Hanif Kureishi - The Last Word

‘That is a blasphemy.’

‘I’m working well, but you’re undermining me. I feel pretty disturbed by this. Look at my shaking hands.’

‘Don’t drop the drink you’re going to be kind enough to get me. You know I never carry any change.’ Harry got up. Rob said, ‘By the way, can you do me a favour while you’re at it? Please ask that girl—’

He pointed across the bar.

‘Julia?’ said Harry.

‘Ask her if she’d copulate with me later. I put it crudely to save time. Rustle up some smoother words, word-wanker.’

‘Where should she go for the aforementioned copulation?’

‘How about on a coat thrown down on a moonlit field? Being in the country makes me come over bucolic. But it might be draughty. How about your luxurious car?’

Harry said, ‘Consider, Rob, think for a moment how you might appear to her, not having shaved or washed for some time—’

Rob grabbed his collar. ‘What are you talking about? It’s like Iceland here, they haven’t seen an outsider for decades. They queue up to fuck Londoners.’

But Julia had left and Rob was delayed by his drinking. Harry listened to him for too long about interesting events in the world of literature before saying he was going back to the house. He needed to phone Alice and talk calmly. She’d be at home by now; sometimes she could be kind and would listen to him.

It was arduous getting Rob to his feet. Having been consuming duff speed to enable himself to drink for longer, by now his brain appeared to have been drowned, like a Ferrari driven into a pond.

Harry was helping Rob along the lane when Scott and some mates, with their heads covered, stepped out in front of them. Harry and Rob stopped. Scott was in shorts and, as they were near a rare working street light, Harry was able to notice that he had a grey police tag around his ankle.

‘You went too far. You banged my sister and stole my stuff,’ said Scott. ‘You laughed at me. What’s all that about?’

‘Who is this?’ said Rob to Harry, in a low voice.

‘The brother of the girl you were going to fuck.’

‘Ah,’ said Rob, leaning forward to vomit.

‘What stuff?’ said Harry to Scott.

Scott and his mates made a move towards Harry and Rob. Harry fancied giving the little shit a slap; he thought it would help the kid see straight. But Rob was swaying and the boys probably had knives; Harry wouldn’t be able to take the three of them on. Anyway, his legs were trembling.

Scott was swinging a piece of wood. ‘I’d love to kill a nigger tonight. I’m in the mood for a dune coon. Failing that — there’s you.’

‘Look here, chaps,’ said Rob. He took another step forward and dropped his phone, which one of the thugs stamped on.

Harry said to Scott, ‘I can’t imagine you’d have anything I’d want to steal.’

‘Them drugs. In our Julia’s room. You think you can come down from London and take our stuff?’

Harry put his hand in his pocket and offered a couple of twenties to Scott. ‘How much?’

Scott spat on the ground and rubbed his trainer in it. ‘I’m going to remember that you are a stupid boy.’

In the car Rob said, ‘No chance with the girl then? You’re well embedded down here. It’s racy, innit? I haven’t had such a good time for ages. It’s not England or Britain, but another place altogether. Ingerland they call it, and Ingerland it is.’ Rob sang, ‘ Ingerland, Ingerland, Ingerland. . ’ all the way to Prospects House.

Everything good in art came from seeing a new thing and saying it, Harry said to himself. So when it came to the book, what mattered most was that he liked it. And despite the fact the world seemed be exploding in his face, with everything suddenly shifting and moving in ways he couldn’t comprehend, Harry knew that to write he needed time and regularity. He worked all day and, at the end of each afternoon, had taken to running in the woods, illuminating his way, when it got gloomy under the heavy trees, with the light of a miner’s helmet Julia had found in a market.

By the late evening, Harry was glad to get out of the house. He’d meet Julia at the top of the track. Smiling, she’d rush out from the woods, jump into his car, and they’d go for a drink — she knew all the local high spots. She liked it if, after, he accompanied her to her bedroom. Increasingly under siege from her mother and the agitated suitors, she would ask him to read to her, or to play her guitar while she sang.

Having issued a severe warning, Rob had gone, flinging his rags into his suitcase and taking off like a Romantic poet, striding through forests and across fields, through streams, across car parks and into pubs. He seemed to believe he would gain knowledge of the countryside if made to suffer by it. To celebrate Rob’s departure, Harry thought he’d take Julia out for an Indian. ‘What do you say to that?’

She had to say she was pleased about the on-the-way children. She knew her place, shut her mouth and accepted what she was offered. Her family had always been on the wrong side, too. She was, however, slightly bemused by the dinner. Why pay for something when you could have a tuna sandwich and Coke at home? The last time she and Harry had gone out ‘formally’, they’d taken an E each and gone bowling at a floodlit centre called the Hollywood Bowl, just out of town, where there was a mega-cinema, drive-thru McDonald’s and KFC. The evening had been fluorescent, glittering, like a cartoon.

But drugs were fatuous, he found, as he got older. This time they would talk — about what, he had no idea. Why would he worry? If love is loquacity, in bed they liked to discuss her body and its vicissitudes, as well as her weight and hair colour; and, he had to admit, he learned more about present-day England from her than he did from anyone else. In bed, while he thought about the book, she would ask questions, not wanting to waste the resource she had beside her.

‘Friendly Harry,’ she would say, ‘how many prime ministers have there been since the war? And who was the best? Which is the most interesting newspaper and why? What do you think of Canary Wharf? Will you take me there? Who was Muhammad Ali? Why are men unfaithful to their wives? Will you dump me?’

What tormented her now, she told him, was that he was like a circus which came to town for a while, and then went away. ‘When you and Alice go, I’m scared of being left behind. Mum’s getting worse. More men come to the house. I’m always in her way. She says I put people off loving her.’

But Julia loved Harry, and there was something she wanted to give him, a special treat to remember in exchange for the kindness he had shown her. And, as she said, ‘It isn’t every day your lover’s girlfriend gets pregnant.’

And so, that evening, when they walked into the Indian restaurant where Mamoon had had his party, a girl stepped out from behind a screen. Julia had arranged for a friend to join them. Prettier than Julia, like her she wore eye shadow, lip gloss and platform shoes, as if they were going out to meet footballers. ‘This is Lucy,’ she said, as the girl went to kiss him. ‘We both congratulate you.’

Lucy gave them each some MDMA, and took them to a club where an obese woman vomited over the floor. Julia suggested they go somewhere else — not Julia’s, as her brother could be there, no doubt tattooing himself on the forehead with a penknife; and not Lucy’s, because of her child. The girls were keen for him to take them to a hotel in town. They bought alcohol and cocaine, closed the curtains, turned off their phones and didn’t emerge until the next afternoon.

However, some time in the late morning, while the girls slept on either side of him, Harry, who didn’t sleep at all, recalled something Mamoon had said with regard to Marion. ‘The truth is, everything we really desire is either forbidden, immoral or unhealthy, and, if you’re lucky, all three at once.’