Hanif Kureishi - Collected Stories

‘Well, Howard, you’re in the shit, aren’t you?’ Nina says. ‘Ma’s pissed off no end with you, man. She’s crying all over the shop. I couldn’t stand it. I’ve moved out. You can die of a broken heart, you know. And you can kill someone that way too.’

‘Don’t talk about it,’ I say, breaking up the ice with a hammer and dropping it into the glasses. ‘She wrote me a pissed-off letter. Wanna read it?’

‘It’s private, Howard.’

‘Read it, for Christ’s sake, Nina,’ I say, shoving it at her. She reads it and I walk round the kitchen looking at her. I stand behind her a long time. I can’t stop looking at her today.

She puts it down without emotion. She’s not sentimental; she’s always practical about things, because she knows what cunts people are.

‘You’ve ripped Ma off before. She’ll get over it, and no one reads the shit you write anyway except a lot of middle-class wankers. As long as you get paid and as long as you give me some of it you’re all right with me.’

I was right. I knew she’d be flattered. I give her some money and she gathers up her things. I don’t want her to go.

‘Where are you off to?’

‘Oh, a friend’s place in Hackney. Someone I was in the loony bin with. I’ll be living there. Oh, and Billy will be joining me.’ She smiles broadly. ‘I’m happy.’

‘Wow. That’s good. You and Billy.’

‘Yeah, ain’t it just!’ She gets up and throws back the rest of the whisky. ‘Be seeing ya!’

‘Don’t go yet.’

‘Got to.’

At the door she says: ‘Good luck with the writing and everything.’

I walk to the lift with her. We go down together. I go out to the front door of the building. As she goes out into the street running with sheets of rain, I say: ‘I’ll come with you to the corner,’ and walk with her, even though I’m not dressed for it.

At the corner I can’t let her go and I accompany her to the bus stop. I wait with her for fifteen minutes in my shirt and slippers. I’m soaked through holding all her bags but I think you can make too much of these things. ‘Don’t go,’ I keep saying inside my head.Then the bus arrives and she takes her bags from me and gets on and I stand there watching her but she won’t look at me because she is thinking of Billy. The bus moves off and I watch until it disappears and then I go inside the flat and take off my clothes and have a bath. Later. I write down the things she said but the place still smells of her.

I used to like talking about sex. All of life, I imagined — from politics to aesthetics — merged in passionate human conjunctions. A caress, not to speak of a kiss, could transport you from longing to Russia, on to Velazquez and ahead to anarchism. To illustrate this fancy, I did, at one time, consider collecting a ‘book of desire’, an anthology of outlandish, melancholy and droll stories about the subject. This particular story was one, had the project been finished — or even started — I would have included. It was an odd story. Eshan, the photographer who told it to me, used the word himself. At least he said it was the oddest request he’d had. When it was put to him by his pub companion, his first response was embarrassment and perplexity. But of course he was fascinated too.

At the end of the street where Eshan had a tiny office and small dark room, there was a pub where he’d go at half past six or seven, most days. He liked to work office hours, believing much discipline was required to do what he did, as if without it he would fly off into madness — though he had, in fact, never flown anywhere near madness, except to sit in that pub.

Eshan though he liked routine, and for weeks would do exactly the same thing every day, while frequently loathing this decline into habit. In the pub he would smoke, drink and read the paper for an hour or longer, depending on his mood and on whether he felt sentimental, guilty or plain affectionate towards his wife and two children. Sometimes he’d get home before the children were asleep, and carry them around on his back, kick balls with them, and tell them stories of pigs with spiders on their heads. Other times he would turn up late so he could have his wife make supper, and be free of the feeling that the kids were devouring his life.

Daily, there were many hapless people in that bar: somnolent junkies from the local rehab, the unemployed and unemployable, pinball pillocks. Eshan nodded at many of them, but if one sat at his table without asking, he could become truculent. Often, however, he would chat to people as he passed to and fro, being more grateful than he knew for distracting conversation. He had become, without meaning to, one of the bar’s characters.

Eshan’s passion was to photograph people who had produced something of significance, whose work had ‘meaning’. These were philosophers, novelists, painters, film and theatre directors. He used only minimal props and hard, direct lighting. The idea wasn’t to conceal but to expose. The spectator could relate the face to what the subject did. He called it the moment of truth in the features of people seeking the truth.

He photographed ‘artists’ but also considered himself, in private only, to be ‘some sort’ of an artist. To represent oneself — a changing being, alive with virtues and idiocies — was, for Eshan, the task that entailed the most honesty and fulfilment. But although his work had been published and exhibited, he still had to send out his portfolio with introductory letters, and harass people about his abilities. This was demeaning. By now he should, he reckoned, have got further. But he accepted his condition, imagining that overall he possessed most of what he required to live a simple but not complacent life. His wife illustrated children’s books, and could earn decent money, so they got by. To earn a reasonable living himself, Eshan photographed new groups for the pop press — not that he was stimulated by these callow faces, though occasionally he was moved by their ugliness, the stupidity of their innocence, and their crass hopes. But they wanted only clichés.

A young man called Brian, who always wore pink shades, started to join Eshan regularly. The pub was his first stop of the day after breakfast. He was vague about what he did, though it seemed to involve trying to manage bands and set up businesses around music. His main occupation was dealing drugs, and he liked supplying Eshan with different kinds of grass that he claimed would make him ‘creative’. Eshan replied that he took drugs in the evenings to stop himself getting creative. When Eshan talked about surrealism, or the great photographers, Brian listened with innocent enthusiasm, as if these were things he could get interested in were he a different person. It turned out that he did know a little about the music that Eshan particularly liked, West Coast psychedelic music of the mid-sixties, and the films, writing and politics that accompanied it. Eshan talked of the dream of freedom, rebellion and irresponsibility it had represented, and how he wished he’d had the courage to go there and join in.

‘You make it sound like the past few years in London,’ Brian said. ‘Except the music is faster.’

A couple of months after Eshan started seeing him in the pub, Brian parted from his casual girlfriends. He went out regularly — it was like a job; and he was the sort of man that women were attracted to in public places. There was hope; every night could take you somewhere new. But Brian was nearly thirty; for a long time he had been part of everything new, living not for the present but for the next thing. He was beginning to see how little it had left him, and he was afraid.