Hanif Kureishi - Something to Tell You

Before the nine o’clock news, she liked to eat cheese and pickle on cream crackers. I would, at least three evenings a week, sit in the house with her, listening to music, reading, but ultimately, just keeping her company in her gloom.

Tonight, I became convinced she was looking at me with more attention than usual. I must have seemed wary; perhaps I blushed or my eyes flared.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“Coming to sit with you,” I said. “What’s on telly? Can I bring you a cup of tea?”

However unnatural this sounded, I didn’t believe that Mum suspected I’d returned home after beating my girlfriend’s father to the ground. Yet, unsurprisingly, my body kept reminding me something was awry. When I brought Mum the tea, I had to hold on to the cup, saucer and spoon with both hands, for fear of them vibrating.

The knife remained with Mum, of course. She kept it for years; perhaps she still has it.

Sitting there watching the adverts, I could feel the watch in my jeans pocket all that evening. Later, I hid it in my bedroom. After a few months, I began to take it out and look at it, thinking over what had happened. I began to wear it in the house occasionally, telling Mum I’d liked the look of it and had swapped it for some records. I wore it outside a few times. I changed the strap. I took it with me to my new digs, hating it and needing it at the same time.

The morning after the attack I didn’t know what to do. I had been walking about the house since five. At nine I went into the garden. At last I thought I’d go to college and see if Valentin was there.

I was leaving the house; the phone rang; I ran to pick it up.

“Dad is dead,” Ajita said. “I’m at the hospital.”

“Who killed him?” I said.

“The strikers. They came to the house when we were away and scared him to death. His heart was weak already, he was having tests.”

There was a pause. I think I was expecting some kind of pleasure, or relief, in her voice. Hadn’t I done her a favour?

“He looked,” she said, “when Mustaq and I found him, not at all peaceful, as they say the dead do. But anguished, contorted, frightened, with bruises on his head and blood coming out of his nose. Why would anyone do that to a man?”

“Oh God,” I said.

“I’m going to wail now.” She was already sobbing. “It’ll be horrible, you don’t want to hear it. I’ll ring you again,” she said, putting the phone down.

I rang the boardinghouse and told Wolf and Valentin that the man was dead. I said nothing else, not wanting to give anything away on the phone. I would be in touch later.

The next time Ajita called, that evening, it was to say her father had been murdered by people from the trade union who had discovered his address and attacked him. She told me two people had been arrested. She called them “racists,” adding, “Who else would do such a thing?”

“Burglars?”

“But nothing was stolen. His wallet was there on the floor, undisturbed.”

I had no way of knowing whether Wolf and Valentin had been arrested. I rang their place several times, but there was either no reply or the landlady said they were out. When I called round, she said they’d left. “Good riddance too. They owe me money.”

That night I received a reverse-charges call from a phone box on “the coast.” Wolf, typically talking in a whisper, said they’d packed their things, left the boardinghouse, got into the old Porsche they’d bought with the money from the robbery and were heading for the South of France. It was a good idea, Wolf said, for them to “lie low” for a while. They had been looking for an excuse to get away.

Their careers had hardly been prospering. So they ran and were not pursued, except by their consciences, if they had any. But from my point of view, they had disappeared for good.

“I cannot believe my papa is not coming back,” Ajita said when she called the next day.

“At least you’ll be able to sleep at night now.”

“What are you meaning?”

“You know what I mean.”

“But I can’t close my eyes at all! The racists are chasing behind us now, Jamal. We are all in great danger here.”

This was not only paranoia. We didn’t know, in those days, which way the “race question,” as it was called, would go. My father had often said “the persecution” might begin any day. When it did, he’d come and get us. “Thanks, Dad,” I said.

“Where else can we possibly live?” I asked Ajita. “Can’t I come with you?”

“I’m being looked after by my uncle. Darling, I will be in touch.”

The next thing I heard from Ajita, ringing from the airport, was that she, Mustaq and the uncle, accompanied by the aunt who lived in the house, were taking their father’s body to India for burial. The house would be put up for sale.

“Goodbye,” she said. Before I could ask her when she’d be back, she added, “Wait for me, and never forget that I will love you forever,” and put the phone down.

I followed the case in the news, reading all the papers in the college library. Eventually, the charges against the so-called murderers were dropped. There was much speculative talk of a racist attack by white thugs, and the Left condemned the police for not taking racist attacks seriously. But there were no clues. Apart from the watch, we took nothing with us. There were no fingerprints or blood.

The factory was closed down; the pickets went away. I was amazed by the inability of the police to find me. I guess I’d have confessed pretty easily, but there was no evidence to connect me with the dead man.

The upshot of this nifty piece of criminality was that I never saw Ajita again. She had gone to India, where I didn’t know where to find her. I waited, but she didn’t contact me, though I told Mum that if she rang she was to take her number.

Ajita was gone; I hadn’t realised she was saying goodbye for good. There was only silence, and I had lost my three closest friends.

I was in shock for another reason: I didn’t kill the father with my bare hands, but without my assistance he’d be walking around, even now perhaps.

I had done for him, and called myself “murderer.”

The plane must have touched down around three in the morning.

I had to slap and shake Miriam awake. She’d been living in a squat in Brixton and was eager to get away. The area had recently been torn apart by antipolice riots. Miriam had been up for a week throwing bricks and helping out at the law centre. The contemporary graffiti advised: HELP THE POLICE-BEAT YOURSELF UP.

Inevitably, Miriam had taken something to calm her nerves on the flight, cough syrup, I think, one of her favourites, which had poleaxed her. I helped her throw her stuff into her various hippy bags and shoved her out into the Third World. Lucky them.

It was still dark but warming up. In the chaos outside the airport, scores of raggedy beggars pressed menacingly at us; the women fell at, and kissed, Miriam’s red Dr. Martens.

Wanting to escape, we got into the first car that offered a ride. I was nervous, not knowing how we’d find our way around this place, but Miriam closed her eyes again, refusing to take responsibility for anything. I’d have dumped her if it wouldn’t have caused more problems than it solved.

We couldn’t have been in Pakistan, the land of our forefathers, for more than an hour when the taxi driver pulled a gun on us. He and his companion, who looked about fourteen, wrapped in a grim blanket against the night cold, had been friendly until then, saying, as we took off from the airport to Papa’s place with Bollywood music rattling the car windows, “Good cassette? Good seat, comfortable, eh? You try some paan? You want cushion?”