Early evening, and my last patient gone into the night, having endeavoured to leave me his burden.

Now someone is kicking at the front door. My son, Rafi, has called for me. The boy lives a couple of streets away with his mother, Josephine, and comes plunging round on the scooter we bought at Argos with his PSP, trading cards and football shirts in his rucksack. He is wearing a thick gold chain around his neck, a dollar sign hanging from it. Once he told me he felt tired if he wasn’t wearing the right clothes. His face is smooth and a little smudged in places, with scraps of food dotted around his mouth. His hair is razor-cropped, by his mother. We touch fists and exchange the conventional middle-class greeting, “Yo, bro—dog!”

The twelve-year-old tries to hide his head when he sees me because he’s just the right height to be grabbed, but where can you hide a head? I want to kiss and hold him, the little tempest, and smell his boy flesh, pulling him to the ground and wrestling with him. His head is alive with nits, and he squints and squirms, with his father so pleased to see him, saying hopefully, “Hello, my boy, I’ve missed you today, what have you been doing?”

He shoves me away. “Piss off, don’t touch me, keep away, old man—none of that!”

We’re going to eat and find company, and since I’ve been a single man, the place to do that is Miriam’s.

Rafi has some juice, and we exchange CDs. On the way to Miriam’s, we drive past Josephine’s house, the place he left earlier, slowing down. Josephine and I have been separated for eighteen months. We had stayed together because of our shared pleasure in the kid, because I feared years of TV dinners, and because, at times, we liked the problem of each other. But in the end we couldn’t walk down the street without her on one side, me on the other, shouting complaints across the road. “You didn’t love me!” “You were cruel!” The usual. You don’t want to hear about it, but you will, you will.

I doubted whether she’d be at home, or even that a light would be on, as she had begun to see someone. I had deduced this from the fact that a couple of weeks ago Rafi had turned up at my house wearing a new Arsenal shirt with HENRY on the back. He looked shifty already, and required no confirmation that no son of mine was coming in the house wearing that. We had honourable, legitimate reasons for being Manchester United fans—to be explained at length later—and he did take the shirt off, replacing it with the more respectable GIGGS top he’d left in his room. Neither of us mentioned the Arsenal shirt again, and there was no addition to the kit. The boy loved his father, but whether he’d have been able to resist a trip to Highbury with a strange man who fancied his mother was another matter. We would see.

We were both aware that she required him out of the way, staying with me, in order to see her boyfriend. At such times we felt homeless, abandoned. I guess we were both thinking of what she was doing, of the hope and happiness not directed at us when she was with her new lover.

How could we not drive past, looking? When I see her in my mind, she is standing on the steps of that house, tall, unmoving and unreachable, as though she had put her self far away, where no one could touch it. We met when she was young, twenty-three, and I was maddened by my own passion and her young beauty. She was, then, virtually a teenager, and she had remained so, indifferent to most of the world’s motion and fuss, as though she had seen through it all, seen through everything, until there was nothing to do or believe in.

What did preoccupy her were her “illnesses”—cancers, tumours, diseases. Her body was in a perpetual state of crisis and breakdown. She adored doctors. A donkey with a medical degree was a stallion to her. But her passion was to frustrate them, if not to try to drive them mad, as I knew to my own cost. The hopeless search for cures was her vocation. Freud’s original patients were hysterical women, and one of the first things he said about them was “All that is present is what might be called a symbolic relation between the cause and the pathological phenomenon, a relation such as healthy people form in dreams.” Josephine was dreaming while awake, and her adventures as a somnambulist were something else, too. During her excursions out of the house and into the night, she would smash her face against trees. Of course, when you love the unwell, you constantly have to ask yourself: Do I love her, or her illness? Am I her lover or her healer?

“Okay?” I said, when he’d seen she’d already gone out.

“Yes.”

It was a twenty-minute drive to my older sister’s. In the car Rafi pulled a silver disc from his bag and slipped it into the player. Unlike me, he is more than capable with such machines. It is Mexican hip-hop, of all things. Sam, Henry’s son, records music for him; Henry brings the discs over, and Rafi and I listen to them together. (“Dad, what’s a ‘ho’?” “Ask your mother.”) Luckily for him, Rafi was bilingual. At home, mostly, he was middle-class; on the street and at school he used his other tongue, Gangsta. His privilege was in being able to do both.

Rafi was checking his hair in the passenger mirror as we went, blowing himself kisses—“pimp, you look hip!”—before dragging a black hood over his head. I noticed he was wearing his mother’s expensive perfume again, which set off an uproar of feeling in me, but I managed to say nothing. The unlikely thing was that he and I liked the same music and, often, the same films. I wore his tee-shirts, refusing to give them back; and he wore my hoodies and my Converse All Stars, which were big but not that big for him. I was looking forward to the time when I didn’t have to buy jeans but could take his.

Miriam lived in a rough, mainly white neighbourhood in what used to be called Middlesex—recently voted Britain’s least popular county—though every place is becoming London now, the city stain spreading.

The typical figures on the street were a young man in a green bomber jacket, jeans and polished boots, followed by an underdressed teenager with her hair scraped back—the “Croydon face-lift”—pushing a pram. Other girls in microminis drifted sullenly about, boys on bicycles circling them, drinking sweet vodka smashes from the bottle and tossing them into gardens. And among these binge-mingers, debtors and doggers hurried Muslim women with their heads covered, pulling their children.

Outside Miriam’s detached council house, Rafi hooted the horn. One of her helpful kids came out and moved their car so I could park in the front yard, next to the two charred armchairs which had sat there for months.

It was five kids she had, I think, from three different men, or was it three kids from five men? I wasn’t the only one to lose count. I knew at least that the eldest two had left home: the girl was a fire officer, and the guy worked at a rehearsal studio for bands; both were doing well. After the insanity of her childhood and adolescence, this was what Miriam had done—got these children through—and she was proud of it.

The area was gang-ridden, and political parties of the Right were well supported. Muslims, who were attacked often on the street, and whose fortunes and fears rose and fell according to the daily news, were their target. Yet if one of the Right’s candidates tried campaigning anywhere near her house, Miriam would shoot out of her chair and rush outside yelling, “I’m a Muslim single-mother Paki mad cunt! If anyone’s got any objection, I’m here to hear it!” She’d be waving a cricket bat around her head, with her kids and “assistant,” Bushy, dragging at her to get inside.

But no one wanted a war with Miriam. She had people’s “respect” and, often, their love. It seems funny now, but as a teenager she’d been a Hells Angel. A month I think she lasted, before she decided the swaggering Kent boys were too straight for her. “Builders in leather,” she called them. “Not real bikers.” No wonder I became an intellectual.

She’d also have fistfights in our local pubs, with both men and women. “When I’m angry I feel at my best,” she explained to me once. Half-Indian, half-idiot she used to be called. The mongrel dog. I used to wish she’d get a good smacking, in the hope that it would turn her into someone I could like, or at least understand. It had been quite a feat, and something I was proud of, that, although we’d always seen each other, often reluctantly, in the past two years we had become close friends. I had begun to go regularly to her house.

It had taken me a long time to come to enjoy Miriam, mostly because she caused Mum such hair-tearing, brain-whirring upset. Me too, of course. I cannot forget, though, that whatever chaos she has made, here and in Pakistan, and you’ll be hearing about this, it’s not as bad as the crime I have committed.

I live every day with a murder. A real one. Killer, me. There; I’ve told you. It’s out. Now everything is different. Until I put down those words, I had trusted only one other person with the information. If it got around, my career as a mind doctor might be impeded. It wouldn’t be good for business.

As always, the back door to Miriam’s was open. Rafi ran in and disappeared upstairs. He knew there’d be a small crowd of kids looking at the latest Xbox games or “snide” DVDs with Thai subtitles, recorded from the screen in a Bangkok cinema. I was glad to have my son join the noise and disorder. The kids in this area, even at his age, appeared older and less naive than my son. For them, school was mainly an inconvenience.

But Miriam’s kids, and Miriam herself, would never let the neighbours kick Rafi around. He’d emerge with eye-strain, less articulate and, at the same time, full of new words like cuss, sick, hectic, deep and, more surprisingly, radical, for me a word redolent with hope and joyful disruption, from which it had now become divorced. Rafi, however, would take exception to my appropriation of his words. If I were to say, for instance, “Radical-hectic, man!” he’d murmur, “Embarrassing, sad fat bald old man nearly dead. Better hush your mouth.”

Josephine had never disliked Miriam; she had, at the beginning, gone to some trouble to know her, but soon found she couldn’t take too much. She did envy Miriam’s “egotism,” saying, however, that Miriam “talked and talked in the hope of finding something to say,” comparing the endless stream of her conversation to the experience of having a plastic bag tightened slowly over your face.

Josephine preferred to speak through her ailments, and was suspicious and envious of the mouthy and the articulate, though she had considerable appetite for any talk of—or books about—ulcers, migraines, irritable bowel syndrome, viruses, infections and nightmares, many of which she attempted to treat with carrots, banana drinks and extreme yoga positions. She took so much aspirin I suspected she considered it to be a vitamin.

Josephine maintained she could always tell when Rafi had been to Miriam’s: his language was fruitier than usual. Josephine and I had argued furiously, as parents have to, over what to put into the kid. I let him watch TV, eat what he wanted and use bad words, the more creatively the better. Familiarity with the language and its limits, I called it. For a while he referred to me only as Mr. Cunty Cunt. “What’s wrong with that?” I said to Josephine. “The Mister shows respect.” From her point of view, I was lax, loose, louche. What use was a father who could not prohibit? My debates with Josephine, furious and disagreeable, were over the deepest things—our ideas of what a good person was and how they would speak.

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.

I say that I don’t know how Bushy made a living out of cab driving, but I suppose Miriam must have paid him a percentage of her earnings. If anyone asked him, in the English manner, what he did, he would reply, “Nuffin’ without being paid.”

Miriam and I knew well enough that Bushy had something of our grandfather’s “ingenuity”; perhaps that’s why we liked him. But she had it too: certainly Miriam usually had some money moving in and out. Bushy was a trusted assistant in her numerous small-time “trades”: smuggled TVs, computers, iPods, phones, cigarettes, porno, alcohol and dope, as well as the leather jackets and DVDs she obtained and sold, via him and the older children, around the neighbourhood and, mostly, in the Cross Keys.

Not long ago she bought two hundred pairs of stolen Levi’s from a Polish builder. Having realised they were all size 46 waist, we had to spend a weekend ripping out the labels so she could sell them as various sizes, knowing that people at a car-boot sale wouldn’t want to try them on, being dazzled, we predicted, by the low price. She’d also obtained a consignment of stolen Turgeniev vodka, for which the price was 5,000 pounds. I helped her out with a loan, and soon the local pubs and clubs were awash with the lousy stuff. People might be bleeding from the stomach, but we had made, as Miriam put it, “a good honest profit.”

Miriam was a more capable criminal than my former pals and accomplices Wolfgang or Valentin, so much so that I liked to call her an “entrepreneur,” at which she scoffed. However, it was true that she had spent years building up her “business.” She knew when to sell, and who desired what. Her success had required cunning, tenacity and knowledge of others, and she kept herself, her family and several neighbours just about alive by it, quite a feat. She and the law, therefore, were not on good, or even respectful, terms. The law was naked Power, to be avoided and ignored. She liked to say she’d never appeared on any government computer, as though this liberated her.

Despite her generous description of me as a “doctor of the soul,” I wasn’t so respectable that, after leaving Josephine and returning to live in the two floors of the flat I used as a consulting room, the cramped, damp cellar was not already full of Bushy-delivered plastic bags containing “hot” goods Miriam was afraid to keep in her house, as well as rolls of Bubble Wrap, for which she had no room and hadn’t been able to secure a buyer. I was, however, glad to be keeping my transgressions alive, even in such a lowly capacity. I would, when I got round to it, use the Bubble Wrap to keep Rafi’s old shoes and football boots from getting damp, mementos of his fading childhood.

As a young man myself, studying movie and pop stars, I strove to make myself less nerdy, more hip. But I had always been the quiet, good, bookish one. There wasn’t room for two show-offs in our household, and I believed that, as long as I kept still, didn’t move, there would be less trouble around me. Father hadn’t protected me. He’d lived with his English wife, our mother, and us—his two half-and-half kids—for only a short time, eventually returning to the subcontinent where he’d been born, settling down in Karachi, Pakistan, which he called “the new country.” There, briefly, he found a new wife, though much of the time he was travelling as a journalist in China, America or Mexico.

Mother and Miriam were as furiously involved with each other as any married couple. Having little choice, I had always listened to Miriam, though I had learned that when I did wish to speak, I should just kick off, unintimidated and loud. As a result, Miriam and I still talk simultaneously, as though Mother, who had, after all, two ears, was still attempting to listen to us. Luckily, Mother, who was not only alive but very well, now had better things to do than pay us any attention.

Even as a teenager, usually pregnant and tripping—Janis Joplin was her heroine—Miriam had never been sullen. She believed our overheated blood made us talkative, restless and liable to fling things at people’s heads. Mother had been red-haired and, at one time, bohemian. So there we were as kids, this oddball Muslim-Christian mix, and single-parented too—which was unusual then—living in a straight white neighbourhood.

Now, sighing contentedly, I sat down at my sister’s table. One of the kids brought me dhal, rice and beer. “Uncle,” they called me, respectfully. I opened the paper, in the hope of reading about others’ sexual lives—politicians’ in particular. I had considered taking Rafi to the cinema or to a restaurant this evening, but this was where I liked to be, the only family home I had now.

Bushy sometimes ate with me. “I’m going to fuckin’ ’ave that!” he’d cry, assailing a pork pie like a half-starved goblin who’d just emerged from underground.

But now he was at the back door with his sack, saying, “Hey, Jamal, I had this weird dream about a guitar, a dog and a trampoline. And—”

Miriam interrupted. “Leave off. The doctor don’t do off-the-peg dreams—without being paid.”

“What’s the whack then, to have a dream read? Or d’you reckon it’ll be cheaper to lay off the cheese?”

“It’s a good question,” I said.

“It ain’t a long dream.” It had not occurred to me to charge per dream, or even for its duration. Perhaps, for a satisfying interpretation, I’d be rewarded with a tip. He said, “Or do yer only do posh people?”

“Bushy, if you want, I will hear one of your dreams when I have time.”

“Thank you, boss, I’d be grateful. I better get some sleep, then.”

“Off you trot now, Bushy,” Miriam said.

If I was surprised by her defence of me, it was because in certain moods Miriam found my work not so much risible as ridiculous. (She had said to me that the only other man of letters she knew was the postman.) She considered my “nutters” to be suckers, paying to hear me nod or say “So?”

If that weren’t bad enough, it was exclusively “egotists” and the morally weak who would part with large amounts of money in order to talk, to be heard, by only me. Nevertheless, it had been Miriam who encouraged me to charge my wealthy patients more, in order that I could see others for smaller fees. I might subvert someone’s deepest beliefs, but I didn’t mess with the market. Most people find it unbearable that money means so much to them; they don’t want what they want.

When Miriam herself decided to see an “adviser,” it was hard facts she was after: whether, for instance, a particular crystal healer would tell her if it would rain on Sunday when she was having a car-boot sale, or whether there was “hope”—in other words, would she get a good price for the Bubble Wrap and the new line of wraparound sunglasses she was hawking.

In the contemporary Freudian style, I liked to be modest. I would claim neither to predict nor even to “cure.” Sometimes, brashly, I might use the word modify or, more pompously, speak of “enlarging the patient’s capacity for pleasure by reducing inhibition.” Mostly, I believed in the efficacy of conversation—all Freud demanded of his patients was wilder words; they didn’t have to live differently—as a way to expose hidden conflicts.

Nevertheless, I was told by Bushy, as though it were a secret, that Miriam “looked up” to me. This might have been because her neighbours had started to come to me with child-care problems, eczemas, addictions, depressions, phobias. The working class were always the worst served in terms of mental health. But I was moved: at last I could impress her.

Miriam had been a terrible child, tantrummy, screaming and absolute. A girl who claimed to be neglected but who was at the centre of the house, shoving me aside, often physically. Yet she and I had once liked each other. This was when we were children, conspiring together in the bedroom we shared until she was ten. Mother had moved downstairs, into a box room, “the coffin,” we called it. Miriam and I would play tricks on the neighbours, go scrumping for apples and roam around the fields together, looking for trouble. Our fights had always been apocalyptic, though, and she would tear wildly at my face. I bore the ruts and tears even as a teenager, which was when I started to hate her, when everything she did was too grown-up for me to participate in.

Now, in Miriam’s house, I seemed to serve as some sort of symbolic authority. Thankfully it was a formal role, like some presidents, and mainly involved me sitting down; at her place the world was my sofa. Until Henry, Miriam had only engaged with violent, stupid or addicted men. But here there were few actual men around, and none as bookwormy or word aware as me. Where were they? In the pub? In prison? Heaven only knows how the neighbourhood women and girls got to be perpetually pregnant. In creating a society of mothers and babies, it was as though the women believed that, if they got rid of the men entirely, they would no longer need them, they would forget about them, and about sex and the confusion which accompanied it.

There were many loose adolescent boys around, in white trainers and heavily gelled, shining, thorny hair, wearing, with their acne, chains they’d obtained, no doubt, from Miriam, both of whose arms, from wrist to elbow, were covered in metal bangles. If she continued with the metal, she might as well wear a suit of armour.

At times her kitchen was like a waiting room, as sullen boys, secure in gangs but lacking good-bad authorities, waited to see me, a part-time, suburban Godfather. They’d shuffle their feet, their eyes scatting about, barely able to speak. “Sir, if it’s okay, can I tell yer, this girl’s pregnant…” “Mister, I done this bad thing…”

Miriam said to me, “I’ve been speaking to Dad.”

“How is he?”

“He needs some human warmth.”

“Heaven’s a lonely place, eh?”

“It can be, you know. People have the wrong idea about it.”

Having failed to reach him in this world, Miriam thought she might have more luck contacting Dad in the “other” dimension. We had both parted from him in absurd and awful circumstances; and she still pursued his forgiveness and understanding.

Miriam was two years older than me. Before she immigrated to the far side of eccentricity, Miriam had been the intelligent one, quicker, funnier, more easily able to grasp difficult ideas, and far less nervous and reticent. The reading I hid myself in as a child she considered a waste of time. What was a book compared to experience? Mum and I would sit in the house reading together, but Miriam was more like our father, always with others, talking, kicking people in the legs, making wild dramas.

These days, however, little that was new or not mundane entered her head; she was weary. I wanted to say that I thought we should go somewhere, to the seaside or to Venice, somewhere to talk, rest and refill ourselves. But I was tired myself—the separation from Josephine weighed on me; how exhausting it is to hate!—and really I didn’t have the energy to travel.

After I’d eaten the dhal, I asked Miriam to call Rafi down. He always jumped nervously at her voice. When he appeared, he complained that he wanted to stay the night. Things could get riotous among the children even if they were quiet; they’d still be watching Dumb and Dumber or even Blade II at four in the morning. He lived too ordered a life between me and his mother, but I wouldn’t be able to pick him up from Miriam’s at breakfast time. I was seeing my first patient at seven, and I wouldn’t have time to pack his school bag, fill his lunch box and prepare his football gear.

Before we left, I remembered to ask Miriam about the dope.

“I have a friend who needs it,” I said. “I’m not telling you who.”

“It’s Henry then. As it’s him, I’ll have to get up,” she said, ignoring the stuff she kept on the table in a shoebox. “I’m not giving him this; you’d be better off smoking Marmite.”

I noticed how heavy she was, and getting heavier, as she got to her feet and moved around, holding on to the furniture as she went.

While she rummaged around in various drawers and bags, sniffing, squishing and shouting at the now absent driver, “Bushy! Bushy—where’s the decent stuff?”, I informed her that Henry was considering a production of Ibsen’s Ghosts. Years ago I’d taken Miriam to see a production of short Beckett pieces Henry had done with students. These end-of-term plays with tyro actors, which he did every couple of years, were highly considered, and packed with other directors, writers and even critics. This particular show had impressed Miriam, or at least I thought so: she’d fallen silent. “What’s Henry doing?” she’d say. “Any more of those sad Becketts we can go and see?”

“Okay?” Having realised Bushy had left for the Cross Keys, she was holding up a piece of hash the size of a dice. “Why does your friend want this?”

“I think Henry’s discovered dissipation in his old age,” I said. “He’s taken up drinking, too. He always appreciated wine, but now it’s the effect he’s after.”

She asked, “Anything else?”

“What’s on your mind?”

“Does he want any pornos?” She giggled. “Remember when you used to work in that side of things?”

“Thanks for reminding me. I wish I hadn’t told you.”

“Don’t you tell me everything?”

“I try not to.”

“You didn’t write the films, though, did you?”

“No, not the films,” I said.

“That’s where you’d have made the money. You didn’t act in the pornos either, did you?”

“For God’s sake, Miriam, can you see me acting, particularly without trousers?”

“Do you talk to your patients about your dodgy past?”

“No.”

“There’s a lot about you they don’t know.”

“They’re not supposed to know. They need me to be a blank screen. As for Henry,” I went on, “he thinks he’s too old for sex, and his body resembles a plate of spaghetti—or a mudslide. Among others, his son is dating a fashion writer. She walks about his flat in mules and a red satin dressing gown, which falls open to expose more shimmering flimsies and worse. Imagine how terrible this is for Henry. He thinks this mule woman can only do this because she doesn’t consider him to be a man but an impotent grandfather.”

“Poor guy.” Her eyes were tearing into me. “But you like that woman too, don’t you—the mule thingy? You’ve met her around there?”

“Yes.”

“What went on?”

I hesitated. “You are perceptive. I invited her out. We walked together by the river one evening when Henry’s son was out, stopping off at various pubs to drink whisky macs. By the end we were soused. I have to say I’ve never felt so strongly towards anyone before—not even Ajita. For the next week I woke up thinking about her every morning. It was a delirium, like being ducked in madness.”

“And?”

“And nothing. She didn’t see me like that. Had she given me one word of hope, I’d have followed her anywhere. But I had nothing she wanted.”

“Oh, Jamal. Poor Henry, too.” She had resumed bustling about. “If he does want any pornos, they’re in your basement in a cardboard box.”

“They are?”

“Just take a couple for yourself and give some to him. You know Jordan?”

“Never been there.”

“Not the place, you cunt, the porn star. She’s in some of them, with black men. You don’t know who she is?”

“You mistake me for an intellectual. Late-night television’s my favourite indulgence,” I went on. “Did I tell you Henry was offered an OBE but turned it down?”

“Why did he say no?”

“The respectability of his generation is making him crazy. Once they were hippy ‘heads,’ now they’re all headmasters. Blair himself is a mixture of Boy Scout and Mrs. Thatcher. Henry’s decided to keep the dissident flag flying.”

Miriam shut the drawer she’d been fiddling in. “Yes or no to Her-fucking-Majesty, this stuff’s not good enough for the likes of Henry. It makes you dumb, like the people around here.”

“I know you always liked him.”

“You’re right. He didn’t look down on me, as you did. He liked to explain what he was doing, even though I’m a fat and mad philis—…You know.”

“Philistine,” I said. “He’s coming for lunch next week.”

“I’ll get the stuff and have it delivered to your place.” She kissed me. “I love you so much, bro.”

 

On the way home Rafi played Beethoven’s Ninth to me on his trembling mouth organ, which always made me laugh, though I was sure to praise the rendition. Then he did his “conversation between an Irishman, a Jamaican and an Indian,” and I almost crashed.

As we turned the corner, something quick ran across the road, like a collection of brown elbows.

“A wolf!” said Rafi. “Will it attack us?”

“It’s a fox,” I said. “There are no wolves around here, apart from the human variety.”

We were inside; as it was a warm evening, I opened the doors to the garden.

I would get Rafi into bed and then sit outside for a bit with a glass of wine and the rest of yesterday’s joint. It was still light, and I noticed the cats were on the back wall. Not my grey, who was on my bed with his head in my shoulder bag, but the red-collared black with a white face from next door and the local Tom tabby—gruff, up for it—with a wide head and menacing eyes. They appeared, at the moment, to be tapping one another’s faces with their paws.

“Hey, Rafi, look at this. I think these cats are about to get married,” I said. “But that wall doesn’t look comfortable.”

Rafi attended to his Game Boy as well as to the scene in front of him, which was developing quickly. The cats moved down to the little lawn, a few feet from us. The Tom dug his teeth into Red’s neck, threw her down and got on top of her. It didn’t look promising for him, more like thrusting your fingers into a bag full of needles.

“Is it a rape?” Rafi asked.

“I’m afraid she likes it.”

“Are they happy?”

“Yes, because they’ve forgotten themselves, temporarily.” I pulled the door closed to give them privacy. “They were doing it in the same place yesterday. But it is rough sex. It’s wilder than you’d think in this neighbourhood.”

She was down on her back, and he was on her, concentrating on thrusting, trying for a better position, pushing more while stabbing his paw into her stomach, trying to keep her in place. They spat and hissed at one another.

“Disgusting,” said Rafi, making a face. “This new game is difficult,” he added relevantly, his toy making a tinny pop sound.

“The American poet Robert Lowell says something like, ‘But nature is sundrunk with sex.’”

Rafi said, “Yeah?”

“Apparently human beings are the only species that don’t like to be looked at while having sex. They are, too, the only animals who bury their dead.” I added, “Did you know the clitoris was discovered in 1559 by Columbus—this was Renald Columbus of Padua, who called it ‘the sweetness of Venus.’”

“Yeah?”

“It’s true,” I said.

“I’ve heard all this before, the facts of life and everything. In a book at school. D’you think I’m intelligent for my age?”

“Yes. Am I?”

“Yes.”

I said, “That’s because I read a lot as a kid.”

“Poor you, is that all there was to do?”

The cat sex went on a long time. Rafi opened the doors for a clearer view, fetched a chair and sat down, giggling and gasping. Despite his efforts, the couple were not easily disturbed. When they were done, Red frolicked on her back, celebrating, turning, stretching, while Tom Tabby sat on his haunches, watching her, before lapping at his genitals. At last the two of them strolled off together into other gardens. If they’d had hands, they’d have joined them.

Rafi wanted to ring his mother, to tell her what he’d seen. Had Rafi described the scene to her, no doubt she’d have chastised me for letting him watch, but her phone was turned off. No doubt she was attempting the same thing, at last.

When it comes to teaching the art of pleasure, parents and schools can be an obstruction, a disaster even. I looked at the boy and thought about my father, who had passed little knowledge of sex on to me, or even about the place he thought pleasure might take in someone’s life. In my twenties I resented the fact he’d made no attempt to explain what I characterised then as “the truth about sex.”

But what would I have wanted a father or, indeed, a mother to say? What did sex consist of, and what did my son have to look forward to? I remember wondering about this with Josephine one time, asking her about the variety of sexual experiences that were available, and which of them he might develop a liking for. “As long as it’s nice and loving,” she said, sweetly. Indeed; but as La Rochefoucauld remarked on ghosts and love, “All talk of it, but none have seen it for certain.”

Her remark stopped me, briefly. I knew my son would learn that there were numerous varieties of sexual expression: promiscuity, prostitution, pornography, perversion, phone sex, one-night stands, cruising, S&M, Internet dating, sex with a wife or husband, sex with someone else’s wife or husband. There was a full menu, as long as a novella. Which would appeal? Freud, the committed monogamist, began his famous Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality with his thoughts about fetishism, homosexuality, exhibitionism, sadism, bestiality, anal sex, bisexuality, masochism and voyeurism. I was reminded of a joke: Which way of being normal would you like to be, neurotically normal, psychotically normal or perversely normal?

Perhaps my son would, one day, prefer to be blown by a stranger in a toilet, or perhaps he would like to be spanked while being fellated by a Negro transvestite. The side circles of pleasure were manifold, and with an aesthetic edge too: there was smelling, hearing and tasting. And speaking. More than half of sex is speaking. Words ignite desire; if speaking is an erotic art, what could be more erotic than a whisper? However, repetition is a love which doesn’t diminish: in the Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, Mme. de Saint-Ange asserts that in her twelve-year marriage her husband asked for the same thing every day: that she suck his cock while shitting in his mouth.

I might also add, though it may seem cynical, and it wasn’t something I’d bring up with Josephine, that loving someone, or even liking them, has never brought the slightest improvement to sexual pleasure. In fact, not liking the other, or actively disliking them—even hating them—could free up one’s pleasure considerably. Think of the aggression—violence even—that a good fuck involves.

What, then, were the pleasures and who could guarantee them? Should I have been guiding the train of his desire towards the ultimate, if tyrannically ideal, destination, what Freud called, somewhat optimistically, “full genital sexuality?” Or should I suggest he stop off at some of the other stations and sidings first? As the great Viennese satirist Karl Kraus noted—a man characterised as a “mad halfwit” by Freud—it is the most tragic thing in the world for the fetishist who wants only a shoe but gets the whole woman.

One of the “truths” about sex which Rafi would also discover—perhaps early on—would be how problematical sex is, and how much people hate it, as well as how much shame, embarrassment and rage it can encourage. Henry and his generation did a lot to educate us about the nature of desire, but however free we believe ourselves to be—liberated now from the horrors of religious morality—our bodies will always trouble us with their unusual desires and perverse refusals, as though they had a mind of their own, and there was a stranger within us.

Josephine liked to be flirted with while pretending to ignore the sub-text. For devoted parents, there were opportunities for such fun. Many of our neighbours had strenuous shared lives organised around the school; lovers could meet at the gates twice a day. If the children were busy with one another, the parents were more so. As Josephine would come to learn, the school playground being an emotional minefield, with the Muslim parents keeping their kids away from white homes. In bed, in the days when we shared one, Josephine would give me the gossip. I was reminded of a book, Updike’s Couples, that Dad had passed on to me and which seemed, at the time, deliciously corrupt in its banal everyday betrayals. As then, it was the betrayals—and the secrets they engendered—which were the most delectable transgressions.

Of all the perversions, the strangest was celibacy, the desire to cancel all desire, to hate it. Not that you could abolish it once and for all. Desire, like the dead or an unpleasant meal, would keep returning—it was ultimately indigestible. Rafi’s mother had insisted on, indeed clung to, her own innocence. The badness was always only in me. It was, from her point of view, a rational division of labour. What she didn’t see was that the innocent have everything—integrity, respect, moral goodness—except pleasure. Pleasure: vortex and abyss—that which we desire and fear simultaneously. Pleasure implies dirtying your hands and mind, and being threatened; there is fear, disgust, self-loathing and moral failure. Pleasure was hard work; not everyone, perhaps not most people, could bear to find it.

The sex show was over. The boy threw his clothes down and went to bed. Through the open doors, I could watch him sleep. He was wearing headphones and the music was loud enough for me to experience a familiarity with 50 Cent I could have forfeited. When Rafi’s long lashes fluttered less and less, like a butterfly settling, I turned the music off.

I sat at my desk with part of my inheritance: Father’s favourite and now mine, a glass of almost frozen vodka and a carton of Häagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream. A slug and a slurp, and the cat sitting on my papers. I was all set. I would write with a fountain pen before typing everything into my new Apple G4. I could listen to music on it; when I was bored I would look at the photographs and pictures I was currently interested in. Unable to sleep and with bursts of obsessive energy—and this was a new thing with me—I had been thinking of the phrase Henry had quoted from Ibsen, “We sail with a corpse in the cargo.”

For some reason it made me recall the line which had occurred to me earlier and which I kept hearing in my head: “She was my first love, but I was not hers.”

Oh, Ajita, if you are still alive, where are you now? Do you ever think of me?