Hanif Kureishi - Collected Stories

He said, ‘About culture, about marriage, about education, death … You receive all sorts of assumptions that it takes years to correct. The less the better, I say. It’s taken me years to correct some of the things I was made to believe early on.’

He was impressed by how impressed she had been.

‘I will go back to school,’ she said. ‘I think I should, for Mum.’

Before he took her to the station, she sat where her mother sat, at the table, writing in a notebook.

*

He had to admit that lately he had become frustrated and aggressive with Alexandra, angry that he couldn’t control or understand her. By changing, she was letting him down; she was leaving him.

Alexandra rarely mentioned his mother and he never talked seriously about her for fear, perhaps, of his rage, or the memory of rage, it would evoke. But after a row over Olga, Alexandra said, ‘Remember this. Other people aren’t your mother. You don’t have to yell at them to ensure they’re paying attention. They’re not half-dead and they’re not deaf. You’re wearing yourself out, Harry, trying to get us to do things we’re doing already.’

Alexandra had the attributes that Mother never had. He hadn’t, at least, made the mistake of choosing someone like his mother, of living with the same person for ever without even knowing it.

Oddly, it was the ways in which she wasn’t like Mother which disturbed him the most.

*

He thought: a man was someone who should know, who was supposed to know. Someone who knew what was going on, who had a vision of where they were all heading, separately and as a family. Sanity was a great responsibility.

*

‘Why did you run away from school?’ he asked Heather at last.

Placing her hands over her ears, she said there were certain songs she couldn’t get out of her head. Words and tunes circulated on an endless loop. This had driven her home to Father.

He said, ‘Are the noises less painful here?’

‘Yes.’

He would have dismissed it as a minor madness if he hadn’t, only that afternoon …

He had been instructed to rest, and rest he would, after years of work. He had gone into the garden to lie on the grass beneath the trees. There, at the end of the cool orchard, with a glass of wine beside him, his mind had become possessed by brutal images of violent crime, of people fighting and devouring one another’s bodies, of destruction and the police; of impaling, burning, cutting.

Childhood had sometimes been like this: hatred and the desire to bite, kill, kick.

He had been able to lie there for only twenty minutes. He had walked, then, thrashing his head as if to drive away the insanity.

A better way of presenting the news might be this: a screaming woman, dripping blood and guts, holding the corpse of a flayed animal. A ripped child; armfuls of eviscerated infants; pieces of chewed body.

This would be an image, if they kept it on screen for an hour or so, that would not only shock but compel consideration of the nature of humankind.

He had run inside and turned on the television.

If he seemed to know as much about his own mind as he did about the governance of Zambia, how could his daughter’s mind not be strange to her?

*

There was no day of judgement, when a person’s life would be evaluated, the good and the bad, in separate piles. No day but every day.

Alexandra was educating him: a pedagogy of adjustment and strength. These were the challenges of a man’s life. It was pulling him all over the place. The alternative wasn’t just to die feebly, but to self-destruct in fury because the questions being asked were too difficult.

If he and Alexandra stayed together, he would have to change. If he couldn’t follow her, he would have to change more.

A better life was only possible if he forsook familiar experiences for seduction by the unfamiliar. Certainty would be a catastrophe.

*

The previous evening, Alexandra had rung from her mobile phone. He’d thought the background noise was the phone’s crackle, but it was the sea. She had left the taverna and was walking along the beach behind a group of other women.

‘I’ve decided,’ she said straight away, sounding ecstatic.

‘What is it, Alexandra?’

‘It has become clear to me, Harry! My reason, let’s say. I will work with the unconscious.’

‘In Thailand?’

‘In Kent. At home.’

‘I guess you can find the unconscious everywhere.’

‘How we know others. What sense we can make of their minds. That is what interests me. When I’m fully trained, people will come —’

‘Where? Where?’ He couldn’t hear her.

‘To the house. We will need a room built, I think. Will that be all right?’

‘Whatever you want.’

‘I will earn it back.’

He asked, ‘What will the work involve?’

‘Working with people, individually and in groups, in the afternoons and evenings, helping them understand their imaginations. It is a training, therefore, in possibility.’

‘Excellent.’

‘Do you mean that? This work is alien to you, I know. Today, today — a bunch of grown-ups — we were talking to imaginary apples!’

‘Somehow it wouldn’t be the same’, he said, ‘with bananas! But I am with you, at your side, always … wherever you are!’

*

He had had intimations of this. There had been an argument.

He had asked her, ‘Why do you want to help other people?’

‘I can’t think of anything else as interesting.’

‘Day after day you will listen to people droning on.’

‘After a bit, the self-knowledge will make them change.’

‘I’ve never seen such a change in anyone.’

‘Haven’t you?’

‘I don’t believe I have,’ he’d said.

‘Haven’t you?’

He’d said agitatedly, ‘Why d’you keep repeating that like a parrot?’ She’d looked at him levelly. He’d gone on, ‘Tell me when and where you’ve seen this!’

‘You’re very interested.’

‘It would be remarkable,’ he’d said. ‘That’s why I’m interested.’

‘People are remarkable,’ she’d said. ‘They find all sorts of resources within themselves that were unused, that might be wasted.’

‘Is it from that “Amazing” woman that you get such ideas?’

‘She and I talk, of course. Are you saying I don’t have a mind of my own?’

He’d said, ‘Are you talking about a dramatic change?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well,’ he’d said. ‘I don’t know. But I’m not ruling it out.’

‘That’s something.’ She had smiled. ‘It’s a lot.’

*

He had wanted to tell Heather that clarity was not illuminating; it kept the world away. A person needed confusion and muddle — good difficult knots and useful frustrations. Someone could roll up their sleeves and work, then.

*

He got Mother into the car and started it.

She said, ‘Usually I lie down and shut the tops of me eyes at this time. You’re not going to keep me up, are you?’

‘Only if you want to eat. D’you want to do that?’

‘That’s an idea. I’m starving. Tummy’s rumbling. Rumblin’!’

‘Come on.’

In the car, he murmured, ‘You were rotten to me.’

‘Oh, was I so terrible?’ she cried. ‘I only gave you life and fed and clothed you and brought you up all right, didn’t I? You were never late for school!’

‘Sorry? You couldn’t wait for us to get out of the house!’

‘Haven’t you done better than the other boys? They’re plumbers! People would give their legs to have your life!’

‘It wasn’t enough.’

‘It’s never enough, is it? It never was! It never is!’

He went on, ‘If I were you, looking back on your life now, I’d be ashamed.’