Hanif Kureishi - Something to Tell You

FICTION

The Buddha of Suburbia

The Black Album

Love in a Blue Time

Intimacy

Midnight All Day

Gabriels Gift

The Body

NONFICTION

The Faber Book of Pop (edited with Jon Savage)

Dreaming and Scheming

My Ear at His Heart

The Word and the Bomb

PLAYS

Plays One: The King and Me, Outskirts, Borderline, Birds of Passage

Sleep with Me

When the Night Begins

SCREENPLAYS

My Beautiful Laundrette & Other Writings

Sammy and Rosie Get Laid

London Kills Me

My Son the Fanatic

The Mother

Venus

Collected Screenplays 1

SCRIBNER
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,
and incidents either are products of the authors imagination or
are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales
or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2008 by Hanif Kureishi

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

Originally published in Great Britain in 2008 by Faber and Faber Limited

SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of The Gale Group, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, Inc., the publisher of this work.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2008013755

ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-8818-4
ISBN-10: 1-4165-8818-3

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I went down to the crossroads,
Fell down on my knees

R OBERT J OHNSON

Secrets are my currency: I deal in them for a living. The secrets of desire, of what people really want, and of what they fear the most. The secrets of why love is difficult, sex complicated, living painful and death so close and yet placed far away. Why are pleasure and punishment closely related? How do our bodies speak? Why do we make ourselves ill? Why do you want to fail? Why is pleasure hard to bear?

A woman has just left my consulting room. Another will arrive in twenty minutes. I adjust the cushions on the analytic couch and relax in my armchair in a different silence, sipping tea, considering images, sentences and words from our conversation, as well as the joins and breaks between them.

As I do often these days, I begin to think over my work, the problems I struggle with, and how this came to be my livelihood, my vocation, my enjoyment. It is even more puzzling to me to think that my work began with a murdertoday is the anniversary, but how do you mark such a thing?followed by my first love, Ajita, going away forever.

I am a psychoanalyst. In other words, a reader of minds and signs. Sometimes I am called shrinkster, healer, detective, opener of doors, dirt digger or plain charlatan or fraud. Like a car mechanic on his back, I work with the underneath or understory: fantasies, wishes, lies, dreams, nightmaresthe world beneath the world, the true words beneath the false. The weirdest intangible stuff I take seriously; Im into places where language cant go, or where it stopsthe indescribableand early in the morning too.

Giving sorrow other words, I hear of how peoples desire and guilt upsets and terrorises them, the mysteries that burn a hole in the self and distort and even cripple the body, the wounds of experience, reopened for the good of the soul as it is made over.

At the deepest level people are madder than they want to believe. You will find that they fear being eaten, and are alarmed by their desire to devour others. They also imagine, in the ordinary course of things, that they will explode, implode, dissolve or be invaded. Their daily lives are penetrated by fears that their love relations involve, among other things, the exchange of urine and faeces.

Always, before any of this began, I enjoyed gossip, an essential qualification for the job. Now I get to hear a lot of it, a river of human effluvium flowing into me, day after day, year after year. Like many modernists, Freud privileged detritus; you could call him the first artist of the found, making meaning out of that which is usually discarded. It is dirty work, getting closely acquainted with the human.

There is something else going on in my life now, almost an incest, and who could have predicted it? My older sister, Miriam, and my best friend, Henry, have conceived a passion for each other. All our separate existences are being altered, indeed shaken, by this unlikely liaison.

I say unlikely because these are quite different kinds of people, who you would never think of as a couple. He is a theatre and film director, a brazen intellectual whose passion is for talk, ideas and the new. She couldnt be rougher, though she was always considered bright. They have been aware of one another for years; she has sometimes accompanied me to his shows.

I guess my sister had always been waiting for me to invite her out; it took me a while to notice. Though an effort on occasionher knees are crumbling and cant take her increasing weightit was good for Miriam to leave the house, the kids and the neighbours. She was usually impressed and bored. She liked everything about the theatre but the plays. Her preferred part was the interval, when there was booze, cigarettes and air. I agree with her. Ive seen many bad shows, but some of them had great intervals. Henry, himself, would inevitably fall asleep within fifteen minutes of the start of any play, particularly if it was directed by a friend, his furry head resting on your neck while he gurgled gently in your ear like a polluted brook.

Miriam knew Henry would never take her opinions seriously, but she wasnt afraid of him or his pomposity. It was said of Henry, and particularly of his work, that you had to praise him until you blushed, and then build from there. Miriam was not a praiser; she didnt see the need for it. She even liked to needle Henry. One time, in the foyer after an Ibsen or Molire, or maybe it was an opera, she announced that the piece was too long.

Everyone in the vicinity held their breath until he said through his grey beard, in his deep voice, That, Im afraid, is exactly the time it took to get from the beginning to the end.

Well, they could have been closer together, thats all Im saying was Miriams reply.

Now there is something going on between the two of themwho are much closer together than before.

It occurred like this.

If Henry is not rehearsing or teaching, he strolls round to my place at lunchtime, as he did a few months ago, having rung Maria first. Maria, slow-moving, kind, easily shocked, indeed mortifiedoriginally my cleaner but a woman I have come to rely onprepares the food downstairs, which I like to be ready when Ive finished with my last patient of the morning.

I am always glad to see Henry. In his company I can relax and do nothing important. You can say what you like, but all of us analysts go at it for long hours. I might see my first patient at 6:00 A.M. and not stop until one oclock. After, I eat, make notes, walk or nap, until its time for me to start listening again, into the early evening.

I can hear him, his voice booming from the table just outside the back door, before I am anywhere near the kitchen. His monologues are a torment for Maria, who has the misfortune to take peoples words seriously.