Hanif Kureishi - Something to Tell You

That was about three years ago. Since around that time, Mother had been living with Billie, a woman of the same age whom she’d known since she was eight. Mother had always seen a lot of Billie, and I’d talk to her when she came to the house. “You prefer her to me,” Mother said once. “She lives more in the world” was my reply, or something like it. What I couldn’t say to Mother was that, as a teenager, and even younger, I’d fancied Billie. She was aware of her body; she moved well, she was sensual.

For years after Miriam and I had gone, Mother talked about selling the family house and buying a small “granny” flat. It was what we expected her to do, as she liked to sit in the same place and do the same things every day, something I’d never understood until I read Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where Freud describes such repetition as “daemonic” and characterises it, simply, as “death.” And she did put the house on the market, and she did, to our surprise, sell it.

Miriam refused to visit the house for the last time. It was painful to have to pick up our toys, school reports and books, and remove them to London. I had to throw a lot of things away (and I love to clear out), but each loss was a blow. I think Mother thought we’d be more sentimental about the house itself; we’d grown up there, but for us it had no sentient life.

What Mother then did was go and live with Billie, telling us the flat she wanted wasn’t “ready.” Billie still lived in the house she’d grown up in, a huge place near the Common, a house I hadn’t visited for years but one I remembered as being full of drawings, paintings, sculptures and cats. Billie was “Mr. Invisible.”

For thirty years Billie had taught at a studio for artists in a rough part of South London, as well as organising photography, painting, drawing and sculpture courses for local people. Billie had had many boyfriends but never “found love” or had children. She still wore black eye shadow and gold sandals, had a Cleopatra haircut and dressed in some of the antique clothes and jewellery she’d always collected with Mum. She was intelligent and good to talk to. Now the two women got up early and went to the studio. They cooked, bought furniture and travelled, often spending their weekends in Brussels or Paris, or going there for lunch and an afternoon stroll. They were talking of renting an apartment in Venice or holidaying in Barcelona.

Mother didn’t want us to think her strange, individualistic or radical; she had just moved house. Whether they were lovers or not we didn’t ask. Certain words were not promoted here; Mother referred to Billie as her “friend.” Sometimes I called Billie her companion and she didn’t object. It was the best relationship of Mother’s life. Billie didn’t seem in the least bothered by Mother’s self-pity, anxiety and numerous fears, or her penchant for stasis. Mother didn’t make Billie as anxious as she made us. Billie was too busy for that.

Unfortunately, Mother, who had worried about Miriam all her life, now hardly concerned herself with her. Miriam felt abandoned, but I was more powerful now; I tried not to let her attack Mother.

At first, when Miriam and I saw Mum and Billie together, usually fresh from a pile-high book-buying spree at Hatchards, we couldn’t avoid their absorption in one another; it was a revelation, particularly when they showed off the rings or haircuts they’d bought each other. Then, one time at lunch, Billie asked whether Miriam “had” anyone. Certainly Mother had never had a high opinion of any of Miriam’s boyfriends; she considered them to be “boys”-immature, not worth the space they inhabited-rather than men. Miriam could only answer, “I am lucky enough to have several children to bring up.”

This time, when we met, Billie was polite to Miriam, but there was no doubt she considered her to be borderline cracked, which made sense in the circumstances. Like when Billie mentioned something “marvellous” going on at the Tate Modern, Miriam’s response was to say how stupid it was that the place was called Tate Modern rather than the Modern Tate, which, in her view, would have been less pretentious, more accurate. Billie said that would be like calling the Houses of Parliament the Parliament Houses.

As this tricky conversation developed, I could see that in such circumstances Miriam might easily revert to her teenage self, never far from the surface at the best of times, and I wondered whether she might seize some object and attempt to hurt the wall with it. As it was a cold day, the rising heat from her body almost warmed me, but the one thing I didn’t want was for her to have a stand-up row with Billie. Mother sat there almost oblivious, like a tortoise in front of a street parade.

I had thought about whether Miriam might say she had “met someone,” whether she and Henry might become official. But Miriam was not thinking like that; she was already too angry. What infuriated her was that not only had the two women been travelling and buying pictures-some of them costing 3,000 pounds-but that the women were designing an artists’ studio for their garden, which they were intending to have built as soon as they found an architect they liked. Mother and Billie seemed to think they could do it “for less than 15,000 pounds.”

Like everyone in Britain, Mother had made more money from property than she had from working. She had sold the house, paid off the mortgage and kept the rest of the cash, which she was now going through at a tremendous rate. “If I spend it all before I die, I won’t care,” she said to me. “I’ll borrow more, too, on my credit cards, if I need it.”

“Quite right,” I replied. Even more laudably, she gave none of her money to her children or grandchildren, even though Miriam complained with increasing volume that her house, which she had bought cheaply from the council, was falling apart. It hadn’t been decorated for years and the roof was rotten. For some reason which Miriam couldn’t fathom, Mother seemed to think her daughter should work for a living.

Miriam blamed Billie for being a “bad influence,” but Mother had changed too. When Miriam suggested the women might be too old to embark on such an adventurous building project, Billie refused to accept she was old.

“Old is over ninety,” she said defiantly. “Soon people will be living to three hundred.” “That’s right,” said Mother. “We’re not too old to sit through an opera, as long as it’s got two intervals and a nearby toilet.” She opened her bag, and the two women grabbed a bunch of “rejuvenating” pills, swallowed with rapid swigs of organic wine. “No one calls me Grandma, either,” said Billie threateningly.

I wondered whether, on the phone, Miriam had said something to Mother about being a neglectful grandmother, because Billie then informed us that, after marriage, domesticity was surely the lowest form of life. Certainly she abhorred anything which involved schools or bovine earth mothers, with their plastic bottles of milk and identical, filthy-faced children all called Jack and Jill.

Now the two women were off to the hairdressers for the afternoon, followed by more shopping and a party given by a local artist. If the women had to be helped to the street and into the taxi, it wasn’t because they were infirm but because they were so pissed and giggly.

On the way back in the car, Bushy was silent; me too. Miriam was sitting there trembling; we could hear her jewellery humming. She was tighter than a tuning fork. It had taken us a while to realise, but Mother was gone for good. She would always talk to us, but we were no longer at the centre of her life. She didn’t appear to even like us much, as though we were old friends she’d fallen out with. She had discharged her duty and gone AWOL.