Hanif Kureishi - Collected Stories

Near the station there had been a small record shop, a bookshop and a place to buy jeans, along with several pubs that I’d been taken to as a young man by a local bedsit aesthete, the first person I came out to. Of course, he knew straight away. His hero was Jean Cocteau. We’d discuss French literature and Wilde and Pop, before taking our speed pills and applying our make-up in the station toilet, and getting the train into the city. Along with another white friend who dressed as Jimi Hendrix, we saw all the plays and shows. Eventually I got a job in a West End box office. This led to work as a stagehand, usher, dresser — even a director — before I found my ‘vocation’ as a producer.

*

Now I asked my father his name and what he did. I knew how to work Dad, of course. Soon he was more interested in me than in the other man. Yet my fear didn’t diminish: didn’t we look similar? I wasn’t sure. My clothes, as well as my sparkly new teeth, were more expensive than his, and I was heavier and taller, about a third bigger all over — I have always worked out. But my hair was going gray; I don’t dye it. Dad’s hair was still mostly black.

An accountant all his life, my father had worked in the same office for fifteen years. He was telling me that he had two sons: Dennis, who was in the Air Force, and me — Billy. A few months ago I’d gone away to university, where, apparently, I was doing well. My all-female production of Waiting for Godot — ‘a bloody depressing play’, according to Dad — had been admired. I wanted to say, ‘But I didn’t direct it, Dad, I only produced it.’

I had introduced myself to Dad as Peter, the name I sometimes adopted, along with quite a developed alternative character, during anonymous sexual encounters. Not that I needed a persona: Father would ask me where I was from and what I did, but whenever I began to answer he’d interrupt with a stream of advice and opinions.

My father said he wanted to sit down because his sciatica was playing up, and I joined him at a table. Eying the barmaid, Dad said, ‘She’s lovely, isn’t she?’

‘Lovely hair,’ I said. ‘Unfortunately, none of her clothes fit.’

‘Who’s interested in her clothes?’

This was an aspect of my father I’d never seen; perhaps it was a departure for him. I’d never known him to go to the pub after work; he came straight home. And once Dennis had left I was able to secure Father’s evenings for myself. Every day I’d wait for him at the bus stop, ready to take his briefcase. In the house I’d make him a cup of tea while he changed.

Now the barmaid came over to remove our glasses and empty the ashtrays. As she leaned across the table, Dad put his hand behind her knee and slid it all the way up her skirt to her arse, which he caressed, squeezed and held until she reeled away and stared at him in disbelief, shouting that she hated the pub and the men in it, and would he get out before she called the landlord and he flung him out personally?

The landlord did indeed rush over. He snatched away Dad’s glass, raising his fist as Dad hurried to the door, forgetting his briefcase. I’d never known Dad to go to work without his briefcase, and I’d never known him to leave it anywhere. As my brother and I used to say, his attaché case was always attached to him.

Outside, where Dad was brushing himself down, I handed it back to him.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t have done that. But once, just once, I had to. Suppose it’s the last time I touch anyone!’ He asked, ‘Which way are you going?’

‘I’ll walk with you a bit,’ I said. ‘My bag isn’t heavy. I’m passing through. I need to get a train into London but there’s no hurry.’

He said, ‘Why don’t you come and have a drink at my house?’

My parents lived according to a strict regime, mathematical in its exactitude. Why, now, was he inviting a stranger to his house? I had always been his only friend; our involvement had kept us both busy.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Come.’

*

Noise and night and rain streaming everywhere: you couldn’t see farther than your hand. But we both knew the way, Dad moving slowly, his mouth hanging open to catch more air. He seemed happy enough, perhaps with what he’d done in the pub, or maybe my company cheered him up.

Yet when we turned the corner into the neat familiar road, a road that had, to my surprise, remained exactly where it was all the time I hadn’t been there, I felt wrapped in coldness. In my recent dreams — fading as they were like frescoes in the light — the suburban street had been darkly dismal under the yellow shadows of the streetlights, and filled with white flowers and a suffocating, deathly odor, like being buried in roses. But how could I falter now? Once inside the house, Dad threw open the door to the living room. I blinked; there she was, Mother, knitting in her huge chair with her feet up, an open box of chocolates on the small table beside her, her fingers rustling for treasure in the crinkly paper.

Dad left me while he changed into his pyjamas and dressing gown. The fact that he had a visitor, a stranger, didn’t deter him from his routine, outside of which there were no maps.

I stood in my usual position, just behind Mother’s chair. Here, where I wouldn’t impede her enjoyment with noise, complaints or the sight of my face, I explained that Dad and I had met in the pub and he’d invited me back for a drink.

Mother said, ‘I don’t think we’ve got any drink, unless there’s something left over from last Christmas. Drink doesn’t go bad, does it?’

‘It doesn’t go bad.’

‘Now shut up,’ she said. ‘I’m watching this. D’you watch the soaps?’

‘Not much.’

Maybe the ominous whiteness of my dreams had been stimulated by the whiteness of the things Mother had been knitting and crocheting — headrests, gloves, cushion covers; there wasn’t a piece of furniture in the house without a knitted thing on it. Even as a grown man, I couldn’t buy a pair of gloves without thinking I should be wearing Mother’s.

In the kitchen, I made a cup of tea for myself and Dad. Mum had left my father’s dinner in the oven: sausages, mash and peas, all dry as lime by now, and presented on a large cracked plate with space between each item. Mum had asked me if I wanted anything, but how would I have been able to eat anything here?

As I waited for the kettle to boil, I washed up the dishes at the sink overlooking the garden. Then I carried Father’s tea and dinner into his study, formerly the family dining room. With one hand I made a gap for the plate at the table, which was piled high with library books.

After I’d finished my homework, Dad always liked me to go through the radio schedules, marking programmes I might record for him. If I was lucky, he would read to me, or talk about the lives of the artists he was absorbed with — these were his companions. Their lives were exemplary, but only a fool would try to emulate them. Meanwhile I would slip my hand inside his pyjama top and tickle his back, or I’d scratch his head or rub his arms until his eyes rolled in appreciation.

Now in his bedwear, sitting down to eat, Dad told me he was embarked on a ‘five-year reading plan’. He was working on War and Peace . Next it would be Remembrance of Things Past, then Middlemarch , all of Dickens, Homer, Chaucer, and so on. He kept a separate notebook for each author he read.

‘This methodical way,’ he pointed out, ‘you get to know everything in literature. You will never run out of interest, of course, because then there is music, painting, in fact the whole of human history —’

His talk reminded me of the time I won the school essay prize for a tract on time-wasting. The piece was not about how to fritter away one’s time profitlessly, which might have made it a useful and lively work, but about how much can be achieved by filling every moment with activity! Dad was my ideal. He would read even in the bath, and as he reclined there my job was to wash his feet, back and hair with soap and a flannel. When he was done, I’d be waiting with a warm, open towel.