Hanif Kureishi - Midnight All Day

As they were leaving the park, Eddie tore some daffodils from a flowerbed and stuffed them in his pocket. ‘For Mummy,’ he explained.

The house was a ten-minute walk away. Holding hands, they ran home through the rain. His wife would be back soon, and he would be off.

It was not until he had taken out his key that he remembered his wife had changed the lock last week. What she had done was illegal: he owned the house; but he had laughed at the idea she thought he would intrude, when he wanted to be as far away as possible.

He told the boys they would have to wait. They sheltered in the little porch where water dripped on their heads. The boys soon tired of standing with him and refused to sing the songs he started. They pulled their hoods down and chased one another up and down the path.

It was dark. People were coming home from work.

The next-door neighbour passed by. ‘Locked out?’ he said.

“Fraid so.’

Oliver said, ‘Daddy, why can’t we go in and watch the cartoons?’

‘It’s only me she’s locked out,’ he said. ‘Not you. But you are, of course, with me.’

‘Why has she locked us out?’

‘Why don’t you ask her?’ he said.

His wife confused and frightened him. But he would greet her civilly, send the children into the house and say goodbye. It was, however, difficult to get cabs in the area; impossible at this time and in this weather. It was a twenty-minute walk to the tube station, across a dripping park where alcoholics and junkies gathered under the trees. His shoes, already wet, would be filthy. At the party he would have to try and remove the worst of the mud in the toilet.

After the violence of separation he had expected a diminishment of interest and of loathing, on her part. He himself had survived the worst of it and anticipated a quietness. Kind indifference had come to seem an important blessing. But as well as refusing to divorce him, she sent him lawyers’ letters about the most trivial matters. One letter, he recalled, was entirely about a cheese sandwich he had made for himself when visiting the children. He was ordered to bring his own food in future. He thought of his wife years ago, laughing and putting out her tongue with his semen on it.

‘Hey there,’ she said, coming up the path.

‘Mummy!’ they called.

‘Look at them,’ he said. ‘They’re soaked through.’

‘Oh dear.’

She unlocked the door and the children ran into the hall. She nodded at him. ‘You’re going out.’

‘Sorry?’

‘You’ve got a suit on.’

He stepped into the hall. ‘Yes. A little party.’

He glanced into his former study, where his books were packed in boxes on the floor. He had, as yet, nowhere to take them. Beside them were a pair of men’s black shoes he had not seen before.

She said to the children, ‘I’ll get your tea.’ To him she said, ‘You haven’t given them anything to eat, have you?’

‘Doughnuts,’ said Eddie. ‘I had chocolate.’

‘I had jam,’ said Oliver.

She said, ‘You let them eat that rubbish?’

Eddie pushed the crushed flowers at her. ‘There you are, Mummy.’

‘You must not take flowers from the park,’ she said. ‘They are for everyone.’

‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ said Eddie suddenly, with his hand over his mouth.

‘Shut up! People don’t like it!’ said Oliver, and hit Eddie, who started to cry.

‘Listen to him,’ she said to Roger. ‘You’ve taught them to use filthy language. You are really hopeless.’

‘So are you,’ he said.

In the past few months, preparing his lectures, he had visited some disorderly and murderous places. The hatred he witnessed puzzled him still. It was atavistic but abstract; mostly the people did not know one another. It had made him aware of how people clung to their antipathies, and used them to maintain an important distance, but in the end he failed to understand why this was. After all the political analysis and talk of rights, he had concluded that people had to grasp the necessity of loving one another; and if that was too much, they had to let one another alone. When this still seemed inadequate and banal, he suspected he was on the wrong path, that he was trying to say something about his own difficulties in the guise of intellectual discourse. Why could he not find a more direct method? He had, in fact, considered writing a novel. He had plenty to say, but could not afford the time, unpaid.

He looked out at the street. ‘It’s raining quite hard.’

‘It’s not too bad now.’

He said, ‘You haven’t got an umbrella, have you?’

‘An umbrella?’

He was becoming impatient. ‘Yes. An umbrella. You know, you hold it over your head.’

She sighed and went back into the house. He presumed she was opening the door to the airing cupboard in the bathroom.

He was standing in the porch, ready to go. She returned empty handed.

‘No. No umbrella,’ she said.

He said, ‘There were three there last week.’

‘Maybe there were.’

‘Are there not still three umbrellas there?’

‘Maybe there are,’ she said.

‘Give me one.’

‘No.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I’m not giving you one,’ she said. ‘If there were a thousand umbrellas there I would not give you one.’

He had noticed how persistent his children were; they asked, pleaded, threatened and screamed, until he yielded.

He said, ‘They are my umbrellas.’

‘No,’ she repeated.

‘How petty you’ve become.’

‘Didn’t I give you everything?’

He cleared his throat. ‘Everything but love.’

‘I did give you that, actually.’ She said, ‘I’ve rung my friend. He’s on his way.’

He said, ‘I don’t care. Just give me an umbrella.’

She shook her head. She went to shut the door. He put his foot out and she banged the door against his leg. He wanted to rub his shin but could not give her the pleasure.

He said, ‘Let’s try and be rational.’

He had hated before, his parents and brother, at certain times. But it was a fury, not a deep, intellectual and emotional hatred like this. He had had psychotherapy; he took tranquillisers, but still he wanted to pulverise his wife. None of the ideas he had about life would make this feeling go away.

‘You used to find the rain “refreshing”,’ she sneered.

‘It has come to this,’ he said.

‘Here we are then,’ she said. ‘Don’t start crying about it.’

He pushed the door. ‘I’ll get the umbrella.’

She pushed the door back at him. ‘You cannot come in.’

‘It is my house.’

‘Not without prior arrangement.’

‘We arranged it,’ he said.

‘The arrangement’s off.’

He pushed her.

‘Are you assaulting me?’ she said.

He looked outside. An alcoholic woman he had had to remove from the front step on several occasions was standing at the end of the path holding a can of lager.

‘I’m watching you,’ she shouted. ‘If you touch her you are reported!’

‘Watch on!’ he shouted back.

He pushed into the house. He placed his hand on his wife’s chest and forced her against the wall. She cried out. She did bang her head, but it was, in football jargon, a ‘dive’. The children ran at his legs. He pushed them away.

He went to the airing cupboard, seized an umbrella and made his way to the front door.

As he passed her she snatched it. Her strength surprised him, but he yanked the umbrella back and went to move away. She raised her hand. He thought she would slap him. It would be the first time. But she made a fist. As she punched him in the face she continued to look at him.

He had not been hit since he left school. He had forgotten the physical shock and then the disbelief, the shattering of the feeling that the world was a safe place.