Hanif Kureishi - Collected Stories

The phone call had upset and disturbed me, and I was torn.

How might one turn down the request of a man so sick, perhaps dying unhappily and more or less alone, someone who’d been such a close friend? I’d liked him; I’d loved him, I suppose, and he me. It had been a passionate friendship which had ended badly, indeed violently. Was an inexplicable outbreak any reason to forget the good, wonderful part of it?

As I considered the trip to Como, I became aware of how angry I still was over what had gone on between Phillip and me. Why exactly had I so taken to heart Phillip’s attacks on me? Why did I still puzzle over them and continue to hear his voice in my mind, as I argued with him over and over?

*

Although the three of us had been at university together, Phillip was ten years older than Fiona and me and, unusually for that punky dissenting period — the mid-seventies — Phillip had worn ironed shirts, a jacket and leather shoes. At the school where later he became a history master, he wore a tie and carried a briefcase. He had a moustache and glasses. He was not hip and didn’t attempt to dress young but looked, according to us, like someone’s father, giggling when we called him ‘Mr Chips’ and, later, Mr Lips.

For us he was knowledgeable and, above all, experienced, seeming to know his way around the world. He’d been married briefly; he wasn’t middle-class; his parents had been ‘in service’ — his mother a cook and his father a gardener — and he had moved far beyond them. After starting as an actor in ‘rep’, he had run theatres, worked as a stage manager, and even been an actors’ agent for a while, before trying to become a journalist. When none of it had seemed to work out, he had returned to university to do a PhD on the British army in the Second World War.

Phillip was the only actively bisexual person I’d known. When Fiona first met him, about a year before I did, he lived with a pretty young male lover with whom he listened to Wagner and went to gay bars like the Black Cap in Camden. But by our third year, when Fiona and I were installed together — and Phillip, having left university, was living alone a few doors down from us — he had had decided life was ‘easier’ as a heterosexual. He was working as a schoolteacher in the local comprehensive school, while supposedly completing his doctorate.

After university I set out as an actor in children’s theatre, but quickly realised that I disliked both children and being on stage. For real money I worked as a typist for an employment agency which sent me to a different office each week.

I had never felt more alienated than I did on that train with the other commuters and in those offices with the other drones. (Of course my father worked in an office, as an accountant.) It was such a fright that I was forced to take myself seriously and become motivated, as they say. At work I began to scribble down plays which were eventually performed on ‘the fringe’, in small venues and lunchtime theatres. Then I wrote a more ambitious work about a group of students — including characters who resembled Phillip, Fiona and me — visiting a Greek island, the first half of which was comic and the second farcical, nihilistic and vicious.

After starting out at a fringe venue, the play had become a success in the West End. It was produced in nine other countries and made a lot of money for others and some for me. For a few months, I was considered, at least by a couple of newspapers, to be the ‘voice of the young’ as well as one of Britain’s ‘most promising’ young writers. As Fiona said, if that wouldn’t spook your life, what would?

Soon I was working on the script of the film version. The producers had agreed to let me have a go at writing it, with the proviso that if I didn’t succeed a proper screenwriter would be brought on. I was keen to do it. The more successful I had become, the more self-doubt I seemed to be prone to.

Phillip had given me the key to his place. My own flat was noisy and Fiona often slept during the day: she was working with young offenders, and had overnight duties. So I’d stroll down to Phillip’s in the morning after he’d left for work.

If it was warm, I’d sit on the roof, a flat area with an iron fence looking out over Earls Court, my typewriter on a crate, a beer and an ashtray next to it, trying to write this movie. I’d stride about, saying the dialogue, attempting to see the different scenes crashing together. It wasn’t long before I learned that a movie uses up a lot of imagination quickly.

I was anxious all the time, with, I believed, much to be anxious about. During the high success of the play, I had travelled whenever I was invited, meeting journalists, giving talks, as well as doing some reviewing and article writing. My directness was considered amusing and mischievous, and I had appeared on a couple of TV quiz shows. I wasn’t optimistic that any of this would last. Indeed, convinced it was a fluke, success induced a plague of symptoms in me, twitches, compulsions, huge anxiety and, on some days, agoraphobia.

Like some of the untalented and talented people I’ve known, I was preoccupied by the idea that eventually people would understand that I was a fraud and a fool. After all, if you were a professional musician or even a footballer, you had already achieved a high level of competence. In my line of work, I could still feel as useless as a drunk, even as I won a short-story competition for a couple of pages about a woman being devoured by dogs, and my agent rang me with the figures from my latest opening. An older writer whose advice I sought sometimes had said to me, ‘It’s nothing to write one good or successful piece. Unless you choose to die young, you have to repeat it your whole life. Good luck.’

This wasn’t my only doubt and conflict. Fiona and I had been living together for four years, but were separating. She was waiting for a flat she would rent to become available, and soon I would buy my own place. Both of us had been seeing other people, but most nights we slept in the same bed. As a child adored by his parents, I discovered it took an axe to your identity to live with someone who despised you, who looked at you with loathing, refusing to let you give them anything.

Around five o’clock each day it was a relief when Phillip came home, thus signalling the end of my work. If I’d been on the roof, I went down into the flat to greet him, and would bring him a gin and tonic and a cigar. The effort of writing, and the paranoia which solitude engendered, had destabilised me by the afternoon. I believed there could be no luckier man than someone like Phillip who had spent the day working fruitfully, having exhausted his guilt.

*

While Phillip read the paper, I’d cook for him. If I’d been sunbathing, as I often had, I’d continue to walk about naked as he looked on. I’d been doing yoga in the mornings, I ran and cycled by the river, swam, and lifted weights in our small flat in front of the mirror. I had sculpted this chunky little hot body and was keen for it to be admired.

I’ve become aware that I have always liked to have a best friend, someone older than me to be brother, guide, accomplice. Phillip was the person with whom I laughed the hardest, and whom I most wanted to hear my thoughts and know me. I could crack him up doing the voices, having always been able to pick up accents and attitudes, mimicking them in a minute. I did resent being an entertainer, but he’d beg me to do them: sturdy lefties in the party, friends, TV personalities. In those days of grave and serious political struggle, frivolity was not only at a premium, it was subversion.

I’d always been an indifferent student, but having a tolerance for others I now recognise as unusual in a writer, I was smart enough to see that if I made intelligent friends, there was much I could pick up with minimal concentration or study. Phillip was also the most fun of anyone around at the time, his conversation being a mixture of personal anecdote — detailed and hilarious accounts of his romantic and sexual misfortunes with both men and women — and literary reference and political gossip: he was a busy member of the Labour Party, and ran the local CND branch. The one-bedroom flat, with a large living room, was stuffed with books. He and I and Fiona spent weekends putting up new shelves while drinking and holding parties on his roof.