‘We’ve always quite liked your dad, and we never had no objections to him marrying Margaret, though some people didn’t like her marrying a coloured –’
‘Auntie Jean –’
‘Duck, don’t interrupt. Your mum’s told me all about what a caper your dad’s been leading over in Beckenham. He’s been impersonating a Buddhist –’
‘He is a Buddhist.’
‘And carrying on with that mad woman, who everyone knows – because she’s told them – is disfigured.’
‘Disfigured, Auntie Jean?’
‘And yesterday, well, we couldn’t believe our eyes, could we, Ted. Ted!’
Ted nodded to indicate that he couldn’t believe his eyes.
‘ ’Course, we presume this madness is going to stop right now.’
She sat back and waited for my reply. I tell you, Auntie Jean really knew how to give you frightening looks, so much so that I found myself struggling to suppress a fart that needed to be free. I crossed my legs and pressed down into the sofa as hard as I could. But it was no use. The naughty fart bubbled gaily out of me. Within seconds the rank gas had risen and was wafting towards Auntie Jean, who was still waiting for me to speak.
‘Don’t ask me, Auntie Jean. It’s none of our business, what Dad does, is it?’
‘I’m afraid it’s not just his bloody business, is it? It affects all of us! They’ll think we’re all bloody barmy. Think of Peter’s Heaters!’ she said, and turned to Uncle Ted, who was holding a cushion over his face. ‘What are you doing, Ted?’
I asked as innocently as I could, ‘How will Dad’s behaviour affect your livelihood, Auntie Jean?’
Auntie Jean scratched her nose. ‘Your mum can’t take no more,’ she said. ‘It’s your job to stop the rot right now. If you do that nothing more will be said. God’s honour.’
‘ ’Cept at Christmas,’ added Ted. He loved to say the wrong thing at the wrong time, as if some self-respect came from rebellion.
Jean got up and walked across the carpet in her high heels. She opened a window and sniffed the fresh garden air. This tonic turned her thoughts to Royalty.
‘Anyway, your dad’s a Civil Servant. What would the Queen say if she knew what he was up to?’
‘Which queen?’ I murmured to myself. Aloud I said, ‘I don’t answer rhetorical questions.’ and got up and went to the door. As I stood there I realized I was trembling. But Jean smiled at me as if I’d agreed with everything she said.
‘There’s a good boy, duck. Now give me a kiss. And what’s that mess on the back of your coat?’
I heard nothing more from either Gin or Tonic for a few weeks, and during that time I didn’t run to Dad and urge him, on my knees, to give up the Buddha business just because Jean didn’t like it.
As for Eva, there was no word from her. I began to think the whole affair was over, and I rather regretted this, as our life returned to dull normalcy. But one evening the phone rang and Mum answered it. She immediately replaced the receiver. Dad was standing at the door of his room. ‘Who was it?’ he asked.
‘No one,’ said Mum, with a defiant look.
CHAPTER FOUR
It was clear in other ways that Eva wasn’t going to leave our lives now. She was present when Dad was withdrawn and preoccupied – every night, in fact; she was there when Mum and Dad watched Panorama together; she was there when he heard a sad record or anyone mentioned love. And no one was happy. I had no idea if Dad was meeting Eva on the sly. How could that have been possible? Life for commuters was regulated to the minute; if trains were delayed or cancelled there were always others soon after. There were no excuses to be made in the evenings: no one went out, there was nowhere to go, and Dad never socialized with anyone from the office. They too fled London as quickly as they could after work. Mum and Dad went to the pictures maybe once a year, and Dad always fell asleep; once they went to the theatre to see West Side Story. We didn’t know anyone who went to pubs, apart from Uncle Ted: pubbing was lower class, and where we lived the toothless and shameless tended to sing ‘Come, come, come and make eyes at me, down at the old Bull and Bush’ to knackered pianos.
So the only time Dad could have got to see Eva was at lunchtimes, and maybe she did meet him outside his office for an arm-in-arm lunch in St James’s Park, just like Mum and Dad when they were courting. Whether Dad and Eva were making love or not, I had no idea. But I found a book in his briefcase with illustrations of Chinese sexual positions, which included Mandarin Ducks Entwined, the complicated Dwarfed Pine Tree, Cat and Mouse Share a Hole, and the delightful Dark Cicada Clings to a Branch.
Whether the Dark Cicada was clinging to a branch or not, life was tense. But on the surface, at least, it was straightforward, until one Sunday morning two months after I’d visited Gin and Tonic’s house I opened our front door and Uncle Ted was standing there. I looked at him without a smile or greeting, and he looked at me back, getting uncomfortable until he managed to say, ‘Ah, son, I’ve just popped round to look at the garden and make sure them roses have come out.’
‘The garden’s blooming.’
Ted stepped over the threshold and sang, ‘There’ll be blue birds over, the white cliffs of Dover.’ He asked, ‘How’s yer old dad?’
‘Following up on our little discussion, eh?’
‘Keep that to yerself as previously agreed,’ he said, striding past me.
‘ ’Bout time we went to another football match, Uncle Ted, isn’t it? By train, eh?’
He went into the kitchen, where Mum was putting the Sunday roast in the oven. He took her out into the garden, and I could see him asking her how she was. In other words, what was happening with Dad and Eva and all the Buddha business? What could Mum say? Everything was OK and not OK. There were no clues, but that didn’t mean crimes were not being committed.
Having dealt with Mum, still in his businessman mode, Ted barged into the bedroom, where Dad was. Nosy as ever, I followed him, even as he tried to slam the door in my face.
Dad was sitting on the white counterpane of his bed, cleaning his shoes with one of my tie-dyed vests. Dad polished his shoes, about ten pairs, with patience and care, every Sunday morning. Then he brushed his suits, chose his shirts for the week – one day pink, the next blue, the next lilac and so on – selected his cufflinks, and arranged his ties, of which there were at least a hundred. Sitting there absorbed, and turning in surprise as the door banged open, with huge puffing Ted in black boots and a baggy green turtle-neck filling the room like a horse in a prison cell, Dad looked small and childlike in comparison, his privacy and innocence now violated. They looked at each other, Ted truculent and clumsy, Dad just sitting there in white vest and pyjama bottoms, his bull neck sinking into his tremendous chest and untremendous guts. But Dad didn’t mind at all. He loved it when people came and went, the house full of talk and activity, as it would have been in Bombay.
‘Ah, Ted, please, can you have a look at this for me?’
‘What?’
A look of panic invaded Ted’s face. Every time he came to our place he determined not to be manoeuvred into fixing anything.
‘Just glance at one gone-wrong damn thing,’ Dad said.
He led Ted around the bed to a shaky table on which he kept his record-player, one of those box jobs covered in cheap felt with a small speaker at the front and a brittle cream turntable, with a long spindle through it for stacking long-players. Dad waved at it and addressed Ted as I’m sure he used to speak to his servants.
‘I’m heart-broken, Ted. I can’t play my Nat King Cole and Pink Floyd records. Please help me out.’
Ted peered at it. I noticed his fingers were thick as sausages, the nails smashed, the flesh ingrained with filth. I tried to imagine his hand on a woman’s body. ‘Why can’t Karim do it?’
‘He’s saving his fingers to be a doctor. Plus he’s a useless bastard.’
‘That’s true,’ said Ted, cheered by this insult.
‘Of course, it’s the useless that e
ndure.’
Ted looked suspiciously at Dad after this uncalled-for mysticism. I fetched Ted’s screwdriver from his car and he sat on the bed and started to unscrew the record-player.
‘Jean said I should come and see you, Harry.’ Ted didn’t know what to say next and Dad didn’t help him. ‘She says you’re a Buddhist.’
He said ‘Buddhist’ as he would have said ‘homosexual’ had he cause to say ‘homosexual’ ever, which he didn’t.
‘What is a Buddhist?’
‘What was all that funny business with no shoes on the other week up in Chislehurst?’ Ted countered.
‘Did it disgust you, listening to me?’
‘Me? No, I’ll listen to anyone. But Jean, she definitely had her stomach turned queer.’
‘Why?’
Dad was confusing Ted.
‘Buddhism isn’t the kind of thing she’s used to. It’s got to stop! Everything you’re up to, it’s got to stop right now!’
Dad went into one of his crafty silences, just sitting there with his thumbs together and his head humbly bent like a kid who’s been told off but is convinced, in his heart, that he’s right.
‘So just stop, or what will I tell Jean?’
Ted was getting stormy. Dad continued to sit.
‘Tell her: Harry’s nothing.’
This took the rest of the puff out of Ted, who was, failing everything else, in need of a row, even though he had his hands full of record-player parts.
Then, with a turn of speed, Dad switched the subject. Like a footballer passing a long low ball right through the opposition’s defence he started to ask Ted how work was, work and business. Ted sighed, but he brightened: he seemed better on this subject.
‘Hard work, very hard, from mornin’ till night.’
‘Yes?’
‘Work, work, damn work!’
Dad was uninterested. Or so I thought.
Then he did this extraordinary thing. I don’t think he even knew he was going to do it. He got up and went to Ted and put his hand on the back of Ted’s neck, and pulled Ted’s neck towards him, until Ted had his nose on Dad’s chest. Ted remained in that position, the record-player on his lap, with Dad looking down on to the top of his head, for at least five minutes before Dad spoke. Then he said, ‘There’s too much work in the world.’
Somehow Dad had released Ted from the obligation to behave normally. Ted’s voice was choked. ‘Can’t just stop,’ he moaned.
‘Yes, you can.’
‘How will I live?’
‘How are you living now? Disaster. Follow your feelings. Follow the course of least resistance. Do what pleases you – whatever it is. Let the house fall down. Drift.’
‘Don’t be a cunt. Got to make an effort.’
‘Under no circumstances make an effort,’ said Dad firmly, gripping Ted’s head. ‘If you don’t stop making an effort you’ll die soon.’
‘Die? Will I?’
‘Oh yes. Trying is ruining you. You can’t try to fall in love, can you? And trying to make love leads to impotence. Follow your feelings. All effort is ignorance. There is innate wisdom. Only do what you love.’
‘If I follow my fucking feelings I’ll do fuck-all,’ said Ted, I think. It was hard to be sure, what with his nose pressed into Dad and this honking noise come out. I tried tc take up a grandstand position to see if Uncle Ted was in tears, but I didn’t want to jump around all over the place and distract them.
‘Do nothing, then,’ said God.
‘The house will fall down.’
‘Who cares? Let it drop.’
‘The business will collapse.’
‘It’s on its arse anyway,’ Dad snorted.
Ted looked up at him. ‘How d’you know?’
‘Let it collapse. Do something else in a couple of years’ time.’
‘Jean will leave me.’
‘Oh, but Jean’s left you.’
‘Oh God, oh God, oh God, you’re the stupidest person I’ve ever met, Harry.’
‘Yes, I think I am quite stupid. And you’re suffering like hell. You’re ashamed of it, too. Are people not allowed even to suffer now? Suffer, Ted.’
Ted was suffering. He sobbed generously.
‘Now,’ said Dad, readjusting his priorities, ‘what’s wrong with this fucking record-player?’
Ted emerged from Dad’s room to find Mum coming up the hall with a full plate of Yorkshire puddings. ‘What have you done to Uncle Ted?’ she said, clearly shocked. She stood there as Uncle Ted’s endless legs buckled and he sank down on the bottom of the stairs like a dying giraffe, still holding Dad’s turntable, his head against the wall, rubbing Brylcreem against the wallpaper, the one thing certain to incense Mum.
‘I’ve released him,’ said Dad, rubbing his hands together.
What a weekend it was, with the confusion and pain between Mum and Dad virtually tangible; if it had had physical substance, their antipathy would have filled our house with mud. It was as if only one more minor remark or incident were required for them to murder each other, not out of hatred but out of despair. I sat upstairs in my room when I could, but kept imagining they were going to try and stab each other. And I panicked in case I wouldn’t be able to separate them in time.
The following Saturday, when we were all together again with hours of proximity ahead of us, I cycled out of the suburbs, leaving that little house of turmoil behind me. There was another place I could go.
When I arrived at Uncle Anwar’s shop, Paradise Stores, I could see their daughter, Jamila, filling shelves. Her mother, the Princess Jeeta, was on the till. Paradise Stores was a dusty place with a high, ornate and flaking ceiling. There was an inconvenient and tall block of shelves in the centre of the shop, around which customers shuffled, stepping over tins and cartons. The goods seemed to be in no kind of order. Jeeta’s till was crammed into a corner by the door, so she was always cold and wore fingerless gloves all the year round. Anwar’s chair was at the opposite end, in an alcove, from which he looked out expressionlessly. Outside were boxes of vegetables. Paradise opened at eight in the morning and closed at ten at night. They didn’t even have Sundays off now, though every year at Christmas Anwar and Jeeta took a week off. Every year, after the New Year, I dreaded hearing Anwar say, ‘Only three hundred and fifty-seven days until we can rest freely again.’
I didn’t know how much money they had. But if they had anything they must have buried it, because they never bought any of the things people in Chislehurst would exchange their legs for: velvet curtains, stereos, Martinis, electric lawnmowers, double-glazing. The idea of enjoyment had passed Jeeta and Anwar by. They behaved as if they had unlimited lives: this life was of no consequence, it was merely the first of many hundreds to come in which they could relish existence. They also knew nothing of the outside world. I often asked Jeeta who the Foreign Secretary of Great Britain was, or the name of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, but she never knew, and did not regret her ignorance.
I looked through the window as I padlocked my bike to the lamppost. I couldn’t see Anwar. Maybe he’d gone out to the betting shop. His absence struck me as odd, because usually at this time, unshaven, smoking, and wearing a rancid suit that Dad gave him in 1954, he was nosing around the backs of possible shoplifters, whom he referred to as SLs. ‘Saw two bad SLs today,’ he’d say. ‘Right under my bloody nose, Karim. I chased their arses like mad.’
I watched Jamila, and pressed my nose to the glass and made a range of jungle noises. I was Mowgli threatening Shere Khan. But she didn’t hear me. I marvelled at her: she was small and thin with large brown eyes, a tiny nose and little wire glasses. Her hair was dark and long again. Thank Christ she’d lost the Afro ‘natural’ which had so startled the people of Penge a couple of years ago. She was forceful and enthusiastic, Jamila. She always seemed to be leaning forward, arguing, persuading. She had a dark moustache, too, which for a long time was more impressive than my own. If anything it resembled my eyebrow – I had only one and, as
Jamila said, it lay above my eyes, thick and black, like the tail of a small squirrel. She said that for the Romans joined eyebrows were a sign of nobility; for the Greeks they were a sign of treachery. ‘Which will you turn out to be, Roman or Greek?’ she liked to say.
I grew up with Jamila and we’d never stopped playing together. Jamila and her parents were like an alternative family. It comforted me that there was always somewhere less intense, and warmer, where I could go when my own family had me thinking of running away.
Princess Jeeta fed me dozens of the hot kebabs I loved, which I coated with mango chutney and wrapped in chapati. She called me the Fire Eater because of it. Jeeta’s was also my favourite place for a bath. Although their bathroom was rotten, with the plaster crumbling off the walls, most of the ceiling dumped on the floor and the Ascot heater as dangerous as a landmine, Jeeta would sit next to the bath and massage my head with olive oil, jamming her nifty fingers into every crevice of my skull until my body was molten. In return Jamila and I were instructed to walk on her back, Jeeta lying beside her bed while Jammie and I trod up and down on her, holding on to each other while Jeeta gave orders: ‘Press your toes into my neck – it’s stiff, stiff, made of iron! Yes, there, there! Down a bit! Yes, on the bulge, on the rock, yes, downstairs, upstairs, on the landing!’
Jamila was more advanced than I, in every way. There was a library next to the shop, and for years the librarian, Miss Cutmore, would take Jamila in after school and give her tea. Miss Cutmore had been a missionary in Africa, but she loved France too, having suffered a broken heart in Bordeaux. At the age of thirteen Jamila was reading non-stop, Baudelaire and Colette and Radiguet and all that rude lot, and borrowing records of Ravel, as well as singers popular in France, like Billie Holliday. Then she got this thing about wanting to be Simone de Beauvoir, which is when she and I started having sex every couple of weeks or so, when we could find somewhere to go – usually a bus shelter, a bomb-site or a derelict house. Those books must have been dynamite or something, because we even did it in public toilets. Jammie wasn’t afraid of just strolling straight into the Men’s and locking the cubicle behind us. Very Parisian, she thought, and wore feathers, for God’s sake. It was all pretentious, of course, and I learned nothing about sex, not the slightest thing about where and how and here and there, and I lost none of my fear of intimacy.
The Buddha of Suburbia Page 6
