Free Collected Stories by Hanif Kureishi

fittings. How fastidious he’d become! How had it happened? What other changes had there been while he was looking in the other direction?

    He noticed a curled photograph of a man tacked to the wall. It looked as though it had been taken at the end of the sixties. Bill concluded it was the hopeful radical who’d fucked his wife. He had been a handsome man, and with his pipe in his hand, long hair and open-necked shirt, he had an engaging look of self-belief and raffish pleasure. Bill recalled the slogans that had decorated Paris in those days. ‘Everything Is Possible’, ‘Take Your Desires for Realities’, ‘It Is Forbidden to Forbid’. He’d once used them in a TV commercial. What optimism that generation had had! With his life given over to literature, ideas, conversation, writing and political commitment, ol’ Vincent must have had quite a time. He wouldn’t have been working constantly, like Bill and his friends.
    The food was good. Bill leaned across the table to kiss Celestine. His lips brushed her cheek. She turned her head and looked out across the dark square to the lights beyond, as if trying to locate something.
    He talked about the film industry and what the actors, directors and producers of the movies were really like. Not that he knew them personally, but they were gossiped about by other actors and technicians. She asked questions and laughed easily.
    Things should have been moving along. He had to get up at 5.30 the next day to direct a commercial for a bank. He was becoming known for such well-paid but journeyman work. Now that Nicola was pregnant he would have to do more of it. It would be a struggle to find time for the screenwriting he wanted to do. It was beginning to dawn on him that if he was going to do anything worthwhile at his age, he had to be serious in a new way. And yet when he considered his ambitions, which he no longer mentioned to anyone – to travel overland to Burma while reading Proust, and other, more ‘internal’ things – he felt a surge of shame, as if it was immature and obscene to harbour such hopes; as if, in some ways, it was already too late.
    He shuffled his chair around the table until he and Celestine were sitting side by side. He attempted another kiss.

    She stood up and offered him her hands. ‘Shall we dance?’
    He looked at her in surprise. ‘Dance?’
    ‘It will ’ot you up. Don’t you … dance?’
    ‘Not really.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Why? We always danced like this.’ He shut his eyes and nodded his head as if attempting to bang in a nail with his forehead.
    She kicked off her shoes.
    ‘We dance like this. I’ll illustrate you.’ She looked at him. ‘Take it off.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘This stupid thing.’
    She pulled off his scarf. She shoved the chairs against the wall and put on a Chopin waltz, took his hand and placed her other hand on his back. He looked down at her dancing feet even as he trod on them, but she didn’t object. Gently but firmly she turned and turned him across the room, until he was dizzy, her hair tickling his face. Whenever he glanced up she was looking into his eyes. Each time they crossed the room she trotted back, pulling him, amused. She seemed determined that he should learn, certain that this would benefit him.
    ‘You require some practice,’ she said at last. He fell back into his chair, blowing and laughing. ‘But after a week, who knows, we could be having you work as a gigolo!’
    *
     
    It was midnight. Celestine came naked out of the bathroom smoking a cigarette. She got into bed and lay beside him. He thought of a time in New York when the company sent a white limousine to the airport. Once inside it, drinking whisky and watching TV as the limo passed over the East River towards Manhattan, he wanted nothing more than for his friends to see him.
    She was on him vigorously and the earth was moving: either that, or the two single beds, on the juncture of which he was lying, were separating. He stuck out his