Hanif Kureishi: Collected Stories

In his garden in the mornings, he began to write, laying out the scenes on index cards on the grass, as if he were playing patience. The concentration was difficult. He was unused to such a sustained effort of dreaming, particularly when the outcome was distant, uncertain and not immediately convertible into a cheque or interest from colleagues. Why not begin next year?

After a few days’ persistence his mind focused and began to run in unstrained motion. In these moments — reminded of himself even as he got lost in what he was doing — the questions he had asked about life, its meaning and direction, if any, about how best to live, could receive only one reply. To be here now, doing this.

That was done. He was in a hurry to begin shooting. Private satisfactions were immaterial. The film had to make money. When he was growing up, the media wasn’t considered a bright boy’s beat. Like pop, television was disparaged. But it had turned out to be the jackpot. Compared to his contemporaries at school, he had prospered. Yet the way things were getting set up at home he had to achieve until he expired. He and Clara would live well: nannies, expensive schools, holidays, dinner parties, clothes. After setting off in the grand style, how could you retreat to less without anguish?

All morning his mind had whirled. Finally he phoned Clara. She’d been sick, and had come downstairs to discover Jimmy asleep on the floor amid the night’s debris, wrapped in the tablecloth and the curtains, which had become detached from the rail. He had pissed in a pint glass and placed it on the table.

To Roy’s surprise she was amused. She had, it was true, always liked Jimmy, who flirted with her. But he couldn’t imagine her wanting him in her house. She wasn’t a cool or loose hippie. She taught at a university and could be formidable. Most things could interest her, though, and she was able to make others interested. She was enthusiastic and took pleasure in being alive, always a boon in others, Roy felt. Like Roy, she adored gossip. The misfortunes and vanity of others gave them pleasure. But it was still a mostly cerebral and calculating intelligence that she had. She lacked Jimmy’s preferred kind of sentimental self-observation. It had been her clarity that had attracted Roy, at a time when they were both concerned with advancement.

Cheered by her friendliness towards Jimmy, Roy wanted to be with him today.

*

Jimmy came out of the bathroom in Roy’s bathrobe and sat at the table with scrambled eggs, the newspaper, his cigarettes and ‘Let It Bleed’ on loud. Roy was reminded of their time at university, when, after a party, they would stay up all night and the next morning sit in a pub garden, or take LSD and walk along the river to the bridge at Hammersmith, which Jimmy, afraid of heights, would have to run across with his eyes closed.

Roy read his paper while surreptitiously watching Jimmy eat, drink and move about the room as if he’d inhabited it for years. He was amazed by the lengthy periods between minor tasks that Jimmy spent staring into space, as if each action set off another train of memory, regret and speculation. Then Jimmy would search his pockets for phone numbers and shuffle them repeatedly. Finally, Jimmy licked his plate and gave a satisfied burp. When Roy had brushed the crumbs from the floor, he decided to give Jimmy a little start.

‘What are you going to do today?’

‘Do? In what sense?’

‘In the sense of … to do something.’

Jimmy laughed.

Roy went on, ‘Maybe you should think of looking for work. The structure might do you good.’

‘Structure?’

Jimmy raised himself to talk. There was a beer can from the previous night beside the sofa; he swigged from it and then spat out, having forgotten he’d used it as an ashtray. He fetched another beer from the fridge and resumed his position.

Jimmy said, ‘What sort of work is it that you’re talking about here?’

‘Paying work. You must have heard of it. You do something all day —’

‘Usually something you don’t like to do —’

‘Whatever. Though you might like it.’ Jimmy snorted. ‘And at the end of the week they give you money with which you can buy things, instead of having to scrounge them.’

This idea forced Jimmy back in his seat. ‘You used to revere the surrealists.’

‘Shooting into a crowd! Yes, I adored it when —’

‘D’you think they’d have done anything but kill themselves laughing at the idea of salaried work? You know it’s serfdom.’

Roy lay down on the floor and giggled. Jimmy’s views had become almost a novelty to Roy. Listening to him reminded Roy of the pleasures of failure, a satisfaction he considered to be unjustly unappreciated now he had time to think about it. In the republic of accumulation and accountancy there was no doubt Jimmy was a failure artist of ability. To enlarge a talent to disappoint, it was no good creeping into a corner and dying dismally. It was essential to raise, repeatedly, hope and expectation in both the gullible and the knowing, and then to shatter them. Jimmy was intelligent, alertly bright-eyed, convincing. With him there was always the possibility of things working out. It was an achievement, therefore, after a calculated build-up, to bring off a resounding fuck-up. Fortunately Jimmy would always, on the big occasion, let you down: hopelessness, impotence, disaster, all manner of wretchedness — he could bring them on like a regular nightmare.

Not that it hadn’t cost him. It took resolution, organisation, and a measure of creativity to drink hard day and night; to insult friends and strangers; to go to parties uninvited and attempt to have sex with teenage girls; to borrow money and never pay it back; to lie, make feeble excuses, be evasive, shifty and selfish. He had had many advantages to overcome. But finally, after years of application, he had made a success, indeed a triumph, of failure.

Jimmy said, ‘The rich love the poor to work, and the harder the better. It keeps them out of trouble while they’re ripped off. Everyone knows that.’ He picked up a porn magazine, Peaches , and flipped through the pages. ‘You don’t think I’m going to fall for that shit, do you?’

Roy’s eyes felt heavy. He was falling asleep in the morning! To wake himself up he paced the carpet and strained to recall the virtues of employment.

‘Jimmy, there’s something I don’t understand about this.’

‘What?’

‘Don’t you ever wake up possessed by a feeling of things not done? Of time and possibility lost, wasted? And failure … failure in most things — that could be overcome. Don’t you?’

Jimmy said, ‘That’s different. Of mundane work you know nothing. The worst jobs are impossible to get. You’ve lived for years in the enclosed world of the privileged with no idea what it’s like outside. But the real work you mention, I tell you, every damn morning I wake up and feel time rushing past me. And it’s not even light. Loneliness … fear. My heart vibrates.’

‘Yes! and don’t you think, this is a new morning, maybe this day I can redeem the past? Today something real might be done?’

‘Sometimes I do think that,’ Jimmy said. ‘But most of the time … to tell you the truth, Roy, I know nothing will get done. Nothing, because that time is past.’

When the beer was gone they went out, putting their arms around one another. On the corner of Roy’s street was a rough pub with benches outside, where many local men gathered between March and September, usually wearing just shorts. They’d clamber from their basements at half past ten and by eleven they’d be in place, chewing a piece of bread with their beer, smoking dope and shouting above the traffic. Their women, who passed by in groups, pushing prams laden with shopping, were both angrier and more vital.