Hanif Kureishi - Collected Stories

‘Exactly.’

‘You were always retreating to that womb or hiding place. What made me cross was how you placed the madness outside yourself — in me, the half-addicted, promiscuous, self-devouring crazy girl. Isn’t that misogyny?’

He looked startled. ‘I’m not sure.’

‘You made yourself, Nick, you see, before things got … a little mad. You weren’t privileged, like some of those show-off scribblers. I remember you sitting with your favourite novels, underlining sentences. The lists of words pinned up by your shaving mirror — words to learn, words to use. You’d write out the same sentence again and again, in different ways. I can’t imagine a woman being so methodical and will-driven. You want to be highly considered. Only I wish you hadn’t taken a sneaky and spiteful revenge against me.’

He said, ‘It’s never going to be frictionless between men and women as long as they want things from one another — and they have to want things, that’s a relationship.’

‘Sophistry!’

‘Reality!’

She said, ‘Self-deception!’

He got up. It wouldn’t take him long to get home. He could carry a low chair out into his new garden, on which they had recently spent a lot of money, and read and doze. Six men had come through the side door with plants, trees and paving stones; he and Lolly couldn’t wait for nature. It wasn’t his money, or even Lolly’s, but her American father’s. He wondered if he knew what married but dependent women must feel, when what you had wasn’t earned or deserved. Humiliation wasn’t quite what he felt, but there was resentment.

He had met Natasha one Mayday at a private party at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, just down from Buckingham Palace, in sight of Big Ben. He would always drink and smoke grass before leaving his flat — in order to get out at all; and he was chuckling to himself at the available ironies. Apart from the Soviet invasion of Hungary, there couldn’t have been a worse time for socialism. Certainly no one he knew was admitting to being on the hard left, or to having supported the Soviet Union. ‘I was always more of an anarchist than a Party man,’ Nick heard as he squeezed through the crowd to the drinks table. A voice replied, ‘I was only ever a Eurocommunist.’ He himself announced, ‘I was never much of a joiner.’ His more imaginative left-wing acquaintances had gone to Berlin to witness the collapse of the Wall, ‘to be at the centre of history’, as one of them put it. ‘For the first time,’ Nick had commented.

It was easy to sneer. What did he know? It was only now that he was starting to read history, having become intrigued by the fact that people not unlike him had, only a few decades before, been possessed by the fatal seriousness of murderous, mind-gripping ideologies. He’d only believed in pop. Its frivolity and anger was merely subversive; it delivered no bananas. If asked for his views, he’d be afraid to give them. But he was capable of description.

Like him, Natasha usually only worked in the morning, teaching, or working on these theses. They both liked aspects of London, not the theatre, cinema or restaurants but the rougher places that resembled a Colin McInnes novel. Nick had come to know wealthy and well-known people; he was invited for cocktails and launches, lunches and charity dinners, but it was too prim to be his everyday world. He started to meet Natasha at two o’clock in a big deserted pub in Notting Hill. They’d eat, have their first drinks, talk about everything and nod at the old Rastas who still seemed permanently installed in these pubs. They would buy drugs from young dealers from the nearby estates and hear their plans for robberies. Notting Hill was wealthy and the houses magnificent, but it had yet to become aware of it. The pubs were still neglected, with damp carpets and dusty oak bars covered in cigarette burns, about to be turned into shiny places crammed with people who looked as though they appeared on television, though they only worked in it.

He and Natasha would take cocaine or ecstasy, or some LSD, or all three — and retire for the afternoon to her basement nearby. When it got dark they pulled one another from bed, applied their eye-shadow in adjacent mirrors, and stepped out in their high heels.

Now she took his hand. ‘You can’t walk out on me!’ She tugged him back into his seat.

He said, ‘You can’t pull me!’

‘Don’t forget the flowers you came at me with!’ she said. ‘The passion! The hikes through the city at night and breakfast in the morning! And conversation, conversation! Didn’t we put our chairs side by side and go through your work! Have you forgotten how easily you lost hope in those days and how I repeatedly sent you back to your desk? Everyone you knew wanted to be a proper writer. None of them would do it, but you thought, why shouldn’t I? Didn’t I help you?’

‘Yes you did, Natasha! Thank you!’

‘You didn’t put it in the book, did you? You put all that other stuff in!’

‘It didn’t fit!’

‘Oh Nick, couldn’t you have made it fit?’ She was looking at him. ‘Why are you laughing at me?’

‘There’s no way out of this conversation. Why don’t we walk a little?’

‘Can we?’

‘Why not?’

‘I keep thinking you’re going to go away. Have you got time?’

‘Yes.’

‘My sweet and sour man I called you. D’you remember?’ She seemed to relax. ‘A fluent, creative life, turning ordinary tedium and painful feeling into art. The satisfactions of a self-sufficient child, playing alone. That’s what I want. That’s why people envy artists.’

‘Vocation,’ he said. ‘Sounds like the name of someone.’

‘Yes. A guide. Someone who knows. I don’t want to sound religious, because it isn’t that.’

‘A guiding figure. A man.’

She sighed. ‘Probably.’

He said, ‘I was thinking … how our generation loved Monroe, Hendrix, Cobain, even. Somehow we were in love with death. Few of the people we admired could go to bed without choking on their own vomit. Wasn’t that the trouble — with pop, and with us?’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘We were called a self-indulgent generation. We didn’t go to war but we were pretty murderous towards ourselves. Almost everyone I know — or used to.’

‘But I was just going to —’ She reached into her bag and leaned over to him. ‘Give me your hand,’ she said. ‘Go on. I got you something.’ She passed the object to him. ‘Now look.’

He opened his hand.

*

On a dreary parade in North Kensington, between a second-hand bookshop and a semi-derelict place hiring out fancy-dress costumes, was a shop where Nick and Natasha went to buy leather and rubberwear. Behind barred windows it was painted black and barely lit, concealing the fact that the many shiny red items were badly made or plain ragged. The assistants, in discreet versions of the available clothes — Nick preferred to call them costumes — were enthusiastic, offering tea and biscuits.

Wrapping themselves in fake-fur coats from charity shops, Natasha and Nick began going to places where others had similar tastes, seeking new fears and transgressions, of which there were many during this AIDS period. If couples require schemes, they had discovered their purpose. It was possible to be a sexual outlaw as long as there were still people who were innocent. They pressed each other on, playing Virgil to one another, until they no longer knew if they were children or adults, men or women, masters or servants. The transformation into pleasure of the banal, the unpleasant and the plain unappetising was like black magic — poor Don Juan on a treadmill, compelled to make life’s electricity for ever.

Nick recalled walking one night onto the balcony of a vast club, seeking Natasha, and looking down on a pageant of bizarre costumes, feathers, semi-nudity, masks and clothes of all periods, representing every passion, every possible kink and kook, zig and zag. Natasha was among them, waiting for him with some bridled old man who worked in a post office.