Hanif Kureishi - Collected Stories

‘Hey,’ he says to Nadia (it’s her first day here). Nadia stiffens. ‘Hey, won’t yer pick them up for me?’

She looks at me. I’m humming a tune. The tune is ‘Just My Imagination’. I’m not scared of the little jerks. It’s the bad impression that breaks my heart. Nadia picks up the trainers.

‘Just tuck them right in there,’ the little kid says, exposing his armpit.

‘Won’t they be a little large for you?’ Nadia says.

‘Eat shit.’

Soon we’re out of there and into the air. We make for South Africa Road and the General Smuts pub. Kids play football behind wire. The old women in thick overcoats look like lagged boilers on little feet. They huff and shove carts full of chocolate and cat food.

I’m all tense now and ready to say anything. I feel such a need to say everything in the hope of explaining all that I give a guided tour of my heart and days.

I explain (I can’t help myself): this happened here, that happened there. I got pregnant in that squat. I bought bad smack from that geezer in the yellow T-shirt and straw hat. I got attacked there and legged it through that park. I stole pens from that shop, dropping them into my motorcycle helmet. (A motorcycle helmet is very good for shoplifting, if you’re interested.) Standing on that corner I cared for nothing and no one and couldn’t walk on or stay where I was or go back. My gears had stopped engaging with my motor. Then I had a nervous breakdown.

Without comment she listens and nods and shakes her head sometimes. Is anyone in? I take her arm and move my cheek close to hers.

‘I tell you this stuff which I haven’t told anyone before. I want us to know each other inside out.’

She stops there in the street and covers her face with her hands.

‘But my father told me of such gorgeous places!’

‘Nadia, what d’you mean?’

‘And you show me filth!’ she cries. She touches my arm. ‘Oh, Nina, it would be so lovely if you could make the effort to show me something attractive.’

Something attractive. We’ll have to get the bus and go east, to Holland Park and round Ladbroke Grove. This is now honeyed London for the rich. Here there are La restaurants, wine bars, bookshops, estate agents more prolific than doctors, and attractive people in black, few of them ageing. Here there are health food shops where you buy tofu, nuts, live-culture yogurt and organic toothpaste. Here the sweet little black kids practise on steel drums under the motorway for the Carnival and old blacks sit out in the open on orange boxes shouting. Here the dope dealers in Versace suits travel in from the suburbs on commuter trains, carrying briefcases, trying to sell slummers bits of old car tyre to smoke.

And there are more stars than beggars. For example? Van Morrison in a big overcoat is hurrying towards somewhere in a nervous mood.

‘Hiya, Van! Van? Won’t ya even say hello!’ I scream across the street. At my words Van the Man accelerates like a dog with a winklepicker up its anus.

She looks tired so I take her into Julie’s Bar where they have the newspapers and we sit on well-woven cushions on long benches. Christ only know how much they have the cheek to charge for a cup of tea. Nadia looks better now. We sit there all friendly and she starts off.

‘How often have you met our father?’

‘I see him every two or three years. When he comes on business, he makes it his business to see me.’

‘That’s nice of him.’

‘Yes, that’s what he thinks. Can you tell me something, Nadia?’ I move closer to her. ‘When he’d get home, our father, what would he tell you about me?’

If only I wouldn’t tempt everything so. But you know me: can’t live on life with slack in it.

‘Oh, he was worried, worried, worried.’

‘Christ. Worried three times.’

‘He said you … no.’

‘He said what?’

‘No, no, he didn’t say it.’

‘Yes, he did, Nadia.’

She sits there looking at badly dressed television producers in linen suits with her gob firmly closed.

‘Tell me what my father said or I’ll pour this pot of tea over my head.’

I pick up the teapot and open the lid for pouring-over-the-head convenience. Nadia says nothing; in fact she looks away. So what choice do I have but to let go a stream of tea over the top of my noddle? It drips down my face and off my chin. It’s pretty scalding, I can tell you.

‘He said, all right, he said you were like a wild animal!’

‘Like a wild animal?’ I say.

‘Yes. And sometimes he wished he could shoot you to put you out of your misery.’ She looks straight ahead of her. ‘You asked for it. You made me say it.’

‘The bastard. His own daughter.’

She holds my hand. For the first time, she looks at me, with wide-open eyes and urgent mouth. ‘It’s terrible, just terrible there in the house. Nina, I had to get away! And I’m in love with someone! Someone who’s indifferent to me!’

‘And?’

And nothing. She says no more except: ‘It’s too cruel, too cruel.’

I glance around. Now this is exactly the kind of place suitable for doing a runner from. You could be out the door, halfway up the street and on the tube before they’d blink. I’m about to suggest it to Nadia, but, as I’ve already told her about my smack addiction, my two abortions and poured a pot of tea over my head, I wouldn’t want her to get a bad impression of me.

‘I hope,’ I say to her, ‘I hope to God we can be friends as well as relations.’

*

Well, what a bastard my dad turned out to be! Wild animal! He’s no angel himself. How could he say that? I was always on my best behaviour and always covered my wrists and arms. Now I can’t stop thinking about him. It makes me cry.

This is how he used to arrive at our place, my daddy, in the days when he used to visit us.

First there’s a whole day’s terror and anticipation and getting ready. When Ma and I are exhausted, having practically cleaned the flat with our tongues, a black taxi slides over the horizon of the estate, rarer than an ambulance, with presents cheering on the back seat: champagne, bicycles, dresses that don’t fit, books, dreams in boxes. Dad glows in a £3,000 suit and silk tie. Neighbours lean over the balconies to pleasure their eyeballs on the prince. It takes two or three of them working in shifts to hump the loot upstairs.

Then we’re off in the taxi, speeding to restaurants with menus in French where Dad knows the manager. Dad tells us stories of extreme religion and hilarious corruption and when Ma catches herself laughing she bites her lip hard — why? I suppose she finds herself flying to the magnet of his charm once more.

After the grub we go to see a big show and Mum and Dad hold hands. All of these shows are written, on the later occasions, by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

This is all the best of life, except that, when Dad has gone and we have to slot back into our lives, we don’t always feel like it. We’re pretty uncomfortable, looking at each other and shuffling our ordinary feet once more in the mundane. Why does he always have to be leaving us?

After one of these occasions I go out, missing him. When alone, I talk to him. At five in the morning I get back. At eight Ma comes into my room and stands there, a woman alone and everything like that, in fury and despair.

‘Are you involved in drugs and prostitution?’

I’d been going with guys for money. At the massage parlour you do as little as you can. None of them has disgusted me, and we have a laugh with them. Ma finds out because I’ve always got so much money. She knows the state of things. She stands over me.

‘Yes.’ No escape. I just say it. Yes, yes, yes.

‘That’s what I thought.’