Love in a Blue Time

by Hanif Kureishi

  Billy is standing on the roof in his underpants. I fetch a towel and dry his hair and legs and he holds me and we move a little together to imaginary music. When I remember the envelope Nadia gave me, I open it and find a shiny folder inside. It’s a ticket to London.

  I’d given my ticket home to my father for safe-keeping, an open ticket I can use any time. I can see that Nadia’s been to the airline and specified the date, and booked the flight. I’m to leave tomorrow morning. I go to my dad and ask him what it’s all about. He just looks at me and I realise I’m to go.

  4

  Hello, reader. As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, I, Howard, have written this Nina and Nadia stuff in my sock, without leaving the country, sitting right here on my spreading arse and listening to John Coltrane. (And rolling cigarettes.) Do you think Nina could have managed phrases like ‘an accent as thick as treacle’ and ‘But the curtains are well and truly pulled here’ and especially ‘Oh, oh, oh’? With her education? So all along, it’s been me, pulling faces, speaking in tongues, posing and making an attempt on the truth through lies. And also, I just wanted to be Nina. The days Deborah and I have spent beating on her head, trying to twist her the right way round, read this, study dancing, here’s a book about Balanchine and the test of it. What does she make of all this force feeding? So I became her, entered her. Sorry.

  Nina in fact has been back a week, though it wasn’t until yesterday that I heard from her when she phoned to tell me that I am a bastard and that she had to see me. I leave straightaway.

  *

  At Nina’s place. There she is, sitting at the kitchen table with her foot up on the table by her ashtray in the posture of a painter. Deborah not back from school.

  ‘You look superb,’ I tell her. She doesn’t recoil in repulsion when I kiss her.

  ‘Do I look superb?’ She is interested.

  ‘Yeah. Tanned. Fit. Rested.’

  ‘Oh, is that all? She looks hard at me. ‘I thought for a moment you were going to say something interesting. Like I’d changed or something. Like something had happened.’

  We walk through the estate, Friday afternoon. How she walks above it all now, as if she’s already left! She tells me everything in a soft voice: her father, the servants, the boy Billy, the kiss, the panties. She says: ‘I was devastated to leave Billy in that country on his own. What will he do? What will happen to that boy? I sent him a pack of tapes. I sent him some videos. But he’ll be so lonely.’ She is upset.

  The three of us have supper and Deborah tries to talk about school while Nina ignores her. It’s just like the old days. But Nina ignores Deborah not out of cruelty but because she is elsewhere. Deborah is thinking that probably Nina has left her for good. I am worried that Debbie will expect more from me.

  The next day I fly to my desk, put on an early Miles Davis tape and let it all go, tip it out, what Nina said, how she looked, what we did, and I write (and later cross out) how I like to put my little finger up Deborah’s arse when we’re fucking and how she does the same to me, when she can comfortably reach. I shove it all down shamelessly (and add bits) because it’s my job to write down the things that happen round here and because I have a rule about no material being sacred.

  What does that make me?

  I once was in a cinema when the recently uncovered spy Anthony Blunt came in with a friend. The entire cinema (but not me) stood up and chanted ‘Out, out, out’ until the old queen got up and left. I feel like that old spy, a dirty betrayer with a loudspeaker, doing what I have to.

  I offer this story to you, Deborah and Nina, to make of it what you will, before I send it to the publisher.

  Dear Howard,

  How very kind of you to leave your story on my kitchen table casually saying, ‘I think you should read this before I publish it.’ I was pleased: I gave you an extra kiss, thinking that at last you wanted me to share your work (I almost wrote world).

  I could not believe you opened the story with an account of an abortion. As you know I know, it’s lifted in its entirety from a letter written to you by your last girlfriend, Julie. You were conveniently in New York when she was having the abortion so that she had to spit out all the bits of her broken heart in a letter, and you put it into the story pretending it was written by my daughter.

  The story does also concern me, our ‘relationship’ and even where we put our fingers. Your portrait of me as a miserable whiner let down by men would have desperately depressed me, but I’ve learned that unfeeling, blood-sucking men like you need to reduce women to manageable clichés, even to destroy them, for the sake of control.

  I am only sorry it’s taken me this long to realise what a low, corrupt and exploitative individual you are, who never deserved the love we both offered you. You have torn me apart. I hope the same thing happens to you one day. Please never attempt to get in touch again.

  Deborah

  Someone bangs on the door of the flat. I’ve been alone all day. I’m not expecting anyone, and how did whoever it is get into the building in the first place?

  ‘Let me in, let me in!’ Nina calls out. I open up and she’s standing there soaked through with a sports bag full of things and a couple of plastic bags under her arm.

  ‘Moving in?’ I say.

  ‘You should be so lucky,’ she says, barging past me. ‘I’m on me way somewhere and I thought I’d pop by to borrow some money.’

  She comes into the kitchen. It’s gloomy and the rain hammers into the courtyard outside. But Nina’s cheerful, happy to be back in England and she has no illusions about her father now. Apparently he was rough with her, called her a half-caste and so on.

  ‘Well, Howard, you’re in the shit, aren’t you?’ Nina says. ‘Ma’s pissed off no end with you, man. She’s crying all over the shop. I couldn’t stand it. I’ve moved out. You can die of a broken heart, you know. And you can kill someone that way too.’

  ‘Don’t talk about it,’ I say, breaking up the ice with a hammer and dropping it into the glasses. ‘She wrote me a pissed-off letter. Wanna read it?’

  ‘It’s private, Howard.’

  ‘Read it, for Christ’s sake, Nina,’ I say, shoving it at her. She reads it and I walk round the kitchen looking at her. I stand behind her a long time. I can’t stop looking at her today.

  She puts it down without emotion. She’s not sentimental; she’s always practical about things, because she knows what cunts people are.

  ‘You’ve ripped Ma off before. She’ll get over it, and no one reads the shit you write anyway except a lot of middle-class wankers. As long as you get paid and as long as you give me some of it you’re all right with me.’

  I was right. I knew she’d be flattered. I give her some money and she gathers up her things. I don’t want her to go.

  ‘Where are you off to?’

  ‘Oh, a friend’s place in Hackney. Someone I was in the loony bin with. I’ll be living there. Oh, and Billy will be joining me.’ She smiles broadly ‘I’m happy.’

  ‘Wow. That’s good. You and Billy.’

  ‘Yeah, ain’t it just!’ She gets up and throws back the rest of the whisky. ‘Be seeing ya!’

  ‘Don’t go yet.’

  ‘Got to.’

  At the door she says: ‘Good luck with the writing and everything.’

  I walk to the lift with her. We go down together. I go out to the front door of the building. As she goes out into the street running with sheets of rain, I say: ‘I’ll come with you to the corner,’ and walk with her, even though I’m not dressed for it.

  At the corner I can’t let her go and I accompany her to the bus stop. I wait with her for fifteen minutes in my shirt and slippers. I’m soaked through holding all her bags but I think you can make too much of these things. ‘Don’t go,’ I keep saying inside my head. Then the bus arrives and she takes her bags from me and gets on and I stand there watching her but she won’t look at me because she is thinking of Billy. The bus moves off and I watch until it disappears and t
hen I go inside the flat and take off my clothes and have a bath. Later. I write down the things she said but the place still smells of her.

  Blue, Blue Pictures of You

  I used to like talking about sex. All of life, I imagined – from politics to aesthetics – merged in passionate human conjunctions. A caress, not to speak of a kiss, could transport you from longing to Russia, on to Velazquez and ahead to anarchism. To illustrate this fancy, I did, at one time, consider collecting a ‘book of desire’, an anthology of outlandish, melancholy and droll stories about the subject. This particular story was one, had the project been finished – or even started – I would have included. It was an odd story. Eshan, the photographer who told it to me, used the word himself. At least he said it was the oddest request he’d had. When it was put to him by his pub companion, his first response was embarrassment and perplexity. But of course he was fascinated too.

  At the end of the street where Eshan had a tiny office and small dark room, there was a pub where he’d go at half past six or seven, most days. He liked to work office hours, believing much discipline was requited to do what he did, as if without it he would fly off into madness – though he had, in fact, never flown anywhere near madness, except to sit in that pub.

  Eshan thought he liked routine, and for weeks would do exactly the same thing every day, while frequently loathing this decline into habit. In the pub he would smoke, drink and read the paper for an hour or longer, depending on his mood and on whether he felt sentimental, guilty or plain affectionate towards his wife and two children. Sometimes he’d get home before the children were asleep, and carry them around on his back, kick balls with them, and tell them stories of pigs with spiders on their heads. Other times he would turn up late so he could have his wife make supper, and be free of the feeling that the kids were devouring his life.

  Daily, there were many hapless people in that bar: somnolent junkies from the local rehab, the unemployed and unemployable, pinball pillocks. Eshan nodded at many of them, but if one sat at his table without asking, he could become truculent. Often, however, he would chat to people as he passed to and fro, being more grateful than he knew for distracting conversation. He had become, without meaning to, one of the bar’s characters.

  Eshan’s passion was to photograph people who had produced something of significance, whose work had ‘meaning’. These were philosophers, novelists, painters, film and theatre directors. He used only minimal props and hard, direct lighting. The idea wasn’t to conceal but to expose. The spectator could relate the face to what the subject did. He called it the moment of truth in the features of people seeking the truth.

  He photographed ‘artists’ but also considered himself, in private only, to be ‘some sort’ of an artist. To represent oneself – a changing being, alive with virtues and idiocies – was, for Eshan, the task that entailed the most honesty and fulfilment. But although his work had been published and exhibited, he still had to send out his portfolio with introductory letters, and harass people about his abilities. This was demeaning. By now he should, he reckoned, have got further. But he accepted his condition, imagining that overall he possessed most of what he required to live a simple but not complacent life. His wife illustrated children’s books, and could earn decent money, so they got by. To earn a reasonable living himself, Eshan photographed new groups for the pop press – not that he was stimulated by these callow faces, though occasionally he was moved by their ugliness, the stupidity of their innocence, and their crass hopes. But they wanted only clichés.

  A young man called Brian, who always wore pink shades, started to join Eshan regularly. The pub was his first stop of the day after breakfast. He was vague about what he did, though it seemed to involve trying to manage bands and set up businesses around music. His main occupation was dealing drugs, and he liked supplying Eshan with different kinds of grass that he claimed would make him ‘creative’. Eshan replied that he took drugs in the evenings to stop himself getting creative. When Eshan talked about surrealism, or the great photographers, Brian listened with innocent enthusiasm, as if these were things he could get interested in were he a different person. It turned out that he did know a little about the music that Eshan particularly liked, West Coast psychedelic music of the mid-sixties, and the films, writing and politics that accompanied it. Eshan talked of the dream of freedom, rebellion and irresponsibility it had represented, and how he wished he’d had the courage to go there and join in.

  ‘You make it sound like the past few years in London,’ Brian said. ‘Except the music is faster.’

  A couple of months after Eshan started seeing him in the pub, Brian parted from his casual girlfriends. He went out regularly – it was like a job; and he was the sort of man that women were attracted to in public places. There was hope; every night could take you somewhere new. But Brian was nearly thirty; for a long time he had been part of everything new, living not for the present but for the next thing. He was beginning to see how little it had left him, and he was afraid.

  One day he met a girl who used to play the drums in a trip-hop group. Any subject – the economy, the comparative merits of Paris, Rome or Berlin – would return him to this woman. Every day he went to some trouble to buy her something, even if it was only a pencil. Other times it might be a first-edition Elizabeth David, an art deco lamp from Prague, a tape of Five Easy Pieces, a bootleg of Lennon singing ‘On The Road to Rishikesh’. These things he would anxiously bring to the pub to ask Eshan’s opinion of. Eshan wondered if Brian imagined that because he was a photographer he had taste and judgement, and, being married, had some knowledge of romance.

  After a few drinks Eshan would go home and Brian would start phoning to make his plans for the night ahead. In what Eshan considered to be the middle of the night, Brian and Laura would go to a club, to someone’s house, and then on to another club. Eshan learned that there were some places that only opened at nine on Sunday morning.

  Lying in bed with his wife as they watched TV and read nineteenth-century novels while drinking camomile tea, Eshan found himself trying to picture what Brian and Laura were doing, what sort of good time they were having. He looked forward to hearing next day where they’d been, what drugs they’d taken, what they wore and how the conversation had gone. He was particularly curious about her reaction to each gift; he wanted to know whether she was demanding more and better gifts, or if she appreciated the merits of each one. And what, Eshan inquired with some concern, was Brian getting in return?

  ‘Enough,’ Brian inevitably replied.

  ‘So she’s good to you?’

  Unusually, Brian replied that no lover had ever shown him what she had. Then he leaned forward, glanced left and right, and felt compelled to say, despite his loving loyalty, what this was. Her touch, her words, her sensual art, not to mention her murmurs, gasps, cries; and her fine wrists, long fingers and dark fine-haired bush that stood out like a punk’s back-combed mohican – all were an incomparable rapture. Only the previous evening she had taken him by the shoulders and said –

  ‘Yes?’ Eshan asked.

  ‘Your face, your hands, you, all of you, you …’

  Eshan dried his palms on his trousers. Sighing inwardly, he listened, while signalling a detached approval. He encouraged Brian to repeat everything, like a much-loved story, and Brian was delighted to do so, until they were no longer sure of the facts.

  Perhaps Eshan envied Brian his lover and their pleasure, and Brian was beginning to envy Eshan his stability. Whatever it was between them, Brian involved Eshan in his new love. It was, Eshan was pleased to see, agonising. Laura drew out Brian’s best impulses; tenderness, kindness, generosity. He became more fervent as a dealer so as to take her to restaurants most nights; he borrowed money and took her to Budapest for a week.

  But in love each moment is magnified, and every gesture, word and syllable is examined like a speech by the President. Solid expectation, unfurled hope, immeasurable disappointment – all are hurle
d together like a cocktail of random drugs that, quaffed within the hour, make both lovers reel. If she dressed up and went to a party with a male friend, he spent the night catatonic with paranoia; if he saw an old girlfriend, she assumed they would never speak again. And surely she was seeing someone else, someone better in every way? Did she feel about him as he did her? To love her was to fear losing her. Brian would have locked her in a bare room to have everything hold still a minute.

  One day when Eshan went to the bar he returned to see that Brian had picked up a folder Eshan had left on the table, opened it, and was holding up the photographs. Brian could be impudent, which was his charm, and Eshan liked charm, because it was rare and good to watch as a talent. But it also exposed Brian as a man who was afraid; his charm was charged with the task of disarming people before they damaged him.

  ‘Hey,’ said Eshan.

  Brian placed his finger on a picture of Doris Lessing. Laura was reading The Golden Notebook; could he buy it for her? Eshan said, yes, and he wouldn’t charge. But Brian insisted. They agreed on a price and on a black frame. They drank more and wondered what Laura would think. A few days later Brian reported that though Laura would never finish the book – she never finished any book, the satisfaction was too diffuse – she had been delighted by the picture. Could she visit his studio?

  ‘Studio? If only it was. But yes, bring her over – it’s time we met.’

  ‘Tomorrow, then.’

  They were more than two hours late. Eshan had been meditating, which he did whenever he was tense or angry. You couldn’t beat those Eastern religions for putting the wet blanket on desire. When he was turning out the lights and ready to leave, Brian and Laura arrived at the door with wine. Eshan put out his work for Laura. She looked closely at everything. They smoked the dope he had grown on his balcony from Brian’s seeds, lay on the floor with the tops of their heads touching, and watched a Kenneth Anger film. Brian and Laura rang some people and said they were going out. Would he like to come? Eshan almost agreed. He said he would like to have joined them, but that he got up early to work. And the music, an electronic blizzard of squeaks, bleeps and beats, had nothing human in it.