Hanif Kureishi - Something to Tell You

“His hands were off my chest, and he was pulling up the white disposable paper gown and saying, ‘Fine below and above, one of the lovelier uteruses, see you next time.’ I was free. I’d got through. ‘You mean,’ I said, ‘you didn’t find anything?’

“I shouldn’t have said that. He’s stopped washing his hands, and turning round to look at me again. He says, ‘Why don’t we just check again, to be sure? You think you’ve found something, don’t you? Which one, right or left?’

“When he says ‘left’ I blush and I feel my eyes widen to the size of the screen at the Sony Imax theatre. His hands are immediately on the left. He’s watching me, my eyes. ‘Am I getting close? Going to give me a hint?’

“I don’t say a thing. You went to medical school, you’re on your own, pal.

“He finds it. ‘Aah.’ His fingers, both hands, passing and passing again over the thing, moving it, isolating it, angling it.

“He’s not looking at me now. He’s not my breezy, older, attractive, cool, flirty doctor anymore. He’s a lookout for the cancer team, and he’s going to put me into the system, the system that finishes women. Once you’re in, you’re out. You’re not a woman who counts in the world.

“How could I endure it-the obliteration, the ugliness, the havoc, of having no breasts or hair? I saw different doctors and they all had their disclaimers. It could be a cyst, a blocked duct or a tumour which wasn’t cancerous. I believed every one. I can’t even keep a husband. Who would look after me? I couldn’t work. Who would look after the kids?

“I argued with the doctors. I tried to talk the breast surgeon out of insisting on the surgical biopsy. She was doing me a favour by scheduling it so quickly. But I felt I was being drawn into the hospital death trap. I met a woman at the hospital who was having a biopsy too. She was overjoyed. She wouldn’t have the anxiety of not knowing.

“I was more dishonest. I didn’t understand any of it until they told me in the hospital that I had a tumour of considerable mass.”

It had begun, my generation had begun to die. One by one we’d be picked off: illness, and then death. More funerals than weddings. Who would be next? I wondered.

The next death came sooner, and more suddenly, than I could have imagined.

At the end of supper I helped Karen into a cab. I walked for a while, looking at the city, aware of every person with a bag; every trip on the tube a potential death. Will it be now? Will he be a bomber? Will I be killed? Would I mind, or would it be a good way to exit-suddenly, plucked from the world? I thought of the Mule Woman’s parents. What if it had been Rafi?

After Karen finally told me what had happened to her, I rang her most days. Even Henry was concerned, in his own way. He began to shoot more material for the actors’ documentary, which on hearing that Karen was ill, he had decided to complete.

At the Riverside Studios, not far from his flat, he worked with Miriam on the Chekhov scenes. Despite the anxiety which caused her to call me incessantly, Miriam was ecstatic. In rehearsal he took her as seriously as he would any actor, listening to her, watching her, using what was there. “Intuitively, underneath, I was always an actress,” she told me. “Undiscovered, of course-until recently.”

Henry was directing the scene in several different styles, with different actors, before cutting the material together. He came over with his computer and showed it to me. He’d thought he was “finished,” but his energy was high and the work good. We were on better terms, too, over Lisa.

I had given her poems to a young Libyan acquaintance I met sometimes in a pub nearby. He was enterprising, with his own small-circulation magazine and a tiny publishing operation. He distributed the work himself, heaving the stuff around bookshops in a suitcase. He agreed to run three of her poems in his magazine. He asked her to write an essay on modern poetry.

She seemed a little put out that the poems weren’t going to be published in the TLS, but I thought she’d appreciate this young man and his efforts. She agreed to meet him and help him take stuff around the shops.

I resented the little time Lisa demanded of me. I was working hard. The practice was growing. I was being approached by more potential patients than I could possibly see. God knows, I needed the money. So the new ones I fitted in early.

It was one morning, in the often frantic ten minutes between sessions, that Maria came in looking more worried than usual, and without my coffee.

She said that Ajita had called to say Wolf had died during the night, in her house in Soho.

My first thought was: Will this be my release or my condemnation?

Mustaq’s office had located Wolf’s sister in Germany and arranged for his body to be flown home. Ajita had informed Mustaq that Wolf had no family in Britain, and that she didn’t want to go to the funeral. Neither of us did, for different reasons.

“Jesus, sweetie, you look more distressed than me,” she said when I turned up that evening. She was sitting on a sofa in a quiet little private club behind St. Martin’s Lane. “Have something to calm you. This is an awful fucking business.”

“Ajita, tell me what happened.”

She said, “We had finished making love. Wolf got up and was standing at the end of the bed in Mustaq’s dressing gown. Suddenly I was struck by how much like my father he looked. A mixture of Mustaq and Dad.

“I never stopped talking to Wolf about myself, but I didn’t really want to know him. We just did those intense things together. Sometimes I felt I was using him. Not that he would have seen it like that.

“A while ago outside the club where he was working, a man came at him with a knife and threatened to slash him. Wolf escaped, but he wept about it. I didn’t want to see him like that, a child.” She said, “What about you? Will you miss him at all?”

“I found him aggressive and needy this time round.”

“He didn’t like me seeing you. He was pissed off that you hadn’t been warm towards him, that you refused to recognise the friendship you once had.”

“I had too much else going on.”

“You shouldn’t do that to people, Jamal,” she said. “But who am I to talk? I was worse, always going on about myself. After he was attacked, he complained of breathlessness and pains in his chest, but I thought they’d pass. How could it not have occurred to me to take him to the doctor?” She went on: “When he was waiting for the ambulance, he asked me to forgive him. I said only God or a priest could do that.”

“To forgive him for what?” I asked. She shrugged. I thought she was going to say something else to me, but she looked away. I said, “Shall we have supper here? Aren’t there private rooms?”

To my surprise she said, “Sorry, Jamal, I don’t feel up to it. I need to go home.” Her explanation was “I hate you to see me like this.” She paid the bill and left me there.

Then I didn’t hear from her. She didn’t return my calls. When I went into Soho and knocked on the door there was either no reply or the staff, barely opening the door, informed me that no one was there.

Worrying about her, and not knowing what else to do, I rang Mustaq in America. Ajita had told him there was no need for him to return to London; she was “okay.” She knew he was taken up with Alan; he didn’t need any more deaths.

I asked Mustaq if Ajita was surviving, and he told me, “She’s in the house, but in bed most of the time. She sees no one but the staff, and she doesn’t talk to them. All they do is take her food. I’d be grateful if you could visit, Jamal.”

Mustaq informed the staff I was going to take her out. She was lying down but not unpleased to see me. She asked me to slip into bed beside her, to hold and cuddle her. She didn’t want to be caressed but lay there still and heavy, in my arms.