Hanif Kureishi - Collected Stories

Now you lie on your bed and pluck up food with one hand and read an American comic with the other. A servant, a young boy, presses one of those fat vibrating electric instruments you see advertised in the Observer Magazine on to your short legs. You look up and see me. The sight of me angers you. You wave furiously for me to come in. No. Not yet. I walk on.

*

In the women’s area of the house, where visitors rarely visit, Dad’s wife sits sewing.

‘Hello,’ I say. ‘I think I’ll have a piece of sugar cane.’

I want to ask the names of the other pieces of fruit on the table, but Wifey is crabby inside and out, doesn’t speak English and disapproves of me in all languages. She has two servants with her, squatting there watching Indian movies on the video. An old woman who was once, I can see, a screen goddess, now sweeps the floor on her knees with a handful of twigs. Accidentally, sitting there swinging my leg, I touch her back with my foot, leaving a dusty mark on her clothes.

‘Imagine,’ I say to Wifey.

I slip the sugar cane into my mouth. The squirting juice bounces off my taste buds. I gob out the sucked detritus and chuck it in front of the screen goddess’s twigs. You can really enjoy talking to someone who doesn’t understand you.

‘Imagine my dad leaving my ma for you! And you don’t ever leave that seat there. Except once a month you go to the bank to check up on your jewellery.’

Wifey keeps all her possessions on the floor around her. She is definitely mad. But I like the mad here: they just wander around the place with everyone else and no one bothers you and people give you food.

‘You look like a bag lady. D’you know what a bag lady is?’

Moonie comes into the room. She’s obviously heard every word I’ve said. She starts to yell at me. Wifey’s beaky nozzle turns to me with interest now. Something’s happening that’s even more interesting than TV. They want to crush me. I think they like me here for that reason. If you could see, Ma, what they’re doing to me just because you met a man at a dance in the Old Kent Road and his French letter burst as you lay in front of a gas fire with your legs up!

‘You took the car when we had to go out to work!’ yells Moonie. ‘You forced the driver to take you! We had to sack him!’

‘Why sack him?’

‘He’s naughty! Naughty! You said he drives you badly! Nearly killed! You’re always causing trouble, Nina, doing some stupid thing, some very stupid thing!’

Gloomie and Moonie are older than Nadia and me. Both have been married, kicked around by husbands arranged by Dad, and separated. That was their small chance in life. Now they’ve come back to Daddy. Now they’re secretaries. Now they’re blaming me for everything.

‘By the way. Here.’ I reach into my pocket. ‘Take this.’

Moonie’s eyes bulge at my open palm. Her eyes quieten her mouth. She starts fatly towards me. She sways. She comes on. Her hand snatches at the lipstick.

‘Now you’ll be able to come out with me. We’ll go to the Holiday Inn.’

‘Yes, but you’ve been naughty.’ She is distracted by the lipstick. ‘What colour is it?’

‘Can’t you leave her alone for God’s sake? Always picking on her!’ This is Nadia coming into the room after work. She throws herself into a chair. ‘I’m so tired.’ To the servant she says: ‘Bring me some tea.’ At me she smiles. ‘Hello, Nina. Good day? You were doing some exercises, I hear. They rang me at work to tell me.’

‘Yes, Nadia.’

‘Oh, sister, they have such priorities.’

For the others I am ‘cousin’. From the start there’s been embarrassment about how I am to be described. Usually, if it’s Moonie or Gloomie they say: ‘This is our distant cousin from England.’ It amuses me to see my father deal with this. He can’t bring himself to say either ‘cousin’ or ‘daughter’ so he just says Nina and leaves it. But of course everyone knows I am his illegitimate daughter. But Nadia is the real ‘daughter’ here. ‘Nadia is an impressive person,’ my father says, on my first day here, making it clear that I am diminished, the sort with dirt under her nails. Yes, she is clever, soon to be doctor, life-saver. Looking at her now she seems less small than she did in London. I’d say she has enough dignity for the entire government.

‘They tear-gassed the hospital.’

‘Who?’

‘The clever police. Some people were demonstrating outside. The police broke it up. When they chased the demonstrators inside they tear-gassed them! What a day! What a country! I must wash my face.’ She goes out.

‘See, see!’ Moonie trills. ‘She is better than you! Yes, yes, yes!’

‘I expect so. It’s not difficult.’

‘We know she is better than you for certain!’

*

I walk out of all this and into my father’s room. It’s like moving from one play to another. What is happening on this set? The room is perfumed with incense from a green coiled creation which burns outside the doors, causing mosquitoes to drop dead. Advanced telephones connect him to Paris, Dubai, London. On the video is an American movie. Five youths rape a woman. Father — what do I call him, Dad? — sits on the edge of the bed with his little legs sticking out. The servant teases father’s feet into his socks.

‘You’ll get sunstroke,’ he says, as if he’s known me all my life and has the right to be high-handed. ‘Cavorting naked in the garden.’

‘Naked is it now?’

‘We had to sack the driver, too. Sit down.’

I sit in the row of chairs beside him. It’s like visiting someone in hospital. He lies on his side in his favourite mocking-me-for-sport position.

‘Now —’

The lights go out. The TV goes off. I shut my eyes and laugh. Power cut. Father bounces up and down on the bed. ‘Fuck this motherfucking country!’ The servant rushes for candles and lights them. As it’s Friday I sit here and think of Ma and Howard meeting today for food, talk and sex. I think Howard’s not so bad after all, and even slightly good-looking. He’s never deliberately hurt Ma. He has other women — but that’s only vanity, a weakness, not a crime — and he sees her only on Friday, but he hasn’t undermined her. What more can you expect from men? Ma loves him a lot — from the first moment, she says; she couldn’t help herself. She’s still trusting and open, despite everything.

Never happen to me.

Dad turns to me: ‘What do you do in England for God’s sake?’

‘Nadia has already given you a full report, hasn’t she?’

A full report? For two days I gaped through the window lipreading desperately as nose to nose, whispering and giggling, eyebrows shooting up, jaws dropping like guillotines, hands rubbing, Father and Nadia conducted my prosecution. The two rotund salt and pepper pots, Moonie and Gloomie, guarded the separate entrances to this room.

‘Yes, but I want the full confession from your mouth.’

He loves to tease. But he is a dangerous person. Tell him something and soon everyone knows about it.

‘Confess to what?’

‘That you just roam around here and there. You do fuck all full time, in other words.’

‘Everyone in England does fuck all except for the yuppies.’

‘And do you go with one boy or with many?’ I say nothing. ‘But your mother has a boy, yes? Some dud writer, complete failure and playboy with unnatural eyebrows that cross in the middle?’

‘Is that how Nadia described the man she tried to —’

‘What?’

‘Be rather close friends with?’

The servant has a pair of scissors. He trims Father’s hair, he snips in Father’s ear, he investigates Father’s nostrils with the clipping steel shafts. He attaches a tea-cloth to Father’s collar, lathers Father’s face, sharpens the razor on the strop and shaves Father clean and reddish.