“It’s heavy.”
“I’ll give ’em my Latin.” He checked himself in the mirror and looked at me. “Your wig’s crooked.”
“Can you adjust it for me?”
“A pleasure, man of leisure. You’re looking good, man, fully expressed. I told you I needed you here with me.”
Bushy went out before me, back to the stage area. Henry was waiting outside, with so much sweat coming off him I thought a pipe had burst over his head.
I showed him the blade before putting it in my pocket. “A close shave.” Henry could see from my face that something bad had happened. “I need a drink. Christ, Henry, some people are really crazy.”
Bushy’s second appearance was indeed quieter, mostly Latin tunes accompanied by some gruff crooning. The music became so smooth and serious that people began to make love around him, on sofas and cushions; as they copulated, Bushy adjusted his time and rhythm. “I was the illustrator of fuck,” he told me later. “As their rhythm changed so did mine, in fuck-adjustment. Then I saw I could influence their fuck movement, making ’em do different fucking things.”
A couple lying on a sofa invited me to join them. I was left in no doubt, in such a place, where other mundane norms were suspended, of how polite and courteous everyone was.
“He likes to watch,” she whispered. I just about managed to fuck the woman while the man looked on, idly stroking his flaccid penis, smiling and nodding at me as though I were doing him a great favour. After a time I felt I was. Occasionally, the woman attempted to suck him, but otherwise he left all the love work to me. “Thanks,” he said as I rested breathlessly in his wife’s arms. When I left, we shook hands.
It was late when Bushy drove us back. Henry and Miriam were asleep in the back of the car. I wanted to shower.
“Thanks for my tune, Bushy,” I said.
“Pleasure,” he replied. “Enjoyed it, sir.”
As an encore, and to thank me, Bushy had played Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads.” One time in the car, when he’d been humming it, I told him it was one of my favourite songs. It was, after all, at a place where three highways meet-a crossroads-where Oedipus kills his father, the paedophile Laius, after which Jocasta, his wife and mother, says, “Have no more fear of sleeping with your mother. / How many men, in dreams, have lain with their mothers! / No reasonable man is troubled by such things.” Bushy considered this founding myth a little soap-opera-like for his tastes. He replied by saying that Robert Johnson, who had bad eyesight and was rumoured to have sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his talent, was poisoned by a jealous husband in a bar called Three Forks.
Now Bushy said, “People don’t realise how difficult it is to play that song properly, using Johnson’s fingering. But I learned it for you, because you helped me.”
“Thank you again, Bushy,” I said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
I found Miriam washing up the next time I went to her house to watch the football. She didn’t turn round to address me but said, over her shoulder, “You’ve been keeping away from me.”
“I’ve had new patients. I’ve been asked to lecture. You know, I really enjoy my work.”
“So what? You didn’t like the Sootie. You’ve told everyone but me.”
“Didn’t I look funky in the wig? Even you admitted I made an effort.”
“You were taking the piss, calling them the clusterfuckers and stuff. You were acting superior that night and you know it.”
“Not only me.”
“Who?”
I said, “Henry was like an officious parent commanding his children to enjoy their holiday. ‘You must like this or else!’” I added, “It reminded me of our society’s implausible commitment to optimism, and how much the depressed are hated.”
She turned and threw water at me. “Snob-nob! What did you actually say to Henry?”
“I told him it wasn’t a real orgy. The real orgy is elsewhere.”
“Where?”
“Baghdad.” I went on: “It suddenly became my job to calm Bushy down, while you sat with a group of women discussing animals and tattoos, just as you would at home. The men and their penises didn’t appear to inject much zing into your ming.”
“I may have been quiet, but I was having a lookout,” she said. “There’s a masked woman Henry always goes for.”
“Is she there often?”
Miriam shrugged. “I’m not certain which one she is. People look similar with their clothes off, and I never wear my glasses in there.”
I raised Miriam’s cat above my head. “Of course not. Are you jealous?”
“He fucks the women, but he always comes in me. That’s the rule. He’s mine and he bloody well knows it, otherwise I’ll tattoo my name onto his arse myself.” She said, “Jamal, I’m warning you, if anyone annoys me today, I’m in one of my moods, they’re gonna get it, okay? By the way, that cat’s about to piss on you.”
Now I was laughing, and she was shaking her head darkly. I knew that any dismissiveness of the Sootie was a sore subject for Miriam because she and Henry had recently been in deep dispute about “the scene.”
After I had mentioned the Sootie to Karen-this was a while ago-she had gone to investigate with Miriam, wrapped in an acre of sticky plastic, looking not unlike a potato in clingfilm, as Henry put it. She had decided to make three programmes for TV about what she liked to describe, in “tab-speak,” as “the underbelly-or potbelly, more like-of British suburban sexuality”: swapping, dogging, fetishism and the like. She had already taken Miriam out to lunch to discuss it.
Miriam was excited not only by the idea of appearing on TV, but of working as an “adviser.” Karen had suggested that Miriam would be the right person to persuade potential participants in the programme to take part. Miriam saw it as an “opportunity”; it would make her “a professional” in the media, like Henry’s friends. Miriam had even said that Karen was planning to feature me on the programme, as a “psychological expert.” “She promised you’d get paid,” Miriam had added. “What do you think?”
“Was Karen cheerful?”
“Oh yes. When I saw her, she was about to go out on a date with an American TV producer. I gave her great advice about what to wear.”
But when Miriam had put Karen’s proposition to Henry as something they could do together, without any hesitation he’d trashed Karen and “her ilk,” delivering an intense monologue about “the end of privacy.” If everyone could become a celebrity, and no celebrity could control how they were seen, there could be no more heroes or villains: we were living in a democracy of the mad, of the victim and the exhibitionist. The media had become a freak show.
“What’s the alternative?” asked Miriam, exasperated.
Henry argued that such intimacy, such a close-up of the individual, had always been the privilege of the novel and the drama. That was how, until recently, we examined the Other, through the imagination and intelligence of an artist like Ibsen or Proust. Now everyone revealed everything but no one understood anything. Being gawped at on television would not give him pleasure, nor would it provide one watt of illumination for the public.
Most of this Miriam characterised as “overbrainy bollocks,” but she understood Henry found her desire to work on the programmes as “vulgar and idiotic.” It wasn’t something she wanted to do alone, and it wasn’t something he could participate in.
“I’ve never felt so different to him,” she said. “We do everything together. Until he announces he’s a superelitist, too grand to go along with a ditch pig like me. The other day he said, ‘Miriam, how did you live so long and yet manage to pick up so little?’”
“What did you say?”
“‘I haven’t had fucking time! I’ve had five children and more abortions than you’ve had orgies! While you people were nancying around in theatres, I was in a psychiatric hospital!’”