Free The Last Word by Hanif Kureishi Page B

about Mrs Thatcher. Why, Harry had asked, would Mamoon like someone with no discernible culture, and who had driven Britain towards vulgarity and consumerism? Besides, anyone would have thought that a scribbling Indian would be the last thing Thatcher would have liked. Apparently, she enjoyed Mamoon’s company, and he had been asked to visit her late at night, in Downing Street. A few days ago Harry had got Mamoon to say that Thatcher ‘stood up to the mob’ and to ‘pointless demagogues like Scargill’, and that ‘Margaret liked men.’ While a scoop about Mamoon’s private conversations with Thatcher would have helped the book, Mamoon wouldn’t say more.
    Now, in an attempt to think about how to approach Mamoon more profitably, Harry took off to the woods with Yin and Yang, who could run all day. He said to Alice on the phone, ‘This is turning bad. Mamoon has given me only titbits. I’ve got a thousand facts and dates, but who wants that? What am I to do, my love? How can I really open him up?’
    Harry had known he would have to ask Mamoon questions he wouldn’t have put to his friends or, indeed, to any other man. There were many aspects of his friends, and indeed of his girlfriends, that Harry, with English restraint, didn’t want any knowledge of. Forgetting, along with hypocrisy, were, to him, the necessary arts central to living, just as they clearly were to Mamoon. Why then, he wondered, of all things, had he decided to become a literary biographer – someone who sought the truth of another and wished to remake them in his own words? Was this what he should be doing, or would he have been better off as a coastguard, as one of his brothers had recently suggested?
    In London last weekend, strolling with his father in Richmond Park, he had consulted him about making progress with Mamoon. The old man said, ‘Persistence is the key, surely you must have learned that from me? If you want to treat a schizophrenic, for instance, particularly one who is more or less catatonic, the only prescription is time and close attention. And you have to enter the fantasy rather than attempt to refute it. It could take months or years before you get anywhere. Sometimes you get nowhere. Not only that, the patients try to make you crazy. They want to deposit their illness in you. At the same time, the doctors get very annoyed with the patients for not getting better, and often punish them, just as teachers become impatient with their pupils. The truth is, Harry, in these relationships there’s a lot going on even when nothing seems to be going on. The sane have always envied the mad for their freedom and ecstasy. Look at your mother,’ he said, ‘she could be adorable, and was adored. But all our love and attention couldn’t keep her alive.’
    ‘Can I ask you now – I’ve never said it. Did you love her?’
    ‘I did, Harry. She loved other men. I don’t happen exactly to believe in the bourgeois marriage settlement, a form designed to limit sexuality, and which obviously demands too high a price. But she made it difficult for me. She was curious about the world, she was a believer: it was her weakness. If she wanted to know someone, she just followed them, any faker or fakir, and damn the consequences. She disappeared; we were mad with worry; but she came back after a week saying she’d hung out with some DJs in Brighton. You know some of this? Did the boys tell you?’
    ‘Pretty much.’
    He didn’t want to tell his father that he still dreamed about a family holiday in Italy, when he went to his mother’s room to find the door ajar. Looking through, he saw her in bed with a man. They were lying still; he was in her arms. Her clothes were on the floor, but her shoes, oddly enough, were together on a chair – either, he wondered, as a sort of exhibit, or for their own safety. Harry pushed the door a little and went into the room. His mother jumped up, pulling a sheet over herself; the man was exposed. She