Something to Tell You Read Online Free PDF

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