Something to Tell You

by Hanif Kureishi

  I arrived at the house in the early evening to find my prodigal hot, his face shining and luminous with enthusiasm. I could smell burning.

  “Hello, old man. Still alive?” he said, leading me in. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt under a pinny with the words THE MOTHER written on it. “Did you know—you can sniff my hair if you want?”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t disarray it. It’s punked-up specially.”

  I pressed my nose into the fragrant spikes. “What is it?”

  “Banana shampoo.”

  “Yummy.”

  “It doesn’t mean I’m gay because I like fashion.”

  “But you like pink too.”

  “Not as much as I used to. Is that a sign of gayness too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t joke me, Dad. You know I kissed a girl.”

  “Which girl?”

  “You will never know that.”

  Josephine had helped Rafi with the shopping and chopping before going for a run in the park. On a brightly patterned tablecloth, a place was set for one, along with the best, heaviest cutlery.

  I noticed a folded piece of paper with the word menu written on it in wavy writing. I read: “Omelette du jour (omelette of the day). Fresh tomato and courgette. Very good quality eggs and butter (fresh). Fresh avocado and potatoes. Shallot (fresh) and fresh good quality cooking oils.” Under “pudding” he’d written “pistachio ice cream”; under “drinks” he was offering “water, cider.” He’d signed it, or rather, autographed it, at the bottom.

  I was supposed to be having a serious talk with him, and wondered if this was the right time for it. Recently Josephine and I had met in a nearby deli with long tables and the papers spread all over them, a place full of mothers who’d just dropped their kids off at school. After, she was off to be interviewed for a job in a college psychology department.

  I’d got there early to read the papers and hear the women’s voices. When I looked up and she was walking towards me, I was glad to see her; it was still her beauty and vulnerability I was drawn to, and the love in her eyes.

  Though it was warm, I noticed she was wearing one of my scarves; she would always borrow my clothes, particularly the expensive ones—the raincoats she liked—though she was taller and thinner than me.

  She wanted to talk because Rafi had been upsetting her, calling her, several times, “a fucking bitch and a ho.” He’d pointed his fingers at her and threatened to “blow her away” if she insisted he went to bed at a certain time.

  She said, “As if America hasn’t done enough damage in the world! He takes these rap lyrics seriously. I hate all the aggressive gestures and shouting. What is it with boys and gangsters? You would say the boy has to move away from the mother. But why would they think that being a man is being a bastard?”

  “It’s cartoon. The bling and posing is no more real than a pantomime dame in costume.”

  “Not all those kids can tell the difference. I’ve decided to throw his CDs out. That stuff is now banned from the house! I don’t care that you hate censorship.”

  I said. “It’s too late already. But I am sorry he spoke to you like that. Perhaps he’s anxious about you going to work. He thinks you’ll have less time for him.”

  “Oh God,” she said, getting up and gathering her things. “Perhaps that’s it. I knew you’d make me feel worse. How did I ever waste ten years with you?”

  Now, as I sat there looking at the evening newspaper, he came in and out of the kitchen. “Are you looking forward to it, dude?”

  “I can’t wait.”

  “It’s cooking up beautifully. There’s a lot of things I can cook now. Some of my dishes are legendary.”

  “You’re lucky to have a good mother who taught you. Miriam and I ate bread and dripping, and later, burgers, chips and cakes.”

  “D’you feel a fool for leaving here?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Come back then. Don’t you love Mum?”

  “I like her a lot. She’s looked after you brilliantly.”

  “That’s not love.”

  “It’ll happen to you,” I said. “Marriage, separation, kids here and there, the whole disintegrated thing. No one gets married at twenty-five and stays with their partner until they’re seventy unless they are deficient in imagination. May you have many wives, son. And that’s a curse!”

  “Thanks, punk and role model.”

  Eventually, like someone carefully carrying a birthday cake into a crowd, he brought the omelette out on a huge plate. He opened the napkin in my lap and gave me the knife and fork. He didn’t sit at the table with me but stood with his elbow on my shoulder.

  “Start before it gets cold.” As I took each mouthful, he offered advice. “Put some salad with it, Dad.” “Mix up the things more. Here’s some bread.” “Don’t you like cucumber? Salad is good for you.”

  The omelette was filled with melted cheese and a mixture of chopped tomatoes and courgette. Thus supervised, I was taking my last mouthful when he ducked back into the kitchen and came out with a bowl of pistachio ice cream. As it was, I could barely move.

  “Deep, eh?”

  “Not only deep but heavy too,” I said.

  “Have you ever had a better meal?”

  “How could I have had?”

  “You’ll love this,” he said, putting the spoon in my hand. He went to a shelf, removed a bottle and poured me about half a glass of his mother’s vodka. Catching a whiff of it, he said, “Smells like petrol. But this ice cream is your favourite. Mum and I had to go out specially to get it.”

  When I was eating my ice cream and finishing the vodka, he sat down and ate his own omelette, pouring ketchup over it until it was a red mess.

  After the meal I lay down on the floor and slept briefly, while beside me Rafi sat cross-legged, attached to the TV by wires, clicking away like a widow at her knitting. Isolated figures murdered one another in what resembled the deserted Roman cityscapes of de Chirico.

  I was woken up by his mother caressing my shoulder. “Did you enjoy it?”

  I got to my feet slowly. “It was the best meal of my life.”

  She and I still considered one another warily, like kids after a fight, both wondering which one will restart the conflict. But our fury with one another was diminishing; I felt reluctant to leave right away.

  My favourite thing had always been to watch her in the house as she walked about, sat, combed her hair, showered, dressed, read. All day she was different, her numerous moods transforming her look, and I followed them, indeed lived in them, as a child lived with its mother. At night, as she slept, I’d listen to her breathing and I would kiss her hair. We had our difficulties and disputes, but I believed at least she wanted to be here with me, that I was always everything to her.

  I became a connoisseur of her body—transfixed, obsessed even; like a child, I needed her company, her reassurance and presence, and to escape into the world at the same time.

  “Can I see what you’ve been doing?” I said. “Your new work?”

  She fetched her folder and spread her recent drawings on the floor. Friends often asked to buy them, but she rarely sold her work, preferring to give it away. I had one of her nudes, framed, in my consulting room. Next to it was André Brouillet’s famous engraving of Charcot—the P. T. Barnum of hysteria—in the lecture hall at the Salpêtrière clinic in Paris, exhibiting one of his most famous hysterics, the somnambulist Blanche Wittman. Freud always had a copy in his office. It was in this hospital, years later, that the latest supermodel of hysteria, Princess Diana, had died.

  I padded among Josephine’s drawings, telling her how much she continued to improve. She told me about her new daylong life class and about her art teacher, who was, inevitably, encouraging her to become a nude model as well as an artist. It was being an artist that she loved. She admired the ferociously weird and tender imagination of Paula Rego, particularly her prints.

  Art was all Josephine wante
d to do, but as well as not yet developing her own vision—as if she didn’t know who she was—she felt guilty about it. Guilty that she didn’t have a career and earned little money.

  She felt herself to be a failure compared to other “executive” women in their smart suits, with their computers and fast cars. I replied that, unfortunately for these women, no man considered a woman to be more of a woman because she was successful. For some reason, that criterion applied only to men.

  So I praised Josephine’s art and her mothering, and watched her eyes for a gathering brightness, and then for an explosion of self-loathing. “But I can be lazy, I don’t work enough or earn enough. I still take to my bed for days, hugging the pillow—”

  She interrupted herself by asking me if I was writing. I began to tell her about an idea which I was still uncertain about. Henry had never been a great reader of my work, seeing anything I said as an opportunity to entertain his own thoughts. Josephine read little, but her remarks were always pertinent.

  I said I wanted to try to move analysis away from technical obscurity and “scientism”—analysts writing for one another, and for students—to a more popular area, where it might become again, as it had been with Freud’s lucid writing, about the stuff which concerns everyone: childhood, sexuality, illness, death, the problem of pleasure. Otherwise the public would be left with only self-help books and the authors putting “Ph.D.” on the cover, somehow a guarantee of stupidity.

  “You’re good at those little essays,” she said. “Keep them odd and quirky. That’s their uniqueness, their unconventionality. No one else can do it.” She was looking at me and said, “Is something bothering you? You’ve got that sad, hurt face on.”

  “I have?”

  “Won’t you tell me why? Are you in trouble? Is it a patient?”

  I said, “Will you look at what I’ve been writing? You know, sometimes I listen to you.”

  She laughed suddenly and said, “I had a thought the other day: we must not forget that people do most of their reading while defecating.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Oh, Jammie, please, I don’t want to be mean, bring it over and I’ll make some suggestions. We could try lunch again.”

  “Yes, let’s do that,” I said. “I like taking you out—if you’re not being argumentative.”

  She reached out to tweak my nose. “If you’re not being unkind…”

  “If you’re not playing the victim…”

  We stopped; we were laughing. Silently, as if holding his breath, Rafi had been watching us. He’d only said, at one point, “Well, of course, Plato is a great thinker,” and he’d imitated my voice, surprisingly deep, upper-middle-class at last, and pompous.

  Now, as I was leaving—“Was it really deep? Do you feel better? Will you come back?”—he pressed the menu into my hand and his nose into my sleeve. “Booze, fags, piss. Your smell.”

  “You’ll never forget it.”

  “I feel really close to you, Dad,” he said. “We’re almost like family.”

  “Very funny. Kiss your beautiful mummy for me—lots.”

  “Can’t you do anything yourself?”

  During the walk I stopped to look at the menu, which I would never throw away.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  If you had the misfortune to pass the Cross Keys without being familiar with it, you’d think it was derelict. The windows were boarded over and graffitied. There was rusty scaffolding around the side of the pub, wreathed in barbed wire, but no other evidence of building work, which made me wonder whether the scaffolding was in fact holding everything up. Surely if it wasn’t soon knocked down, it would fall down. Despite not even having a pub sign, the place was always busy and often heaving.

  The Cross Keys stood on the corner of a desolate street lined with low-rise industrial buildings, the sort of places that would, in a more likely part of town, be converted into art galleries and lofts. Meanwhile the doorways were scattered with drug debris.

  Dodging past a group of tall Africans on the street corner touting for minicab work, I shoved at the busted door. It had been a while since I’d been here, but nothing had changed. Just inside there was a small bar, and behind it a larger back room with a tiny stage, the windows blacked out. In here there were nonstop strippers, each undressing to one record.

  There were pretty girls, pretty nasty ones, young and old, black, Indian, Chinese. It had been months since I’d last been to the Keys. I knew at least I was unlikely to run into any of my patients; or indeed into anyone I knew, apart from Bushy. A man could read the newspaper, have a pint and, from a distance of a few yards, stare between the legs of a high-heeled woman.

  There could be commotions. Usually the two bars were occupied by rough, loud men—or respectable men with briefcases and umbrellas soon turned into rough, loud men—and girls in flimsies trotting around with beer glasses, collecting change. The men gathered at the base of the tiny stage and, as the evenings progressed, were liable to collapse onto it, which was dangerous, as a springy Salome might be tempted to kick you in the head.

  In the Cross Keys there were no bouncers or remixed music, no cameras, and, inevitably, there was broken glass on the floor of the toilets, where when you peed, the cistern dripped cold water onto your head. On the bar was a handwritten sign saying SHIRTS MUST BE WORN AT ALL TIMES.

  This dive was overseen by a loudmouthed harridan with whom no one messed, apart from Bushy. “Leave my fucking dancers alone!” she’d yell, if anyone touched a girl. Oddly enough, the Czech barmaid, in her mid-twenties, was more beautifully angelic than the strippers, and would glance at the nude girls without emotion. It was ironic, of course, that she was the only person there you’d want to see undressed.

  The Harridan was the woman Bushy had been “going with” for a while, an upstairs room being used for their trysts. Now, while she was trying to persuade him to stay with her in her beach hut in Whitstable—“Oh, Bushy, dear, let’s get far away from all this, I have a place by the sea!”—he wanted to let her know he was less wholehearted than his initial passion might have led her to believe.

  The women who were waiting to perform sat inside a wooden pen beside the bar, doing their make-up, abusing or flirting with the men who leaned over the side to talk to them. Now, one of them was shaving her legs. I liked strippers of any age, the rougher the better. I could watch them for hours while wondering, each time, whether the outcome might be different, like watching the replay of a football match, where one had the strange experience of knowing more than the players. Such squalid privacy was dying out in London, particularly as, with the development of CCTV—encouraged by a blind home secretary—everyone now watched everyone else, as though the whole country were under suspicion.

  I’d taken Henry to the Cross Keys a couple of times, but he didn’t like it. “Even Christopher Marlowe would have given this greasy strip a miss,” he complained. “Shit, I think I’ve got spit and spunk up to my ankles! Doesn’t the zoo stink bother you? The only thing to be said for it is that one gets to learn something about contemporary fashions in pubic hair—who has, and has not, for instance, mown the lawn—an opportunity not to be sniffed at, as it were.”

  The Cross Keys was a market where Bushy did many transactions, selling jackets, drugs, cigarettes, phones. I’d also seen him buying stuff. Various shuffling characters, some of them Korean or Chinese, would approach him, concealing something—usually bootleg DVDs—under their coats, or carrying suitcases.

  “Wolf came into the flat. I talked to him.”

  “What did he say? You don’t look good, man,” said Bushy, sitting at his usual table. “You ain’t shaved in a while. An’ I got a sensitive nose. Is it the vodka you still on?”

  “It was pressed on me by my son.”

  “Jeez, and him such a decent, bright kid too!”

  I caught a glimpse of myself in one of the pub mirrors and gave myself a nod. I looked no worse than anyone else on the premises.

  I said
to Bushy, “I know Wolf from the old days, when I was a student. He’s come back because he wants to blackmail me.” I hesitated before saying, “He’s got something on me.”

  “What sort of something?”

  “I won’t tell you.”

  “One of those no-details things. Shit, it could be filthy.” I had impressed him at last. “Bushy don’t need to know whether you done a person or not. You’re a man of integrity and dignity, and I don’t care how many people you’ve offed. We’re family, Jamal,” he said. “I hate to see a good doctor like you in trouble. You’re a gentleman and a scholar, but where will it get you these days, financially? Those books have put you in a dreamworld.”

  “Have they really?”

  I was wondering if he was right when he said, “You know I can say something like that without meaning nothing by it.”

  I said, “Bushy, I’ve been thinking about this and don’t know what to do. I can’t go to the police. Wolf’s after money, and he has a lot of power over my good name, such as it is. The other day I was offered a weekly column on a national newspaper. Unlike a lot of people, I do, regrettably, need my reputation, otherwise I’d have few patients and no income. It’s a big deal for me, and decent money. So, you see, I am inclined to give him some money.”

  Across the bar, a young Indian woman squatted down and spread her legs, her genitalia looking as though they were pinned together by a silver ring. She turned over and showed three old men—unshaven toothless grotesques who occupied the same position all day most days—the shrivelled eye of her anus, the gentlemen leaning forward with their hands on the edge of the stage, as though to examine a rare object which had turned up after a long time.

  Considering Wolf, I was reminded of that time at school when all through the lunch break the bully who used to be your best friend has been following you, and is now approaching. You’re in the cloakroom; everyone else has returned to their classrooms; the school is temporarily quiet. He is stepping slowly towards you with a smile on his face, and what do you do? Fight and suffer more damage, or roll up in a ball and beg for mercy? I was tempted by the “rolling up in a ball position”—to let Wolf speak, and allow everything to come down which could come down, at least for the pleasure of seeing where it fell.