Hanif Kureishi - Something to Tell You

One morning I took Valentin and Wolf to Ajita’s. There, I pointed out the house which backed on to Ajita’s, and explained how the couple went away on Thursdays and returned on Monday mornings.

A few days later, on a Friday, when Ajita was at college, her father at work, her brother at school and the aunt at the market, we broke into the house and took a lot of stuff. Oddly, Wolf had insisted on taking a dust-pan and brush with him, in order to sweep up after. Valentin told me that a criminal they knew had informed Wolf that real villains are always careful. The loot was brought out of the back of the house, through Ajita’s garden and into the garage. When Wolf and Valentin were ready and it was starting to get dark, they took off.

The victims were an old couple. We’d ripped off their life savings, tearing the heart out of their lives, for nothing really. It wasn’t difficult; I was impressed by how easy it was. They didn’t even have window locks. Wolf had been a builder; he knew how to take a window out. I was small, I could get through it and let the others in. I hated being in their house, violating them. Burglars aren’t supposed to think of this, of what the people will think when they get home. To be a criminal, you have to lack imagination.

I wasn’t sure exactly what swag they obtained from the house. There were several bags full of stuff: clocks, watches, ornaments, pictures, as well as jewellery and silver, I guessed. I suggested to Valentin and Wolf that we still had time to put the gear back if they wanted. I can’t have been a natural gangster if I felt this much guilt about my crimes.

It was to be a villains’ carnival. They fenced the gear quickly and spent the day shopping for suits and shoes. They took me out to dinner before we went to the club, opposite the Natural History Museum, where Valentin had worked as a bouncer. I had drunk a lot and wanted to crash through all the laws, knowing at last the excessive pleasures of cruelty and corruption.

In the club a woman (who I considered to be an “older” woman, like a Colette heroine, because she must have been in her late twenties) came to sit beside me, slipping my hand up her skirt. At the end of the night, when I said I had to get the train back to the suburbs, she suggested we go back to the boardinghouse in West Kensington, where Wolf and Valentin would join us later. At the house she went into Wolf’s bedroom, saying she had to “get ready.” When she called me in, she was naked apart from an elbow-length velvet glove, and very willing to suck me off. Before she left, I asked if she wanted to see a movie the next afternoon. She said she couldn’t; she had “a client.”

I had already told Valentin and Wolf that things had been going wrong with Ajita, that she had been unfaithful to me and wouldn’t tell me who it was. Despite the whore, they liked Ajita and told me I should try to work it out with her. On the other hand, they didn’t like to see me getting hurt.

Ajita and I still made love when we met, but it was unhappy love, the worst sort, increasing my loneliness. My nerves crackled and popped continuously. I wanted to believe my mind was under my control, that I could persuade it to go in the direction I required, but it became obvious that this was a false belief.

“Tell me who it is and we can sort it out,” I said once more, but she refused. I asked her what I lacked that made her go elsewhere.

“Lack?” she said. “But you haven’t failed me. You are everything I want.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said. “It’s my fault. If it isn’t,” I went on, “tell me what qualities this other man has. The qualities he has that make you desire him.”

She said, “What makes you think I desire him?”

“Can’t you put me out of my misery?”

“Okay,” she said. “I will. Are you ready, sweetie? Sit down and listen.”

She told me the truth.

For days after, I walked around with this knowledge in my mind, trying to come to terms with it; because after she spoke, I thought I would-genuinely, and without possibility of return-go insane.

This is what she told me.

The summer break was approaching. We had been going out for eight months. The moment we saw the sun, we resumed our habit of lying on the blanket in her garden with our books, the radio, wine, cigarettes. I’d been rubbing and caressing her feet and ankles, and wondered if she was ready for love.

But I said, “A few weeks ago I visited the factory.”

“You did?”

I explained that I had wanted to see the picket lines, the students, the whole hurly-burly. I said I had seen her going into the factory, half-concealed in the back of the car.

“It’s no secret,” she said, touching my face tenderly. “You never asked me about it.” She started to dress, or at least to cover herself up, as though she wasn’t wearing the appropriate clothes for what she wanted to say. “For ages now you’ve been interrogating me with these questions about my lovers, as you call them.”

“Interrogating you? What about the truth cure? You have never once denied my suspicions.”

She said, “I can’t make you stop asking. You have to know everything and I like that about you. So, I will tell you, and it will shut you up, oh yes.”

“It’s Valentin, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“Wolf?”

“He is more likely.”

“Why?”

“He is insistent, and less concerned about deceiving you.”

“He came on to you?”

“They’re your friends, and I wouldn’t do that. Are you offering me to him?”

“No!”

“So how can you think such a thing about me?”

I was clutching my head. “How can I know what to think unless you help me? My mind is going everywhere! Somehow the truth anchors us, I know that! Is there someone you love more than me? Am I only second best?”

“Come, rest here, in my arms. Listen carefully. I won’t be able to say this again. The words are too heavy.” She said, “Sometimes, after midnight, my father comes into my room and makes love to me.”

“He does?”

“Yes. He does, Jamal.”

I must have been nodding at her. I was empty, looking into her eyes. It occurred to me that I should know more. “How long has this been happening?”

“What do you mean?”

“Is it before we met and fell in love, or after?”

Her eyes dropped. “Before.”

“It was happening when we met?”

“It had just started.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“How could I? I was falling for you. Surely it would have put you off. Perhaps the news would have got round, and my father would have been arrested. Or his reputation would have been ruined.”

“His reputation?”

“The community means a lot to us here. We can’t go against it without falling out of the circle.”

I said, “Didn’t you think you would have to tell me?”

“I don’t know. What did I tell myself? Nothing. Perhaps I thought it would stop and somehow I would forget the whole thing. I have no experience of these matters. But do you not love me now? Am I filthy and disgusting to you?”

I kissed her on the mouth. “Of course I do love you now. More, even.”

“Yes?” She said, “Jamal, that was why I needed your protection so much, why I needed to feel loved. And I did receive that from you. My only darling, you have been good to me.”

“And you to me. You are my life. I want to marry you.”

“You do?” Her mouth twisted. “Me too. But this isn’t the right time for such talk.”

I said, “How did all this start with your dad?”

“After my mother had gone to India, Dad came into my room one night and got into my bed. He kissed me, sexually, you know, with his tongue, and he rubbed himself against my stomach until he came off. Then he went away. He was in a sort of trance, like one of those Shakespeare ghosts, staring eyes, stiff movements, like someone hypnotised or sleepwalking…