Hanif Kureishi - Something to Tell You

I rang the bell of Josephine’s place, the house I’d lived in but never much liked. It was on three floors, with two rooms on each and a decent-size garden. At the back was the shed where Rafi played his drum kit and guitars, and where he held sleepovers. Regarding the place, I remembered one of my favourite jokes, which went: Why marry? Why not just find a woman you hate and give her your house?

“What are you giggling at, fat-old-man-now-out-of-breath?” Rafi asked.

“I can’t tell you. Didn’t I play well today?”

“You should be with the disabled.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re losing your hair, too. When you bend over, I can see your skull. It’s pretty horrible, bringing deep shame on our family.”

Today, as we’d left the park, he’d asked how much longer I thought he and I would be able to play football together, in the same team. The question surprised me: this sense of the future, of transience, seemed unusual in kids his age.

“You see, I’m twelve and have to start playing more seriously,” he told me. “I want to join a proper team. You can drive me there, but you’ll only be able to watch.” He adopted an American accent: “Punk, will you be sorry for what you’ve done, and will you live to regret it?”

As he waited on the doorstep in his football socks, banging his muddy boots against the wall, eager to tell his mother about the volley and knockin he’d scored, I decided to go into the house, if she didn’t stop me, to see whether anything peculiar was happening with her.

Occasionally I wondered whether I might start liking her again, but it wasn’t an idea I was enthusiastic about. The thought that occurred to me most regularly was that, if it weren’t for Rafi, we wouldn’t need to see one another. Of course I hated myself for wishing the boy away, as I wondered who I’d be and what other mistakes I’d have made if he hadn’t been born.

Josephine opened the door, and I stepped into the hall and followed her down the stairs, into the basement. She turned to look at me but said nothing.

Josephine and I had been arguing on the phone over Rafi’s education, and I have to admit I’d become a little agitated. He’d failed the entrance exams to two schools. These were highly academic places, and as Josephine said, the children there looked anaemic and stressed. I could only agree with her that these schools were expensive machines for turning out smart-white-boy clone drones. All the same, I had cursed the kid. Josephine pointed out that I hadn’t gone to such a place myself and refused to physically enter such schools. She also claimed I was being snobbish. I knew many parents whose kids had gone to those schools and couldn’t believe my own son hadn’t sauntered effortlessly through the gates. Apparently my competitiveness was making the boy rage and fume at home. He’d pulled his mother’s hair and argued about everything.

Josephine was right to emphasise that this was about his future rather than my own self-esteem, adding that I seemed to have turned into my father, who hadn’t been around and yet still expected us to be brilliant and successful. For my part, I had decided to stop my reproaches after asking Rafi rather aggressively, “So, what are you the best at in your class?” He’d thought about this a while before replying, “I’m the best looking.”

As a child, he’d liked his food separated on his plate. The beans couldn’t touch the potatoes, the potatoes couldn’t touch the fish fingers. Now I saw how pleased he was to see his mother and me in the same room, as he watched us closely, eager to see what was going on-investigating a marriage.

I sat at the dining-room table; Josephine brought me some tea. When she went to sit down, I noticed that Rafi had pulled her chair over, so that we were close together. He was making childish noises and gestures, as though pretending to be a baby for our benefit, to remind us that we were a family.

Josephine was a woman who said little; she had no small talk nor much big talk. As I was comfortable with silence, we might as well have been statues.

Her father the abuser: drunk, crazy, run over trying to cross a motorway, some poor fucker carrying the memory of this madman rearing up in front of him. And the daughter, petrified for life, burning with anxiety, as though a car were coming at her forever.

Left with the exhibitionist mother, what Josephine liked-and hated in herself-was to be anonymous and silent, as though she’d never been able to grow out of the idea that the well-behaved are the most rewarded. Many of my friends forgot her name. Both of her therapists did that, and she’d angrily left therapy almost as soon as she’d started. It was inevitable that someone like Miriam, who Josephine liked to call an “attention seeker,” would make her annoyed. This, I liked to point out, was how she recognised how competitive the world was, and that, by making yourself more attractive, or noisy, you might be able to arouse more curiosity in others.

I was looking at her, the silence standing in for all that we might say. As ever, her fingers were not silent, but they drummed on the table, almost frantically, as though there was something inside herself she was trying to make dance.

Meanwhile, a mob of enquiring voices babbled in my head. Perhaps we had both hoped, as it ended, for some explanation, for a day when the knot of every misunderstanding would be combed out, strand by strand.

“Why don’t you hold hands?” Rafi said, grinning.

“I don’t want to drop my tea,” I said.

We were both anxious about him growing up. Me, because I wished I’d had more children and lived with them-I liked it when he brought his friends to my flat-and her because she feared his growing independence and sexuality, which she’d encouraged in him even as it programmed him to move away from us.

I asked her, “Been going out? Seen anyone?”

If there was a pause before she answered, I knew she had taken a tranquilliser. Usually she took them in the evening with wine, reading the label aloud: “Do not operate heavy machinery,” “Keep away from children.” “That’s good advice,” I’d say. Anything with -pam on the end, as in temazepam, lorazepam or diazepam, she liked. Polythene Pam, I called her. But as she didn’t like to be dependent on anything or anyone, she had begun to ration herself.

“Not really,” she said eventually. “I’m looking after Rafi, aren’t I? You went to Ajita’s brother’s place. Rafi showed me George’s autograph.”

“Yes, with Henry and Miriam.”

“They’re together, are they? Good of you to help them.”

I said, “If you need a babysitter in the evenings, I can always come over here and work. It would be a pleasure to see Rafi-and to see you, however briefly.”

“Yes? Thank you,” she said. “That’s kind.”

It wasn’t long before I stood up.

“Let me make you another cup of tea,” said Rafi.

“That would be a first,” I said, kissing his head. “But I have to go.”

As I was leaving, he slipped a CD into my hand. “For you, Dad.” It was one he’d burned for me, of some of his current favourites, Sean Paul, Nelly, Lil Jon. What I had once done for him, he was now doing for me.

The door closed behind me like a gunshot. Unconsciousness on a Sunday afternoon was one of the few pleasures of middle age. When I began to see my first patients, I’d learned to sleep between appointments. I could lie on my back on the floor and sleep immediately, sometimes for twenty minutes, or even for ten.

But today I felt so moved and desperate after leaving Rafi and Josephine-him waving at me from the window, after holding me and saying, “Daddy, don’t die today. If you lived here you’d be safe”-that I went home, showered and made a phone call.