Hanif Kureishi - Collected Stories

*

It’s dusk and I’m sitting upstairs in a deckchair outside Billy’s room on the roof. Billy’s sitting on a pillow. We’re wearing cut-off jeans and drinking iced water and reading old English newspapers that we pass between us. Our washing is hanging up on a piece of string we’ve tied between the corner of the room and the television aerial. The door to the room is open and we’re listening again and again to ‘Who’s Loving You’ — very loud — because it’s our favourite record. Billy keeps saying: ‘Let’s hear it again, one mo’ time, you know.’ We’re like an old couple sitting on a concrete patio in Shepherd’s Bush, until we get up and dance with no shoes on and laugh and gasp because the roof burns our feet so we have to go inside to make love again.

Billy goes in to take a shower and I watch him go. I don’t like being separated from him. I hear the shower start and I sit down and throw the papers aside. I go downstairs to Nadia’s room and knock on her door. Wifey is sitting there and Moonie is behind her.

‘She’s not in,’ Moonie says.

‘Come in,’ Nadia says, opening her door, I go in and sit on the stool by the dressing table. It’s a pretty room. There is pink everywhere and her things are all laid out neatly and she sits on the bed brushing her hair and it shines. I tell her we should have a bit of a talk. She smiles at me. She’s prepared to make an effort, I can see that, though it surprises me. She did go pretty berserk the other day, when we came out of the kitchen, trying to punch me and everything.

‘It was an accident,’ I tell her now.

‘Well,’ she says. ‘But what impression d’you think it made on the man I want to marry?’

‘Blame me. Say I’m just a sicko Westerner. Say I’m mad.’

‘It’s the whole family it reflects on,’ she says.

She goes to a drawer and opens it. She takes out an envelope and gives it to me.

‘It’s a present for you,’ she says kindly. When I slip my finger into the flap of the envelope she puts her hand over mine. ‘Please. It’s a surprise for later.’

Billy is standing on the roof in his underpants. I fetch a towel and dry his hair and legs and he holds me and we move a little together to imaginary music. When I remember the envelope Nadia gave me, I open it and find a shiny folder inside. It’s a ticket to London.

I’d given my ticket home to my father for safe-keeping, an open ticket I can use any time. I can see that Nadia’s been to the airline and specified the date, and booked the flight. I’m to leave tomorrow morning. I go to my dad and ask him what it’s all about. He just looks at me and I realise I’m to go.

Hello, reader. As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, I, Howard, have written this Nina and Nadia stuff in my sock, without leaving the country, sitting right here on my spreading arse and listening to John Coltrane. (And rolling cigarettes.) Do you think Nina could have managed phrases like ‘an accent as thick as treacle’ and ‘But the curtains are well and truly pulled here’ and especially ‘Oh, oh, oh’? With her education? So all along, it’s been me, pulling faces, speaking in tongues, posing and making an attempt on the truth through lies. And also, I just wanted to be Nina. The days Deborah and I have spent beating on her head, trying to twist her the right way round, read this, study dancing, here’s a book about Balanchine and the rest of it. What does she make of all this force feeding? So I became her, entered her. Sorry.

Nina in fact has been back a week, though it wasn’t until yesterday that I heard from her when she phoned to tell me that I am a bastard and that she had to see me. I leave straightaway.

*

At Nina’s place. There she is, sitting at the kitchen table with her foot up on the table by her ashtray in the posture of a painter. Deborah not back from school.

‘You look superb,’ I tell her. She doesn’t recoil in repulsion when I kiss her.

‘Do I look superb?’ She is interested.

‘Yeah. Tanned. Fit. Rested.’

‘Oh, is that all?’ She looks hard at me. ‘I thought for a moment you were going to say something interesting. Like I’d changed or something. Like something had happened.’

We walk through the estate, Friday afternoon. How she walks above it all now, as if she’s already left! She tells me everything in a soft voice: her father, the servants, the boy Billy, the kiss, the panties. She says: ‘I was devastated to leave Billy in that country on his own. What will he do? What will happen to that boy? I sent him a pack of tapes. I sent him some videos. But he’ll be so lonely.’ She is upset.

The three of us have supper and Deborah tries to talk about school while Nina ignores her. It’s just like the old days. But Nina ignores Deborah not out of cruelty but because she is elsewhere. Deborah is thinking that probably Nina has left her for good. I am worried that Debbie will expect more from me.

The next day I fly to my desk, put on an early Miles Davis tape and let it all go, tip it out, what Nina said, how she looked, what we did, and I write (and later cross out) how I like to put my little finger up Deborah’s arse when we’re fucking and how she does the same to me, when she can comfortably reach. I shove it all down shamelessly (and add bits) because it’s my job to write down the things that happen round here and because I have a rule about no material being sacred.

What does that make me?

I once was in a cinema when the recently uncovered spy Anthony Blunt came in with a friend. The entire cinema (but not me) stood up and chanted ‘Out, out, out’ until the old queen got up and left. I feel like that old spy, a dirty betrayer with a loudspeaker, doing what I have to.

I offer this story to you, Deborah and Nina, to make of it what you will, before I send it to the publisher.

Dear Howard,

How very kind of you to leave your story on my kitchen table casually saying, ‘I think you should read this before I publish it.’ I was pleased: I gave you an extra kiss, thinking that at last you wanted me to share your work (I almost wrote world).

I could not believe you opened the story with an account of an abortion. As you know I know, it’s lifted in its entirety from a letter written to you by your last girlfriend, Julie. You were conveniently in New York when she was having the abortion so that she had to spit out all the bits of her broken heart in a letter, and you put it into the story pretending it was written by my daughter.

The story does also concern me, our ‘relationship’ and even where we put our fingers. Your portrait of me as a miserable whiner let down by men would have desperately depressed me, but I’ve learned that unfeeling, blood-sucking men like you need to reduce women to manageable clichés, even to destroy them, for the sake of control.

I am only sorry it’s taken me this long to realise what a low, corrupt and exploitative individual you are, who never deserved the love we both offered you. You have torn me apart. I hope the same thing happens to you one day. Please never attempt to get in touch again.

Deborah

Someone bangs on the door of the flat. I’ve been alone all day. I’m not expecting anyone, and how did whoever it is get into the building in the first place?

‘Let me in, let me in!’ Nina calls out. I open up and she’s standing there soaked through with a sports bag full of things and a couple of plastic bags under her arm.

‘Moving in?’ I say.

‘You should be so lucky,’ she says, barging past me. ‘I’m on me way somewhere and I thought I’d pop by to borrow some money.’

She comes into the kitchen. It’s gloomy and the rain hammers into the courtyard outside. But Nina’s cheerful, happy to be back in England and she has no illusions about her father now. Apparently he was rough with her, called her a half-caste and so on.