Something to Tell You

by Hanif Kureishi

  “It was all talk?”

  “I gave him the joint. It’s special stuff. I knew it would draw out the subject for him.” Now Miriam came and sat next to me, lowering her voice. “I’ll tell you how he seduced me into love.”

  “Love already?”

  Henry had asked Bushy to drive them to his flat by the river at Hammersmith where he lived on the first floor. I often went there: the living room had a long window overlooking the Thames and the trees on the towpath opposite. The other three flats in the house were occupied by ageing theatre queens with whom Henry was always arguing, either about the dustbins or the number of rent boys or, more likely, young actors, stamping up and down the stairs. Or they’d have long discussions on the landing about productions at the Royal Court in the mid-1960s.

  Apart from the large living room, Henry’s place was composed of a number of small and medium-sized rooms filled randomly with theatre memorabilia as well as the “artworks” he’d begun to make himself in the last few years. Sitting on worn carpets were his “sculptures” made of wire and plaster, or of egg-boxes mixed with Polyfilla; on the walls, among the broken mirrors, posters and sketches for costumes from numerous shows, were his drawings and watercolours.

  Like a lot of people, he was prouder of his hobbies than he was of his work. His son, Sam, had told the Mule Woman, indeed any woman who passed through, that if you praised Henry’s photography you were in with him, if that’s what you wanted. In fact, the Mule Woman had been so in love with the idea of living near the river, which she watched constantly, that she attempted to dust a little, soon realising it would take a team of people several days to make an impression. Nevertheless, she’d honoured the pictures and received some kindness in return.

  Henry had a large armchair by the window, and a radio on a table next to it. Here he read newspapers, poetry, plays and Dostoevsky, while watching the river. He liked to claim that at night he could see, among the trees, his gay friends participating in open-air orgies.

  Miriam said, “I liked the pad. The history of his life everywhere, awards, photographs of him with that famous French actress, Brigitte Bardot.”

  “Jeanne Moreau.”

  Miriam said, “We wanted to get the sex done with straightaway. Both of us were starving for physical love. He was like some madwoman, talking about how his body would disgust anyone who saw it. He wouldn’t take his clothes off. He actually put his jumper on. You know I’m used to odd things, but it got bizarre, lying naked in bed with a completely dressed stranger who wouldn’t stop telling me how frightened he was. Anyway, you don’t need to hear about it.”

  “Why not?”

  “It might make you sad about yourself.” I laughed. At times she sounded as sentimental as Rafi, who would say, “Oh, Dad, I don’t want you to feel sad.” Now she went on, “Well, after the love, he got this book out. We were on the vodka, smoking another joint. He made me read to him. She was called Sonya.”

  “From Uncle Vanya? The last speech?”

  “He put a chair in the middle of the room and watched how I sat. He had the cheek to give me instructions.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He made me do it slower. He told me when to look at the book and when to look up. At the same time he wanted me to do it naturally, as if I were at home. The speech was about work and the angels and the heavens, full of emoting. Too much about work for my liking. He got very involved in it, dashing about here and there. I had no idea he could be so light on his feet.”

  Now and again over the years, I’d sat in on Henry’s rehearsals for both his modern and classical work. I’d particularly liked his workshops with ordinary people and his appreciation of what he called “naive” acting, which, he said, had its own beauty. “Bring me only the worst actors. What could be more depressing than talent?” he’d say. “I hope never to meet anyone talented again!”

  If, when he was doing a production, there was an actor he couldn’t get along with, he’d ask me to come in and have a look at them, and Henry and I would talk in the bar later. Henry was different at work; I’d heard he’d been a bully, particularly with women, but he seemed to have grown out of that. In the rehearsal room, I was impressed by his assurance and intense concentration, by his concern for the actors and his interest in their ideas, as well as his firmness when he wanted something. I saw that this was where he was meant to be, what he was alive for. But it also made me wonder why this self, so alert and vibrant, was separated from the anxious, daily self which I knew.

  Miriam said, “He told me he might record me saying the speech for television. Was he lying or just winding me up? I’m used to that stuff from men. Married men always adored me.”

  “They did?”

  “I swallowed everything.”

  “Indeed.”

  “I don’t even mind him lying, but—”

  “Henry wouldn’t do that. He is supposed to be making a documentary about acting. If you’re not careful he’ll put you in it.”

  “Really? I’ll have to get my hair done and cover my tattoos. I wish I had some money.”

  A few years back I introduced Henry to one of my ex-girlfriends, Karen Pearl, sometimes fondly referred to as “the TV Bitch.” About eighteen months ago, she had agreed to produce a documentary that Henry wanted to make. But instead of shooting it over a ten-day period, as most people would, Henry had decided he would make his film “over a couple of years,” with his own camera, while doing other things, like teaching, travelling and lecturing—his “retirement” activity, though he hadn’t retired, of course.

  Karen wanted celebrities in the documentary, by which she meant soap stars, while Henry wanted talented, well-known actors with whom he’d worked before, as well as amateurs attempting pieces from the classical repertoire.

  Henry had become annoyed with me for putting the two of them together in the first place, and Karen claimed his obduracy was helping to bankrupt her, though even he can’t have been the sole cause. She’d invited me to one of her pop things recently, in a warehouse full of barely dressed and over-made-up semi-children. She’d turned into Hattie Jacques in the Carry On films: matronly, patronising, foolishly grand.

  She was fond of the juice, and as furiously difficult in her persistence as Henry. One of the first to produce makeover programmes—gardens, houses, women—things hadn’t gone her way for a while; everyone was doing it now. The company she had started had recently been fired from a series they were making. Therefore I didn’t think Karen would be too pleased with Henry’s new but touching idea to have his girlfriend recite Sonya’s speech in its entirety on television. I could see many battles ahead.

  Miriam said, “Bushy got me home. I felt like I was lying on a cushion of air. It’s been years since I’ve had any real love. I kept singing. I wanted to hear a song by Enya.”

  “Oh, bad luck.” Before she could slap me, I said, “Will you see him again?”

  “Only if you tell me why he likes me.”

  “You’re likeable.”

  She said, “Why don’t you have a lover? I know you miss Josephine.”

  “I get lonely. But, as my first analyst used to say, ‘Don’t worry about me, I’ve had my satori.’”

  She said, “It was the one before Karen, Ajita, who was always your true love.”

  “She was?”

  “How many times did I meet her? Two or three? That was enough for me to tell. She was lovely, and uncomplicated. She gave me that jewellery too. Why didn’t you stay together?”

  “Things fell apart.”

  “What really went on between you two? Maybe it will still work out. Why don’t you search for her?”

  “I’m not sure I want to.”

  “Didn’t someone get killed?”

  “They did.”

  “When will I hear the whole story?”

  I said, “She’s been on my mind a lot. It’s that time of year, the anniversary, when I saw her for the last time. I always sit and think of her, and fe
el damned dark, dark, dark.”

  “Jamal, try and find her. She’s probably living nearby. Like you, she will have been with other people, but I’ve got a feeling there’s something between you.”

  “What if there isn’t? Wouldn’t that be worse? To me it’s Pandora’s box.”

  “You won’t know until you find out.”

  “Listen,” I went on, avoiding the subject. “Miriam, you can go to Henry’s when you want, but his son is sometimes there. I’ll put my flat at your disposal. I will have two keys cut. Use the place when you want, when I am not working in the evenings, or at weekends. If Maria is there, send her out.”

  I noticed that Bushy had come in; he was standing there, nodding at Miriam. Earlier I’d noticed, but not really taken in the fact, that she was wearing make-up as well as perfume.

  “Jamal, I have to go. Henry is taking me to a club for a drink.”

  “Excellent,” I said. She was passing her hand repeatedly over her face. “What’s wrong?”

  “But I don’t want this. I hate to go out. I have my people, the children, Bushy. Henry unsettles me. Perhaps he will ruin me, and I have ruined my life too often. Do I have to go?”

  “Yes.”

  Behind us, Bushy cleared his throat. I said, “Miriam, it is like the old days. You about to go out into the night and me about to go to bed.”

  “I would invite you to come,” she said. “But Henry wants to see me alone.”

  “I am working on my book. It’s the thing which interests me most now.”

  In the last ten years I had published two books of case studies, Six Characters in Search of a Cure and The Reader of Signs. In each volume I took a number of individuals and discussed my sessions with them, musing, as the stories unfolded, on the nature of “everyday illnesses” or symptoms: fears, obsessions, inhibitions, phobias, addictions. This was normal, everyday stuff any reader would recognise: symptoms around which whole lives are organised and on which, sometimes, they founder.

  To my surprise, as well as that of the publishers, my books were successful and translated into five languages. As well as being an attempt to revive Freud’s idea of the case study as a mixture of literature, speculation and theory, it was a way of explaining analysis to a new generation, a way of showing how it could succeed as well as fail. Therefore it was partly about how people hate the thought of giving up their symptoms—forfeiting one’s illnesses is a big risk, since they work as cures for other conflicts.

  I had avoided technical language and discovered that these accounts of distress naturally had the structure, organisation and narrative push of stories. They were, in fact, character studies, in which the subjects were collages of real patients, along with fragments of myself and other parts which were invented. They were the closest I’d come, and it was pretty close, to writing fiction. It was a form, a relatively free one, unlike that of the academic article, where I could say what I needed to, musing on my daily work and on the thinking of others, poets, philosophers, analysts.

  I wasn’t inexperienced as a scribbler. I had a contract for another book, and it was my intention to write one: I needed the money. But this material about Ajita, which was emerging spontaneously and taking up most of my writing time, seemed different. I imagined my account of her, seemingly random and chaotic, would be not unlike that of a psychoanalytic session: a mixture of dreams, wishes, interruptions, disputes, fantasies, resistances, memories from different periods, and an attempt to find a way through it all. To what? I was trying to find out.

  I walked around to the front of the house with Miriam. I noticed Bushy was carrying what looked like Miriam’s overnight bag. Before getting in my own car, I kissed her and watched as Bushy opened the rear door for her, waiting as she struggled, suppressing various “old woman” noises, to get herself comfortable.

  Then, as she went to her pleasure, she waved and called out, “See you later, Brother.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  My lover was crying, shaking. I’d never seen her in such a state.

  Ajita and I were putting our towels out, scanning the sky for clouds, when she broke down, weeping hard. It was some time before she admitted that something serious was bothering her. Her father was having trouble at his factory, the place he wanted her to run with him when she graduated. She had even hypothesised about whether she and I might manage it together, when her father retired.

  There had been a television documentary about the factory, which as it happened, I had watched with Mum, not realising it was about her family.

  A few months previously, her father had been approached by a director who told him the putative “doc” would be a sympathetic look at the lives of the Ugandan Asians, people who had come here with little but who were already pushing up, socially; a bright story about an immigrant’s progress. Ajita’s father had liked the director, with whom he had many talks about cricket, India and the politics of the Third World. However, it turned out that the director was a sort of double agent, as a lot of them were said to be. He was an upper-class, Cambridge-educated Communist, a clever, successful renegade who hated his own class and background.

  In the documentary, there were many shots inside the factory and interviews with the workers. Ajita’s father had cooperated; he was flattered to be involved. But the Cambridge Communist had exposed Ajita’s father as a merciless exploiter of his own people, as an archcapitalist and greedy villain. Ajita’s father had tried to contact the man and remonstrate with him. But now the Commie wouldn’t speak to him. Ajita’s father couldn’t understand how anyone could behave so perfidiously. It was “typically English,” from his point of view—as well as being what he described as “Marxist colonialism.”

  The factory workers had, of course, seen the programme and had become more difficult, complaining openly now and even threatening strike action. In Africa or India, of course, they’d have been fired or beaten up. Ajita said to me, “Why can’t they just work? Surely in this political climate they’re lucky to have jobs.” This must have been what her father had told her.

  I made it clear to Ajita that, when it came to such things, I was on the side of the workers; that was my instinct and my belief, passed on to me by my own father. Somewhat self-righteously, I told her I was also a supporter of Rock Against Racism, formed after Eric Clapton made a racist speech from the stage in Birmingham. “Come on, Eric,” went the original letter in Melody Maker. “Own up. Half your music’s black. You’re rock’s biggest colonist.” But Ajita wasn’t about to become a leftist. She said nothing; she wasn’t taking anything in.

  My hope was that, despite our differences, we would return to our indolent life, financed by the great exploiter, her father. The longer the old man was at work, harassed though we might be, the more time I had to eat his food, drink his beer and fuck his daughter. Other than when it concerned race, politics didn’t fascinate me. People were always on strike in the 1970s; it was the only consolation for having to work. The lights crashed almost every week. You’d hear a huge ironic cheer going round the neighbourhood pubs and dance halls, before you could grab the girls and the candles came out. Or there were food or petrol shortages, along with some sort of national crisis with ministers resigning and governments surviving on the edge. Then there’d be an IRA bomb: among other things, they liked blowing up pubs, as well as Hammersmith Bridge, which was attacked twice. The wrong people were soon beaten, forced to confess and locked up. We were used to it.

  But this crisis at the factory was upsetting Ajita so much she didn’t want to make love. “Don’t touch me, Jamal,” she said, turning away from me. “I can’t do this anymore. I feel too bad.” It was the first time she’d refused me, the first shadow over our infatuation.

  She wouldn’t be comforted. To distract ourselves, we drove into college and were sitting quietly in the bar with Valentin. I liked being there, the men looking at her. She was a standout girl. I had my little gang now; I felt protected.

  One of the most active student
groups was the Iranian exiles. Every lunchtime they’d leaflet the bar with horrific pictures of the victims of the shah’s secret police, SAVAK, an organisation supported by the US, ever the dictator’s friend and financier. I would speak to the young leftists who wanted our support; they claimed they would use the mosques to organise the people. Once the rebellion had started, the Left would take over.

  The other active college group, always busy and looking for trouble, and related to the Anti-Nazi League, was the SWP, the Socialist Workers Party. A student in our philosophy class came over to hand us some of their leaflets. Like Marxism itself, he wasn’t ready to go away but drew up a stool and talked urgently to Valentin about a meeting.

  The Trots were always trying to convert him, which was peculiar since he’d been brought up in a Communist state from which he’d gone to some trouble to flee, arguing that Marxist ideology had devastated his country. Despite the Trots’ arguments that the system had “gone wrong” after being hijacked by Stalinists, Valentin couldn’t be convinced. He told me he found these guys amusing or “almost mad,” but he often listened to them, having nothing better to do.

  Valentin seemed contemptuous of almost all human effort or enterprise, as if it were beneath him. Certainly, he considered me beneath him, which was perhaps why I was so keen to impress him. When once I asked him to help me with my logic, he just said, “Oh, I mastered all this months ago.” Then, when we’d go to the King’s Road on Friday and Saturday nights to pick up women, he’d usually score and I’d always have to get the last train home. I guess, when he “gave” me Ajita, it was another patronising act.

  I noticed that after glancing at the leaflet she had been given, Ajita then reread it several times, which surprised me as she’d never been keen on either reading or politics.

  The Trot jabbed at the leaflet. “That factory owner there, the one we’re concerned with…” He drew his finger across his throat and opened his mouth and rolled his eyes like a distressed figure in a Bacon painting.