Free Love in a Blue Time by Hanif Kureishi Page B

a wheelchair into a green room where I met the doctor. He called us all ‘ladies’ and told jokes. I could see some people getting annoyed. He was Indian, unfortunately, and he looked at me strangely as if to say, ‘What are you doing here?’ But maybe it was just my imagination.
    I had to lie on a table and they put a needle or two into my left arm. Heat rushed over my face and I tried to speak. The next thing I know I’m in the recovery room with a nurse saying, ‘Wake up, dear, it’s all over.’ The doctor poked me in the stomach and said, ‘Fine.’ I found myself feeling aggressive. ‘Do you do this all the time?’ I asked. He said he did nothing else.
    They woke us at six and there were several awkward-looking, sleepy boyfriends outside. I got the bus and went back to the squat.
    *
    A few months later we got kicked out and I had to go back to Ma’s place. So I’m back here now, writing this with my foot up on the table, reckoning I look like a painter. I sip water with a slice of lemon in it. I’m at Ma’s kitchen table and there are herbs growing in pots around me. At least the place is clean, though it’s shabby and all falling apart. There are photographs of Ma’s women friends from the Labour Party and the Women’s Support Group and there is Blake’spicture of Newton next to drawings by her kids from school. There are books everywhere, on the Alexander Method and the Suzuki Method and all the other methods in the world. And then there’s her boyfriend.
    Yes, the radical (ha!) television writer and well-known toss-pot Howard Coleman sits opposite me as I record him with my biro. He’s reading one of his scripts, smoking and slowly turning the pages, but the awful thing is, he keeps giggling at them. Thank Christ Ma should be back any minute now from the Catholic girls’ school where she teaches.
    It’s Howard who asked me to write this diary, who said write down some of the things that happen. My half-sister Nadia is about to come over from Pakistan to stay with us. Get it all down, he said.
    If you could see Howard now like I can, you’d really laugh. I mean it. He’s about forty-three and he’s got on a squeaky leather jacket and jeans with the arse round his knees and these trainers with soles that look like mattresses. He looks like he’s never bought anything new. Or if he has, when he gets it back from the shop, he throws it on the floor, empties the dustbin over it and walks up and down on it in a pair of dirty Dr Marten’s. For him dirty clothes are a political act.
    But this is the coup. Howard’s smoking a roll-up. He’s got this tin, his fag papers and the stubby yellow fingers with which he rolls, licks, fiddles, taps, lights, extinguishes and relights all day. This rigmarole goes on when he’s in bed with Ma, presumably on her chest. I’ve gone in there in the morning for a snoop and found his ashtray by the bed, condom on top.
    Christ, he’s nodding at me as I write! It’s because he’s so keen on ordinary riff-raff expressing itself, especially no-hoper girls like me. One day we’re writing, the next we’re on the barricades.
    Every Friday Howard comes over to see Ma.
    To your credit, Howard the hero, you always take her somewhere a bit jazzy, maybe to the latest club (a big deal for a poverty-stricken teacher). When you get back you undo her bra and hoick your hands up her jumper and she warms hers down your trousers. I’ve walked in on this! Soon after this teenage game, mother and lover go to bed and rattle the room for half an hour. I light a candle, turn off the radio and lie there, ears flapping. It’s strange, hearing your ma doing it. There are momentous cries and gasps and grunts, as if Howard’s trying to bang a nail into a brick wall. Ma sounds like she’s having an operation. Sometimes I feel like running in with the first-aid kit.
    Does this Friday thing sound remarkable or not? It’s only Fridays he will see Ma. If Howard has to collect an award