Hanif Kureishi - Collected Stories

But I won’t dwell on that, I’m going to think constructively where possible even though its bright little eyes are glinting and the mouth is moving and it has developed scales under which ooze — don’t think about it. And what’s that, little wings …

I grab the toilet roll and rip off about a mile of paper and start wrapping it around the turd, around and around, so those eyes are never gonna look at me again, and smile in that way. But even in its paper shroud it’s warm and getting warmer, warm as life, and practically throbbing and giving off odours. I look desperately around the room for somewhere to stuff it, a pipe or behind a book, but it’s gonna reek, I know that, and if it’s gonna start moving, it could end up anywhere in the house.

There’s a knocking on the door. A voice too — my love. I’m about to reply ‘Oh love, love’ when I hear other, less affectionate raised voices. An argument is taking place. Someone is turning the handle; another person is kicking at the door. Almost on me, they’re trying to smash it in!

I will chuck it out of the window! I rest the turd on the sill and drag up the casement with both hands. But suddenly I am halted by the sky. As a boy I’d lie on my back watching clouds; as a teenager I swore that in a less hectic future I would contemplate the sky until its beauty passed into my soul, like the soothing pictures I’ve wanted to study, bathing in the colours and textures of paint, the cities I’ve wanted to walk, loafing, the aimless conversations I’ve wanted to have — one day, a constructive aimlessness.

Now the wind is in my face, lifting me, and I am about to fall. But I hang on and instead throw the turd, like a warm pigeon, out out into the air, turd-bird awayaway.

I wash my hands in the sink, flush the toilet once more, and turn back to life. On, on, one goes, despite everything, not knowing why or how.

She comes to him late on Wednesdays, only for sex, the cab waiting outside. Four months ago someone recommended her to him for a job but he has no work she can do. He doesn’t even pay himself now. They talk of nothing much, and there are silences in which they can only look at one another. But neither wants to withdraw and something must be moving between them, for they stand up together and lie down beside the table, without speaking.

Same time next week she is at the door. They undress immediately. She leaves, not having slept, but he has felt her dozing before she determinedly shakes herself awake. She collects herself quickly without apology, and goes without looking back. He has no idea where she lives or where she is from.

Now she doesn’t come into the house, but goes straight down into the basement he can’t afford to furnish, where he has thrown blankets and duvets on the carpet. They neither drink nor play music and can barely see one another. It’s a mime show in this room where everything but clarity, it seems, is permitted.

At work his debts increase. What he has left could be taken away, and no one but him knows it. He is losing his hold and does it matter? Why should it, except that it is probably terminal; if one day he feels differently, there’ll be no way back.

For most of his life, particularly at school, he’s been successful, or en route to somewhere called Success. Like most people he has been afraid of being found out, but unlike most he probably has been. He has a small flat, an old car and a shabby feeling. These are minor losses. He misses steady quotidian progress, the sense that his well-being, if not happiness, is increasing, and that each day leads to a recognisable future. He has never anticipated this extent of random desolation.

Three days a week he picks up his kids from school, feeds them, and returns them to the house into which he put most of his money, and which his wife now forbids him to enter. Fridays he has dinner with his only male friend. After, they go to a black bar where he likes the music. The men, mostly in their thirties, and whose lives are a mystery to him, seem to sit night after night without visible discontent, looking at women and at one another. He envies this, and wonders if their lives are without anxiety, whether they have attained a stoic resignation, or if it is a profound uselessness they are stewing in.

On this woman’s day he bathes for an hour. He can’t recall her name, and she never says his. She calls him, when necessary, ‘man’. Soon she will arrive. He lies there thinking how lucky he is to have one arrangement which costs nothing.

Five years ago he left the wife he didn’t know why he married for another woman, who then left him without explanation. There have been others since. But when they come close he can only move backwards, without comprehending why.

His wife won’t speak. If she picks up the phone and hears his voice, she calls for the kids, those intermediaries growing up between immovable hatreds. A successful woman, last year she found she could not leave her bed at all. She will have no help and the children have to minister to her. They are inclined to believe that he has caused this. He begins to think he can make women insane, even as he understands that this flatters him.

Now he has this inexplicable liaison. At first they run tearing at one another with middle-aged recklessness and then lie silently in the dark, until desire, all they have, rekindles. He tells himself to make the most of the opportunity.

When she’s gone he masturbates, contemplating what they did, imprinting it on his mind for ready reference: she on her stomach, him on the boat of her back, his face in her black hair for ever. He thinks of the fluffy black hairs, flattened with sweat, like a toff ’s parting, around her arsehole.

Walking about later he is both satisfied and unfulfilled, disliking himself for not knowing why he is doing this — balked by the puzzle of his own mind and the impossibility of grasping why one behaves so oddly, and why one ends up resenting people for not providing what one hasn’t been able to ask for. Surely this new thing is a web of illusion, and he is a fool? But he wants more foolishness, and not only on Wednesdays.

The following weeks she seems to sense something. In the space where they lie beneath the level of the street, almost underground — a mouse’s view of the world — she invites him to lie in different positions; she bids him touch different parts of her body. She shows him they can pore over one another.

Something intriguing is happening in this room, week after week. He can’t know what it might be. He isn’t certain she will turn up; he doesn’t trust her, or any woman, not to let him down. Each week she surprises him, until he wonders what might make her stop.

One Wednesday the cab doesn’t draw up. He stands at the window in his dressing gown and slippers for three hours, feeling in the first hour like Casanova, in the second like a child awaiting its mother, and during the third like an old man. Is she sick, or with her husband? He lies on the floor where she usually lies, in a fever of desire and longing, until, later, he feels a presence in the room, a hanging column of air, and sits up and cries out at this ghost.

He assumes he is toxic. For him, lacking disadvantages has been a crime in itself. He grasps the historical reasons for this, since his wife pointed them out. Not that this prevented her living off him. For a while he did try to be the sort of man she might countenance. He wept at every opportunity, and communicated with animals wherever he found them. He tried not to raise his voice, though for her it was ‘liberating’ to get wild. Soon he didn’t know who he was supposed to be. They both got lost. He dreaded going home. He kept his mouth shut, for fear of what would come out; this made her search angrily for a way in.