Hanif Kureishi - Something to Tell You

“The next night I was terrified of him doing it again, so I stayed awake, with all the lights on and music playing-”

“What happened?”

“He did return. He opened my door. The music was roaring, all the lights were blazing like mad! Oh, Jamal, you should have seen me in two pairs of pants, two pairs of trousers, a jumper, a coat. I was sweating and I must have looked strange. I even had a damn hat on, I don’t know why. He took one look at me and went off. I got into bed with some relief, though I didn’t sleep at all.

“He didn’t come back for a few days. I thought I’d scared him off. Until it happened again.” She said it was still happening. “If I wear a ton of clothes, he takes them off. That makes the whole thing go on longer. All I do is hold a tee-shirt over my face, so I don’t have to see or smell him.”

“Ajita, why don’t you lock your door?”

“There’s no lock.”

“It’s no trouble to get one fitted. Wolf and I would do it, today.”

“That’s kind, but I can’t do it,” she said. “Lock out my own father? He’d kill himself.”

“What could be better?”

She screamed, “No!”

“Do you have good reason to think he will do that?”

“He’s threatened it before. He said that, if things collapsed at the factory, he would have to end it. He couldn’t start his life again. If he failed his family, he couldn’t face the shame.”

“Ajita, that is blackmail.”

“I have to look after him.”

“Only as a daughter. You’re not his wife, for Christ’s sake. He’s a fascist and a bully.”

“You don’t know him.”

“Every day he rapes you.”

“There’s no force. Now please shut up. I can’t bear this.”

To her dismay, I gathered my things and went away. I needed to take it all in. This wasn’t something I could talk to Mum about; she’d panic. The only person who might have the experience to understand was Miriam. But her moods were unreliable, depending on what she was taking.

The next day Ajita brought up the subject herself, saying, “You see, I do listen to you.” She couldn’t lock her bedroom door, but she’d put a wedge under it. “I heard him,” she said. “I don’t sleep much now. You say I look exhausted, but going to bed is a horror. Last night I heard his slippers outside as I always do. They sort of slap, you see, and you always know where he is going in the house. Then he was banging on the door.

“The harder he pushed, the more the wedge stuck. It went on for a long time, this pushing and shoving. Then it stopped. Later I heard snoring. He was asleep in the hall. I went out and covered him up. He was shivering. He could have died out there-”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“He wants my warmth.”

“That’s why he has a wife.”

“She doesn’t want him. She is even thinking that he is a big fool.”

I asked, “Your father never mentions what happens at night?”

“At breakfast he’s always the same, hungover, curt, bad-tempered, in a hurry to leave for the factory, asking us if we’re learning anything at college or whether we’re wasting his money. Wanting to know when we’re going to start earning a living.” She said, “Jamal, you must never, ever, under any circumstances, tell another human being about this. Promise, promise on your mother’s life.”

“I promise.”

In my own bed, I couldn’t sleep. I’d lie there going over what Ajita had told me. I would imagine her father in a trancelike state walking along the corridor to her bedroom, opening the door, getting into bed, and forcing himself between her legs. Sometimes I wanted to masturbate, to rid myself of the image, remembering something she’d said: “He’s got such a large penis, it fills me up.”

“Does he make you come?” I asked her. When we made love she’d say: “I love coming; make me come; I want to come all the time, I’m wet all the time I’m with you.”

“What a pathetic fool you are,” she said. “But who could blame you, in such circumstances? I’m so sorry, so ashamed and lost.”

One night, so impossible was it to sleep, I did get up. I found myself getting dressed and leaving the house. I, too, was in a trancelike state, and the world seemed immobile, frozen.

Heading to Ajita’s place, I climbed over the iron railings and into the park, then legged it along the silent roads, past the cars and dark houses, until I arrived at the familiar fence.

Now I had no idea what I wanted to do, but stood outside, looking up at the windows, wondering whether I’d see a ghostlike figure moving through the house.

But what if he was fucking my girlfriend at that moment, about to cry out in his orgasm? By ringing the bell or knocking on the door, I’d interrupt him at his terrible pleasure. The commotion might make him think it was the police, and he’d be startled from his reverie. I stood there with my fist over the door, ready to strike it and run, but I could not bring myself to crash into their lives.

Perhaps I was distracted by her brother’s light, which was on. I became convinced he was peeping at me from behind the curtain. Terrified that he’d spotted me hanging around his house in the middle of the night, and would report me to his father, who would have me beaten or arrested, I fled.

Over the next few days I went back three times but was unable to act.

At college, sick with sleeplessness, I returned to Ajita, in the hope she’d become the person she was before and we’d have the same pleasures. But this stain couldn’t be removed. We’d talk, make love, go out to the same places, but we’d lost our innocence. When we fucked, I wondered if her father’s face might be superimposed onto mine. Was I another male monster banging into this girl? Thinking this, I couldn’t continue, and we’d lie there, side by side, lost.

There was no going back. But there was, I figured, a way to go forward. I was working on it, unconsciously, but wasn’t yet ready to admit it to myself.

“Hitler,” I called him. The man who would not stop. The man for whom “everything” was not enough. The man who was turning me into a terrorist. Evil had stomped into my life like a mad mobster. It demanded to be dealt with. We would not be victims. It was either him or me.

What sort of man would I turn out to be?

I had been introduced to Henry through a writer friend of mine who had translated a version of a Genet play and wanted Henry to stage it. Having seen some of Henry’s productions, I went along for the conversation, in the dark bar of a central London hotel, one of those hushed, wood-panelled places that doesn’t seem like it’s in London at all. While Henry was trying to make up his mind whether the time was right for Genet to “reenter our world” (he didn’t think it was, just yet), he made me his friend.

I put it like this because it was sudden. When he fell for you, there were no gaps in the friendship. It was passionate; he began to ring several times a day, or come around uninvited when he had something he needed to talk about. He’d ask me out two or three times a week.

As Josephine liked to point out if I remarked on her indolence, which I often had occasion to do, what people like Henry did most of the time in London was not work but talk about work, as they ate with one another. For them, known as the “chattering classes,” life was a round of breakfasts, brunches, lunches, teas, suppers, dinners and late suppers in the increasing number of new London restaurants. And very agreeable it was. Henry’s activity delighted me; he had no desire for me to replicate him: we were complements.

I discovered that his wife, Valerie, who he was separated from but constantly in touch with, was somewhere close to the centre of the numerous overlapping and intermarrying groups, circles, sets, families and dynasties of semi-bohemian West London. They were all constantly enlarging and moving together through a series of country weekends, parties, prize givings, scandals, suicides and holidays. The children, too, at school and rehab together, married amongst themselves; others employed one another, and their children played together.