The Last Word by Hanif Kureishi Read Free Book Online

that, why couldn’t he say so now and make everything clear to her?
    That was the least of it. Harry rang Rob to tell him how it was going, and how inhibited he felt already, as well as to complain about the other noises which prevented him from sleeping – the wildlife.
    Rob yelled, ‘Get a gun and fire off a few rounds from the window. When the goats get the idea you mean business they’ll retreat to their stables.’
    ‘They’re not goats.’
    ‘Horses?’
    ‘They’re birds, I think. It’s cold in the room, the light doesn’t work, the window doesn’t shut and at about four o’clock in the morning these animals – what are they, bats, geese, ducks, fish, pigs; anyway most of Noah’s ark – start up this atrocious animal disco. I’m trapped in a rectum here!’
    ‘You fucking wuss, complain to your agent, not to me. Thank God I didn’t put you forward for the Freya Stark gig, redoing her African walks or wherever it was the old girl traipsed around.’
    Harry said, ‘Is it true you’ve given Liana creative control of my book?’
    Rob put the phone down.
    Before retreating to his room, Harry began to go out into the yard and smoke a joint to help him sleep. Then he lay in bed thinking about Peggy, with a notebook and pen beside him. This was how he often had ideas. But sentences from the ‘miseries’, as he called the diaries, began to circulate in his head. One night, after he’d been there for ten days, these whispers appeared to have their own agency, or to be coming from another source, a hubbub he couldn’t turn off.
    Harry got up, stumbled across the room, and put on the dim light. There she suddenly was: Peggy perched on the foot of the bed, perilously thin, exhausted but fiercely energetic, and glowing.
    ‘What will you say about me, Harry?’ she said. ‘Will I be defined by my bitter end? Isn’t there more to me than that? And who are you to judge?’
    Peggy had been a quiet, articulate, academic girl with well-off alcoholic parents who had taught French at private schools. After university she’d worked for a small literary magazine and been introduced to Mamoon by the editor in one of the Bloomsbury pubs he frequented. In Harry’s view Mamoon, whose school-teacher father had trained him hard to win scholarships, was traumatised by being sent to an English public school and then to Oxford. There wasn’t a moment when he didn’t feel awkward and out of place amongst the English toffs his father was so keen for him to join, though the father also claimed, at the same time, to hate the British. On his first date with Peggy he had embarrassed himself by getting into the front of a black taxi next to the driver, and shuffling about trying to find the seat, until the outraged driver threw him out.
    In cold, sooty London, a city full of people who believed Indians to be backward and inferior, while the sexy white kids were dressing like Syd Barrett, Peggy helped Mamoon negotiate the master race of Belgravia for whom he was a failed white man barely acquainted with cutlery, and persuaded him to meet her friends in the literary world. Half the people he charmed: he was sympathetic, and was considered to have class and quiet wit. The other half he offended with his arrogance. But his father wanted him back, and wrote all the time begging him to return. He would have gone; he couldn’t see a way forward. It was Peggy who persuaded him to stay in London and make a career as a writer, one of the most difficult choices a man like him could have made. It was she, when he wasn’t getting enough work done in London, who pleaded with her parents to loan them the money to buy the cottage in Somerset.
    As couples are at the start, they were together all the time, exploring their new neighbourhood, and driving around the rest of the country, visiting second-hand bookshops. Mamoon then took her to India for a few months. Meanwhile, intellectually, she never let him off the hook; she even accused him of