The Last Word (6 page)

‘Yes, we have so much of it we’re frightened all the time.’

‘Good job you’re down here. He’s lucky, my son.’

‘In what way?’

She said, ‘To have work which suits him.’

‘You can’t say fairer than that, Ruth. Clearly a fulfilled life lies ahead of him despite these hard times.’

‘Have you met him?’

‘I don’t think I’ve had that privilege.’

‘You will.’ She went on, ‘Do you think he could work up in London one day?’

‘Why not?’

‘Would you help him, if you could? You must know people who need security.’

‘Indeed.’

‘I’d be ever so grateful. These children had no proper father. The men down here are no good.’

‘Apparently men everywhere are no good, Ruth. But ambition in a young man is a wonderful thing.’

Far from living, as Harry had imagined, in flower-strewn Aga-heated cottages in the verdant enchanted English countryside, the part of the town Julia’s mother directed him to was composed of run-down ugly council houses – many of them boarded up, seemingly abandoned – and shabby graffitied streets. The people looked pasty-faced, slow-moving, ill-kempt, both dozy and violent. Clearly the fathers had scarpered, or been driven out by unemployment, or by the women. Harry seemed to have discovered an island run by teenagers: a semi-violent English poverty and hopelessness unrelieved by years of government investment. You wouldn’t leave your car here, let alone your family.

When the sister emerged, she also sat in silence, her lunch in a plastic box on her knee. To avoid any unnecessary enquiries, Harry dropped off the women halfway up the track. Looking up, as he handed Ruth the £20 loan she had solicited for ‘expenses’, he had the impression, though he couldn’t be sure from such a distance, that Mamoon was standing at his bedroom window, adjusting his collar, his hooded eyes seeming to lift and sparkle with mischievous interest.

Harry hurried into the kitchen to make coffee. Liana looked at him, but said nothing. Soon after, Ruth, her sister, and Julia arrived and began pulling up the carpets and plunging their arms into the toilets. Harry would go to the barn and continue work, for another day, on Peggy’s letters and diaries.

But he went to his room first, to change. While he was doing so, he heard a knock on the door.

‘Harry?’ Mamoon’s gentle tap alarmed Harry, and he dropped the papers he was holding. ‘I need to see you.’

‘You do, sir?’

‘Oh yes. Can we talk later this morning? Will you be available?’

‘Talk? That’s why I’m here, sir, getting under your feet like vermin, as you put it the other day.’

‘See you in the library, my friend,
insh’allah
. I’m looking forward to it.’

‘You are?’

‘Why not? There’s much to say.’

This was a surprise; Mamoon had never before solicited Harry’s company. He either wanted to put the record straight about something, which was unlikely, or Harry was going to be kicked out.

Distracted, tired and guilty after his exertions with Julia, Harry was also concerned he hadn’t got far with his most recent questions to Mamoon, which were about Mrs Thatcher. Why, Harry had asked, would Mamoon like someone with no discernible culture, and who had driven Britain towards vulgarity and consumerism? Besides, anyone would have thought that a scribbling Indian would be the last thing Thatcher would have liked. Apparently, she enjoyed Mamoon’s company, and he had been asked to visit her late at night, in Downing Street. A few days ago Harry had got Mamoon to say that Thatcher ‘stood up to the mob’ and to ‘pointless demagogues like Scargill’, and that ‘Margaret liked men.’ While a scoop about Mamoon’s private conversations with Thatcher would have helped the book, Mamoon wouldn’t say more.

Now, in an attempt to think about how to approach Mamoon more profitably, Harry took off to the woods with Yin and Yang, who could run all day. He said to Alice on the phone, ‘This is turning bad. Mamoon has given me only titbits. I’ve got a thousand facts and dates, but who wants that? What am I to do, my love? How can I really open him up?’

Harry had known he would have to ask Mamoon questions he wouldn’t have put to his friends or, indeed, to any other man. There were many aspects of his friends, and indeed of his girlfriends, that Harry, with English restraint, didn’t want any knowledge of. Forgetting, along with hypocrisy, were, to him, the necessary arts central to living, just as they clearly were to Mamoon. Why then, he wondered, of all things, had he decided to become a literary biographer – someone who sought the truth of another and wished to remake them in his own words? Was this what he should be doing, or would he have been better off as a coastguard, as one of his brothers had recently suggested?

In London last weekend, strolling with his father in Richmond Park, he had consulted him about making progress with Mamoon. The old man said, ‘Persistence is the key, surely you must have learned that from me? If you want to treat a schizophrenic, for instance, particularly one who is more or less catatonic, the only prescription is time and close attention. And you have to enter the fantasy rather than attempt to refute it. It could take months or years before you get anywhere. Sometimes you get nowhere. Not only that, the patients try to make you crazy. They want to deposit their illness in you. At the same time, the doctors get very annoyed with the patients for not getting better, and often punish them, just as teachers become impatient with their pupils. The truth is, Harry, in these relationships there’s a lot going on even when nothing seems to be going on. The sane have always envied the mad for their freedom and ecstasy. Look at your mother,’ he said, ‘she could be adorable, and was adored. But all our love and attention couldn’t keep
her
alive.’

‘Can I ask you now – I’ve never said it. Did you love her?’

‘I did, Harry. She loved other men. I don’t happen exactly to believe in the bourgeois marriage settlement, a form designed to limit sexuality, and which obviously demands too high a price. But she made it difficult for me. She was curious about the world, she was a believer: it was her weakness. If she wanted to know someone, she just followed them, any faker or fakir, and damn the consequences. She disappeared; we were mad with worry; but she came back after a week saying she’d hung out with some DJs in Brighton. You know some of this? Did the boys tell you?’

‘Pretty much.’

He didn’t want to tell his father that he still dreamed about a family holiday in Italy, when he went to his mother’s room to find the door ajar. Looking through, he saw her in bed with a man. They were lying still; he was in her arms. Her clothes were on the floor, but her shoes, oddly enough, were together on a chair – either, he wondered, as a sort of exhibit, or for their own safety. Harry pushed the door a little and went into the room. His mother jumped up, pulling a sheet over herself; the man was exposed. She screamed at Harry to get out.

He ran away, and when he saw her a few hours later she was unaffected, and didn’t mention it. He knew then there was another mother within the mother he believed he knew, and after that he wondered often when he would see his real mother again. But which one would it be? Had she deliberately given him erections by lazily rubbing eczema cream into his skin?

He learned from his brothers that he had escaped awareness of the worst of her extremity, though he assisted when their mother searched the house for bugs and closed the curtains against spies. When that didn’t keep them away, she stowed her three boys in the car and drove them singing, a bottle of vodka in one hand – water was poisoned – to Scotland to escape an abuser. When she went to the police station to report him, her children saw her held in handcuffs, taken away to a locked ward where she was drugged, only to be returned to the family months later, in a worse state.

His father said, ‘You should know, she would be proud of you being a literary man. She was fond – often over-fond – of any prick who could wield a pen nicely. The writers always put their art first, as they should. But they are usually available in the afternoon, at which point their minds give way to their genitals. Women are attracted to artists, of course, as they are to doctors, and prisoners on death row. The powerful and the vulnerable. If you want to continue to get laid, particularly as you get older, that’s where to head, boy.’

‘Did her infidelities hurt you?’

He shrugged and said, ‘I can’t quite count the ways in which we hurt one another. It was the means by which we tried to help one another – me, turning her into a patient, her, turning me into a dull authority – which were as bad as, if not worse, than our actual abuses.’

His father then said the harshest thing that Harry thought he had ever heard.

‘The truth is, she was your whole life and she’ll be in your dreams until your dying day; she was your mother, Harry. But to me she was just another woman. You boys are a very happy memento. You know, when you end a relationship and say you fell out of love, you actually mean you were never really in love. The past is a river, not a statue.’

Although Alice had been against the biography, before he had set off to Mamoon’s at the very beginning, she had insisted Harry practise his interview technique. She was worried that with Mamoon’s short-temperedness and indifference alongside Harry’s blithe politeness, Mamoon would run rings around the boy, and the two would exchange only small talk. Alice had therefore insisted that she and Harry draw up a list of demanding and incisive questions for Mamoon, which she had videoed him asking in as mild and neutral a voice as possible. But Mamoon had conducted numerous interviews with some of the world’s most unpleasant characters, asking them about the children they had murdered and the women they had raped – ‘Did strangling the woman to death complete your pleasure or did you consider it a supplement, like brandy at the end of the meal?’ – and he used silence like a knife. The ‘master’ would always be the one who could wait without anxiety; Mamoon could also, as Rob had predicted, become bored and prickly. ‘The sight of you, Harry,’ said Rob, early on, ‘will no doubt remind him of how little time he has left to live truly and authentically.’

Harry had inadvertently discovered that there were some literary subjects which would rile and arouse Mamoon. These provided usefully unguarded moments, which Harry had to utilise sparingly, for fear of alerting his opponent to the baiting. It was more like road rage than literary criticism, and Mamoon would sit up in his chair. ‘The enervated nancy boy of English writing, the slack-arsed lily-livered mother-loving faggot?’

Harry had referred, in passing, and in a low voice, to E. M. Forster. ‘Why, what is your view, sir?’

‘View? I have no views on a man who claimed he wanted to write about homosexual sex, a subject we certainly needed to know about. Since he lacked the balls to do it, he spent thirty years staring out of the window, when he wasn’t mooning over bus conductors and other Pakis. An almost-man who claimed to hate colonialism using the Third World as his brothel because he wouldn’t get arrested there, as he would showing off his penis in a Chiswick toilet. Apparently he preferred his friends to his country! How brave and original! Of course,’ he went on, his eyes flashing, ‘Orwell was even worse. He’s the worst of the Blairs. Do they still take him seriously in this country?’

‘Mostly as an essayist.’

‘He wrote books for children, or, rather, for children who have the misfortune to be studying him. All that ABC writing, the plain style, the bare, empty mind with a strong undertow of sadism, the sentimental socialism and Big Brother and the pigs, and nothing about love – intolerable. No adult apart from a teacher would bother with one of his novels. If I think of hell, it is being alone forever in room 101 with nothing to read but one of his books.’

‘Didn’t you once say that the mystery of human cruelty is the only subject there is?’

‘That sounds like me, though I repudiate that view. There is love. Neither of these writers, the poof and the puritan, has described a beautiful woman. What sort of writer cannot do that?’

He shuddered; then, having appeared to climax after this jihadic uprush of hatred, he would sink back in his chair, his mouth open, murmuring, ‘I much prefer little Willie Maugham or randy H. G. Wells. Yet the only one I still love to read is the Goddess.’

‘Which one?’

‘She who reminds me of my lonely mongrel alcoholic wandering in London and in Paris, when I first arrived – Jean Rhys. She’s the only female writer in English you’d want to sleep with. Otherwise it’s just Brontës, Eliot, Woolf, Murdoch! Can you imagine cunnilingus with any of them? As Jean said, the world is simple: it’s just a matter of cafes where they like you, and cafes where they don’t.’

Harry knocked softly.

He was standing at the door of the library. Since he couldn’t remember the mantra Alice had insisted would calm him, he repeated to himself, ‘Doom, doom, doom . . .’

‘Come.’

The book-lined room was quiet and cool, the heavy curtains keeping out the light. The desks, piled with the world’s most obscure and difficult books, were antique. Busts, sculpture, paintings and tapestries, some exquisite, some vulgar, had been shipped from Liana’s parents’ house near Bologna. Harry took off his shoes, stepping onto a long Venetian carpet selected by Mamoon when shopping with Liana. It was like walking across a Mantegna towards a hanging judge.

Mamoon had changed out of his usual roomy tracksuit, and was dressed in grey flannel trousers, Italian loafers with grey woollen socks, and a white shirt with the sleeves unbuttoned. The ginger tom on his lap closed his eyes as Mamoon stroked his head.

Harry sat down opposite and placed his notebook and pen, as well as his tape recorder, on the low table.

Mamoon said, ‘Harry, please, dear boy, before you ignite that dreadful recording box, can’t it be my turn to bore you with a question?’

Harry nodded. If he didn’t fall asleep, Mamoon would, occasionally, ask Harry a question which would be direct and difficult to answer, a question which, nonetheless, Harry believed he should answer in order to illustrate that silence was no use.

‘Harry, do you believe in monogamy and fidelity?’ Harry started. ‘Do you?’

‘Yes. Yes I do, yes, in theory.’

‘In theory?’

‘Ah-ha.’

‘You are a theoretician, you say?’

‘In a way.’

‘In what way are you in fact a theoretician?’

Harry said, ‘People say fidelity is the best solution, that everything is simpler inside the prison of love. Fewer people go crazy. The various alternatives make for more unhappiness, don’t they?’

‘How would I know?’ said Mamoon. ‘I have lived this long and still cannot answer the unanswerable questions. People come and ask me for universal truths, but this is the wrong address. You’ll only get universal questions here, the ones that make literature.’

‘How can you expect
me
to answer them?’

‘I’ve seen the way you look at women. We researched you, and heard rumours which shocked us. Luckily Rob vouched for you, otherwise we wouldn’t have considered taking you on. Perhaps, though, you’re not ready to withdraw from the game yet.’

Harry said, ‘My mother died. I needed female attention. There were aunts, Dad’s female friends, and my brothers’ girlfriends. It was a sumptuous pleasure, running into the arms of the women at that age, with many of them being more than nice to me. Perhaps it became something of an obsession, to try and satisfy a woman after being in her debt.’

‘To pay her back for her kindness?’

‘You should know, sir, that at the moment I am very seriously detoxing as far as that side of things goes. I learned I could have a very powerful effect on women. When they wanted to be desired, their passions could be huge. But I’m trying to stop, or at least quieten down, after certain somewhat hazardous escapades and scrapes.’

‘Recently?’

‘Oh God, I should have learned my lesson by now.’

‘What are you saying? I must have an example.’

‘I’m not sure we should get distracted, Mamoon, sir.’

Mamoon leaned forward. He was becoming impatient. ‘The point is, Harry, if I’m not to find you abhorrent, there will have to be more reciprocity all round. Particularly from your side.’ Mamoon tickled the stirring cat under its chin. ‘Do you follow me?’

Harry said, ‘Sir, I’d been on a bit of a binge with the women. I’d asked for too much. My debts were being called in. I picked up a woman on the tube.’

‘Which line?’

‘Central.’

‘Ah yes. Marble Arch. Bond Street.’

‘She was a woman I adored and then pitied – but perhaps led on – an isolated person, an overseas mature student, who eventually wouldn’t leave me alone, and then deliberately became pregnant by me. Or so she said. Apparently it was her last chance, at her age. She wanted nothing else from me – but a child! I was worrying. I remembered that she wrote everything down.’

‘Ah-ha. Everything is recorded. Go on.’

‘At some peril, I climbed up the side of her building and broke into her place, to read her diary and find out the facts about her pregnancy. The door opened while I was consulting the evidence. I thought I would die of a heart attack. It was her flatmate, who had a knife. She was so terrified I thought she might accidentally kill me.

‘I said I would explain everything. We put away some whisky. I slept with her. Then I refused to do it again. So this woman confessed everything to her friend, who got in her car and hunted me down. It turned out that for three days she waited for me in various places, before trying to run me over while I was cycling. My back wheel was crushed. When I looked up and saw her eyes, I threw the bike down and ran for my life. Meanwhile, I had to keep all this from my girlfriend, with whom I’d begun living.’

‘Alice – is that her name?’

‘Yes, she’s gentle and hopeless, and sort of flounders about. But she’s good to look at, and I’m mad about her. Before, if I could, I liked to have three girls a day.’

‘Three? You could manage that?’

‘Four is my record. No, five. What is yours, sir?’ When Mamoon said nothing, Harry said, ‘Now I am determined to put the devil behind me and go straight. But at that time there were others I hadn’t quite finished with – left over from an earlier period, you might say. One had an abortion. Another attempted suicide – in front of me. One of my brothers said I should never have to resort to touching my own penis, though it would have saved me some trouble.’

‘You seem to specialise, if that is the word, in making others crazy. Can it be deliberate?’

‘It’s been a bad run, Mamoon, sir. But at times it seemed worth it.’

‘In what way?’

‘The women were spectacular.’

‘How?’

‘One of them had big eyes,’ he said. ‘Every time she opened them wide, it was as though all the clothes were peeling from her body. She was a violinist who’d play Bach, and sing to me.’

‘Ah.’

‘So you see, they required the sacrifice. I knew I’d be a fool to follow them, but more of a fool not to.’

‘Good. A man who hasn’t left behind him a string of broken women has hardly been alive. And if anyone manages to get their sexuality and their love lined up together, they are indeed lucky. It is as rare as a fine spring day in the country.’

Harry said, ‘I am glad, I have to say, to be here in the countryside, where it’s quieter. I can be more monstrous than I would like to believe – in my passions, and in the way they suddenly end, as if the relationships never happened. I’m one of those people who needs to know where their next meal is coming from – just in case it doesn’t come at all. Not that women like to be so used, of course.’

‘Why behave in such a way?’

‘I have thought about this, Mamoon, sir, you’ll be surprised to hear.’

‘And?’

‘I love the razor’s edge. I want to be cut open. My terror is of a bourgeois, ordinary life. I can’t bear the everyday constraint. I believe that ordinariness would put out my spark, such as it is.’

Mamoon said, ‘I have said this: we must bow down in gratitude to the fundamentalist, who reminds us how dangerous books and sex are. All sex, and indeed all pleasure, must include a poisonous drop of perversion, of devilish transgression – of evil, even – for it to be worth getting into bed for. It’s become banal, now that it is ubiquitous. As a keen student of the scandal sheets, I have learned that adultery – pleasure plus betrayal – is the only fun left to us. Marriage domesticates sex but frees love. It is unsuitable as a solution to human need, but as with capitalism, the alternatives are much worse.

‘But all this,’ Mamoon continued, waving at the room, ‘that which you refer to as the everyday, the bourgeois and the dull? I want it. I need it. I love it.’

‘You do?’ Harry leaned forward to turn on the recorder.

‘Do not touch that,’ said Mamoon. ‘I’ve come home, Harry. I did, the other day, have to lower a knife into the toaster and it was more danger than I can bear. I’m sure it will happen to you – the desire for comfort and contentment. The desire not to be special. But I had heard from someone, perhaps Rob – aren’t you intending to get married?’

‘I hope so. Yes, that’s what I want to do. Definitely. I see marriage as a kind of defence, a levee against the turbulence of desire. Do you think it might work like that?’

‘Why would you think that?’

Harry picked up the tape recorder and showed it to Mamoon. ‘I’m supposed to ask you the questions.’

‘Your life is more interesting than mine.’

‘You won’t write about me, will you?’

‘I’d like you more as a fictional character, and you should be flattered to appear in one of my works, even without your trousers. However, Harry, my clock has stopped. The embalmer is rolling up his sleeves. Even as we speak, seventy-two virgins are slipping into schoolgirl uniforms for me. You must live, and I confirm: always put your penis first. Harry, you know I consider you to be an ass and a twerp, but it doesn’t follow you haven’t taught me a lot.’

‘Thank you for that. It cheers me. But what did I teach you, sir?’

‘My backhand was all over the place, you know that. I’d been making that wrong swing for years. It was too high.’ Mamoon went on, ‘You’re far more sophisticated, thoughtful and well read than I was at your age. But in other ways you’re very crude and self-deceiving.’

‘I am?’

‘I’m sorry if I just laughed at you.’

‘Did you laugh at me?’

‘Didn’t you hear my noise?’

‘I did, sir, and became alarmed that you were unwell. Why did you make your noise?’

‘The juxtapositions you described are laughable.’ Mamoon said, ‘On the one hand there is the banal bourgeois existence, and on the other a fantasy of what could be called limitless enjoyment – as though those were the only alternatives.’

‘Yes,’ said Harry. ‘It seems royally stupid now you put it like that.’

‘I’m sorry if I was abrupt. But the way you picture it is misleading. The frame, one might say, is in the wrong place. You haven’t applied your considerable intelligence to this matter and I want to know why. It’s almost a fundamentalist separation you have going.’ He stared at the ceiling. ‘The novel is contamination. The novel sees the complication.’ He went on, ‘You’d be advised to attend to something Joseph Conrad once said, not that he’s a writer I can care much for now – very little gives me pleasure, as you know, since I am almost dead.’

‘What did Conrad say?’

‘“The discovery of new values is a chaotic experience. This is a momentary feeling of darkness. I let my spirit float supine on that chaos.”’

‘Floating supine on that chaos,’ repeated Harry. ‘That’s what I need.’

‘It’s the values bit I would attend to, if I were you.’

Harry noticed that Mamoon was looking at him with some amusement. Harry said, ‘Am I a weak young man, do you think? Or someone who has more pleasure than they deserve?’

‘Pleasure?’ Mamoon laughed. ‘Most people don’t know how to maximise their pleasure, Harry, they sexualise their pain. Surely you’ve noticed that most people live without love, spending their lives trying to find people they’re not turned on by.’

‘Why?’

‘Think about it.’

‘Could that possibly be a picture of you, sir?’

Mamoon leaned forward in his chair and said, ‘I hate to express a view, but you insist on forcing me. I never want to be too clear. Nothing confuses like clarity. The best stories are the open ones, those you don’t quite understand. But my idea of these matters is very simple: the loves you describe are very reduced encounters, of course. Not relationships, no. They couldn’t be described as such. They’re addictions, or anti-relationships. Perhaps you only like to be with people you hate?’

‘How so, sir?’

‘Relationships which don’t develop become sadistic. There has to be an exchange which develops both participants: there must be some sort of transformation, or new thing, otherwise there is violence. The violence of those who wish to explode out of a situation.’

‘Do you know that well, sir?’

Mamoon shrugged. ‘Mutual transformation is rare, as good things are. In my view, a person should live as they wish until they find someone they want to be faithful to. After all, as you say, one can’t suck oneself off.’

‘Exactly.’

Mamoon went on, ‘I think we’ve said enough for today. I feel the need to lie down for some time and think about what you’ve made me say.’ He smiled at Harry. ‘Why don’t you invite your girlfriend to stay here? I would like to see her.’

‘You would?’

‘I have the feeling that a young woman’s presence would make me more voluble.’

‘How come?’

Mamoon closed his eyes and said, ‘Perhaps it is again time for me to be reminded of the finer and baser things. When Victor Hugo was buried, you couldn’t find a whore in all of Paris. They were too busy paying their respects. That was a man – and he still has a show on in the West End.’

‘Right.’ Harry collected his things and began to pad backwards down the carpet towards the door.

But before he got out, Mamoon opened his eyes and said, ‘You might find that you can’t buy your sexuality off the peg in some sort of one-size-fits-all fantasy – that crass bourgeois idea, the morality of slaves. If you thought about it seriously, you would see that people have to shape and form their sexuality out of what they’re given. But it’s more like writing a book than reading from a script.’

‘Thanks.’

‘My pleasure. How is our little psychonarrative – my monument, your hauntology – coming along?’

‘It’s getting there, sir. But there’s some considerable distance to go.’

‘Good. There always will be, I suspect. I hope you are turning me into a story I can enjoy. Am I interesting? I’m so looking forward to being surprised by how I come out.’

Harry said, ‘You will be very surprised.’

‘Why?’

‘The truth is a tattoo on your forehead. You can’t see it yourself. I am your mirror.’