“Go on.”
“Didn’t you, sometimes, wait outside our house at night? My bedroom was at the front, overlooking the road, and I’d stay up, dancing to the Thin White Duke. Was it you, just standing, looking, a few times?”
“Yes. It was me.”
“Why did you do that? I used to think, which one of us is he in love with? Can it be me?”
“I knew who I wanted.”
“Why were you there?”
“I was a fool in love.”
“Me too. Did you know I wrote ‘Everyone Has Their Heart Torn Apart, Sometime’ when I was still living at home? Years later it went to number one around the world virtually unchanged. I can tell you now where I stole the tune, not that anyone was bright enough to notice.”
“It takes talent to steal the right tune.”
“The song was about you, Jamal.”
He was sitting close to me. At times he took my hand, and I took his, as though we needed to comfort one another while the past rolled through us.
He said, “The only window which overlooked the garden was in my sister’s bedroom. When I was home, I’d sit just behind the curtain, with my elbows on the sill, looking out. You smoked roll-ups all the time, and always wore black. You looked smooth in suits, particularly with the baseball boots.
“But in my view, you looked best with nothing on and your lovely cock out. You were thin then, with a fine tanned body, and boy could you do it a lot-you guys were horny!” He went on. “Other times I’d sit with you in the kitchen when Ajita was upstairs changing or on the phone. I loved it when you talked to me.
“But I couldn’t have expected you to guide me. I should have been a doctor. That’s what my father wanted.”
He was looking at me, smiling; I was trying to take all this in. Then he stood up, gave me a long look, as if wondering himself about the strangeness of our conversation, and excused himself, going to join the others, most of whom had now come into the room.
I watched Ajita with a friend of Mustaq’s, laughing as she used to, putting her hand over her mouth as though she’d just said something outrageous, perching here and there to talk, helping her brother and Alan run the weekend.
When I rejoined the group, I discovered from Alan, who did a good imitation of him, that Omar had decided to drive into town “to see who was around,” adding, “You see, I never lost the common touch!”
It turned out that Omar had rung to say he was “stuck” in town and needed to be rescued. He wouldn’t be able to make it back alone. Alan asked for volunteers “to go in.” Apparently the town, a triumph of postwar socialist planning, was a sewer, full of tattooed beasts and violent zombies, with vomit and blood frothing in the gutters. I couldn’t wait to see it.
There was a pub Omar liked to visit when he came up, where the local lost children, most of them junkies, listened to savagely loud music. At least one of these kids would be fuckable.
Omar was too drunk to return to Mustaq’s and didn’t want to leave his car behind. Of all his crimes, drunk driving might turn out to be the most viably punishable. Also, he had to get up early in the morning to fulfill one of his duties, which was to sit in a large black car surrounded by motorcycle outriders and greet some foreign dignitary at Heathrow on behalf of the queen and the government, and then accompany this variety of murderers and torturers to their hotel while making small talk.
Omar said, “I have to be quite careful. I’m always getting the words dignitary and dictator mixed up.” He was, apparently, often in bad shape for some of this “meeting and greeting.”
Alan required one of us to drive Omar’s car back. So, fancying a change, I went into town with Karen, following Alan, who knew the pub. On the way out I said to Mustaq, “Why don’t you come with us?” He shook his head and smiled. As we got in the car, Karen told me that the price Mustaq paid for his wealth was the fact that he couldn’t walk on the street, go to the shop or pub without being mobbed, questioned, photographed.
We drove past a lurid building called the Hollywood Bowl, a multiplex featuring a drive-through McDonald’s, security guards and hooded kids wandering around windswept, concrete spaces.
“Why so fast, Karen? We won’t get lost. Are you drunk?”
“Yeah. You want to get out?” she said. “I should have killed you five minutes ago.”
“What stopped you?”
“So that is Ajita. The one you really loved and were faithful to. The one you kept expecting to return. You would lie there, my darling, ‘thinking,’ with a book open on your chest, and you’d smile to yourself. I knew that’s when you were with her in your mind. I absolutely totally hated you then.”
“Are you now pleasantly disappointed?”
“She’s an ordinary woman of a certain age. The age of desperation. But I can see it,” she said, “if I put my glasses on and look hard-what she had. The cuteness, the girly voice, the desire to please. Unfortunately, I was supposed to feel sorry for her all that time. What sadness you moped about in, which I had to endure! Even to me she seemed mystically important. Wasn’t her damned father murdered during a strike?”
“Something like that.”
“I only married the wrong person because of the whole mess. You made me feel second-best for so long I ended up with the first person who gave me their attention.”
“It would have to be my fault,” I said.
“Nothing cheered you up, even when you went to see that bloody analyst the whole time. After a session you’d spend hours writing it down. Didn’t you ever see that analysis doesn’t make people kinder or funnier or more intelligent? It makes them more self-absorbed. They start using all those awful words like transfer and cathartic. Did I want to hear about your dreams, about your mother and sister, when we were in the middle of a disaster? Didn’t that occur to you?”
“It was my vocation, and it interested me more than anything.”
“I hate to say this, Jamal, but you are intelligent and you’ve done nothing with it but learn to say all those words which are no use to anyone.”
“Shit, you are in a bad mood.”
“I am now.”
I said, “I’m definitely not going to fuck you tonight.”
“Bastard, it’ll be the Indian girl, won’t it? Why do you have to be so cruel, Jamal? Doesn’t it matter to you, cunt-teaser?”
We discovered Lord Ali, with his jacket and shoes off and shirt half open, lying across several chairs in the back room of the pub, “holding court.” This kinglike position wasn’t only due to his personal magnetism, or to curiosity among the poor about the lord’s work relieving the condition of the proletariat, but owed much to the fact he was buying drinks for everyone in the pub.
“Oh, fucking Christ!” said Alan, as we approached. The lord’s eyes, as Alan put it, were like “two pools of inky semen.”
We caught Omar telling the assembled drinkers, many of them already slumped, that he’d met the queen on three occasions and sat in her carriage once. Last week he’d found himself alone in a room with her. She was concerned that Labour was going to attempt to ban shooting as well as hunting. “‘We had a lovely shoot the other day,’” he said, fruitily. Lord Omar said this several times, louder and louder, until it started to sound not only pornographic but an arrestable offence.
Alan was ready to pull him out of there before he said anything else that might turn up in the News of the World, or bring information about their weekends to the wider world, but Omar wasn’t ready to leave. He hadn’t managed any physical contact. Alan spoke to one of the kids and came away with some decent weed, and while the cock-drunk good lord was satisfied in the toilet, Alan and Karen played pool.
I sat at the bar lining up vodka shots. The barman knew we were friends of George and told me what spoiled, overprivileged rats we were “up at the big house,” compared to the people around here. “What we need,” he said, as though it had never occurred to anyone before, “is a revolution. Look at that,” he said, pointing at Lord Ali, who was emerging from the toilet with wet knees and a pasty-faced kid while murmuring “Such, such were the boys…”