Free Midnight All Day by Hanif Kureishi Page B

fancy-dress costumes, was a shop where Nick and Natasha went to buy leather and rubberwear. Behind barred windows it was painted black and barely lit, concealing the fact that the many shiny red items were badly made or plain ragged. The assistants, in discreet versions of the available clothes – Nick preferred to call them costumes – were enthusiastic, offering tea and biscuits.
    Wrapping themselves in fake-fur coats from charity shops, Natasha and Nick began going to places where others had similar tastes, seeking new fears and transgressions, of which there were many during this AIDs period. If couples require schemes, they had discovered their purpose. It was possible to be a sexual outlaw as long as there were still people who were innocent. They pressed each other on, playing Virgil toone another, until they no longer knew if they were children or adults, men or women, masters or servants. The transformation into pleasure of the banal, the unpleasant and the plain unappetising was like black magic – poor Don Juan on a treadmill, compelled to make life’s electricity for ever.
    Nick recalled walking one night onto the balcony of a vast club, seeking Natasha, and looking down on a pageant of bizarre costumes, feathers, semi-nudity, masks and clothes of. all periods, representing every passion, every possible kink and kook, zig and zag. Natasha was among them, waiting for him with some bridled old man who worked in a post office.
    Nick wondered if everyone involved liked participating in a secret, as they recreated the mystery which children discover by whispers, that what people want to do with one another is strange, and that the uncovering of this strangeness is itself the excitement. Certainly there were terrifying initiations, over and over. They were the oddest people; he learned that there was little that was straightforward about humanity. But what appeared to frighten them all was the mundane, the familiar, the ordinary.
    Like actors unable to stop playing a part, as though they could be on stage for ever, he and Natasha wanted to remain at a dramatic pitch where there was no disappointment, no self-knowledge or development, only a state of constant, narcissistic emergency and a clear white light in the head.
    In order to consume their punishment with their pleasure, which some might call a convenience, they were stoned. Nickremembered a friend at school saying – and this was the best advertisement for drugs he’d heard – ‘If you are stoned you can do anything.’ Why was living the problem? If he looked around at his friends and acquaintances, how many of them were able to survive unaided? They sought absence until they had become like a generation lost to war. Those who survived were sitting in shell-shocked confessional circles in countryside clinics. He suspected they had left success to fools and mediocrities. By midnight he was rarely able to see in front of him; he and Natasha held one another up, like the vertical arms of a staggering triangle. Sobriety was a terror, though they couldn’t remember why, and their heroes, legends, myths, were hopeless incompetents, death-soaked tragic imaginations.
    He saw people going to heroin like a fate; imagining you could shun it was arrogant or solemn. Nick had wanted to find like-minded people; he turned them into his jailers. He recalled people in rubber masks, coming at him like executioners. It was arduous work, converting people into objects, when he had not been brought up to it
    Midday one morning he woke up at her place. He rose and lumbered about, reacquainting himself with an unfamiliar object, his body. He had been whipped, badly; his face and hands were grazed, too: he must have fallen somewhere and no one, not even him, had noticed.
    Somehow she had gone to work, leaving him a note. ‘Remember, Remember!’ she had scrawled in lipstick.
    Remember what? Then it returned. His task was to withdraw three thousand pounds from his bank account,