I had said to Tahir, a year after I’d started seeing him, that his profession was one I fancied for myself. How come? I was aware, from an early age, when I met people on the street with Mother, that I wanted to hear their gossip. This was the route, I saw later, to the deepest things about them. Not necessarily to their secrets, though this was part of it, but to what had formed and haunted them within the organisation of the family.
Soon, however, the everyday conversations that characterised life in the suburbs were not enough. I wanted the serious stuff, the “depths.” I’d come to Nietzsche and Freud through Schopenhauer, whose two-volume The World as Will and Idea had so entertained me at university. There I copied out the following passage: “The sexual passion is the kernel of the will to live. Indeed, one might say man is concrete sexual desire; for his origin is an act of copulation and his wish of wishes is an act of copulation, and this tendency alone perpetuates and holds together his whole phenomenal existence. Sexual passion is the most perfect manifestation of the will to live.”
I had seen myself as someone who was always about to become an artist, a writer, movie director, photographer, or even (fallback position) an academic. I had written books, songs, poetry, but they never seemed to be the meaning I sought. Not that you could make a living writing haikus. I had always been impressed by people who knew a lot. The one thing Mother and I did do together was watch quiz shows on TV. University Challenge was our favourite, and she’d say, “You should know all this. These people aren’t as bright as you, and look at their clothes!”
None of the careers I’d considered excited me. Yet, unconsciously, something had been stirring within. Being with Dad in Pakistan, catastrophic and depressing as it had been in many ways, had instilled something like a public-school ethos in me. The sense of the family, of its history and achievement-my uncles had been journalists, sportsmen, army generals, doctors-along with the expectation of effortless success had, I was discovering now, been both exhilarating and intimidating. I wasn’t only a “Paki.” Suddenly, unlike Miriam, I had a name and a place, as well as the responsibility which went with it.
I began to see that not only was I intelligent, but that I had to find a way to use my mind. This was something to do with “family honour,” an idea which formerly I’d have found absurd. It was Tahir who brought everything together for me. It took me a long time to bring it up with him; I was afraid he’d think I wanted to take his place.
But at last I did. “What do you think?” I said. “Could I do it?”
“You’ll be as excellent as any of us,” he said.
During the first year of my work with Tahir, I saw little of Mother and Miriam. I went to some trouble to avoid them. Both their arguments and their intimacy, without a father, I saw now, to desire them both in different ways, and to keep them apart, made me overwrought.
But when Miriam said we should go there for Christmas lunch, I wasn’t able to disagree. Anyway, I wanted to see Miriam’s first child, a cute baby provided by a cabdriver whose fare, one night, she’d been unable to afford. By now she was living at the top of a council block with the child and another on the way, her only adult company being a violent man. She was stoned most of the time, with interludes on a psychiatric ward. Later she moved to the outskirts of London, arguing that she couldn’t be high up, as the voices yelled “Jump, jump!” “But never quite loudly enough,” Mum remarked.
Over dessert they asked me if I was intending to remain at the library, perhaps becoming an exhibit. I said “not indefinitely”; I knew now what I wanted to do. I would become an analyst, a shrink, a head doctor. I floated this with as much seriousness as I could gather, but I had to bat away numerous irritating remarks. “He needs a head doctor,” Miriam muttered. Mother: “You’re the one who needs it.” Miriam: “Actually, Mother, if you bothered to look within, you’d see it was you.” Mother: “You look inside yourself, dear.” Miriam: “After all, you made us…” On and on.
When this tailed off, I continued. While the Devil’s Dictionary definition of a doctor is “One upon whom we set our hopes when ill and our dogs when well,” the word doctor, as Josephine could have told you, inevitably went down well with most people. As I spoke, explaining the training, the theory, the practice, the income, the interest, the words, to my surprise, did seem to have authority. They were surprised, I guessed, partly by my determination and engagement. I knew they thought of me-I thought it myself-as passive and repressed, without much will or desire.
But now, rather than feeling only partly present, as I did before-my life as an interruption to them-I seemed to have some weight. I was able to be their equal and, to my dismay, it seemed to diminish them, render them a little pathetic even, as though I had been reducing my own stature all my life, to keep Mum and Miriam big. Unlike either of them, I seemed to know what I was about, where I was going. My crime was my spur. I would spend my life paying off that early debt. I was happy to do it.
“You will be doing good then?” Miriam said.
“Maybe a little.”
“That’s nice.” She wasn’t being sarcastic. Her other selves were almost always hidden beneath her aggression, her general stroppiness, which was a good, accurate word to describe her. “You can help me, then, can’t you?”
They were looking at me almost pleadingly. “You both know,” I said, “no doctor can treat a member of his own family.”
A year into my training, when I was beginning to work with juveniles, we heard that Father had died. After leaving Pakistan, Miriam and I didn’t see him again. Did we mourn him? I’d have wanted him to know I’d found a vocation. Whether he’d have appreciated it, I doubted. However, I was strong enough by then to have ridden his disapproval. I was on my own, but I knew, at last, what I was doing.
That night, after I left the house, walking the familiar streets from which I thought I’d never escape, a boy semi-defeated by something he didn’t understand, I was in a hurry to get back to my complete edition of Freud, the patients I would start seeing, the conferences I’d attend, the books I’d write. I wanted to be useful, to have done something.
Even then, at a moment of such hope, when the future was something I wanted, I would hear the dead man’s words echoing in my ears: “What do you want of me?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Straight out I said to Miriam, “You know I’m a gossip trollop and must have it immediately.”
“You and Henry sound so similar to one another,” she said. “But he’s like Tigger, and you were never so outgoing. Or have you changed?”
I said, “Now it’s you who is beginning to sound like him.”
“Oh God, we’re all dissolving into one another!” she said.
Evening, and Miriam was in her kitchen when I arrived. Kids on bikes doing wheelies in the front yard. Other boys and girls distributed around the house with their friends; a teenage boy in front of the television at the other end of the room, one hand in a minger’s chest, the other on the TV remote. Bushy perched barefoot on a chair, stuffing money into his socks before putting them on again. Then he threw his keys in the air, caught them, and went off to pick up a paying customer.
At her place, Miriam seemed distracted or preoccupied, as she had been as a young woman, wishing she were elsewhere, wondering where the pleasure was. However, I noticed she was looking at me as I fiddled in her kitchen, preparing pasta for myself.