Something to Tell You

by Hanif Kureishi

  He named the street, and I knew it, though not well. That part of Kent was close to the city and not far from the coast, and had plenty of the sort of houses favoured by criminals and pop stars. The street he mentioned was in the area where I’d grown up. That puzzled me. Why would he go there? Then it occurred to me that the street was closer to Ajita’s than to my old house. If it was one of Mustaq’s men, why would he sleep in a car there?

  I asked, “What should we do?”

  “I can’t bring him in and ask him questions meself,” Busy said. “I’d have to get geezers. That would cost yer.”

  “I don’t want men,” I said. “I can’t afford it and I can’t get involved in anything lunatic.”

  He could only laugh at my naivety. “You might already be up to the throat in the lunatic, Jamal. I reckon he’ll make his moves in the next twenty-four hours. He can’t hang around much longer. He’s perceived what he wants to perceive.”

  There was a silence, then I said, “It sounds as though I’ll have to start taking this seriously. What we need is a photo.”

  “I can do that.”

  Bushy borrowed my Polaroid camera and later dropped by with the picture he’d taken. It was difficult to make out who it was, as Bushy was no Richard Avedon. Someone was asleep in a car. I could see a shoulder and an ear, but had no notion who they might belong to.

  “I can’t wait anymore,” I said to Bushy on the phone. “I’m going to approach this guy. If I know him and he’s not scary, I’ll take him into the flat and try to talk to him. If I raise the blind, you come in.”

  “Jesus no, there’s no way I’d advise that!”

  “Don’t worry.”

  Bushy said, “You don’t know what goes on half the time.”

  “I don’t?”

  “You think you can X-ray people with your eyes, but you can’t always.” He went on: “When I see you on the street, I always think: there goes the student.”

  “Student?”

  “With your worn jacket and uptight look, and always carryin’ books, head down, as if you don’t want to talk to no one…”

  I put the phone down, a worried man with a worried mind, and went out of the house and approached the car.

  The man was asleep, or at least his eyes were closed. I was about to knock on the window when he opened his eyes. He seemed to surge into life and wound down the window.

  “Ah, Jamal! At last! Did you know it was me?”

  “Hello, Wolf. My eyes are open,” I said, looking up the street to where Bushy’s car was parked.

  “Can I come in?”

  I said, “Let’s go to a café.”

  “We have so much to talk about!”

  “Why have you been hanging around out here?”

  “I was afraid, nervous,” he said. “It’s been so long. But you do remember me?”

  He was out of the car, embracing, kissing me and looking me over, as though wanting to see what remained after so many years.

  He said, “I thought this moment would never come. Hallo, and hallo again, my dear, my most missed, friend. What an important moment this is—for both of us! The moment I’ve been waiting years for!”

  I was looking at him too and said, “Perhaps like me you look the same, apart from your hair. My son says I get more and more hairy, except on my head, where it counts.”

  “Your son?” he said. “I’m so glad for you. Is he here?”

  “I hope he’s at school.”

  “I’ve got to hear all about him. Will you tell me everything? Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I am. Come right in.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “This is beautiful. A beautiful moment.” He was looking up at my building. “London is so great. It feels like I’ve come home. This is where I belong—here with you again, my dear friend! You know, I’ve got the feeling it’s going to be like the old days again!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Wolf refused a beer, and while I waited for the kettle to boil, he walked around taking everything in, “with the concentration of a bailiff” I might have said.

  “You’ve done well,” he said. Suddenly he had become serious. “Since that night.”

  “Which night, Wolf?”

  “You’ve forgotten? I don’t believe you have. But people can put these little things aside if they are busy.” I was staring at him. He said, “The suburbs. We were in the Indian’s garage with Val.”

  “Right.”

  “A girl’s father.” His fist smashed into the palm of his other hand. “Pow! We got him! He took it—right?—and went down begging and crying.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Do you think about it?”

  “Not often now, no.”

  “But you did once?”

  “Yes,” I said. “A lot.”

  “What conclusion did you come to?”

  “That it would be pointless to torment myself over it.”

  “That’s it? That is all you think about it?”

  “There was no possible resolution. I quit the useless questions. They were a vice costing me time and money.”

  He said, “As a young man, you were intelligent and sure of yourself. Now you’re a doctor.”

  I said, “Only a talking one, I’m afraid.”

  “I could do with some of that talking.”

  “Why’s that?”

  He hung his head like an ashamed child. “Jamal, I have come to you for a reason, and not only because of the depth of our friendship. Things have not gone well for me.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “It was my first murder. It started me off. Since then I’ve been murdering others.”

  “You liked it that much?”

  He looked up at me and shook his head. His father had been a German cop, his mother was English. Brought up in Munich, he’d been living in London for five years when I met him, speaking English without an accent.

  Now, a man almost worn out, he had the head of a middle-class respectable man but with a powerful, desperate, bitter aspect which I recognised from juvenile thieves I’d seen: those who were looking to take that which no one would give them. As he had the assassin’s sunken eyes and the direct but confused look of a psychotic, I thought I should decide whether he would become violent. But Wolf had a cringing side which suggested he’d rather get something from me than hurt me.

  Maria, who had come by to drop off the shopping, looked into the room. “Maria, this is an old friend from my student days.” She nodded at him. She knew that, if he were a patient, I’d have shut the door.

  “Who’s that?” he asked. “What is she doing?”

  “She looks after me and the patients,” I said. “She shops and washes too.”

  “You’re professional,” he said. “Has she gone now?”

  “I don’t know. But carry on, please.”

  “She’s made me nervous. Is she watching us? Where did she get those eyes from?”

  “Her mother.”

  I sat down opposite him. It was a while before he began again. “Okay,” he said at last.

  He told me he had been living with a rich widow for years, a woman older than him who had become senile. A month ago her relatives had had strong-arm guys remove him when he attempted to get his name on her properties, including small hotels, which she owned and he’d maintained, even rebuilding some of them. The family considered him a sponger, though he’d looked after her better than they had, doing every-thing for her. Since then he’d been living in a room in Berlin and was in a bad way.

  “You must be furious.”

  He said, “I’m a man who’s been robbed and left with nothing.”

  “How did that come to be? You were always intelligent and resourceful. I liked your initiative.”

  There was no doubt I’d long been fascinated by certain sorts of psychotics. I liked their focus and certainty, their lack of symptoms, the way they shrugged off the neurotic fears and terrors which ma
de life so difficult for the rest of us. Psychotics appeared unworried; they could take a lot of criticism and made good politicians, leaders, generals. Unfortunately, their weakness was paranoia, which could become very severe.

  And with someone like Wolf, there was conversation; there was even fine intelligence. But, after a short time, about half an hour, you’d begin to feel restless, irritable, registering the fact that your emotional world is not really present to the other person. Not only that, they seem to be bearing down on you with demands you cannot answer. You begin to feel suffocated, assaulted even. You might want to run away.

  Wolf told me that after “the garage incident,” he and Val had worked on boats in the South of France. Val had also worked in casinos. They had found that everyone there was rich, or wanted to be; it was expensive. The place was awash with criminals full of large ideas.

  “We needed a big coup. Then we put all our money together. I went to Syria. I’m driving the car, it’s full of hash—the pure stuff—which I’m going to smuggle into Europe in tins of pineapple—I know how to do that—when I’m arrested. When they say they think I’m an Israeli spy, I know I’m fucked, and I am.”

  “Why would they think you were a spy?”

  “I had cameras and a citizens band radio. Jamal, I can tell you, three years in a Syrian jail doesn’t make anyone feel attractive.”

  Sometimes he was kept in a hole in the ground, as well as in a small box. He was beaten and given electric shocks. He began to believe in God. He thought about grass and birds. He had a heart attack, murdered a Syrian in a fight over food (this, it turned out, was his only other murder) and, following pressure from the German government, was eventually released.

  He went back to Germany, broken. During his rehabilitation he had taken up with different women. He said his one gift was to tell his story and induce sympathy. He had made the most of it.

  Wolf and I had been talking for ninety minutes.

  “Wolf,” I said, tapping my watch, “I have to go and see my son.”

  “London’s the most expensive city in the world,” he said.

  “Blame the government.”

  He made no move to leave. He was restive. He wanted to stay. He said he’d sleep on the floor, he only needed a blanket, the car was cold and he had nowhere else to go. I said it wasn’t possible. I didn’t want to spend a night with him in the flat, not being convinced he’d leave the next day.

  He was watching me. I couldn’t help thinking: the present drags us back into the past, where all the trouble began, and which returns with its debt, wanting to be repaid. But who owes what to whom?

  “Okay, my friend, if that’s how you feel,” he said and, at last, got up. “It’s been good to see you again.”

  As he was almost at the door, he put his hand on my arm and asked me for 50,000 pounds. I couldn’t stop myself snorting loudly and saying, “I wish I had that kind of money myself.” Then I asked, “Why is it you want money so much?” He seemed confused by the question. “Not that I’m trying to put you off.”

  Suddenly he became angry and held my arm tightly, which was more painful than I’d have imagined. He said that if I didn’t make at least a decent instalment—around 10,000 pounds would be “courteous”—he would see that “the right people” learned about my murdering.

  He emphasised that the amount wasn’t random. He was intending to buy a derelict house, decorate it himself and rent out rooms. If I could only give him “a start,” he wouldn’t ask for more, in fact he would then help me. Wolf may have had a strange mind, but he knew the housing market was where the money was.

  I didn’t know what to do or say, apart from, “But that’s ridiculous. Anyway, you won’t get a house for 50,000 pounds. You’d be lucky to get a front door.”

  “It will be a deposit. You know I’m not afraid to work. I could build a house from the dirt up if need be. All I ask is for that initial start.”

  I shoved him away. I thought he was going to come back at me, but he stood there watching me.

  I said, “I haven’t got any more time to discuss it. Never touch me again.”

  “You’re going to have to make time. This is important.” At the door he said, “Why didn’t you ask about Val?”

  “Why, is he outside too, waiting to come in and ask for money?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “All right.”

  He said, “He did himself in.”

  “He did?”

  “While I was in jail. I found out about it from one of his women.”

  “Was he depressed?”

  “Always. The killing made him more so. He dwelled on it. He was more sensitive than us, and not so strong. He didn’t blame you, but he might as well have. It was his turning point, sending him into hell.”

  I said, “I liked him. Lots of women liked him.”

  “They couldn’t save him.” Wolf was looking at me. “The whole murder—I feel like my soul has been dyed black by it. Don’t you?”

  I realised I was whispering, though no one could overhear us. “It was an accident. We wanted to scare him. We might have been young fools, but we were on the side of the angels.”

  “The Hells Angels?” He laughed bitterly. “It doesn’t matter. It comes back. No one told me that. I was naive, but made into a fool. Jamal, I need to get it out, you know. Better in than out.”

  “Why invite punishment? You’ve been in jail. You liked it enough to go back?”

  “What do they say over here? You can do the time if you’ve done the crime.”

  I asked, “Who have you told?”

  My phone rang. It was Rafi. Wolf looked at me and smiled. “You’re afraid. I must have scared you. You’re shaking.”

  I could hear Rafi saying, “Dad, Dad, you’re coming, aren’t you?”

  I was watching Wolf while saying to my son, “Yes, of course. I’m on my way.”

  Rafi said, “We’ve been working all day on this thing for you. I was thinking about it all night.”

  “Rafi, I wouldn’t miss it for anything.” I turned off the phone and said to Wolf, “What we’ve been talking about—it’s not something I’d want my son to know. It wouldn’t help him to think of me that way.”

  “As a murderer?”

  “You see that, don’t you?”

  “You’re lying to him.”

  I said, “He’s not entitled to know everything about me. I don’t consider myself to be a murderer.”

  “In your heart you wanted to kill that man and you dragged me into it. You hated him and wanted him out of the way so you could have the daughter for yourself.”

  I repeated, “Who have you told?”

  “Not many. Don’t worry so much. A few women. You?”

  “I have no desire to confess.”

  “Not even to the mother of your son? What is her name?”

  “Josephine.”

  “You were with her more than ten years.”

  I said, “I’ve told her nothing.”

  “Was that difficult?”

  “Honesty is always a temptation. But no.”

  “You must have thought you’d covered your tracks. Then I turn up, bringing it all back.” He said forcefully, “Where’s the girl now? Have you seen her? The Indian one?”

  “Ajita?”

  “Where does she live? Is she still alive? What does she think of it all?”

  I was shaking my head. “I haven’t seen her since then. She went to India. I lost all of you. It was terrible for me. My mind wasn’t my own for some time.”

  He interrupted. “But if you did see her, would you tell Ajita the truth, would you confess?”

  “No.”

  “But surely you believe you should, that it will release you?” He went on: “We were a tight group, a little gang of four. In prison I thought about it often, to keep myself alive, reliving the good times in West London, the meals, the laughter, the drinks, the card games, the cinema, with everything ahead of us. Jamal, I want t
o see her again.”

  “Why?”

  “I tried to spend time with her alone, away from you. She came with me, twice. Don’t worry, I didn’t sleep with her. You were too young for her, and immature. You didn’t understand how much she wanted you. You seemed to turn away. But she refused me. She loved you.”

  I’d walked him to the door, but now he was back in the room, striding about as though looking for someone else to tell the story to. I picked up a pair of jeans from a pile on the floor; I found some money in my pocket, pulled it out and went to the front door with it, knowing he’d follow me.

  As he was leaving, I gave him the jeans plus a hundred pounds I had received from a patient earlier, told him to find a cheap hotel, and asked him to phone me and arrange a time to come back.

  I watched him drive away. I’d imagined he might calm down, and be easier to deal with on another day. But now I wasn’t so sure. As Eric Cantona memorably said, “When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.”

  I rang Bushy and asked him if he’d come over. He said, “You sound panicked. Is he hurting you yet?”

  “I need to talk tonight.”

  He said he wouldn’t be in my neighbourhood but in his office and local, the Cross Keys, in Acton, attending to company matters. It was a bit of a walk for me, but I needed time to think.

  I tucked my iPod into my shirt pocket; with my hood up, street robbers wouldn’t be able to see the white wire or the telltale headphones.

  First, however, I had to see Rafi. The boy had promised me a treat.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Rafi had decided to cook me a meal. When he and I had played football in the park a few days earlier, he had said, looking me over, “Man, you don’t look right. It’s not that your hair’s funny or your clothes more strange than usual. But you’re lonely-looking and thin, and I’ve never said that about you before. Old man, you’re not going to die, are you?”

  If his generosity surprised me, it was because I’d noticed he was about to become a teenager. He loved mirrors, as I once did. His upper lip was dark now; soon he’d be shaving. Whereas before he was happy to talk, indeed to chatter away interminably, now he kept his words sullenly to himself. But not all of them. He could be cruel, abusive even, trying to hurt, as though trying to make a space between us. How I’d been missing his younger self, when he’d let me read to him and kiss him, and he slept between us, taking up most of the bed. When he needed me more.