Hanif Kureishi - Collected Stories

To show how it must be done, and indeed that it is possible, he gets a good grip on one box, kicks it at the bottom, and shoves it right out of the shop and then along the smooth floor of the shopping centre, past the sweet seller and security guard and the old women sitting on benches.

At the exit he turns and sees her standing in the shop entrance, watching him, laughing. He thinks how lovely she is and what a good time they always have together.

She starts to follow him, pushing her box as he did his.

He continues, thinking that this is how they will do it, they will soon be at the tube station.

But outside the shopping mall, on the hot pavement, the box sticks. You can’t shove cardboard along on concrete; it won’t go. That morning she suggested they borrow a car. He had said they wouldn’t be able to park nearby. Perhaps they would get a taxi. But outside it is a one-way street, going in the wrong direction. He sees that there are no taxis. The boxes wouldn’t fit in anyway.

Out there on the street, in the sun, he squats a little. He gets his arms around the box. It is as if he is hugging a tree. Making all kinds of involuntary and regrettable sounds, he lifts it right up. Even if he can’t see where he is going, even if his nose is pushed into the cardboard, he is carrying it, he is moving. They are still on their way.

He doesn’t get far. Different parts of his body are resisting. He will ache tomorrow. He puts the box down again. In fact he almost drops it. He looks back to see that Dina is touching the corners of her eyes, as if she is crying with laughter. Truly it is a baking afternoon and it was an awful idea to invite Henry over.

He is about to shout back at her, asking her whether she has any better ideas, but watching her, he can see that she does. She is full of better ideas about everything. If only he trusted her rather than himself — thinking he is always right — he would be better off.

She does this remarkable thing.

She lifts her box onto her hip and, holding it by the cardboard flap, starts to walk with it. She walks right past him, stately and upright, like an African woman with a goat on her shoulders, as if this is the most natural thing. Off she goes towards the tube. This, clearly, is how to do it.

He does the same, the whole African woman upright stance. But after a few steps the flap of the cardboard rips. It rips right across and the box drops to the ground. He can’t go on. He doesn’t know what to do.

He is embarrassed and thinks people are looking at him and laughing. People are indeed doing this, looking at him with the box, and at the beautiful woman with the other box. And they look back at him and then at her, and they are splitting their sides, as if nothing similar has ever happened to them. He likes to think he doesn’t care, that he is strong enough at his age to withstand mockery. But he sees himself, in their eyes, as a foolish little man, with the things he has wanted and hoped for futile and empty, reduced to the ridiculous shoving of this box along the street in the sun.

You might be in love, but whether you can get four chairs home together is another matter.

She comes back to him and stands there. He is looking away and is furious. She says there’s only one thing for it.

‘All right,’ he says, an impatient man trying to be patient. ‘Let’s get on with it.’

‘Take it easy,’ she says. ‘Calm down.’

‘I’m trying to,’ he replies.

‘Squat down,’ she says.

‘What?’

‘Squat down.’

‘Here?’

‘Yes. Where do you think?’

He squats down with his arms out and she grips the box in the tree-hugging pose and tips it and lays it across his hands and on top of his head. With this weight pushing down into his skull he attempts to stand, as Olympic weight lifters do, using their knees. Unlike those Olympic heroes he finds himself pitching forward. People in the vicinity are no longer laughing. They are alarmed and shouting warnings and scattering. He is staggering about with the box on his head, a drunken Atlas, and she is dancing around him, saying, ‘Steady, steady.’ Not only that, he is about to hurl the chairs into the traffic.

A man passing by sets the box down for them.

‘Thank you,’ says Dina.

She looks at John.

‘Thank you,’ says John sullenly.

He stands there, breathing hard. There is sweat on his upper lip. His whole face is damp. His hair is wet and his skull itching. He is not in good shape. He could die soon, suddenly, as his father did.

Without looking at her, he picks up the box in the tree-hugging stance and takes it a few yards, shuffling. He puts it down and picks it up again. He covers a few more yards. She follows.

Once they are on the tube he suspects they will be all right. It is only one stop. But when they have got out of the train they find that getting the boxes along the station is almost impossible. The tree-hugging stance is getting too difficult. They carry one box between them up the stairs, and then return for the other. She is quiet now; he can see she is tiring, and is bored with this idiocy.

At the entrance to the station she asks the newspaper seller if they can leave one of the boxes with him. They can carry one home together and return for the other. The man agrees.

She stands in front of John with her arms at her side and her hands stuck out like a couple of rabbit ears, into which shape the box is then placed. As they walk he watches her in her green sleeveless top with a collar, the sling of her bag crossing her shoulder, and the back of her long neck.

He thinks that if they have to put the box down everything will fail. But although they stop three times, she is concentrating, they both are, and they don’t put the box down.

They reach the bottom of the steps to the house. At last they stand the box upright, in the cool hall, and sigh with relief. They return for the other box. They have found a method. They carry it out efficiently.

When it is done he rubs and kisses her sore hands. She looks away.

Without speaking they pull the blue chairs with the cane seats from the boxes and throw the wrapping in the corner. They put the chairs round the table and look at them. They sit on them. They place themselves in this position and that. They put their feet up on them. They change the table cloth.

‘This is good,’ he says.

She sits down and puts her elbows on the table, looking down at the table cloth. She is crying. He touches her hair.

He goes to the shop for some lemonade and when he gets back she has taken off her shoes and is lying flat out on the kitchen floor.

‘I’m tired now,’ she says.

He makes her a drink and places it on the floor. He lies down beside her with his hands under his head. After a time she turns to him and strokes his arm.

‘Are you OK?’ he says.

She smiles at him. ‘Yes.’

Soon they will open the wine and start to make supper; soon Henry will arrive and they will eat and talk.

They will go to bed and in the morning at breakfast time, when they put the butter and jam and marmalade out, the four blue chairs will be there, around the table of their love.

We are unerring in our choice of lovers, particularly when we require the wrong person. There is an instinct, magnet or aerial which seeks the unsuitable. The wrong person is, of course, right for something — to punish, bully or humiliate us, let us down, leave us for dead, or, worst of all, give us the impression that they are not inappropriate, but almost right, thus hanging us in love’s limbo. Not just anyone can do this.