Hanif Kureishi: Something to Tell You

Nevertheless, I was told by Bushy, as though it were a secret, that Miriam “looked up” to me. This might have been because her neighbours had started to come to me with child-care problems, eczemas, addictions, depressions, phobias. The working class were always the worst served in terms of mental health. But I was moved: at last I could impress her.

Miriam had been a terrible child, tantrummy, screaming and absolute. A girl who claimed to be neglected but who was at the centre of the house, shoving me aside, often physically. Yet she and I had once liked each other. This was when we were children, conspiring together in the bedroom we shared until she was ten. Mother had moved downstairs, into a box room, “the coffin,” we called it. Miriam and I would play tricks on the neighbours, go scrumping for apples and roam around the fields together, looking for trouble. Our fights had always been apocalyptic, though, and she would tear wildly at my face. I bore the ruts and tears even as a teenager, which was when I started to hate her, when everything she did was too grown-up for me to participate in.

Now, in Miriam’s house, I seemed to serve as some sort of symbolic authority. Thankfully it was a formal role, like some presidents, and mainly involved me sitting down; at her place the world was my sofa. Until Henry, Miriam had only engaged with violent, stupid or addicted men. But here there were few actual men around, and none as bookwormy or word aware as me. Where were they? In the pub? In prison? Heaven only knows how the neighbourhood women and girls got to be perpetually pregnant. In creating a society of mothers and babies, it was as though the women believed that, if they got rid of the men entirely, they would no longer need them, they would forget about them, and about sex and the confusion which accompanied it.

There were many loose adolescent boys around, in white trainers and heavily gelled, shining, thorny hair, wearing, with their acne, chains they’d obtained, no doubt, from Miriam, both of whose arms, from wrist to elbow, were covered in metal bangles. If she continued with the metal, she might as well wear a suit of armour.

At times her kitchen was like a waiting room, as sullen boys, secure in gangs but lacking good-bad authorities, waited to see me, a part-time, suburban Godfather. They’d shuffle their feet, their eyes scatting about, barely able to speak. “Sir, if it’s okay, can I tell yer, this girl’s pregnant…” “Mister, I done this bad thing…”

Miriam said to me, “I’ve been speaking to Dad.”

“How is he?”

“He needs some human warmth.”

“Heaven’s a lonely place, eh?”

“It can be, you know. People have the wrong idea about it.”

Having failed to reach him in this world, Miriam thought she might have more luck contacting Dad in the “other” dimension. We had both parted from him in absurd and awful circumstances; and she still pursued his forgiveness and understanding.

Miriam was two years older than me. Before she immigrated to the far side of eccentricity, Miriam had been the intelligent one, quicker, funnier, more easily able to grasp difficult ideas, and far less nervous and reticent. The reading I hid myself in as a child she considered a waste of time. What was a book compared to experience? Mum and I would sit in the house reading together, but Miriam was more like our father, always with others, talking, kicking people in the legs, making wild dramas.

These days, however, little that was new or not mundane entered her head; she was weary. I wanted to say that I thought we should go somewhere, to the seaside or to Venice, somewhere to talk, rest and refill ourselves. But I was tired myself-the separation from Josephine weighed on me; how exhausting it is to hate!-and really I didn’t have the energy to travel.

After I’d eaten the dhal, I asked Miriam to call Rafi down. He always jumped nervously at her voice. When he appeared, he complained that he wanted to stay the night. Things could get riotous among the children even if they were quiet; they’d still be watching Dumb and Dumber or even Blade II at four in the morning. He lived too ordered a life between me and his mother, but I wouldn’t be able to pick him up from Miriam’s at breakfast time. I was seeing my first patient at seven, and I wouldn’t have time to pack his school bag, fill his lunch box and prepare his football gear.

Before we left, I remembered to ask Miriam about the dope.

“I have a friend who needs it,” I said. “I’m not telling you who.”

“It’s Henry then. As it’s him, I’ll have to get up,” she said, ignoring the stuff she kept on the table in a shoebox. “I’m not giving him this; you’d be better off smoking Marmite.”

I noticed how heavy she was, and getting heavier, as she got to her feet and moved around, holding on to the furniture as she went.

While she rummaged around in various drawers and bags, sniffing, squishing and shouting at the now absent driver, “Bushy! Bushy-where’s the decent stuff?”, I informed her that Henry was considering a production of Ibsen’s Ghosts. Years ago I’d taken Miriam to see a production of short Beckett pieces Henry had done with students. These end-of-term plays with tyro actors, which he did every couple of years, were highly considered, and packed with other directors, writers and even critics. This particular show had impressed Miriam, or at least I thought so: she’d fallen silent. “What’s Henry doing?” she’d say. “Any more of those sad Becketts we can go and see?”

“Okay?” Having realised Bushy had left for the Cross Keys, she was holding up a piece of hash the size of a dice. “Why does your friend want this?”

“I think Henry’s discovered dissipation in his old age,” I said. “He’s taken up drinking, too. He always appreciated wine, but now it’s the effect he’s after.”

She asked, “Anything else?”

“What’s on your mind?”

“Does he want any pornos?” She giggled. “Remember when you used to work in that side of things?”

“Thanks for reminding me. I wish I hadn’t told you.”

“Don’t you tell me everything?”

“I try not to.”

“You didn’t write the films, though, did you?”

“No, not the films,” I said.

“That’s where you’d have made the money. You didn’t act in the pornos either, did you?”

“For God’s sake, Miriam, can you see me acting, particularly without trousers?”

“Do you talk to your patients about your dodgy past?”

“No.”

“There’s a lot about you they don’t know.”

“They’re not supposed to know. They need me to be a blank screen. As for Henry,” I went on, “he thinks he’s too old for sex, and his body resembles a plate of spaghetti-or a mudslide. Among others, his son is dating a fashion writer. She walks about his flat in mules and a red satin dressing gown, which falls open to expose more shimmering flimsies and worse. Imagine how terrible this is for Henry. He thinks this mule woman can only do this because she doesn’t consider him to be a man but an impotent grandfather.”

“Poor guy.” Her eyes were tearing into me. “But you like that woman too, don’t you-the mule thingy? You’ve met her around there?”

“Yes.”

“What went on?”

I hesitated. “You are perceptive. I invited her out. We walked together by the river one evening when Henry’s son was out, stopping off at various pubs to drink whisky macs. By the end we were soused. I have to say I’ve never felt so strongly towards anyone before-not even Ajita. For the next week I woke up thinking about her every morning. It was a delirium, like being ducked in madness.”

“And?”

“And nothing. She didn’t see me like that. Had she given me one word of hope, I’d have followed her anywhere. But I had nothing she wanted.”