Something to Tell You Read Free Page B

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