Hanif Kureishi - Collected Stories

In order to think, I walked home, but this time I didn’t feel tired. As I went I was aware of groups of young men and women hanging around the streets. The boys, in long coats and hoods that concealed most of their faces, made me think of figures from The Seventh Seal . They made me recall my best friend’s painful death, two months before.

‘It won’t be the same without me around,’ he had said. We had known each other since university. He was a bad alcoholic and fuck-up. ‘Look at your life and all you’ve done. I’ve wasted my life.’

‘I don’t know what waste means.’

‘Oh, I know what it is now,’ he had said. ‘The inability to take pleasure in oneself or others. Cheerio.’

The chess pieces of my life were being removed one by one. My friend’s death had taken me by surprise; I had believed he would never give up his suffering. The end of my life was approaching, too; there was a lot I was already unable to do, soon there would be more. I’d been alive a long time but my life, like most lives, seemed to have happened too quickly, when I was not ready.

The shouts of the street kids, their incomprehensibly hip vocabulary and threatening presence reminded me of how much the needs of the young terrify the old. Maybe it would be interesting to know what they felt. I’m sure they would be willing to talk. But there was no way, until now, that I could actually have ‘had’ their feelings.

At home, I looked at myself in the mirror. Margot had said that with my rotund stomach, veiny, spindly legs and left-leaning posture I was beginning to resemble my father just before his death. Did that matter? What did I think a younger body would bring me? More love? Even I knew that that wasn’t what I required as much as the ability to love more.

I waited up for my wife, watched her undress and followed her instruction to sit in the bathroom as she bathed by candle-light, attending to her account of the day and — the highlight for me — who had annoyed her the most. She and I also liked to discuss our chocolate indulgences and bodies: which part of which of us, for example, seemed full of ice-cream and was expanding. Various diets and possible types of exercise were always popular between us. She liked to accuse me of not being ‘toned’, of being, in fact, ‘mush’, but threatened murder and suicide if I mentioned any of her body parts without reverence. As I looked at her with her hair up, wearing a dressing gown and examining and cleaning her face in the mirror, I wondered how many more such ordinary nights we would have together.

A few minutes after getting into bed, she was slipping into sleep. I resented her ability to drop off. Although sleeping had come to seem more luxurious, I hadn’t got any better at it. I guess children and older adults fear the separation from consciousness, as though it’ll never return. If anyone asked me, I said that consciousness was the thing I liked most about life. But who doesn’t need a rest from it now and again?

Lying beside Margot, chatting and sleeping, was exceptional every night. To be well married you have to have a penchant for the intricacies of intimacy and larval change: to be interested, for instance, in people dreaming together. If the personality is a spider’s web, you will want to know every thread. Otherwise, after forty, when the colour begins to drain from the world, it’s either retirement or reinvention. Pleasures no longer come to you, but there are pickings to be had if you can learn to scavenge for them.

Later, unusually — it had been a long time — she woke me up to make love, which I did happily, telling her that I’d always loved her, and reminiscing, as we often did, about how we met and got together. These were our favourite stories, always the same and also slightly different so that I listened out for a new feeling or aspect.

For the rest of the night I was awake, walking about the house, wondering.

The following morning there was no question of not meeting Ralph at the coffee shop he’d suggested. At the same time I didn’t believe he’d show up; perhaps that was my wish. He had made me think so hard, the scope of my everyday life seemed so mundane and I had become so excited about this possible adventure and future that I was already beginning to feel afraid.

He arrived on a bicycle, wearing few clothes, and told me he’d stayed up late dancing, woken up early, exercised and studied a ‘dramatic text’ before coming here. It was common, he said, that people living a ‘second’ life, like people on a second marriage, took what they did more seriously. Each moment seemed even more precious. There was no doubt he looked fit, well and ready to be interested in things.

I found myself studying his face. How should I put it? If the body is a picture of the mind, his body was like a map of a place that didn’t exist. What I wanted was to see his original face, before he was reborn. Otherwise it was like speaking on the phone to someone you’d never met, trying to guess what they were really like.

But it was me, not him, we were there for, and he was businesslike, as I guessed he must have been in his former life. He went through everything as though reading from a clipboard in his mind. After two hours we shook hands, and I returned home.

Margot and I always talked and bickered over lunch together, soup and bread, or salad and sandwiches, before our afternoon nap on separate sofas. Today, I had to tell her I was going away.

Earlier in the year Margot had gone to Australia for two months to visit friends and travel. We needed each other, Margot and I, but we didn’t want to turn our marriage into more of an enclosure than necessary. We had agreed that I, too, could go on ‘walkabout’ if I wanted to. (Apparently, ‘walkabout’ was called ‘the dreaming’ by some Aboriginals.) I told her I wanted to leave in three days’ time. I asked for ‘a six-month sabbatical’. As well as being upset by the suddenness of my decision, she was shocked and hurt by the length of time I required. She and I are always pleased to part, but then, after a few days, we need to share our complaints. I guess that was how we knew our marriage was still alive. Yet she knew that when I make up my mind, I enter a tunnel of determination, for fear that vacillation is never far away.

She said, ‘Without you here to talk about yourself in bed, how will I go to sleep?’

‘At least I am some use, then.’

She acquiesced because she was kind. She didn’t believe I’d last six months. In a few weeks I’d be bored and tired. How could anyone be as interested in my ailments as her?

It took me less time than I would have hoped to settle my affairs before the ‘trip’. I had a circle of male friends who came to the house once a fortnight to drink, watch football and discuss the miseries of our work. Margot would inform them I was going walkabout and we would reconvene on my return. I made the necessary financial arrangements through my lawyer, and followed the other preparations Ralph had insisted on.

When Ralph and I met up again he took one look at me and said, ‘You’re my first initiate. I’m delighted that you’re doing this. You live your life trying to find out how to live a life, and then it ends. I don’t think I could have picked a better person.’

‘Initiate?’

‘I’ve been waiting for the right person to follow me down this path, and it’s someone as distinguished as you!’

‘I need to see what this will bring me,’ I murmured, mostly to myself.

‘The face you have must have brought you plenty,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you see those girls watching you at the party? They asked me later if you were really you.’

‘They did?’