Hanif Kureishi - Something to Tell You

“I can drive one-handed. You know there’s a lot I can do one-handed.”

I said, “I didn’t know you were coming to George’s this weekend.”

“You didn’t? But I haven’t been out for absolutely ages.”

“You’ve been hiding at home?”

She said, “Things haven’t been good. They’ve been bloody rotten and down on me. Can’t we stop for a drink?”

“No.”

“Just a little one in a country pub?”

“It’s a different decade now, I’m afraid.”

“Haven’t we become too sensible?”

“The world has, but I’m sure you haven’t. It’s terrific to see you, Karen.”

“Is it? Is it really, Jamal?”

Karen was driving me to Mustaq’s.

Miriam had become determined to live her own life, even though she still felt guilty about leaving the kids and the house. Nonetheless, she and Henry were looking for the opportunity to get away together. As there was a club they were reluctant to miss on Friday night, they would come to the country after lunch on Saturday morning. I could have waited for them or gone down on the train.

It was a surprise then, when my old girlfriend Karen Pearl, the “TV Bitch,” offered me a lift. I wasn’t aware that she knew Mustaq, but it turned out that over the years he had appeared several times on her TV shows. Now and again she went to his house to recuperate from her life.

She turned up outside my place in a tiny red car, which roared when she pressed the accelerator. She’d asked her husband to buy it as compensation for leaving her, which he considered a more than fair exchange. If I was already anxious about seeing Mustaq and answering his inevitable questions, being squashed in a small space with Karen while being hurled down the motorway certainly made me breathe more rapidly.

“I am delighted and totally chuffed to be getting away,” she said. “You?”

I felt unnaturally close to the road; Karen played loud music, mostly ABBA, and, for my benefit, Gladys Knight as well as the Supremes, while smoking the entire time, as we always used to. Twice she opened the roof to demonstrate how it worked.

“Groovy top.”

“Isn’t it? We’re so old now, Jamal. My two girls are growing up,” she said. “It’s all slammed doors and lost mobile phones. But we have a grand girly time-like being back at boarding school. Otherwise, contrary to your corrupt view of me, I don’t have much of a laugh these days. Tom”-her ex-husband-“has taken the girls, along with his more or less teenage girlfriend, to Disneyland, Paris. As they are all of the same mental age, they’ll have a great time.”

“You having anyone?”

“I’m an untouchable,” she said. “This will make you laugh-I know exactly the kind of thing which will appeal to you.”

“Tell me.”

“Well, a few weeks ago I thought I’d give myself a treat. I tried it on with a potential toy boy. I’d heard that’s what all the old girls were doing. I strong-armed this moody, well-built kid into a ruinously expensive hotel room. There was champagne, drugs and what you used to describe as my vast arse, in silk red panties, all ready. And the boy so fit and sweet-”

“Famous?”

“On his way there. At the moment, an extra-a speaking extra, mind, but words rather than sentences-from a soap opera. At some cost to the little dignity I have left, I removed a good deal of my clothing, presenting said panties in what I considered to be a provocative way.”

“Oh wow.”

“He sat on the edge of the bed holding my hand, looking, I think, at how withered it was. Either that or my nail varnish had hypnotised him. Within half an hour he was on the tube home. I sat there for a while crying-”

“Oh, Karen-”

“Ready for my overdose, Mr. DeMille. Then I went home and got into bed with the girls. Oh, Jamal, think of all the nights you and I wasted not making love.”

“There were many,” I said. “But I enjoyed every one of them with you.”

“You’ve got sweeter in your old age, Jamal. It’s nice to talk to you again. Why do you never call me now? Oh, forget it, I’m going to think positive today. Isn’t that what you psychologists tell us?”

“No.”

“What do you tell us, then?” After a while she said. “Henry’s coming down, isn’t he? Will you put in a word for me?”

“You fancy Henry now? You two can’t spend ten minutes together without falling out.”

“Darling, haven’t you known desperation? He’s a man, isn’t he? At least below the waist, and he’s free.”

“He just got occupied,” I said.

“Who grabbed the old fox?”

“My sister.”

“Isn’t he trying to put her in the documentary?”

“Yes.”

“Fucking artists with their spontaneous ideas, I hate them. Remind me to kill him when I see him.” She said, “Is your sister going to be around this weekend?”

“On Saturday.”

“They in love?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t think he’d last long on the open market. That’s my hope accounted for, then. You still single?”

“There’s nothing doing. These days there’s rarely a twitch.”

She turned and looked down at my crotch. “Yeah, right.”

I said, “The idea of all that seems very far away from me. Josephine was hard work. Sometimes I think I miss being in love, or being loved. A little passion now and again would be a thrill.”

“You’re too objective about love. You can see through it. I was thinking…you said this thing to me once. That you hated to fall in love, it was like being sucked down the plughole. You lost control, it was madness.”

“Did I say that?”

“Did you feel that about Josephine?”

“Sucked into some elemental state of need, overidealising the other, drifting in illusion and then one day waking up and wondering how you got there? Yes…But-”

I didn’t want to say it to her for fear of upsetting myself, but I had liked being in a family, liked having Rafi and Josephine around me, hearing their voices in the house, their shoes all over the hall.

I had met Josephine at a lecture I was giving, “How to Forget.” She was a psychology student but was bored by the “rats on drugs” approach. We had only been together for a few months when she fell pregnant. My father had died about eighteen months before, and I was keen to replace him with another father: myself. I was living in the flat where I saw patients, and beginning to make a decent living.

Josephine had her own place, which her mother had left her, and we bought a small house near what became my office. We hadn’t been together long when I lost her almost immediately to another man, my son. Or, rather, we lost each other to him, and neither of us bothered to come back. Of course, many relationships require a “third object” to work: a child, house, cat; some sort of shared project. He was that, but also the wedge. Josephine knew how to be a mother; being a woman was far more difficult. She waited a long time before trying to find out what that might mean.

When he was little, I kissed Rafi continuously, licked his stomach, stuck my tongue in his ear, tickled him, squeezed him until he gasped, laughing at his beard of saliva, his bib looking like an Elizabethan ruff. I loved the intimacy: the boy’s wet mouth, the smell of his hair, as I’d loved that of various women. “Toys,” he called his mother’s breasts. “What is thinking?” he’d ask. “Why do people have noses?”

Around the age of six, Rafi would wake up early, as I tended to, while Josephine slept. I’d sit at the table downstairs, making notes on my patients, or I’d prepare a paper or lecture I was giving. He brought me his best pens to borrow, to help make my writing “neater,” as he put it. He’d sit with me-indeed, often, on me; or on the table-listening to music on my CD player, through headphones bigger than his cheeks. He liked Handel, and when he got excited he said, “Daddy, I feel as if I’ve got people dancing in my tummy.”