Hanif Kureishi - Collected Stories

‘Will they never stop?’ shouts the man.

‘How can they sleep?’ she replies. ‘The atmosphere is suffocating them.’

‘All of us!’ says the man.

‘So you’ve noticed!’

‘How could I not?’

He drinks in silence. Baxter, growing accustomed to the gloom, notices a strange gesture he makes. Dipping his fingers into his glass, the bearded man flicks the liquid across his face, and in places rubs it in. He does the same with his arms, even as they talk, as if the alcohol is a lotion rather than an intoxicant.

The man stands up and thrusts his face towards his guest.

‘We’re getting out.’

‘Where?’

He is hustling Baxter by the arm of his black PVC coat towards the door. Immediately the woman flies down the stairs like a bat and begins to dispute with her husband. Baxter doesn’t attend to what they are saying, although other couples’ arguments now have the ability to fascinate him. He is captivated by something else. A fly detaches itself from the end of the man’s protuberant tongue, crawls up the side of his nose, and settles on his eyebrow, where it joins a companion, unnoticed until now, already grazing on the hairy ridge. It is time to move on.

Taking a wrong turn in the hall, Baxter passes through two rooms, following a smell he recognises but can’t identify. He opens a door and notices an object standing in the bath. It is a glowing blue pole, like the one in his flat, and it seems to be pulsating. He looks closer and realises that this effect is caused by the movement of flies. He is reaching out to touch the thing when he hears a voice behind him, and turns to see the bearded man and his wife.

‘Looking for something?’

‘No, sorry.’

He doesn’t want to look at them but can’t help himself. As he moves past they drop their eyes. At that moment the woman blushes, for shame. They give off a sharp bleachy odour.

He isn’t ready to go home but can’t stay out on the street. Further down the road he sees figures in a window, before a hand drags the curtain across. He has barely knocked on the door before he is in the room with a glass in his hand.

It is a disparate crowd, comprising, he guesses, shy foreign students, the sorts of girls who would join cults, an oldish man in a tweed suit and rakish hat, people dancing with their shoes off, and others sitting in a row on the sofa. In the corner is a two-bar electric fire and a fish tank. Baxter has forgotten what exactly he is wearing and when he glimpses himself in a mirror and realises that no one minds, he is thankful.

His neighbour is drunk but oddly watchful. She puts her arms around his neck, which discomfits him, as if there is some need in him that she has noticed, though he can’t see what it is.

‘We didn’t think you’d come. Your wife barely speaks to any of us.’

‘Doesn’t she?’

‘Well, she’s charming to some people. How is the flat?’

‘It’s fine … Not too bad.’

Becoming aware of an itching on his forehead, he slaughters a fly between finger and thumb.

She says, ‘Sure?’

‘Why not?’

He feels another fly creeping across his cheek. She is looking at him curiously.

‘I’d like it if you would dance with me,’ she says.

He dislikes dancing but suspects that movement is preferable to stasis. And tonight — why not? — he will celebrate. She points out her husband, a tall man standing in the doorway, talking to a woman. Warm and fleshy, she shakes her arse, and he does what he can.

Then she takes the index finger of his right hand and leads him into a conservatory at the back. It is cold; there is no music. She shoves down her clothes, bends forward over the arm of a chair and he slides the finger she’s taken possession of, and two others, into her. It is a luxurious and well-deserved oblivion. Surely happiness is forgetting who you are! But too soon he notices a familiar caustic smell. He looks about and sees bowls of white powder placed on the floor; another contains a greenish-blue sticky substance. Injured specks move drowsily in the buckets.

He extracts his hand and holds it out. Up at the wrist it is alive with flies.

She looks round. ‘Oh dear, the little babies are hungry tonight.’ She flaps at them unconcernedly.

‘Isn’t there a remedy?’ he asks.

‘People live with it.’

‘They do?’

‘That is the best thing. It is also the worst. They work incessantly. Or drink. People all over the world endure different kinds of bacteria.’

‘But surely, surely there is a poison, brew or … blue light that will deter them for ever?’

‘There is,’ she says. ‘Of a kind.’

‘What is it?’

She smiles at his desperation. ‘The potions do work, for a period. But you have to replace them with different makes. Imported is best, but expensive. Try the Argentinian. Then the South African, in that order. I’m not sure what they put in that stuff, but … Course, the flies get used to it, and it only maddens and incites them. You might need to go on to the Madagascan.’ Baxter must be looking disheartened because she says, ‘In this street this is how we keep them away — passion!’

‘Passion?’

‘Where there is passion you don’t notice anything.’

He lies over her from behind. He says he can’t believe that these things are just inevitable; that there isn’t, somewhere, a solution.

‘We’ll see to it — later,’ she grunts.

After, in the living room, she whispers, ‘Most of them have got flies round here. Except the newly-weds and adulterers.’ She laughs. ‘They got other things. Eighteen months, it takes. If you’re lucky you get eighteen months and then you get the flies.’ She explains that the flies are the only secret that everyone keeps. Other problems can be paraded and boasted of, but this is an unacceptable shame. ‘We are poisoned by ourselves.’ She looks at him. ‘Do you hate her?’

‘What?’

‘Do you, yet? You can tell me.’

He whispers that it is dawning on him, as love dawns on people, that at times he does hate her; hates the way she cuts up an apple; hates her hands. He hates her tone of voice and the words he knows she’ll use; he hates her clothes, her eyelids, and everyone she knows; her perfume makes him nauseous. He hates the things he’s loved about her; hates the way he has put himself in thrall to her; hates the kindnesses she shows him, as if she is asking for something. He sees, too, that it doesn’t matter that you don’t love someone, until you have a child with them. And he understands, too, how important hatred is, what a strong sustaining feeling it is; a screen perhaps, to stop him pitying her, and himself, and falling into a pit of misery.

His neighbour nods as he shivers with shame at what she has provoked him into saying. She says, ‘My husband and I are starting a microbe business ourselves.’

‘Is there that much call for it?’

‘You can’t sing to them, can you?’

‘I suppose not.’

‘We’ve put a down payment on our first van. You will use only us, won’t you?’

‘We’re broke, I’m afraid. Can’t use anyone.’

‘You can’t let yourself be invaded. You’ll have to work. You haven’t been using the Microbe Consultants, have you?’

‘They have passed by, yes.’

‘They didn’t sell you a pack?’

‘Only two.’

‘Useless, useless. Those men are on commission. Never let them in the house.’

She holds him. Dancing in the middle of the night, while he is still conscious, she puts her mouth to his ear and murmurs, ‘You might need Gerard Quinn.’

‘Who?’

‘Quinn has been hanging around. He’ll be in touch. Meanwhile, behind that door’ — she points at a wooden door with a steel frame, with a padlock hanging from it — ‘we are working on a combination potion, a deadly solution. It’s not yet ready, but when we have a sample, I’ll bring it.’ He looks at her sceptically. ‘Yes, everyone would be doing it. But the snag is, what prevents a definitive remedy is that husbands and wives give the stuff to their partners.’ Baxter feels as if he will fall over. ‘Have you actually mixed it in with her cereal yet, or are you still considering it?’