Hanif Kureishi - Collected Stories

Yet their conflicts, of which there was at least one a week — some continued for days — weren’t entirely terrible. Their disagreements uncovered misunderstandings. Sometimes they wanted different things, but only in the context of each other. She was close to his wishes, to the inner stream of him. They always returned to each other. There was never a permanent withdrawal, as there had been with Mother.

It was a little paradise at times.

*

In the newspapers, he learned of actors and sportsmen having affairs. Women wanted these people. It seemed easy.

There were attractive women in the office, but they were claimed immediately. They didn’t want him. It wasn’t only that he looked older than his years, as his wife had informed him. He looked unhealthy.

Plastic, anonymous, idealised sex was everywhere; the participants were only young and beautiful, as if desire was the exclusive domain of the thin.

He didn’t think it was sex he wanted. He liked to believe he could get by without excessive pleasure, just as he could get by without drugs. He kept thinking that the uses of sex in the modern world were a distraction. It didn’t seem to be the important thing.

What was important? He knew what it was — impermanence, decay, death and the way it informed the present — but couldn’t bring himself to look straight at it.

*

‘Where is Alexandra today?’ Mother asked. ‘I thought she might come with us. She never wants to see me.’

Mother’s ‘madness’ had no magnetism for Alexandra; her complaints bored her; Alexandra had never needed her.

He said, ‘She’s gone to Thailand. But she sends beautiful letters to me, by fax, every day.’

He explained that Alexandra had gone to a centre in Thailand for a fortnight to take various courses. There were dream, healing, and ‘imaging’ workshops.

Mother said, ‘What is she doing there?’

‘She said on the phone that she is with other middle-aged women in sandals and bright dresses with a penchant for Joni Mitchell. The last I heard she was hugging these women and taking part in rituals on the beach.’

‘Rituals?’

He had said to Alexandra when she rang, ‘But you can’t dance, Alexandra. You hate it.’

‘I can dance badly,’ she’d replied. ‘And that’s what I do, night after night.’

Dancing badly.

Harry said to Mother, ‘She told me she looked up and the moon was smiling.’

‘At her in particular?’ said Mother.

‘She didn’t itemise,’ said Harry.

‘This is at your expense?’

Alexandra, somewhat patronisingly, had felt she had to explain it wasn’t an infidelity.

‘There’s no other man involved,’ she’d said before she left, packing a few things into their son’s rucksack. ‘I hope there aren’t even any men there.’

He had looked at her clothes.

‘Is that all you’re taking?’

‘I will rely on the kindness of strangers,’ she had replied.

‘You’ll be wearing their clothes?’

‘I don’t see why not.’

It was an infidelity if she was ‘coming alive’, as she had put it. What could be a more disturbing betrayal than ‘more life’ even as he felt himself to be fading!

He was a conventional man, and he lived a conventional life in order for her, and the children presumably, one day, to live unconventional ones. Was he, to her, a dead weight? He feared losing sight of her, as she accelerated, dancing, into the distance.

‘Anyway,’ Mother said, ‘thank you, Harry, dear.’

‘For what?’

‘For taking me to Dad’s … Dad’s …’

He knew she couldn’t say ‘grave’.

‘That’s okay.’

‘The other sons are good to their mothers.’

‘Better than me?’

‘Some of them visit their mums every week. They sit with them for hours, playing board games. One boy sent her on a cruise.’

‘On the Titanic ?’

‘Little beast, you are! Still, without you I’d have to take three buses to see Dad.’

‘Shame you didn’t learn to drive.’

‘I wish I had.’

He was surprised. ‘Do you really?’

‘Then I would have got around.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘Oh, I don’t know now. Too much to do, with the washing and the cleaning.’

He asked, ‘Is there anything else that you would like me to do for you?’

‘Thank you for asking,’ she said. ‘Yes.’

‘What is it?’

‘Harry, I want to go on a journey.’

*

One morning, when Alexandra was scribbling, he said, ‘I’ll say goodbye.’

She came to the door to wave, as she always did if she wasn’t driving him to the station. She said she was sorry he had to go into the office — ‘such a place’ — every day.

‘What the hell is wrong with it?’ he asked.

The building was a scribble of pipes and wires, inhabited by dark suits with human beings inside. The harsh glow of the computer and TV screens reflected nothing back. Nothing reflected into eternity.

Something changed after she said this.

He travelled on the train with the other commuters. The idea they shared was a reasonable though stifling one: to live without, or to banish, inner and outer disorder.

He was attempting to read a book about Harold Wilson, Prime Minister when Harry was young. There was a lot about the ‘balance of payments’. Harry kept wondering what he had been wearing on his way to school the day Wilson made a particular speech. He wished he had his school exercise books, and the novels he had read then. This was a very particular way of doing history.

He had to put his face by the train window but tried not to breathe out for fear his soul would fly from his body and he would lose everything that had meaning for him.

At work, he would feel better.

He believed in work. It was important to sustain ceaseless effort. Making; building — this integrated the world. It was called civilisation. Otherwise, the mind, like an errant child, ran away. It wanted only pleasure, and nothing would get done.

The news was essential information. Without it, you were uninformed, uneducated even. You couldn’t see the way the world was moving. The news reminded you of other people’s lives, of human possibility and destructiveness. It was part of his work to glance at the French, German, American and Italian papers every day.

However, an image haunted him. He was taking his university finals and a kid in his class — a hippy or punk, a strange, straggly peacock — turned over the exam paper, glanced at the question and said, ‘Oh, I don’t think there’s anything here for me today,’ and left the room, singing ‘School’s Out’.

Beautiful defiance.

Couldn’t Harry walk into the office and say, ‘There’s nothing here for me today!’ or ‘Nothing of interest has happened in the world today!’?

*

He remembered his last years at school, and then at university. The other mothers helped their student kids into their new rooms, unpacking their bags and making the beds. Mother had disappeared into herself, neither speaking nor asking questions. As the size of her body increased, her self shrank, the one defending the other. He doubted she even knew what courses he was taking, whether he had graduated or not, or even what ‘graduation’ was.

She didn’t speak, she didn’t write to him, she hardly phoned. She was staring into the bright light, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, year after year. Television was her drug and anaesthetic, her sex her conversation her friends her family her heaven her …

Television did her dreaming for her.

It couldn’t hear her.

After the television had ‘closed down’, and Father was listening to music in bed, she walked about the house in her dressing gown and slippers. He had no idea what she could be thinking, unless it was the same thing repeatedly.