Hanif Kureishi - Collected Stories

Now, a renewed physical animation, combined with mental curiosity, made me feel particularly energetic. In this incarnation I would go everywhere and see everything.

When I first had children I was inspired to think about my own childhood and parents; now, this transformation was making me reflect on the sort of young man I had been. I hadn’t travelled much then. I had been too absorbed in the theatre, working in any capacity, reading scripts, running the box office and serving tyrannical directors. The rest of the time I was having tragic, complicated affairs, and trying to write. I forfeited a lot of pleasure for my craft; at times I found the deferment and discipline intolerable. I’d break out and go mad, before retiring to my room for long periods — for too long, I’d say now. But those years of habit and repetition served me well: I gained invaluable experience of writing, not only of the practical difficulties, but of the terrors and inhibitions that seem to be involved in any attempt to become an artist.

My excitements then had never been pure; they had always been anxieties. In later life I wondered whether I had been too constrained and afraid for my future, too focused on the success I yearned for and too determined to become established. Travelling unworriedly through Europe had been the least of my concerns.

Did I regret it now, or wish it otherwise? At least I had the sense to understand that there couldn’t be a life without foolishness, hesitation, breakdown, unbearable conflict. We are our mistakes, our symptoms, our breakdowns.

The thing I missed most in my new life was the opportunity to discuss — and, therefore, think about properly — the implications of becoming a Newbody. I doubted whether Ralph would have been interested in going into it further. Perhaps such a transformation, like face-lifts, worked better for people who didn’t have theories of authenticity or the ‘natural’, people who didn’t worry about its meaning at the expense of its obvious pleasures.

It was its pleasures I was in search of. Soon, I was tearing across Paris; then I went to Amsterdam, Berlin; Vienna. I did the churches and museums of Italy, and they did me. It wasn’t long before I’d had my fill of degraded, orgasmically violated bodies strung from walls, and vaults full of old bones. On most days I woke up in a different place. I travelled by train and bus, in the slowest possible way. Sometimes I just walked across mountains, beaches or fields, or got off trains when I fancied the view from the window. If I liked a bus — the route, the thoughts it provoked, the width of the seat or a sentence in a book I was reading on it — I’d sit there until the end of the line. There was no rush.

I stayed in cheap hotels, hostels and boarding houses. I had money, but I didn’t want opulence. As a young man I’d wanted that — as a measure of success and of how far I had escaped my childhood. Now it seemed confining to be overconcerned with furnishings.

I talked only to strangers, making friends easily for the first time in years. I met people in cafés, museums and clubs, and went to their houses when I could. If I had been too fastidious before, now I stayed with anyone who would have me, to see how they lived. Unlike most young people, I was interested in people of all ages. I’d go to the house of a Dutch guy of my age, and end up chatting to his parents all weekend. It was the mothers I got along with because I was interested in children and how you might get through to them. The mothers talked about children, but I learned they were talking about themselves, too, and this moved me.

I did, at least, know how to look after myself. I could escape anyone boring. People were more generous than I had noticed. If you could listen, they liked to talk. Perhaps being ambitious and relatively well known from a young age had put the barrier of my reputation, such as it was, between me and others.

The days in each city were full. I could drink, have sex with people I picked up or with any prostitute whose body took my fancy, visit galleries, queue for cheap seats to the theatre or opera, or merely read and walk. In the former East Berlin all I did was walk and take photographs. In a bar in Paris, I met a young Algerian guy who modelled occasionally. The male models didn’t earn anything like as much as the girls, and most of them had other jobs. My friend got me a catwalk show during Fashion Week, and I took my turn parading on the narrow aisle, as the flash-bulbs exploded and the unprepossessing journalists scribbled. Was it the clothes or really the bodies they were looking at? Backstage, it was a chaos of semi-naked girls and boys, dressers, the designer and numerous assistants.

I enjoyed all of it, and, after chatting with the designer, whom I’d known slightly in my previous body, I was offered a job in one of his shops, with the prospect of becoming a buyer, which I declined. I did ask him, though, whether, by any chance, as I was a ‘student’, he’d read any of ‘my’ — Adam’s — books or seen ‘my’ plays or films. If he had, he couldn’t remember. He didn’t have time for cultural frivolity. Making a decent pair of trousers was more important. He did say he liked ‘me’ — Adam — though he had found me shy at times. He said, to my surprise, that he envied the fact that women were attracted to me.

The following day, my new catwalk acquaintance thought it would be a good idea to take me shopping. I had told him I had a small inheritance to blow, and he knew where to shop. In our new gear we went to bars suitable for looking at others as we enjoyed them looking at us — those, that is, who didn’t regard us dark-skinners with fear and contempt.

I didn’t stay; I wasn’t like these kids. I didn’t want a place in the world and money. One day, because it rained, I thought I should go to Rome. There, as I attended a lecture and dozed in the front row in my new linen suit, the queer biographer of an important writer, leaning over me enormously, asked me out for a drink. At dinner, this British hack said he wanted me to be his assistant, which I did agree to try, while insisting, as I’d learned I had to, that I would not be his lover. He claimed that all he wanted was to lick my ears. I thought: why not share these fine pert ears around? They’re not even mine, but a general asset. I closed my eyes and let his old tongue enjoy me. It was as pleasant as having a snail crawl across your eyeball. It was more difficult being a tart than I’d hoped. Tarts are trouble, mostly to themselves.

I could experiment because I was safe. If you know you’re going home, you can go anywhere first. I went with him, imagining tall, glass-fronted bookcases and long, polished library tables on which I would work on my version of The Key to All Mythologies , in the way I’d browsed in my father’s books as a teenager. That, indeed, was what I was doing, ‘browsing’ or ‘grazing’ in the world. The job was less demanding than I’d hoped. Mostly it involved me wearing the clothes he bought for me to parties and dinners. I was his bauble or pornography, to be shown off to friends — intelligent, cultured queens I’d have liked to talk with. As a young man I didn’t much enjoy the company of my peers; I liked being an admired boy in the theatre, surrounded by older men.

Therefore this fantasy of Greek life suited me, except that my ‘employer’ refused to let me out of his sight. When I did get the opportunity to read in his library, I could see his bald pate bobbing up and down outside, as he tried to watch me through the window from an uneven box. His adoration of me became nothing but suffering for him, until I began to feel like an imprisoned princess from The Arabian Nights . Beauty sets people dreaming of love. If you don’t want to be in someone else’s dream you have to clear off.