Something to Tell You

by Hanif Kureishi

  In my early twenties, I had left Mother too, having known for a while it was time to get away from the house and the neighbourhood. If the suburbs were the gentle solution to the question of how to live, I was out of there.

  Through a university acquaintance, someone I’d directed in a female production of Waiting for Godot, I had found a room in a house shared by a group of white, middle-class politicos. They were carpenters, teachers, social workers, feminists and radical lawyers, two of whom later became MPs, keen Blairites, often on TV defending the Iraq war. They had set up several similar houses in streets nearby.

  However, I wasn’t able to move straight into the room I wanted. There were other applicants, and these politicos were democrats, from time to time. I was to be interviewed, though I knew the lefties would offer me the room as soon as I asked whether there were any black people in the house. The guilt shuddered through them like a bout of food poisoning and I was in, despite my pale skin and the queue of whites outside.

  It wasn’t exactly a commune; people had their own rooms, and the cooking and chores weren’t shared, though some tasks were. There were a lot of meetings and mad talk, cycling and recycling. New posters—“Protest and Survive!” or a picture of a monkey being experimented on—along with leaflets advertising meetings appeared in the hall every day, along with piles of wood for “reuse.”

  Often we cycled to the woods, with wine and dope in our baskets. One time the others couldn’t wait to get their clothes off and jump in some filthy pond. Generally I was uptight, but this time I joined them.

  Most weekends were taken up with some kind of antinuclear protest. During the week there were Labour Party branch meetings held in draughty halls on run-down estates. If I went, it was because everyone else went; I wanted to know what was going on. It was serious work. The old guard, the working-class stalwarts who smoked pipes and spoke interminably in difficult accents—and had many personal memories of Harold Wilson—along with the eccentrics, the codgers, the plain crazies and those who had nowhere else to go in the evenings, were being replaced by the people I knew.

  These were young, smart lawyers, housing officers, radicals from provincial universities. A few of these “activists” were actually Trots or Commies, clinging to respectability and the possibility of real power; others were channelling their ambition into conventional political careers. The idea was to move the Party to the left by integrating radical elements that had emerged during the mid-70s: gays, blacks, feminists. Michael Foot was elected leader of the Party, followed by Neil Kinnock. The Party was beginning to modernise but still wasn’t electable. To become that, it was the left politics which had to go. How we all despised Thatcher, but she led the way.

  I was amazed by the bitterness, viciousness and cruelty of small-time politics. Even here idealism was, as it always is, an excuse for quite extreme aggression. I leafleted local estates, and “knocked up” during local elections. Sometimes we were invited into the flats. I’d never seen such places before in the city, and I can tell you, it was an education.

  In the house I didn’t say much to anyone, staying in my room and reading. Usually there were political visitors. These were the days before the working class were considered to be consumerist trash in cheap clothes with writing on them, when they still retained the dignity of doing essential but unpleasant work.

  Striking miners were popular with the gays; the Greenham women, in London for fundraisers, were favoured by the lesbians, though, apparently, they had to be bathed first; for the rest of us there were the Nicaraguans. (Several of our circle went to Managua to help out; I considered it myself but heard it involved a lot of digging.) I liked the company, liked knowing there were people around. It was the first time I’d had a place of my own, somewhere I had to pay for.

  Miriam and I had returned, not long before, from our “roots” visit to Father in Pakistan, hating each other, hating everything. Not only did I not know what I was going to do, I was in bad mental trouble. I was beginning to realise that I’d thought, after the Ajita catastrophe, that the Pakistan trip would be a turning point. If I couldn’t find Ajita there—how could I?—I would at least find my father, along with a sense of direction, some strength and my best self. What Miriam and I did in fact return with would take years to absorb.

  I should have guessed I’d end up messing about with books. I found a monotonous but easy job in the British Library, where I was a sort of earthworm with arms, fetching books for readers from the miles of book-stacked tunnels under Bloomsbury. I spent my day in the intestines of the gloomy building, surrounded by rotting printed paper, emerging occasionally into the light and space of the magnificent Reading Room in the British Museum. “I am a mole and I live in a hole!” I sang, or droned, as I worked.

  My eyes, and those of my fellow workers, had become used to only low artificial light. We book-miners despised the readers, their self-importance, leisure and flirtatiousness with one another. Didn’t they realise this was a library? Though we might be peculiar, freakish even—we were the footnotes to the body of their text—didn’t they ever think of what we did for them, how we kept them supplied? Bent-backed, I liked shoving along a trolley in the depths of the earth, in what Keats called “dark passages.” Some of the people I worked with had laboured in the valley of books for thirty years, stifled and safe, nesting in forests of tomes. There was no better place to be buried alive.

  One of the scholars working in the Reading Room—on Coleridge’s Notebooks and the poet’s love of The Arabian Nights—I had known at university. He had taught friends of mine. He walked on sticks, and his body was shrunken and misshapen, as much by the steroids he took as by the illness. Often we’d have lunch in cafés in Bloomsbury, and one time he complimented me on my long, luxuriant hair. I said I wasn’t growing it for reasons of fashion but because I couldn’t sit in a barber’s chair, couldn’t let myself be touched.

  “Even by a woman?”

  “Well…yes—especially by a woman.”

  “You don’t have a girlfriend?” he asked.

  “I did. But she went away and she’s not coming back. I thought she would. But it looks like she really isn’t.”

  “I’m sure women like you. If I looked like you, I wouldn’t be sitting in the library all day. I sit down because I can’t walk properly. My broken body is going to hell.”

  “Libraries are sexual places,” I said. “It’s the quiet, the whispering. You readers don’t see us watching you, but we know what’s going on. We notice who leaves the building with who, and we gossip about it. Still, tell me what you would be doing instead.”

  “Having it off, of course,” he said. “As it is, the only people who touch me are prostitutes, something you don’t need. I’m sure there are women who would pay you.” He talked about himself and his own problems for a while. Then he said, “Do you have any other symptoms?”

  “Symptoms?”

  “States of mind which prevent you leading a relatively rewarding life.”

  I explained that I had begun to stop still in the street, unable to move at all, either backwards or forwards. Recently I had stood in the same place for an hour—suspended, paralysed, dead—reading and rereading an advertisement, unable to get to work on time. If I was actually in motion, I found myself yelling at people in my mind. I wanted to fight them, wanted to get beaten up.

  Mostly my mad stuff was inside me, but I would shove people on the bus; someone punched me in a pub. I wasn’t far from becoming one of those lunatics who mutter and shout at themselves at bus stops. I had to leave work early in order to lock myself in my room because I believed, and didn’t believe, that when I was outside others could hear my thoughts, that my head was transparent like a goldfish bowl.

  In the evening, as you do, I’d catch glimpses of rats, birds and alligators from the corner of my eye. In my dreams, bears would dance with me, buggering me from behind. Live chickens would be stuffed down the back of my shirt.

  I found one day,
soon after beginning the job, that I was unable to walk; a spinal disc was perforated. I had an operation, shared a hospital ward with the limbless, and learned to walk again. Living even at the most basic level was becoming more arduous.

  The oddest thing was, I felt my experiences were not taking place in the world but beyond it, in a void. There were no words for my suffering. Like the undead, the internal voices of hatred would knock on my door forever, seeking an impossible peace. If I was so ill, and getting worse, as I believed I was, how would I ever lead a useful life?

  My friend said, “From our talks, I am aware that the art you like is modernism, the exploration of extreme mind states, of neurosis and psychosis. I, too, have spent my life with such books, but reading Kafka or Bruno Schulz can only take you so far. You will find in books characters who are like you. But you will never find yourself in a book unless you write it yourself. It is the wrong place to search. To switch metaphors, you can’t get out of a locked room without the right key.”

  “What or where is the key?” I almost shouted. “Have you got it in your pocket? Open the door!”

  He said the key might be this fellow Tahir Hussein.

  The next day he obtained Hussein’s phone number for me, adding that he was much talked about. I said a lot of people were talking about me, but I was paranoid. I had no idea who was talking about Tahir Hussein. It was probably a small literary metropolitan elite, all of whom had been at university together. That was how it worked in England. But I was sane enough to realise that, without help, I would fall into a black hole. For weeks I didn’t call this man, continuing to believe I could survive alone and that my illness would disappear magically.

  Another day: the morning, before work at the library. I am standing on the street. People are bent forward; they look like tables, running. Everyone had purpose, somewhere to go. When they arrived, they would have plenty to say to each other. Didn’t I, too, have plans? But—I almost said I had forgotten what they were. No. It was not that I had mislaid my plans in a far part of my mind. The future no longer had any force over me. I was too dizzy, with wild surges of mad feeling. My wish was to faint, to become unconscious. You cannot will a faint, I know that, any more than you can will a dream, a laugh or a fart. How I wanted some release from this suffering, to which even death seemed preferable. I wasn’t driven towards suicide. I wanted only to be rid of this swirling whirring.

  At that moment I saw ahead of me a red London phone booth, with a gap or trench open before it, into which I waded. I came up in the booth; I was surprised to find it working; surprised to find I had change; surprised to find it ringing and answered by Tahir himself. I was particularly surprised to be invited to see him.

  He had said he would take me on. I could see him the next day. He gave me his address and said simply, “Come tomorrow morning at eight and we will begin.”

  If I’d had to wait more than a week, I wouldn’t have turned up. Waiting was another of my phobias. Surely I would die before the appointment? Also, I knew therapy would be expensive, exhausting most of my small income. But I couldn’t see what else to do, and having nothing didn’t hurt me; it was what I was worth.

  But would I ever tell him the truth?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  When I walked into that room where my life changed, although I’d studied some Freud at university and also when I was in Pakistan, I had little idea what an analysis involved, and there was no one I could ask.

  In the lefty house where I lived, I kept Civilisation and Its Discontents under the bed, along with my favourite pornos, Game and Readers’ Wives, though with an E. P. Thompson paperback on top of them. This was because, among the young intelligentsia, class was the paradigm. As a useful concept, it was easier to deal with, and less dangerous than sexuality. The problems of the proletariat were not caused by being born a human being and living in families but by class conflict. Once these were solved by social change, most problems would evaporate. Any difficulties left over could be solved by Maoist group discussions.

  The Left could be puritanical: in the heaven of the far future, there would be more than enough fucking, but right now the priority was that everyone pushed for change. Freud was reviled as a white, bourgeois, patriarchal pig, and psychoanalysis was considered to be exhausted as a theory. What woman would admit to, or even accept the idea of, envying our little penises?—though that, of course, was exactly what feminism was. As Adorno wrote, “In Freudian psychoanalysis, nothing is more true than its exaggerations.”

  Nonetheless, R. D. Laing—popularly known as “the Two Ronnies,” after the television comedians—was still admired by students, mad behaviour was often idealised, and numerous therapies, a mixture of Vienna and California, were emerging. I knew Lennon and Ono had screamed and rolled around with Janov, and that the great Plastic Ono Band album had been the result. But I didn’t see what any of this could do for me. What of the quietly mad, the ordinary and unphotogenically disconcerted?

  Tahir Hussein told me that not knowing anything about technique was the best way to approach analysis. To drive a car you didn’t have to know what was under the bonnet.

  “You’re the mechanic of souls?” I said.

  He invited me to lie down on the couch and say whatever came into my mind. I did this immediately, determined not to miss the full Freudian experience. His chair was behind my head, but by his breathing I could tell he was leaning towards me, scratching his chin, waiting to hear. “The thing is…” I said.

  I began: hallucinations, panic attacks, inexplicable furies, frantic passions and dreams. It seemed only a minute before he said we had to finish. When I was outside, standing on the street knowing I would return in a couple of days, waves of terror tore through me, my body disassembled, exploding. To prevent myself collapsing, I had to hold on to a lamppost. I began to defecate uncontrollably. Shit ran down my legs and into my shoes. I began to weep; then I vomited—vomiting the past. My shirt was covered in sick. My insides were on the outside; everyone could see me. It wasn’t pretty and I had ruined my suit, but something had started. I came to love my analyst more than my father. He gave me more; he saved my life; he made and remade me.

  After a few sessions, when I asked him how he thought I would pay for my analysis, he only said, “You will get the money.”

  This did concentrate my mind. I noticed that the man who had given me Tahir Hussein’s phone number always studied the racing papers at lunchtime but never bet on horses, even though, as he put it, he believed he could make a lot of money that way. I told him my situation so far with Tahir Hussein and asked again for his help. “Easy,” he said, giving me a tip for the following day. I slung everything I had on the nag, about two hundred pounds, saved to pay my rent, and won over two thousand pounds, which I spent on my treatment. I went three mornings a week. It was serious and intense, the first time I’d taken myself seriously, as though normally what happened to me was not worth noting, and it wasn’t a moment too soon.

  My academic friend had told me that one of the virtues of psychoanalysis in England was that it had been developed not only by women but by people of all nationalities, by which he meant European. Unusually for an analyst, Tahir Hussein was a Pakistani Muslim. Tahir had a smart flat at a smart address, in South Kensington. Even as I walked there, I felt rays of hatred emanating from passersby.

  Tahir’s place was full of pots and rugs and furniture that had to be polished, paintings that had to be insured and sculpture that had to be plugged in. He was extravagant too. I’d almost expected a quiet guy in a suit and bow tie. But Tahir was something of a show-off, dressed in postwar ethnic gear. He’d wear salwar kameez, a kaftan, hippy trousers, even a fez, and those slippers which curled up at the toe. I’d say, at times, that he looked more like a magician at the end of a pier than a doctor.

  Nevertheless, he had the complete exotic-doctor presence and charisma. Dark-skinned, with long, greying hair, he was imperious, handsome, imposing. He must have been aware that h
e could seem ridiculous. Few would doubt he was arrogant, cruel, alcoholic and more than a little narcissistic. But I guess he reserved the right to be himself, as much himself as he could be. For him, as for the other hip shrinks, it wasn’t the work of analysis to make people respectable conformists but to let them be as mad as they wanted, living out and enjoying their conflicts—even if it meant suffering more—without being self-destructive. I caught on early when he quoted Pascal: “Men are so fundamentally mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.”

  I fell in love with him, as I was supposed to, perhaps before I met him, and fantasised about his private life. I tried to seduce him, begging him to fuck me on the couch, while convinced that this was not something I really wanted; I took him small presents: coffee, pens, postcards, novels.

  When it came to the important things, listening and interpretation, he was there, on the spot. He wasn’t one of those analysts who terrify you with their silence, sphinxes identified with their own stillness. Once he asked if I thought he talked too much, but I said no. I loved the exchange. He said that silence is a powerful tool but that it could re-create the inaccessible parent and “frantic child” scenario. So when he had something to say, he said it. Discussing Freudian theory was always considered a resistance, I knew that. But resist I would; the theory began to fascinate me.

  Every time I saw him, I felt I’d moved forward in understanding; even as I rejoined the street, I’d be asking myself new questions. Gossip had it that Tahir had had affairs with his patients; apparently he’d talked on the phone while seeing them, and even went to the opera with them. But he was nothing but focused with me. Occasionally, if I asked him what he was doing that night, he would speak of his friendships with painters, dancers, poets, knowing I liked to identify with him, that this was something I wanted for myself.