L text 4

When Dad moved in with Eva, and Jamila and Changez moved into their flat, there were five places for me to stay: with Mum at Auntie Jean’s flat; at our now empty house; with Dad and Eva; with Anwar and Jeeta; or with Changez and Jamila. I finally stopped going to school when Charlie did, and Eva arranged for me to go to a college where I could finish my A-levels. This college seemed as if it was going to be the best thing that happened to me.

The teachers looked the same as the pupils and everyone was equal, ha, ha, though I made a fool of myself calling the male teachers sir and the female miss. It was the first time, too, that I’d been in a classroom with girls, and I got in with a bad bunch of women. The ceremony of innocence was well drowned as far as they were concerned. They laughed at me all the time, I don’t know why; I suppose they thought I was immature. After all, I’d only just stopped doing my paper-round and I heard talking about headlong stuff I never knew about before: abortions, heroin, Sylvia Plath, prostitution. These women were middle class but they’d broken away from their families. They were always touching each other; they fucked the lecturers and asked them for money for drugs. They cared little for themselves; they were in and out of hospital for drug addiction or overdoses or abortions; they tried to take care of each other and sometimes of me. They thought I was sweet and cute and pretty and everything, which I liked. I liked it all, because I was lonely for the first time in my life and an itinerant.

I had a lot of spare time, and from leading a steady life in my bedroom with my radio, and with my parents downstairs, I now wandered among different houses and flats carrying my life equipment in a big canvas bag and never washing my hair; I was not too unhappy, criss-crossing South London and the suburbs by bus, no one knowing where I was. Whenever someone—Mum, Dad, Ted—tried to locate me, I was always somewhere else, occasionally going to a lecture and then heading out to see Changez and Jamila.

I didn’t want to be educated. It wasn’t the right time of my life for concentration, it really wasn’t. Dad was still convinced I was trying to be something—a lawyer, I’d told him recently, because even he knew that doctor stuff was a wind-up. But I knew there’d have to come a time when I broke the news to him that the education system and I had split up. It would break his immigrant hear, too. But the spirit of the age among the people I knew manifested itself as general drift and idleness. We didn’t want money. What for? We could get by, living off parents, friends or the state. And if we were going to be bored, and we were usually bored, rarely being self-motivated, we could at least be bored on our own terms, lying smashed on mattresses in ruined houses rather than working in the machine. I didn’t want to work in a place where I couldn’t wear my fur coat.

Anyway, there was plenty to observe—oh, yes, I was interested in life.

Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia, chapter 7, pages 94-5