Authors: Hanif Kureishi
He liked the question.
‘Very much‚’ he said. ‘Do you?’
She looked down. She said, ‘Will you look after her?’
‘Yes. I promise.’
She nodded. ‘That’s all I wanted to know. I’ll make your dinner.’
While she cooked, Nicole and Majid waited in the lounge. He said that, like him, she seemed only to sit on the edge of the furniture. She sat back self-consciously. He started to pace about, full of things to say.
Her mother was intelligent and dignified, he said, which must have been where Nicole inherited her grace. But the place, though it wasn’t sordid, was desolate.
‘Sordid? Desolate? Not so loud! What are you talking about?’
‘You said your mother was selfish. That she always put herself, and her men friends in particular, before her children.’
‘I did say –’
‘Well, I had been expecting a woman who cosseted herself. But I’ve never been in a colder house.’ He indicated the room. ‘No mementos, no family photographs, not one picture. Everything personal has been erased. There is nothing she has made, or chosen to reflect –’
‘You only do what interests you‚’ Nicole said. ‘You work, sit on boards, eat, travel and talk. “Only do what gives you pleasure,” you say to me constantly.’
‘I’m a sixties kid‚’ he said. ‘It was a romantic age.’
‘Majid, the majority can’t live such luxurious lives. They never did. Your sixties is a great big myth.’
‘It isn’t the lack of opulence which disturbs me, but the
poverty of imagination. It makes me think of what culture means –’
‘It means showing off and snobbery –’
‘Not that aspect of it. Or the decorative. But as indispensable human expression, as a way of saying, “Here there is pleasure, desire, life! This is what people have made!”’
He had said before that literature, indeed, all culture, was a celebration of life, if not a declaration of love for things.
‘Being here‚’ he continued, ‘it isn’t people’s greed and selfishness that surprises me. But how little people ask of life. What meagre demands they make, and the trouble they go to, to curb their hunger for experience.’
‘It might surprise you‚’ she said, ‘because you know successful egotistical people who do what they love. But most people don’t do much of anything most of the time. They only want to get by another day.’
‘Is that so?’ He thought about this and said that every day he awoke ebulliently and full of schemes. There was a lot he wanted, of the world and of other people. He added, ‘And of you.’
But he understood sterility because despite all the ‘culture’ he and his second wife had shared, his six years with her had been arid. Now he had this love, and he knew it was love because of the bleakness that preceded it, which had enabled him to see what was possible.
She kissed him. ‘Precious, precious‚’ she said.
She pointed to the bolted door she had mentioned to him.
She wanted to go downstairs. But her mother was calling them.
They sat down in the kitchen, where two places had been laid. Nicole and her mother saw him looking at the food.
‘Seems a bit funny giving Indian food to an Indian‚’ the mother said. ‘I didn’t know what you eat.’
‘That’s all right‚’ he said.
She added, ‘I thought you’d be more Indian, like.’
He waggled his head. ‘I’ll try to be.’ There was a silence. He said to her, ‘It was my birthday yesterday.’
‘Really?’ said the mother.
She and her daughter looked at one another and laughed.
While he and Nicole ate, the mother, who was very thin, sat and smoked. Sometimes she seemed to be watching them and other times fell into a kind of reverie. She was even-tempered and seemed prepared to sit there all day. He found himself seeking the fury in her, but she looked more resigned than anything, reminding him of himself in certain moods: without hope or desire, all curiosity suppressed in the gloom and agitated muddle of her mind.
After a time she said to Nicole, ‘What are you doing with yourself? How’s work?’
‘Work? I’ve given up the job. Didn’t I tell you?’
‘At the television programme?’
‘Yes.’
‘What for? It was a lovely job!’
Nicole said, ‘It wore me out for nothing. I’m getting the
strength to do what I want, not what I think I ought to do.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ her mother said. ‘You stay in bed all day?’
‘We only do that sometimes‚’ Majid murmured.
Her mother said, ‘I can’t believe you gave up such a job! I can’t even get work in a shop. They said I wasn’t experienced enough. I said, what experience do you need to sell bread rolls?’
In a low voice Nicole talked of what she’d been promising herself – to draw, dance, study philosophy, get healthy. She would follow what interested her. Then she caught his eye, having been reminded of one of the strange theories that puzzled and alarmed her. He maintained that it wasn’t teaching she craved, but a teacher, someone to help and guide her; perhaps a kind of husband. She found herself smiling at how he brought everything back to them.
‘Must be lovely‚’ her mother said. ‘Just doing what you want.’
‘I’ll be all right‚’ Nicole said.
After lunch, in the lounge, Nicole pulled the brass bolt and he accompanied her down a dark flight of stairs. This was the basement where she and her brother and sister used to sleep, Nicole wearing a knitted hat and scarf, as her mother would heat only the front room. The damp room opened on to a small garden where the children had to urinate if the bolt was across. Beyond there were fields.
Late at night they would listen to the yells and crashes upstairs. If one of her mother’s boyfriends – whichever man it
was who had taken her father’s place – had neglected to bolt the door, Nicole would put on her overcoat and Wellington boots, and creep upstairs. The boots were required because of overturned ashtrays and broken glass. She would ensure her mother hadn’t been cut or beaten, and try to persuade everyone to go to bed. One morning there had been indentations in the wall, along with the remains of hair and blood, where her mother’s head had been banged against it. A few times the police came.
Majid watched as Nicole went through files containing old school books, magazines, photographs. She opened several sacks and hunted through them for some clothes she wanted to take back to London. This would take some time. He decided to go upstairs and wait for her. As he went, he passed the mother.
He walked about, wondering where in the house, when Nicole was ten, her father had hanged himself. He hadn’t been able to ask. He thought of what it would be like to be living an ordinary life, and the next day your husband is self-murdered, leaving you with three children.
On returning he paused at the top of the stairs. They were talking; no – arguing. The mother’s voice, soft and contained earlier, had gained a furious edge. The house seemed transparent. He could hear them, just as her mother must have heard him.
‘If he’s asked you‚’ she was saying. ‘And if he means it, you should say yes. And if you’re jealous of his bloody kids, have some with him. That’ll keep him to you. He’s well off and
brainy, he can have anyone. D’you know what he sees in you, apart from sex?’
‘He says he loves me.’
‘You’re not having me on? Does he support you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
Quietly Majid sat down on the top step. Nicole was struggling to maintain the dignity and sense she’d determined on that morning.
The mother said, ‘If you stop working you might end up with nothing. Like I did. Better make sure he don’t run off with someone younger and prettier.’
‘Why should he do that?’ Nicole said sullenly.
‘He’s done it already.’
‘When?’
‘Idiot, with you.’
‘Yes, yes, he has.’
‘Men are terrible beasts.’
‘Yes, yes.’
Her mother said, ‘If it’s getting you down, you can always stay here … for a while.’ She hesitated. ‘It won’t be like before. I won’t bother you.’
‘I might do that. Can I?’
‘You’ll always be my baby.’
Nicole must have been pulling boxes around; her breathing became heavier.
‘Nicole don’t make a mess in my house. It’ll be me who’ll have to clear everything up. What are you looking for?’
‘I had a picture of Father.’
‘I didn’t know you had one.’
‘Yes.’ Shortly after, Nicole said, ‘Here it is.’
He imagined them standing together, examining it.
‘Before he did it‚’ said the mother, ‘he said he’d show us, teach us a lesson. And he did.’
She sounded as if she were proud of her husband.
Upstairs Nicole packed her clothes in a bag, then went back to find something in a cupboard; after this, there were other things she wanted.
‘I must do this‚’ she said, hurrying around.
He realised that she might want to stay, that she might make him go back alone. He put on his coat. In the hall he waited restlessly.
The mother said to him, ‘You’re in a hurry.’
‘Yes.’
‘Is there something you have to get home for?’
He nodded. ‘Lots of things.’
‘You don’t like it here, I can tell.’
He said nothing.
To his relief he saw Nicola emerge and put her scarf on. They kissed her mother and walked quickly back where they’d come. The bus arrived; and then they waited for the train, stamping their feet. As it pulled away, she took out her book. He looked at her; there were some things he wanted to
ask, but she had put herself beyond his reach.
Near their house they stopped off to buy newspapers and magazines. Then they bought bread, pasta, hummus, yoghurt, wine, water, juice, florentines. They unpacked it on the kitchen table, on which were piled books and CDs, invitations and birthday cards, with his children’s toys scattered underneath. It was only then they realised she’d left the bag of clothes somewhere, probably on the train. Tears came to her eyes before she realised the clothes didn’t matter; she didn’t even want them, and he said she could buy more.
He sat at the table with the papers and asked her what music she was in the mood for, or if she.didn’t care. She shook her head and went to shower. Then she walked about naked, before spreading a towel on the floor and sitting on it to massage cream into her legs, sighing and humming as she did so. He started to prepare their supper, all the while watching her, which was one of his preferred occupations. Soon they would eat. After, they would take tea and wine to bed; lying there for hours, they would go over everything, knowing they would wake up with one another.
Something to look forward to, that was what she wanted, however meagre. Every evening, when Marcia drove back from school through the suburban traffic, angry and listless, with a talking book on the cassette player and her son sitting in the back, she hoped she might have received a letter from a publisher or literary agent. Or there might be one from a theatre, if she had been attempting a play. She did, sometimes – quite often – receive ‘encouragement’. It cost nothing to give, but she cherished it.
As she opened the door, and her son Alec ran into the house to put the TV on, she found on the mat, handwritten in black ink on impressively formal grey card, a note from the famous writer, Aurelia Broughton. Marcia read it twice.
‘This is exciting‚’ she said to Alec. ‘You can look at it but don’t touch it.’ He was a pupil at the school where she taught seven-year-olds. She read it again. ‘Those swine in the writers’ group will be very interested. We’d better get going.’
Three years ago Marcia had had a story published in a small magazine of new writing. Last year an hour-long play of hers had been given a rehearsed performance in a local arts centre. It had been directed by an earnest, forceful young man
who worked in advertising but loved the theatre.
Marcia had been dismayed by how little the actors resembled the people they were based on. One of the men even had a moustache. How carelessly the actors carried the play in a direction she hadn’t considered! After, there had been a debate in the bar. Several members of the writers’ group had come to support her. The young histrionic faces, handwaving, and passionate interruptions began to exhilarate her. It was her work they were arguing about!
The director took her to one side and said, ‘You must send this play to the National Theatre! They need new writers.’
He had forgotten that Marcia would be forty this year.
A couple of months later, when the play was returned, she didn’t open the envelope. She couldn’t see how to go on. She did sometimes feel like this, although it was more ominous now. She had been writing for ten years and had never given up hope. Her need for publication, and the pride it would bring, had grown more acute.
Recently she’d been writing in bed, sometimes for fifteen minutes. At other times she lasted only five. In the morning – oh, the wasted will and lost clarity of words in the morning! – she wrote standing up in her overcoat at the dining-room table, her school bag packed, as her son waited at the front door, juggling with tennis balls. This was the most she could do. At other times she wanted, badly, to harm herself. But self-mutilation was an inaccurate language. Scars couldn’t speak.
Marcia dropped the card in her bag along with her pens and the formidable sketchbook in which she made notes. She called them the ‘tools of her love’.
While Alec ate his tea, she phoned Sandor, her ‘boyfriend’ – though she had vowed not to speak to him – and told him about the postcard. He paid little attention to her enthusiasm; it wasn’t something he understood. But she couldn’t be discouraged.
They drove to her mother’s, ten minutes away. It was the plain, semi-detached house in which Marcia had grown up, where her mother lived alone.
She let Alec out and handed him his overnight bag.
‘Run to the door and ring the bell. I haven’t got time to stop.’
Marcia drove to the end of the quiet road in which she had ridden her bicycle as a child. She turned the car round and passed the house, hooting and accelerating as her mother hurried to the front gate in her flapping slippers, raising her hand as if to stop the car, with Alec standing behind her.
The members of the writers’ group were making tea and arranging their seats in the cold local hall where they met once a week. On other nights Scouts, Air Cadets and Trotskyists used it. Marcia had started the group by advertising in a local paper. Originally it was to be a reading circle; she thought more people would come. At the last minute she changed the ‘reading’ to ‘writing’. Two dozen poems, screenplays and a complete novel dropped through her letter box. It
was not only she who wanted to put her side of things.
Twelve of them sat on hard chairs in a circle, and read to one another. During the past two years they had declaimed terrible confessions that elicited only silence and tears; dreams and fantasies; episodes of soap operas and, occasionally, there was some writing of fire and imagination, usually produced by Marcia.
The group was to have no official leader, though Marcia often found herself in that position. She enjoyed the admiration and even the spite and envy, which she considered ‘literary’. She always kept at least one author’s biography beside her bed, and was aware that writing was a contact sport. Marcia also liked to talk about writing and how creativity developed, as if it was a mystery that she would grasp one day. She knew that considering the relation between language and feeling, hearing the names of writers, and speaking of their affairs and rotten personal lives, was what she wanted to do.
She also felt it was an indulgence. Life wasn’t about doing what you wanted all day. But didn’t Aurelia Broughton do that?
The nurses, accountants, bookshop assistants and clerks who comprised the writers group – all, somehow, thwarted – were doing their best work. Every one of them had the belief, conviction, hope, that they could interest and engage someone else. They wrote when they could, during their lunch break, or in the spent hours late at night. Yet their spavined stories stumbled into an abyss, never leaping the electric distance
between people. These ‘writers’ made crass mistakes and were astonished and sour when others in the group pointed them out. She didn’t believe she was such a fool; she couldn’t believe it. None of them did.
‘I grunt, I grunt. I grunt.’
Marcia put on her glasses and regarded the young man who had stood up to read, a waiter in the pizza restaurant in the High Street. He had come to the house and played with Alec. He was pretty, if not a little fey. He had a crush on Marcia. For a while, after reading some George Sand, she considered giving him a try. Before, he had cried if asked to read aloud. Marcia regretted persuading him to ‘share’ his work with them. You couldn’t tell how someone’s prose would sound by the look of them. This boy had been writing a long piece about a waiter in a pizza parlour attempting to give birth to a tapeworm growing inside his body. As the thick grey worm made its interminable muddy progress into the light, via the waiter’s rectum – and God had made the world more quickly – Marcia lowered her head and re-read Aurelia Broughton’s card.
At school two weeks ago, Marcia had seen in the newspaper that Aurelia Broughton was reading from her latest novel. It was that night. Spontaneously, but aware that she was ravenous for influence, she dropped Alec at her mother’s and drove to London. She parked on a yellow line, and obtained the last ticket. The room was full. People who had just left their offices were standing on the stairs. Students sat crosslegged
on the floor. There was some random clapping and then a hush when Aurelia went to the lectern. At first she was nervous, but when she realised the audience was supporting her, she seemed to enter a trance; words poured from her.
After, there were many respectful questions from people who knew her work. Marcia wondered why they had come. What had made her come? Not only a longing for poetry and something sustaining. Perhaps, Marcia thought, she could locate the talent in Aurelia by looking at her. Was it in her eyes, hands or general bearing? Was talent intelligence, passion or a gift? Could it be developed? Looking at Aurelia had made Marcia consider the puzzle of why some people could do certain things and not others.
Aurelia had made an interesting remark. Marcia had sometimes thought of her own ability, such as it was, on the model of an old torch battery, as a force with a flickering intensity, which might run down altogether.
However, Aurelia had said, with grandiose finality, ‘Creativity is like sexual desire. It renews itself day by day.’ She went on, ‘I never stop having ideas. They stream from me. I can write for hours. Next morning I can’t wait to start again.’
Someone in the audience commented, ‘It’s something of an obsession, then.’
‘No, not an obsession. It is love‚’ said Aurelia.
The audience wanted a life transformed by art.
Marcia joined a queue to have Aurelia sign the costly hardback. The writer was surrounded by publicists and the shop
staff, who opened and passed the books to her. Wearing jewellery, expensive clothes, and an extravagant silk scarf, Aurelia smiled and asked Marcia her name, putting an ‘e’ at the end instead of an ‘a’.
Marcia leaned across the table. ‘I’m a writer, too.’
‘The more of us the better‚’ Aurelia replied. ‘Good luck.’
‘I’ve written –’
Marcia tried to talk with Aurelia, but there were people behind, pushing forward with pens, questions, pieces of paper. An assistant manoeuvred her out of the way.
The next day, via Aurelia’s publisher, Marcia sent her the first chapter of her novel. She enclosed a letter telling of her struggle to understand certain things. Over the years she had tried to contact writers. Many had not replied; others said they were too busy to see her. Now Aurelia had written to invite her for tea. Aurelia would be the first proper writer she had met. She was a woman Marcia would be able to have vital and straightforward conversations with.
Today Marcia shook her head when asked if she had anything to read to the group. After, she didn’t go for a drink with the others but left immediately.
As she was getting into her car, the boy who’d written the tapeworm story ran up behind her.
‘Marcia, you said nothing. Are you enjoying the piece? Don’t be afraid of being ruthless.’
He was moving backwards even as he waited for her reply. She had been accused before, in the group, of being dismissive
contemptuous even. It was true that on a couple of occasions she had had to slip outside, she was laughing so much.
He said, ‘You seemed lost in thought.’
‘The school‚’ she said. ‘I’ll never get away.’
‘Sorry. I thought it might have been the worm.’
‘Worm?’
‘The story I read.’
She said, ‘I didn’t miss a grunt. It’s coming out, isn’t it, the piece. Coming out … well.’ She patted him on the shoulder and got into the car. ‘See you next week, probably.’
Her living-room floor was covered in toys. She remembered a friend saying how children forced you to live in squalor. In the corner of the room, the damp wall had started to crumble, leaving a layer of white powder on the carpet. The bookshelves, hammered carelessly into the alcoves by her incompetent husband, sagged in the middle and were pulling out of the bricks.
She wrote and told Aurelia that she was looking forward to seeing her at the appointed time.
With Aurelia’s card propped up against Aurelia’s novels and stories, Marcia started to write. She would visit Aurelia and take with her a good deal more of the novel. Aurelia was well connected; she could help her get it published.
Next morning Marcia rose at five and wrote in the cold house until seven. That night, when Alec went to bed, she put in another hour. Normally, whenever she had a good idea she would think of a good reason why it wasn’t a good idea. Her
father’s enthusiasm and her mother’s helplessness had created a push-me-pull-you creature that succeeded only at remaining in the same place. She bullied herself – why can’t you do this, why isn’t it better? – until her living part became a crouching, cowed child.
The urgency of preparing something for Aurelia abolished Marcia’s doubts. This was how she liked to work; there was only pen, paper, and something urgent proceeding between them.
During the day, even as she yelled at the children or listened to the parents’ complaints, Marcia thought often of Aurelia, sometimes with annoyance. Aurelia had asked her to come to her house at four-thirty, a time when Marcia was still at school. As Aurelia lived in West London, a two-hour drive away, Marcia would have to make an excuse and take the day off in order to prepare to see her. These were the kinds of things famous writers never had to think about.
*
They were standing, a few days later, in the cramped kitchen looking out over the garden in which she, her father and younger brother had played tennis over a tiny net, when Marcia decided to tell her mother the good news.
‘Aurelia Broughton wrote to me. You know, the writer. You’ve heard of her, haven’t you?’
‘I have heard of her‚’ her mother said.
Mother was small but wide. She wore two knitted jumpers and a heavy cardigan, which made her look even bigger.
Mother said, ‘I’ve heard of lots of writers. What does she want from you?’
Alec went into the garden and kicked a ball. Marcia wished her father were alive to do this with him. They all missed having a man around.
‘Aurelia liked my work.’ Marcia felt she had the right to call the writer Aurelia; they would become friends. ‘She wants to talk about it. It’s great, isn’t it? She’s interested in what I’m doing.’
Her mother said, ‘You’d better lend me one of her books so I can keep up.’
‘I’m re-reading them myself at the moment.’
‘Not during the day. You’re at school.’
‘I read at school.’
‘You never let me join in. I’m pushed to one side. These are the last years of my life –’
Marcia interrupted her. ‘I’ll be needing to write a bit in the next couple of weeks.’
This meant her mother would have to keep Alec in the evenings, and for some of the weekend. His father took him on Saturday afternoons, and returned him on Sunday.
Marcia said, ‘Could he spend Sunday with you?’ Her mother assumed her ‘put-upon’ face. ‘Please.’
Mother formed the same expressions today as she had in the past when caring for two children and a husband, and had made it obvious by her suffering that she found her family overwhelming and pleasureless. Depressives certainly had
strong wills, killing off sentient life for miles around them.
‘I had a little date, but I’ll cancel it‚’ said Mother.