Free Midnight All Day by Hanif Kureishi

entirely gone‚’ he said. ‘But these days I do’ pick up a book and have no memory of what I read yesterday.However, I was labouring through a seven-hundred-page biography of someone I liked. It bulged with facts. Almost the only part I found irresistible was the subject’s sciatica and slipped disc – you know how it is at our age. In the end I had no idea what the man might be like. Everything personal and human was missing. Then I thought: where else could you get the complexity and detail of inner motion except in fiction? It’s the closest we can get to how we are inside.’
    She looked away. ‘I’ve never had a vocation.’
    ‘Why don’t you go to Spain?’
    ‘What? Vocation, I said.’
    ‘Why does a vocation matter?’
    ‘I want to find something to be good at. One of my patients is a skinhead, sexually abused by his mother and sister. I don’t think he can even read his own tattoos. It is not me he’s hating and sapping as he sits there saying “cunt, cunt, cunt”. Why am I compelled to help this bastard? Nick, you’re omnipotent and self-sufficient in that little room with your special pens that no one’s allowed to touch, the coffee that only you can make, music where you can reach it, postcards of famous paintings pinned in front of you. Is it the same?’
    ‘Exactly.’
    ‘You were always retreating to that womb or hiding place. What made me cross was how you placed the madness outside yourself – in me, the half-addicted, promiscuous, self-devouring crazy girl. Isn’t that misogyny?’
    He looked startled. ‘I’m not sure.’
    ‘You made yourself, Nick, you see, before things got … a little mad. You weren’t privileged, like some of those show-off scribblers. I remember you sitting with your favourite novels, underlining sentences. The lists of words pinned up by your shaving mirror – words to learn, words to use. You’d write out the same sentence again and again, in different ways. I can’t imagine a woman being so methodical and will-driven. You want to be highly considered. Only I wish you hadn’t taken a sneaky and spiteful revenge against me.’
    He said, ‘It’s never going to be frictionless between men and women as long they want things from one another – and they have to want things, that’s a relationship.’
    ‘Sophistry!’
    ‘Reality!’
    She said, ‘Self-deception!’
    He got up. It wouldn’t take him long to get home. He could carry a low chair out into his new garden, on which they had recently spent a lot of money, and read and doze. Six men had come through the side door with plants, trees and paving stones; he and Lolly couldn’t wait for nature. It wasn’t his money, or even Lolly’s, but her American father’s. He wondered if he knew what married but dependent women must feel, when what you had wasn’t earned or deserved. Humiliation wasn’t quite what he felt, but there was resentment.
    He had met Natasha one Mayday at a private party at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, just down from Buckingham Palace, in sight of Big Ben. He would always drink and smokegrass before leaving his flat – in order to get out at all; and he was chuckling to himself at the available ironies. Apart from the Soviet invasion of Hungary, there couldn’t have been a worse time for socialism. Certainly no one he knew was admitting to being on the hard left, or to having supported the Soviet Union. ‘I was always more of an anarchist than a Party man‚’ Nick heard as he squeezed through the crowd to the drinks table. A voice replied, ‘I was only ever a Eurocom-munist.’ He himself announced, ‘I was never much of a joiner.’ His more imaginative left-wing acquaintances had gone to Berlin to witness the collapse of the Wall, ‘to be at the centre of history’, as one of them put it. ‘For the first time‚’ Nick had commented.
    It was easy to sneer. What did he know? It was only now that he was starting to read history, having become intrigued by the