Hanif Kureishi - The Last Word

When he said nothing, she went on, ‘Try and imagine this. When I first met him, Mamoon had anticipated being properly married for the rest of his life. He didn’t think he and Peggy would ever separate. But he did take to sex, when he refound it through me. It gave him a new confidence. He liked it. He liked it too much. He’d regained a part of himself, so that he wanted it the whole time. Then he wanted more. More extremity.’ When Harry asked what sort of extremity, she said, ‘If I tell you, and you put it in the book, it will come to be the only thing anyone ever knows about me.’

‘You’ve considered that?’

‘Of course.’

‘At the same time, you want to give your side of the story?’

She said, ‘He will deny me, I know that. He will laugh and shrug and accuse me of being mad, a common strategy of men. Recently, to a journalist, he accused me of being a balloon of unbound fantasies, a magical realist even — stories for children! This from someone who makes up people, and has them speak and then die, for a living! But I will have spoken before I go.’

Harry pushed the recorder closer to her. ‘What are you referring to?’

‘Turn off that damn machine.’ He pushed a button on it. She smiled, grabbed it and tossed it out of the room into the corridor, before asking him to shut the door.

She told him there were a couple of clever, attractive married women she’d known, good friends for years, whom she’d introduced him to. One night he said they were attractive. He was bored with her. ‘I couldn’t make his penis smile. He would go with them, it would put some lead in his pencil.’

He said he had become a utilitarian, providing the greatest happiness for the greatest number. He had also become despondent. His father had died and he was reproaching himself. He’d physically fought with the dad, plucking him from his chair and flinging the old fellow against a wall.

‘Yes, I heard. But what are the details of that?’

She told him that the headmaster of Mamoon’s school, and also the headmaster’s wife, had been dear, lifelong friends of the father. And the man — ‘who, incidentally, had only one leg’ — had been kind and let Mamoon attend the place at a cheap rate. It turned out that Mamoon, at fifteen, had been screwing the headmaster’s wife, the school nurse, in the medical room, most days. She had also loaned him books and read his early stories, editing them for him, encouraging him, telling him that he had it, that thing that everyone wants and most people don’t have: talent. He saw that as soon as he wrote he was loved and admired. Literature was the leg-opener. A good paragraph was better than a few glasses of wine.

She said, ‘The headmaster didn’t find out about any of this until Mamoon was in his mid-twenties. The headmaster then hopped across to see the father, after the woman died, to say his wife’s infidelity had besmirched the last years of his life. The woman had said she’d loved Mamoon. The headmaster was shamed.’ Marion put on a paternalistic Indian accent. ‘The father said to Mamoon, “You dirty bastard, you shamed us all by fiddling with the very woman — a family friend — on the actual school premises while we were getting a generous discount! What other deceptions are you capable of?”

‘“She was very enthusiastic and grateful at the time,” replied Mamoon. “Why is it exercising you? Are you jealous? She said she was lonely. I was the ‘second leg’. I had a body to die for, and she opened my fly with her teeth. Your friend bored her to death. You should have sent me a telegram of congratulation for cheering her up.”’ Marion went on, ‘As you can imagine, it was here that the father, becoming more and more incensed, struck Mamoon across the face. And Mamoon, being quite strong then, having taken up weight-lifting, picked him up and tossed him across the room, towards the litter bin, like a basketball.

‘In his later life Mamoon was ashamed and regretful, and worried over the father a lot. I’d brought up the subject of whether his father was gay.’

Harry almost choked. ‘How exactly did that go down?’

Mamoon had taken it seriously. The pieces were falling into place. Mamoon’s father had had an arranged marriage, fought with his wife continuously, gambled most nights, and drank ferociously. But he never went with women and repeatedly told his son never to marry. Mamoon began to wonder if his weird adolescent sexuality was a picture of his father’s confusions.

Marion said, ‘Mamoon, as you might have found out, was something of a Nietzsche jukebox, with a quote for every occasion. And he particularly liked this: “That which is silent in the father speaks in the son.” We discussed it very intensely. At detumescence, after all, there is conversation, that is where love begins. Over a bottle of wine or three, we spent entire evenings talking, working everything out. We were very close, and living together, because he had been teaching in America.’

He asked her what that was like.

She laughed. ‘It was wonderful to spend time with him. But it was not unconflictual. Nothing with Mamoon was unconflictual. There had been the inevitable run-ins with the authorities, culminating in the accusation of misogyny and so on.’

Harry said he’d heard something about that and was going to look into it. He asked her what the details were.

‘I’d been living with him outside the university for a couple of months,’ she said. Mamoon made sure he was too maverick for the institution. But he knew how to interest people in ideas. ‘Then, unfortunately, there was the incident with the black feminist lecturer to whom he said, at a cocktail party, “Surely, being black isn’t an entire career these days, is it?”’

‘What happened?’

‘Big flatulent row. That, along with his remark that there was a high incidence of psychosis in the Afro-Caribbean community because of the fathers’ absence, did for him. It turned nasty. We had to pack up and get out of there fast. It was like being run out of town.’

‘Did it bother him?’

‘Of course he said he didn’t want to be deprived of the jouissance of racism just because he had brown skin and had suffered it himself. Clearly, he said, it must be one of the great pleasures to hate others for more or less random, arbitrary reasons.’

It meant he was never able to teach again. It cost him money. He was more bothered than he could own up to, because he had important things to say about the craft he had devoted his life to. Somehow he got himself tangled up in these fatuous debacles. He couldn’t understand it and needed ‘comfort’, he claimed.

‘Female comfort?’

‘I told him that as I had sacrificed so much to be with him, I couldn’t have him taking off with my best friends in front of me. He called me a bore, and sulked. He had the temerity to say I was no good at sucking cock.’

‘Oh dear. You have to take care with your teeth,’ said Harry. ‘I guess you know that. Perhaps you could have practised.’

‘Believe me, baby, I could suck your brain out through your ass and blow it down the can.’

He asked, ‘How was he at cunnilingus?’

‘Enthusiastic, at times. But inaccurate. And then—’

‘Then?’

She said, ‘When a man doesn’t want to eat you out, he’s done with you.’

‘That must be one of life’s hardest lessons.’

She went on, ‘Mamoon could really freeze you out, until I couldn’t bear the anxiety. Threesomes weren’t my thing, I had tried them. Men think they like them, but their eyes are bigger than their dicks. It’s rare for a man to satisfy one woman, let alone two. Still, I decided these women could join us, if they wanted to — one at a time. Why not? Hadn’t we had the sixties? Why be conventional, why say no to everything? And they were free women. We did it a few times. He said it was the most exciting thing he’d done.’