Free Something to Tell You by Hanif Kureishi Page B

that when he wanted to talk, he’d talk to me in the pub. A man could deal with it.
    It came back to talking, then, the thing most people do a lot of. The whole family liked stories. My grandmother, who had lived with us before moving to a little flat nearby, read Agatha Christie and Catherine Cook-son. There were piles of them, under the bed, in the corner, next to the toilet; my mother watched soaps, and Dad read Henry Miller on aeroplanes. I adored James Bond.
    But the words in books weren’t as hazardous as those that someone might suddenly say. Like the words Ajita said to me one day, and I almost missed, but which stuck in my head, returning to me over and over, the devil’s whisper.
    She had turned up late to the philosophy lecture where I met her because although she was reading law, she needed another “module” to complete her course. She didn’t love philosophy, as I’d hoped she would. She didn’t see the point of it, though she was amused by my attempts to explain it to her.
    “Isn’t it about the wisdom of living, and about what is right and wrong?” she’d say.
    “If only,” I’d reply. “I guess you’ll have to go to the psychology department for that, though you can’t change courses now. For me philosophy is to do with Aristotle’s idea that the desire for pleasure is at the centre of the human situation. But philosophy as it’s taught is, I am afraid, about concepts. About how we know the world, for instance. Or about what knowing is—how we know what we know. Or about what we can say about knowing that makes sense.” Having nearly exhausted myself earning her bafflement, I went personal. “I want to know you. Everything about you. But how will I ever know that I know everything about you?”
    “You wouldn’t want to know me inside out,” she said abruptly.
    “Why’s that?”
    “It would put you off me.”
    “How do you know?”
    “It just would, I’m telling you.”
    “You have secrets?” I said.
    “Don’t ask.”
    “Now I have to ask. I’m bursting, Ajita.”
    She was smiling at me. “Curiosity killed the cat, didn’t it?”
    “But cats just have to know, don’t they? It’s their nature. If they don’t shove their faces in that bag, they will go crazy.”
    “But it isn’t being good for them, sweetie.”
    I said, “The good isn’t always something you can decide in advance.”
    “In this case it definitely is. Now stop it!”
    I was looking at her hard, surprised by how defiant she was. She was almost always soft with me, kissing and caressing me as we spoke. We had this conversation behind her garage, where, unseen from the house, there was a little garden, which no one used, with a decent patch of grass. When spring came and it got warm, we made it the secret place where we’d lie out listening to Radio 1 before driving to London for lunch.
    Though we were dark-skinned enough to be regularly insulted around the neighbourhood, often from passing cars, we started to enjoy sun-bathing naked, close to everything we needed—music, drinks, her aunt’s food. Often Ajita would bring a bag of clothes out into the garden. Love through my eyes: she was teaching me the erotics of looking. She liked her own body then, and liked to show it, posing with her clothes pulled down or open, or with her ankles, throat or wrists lightly tied.
    To me, the time we spent outside was a celebration. We’d survived the hard work of our childhood—parents, school, continuous obedience, terror—and this was our holiday before embarking on adulthood. We were still kids who behaved like kids. We’d chase and tickle one another, and pull each other’s hair. We’d watch each other pee, have spaghetti-eating competitions and egg-and-spoon races with our underwear around our ankles. Then we’d collapse laughing, and make love again. We had come through our childhood. Or had we?
    Had Ajita’s aunt been looking—and I often wondered whether she was; someone seemed to be watching