Hanif Kureishi - Collected Stories

It was in Greece, on a boat one morning, that I met a middle-aged woman with a rucksack who was going to study photography at a ‘spiritual centre’ on the island I was visiting. She had hitchhiked from London to visit the Centre, which was known to be particularly rejuvenative for those suffering from urban breakdown. When I told her my sad story, she offered to take me along with her.

While I waited in a café in a nearby square, drinking wine and reading Cavafy, she went to the Centre and enquired whether there was any work I could do in exchange for food, a place to sleep and a little payment. Otherwise, I would find a job in a bar or disco, and crash on the beach. The woman returned and told me the Centre had been looking for an ‘oddjob’ to clean the rooms and work in the kitchen. Providing the leader didn’t dislike me, I would eat for free, earn a little money and sleep on the roof.

We walked down to a handful of flower-dotted, whitewashed buildings on the edge of an incline, with a view of the sea. She opened the door in a long, high wall.

‘Look,’ she said. I did: the devil peeping into paradise. ‘They must be between classes.’

It was a shaded garden where the women — naturally, it was mostly women — sat on benches. They talked, wrote earnestly in notebooks and read. In one corner, a woman was singing; another was doing yoga, another combing her hair; on a massage table, a body was being kneaded.

Here, these middle-aged, middle-class and, of course, divorced women from London took ‘spiritual’ nourishment, meditation, aromatherapy, massage, yoga, dream therapy. What baby with its mother ever had it better than in this modern equivalent of the old-style spa or sanatorium? The three men I saw were middle-aged, with hollow chests and varicose veins.

She asked, ‘Will you be all right here?’

‘I think I’ll manage,’ I replied.

After being shown around the kitchen, the ‘work’ rooms, and the dining room, I was taken to see the Centre’s founder or leader, the ‘wise woman’, as she was called, without irony, or with none that I noticed. I had the impression that it would be wise for me, too, to lay off the irony. It was too much of a mature and academic pleasure.

Patricia came to the door of a small, shuttered house ten minutes’ walk from the Centre. In her late fifties, she was big, with long, greying hair, in clothes with the texture and odour of cheap oriental carpets. She invited me in, and ordered me to sit on a cushion. As I dozed off, she talked loudly on the phone, read her correspondence (‘Bastards! Bastards!’), scratched her backside and, from time to time, looked me over.

When I got up to inspect a picture, she turned. ‘Sit down, don’t fidget!’ she said. ‘Be still for five minutes!’

I sat down and bit my lip.

I could recall her variety of feminism from the first time around: its mad ugliness, the forced ecstasy of sisterhood, the whole revolutionary puritanism. I didn’t loathe it — it seemed to me to be a strain of eccentric English socialism, like Shavianism — as long as I didn’t have to live under or near it. It did, however, seem better being a young man these days: the women were less aggressive, earned their own money and didn’t blame anyone with a cock for their nightmares.

I was irritated by what I considered to be this woman’s high-handed approach, and was about to walk out — not that she would have minded — when it occurred to me that for her I was virtually a child as well as only a potential menial. I was neither an Oldbody nor a Newbody. I was a nobody.

I’d always had a penchant for tyrants, at school, at work and in the theatre where, when I was young, they flourished, having come from army backgrounds. I had enjoyed testing myself against them. How many times could they beat you up before they had to come to terms with you? However, now I was shaken by a blast of late-adolescent fury. I’d forgotten how adults talk down to you, when they’re not ignoring you, and how they hate to hear your opinion while giving their own. You’re at one of your parents’ dinner parties and your parents’ friends ask you how your exams are going and you tell them you have failed and you are glad, glad, glad. Your parents tell you not to be rude, and you’ve just been to see If … Your parents want a gin and tonic but you want a machine gun and the revolution, and you want them now.

Despite this, I guessed that Patricia had an intelligence and intensity my former persona would have enjoyed. I liked the fact that the one thing I wouldn’t have said about her, even after only cursory inspection, was that she was serene. Long periods of inner investigation and deep breathing, or whatever therapy she practised, hadn’t seemed to have cured her of irritability or incipient fury.

When she did look at me, with what I was afraid was some perception, I felt I would shrivel up. For the first time I felt that someone had seen me as an impostor, a fake, as not being what I seemed. The game was up, the pretence was over.

‘What did you say your name was?’ she asked.

‘Leo Raphael Adams.’

She snorted. ‘Arty, bohemian parents, eh?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘I probably knew them.’

‘You didn’t.’

‘What did they do?’

‘Lots of things.’

‘Lots of things, eh?’

‘They moved around a lot.’

‘Good for them,’ she said. ‘What do you want to do?’

‘Work here for a bit,’ I replied. ‘I’ll do anything you want me to.’

‘I should hope so. But don’t pretend to take what I say literally, Leo, when you know I mean “in life”.’

‘In life? I don’t know,’ I said genuinely. ‘I’ve no idea. Why do I have to “do” anything?’

She imitated me. ‘Don’t know. Don’t care. Don’t give a shit.’

I shaded my eyes, as if from the sun. ‘Why do you keep staring at me?’

‘Your blank face.’

I said, ‘Is it blank? I’ve looked at it a lot and —’

‘I can imagine, dear.’

‘I’ve never thought of it as blank.’

‘Is there one intelligent thought in there — something that will make me think, “I haven’t heard that before”? I must have forgotten’, she went on, ‘that conversation isn’t a male art.’

There was a lot I did want to say, but if I started on at her I wouldn’t know what it was like to be young.

I said, ‘You want me to leave.’

‘Only if you want to.’ She started to giggle. ‘We don’t usually have men working here, though there’s no rule against it. I may be an old-style sixties feminist, and the self-esteem of women in a male world may be of interest, but it wasn’t my intention to set up a nunnery. Your porky prick’ — she looked directly at my crotch — ‘will certainly put the cat among the pigeons. I think that will amuse me. You can stay … for a bit.’

‘Thank you.’

Patricia went to the window, leaned out and yelled into the square.

‘Alicia!’ she called. ‘Alicia!’ Almost immediately, a girl appeared. ‘Take him away,’ she said. ‘He’s working here at the moment. Give him something to do!’

As I walked back, I was aware of someone beside me, as insubstantial and insistent as a shadow.

‘I think I’ll get out of here,’ I said.

‘Is that what you normally do — run?’

‘If I’m feeling sensible.’

‘Don’t start getting sensible.’

I said, ‘Something about me seemed to enrage her.’

‘You take it personally?’

‘I’ve decided to.’

‘Why?’

‘It made me wonder what sort of power I might have over her.’

‘You’ll never have any power over her.’

Alicia was not a girl, but a young woman from London, a frail poet with a squint and a roll-up in the corner of her mouth. She told me she had been staying at the Centre for three months, at the expense of an American benefactor, writing and teaching. Despite the relentless sunlight and the hunger for it of the other women, Alicia had not tanned. Her skin remained remorselessly ‘Camden High Street in the rain’, as I thought of it. She was to show me the roof of the Centre, where I would sleep. It was baking during the day and most likely cold at night, but it suited me, being secluded. I like the sky, though until now have lacked the time to ‘commune’ with it.