Hanif Kureishi: Love + Hate: Stories and Essays

On he went towards the Green, believing he’d either run his twinges off or become accustomed to the pain. Much worse than this, he soon learned, was the public exposure, the panting parade of shame. Many pedestrians seemed to be walking faster than he ran, but he did get past a banker’s au pair pushing a child. A Polish builder he knew was unloading his van, and the Hungarian waiters from his local cafe, on their way to work, were keen to smile and wave, and offer him a cigarette. His neighbours, a lawyer, a madman and a journalist, were easy to pass. The dry cleaner, contemplating eternity outside his shop, didn’t see him.

He noticed couples who could abide one another all day, who would eat breakfast and talk together in holiday hotels, and felt like a man who’d opened a pornographic website only to see awful images of consummated happiness and joyful love-making among the married, more obscene than obscenity.

He ran past the private school, the state school and the French school, as well as the Chinese church, the Catholic church, and the mosque which occupied the ground floor of a house. He flew past Tesco’s and several corner shops, as well as an Indian restaurant, a Moroccan coffee shop, and several charity shops. In the window of one, he saw a display of the books he didn’t have room for in his small new flat where, he believed, the nights all lasted a hundred years. He would wake to no family sounds. He had to learn to live again. And why would anyone want to do that?

It was some relief to make it into the park, and to see other grimacing self-scourgers, many even older. This was where he spotted his rival again, the wife he couldn’t love or kill. There she was, a tiny figure pumping strongly into the wind, across the far side of the grass. She disappeared through the trees, apparently untiring.

After a concentrated circuit of the park, he came out onto the pavement for a bit. Dodging the commuters, he headed down into a fetid underpass where his footsteps were loud, and up and out onto the towpath beside the vast surprise of the river. Public schoolboys and girls in wellington boots, with their lives ahead of them, pulled long boats out onto the water.

He skirted them and, after about fifteen minutes, came to the bridge. He looked up and ran half the steps. It would be wise, he thought, to plod the rest. He was breathing heavily, and coughing, being not a Cartesian vessel of higher consciousness and rationality, but rather a shapeless bag of bursting tendons, extruding veins and screaming lungs.

Yet some spark of agency remained, and on the bridge he jogged again, glimpsing the wide view, and the eyes of the lovely houses overlooking it, places he’d never afford now. Home is for children, he thought, tossing his wedding ring over the side. Perhaps there was a pile of the golden ones down there, just under the surface, the bitter debris of love, and a tribute to liberation.

Holding tight onto the handrail for fear of plunging down headfirst, he reached the bottom of the steps on the other side and turned, with a madly confident kick of speed, onto the street. After another hundred yards he took a breather. He had to.

It would be a lengthy final stretch now, along the avenue of loss, with the tree-lined river on one side and the reservoir on the other. Further along this path, if he didn’t have a heart attack, he would find his wife collapsed and whimpering, or perhaps even vomiting, with only sufficient energy to claw at his ankles, pleading. Not that he’d stop. He’d leap over her, maybe giving her a little accidental kick in the head, before firing on to victory.

After slogging up and down those steps, he knew he was tiring, or else could die. He’d had enough of this run, and required all his reserve power. Where was it? He tied and retied his shoes and then ran on the spot, afraid of stopping, as he contemplated the wet vista of mud, trees and clouds ahead of him. And all the while his mind whirled and turned, counting his losses, until the search for suffering came to a stop. He’d had a better idea. He took a step.

Instead of following her, instead of perhaps catching up with her at last, he turned and faced the other way. He took another step. He took several steps, a little off balance, as if he’d never walked before. He was away. Going in the other direction.

Like Zeno’s arrow, shot through the air forever, he would never get there. He would get somewhere else. Weren’t there other places but here? He would be a missing person. Sometimes you had to have the courage of your disillusionments. No more the S&M clinch, the waltz of death. Ruthlessness was an art. He regretted everything, but not this.

The sky was darkening, yet he felt a new propulsive energy, formless and uncompetitive. Run, run, run, said all the pop songs he’d grown up on. He would take that advice, while never forgetting that anyone who is running from something is running towards something else.

I say to my youngest son, please, let’s run together this afternoon. Sitting down exhausts me; some movement would do me good, we will feel the better for it — just twice around the Green, no more than fifteen or twenty minutes. I want to add: I’m losing strength, and boredom is worse as you get older. Mixed with sadness and regret, it seems heavier and more final; sometimes even music doesn’t temper it. I wonder if a jog might dislodge some of my gloom.

For him this is a cue for sighing. It will be an effort; he will have to rise from the sofa and even leave the house. This short run could also be — this is his fear — an opportunity for me to lecture him on philosophical or psychological matters, or worse, politeness, sex or tidying up the house. Often he regrets that I exist at all, and that he has to deal with me.

But, miraculously, and to my surprise, he agrees.

We have done this before, and sometimes, as I trot along, he walks or even strolls beside me, rather patronisingly, in my view. But today, to equalise things, to make them more of an exertion and challenge, since I am so slow for this quick fifteen-year-old, he decides to strap on his ankle weights. They are heavy, pull at the muscles of the legs and cramp the ankles. For me, to wear such things would be like trying to cook while being crucified, but he has heard that this is how Cristiano Ronaldo practises step-overs.

Now, today, as we jog easily along the perimeter of the Green, I decide to give the little shit a shock, by kicking off a bit, insofar as I can. So I go a bit faster, and feel him fall behind me. I still have it, I think. I will sprint home in triumph, showing him who is boss.

In India, according to family legend, my father had been an excellent cricketer, boxer and squash player. I’d always run with him in our local park in the suburbs, until one day in the late 60s my father and I raced across the park to the open-air swimming pool, which was, more or less, the only other entertainment in the area. When I finished, and turned to look for him, his hands were on his knees and he was puffing wildly. I’d beaten him, and suddenly he seemed frail and vulnerable. I guess he might have been ill already, and he was to be sick for most of my teenage years. I ascribed huge and mysterious knowledge to my father, and still do. I didn’t want to be disappointed. But I was at an age when I had to look forward. It is, however, a shock to learn that not only are your parents not the only people in the world, but that they are not even the most important to you. And it is a shock for them when they see that you have seen this.

*

My youngest son runs easily beside me as we go. Once small for his age, this summer he has begun to develop a wide chest and long legs. Neighbours are startled by how tall he has suddenly become. We can look one another directly in the eye. Despite still having some of his baby teeth, he will soon have the body which every adult will spend his life trying to regain. His hair, until recently cut with some inaccuracy by his mother, has become a matter of interest and concern. I have started to take him to my barber, Luka, who works nearby out of a shabby cabin under a disused garage where my older teenage sons have their hair cut. Now and again they are also shaved by Luka, a man we consider the Lionel Messi of the razor, though we all tend to look a little Luka-like now. My youngest had Luka shave a sharp parting into his head. The boy is keen to look good now, and he gives Luka instructions, returning if the parting doesn’t hold and having it recut.