by Simon Ings
Mum, non plussed, chuntered happily on, partly to herself, partly to me, partly to a young lady of her own invention. As the day wore on she grew more confident. She squeezed Debbie into the mould she had dreamed up in the days prior to our visit. Debbie could no more resist the cascade of my mother’s logic than a terminal patient can resist the blandishments of an aggressive oncologist, and by two that afternoon, there was Mum snapping away merrily with her Instamatic camera, and there was Debbie, tottering about the garden in one of Mum’s old summer frocks.
‘Saul, get in the picture!’
Mum sent me one of these photographs a couple of weeks later. Debbie is standing in our back garden wearing a sleeveless summer dress smothered with brown and yellow flowers. She is trying to show willing and flounce for the camera; as a consequence, one of her legs looks shorter than the other. She is looking down and away, hiving herself off from the world. Sealing herself up. You imagine her staggering away from a car accident. Debbie’s combination of shorn hair and this old John Lewis summer dress, at least two sizes too big, makes her look even more like a doll hurled out of a pram.
It amused me, that afternoon, to see Mum’s quiet egomania carrying the field. On the train back to London, I fed Debbie the story she needed: how kind and patient she had been, and what a good sport. ‘Those bloody dresses!’
Debbie had been made to choose one for herself as a present. As we rattled through Godalming, alone in the second-class carriage, she fished it out of its polythene bag: Mum’s gift.
‘Jesus,’ I said.
Debbie laughed, and spread it out on her lap for me to see.
I covered my eyes. ‘Take this abomination away.’
‘If I slip it on,’ she said, ‘will you kiss me?’
With an Oedipal howl, I tore the dress out of her hands, pulled open the window and stuffed the dress through.
And that was the end of that: one more moderately disheartening return to the place of my birth. I remember Debbie looking out of the window, as the orange suburbs of London coagulated around us: Croydon to Clapham, Wandsworth to Waterloo. The flatness of her mood. The empty polythene bag, scrunched up in her hands.
Afterwards, whenever the subject came up, she would talk about our ‘ghastly’ visit. That ‘ghastly’ day we had. ‘Ooh, do you remember that ghastly dress!’ But whatever she might say afterwards, whatever she might tell herself, my taking her home with me that day had represented something. All she had to show for meeting my parents was that dress; and I had thrown it away.
It seems so obvious, this long after the event, the damage I was doing to her. I was leading her on. I was making it possible for her to believe in this calamitous idea she had of herself since moving to the squat in Holland Park: Debbie the contrarian, the under-age radical; Debbie the teenage iconoclast.
She was none of these things. She was, like most children, hungry for life, full of energy, desperate for validation.
‘What about your dad?’ I was still trying to unpick this – still trying to solve the twin mysteries of her injury and aloneness.
‘What about him?’
‘What’s he like?’
It wasn’t his cruelty she had run away from. It was his care. ‘He thinks he could have stopped the accident,’ she told me, in bed one night. ‘He thinks he should have prevented it. He’s always trying to make it up to me. The accident – I was eight years old when it happened. Ever since he’s been… surrounding me.’
The image of herself she had conjured – a child running away from her father’s terrible need – should have been enough for me. I had never been as honest about myself. But like a fool, I took this as my cue to ask her again about the accident.
‘Leave me alone,’ she said.
She liked the idea of independence. For her, solitude and freedom were the same thing. This made for a frustrating sort of companionship. All I could do was inflate her self-confidence or tear it to rags in front of her eyes. Either, or. There was no middle ground with her. Those who were not with her were against her.
It was astonishing the degree to which even the brute stuff of the domestic world resisted her. The vacuum cleaner didn’t need emptying so often, she said; eventually it burst into flames on her. You just need a dash of water in this, she said, preparing the pressure cooker; it took a whole day for the smell of burnt beans to clear.
She was one of those people who never follows a recipe and claims to be able to do things with vegetables and pasta. She made us a cauliflower cheese once, only she reached into the wrong cupboard and ended up using laundry starch instead of cornflour. ‘It’s the same stuff,’ she said, swilling the paste from her teeth. She was sick the next morning, and every morning for a week after that.
She took her push-bike to a shop to have new brakes fitted. When she got home she told me the shop had adjusted them all wrong. She spent the rest of the day tinkering with them, and every so often she would start crying: strange little yelping sounds like a puppy caught in a trap. The next day she rode her bike slap into the back of a number twelve bus.
When I phoned him, Debbie’s father thought I was a private detective. He had paid two separate agencies to track down his runaway daughter. He thanked me for calling. When he turned up at the hospital, knowing who I was, the atmosphere was different. He seemed as afraid of me as I was of him; seeing the size of his hands, I was heartily thankful.
Debbie’s fits were under control by then: one grand mal seizure every twenty-four hours or so. No one could explain why her messy but hardly life-threatening accident with the bus should have triggered epileptic seizures. I wasn’t family.
Then, of course, what with one test and another, they found out she was pregnant. Harold wanted his daughter to have an abortion. One of the few things he actually said to me, that he made very clear, standing with his face just a couple of inches from mine, the air between us thick with his Old Spice aftershave, was how much he wanted his daughter to have an abortion. This had nothing to do with me. But since trying to convince him of this would have been an impossible task, I didn’t even try. And when Debbie insisted on keeping the child, I steeled myself for a disappearing act of my own. One of the things that had kept me going throughout my miserable three-month charade with Debbie was the thought that Noah Hayden hadn’t got to fuck her either. Discovering otherwise was galling enough; there was no way anyone was going to strong-arm me into fathering his bloody kid.
Nothing happened. No one phoned. No one beat at the door. When I visited the hospital a couple of days later, Debbie was gone. Her father had collected her and driven her away.
There was something fairy-tale about Debbie’s abrupt disappearance – her clothes and few belongings abandoned in the flat we had shared. (My flat, I would have to learn to say.) She had broken through into the outside world only to be spirited away again. It was as though she had never existed.
I rang up Miriam at the Society, and I went back to work.
3
‘My mother was a passionate believer in education. After my father died, she said to me, “You must learn the white man’s magic!”’
General laughter.
That’s right. Keep it light. Remember: last week this same audience of well-intentioned whites was over at the Africa Centre in Covent Garden, learning how to make traditional costumes with Sally Mugabe.
White man’s magic!
White man’s ‘lore’, he might have said. White man’s ‘skill’. White man’s ‘culture’. But he has learned, when addressing Western audiences, not to be too po-faced. When he tells the tale they want him to tell – ‘When I was but a simple goatherd, my mammy said to me’ – he uses the word ‘magic’, even if it does make it sound like he crawled out from under a mushroom.
It is Tuesday, 4 March 1969, and in the library of a distinguished philosophical society in a leafy offshoot of Gower Street in central London, Jorge Katalayo, president of FRELIMO, is speaking about Mozambique, the country of his birth, abo
ut the revolution he is fomenting there, and about the serious threat that he and his comrades – educated revolutionaries – pose to their own cause.
Under colonialism, he says, bureaucracy is the only career open to the educated black man. Paper-shuffling is the only thing at which he is permitted to excel.
(He has a complex, assymetrical face, kept this side of ugliness by its smile. He is wearing a cheap, neat polyester suit. He looks, ironically enough, like a bureaucrat.)
‘When the Europeans have gone, we lift it as a shibboleth: this power, not even of the pen, so much as of the carbon copy. This is why we so often find ourselves – to our consternation, yes, but also to our considerable personal profit – colonial rulers in our own land.’
Even at the back of the room, by a draughty window where his every other word is snatched away by the street, Jorge Katalayo’s oratory prickles the back of my neck.
When, on my return to work, I discovered that the Society had developed a curiosity about the politics of anticolonialism, I was pleasantly surprised; no more. The Society was insatiable, and it had the stomach of an ox. It had long since learned how to cram down every crumb of novelty, lick every smear of fat from off the New and, furthermore, how to render this stuff, however intractable – the Black Panther movement, Nova magazine, Free Love – into a rich and easy stew on which even its most elderly members might feed.
Mornings, I shuffled paper in the Society’s library or typed up little articles for its stream of newsletters. Afternoons, I yawned my way around the arrivals hall of Heathrow airport, holding one sign or another to my chest: Lewis Nkosi; Dennis Brutus.
I was the Society’s runner and factotum. I showed our guests the sights of the city. I took them to cafés and paid for their tea with petty cash. I reminded them of their schedules. I got them to the meeting room on time.
Invariably, as we climbed the smart white steps up to the front door, our speaker would pause before that discreet brass plaque, and frown. How the Society managed to attract its speakers mystified me. Not one of them, entering the magnolia-painted hallway, seemed happy to be here. What had they been promised? They followed me up the stairs to the meeting rooms, speechless and staring, as though waking from a spell.
Joshua Nkomo; Agostinho Neto; the ANC leader Oliver Tambo. Holden Roberto cancelled at the last minute. A bout of the flu meant I missed Benedicto Kiwanuka. (Years later, Idi Amin would have him killed for not finding the right people guilty.) Amilcar Cabral, the leader of Guinea-Bissau, spoke so softly that I could not hear him from my place at the back of the room.
Would-be presidents and statesmen-in-exile in sober Methodist ties, the Society’s speakers were demonstrably adult in a way Josh and his followers were not.
Katalayo tells his audience that when he was twenty-five, and barely out of elementary school, Swedish missionaries arranged a scholarship, plucking the frustrated student from his obscure province and depositing him in the Douglas Laing Smith Secondary School in Lemana, northern Transvaal. It was here that Katalayo came across a book larger and more impressive than any book he had ever seen before, other than the Bible. It was so big, it came in two volumes – ‘A to K’ and ‘L to Z’.
‘I remember learning to read English from this book.’
The English language, from a dictionary of philosophy. Was this possible?
Anarchists are not supposed to be interested in politics. These deadly serious Africans and their wars appalled my Holland Park friends. What possible revolution in human relations could mere politicians bring about, with their antediluvian baggage of ideologies and interchangeable figureheads? In vain, Josh, Holland Park’s eminence gris, dispatched Noah to guide me back to the path of righteousness: ‘What are our actions, our trespasses, our performances, our carefully staged “situations”, if not attacks upon the dialectic between property and privacy, that narcotizing dialectic from which the State itself emerges?’ These were the kind of rhetorical sticks he beat me with.
Noah and I both knew time was passing, that dressing up in Santa costumes and causing havoc in Selfridges’ toy department would accomplish nothing, that the squat was slowly but steadily falling apart. Seeing it was hopeless, Noah admitted to me that my shacking up with Deborah had sent a number of long-running residents scurrying to the bathroom mirror for a long, hard look at themselves.
When I asked him why he remained, Noah’s windy lecture deflated like a wet bag. ‘Change is hard,’ he said. ‘So we go out in scary clown costumes and we sow a little bit of unease – so what? It just makes the straights even more grateful for their old comforts.’
He was finding a way out of the squat’s rhetoric. The buzzwords were still in place but the old debating society grammar was knitting itself round them like a vine. It was good to hear Noah sounding like himself again. At the same time, I knew that our friendship could never be what it was. He had been too much someone else’s eager fetcher-and-carrier. I could not look up to him any more and, without that, I couldn’t see that there was much else left. Deborah had begged me not to tell Hayden about his baby, and I didn’t find it hard to grant her plea. I was only doing the right thing; her wishes had to come first.
Later, of course – too late – even I could see the real motive behind my silence. I had been given a certain power over Noah Hayden, and this enabled me to release myself from his influence. So I deliberately let him down.
Red with embarrassment, Noah Hayden confessed that he was in the process of smartening himself up. Once he had paid off his library fines, the authorities at St John’s would be more than happy to hand him his forgotten first-class degree. After that, there was an opening for him in public service. His family had probably had a hand in this, but I reckon he was bright enough to fulfil whatever promises had been made on his behalf. I wished him luck with his mission.
‘What?’
‘Your secret project to change the system from within,’ I explained, with a smile.
Hayden bridled. ‘And what about you?’ he said. He thought I was being sarcastic. This was a shame; given his talents and background, Hayden’s course of action seemed eminently sound to me. ‘Back to that ridiculous drop-in centre, I suppose?’
‘That’s not fair,’ I said.
‘Why can’t you go to work for somebody sensible, for Christ’s sake?’
How was I supposed to answer?
‘I mean,’ said Hayden, waving his hands about in exasperation, ‘what does your outfit actually do?’
In order to fund its latest hobby horse – Africa: a Way Forward? – the Society had embarked on an operation to ‘realize its assets’. This was Miriam’s important description for the jumble sales she ran, every month or so, in the building’s basement. A small, forbidding sign tied to the railing the week before (‘Bring Your Own Bag’) was her sole advertisement, but she need hardly have bothered. The same dowdy regulars attended these sales as religiously as they attended the Society’s talks, seminars and ‘tape/slide presentations’.
The first jumbles were ambitious (‘Sale & Auction’ the sign announced). There was an old Underwood typewriter. A couple of card-index cabinets from the library – fine examples of the sort of eccentric, looks-useful-but-isn’t cabinet-work that these days crawls away to Portobello Market to die. A kilim with a pale-brown stain on it – dried blood? An adjustable couch with brass handles and a smell of horse hair under the perished leather – less like a seat, more like a deluxe operating table.
By the second sale, we were reduced to recycling our waste paper. At the absurdly inflated prices Maureen wanted to charge, the Society’s past publications were slow to shift, even among the regulars. There were boxes of old programmes: Dr J. R. Rees lectures on the work of Ugo Cerletti and Lucio Bini for the Drill Hall Open Programme on Mental Infirmity and the Arts. Sir Richard Gregory speaks on ‘Science and World Order’. There were little pamphlets on the semantics of Korzybski, the poetry of Mayakovsky, the paintings of Kazemir Malevich. There was a box,
never opened, sealed with tape so brittle it crackled to pieces when you tried to pull it, which turned out to contain mint copies of a wartime spiritualist self-help book called You Can Speak With Your Dead.
Miriam’s third sale was advertised with a justified baldness: ‘Clearance’. The first box I unpacked promised much: a set of padded leather straps and a rubber gat carrying unmistakable bite marks. This was a dimension of the Society’s business I had not suspected: I imagined Kinseyite sexual experimentations.
The second box contained framed photographs of a European city between the wars. Looking closer, I saw the shop signs were spelled out in a language I did not recognize: not Vienna, then, as I had at first thought, but a place long since swallowed up into Soviet anonymity.
These were the highlights of the sale; the rest amounted to no more than some bizarre bric-à-brac: a leather hat box; a foot-long stuffed alligator; an able seaman’s uniform.
The rest of my time I spent watching as modern Africa invented itself, scribbling itself out on paper napkins in cafeterias all over London. I remember sitting in a greasy spoon on Gray’s Inn Road, among squeezy ketchup bottles and mugs of half-drunk orange tea, with Tariq Ali and Vanessa Redgrave. With Joseph Nyrere. Kenneth Kaunda getting drunk with Margaret Feeny in a guest-house kitchen in Gower Street. It sounds strange to recall now, I know. The libretto of a comic opera by Doris Lessing. The future of a free Africa, drawn up on a napkin. These good men, with their fragile dreams: all the ironies of their educated, depatriated condition.
And there, in the corner, trading literary recommendations with Sally’s husband Robert, a bald little man in a grey suit – the Soviet negotiant.
You had to admire the man’s bulldog determination, the weeks and months he spent making friendly overtures and warm promises to the future masters of Mozambique. But Jorge Katalayo and the FRELIMO council had agreed upon a trenchant policy of non-alignment. This policy, put into action in the cafés of east London, gave Katalayo ample opportunities for mischief. Witness the conversation he started, the day following a party at the Chinese embassy.
