Hanif Kureishi - Collected Stories

It was difficult to be attached to someone who could only be attached to something else. A sleeping princess who wouldn’t wake up.

He wondered if he’d gone into television so that he would be in front of her face, at least some of the time.

At this, he laughed.

‘Don’t shake like that,’ she said. ‘Look where you’re going.’

‘What journey?’ he said.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘I haven’t told you.’

*

On the way to work, he had started to feel that if he talked with anyone they would get inside him; parts of the conversation would haunt him; words, thoughts, bits of their clothing would return like undigested food and he would be inhabited by worms, gnats, mosquitoes. Going to a meeting or to lunch, if human beings approached, his skin prickled and itched. If he thought, ‘Well, it’s only a minor irritation’, his mind became unendurable, as if a landscape of little flames had been ignited not only on the surface of his skin, but within his head.

The smell, the internal workings of every human being, the shit, blood, mucus swilling in a bag of flesh, made him mad. He felt he was wearing the glasses the stage hypnotist had given people, but instead of seeing them naked, he saw their inner physiology, their turbulence, their death.

At meetings, he would walk up and down, constantly going out of the room and then out of the building, to breathe. From behind pillars in the foyer, strangers started to whisper the ‘stupid’ remark at him, the one he had made to Father.

His boss said, ‘Harry, you’re coming apart. Go and see the doctor.’

The doctor informed him there were drugs to remove this kind of radical human pain in no time.

Harry showed the prescription to Alexandra. She was against the drugs. She wouldn’t even drink milk because of the ‘chemicals’ in it.

He told her, ‘I’m in pain.’

She replied, ‘That pain … it’s your pain. It’s you — your unfolding life.’

*

They went to a garden party. The blessed hypnotherapist would be there. It would be like meeting someone’s best friend for the first time. He would see who Alexandra wanted to be, who she thought she was like.

He spotted Amazing Olga on the lawn. She wore glasses. If she had a slightly hippy aspect it was because her hair hung down her back like a girl’s, and was streaked with grey.

Alexandra had copied this, he realised. Her hair was long now, making her look slightly wild — different, certainly, to the well-kempt wives of Harry’s colleagues.

The hypnotherapist looked formidable and self-possessed. Harry wanted to confront her, to ask where she was leading his wife, but he feared she would either say something humiliating or look into his eyes and see what he was like. It would be like being regarded by a policeman. All one’s crimes of shame and desire would be known.

*

He didn’t like Alexandra going away because he knew he didn’t exist in the mind of a woman as a permanent object. The moment he left the room they forgot him. They would think of other things, and of other men, better at everything than he. He was rendered a blank. This wasn’t what the women’s magazines, which his daughter Heather read, called low self-esteem. It was being rubbed out, annihilated, turned into nothing by a woman he was too much for.

*

Sometimes, he and Alexandra had to attend dull dinners with work colleagues.

‘I always have to sit next to the wives,’ he complained, resting on the bed to put on his heavy black shoes. ‘They never say anything I haven’t heard before.’

Alexandra said, ‘If you bother to talk and listen, it’s the wives who are interesting. There’s always more to them than there is to the husbands.’

He said, ‘That attitude makes me angry. It sounds smart, but it’s prejudice.’

‘There’s more to the women’s lives.’

‘More what?’

‘More emotion, variety, feeling. They’re closer to the heart of things — to children, to themselves, to their husbands and to the way the world really works.’

‘Money and politics are the engine.’

‘They’re a cover story,’ she said. ‘It’s on top, surface.’

He was boring. He bored himself.

She was making him think of why she would want to be with him; of what he had to offer.

When he came home from school with news spilling from him, Mother never wanted to know. ‘Quiet, quiet,’ she’d say. ‘I’m watching something.’

Gerald had said, ‘Even when we’re fifty we expect our mummy and daddy to be perfect, but they are only ever going to be just what they are.’

It would be childish to blame Mother for what he was now. But if he didn’t understand what had happened, he wouldn’t be free of his resentment and couldn’t move on.

Understand it? He couldn’t even see it! He lived within it, but like primitive man almost entirely ignorant of his environment, and trying to influence it with magic, in the darkness he couldn’t make anything out!

Gerald had said, ‘Children expect too much!’

Too much! Affection, attention, love — to be liked! How could it be too much?

*

On their wedding day, he had not anticipated that his marriage to Alexandra would become more complicated and interesting as time passed. It hadn’t become tedious or exhausted; it hadn’t even settled into a routine. He lived the life his university friends would have despised for its unadventurousness. Yet, every day it was strange, unusual, terrifying.

He had wanted a woman to be devoted to him, and, when, for years, she had been, he had refused to notice. Now, she wasn’t; things had got more lively, or ‘kicked up’, as his son liked to say.

Alexandra blazed in his face, day after day.

Mother, though, hadn’t changed. She was too preoccupied to be imaginative. He wasn’t, therefore, used to alteration in a woman.

Last night …

He had found himself searching through Alexandra’s clothes, letters, books, make-up. He didn’t read anything, and barely touched her belongings.

He had read in a newspaper about a public figure who had travelled on trains with a camera concealed in the bottom of his suitcase in order to look up women’s skirts, at their legs and underwear. The man said, ‘I wanted to feel close to the women.’

When it comes to love, we are all stalkers.

Last night, Harry checked the house, the garden and the land. He fed the dogs, Heather’s horse, the pig and the chickens.

Alexandra kept a tape deck in one of the collapsing barns. He had seen her, dancing on her toes, her skirt flying, singing to herself. He’d recalled a line from a song: ‘I saw you dancing in the gym, you both kicked off your shoes …’

On an old table she kept pages of writing; spread out beside them were photographs she had been taking to illustrate the stories.

She’d said, ‘If there’s a telephone in the story, I’ll take a picture of a phone and place it next to the paragraph.’

In the collapsing barn, he put on a tape and danced, if dancing was the word for his odd arthritic jig, in his pyjamas and wellington boots.

That was why he felt stiff this morning.

*

‘There is a real world,’ said Richard Dawkins the scientist.

Harry had repeated this to himself, and then passed it on to Alexandra as an antidote to her vaporous dreaming.

She had laughed and said, ‘Maybe there is a real world. But there is no one living it it.’

*

It was inevitable: they were nearing the churchyard and a feeling of dread came over him.

Mother turned to him. ‘I’ve never seen you so agitated.’

‘Me? I’m agitated?’

‘Yes. You’re twitching like a St Vitus’s dance person. Who d’you think I’m talking about?’