Something to Tell You

by Hanif Kureishi

  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.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I wasn’t convinced, however, that I would hear from George Cage again. I imagined that, like most celebrities, his life had become a matter of keeping people away. Meanwhile, there were questions which had been going through my mind. Did Ajita want to see me? And did I want to see her?

  George Cage had his secretary call me a week later, inviting me to a drinks party. Although it wouldn’t just be the two of us, I realised George was trying to talk to me about the past. I could have refused to meet Mustaq—as I still thought of him—but I had been thinking about his father, whose face had appeared in several of my dreams recently. The dead man not only names his murderer, he whispers it throughout eternity, waiting to be heard.

  Nor had Ajita disappeared from my life, as I’d thought she had. She was alive in the real world, existing outside my mind. Really, she was the one I wanted to connect with again. Once more it seemed pressing. I needed her brother’s help in some way. Perhaps some sort of resolution might be possible.

  I agreed to go over, asking if it was okay if I brought a friend. I’m happy going to places I haven’t been before if Henry is with me.

  George Cage’s house in Soho was tall and narrow, in an alley off Wardour Street, sandwiched between a film-cutting studio and a walk-in brothel offering Russian, Oriental and black women. “Even the brothels are multicultural now,” Henry noted.

  Despite its location, George’s house had a luxurious hush, as though it were soundproof. The decor was white; Oriental staff offered trays of drinks and sushi. Expensive dogs sniffed the guests’ crotches. There were good prints on the walls. Be-ringed queens from the East End mingled with upper-class young men in priceless suits, pop stars, painters, Labour Party researchers and, to my surprise, a couple of black Premiership foot-ballers—one in a white fur coat—who stirred more excitement than the pop stars.

  George Cage introduced Henry and me to Alan, his “future wife” and boyfriend of five years, the man he was intending to “marry” when civil partnerships became legal. In his late forties, Alan was wearing a sleeveless tee-shirt and shorts, with white socks and sandals. He used one hand to carry, at all times, a glass of wine and a thin joint. He was muscly and wanted you to acknowledge it. He was good-looking, with a seductive decadence that stated there were few experiences he had eschewed.

  I learned almost immediately that he’d been a fascist, a tube driver, a junkie alcoholic and drug dealer; he’d done his “bird.” As a consequence, he seemed to suggest, he was suspicious of “con men” like us, who seemed to survive in a talky, false world whose violence was unacknowledged. When he told me where he was from, I was pleased to tell him I’d been brought up a couple of miles away. Miriam and I, as kids, would go on the bus to Ladywell Baths and spend all day there.

  “What do you do, then?” he asked. “You in the politics too?”

  “I’m a therapist.”

  “I got a therapist,” he said. “An aromatherapist. Do you use scents?”

  “Nope.”

  “Not even vanilla candles?”

  While I wondered whether Freud might have had a view on vanilla candles, Alan looked at me sceptically, as though he’d been about to recommend several people to me for therapy but was now thinking better of it.

  He and Mustaq had met in a bar, he said. They still sometimes went to bed at ten and got up at two to trawl rough gay bars in the early hours. One place they’d gone to at four in the morning, only to be told they were “too early.” Alan had always felt at home in these places, with what he considered to be his “people,” the aimless, lost, unfulfilled and “perverted,” and Mustaq had found a place there too.

  There didn’t seem to me to be any reason why Alan should feel alienated in Mustaq’s world, but as more of Mustaq’s friends came over, Alan would suddenly st
art into an upper-class accent, pinched, absurd, superior; a stoned Lady Bracknell. Mustaq seemed used to it, and no one else took any notice, aware perhaps that this was always the risk you ran with rough trade.

  Mustaq said he was keen to introduce me to another of “our people.” I wasn’t sure what he meant; it turned out to be a plump Asian in a Prada suit with a lot to smile about. This was Omar Ali, the well-known owner of laundrettes and dry cleaners, who’d sold his flourishing business in the mid-90s to go into the media.

  Now, as well as being a stalwart of the antiracist industry, Omar Ali made television for, by and about minorities. The “Pakis” had always been considered socially awkward, badly dressed, weirdly religious and repressed. But being gay, Omar was smart enough to know how hip and fashionable minorities—or any outsiders—could become, with the right marketing, as they made their way up the social hierarchy.

  After Blair was elected in 1997, Omar had become Lord Ali of Lewisham, which was the raw part of town he was from. His father, a radical Pakistani journalist who’d been critical of Bhutto’s various deals with the mullahs—a man who had, it turned out, known my own father as a student in India—had drunk himself to death in a dingy room there. As is often the case in families, it had been the uncle who’d saved Omar in those Thatcherite times, letting him run one of his laundrettes and telling him, despite his father’s fatal integrity, to run out of the ghetto in pursuit of money, which had no colour or race.

  Omar’s lifelong penchant for skinheads, childhood friends who’d kicked him around, had got him into less trouble than it might have done at an earlier time. It was ironic to think of how Omar meshed with his times. His commendable antiracism had made him into the ideal committeeman. Now, as an Asian, gay millionaire with an interest in a football club, he was perfect leadership material. He was disliked by Muslims for his support of the government’s fondness for bombing Muslims, and hated by the Left and Right for good reasons I was unable to remember. But he was protected by a political ring fence. No one could bring him down but himself.