Hanif Kureishi - Collected Stories

‘I did give you that, actually.’ She said, ‘I’ve rung my friend. He’s on his way.’

He said, ‘I don’t care. Just give me an umbrella.’

She shook her head. She went to shut the door. He put his foot out and she banged the door against his leg. He wanted to rub his shin but could not give her the pleasure.

He said, ‘Let’s try and be rational.’

He had hated before, his parents and brother, at certain times. But it was a fury, not a deep, intellectual and emotional hatred like this. He had had psychotherapy; he took tranquillisers, but still he wanted to pulverise his wife. None of the ideas he had about life would make this feeling go away.

‘You used to find the rain “refreshing”,’ she sneered.

‘It has come to this,’ he said.

‘Here we are then,’ she said. ‘Don’t start crying about it.’

He pushed the door. ‘I’ll get the umbrella.’

She pushed the door back at him. ‘You cannot come in.’

‘It is my house.’

‘Not without prior arrangement.’

‘We arranged it,’ he said.

‘The arrangement’s off.’

He pushed her.

‘Are you assaulting me?’ she said.

He looked outside. An alcoholic woman he had had to remove from the front step on several occasions was standing at the end of the path holding a can of lager.

‘I’m watching you,’ she shouted. ‘If you touch her you are reported!’

‘Watch on!’ he shouted back.

He pushed into the house. He placed his hand on his wife’s chest and forced her against the wall. She cried out. She did bang her head, but it was, in football jargon, a ‘dive’. The children ran at his legs. He pushed them away.

He went to the airing cupboard, seized an umbrella and made his way to the front door.

As he passed her she snatched it. Her strength surprised him, but he yanked the umbrella back and went to move away. She raised her hand. He thought she would slap him. It would be the first time. But she made a fist. As she punched him in the face she continued to look at him.

He had not been hit since he left school. He had forgotten the physical shock and then the disbelief, the shattering of the feeling that the world was a safe place.

The boys were screaming. Roger had dropped the umbrella. His mouth throbbed; his lip was bleeding. He must have staggered and lost his balance for she was able to push him outside.

He heard the door slam behind him. He could hear the children crying. He walked away, past the alcoholic woman still standing at the end of the path. He turned to look at the lighted house. When they had calmed down, the children would have their bath and get ready for bed. They liked being read to. It was a part of the day he had always enjoyed.

He turned his collar up but knew he would get soaked. He wiped his mouth with his hand. She had landed him quite a hit. He would not be able to find out until later whether it would show. If it did, it would cause interest and amusement at the party, but not to him; not with a date to go to.

He stood in a doorway watching the people hurry past. His trouser legs stuck to his skin. It would not stop raining for a long time. He could not just stand in the same place for hours. The thing to do was not to mind. He started out then, across the Green, in the dark, wet through, but moving forward.

It had been snowing.

He got to the house, looked at his watch, saw he was late, and hurried on to a pub he knew at the end of the street. He pushed the door and a barking Alsatian on a chain leapt at him. Young children, one of them badly bruised, chased one another across the slush-wet floor, tripping over the adults’ feet. The jukebox was loud, as were the TV and the drinkers’ voices. He hadn’t been in here for months yet he recognised the same people.

He was backing out when the barman shouted, ‘Hey, my man Alan. Alan, where you been?’ and started to pull him a pint.

Alan took a seat at the bar, lit a cigarette and drank off half his glass. If he finished quickly he might get another pint in him. It would mean he had no money but why would he need money tonight? The last time he had attended a school nativity play and carol service he had been fourteen, and his best friend’s father had turned up so soaked in alcohol that he didn’t realise his tie had been dunked in red wine and was still dripping. The boys pointed and laughed at him, and his son had been ashamed.

Alan nodded at the barman who placed the second pint beside the first. Alan’s son was too young for shame; in fact, Mikey was starting to worship his father.

Alan needed to calm himself. Melanie, his present girlfriend, with whom he’d lived for a year, had pursued him down the street as he’d left the flat, pulling on his hand and begging him not to go. He told her repeatedly that he had promised his son that he would attend the nativity play. ‘All the daddies will be there,’ Mikey had said.

‘And so will this daddy,’ Alan had said.

After much shouting, Alan left Melanie standing in the snow. God knows what state she’d be in when he returned home, if she were there at all. Alan worked in the theatre, though not as an actor. Yet today he felt she had cast him as a criminal, a role he wasn’t prepared to play.

Alan finished both drinks and got up to go. It would be the first time he, his wife and their son had been out together as a family since he had left, eighteen months ago.

Perhaps it was his fear that had communicated itself to Melanie. He wasn’t sure, however, that fear was the right word. On the way over he had been trying to identify the feeling. It wasn’t even dread. The solution came to him now as he approached the house. It was grief; a packed, undigested lump of grief in his chest.

The boy was standing on a chair by the window. Seeing his father he jumped up and down, shouting, ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!’, banging on the smudged glass.

It had been a week since Alan had seen Mikey, and he was used to looking for the alteration in him. Yet how peculiar he still found it to visit his own son as if he were dropping by for tea with a relation. What he liked most was taking Mikey out to cafés. Occasionally the boy would slip off his stool and run about to demonstrate how high he could jump, but mostly they sat and made conversation like friends, Mikey asking the most demanding questions.

‘You’re late,’ Anne said at the door. ‘You’ve been drinking.’

She was shaking, and her eyes were fixed and wide. He was familiar with these brief possessions, the sudden fits of rage she had throughout the day, usually when she had to ask for something.

Alan slipped past her. ‘Pretty Christmas tree,’ he said.

He crouched down and Mikey ran into his arms. He was wearing tartan trousers and a knitted sweater. He handed Alan a maroon woolly hat. Anne went to get her coat. Alan pulled the hat down over Mikey’s face, and then, as the kid struggled and shouted, picked him up and buried his face in his stomach.

Alan had never liked the street, the area or the house. It had some kind of guilty hold over him. When he visited he felt he should go upstairs, get into bed, close his eyes and resume his old life, as if it were his duty and destiny. Anne still blamed him for leaving, though Alan couldn’t understand why she didn’t see that it had been best for both of them.

‘Kiss,’ said Mikey when Anne joined them. ‘Kiss together.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Kiss Mummy.’

Alan looked at his wife.

She had lost weight, her face coming to a point at her chin for the first time in years. She had been dieting; starving herself, it looked like. Her face was covered in white make-up or powder. Her lips were red. He had never let her wear lipstick, not liking it on his face. She dressed better now, presumably on his money. She hadn’t been sleeping at the house often, he knew that. Her mother had been staying there with Mikey, not knowing — or not saying — when she would be back.