Hanif Kureishi - Something to Tell You

At this point Henry had the clever idea of calling the Mule Woman an exhibitionist. Didn’t she want to attract his attention, walking about in insubstantial clothing like a “bit of a tart”? “And I like tarts, mind. I can hardly look at a woman these days without wondering how much she charges.”

Sam retorted it was Henry who was the exhibitionist with his “mad talking.” Henry lost control, yelled at the boy and, I gathered, attempted in a rather ramshackle way to whack the little shit upside his head. But Henry couldn’t get a clear punch in, and the boy disappeared down the stairs, yelling abuse, calling his father “perverted.”

“You’ve got this to look forward to,” Henry said to me now. “Your children turning on you, their hatred total and inexplicable.”

Then, like the actress he could be when distressed, Henry had collapsed to the floor with his hand glued to his brow. Soon after, as when he had any kind of problem, he rang me and Valerie, as well as various other former girlfriends he’d had years of indifferent-or no-sex with. Having separated from a woman years before was no reason, for Henry, not to communicate with her about the most personal things, daily-and, often, hourly.

After this, he retired to bed. It was then that Henry received a call from Lisa, who said she’d been “grossed out” too. Not that she’d been anywhere near the incident; she’d heard about it from her younger brother. Henry handled it pretty well, informing both kids it was none of their damned business. Did he tell them who they could fuck?

“‘Grossed out,’” he kept saying. “‘Grossed out’! Is that the worst thing they’ve ever seen? What world are they living in?”

He was devastated that Sam had threatened to move out. Henry had refused to let him, saying he would go to wherever Sam was and drag him back physically, or he would lie down on the pavement outside wherever he was.

It had all gone wrong. I reminded Henry that now he had Miriam-with whom he was much absorbed-this would, inevitably, have something to do with Sam’s animosity. Sam wouldn’t want to feel he was letting his mother down by sitting around with Henry and his new girlfriend, Miriam, the woman Henry really loved at last.

“Yes,” he said, “I can see that.”

Henry seemed to have talked to everyone about being caught by his son in flagrante delicto, but he didn’t tell Miriam about the response of Sam and Lisa. Not that Miriam asked: it didn’t occur to her that Henry’s cool middle-class children would be upset by such an innocuous episode.

Although the incident and its fallout were causing confusion, I noticed that Henry didn’t let it come between him and his pleasures, which were developing daily. Fascinated and appalled by his gay friends, Henry had always loved hearing of their adventures in clubs and bars and on the Heath, or even on the street. He wanted to ask to be taken along, “to see,” but had never had the courage to go. He’d always been curious whether any straight man would want to live in such a way.

A few days after our dinner, Henry was at Miriam’s, and she was showing Henry her photographs: Mother and Father; she and I in Pakistan; her children when young; the men who’d beaten her up; her favourite tattoos.

“What’s that?” He was pointing at an album secured with string.

“My black album?” she said. “Filthy pictures. My first husband used to photograph me in a pose and would send them to pornos, Readers’ Wives an’ that. He’d get fifty quid for it. There’s some of those in there, as well as stuff with the neighbours and pictures of orgies and parties we went to.” She began to untie it. “If you look,” she said, “you must promise not to be offended.”

Henry said to me: “I looked at the obscene pictures, the cheap clothes and the wretched people, and I was offended that such things were going on in ordinary homes while I was reading. I was turned on. Yet only that morning I’d been thinking that I should be winding down. I’m playing the second half now, heading towards injury time. It should be painting, grandchildren, restful holidays with a book I’d always wanted to read, being interviewed on my life’s work, giving my opinions on the past fifty years.

“The other day there was a party at a friend’s. As I walked in, I saw that everyone had grey or white hair. They were all old and done for, like me. I’d known them all my life.

“I thought I’d die of boredom, until I learned there was another way. The devil was calling me! At last I was getting his attention!”

Henry and my sister never had sex at Miriam’s place, not with all the kids, the chaos and everyone sleeping anywhere.

“I was so hot after seeing the photos that I insisted she accompany me to the shed at the end of the garden, where Bushy had the dope growing under lights. There was a well-used mattress. I couldn’t believe that at my age I could feel such urgency. Sex is mad, mad, mad, Jamal.”

“You’d forgotten?”

“When we were pulling our pants up, I said, ‘Why can’t we do that stuff?’

“So I got a Polaroid, the pervert’s delight, and a little DV camera. I’ve made films, of course. But not like this.

“I guess I can’t show them to you, it being your big sister. But when I shoot them, I can’t help turning them from pornos into little movies. I can cut them on my son’s laptop! I’ve even put music on them, a few loose Brazilian tunes. They turn into little comedies.

“Then,” he said, “things went further. We went to this place under the railway arches in South London.”

He described a nondescript doorway set in a railway arch. This was in a desolate stretch of South London. “Ben Jonson would have recognised it.”

Bushy had been driving them back from a film screening and said they might “fancy a look.” There was a couple he took there regularly. In fact, Bushy had been asked to play guitar at one of their “parties.” He had rehearsed and got himself psyched up but, when it came to it, had been too nervous to go on. At the door it turned out Bushy had forgotten to tell them that to be admitted Miriam and Henry couldn’t enter in “civvies” but had to wear fetish gear: rubber, leather or uniform. The alternative was to go in naked.

Henry said, “I was laughing. This was new to me. I’ve never been into any building naked before. Apparently Miriam had. It was cold, but nude sounded good to me. I’ve directed a naked Lear.”

“How could I forget? Even the daughters were naked.”

“Unfortunately for the public, old men can’t wait to get their clothes off. I overcame my shame, and Miriam didn’t bother with such needless sophistication. There I was, naked but for my shoes, my dick a shrivelled mushroom. But inside the fuckery it was warm and friendly. Everyone said hello. Soon I was enthralled.

“There were people on dog’s leads, and lying in baths to be urinated on, others facedown in a sling, queuing to be whipped. People lining up-rushing, indeed, to be in one another’s bodies! I accompanied Miriam into a small room where she lay down and was satisfied.

“Then I met a twenty-three-year-old boy, a waiter, whose greatest pleasure is to lick people’s boots clean. He knows what he wants and likes, even at that age. I’m telling you, Jamal, not since I was a socialist have I felt such a sense of community.”

I was laughing. “Henry, you can’t pretend you were at the Fabian Society.”

“The faces of people who are so close to their desire! Doesn’t Nietzsche have something to say about it? How can you laugh? Surely, in your line of work, you’ve heard everything?”

“I’m not laughing at you, Henry, but at the idea that you have to give your behaviour a thorough intellectual grounding.”