“It’s not too late, Jamal. Can’t we do it properly?”
I kissed her again, pressing my tongue against hers. Beyond the cigarettes, alcohol and perfume, I could smell someone I knew and liked a lot.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I had been living with the lefties in Barons Court Road, where the Piccadilly and District Line trains ran alongside my room, rattling the windows. I first saw Karen upstairs, in the communal area, where I’d sit after returning from the library, or in the morning, having breakfast, with some serious book-maybe The Ego and the Id or the Ecrits-propped up in front of me.
This was a vegan kitchen packed with pulses and gluten-free pasta, with chickpeas bubbling on the hob and the yeasty smell of wholemeal bread rising from underneath a tea towel. Imagine this level of earnestness and then, one Saturday morning, suddenly you see a young woman wearing nothing but lipstick, high heels and a Silk Cut, hunting about for something to throw on-which, in the end, was someone’s old greatcoat. It was like spotting a movie star getting out of a taxi in Bromley High Street. Of course, other people walked about the place naked, except that they (men and women alike) only wanted to exhibit their honesty.
A woman in the house had been at university with Karen, who had stayed over after a party. When one of the rancorous female lawyers referred to her as “the TV Bitch”-a new genus, though I didn’t know it then, but some clever cunt had intuited that Karen represented something about the future-it occurred to me that she and I might have something in common.
She stayed for the rest of the weekend, and nobody since Ajita had made me laugh like Karen. It cheered me that everyone else in the house disliked her on principle. When she wasn’t walking about talking into the phone, Karen watched soap operas with a pile of Cosmopolitan magazines in front of her, painting her nails. After all the shit I’d been through, her brashness, vulgarity and loudness gave me a kick. What she saw in me I have no idea, you’d have to ask her. How could it not have ended badly?
At one time girls wanted to be actresses, but in the 80s they wanted to be TV presenters. During that period Karen was a reporter on a local station outside London. I had to buy a television and carry it home in order that, if the aerial was facing in the right direction, I could see her talking about small-time politics, robberies, even the weather.
She didn’t earn much, but she knew she would. She was aware that she had entered, early on, an industry capable of inexhaustible expansion. If Britain was being deindustrialised-it no longer made cars, boats or clothes-what would people do for a living? Would they be waiters, make computers, sell tourism? Karen seemed to realise there would be little limit on how much TV the public would be able to tolerate in the future. We had four television channels; soon there would be hundreds.
For the numerous unemployed, she had no sympathy. Taking good advice from her family, she put her salary into property near Canary Wharf and rented it. Meanwhile, as she had done as a student, she kept a room in a flat in Chelsea, where I stayed sometimes. All manner of girls Karen had been at school and university with would come by, often several at a time, but only those with names ending in a-Lavinia, Davina, Delia, Nigella, Bella, Sabrina, Hannah-sitting on the carpet with their legs out, talking of what they would do now, the world having been opened to women like them. Would they make money in the City or be artists, before becoming mothers?
Most nights Karen took me out into the fast London she knew through her university set. We went to the new clubs, the Groucho in particular, room upon room and floor upon floor of grown-up decadence. It was the hippest place, full of writers, fashionable publishers, pop-promo directors, producers from The Late Show and the young movie people working at Channel Four, which had just started making low-budget movies. Often someone would lead us to Derek Jarman’s place, a small flat in an old block on the Charing Cross Road. He liked to read from his handwritten journals, and I wanted to be like that, so self-absorbed, as people came and went.
There was, of course, the “new” kind of shopping. Where my mother would make a list and return with the items on it (perhaps bringing home a treat like chocolate or biscuits), Karen would spend every Saturday shopping because she liked being in shop “environments,” returning with numerous artfully packaged objects she didn’t know she needed. People were beginning to buy “names”-brands-rather than things.
In the evenings there were other parties and new restaurants-with desirable names-where Karen drank ferociously until she staggered. She liked me to be there to help her out the door, into the cab, and into bed, where I’d sit beside her with a bowl awaiting the inevitable upchuck and the sleep which would follow it.
“Tender is the night,” she’d moan, quoting neither Keats nor F. Scott Fitzgerald but the pop song. She may have been out drinking until two in the morning, but she’d be up for work early the next day, arriving at her desk at eight and staying there for twelve hours. Women had to “prove” themselves then.
She didn’t have a boyfriend, though I think she had quite a lot of bad sex with older men-the bosses-or with cameramen or others in the crew, as she was often travelling, spending about three nights a week out of London. I can see her now, idly throwing her legs open and looking away, out of the window or across the room, biting her nails and thinking of what she’d wear the next day. When she was away, she worried that I was missing her, or lonely. If I spent the evening with someone else, she’d ask if I’d had sex with them. If she and I were at a party, she’d tell me who was attractive and who was a likely conquest, and she’d even chat them up for me.
Although Karen and I were together as some sort of couple, it soon became a more or less celibate relationship. Like many people, she didn’t really like sex but would go through with it if she thought the other person badly wanted it. I find it odd now, but I did believe then-without, I admit, having much considered it-that the ideal of the exclusive couple was one which still compelled me, that this unchosen template suited everyone. Even when I was unfaithful to Karen, it seemed right I should experience the correct sum of guilt.
But perhaps our relationship was without passion because, after Ajita, I had no desire to suffer sexual jealousy again. I asked for no power over Karen; her life and body were her own. I wanted to be with a woman I didn’t want. If love is the only intensity in town, what sort of love was that?
We did spend many nights together. In bed it would be me, her and an ashtray, the TV always on and her eating ice cream from the tub. We’d read the same magazines, both being interested in the same thing, women and how they became themselves. And we talked simultaneously, because she liked coke. With Karen there was no vulgar chopping with credit cards or snorting through rolled-up fivers from toilet seats. The gear she bought came in cute little bottles with a tiny spoon at the top. It was expensive, but she and the other girls who went to her flat in Chelsea Manor Street had lived in a world-quite different to mine and Miriam’s-in which there had always been money, and always would be.
I say we didn’t touch or kiss. Maybe we were trying to forget about sex because there was too much of it around. As well as studying psychology, philosophy and psychoanalysis, I was developing into a pornographer.
I had left Mother and replaced her with books. At least in my work, I had discovered something I wanted. Whatever I did in life, I was usually bored, always feeling insufficiently used or stretched. At this time I liked to study, I loved to read and I enjoyed my training, but it was expensive.
I was still seeing Tahir, as well as attending lectures on dreams, the Oedipus complex and the unconscious. I was reading Freud’s early disciples, Ferenczi, Adler, Jung, Theodor Reik, and the later analysts, Klein, Winnicott, Lacan. It wasn’t a long tradition, about a hundred years’ worth, but there was a ton of it, and almost every word in abominable prose. This discourse, saturated in talk of pleasure, provided no enjoyment in itself. If the best thing to be said for reading is that you can do it lying down, Karen would lie with me, watching videos and reading fat, shiny paperbacks about people shopping, waiting for her own face to appear on TV.