Hanif Kureishi - Something to Tell You

I became a connoisseur of her body-transfixed, obsessed even; like a child, I needed her company, her reassurance and presence, and to escape into the world at the same time.

“Can I see what you’ve been doing?” I said. “Your new work?”

She fetched her folder and spread her recent drawings on the floor. Friends often asked to buy them, but she rarely sold her work, preferring to give it away. I had one of her nudes, framed, in my consulting room. Next to it was André Brouillet’s famous engraving of Charcot-the P. T. Barnum of hysteria-in the lecture hall at the Salpêtrière clinic in Paris, exhibiting one of his most famous hysterics, the somnambulist Blanche Wittman. Freud always had a copy in his office. It was in this hospital, years later, that the latest supermodel of hysteria, Princess Diana, had died.

I padded among Josephine’s drawings, telling her how much she continued to improve. She told me about her new daylong life class and about her art teacher, who was, inevitably, encouraging her to become a nude model as well as an artist. It was being an artist that she loved. She admired the ferociously weird and tender imagination of Paula Rego, particularly her prints.

Art was all Josephine wanted to do, but as well as not yet developing her own vision-as if she didn’t know who she was-she felt guilty about it. Guilty that she didn’t have a career and earned little money.

She felt herself to be a failure compared to other “executive” women in their smart suits, with their computers and fast cars. I replied that, unfortunately for these women, no man considered a woman to be more of a woman because she was successful. For some reason, that criterion applied only to men.

So I praised Josephine’s art and her mothering, and watched her eyes for a gathering brightness, and then for an explosion of self-loathing. “But I can be lazy, I don’t work enough or earn enough. I still take to my bed for days, hugging the pillow-”

She interrupted herself by asking me if I was writing. I began to tell her about an idea which I was still uncertain about. Henry had never been a great reader of my work, seeing anything I said as an opportunity to entertain his own thoughts. Josephine read little, but her remarks were always pertinent.

I said I wanted to try to move analysis away from technical obscurity and “scientism”-analysts writing for one another, and for students-to a more popular area, where it might become again, as it had been with Freud’s lucid writing, about the stuff which concerns everyone: childhood, sexuality, illness, death, the problem of pleasure. Otherwise the public would be left with only self-help books and the authors putting “Ph.D.” on the cover, somehow a guarantee of stupidity.

“You’re good at those little essays,” she said. “Keep them odd and quirky. That’s their uniqueness, their unconventionality. No one else can do it.” She was looking at me and said, “Is something bothering you? You’ve got that sad, hurt face on.”

“I have?”

“Won’t you tell me why? Are you in trouble? Is it a patient?”

I said, “Will you look at what I’ve been writing? You know, sometimes I listen to you.”

She laughed suddenly and said, “I had a thought the other day: we must not forget that people do most of their reading while defecating.”

“Indeed.”

“Oh, Jammie, please, I don’t want to be mean, bring it over and I’ll make some suggestions. We could try lunch again.”

“Yes, let’s do that,” I said. “I like taking you out-if you’re not being argumentative.”

She reached out to tweak my nose. “If you’re not being unkind…”

“If you’re not playing the victim…”

We stopped; we were laughing. Silently, as if holding his breath, Rafi had been watching us. He’d only said, at one point, “Well, of course, Plato is a great thinker,” and he’d imitated my voice, surprisingly deep, upper-middle-class at last, and pompous.

Now, as I was leaving-“Was it really deep? Do you feel better? Will you come back?”-he pressed the menu into my hand and his nose into my sleeve. “Booze, fags, piss. Your smell.”

“You’ll never forget it.”

“I feel really close to you, Dad,” he said. “We’re almost like family.”

“Very funny. Kiss your beautiful mummy for me-lots.”

“Can’t you do anything yourself?”

During the walk I stopped to look at the menu, which I would never throw away.

If you had the misfortune to pass the Cross Keys without being familiar with it, you’d think it was derelict. The windows were boarded over and graffitied. There was rusty scaffolding around the side of the pub, wreathed in barbed wire, but no other evidence of building work, which made me wonder whether the scaffolding was in fact holding everything up. Surely if it wasn’t soon knocked down, it would fall down. Despite not even having a pub sign, the place was always busy and often heaving.

The Cross Keys stood on the corner of a desolate street lined with low-rise industrial buildings, the sort of places that would, in a more likely part of town, be converted into art galleries and lofts. Meanwhile the doorways were scattered with drug debris.

Dodging past a group of tall Africans on the street corner touting for minicab work, I shoved at the busted door. It had been a while since I’d been here, but nothing had changed. Just inside there was a small bar, and behind it a larger back room with a tiny stage, the windows blacked out. In here there were nonstop strippers, each undressing to one record.

There were pretty girls, pretty nasty ones, young and old, black, Indian, Chinese. It had been months since I’d last been to the Keys. I knew at least I was unlikely to run into any of my patients; or indeed into anyone I knew, apart from Bushy. A man could read the newspaper, have a pint and, from a distance of a few yards, stare between the legs of a high-heeled woman.

There could be commotions. Usually the two bars were occupied by rough, loud men-or respectable men with briefcases and umbrellas soon turned into rough, loud men-and girls in flimsies trotting around with beer glasses, collecting change. The men gathered at the base of the tiny stage and, as the evenings progressed, were liable to collapse onto it, which was dangerous, as a springy Salome might be tempted to kick you in the head.

In the Cross Keys there were no bouncers or remixed music, no cameras, and, inevitably, there was broken glass on the floor of the toilets, where when you peed, the cistern dripped cold water onto your head. On the bar was a handwritten sign saying SHIRTS MUST BE WORN AT ALL TIMES.

This dive was overseen by a loudmouthed harridan with whom no one messed, apart from Bushy. “Leave my fucking dancers alone!” she’d yell, if anyone touched a girl. Oddly enough, the Czech barmaid, in her mid-twenties, was more beautifully angelic than the strippers, and would glance at the nude girls without emotion. It was ironic, of course, that she was the only person there you’d want to see undressed.

The Harridan was the woman Bushy had been “going with” for a while, an upstairs room being used for their trysts. Now, while she was trying to persuade him to stay with her in her beach hut in Whitstable-“Oh, Bushy, dear, let’s get far away from all this, I have a place by the sea!”-he wanted to let her know he was less wholehearted than his initial passion might have led her to believe.

The women who were waiting to perform sat inside a wooden pen beside the bar, doing their make-up, abusing or flirting with the men who leaned over the side to talk to them. Now, one of them was shaving her legs. I liked strippers of any age, the rougher the better. I could watch them for hours while wondering, each time, whether the outcome might be different, like watching the replay of a football match, where one had the strange experience of knowing more than the players. Such squalid privacy was dying out in London, particularly as, with the development of CCTV-encouraged by a blind home secretary-everyone now watched everyone else, as though the whole country were under suspicion.