Something to Tell You

by Hanif Kureishi

  The fathers didn’t want to embarrass themselves by appearing to have made an effort, but the kids came dressed for the match even though the goal at one end was two trees and, at the other, bags and discarded tops. The pitch was muddy and broken, with a pool of water to one side, into which numerous children plunged, kicking out and usually falling over.

  Rafi trotted across this in the full Christmas-present Manchester United kit, sweatbands on each wrist as well as a captain’s armband, shin pads and immaculate Nike Total 90s in silver. Occasionally, he sported other shirts, those of Juventus or Barcelona, which I had picked up for him when attending conferences in Europe, but apart from the unrepeated “Arsenal incident,” he would not wear the shirt of another British club. His hair was glued up like a stiff brush, and he wouldn’t head the ball for fear of mussing it. If he did score—which he often did, being quick, persistent and surprisingly strong—we relived it repeatedly, acting it out in the kitchen.

  It’s well known that you have to be wary when telling people you support the Red Devils. If you can’t give a convincing reason, you risk being accused of merely following a successful and fashionable club. My reasons were impeccable, and nicely obscure. I’d liked football as a boy and played most days in the park, but lost interest as a teenager when I realised girls preferred music to football.

  I became interested again only when Eric Cantona, a Frenchman then playing for Leeds, joined Manchester United in 1992, “transforming the fortunes of the club,” as they say on the sports pages. Man United began to win cups again. Cantona was the only footballer I’d heard of who’d had psychoanalysis; not only that, it was a Lacanian analysis. When he was playing for Nîmes and was then transferred to Leeds, he suffered much anxiety at leaving his analyst. He said, “When I am in analysis, it is like an oil change. I am in my best form, I play my best. Yes, I must start again. It is no longer a curiosity but a necessity. As a matter of fact, everyone should have the courage to have done one. Everyone should at the very least read Freud and Groddeck.”

  A psychoanalysed midfielder who once inflicted, during a match, a vicious two-footed kung fu kick on an abusive Crystal Palace supporter, as well as reading the crazy Groddeck—the “wild” analyst who Freud admired, and one of the first to investigate psychosomatic medicine—was too much to resist. I was Man United for life, and so would be my flesh and blood.

  I had wondered whether I might have asked Ajita to join us in the park; she and I had been chatting on the phone every day, getting to know one another again. But she had invited Rafi and me to the country, where she had returned with Mustaq “to relax,” after only a brief visit to his house in Soho. I had considered returning to Mustaq’s country place; although I was nervous of the relationship with Ajita going too fast, I did have plenty to say to her. But Rafi had refused, not wanting to spend the weekend with “only lame grown-ups,” even if one of them was a rock star.

  All the fathers were enthusiastic about the Sunday-morning game, and competitive too. The other families socialised with each other, the kids in and out of each other’s houses. Rafi and I didn’t do that, but when I ran into any of the other fathers, I was pleased to see them. It was hard to dislike anyone you played football with, though all the boys would get upset or even feel rejected if no one passed to them. Like me, Rafi was a bad loser. As a younger boy he was the sort to pick up his ball and walk off if a goal was scored against him.

  I was looking forward to getting back to my place, where I would sigh and sink down like an exhausted dog. Football was the only physical exercise I got or wanted; by the end, I felt as though I’d been rolled down the side of a hill in a barrel. Still, I considered a goal I’d headed from a corner taken by Rafi to be the second greatest moment of my life. (The first was his birth, of course.) I had lumbered in from outside the box, catching the ball on the forehead and briefly blinding myself. Light returned, with cheering. The ball had flown between the two trees, actors were ruffling my hair and Rafi had climbed onto my back.

  After the match, the adults and kids sat on benches outside the tea-house, eating crisps and drinking hot chocolate. Going into the public toilet, I discovered three semi-undressed Polish men having a stand-up wash. One perched on one leg with his foot out while another man soaped it. Scattered around, there were clothes and bags. Lots of Poles slept rough in the area; if they could survive for three years, they’d become entitled to state benefits. As I left, two policemen were rushing towards the toilets.

  Outside, four pretty girls—two of them from Rafi’s school—had appeared and gathered around the boy. Dressed in boots, miniskirts and numerous bits of bright bling, they stood close to one another, chattering about mobile phones. They were dressed a little extravagantly for the park, but one of them had rung Josephine earlier, who’d told them where Rafi was. He was a favourite among the girls at school. They’d come to see him play football.

  “Did you see my goal?” he said.

  He wasn’t looking at them but was aware, from the little amused smile on his face—which reminded me of my father—that they were looking at him. As they talked about his goal, he shook his head, as if at the daftness of all they had to say.

  His pose was cool, his mussed hair looked good. His jewellery and clothes were always carefully chosen in H&M. The previous weekend we’d gone to the sales, where I’d been looking for clothes for myself, and returned with bags full of boy gear. He looked better than me in every way, more hip and stylish, and more handsome. That was how it had to be. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help feel a pang of both bitterness and regret. Sometimes, all you wanted was to be fancied. Why had I always been less confident and far more anxious than he appeared to be? I couldn’t resist envying him the years of pleasure with women he had ahead of him.

  The girls wanted to leave; they were nervous, convinced a man was watching them through the trees. They arranged to meet up later with Rafi at the shopping centre, their favourite place, where they’d help him choose new trainers.

  “I know how to be cool,” he said to me on the way home. “And I don’t even wear designer, apart from the D and G belt, unless I’m really in the mood.”

  I rang the bell of Josephine’s place, the house I’d lived in but never much liked. It was on three floors, with two rooms on each and a decent-size garden. At the back was the shed where Rafi played his drum kit and guitars, and where he held sleepovers. Regarding the place, I remembered one of my favourite jokes, which went: Why marry? Why not just find a woman you hate and give her your house?

  “What are you giggling at, fat-old-man-now-out-of-breath?” Rafi asked.

  “I can’t tell you. Didn’t I play well today?”

  “You should be with the disabled.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re losing your hair, too. When you bend over, I can see your skull. It’s pretty horrible, bringing deep shame on our family.”

  Today, as we’d left the park, he’d asked how much longer I thought he and I would be able to play football together, in the same team. The question surprised me: this sense of the future, of transience, seemed unusual in kids his age.

  “You see, I’m twelve and have to start playing more seriously,” he told me. “I want to join a proper team. You can drive me there, but you’ll only be able to watch.” He adopted an American accent: “Punk, will you be sorry for what you’ve done, and will you live to regret it?”

  As he waited on the doorstep in his football socks, banging his muddy boots against the wall, eager to tell his mother about the volley and knockin he’d scored, I decided to go into the house, if she didn’t stop me, to see whether anything peculiar was happening with her.

  Occasionally I wondered whether I might start liking her again, but it wasn’t an idea I was enthusiastic about. The thought that occurred to me most regularly was that, if it weren’t for Rafi, we wouldn’t need to see one another. Of course I hated myself for wishing the boy away, as I wondered who I’d be and what other mistakes I’
d have made if he hadn’t been born.

  Josephine opened the door, and I stepped into the hall and followed her down the stairs, into the basement. She turned to look at me but said nothing.

  Josephine and I had been arguing on the phone over Rafi’s education, and I have to admit I’d become a little agitated. He’d failed the entrance exams to two schools. These were highly academic places, and as Josephine said, the children there looked anaemic and stressed. I could only agree with her that these schools were expensive machines for turning out smart-white-boy clone drones. All the same, I had cursed the kid. Josephine pointed out that I hadn’t gone to such a place myself and refused to physically enter such schools. She also claimed I was being snobbish. I knew many parents whose kids had gone to those schools and couldn’t believe my own son hadn’t sauntered effortlessly through the gates. Apparently my competitiveness was making the boy rage and fume at home. He’d pulled his mother’s hair and argued about everything.

  Josephine was right to emphasise that this was about his future rather than my own self-esteem, adding that I seemed to have turned into my father, who hadn’t been around and yet still expected us to be brilliant and successful. For my part, I had decided to stop my reproaches after asking Rafi rather aggressively, “So, what are you the best at in your class?” He’d thought about this a while before replying, “I’m the best looking.”

  As a child, he’d liked his food separated on his plate. The beans couldn’t touch the potatoes, the potatoes couldn’t touch the fish fingers. Now I saw how pleased he was to see his mother and me in the same room, as he watched us closely, eager to see what was going on—investigating a marriage.

  I sat at the dining-room table; Josephine brought me some tea. When she went to sit down, I noticed that Rafi had pulled her chair over, so that we were close together. He was making childish noises and gestures, as though pretending to be a baby for our benefit, to remind us that we were a family.

  Josephine was a woman who said little; she had no small talk nor much big talk. As I was comfortable with silence, we might as well have been statues.

  Her father the abuser: drunk, crazy, run over trying to cross a motorway, some poor fucker carrying the memory of this madman rearing up in front of him. And the daughter, petrified for life, burning with anxiety, as though a car were coming at her forever.

  Left with the exhibitionist mother, what Josephine liked—and hated in herself—was to be anonymous and silent, as though she’d never been able to grow out of the idea that the well-behaved are the most rewarded. Many of my friends forgot her name. Both of her therapists did that, and she’d angrily left therapy almost as soon as she’d started. It was inevitable that someone like Miriam, who Josephine liked to call an “attention seeker,” would make her annoyed. This, I liked to point out, was how she recognised how competitive the world was, and that, by making yourself more attractive, or noisy, you might be able to arouse more curiosity in others.

  I was looking at her, the silence standing in for all that we might say. As ever, her fingers were not silent, but they drummed on the table, almost frantically, as though there was something inside herself she was trying to make dance.

  Meanwhile, a mob of enquiring voices babbled in my head. Perhaps we had both hoped, as it ended, for some explanation, for a day when the knot of every misunderstanding would be combed out, strand by strand.

  “Why don’t you hold hands?” Rafi said, grinning.

  “I don’t want to drop my tea,” I said.

  We were both anxious about him growing up. Me, because I wished I’d had more children and lived with them—I liked it when he brought his friends to my flat—and her because she feared his growing independence and sexuality, which she’d encouraged in him even as it programmed him to move away from us.

  I asked her, “Been going out? Seen anyone?”

  If there was a pause before she answered, I knew she had taken a tranquilliser. Usually she took them in the evening with wine, reading the label aloud: “Do not operate heavy machinery,” “Keep away from children.” “That’s good advice,” I’d say. Anything with -pam on the end, as in temazepam, lorazepam or diazepam, she liked. Polythene Pam, I called her. But as she didn’t like to be dependent on anything or anyone, she had begun to ration herself.

  “Not really,” she said eventually. “I’m looking after Rafi, aren’t I? You went to Ajita’s brother’s place. Rafi showed me George’s autograph.”

  “Yes, with Henry and Miriam.”

  “They’re together, are they? Good of you to help them.”

  I said, “If you need a babysitter in the evenings, I can always come over here and work. It would be a pleasure to see Rafi—and to see you, however briefly.”

  “Yes? Thank you,” she said. “That’s kind.”

  It wasn’t long before I stood up.

  “Let me make you another cup of tea,” said Rafi.

  “That would be a first,” I said, kissing his head. “But I have to go.”

  As I was leaving, he slipped a CD into my hand. “For you, Dad.” It was one he’d burned for me, of some of his current favourites, Sean Paul, Nelly, Lil Jon. What I had once done for him, he was now doing for me.

  The door closed behind me like a gunshot. Unconsciousness on a Sunday afternoon was one of the few pleasures of middle age. When I began to see my first patients, I’d learned to sleep between appointments. I could lie on my back on the floor and sleep immediately, sometimes for twenty minutes, or even for ten.

  But today I felt so moved and desperate after leaving Rafi and Josephine—him waving at me from the window, after holding me and saying, “Daddy, don’t die today. If you lived here you’d be safe”—that I went home, showered and made a phone call.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  No other country has anything quite like a London basement. You turn sharply off the street and clamber down slippery and narrow steps into an echoey chamber, go through a door and find yourself separate from the clamour, underneath the city, where everything is cooler. It is like crossing a border from a maelstrom into an easy country.

  I was in a dark, narrow hallway with several doors off it. I said to Madame Jenny, who had let me in, “I had a feeling that the Goddess might need help with her homework.”

  “She does, dear, she does.” She took my coat. “How are you, Doctor? We haven’t seen you for a while. We even got you a Christmas card. Do you still want it?”

  “I’d be delighted.”

  The turbulent turn of the century—from the nineteenth to the twentieth—had been giving the Goddess some difficulty. In my view she spent too long on her essays and in the end got muddled and upset. Madame Jenny was proud of all her girls and was chuffed when I called them “intellectuals.” “Yes,” she said, “the girls in other places are not so bright as ours.”

  “Nor as sexy.”

  As I walked through the hallway, Madame Jenny said, “She’s expecting you.” I had phoned earlier, of course; like me, they only worked by appointment. “Otherwise it’s a madhouse rather than a whorehouse.”

  “Here she is, sir,” said Madame Jenny, leading me into the room.

  It was fittingly dim, the walls painted maroon. I held the Goddess for a moment, kissing her blond ringlets and stroking her face.

  I paid her and said, “I’ve been looking forward to seeing you, Goddess.”

  “Where have you been? I hope you haven’t been seeing any other tarts.”

  “I wouldn’t even dream of it.”

  “How do you want me?” she asked, thrusting out a hip and showing me the end of her tongue.

  I contemplated the wall, which was covered in costumes on hangers; on the other wall were the whips. I asked her to dress as an air hostess. My father, of course, had spent a lot of time on planes, which seemed exotic to me then. Once he gave me a BOAC shoulder bag.

  She asked, “Which airline?”

  “British Airways, I think.”

  “Patriotic as ever.
”

  She went off with the costume. Sex was niche marketing at its best. At least they didn’t stick the prices on the wall, as they did in some establishments, on brightly coloured pieces of paper, charging separately for “hand,” “oral,” “position,” “69” and my favourite, “complete.” I recalled that apparently, in the old days, brothels liked to feature a one-legged woman. I did have, a while ago, a patient who masturbated over his mother’s prosthetic leg. But I wasn’t here to think about work.

  I removed my Converse All Stars, my trousers and my shorts. It was a little cold to take off my shirt. While I waited, hoping the Viagra and the painkillers were kicking in, I almost fell asleep, so contented did I feel, here where no one could reach me. I couldn’t think of a better way to squander time and money.

  She returned, telling me that for her M.A. she was “doing” decadence and apocalypse, always a turn-of-the-century preoccupation, along with calls for a “return to the family.” Unfortunately, this millennium, our fears had turned out to be realities. It had been worse than we imagined.

  Not that I could take in everything she said, as she was trussing my balls with a stocking, the house speciality—“tighter! tighter!”—and securing a vibrator to my dick with another one. No one could ever say she wasn’t good at what she did. She knew that, at my age, I needed all the stimulation I could get. Then she secured me to the bed with handcuffs. In the corner of the room was a cross to which you could also be tied, but I preferred the bed. I was keen to try most perversions, provided you could sit down for them.

  She sat on me, flinging her hair across my face. She showed me her breasts, of which she was proud. They were “au naturel,” as she put it, which was unusual here and had become, in contemporary sexual life, something of a boon. “Enjoy them,” she said. “They’re yours.” She stood on the bed above me, bending forward, showing me her legs and butt, one of my favourite outlooks, I had to admit, along with the sight of the Thames from Hammersmith Bridge.