Intimacy by Hanif Kureishi Read Free Book Online Page B

magisterial. I am convinced I will be served first in shops and that I can talk down to people. I will need it for all the bars and restaurants I will be visiting with Victor, to offset his sky-blue number. But I can’t go round likethat every day. I will need other clothes too.
    I bought a brown checked suit the other day, a light, summer thing, to cheer myself up. It has to be altered and they won’t send it over for a few days. I bought shirts too, but I can’t remember how many or in what colours. I can’t stay here just for that; I will have to ring the shop and get the stuff diverted. I can’t even wear it yet. And by the time the weather has turned warmer, I will have been gone a while.
    I remove my signed photograph of John Lennon from the wall and slip it into the empty bag. That is something to take. A handful of CDs too. Alfred Brendel or Emil Gilels? Marvin Gaye or Otis Redding? Perhaps I should remind myself that I am absconding, not appearing on Desert Island Discs. Yet I still can’t hear the beginning of ‘Stray Cat Blues’ without wanting to hitchhike to Spain with a teenager. I am, too, more likely to listen to Hot Rats than I am to read Sartre, Camus, Ionesco, Beckett and the other poets of solitude and dread that restored me as a young man. Probably it is the human condition that we are ultimately isolated, and will die alone. But tonight, standing here, I want so much to reach out that I could punch through the window.
    Patience is a virtue only in children and the imprisoned. Neither Susan nor I are impulsive. In the middle-class way, while others were frolicking and wasting – how I envied any prolonged dissipation! –  we both planned and contained our frivolity in order to get all we have. I had a teacher who used to say that every extra year of education adds five thousand pounds to your income for life. I have been able to rise at five, leave the house and get to my desk by five-forty-five. I have excelled at relinquishing things I liked – it isn’t any fun giving up things that are not fun. When unnerved I start seeking pleasures to relinquish. But Victor – or is it his therapist, it is easy to confuse those conspirators these days – says toleration can become a bad habit. Yes, I will defer deferral. I am getting on with it. I want it now!
    I have been drinking. I will put down the beer bottle, after this swig.
    How little directness there is, when you look around! We have to make things distinct by indirection. What a redundant and fearful dance it all is, as if our feelings are weapons that could kill, and words are their bullets. I will go upstairs, sit on the edge of the bed, and tell Susan firmly and truthfully that I amgoing to leave. I can’t stay here another night. What’s the point? How absurd to think that this is something one could prepare for! There is only the unknown and my coming to terms with it. I will pack, kiss the children, and go! It will be done and I will be away.
    Yes!

My children hunt through their toy boxes
    My children hunt through their toy boxes, chucking aside the once-cherished to drag out what they need to keep themselves interested. I am the same with books, music, pictures, newspapers. Can we do this with people? That would be considered shallow. We must treat other people as if they were real. But are they?
    Yet what makes me think I should have what I want? Surely you can’t constantly be replacing people who don’t provide what you need? There must be other opportunities for sustenance – in pictures, books, dance – even within. Yet all these forms are enraptured by love and desire, and are created from them.
    Susan, who is four years younger than me, thinks we live in a selfish age. She talks of a Thatcherism of the soul that imagines that people are not dependenton one another. In love, these days, it is a free market; browse and buy, pick and choose, rent and reject, as you like. There’s no sexual and social security; everyone has