“Not even in the privacy of my own bedroom. There’s no reason why you would have noticed, but analysts and therapists always dress oddly, the men looking uncomfortable in the sort of jackets that provincial academics wear while the women resemble wealthy hippies, in bolts of velvet with flowing scarves.”
“I can’t wait to see you at the Sootie,” she said. “I’m so going to laugh my big tits off. You’ve always been timid, a mincing little thing.”
“Thank you.”
“Actually, you’ve got better,” she said. “You were shy and quiet before, terrified of people, mooching in your room for days, not talking, miserable. In Karachi your nickname was Sad Sack. But you did change-when you went to live in that house in London.”
“I found my first analyst then, after we came back from Pakistan. You’d be reluctant to recall it, but I was in a mess.”
“We both were, thanks. You and Dad trotted off together like long-lost lovers, expecting me to spend every minute with the boring, well-behaved women, like I was in purdah.”
“A position you rightly refused.”
“I was channelling Dad this afternoon and remembered that the last words he said to me were, ‘No one will ever marry a whore like you.’ Wasn’t he right?”
“He didn’t say no one would ever love you,” I said. “My analyst was a Pakistani, you know, with a cute accent, like Dad’s. I was lucky to meet him when I did. Otherwise I’d have ruined my life before it started.”
She said, “I could have done with someone to save my life. Why didn’t you send me there?”
“It was my thing.”
“He converted you?”
“Something like that. To a life of enquiry, perhaps.”
She said, “Josephine used to wonder whether you were gay.”
“Thanks for reminding me.”
“She did come to me one time, at a family Christmas, got me in a corner and asked me if you were that way. My instinct was to give the cow a backhander-for being so unobservant. Then I nearly told her, ‘He’s my brother, and a woman with your problems is enough to make Casanova gay.’ But I zipped it-for you.”
“Thank you, my dear.” I went on: “She had this bizarre theory that because I liked her arse I was gay.”
“Even a sexual dyslexic like her can see you’re not a boy-bummer.”
I said, “No, I’m a married man with a married mind. There was a film premiere we went to, a few months ago, even though Josephine and I weren’t together. Miriam, she looked great in her heels and black dress and red wrap, with bare legs. All evening I wanted to fuck her. For a while I wasn’t bored.”
“She’s a striking woman, being so tall.”
“Yes, I used to think one didn’t so much go down on her as go up on her.”
“You can be sulky and moody, but you’re also nervous and very evasive, Jamal.”
“Am I still?”
“Look at your bitten nails and the way your eyelashes flap.”
“They do?”
“But you got on by not throwing everything away like me. You knew there was a future.” She was tickling me. “Now, you therapists are always talking about sex. Maybe you should see some for once. It’ll be good for you to hang out at the Sootie.”
I said, “I never knew whether you were glad Josephine and I separated.”
“I quite liked her, mainly because she liked you. Loved you, I mean. She never stopped loving you, Jamal, though you must have tested her hard.”
“Don’t remind me of that, Miriam.”
We embraced; I told her I had to go. Wearily I walked to the Cross Keys to have a look at my parallel man, Wolf. While I was in Venice, Bushy had phoned to say he’d popped into the pub several times to see how Wolf was doing. Now I was wondering whether they might have been getting on too well.
Bushy was smoking at the bar. Wolf was in the cellar, changing the barrels. After my trip to Venice, the place looked less salubrious than I remembered it. Maybe it was time to find a new local.
Bushy indicated the Harridan. “That’s a smile on her gob. She’s happy with ’im,” he said.
“How come?”
Wolf was physically strong and hardworking. When men tumbled onto the stage, or tried to dance with the girls, Wolf would pull them off and have them outside in seconds. The girls liked him, he involved himself in their problems, but he wasn’t “up an’ all over ’em. He don’t touch ’em. I think he’s got someone.”
“One of the girls here?”
“No, he after something bigger. I’ll find out soon as I can.”
Wolf came up out of the cellar and saw me. He wore a tight white tee-shirt and looked fit and toned, as though he’d been exercising. Unfortunately his jeans were too big, his belt just about holding them up.
He was subdued, and didn’t shake my hand. Not that he appeared to be unhappy. He had requested one big thing and received a smaller thing-a job. It was, as Bushy put it, “a hopeful opening,” into which Wolf had moved.
Wolf said, “Let’s speak. Not here.” He added, “What’s with these jeans? Why are they so big?”
“They’re knockoffs,” I said. “Blame my sister.”
He took me up to the room in which he slept, a small dressing room for the girls containing a mirror and dressing table covered with discarded thongs and spangled bras. There was a single mattress under a rattling window covered with a soiled piece of net curtain. Through a tear in the curtain I could see, on the corner, tall Somalians, their busted Primeras lined up on the street outside the cab office.
He said, “These African boys are busy up West all night. They take me with them. You’ve dumped me far out here.”
“What have you got going in town?”
He shrugged. “Ventures.”
As we talked, one of the girls-an Eastern European-came in to fix her hair. Before leaving she changed her thong: naked, she bent forward and dragged the cheeks of her backside open. “Check me being clean, Wolfie, if that’s good,” she said.
Having inspected her, he kissed her on the arse. “Juicy as ever, Lucy.”
She looked at me. “Punter here?”
“I’m a pal of Wolf’s.”
“Sir, you like show?”
“I did the first time I saw it.”
“Next time I make it extra-spicy for you special.”
After she’d gone, Wolf said, “She likes you, didn’t you notice? You still look decent for your age. But you wouldn’t go for a girl like that, would you?” I shrugged. He said, “You know that when I go to any city I want to be with the lowest, the whores, hustlers, criminals. To me these are the finest people. You and I are similar like that.”
“In what way?”
“You must have something like that in you, spending every day with the mentally diseased.”
“The sane are much worse. As you know, calling someone sane isn’t much of a compliment.” I said, “Wolf, I want to know about Val,” and sat down with the joint Miriam had given me as I left.
Wolf told me that he and Valentin had been looking for an excuse to leave London for a while. They’d even considered taking me with them, but decided I should finish at university. I wondered whether I might have been tempted to accompany them. Probably I would have.
In the South of France, Valentin worked in casinos. He was well paid and respected enough to be trusted to train the new recruits. He considered this work to be worthless, but he kept himself together, cycling for miles across the mountains on icy roads.
Wolf said, “Back in his sparse room, he read those huge philosophical books, like a madman always with the Bible, trying to find the truth.” At night, when he left work, women, rich and poor, old and young, would be waiting for him. They wanted to sleep with him. Once they’d done that, they wanted to help him. “They wanted to send him to doctors, to find him a drug to make him well. But he refused. He wanted to be one of the lost ones. He never found a place. We should remember him a moment.”
Wolf bowed his head. I did so too, recalling Valentin earnestly advising me to take up his diet, which was Heinz tomato soup, two slices of bread with margarine spread on them, and an apple-twice a day. He’d sometimes walk five miles across London, wearing only tennis shoes, rather than taking the tube-an even more mephitic hole then-though most people used it for free, easily sneaking past the somnolent staff. Valentin’s ambition had always been to reduce his desire to almost zero; there would be no excess of pleasure. But where did a lifetime of self-punishment get him?