Hanif Kureishi: Something to Tell You

“Oh, Jamal. Poor Henry, too.” She had resumed bustling about. “If he does want any pornos, they’re in your basement in a cardboard box.”

“They are?”

“Just take a couple for yourself and give some to him. You know Jordan?”

“Never been there.”

“Not the place, you cunt, the porn star. She’s in some of them, with black men. You don’t know who she is?”

“You mistake me for an intellectual. Late-night television’s my favourite indulgence,” I went on. “Did I tell you Henry was offered an OBE but turned it down?”

“Why did he say no?”

“The respectability of his generation is making him crazy. Once they were hippy ‘heads,’ now they’re all headmasters. Blair himself is a mixture of Boy Scout and Mrs. Thatcher. Henry’s decided to keep the dissident flag flying.”

Miriam shut the drawer she’d been fiddling in. “Yes or no to Her-fucking-Majesty, this stuff’s not good enough for the likes of Henry. It makes you dumb, like the people around here.”

“I know you always liked him.”

“You’re right. He didn’t look down on me, as you did. He liked to explain what he was doing, even though I’m a fat and mad philis-…You know.”

“Philistine,” I said. “He’s coming for lunch next week.”

“I’ll get the stuff and have it delivered to your place.” She kissed me. “I love you so much, bro.”

On the way home Rafi played Beethoven’s Ninth to me on his trembling mouth organ, which always made me laugh, though I was sure to praise the rendition. Then he did his “conversation between an Irishman, a Jamaican and an Indian,” and I almost crashed.

As we turned the corner, something quick ran across the road, like a collection of brown elbows.

“A wolf!” said Rafi. “Will it attack us?”

“It’s a fox,” I said. “There are no wolves around here, apart from the human variety.”

We were inside; as it was a warm evening, I opened the doors to the garden.

I would get Rafi into bed and then sit outside for a bit with a glass of wine and the rest of yesterday’s joint. It was still light, and I noticed the cats were on the back wall. Not my grey, who was on my bed with his head in my shoulder bag, but the red-collared black with a white face from next door and the local Tom tabby-gruff, up for it-with a wide head and menacing eyes. They appeared, at the moment, to be tapping one another’s faces with their paws.

“Hey, Rafi, look at this. I think these cats are about to get married,” I said. “But that wall doesn’t look comfortable.”

Rafi attended to his Game Boy as well as to the scene in front of him, which was developing quickly. The cats moved down to the little lawn, a few feet from us. The Tom dug his teeth into Red’s neck, threw her down and got on top of her. It didn’t look promising for him, more like thrusting your fingers into a bag full of needles.

“Is it a rape?” Rafi asked.

“I’m afraid she likes it.”

“Are they happy?”

“Yes, because they’ve forgotten themselves, temporarily.” I pulled the door closed to give them privacy. “They were doing it in the same place yesterday. But it is rough sex. It’s wilder than you’d think in this neighbourhood.”

She was down on her back, and he was on her, concentrating on thrusting, trying for a better position, pushing more while stabbing his paw into her stomach, trying to keep her in place. They spat and hissed at one another.

“Disgusting,” said Rafi, making a face. “This new game is difficult,” he added relevantly, his toy making a tinny pop sound.

“The American poet Robert Lowell says something like, ‘But nature is sundrunk with sex.’”

Rafi said, “Yeah?”

“Apparently human beings are the only species that don’t like to be looked at while having sex. They are, too, the only animals who bury their dead.” I added, “Did you know the clitoris was discovered in 1559 by Columbus-this was Renald Columbus of Padua, who called it ‘the sweetness of Venus.’”

“Yeah?”

“It’s true,” I said.

“I’ve heard all this before, the facts of life and everything. In a book at school. D’you think I’m intelligent for my age?”

“Yes. Am I?”

“Yes.”

I said, “That’s because I read a lot as a kid.”

“Poor you, is that all there was to do?”

The cat sex went on a long time. Rafi opened the doors for a clearer view, fetched a chair and sat down, giggling and gasping. Despite his efforts, the couple were not easily disturbed. When they were done, Red frolicked on her back, celebrating, turning, stretching, while Tom Tabby sat on his haunches, watching her, before lapping at his genitals. At last the two of them strolled off together into other gardens. If they’d had hands, they’d have joined them.

Rafi wanted to ring his mother, to tell her what he’d seen. Had Rafi described the scene to her, no doubt she’d have chastised me for letting him watch, but her phone was turned off. No doubt she was attempting the same thing, at last.

When it comes to teaching the art of pleasure, parents and schools can be an obstruction, a disaster even. I looked at the boy and thought about my father, who had passed little knowledge of sex on to me, or even about the place he thought pleasure might take in someone’s life. In my twenties I resented the fact he’d made no attempt to explain what I characterised then as “the truth about sex.”

But what would I have wanted a father or, indeed, a mother to say? What did sex consist of, and what did my son have to look forward to? I remember wondering about this with Josephine one time, asking her about the variety of sexual experiences that were available, and which of them he might develop a liking for. “As long as it’s nice and loving,” she said, sweetly. Indeed; but as La Rochefoucauld remarked on ghosts and love, “All talk of it, but none have seen it for certain.”

Her remark stopped me, briefly. I knew my son would learn that there were numerous varieties of sexual expression: promiscuity, prostitution, pornography, perversion, phone sex, one-night stands, cruising, S &M, Internet dating, sex with a wife or husband, sex with someone else’s wife or husband. There was a full menu, as long as a novella. Which would appeal? Freud, the committed monogamist, began his famous Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality with his thoughts about fetishism, homosexuality, exhibitionism, sadism, bestiality, anal sex, bisexuality, masochism and voyeurism. I was reminded of a joke: Which way of being normal would you like to be, neurotically normal, psychotically normal or perversely normal?

Perhaps my son would, one day, prefer to be blown by a stranger in a toilet, or perhaps he would like to be spanked while being fellated by a Negro transvestite. The side circles of pleasure were manifold, and with an aesthetic edge too: there was smelling, hearing and tasting. And speaking. More than half of sex is speaking. Words ignite desire; if speaking is an erotic art, what could be more erotic than a whisper? However, repetition is a love which doesn’t diminish: in the Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, Mme. de Saint-Ange asserts that in her twelve-year marriage her husband asked for the same thing every day: that she suck his cock while shitting in his mouth.

I might also add, though it may seem cynical, and it wasn’t something I’d bring up with Josephine, that loving someone, or even liking them, has never brought the slightest improvement to sexual pleasure. In fact, not liking the other, or actively disliking them-even hating them-could free up one’s pleasure considerably. Think of the aggression-violence even-that a good fuck involves.

What, then, were the pleasures and who could guarantee them? Should I have been guiding the train of his desire towards the ultimate, if tyrannically ideal, destination, what Freud called, somewhat optimistically, “full genital sexuality?” Or should I suggest he stop off at some of the other stations and sidings first? As the great Viennese satirist Karl Kraus noted-a man characterised as a “mad halfwit” by Freud-it is the most tragic thing in the world for the fetishist who wants only a shoe but gets the whole woman.