Hanif Kureishi - Something to Tell You

When she did glance over, I saw her start suddenly and then take me in, her lips parting and her eyes widening. She watched me looking at her. I could feel the readjustment of perspective between us, as fantasy and reality crashed together and began to realign. Neither of us were students now; we were more than middle-aged.

She began to smile, and so did I. She got up then. One of us had to do something. We were kissing and embracing, and swinging one another around until we were embarrassed.

When we were done her brother, not the only one watching but the most attentive, came and stood behind us, leaning down on both our shoulders as we dabbed at our eyes.

“My darling sweety sweets, I’m sorry I didn’t tell either of you that you might meet tonight. I was afraid that one of you would change your mind. Was that wrong of me?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I think we’ll be fine.”

“Yes,” said Ajita. She turned to me with a determined smile. “So, how have you been? What’s been going on?”

“Quite a lot, actually,” I said. “There’s years of it.”

“And with me too,” she said. “Years of it.” We picked up our glasses and touched them together. She laughed. “You always said actually. I’m so glad you haven’t changed.”

“How have you changed?”

“I guess you’ll find out soon enough,” she replied, leaning over and kissing me on the cheek.

It was a long table; I guessed that thirty people could sit around it. There were half that number present, but more Londoners kept arriving, driving up for the evening or weekend and coming in to eat.

Karen was sitting opposite Ajita, and she talked continuously, as she did when nervous. This didn’t prevent her trying to get a good look at Ajita.

Omar Ali came and sat beside me. Charlie and Karim were further down the table, with people I didn’t know. Knighthoods-that prosthetic for the middle-aged-were being discussed, and whether it was a good idea to accept one. Then the subject was whether Karim should appear on I’m a Celebrity…Get Me out of Here!

Charlie argued against it, saying Johnny Rotten had lost more than his mystique by appearing. But as Karim, after acting in British soaps, had been living in America for years, mostly playing either torturers or the tortured in bad movies, he didn’t have any mystique to lose. Charlie had, of course, already said no, and was unsure whether to regret it or not.

Meanwhile, I turned to Ajita. When, years ago, Ajita was about to masturbate me-one of our favourite pastimes-she would rub her tongue on the palm of her hand as a preparation for the work ahead, a gesture I found unconscionably exciting. Later, when we were in a class together, we’d make the gesture to one another, and giggle. Now, when she turned to me, I repeated the sign. For a moment there was no recognition, before she began to laugh, and gave me her own demonstration of the long-lost lick of love.

After supper, but while most people were taking coffee and beginning on the brandy, Mustaq joined me. “Come,” he said. “Can we talk a little?”

Mustaq and I went upstairs to a large room with a long window over-looking his land. While Mustaq gave instructions to the staff, I noticed that there were, on a side table, numerous photographs. Looking closer I realised they weren’t what I expected: George with Elton John, George with Bill Clinton and Dolce and Gabbana, the stuff everyone had in their house. No, they were family photographs, pieces of frozen time which seemed, at that moment of the uncanny, to freeze me. As I picked one up, I noticed Mustaq looking at me.

“That’s Mother.” He came over. “Did you meet her?”

“She was in India when Ajita and I were together. I wish I had met her.”

“She’s still alive, and still beautiful, though lashingly bad-tempered,” he said. “She’s been here a couple of times.”

Less than a year after her first husband’s murder, their mother had remarried in India, to the rich executive she’d been having an affair with. She often came to London, where they had a flat in Knightsbridge. She was one of those foreign women floating about Harrods and Harvey Nichols for consumables unavailable in the Third World. Did she ever go back to the house in Kent? No; she didn’t like it the first time. She didn’t suffer from nostalgia, either.

Another photograph: one I’d never expected to see again. It was me, in Mushy Peas’s bedroom in the mid-70s, before our wrestle, I guessed. I had some kind of embarrassed smirk on my face, but at least I had plenty of dark hair. I supposed that Mustaq had displayed the photograph just for me.

“Yes, you,” he said. “Fresh young meat, eh?”

“I wish I’d made more of it.”

He picked up another picture. “Him-you cannot see.”

It was Ajita I noticed first in the photograph, a little younger than when I first met her; she was standing arm-in-arm with the father I had murdered, a massive dose of adrenaline in the heart stunning him.

I could feel Mustaq looking at me as I recalled that night in the garage, trying to picture the father’s face and compare it to what I had in front of me. I had no photographs of Ajita, or of Wolf or Valentin. The only photograph I had was one of the father, cut from the newspaper, which I hadn’t seen for years, and which must have been thrown out when Mother moved.

“Do you miss him?” I asked.

Mustaq replaced the picture. “He would have hated all that I am. I can’t imagine him having supper with Alan. But maybe he’d have appreciated my wealth and success.”

“That normally brings people around.”

“Are you pleased to see my sister?”

“Thank you, Mustaq. Yes-delighted, though we haven’t spoken much yet.”

“You’ve certainly been looking at one another.”

“Indeed. Is she with her husband and children?”

“I took them all to dinner in New York. When I told her I had seen you in London, and that you were coming to the country for the weekend, she came to life. She phoned me continuously, and began to move very quickly. Though she hates to leave the house, she brought no one with her. I suspect she might be ready for an encounter. Jamal, you lucky guy, you’re all she’s been waiting for.”

“I’d better not let her down.”

Mustaq lifted my wrist and looked at it, stroking my arm ironically. “You’ve taken the watch off. What I want now is information. I know it was a long time ago, but how in God’s name did you really get that thing?”

I reached into my pocket and drew out the watch. I couldn’t look at it now without wishing I could wind it back until before the moment it was given to me. My attempted good deed had brought more hell into my life than I could handle. Mustaq’s father was a ghost who still wouldn’t take his hands from my throat and, I feared, never would. The one thing you can never kill is a name. I wanted to cry out, Will the dead never leave us alone?

I gave it to him and sighed. “You can take it.”

He looked surprised. “It’s not mine, really.”

“Nor mine, I guess. Please.”

He removed his own watch and replaced it with his father’s. Tapping it, he said, “Thank you. I have to ask you this. Why did you deny that it was my father’s?”

“I wasn’t able to say how I got it.”

“Why not?”

“It’s a painful subject, Mustaq, going back a long time.”

“Painful for you or for me?”

“I will tell you. It may change your view of your father.”

“You don’t know what my view is. I don’t know what my view is. And I am almost an adult.”

“Okay.” I said. “Now?”

“Yes, if you don’t mind. Think how many years I’ve waited.”