Hanif Kureishi - Something to Tell You

“I can do that.”

Bushy borrowed my Polaroid camera and later dropped by with the picture he’d taken. It was difficult to make out who it was, as Bushy was no Richard Avedon. Someone was asleep in a car. I could see a shoulder and an ear, but had no notion who they might belong to.

“I can’t wait anymore,” I said to Bushy on the phone. “I’m going to approach this guy. If I know him and he’s not scary, I’ll take him into the flat and try to talk to him. If I raise the blind, you come in.”

“Jesus no, there’s no way I’d advise that!”

“Don’t worry.”

Bushy said, “You don’t know what goes on half the time.”

“I don’t?”

“You think you can X-ray people with your eyes, but you can’t always.” He went on: “When I see you on the street, I always think: there goes the student.”

“Student?”

“With your worn jacket and uptight look, and always carryin’ books, head down, as if you don’t want to talk to no one…”

I put the phone down, a worried man with a worried mind, and went out of the house and approached the car.

The man was asleep, or at least his eyes were closed. I was about to knock on the window when he opened his eyes. He seemed to surge into life and wound down the window.

“Ah, Jamal! At last! Did you know it was me?”

“Hello, Wolf. My eyes are open,” I said, looking up the street to where Bushy’s car was parked.

“Can I come in?”

I said, “Let’s go to a café.”

“We have so much to talk about!”

“Why have you been hanging around out here?”

“I was afraid, nervous,” he said. “It’s been so long. But you do remember me?”

He was out of the car, embracing, kissing me and looking me over, as though wanting to see what remained after so many years.

He said, “I thought this moment would never come. Hallo, and hallo again, my dear, my most missed, friend. What an important moment this is-for both of us! The moment I’ve been waiting years for!”

I was looking at him too and said, “Perhaps like me you look the same, apart from your hair. My son says I get more and more hairy, except on my head, where it counts.”

“Your son?” he said. “I’m so glad for you. Is he here?”

“I hope he’s at school.”

“I’ve got to hear all about him. Will you tell me everything? Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

“Yes,” I said. “I am. Come right in.”

“Thanks,” he said. “This is beautiful. A beautiful moment.” He was looking up at my building. “London is so great. It feels like I’ve come home. This is where I belong-here with you again, my dear friend! You know, I’ve got the feeling it’s going to be like the old days again!”

Wolf refused a beer, and while I waited for the kettle to boil, he walked around taking everything in, “with the concentration of a bailiff” I might have said.

“You’ve done well,” he said. Suddenly he had become serious. “Since that night.”

“Which night, Wolf?”

“You’ve forgotten? I don’t believe you have. But people can put these little things aside if they are busy.” I was staring at him. He said, “The suburbs. We were in the Indian’s garage with Val.”

“Right.”

“A girl’s father.” His fist smashed into the palm of his other hand. “Pow! We got him! He took it-right?-and went down begging and crying.”

“Yes, yes.”

“Do you think about it?”

“Not often now, no.”

“But you did once?”

“Yes,” I said. “A lot.”

“What conclusion did you come to?”

“That it would be pointless to torment myself over it.”

“That’s it? That is all you think about it?”

“There was no possible resolution. I quit the useless questions. They were a vice costing me time and money.”

He said, “As a young man, you were intelligent and sure of yourself. Now you’re a doctor.”

I said, “Only a talking one, I’m afraid.”

“I could do with some of that talking.”

“Why’s that?”

He hung his head like an ashamed child. “Jamal, I have come to you for a reason, and not only because of the depth of our friendship. Things have not gone well for me.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It was my first murder. It started me off. Since then I’ve been murdering others.”

“You liked it that much?”

He looked up at me and shook his head. His father had been a German cop, his mother was English. Brought up in Munich, he’d been living in London for five years when I met him, speaking English without an accent.

Now, a man almost worn out, he had the head of a middle-class respectable man but with a powerful, desperate, bitter aspect which I recognised from juvenile thieves I’d seen: those who were looking to take that which no one would give them. As he had the assassin’s sunken eyes and the direct but confused look of a psychotic, I thought I should decide whether he would become violent. But Wolf had a cringing side which suggested he’d rather get something from me than hurt me.

Maria, who had come by to drop off the shopping, looked into the room. “Maria, this is an old friend from my student days.” She nodded at him. She knew that, if he were a patient, I’d have shut the door.

“Who’s that?” he asked. “What is she doing?”

“She looks after me and the patients,” I said. “She shops and washes too.”

“You’re professional,” he said. “Has she gone now?”

“I don’t know. But carry on, please.”

“She’s made me nervous. Is she watching us? Where did she get those eyes from?”

“Her mother.”

I sat down opposite him. It was a while before he began again. “Okay,” he said at last.

He told me he had been living with a rich widow for years, a woman older than him who had become senile. A month ago her relatives had had strong-arm guys remove him when he attempted to get his name on her properties, including small hotels, which she owned and he’d maintained, even rebuilding some of them. The family considered him a sponger, though he’d looked after her better than they had, doing every-thing for her. Since then he’d been living in a room in Berlin and was in a bad way.

“You must be furious.”

He said, “I’m a man who’s been robbed and left with nothing.”

“How did that come to be? You were always intelligent and resourceful. I liked your initiative.”

There was no doubt I’d long been fascinated by certain sorts of psychotics. I liked their focus and certainty, their lack of symptoms, the way they shrugged off the neurotic fears and terrors which made life so difficult for the rest of us. Psychotics appeared unworried; they could take a lot of criticism and made good politicians, leaders, generals. Unfortunately, their weakness was paranoia, which could become very severe.

And with someone like Wolf, there was conversation; there was even fine intelligence. But, after a short time, about half an hour, you’d begin to feel restless, irritable, registering the fact that your emotional world is not really present to the other person. Not only that, they seem to be bearing down on you with demands you cannot answer. You begin to feel suffocated, assaulted even. You might want to run away.

Wolf told me that after “the garage incident,” he and Val had worked on boats in the South of France. Val had also worked in casinos. They had found that everyone there was rich, or wanted to be; it was expensive. The place was awash with criminals full of large ideas.

“We needed a big coup. Then we put all our money together. I went to Syria. I’m driving the car, it’s full of hash-the pure stuff-which I’m going to smuggle into Europe in tins of pineapple-I know how to do that-when I’m arrested. When they say they think I’m an Israeli spy, I know I’m fucked, and I am.”