Hanif Kureishi: A Theft: My Con Man

In my case absurdity had certainly created commitment. I and some others kept Jeff going, as if he had started his own religion. But it was from this engagement with Jeff that a question formed in my mind, one of the most important there is. Can one person drive another person mad, persuading them to forsake that which is truly of value, collapsing their mind so they see reality askew? Certainly, adults can drive children mad, and adults can make one another crazy by creating conflicts in them which seem insoluble, or for which the only solution might appear to be a retreat into inner chaos and disintegration. Jeff seemed to have that effect on me. But if my head was parked under the bed, I had to wonder about my own part in putting it there. I seemed to have willingly joined a sect and come to believe that my suffering was worthwhile and would lead, eventually, to relief and happiness. I had believed Jeff was the solution when he was the problem, and that my madness was the only thing keeping me sane.

Sometimes you can only get anywhere by giving up on people, by cutting the links between you. How do you begin to do that? With Jeff, it felt as if he was no longer a real person in the world, but, rather, as if I’d swallowed but could not digest him. People can kill themselves to get rid of a devilish persecutor inside them.

*

The last time we met, in a cafe near my house, Jeff wasn’t in good shape. His fiancée seemed to have disappeared, and she didn’t want to know anything about where he’d got so much money from, or even hear from him again. Thugs had been coming to his place to threaten him, and he’d had to call the police. It seemed to me that his mania had surrendered to disintegration; his body had given up and he couldn’t get out of bed or wake up properly. He could barely breathe or talk. I told him that it had been nine months since my money had gone missing, and I was going to give a statement to the police. He looked alarmed and promised to give me a ‘little bit’ on Monday, and he winked. To prove it — and, perhaps to keep up appearances — he showed me a bank statement for forty-three million rials belonging to a Dubai sheik he’d ‘invested’ for.

I laughed and attempted to add to the bitterness of his woes by telling him that I’d worked briefly in a women’s prison and could still recall the hopeless cries of the self-harmers and the clink of keys being turned in locks. He nodded and said that it was now inevitable that he would have to do ‘time’. He knew he wouldn’t like it in jail, particularly as he was claustrophobic. His voice began to break, and he said he’d only stolen money — or ‘borrowed’ it, as he preferred to put it — when he’d received a notice claiming to deliver £350,000 to his account. He’d then begun to move money around, and everything went crazy, as it can when you get desperate and start to panic. I visualised him being encircled by those he’d wanted to enrich; and I knew he feared being shut in, and returned to the place he was most afraid of. The claustrophobic desires his own immurement, and he had brought it about that he would be shut in for a long time.

That’s justice for you, and as I watched the sexless, bland bean counter walk away, it just seemed obvious that time is more valuable than money. If it took me a while to see this. Chandler had done me a terrible disservice by creating the impression that money was the only important thing in the world, that it was love itself, the milk of paradise, the medium that mattered the most, being more important than ideas, or poetry, or friendship or conversation. This was the point at which communism and capitalism met: where the single value was the crudest form of social utility.

*

One day I was released — by the pitying look on a good friend’s face. After he’d heard me out for at least the third time, he was firm. ‘More than enough already,’ he said. ‘This has gone too far. Let him go.’

‘Has it gone too far? Are you sure?’

‘All you can do is write it out.’

My heart sank, and my instinct was to resist such a terrible truth, one which was disruptive and uncomfortably liberating, connecting me to that which Henry James referred to as ‘the grim face of reality’. After all, the masochistic bond is one of the strongest there is. We choose our oppressors; we love them like our parents. Doesn’t La Boétie write somewhere, ‘Freedom is the one thing which men have no desire for’? I wandered around for a few days as if I’d been punched. Eventually, I dragged myself to my desk. Perhaps my friend was correct; perhaps there was nothing else for it but the breaking of that bond of voluntary servitude, and serious reflection. Jeff had enlarged my fears, at times making them very large indeed. But at least I could see what they were. I had to find a way to live around them.

It is exhausting work to disperse all goodness and create futility and pointlessness. None of this wild fantasy had been good for Jeff, for me, for anyone. Artists have an imagination, their minds can go anywhere, but their feet have to be on the ground, and their words organised. Insofar as it was possible, I would have to see Jeff as he was, and consider what I’d made of him. It can be real work keeping alive the most important things, and everybody hides from that which matters most to them. When it comes to writing, it is probably true that human weakness in all its varieties is the only subject there is, and I had had more than enough of that.

I began to write, throwing down thoughts as they occurred to me, while not being sure as I began on this piece that writing is quite the cure it can be made out to be. Not only is writing an indirect and long-term form of communication, but doesn’t writing open a wound before it heals it?

However: alone you cannot achieve anything; alone you can only return to where you were as a child. Writing is an adult transaction; there is always someone there, a real target, as it were, for your words, which should be open-ended and fresh. Words are the strongest material there is, and telling stories is a form of action which changes reality. My relationship with Jeff was not dead; it was worse than that, it had been actively destructive and still was, its only consolation and reward being a little perverse excitement and complicity. For me to try and find another way through this difficulty was to give up my addiction to the idea that he would deliver. Loss is the price of knowledge: I would have to forsake something comparatively easy for something more difficult, forfeiting the accelerations of love and hate for the relatively low mood of mere sadness and acceptance. Art, like the best conversation, re-frames conflicts, representing them in ways which enable fresh thought, generating more plausible stories. A third thing, something brand new, would eventually have to emerge from the stasis and despair of this filthy, stupid dialectic. After all, I wondered, who did my mind belong to — my father, my children, my accountant? How could I retrieve it? What agency did I have over it? It seemed to me, after all this, that having a peaceful, creative mind was a most desirable thing. The most fortunate people, it seemed, were those with least anxiety, and I was a long way from that.

The police had written to me about Jeff. While I’d been giving Jeff a chance to come up with the money, I hadn’t replied. Now, after my hopes had run their vain course, I called them. They were well aware of Jeff, and had been gathering material and information. However, several victims hadn’t been found or come forward. Some were too rich to notice or get embroiled. Many of these suckers were understandably embarrassed; they’d been greedy and seduced, and couldn’t admit to themselves or their families what they had let Jeff do to them. Some believed they had insufficient evidence to prosecute him, and others were still helping Chandler, chained to the illusion, believing he would deliver, unable to give up on him.