Hanif Kureishi - Collected Stories

Setting off from home that morning, he had been convinced that he knew how to get to the cemetery, but now, although he recognised some things, it was only a glancing, bewildered familiarity. He hadn’t driven around this area for more than twenty-five years.

Mother seemed to take it for granted that he knew where he was. This might have been the only confidence she had in him. She loved ‘safe’ drivers. She liked coaches; for some reason, coach drivers, like some doctors, were trustworthy. Being safe mattered more than anything else because, in an inhospitable world, they were always in danger.

He didn’t want to stop to ask the way, and he couldn’t ask Mother for fear his uncertainty would turn her more feverish.

Cars driven by tattooed south London semi-criminals with shaven heads seemed to be pursuing them; vans flew at them from unexpected angles. His feet were cold, but his hands were sweating.

If he didn’t keep himself together, he would turn into her.

*

He hadn’t spoken to Mother for almost three months. He had had an argument with his brother — there had almost been a fist fight in the little house — and Mother, instead of making the authoritative intervention he had wished for, had collapsed weeping.

‘I want to die,’ she’d wailed. ‘I’m ready!’

The forced pain she gave off had made him throw up in the gutter outside the house.

He had looked up from his sick to see the faces of the neighbours at their windows — the same neighbours, now thirty years older, he’d known as a child.

They would have heard from Mother that he was well paid.

Sometimes he was proud of his success. He had earned the things that other people wanted.

He worked in television news. He helped decide what the news was. Millions watched it. Many people believed that the news was the most important thing that had happened in the world that day. To be connected, they needed the news in the way they needed bread and water.

He remembered how smug he had been, self-righteous even, as a young man at university. Some went to radical politics or Mexico; others sought a creative life. The women became intense, quirkily intelligent and self-obsessed. Being lower middle class, he worked hard, preparing his way. The alternative, for him, he knew, was relative poverty and boredom. He had learned how to do his job well; for years he had earned a good salary. He had shut his mouth and pleased the bosses. He had become a boss himself; people were afraid of him, and tried to guess what he was thinking.

He worried there was nothing to him, that under his thinning hair he was a ‘hollow man’, a phrase from the poetry he’d studied at school. Being ‘found out’, Gerald called it, laughing, like someone who had perpetrated a con.

Harry’s daughter Heather talked of wanting confidence. He understood that. But where could confidence originate, except from a parent who believed in you?

There she was next to him, vertiginous, drivelling, scratching in fear at the seat she sat on, waving, in her other hand, the disconnected seat-belt buckle.

*

It wasn’t long before Alexandra started to call it ‘work’.

The ‘work’ she was doing on herself.

The ‘work’ with the different-coloured pens.

The ‘work’ of throwing them on the floor, of being the sort of person who threw things about if she felt like it.

‘Work,’ he said, with a slight sneer. ‘The “work” of imagining an apple and talking to it.’

‘The most important work I’ve done.’

‘It won’t pay for the barn to be cleared and rebuilt.’

‘Why does that bother you so much?’

Money was a way of measuring good things. The worth of a man had to be related to what he was able to earn. She would never be convinced by this.

Her ‘work’ was equivalent to his work. No; it was more important. She had started to say his work was out of date, like prisons, schools, banks and politics.

She said, ‘The cost and waste of transporting thousands of people from one part of the country to another for a few hours. These things continue because they have always happened, like bad habits. These are nineteenth-century institutions and we are a few months from the end of the twentieth century. People haven’t yet found more creative ways of doing things.’

He thought of the trains on the bridges over the Thames, transporting trainloads of slaves to futility.

*

In the suburbs, where Mother still lived, the idea was to think of nothing; to puzzle over your own experience was to gratuitously unsettle yourself. How you felt wasn’t important, only what you did, and what others saw.

Yet he knew that if he wasn’t looking at himself directly, he was looking at himself in the world. The world had his face in it! If you weren’t present to yourself, you’d find yourself elsewhere!

Almost all the men in the street had lighted sheds at the end of the garden, or on their allotments, to which they retreated in the evenings. These men were too careful for the pub. The sheds were where the men went to get away from the women. The women who weren’t employed and had the time, therefore, to be disturbed. It was a division of labour: they carried the madness for the men.

*

‘All right, Mother?’ he said at last. ‘We aren’t doing so badly now.’

They had escaped the highway and regained the narrow, clogged suburban roads.

‘Not too bad, dear,’ she sighed, passing the back of her hand across her forehead. ‘Oh, watch out! Can’t you look where you’re going? There’s traffic everywhere!’

‘That means we go slower.’

‘They’re so near!’

‘Mother, everyone has an interest in not getting killed.’

‘That’s what you think!’

If Mother had kept on repeating the same thing and squealing at high volume, he would have lost his temper; he would have turned the car round, taken her home and dumped her. That would have suited him. Alexandra was coming back tomorrow; he had plenty to do.

But after a few minutes Mother calmed down, and even gave him directions.

They were on their way to the cemetery.

*

It was easy to be snobbish and uncharitable about the suburbs, but what he saw around him was ugly, dull and depressing. He had, at least, got away.

But, like Mother continuing to live here when there was no reason for it, he had put up with things unnecessarily. He had never rebelled, least of all against himself. He had striven, up to a point — before the universe, like his mother, had shut like a door in his face.

*

He was afraid Alexandra would fall in love with some exotic idea, or with Thailand, and never want to return. Mother’s irritability and indifference had taught him that women wanted to escape. If they couldn’t get away, they hated you for making them stay.

*

There was a couple he and Alexandra had known for a long time. The woman had laboured for years to make their house perfect. One afternoon, as he often did, Harry drove over for tea in their garden. The woman cultivated wild flowers; there was a summerhouse.

Harry sighed, and said to the man, ‘You have everything you could want here. If I were you, I’d never go out.’

‘I don’t,’ the man replied. He added casually, ‘If I had my way, of course, we wouldn’t live here but in France. They have a much higher standard of living.’

The man did not notice, but at this the woman crumpled, as if she’d been shot. She went inside, shut the windows and became ill. She could not satisfy her husband, couldn’t quell his yearnings. It was impossible, and, without him asking her to do it, she had worn herself out trying.

If Alexandra was seeking cures, it was because she didn’t have everything and he had failed her.