Free Midnight All Day by Hanif Kureishi Page A

fact that people not unlike him had, only a few decades before, been possessed by the fatal seriousness of murderous, mind-gripping ideologies. He’d only believed in pop. Its frivolity and anger was merely subversive; it delivered no bananas. If asked for his views, he’d be afraid to give them. But he was capable of description.
    Like him, Natasha usually only worked in the morning, teaching, or working on these theses. They both liked aspects of London, not the theatre, cinema or restaurants but the rougher places that resembled a Colin Mclnnes novel. Nick had come to know wealthy and well-known people; he was invited for cocktails and launches, lunches and charity dinners,but it was too prim to be his everyday world. He started to meet Natasha at two o’clock in a big deserted pub in Notting Hill. They’d eat, have their first drinks, talk about everything and nod at the old Rastas who still seemed permanently installed in these pubs. They would buy drugs from young dealers from the nearby estates and hear their plans for robberies. Notting Hill was wealthy and the houses magnificent, but it had yet to become aware of it. The pubs were still neglected, with damp carpets and dusty oak bars covered in cigarette burns, about to be turned into shiny places crammed with people who looked as though they appeared on television, though they only worked in it.
    He and Natasha would take cocaine or ecstasy, or some LSD, or all three – and retire for the afternoon to her basement nearby. When it got dark they pulled one another from bed, applied their eye-shadow in adjacent mirrors, and stepped out in their high heels.
    Now she took his hand. ‘You can’t walk out on me!’ She tugged him back into his seat.
    He said, ‘You can’t pull me!’
    ‘Don’t forget the flowers you came at me with!’ she said. ‘The passion! The hikes through the city at night and breakfast in the morning! And conversation, conversation! Didn’t we put our chairs side by side and go through your work! Have you forgotten how easily you lost hope in those days and how I repeatedly sent you back to your desk? Everyone you knew wanted to be a proper writer. None of them woulddo it, but you thought, why shouldn’t I? Didn’t I help you?’
    ‘Yes you did, Natasha! Thank you!’
    ‘You didn’t put it in the book, did you? You put all that other stuff in!’
    ‘It didn’t fit!’
    ‘Oh Nick, couldn’t you have made it fit?’ She was looking at him. ‘Why are you laughing at me?’
    ‘There’s no way out of this conversation. Why don’t we walk a little?’
    ‘Can we?’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘I keep thinking you’re going to go away. Have you got time?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘My sweet and sour man I called you. D’you remember?’ She seemed to relax. ‘A fluent, creative life, turning ordinary tedium and painful feeling into art. The satisfactions of a self-sufficient child, playing alone. That’s what I want. That’s why people envy artists.’
    ‘Vocation,’ he said. ‘Sounds like the name of someone.’
    ‘Yes. A guide. Someone who knows. I don’t want to sound religious, because it isn’t that.’
    ‘A guiding figure. A man.’
    She sighed. ‘Probably.’
    He said, ‘I was thinking … how our generation loved Monroe, Hendrix, Cobain, even. Somehow we were in love with death. Few of the people we admired could go to bed withoutchoking on their own vomit. Wasn’t that the trouble – with pop, and with us?’
    ‘What d’you mean?’
    ‘We were called a self-indulgent generation. We didn’t go to war but we were pretty murderous towards ourselves. Almost everyone I know – or used to.’
    ‘But I was just going to –’ She reached into her bag and leaned over to him. ‘Give me your hand,’ she said. ‘Go on. I got you something.’ She passed the object to him. ‘Now look.’
    He opened his hand.
    *
    On a dreary parade in North Kensington, between a secondhand bookshop and a semi-derelict place hiring out