Something to Tell You

by Hanif Kureishi

  We were almost asleep, or near-catatonic, when we heard a car. There was little traffic in that neighbourhood. I turned and looked.

  “It’s him,” I whispered.

  “Let’s go,” said Wolf. “Calm. Only the business.”

  We slipped down in our seats.

  Once Ajita’s father was there, everything began to happen quickly. The garage doors opened and he drove in. Now he was unable to see us. We crept out of our car and entered the garage by the side door he would exit from, a few feet from the kitchen.

  We were in. I shut the door behind us. Valentin had brought a torch, which he switched on and rested on a bench. There was enough light for us to see our victim. We were standing around him as he got out of his car.

  With his open hand, Wolf slapped the father twice on the side of his head, just to let him know we were there. Valentin stepped forward and punched him in the stomach, surprisingly hard.

  Meanwhile I whispered fiercely, “Leave her alone, your daughter, never touch her again, she’s your child, you do not have sex with her, do you understand? We will cut your balls off.”

  He tried to nod as he fought for breath. He was terrified, and his terror was so great it seemed to make him unaware of what I was saying or what we were doing there.

  He did this strange thing. Valentin had knocked him against the car, where he was struggling with something. For a moment, I don’t know why, I thought it might be a gun. Then I grasped that he had taken off his watch, which he gave to me with trembling hands. I slipped it into my pocket.

  When I grabbed his lapels in order to elaborate my diatribe at closer quarters, he tried to give me his wallet.

  “What do you want of me?” he repeated. “I know you! I’ve seen you before! What’s your name? What are you doing here? Help! Come, police!”

  I couldn’t take the wallet because by then I was determined he would stop yelling and hear me properly—I was pulling one of Mother’s kitchen knives out of my jacket. It was intended to scare him into sense. It did scare him.

  When he saw it, he started to hyperventilate, gasping so much he couldn’t get any more words out. His hand was clutching my wrist; I had to prise his fingers from me.

  He collapsed, shaking and clutching his arm and chest, making dreadful noises, begging for help as he fell to his knees, before toppling over onto his side.

  I stepped back. I was ready to kick him in the head when Valentin said “Enough!” and pulled me away.

  We picked up the torch and got out.

  Before I shut the door, I could hear the father choking and gurgling. Or perhaps I imagined that. I’m sure Wolf said, “It’s done,” and shook my hand. “That dirty bastard has taken it.”

  “He learned his lesson,” Valentin said.

  Wolf thumped one black leather glove into the other. “We did him. The business.”

  We drove away, none of us looking at the others. Not a word said. We were not exhilarated or high, but exhausted and frightened. At least the job was done. “Only the business.”

  Wolf and Valentin left for London, dropping me off on the way. I walked for a long time, often in circles and back on myself, stopping at various pubs for a half pint in each. I couldn’t move normally; the different parts of my body seemed to have become disconnected.

  At home, I washed the knife in the bathroom sink—there was no good reason for this—dried it, put it back in the drawer and turned to look at Mother, who had come into the small kitchen. Tonight I was glad to see her.

  As always in the evening she was wearing, under her dressing gown, a pink bri-nylon nightie, which crackled with static when she got up from watching TV. I didn’t understand it then, how she could sit there, sober, her eyes bright, hour after hour, year after year, utterly absorbed by this passion for the flickering figures in front of her.

  Before the nine o’clock news, she liked to eat cheese and pickle on cream crackers. I would, at least three evenings a week, sit in the house with her, listening to music, reading, but ultimately, just keeping her company in her gloom.

  Tonight, I became convinced she was looking at me with more attention than usual. I must have seemed wary; perhaps I blushed or my eyes flared.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  “Coming to sit with you,” I said. “What’s on telly? Can I bring you a cup of tea?”

  However unnatural this sounded, I didn’t believe that Mum suspected I’d returned home after beating my girlfriend’s father to the ground. Yet, unsurprisingly, my body kept reminding me something was awry. When I brought Mum the tea, I had to hold on to the cup, saucer and spoon with both hands, for fear of them vibrating.

  The knife remained with Mum, of course. She kept it for years; perhaps she still has it.

  Sitting there watching the adverts, I could feel the watch in my jeans pocket all that evening. Later, I hid it in my bedroom. After a few months, I began to take it out and look at it, thinking over what had happened. I began to wear it in the house occasionally, telling Mum I’d liked the look of it and had swapped it for some records. I wore it outside a few times. I changed the strap. I took it with me to my new digs, hating it and needing it at the same time.

  The morning after the attack I didn’t know what to do. I had been walking about the house since five. At nine I went into the garden. At last I thought I’d go to college and see if Valentin was there.

  I was leaving the house; the phone rang; I ran to pick it up.

  “Dad is dead,” Ajita said. “I’m at the hospital.”

  “Who killed him?” I said.

  “The strikers. They came to the house when we were away and scared him to death. His heart was weak already, he was having tests.”

  There was a pause. I think I was expecting some kind of pleasure, or relief, in her voice. Hadn’t I done her a favour?

  “He looked,” she said, “when Mustaq and I found him, not at all peaceful, as they say the dead do. But anguished, contorted, frightened, with bruises on his head and blood coming out of his nose. Why would anyone do that to a man?”

  “Oh God,” I said.

  “I’m going to wail now.” She was already sobbing. “It’ll be horrible, you don’t want to hear it. I’ll ring you again,” she said, putting the phone down.

  I rang the boardinghouse and told Wolf and Valentin that the man was dead. I said nothing else, not wanting to give anything away on the phone. I would be in touch later.

  The next time Ajita called, that evening, it was to say her father had been murdered by people from the trade union who had discovered his address and attacked him. She told me two people had been arrested. She called them “racists,” adding, “Who else would do such a thing?”

  “Burglars?”

  “But nothing was stolen. His wallet was there on the floor, undisturbed.”

  I had no way of knowing whether Wolf and Valentin had been arrested. I rang their place several times, but there was either no reply or the landlady said they were out. When I called round, she said they’d left. “Good riddance too. They owe me money.”

  That night I received a reverse-charges call from a phone box on “the coast.” Wolf, typically talking in a whisper, said they’d packed their things, left the boardinghouse, got into the old Porsche they’d bought with the money from the robbery and were heading for the South of France. It was a good idea, Wolf said, for them to “lie low” for a while. They had been looking for an excuse to get away.

  Their careers had hardly been prospering. So they ran and were not pursued, except by their consciences, if they had any. But from my point of view, they had disappeared for good.

  “I cannot believe my papa is not coming back,” Ajita said when she called the next day.

  “At least you’ll be able to sleep at night now.”

  “What are you meaning?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “But I can’t close my eyes at all! The racists are chasing behind us now, Jamal. We are all in great
danger here.”

  This was not only paranoia. We didn’t know, in those days, which way the “race question,” as it was called, would go. My father had often said “the persecution” might begin any day. When it did, he’d come and get us. “Thanks, Dad,” I said.

  “Where else can we possibly live?” I asked Ajita. “Can’t I come with you?”

  “I’m being looked after by my uncle. Darling, I will be in touch.”

  The next thing I heard from Ajita, ringing from the airport, was that she, Mustaq and the uncle, accompanied by the aunt who lived in the house, were taking their father’s body to India for burial. The house would be put up for sale.

  “Goodbye,” she said. Before I could ask her when she’d be back, she added, “Wait for me, and never forget that I will love you forever,” and put the phone down.

  I followed the case in the news, reading all the papers in the college library. Eventually, the charges against the so-called murderers were dropped. There was much speculative talk of a racist attack by white thugs, and the Left condemned the police for not taking racist attacks seriously. But there were no clues. Apart from the watch, we took nothing with us. There were no fingerprints or blood.

  The factory was closed down; the pickets went away. I was amazed by the inability of the police to find me. I guess I’d have confessed pretty easily, but there was no evidence to connect me with the dead man.

  The upshot of this nifty piece of criminality was that I never saw Ajita again. She had gone to India, where I didn’t know where to find her. I waited, but she didn’t contact me, though I told Mum that if she rang she was to take her number.

  Ajita was gone; I hadn’t realised she was saying goodbye for good. There was only silence, and I had lost my three closest friends.

  I was in shock for another reason: I didn’t kill the father with my bare hands, but without my assistance he’d be walking around, even now perhaps.

  I had done for him, and called myself “murderer.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The plane must have touched down around three in the morning.

  I had to slap and shake Miriam awake. She’d been living in a squat in Brixton and was eager to get away. The area had recently been torn apart by antipolice riots. Miriam had been up for a week throwing bricks and helping out at the law centre. The contemporary graffiti advised: HELP THE POLICE—BEAT YOURSELF UP.

  Inevitably, Miriam had taken something to calm her nerves on the flight, cough syrup, I think, one of her favourites, which had poleaxed her. I helped her throw her stuff into her various hippy bags and shoved her out into the Third World. Lucky them.

  It was still dark but warming up. In the chaos outside the airport, scores of raggedy beggars pressed menacingly at us; the women fell at, and kissed, Miriam’s red Dr. Martens.

  Wanting to escape, we got into the first car that offered a ride. I was nervous, not knowing how we’d find our way around this place, but Miriam closed her eyes again, refusing to take responsibility for anything. I’d have dumped her if it wouldn’t have caused more problems than it solved.

  We couldn’t have been in Pakistan, the land of our forefathers, for more than an hour when the taxi driver pulled a gun on us. He and his companion, who looked about fourteen, wrapped in a grim blanket against the night cold, had been friendly until then, saying, as we took off from the airport to Papa’s place with Bollywood music rattling the car windows, “Good cassette? Good seat, comfortable, eh? You try some paan? You want cushion?”

  “Groovy,” murmured Miriam, shutting her eyes. “I think I’m already on a cushion.”

  This was the early 80s; I had graduated, Lennon had been murdered, and the revolution had come at last: Margaret Thatcher was its figurehead. Miriam and I were in an ancient Morris Minor with beads and bells strung across it. She must have thought we were approaching some sort of head idyll and would soon run into Mia Farrow, Donovan and George Harrison meditating in front of a murmuring Indian.

  The driver had taken a sharp left off the road, through some trees and across a lot of dirt, where we came to a standstill. He dragged us out of the car and told us to follow him. We did. He was waving a gun at our faces. It was not Dad’s house; it was the end. A sudden, violent death early in the morning for me—on day one in the fatherland. A death not unlike the one I had caused not long ago. That would be justice, wouldn’t it? An honest and almost instant karma? I wondered whether we’d be in the newspapers back home, and if Mum would give them photographs of us.

  Not that Miriam and I were alone. I could see people in the vicinity, living in tents and shacks, some of them squatting to watch us, others, skinny children and adults, just standing there. It looked like some kind of permanent pop festival: rotting, ripped canvas and busted corrugated metal, fires, dogs, kids running about, the heat and light beginning to come up. No one was going to help us.

  We considered the shooter. Oh, did we take it in! Sister and I were shouting, indeed jumping up and down and wildly yelling like crazies, which made the robber confused. He appeared to get the message that we didn’t have any money. Then Miriam, who was accustomed to intense situations, had the stunning idea of giving him the corned beef.

  She said, “It’s not sacred to them, is it?”

  “Corned beef? I don’t think so.”

  She became very enthusiastic about it; she seemed to believe they should want corned beef, perhaps she thought they’d had a famine recently. They did indeed want corned beef. The robber grabbed the heavy bag and kept it without looking inside. Then the other man drove us back to the road and to Papa’s place. Even robberies by taxi drivers are eccentric in Karachi.

  “Papa won’t be getting a brand-new bag then,” I said as we hit the main road. Miriam groaned as we swerved past donkey carts, BMWs, camels, a tank with Chinese markings, and crazy-coloured buses with people hanging from the roofs like beads from a curtain.

  Luckily, along with the reggae records Dad had requested, I’d put a couple of cans of corned beef in my own bag. Papa wasn’t disappointed; it had been his request. Although, apparently, he had told Miriam that corned beef was the thing he missed most about Britain, I can’t believe he’d have wanted a suitcase full of it. He was partial to the stuff, though, sitting at his typewriter eating it from the can and helping it down with vodka obtained from a police friend. “It could be worse,” he’d say. “The only other thing to eat is curried goat brain.”

  Mother had wanted us to come here. She was sick of worrying about Miriam when she wasn’t at home, and arguing with her when she went there to crash. Mother was also, at times, bitterly angry with Father. She had found us hell to cope with, and she had no support. It would benefit all of us to spend time with him, getting to know how he lived and how he really felt about things. Even Miriam agreed.

  Long before we got to Pakistan, like a lot of other “ethnics,” she’d been getting into the roots thing. She was a Pakistani, a minority in Britain, but there was this other place where she had a deep connection, which was spiritual, even Sufi. To prepare for the trip, she’d joined a group of whirling dervishes in Notting Hill. When she demonstrated the “whirling” to me, at Heathrow, it was pretty gentle, a tea-dance version. Still, we’d see just how spiritual the place was. So far we’d had a gun at our heads.

  Soon Papa’s servant was making us tea and toast. Papa, not only as thin but as fragile as a Giacometti, yet dignified in his white salwar kameez and sandals, informed us we would not be staying with him but with our uncle, his older brother Yasir. To be honest, it was a relief.

  “What the fuck is this, a squat?” Miriam said when we were alone.

  It turned out that Father, an aristocrat to those he left behind, was living in a crumbling flat, the walls peeling, the wires exposed, the busted furniture seeming to have been distributed at random, as though a place would be found for it later. Dust blew in through the windows, settling amongst the ragged piles of newspaper rustling on the floor and the packets of unu
sed white paper already curling in the heat.

  Later that morning, saying he had to write his column, Papa got his servant to drive us to Yasir’s. It was a broad one-storey house that looked like a mansion in movies set in Beverly Hills, an empty swimming pool full of leaves at the front and rats rushing through them.

  Miriam was annoyed we weren’t staying with Dad, but I went along with the adventure. For a suburban kid with not very much, I like my luxuries. And luxuries there were at Yasir’s, exactly how I liked them.

  It was a house of doe-eyed beauties. There were at least four. “The Raj Quartet,” I called them. I was still mourning Ajita, of course, as well as assuming we could get back together when she eventually returned to London. I had never given up on her. When the time was right, I would tell her what had happened to her father, and she would be shocked, but she’d forgive me, seeing that it had to be done. We would be closer than before; we would marry and have children.

  Meanwhile, it occurred to me that this quartet of dark-skinned, long-haired women staring at us from a doorway, Uncle Yasir’s daughters, might help me bear my pain.

  I was looking at the girls, confronting the anguish of choice, not unlike a cat being offered a box of captive mice, when there was a commotion. Apparently there was a rabid dog on the roof. We rushed out to see it being chased by servants with long sticks. The servants got a few good cracks in, and the dog lay injured in the road outside, making god-awful noises. When we went out later, it was dead. “You like our country?” said the house guard.

  Miriam was told that she not only had to share a room with two of her cousins but with a servant too, a couple of children and our grandmother, who was, apparently, a princess. This old woman spoke little English and washed her hands and clothes continuously; the rest of the time she spent either praying or studying the Koran.