Hanif Kureishi - Midnight All Day

He was moving backwards even as he waited for her reply. She had been accused before, in the group, of being dismissive

contemptuous even. It was true that on a couple of occasions she had had to slip outside, she was laughing so much.

He said, ‘You seemed lost in thought.’

‘The school‚’ she said. ‘I’ll never get away.’

‘Sorry. I thought it might have been the worm.’

‘Worm?’

‘The story I read.’

She said, ‘I didn’t miss a grunt. It’s coming out, isn’t it, the piece. Coming out … well.’ She patted him on the shoulder and got into the car. ‘See you next week, probably.’

Her living-room floor was covered in toys. She remembered a friend saying how children forced you to live in squalor. In the corner of the room, the damp wall had started to crumble, leaving a layer of white powder on the carpet. The bookshelves, hammered carelessly into the alcoves by her incompetent husband, sagged in the middle and were pulling out of the bricks.

She wrote and told Aurelia that she was looking forward to seeing her at the appointed time.

With Aurelia’s card propped up against Aurelia’s novels and stories, Marcia started to write. She would visit Aurelia and take with her a good deal more of the novel. Aurelia was well connected; she could help her get it published.

Next morning Marcia rose at five and wrote in the cold house until seven. That night, when Alec went to bed, she put in another hour. Normally, whenever she had a good idea she would think of a good reason why it wasn’t a good idea. Her father’s enthusiasm and her mother’s helplessness had created a push-me-pull-you creature that succeeded only at remaining in the same place. She bullied herself — why can’t you do this, why isn’t it better? — until her living part became a crouching, cowed child.

The urgency of preparing something for Aurelia abolished Marcia’s doubts. This was how she liked to work; there was only pen, paper, and something urgent proceeding between them.

During the day, even as she yelled at the children or listened to the parents’ complaints, Marcia thought often of Aurelia, sometimes with annoyance. Aurelia had asked her to come to her house at four-thirty, a time when Marcia was still at school. As Aurelia lived in West London, a two-hour drive away, Marcia would have to make an excuse and take the day off in order to prepare to see her. These were the kinds of things famous writers never had to think about.

*

They were standing, a few days later, in the cramped kitchen looking out over the garden in which she, her father and younger brother had played tennis over a tiny net, when Marcia decided to tell her mother the good news.

‘Aurelia Broughton wrote to me. You know, the writer. You’ve heard of her, haven’t you?’

‘I have heard of her‚’ her mother said.

Mother was small but wide. She wore two knitted jumpers and a heavy cardigan, which made her look even bigger.

Mother said, ‘I’ve heard of lots of writers. What does she want from you?’

Alec went into the garden and kicked a ball. Marcia wished her father were alive to do this with him. They all missed having a man around.

‘Aurelia liked my work.’ Marcia felt she had the right to call the writer Aurelia; they would become friends. ‘She wants to talk about it. It’s great, isn’t it? She’s interested in what I’m doing.’

Her mother said, ‘You’d better lend me one of her books so I can keep up.’

‘I’m re-reading them myself at the moment.’

‘Not during the day. You’re at school.’

‘I read at school.’

‘You never let me join in. I’m pushed to one side. These are the last years of my life —’

Marcia interrupted her. ‘I’ll be needing to write a bit in the next couple of weeks.’

This meant her mother would have to keep Alec in the evenings, and for some of the weekend. His father took him on Saturday afternoons, and returned him on Sunday.

Marcia said, ‘Could he spend Sunday with you?’ Her mother assumed her ‘put-upon’ face. ‘Please.’

Mother formed the same expressions today as she had in the past when caring for two children and a husband, and had made it obvious by her suffering that she found her family overwhelming and pleasureless. Depressives certainly had strong wills, killing off sentient life for miles around them.

‘I had a little date, but I’ll cancel it‚’ said Mother.

‘If it’s not too much trouble.’

Since Marcia’s father had died six years ago, Mother had started going to museums and galleries. In the evenings, after a smoked salmon and cream cheese supper, she went often to the theatre and cinema. For the first time since she was young, she had friends with whom she attended lectures and concerts, sailing home in a taxi, spending the money Father had received on retirement. She had even taken up smoking. Mother had grasped that it was a little late for hopelessness.

Marcia didn’t want to wait thirty years.

She had, recently, gained a terrible awareness of life. It might have started when she began meeting men through the dating agency, which had made her feel — well, morbid. Until recently, she had lived as if one day there would be a salve for her wounds; that someone, a parent, lover, benefactor, would pluck her from chaos.

Marcia didn’t become a teacher until she was almost thirty. She and her husband had started wanting to smash at one another’s faces. She had, literally, kicked him out of bed; he ran into the street wearing pyjamas and slippers. Without him, she had a child, a mortgage and only a nugatory income, working in a bar and writing in the mornings. The first day at teacher training college had been awful. She had believed she would wear scarves like Aurelia Broughton and write with a gold fountain pen.

Marcia collected stories of struggling women who eventually became recognised as artists. She believed in persistence and dedication. If she wasn’t a writer, how would she live with herself and what value would she have? When she was a proper writer, her soul would not be hidden; people would know her as she was. To be an artist, to live a singular, self-determined life, and follow the imagination where it led, was to live for oneself, and to be useful. Creativity, the merging of reason and imagination, was life’s ultimate fulfilment.

If she passed a bookshop and saw dozens of luridly coloured blockbusters, she knew these bad and, often, young writers were making money. It seemed tragic and unfair that, unlike them, she couldn’t go to a shop and buy the furniture, clothes and music she wanted.

‘You hate me interfering‚’ Mother said, ‘but you wouldn’t want to have got to the end of your life and realised you’d wasted your time.’

‘Like Father?’

‘Filling bits of paper with a lot of scribbling the whole evening.’

‘How can expressing yourself be a waste of time?’

From the age of eight, after seeing Margot Fonteyn dance, Marcia had wanted to be a dancer; or at least her mother had wanted that for her. Marcia had attended an expensive ballet boarding school while Mother, who had never worked, packed boxes in a local factory to pay for it. Marcia left school at sixteen to get work as a dancer, but apart from not being as good as the others, and lacking the necessary vanity and ambition, she was terrified of appearing on stage. Now Mother kept three pairs of Marcia’s ballet shoes on the mantelpiece, to remind Marcia of how she had wasted her mother’s efforts.

‘Alec is always round here‚’ said Mother. ‘Not that I don’t need the company. But it would be good if that writer woman could offer you some guidance about your … work. I expect she knows people employed on the journals.’