*
As I walked about, thinking him through, it came back to me, after a while, where I had seen something like this before. Had Jeff always been there? In what sense had he — or a man resembling him — always been present in my life? And when I wasn’t using him to undermine and depress me, what use could he be? Would I have to look at his face forever? For there were, when I could bear to think about it, an eternity of Jeffs, of mostly older men whose stories I’d attend to. There are friends you begin to hate even as you love them, even as they waste you, and you refuse to see how tiresome and what an expense it all is. What emerges in such friendships is the same thing repeatedly, until both partners become sadistic. The ending of significant friendships is painful, yet still I believe in the future; rebirths are possible: there are conversations where new things can be said and heard.
*
My father, born in Madras, had been at the younger end of a large family of mainly boys who were rough and competitive. In his early twenties my father came from Bombay to London to study and to make a new life. He married an Englishwoman, left college and settled in the suburbs, where the quiet and regularity suited him, and he liked the people. But Dad’s job, in the Pakistani Embassy, was dull and badly paid, and without a pension. My mother and I urged him to find a better job and, at one point, he considered joining the police as a clerk. He also considered becoming a traffic warden. But in the end Dad refused to change. He thought he was better than all that: another job was unimportant, it was nothing, because soon, he imagined, he’d become a writer. He would have the dignity and class an artist deserved. But until then we had to provide encouragement and support, keeping the faith. We were supposed to be fans and believers, maintaining the master in his place. Our love and confidence would keep him afloat, just as the prayers of the faithful keep God from discouragement. Whatever happened, we could never be disappointed in Dad; the good thing would turn up. After all, self-belief is necessary, isn’t it? And, surely, one should have grit and never give up.
However, I figured out, years later, that I in particular had been persuaded. I had betrayed a more thoughtful and realistic position, getting everything the wrong way round. Somehow I had joined a protection racket or cult. Whatever happened, Dad couldn’t be disenchanted, or taste the bitterness of failure. It had become my job, as his disciple and imitator, to shield him from truths which, however tough they might have been, could have made him more imaginative. That was my naivety; but I was young, and this was ages ago, before I could recognise how necessary and important disappointment is, and long before I saw that others’ delusions keep them sane, but don’t necessarily do the same for us.
*
In many other ways, my mates and cohorts and those a bit older in the 60s and 70s, mature property owners now, were a generation of hoodwinked fools. We, who had denounced and given up on numerous authorities, had sought new masters over and over again. Friends, and those in our circles, were Maoists, Stalinists and Trotskyites of various types; others I knew followed Scientology and similar groups, like EST (Erhard Seminars Training), to which they showed cult-like dedication. We doubters seem to be easily impressed by those with conviction. And it is the attitude of the believer rather than the belief itself which is the crucial thing here. Whether it’s political or scientific salvation, seventy-two virgins waiting in heaven, a particular example of satanic ritual abuse, or the idea that one has a crucial message of liberation for the world, it is the state of absolute certainty and dogmatism which is the menace. The idea that by removing the object of the delusion one will cure the delusion is itself a delusion. Delusions are two-a-penny; what is significant is the attitude taken towards the material. Any fool can believe the sun will rise tomorrow: it takes a certain kind of absurd commitment to believe in, say, the efficacy of lifelong celibacy, or prayer or heaven, or some kind of political paradise — or to believe in a con man. It is the absurdity of the belief which makes the commitment to it absolutely necessary, and the intractability of the conviction will be in inverse proportion to the unsustainability of the idea.
In my case absurdity had certainly created commitment. I and some others kept Jeff going, as if he had started his own religion. But it was from this engagement with Jeff that a question formed in my mind, one of the most important there is. Can one person drive another person mad, persuading them to forsake that which is truly of value, collapsing their mind so they see reality askew? Certainly, adults can drive children mad, and adults can make one another crazy by creating conflicts in them which seem insoluble, or for which the only solution might appear to be a retreat into inner chaos and disintegration. Jeff seemed to have that effect on me. But if my head was parked under the bed, I had to wonder about my own part in putting it there. I seemed to have willingly joined a sect and come to believe that my suffering was worthwhile and would lead, eventually, to relief and happiness. I had believed Jeff was the solution when he was the problem, and that my madness was the only thing keeping me sane.
Sometimes you can only get anywhere by giving up on people, by cutting the links between you. How do you begin to do that? With Jeff, it felt as if he was no longer a real person in the world, but, rather, as if I’d swallowed but could not digest him. People can kill themselves to get rid of a devilish persecutor inside them.
*
The last time we met, in a cafe near my house, Jeff wasn’t in good shape. His fiancée seemed to have disappeared, and she didn’t want to know anything about where he’d got so much money from, or even hear from him again. Thugs had been coming to his place to threaten him, and he’d had to call the police. It seemed to me that his mania had surrendered to disintegration; his body had given up and he couldn’t get out of bed or wake up properly. He could barely breathe or talk. I told him that it had been nine months since my money had gone missing, and I was going to give a statement to the police. He looked alarmed and promised to give me a ‘little bit’ on Monday, and he winked. To prove it — and, perhaps to keep up appearances — he showed me a bank statement for forty-three million rials belonging to a Dubai sheik he’d ‘invested’ for.
I laughed and attempted to add to the bitterness of his woes by telling him that I’d worked briefly in a women’s prison and could still recall the hopeless cries of the self-harmers and the clink of keys being turned in locks. He nodded and said that it was now inevitable that he would have to do ‘time’. He knew he wouldn’t like it in jail, particularly as he was claustrophobic. His voice began to break, and he said he’d only stolen money — or ‘borrowed’ it, as he preferred to put it — when he’d received a notice claiming to deliver £350,000 to his account. He’d then begun to move money around, and everything went crazy, as it can when you get desperate and start to panic. I visualised him being encircled by those he’d wanted to enrich; and I knew he feared being shut in, and returned to the place he was most afraid of. The claustrophobic desires his own immurement, and he had brought it about that he would be shut in for a long time.
That’s justice for you, and as I watched the sexless, bland bean counter walk away, it just seemed obvious that time is more valuable than money. It took me a while to see this. Chandler had done me a terrible disservice by creating the impression that money was the only important thing in the world, that it was love itself, the milk of paradise, the medium that mattered the most, being more important than ideas, or poetry, or friendship or conversation. This was the point at which communism and capitalism met: where the single value was the crudest form of social utility.