Hanif Kureishi - Something to Tell You

At the door she said, “I will not let my father be destroyed.”

There was mud on the floor from her boots. She also “forgot” one of her rucksacks. My patients often left umbrellas and coats, as well as change, lighters, condoms, Tampaxes and other stuff which dropped out of their pockets onto my couch. It was a form of payment as well as of relationship. I knew Lisa would be back.

She returned two days later.

“Thank you for putting up with me,” she said, as though I’d had a choice. She sat on the couch, dragging her skirt up over her boots, another colourful thing, ethnic, like me. She was watching me looking at her legs and smiled. “Did you know Valerie’s got an Ingres drawing on her bedroom wall? It’s lost in a mess of other stuff, some valuable things, family photographs and so on, but it’s there. That’s insouciance for you. You have any idea what it’s worth?” I said nothing as she looked at me. “Valerie says you’re a sphinx without a secret. Aren’t you the one who is ‘supposed to know’?” She paused. “You nodded then, but tell me, how do you sustain that stillness, Jamal? The way you’re just there. Did you learn it?”

“I don’t think I ever did.”

“You never fidget, your hands don’t fuss, your brown eyes are steady. They’re soft but merciless. And that little Gioconda smile of yours, which seems to know everything as you hear everything…It’s enough to convince a girl you could hear her soul murmuring. I bet all your patients want to be like you.” She was smiling at me. “I could sit with you for a long time, surrounded by books, CDs and these lovely pictures.”

“They’re all by friends.”

“The sketches?”

“My wife, Josephine.”

“And your son’s work too. So many photographs of him! Unlike my mother’s friends, you’re not showing off your wealth or power.” Silence. “You’re not supposed to give advice,” she said. “You shamans don’t even like to admit you can cure-if indeed you can.”

I said, “The difference between therapy and analysis is that in therapy the therapist thinks he knows what’s good for you. In analysis you discover that for yourself.”

“What would you say if you had a patient who was destroying himself?”

“I would warn him.”

She said, “Jamal, please, will you see me? As a patient, I mean.”

I told her there were good analysts I could recommend, but I couldn’t see her. I would phone her with suggestions. If she was in a hurry, I could find a couple of phone numbers right now.

She said, “Why are you refusing to help me? I took your two books from Mother’s house and read them. I’ve studied your essays on the Internet. Like all good artists, you make me believe you are writing for only me.” She went on: “Will you answer this? What happens when you feel that the conversations you have are the wrong conversations with the wrong people?”

I noticed that, while I was looking through my address book, finding a pen and paper, she had put her feet up on the couch and lain down.

“Lisa.”

“But I have to tell you what happened.”

“What happened when?”

“When I called Henry and we agreed to have dinner at that place near Riverside Studios. She was there when I arrived.”

“Who?”

“Your beloved sister. She’s uninvited, but never mind, she starts to talk. Capricorn rising, or was it falling? Wizards she has known. Belly-dancing lessons. Posh Spice as a goldfish. Botox and how to get it cheap. Big Brother. On and on. A talking tabloid. He listens to every word. I think: How does he know what Big Brother is? She records it for him. How sweet! Then you know what he does?”

“What?”

“He shows me the tickets he’s got for the Rolling Stones.”

“Did he say whether he got me one?”

“What is Dad doing-regressing to another adolescence? She has stolen him. He missed my childhood, having better people to be with. But in the past two years we were lunching once a week. Now he doesn’t see me, doesn’t need my advice. When I do get him to lunch, that woman’s there! He apologises, sees what I’m saying. He agrees to meet me. But he talks about her again, her arthritic hands, her agony. He says this awful thing: ‘But Miriam has liberated me from my horrible bourgeois upbringing. Almost everything I believed was stupid, wrong, sterile!’”

“There’s no room for you?”

“I tell him, if you don’t sort this out I’m going to do something!”

“Here,” I said, as she gathered her things to leave. “Take this number. This therapist is a friend who writes well.”

She looked at the piece of paper, folded it and put it in her pocket. “You have remarkable faith in these people.”

I said, “The early analysts really thought about the structure of the human mind, about what it is to be a child, to be sexual, to be with others-to live in society, or civilisation, as a gendered animal, and to have to die. They knew that every hour of the past, as Proust puts it, is inscribed on the body, indeed, makes the body. There’s nothing more important or absorbing, is there?”

I picked up biographies of Melanie Klein and Anna Freud, and gave them to her. “They are fascinating women, pioneers. Radical intellectuals.”

“Thank you,” she said. “It’s been a long time since anyone’s given me direction. My parents just expected me to be successful.”

She went on: “Before our ‘clients’ see me, they visit their doctors, who prescribe medication which the patient may take for years.”

I said, “Someone splits up with their girlfriend and they’re given a pharmacological concoction, as though pain were unnatural.”

She said, “Doctors haven’t got time to take a history. They are with each patient for ten minutes. So I listen, but I am there all morning. Then I get into trouble for being slow.”

I said, “Freud’s revolution was in the fact he didn’t drug people, hypnotise them or give them advice, which would have infantilised them. He listened. He wrote down their stories.”

The next time I saw Henry I told him that Lisa had been to see me.

“Don’t you think I love to see Lisa too?” he said, worriedly. “Now she calls me a deluded bastard. I am only a fool because I want them all to get along. I am, I know, ignoring basic human nature.”

We both wanted to talk of other things, and we did, but that was not the end of it. I didn’t believe Lisa would see the therapist I’d recommended, but she was in a worse state than I’d thought.

The day after, Rafi and I went to visit Miriam. When Rafi was downloading ringtones with the other kids, I looked over at Miriam-sitting at the table-and could see her hands were shaking.

“Who’s bothering you, my love?”

“Lisa came over. She is a very naughty girl, that one. As she’s Henry’s daughter, I took it easy with her.”

“How easy?” I said, uneasily.

I wanted to eat and to relax, but Miriam was giving me a mephitic vibe. At least she poured me a drink.

I said, “Where is Lisa now?”

“In Casualty. I expect her parents are flapping around her.”

“How did she get there-Casualty?”

“How d’you think?” said Miriam. I got up to leave. She grabbed me. “Please stay, Brother. You know I need you tonight.”

After visiting me the second time, Lisa had rung Miriam and asked to see her. While Miriam was thinking over whether this was a good idea, as well as wondering whether she should talk to Henry first, Lisa walked in. She must have been on her bicycle in the street.

She came right into Miriam’s kitchen and sat down. “In my fucking face-right there!” Looking at Bushy and indicating the door, Lisa said the two of them needed to talk alone. So Bushy shuffled out to mess around with his car, but he was not far away, having an instinct.