Something to Tell You (7 page)

What a pleasant late adolescence it was. Being at university in those days was a mixture of extended holiday and finishing school. Unlike school, there was no bullying or cramming, and there was little of the concern about careers and money there is now. It didn’t matter to me whether I got a third or a two-one; no one would ever ask me about it.

I read more then than I’d ever read before, and with a passion that was new and surprising to me. I was like someone previously sedentary discovering suddenly that they could run or jump. One of my lecturers said, “Write about whatever interests you.” I worked on the first of my favourite Viennese thinkers, Wittgenstein, and the idea of private language. The questions he asked were satisfyingly strange. It would be a while before I reached Freud properly.

When we were not at lectures, which was most of the time, I took Ajita to see Valentin and Wolf. She shopped and cooked us steak and chips. We were a little family. If I say she was my first love, I’d be saying she was the first woman I couldn’t just pull away from; who stayed in my mind when I wasn’t with her, and that I thought about continuously. When she was gone, I minded very much.

We’d use Valentin’s bed to make love while the guys smoked outside. “Go on, lie down together,” Wolf would say. “You two can’t keep your fingers out of each other’s pies.”

An odd sexual thing had begun to happen to me. There was no longer any discontinuity between orgasm and foreplay. The flutterings, surges, pulsations were whole-body experiences, taking place inside me rather than only in my genitals, so that my orgasms were multiple. They didn’t end with a bang, they didn’t stop suddenly, but seemed almost continuous, like a series of diminishingly powerful shots.

What is a criminal? Someone pursued—wanted!—by the police. I wasn’t wanted by the police, yet. Were my friends? I can’t say I knew what “crimes” Valentin and Wolf actually committed, if any. They would talk about fights, telling me how Romeo hit someone over the head with a chair. They would mention bent policemen and solicitors, and speak of how simple it was to bribe a judge or buy a passport.

There were numerous antique or junk shops in the area, which I would tour with Wolf. I was used to such places, and could help him find bargains. This was not easy, because as soon as Wolf walked into one of these shops, he’d begin to distribute five-pound notes to the staff. They were certainly impressed, and moved about as if inspired, bringing him vases. Whether he was rewarded in any other way I doubted; prices would go up rather than down. The deference might have been enough for him. It was enough for me. At this stage, I still was intending to be an academic, doing the criminal stuff on the side. I liked the contrast. Plato the thief.

One time, though, something extreme did happen to Valentin. There was a guy he met in the Water Rat who wanted Valentin to fuck his wife while the guy beat off. Val needed the money, and he got paid for doing this a couple of times. The wife seemed to find it moderately interesting, but what she really wanted was to see Val on his own, for dinner followed by the theatre. She’d pay him too. Then the guy came back to Valentin and said he’d pay him a lot more, a considerable amount, if he would tie the woman up, “knock her about and slap her a bit.”

Valentin was sick, disgusted by the idea, though Wolf and I seemed to think that he had a pretty good thing going there; the money available, he could have asked for more. What did happen was that, when the man made this proposal to Valentin, Valentin hit him, knocking him down. Valentin was already depressed, liable to catatonic absences, and this made him worse. He didn’t want to be a whore and he didn’t want to be violent; why did these things happen to him? Oddly enough, I remember suggesting therapy to him, though I knew little about it, but he said that when he wanted to talk, he’d talk to me in the pub. A man could deal with it.

It came back to talking, then, the thing most people do a lot of. The whole family liked stories. My grandmother, who had lived with us before moving to a little flat nearby, read Agatha Christie and Catherine Cook-son. There were piles of them, under the bed, in the corner, next to the toilet; my mother watched soaps, and Dad read Henry Miller on aeroplanes. I adored James Bond.

But the words in books weren’t as hazardous as those that someone might suddenly say. Like the words Ajita said to me one day, and I almost missed, but which stuck in my head, returning to me over and over, the devil’s whisper.

She had turned up late to the philosophy lecture where I met her because although she was reading law, she needed another “module” to complete her course. She didn’t love philosophy, as I’d hoped she would. She didn’t see the point of it, though she was amused by my attempts to explain it to her.

“Isn’t it about the wisdom of living, and about what is right and wrong?” she’d say.

“If only,” I’d reply. “I guess you’ll have to go to the psychology department for that, though you can’t change courses now. For me philosophy is to do with Aristotle’s idea that the desire for pleasure is at the centre of the human situation. But philosophy as it’s taught is, I am afraid, about concepts. About how we know the world, for instance. Or about what knowing is—how we know what we know. Or about what we can say about knowing that makes sense.” Having nearly exhausted myself earning her bafflement, I went personal. “I want to know you. Everything about you. But how will I ever know that I know everything about you?”

“You wouldn’t want to know me inside out,” she said abruptly.

“Why’s that?”

“It would put you off me.”

“How do you know?”

“It just would, I’m telling you.”

“You have secrets?” I said.

“Don’t ask.”

“Now I have to ask. I’m bursting, Ajita.”

She was smiling at me. “Curiosity killed the cat, didn’t it?”

“But cats just have to know, don’t they? It’s their nature. If they don’t shove their faces in that bag, they will go crazy.”

“But it isn’t being good for them, sweetie.”

I said, “The good isn’t always something you can decide in advance.”

“In this case it definitely is. Now stop it!”

I was looking at her hard, surprised by how defiant she was. She was almost always soft with me, kissing and caressing me as we spoke. We had this conversation behind her garage, where, unseen from the house, there was a little garden, which no one used, with a decent patch of grass. When spring came and it got warm, we made it the secret place where we’d lie out listening to Radio 1 before driving to London for lunch.

Though we were dark-skinned enough to be regularly insulted around the neighbourhood, often from passing cars, we started to enjoy sun-bathing naked, close to everything we needed—music, drinks, her aunt’s food. Often Ajita would bring a bag of clothes out into the garden. Love through my eyes: she was teaching me the erotics of looking. She liked her own body then, and liked to show it, posing with her clothes pulled down or open, or with her ankles, throat or wrists lightly tied.

To me, the time we spent outside was a celebration. We’d survived the hard work of our childhood—parents, school, continuous obedience, terror—and this was our holiday before embarking on adulthood. We were still kids who behaved like kids. We’d chase and tickle one another, and pull each other’s hair. We’d watch each other pee, have spaghetti-eating competitions and egg-and-spoon races with our underwear around our ankles. Then we’d collapse laughing, and make love again. We had come through our childhood. Or had we?

Had Ajita’s aunt been looking—and I often wondered whether she was; someone seemed to be watching us—she’d have seen Ajita lying there with her eyes closed and me on my knees, kissing her up and down her body, her lips parting in approval. All day I played in her skin, until I believed that, blindfolded, I would know her flesh from that of a hundred women.

I did often wonder about Ajita’s aunt, and the way she crept invisibly about the house with her head covered. I guess she’d have communicated with me in some way, had I been younger. As a child, when my Indian aunts had visited London, they’d pored over me, kissing and pulling me perpetually, certainly more than my mother did. Who, though, did the aunt talk to properly? Certainly not Ajita or her brother. She washed and cooked for them, but didn’t eat with them. Mostly she was alone in her room, more of a servant than a member of the family. I guess I believed, even then, in the necessity of conversation; believed, in fact, that she suffered for having no one to talk to.

There seemed to be no one else around. The neighbourhood appeared to be deserted, kids at school, adults at work. We’d have the radio on low, and occasionally we’d even glance at our college books. Otherwise all there was to look at was the sky and the house opposite. I observed that house and the couple who lived there for days without really seeing it, until it occurred to me that if my life in crime was to start—and I thought it should; with Wolf and Valentin I kept thinking I had to prove myself, to become tough like them—it could begin there.

Then I started to ask Ajita more questions. The things I wanted to know were the things she didn’t want me to know. Where she had warned me off, I needed to go.

It was around this time, after we had been together a couple of months, that things began to get even stranger, and I began to feel I was in the middle of something I would never be able to understand.

Everyone has their heart torn apart, sometime.

“A call for you, Dr. Khan,” said Maria.

She was my sentry, and never normally called me to the phone at this time unless it was a potential suicide—every analyst’s fear, and something many have had to deal with.

I would say that an analyst without a maid is no good to anyone; nor is an analyst without a shabby room. On the one occasion that he went to visit Freud, in 1921, André Breton, after circling Freud’s building for days, was determinedly disappointed by the great man: by his building, by his antiquities, his office, his size. (Breton’s colleague Tristan Tzara called Freud’s profession “psychobanalysis.”) Jacques Lacan’s circumstances—the worn carpet, and the phallic driftwood on his waiting room table—were often similarly disappointing to visitors. One expects to find a magician or magus and finds merely a man. Analysis is at least an exercise in disillusionment.

We were having lunch: cold salmon, salad, bread and wine, a week after Rafi and I had been to Miriam’s place. Henry had come over for talk and distraction.

Now Maria was holding out the telephone. “Mr. Bushy is outside.”

“I see. Thank you.” When I put the phone down, I said to Henry, “It’s for you. Bushy’s brought you the supplies you asked for.”

“Ah. Supplies. At last. What does Baudelaire call it? ‘The longing for the infinite…’ Bring it on!”

There was considerable jangling in the hall, like someone pouring a bag full of coins down a metal chute. That wouldn’t be Bushy. As an ex-burglar, he was a quiet man. It was Miriam herself, clearly wearing all her jewellery at once, and up on both legs, too, without the sticks she sometimes used. In she came, removing her black crushed-velvet cloak and handing it to Maria, who gave her the respect she’d have accorded any queen I admired, male or female.

Miriam was wrapped in layers of flashing semi-psychedelic clothing along with a black, Goth, spiderweb top. Her wild hair was freshly streaked with red and blue, her face studs sparkling, a renovation which must have caused her considerable trouble.

“I was in a cage with the black wolf this morning,” she said as she swept in. “Close to his spirit. He was looking away, to the east, worrying about those being blown up in the war. He said I should come here. Connections needed to be made. I had to bring this myself.”

“Right,” said Henry, looking at her eagerly. I have to say it surprised me to see Miriam come in by herself. Like any other celebrity, she didn’t like to be seen alone, and because she was infirm she usually had a smaller person on each side of her, upon whom she could rest.

Henry seemed impressed. “Absolutely.”

We leaned towards it. The “infinite” was in the exquisite wooden box she held out in front of her. I recognised it. Our mother, with her passion for markets and antiques, had collected anything “Eastern” and held on to it. “It was only the husband who got away” was my response to her incessant dusting of various items of chinoiserie.

She gave him the box. “Here, Henry.”

“Miriam, darling, you are a good person!”

“I am, I am—but only you appreciate it!”

You should have seen it—the two of them suddenly in each other’s arms, long lost.

Miriam sat beside Henry, opened the box and unwrapped some grass. She offered it to his nose—a nose which had travelled the length and breadth of France in search of wine, with actor pals resilient enough to enjoy his monologues.

“Against death and authoritarianism there is only one thing,” he said once. “Love?” I suggested. “Culture, I was going to say,” he said. “Far more important. Any clown can fall in love or have sex. But to write a play, paint a Rothko or discover the unconscious—aren’t these extraordinary feats of imagination, the only negation of the human desire to murder?”

Now he swooned and his chins wobbled over the simplest thing.

“What d’you feel?” Miriam asked.

“Oh, Miriam, it’s your fingers I am admiring.”

“I know.”

“Where did you get the black nail varnish?”

“Wait, wait,” urged Miriam. “Here.”

Henry leaned forward, her anxiety drawing him. “What is it?”

Maria and I watched her place both hands on Henry’s head. She shook her own head sorrowfully: Henry’s discontent was vibrating in her fingertips.

“What is it?” said Henry. “Genius? Cancer? A jinn?”

“What sign are you?” she asked. This was not a good question to ask Henry, but she went on quickly, “Have you seen a ghost recently?”

“A ghost?” he said. “Of course!”

“How many?”

“You really want to know?”

“I can say you are definitely inhabited!” she said firmly.

“I always knew it,” he said. “But only you recognise it!”

“But not possessed.”

“No? Not possessed?”

I could see that Maria, listening from the door, was about to panic. I took a last mouthful of food, glanced at my watch and said, “I must go for my walk.”

Outside, Bushy was standing across the road leaning against his car, smoking. I waved and called out. Seeing me, he gathered himself together; his mouth began to work, no doubt a dream emerging from it.

“Want a lift?” he shouted. He was coming over, but I kept moving. He was beside me. “’Ere,” he said. “You know all about it—I’m having more sex now than I’ve ever had! A man without his dick up someone is no good to no one.”

“I’m glad to hear it, Bushy,” I said, scuttling away.

When I returned from my walk, just before my first patient of the afternoon arrived, Henry and my sister had gone. Maria was clearing up. She said that Bushy had driven them down to the river at Hammersmith, where there was a pub, the Dove, that Henry knew. “No doubt,” she said with some disapproval, “they’ll be spending the afternoon there.”

“Good,” I said, going into my room. “Can you show the patient in, please?”