The Last Word

by Kureishi, Hanif

  ‘You see?’ said Marion.

  With her behind him, Harry continued to stare: if he had forgotten why, as a young man, he’d loved Mamoon – the tough-guy, hard-living artist who looked into the dark without flinching, and spoke what he saw, putting truth and authenticity before safety – this picture of pride, self-knowledge and glamour should remind him.

  It had to be true, as Rob liked to reiterate, that the writer, indeed every real artist, was the devil, rivalling God in creativity, trying even to surpass him. God was surely man’s most fatal creation, the devil’s kitsch bitch. It was God, with his insistence on being worshipped and admired, who made the argument of art necessary, keeping the fire of dissent alive in men and women. This dissident was the artist, who spanned with his imagination reason and unreason, the under and the over, the dream and the world, men and women.

  Plato, along with the latest pope, recognised how dangerous it is to have an artist around making mischief, stirring things up with the spoon of truth and intoxicant of fantasy and magic. And so, for crossing the line, and for stealing God’s fire, artists were banned, imprisoned, condemned, silenced, killed – they always would be, these sometime Christs of the page.

  It must have been the Faustian idea of Mamoon as hero and holy transgressor, as the one who took on God and the righteous, that Harry had fallen in love with, an image which had brought him to this room today, followed by this woman who had slept every night for years beneath the picture. It was, also, a picture of the man Harry had, at one time, wanted to become. Yet now he was only the illustrator, not the subject. In what way, he wondered, could he become more like the image? How brave or daring had he ever been?

  Marion kissed her fingers and pressed them against the photograph.

  Harry noticed there was nowhere else to sit except beside her on the narrow single bed. On the undusted shelf there were photographs of her children when young. He told her they were lovely kids.

  ‘Women must not bolt,’ she said. ‘The children punished me. When I went, one of them attempted suicide, and is still mad in an asylum. The youngest refuses to let me meet my grandchildren.’

  She asked Harry to pull a shoe box from under the bed. Out of this she extracted the letters, of which there were about fifty. She opened two of them, and let him see the date and the ‘Darling Marion’ and ‘all my love, Mamoon’, in his familiar minuscule writing.

  She said, ‘During this period he kept saying I bored him, and he didn’t feel alive any more. If I didn’t think of new things for us to do, he’d go mad. He was fascinated by styles of love-making, by how different women respond, move, kiss, and how he was new each time. It was almost forensic for him.

  ‘I suggested we could ask men to join us, and he could watch, if he wanted to. He did watch; he wanted to take part. He seemed to join forces with the other men. There were too many of them. He started to make me do things I couldn’t bear to do to please him. Scenes so depraved it makes me sick to think of them. Tiger burning . . . burning . . .

  ‘He wanted an accelerated ecstasy, as he nominated it, what Poe calls an “infinity of mental excitement . . .” He claimed, oddly for him, that this extremity, this repeated transgression and sacrilege, was the closest thing to a religious experience he’d had. Here, he said, he could fruitfully lose himself entirely, and betray his father over and over again. He understood the point of the crowd, and how it could pull you away from yourself. And this from no keener follower of individualism.

  ‘I made love to people I wouldn’t otherwise have touched. This was dangerous at that time, but I would have done anything to keep him. Anything.’

  ‘Did he hurt you?’

  ‘Now, looking back, I feel abused. I was used. I was a fool to think he would love me always, that he would marry me.’ She said, ‘He was strong then. He grabbed my face and forced it into a man’s crotch and I remember thinking “You’ve hurt me for your pleasure. It matters more to you than I do.” There’s a lot of degradation in sex, isn’t there?’

  ‘When it’s done right. Are you saying he was a pervert?’

  ‘Are you a serious writer, or are you working for the National Enquirer?’

  ‘The Enquirer.’

  ‘I learned that real sex is mad, mad, mad,’ she said, ‘It can overrun everything else, particularly sense and intelligence. And you must remember, he loved me so much, even as he hated me. I had captivated him, sexually, and he was mine. Fortunately, he was travelling a lot at the same time and wrote to me with various “requests” I should fulfil when he came home.’

  ‘He did?’

  ‘In the end, Peggy, who was not well in mind or body, requested him to return. He hesitated for days. Suppose he just walked out now. What would he lose, what would he gain? What about her? Duty or love? I’d never seen him so anguished. I was foolish: I said I’d stand by him whichever way he went. He kissed me goodbye. I believed he would marry me. I didn’t think for a moment I’d never see him again.’ She went on, ‘I suspect he went back to see another woman – not Liana. It wasn’t her turn yet.’

  ‘Another woman? Do you know which woman?’

  She shrugged. ‘Do you? Yes, obviously. You do know.’ When he said nothing she continued. ‘I learned later, from reading him, that the experiences we’d had together had traumatised him. He could only process all that raw experience by sitting in a room for months. I even think he still believed he could turn his back on his sexuality and sublimate it entirely.

  ‘Peggy kept going for eighteen months. She created the environment he needed, where he wrote that horrible text, one of the ugliest books I’ve read, with a sadism which I believe is quite unconscious, since he actually loves women. He was the most conscious of artists, but he knew there were some things you had to leave alone when they occurred to you, which were the essence of something true.’

  Harry said, ‘I need to ask you something. Are you sure I can’t see his letters to you? Could I copy them? I could photograph them with my phone. I could help you arrange for them to be purchased by an American university. It goes without saying that you could do well out of them.’

  She laughed. ‘I’m aware of that and I need the money badly for health care. I’m not so stupid, Harry. This material will make a chapter in your account. I’m hanging onto it for now because for me it will be an entire book. Mine will be far more spicy, passionate and vulgar than yours. I know the other women involved and they will back me up with their recollections, while remaining anonymous. And I have started my book. Are you and I racing?’

  He said, ‘Coming from me, this will sound a bit rich, but why would you want to expose this private material?’

  ‘Suppose Flaubert’s lover had written a book about him? Or Kafka’s fiancée? What would it be like to be a writer’s companion? After my story of my life with him, he and I will be side by side forever.’ She added, ‘He loved and exploited me. Now I can do the same to him!’

  ‘Very tabloid.’

  ‘Isn’t it usually the women’s voices which are suppressed? You envy him, and will never know what it is like to love him. I will give the view from the bedroom, the intimate picture. If you want to know a man, see how he is in love. Isn’t that where the truth lies?’

  ‘Yes, the truth always lies. It might be in the complexity of the work.’

  ‘That’s the cover story.’

  He said, ‘And if he wanted you back?’

  ‘I’d be there like a shot, even now. Will you say that to him? He was cruel, handsome and brilliant, everything a man should be. Harry, will you say my name in front of him and watch his face? He knows very well that he is still mine, that he will not escape me.’

  At the door she put her face up to his. He kissed her cheek, and saw she wanted to give him her mouth. Perhaps it would be her last kiss. For a short time he gave her his mouth. Why not? She tried to pull him towards her, but he removed her hands from his body.

  ‘I still have physical feeling,’ she said. ‘If you h
elp me, I’ll show you the letters.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m tired. Come back tomorrow? Would you – for one more day? I will have something important.’

  The next day he learned that he could read some of the letters on her bed, where she would lie next to him. He would wear a T-shirt and trousers, and she would be permitted to touch his upper body only: chest, shoulders, head and hair. He didn’t object to her caresses; he believed he was glad to be of use, and he was, anyway, tense for a number of good reasons.

  As her hands worked on him, Harry took in the material: they were love letters, with requests for assignations disguised as wishes for others to accompany them ‘on walks’. Despite her promises, and sentences about how much ‘the other evening’ had meant to him at his time of life, and how ‘revived’ and ‘interested’ he was, once more, in what he referred to as ‘the human scene’, there was nothing substantial to count as confirmation.

  All Harry could do was thank Marion, kiss her, and say goodbye. He would write to her if he needed anything else.

  ‘Please come back again – whenever you like,’ she said, taking his hands. He wondered if she’d ever let him go. ‘Please, I’ll try to find other pictures and notes. Tell me, do you pity me, an old woman alone, with nothing except a few memories of a writer?’

  ‘I admire you, Marion.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For being a fundamentalist, for giving up everything for one idea – love. And you still live it.’

  ‘Would you have sacrificed so much?’

  ‘For me the world’s full of women. Many of them – too many – are nice.’

  ‘The serial loves keep you safe, and that’s the most dangerous thing of all. You never miss anyone, and if there’s no sacrifice, there’s no love.’

  He asked her how she read her love now, as devotion, or the siren call of masochism?

  ‘Until you said it, I thought it was the first. Now you tell me.’

  Self-sacrifice would be the hardest addiction to shift. He said, ‘Mamoon felt uneasy, with all that relentless love and possessiveness coming at him.’

  ‘That’s what you would feel. I know some puny men are afraid of women. But why would you say that about him?’

  ‘He fled.’

  ‘So he’s the victim here, after all.’

  He said, ‘I guess it’s wonderful to fall in love, but falling out of it, losing the illusion – now there’s a necessary art, which might profitably be learned.’

  ‘I suppose that is what you will write. I must do my book then.’ She sighed. ‘I seem to have ruined my life, and you appear to have saved yours.’

  ‘Not so fast,’ he said. ‘My girlfriend and I did a test back in London, and she’s having a child. We talked about children, but never agreed on anything definite. Myself, I still feel I’m an adolescent.’

  ‘You’re mis-recognising yourself,’ she said. ‘That is very dangerous.’

  ‘How to see straight?’

  ‘That is the thing.’

  ‘How, how?’

  ‘It’s been done already, the straight seeing,’ she said. ‘You’ve seen. Now you cover it up. You hide yourself from yourself.’ She kissed him. ‘Don’t forget, conventionally, you actually have what most people want. Send me a picture of the little one.’

  Nineteen

  Harry guessed there was something wrong with Rob when, the afternoon after his return to London, Rob suggested they meet in the frantic bar of a railway station. It was not the case that Rob was intending to take a journey: he said he only liked ‘anonymous places’ or ‘non-spaces’ now. As soon as they met, Rob commented on the number of anxious bodies rushing around them, saying how the limbs had lost contact with their owners and resembled electrified stumps.

  Rob had been drinking and was sweaty and shaking excessively, even for him. He appeared to have shoved most of his clothes in a kit bag that didn’t close, and Harry could see a slew of manuscripts, Bulgarian, Albanian and Tunisian novels, and poetry books. As there was the stench of the grave about the editor, Harry got down from his stool, saying it was awkward, and insisted they sit at a table where Rob was further away.

  ‘Don’t I look a hundred per cent?’ said Rob. His eyes widened and he glanced around furtively, as if he were about to be attacked. Harry remembered how gentle his father was with paranoiacs, speaking to them quietly, and without intrusive questions, often just repeating what they said in a whisper. He managed this until Rob informed him that he was intending to accompany him to Mamoon’s place in the country.

  ‘You are? Why?’ asked Harry.

  ‘Don’t you think it would be a good place to detox? We can talk through the material while strolling about the woods. I can help you organise it.’

  ‘Rob, I’m not ready for that,’ said Harry. ‘All you need to know is that India was terrific.’

  ‘And America?’

  ‘I had to beg for it, but finally it turned out to be good stuff, with Marion. She’s very similar to Liana in her brashness and confidence. Mamoon must know that people go for the same types without seeing it. But she’s more intelligent and shrewder than Liana. She knows him better. However, it turns out she loved the curmudgeonly old cunt non-stop for years, and still does, remarkably enough. She even fetched other women for him.’

  ‘There’s no accounting for taste. Particularly with literary giants, Harry, you will find that the women fling themselves into the fire head first. We fans are on the wrong side of literature.’

  Harry said, ‘She gave him everything he wanted, and plenty of what he didn’t want. There was so much of it, he had to run for his life, even if it meant going back to the moaning lush Peggy who’d swallow anything, except his semen.’

  ‘No wonder he hid in the shed writing.’

  ‘He regrets the hiding, I suspect. It did him no good to miss out on the kisses. Still, it cheers me to think what a torment the bastard endured with both of them. It must have been a relief when Liana turned up, his escape from the labour of love. He must have believed everything would get easier.’

  ‘Did it work out for Mamoon? What’s it really like down there in the country with him? I guess I’ll find out later tonight.’ Harry must have looked surprised. ‘But I’m already packed. And this is juicy stuff, Harry. I can’t wait to hear more!’

  ‘In due course.’

  ‘What the fuck?’ said Rob. ‘Aren’t you going to let me sniff the sock?’

  ‘Rob, you sound a little manic. Your words are too close together. You don’t look at your all-time best.’

  He said, ‘Did you get objective confirmation of the Mamoon violations? You can’t just stick any fucking gossip in one of my books: the lawyers will rip it right out.’

  ‘I understand that.’

  Rob said he was rereading Mamoon’s second book, which was improving with age. He saw it all: how Marxism and fundamentalism both require and enjoin silence, and that where there is silence evil is done. Far from fading, the writer had become a more crucial figure. He and Harry should shout out to the world that Mamoon still existed and people should hear him. Rob went on to say that things were not good for him either. ‘The wife’s thrown me out of the house. We had an altercation involving violence – on her side. She says I’m a paranoid alcoholic with a personality disorder.’

  ‘Who’d have thought it?’

  ‘I am narcissistic, too, apparently, as is anyone who doesn’t think about her continuously. I’m going to get treatment for depression. If the pills don’t work, I’m going to ask to have electricity put through me to jolt me into full health. Will you hold my hand when I’m plugged into the AC/DC?’

  ‘Rob, it was you who suggested that things were not good for me.’

  ‘Sorry, I forgot. They are not good for you. They couldn’t be worse, no.’ He leaned towards Harry. ‘Watch out all around – from behind, the side and the front.’

  Harry laughed. ‘For what? I’ve just been in New York
discussing the book with the American publisher. I’m full of ideas. He was pleased.’

  Rob leaned towards him. ‘There’s a young gun, just out of college, more businesslike, less drippy and dreamy than you. When you left the country Liana hopped off to London to meet with him secretly. She told him how difficult you are, with your unusual hard-on for the truth, and she gave him encouragement.’

  ‘She did that to me?’

  ‘The young gun was guaranteeing he could turn the biography around in a year, and give Mamoon a lovely fresh gloss – the last of the post-war literary geniuses, there being only blogs, trolls and amateurs from now on. I could hear Liana’s vagina clapping with enthusiasm.’

  ‘You’re joking, Rob. I signed a contract.’

  ‘If Liana gives the word, you’re gone like a used condom. Me and Lotte, my super-soft sidekick, are making a superhuman effort to hold you in place.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘We’re using threats – among other things. Liana has to trust me: I said the young gun doesn’t have half your brain or ability. It sounds as if you’ve been doing good work. I bought you more time. You must press on, friend. Without my protection it will get dirty. I wouldn’t want to see you on antidepressants. What’s up? Your coat is going on. You’re looking away. You’re dashing off tonight – but, please, not without me.’

  ‘Sorry, Rob, I don’t want to be rude, but I need to see Alice properly.’

  When Rob said he did too, Harry got up, paid the bill and started to walk away. Rob followed him, still talking. ‘I say – let’s meet soon, with the material in front of us. Perhaps on site. I could feel purified down there amongst the goats, fish and dung.’ He went on, ‘And if I can’t confirm the material’s decent, it’s curtains and creative writing for you, dude. You get me?’