Hanif Kureishi - Collected Stories

Outside Patricia’s, Alicia said she’d wait for me under a tree across the square.

I knocked on the door, and Patricia’s irritable face appeared at the window. I’m glad to say I always annoyed Patricia; by being alive at all, I failed her. On this occasion, to my dismay, she brightened.

She had come to the door wearing only a wrap-around skirt. Her large brown breasts were hanging down.

‘My,’ I said, and then blushed. I knew she’d heard it as ‘mine’. I went on, ‘Patricia, there’s something I need to talk to you about.’

‘I’m glad you’ve come, Oddjob,’ she said. ‘I’ve got some work for you. Why did you leave my workshop?’

‘I wanted to think about it.’

‘Did you enjoy it, then?’ When I nodded, she said, ‘If so, how much? Very, very much? Just very much? Quite a lot? Or something else?’

‘Let me think about that, Patricia.’ She was looking at me. I said, ‘I did like it, in fact.’

‘If you did really, you can say why — in your own words.’

I said, ‘You used the dream, not as a puzzle to be solved, with all the anxiety of that, as if one of us would get it right, but as a felt image, to generate thoughts, or other images. That was useful. I haven’t stopped thinking.’

‘That’s a good thing to say.’ She was flattered and pleased. ‘You see, you can be almost articulate, if you really want to be. By the way, I heard what you called the Centre. Weepeasy,’ she said. ‘Right?’

‘Sorry,’ I said, bowing my head.

‘Is that what you think?’

‘It’s easy to make people cry.’ I went on, ‘Confession, not irony, is the modern mode. A halting speech at Alcoholics Anonymous is the paradigm. But what concealments and deceptions are there in this exhibition of self-pity? Isn’t it tedious for you?’

‘There’s no rigour here any more, you could be right. Or any progress. It’s become the same every day. I can tell you, that’s the least of it.’ Then she said, ‘Please, come here.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Here!’ I shuffled forward. She put her arms around me and pressed her breasts into my body. ‘I am feeling tense today. I wanted to run a centre for self-exploration, only to discover I’d started a small business. You can’t explore anything if you don’t get the figures right — the eighties taught some women that, at least. Now I’m sick of being an accountant and I’m sick of being wise. Sometimes, I only want to be mad.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Being the wise woman must be a right bore.’

‘Who takes care of me? I have to mother everyone! You’ve been attending the massage class, haven’t you? You know how to do it.’

By now, she was pulling at my fingers.

‘Patricia —’

‘Massage me, Leo, you dear boy. There’s the oil.’

‘I want to talk about Alicia.’

‘Who wants to hear about that funny little thing? Oh, talk, talk about what you want, as long as you smooth out my soul.’

Her skirt dropped to the floor. She walked across the room, located the oil, and lay down on a towel on her low bed.

She was watching me scratch my stomach. There were certain conversations I’d missed in this new life. You might have a new body but if your mind is burdened the differences don’t count for much.

‘Go on,’ she said.

I told her how Alicia had got sweet on me and that I was concerned about it. I emphasised that I hadn’t deliberately led her on.

Of course, I loved the attention of the women at the Centre — who didn’t, admittedly, have much else to look at — and had walked around barefoot, wearing only shorts. Celibacy had increased my desire; I wanted to live less in my mind. I remember Margot telling me, years ago, this thing about certain school phobics. Some boys, of particularly disturbed sexuality, imagined that their bodies had turned into penises. The dreaded school was their mother’s forbidden body. I was all sex, a walking prick, a penis with an appended body. I didn’t flirt; I was unprovocative. I didn’t need to do anything.

In my mad mind, I became a kind of performer. Many of my friends have been actors, singers or dancers, men and women who used their bodies in the service of art, or as art itself; people who were looked at for a living. Those of us who cannot perform, who imagine from the audience only an examination of our faults, can have little idea of the relationship between player and voyeur, of how the audience, like a sea of feeling, might hold you up, if you can use it. What do you see and hear out there in all that blackness? What are the watchers doing to you? What was the stripper or any celebrity doing but increasing and controlling envy and desire? This was a splendidly erotic activity, it seemed to me.

It had been years since I had danced, and now, since I didn’t need much sleep, I danced every night in one or other of the town’s discos, with women from the Centre. Most of them were older than forty, some were over fifty. They knew the chances of their being loved, caressed, wanted, were diminishing, even as their passion increased, in the sun. I danced with them, but I didn’t touch them. If I’d been a ‘real’ kid, I probably would have gone to bed, or to the beach, with several of them. I was their pornography, a cunt teaser. But at least everyone knew where they stood with me.

Usually, while I danced, Alicia watched me, or sat on a chair drinking and smoking. She never danced herself, but took a lot of pleasure in others’ enjoyment. Oddly enough, the music most people preferred originated in my day: 1950s rock ’n’ roll, and 1960s soul. I knew every note. It sounded fresher and more lasting than the laboured literary work of me and my contemporaries.

In one of the town’s discos, while dancing with my ‘coven’, as I called them, several of the local men started to taunt me. They didn’t like this spoiled kid dancing with and hugging these happy women night after night, as well as looking after their bags, fetching them drinks and making sure they all got safely back to the Centre. One night, they gathered around me at the bar and said they wanted to see what sort of man I was. They could find this out only on the beach, where we would be able to have ‘a good talk’. Alicia and the other women had to escort me out of there in a group. Looking back, I could see the men standing at the door, smoking and sneering.

Why did this happen? How did they see me? I enquired of Alicia. As someone who had everything, and a future, too. There was nothing I couldn’t do or be, she seemed to think. They hated it and wanted it. They could have killed and eaten me.

There were other fantasies about me. A woman in her fifties had told Alicia that I made the women feel inadequate. I was a problem-free rich kid bumming around the world before going to work for a bank. ‘We’re trying to restart our troubled lives here. He’s just passing through,’ she said.

‘Maybe that is what you are,’ Alicia continued, after she’d told me, throwing down her roll-up and rubbing out the stub with her sandal. ‘You have the confidence, poise and sense of entitlement of a rich kid. Isn’t that right?’

I didn’t answer; I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t anticipated this much envy. I had, though, known actors who’d become movie stars and been made paranoid and withdrawn as much because of the pressure of imagined spite as that of fame.

I laboured over Patricia’s crumpled and folded flesh, humming and thinking. I was good at this; at least I’d learned to love giving comfort and pleasure.

I said, ‘How can I deal with this? I am beginning to feel like an object. It is not pleasant, it’s persecution.’

‘You are supremely enviable,’ she said, her voice muffled by the towel. ‘You’re like the woman everyone wants but no one understands. What you require is support and protection.’