Recently I’d bought Rafi a new bike; at weekends I’d walk energetically to Barnes or Putney, and he’d cycle along with me. Or he’d persuade me to take him to a shopping mall-these were, strangely, his favourite places-or to the ice rink at Queensway, where he’d play killing and shooting games in the arcade; sometimes we’d spin across the grey ice, screaming. I liked to watch the teenagers gossiping or playing pool, the girls dressed up, the boys watching them. I preferred my son’s company to that of anyone else, but together, recently, we both felt some loneliness or absence.
“Hey, boys!” said Miriam as we came in, calling for some kid to bring us food. “Kiss me, Jamal, little brother.” She was leaning back with her arms held out. “No one kisses me now.”
“For fear of impalement?”
I was drawn to my sister’s face, but kissing it was perilous. You had to take care to mind the numerous rings and studs which pierced her eyebrows, nose, lips and chin. Parts of her face resembled a curtain rail. “Avoid magnets” was the only cosmetic advice I felt was applicable. I hated to think of her having to get on a plane, the airport alarms going berserk-not that piercings were likely to be a characteristic of terrorists.
In a corner of the kitchen, Bushy the driver was packing cigarettes into a suitcase. All over the house there were black sacks of contraband, like a giant’s droppings. Before he’d become a cabbie, Bushy had been a burglar. He’d considered himself a “mate” of mine ever since I told him that, as a young man, I myself had been torn between burglary and academia as careers. I had, in fact, even taken part in a burglary, about which I still felt ashamed.
Occasionally I ran into Bushy in the Cross Keys, a rough pub not far away where I used to drink, particularly in the long, bad days before and after the separation from Josephine, when she was still lying about her affair and destroying my dream of her, though I told her repeatedly I was aware of what was going on. None of my friends could see the pub’s charms, though they all found Josephine to be kind and sympathetic, a woman much exercised by my evasiveness and moods. Oddly, after the split from Josephine, it took me weeks to like music again, and I only listened to the records played in the Cross Keys.
“What’s up, doc?” Bushy said. He looked about before whispering, “How about some Viagra? A man without Viagra inside him is no good to anyone.”
“You know I can’t prescribe, Bushy. Not that a man like you would need any help.”
“I meant,” he said, “maybe you’d fancy obtaining a bunch? I got right here a brand-new installment of the naughty blue ones. This stuff will keep your pencil sharp for days-guaranteed, honest, straight-up pukka.”
“What’s the use of a pencil without nothing to write on? You’d be wasting it on him,” called Miriam, who heard a remarkable amount for someone who liked to claim to be deaf.
“Is that right?” said Bushy, looking me over with some surprise.
“Absolutely,” I said.
“Christ,” he said. “What is the world coming to when even a qualified doctor can’t dip his wick?”
Miriam had taken her place at the long kitchen table. Here she spent much of the day and night, in a sturdy, worn wooden chair from where she could reach her numerous pills, as well as her vitamins, cigarettes and dope. Without looking, she could locate her three mobile phones, a cup of tea, her address book, her tarot cards, a large box bursting with bling, several cats and dogs, as well as numerous packets of half-eaten biscuits, a dope cake, the TV changer, a calculator, a computer and a slipper she could throw-for the dogs-or use to whack either them or a kid with, if they had the misfortune to pass when she was “going off.”
Her laptop was always on, though she mostly used it at night. The unbounded anarchy of the Internet was ideal for crazies like her. She could create numerous different identities of various genders. Photographs of disembodied genitalia were exchanged with strangers after floating in cyberspace. “But whose balls are they?” I enquired. “They look a little peculiar with the man’s face scratched out.”
“Who cares? Those teabags are going to belong to some male, aren’t they?”
I hadn’t often seen her sitting there alone. One of her children might be waiting for an opportunity to speak, or there’d be at least one neighbour, usually with a baby, to whom Miriam would be giving advice, usually of a medical, legal, religious or clairvoyant nature. The table served as a kind of waiting room.
Bushy Jenkins, the minicab driver and her right-hand man, was of indeterminate age but could only be younger than he looked-and he looked like the almost dead Dylan, not Bob, but Dylan Thomas: ruddy, cherubic, with parts of his skin the texture and colour of tobacco leaf.
I had never seen Bushy in anything but a grey suit, and I had no reason to believe he’d ever removed it to be cleaned. Perhaps he just wiped it down sometimes, as people do a kitchen surface. Bushy spent a lot of time at Miriam’s, where he ate, drank, took an interest in the children, the animals and the piranhas, and sometimes lay down on the floor to sleep, when Miriam herself “dropped off” in the chair.
Bushy had, in fact, nowhere to live. He kept many of his possessions in his car; he stayed at Miriam’s but had never had a room or bed there. I am interested in how people prepare for their dream life, for their going to bed, and how seriously they take it, lying down to make a dream. But Bushy slept on the kitchen floor, with the cats. I’d seen him, with a sack stuffed under his head, snoring.
Miriam had often claimed that Bushy was a guitar player of some originality, better and more unusual than anyone she’d heard live. However, Bushy told me-when I suggested he might relieve our sorrow with a tune-that since quitting the booze he never touched the instrument. He couldn’t play sober. I said that often people couldn’t do anything well if they weren’t lost enough, if they couldn’t feel abandoned. “I’ve bin lost,” he said. “Oh yes. And ’bandoned.”
“Your talent will return, then,” I said.
“I dunno, I dunno,” he replied. “You really think so?”
A good deal of Bushy’s chauffeuring was on behalf of Miriam and her crew. He drove Miriam-usually accompanied by a caravan of neighbours, children and animals-to her fortune-teller, physiotherapist, aura reader, cigarette smuggler, veterinary surgeon, ten-pin bowling alley or tattooist. (None of her five children were allowed tattoos. I knew, though, from a passing interest in pornography-once, briefly, my profession-that Scarlett, the eldest girl, now pregnant, had a flying fish on her inner thigh.) Miriam herself, once she’d stopped cutting herself, had become a veritable illustration or mural, particularly as her size increased. “More pictures than the Tate,” I’d say to her after she tried to show me another fish or flag down her back.
Bushy would also deliver Miriam to what she called her “agonies,” the daytime TV shows she believed herself to be famous for appearing on. When it came to agony, she had a voluminous, flexible portfolio of complaints to exhibit. She could appear on any programme involving weight problems, drug addiction, domestic abuse, tattooing, teenagers, rape, rage, race or lesbianism-or any combination of the aforementioned.
If you wanted, and often if you didn’t, she’d show you videos of the programmes. There was no way you could sneer at any of it. If I wanted to talk about the original confessionalists-those I read as a young man, such as St. Augustine, Rousseau, De Quincey, Edmund Gosse-she would refer to her “agonies” as contemporary therapy for the nation. These presenters did what I did, except it was public, for the benefit of all, not snobby, and certainly more amusing.
Most recently, “with all this war going on,” Miriam had taken up with a wise wolf. There was a sanctuary Bushy drove her to, where she sat with an old wolf, and sometimes his relatives. These animals didn’t commune with just anyone, she believed. You had to have “the spirit.” There was no doubt that she did, of all people, have the spirit.