Something to Tell You

by Hanif Kureishi

  I was aware that Valentin was trying to pull a coup at the casino—Wolf would go in there and Valentin would ensure he won at blackjack—but it seemed like a lot of talk. Mostly they discussed what they’d do with the money when they had it, which part of the South of France they’d live in; maybe they’d get a boat, but which sort? They even talked of how they’d decorate their apartments and how the day would be spent reading papers, eating, swimming, having sex and fraternising with other criminals. Once, when I was sarcastic about their ability as crooks (“very, very small time,” I called them), Wolf asked me whether, if I thought I was so smart, I had any better ideas. I said I had.

  One morning I took Valentin and Wolf to Ajita’s. There, I pointed out the house which backed on to Ajita’s, and explained how the couple went away on Thursdays and returned on Monday mornings.

  A few days later, on a Friday, when Ajita was at college, her father at work, her brother at school and the aunt at the market, we broke into the house and took a lot of stuff. Oddly, Wolf had insisted on taking a dust-pan and brush with him, in order to sweep up after. Valentin told me that a criminal they knew had informed Wolf that real villains are always careful. The loot was brought out of the back of the house, through Ajita’s garden and into the garage. When Wolf and Valentin were ready and it was starting to get dark, they took off.

  The victims were an old couple. We’d ripped off their life savings, tearing the heart out of their lives, for nothing really. It wasn’t difficult; I was impressed by how easy it was. They didn’t even have window locks. Wolf had been a builder; he knew how to take a window out. I was small, I could get through it and let the others in. I hated being in their house, violating them. Burglars aren’t supposed to think of this, of what the people will think when they get home. To be a criminal, you have to lack imagination.

  I wasn’t sure exactly what swag they obtained from the house. There were several bags full of stuff: clocks, watches, ornaments, pictures, as well as jewellery and silver, I guessed. I suggested to Valentin and Wolf that we still had time to put the gear back if they wanted. I can’t have been a natural gangster if I felt this much guilt about my crimes.

  It was to be a villains’ carnival. They fenced the gear quickly and spent the day shopping for suits and shoes. They took me out to dinner before we went to the club, opposite the Natural History Museum, where Valentin had worked as a bouncer. I had drunk a lot and wanted to crash through all the laws, knowing at last the excessive pleasures of cruelty and corruption.

  In the club a woman (who I considered to be an “older” woman, like a Colette heroine, because she must have been in her late twenties) came to sit beside me, slipping my hand up her skirt. At the end of the night, when I said I had to get the train back to the suburbs, she suggested we go back to the boardinghouse in West Kensington, where Wolf and Valentin would join us later. At the house she went into Wolf’s bedroom, saying she had to “get ready.” When she called me in, she was naked apart from an elbow-length velvet glove, and very willing to suck me off. Before she left, I asked if she wanted to see a movie the next afternoon. She said she couldn’t; she had “a client.”

  I had already told Valentin and Wolf that things had been going wrong with Ajita, that she had been unfaithful to me and wouldn’t tell me who it was. Despite the whore, they liked Ajita and told me I should try to work it out with her. On the other hand, they didn’t like to see me getting hurt.

  Ajita and I still made love when we met, but it was unhappy love, the worst sort, increasing my loneliness. My nerves crackled and popped continuously. I wanted to believe my mind was under my control, that I could persuade it to go in the direction I required, but it became obvious that this was a false belief.

  “Tell me who it is and we can sort it out,” I said once more, but she refused. I asked her what I lacked that made her go elsewhere.

  “Lack?” she said. “But you haven’t failed me. You are everything I want.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I said. “It’s my fault. If it isn’t,” I went on, “tell me what qualities this other man has. The qualities he has that make you desire him.”

  She said, “What makes you think I desire him?”

  “Can’t you put me out of my misery?”

  “Okay,” she said. “I will. Are you ready, sweetie? Sit down and listen.”

  She told me the truth.

  For days after, I walked around with this knowledge in my mind, trying to come to terms with it; because after she spoke, I thought I would—genuinely, and without possibility of return—go insane.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  This is what she told me.

  The summer break was approaching. We had been going out for eight months. The moment we saw the sun, we resumed our habit of lying on the blanket in her garden with our books, the radio, wine, cigarettes. I’d been rubbing and caressing her feet and ankles, and wondered if she was ready for love.

  But I said, “A few weeks ago I visited the factory.”

  “You did?”

  I explained that I had wanted to see the picket lines, the students, the whole hurly-burly. I said I had seen her going into the factory, half-concealed in the back of the car.

  “It’s no secret,” she said, touching my face tenderly. “You never asked me about it.” She started to dress, or at least to cover herself up, as though she wasn’t wearing the appropriate clothes for what she wanted to say. “For ages now you’ve been interrogating me with these questions about my lovers, as you call them.”

  “Interrogating you? What about the truth cure? You have never once denied my suspicions.”

  She said, “I can’t make you stop asking. You have to know everything and I like that about you. So, I will tell you, and it will shut you up, oh yes.”

  “It’s Valentin, isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “Wolf?”

  “He is more likely.”

  “Why?”

  “He is insistent, and less concerned about deceiving you.”

  “He came on to you?”

  “They’re your friends, and I wouldn’t do that. Are you offering me to him?”

  “No!”

  “So how can you think such a thing about me?”

  I was clutching my head. “How can I know what to think unless you help me? My mind is going everywhere! Somehow the truth anchors us, I know that! Is there someone you love more than me? Am I only second best?”

  “Come, rest here, in my arms. Listen carefully. I won’t be able to say this again. The words are too heavy.” She said, “Sometimes, after midnight, my father comes into my room and makes love to me.”

  “He does?”

  “Yes. He does, Jamal.”

  I must have been nodding at her. I was empty, looking into her eyes. It occurred to me that I should know more. “How long has this been happening?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Is it before we met and fell in love, or after?”

  Her eyes dropped. “Before.”

  “It was happening when we met?”

  “It had just started.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “How could I? I was falling for you. Surely it would have put you off. Perhaps the news would have got round, and my father would have been arrested. Or his reputation would have been ruined.”

  “His reputation?”

  “The community means a lot to us here. We can’t go against it without falling out of the circle.”

  I said, “Didn’t you think you would have to tell me?”

  “I don’t know. What did I tell myself? Nothing. Perhaps I thought it would stop and somehow I would forget the whole thing. I have no experience of these matters. But do you not love me now? Am I filthy and disgusting to you?”

  I kissed her on the mouth. “Of course I do love you now. More, even.”

  “Yes?” She said, “Jamal, that was why I needed your protection so much, why I needed to feel loved. And I did re
ceive that from you. My only darling, you have been good to me.”

  “And you to me. You are my life. I want to marry you.”

  “You do?” Her mouth twisted. “Me too. But this isn’t the right time for such talk.”

  I said, “How did all this start with your dad?”

  “After my mother had gone to India, Dad came into my room one night and got into my bed. He kissed me, sexually, you know, with his tongue, and he rubbed himself against my stomach until he came off. Then he went away. He was in a sort of trance, like one of those Shakespeare ghosts, staring eyes, stiff movements, like someone hypnotised or sleepwalking…

  “The next night I was terrified of him doing it again, so I stayed awake, with all the lights on and music playing—”

  “What happened?”

  “He did return. He opened my door. The music was roaring, all the lights were blazing like mad! Oh, Jamal, you should have seen me in two pairs of pants, two pairs of trousers, a jumper, a coat. I was sweating and I must have looked strange. I even had a damn hat on, I don’t know why. He took one look at me and went off. I got into bed with some relief, though I didn’t sleep at all.

  “He didn’t come back for a few days. I thought I’d scared him off. Until it happened again.” She said it was still happening. “If I wear a ton of clothes, he takes them off. That makes the whole thing go on longer. All I do is hold a tee-shirt over my face, so I don’t have to see or smell him.”

  “Ajita, why don’t you lock your door?”

  “There’s no lock.”

  “It’s no trouble to get one fitted. Wolf and I would do it, today.”

  “That’s kind, but I can’t do it,” she said. “Lock out my own father? He’d kill himself.”

  “What could be better?”

  She screamed, “No!”

  “Do you have good reason to think he will do that?”

  “He’s threatened it before. He said that, if things collapsed at the factory, he would have to end it. He couldn’t start his life again. If he failed his family, he couldn’t face the shame.”

  “Ajita, that is blackmail.”

  “I have to look after him.”

  “Only as a daughter. You’re not his wife, for Christ’s sake. He’s a fascist and a bully.”

  “You don’t know him.”

  “Every day he rapes you.”

  “There’s no force. Now please shut up. I can’t bear this.”

  To her dismay, I gathered my things and went away. I needed to take it all in. This wasn’t something I could talk to Mum about; she’d panic. The only person who might have the experience to understand was Miriam. But her moods were unreliable, depending on what she was taking.

  The next day Ajita brought up the subject herself, saying, “You see, I do listen to you.” She couldn’t lock her bedroom door, but she’d put a wedge under it. “I heard him,” she said. “I don’t sleep much now. You say I look exhausted, but going to bed is a horror. Last night I heard his slippers outside as I always do. They sort of slap, you see, and you always know where he is going in the house. Then he was banging on the door.

  “The harder he pushed, the more the wedge stuck. It went on for a long time, this pushing and shoving. Then it stopped. Later I heard snoring. He was asleep in the hall. I went out and covered him up. He was shivering. He could have died out there—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “He wants my warmth.”

  “That’s why he has a wife.”

  “She doesn’t want him. She is even thinking that he is a big fool.”

  I asked, “Your father never mentions what happens at night?”

  “At breakfast he’s always the same, hungover, curt, bad-tempered, in a hurry to leave for the factory, asking us if we’re learning anything at college or whether we’re wasting his money. Wanting to know when we’re going to start earning a living.” She said, “Jamal, you must never, ever, under any circumstances, tell another human being about this. Promise, promise on your mother’s life.”

  “I promise.”

  In my own bed, I couldn’t sleep. I’d lie there going over what Ajita had told me. I would imagine her father in a trancelike state walking along the corridor to her bedroom, opening the door, getting into bed, and forcing himself between her legs. Sometimes I wanted to masturbate, to rid myself of the image, remembering something she’d said: “He’s got such a large penis, it fills me up.”

  “Does he make you come?” I asked her. When we made love she’d say: “I love coming; make me come; I want to come all the time, I’m wet all the time I’m with you.”

  “What a pathetic fool you are,” she said. “But who could blame you, in such circumstances? I’m so sorry, so ashamed and lost.”

  One night, so impossible was it to sleep, I did get up. I found myself getting dressed and leaving the house. I, too, was in a trancelike state, and the world seemed immobile, frozen.

  Heading to Ajita’s place, I climbed over the iron railings and into the park, then legged it along the silent roads, past the cars and dark houses, until I arrived at the familiar fence.

  Now I had no idea what I wanted to do, but stood outside, looking up at the windows, wondering whether I’d see a ghostlike figure moving through the house.

  But what if he was fucking my girlfriend at that moment, about to cry out in his orgasm? By ringing the bell or knocking on the door, I’d interrupt him at his terrible pleasure. The commotion might make him think it was the police, and he’d be startled from his reverie. I stood there with my fist over the door, ready to strike it and run, but I could not bring myself to crash into their lives.

  Perhaps I was distracted by her brother’s light, which was on. I became convinced he was peeping at me from behind the curtain. Terrified that he’d spotted me hanging around his house in the middle of the night, and would report me to his father, who would have me beaten or arrested, I fled.

  Over the next few days I went back three times but was unable to act.

  At college, sick with sleeplessness, I returned to Ajita, in the hope she’d become the person she was before and we’d have the same pleasures. But this stain couldn’t be removed. We’d talk, make love, go out to the same places, but we’d lost our innocence. When we fucked, I wondered if her father’s face might be superimposed onto mine. Was I another male monster banging into this girl? Thinking this, I couldn’t continue, and we’d lie there, side by side, lost.

  There was no going back. But there was, I figured, a way to go forward. I was working on it, unconsciously, but wasn’t yet ready to admit it to myself.

  “Hitler,” I called him. The man who would not stop. The man for whom “everything” was not enough. The man who was turning me into a terrorist. Evil had stomped into my life like a mad mobster. It demanded to be dealt with. We would not be victims. It was either him or me.

  What sort of man would I turn out to be?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I had been introduced to Henry through a writer friend of mine who had translated a version of a Genet play and wanted Henry to stage it. Having seen some of Henry’s productions, I went along for the conversation, in the dark bar of a central London hotel, one of those hushed, wood-panelled places that doesn’t seem like it’s in London at all. While Henry was trying to make up his mind whether the time was right for Genet to “reenter our world” (he didn’t think it was, just yet), he made me his friend.

  I put it like this because it was sudden. When he fell for you, there were no gaps in the friendship. It was passionate; he began to ring several times a day, or come around uninvited when he had something he needed to talk about. He’d ask me out two or three times a week.

  As Josephine liked to point out if I remarked on her indolence, which I often had occasion to do, what people like Henry did most of the time in London was not work but talk about work, as they ate with one another. For them, known as the “chattering classes,” life was a round of breakfasts, brunches, lunches, teas
, suppers, dinners and late suppers in the increasing number of new London restaurants. And very agreeable it was. Henry’s activity delighted me; he had no desire for me to replicate him: we were complements.

  I discovered that his wife, Valerie, who he was separated from but constantly in touch with, was somewhere close to the centre of the numerous overlapping and intermarrying groups, circles, sets, families and dynasties of semi-bohemian West London. They were all constantly enlarging and moving together through a series of country weekends, parties, prize givings, scandals, suicides and holidays. The children, too, at school and rehab together, married amongst themselves; others employed one another, and their children played together.

  Valerie came from a family which had been rich and distinguished for a couple of hundred years. They were art collectors, professors, scholars, newspaper editors. Henry would sometimes say of some full-of-it reprobate, “Oh yes, that’s Valerie’s second cousin by marriage. Better zip it, or you’ll ruin someone’s Christmas.”

  He added, “They’re so everywhere, that family, I’d say they were overextended.” Not only were they wealthy, they had a hoard of social capital. They were friends with, and had married into, numerous Guinnesses, Rothschilds and Freuds. The living room contained a Lucian Freud drawing, a Hockney portrait of Valerie and Henry, a Hirst spot painting, a Bruce McLean, a little thing by Antony Gormley, as well as various old and interesting things that you could look at or pick up as you wondered about their history. The house was like a family museum, or body even, indented, scarred and marked everywhere by the years which each new generation was forced to carry with it.