was, in this talk and in my work.

For me, everything was “good enough” between Karen and me until she became pregnant. Such an event might seem awkward to achieve in a celibate relationship but not, as I discovered, impossible. Platonic love is a gun you don’t know is loaded. At her place, going to bed drunk, as we did more often than I’d like to admit, we copulated in our sleep. I remembered enough to know it happened. We both took it for granted that she’d have an abortion. They knew her down at the clinic, and I joked that she had an account there; one morning she set off with her overnight bag.

Karen was as tough as any artist with their vision. Occasionally she had to take a lot of contempt from artists and talented people, but it didn’t stop her thinking of what they did as rubbish. But the abortion, used by most of her friends as a means of contraception, seemed to smash her.

I was waiting at her flat when she returned, ashen and unable to stand. For two days she lay on the sofa wrapped in a dressing gown. I knew she was ill because she didn’t smoke or drink. I was blamed, but I sat it out with her, looking out of the window when I could, until she stood up and began to scream, telling me that I hadn’t grasped what this meant to her.

“It was my only chance to have a child! Suppose I don’t meet anyone else! Suppose I have to go it alone! And don’t you realise I’ll have to live with the murder of this child for the rest of my life?”

I was too immature to understand her. From my point of view, she was in her mid-twenties and had plenty of time to breed. I had taken it for granted that for her sex was a business transaction, or a way of spending time with her superiors. It hadn’t occurred to me to think about children. As far as I was concerned I was still recovering from my childhood, and thought you might as well call adults recovering children.

She went on, “The other day I thought: he only likes me because I’m silly, a kind of entertainment. Why would a man want that from a woman? Why were you with me?”

“It never occurred to me not to be with you. We always had a nice time.”

“Except you never loved me. You’ve been in love with Ajita all this time. You can’t accept she’s gone,” she said. “Don’t you understand the simplest things? Me, the woman, wants to be wanted—wanted more than other women! Without that there’s nothing. You think we’re friends?”

“Aren’t we?”

“I have been in love with you.”

I apologised and I listened to her; at least I knew how to do that. But I sickened her, and my restlessness caused her to banish me. None of this pleased me. She’d wanted me to give her a baby but had no thought for what I wanted. Indeed, so little had I impressed my desire on her that I appeared to be hardly in the equation.

I wasn’t doing well. Two relationships and two murders. I was on the way to becoming a serial killer. Karen had been an attempted treatment for the hurt I’d suffered with Ajita, which had made me phobic of romantic proximity. But I discovered that just because you don’t love a woman it doesn’t follow that she can’t hurt you, that you won’t suffer, particularly if you hurt her. Yet it was still a loss, and all losses, even when there are gains, leave their traces, reminding you of other losses, and all must be mourned, always incompletely.

After the split, I had wanted to remain friends with her, but for a long time we were rarely in touch. She began a relationship with, and later married, a TV producer who was envious of me, but we never entirely fell out.

“Wakey-wakey,” Karen was saying to me. “We’re nearly there.” We had been driving for miles through narrow lanes; at last we turned onto a rough, unmade road. “I’ve got a feeling,” she said, “one of us is going to get laid this weekend.”

“Goodie,” I said. “Let’s hope it’s you.”

We had come to a high wall topped with barbed wire that we followed until we arrived at a big gate. Karen wound down the window and spoke into a grille beside the gate, which, when it rolled slowly open, revealed a country house.

In the yard outside was standing Mustaq’s boyfriend, Alan, not quite on both feet but successfully holding a joint and a glass of wine. He was giggling to himself and examining a large black iron cobweb with an iron spider—painted red—in the middle of it. “I made that sculpture!” he shouted. “That’s art, that is! Hi, guys! Welcome! Enjoy!”

Moments later Karen was in his arms. Soon, in the living room, Alan was opening a bottle, before asking a member of the staff—who I recognised from London—to show me to my room in the converted barn, which was where the guests stayed.
Barn,
of course, gave no clue to the luxury Mustaq could afford and liked to show his guests.

Karen and I had arrived early; we’d both wanted to get away from London. As I’d hoped, this gave me time to tramp across the fields which surrounded Mustaq’s house. He’d told me, when he came in to meet us, “As far as you can see, I own it. Everything else belongs to Madonna. My fields are rented to local organic farmers, but please feel free to trudge through them as you wish.”

After two hours in the fields I returned to the house, where I looked at the luxuriant garden. This was Alan’s domain: he did everything himself—flowers, herbs, grasses, ponds—and then put his iron sculptures out, dotted about the place like huge paperclips. He had become an artist; in London he would have a show in a major gallery; everyone would come, including Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones.

Mustaq had suggested I might like a swim after my walk. I had already noticed the pool, enclosed in a glass building to the side of the main house. Now, as I walked towards it, something I saw through the glass doors made me stop.

I had spotted a head above water, wearing a black swimming cap. I watched the woman climb from the pool and put on a dressing gown and flip-flops. For a moment she was looking towards me. Whether it was shortsightedness or because she didn’t recognise me—so old or changed was I—she stared in my direction and I stared back. Neither of us made a gesture.

Not wanting her to think I’d turned away—if, indeed she had recognised me, which I doubted—I stood there, gazing at her indistinct outline through the thick glass beaded with moisture. Eventually she went down the steps towards the showers and changing rooms under the house. There it went, the body I had loved and wanted more than any other.

I was aware that Mustaq would want to have intense and fervent discussions. I needed to talk to him too. But I had not even guessed that the weekend was going to include Ajita. The moment I’d waited for had arrived. Soon we would be able to say everything we had yearned to say. But where would we begin, and where would the talk take us?

Nothing, now, would be as simple as it had been during those years when all I had to do was miss her.

I went to my room and sat at the window. In the courtyard, one of Mustaq’s staff was brushing the tyres of his employer’s Mustang. In the distance were fields bounded by a motorway, beyond which was the outline of the town. The clothes I’d driven down in, which I’d flung on the floor as I did at home, had been folded on a chair. The contents of my holdall had been hung up in closets, and my old trainers, not the most pristine, had been cleaned.

In an attempt to calm myself, to stop pacing, I lay down for a while, only to be woken by a loud, disembodied voice. It wasn’t paranoia: Mustaq had had speakers installed in the rooms, and I was being called to supper.

I showered and changed, thinking of Ajita’s eyes on me at last. Regarding myself in the mirror—and the lines and flaws I had become indifferent to: now when I looked at myself, I saw nothing of interest—I wondered what she would see.

Crossing from the barn to the main house with Karen, who had been napping in the next room to me, I saw that the forecourt now resembled a car showroom. We were passing Alan’s sculpture and I was beginning to tell Karen that one of Freud’s disciples, Karl Abraham, had written a paper on the spider as symbol of the female genitalia: it represented the woman with a penis and therefore the possibility of castration. Naturally Karen didn’t show much interest in this.

She did perk up when she noticed that the iron gates were closing once more. In the yard, two self-regarding stars were now getting out of a sports car, looking around as though trying to make out where they were and how they’d got there. Karen slapped both hands to her face to make a “Beatle scream.”

“Who is that?” I whispered. I learned that it was the Asian actor Karim Amir, fresh from a rehab near Richmond. I said, “Isn’t that Stephen Hero, getting out of the car after him?”

“Not Stephen Hero, for fuck’s sake,” Karen said, striking me on the arm. “Who the hell’s that? It’s Charlie Hero. Charlie. He’s a Charlie, and don’t you forget it, this evening or ever!”

I was delighted to see Karen had retained her integrity and was still capable of being impressed by the famous. Years ago she had, of course, been wildly impressed by anyone famous—indeed, by anyone who knew anyone famous—and still the celebrated had not disappointed her.

Karen led me into the kitchen for a glass of champagne and a cigarette.

“What’s wrong? Are you nervous?” she said, brushing down my jacket.

“Terrified,” I said. “I don’t know why. You’re the one who’s good on these occasions.”

She was giggling. “Are my breasts too on show?”

“You are virtually topless and indeed,” I said, looking her over, “virtually bottomless. The heels are great. Make the most of it, I say.”

“That’s what I thought. Jamal, I’m glad you like it. A lot of the other men here will be shortsighted.” She held up a bottle. “Let’s not waste all this fucking drink—there’s buckets of the juice here.”

“Pour me another.”

“Get it down you.” She was looking around the big kitchen. “It is true, the rich are different. They don’t have any clutter. They have people to throw things away for them, ruthlessly. I always thought I’d be rich,” she said. “I took it for granted in the 80s. Didn’t you?”

I said, “I was too foolish to understand the real pleasure of money. You’ve done okay, though.”

“That’s not enough. We’ve both let ourselves down, Jamal.”

We watched Mustaq’s staff moving about quickly and silently, up and down the stairs, in their smart but casual uniforms. Not only did they not look at the guests, they lowered their heads as we passed.

Fifteen minutes later Karen and I entered the dining room together. At the end of the room was a grand piano; on the wall hung gold discs, photographs and guitars. Karen spotted Charlie and Karim immediately and went over to sit with them.

I was holding back, hesitating until I knew for certain—until I could see it was true. Ajita was at supper.

She wore a black dress; her arms were bare, apart from a silver bracelet. I looked for her wedding ring but was too far away to see. She’d always worn expensive clothes and still seemed to, with a hint of ostentation, looking like a woman you’d glance twice at in a Milan restaurant. Her hair was shining, black; it was unchanged, but her head was half-turned away from me, and she was laughing.

Karen was gesturing at me to come and sit down. I had my own excitement to deal with and stood where I was, wanting this moment to last, waiting for Ajita to look at me, knowing quite well that, when she did, there would certainly be trouble. Of which kind, I had no idea, but how could the world not trip a little, after such a sight?

When she did glance over, I saw her start suddenly and then take me in, her lips parting and her eyes widening. She watched me looking at her. I could feel the readjustment of perspective between us, as fantasy and reality crashed together and began to realign. Neither of us were students now; we were more than middle-aged.

She began to smile, and so did I. She got up then. One of us had to do something. We were kissing and embracing, and swinging one another around until we were embarrassed.

When we were done her brother, not the only one watching but the most attentive, came and stood behind us, leaning down on both our shoulders as we dabbed at our eyes.

“My darling sweety sweets, I’m sorry I didn’t tell either of you that you might meet tonight. I was afraid that one of you would change your mind. Was that wrong of me?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I think we’ll be fine.”

“Yes,” said Ajita. She turned to me with a determined smile. “So, how have you been? What’s been going on?”

“Quite a lot, actually,” I said. “There’s years of it.”

“And with me too,” she said. “Years of it.” We picked up our glasses and touched them together. She laughed. “You always said
actually.
I’m so glad you haven’t changed.”

“How have you changed?”

“I guess you’ll find out soon enough,” she replied, leaning over and kissing me on the cheek.