Hanif Kureishi: Collected Stories

Mike put his plate on the hyper-shiny elegant dining-room table where he liked to have supper and talk with friends. Imogen, who for years had never knowingly ingested anything non-organic, would have already eaten with the children. From where he sat Mike had a good view of the two boys playing a violent video game on the family television.

His food wasn’t really edible: the rice was dried up, the prawns rubbery. The boys’ dirty plates were still on the table, which was otherwise covered in school books, pencil cases, a rucksack out of which a football kit was tumbling, and three £20 notes Imogen had left for the cleaner. Mike picked one of them up and looked at it closely. How had he never noticed what a sardonic little Mona Lisa smile the blinged-up monarch wore, mocking even, as if she pitied the vanity and greed the note inspired?

‘Mike, you’ve been stalked by good fortune your whole life,’ his father enjoyed saying to him — the father who only finished paying off his mortgage when he retired, but otherwise considered debt a moral failure. ‘In Kent where I lived as a child there were German bombs every night. You have suffered no such catastrophes, and no murders in the family. You’re one who escaped the twentieth century!’

But not the twenty-first. The word of the post-9/11 era, used interminably by politicians and psychologists, was ‘security’, and the more the country had appeared to be policed by men in fluorescent jackets with ‘Security’ stamped on the back, the more afraid Mike felt — with good reason, as it turned out. Having progressed to running a department of forty people, Mike’s current job was to execute the employees he had engaged and, in two weeks’ time, pack up and remove himself.

‘Take out your plate and wash it up,’ he called across to the fifteen-year-old, who was playing the game.

‘I did it yesterday,’ Tom replied.

‘It is your plate,’ said Mike. The boy ignored him. ‘And please turn that game off. Let’s watch the football or a comedy. I need to be cheered up tonight.’

‘Leave me alone,’ said the kid. ‘I’ve just started. When you’re here you never let me do anything. You’re so controlling.’

‘Ten minutes and it’s going off.’

‘No it isn’t.’

‘Go and waste your life in your own room.’

‘My television’s broken,’ said Tom. ‘Why don’t you get it fixed like you promised? What have you ever done for me?’

‘I’ve given you all I’ve got and always will do so.’

‘Are you joking? You’ve done nothing for me.’

The smaller boy, four years his brother’s junior, and who claimed to have hurt his foot, hopped across to Mike and rested his head on his shoulder. Mike put his arm around Billy and kissed him. The older boy would never let Mike or even his mother kiss him now.

Mike had found it entertaining that some of his colleagues had stated their intention of becoming gardeners until the recession lifted; apparently the only requirements were an empty head and a desire to develop your muscles. Others had said they might be forced into teaching. Mike, at forty-five, had no idea what he would do. First he had to lose everything.

Billy patted Mike on the back, saying, not without an element of patronisation, ‘ I like you sometimes, Daddy. But I want guitar lessons. So first I’ll need the guitar and the amp, like Tom has.’

Family life could appear chaotic, but theirs was finely organised, with every hour accounted for. As well as attending private schools, his sons had, as far as Mike could recall, tennis, Spanish, piano, swimming, singing and karate lessons, and they frequently attended the cinema, the theatre and football matches. Like most of his friends and acquaintances, Mike’s debts were huge, worth almost two years’ income. But he had always considered them — when he did consider them — to be only another outgoing. Somehow, sometime in the mid-1980s debt stopped being shameful and after 1989 there appeared to be general agreement: capitalism was flourishing and there was no finer and more pleasant way to live but under it, singing and spending.

Mike pushed his plate away. After supper he liked to retire to his room where he was studying Stravinsky, listening to his work piece by piece in the order of its composition while reading about the composer’s life. Once a fortnight he and his pals held a record group, playing music to one another. Recently an irksome sculptor in this gang had looked straight at Mike and mockingly referred to ‘the cult of money’, calling his profession and its office ethic ‘fundamentalist’, because ardent belief was paramount and doubt discouraged.

The sculptor held the condescending and false view that the imagination was only active in art. Mike had been furious but unable to dismiss from his mind the damned man’s remark with regard to how he lived his life. He wondered whether he’d become hard and, like the sculptor, incapable of thinking his way into others’ lives.

But he did reckon that the desire of the public to see bankers as thuggish, voracious philistines was simply the wish to separate the banking system from the rest of society, as people would prefer not to think of abattoirs while they were eating. Nonetheless, like many people, Mike had also worried whether the present catastrophe was punishment for years of extravagance and self-indulgence; that that was the debt which had to be paid back in suffering. Yet how could his family be considered despicable or guilty of this, when all they’d asked for was continuous material improvement?

Mike wandered across to the dishwasher, dropped in the lump of detergent, shut the door, tapped the start button and the world went black. The clock on the cooker stopped, its bright digits stuck on four round zeros; the microwave halted in mid-turn. All sound was suddenly suspended, apart from a dog barking in a nearby garden.

Out of that moment’s nothing the little boy’s voice called, ‘Dad, Dad, Dad — do something!’

Mike fumbled in a drawer for a torch, crossed the house and was eventually able to follow the beam down the rackety wooden steps into the basement. But in his stockinged feet on the slippery stair, he slipped and lost his footing. For a second he believed he was crashing onto his back and would break his neck. How easy it was to fall, and how tempting it was — suddenly would be best — to die!

Grabbing the rail, he steadied himself, took some breaths — smelling gas and rotting cardboard — and padded down to the concrete floor where he stood surrounded by paint cans, broken children’s toys, a decade’s worth of discarded purchases and bags of credit card receipts.

There in the semi-darkness, gripping and ungripping his fists, he wondered whether he might go mad with fury. He knew he would be shut out now from the company of those he knew and liked, becoming a sort of ‘disappeared’. He fantasised about informing the national newspapers of the idiocy and corruption in his office, betraying those narrow-minded fools as he had been betrayed. Failing lack of universal interest in that, he’d buy petrol, break in, burn the place down and see how the bastards liked it. But how long would he hate them for, and what effect would such extended hating have on him? Would he die of cancer? Like others he had actually believed he was an exception and would be spared!

Finding at last the little lever which made everything work again, he pulled it. There was a surge and their awful world started up once more with its humming and vibrating.

On his return to the light he couldn’t believe Tom had resumed murdering dark-skinned people in some sort of Third World landscape.

‘Turn it off right now!’ he shouted. ‘That’s enough!’