Hanif Kureishi - Something to Tell You

If, when he was doing a production, there was an actor he couldn’t get along with, he’d ask me to come in and have a look at them, and Henry and I would talk in the bar later. Henry was different at work; I’d heard he’d been a bully, particularly with women, but he seemed to have grown out of that. In the rehearsal room, I was impressed by his assurance and intense concentration, by his concern for the actors and his interest in their ideas, as well as his firmness when he wanted something. I saw that this was where he was meant to be, what he was alive for. But it also made me wonder why this self, so alert and vibrant, was separated from the anxious, daily self which I knew.

Miriam said, “He told me he might record me saying the speech for television. Was he lying or just winding me up? I’m used to that stuff from men. Married men always adored me.”

“They did?”

“I swallowed everything.”

“Indeed.”

“I don’t even mind him lying, but-”

“Henry wouldn’t do that. He is supposed to be making a documentary about acting. If you’re not careful he’ll put you in it.”

“Really? I’ll have to get my hair done and cover my tattoos. I wish I had some money.”

A few years back I introduced Henry to one of my ex-girlfriends, Karen Pearl, sometimes fondly referred to as “the TV Bitch.” About eighteen months ago, she had agreed to produce a documentary that Henry wanted to make. But instead of shooting it over a ten-day period, as most people would, Henry had decided he would make his film “over a couple of years,” with his own camera, while doing other things, like teaching, travelling and lecturing-his “retirement” activity, though he hadn’t retired, of course.

Karen wanted celebrities in the documentary, by which she meant soap stars, while Henry wanted talented, well-known actors with whom he’d worked before, as well as amateurs attempting pieces from the classical repertoire.

Henry had become annoyed with me for putting the two of them together in the first place, and Karen claimed his obduracy was helping to bankrupt her, though even he can’t have been the sole cause. She’d invited me to one of her pop things recently, in a warehouse full of barely dressed and over-made-up semi-children. She’d turned into Hattie Jacques in the Carry On films: matronly, patronising, foolishly grand.

She was fond of the juice, and as furiously difficult in her persistence as Henry. One of the first to produce makeover programmes-gardens, houses, women-things hadn’t gone her way for a while; everyone was doing it now. The company she had started had recently been fired from a series they were making. Therefore I didn’t think Karen would be too pleased with Henry’s new but touching idea to have his girlfriend recite Sonya’s speech in its entirety on television. I could see many battles ahead.

Miriam said, “Bushy got me home. I felt like I was lying on a cushion of air. It’s been years since I’ve had any real love. I kept singing. I wanted to hear a song by Enya.”

“Oh, bad luck.” Before she could slap me, I said, “Will you see him again?”

“Only if you tell me why he likes me.”

“You’re likeable.”

She said, “Why don’t you have a lover? I know you miss Josephine.”

“I get lonely. But, as my first analyst used to say, ‘Don’t worry about me, I’ve had my satori.’”

She said, “It was the one before Karen, Ajita, who was always your true love.”

“She was?”

“How many times did I meet her? Two or three? That was enough for me to tell. She was lovely, and uncomplicated. She gave me that jewellery too. Why didn’t you stay together?”

“Things fell apart.”

“What really went on between you two? Maybe it will still work out. Why don’t you search for her?”

“I’m not sure I want to.”

“Didn’t someone get killed?”

“They did.”

“When will I hear the whole story?”

I said, “She’s been on my mind a lot. It’s that time of year, the anniversary, when I saw her for the last time. I always sit and think of her, and feel damned dark, dark, dark.”

“Jamal, try and find her. She’s probably living nearby. Like you, she will have been with other people, but I’ve got a feeling there’s something between you.”

“What if there isn’t? Wouldn’t that be worse? To me it’s Pandora’s box.”

“You won’t know until you find out.”

“Listen,” I went on, avoiding the subject. “Miriam, you can go to Henry’s when you want, but his son is sometimes there. I’ll put my flat at your disposal. I will have two keys cut. Use the place when you want, when I am not working in the evenings, or at weekends. If Maria is there, send her out.”

I noticed that Bushy had come in; he was standing there, nodding at Miriam. Earlier I’d noticed, but not really taken in the fact, that she was wearing make-up as well as perfume.

“Jamal, I have to go. Henry is taking me to a club for a drink.”

“Excellent,” I said. She was passing her hand repeatedly over her face. “What’s wrong?”

“But I don’t want this. I hate to go out. I have my people, the children, Bushy. Henry unsettles me. Perhaps he will ruin me, and I have ruined my life too often. Do I have to go?”

“Yes.”

Behind us, Bushy cleared his throat. I said, “Miriam, it is like the old days. You about to go out into the night and me about to go to bed.”

“I would invite you to come,” she said. “But Henry wants to see me alone.”

“I am working on my book. It’s the thing which interests me most now.”

In the last ten years I had published two books of case studies, Six Characters in Search of a Cure and The Reader of Signs. In each volume I took a number of individuals and discussed my sessions with them, musing, as the stories unfolded, on the nature of “everyday illnesses” or symptoms: fears, obsessions, inhibitions, phobias, addictions. This was normal, everyday stuff any reader would recognise: symptoms around which whole lives are organised and on which, sometimes, they founder.

To my surprise, as well as that of the publishers, my books were successful and translated into five languages. As well as being an attempt to revive Freud’s idea of the case study as a mixture of literature, speculation and theory, it was a way of explaining analysis to a new generation, a way of showing how it could succeed as well as fail. Therefore it was partly about how people hate the thought of giving up their symptoms-forfeiting one’s illnesses is a big risk, since they work as cures for other conflicts.

I had avoided technical language and discovered that these accounts of distress naturally had the structure, organisation and narrative push of stories. They were, in fact, character studies, in which the subjects were collages of real patients, along with fragments of myself and other parts which were invented. They were the closest I’d come, and it was pretty close, to writing fiction. It was a form, a relatively free one, unlike that of the academic article, where I could say what I needed to, musing on my daily work and on the thinking of others, poets, philosophers, analysts.

I wasn’t inexperienced as a scribbler. I had a contract for another book, and it was my intention to write one: I needed the money. But this material about Ajita, which was emerging spontaneously and taking up most of my writing time, seemed different. I imagined my account of her, seemingly random and chaotic, would be not unlike that of a psychoanalytic session: a mixture of dreams, wishes, interruptions, disputes, fantasies, resistances, memories from different periods, and an attempt to find a way through it all. To what? I was trying to find out.