Hanif Kureishi - Collected Stories

‘Everything you write interests us,’ Nadia says.

‘Not necessarily,’ Ma says.

‘But this is especially … relevant,’ he says.

Ma takes me aside: ‘If you must go, do write, Nina. And don’t tell your father one thing about me!’

Nadia distracts everyone by raising her arms and putting her head back and shouting out in the middle of the airport: ‘No, no, no, I don’t want to go!’

*

My room, this cell, this safe, bare box stuck on the side of my father’s house, has a stone floor and whitewashed walls. It has a single bed, my open suitcase, no wardrobe, no music. Not a frill in the grill. On everything there’s a veil of khaki dust waiting to irritate my nostrils. The window is tiny, just twice the size of my head. So it’s pretty gloomy here. Next door there’s a smaller room with an amateur shower, a sink and a hole in the ground over which you have to get used to squatting if you want to piss and shit.

Despite my moans, all this suits me fine. In fact, I requested this room. At first Dad wanted Nadia and me to share. But here I’m out of everyone’s way, especially my two other half-sisters: Gloomie and Moonie I call them.

I wake up and the air is hot, hot, hot, and the noise and petrol fumes rise around me. I kick into my jeans and pull my Keith Haring T-shirt on. Once, on the King’s Road, two separate people came up to me and said: ‘Is that a Keith Haring T-shirt?’

Outside, the sun wants to burn you up. The light is different too: you can really see things. I put my shades on. These are cool shades. There aren’t many women you see in shades here.

The driver is revving up one of Dad’s three cars outside my room. I open the door of a car and jump in, except that it’s like throwing your arse into a fire, and I jiggle around, the driver laughing, his teeth jutting as if he never saw anything funny before.

‘Drive me,’ I say. ‘Drive me somewhere in all this sunlight. Please. Please.’ I touch him and he pulls away from me. Well, he is rather handsome. ‘These cars don’t need to be revved. Drive!’

He turns the wheel back and forth, pretending to drive and hit the horn. He’s youngish and thin — they all look undernourished here — and he always teases me.

‘You stupid bugger.’

See, ain’t I just getting the knack of speaking to servants? It’s taken me at least a week to erase my natural politeness to the poor.

‘Get going! Get us out of this drive!’

‘No shoes, no shoes, Nina!’ He’s pointing at my feet.

‘No bananas, no pineapples,’ I say. ‘No job for you either, Lulu. You’ll be down the Job Centre if you don’t shift it.’

Off we go then, the few yards to the end of the drive. The guard at the gate waves. I turn to look back and there you are standing on the porch of your house in your pyjamas, face covered with shaving cream, a piece of white sheet wrapped around your head because you’ve just oiled your hair. Your arms are waving not goodbye. Gloomie, my suddenly acquired sister, runs out behind you and shakes her fists, the dogs barking in their cage, the chickens screaming in theirs. Ha, ha.

We drive slowly through the estate on which Dad lives with all the other army and navy and air force people: big houses and big bungalows set back from the road, with sprinklers on the lawn, some with swimming pools, all with guards.

We move out on to the Superhighway, among the painted trucks, gaudier than Chinese dolls, a sparrow among peacocks. What a crappy road and no fun, like driving on the moon. Dad says the builders steal the materials, flog them and then there’s not enough left to finish the road. So they just stop and leave whole stretches incomplete.

The thing about this place is that there’s always something happening. Good or bad it’s a happening place. And I’m thinking this, how cheerful I am and everything, when bouncing along in the opposite direction is a taxi, an old yellow and black Morris Minor stuck together with sellotape. It’s swerving in and out of the traffic very fast until the driver loses it, and the taxi bangs the back of the car in front, glances off another and shoots off across the Superhighway and is coming straight for us. I can see the driver’s face when Lulu finally brakes. Three feet from us the taxi flies into a wall that runs alongside the road. The two men keep travelling, and their heads crushed into their chests pull their bodies through the windscreen and out into the morning air. They look like Christmas puddings.

Lulu accelerates. I grab him and scream at him to stop but we go faster and faster.

‘Damn dead,’ he says, when I’ve finished clawing him. ‘A wild country. This kind of thing happen in England, yes?’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

Eventually I persuade him to stop and I get out of the car.

*

I’m alone in the bazaar, handling jewellery and carpets and pots and I’m confused. I know I have to get people presents. Especially Howard the hero who’s paying for this. Ah, there’s just the thing: a cage the size of a big paint tin, with three chickens inside. The owner sees me looking. He jerks a chicken out, decapitates it on a block and holds it up to my face, feathers flying into my hair.

I walk away and dodge a legless brat on a four-wheeled trolley made out of a door, who hurls herself at me and then disappears through an alley and across the sewers. Everywhere the sick and the uncured, and I’m just about ready for lunch when everyone starts running. They’re jumping out of the road and pulling their kids away. There is a tidal wave of activity, generated by three big covered trucks full of soldiers crashing through the bazaar, the men standing still and nonchalant with rifles in the back. I’m half knocked to hell by some prick tossed off a bike. I am tiptoeing my way out along the edge of a fucking sewer, shit lapping against my shoes. I’ve just about had enough of this country, I’m just about to call for South Africa Road, when –

‘Lulu,’ I shout. ‘Lulu.’

‘I take care of you,’ he says. ‘Sorry for touching.’

He takes me back to the car. Fat, black buffalo snort and shift in the mud. I don’t like these animals being everywhere, chickens and dogs and stuff, with sores and bleeding and threats and fear.

‘You know?’ I say. ‘I’m lonely. There’s no one I can talk to. No one to laugh with here, Lulu. And I think they hate me, my family. Does your family hate you?’

*

I stretch and bend and twist in the front garden in T-shirt and shorts. I pull sheets of air into my lungs. I open my eyes a moment and the world amazes me, its brightness. A servant is watching me, peeping round a tree.

‘Hey, peeper!’ I call, and carry on. When I look again, I notice the cook and the sweeper have joined him and they shake and trill.

‘What am I doing?’ I say. ‘Giving a concert?’

In the morning papers I notice that potential wives are advertised as being ‘virtuous and fair-skinned’. Why would I want to be unvirtuous and brown? But I do, I do!

I take a shower in my room and stroll across to the house. I stand outside your room, Dad, where the men always meet in the early evenings. I look through the wire mesh of the screen door and there you are, my father for all these years. And this is what you were doing while I sat in the back of the class at my school in Shepherd’s Bush, pregnant, wondering why you didn’t love me.

In the morning when I’m having my breakfast we meet in the living room by the bar and you ride on your exercise bicycle. You pant and look at me now and again, your stringy body sways and tightens, but you say fuck all. If I speak, you don’t hear. You’re one of those old-fashioned romantic men for whom women aren’t really there unless you decide we are.