Hanif Kureishi - Collected Stories

The sun came brightly through the window of the hotel dining room as Mal, wearing shorts and shoes without socks, filled himself with buttered kipper and fried mushrooms and toast, a starched napkin tucked into the front of his shirt. He had become the sort of man he’d have laughed at as a boy.

‘I wonder if you’ll remember much of this trip,’ he said to Wallace. ‘I think I’ll get the hotel manager to take a photograph of us outside. You can put it next to your bed.’

‘Dad … I mean, Mal —’

Newspapers were excellently designed for keeping boys’ faces from the sight of their father.

They were on the train when Andrea rang to say she liked the idea of helping Mal move his cutting-room and family to the town for the duration of the film. She had been nervous of suggesting it herself for fear it would put Mal off the job.

Wallace was saying, ‘I need to speak to her urgently.’

Mal passed him the phone and heard him explain that he was prepared to be in the film only if he didn’t have to cut his hair or kiss girls.

‘Andrea agreed,’ said Wallace. ‘But will mum let me be an actor for her?’

‘She might if you tell her you’re getting paid.’

The house was deserted when they got back. Mal had guessed his wife would want to avoid them. He opened the doors to the garden and cooked for them both.

Over lunch, Wallace mentioned his piano lessons for the first time. Mal hunted out a Chopin piece played by Arturo Michelangeli and put it on. As they listened, Mal tried to say why he loved it, but he began to weep. He carried on talking but couldn’t stop his tears. What he dreaded was driving Wallace home. How could any love survive so many interruptions?

Late that afternoon, before they reached the motorway turn-off, Mal stopped at a service station and had a Coke with his son.

He said, ‘When we get to your house, you won’t want to say goodbye to me properly. But I want you to know that I will think of you when you’re at school, or asleep, or with your friends.’

‘I never miss you. I won’t be thinking about you.’

‘You don’t have to. I’ll do the thinking, okay?’

Soon they were at Wallace’s front gate. The boy scrambled out of the car and ran around the back of the house. Mal carried the bags to the front door and returned to the car. He watched Wallace’s stepfather and mother appear and take the bags inside, almost furtively, as though they were stealing them. Mal wanted to look at the couple more, to try and put these two connected families together, but he just waved in their direction and drove away, turning off his phone.

Mal returned to London without stopping. He parked near the house but went past it without going in. He walked to a nearby pub, frequented by northern men working during the week in London. ‘No children or dirty boots’, it said on the door.

Mal bought cigarettes and set himself up at the bar, ordering a pint and a chaser. He was unsure whether he was celebrating his new job or commiserating with himself over what he had just endured, but he toasted himself.

‘To Mal,’ he said. ‘And everyone who knows him!’

He shouted and jumped up and down. ‘See you soon, soon, soon, I hope!’

He continued waving until they disappeared round the corner, his many aunties, uncles and cousins, packed into three taxis. Ali and his parents were standing on the pavement outside the house. The Bombay part of their family had been staying in a rented flat in Dulwich for the summer. Ali and his parents had seen them nearly every day; tomorrow they were returning to India.

‘Come inside now.’ Ali’s father took his hand. ‘I don’t like to see you so upset.’

Ali was embarrassed by his tears. His neighbour Mike was standing across the road, shuffling his football cards and scratching, watching and pretending not to. He had been round earlier. After the uncles and aunts had begun their goodbyes, the front door bell had rung and Ali had opened it, thinking it was a taxi. His cousins had crowded behind him.

‘Comin’ out?’ Mike had asked, biting his nails, trying to examine the faces behind Ali. Mike had lost a clump of hair; his father had pulled it out, beating him up. ‘What’s goin’ on? We could ’ear you lot from down the road, makin’ a noise all day.’

It was the Saturday of the fifth cricket Test. India had been playing England at the Oval. In the morning, Ali’s three rowdy uncles and his father had taken their places in the small front room, pulling the curtains and shutting the door. The men had smoked, drunk beer and cursed the Indian bowlers, while the stolid Englishmen, Barrington and Graveney, batted all day. The uncles blamed the Indian captain Prince Pataudi, who had only one eye. The Indian aunties had been teaching Ali’s English mother to prepare several dishes which she promised to make for her husband and son. The women carried the dhal, keema and rice into the room, which they had been cooking in huge pans first thing in the morning. The men had eaten with their fingers, plates shuddering on their laps, not taking their eyes from the screen. They had yelled abuse in Urdu.

Ali had been allowed to go into the uncles’ room whenever he liked. They had begun to speak to him as another man. One even called him ‘the next head of the family’. The oldest uncle owned factories in India, the second was a famous political journalist, and the third was an engineer who built dams. At home, all three were notorious ‘carousers’ and party-givers. During the cricket intervals, they entertained Ali by betting on tossed coins or on which auntie would come into the room next; they played ‘stone, paper, scissors’. Ali’s abstemious father had a minor job in a solicitor’s office.

Ali was an only child. He wrote down cricket scores next to imaginary teams in a notebook his mother had given him. He spent hours alone in the garden, batting a cricket ball, attached by rope to the branch of a tree, with a sawn-off broomstick. The garden was his kingdom, and he was eager to share it with his Indian family as he had today, opening the windows and back door of the small council house. This was unusual: both his parents disliked draughts, whatever the weather. Today, three of his cousins had played cricket out in the garden; the girls, aged between seven and fourteen, had played chase.

The aunties, after they had washed up, had sat on blankets in the shade, stroking and arranging one another’s hair like people in a French painting. Ali was kissed and fussed over, enjoying the sight of his aunties’ painted toes in their delicate sandals, even the rolls of fat around their stomachs, where their saris had come loose.

That afternoon, Ali had shown his cousin Zahida his bedroom. She was fourteen, a year older than him. They’d looked out at the view of suburban gardens (where he’d once seen a married couple kissing), and he pulled out his copy of The Man with the Golden Gun . They bounced on the bed and then she pressed her lips to his. She said she wanted to be ‘secret’ with him, and he got a torch and led her up the ladder into the attic where there were discarded toys and dusty trunks which had carried his father’s things from Bombay. Her bangles clattered and jangled. They couldn’t stop giggling. Zahida was convinced there were rats and bats. Who would hear her muffled screams so far up?

They kissed again, but she placed her mouth close to his ear. His body was invaded by such sweetness that he thought he would fall over. She bent forward, placing her hands on top of the filthy water-tank, and in a delirium he continued caressing, until, making his way through intricate whirls of material, he reached her flesh and slid his finger into the top of the crack. That was all. She made noises like someone suffering. He could have remained with her there for hours, but his excitement was yoked to a fear of discovery and punishment. He said they should go downstairs. He went first, and urged her to follow.