Hanif Kureishi - Collected Stories

‘Who from?’

‘That is up to you. But you must ask for it.’ She went on, ‘It doesn’t sound as if you’ve done the wrong thing, Oddjob. You’ve made her and some of the others love-sick but you haven’t misled anyone. You’re a good lad. Women of Alicia’s age — they’d fall in love with a plank of wood.’

I was working hard at Patricia’s body. To my dismay, as I punched and pummelled, she didn’t seem to relax, but began breathing harder.

She turned, put out her hands and untied the string which held up my trousers.

‘Please, Patricia,’ I said. ‘Don’t —’

She was holding my penis. ‘That’s a mighty fine thing you’ve got there. Know how to use it?’

‘No, I guess you could show me.’

‘You haven’t slept with Alicia?’

‘That’s right.’

‘You’re a good boy, then. Now, be an even better boy for me.’

Her eyes were glazed with desire.

I said, ‘I thought you were supposed to be a wise woman?’

‘Even the wise need a prick now and again. You’ve been fluttering your eyelashes at me for days, don’t think I haven’t noticed. I’m very intuitive. Now, can you follow through?’

I didn’t want to disappoint her; I didn’t want her to feel her age or resent me.

Her hands were rough, and at one point I wondered whether she might be wearing gloves. I remembered that for exercise she liked to build stone walls. But, to my surprise, I became excited.

Her noises were honest and forthright. I was sitting facing her. We were rocking. I must have been holding my breath. ‘Breathe, breathe,’ she ordered. I did what she said. She went on. ‘Relax and breathe from your stomach, that way you’ll hold out longer.’

It worked, of course. When I’d relaxed, she said, ‘Now, continue.’

Patricia howled, ‘Adore me, adore me, you little shit!’; she dug her fingers into me, scratched and kicked me, and, when she came, thrust her tongue into my mouth until I almost gagged.

‘I needed that,’ she said at last. She was lying on the bed, legs apart, almost steaming. ‘Dear boy, do fetch me a glass of water.’

I took it to her.

‘Thanks, Oddjob. A job well done, eh?’

I sat on the end of the bed and said, ‘Now you’ll be able to give an orgasm workshop.’

‘You know,’ she said, ‘a lot of the women here think you’re a haughty little kid. I don’t mind that. I like it. I could humble you, you know.’

‘Thank you, Patricia,’ I said. ‘I think you just have. I’d better go now.’

‘One more thing,’ she said.

Patricia opened her legs and, from the end of the bed, had me look at her masturbate busily. At times her entire hand seemed to disappear into her body, as if she were about to turn herself inside out.

‘Bet you haven’t seen that before,’ she murmured.

‘No,’ I said sourly. ‘One lives and learns.’

She was about to fall asleep. She waved me away, but not before saying, ‘You come back here tonight. Bring your things. Everything will be better if you come and live here.’

‘Why would that be?’

‘This is the best room in the village. See you tonight!’

I scurried away across the square. Alicia called after me, caught me up and put her arm through mine.

‘You’re still here?’

‘But why not?’

‘Alicia, I’m on my way to the beach.’

‘Are you okay? Can’t I come with you?’

I didn’t like to make her run behind me, but I needed to wash myself. I knew she was still there because she was shouting out poems — not her own — as we went, to remind me of the good things.

I stripped off and ran into the sea. I swam and jogged on the beach until I was exhausted. I lay down next to her with the sun on me. Soon, I’d dozed off. When I opened my eyes, she was sitting there wearing just a cigarette, her arms hugging her knees. Unlike the other women at the Centre, she never removed her clothes but always wore a long-sleeved top and ankle-length skirt.

‘What is it?’

She said, ‘You slept with her.’ Her hands shook as she drew on her cigarette. ‘Everyone in this hemisphere will have heard.’

‘But you didn’t cover your ears.’

‘I listened to your music. Every note.’

‘What will you do with what you heard? Write about it — or is it too human for you?’

‘If that was all I was capable of, I’d hate myself!’ She took my hand and placed it on her foot. ‘Will you look at me? We can’t have sex. You don’t want to. Perhaps you’ve had more than enough for today. I have never had an orgasm, and I am a virgin. Touch me, if you feel like it.’ She lay back. ‘Would you?’

After my earlier experience, I couldn’t claim to be erotically absorbed. I did begin to rub her with the palms of my hands; then, when I began to stroke her with my fingers and her eyes closed, my mind began to wander.

‘I need to borrow this.’

I took her notebook and pen, and began to make an inventory of what I found on her flesh. I did this, as they say on television, in no particular order. I went to what interested me.

The first thing I noticed was a light brown eyelash on her throat, one of her own. On her forehead there was one hard spot and one pus-filled, with several others under the skin. Her hair looked as though it had been dyed a while ago; parts of it had been bleached by the sun. It was hard to make out its original colour. Her lips were a little ribbed and sore, the bottom more than the top.

I found a purplish bruise, recent, on her side where, perhaps, she had knocked into a table. On her knees there were three little childhood scars. I ran my fingers along the still-livid scar where, I guessed, she’d had her gall-bladder removed. She had five painted toenails, all chipped, and five, on the other foot, unpainted: I guess she must have got bored. There was a lot of sand, mostly dry, between her toes, on the soles of her feet and instep.

She wore cheap silver ear-rings, but I didn’t feel she was interested in personal adornment. One ear lobe was slightly inflamed. I also found a leaf on her leg, several insects, dead and alive, in different places, and dirt on her leg. The skin around her fingernails had been pulled and torn. Her cheap watch told the wrong time. Her teeth seemed good; perhaps she had worn a brace as a child, but they were stained, now, from smoking, and one was chipped. There were random and quite deep scratch-marks on one arm (left), which I had noticed before but hadn’t attended to. They appeared to have been done with an insufficiently sharp object — a penknife, say, rather than a razor-blade — as if she’d decided to doodle on herself on the spur of the moment, without preparing.

I peered into her ears and mouth, between her legs and then her toes, where I discovered another insect; I looked up her nose — surprisingly hairless, compared to mine. On her chest she had scored what I guessed to be the word ‘poet’. On her thigh, there were other words which had been recently bleeding.

I wrote, in the fatuous modern manner, ‘This is a Person in the Here and Now Lying Down’, and jotted it down, forensically, working in silence for an hour. I kept the dead insects, the leaf, a couple of public hairs, an example of the dirt, a smear of blood and vaginal mucus, and a record of the words, inside her notebook. Mostly her eyes were closed, her breaths deep and long.

I awoke her from her ‘dream’, and showed her what I’d been doing.

‘No one’s ever done a nicer thing for me,’ she said.

‘Pleasure.’

‘You said to me once, what people want is to be known. Can I ask you: what is that scar you have?’

‘What scar? Where?’

She looked at me as though I were stupid, before pointing it out to me. It was under my elbow, in the soft flesh.