Hanif Kureishi: Something to Tell You

Carrying his own atmosphere with him, Henry swung around the neighbourhood like it was a village-he was brought up in a Suffolk hamlet-continually calling out across the street to someone or other and, frequently, joining them for talk about politics and art. His solution to the fact that few people in London appeared to speak understandable English now was to learn their language. “The only way to get by in this ’hood is to speak Polish,” he announced recently. He also knew enough Bosnian, Czech and Portuguese to get by in the bars and shops without yelling, as well as enough of several other European languages to make his way without feeling marginalised in his own city.

I have lived on the same page of the A-Z all of my adult life. At lunchtime I liked to stroll twice around the tennis courts like the other workers. This area, between Hammersmith and Shepherd’s Bush, I heard once described as “a roundabout surrounded by misery.” Someone else suggested it might be twinned with Bogotá. Henry called it “a great Middle Eastern city.” Certainly it had always been “cold” there: in the seventeenth century, after the hangings at Tyburn, near Marble Arch, the bodies were brought to Shepherd’s Bush Green to be displayed.

Now the area was a mixture of the pretty rich and the poor, who were mostly recent immigrants from Poland and Muslim Africa. The prosperous lived in five-storey houses, narrower, it seemed to me, than North London’s Georgian houses. The poor lived in the same houses divided up into single rooms, keeping their milk and trainers fresh on the windowsill.

The newly arrived immigrants, carrying their possessions in plastic bags, often slept in the park; at night, along with the foxes, they foraged through the dustbins for food. Alcoholics and nutters begged and disputed in the street continuously; drug dealers on bikes waited on street corners. New delis, estate agents and restaurants had begun to open, also beauty parlours, which I took as a positive indication of rising house prices.

When I had more time, I liked to walk up through Shepherd’s Bush market, with its rows of chauffeur-driven cars parked alongside Goldhawk Road Station. Hijabed Middle Eastern women shopped in the market, where you could buy massive bolts of vivid cloth, crocodile-skin shoes, scratchy underwear and jewellery, “snide” CDs and DVDs, parrots and luggage, as well as illuminated 3-D pictures of Mecca and of Jesus. (One time, in the old city in Marrakech, I was asked if I’d seen anything like it before. I could only reply that I’d come all this way just to be reminded of Shepherd’s Bush market.)

While no one could be happy on the Goldhawk Road, the Uxbridge Road, ten minutes away, is different. At the top of the market I’d buy a falafel and step into that wide West London street where the shops were Caribbean, Polish, Kashmiri, Somali. Along from the police station was the mosque, where, through the open door, you could see rows of shoes and men praying. Behind it was the football ground, QPR, where Rafi and I went sometimes, to be disappointed. Recently one of the shops was sprayed with gunfire. Not long ago a boy cycled past Josephine and plucked her phone from her hand. But otherwise the ’hood was remarkably calm though industrious, with most people busy with schemes and selling. I was surprised there wasn’t more violence, considering how combustible the parts were.

It was my desire, so far unfulfilled, to live in luxury in the poorest and most mixed part of town. It always cheered me to walk here. This wasn’t the ghetto; the ghetto was Belgravia, Knightsbridge and parts of Notting Hill. This was London as a world city.

Before we parted, Henry said, “Jamal, you know, one of the worst things that can happen to an actor is that he gets onstage and there’s no excitement, only boredom. He’d rather be anywhere else and there’s still the storm scene to get through. The words and gestures are empty, and how is this not going to be communicated? I’ll admit this to you, though it is hard for me to say and I am ashamed. I have had my fair share of one-night stands. Aren’t strangers’ bodies terrifying! But I haven’t slept with a woman properly for five years.”

“Is that all? It’ll return, your appetite. You know that.”

“It’s too late. Isn’t it true that a person incapable of love and sex is incapable of life? Already I’m smelling of death.”

“That odour is your lunch. In fact, I suspect your appetite has already come back. That’s why you’re so restless.”

“If it doesn’t, it’s goodbye,” he said, drawing his finger across his throat. “That’s not a threat, it’s a promise.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” I said, “in both matters.”

“You’re a true friend.”

“Leave the entertainment to me.”

Early evening, and my last patient gone into the night, having endeavoured to leave me his burden.

Now someone is kicking at the front door. My son, Rafi, has called for me. The boy lives a couple of streets away with his mother, Josephine, and comes plunging round on the scooter we bought at Argos with his PSP, trading cards and football shirts in his rucksack. He is wearing a thick gold chain around his neck, a dollar sign hanging from it. Once he told me he felt tired if he wasn’t wearing the right clothes. His face is smooth and a little smudged in places, with scraps of food dotted around his mouth. His hair is razor-cropped, by his mother. We touch fists and exchange the conventional middle-class greeting, “Yo, bro-dog!”

The twelve-year-old tries to hide his head when he sees me because he’s just the right height to be grabbed, but where can you hide a head? I want to kiss and hold him, the little tempest, and smell his boy flesh, pulling him to the ground and wrestling with him. His head is alive with nits, and he squints and squirms, with his father so pleased to see him, saying hopefully, “Hello, my boy, I’ve missed you today, what have you been doing?”

He shoves me away. “Piss off, don’t touch me, keep away, old man-none of that!”

We’re going to eat and find company, and since I’ve been a single man, the place to do that is Miriam’s.

Rafi has some juice, and we exchange CDs. On the way to Miriam’s, we drive past Josephine’s house, the place he left earlier, slowing down. Josephine and I have been separated for eighteen months. We had stayed together because of our shared pleasure in the kid, because I feared years of TV dinners, and because, at times, we liked the problem of each other. But in the end we couldn’t walk down the street without her on one side, me on the other, shouting complaints across the road. “You didn’t love me!” “You were cruel!” The usual. You don’t want to hear about it, but you will, you will.

I doubted whether she’d be at home, or even that a light would be on, as she had begun to see someone. I had deduced this from the fact that a couple of weeks ago Rafi had turned up at my house wearing a new Arsenal shirt with HENRY on the back. He looked shifty already, and required no confirmation that no son of mine was coming in the house wearing that. We had honourable, legitimate reasons for being Manchester United fans-to be explained at length later-and he did take the shirt off, replacing it with the more respectable GIGGS top he’d left in his room. Neither of us mentioned the Arsenal shirt again, and there was no addition to the kit. The boy loved his father, but whether he’d have been able to resist a trip to Highbury with a strange man who fancied his mother was another matter. We would see.

We were both aware that she required him out of the way, staying with me, in order to see her boyfriend. At such times we felt homeless, abandoned. I guess we were both thinking of what she was doing, of the hope and happiness not directed at us when she was with her new lover.