For a week after that evening Dad sulked and didn’t speak, though
sometimes he pointed at salt and pepper; Sometimes this gesticulation
got him into some complicated Marcel Marceau mime language. Visitors
from other planets looking in through the window would have thought
we were playing a family guessing game as my brother, mum and I
gathered around dad yelling clues to each other as he tried, without
the compromise of friendly words, to show us that the gutters had
become blocked with leaves, that the side of the house was getting
damp and he wanted Allie and me to climb up a ladder and fix it, with
Mum holding the ladder. At supper we sat eating our curled-up
beefburgers, chips and fish fingers in silence. Once Mum burst into
tears and banged the table with the flat of her hand. “My life is
terrible, terrible!” she cried. “Doesn’t anyone understand?”
We looked at her in surprise for a moment, before carrying on with
our food. Mum did the washing-up as usual and no one helped her.
After tea we all dispersed as soon as possible; My brother Amar, four
years younger than me, called himself Allie to avoid racial trouble.
He always went to bed as early as he could, taking with him fashion
magazines like Vogue, Harper’s and Queen, and anything European he
could lay his hand on. In bed he wore a tiny pair of red silk
pyjamas, a smoking jacket he got a t a jumble sale, and his hairnet.
“What’s wrong with looking good?” he’d say, going upstairs.
In the evenings I often went to the park to sit in the piss-sinking
shed and smoke with the other boys who’d escaped from home.
Dad
had firm ideas about the division of labour between men and women.
Both my parents worked: Mum had got a job in a shoe shop in the High
Street to finance Allie, who had decided to become a ballet dancer
and had to go to an expensive private school. But Mum did all the
housework and the cooking. At lunchtime she shopped, and every
evening she prepared the meal. After this she watched television
until ten-thirty. The TV was her only area of absolute authority. The
unspoken rule of the house was that she always watched what she
wanted; if any of us wanted to watch anything else, we had no chance
at all. With her last energy of the day she’d throw such a fit of
anger, self-pity and frustration that no one dared interfere with
her. She’d die for Steptoe and Son,
candid Camera and The
Fugitive.
If
there were only repeats or political programmes on TV she liked to
draw. Her hand flew. She’d been to art school. She had drawn us,
our heads, three to a page, for years. Three selfish men, she called
us. She said she’d never liked men because men were torturers. It
wasn’t women who turned on the gas at Auschwitz, according to her.
Or bombed Vietnam. During this time of dad’s silence she drew a
lot, putting her pad away behind the chair, with her knitting, her
childhood diary of the war (“Air-raid tonight”) and her
Cartherine Cookson novels. I’d often tried to oppress her into
reading proper books like Tender is the
Night and The
Dharma Bums, but she always said the
print was too small.
Hanif
Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia,
chapter 1, pages 19-20
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