Hanif Kureishi - The Last Word

‘To pay her back for her kindness?’

‘You should know, sir, that at the moment I am very seriously detoxing as far as that side of things goes. I learned I could have a very powerful effect on women. When they wanted to be desired, their passions could be huge. But I’m trying to stop, or at least quieten down, after certain somewhat hazardous escapades and scrapes.’

‘Recently?’

‘Oh God, I should have learned my lesson by now.’

‘What are you saying? I must have an example.’

‘I’m not sure we should get distracted, Mamoon, sir.’

Mamoon leaned forward. He was becoming impatient. ‘The point is, Harry, if I’m not to find you abhorrent, there will have to be more reciprocity all round. Particularly from your side.’ Mamoon tickled the stirring cat under its chin. ‘Do you follow me?’

Harry said, ‘Sir, I’d been on a bit of a binge with the women. I’d asked for too much. My debts were being called in. I picked up a woman on the tube.’

‘Which line?’

‘Central.’

‘Ah yes. Marble Arch. Bond Street.’

‘She was a woman I adored and then pitied — but perhaps led on — an isolated person, an overseas mature student, who eventually wouldn’t leave me alone, and then deliberately became pregnant by me. Or so she said. Apparently it was her last chance, at her age. She wanted nothing else from me — but a child! I was worrying. I remembered that she wrote everything down.’

‘Ah-ha. Everything is recorded. Go on.’

‘At some peril, I climbed up the side of her building and broke into her place, to read her diary and find out the facts about her pregnancy. The door opened while I was consulting the evidence. I thought I would die of a heart attack. It was her flatmate, who had a knife. She was so terrified I thought she might accidentally kill me.

‘I said I would explain everything. We put away some whisky. I slept with her. Then I refused to do it again. So this woman confessed everything to her friend, who got in her car and hunted me down. It turned out that for three days she waited for me in various places, before trying to run me over while I was cycling. My back wheel was crushed. When I looked up and saw her eyes, I threw the bike down and ran for my life. Meanwhile, I had to keep all this from my girlfriend, with whom I’d begun living.’

‘Alice — is that her name?’

‘Yes, she’s gentle and hopeless, and sort of flounders about. But she’s good to look at, and I’m mad about her. Before, if I could, I liked to have three girls a day.’

‘Three? You could manage that?’

‘Four is my record. No, five. What is yours, sir?’ When Mamoon said nothing, Harry said, ‘Now I am determined to put the devil behind me and go straight. But at that time there were others I hadn’t quite finished with — left over from an earlier period, you might say. One had an abortion. Another attempted suicide — in front of me. One of my brothers said I should never have to resort to touching my own penis, though it would have saved me some trouble.’

‘You seem to specialise, if that is the word, in making others crazy. Can it be deliberate?’

‘It’s been a bad run, Mamoon, sir. But at times it seemed worth it.’

‘In what way?’

‘The women were spectacular.’

‘How?’

‘One of them had big eyes,’ he said. ‘Every time she opened them wide, it was as though all the clothes were peeling from her body. She was a violinist who’d play Bach, and sing to me.’

‘Ah.’

‘So you see, they required the sacrifice. I knew I’d be a fool to follow them, but more of a fool not to.’

‘Good. A man who hasn’t left behind him a string of broken women has hardly been alive. And if anyone manages to get their sexuality and their love lined up together, they are indeed lucky. It is as rare as a fine spring day in the country.’

Harry said, ‘I am glad, I have to say, to be here in the countryside, where it’s quieter. I can be more monstrous than I would like to believe — in my passions, and in the way they suddenly end, as if the relationships never happened. I’m one of those people who needs to know where their next meal is coming from — just in case it doesn’t come at all. Not that women like to be so used, of course.’

‘Why behave in such a way?’

‘I have thought about this, Mamoon, sir, you’ll be surprised to hear.’

‘And?’

‘I love the razor’s edge. I want to be cut open. My terror is of a bourgeois, ordinary life. I can’t bear the everyday constraint. I believe that ordinariness would put out my spark, such as it is.’

Mamoon said, ‘I have said this: we must bow down in gratitude to the fundamentalist, who reminds us how dangerous books and sex are. All sex, and indeed all pleasure, must include a poisonous drop of perversion, of devilish transgression — of evil, even — for it to be worth getting into bed for. It’s become banal, now that it is ubiquitous. As a keen student of the scandal sheets, I have learned that adultery — pleasure plus betrayal — is the only fun left to us. Marriage domesticates sex but frees love. It is unsuitable as a solution to human need, but as with capitalism, the alternatives are much worse.

‘But all this,’ Mamoon continued, waving at the room, ‘that which you refer to as the everyday, the bourgeois and the dull? I want it. I need it. I love it.’

‘You do?’ Harry leaned forward to turn on the recorder.

‘Do not touch that,’ said Mamoon. ‘I’ve come home, Harry. I did, the other day, have to lower a knife into the toaster and it was more danger than I can bear. I’m sure it will happen to you — the desire for comfort and contentment. The desire not to be special. But I had heard from someone, perhaps Rob — aren’t you intending to get married?’

‘I hope so. Yes, that’s what I want to do. Definitely. I see marriage as a kind of defence, a levee against the turbulence of desire. Do you think it might work like that?’

‘Why would you think that?’

Harry picked up the tape recorder and showed it to Mamoon. ‘I’m supposed to ask you the questions.’

‘Your life is more interesting than mine.’

‘You won’t write about me, will you?’

‘I’d like you more as a fictional character, and you should be flattered to appear in one of my works, even without your trousers. However, Harry, my clock has stopped. The embalmer is rolling up his sleeves. Even as we speak, seventy-two virgins are slipping into schoolgirl uniforms for me. You must live, and I confirm: always put your penis first. Harry, you know I consider you to be an ass and a twerp, but it doesn’t follow you haven’t taught me a lot.’

‘Thank you for that. It cheers me. But what did I teach you, sir?’

‘My backhand was all over the place, you know that. I’d been making that wrong swing for years. It was too high.’ Mamoon went on, ‘You’re far more sophisticated, thoughtful and well read than I was at your age. But in other ways you’re very crude and self-deceiving.’

‘I am?’

‘I’m sorry if I just laughed at you.’

‘Did you laugh at me?’

‘Didn’t you hear my noise?’

‘I did, sir, and became alarmed that you were unwell. Why did you make your noise?’

‘The juxtapositions you described are laughable.’ Mamoon said, ‘On the one hand there is the banal bourgeois existence, and on the other a fantasy of what could be called limitless enjoyment — as though those were the only alternatives.’

‘Yes,’ said Harry. ‘It seems royally stupid now you put it like that.’

‘I’m sorry if I was abrupt. But the way you picture it is misleading. The frame, one might say, is in the wrong place. You haven’t applied your considerable intelligence to this matter and I want to know why. It’s almost a fundamentalist separation you have going.’ He stared at the ceiling. ‘The novel is contamination. The novel sees the complication.’ He went on, ‘You’d be advised to attend to something Joseph Conrad once said, not that he’s a writer I can care much for now — very little gives me pleasure, as you know, since I am almost dead.’