Hanif Kureishi - Collected Stories

When I first became aware of my deterioration, having had it pointed out by a disappointed lover, I dyed my hair and even signed on at a gym. Soon I was so hungry I ate even fruit. It didn’t take me long to realise there are few things more risible than middle-aged narcissism. I knew the game was up when I had to wear my reading glasses in order to see the magazine I was masturbating over.

None of the women I knew could give up in this way. It was rare for my wife and her friends not to talk about botox and detox, about food and their body shape, size and relative fitness, and the sort of exercise they were or were not taking. I knew women, and not only actresses, who had squads of personal trainers, dieticians, nutritionists, yoga teachers, masseurs and beauticians labouring over their bodies daily, as if the mind’s longing and anxiety could be cured via the body. Who doesn’t want to be more desired and, therefore, loved?

In contrast, I tried to dissociate myself from my body, as if it were an embarrassing friend I no longer wanted to know. My pride, my sense of myself, my identity, if you will, didn’t disappear; rather, it emigrated. I noticed this with my friends. Some of them had gone to the House of Lords; they sat on committees. They were given ‘tribute’ evenings; they picked up awards, medals, prizes and doctorates. The end of the year, when these things were handed out, was an anxious time for the elderly and their doctors. Prestige was more important than beauty. I imagined us, as if in a cartoon, sinking into the sludge of old age, dragged down by medals, our only motion being a jealous turn of the head to see what rewards our contemporaries were receiving.

Some of this, you will be delighted to hear, happened to me. My early plays were occasionally revived, most often by arthritic amateurs, though my latest play hadn’t been produced: it was considered ‘old-fashioned’. Someone was working on a biography which, for a writer, is like having a stone-mason begin to chisel one’s name into a tombstone. My biographer seemed to know, better than I did, what had been important to me. He was young; I was his first job, a try-out. Despite my efforts, we both knew my life hadn’t been scandalous enough for his book to be of much interest.

However, I’d written my memoirs and made money out of two houses I’d bought, without much thought, in the early 1960s, one for my parents and one for myself, which turned out to have been situated in an area which became fashionable.

Lately, what I have wanted to be cured of, if anything, was indifference, slight depression or weariness; of the feeling that my interest in things — culture, politics, other people, myself — was running down. A quarter of me was alive; it was that part which wanted a pure, unadulterated ‘shot’ of life.

I wasn’t the only one. A successful but melancholic friend, ten years older than me, described his head as a ‘raw wound’; he was as furious, pained and mad as he had been at twenty-five. No Nirvanic serenity for him; no freedom from ambition and envy. He said, ‘I wouldn’t know whether you should go gentle into that night or rage against the dying of the light. I think, on reflection, that I’d prefer the gentle myself.’ But it is as if your mind is inhabited by a houseful of squabbling relatives, all of whom one could gladly eject, but cannot.

But where to find consolation? Who will teach us the wisdom we require? Who has it and could pass it on? Does it even exist?

There was religion, once, now replaced by ‘spirituality’, or, for a lot of us, politics — of the ‘fraternal’ kind; there was culture, now there is shopping.

When I came round after the operation these weary thoughts, which I’d carried around for months, weren’t with me. I had more important things to do, like standing on my head! Without Ralph telling me this — he had become an optimist — I had expected to feel, at least, as if I’d been beaten up. I had anticipated days of recovery time. However, even though I was only semi-conscious, I found I could move easily.

Nevertheless, as soon as I lay down on the bed, I fell asleep again. This time I dreamed I was at a railway station. When I take a train I like to get to the station early so as to watch the inhabited bodies move around one another. Yet I have become slightly phobic about others’ bodies. I don’t like them too close to me; I can’t touch strangers, friends or even myself. In the dream, when I arrived at the station, everyone wanted to meet me; they crowded around me, shaking my hand, touching, kissing and stroking me in congratulation.

This semi-sleep continued. Somehow, I became aware that I was without my body. It might be better to say I was suspended between bodies: out of mine and not yet properly in another. I was assaulted by what I thought were images but which I realised were really bodily sensations, as if my life were slowly returning, as physical feeling. I had always taken it for granted that I was a person, which was a good thing to be. But now I was being reminded that first and foremost I was a body, which wanted things.

In this strange condition, I thought of how babies are close to their mother’s skin almost the whole time. A body is the child’s first playground and his first experiences are sensual. It doesn’t take long for children to learn that you can get things from other bodies: milk, kisses, bottles, caresses, slaps. People’s hands are useful for this, as they are for exploring the numerous holes bodies have, out of which leaks different stuff, whether you like it or not: sweat, shit, semen, pus, breath, blood, saliva, words. These are holes into which you can put things, too, if you feel like it.

My mother, a librarian, was fat and couldn’t walk far. Movement disturbed her. Her clothes were voluminous. She had no dealings with diets, except once, when she decided to go on a fast. She eschewed breakfast. By lunchtime she had a headache and dizziness; she was ‘starving’ and had a cream bun to cheer herself up.

Mother was always hungry, but I guess she didn’t know what she was hungry for. She replied, when I asked her why she consumed so much rubbish, ‘You never know where your next meal is coming from, do you?’ Things can seem like that to some people, as if there is only scarcity and you should get as much down you as you can, though it never satisfies you.

Mother never let me see her body or sleep beside her; she didn’t like to touch me. She didn’t want anyone’s hands on her, saying it was ‘unnecessary’. Perhaps she made herself fat to discourage temptation.

As you get older, you are instructed that you can’t touch just anyone, nor can they touch you. Although parents encourage their children in generosity, they don’t usually share their genitals, or those of their partner, with you. Sometimes you are not even allowed to touch parts of your own body, as if they don’t quite belong to you. There are feelings your body is forbidden to generate, feelings the elders don’t like anyone having. We consider ourselves to be liberals; it is the others who have inexplicable customs. Yet the etiquette of touching bodies is strict everywhere.

Every body is different, but all are identical in their uncontrollability: bodies do various involuntary things, like crying, sneezing, urinating, growing or becoming sexually excited. You soon find that bodies can get very attracted and repelled by other bodies, even — or particularly — when they don’t want to be.

I grew up after the major European wars, playing soldier games on my father’s farm. My mind was possessed by images of millions of upright male bodies in identical clothes and poses. The world these men made was mayhem and disorder, but at least, as my father used to say, they were ‘well turned out’ for it. At school, it seemed that each teacher had a particular disability — one ear, one leg or testicle, or some war-wound — which fascinated us. None of us thought we’d ever be down to just one of anything where there was supposed to be two, but we couldn’t stop thinking about it. This was the misunderstanding of education: the teachers were interested in minds, and we were interested in bodies. It was the bodies I wanted when I grew up.