Hanif Kureishi - Collected Stories

‘She’s done what?’ said Gerald.

‘It’s true.’

Gerald was chuckling.

*

Harry noticed that Mother was trembling.

On the way to see her, Harry had worried about her liking the new Mercedes, which he called ‘God’s chariot’.

The car and what it meant had no interest for her. Her eyes were closed.

He was trying to control himself.

*

A year ago, a friend had given him and Alexandra tickets for a ‘hypnotic’ show in the West End. They had gone along sceptically. She preferred serious drama, he none at all. He couldn’t count the Ibsens he had slept through. However, he did often recall one Ibsen which had kept his attention — the one in which the protagonist tells the truth to those closest to him, and destroys their lives.

The hypnotist was young, his patter amusing, reassuring and confident. Members of the audience rushed to the stage to have his hands on them. Under the compère’s spell they danced like Elvis, using broom handles as microphone stands. Others put on big ridiculous glasses through which they ‘saw’ people naked.

After, he and Alexandra went to an Italian restaurant in Covent Garden for supper. She liked being taken out.

‘What did you think of the show?’ she asked.

‘It was more entertaining than a play. Luckily, I wasn’t taken in.’

‘Taken in?’ she said. ‘You thought it was fake? Everyone was paid to pretend?’

‘Of course.’

‘Oh, I didn’t think that at all.’

She couldn’t stop talking about it, about the ‘depths’ of the mind, about what was ‘underneath’ and could be ‘unleashed’.

The next day, she went into town and bought books on hypnotism.

She hypnotised him to sleep in the evenings. It wasn’t difficult. He liked her voice.

*

Harry was thirteen when Father crashed the car. They were going to the seaside to stay in a caravan. All summer he had been looking forward to the holiday. But not only had Mother been screeching from the moment the car left their house, but, a non-driver herself, she had clutched at Father’s arm continually, and even dragged at the driving wheel itself.

She was successful at last. They ran into the front of an oncoming van, spent two nights in hospital and had to go home without seeing the sea. Harry’s face looked as though it had been dug up with a trowel.

*

He looked across at Mother’s formidable bosom, covered by a white polo-neck sweater. Down it, between her breasts, dangled a jewel-covered object, like half a salt pot.

At last, she opened her eyes and loudly began to read out the words on advertising hoardings; she read the traffic signs and the instructions written on the road; she read the names on shops. She was also making terrible noises from inside her body groaning, he thought, like Glenn Gould playing Bach.

Visiting Father’s grave had been her idea. ‘It’s time we went back again,’ she had said. ‘So he knows he hasn’t been forgotten. He’ll hear his name being called.’

But it was as if she were being dragged to her death.

If he said nothing, she might calm down. The child he once was would have been alarmed by her terrors, but why shouldn’t she make her noises? Except that her babbling drove out everything else. She ensured there was no room in the car for any other words.

He realized what was happening. If she couldn’t actually take the television with her in the car, she would become the television herself.

*

Alexandra was interested in the history of food, the garden, the children, novels. She sang in the local choir. Recently, she had started to take photographs and learn the cello. She was a governor of the local school and helped the children with their reading and writing. She talked of how, inexplicably, they suffered from low self-esteem. It was partly caused by ‘class’, but she suspected there were other, ‘inner’ reasons.

Her curiosity about hypnotism didn’t diminish.

A friend introduced Alexandra to a local woman, a hypnotherapist. ‘Amazing Olga’, Harry called her.

‘What does she do?’ he asked, imagining Alexandra walking about with her eyes closed, her arms extended in front of her.

‘She hypnotises me. Suddenly, I’m five years old and my father is holding me. Harry, we talk of the strangest things. She listens to my dreams.’

‘What is this for?’

For Harry, telling someone your dreams was like going to bed with them.

‘To know myself,’ she said.

Amazing Olga must have told Alexandra that Harry would believe they were conspiring against him.

She touched his arm and said, ‘Your worst thoughts and criticisms about yourself — that’s what you think we’re saying about you in that room.’

‘Something like that,’ he said.

‘It’s not true,’ she said.

‘Thank you. You don’t talk about me at all?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘Nobody likes to be talked about,’ he said.

‘As if it weren’t inevitable.’

In the train to work, and in the evenings when he fed the animals, he thought about this. He would discuss it with Gerald next time.

Faith healers, astrologers, tea-leaf examiners, palm readers, aura photographers — there were all manner of weirdo eccentrics with their hands in the pockets of weak people who wanted to know what was going on, who wanted certainty. Uncertainty was the one thing you couldn’t sell as a creed, and it was, probably, the only worthwhile thing.

What would he say about this?

He did believe there was such a thing as a rational world view. It was based on logic and science. These days, ‘enlightenment values’ were much discredited. It didn’t follow they were worthless. It was all they had.

‘If you or one of the children fell sick, Alexandra …’ he put to her one night.

It was dark, but he had switched on the garden lights. They were sitting out, eating their favourite ice-cream and drinking champagne. His trees shaded the house; the two young labradors, one black, one white, sat at their feet. He could see his wood in the distance, carpeted with bluebells in the spring, and the treehouse he would restore for his grandchildren. The pond, stifled by duck weed, had to be cleaned. He was saving up for a tennis court.

This was what he had lived for and made with his labour. He wasn’t old and he wasn’t young, but at the age when he was curious about, and could see, the shape of his whole life, his beginning and his end.

‘You’d go to a doctor, wouldn’t you? Not to a faith healer.’

‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘First to a doctor.’

‘Then?’

‘And then, perhaps to a therapist.’

‘A therapist? For what?’

‘To grasp the logic —’

‘What logic?’

‘The inner logic … of the illness.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I am one person,’ she said. ‘A whole.’

‘And you are in control?’

‘Something in me is making my life — my relationships, I mean — the way they are, yes.’

He was opposed to this, but he didn’t know what to say.

She went on, ‘There are archaic unknown sources which I want to locate.’ Then she quoted her therapist, knowing that at university he had studied the history of ideas. ‘If Whitehead said that all philosophy is footnotes to Plato, Freud taught us that maturity is merely a footnote to childhood.’

He said, ‘If it’s all been decided years ago, if there’s no free will but only the determinism of childhood, then it’s pointless to think we can make any difference.’

‘Freedom is possible.’

‘How?’

‘The freedom that comes from understanding.’

He was thinking about this.

*

His car had left the narrow suburban streets for bigger roads. Suddenly, he was in a maze of new one-way systems bounded by glittering office blocks. He drove through the same deep highway several times, to the same accompaniments from Mother.