Hanif Kureishi - Something to Tell You

Lisa started off by apologising for intruding and so on. But it wasn’t long before she told Miriam to lay off her father. She begged. She wept. She mentioned the heart attack. Then she made her first serious mistake, offering Miriam money. She offered her two grand not to see him again.

Miriam asked why Lisa thought she needed her money.

Lisa-who visited the poor and dispossessed every day-looked around at the falling-down house, bursting with animals and children, with some disdain, as her mother might have done. I knew what Miriam meant. Hearing this, even I got an electric jolt of very bad karma, and the taste of vomit on my tongue.

Lisa was, by now, testing Miriam’s patience, never a good idea. According to Miriam, Lisa was sweaty, hairy and probably dirty between her toes. “I should have asked her to weed the garden.”

Certainly, Lisa was making a mistake with Miriam, thinking she was a pushover. Lisa went further: she said that Miriam was only interested in her father’s fame and money. If Henry were nobody, Miriam would have no interest in him. She was implying that Miriam was a kind of groupie, a whore even.

Miriam was getting hot inside her head. But she loved Henry, she’d never adored a man so much. She didn’t want things to get too mad; after all, Lisa was his flesh and blood, and this fight would tear him apart. Just get the bitch out of here, she thought, that’s all I have to do.

She ordered Lisa to leave the house. She said this in a loud voice, giving her one minute to get out, with the rider that she would set the dogs on her. They were barking outside already, but Lisa tried to continue the conversation. However, Miriam isn’t one of those middle-class talky bitches who’ll go on and on until everyone’s paralysed. Inside her broiling head, a limit had been reached.

Her fingers were creeping towards one of her numerous mobiles and before she knew it, it was airbound. She had flung it at Lisa’s face, a lucky hit, which cracked her lover’s daughter’s cheekbone. Then Miriam threw other things-pill bottles, videos, books on astrology-which smacked Lisa in different places about the head.

Lisa turned round and came back at her. She’s strong: she rows, practises women’s boxing. The kids were screaming. Miriam had lost it. Lisa was going mad, taking up postures, her fists flashing. Bushy jammed himself in there, stopping a catfight, throwing his body between them before the knives were out.

He hustled Lisa out before anything worse happened-threw her out into the street in the direction of her bicycle, which, it being a bad neighbourhood, now had no wheels or saddle, was the skeleton of a bicycle. Bushy then took hold of a piece of wood and held it up, defending the house! Behind him, Miriam had come out with a knife and was threatening to rip up Lisa’s smug, middle-class face, reckoning she would look better with some ventilation!

I was twitching with agony over this when my mobile rang. It was Henry, whose calls I hadn’t had time to take that day. I could hardly make out what he was saying. He was stressed out, stoned on dope and trancs, and on top of this, somehow he’d mislaid his tickets for the Stones. He’d turned the flat upside down and didn’t know what to do. Lisa had been ringing him, screaming that she was at the hospital and then at the police station making a statement. She was trying to get Miriam arrested for abuse, assault and attempted murder, and Henry was trying to get her to lay off.

I did work out that Lisa had said to Henry, “You’re killing me!”

“I am killing you?”

“Yes!” And she added, “You wouldn’t like it if you found me strung up by the neck one night!”

During the day Miriam had been telling Henry that it was too much for her too. She loved Henry but would not see him until he chilled the daughter out. She was sorry that Henry had got caught between two women, but she felt at the moment that she wanted to separate. She couldn’t have that madwoman coming round her house scaring the children and animals.

She knew, too, that she was ugly and stupid and rank and worthless, and no man could get his head around her, but she couldn’t stomach any more rejection and she must not be insulted by Lisa again. After feeling loved for the first time in her life, she wasn’t strong enough to survive Lisa’s hatred.

At the other end of the phone, Henry didn’t know where he was, but he knew what he wanted, which was for her not to be hurt and for them to be together, continuing the life they had started. He started to weep and beg but he couldn’t make himself clear and the phone line went dead.

A little later I was watching the Champions League on TV, as well as taking some of this in, while waiting for Rafi to find his shoes and re-prepare his hair, when Henry came in, looking wild, as though he’d got caught in a storm.

He was in Miriam’s arms right away, and they were sobbing, apologising, squeezing each other’s buttocks and Henry wailing, “But I will never reject you, never! You know that! You are my sweet, my soul, my sausage! For you I would become an outlaw from everyone-from my entire family! How could you think I would let you down when I want us to marry!”

“You’re just trying to cheer me up-”

“No, no-”

Rafi came in and looked at them, amazed.

It wasn’t long before the two of them were making phone calls, working out where they’d go that night to “play.”

“By the way,” said Henry to me, patting his pockets as I was leaving, “I found the tickets for the Stones. We’re definitely going!”

Despite my sympathy for Henry’s suffering, I had to say, “What could be more gratifying to a man than to have two women fighting over him? It would be worse if they got along!”

He was shocked. “No pleasure without a price willingly paid? I hate to admit that you are right, but maybe you have a point,” he said, with some relief. “And at my age! All Lotharios cause chaos. None of them make a smoother world! These are the knock-ons of desire! As long as the women don’t go too far, how can I complain? Most people are far too well behaved,” he said confidently. “They go to their graves wondering whether they should have caused more harm to others, knowing they should. Jamal, thank you for your support! I’m sorry I brought such chaos to your sister’s life.”

Even though she had taken him back, he had been devastated by Miriam’s dismissal of him and was determined to bind her to him even more closely. That was why he wanted the Stones outing to be a success. Turned on by the Stones’ decadence-only a quarter century too late-Henry was more excited than I’d seen him for a while. He was ringing me all day. If I was with a patient, he’d talk to Maria, though she barely understood a word. She liked Puccini.

Henry had obtained the tickets from a costume designer he knew, who was now working with the group. The band was due to play the Astoria in Tottenham Court Road. I had seen the Stones with Ajita and Mustaq, but I knew Henry had never seen them before, though he claimed to have been “near” Hyde Park when Jagger wore an Ossie Clark dress, the first gig after Brian Jones died.

Marianne Faithfull had been in one of the productions he’d assisted on, as a young man in the late 60s, and they were still friends, difficult though she could be, like any diva. But Henry had always been a little snobbish about rock’n’roll, unable to make up his mind whether it was tat or the revolution. He hated to dance, disliked anything too loud and was ambivalent about the joys of “vulgarity,” until now, when he knew Miriam would be impressed. She was.

Henry had mislaid the tickets, found them, lost them, and finally found them. At last, when the day came, Miriam and Henry spent the afternoon in Camden market, buying black clothes. We all had our most impressive gear on, with comfortable shoes. Bushy drove Henry, me and Miriam up there, dropping us off in Soho Square. Soho was always crowded now, but tonight it was rammed.