Hanif Kureishi - The Last Word

‘I should have discussed it with Mrs Thatcher,’ he said.

When Julia had run out and Liana had gone into the garden to find the dogs, Mamoon, clutching the arms of the chair and groaning, attempted to get to his feet.

‘If only you knew, Alice, how an artist grunts and strains to keep the language full of beans, and how much my back hurts since the tennis incident, making me stiff in all the wrong places. I could be semi-crippled for good now, with your boyfriend steering my wheelchair.’

‘Maestro, why didn’t you say before? I can help you.’

‘How?’

‘Didn’t Harry tell you that I trained briefly as a masseuse?’

‘You did? No one has ever spoken sweeter words to me,’ he said. ‘Your darling Harry is no use at all, but only asks stupid questions about things that happened forty years ago!’

‘That would make an athlete ache.’

He wriggled. ‘Dear girl, are you sure you can bear to touch me?’

‘As a teenager, I worked as a geriatric nurse.’

‘Perfect.’

‘Let me find some almond oil.’

‘Try Liana’s bathroom. Hurry: we can retire to my barn for privacy. While Harry redrafts my history, you can realign my spine — if Harry gives permission.’

Harry said there would be nothing he would like more. He took Alice out into the hall, and they hugged and kissed, falling against the wall. He whispered, ‘You goddess, how did you do it — taking him on like that?’

‘I don’t know, Harry. He was like you said, tough, and he was at me and I was cornered. It was so quick and I couldn’t breathe. But I knew I had to fight or I’d be done for. It came out like that.’

‘You tiger, if you massage him, he’ll calm down, and we might get somewhere.’

She kissed him. ‘I’ll do it, and leave the rest to you.’

When Harry returned to the kitchen, Mamoon murmured, ‘Thank you for your dream interpretation.’

‘A pleasure.’

‘Clearly.’ Mamoon said, ‘The lovable, country child, Julia. The one who dreams she is naked and once, I believe, within my hearing, while you were playing pool in the afternoon, called you Fizzy Pants. While others talk, you look at her with some interest and amusement.’

‘I do?’

‘Why would that be?’

‘I guess in London you never see white people working.’

‘I agree it is a wonderful sight, and not something you see down here much either. I’ve long said it’s over for the white races, an obvious truth which caused much agitation amongst the journalists. The rich will rule as usual; they come in all colours, particularly yellow.’ He said, ‘But I admit it is good to watch people work.’

‘You feel superior?’

‘Not at all. It reminds me of my humble duty to contribute, which is what I want to get back to, once I’m free of this pain.’

‘Why have you been unable to work?’

Mamoon said, ‘I can listen to Bach, just about, and Schubert I can bear, because I am melancholic. Everything else depresses me — Beethoven, and particularly over-cheerful Mozart, chirruping away. The other day, when I pretended to dismiss Forster and Orwell, your little face looked upset. You still like to be impressed. In my teens and twenties, and even in my thirties, I loved to read, and could get absorbed in a particular writer for weeks, reading all their work, everything. Now I’ve forgotten it, and, besides, it’s all gone.’

‘Gone?’

‘Consider them, Bertrand Russell, A. J. Ayer, D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Anthony Powell, Anthony Burgess, William Golding, Henry Green, Graham Greene—’

‘No, not that Greene. No — never .’

‘Good, plucky of you. But otherwise — unread, unreadable, discarded, departed, a mountain of words washed into the sea and not coming back. Popeye the Sailor Man has more cultural longevity. Only women and poofs read or write now. Otherwise, these days, no sooner has someone been sodomised by a close relative than they think they can write a memoir. The game’s up.’

Harry said, ‘Some of your books will remain.’

‘They will?’

‘Probably about four—’

‘Four?’

‘No, three big pieces. The first novel and a couple of long stories, which are top-drawer lasters. And, probably, the early essay on Ibsen’s and Strindberg’s women.’

‘So much?’ Mamoon said. ‘It’s done, and it’s too late. I shouldn’t complain. What is there left for me? How many older artists have made significant works?’

‘But sir, that was the true meaning of your dream: the desire to fail.’

‘Why?’

‘To infuriate your father, who never let you go with his expectations.’

‘Go on.’

Harry said, ‘To renounce work and women’s love for a pointless equilibrium or retirement is a destructive self-betrayal. The way you describe yourself is a far more limited narrative than anything I might say about you in my book. And look what happens to Lear. He allows others, indeed encourages them, to humiliate him. Surely a man can remain vital and alive if he feels strong.’

‘How does he do that?’

‘I have to say, sir, that while I’ve been here, I’ve learned something. You taught me that it’s frustration which makes creativity possible. You wrestle with the material, and become inventive, even visionary.’

Mamoon was holding his head. ‘You give me vertigo as well as lumbago. All I think is that I must continue, making words which will then be forgotten. I want that; I can do that. At the same time, it’s not enough. There must be something else.’

‘What is it — that something else?’

‘I don’t know. I will think now. This conversation has drained me.’

Harry helped him up. Not long after, Harry watched from the kitchen window, as Mamoon, in his slippers and stripy dressing gown, eagerly padded out to his barn with Alice. He was, Harry noted, resembling more and more the ever demanding question mark he had seemed to become. A moment later the barn door banged closed. It was the very place Liana — and everyone else — was forbidden to enter. All Liana was able to see of Mamoon, through the window, was the top of his head, which remained throughout the day in the same position. ‘The king is in his counting house,’ Liana liked to say. If she needed him urgently, she had to phone, though with the attendant fear that he would let the call run onto voicemail while he was whistling a tune by Stéphane Grappelli. Mamoon’s room was, Rob had said, full of generous gifts presented by perverted power freaks, kleptomaniacs and crazed killer dictators. Mamoon, it was said, had never met a dictator whose arse he didn’t want to kiss. But Alice was the only other person Harry had known to enter the room since he’d arrived.

Ninety minutes later, when he heard the dogs barking, Harry returned to the window, with Julia sweeping around his feet, to see Mamoon come back to the house looking cheerful and taller, like an inverted exclamation mark.

‘She’s got the head of Jean Seberg and the hands of Sviatoslav Richter,’ panted Mamoon. ‘With every caress I felt myself becoming a genius.’

Alice clapped her hands. ‘I made him more creative!’

Mamoon said, ‘If only I were sixty-five again. . Harry, you’re a lucky man.’

‘I swear, this is the first refreshing night’s sleep I’ve had here,’ Harry said when he and Alice woke up the next day and were making love. She was the only woman he liked to look at first thing in the morning; kissing her then was what he was born to do. ‘Thank God you came, and you’re with me. Didn’t the noise madden you?’

‘What noise?’

‘The animals outside. The screaming foxes trapped by Tories.’