SEVENTY FOR THE FIRST TIME
I envy my younger self. There he is, getting off a plane in London, back from L.A and the Oscars, sun-tanned and confident, flush for the first time in his life, everything in front of him.
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A generous friend, who has dated several older men, suggests she get me a dick pump for my birthday.
“What do you mean a dick pump?” I ask.
“You attach it to your penis and pump it up,’ she says.
“Fuck’s sake.”
“The blood fills the old codger - if you’re lucky. Then, you grab a rubber band, attach it to the base of the penis, keeping it up.”
“How erotic,” I say.
“Then you’re good to go.”
“But the problem is, I can’t use my hands. I can’t caress a thigh or twirl a nipple. My girlfriend isn’t going to be too pleased without at least the pretence of foreplay.”
I am now seventy for the first time. I had my mates up in the Bush for a sit-down booze-up and dinner in the former Rouge-mont, the sacred space on the Shepherd’s Bush Road, where my friends and I always caroused and gossiped, consuming execrable food and wine.
I have lived longer than my father, who was ill for much of my adult life. My accident came suddenly and I still wake up at seven in the morning, surprised to find two strangers in my room – my injured self and carer, who always says good morning as she presses a metal straw between my lips.
I have entered the death-zone: several friends have announced they have cancers of various kinds and are undergoing chemotherapy, or awaiting operations. Others have been diagnosed with dementia and heart problems. There is something consoling in this; a kind of solidarity, I am not alone in my misery, and I have come to enjoy hearing the complaints and hospital experiences of others.
I envy my younger self. There he is, getting off a plane in London, back from L.A and the Oscars, sun-tanned and confident, flush for the first time in his life, everything in front of him.
The day after, he can be found at a bar in Dublin, at a film festival, with a woman he has just met. She is Irish, the lover of a well-known Irish playwright. She tells the young Hanif she has to return home to Derry where she works for a theatre company.
“Would you like to join me?” she asks.
They talk all the way from Dublin to Derry. It goes without saying that Brits are not particularly welcome in this part of the world.
“You’re lucky you’re Indian,” she tells him.
The next morning she goes to work, leaving him in the house alone. There, sitting at the kitchen table, in the silence, looking across the fields, enjoying this adventure, he decides it might be a good idea to do some work. His editor at Faber and Faber, Robert McCrum, has agreed to publish the movie script of his recent film. He wants him to produce an essay to accompany the screenplay. Hanif has never written an essay before and doesn’t know what he might say.
He goes to her bookshelf, and looking idly at the titles, sees something by his hero James Baldwin. This is a good start, he thinks. Baldwin wrote fascinating essays, usually beginning with himself: an anecdote or example from his own complex life. He would elevate the personal into the political; talking about race and oppression in contemporary America.
Hanif begins to describe his own experience of racism. He writes as it comes to him; as he felt it at the time. It is still raw, and available to him as experience; it hasn’t gone away. There is plenty of it, and it comes out easily. The essay will be called the Rainbow Sign, referencing the verse from Genesis, and used as an epigraph in James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time.
By mid-afternoon he needs a break. He goes out into the garden for a walk. The garden leads to a field, where he stands in the corner smoking and wondering about his history and the piece he is writing. Soon, he notices something odd; a herd of cows is slowly moving towards him.
He finds himself stepping backwards. He turns; behind him is a high fence which he cannot possibly climb. The way he came is barred.
He has no experience of cows and no idea of what they are capable of. Will they charge at him, or is that only bulls? He knows he has to act, if he doesn’t, he will definitely be trampled and killed. He imagines the Irish woman returning from work and finding her new friend’s broken body in her back garden. That would be a shock.
Suddenly, he notices a narrow gap between two cows. He sprints between them and back into the house, shutting the door behind him. He had heard that Northern Ireland and could be dangerous, but he wasn’t prepared for this.
Back in London, and lucky to be alive, the young Hanif is walking along the Shepherd’s Bush Road, where he sees himself in a wheelchair. As always, the old Hanif is chattering away, trying to raise a smile in his beleaguered carer, who is guiding him across the road.
The young Hanif approaches, clasps the old man’s hand and asks, ‘What the hell happened?’
‘I fell,’ says the older Hanif.
“Shit.”
“Look, perk up, you’ve got a long while yet. And I’m happy.”
“But how do you write?” asks the young Hanif.
“We have a son. Three sons actually. One of them takes our words down.”
“I’ve got a lot to look forward to,” Says the young Hanif.
“You certainly do.”
As someone who knew you then and now, I read this doing my shopping and burst into tears in the middle of King Street.
Happy Birthday Hanif.
Having worked in a hospital and having witnessed both the seriously injured and the terminally ill find their way back to their old dispositions, I suspected that, once humour began to surface in your diary entries, whatever the condition of your body, your mind would would reframe your existence and would once more express itself creatively. Each one of us has to find our own reasons to live. Some people manage to survive and that is all. Despite the strong unfavourable odds, you have done more than simply endure. You are alive and it shows in everything you write.
In a short story, titled 'The Other', the writer Jorge Luis Borges, then in his dotage, has a chance meeting with his younger self. For the older Borges, it is February, 1969. He is in the city of Cambridge, near Boston, sitting on a bench beside the Charles River. The younger Borges is under the impression that he is in Geneva, also seated on a bench, beside the Rhône. For him, it is sometime around 1914.
The pair debate whether their meeting is a dream and, if that is the case, then which of them is the dreamer. The younger of the two is naturally more opinionated and idealistic. He is incredulous that his counterpart possesses only a hazy memory of the works of Dostoyevsky and is incandescent at the suggestion that the poet Walt Whitman might be capable of expressing a falsehood. The older Borges, who is more philosophical, attempts to update his junior on five decades of family news, mostly deaths and marriages. He is wrong in his claim that the poetry he has written will bring more joy to himself than it will to others. I loves his verse and return to 'Manuscript Found in a Book of Joseph Conrad' more than I do to any other poem.
It is touching how the older Borges assumes a fatherly role when attempting to dampen down his younger self's naïve expression of socialism, and to reassure him in regard to the gradual decline of his memory and his eyesight; the latter is so bad that he can barely see and is waiting for a carer to return to the bench and escort him home. Privately, he concludes that, for the younger Borges, their encounter has been a dream, but that for him it has been a real occurrence.
I have gone in search of my younger self, in Kensington Gardens, near to what is often referred to as Round Pond, though it is actually shaped more like an ornate tea tray. If he is anywhere to be found, then it will be there. He will be 19 or thereabouts. It will be Autumn. The air will be damp and uncomfortably chilly. Parts of the park will be badly waterlogged. He will be alone on a bench somewhere off the beaten track. It will be lunchtime. Referring to the contents of a Tower Records bag, acquired on Kensington High Street, I will inform him that R.E.M. are from Athens Georgia, in the US and not, as he believes (influenced by the spectacle of Bill Berry's bushy Mediterranean eyebrows) Athens, Greece.
“I still own that compact disc,” I will tell him. “It still plays. Only old men buy them now.”
I should tell him that his life turns out as he thinks that it will, but that would be cruel and I doubt that it would change very much. As Borges concluded “There was no point in giving advice, no point in arguing, because the young man's inevitable fate was to be the man that I am now”.