Hanif Kureishi - Something to Tell You

There was a pub Omar liked to visit when he came up, where the local lost children, most of them junkies, listened to savagely loud music. At least one of these kids would be fuckable.

Omar was too drunk to return to Mustaq’s and didn’t want to leave his car behind. Of all his crimes, drunk driving might turn out to be the most viably punishable. Also, he had to get up early in the morning to fulfill one of his duties, which was to sit in a large black car surrounded by motorcycle outriders and greet some foreign dignitary at Heathrow on behalf of the queen and the government, and then accompany this variety of murderers and torturers to their hotel while making small talk.

Omar said, “I have to be quite careful. I’m always getting the words dignitary and dictator mixed up.” He was, apparently, often in bad shape for some of this “meeting and greeting.”

Alan required one of us to drive Omar’s car back. So, fancying a change, I went into town with Karen, following Alan, who knew the pub. On the way out I said to Mustaq, “Why don’t you come with us?” He shook his head and smiled. As we got in the car, Karen told me that the price Mustaq paid for his wealth was the fact that he couldn’t walk on the street, go to the shop or pub without being mobbed, questioned, photographed.

We drove past a lurid building called the Hollywood Bowl, a multiplex featuring a drive-through McDonald’s, security guards and hooded kids wandering around windswept, concrete spaces.

“Why so fast, Karen? We won’t get lost. Are you drunk?”

“Yeah. You want to get out?” she said. “I should have killed you five minutes ago.”

“What stopped you?”

“So that is Ajita. The one you really loved and were faithful to. The one you kept expecting to return. You would lie there, my darling, ‘thinking,’ with a book open on your chest, and you’d smile to yourself. I knew that’s when you were with her in your mind. I absolutely totally hated you then.”

“Are you now pleasantly disappointed?”

“She’s an ordinary woman of a certain age. The age of desperation. But I can see it,” she said, “if I put my glasses on and look hard-what she had. The cuteness, the girly voice, the desire to please. Unfortunately, I was supposed to feel sorry for her all that time. What sadness you moped about in, which I had to endure! Even to me she seemed mystically important. Wasn’t her damned father murdered during a strike?”

“Something like that.”

“I only married the wrong person because of the whole mess. You made me feel second-best for so long I ended up with the first person who gave me their attention.”

“It would have to be my fault,” I said.

“Nothing cheered you up, even when you went to see that bloody analyst the whole time. After a session you’d spend hours writing it down. Didn’t you ever see that analysis doesn’t make people kinder or funnier or more intelligent? It makes them more self-absorbed. They start using all those awful words like transfer and cathartic. Did I want to hear about your dreams, about your mother and sister, when we were in the middle of a disaster? Didn’t that occur to you?”

“It was my vocation, and it interested me more than anything.”

“I hate to say this, Jamal, but you are intelligent and you’ve done nothing with it but learn to say all those words which are no use to anyone.”

“Shit, you are in a bad mood.”

“I am now.”

I said, “I’m definitely not going to fuck you tonight.”

“Bastard, it’ll be the Indian girl, won’t it? Why do you have to be so cruel, Jamal? Doesn’t it matter to you, cunt-teaser?”

We discovered Lord Ali, with his jacket and shoes off and shirt half open, lying across several chairs in the back room of the pub, “holding court.” This kinglike position wasn’t only due to his personal magnetism, or to curiosity among the poor about the lord’s work relieving the condition of the proletariat, but owed much to the fact he was buying drinks for everyone in the pub.

“Oh, fucking Christ!” said Alan, as we approached. The lord’s eyes, as Alan put it, were like “two pools of inky semen.”

We caught Omar telling the assembled drinkers, many of them already slumped, that he’d met the queen on three occasions and sat in her carriage once. Last week he’d found himself alone in a room with her. She was concerned that Labour was going to attempt to ban shooting as well as hunting. “‘We had a lovely shoot the other day,’” he said, fruitily. Lord Omar said this several times, louder and louder, until it started to sound not only pornographic but an arrestable offence.

Alan was ready to pull him out of there before he said anything else that might turn up in the News of the World, or bring information about their weekends to the wider world, but Omar wasn’t ready to leave. He hadn’t managed any physical contact. Alan spoke to one of the kids and came away with some decent weed, and while the cock-drunk good lord was satisfied in the toilet, Alan and Karen played pool.

I sat at the bar lining up vodka shots. The barman knew we were friends of George and told me what spoiled, overprivileged rats we were “up at the big house,” compared to the people around here. “What we need,” he said, as though it had never occurred to anyone before, “is a revolution. Look at that,” he said, pointing at Lord Ali, who was emerging from the toilet with wet knees and a pasty-faced kid while murmuring “Such, such were the boys…”

The barman went on: “Some of these people work up there. We know how to get in. One day we’ll all charge up there in a mob and pull it down and burn the lot of yer!”

“It’s a good idea,” I said. “But sadly, you’re all too stoned to do anything like that.”

“Outta my pub, how dare you!” he said. “Stoned? Who? You’re barred for life!”

I had called the others and was already stepping over someone in a move towards the door. Omar was being dragged along by Karen and Alan while singing “Land of Hope and Glory” and yelling, “Thank you so much, my darling subjects, for a lovely shoot! A lovely shoot is all one wants!”

The landlord was spitting with fury and threatening us with the police.

Karen squashed Alan and the lord into her car; I drove the lord’s motor back, tearing up the lanes.

At the house, people were talking in the living room, but most had moved to what Alan referred to as the “Brian Jones” pool. It was fashionable for rich people like Mustaq to buy art and photography. The corridor between the pool and the changing area was full of decent photographs, including one of a woman standing up to piss against a bridge.

Around the pool, people were smoking; others were dancing, or swimming naked. Those vile bodies had cost a fortune to maintain and were made to be exhibited. Charlie Hero was in good shape; even his scars glowed, and the slim bolt through his cock brought out its veiny contours.

Other friends of Alan and Mustaq had turned up by now, dancers, hairdressers, make-up artists, camp young black men, angelic boys, some in overtight or shiny clothing, others keen to show off their nipple clips. Some of these characters looked as though they hadn’t seen daylight for some years. Few women would get laid tonight, I thought. This might be my chance to see whether I really was still uninterested, or whether I’d just been through a discouraging time.

Charlie had attached his iPod to the pool sound system, and suddenly a record came on from my youth, the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Do You Believe in Magic?”, so full of musical sunshine and optimism that Karim and I both began to laugh, glancing at one another and laughing again. Like him, I’d been a little too young to be independently active at that time, but the mid-60s were where I was formed, and what did any of that love mean now, in these dirty days?