Hanif Kureishi - The Last Word

‘What sort of woman is that?’

‘A woman devoted not to herself, to her children, to a cause or to alcohol, but to the man she idealises, and to his pencil and his genius. And that man, where possible,’ Mamoon sighed, ‘should be me.’

‘You are lucky, sir. Soon to get even luckier.’

‘Why?’

‘Wait until you see your wife tonight.’

‘Has she had a facelift?’ Harry shook his head. ‘More expensive? Tell me, please.’

‘One minute.’ Harry stood at the back door and lit a cigarette. ‘I will tell you.’

That morning Julia had come into Harry’s room, shut the door, and almost cried. Not that she was usually the crying type. When Harry asked her what was wrong, she reported that Liana, having become particularly frantic and anxious in the past few days, had vehemently reminded her that she, Liana, was in charge and that as she had everything and Julia nothing, Julia should watch out. Julia was on notice.

‘Girl, you should be more grateful and better behaved,’ Liana added. ‘Then, insh’allah , perhaps Mamoon and I will help you progress in this tough world.’

Harry learned that there had been an accumulation of hurts: Liana had accused Julia, on an earlier occasion, of having greasy hair and of being slovenly. Exasperated by Liana’s high-handedness, impatience and one more threat of a slap, Julia had thought and thought. She had come up with a plan to get back at Liana without being fired. Not that Harry thought Liana would get rid of her anyway; he knew Liana was not paying Julia for all the time she spent at the house and that Liana was trying to make out that the two of them were ‘friends’.

Julia didn’t see money as the essential thing here. She had found some purpose at last, and had been working to insert herself indispensably into Liana’s life. First thing in the morning she prepared her mistress’s wardrobe by laying out her clothes, crystals and accessories for the day. She ensured Liana’s bathroom was as scrubbed as an operating theatre. Then she drove her, shopped with her, brushed and fed the animals, and put out her vanilla ice cream when she became anxious. Julia was turning Liana into the grand lady Liana had always assumed herself to be, while seeing all. From the other side, Harry had heard Liana say, without embarrassment, that working ‘as experience’ for the couple would ‘look good’ on Julia’s CV, at which Julia smirked. ‘Why do you make that face?’ Liana asked, to which Julia replied, ‘But miss, we don’t have careers down here. Sometimes we have jobs. But not often.’

It was no secret to Harry that Julia prefered Prospects House to her own home. She had first come to the house as a child, when her mother was employed by Peggy. Julia’s brother Scott, who tended to take care of her, was away often, and in the past few months her mother’s carousing had been accelerating in intensity and frequency. Barely a night passed when Ruth didn’t go to the pub and bring several men back to the house for a further session. ‘I deserve a bit of company at this time of my life,’ Ruth insisted, dragging in a crate of lager. ‘I might have been unlucky in love, but it’s never too late to live! Look at you for instance,’ she went on. ‘You bring that posh boy back here and do I say nothing?’

‘But why should you say something?’ asked Julia. She said to Harry, ‘So, Mum has started to hate you.’

Harry said, ‘The other morning as I scoffed my scrambled egg I noticed her turning the evil eye on me. But have I been anything but polite to her?’

‘It’s just you,’ she said. ‘She does a hilarious imitation of you flirting.’ Julia was about to repeat it, but thought better of it. ‘She says you’re snobby, middle-class and patronising, and you’re everything she hates about this country. Someone’s going to teach you a lesson one of these days.’

‘I am eager to learn, as you know. But I hope to God Scott isn’t my teacher.’

With Ruth, on one of her ‘nights’, there’d be dancing, and boisterous copulation, followed by fighting, and blood on the floor in the morning. Julia stayed with her friend Lucy when she could; occasionally, when she thought it would be terrible at home, she’d creep into one of the barns and sleep on a sofa, unbeknown to Liana and Mamoon. But mostly she was at home, sleepless behind the bolted door, wondering whether, or when, she should intervene. If the shouts were desperate, and the punches too hard, she dressed, went down and yelled at the maniacs. She smashed the boom-box with a hammer. Another time she called the police. Although Ruth wore glasses and was thin, if not emaciated in the scrawny manner of some alcoholics, the mother fetched Julia a tremendous blow across the ear which seemed to concuss the poor girl, leaving her with a relentless buzzing. Not only that, one of the men seemed to have moved in, taking up residence in a cardboard box under the living-room table. When Julia sat down, a clammy hand would reach out and caress her ankle. ‘It’s like living in a pub,’ she said.

In her time off, she didn’t go home, but swam in the narrow, cold but fresh, almost concealed river at the bottom of one of the hay fields. She and Harry rode down to the river on the quad bike which Scott had repaired. While Harry strummed his guitar, singing her a slow blues, she considered the lavender sky and the countryside and the future.

She had begun to walk more vigorously, and soon she wanted to jog lightly, sometimes with Harry. She had dyed strands of her hair red, so the colour seemed to dance when she ran. To relax she’d sit on a kitchen chair at the bottom of the field with her face up to the sun. She said, ‘A lot of my friends have had kids. I know how they suffer. And how they go on suffering, long after the baby is born and the man has gone.’ Many of these kids she’d looked after; she was kind and patient with children. She said that girls like her were called ‘prams’ by the middle-class locals, but the only regular entertainment in the area was copulation.

One evening after he’d kissed her, she pulled an envelope from her bag and gave it to Harry. Inside were three stained, scuffed reporter’s notebooks full of Mamoon’s almost illegible notes, in faded pencil and biro. She had been keeping them under her bed. Harry thanked her and slipped them into the pockets of his combat trousers; later, when he had time to glance through them quickly, he saw they were gold dust.

He and Julia avoided eye contact in the house. But convinced there was an ‘eternal’ connection between them, she texted him often, sending him kisses and instructions as to what he should do to her later. One time she came into his room with a bucket and mop while he was working. When he turned, she pushed her hand down the front of her tights, licking her middle finger and rubbing herself while he watched her in the mirror.

Harry liked the fact Julia was plucky; the flare of her mischievous and dissenting smile always cheered him. He liked her even more when she was schemingly smart enough to recognise that an appeal to her mistress’s paranoia would work a treat.

This was her vengeful riposte. ‘Liana, you are the chief, organising everything here, thank Jesus in heaven. But there is something I do have more than you.’

‘You joke with me, surely. What? ’

‘Guess.’ After a little giggle, Julia continued in her humble but dogged way, ‘You have less jiggy than me. Less than most people.’

Liana stopped and stared at Julia as if she’d never seen her before. Julia flinched, wondering whether Liana would sock or sack her.

‘Yes, well. . Do people talk about this?’

‘They do.’

Liana pursed her lips. She didn’t describe herself as a witch, mystic and clairvoyant for nothing. She thought for a bit before saying, ‘My hands still dampen when Mamoon walks into the room.’