A Theft: My Con Man (4 page)

What shocks about a crime, I noticed, is not only the violation of limits, but the new knowledge of how insubstantial those limits were in the first place. Why, then, is it a relief and a disappointment when it turns out that the authorities, those we leaned against and even believed in, are themselves – and always were – foolish, perverse and dishonest?

Far from being an exception, a good man who inexplicably went wrong, Jeff was a monster created by the accountancy firm he partly built. As the necessary
excrescence of the system, he embodied the Thatcherite ideal perfectly. Lower middle class, religious, a family man, self-motivated and hard working, he loved money more than he loved himself; he was a chancer, a corrupted wide boy, a charming crook who not only rose to the top of his profession, but destroyed everything around him. In the end, of course, the manic swings and crashes of bipolar capitalism had taken him too, but at least I understood now that far from being a maverick, an exception, the con man, the thief and liar, the man with the over-the-top interest rate, was the money world’s most representative figure. A lunatic at the centre of a corrupt, collapsing system, like the ‘mad’ child in a family, he was its essence, the symptom that spoke its truth.

This view might be right. But it might not be. It is a good, convincing story, and anyone would rightly be suspicious of such cohesion and all that it excludes. So, such a narrative is probably irrelevant. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Jeff and what sort of person he might be. Because he was no Machiavelli, plotting for advantage, power or wealth; he wasn’t focused, predictable or readable. It must be odd to have nothing about you that is true, so I wanted to know what it would be like to be false
through and through, a man you could look at and see nothing. I had, eventually, spoken to friends in the press about this story and some of it had become public, though the behaviour of Jeff’s partners in the company had become disconcerting. However, I stuck to this thought: my money might have been stolen, but my words couldn’t be. Yet even after this, and after he’d been arrested but not charged, I heard that Jeff was still peddling investments and spinning stories, a mad novelist, and a far-out magic realist at that, who couldn’t stop making it up. I tried to get in touch with him, to ask him what he thought he was doing. He wouldn’t answer. Jeff was not a great Dostoevskian criminal or poet of destruction, he was not truly selfish or savage when it came to the violation of limits. There was no additional liberty in his impotent transgressions; the rules were still in place. What he did was a form of random evil in its most banal sense, but he did become good at it, successfully causing despair, hopelessness and ruin. Not everyone can bear to do that; not everyone would want to face the consequences, to reap such hatred. But Jeff lacked imagination, taking no one anywhere. He was a destructive monster, and he was nothing of interest.

Though a lot of people lost important things, this was only a minor tragedy. But it made people who heard about it nervous. They saw that anyone could be found out and taken, however defended they might be, because everyone is dependent on someone else, and there is always something unknowable about others. However, I was duped by a con man but learned more about women than I’d known before. Women were outraged by the wrongness; the women came through, and taught me to depend on them. You can be direct with a woman and she will appreciate it. The women rang the appropriate people; they wrote letters, they talked to one another, and knew what to do. They blamed the right people.

It is no surprise that we are all spellbound by crime and criminality. As children we are continuously taught right and wrong and morality; we are exhorted to obedience and are tempted by defiance. We are told that if we behave well we will be rewarded, but we soon notice that these rewards mostly benefit the authority rather than us. At the same time, we sexualise disobedience and never abandon its dangerous compulsions. This makes it more difficult, rather than easier, to be free. For adults, most of television, cinema, the newspapers and fiction is concerned with detectives, offenders and punishment.
And for good reason. This is where we think about whether we should be good or not, and what the cost of crossing the line is, and what the – usually higher – cost of renunciation is. This is where we think about the relation between pleasure and happiness, and between pleasure and its price. After all, most authorities are experts in denial. Where might we learn what pleasure really is, and who will teach us?

Jeff’s fiancée, or his desire for her, might have been the detonator, but Jeff himself had become a little suicide bomb, devastating everyone around him. It turned out that Jeff stole from his friends – people he’d known since he was eleven – from the church his parents attended, from charities, writers, pension funds, and of course from his partners at the company he had helped build. The line he gave the victims, and the stories he told, his circuitous explanations, as the whole thing broke down were all the same. Painful conflicts between friends and colleagues broke out after Jeff’s crimes. People argued, let one another down, and fell out. I yelled at people until I had to lie down. Jeff taught me, I guess, the necessity of boldness and exactitude in
speech. Where before I’d been evasive and vague, I had to learn to be precise, and ask for what I needed. Then, once this story came out in the press, many people wrote to me and to each other. Some could only get in contact anonymously, and many chose to be ashamed. People believed that because they had fantasised about becoming richer they had actively collaborated in their own downfall. It was as if, for this minor crime of greed, each person had been seduced, fucked, fucked over, and discarded. However, some of the victims continued to defend Jeff, calling him ‘innocent’ or ‘naive’. Of course, it was this facade of naivety which made him so dangerous and convincing. But there was also a part of him which was genuinely naive. It might have been the case that his sexual inexperience had made him hazardous, because he hadn’t understood what was happening to him when he met the Albanian woman. He thought he had to impress her. Or give her everything. I remember now that the first time I met him he opened his wallet in order to show me a photograph of the woman he called his fiancée. The picture was indistinct but I could see that it was, at least, a woman. This action seemed an incongruous, old-fashioned thing to do. I thought he was showing me that the successful man is one who is loved. Now
I know it was the wallet, not the woman, he wanted me to see.

Thieves of time, thieves of friendship, affection and sexuality, thieves of your soul, stealers of dreams: bad loves, and even worse loves. The obscene, perverse, sadomasochistic death dance, both partners locked together in limbo. You could call these anti-loves. People love their suffering, and most thefts are even welcomed, as you can barely wait to give away that which is most valuable; and there are many thefts you don’t notice because you are paying attention to the wrong things. When you do see at last, it can be a shock. Twilight: time is running down; there has to be an attempt at reparation – a release, if not a rebirth, converting action into thought and renewed creativity, into a better madness. Ruthlessness, particularly with oneself, is an art.

I know I’m ready for something fresh when I want to buy new notebooks. With scores of new pages to fill and flip through in anticipation, I can begin to believe I’m a writer again, the void of the empty page being an invitation and a limit to the disorder of my ideas.

My talent, such as it is, had not yet deserted me.
Whether I was distracted or not, I could write; I liked to write and worked longer hours than before. I like to wake up in the morning with the whole day ahead of me, in which I can write uninterruptedly. My writing was developing and changing, even if other things were getting worse by staying the same. I began to scribble these notes, and wonder about what sort of thief an artist is. Things had got too predictable in my life, and unpredictability – at least in the head – is the engine of creativity. I knew that I needed more imagination here. To be liberated from someone is to no longer have the enervating burden of thinking of them: that is one lesson that love can teach. How long had it been since I’d gone a day without this fool flailing in my mind? He had made me into someone I didn’t like, and for a time I hated to wake up to myself. Jeff had taken my money, but what else had he taken? He had come far, according to the policeman, but I had come further, and would go much further. To be happy, I had to forget, and that is difficult.

I thought: I should steal from him. If I stole something back from this devil and homunculus, I could transform and remake him, pinning him to the page. If my despair had made me wonder what art might be for, I could at least now see that art
is a glorious binding Eros, making new unities. Art might seem mad at times, but it has boundaries and structure; it has to. Where there was nothing there would be something new, a moment of light, an upsurge, invention. As an artist you have to force yourself to turn and look at the world, and the world is always worse, and more interesting, than you can imagine or render.

Hanif Kureishi grew up in Kent and studied philosophy at King’s College London. His novels include
The Buddha of Suburbia
, which won the Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel,
The Black Album, Intimacy
and
The Last Word
. His screenplays include
My Beautiful Laundrette,
which received an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay,
Sammy and Rosie Get Laid
and
Le Week-End
. He has also published several collections of short stories. He has been awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the PEN/Pinter Prize and is a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. His work has been translated into thirty-six languages. He is professor of Creative Writing at Kingston University.

PLAYS

Plays One (The King and Me, Outskirts, Borderline, Birds of Passage)

Sleep With Me

When the Night Begins

The Black Album

SCREENPLAYS

My Beautiful Laundrette & Other Writings

Sammy and Rosie Get Laid

London Kills Me

My Son the Fanatic

The Mother

Venus

Collected Screenplays 1

Le Week-End

FICTION

The Buddha of Suburbia

The Black Album

Love in a Blue Time

Intimacy

Midnight All Day

Gabriel’s Gift

The Body

Something to Tell You

Collected Stories

The Last Word

NON-FICTION

The Faber Book of Pop (edited with Jon Savage)

Dreaming and Scheming

My Ear at His Heart

The Word and the Bomb

Collected Essays