Something to Tell You by Hanif Kureishi Read Free Book Online

not liking the other, or actively disliking them—even hating them—could free up one’s pleasure considerably. Think of the aggression—violence even—that a good fuck involves.
    What, then, were the pleasures and who could guarantee them? Should I have been guiding the train of his desire towards the ultimate, if tyrannically ideal, destination, what Freud called, somewhat optimistically, “full genital sexuality?” Or should I suggest he stop off at some of the other stations and sidings first? As the great Viennese satirist Karl Kraus noted—a man characterised as a “mad halfwit” by Freud—it is the most tragic thing in the world for the fetishist who wants only a shoe but gets the whole woman.
    One of the “truths” about sex which Rafi would also discover—perhaps early on—would be how problematical sex is, and how much people hate it, as well as how much shame, embarrassment and rage it can encourage. Henry and his generation did a lot to educate us about the nature of desire, but however free we believe ourselves to be—liberated now from the horrors of religious morality—our bodies will always trouble us with their unusual desires and perverse refusals, as though they had a mind of their own, and there was a stranger within us.
    Josephine liked to be flirted with while pretending to ignore the sub-text. For devoted parents, there were opportunities for such fun. Many of our neighbours had strenuous shared lives organised around the school; lovers could meet at the gates twice a day. If the children were busy with one another, the parents were more so. As Josephine would come to learn, the school playground being an emotional minefield, with the Muslim parents keeping their kids away from white homes. In bed, in the days when we shared one, Josephine would give me the gossip. I was reminded of a book, Updike’s Couples, that Dad had passed on to me and which seemed, at the time, deliciously corrupt in its banal everyday betrayals. As then, it was the betrayals—and the secrets they engendered—which were the most delectable transgressions.
    Of all the perversions, the strangest was celibacy, the desire to cancel all desire, to hate it. Not that you could abolish it once and for all. Desire, like the dead or an unpleasant meal, would keep returning—it was ultimately indigestible. Rafi’s mother had insisted on, indeed clung to, her own innocence. The badness was always only in me. It was, from her point of view, a rational division of labour. What she didn’t see was that the innocent have everything—integrity, respect, moral goodness—except pleasure. Pleasure: vortex and abyss—that which we desire and fear simultaneously. Pleasure implies dirtying your hands and mind, and being threatened; there is fear, disgust, self-loathing and moral failure. Pleasure was hard work; not everyone, perhaps not most people, could bear to find it.
    The sex show was over. The boy threw his clothes down and went to bed. Through the open doors, I could watch him sleep. He was wearing headphones and the music was loud enough for me to experience a familiarity with 50 Cent I could have forfeited. When Rafi’s long lashes fluttered less and less, like a butterfly settling, I turned the music off.
    I sat at my desk with part of my inheritance: Father’s favourite and now mine, a glass of almost frozen vodka and a carton of Häagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream. A slug and a slurp, and the cat sitting on my papers. I was all set. I would write with a fountain pen before typing everything into my new Apple G4. I could listen to music on it; when I was bored I would look at the photographs and pictures I was currently interested in. Unable to sleep and with bursts of obsessive energy—and this was a new thing with me—I had been thinking of the phrase Henry had quoted from Ibsen, “We sail with a corpse in the cargo.”
    For some reason it made me recall the line which had occurred to me earlier and which I kept