Hanif Kureishi - Something to Tell You

There were few black or brown faces on TV; my fate was to correct this imbalance. I informed her it was hopeless, but she insisted I endure two auditions for the job of presenter on a new TV media show entitled Television/Television.

In front of a camera and wearing a borrowed Armani jacket, I had to sit at a desk (on a cushion, as it happened, being little) or on the desk itself. Then I would be instructed to walk around this desk, while saying repeatedly, “Hallo, good evening and welcome to Television/Television. Tonight we have an exclusive interview with Sviatoslav Jarmusch, who claims that digitalisation is the future of this medium. To discuss this, we have in the studio…”

I guess I could have done it, and I’d be someone recognisable in TV now, but I fucked it up beautifully. I was bafflingly disappointing, like someone who’d never spoken before.

It wasn’t, however, the end of my media career. Karen and I had talked of making porno films to earn money: her producing, me directing, neither of us starring. But she knew enough about the media to realise making such films took too much time; it wasn’t a part-time job. It was less of a palaver to write the stuff. I had bought a fast electric typewriter-with a “golf ball,” which flew madly about like a bird caught in a chimney-and I liked writing. After becoming a murderer, was there nothing I considered beyond my talents?

At first I sent in stories to magazines at the low end of the market. When they were published, the editors started asking me to write more. Initially it was fun, trying to organise the story, the rise and fall of which represented coitus itself. I learned to write them quickly.

There’s nothing more conventional than the sly prophylactic of pornography, with the end a foregone conclusion. Anna Freud, the eternal virgin, said that in fantasy you can have your eggs cooked any way you like, except you can’t eat them. Relying on fantasies is like trying to devour the menu rather than the meal. For those who want the same thing over and over, that is more than enough. Indeed, it was the same words: I made a list of them, the basic ingredients of word-porn, spicy and resonant-harder, harder, come, come!-and was sure to salt the text with them each time.

However, the magazines also let me work on semi-pornographic material, articles on de Sade, Beardsley, Hugh Hefner, the history of pornographic pictures, for which I enjoyed the reading.

One time I was sent to meet a sleazy guy in a dirty hotel who asked me to write short novels with titles like The Disciplinarian. It was big work-almost everything is, I was discovering-though if I got into the groove I could do a dirty book in a weekend. But not for long. If pornography is the junk food of love, I couldn’t swallow any more. Being young, I was tempted to add, digress and generally express myself. What did the couples do after sex? Did they find it difficult, embarrassing, boring? What did they do at home? What did they say to their parents? They were bar-maids, businessmen, hotel maids, people meeting casually for one reason only, a reason that wasn’t compelling enough. The whole pornography scam collapsed when I wrote a novel about a couple married to other people who met only to talk.

“Talk! Anyone can talk! Where the fuck is the fucking fucking?” my man in the hotel yelled, rifling hopelessly through the manuscript and finally frisbeeing it across the room. “What is this-Plato? It’s certainly not Plato’s Retreat!”

The line between literature and pornography was uncrossable. Breaking the porno spell was like that moment at a party when the lights came on and all you saw were haunted faces and debris. Now pornography is getting emotional, and straight movies more sexual.

It was a strange business, being in a celibate relationship while thinking of sex continuously. I’d discuss the stories with Karen, and she’d suggest ideas, often from her own life. This was where our sexual relationship was, in this talk and in my work.

For me, everything was “good enough” between Karen and me until she became pregnant. Such an event might seem awkward to achieve in a celibate relationship but not, as I discovered, impossible. Platonic love is a gun you don’t know is loaded. At her place, going to bed drunk, as we did more often than I’d like to admit, we copulated in our sleep. I remembered enough to know it happened. We both took it for granted that she’d have an abortion. They knew her down at the clinic, and I joked that she had an account there; one morning she set off with her overnight bag.

Karen was as tough as any artist with their vision. Occasionally she had to take a lot of contempt from artists and talented people, but it didn’t stop her thinking of what they did as rubbish. But the abortion, used by most of her friends as a means of contraception, seemed to smash her.

I was waiting at her flat when she returned, ashen and unable to stand. For two days she lay on the sofa wrapped in a dressing gown. I knew she was ill because she didn’t smoke or drink. I was blamed, but I sat it out with her, looking out of the window when I could, until she stood up and began to scream, telling me that I hadn’t grasped what this meant to her.

“It was my only chance to have a child! Suppose I don’t meet anyone else! Suppose I have to go it alone! And don’t you realise I’ll have to live with the murder of this child for the rest of my life?”

I was too immature to understand her. From my point of view, she was in her mid-twenties and had plenty of time to breed. I had taken it for granted that for her sex was a business transaction, or a way of spending time with her superiors. It hadn’t occurred to me to think about children. As far as I was concerned I was still recovering from my childhood, and thought you might as well call adults recovering children.

She went on, “The other day I thought: he only likes me because I’m silly, a kind of entertainment. Why would a man want that from a woman? Why were you with me?”

“It never occurred to me not to be with you. We always had a nice time.”

“Except you never loved me. You’ve been in love with Ajita all this time. You can’t accept she’s gone,” she said. “Don’t you understand the simplest things? Me, the woman, wants to be wanted-wanted more than other women! Without that there’s nothing. You think we’re friends?”

“Aren’t we?”

“I have been in love with you.”

I apologised and I listened to her; at least I knew how to do that. But I sickened her, and my restlessness caused her to banish me. None of this pleased me. She’d wanted me to give her a baby but had no thought for what I wanted. Indeed, so little had I impressed my desire on her that I appeared to be hardly in the equation.

I wasn’t doing well. Two relationships and two murders. I was on the way to becoming a serial killer. Karen had been an attempted treatment for the hurt I’d suffered with Ajita, which had made me phobic of romantic proximity. But I discovered that just because you don’t love a woman it doesn’t follow that she can’t hurt you, that you won’t suffer, particularly if you hurt her. Yet it was still a loss, and all losses, even when there are gains, leave their traces, reminding you of other losses, and all must be mourned, always incompletely.

After the split, I had wanted to remain friends with her, but for a long time we were rarely in touch. She began a relationship with, and later married, a TV producer who was envious of me, but we never entirely fell out.

“Wakey-wakey,” Karen was saying to me. “We’re nearly there.” We had been driving for miles through narrow lanes; at last we turned onto a rough, unmade road. “I’ve got a feeling,” she said, “one of us is going to get laid this weekend.”