Hanif Kureishi - Collected Stories

‘Yes, that is my life at the moment. Can I go back to sleep now? I’m expected at work at twelve.’

‘Don’t call it work, Nina. There are other words.’

She goes. Before her car has failed to start in the courtyard, I’ve run to the bathroom, filled the sink, taken Ma’s lousy leg razor and jabbed into my wrists, first one, then the other, under water, digging for veins. (You should try it sometime; it’s more difficult than you think: skin tough, throat contracting with vomit acid sour disgust.) The nerves in my hands went and they had to operate and everyone was annoyed that I’d caused such trouble.

Weeks later I vary the trick and swallow thirty pills and fly myself to a Surrey mental hospital where I do puzzles, make baskets and am fucked regularly for medicinal reasons by the art therapist who has a long nail on his little finger.

Suicide is one way of saying you’re sorry.

*

With Nadia to the Tower of London, the Monument, Hyde Park, Buckingham Palace and something cultured with a lot of wigs at the National Theatre. Nadia keeps me from confession by small talk which wears into my shell like sugar into a tooth.

Ma sullen but doing a workmanlike hospitality job. Difficult to get Nadia out of her room most of the time. Hours she spends in the bathroom every day experimenting with make-up. And then Howard the hero decides to show up.

*

Ma not home yet. Early evening. Guess what? Nadia is sitting across the room on the sofa with Howard. This is their first meeting and they’re practically on each other’s laps. (I almost wrote lips.) All afternoon I’ve had to witness this meeting of minds. They’re on politics. The words that ping off the walls are: pluralism, democracy, theocracy and Benazir! Howard’s senses are on their toes! The little turd can’t believe the same body (in a black cashmere sweater and black leather jacket) can contain such intelligence, such beauty, and yet jingle so brightly with facts about the Third World! There in her bangles and perfume I see her speak to him as she hasn’t spoken to me once — gesticulating!

‘Howard. I say this to you from my heart, it is a corrupt country! Even the revolutionaries are corrupt! No one has any hope!’

In return he asks, surfacing through the Niagara of her conversation: ‘Nadia, can I show you something? Videos of the TV stuff I’ve written?’

She can’t wait.

None of us has seen her come in. Ma is here now, coat on, bags in her hands, looking at Nadia and Howard sitting so close their elbows keep knocking together.

‘Hello,’ she says to Howard, eventually. ‘Hiya,’ to Nadia. Ma has bought herself some flowers, which she has under her arm — carnations. Howard doesn’t get up to kiss her. He’s touching no one but Nadia and he’s very pleased with himself. Nadia nods at Ma but her eyes rush back to Howard the hero.

Nadia says to Howard: ‘The West doesn’t care if we’re an undemocratic country.’

‘I’m exhausted,’ Ma says.

‘Well,’ I say to her. ‘Hello, anyway.’

Ma and I unpack the shopping in the kitchen. Howard calls through to Ma, asking her school questions which she ignores. The damage has been done. Oh yes. Nadia has virtually ignored Ma in her own house. Howard, I can see, is pretty uncomfortable at this. He is about to lift himself out of the seat when Nadia puts her hand on his arm and asks him: ‘How do you create?’

‘How do I create?’

How does Howard create? With four word-kisses she has induced in Howard a Nelson’s Column of excitement. ‘How do you create?’ is the last thing you should ever ask one of these guys.

‘They get along well, don’t they?’ Ma says, watching them through the crack of the door. I lean against the fridge.

‘Why shouldn’t they?’

‘No reason,’ she says. ‘Except that this is my home. Everything I do outside here is a waste of time and no one thanks me for it and no one cares for me, and now I’m excluded from my own flat!’

‘Hey, Ma, don’t get —’

‘Pour me a bloody whisky, will you?’

I pour her one right away. ‘Your supper’s in the oven, Ma.’ I give her the whisky. My ma cups her hands round the glass. Always been a struggle for her. Her dad in the army; white trash. She had to fight to learn. ‘It’s fish pie. And I did the washing and ironing.’

‘You’ve always been good in that way, I’ll give you that. Even when you were sick you’d do the cooking. I’d come home and there it would be. I’d eat it alone and leave the rest outside your door. It was like feeding a hamster. You can be nice.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Only your niceness has to live among so many other wild elements. Women that I know. Their children are the same. A tragedy or a disappointment. Their passions are too strong. It is our era in England. I only wish, I only wish you could have some kind of career or something.’

I watch her and she turns away to look at Howard all snug with the sister I brought here. Sad Ma is, and gentle. I could take her in my arms to console her now for what I am, but I don’t want to indulge her. A strange question occurs to me. ‘Ma, why do you keep Howard on?’

She sits on the kitchen stool and sips her drink. She looks at the lino for about three minutes, without saying anything, gathering herself up, punching her fist against her leg, like someone who’s just swallowed a depth charge. Howard’s explaining voice drifts through to us.

Ma gets up and kick-slams the door.

‘Because I love him even if he doesn’t love me!’

Her tumbler smashes on the floor and glass skids around our feet.

‘Because I need sex and why shouldn’t I! Because I’m lonely, I’m lonely, okay, and I need someone bright to talk to! D’you think I can talk to you? D’you think you’d ever be interested in me for one minute?’

‘Ma —’

‘You’ve never cared for me! And then you brought Nadia here against my wishes to be all sweet and hypercritical and remind me of all the terrible past and the struggle of being alone for so long!’

*

Ma sobbing in her room. Howard in with her. Nadia and me sit together at the two ends of the sofa. My ears are scarlet with the hearing of Ma’s plain sorrow through the walls. ‘Yes, I care for you,’ Howard’s voice rises. ‘I love you, baby. And I love Nina, too. Both of you.’

‘I don’t know, Howard. You don’t ever show it.’

‘But I’m blocked as a human being!’

I say to Nadia: ‘Men are pretty selfish bastards who don’t understand us. That’s all I know.’

‘Howard’s an interesting type,’ she says coolly. ‘Very open-minded in an artistic way.’

I’m getting protective in my old age and very pissed off.

‘He’s my mother’s boyfriend and long-standing lover.’

‘Yes, I know that.’

‘So lay off him. Please, Nadia. Please understand.’

‘What are you, of all people, accusing me of?’

I’m not too keen on this ‘of all people’ business. But get this.

‘I thought you advanced Western people believed in the free intermingling of the sexes?’

‘Yes, we do. We intermingle all the time.’

‘What then, Nina, is your point?’

‘It’s him,’ I explain, moving in. ‘He has all the weaknesses. One kind word from a woman and he thinks they want to sleep with him. Two kind words and he thinks he’s the only man in the world. It’s a form of mental illness, of delusion. I wouldn’t tangle with that deluded man if I were you!’

All right! A few days later.

Here I am slouching at Howard’s place. Howard’s hole, or ‘sock’ as he calls it, is a red-brick mansion block with public-school, stately dark oak corridors, off Kensington High Street. Things have been getting grimmer and grimmer. Nadia stays in her room or else goes out and pops her little camera at ‘history’. Ma goes to every meeting she hears of. I’m just about ready for artery road.