L text 3

I loved drinking tea and I loved cycling. I would bike to the tea shop in the High Street and see what blends they had. My bedroom contained boxes and boxes of tea, and I was always happy to have new brews with which to concoct more original combos in my teapot. I was supposed to be preparing for my mock A-levels in History, English and Politics. But whatever happened I knew I would fail them. I was too concerned with other things. Sometimes I took speed-‘blues’, little blue tablets—to keep me awake, but they made me depressed, they made my testicles shrivel up and I kept thinking I was getting a heart attack. So I usually sipped spicy tea and listened to records all night. I favoured the tuneless: King Crimson, Soft machine, Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa and Wild Man Fisher. It was easy to get most of the music you wanted from the shops in the High Street.

During these nights, as all around me was silent—most of the neighbourhood went to bed at ten-thirty—I entered another world. I read Norman Mailer’s journalism about an action-man writer involved in danger, resistance and political commitment: adventure stories not of the distant past, but of recent times. I’d bought a TV from the man in the chip shop, and as the black-and-white box heated up it stank of grease and fish, but late at night I heard of cults and experiments in living, in California. In Europe terrorist groups were bombing capitalist targets; in London psychologists were saying you had to live your own life in your own way and not according to your family, or you’d go mad. In bed I read Rolling Stone magazine. Sometimes I felt the whole world was converging on this little room. And as I became more intoxicated and frustrated I’d throw open the bedroom window as the dawn came up, and look across the gardens, lawns, greenhouses, sheds and curtained windows. I wanted my life to begin now, at this instant, just when I was ready for it. Then it was time for my paper-round, followed by school. And school was another thing I’d had enough of.

Recently I’d been punched and kicked to the ground by a teacher because I called him a queer. This teacher was always making me sit on his knee, and when he asked me questions like ‘What is the square root of five thousand six hundred and seventy eight and a half?’, which I couldn’t answer, he tickled me. Very educational. I was sick too of being affectionately called Shitface or Curryface, and of coming home covered in spit and snot and chalk and wood-shavings. We did a lot of woodwork at our school, and the other kids liked to lock me and my friends in the storeroom and have us chant ‘Manchester United, Manchester United, we are the boot boy’ as they held chisels to our throats and cut off our shoelaces. We did a lot of woodwork in the school because they didn’t think we could deal with books. One day the woodwork teacher had a heart attack right in front of our eyes as one of the lads put another kid’s prick in a vice and started to turn the handle. Fuck you, Charles Dickens, nothing’s changed. One kid tried to brand my arm with a red-hot lump of metal. Someone else pissed over my shoes, and all my Dad thought about was me becoming a doctor. What world was he living in? Every day I considered myself lucky to get home from school without serious injury.

So after all this I felt I was ready to retire. There was nothing I particularly wanted to do. You didn’t have to do anything. You could just drift and hang out see what happened, which suited me fine, even more than being a Customs officer or a professional footballer or a guitarist.

Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia, chapter 5, pages 62-63