Hanif Kureishi - Something to Tell You

We’d use Valentin’s bed to make love while the guys smoked outside. “Go on, lie down together,” Wolf would say. “You two can’t keep your fingers out of each other’s pies.”

An odd sexual thing had begun to happen to me. There was no longer any discontinuity between orgasm and foreplay. The flutterings, surges, pulsations were whole-body experiences, taking place inside me rather than only in my genitals, so that my orgasms were multiple. They didn’t end with a bang, they didn’t stop suddenly, but seemed almost continuous, like a series of diminishingly powerful shots.

What is a criminal? Someone pursued-wanted!-by the police. I wasn’t wanted by the police, yet. Were my friends? I can’t say I knew what “crimes” Valentin and Wolf actually committed, if any. They would talk about fights, telling me how Romeo hit someone over the head with a chair. They would mention bent policemen and solicitors, and speak of how simple it was to bribe a judge or buy a passport.

There were numerous antique or junk shops in the area, which I would tour with Wolf. I was used to such places, and could help him find bargains. This was not easy, because as soon as Wolf walked into one of these shops, he’d begin to distribute five-pound notes to the staff. They were certainly impressed, and moved about as if inspired, bringing him vases. Whether he was rewarded in any other way I doubted; prices would go up rather than down. The deference might have been enough for him. It was enough for me. At this stage, I still was intending to be an academic, doing the criminal stuff on the side. I liked the contrast. Plato the thief.

One time, though, something extreme did happen to Valentin. There was a guy he met in the Water Rat who wanted Valentin to fuck his wife while the guy beat off. Val needed the money, and he got paid for doing this a couple of times. The wife seemed to find it moderately interesting, but what she really wanted was to see Val on his own, for dinner followed by the theatre. She’d pay him too. Then the guy came back to Valentin and said he’d pay him a lot more, a considerable amount, if he would tie the woman up, “knock her about and slap her a bit.”

Valentin was sick, disgusted by the idea, though Wolf and I seemed to think that he had a pretty good thing going there; the money available, he could have asked for more. What did happen was that, when the man made this proposal to Valentin, Valentin hit him, knocking him down. Valentin was already depressed, liable to catatonic absences, and this made him worse. He didn’t want to be a whore and he didn’t want to be violent; why did these things happen to him? Oddly enough, I remember suggesting therapy to him, though I knew little about it, but he said that when he wanted to talk, he’d talk to me in the pub. A man could deal with it.

It came back to talking, then, the thing most people do a lot of. The whole family liked stories. My grandmother, who had lived with us before moving to a little flat nearby, read Agatha Christie and Catherine Cook-son. There were piles of them, under the bed, in the corner, next to the toilet; my mother watched soaps, and Dad read Henry Miller on aeroplanes. I adored James Bond.

But the words in books weren’t as hazardous as those that someone might suddenly say. Like the words Ajita said to me one day, and I almost missed, but which stuck in my head, returning to me over and over, the devil’s whisper.

She had turned up late to the philosophy lecture where I met her because although she was reading law, she needed another “module” to complete her course. She didn’t love philosophy, as I’d hoped she would. She didn’t see the point of it, though she was amused by my attempts to explain it to her.

“Isn’t it about the wisdom of living, and about what is right and wrong?” she’d say.

“If only,” I’d reply. “I guess you’ll have to go to the psychology department for that, though you can’t change courses now. For me philosophy is to do with Aristotle’s idea that the desire for pleasure is at the centre of the human situation. But philosophy as it’s taught is, I am afraid, about concepts. About how we know the world, for instance. Or about what knowing is-how we know what we know. Or about what we can say about knowing that makes sense.” Having nearly exhausted myself earning her bafflement, I went personal. “I want to know you. Everything about you. But how will I ever know that I know everything about you?”

“You wouldn’t want to know me inside out,” she said abruptly.

“Why’s that?”

“It would put you off me.”

“How do you know?”

“It just would, I’m telling you.”

“You have secrets?” I said.

“Don’t ask.”

“Now I have to ask. I’m bursting, Ajita.”

She was smiling at me. “Curiosity killed the cat, didn’t it?”

“But cats just have to know, don’t they? It’s their nature. If they don’t shove their faces in that bag, they will go crazy.”

“But it isn’t being good for them, sweetie.”

I said, “The good isn’t always something you can decide in advance.”

“In this case it definitely is. Now stop it!”

I was looking at her hard, surprised by how defiant she was. She was almost always soft with me, kissing and caressing me as we spoke. We had this conversation behind her garage, where, unseen from the house, there was a little garden, which no one used, with a decent patch of grass. When spring came and it got warm, we made it the secret place where we’d lie out listening to Radio 1 before driving to London for lunch.

Though we were dark-skinned enough to be regularly insulted around the neighbourhood, often from passing cars, we started to enjoy sun-bathing naked, close to everything we needed-music, drinks, her aunt’s food. Often Ajita would bring a bag of clothes out into the garden. Love through my eyes: she was teaching me the erotics of looking. She liked her own body then, and liked to show it, posing with her clothes pulled down or open, or with her ankles, throat or wrists lightly tied.

To me, the time we spent outside was a celebration. We’d survived the hard work of our childhood-parents, school, continuous obedience, terror-and this was our holiday before embarking on adulthood. We were still kids who behaved like kids. We’d chase and tickle one another, and pull each other’s hair. We’d watch each other pee, have spaghetti-eating competitions and egg-and-spoon races with our underwear around our ankles. Then we’d collapse laughing, and make love again. We had come through our childhood. Or had we?

Had Ajita’s aunt been looking-and I often wondered whether she was; someone seemed to be watching us-she’d have seen Ajita lying there with her eyes closed and me on my knees, kissing her up and down her body, her lips parting in approval. All day I played in her skin, until I believed that, blindfolded, I would know her flesh from that of a hundred women.

I did often wonder about Ajita’s aunt, and the way she crept invisibly about the house with her head covered. I guess she’d have communicated with me in some way, had I been younger. As a child, when my Indian aunts had visited London, they’d pored over me, kissing and pulling me perpetually, certainly more than my mother did. Who, though, did the aunt talk to properly? Certainly not Ajita or her brother. She washed and cooked for them, but didn’t eat with them. Mostly she was alone in her room, more of a servant than a member of the family. I guess I believed, even then, in the necessity of conversation; believed, in fact, that she suffered for having no one to talk to.

There seemed to be no one else around. The neighbourhood appeared to be deserted, kids at school, adults at work. We’d have the radio on low, and occasionally we’d even glance at our college books. Otherwise all there was to look at was the sky and the house opposite. I observed that house and the couple who lived there for days without really seeing it, until it occurred to me that if my life in crime was to start-and I thought it should; with Wolf and Valentin I kept thinking I had to prove myself, to become tough like them-it could begin there.