Something to Tell You

by Hanif Kureishi

  To be punished, in other words. Wouldn’t I be in a similar position to Ajita’s father when his life was collapsing before he died, a man about to lose everything? Except that, unlike him, I would be playing with degrees of suicide. What gains would there be, except in fantasy? If I were one of my own patients, I’d recommend a longer-term strategy of silence and cunning. Perhaps the only way to not be eaten by a wolf is to cling to its back. But would it get me anywhere in the end?

  Bushy said, “Don’t give him nothing. I’m sayin’ you’ll never escape it. Can you inform me of this, though, boss? The thing you didn’t do but are in trouble about…Were there any other witnesses?”

  “One. He’s dead.”

  “Good.”

  I hadn’t enjoyed hearing that Valentin had killed himself.

  Bushy said, “Is the dude coming to see you again?”

  “Without a doubt.”

  “Let’s see what he say when you turn him down. If he gets nasty, I’ll be right outside your house. Measure ’im artfully—otherwise we can’t deal with him.” Then Bushy said to me, “I’m not saying you might not have to off him. That’s the only way to deal with some of these people. I can’t do him myself, mind.” He shuddered. “There’s blokes here who might be able to manage the job.”

  “How much might it cost?”

  “I’ll look into it for yer.”

  I’d already lied to Mustaq about his father. Now this new matter was hurting me. I needed to discuss it. But I didn’t want to worry Miriam, and it was a matter too explosively intimate for my present relationship with Josephine. The only other candidate was Henry, a gossip: there was little he’d keep from the general discourse. It wouldn’t occur to him that I was in any real danger. With him, my secret would go no further than West London, which was too far for me.

  I said, “But maybe I can charm him.” Bushy raised his long eyebrow at me. “Or offer him something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll let you know what he says.”

  I finished my drink and was about to tell Bushy that I needed to get going when he put his hand on my arm and said, looking round the place, “Boss, there’s a little thing I want to ask you—”

  “Yes?” I said. “If there’s anything I can do in return.”

  “I wouldn’t come to you for nothing, you’re a professional man with ultra-high standards. But I been having these dreams. They keep coming back. They’re tripartite.”

  “Sorry?”

  “In threes. You want me to sit down?”

  “You’re going to tell me the dream now?”

  “Why not?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Do it wherever you feel comfortable. It’s the words that count, not the seating.”

  All societies, like all lives, are sewn together by the needle of exchange, and I was amused by the idea of being a dream-dealer, interpreting dreams in exchange for detective work, though under these conditions I’d have to say his work was probably of a higher standard than mine. I had never heard a dream—that daily dose of madness—in such peculiar circumstances. Though parts of it disappeared in the uproar of a dispute over whether a customer had put twenty pence or a pound coin in a stripper’s beer glass, I was able to take his associations too, and attempt an interpretation.

  “You think I’ve got a problem?” he said when I’d finished. Normally I would give an analytic grunt here, but I said, “I think you need to play the guitar. You miss it more than you know.”

  “Bushy can’t do it sober.”

  “I bet you weren’t drunk when you learned to play the guitar.”

  “I was a kid.”

  “There you are. Miriam says you give a lot of pleasure to people when you play.”

  “She said that?”

  He was thinking about this and smiling to himself when Miriam herself phoned. Bushy had to leave. She and Henry were going out that night.

  “One more thing,” said Bushy before we parted. “Haven’t you noticed nothing peculiar about me?”

  He was standing directly in front of me, as though on parade. I looked him up and down. “I haven’t, no.”

  “You sure?”

  “Is there anything peculiar about you?”

  “My nose. Can’t you see, there’s a groove in it.” He ran his finger down his nose. “That’s pretty deep, innit?”

  “It’s not an unusual feature, if that’s what you mean. It doesn’t stand out. You are a fine man, Bushy.”

  “My nose is turning into a backside. That’s not unusual—to have a pair of buttocks screwed to the front of your face?”

  “Is it getting worse?”

  “I’m telling you, soon I’ll be shitting out of me nose. What can I do about it? Is there an operation I can have?”

  “Like plastic surgery?”

  “Kind of.”

  “How much is it worrying you?”

  “How much would it worry you,” he asked, “if you had shit dribbling out yer face?”

  “A lot,” I said, feeling as he intended me to, that I was either stupid or mad not to grasp such a simple truth.

  “Don’t mention the hooter to Henry,” he said. “We likes each other. I wouldn’t want him thinking I’m batty.”

  I said, “Bushy, you wouldn’t want to be too sane. How dull is that? The sane are the only ones that can’t be cured. My first analyst used to say, ‘Our work is to heal the well, too.’”

  The Harridan, who had been collecting glasses across the bar, trotted towards Bushy, pinched his gut and kissed him on the cheek. “Hallo, Bushy dear, you farting ol’ pygmy dick, gonna come and have a drink and more with me?”

  He almost turned his back on her. “When I’m in a business meeting?”

  “Oh dear,” she said. The Harridan succeeded in being tiny and voluminous at the same time. She didn’t move—was she on casters rather than legs?—so much as bustle. “You didn’t used to be too busy for yer little yum-yum baby.”

  “This man here’s a high-flying doctor, one of the top men in the West.”

  “Why’s he in here?”

  “To partake of your watered vodka!”

  “Always nice to have a doctor in the house, just in case.” She made a face. “Mind you, some of my girls could do with some looking into.”

  “He’s a head doctor!” said Bushy impatiently, tapping his forehead and circling his finger. “A shrinker.”

  “Even better!”

  When she’d gone, I said, “Let’s see how the nose develops. We’re going to keep talking anyway.”

  “Will you keep an eye on it?”

  “Sorry?”

  “My nose?”

  “I will,” I said. “I will.”

  “Thank God, boss, you saving me only life.”

  One madman, Bushy, looking after another madman, Wolf. And neither of them heroes of desire, the sort of madmen that R. D. Laing idealised: their craziness not making an increase of life but, rather, consternation, despair, isolation. I felt as though I’d just stuck my tongue through the flimsy cigarette paper which separates sanity and madness.

  Before we left, Bushy said, “Thanks, boss, for hearing me. If I have any other dreams, will you have a look at them? There won’t be too many—I can’t sleep much.”

  “Okay.”

  “I like you, boss. Henry’s a good geezer as well. Man, he can chat! Was he always like that?”

  “Yes.”

  “He won’t let her down, will he? It would destroy Miriam. You put them together—now she’s a different person, really happy. An’ she wildly pleased with you for taking care of her. She say you never did before. No one did. That’s why she got such a close family round her.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  As I hurried home—thinking of myself bent forward, like a fleeing question mark—a section from Dante’s Purgatory came to me: “Accurst be thou, / Inveterate wolf! whose gorge ingluts more prey, / Than every beast beside, yet is not fill’d; / So bottomless t
hy maw.”

  I rang Ajita and arranged to see her. She was the person I wanted to see, the person I felt least anxious with at the moment. Then I thought how much I admired Bushy’s curiosity about his inner world, and the fact that he realised the benefit of becoming acquainted with it, recognising, too, that he couldn’t do this alone.

  I’d been considering Ralph Waldo Emerson and his essay “Circles,” the first words of which are: “The eye is the first circle.” For the next few days I could look at a door and imagine an eye at the keyhole—an eye followed by a head, by a body, a man. A man who had come to hunt me down, arrest me, condemn me. For what? For being a criminal; for committing the most monstrous crime of all. Things are always what they seem.

  I suspected Wolf was watching me, but he didn’t come to the flat. Perhaps he was only my dream. Echoes of echoes, and nothing known for sure.

  Yet if I felt paranoid, it wasn’t without reason. Murdering someone is no way to get rid of them. Speaking from experience for once, I’d say it’s a guarantee of their repeated return. At the same time, I was hoping that Wolf had decided that persecuting me was a futile idea and had gone away. Not that I really believed or expected this. Our own wishes are no guide to reality. As far as I could work out, he had come to London only to find me and to remind me, over and over, of my crime.

  At lunchtime a few days later the door bell rang, and I knew I hadn’t succeeded in keeping the Wolf from the door.

  I asked, as he came in, “By the way, how did you find me?”

  “I’d been thrown out of my home. My clothes, my collection of antique swords, everything was gone. During the day, in the library where I’d keep warm, I saw a book by you, in German. It was a sign you were asking to see me. It wasn’t difficult to get an address. Don’t forget my father was a cop. Now, I’m dirty.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Please, will you let me wash here?” He was unshaven and dishevelled. “You cannot refuse a man a little water.”

  He wanted me to cook him scrambled eggs while he took a shower and freshened up. At this point he was only asking for things it would be difficult to refuse. He was trying to make his way further into my life, and I was getting used to him again.

  However, when he’d washed and eaten, I told him, in my firmest voice, that financially I was on the run and always had been—every month I was one step ahead of what I owed. I had given Josephine my stake in the house, but she constantly requested more money. These days reparation for the crime of leaving your lover was limitless. Money had become the substitute for love. On top of that I had to pay for Rafi’s education for another ten years. Henry blamed Thatcher; I blamed Blair for being unable to provide good state schools for the over-eleven.

  I said, “No one becomes an analyst for the money. There are scores of therapies and not enough sick people, if you can believe it. In London you fall over wealthy people everywhere, most of them without much natural intelligence or talent. It makes me crazy that I didn’t think about my financial situation as a younger man, instead of walking around depressed and arguing with myself.”

  “What you say makes me unhappy. Couldn’t we do something?”

  “It’s too late.”

  “Yes, why would you bother when you’re all set? I am not. You know why.”

  Everything bad which had happened to him since the night in the garage was my fault. If he hadn’t volunteered—out of sincere goodness—to help a mate whose girlfriend was being mistreated, he wouldn’t be in this position now: a man who had been persuaded into a murder that had stained his entire life.

  He said, “I had a drink with Ajita. Lovely house she’s got there.”

  “You went in?” He didn’t reply. I said, “How did you find her?”

  He enjoyed watching me consider the question.

  “I followed you,” he said.

  The day before, she and I had met for lunch in a Moroccan place in South Kensington that I liked. Ajita was wearing a white trouser-suit and looked, in the modern style, more or less ageless. She was carrying numerous shopping bags, as well as books on psychology and Freud she’d picked up at Blackwell’s. She was eager to learn about my work and how I became involved in it. “That whole chunk of your life, truly I know nothing of,” she said.

  It wasn’t transference, the unconscious or the Other that Ajita wanted to hear about. It was the guy who loved to shit himself in public, and wanted to do it more; the woman who stuck needles in her breasts and thighs until she bled, and orgasmed, and the man who covered his penis with insects and said he wanted literally to fuck my brain.

  “But I’m normal, compared to this. Why am I so dull! I feel free in this city,” she went on. “I want to stay here. America’s at war. It’s horrible for people like us. I’d forgotten how wickedly realistic Londoners are.”

  She wanted us to spend the afternoon together, but I had patients to see. Then she asked me to go away with her for a few days. “We can shop, sleep, talk, walk.” I had wondered whether, if she was in the mood for passion, it was a good idea. But now I was warming to the notion. I had good reason to want to get out of London, and perhaps in Venice, Ajita and I might go further with each other. I had always been a cautious and nervous fellow; maybe it was time I changed.

  What I didn’t know was that Wolf had trailed me, and followed her home. How stupid of me not to have been more alert. When it came to crime, despite my efforts, I’d always be an amateur; clearly, transgression was a calling that not anyone could assume.

  I told him, “She hasn’t got any money. It’s her brother’s. He collects houses. He’s got them all over the place.”

  “He has? Where exactly?”

  “I don’t know. Wolf, he’s tough like his father, and more powerful and brutal.”

  “Thanks. I’ll be careful.” He said, “Ajita took me to a bar and ordered champagne. We drank two bottles, and ate oysters. Then we had smoked salmon and toast. She gave me a little something to help me settle into a lovely warm hotel, not far from her. I walked her back home. I didn’t go in, though she asked me. I’m not one to impose.”

  “No.”

  “What makes you think I’m interested in her money? It’s worse. I like her.”

  “You told her your story—the time in jail?”

  “It’s all I have. I can tell she’s been unhappy for a long time. Now she’s looking for something.”

  He went on, “Oh, Jamal, she is still good-natured, kind and beautiful. I said to her, you are without doubt one of those women who will become more beautiful and attractive as you get older, with a sophistication younger women can only envy.” I recalled this as a recommended leg-opener of his, for use on any woman over forty. Its time had surely arrived. “Jamal, you made us knock out her father and then you let her go. Why didn’t you marry her?”

  “She went away, like you and Valentin. The gang was broken up. I didn’t see her again until recently.”

  “You lied to me about that, too.”

  “It was private.”

  “Maybe. But didn’t she want you?”

  “She did, very much. She said she still liked me.”

  “And you turned such a girl away?”

  “I haven’t said that. We get on well.”

  “Is that all?”

  I continued, “From my point of view, when I met you, you were already a criminal, Wolf. I was a kid whose father had left. I was easily impressed by tough guys.”

  “You call me a criminal!” he shouted. “I was never a murderer till I met you! Let the judge decide which of us was the ringleader—the one who gathered us together to commit the dirty work!”

  “The judge? You’ll go down too, you know.”

  He shook his head and drew his finger across his throat. “Valentin and I would be playing together in the great casino in the sky. I’ve got nothing to lose. You’ve got everything. Your wife, son, friends—everyone will be devastated by what you did. You will never escape the shame.” He then said sudden
ly, “Is life worth living? Is it worth the trouble, the suffering?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Listen, Wolfgang. We were good friends. We could still be friends. But you’ve got to drop the bullshit threats, okay?” He smiled. I carried on. “It’s important that Ajita doesn’t hear about what happened to her father. I’m going to be upset, I may even get into trouble. But she will be more than devastated, particularly if it comes from you. She might want to hurt herself.”

  “I can’t worry about all of you when no one’s worrying about me.”

  “Why don’t you go back to Berlin?”

  “There’s nothing there for me!”

  “Your knees are bouncing. In a fury?”

  He said, “They’d taken Ulrike away to one of their houses, and then they came for me, three in the morning. Minutes later I was on the street with only the clothes I could carry. I’d considered barricading myself in and shooting at them. They were ahead of me in everything. So you see, Jamal, friend, I need a little help. I want to stay in London. I don’t care if I have to sleep on the street. I’ve done it before.”

  “I will try to stop that happening to you,” I said.

  “How?”

  I told him again I couldn’t give him any money and that if he stopped frightening me I’d be in a better position to think about how to help him. Meanwhile, even as he had been following me, I had been trying to find him work.

  Bushy had asked the Harridan to let Wolf work behind the bar at the Cross Keys. Wolf could sleep in the room upstairs where the strippers changed, the one he and the Harridan used for their lovemaking; Wolf would, no doubt, be face down in the same fuck-stained sheets. At night there was no one there, and as local boys were always trying to break into the pub, he could keep an eye on it. If he was lucky he’d get to hurt someone, and with moral impunity, always the nicest way.