In the house I didn’t say much to anyone, staying in my room and reading. Usually there were political visitors. These were the days before the working class were considered to be consumerist trash in cheap clothes with writing on them, when they still retained the dignity of doing essential but unpleasant work.
Striking miners were popular with the gays; the Greenham women, in London for fundraisers, were favoured by the lesbians, though, apparently, they had to be bathed first; for the rest of us there were the Nicaraguans. (Several of our circle went to Managua to help out; I considered it myself but heard it involved a lot of digging.) I liked the company, liked knowing there were people around. It was the first time I’d had a place of my own, somewhere I had to pay for.
Miriam and I had returned, not long before, from our “roots” visit to Father in Pakistan, hating each other, hating everything. Not only did I not know what I was going to do, I was in bad mental trouble. I was beginning to realise that I’d thought, after the Ajita catastrophe, that the Pakistan trip would be a turning point. If I couldn’t find Ajita there-how could I?-I would at least find my father, along with a sense of direction, some strength and my best self. What Miriam and I did in fact return with would take years to absorb.
I should have guessed I’d end up messing about with books. I found a monotonous but easy job in the British Library, where I was a sort of earthworm with arms, fetching books for readers from the miles of book-stacked tunnels under Bloomsbury. I spent my day in the intestines of the gloomy building, surrounded by rotting printed paper, emerging occasionally into the light and space of the magnificent Reading Room in the British Museum. “I am a mole and I live in a hole!” I sang, or droned, as I worked.
My eyes, and those of my fellow workers, had become used to only low artificial light. We book-miners despised the readers, their self-importance, leisure and flirtatiousness with one another. Didn’t they realise this was a library? Though we might be peculiar, freakish even-we were the footnotes to the body of their text-didn’t they ever think of what we did for them, how we kept them supplied? Bent-backed, I liked shoving along a trolley in the depths of the earth, in what Keats called “dark passages.” Some of the people I worked with had laboured in the valley of books for thirty years, stifled and safe, nesting in forests of tomes. There was no better place to be buried alive.
One of the scholars working in the Reading Room-on Coleridge’s Notebooks and the poet’s love of The Arabian Nights-I had known at university. He had taught friends of mine. He walked on sticks, and his body was shrunken and misshapen, as much by the steroids he took as by the illness. Often we’d have lunch in cafés in Bloomsbury, and one time he complimented me on my long, luxuriant hair. I said I wasn’t growing it for reasons of fashion but because I couldn’t sit in a barber’s chair, couldn’t let myself be touched.
“Even by a woman?”
“Well…yes-especially by a woman.”
“You don’t have a girlfriend?” he asked.
“I did. But she went away and she’s not coming back. I thought she would. But it looks like she really isn’t.”
“I’m sure women like you. If I looked like you, I wouldn’t be sitting in the library all day. I sit down because I can’t walk properly. My broken body is going to hell.”
“Libraries are sexual places,” I said. “It’s the quiet, the whispering. You readers don’t see us watching you, but we know what’s going on. We notice who leaves the building with who, and we gossip about it. Still, tell me what you would be doing instead.”
“Having it off, of course,” he said. “As it is, the only people who touch me are prostitutes, something you don’t need. I’m sure there are women who would pay you.” He talked about himself and his own problems for a while. Then he said, “Do you have any other symptoms?”
“Symptoms?”
“States of mind which prevent you leading a relatively rewarding life.”
I explained that I had begun to stop still in the street, unable to move at all, either backwards or forwards. Recently I had stood in the same place for an hour-suspended, paralysed, dead-reading and rereading an advertisement, unable to get to work on time. If I was actually in motion, I found myself yelling at people in my mind. I wanted to fight them, wanted to get beaten up.
Mostly my mad stuff was inside me, but I would shove people on the bus; someone punched me in a pub. I wasn’t far from becoming one of those lunatics who mutter and shout at themselves at bus stops. I had to leave work early in order to lock myself in my room because I believed, and didn’t believe, that when I was outside others could hear my thoughts, that my head was transparent like a goldfish bowl.
In the evening, as you do, I’d catch glimpses of rats, birds and alligators from the corner of my eye. In my dreams, bears would dance with me, buggering me from behind. Live chickens would be stuffed down the back of my shirt.
I found one day, soon after beginning the job, that I was unable to walk; a spinal disc was perforated. I had an operation, shared a hospital ward with the limbless, and learned to walk again. Living even at the most basic level was becoming more arduous.
The oddest thing was, I felt my experiences were not taking place in the world but beyond it, in a void. There were no words for my suffering. Like the undead, the internal voices of hatred would knock on my door forever, seeking an impossible peace. If I was so ill, and getting worse, as I believed I was, how would I ever lead a useful life?
My friend said, “From our talks, I am aware that the art you like is modernism, the exploration of extreme mind states, of neurosis and psychosis. I, too, have spent my life with such books, but reading Kafka or Bruno Schulz can only take you so far. You will find in books characters who are like you. But you will never find yourself in a book unless you write it yourself. It is the wrong place to search. To switch metaphors, you can’t get out of a locked room without the right key.”
“What or where is the key?” I almost shouted. “Have you got it in your pocket? Open the door!”
He said the key might be this fellow Tahir Hussein.
The next day he obtained Hussein’s phone number for me, adding that he was much talked about. I said a lot of people were talking about me, but I was paranoid. I had no idea who was talking about Tahir Hussein. It was probably a small literary metropolitan elite, all of whom had been at university together. That was how it worked in England. But I was sane enough to realise that, without help, I would fall into a black hole. For weeks I didn’t call this man, continuing to believe I could survive alone and that my illness would disappear magically.
Another day: the morning, before work at the library. I am standing on the street. People are bent forward; they look like tables, running. Everyone had purpose, somewhere to go. When they arrived, they would have plenty to say to each other. Didn’t I, too, have plans? But-I almost said I had forgotten what they were. No. It was not that I had mislaid my plans in a far part of my mind. The future no longer had any force over me. I was too dizzy, with wild surges of mad feeling. My wish was to faint, to become unconscious. You cannot will a faint, I know that, any more than you can will a dream, a laugh or a fart. How I wanted some release from this suffering, to which even death seemed preferable. I wasn’t driven towards suicide. I wanted only to be rid of this swirling whirring.
At that moment I saw ahead of me a red London phone booth, with a gap or trench open before it, into which I waded. I came up in the booth; I was surprised to find it working; surprised to find I had change; surprised to find it ringing and answered by Tahir himself. I was particularly surprised to be invited to see him.
He had said he would take me on. I could see him the next day. He gave me his address and said simply, “Come tomorrow morning at eight and we will begin.”