What did preoccupy her were her “illnesses”-cancers, tumours, diseases. Her body was in a perpetual state of crisis and breakdown. She adored doctors. A donkey with a medical degree was a stallion to her. But her passion was to frustrate them, if not to try to drive them mad, as I knew to my own cost. The hopeless search for cures was her vocation. Freud’s original patients were hysterical women, and one of the first things he said about them was “All that is present is what might be called a symbolic relation between the cause and the pathological phenomenon, a relation such as healthy people form in dreams.” Josephine was dreaming while awake, and her adventures as a somnambulist were something else, too. During her excursions out of the house and into the night, she would smash her face against trees. Of course, when you love the unwell, you constantly have to ask yourself: Do I love her, or her illness? Am I her lover or her healer?
“Okay?” I said, when he’d seen she’d already gone out.
“Yes.”
It was a twenty-minute drive to my older sister’s. In the car Rafi pulled a silver disc from his bag and slipped it into the player. Unlike me, he is more than capable with such machines. It is Mexican hip-hop, of all things. Sam, Henry’s son, records music for him; Henry brings the discs over, and Rafi and I listen to them together. (“Dad, what’s a ‘ho’?” “Ask your mother.”) Luckily for him, Rafi was bilingual. At home, mostly, he was middle-class; on the street and at school he used his other tongue, Gangsta. His privilege was in being able to do both.
Rafi was checking his hair in the passenger mirror as we went, blowing himself kisses-“pimp, you look hip!”-before dragging a black hood over his head. I noticed he was wearing his mother’s expensive perfume again, which set off an uproar of feeling in me, but I managed to say nothing. The unlikely thing was that he and I liked the same music and, often, the same films. I wore his tee-shirts, refusing to give them back; and he wore my hoodies and my Converse All Stars, which were big but not that big for him. I was looking forward to the time when I didn’t have to buy jeans but could take his.
Miriam lived in a rough, mainly white neighbourhood in what used to be called Middlesex-recently voted Britain’s least popular county-though every place is becoming London now, the city stain spreading.
The typical figures on the street were a young man in a green bomber jacket, jeans and polished boots, followed by an underdressed teenager with her hair scraped back-the “Croydon face-lift”-pushing a pram. Other girls in microminis drifted sullenly about, boys on bicycles circling them, drinking sweet vodka smashes from the bottle and tossing them into gardens. And among these binge-mingers, debtors and doggers hurried Muslim women with their heads covered, pulling their children.
Outside Miriam’s detached council house, Rafi hooted the horn. One of her helpful kids came out and moved their car so I could park in the front yard, next to the two charred armchairs which had sat there for months.
It was five kids she had, I think, from three different men, or was it three kids from five men? I wasn’t the only one to lose count. I knew at least that the eldest two had left home: the girl was a fire officer, and the guy worked at a rehearsal studio for bands; both were doing well. After the insanity of her childhood and adolescence, this was what Miriam had done-got these children through-and she was proud of it.
The area was gang-ridden, and political parties of the Right were well supported. Muslims, who were attacked often on the street, and whose fortunes and fears rose and fell according to the daily news, were their target. Yet if one of the Right’s candidates tried campaigning anywhere near her house, Miriam would shoot out of her chair and rush outside yelling, “I’m a Muslim single-mother Paki mad cunt! If anyone’s got any objection, I’m here to hear it!” She’d be waving a cricket bat around her head, with her kids and “assistant,” Bushy, dragging at her to get inside.
But no one wanted a war with Miriam. She had people’s “respect” and, often, their love. It seems funny now, but as a teenager she’d been a Hells Angel. A month I think she lasted, before she decided the swaggering Kent boys were too straight for her. “Builders in leather,” she called them. “Not real bikers.” No wonder I became an intellectual.
She’d also have fistfights in our local pubs, with both men and women. “When I’m angry I feel at my best,” she explained to me once. Half-Indian, half-idiot she used to be called. The mongrel dog. I used to wish she’d get a good smacking, in the hope that it would turn her into someone I could like, or at least understand. It had been quite a feat, and something I was proud of, that, although we’d always seen each other, often reluctantly, in the past two years we had become close friends. I had begun to go regularly to her house.
It had taken me a long time to come to enjoy Miriam, mostly because she caused Mum such hair-tearing, brain-whirring upset. Me too, of course. I cannot forget, though, that whatever chaos she has made, here and in Pakistan, and you’ll be hearing about this, it’s not as bad as the crime I have committed.
I live every day with a murder. A real one. Killer, me. There; I’ve told you. It’s out. Now everything is different. Until I put down those words, I had trusted only one other person with the information. If it got around, my career as a mind doctor might be impeded. It wouldn’t be good for business.
As always, the back door to Miriam’s was open. Rafi ran in and disappeared upstairs. He knew there’d be a small crowd of kids looking at the latest Xbox games or “snide” DVDs with Thai subtitles, recorded from the screen in a Bangkok cinema. I was glad to have my son join the noise and disorder. The kids in this area, even at his age, appeared older and less naive than my son. For them, school was mainly an inconvenience.
But Miriam’s kids, and Miriam herself, would never let the neighbours kick Rafi around. He’d emerge with eye-strain, less articulate and, at the same time, full of new words like cuss, sick, hectic, deep and, more surprisingly, radical, for me a word redolent with hope and joyful disruption, from which it had now become divorced. Rafi, however, would take exception to my appropriation of his words. If I were to say, for instance, “Radical-hectic, man!” he’d murmur, “Embarrassing, sad fat bald old man nearly dead. Better hush your mouth.”
Josephine had never disliked Miriam; she had, at the beginning, gone to some trouble to know her, but soon found she couldn’t take too much. She did envy Miriam’s “egotism,” saying, however, that Miriam “talked and talked in the hope of finding something to say,” comparing the endless stream of her conversation to the experience of having a plastic bag tightened slowly over your face.
Josephine preferred to speak through her ailments, and was suspicious and envious of the mouthy and the articulate, though she had considerable appetite for any talk of-or books about-ulcers, migraines, irritable bowel syndrome, viruses, infections and nightmares, many of which she attempted to treat with carrots, banana drinks and extreme yoga positions. She took so much aspirin I suspected she considered it to be a vitamin.
Josephine maintained she could always tell when Rafi had been to Miriam’s: his language was fruitier than usual. Josephine and I had argued furiously, as parents have to, over what to put into the kid. I let him watch TV, eat what he wanted and use bad words, the more creatively the better. Familiarity with the language and its limits, I called it. For a while he referred to me only as Mr. Cunty Cunt. “What’s wrong with that?” I said to Josephine. “The Mister shows respect.” From her point of view, I was lax, loose, louche. What use was a father who could not prohibit? My debates with Josephine, furious and disagreeable, were over the deepest things-our ideas of what a good person was and how they would speak.