Hanif Kureishi: A Theft: My Con Man

*

Chandler told me the police arrested him on the plane when he came back from Spain. This annoyed and embarrassed him in front of the other passengers. ‘I wasn’t going to run away. They didn’t need to do that,’ he told me sniffily. Apparently he didn’t say much when the police interviewed him, and he was soon on bail. Over Christmas we met a couple of times and he continued to say the money was about to turn up. He was not pleased with the police. They were not giving him the chance to retrieve the money, and they had upset his frail mother by mentioning jail. Couldn’t they be more sensitive? I asked him how his Sundays were, how going to church with his family, in such circumstances, made him feel. He said it had been difficult for them all — there had been ‘looks’ — since it was now known that he had stolen the church fund he had been charged with taking care of. But he was keen to let me know that ‘God is a forgiving fellow’.

‘That’s all right, then,’ I said.

‘Many of the others will never be repaid, but for you there is still a way out,’ he said, leaning forward.

Unsurprisingly for someone so isolated and living in their own mind, there were labyrinths of mysterious complication without conclusion which he confused and bored me with. But it seemed to boil down to this: though he wanted to pay me back, since he’d been pinched by the police and couldn’t move money around in his own name, I had to open an account in Nevada or the Channel Islands. That way the money wouldn’t show up in my bank statements. Or I could, he said, go to Switzerland, pick up the money in cash, and carry it in a suitcase to another bank. I pictured myself walking around Geneva with thousands of euros in a bag, and while the idea made me laugh, I wondered how things had come to such a pass, and what my children would think. I told him I was ready to book my flight. I was keen to see Geneva, even in winter.

In the cafe that day, examining this peculiar little Lucifer in his cheap shoes, as his phones buzzed at his fingertips, a man who had just smugly announced he’d forgiven himself, I considered the enigma of madness. How could he appear so unworried? How could he deem a catastrophe and the creation of so much fury a local difficulty? I wanted to know him, but he did not want to know himself. Nothing about his own state of mind concerned him. Perhaps his actions were his only thoughts, and there was nothing in his mind at all. Not that distress did not exist. He had inserted it into us, his victims, rendering us afraid, depressed, furious, sleepless, guilty, while he was blithe and even jaunty. Not that such separation doesn’t happen all the time. In this Hollywood world of heroes and villains, good and evil are kept apart; there is no confusion, ambiguity or subtlety. And when, at the end of the Hollywood piece, the two antitheses confront one another and fight to the death, good always succeeds. But when evil is a form of goodness, when, say, it is innocent or even altruistic, there occurs something which cannot be grasped, let’s call it an impossibility. And it was this I was trying to know, and, eventually, write from or out of.

Jeff told me he was ringing his victims regularly, to calm them down and keep them informed, though one of his school friends, whom he persuaded to invest his savings, was about to lose his house. But still I wouldn’t hear it when people I’d confided in dismissed Jeff as a toxic little thief. Jeff was a hero for wanting to make reparation; he was doing his best: he was aware he had almost run out of chances. If idiots are elevated into gods all the time, he was at least my idiot. Not only were we friends, I would continue to believe that he would deliver me into the light, and then I would be happy and free. Yet how is it that people can get stuck inside you, like dreams which refuse to yield up the secrets of their horror, and you can’t wake up or grasp what’s going on? I began to mirror his behaviour. Manically obsessed with him, I couldn’t sleep. I wished him to die, but ended up wishing I could die.

*

As I walked about, thinking him through, it came back to me, after a while, where I had seen something like this before. Had Jeff always been there? In what sense had he — or a man resembling him — always been present in my life? And when I wasn’t using him to undermine and depress me, what use could he be? Would I have to look at his face forever? For there were, when I could bear to think about it, an eternity of Jeffs, of mostly older men whose stories I’d attend to. There are friends you begin to hate even as you love them, even as they waste you, and you refuse to see how tiresome and what an expense it all is. What emerges in such friendships is the same thing repeatedly, until both partners become sadistic. The ending of significant friendships is painful, yet still I believe in the future; rebirths are possible: there are conversations where new things can be said and heard.

*

My father, born in Madras, had been at the younger end of a large family of mainly boys who were rough and competitive. In his early twenties my father came from Bombay to London to study and to make a new life. He married an Englishwoman, left college and settled in the suburbs, where the quiet and regularity suited him, and he liked the people. But Dad’s job, in the Pakistani Embassy, was dull and badly paid, and without a pension. My mother and I urged him to find a better job and, at one point, he considered joining the police as a clerk. He also considered becoming a traffic warden. But in the end Dad refused to change. He thought he was better than all that: another job was unimportant, it was nothing, because soon, he imagined, he’d become a writer. He would have the dignity and class an artist deserved. But until then we had to provide encouragement and support, keeping the faith. We were supposed to be fans and believers, maintaining the master in his place. Our love and confidence would keep him afloat, just as the prayers of the faithful keep God from discouragement. Whatever happened, we could never be disappointed in Dad; the good thing would turn up. After all, self-belief is necessary, isn’t it? And, surely, one should have grit and never give up.

However, I figured out, years later, that I in particular had been persuaded. I had betrayed a more thoughtful and realistic position, getting everything the wrong way round. Somehow I had joined a protection racket or cult. Whatever happened, Dad couldn’t be disenchanted, or taste the bitterness of failure. It had become my job, as his disciple and imitator, to shield him from truths which, however tough they might have been, could have made him more imaginative. That was my naivety; but I was young, and this was ages ago, before I could recognise how necessary and important disappointment is, and long before I saw that others’ delusions keep them sane, but don’t necessarily do the same for us.

*

In many other ways, my mates and cohorts and those a bit older in the sixties and seventies, mature property owners now, were a generation of hoodwinked fools. We, who had denounced and given up on numerous authorities, had sought new masters over and over again. Friends, and those in our circles, were Maoists, Stalinists and Trotskyites of various types; others I knew followed Scientology and similar groups, like EST (Erhard Seminars Training), to which they showed cult-like dedication. We doubters seem to be easily impressed by those with conviction. And it is the attitude of the believer rather than the belief itself which is the crucial thing here. Whether it’s political or scientific salvation, seventy-two virgins waiting in heaven, a particular example of satanic ritual abuse, or the idea that one has a crucial message of liberation for the world, it is the state of absolute certainty and dogmatism which is the menace. The idea that by removing the object of the delusion one will cure the delusion is itself a delusion. Delusions are two-a-penny; what is significant is the attitude taken towards the material. Any fool can believe the sun will rise tomorrow: it takes a certain kind of absurd commitment to believe in, say, the efficacy of lifelong celibacy, or prayer or heaven, or some kind of political paradise — or to believe in a con man. It is the absurdity of the belief which makes the commitment to it absolutely necessary, and the intractability of the conviction will be in inverse proportion to the unsustainability of the idea.