The driver is revving up one of Dad's three cars outside my room. I open the door of a car and jump in, except that it's like throwing your arse into a fire, and I jiggle around, the driver laughing, his teeth jutting as if he never saw anything funny before.

'Drive me,' I say. 'Drive me somewhere in all this sunlight. Please. Please.' I touch him and he pulls away from me. Well, he is rather handsome. 'These cars don't need to be revved. Drive!'

He turns the wheel back and forth, pretending to drive and hit the horn. He's youngish and thin – they all look undernourished here – and he always teases me.

'You stupid bugger.'

See, ain't I just getting the knack of speaking to servants? It's taken me at least a week to erase my natural politeness to the poor.

'Get going! Get us out of this drive!'

'No shoes, no shoes, Nina!' He's pointing at my feet.

'No bananas, no pineapples', I say. 'No job for you either, Lulu. You'll be down the Job Centre if you don't shift it.'

Off we go then, the few yards to the end of the drive. The guard at the gate waves. I turn to look back and there you are standing on the porch of your house in your pyjamas, face covered with shaving cream, a piece of white sheet wrapped around your head because you've just oiled your hair. Your arms are waving not goodbye. Gloomie, my suddenly acquired sister, runs out behind you and shakes her fists, the dogs barking in their cage, the chickens screaming in theirs. Ha, ha.

Hanif Kureishi, « With Your Tongue down My Throat »

When he was little, I kissed Rafi continuously, licked his stomach, stuck my tongue in his ear, tickled him, squeezed him until he gasped, laughing at his beard of saliva, his bib looking like an Elizabethan ruff. I loved the intimacy: the boy's wet mouth, the smell of his hair, as I'd love that of various women. 'Toys,' he called his mother's breasts. 'What is thinking?' he'd ask. 'Why do people have noses?'

Around the age of six, Rafi would wake up early, as I tended to, while Josephine slept. I'd sit at the table downstairs, making notes on my patients, or I'd prepare a paper or lecture I was giving. He brought me his best pens to borrow, the help make my writing 'neater', as he put it. He'd sit with me – indeed, often, on me; or on the table – listening to music on my CD player, through headphones bigger than his cheeks. He liked Handel, and when he got excited he said, 'Daddy, I feel as if I've got people dancing in my tummy.'

We bought identical green coats from Gap, with fur-lined hoods, which we wore with sunglasses and trainers. Big Me and Pigmy, I'd call us, thinking we looked great. When he was smaller, I'd walk fast for miles across London with him in his push-chair, stopping off at coffee shops to feed and change him. It's easy to speak to women if you have a baby with you. It was like being the companion of a celebrity. Strangers greeted him; people constantly gave and bought him things; women fed him, talked to him. He disappeared into their midst like a rugby ball into a scrum, and returned reeking of numerous perfumes, his hair standing up and his eyes staring, his face covered in biscuits.

Hanif Kureishi, Something to Tell You

I loved drinking tea and I loved cycling. I would bike to the tea shop in the High Street and see what blends they had. My bedroom contained boxes and boxes of tea, and I was always happy to have new brews with which to concoct more original combos in my tea pot. I was supposed to be preparing for my mock A level in History, English and Politics. But whatever happened I knew I would fail them. I was too concerned with other things. Sometimes I took speed – 'blues', little blue tablets – to keep me awake, but they made me depressed, they made my testicles shrivel up and I kept thinking I was getting a heart attack. So I usually sipped spicy tea and listened to records all night. I favoured the tuneless: King Crimson, Soft Machine, Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa and Wild Man Fisher. It was easy to get most of the music you wanted from the shops in the High Street.

During these nights, as all around me was silent – most of the neighbourhood went to bed at ten-thirty – I entered another world. I read Norman Mailer's journalism about an action-man writer involved in danger, resistance and political commitment: adventure stories not of the distant past, but of recent times. I'd bought a TV from the man in the chip shop, and as the black-and-white box heated up it stank of grease and fish, but late at night I heard of cults and experiments in living, in California. In Europe, terrorist groups were bombing capitalist targets; in London psychologists were saying you had to live your own life in your own way and not according to your family, or you'd go mad. In bed I read Rolling Stone magazine. Sometimes I felt the whole world was converging on this little room. And as I became more intoxicated and frustrated I'd throw open the bedroom window as the dawn came up, and look across the gardens, lawns, greenhouses, sheds and curtained windows. I wanted my life to begin now, at this instant, just when I was ready for it. Then it was time for my paper-round, followed by school. And school was another thing I'd had enough of.

Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia

I took her notebook and pen, and began to make an inventory of what I found on her flesh. I did this, as they say on television, in no particular order. I went to what interested me.

The first thing I noticed was a light brown eyelash on her throat, one of her own. On her forehead there was one hard spot and one pus-filled, with several others under the skin. Her hair looked as though it had been dyed a while ago; parts of it had been bleached by the sun. It was hard to make out its original colour. Her lips were a little ribbed and sore, the bottom more than the top.

I found a purplish bruise, recent, on her side where, perhaps, she had knocked into a table. On her knees there were three little childhood scars. I ran my fingers along the still-livid scar where, I guessed, she'd had her gall-bladder removed. she had five painted toenails, all chipped, and five, on the other foot, unpainted: I guess she must have got bored. There was a lot of sand, mostly dry, between her toes, on the soles of her feet and instep.

She wore cheap silver ear-rings, but I didn't feel she was interested in personal adornment. One ear lobe was slightly inflamed. I also found a leaf on her leg, several insects, dead and alive, in different places, and dirt on her leg. The skin around the fingernails had been pulled and torn. Her cheap watch told the wrong time. Her teeth seemed good; perhaps she had worn a brace as a child, but they were stained, now, from smoking, and one was chipped. There were random and quite deep scratch-marks on one arm (left), which I had noticed before but hadn't attended to. They appeared to have been done with an insufficiently sharp object – a penknife, say, rather than a razor-blade – as if she'd decided to doodle on herself on the spur of the moment, without preparing.

Hanif Kureishi, The Body

They first saw the blue chairs four days ago. They were looking for an Indian restaurant nearby, and were discussing their ideal Indian menu, how they would choose the dall from this restaurant on King Street, and the bhuna prawn from the take-away on the Fulham Road, and so on, when they drifted into Habitat. Maybe they were tired or they just felt indolent, but in the big store they found themselves sitting in various armchairs, on the sofas, at the tables, and even lying in the deckchairs, imagining they were together in this or that place by the sea or in the mountains, occasionally looking at one another, far away across the shop, or closer, side by side, thinking in astonishment, this is him, this is her, the one I've chosen, the one I've wanted all this time, and now it has really started, everything I have wished for is today.

There seemed to be no one in the shop to mind their ruminations. They lost track of time. Then a shop assistant stepped out from behing a pillar. And the four blue wooden chairs, with the cane seats – after much sitting down, standing up and shuffling of their bottoms – were agreed on. There were other chairs they wanted, but it turned out they were not in the sale, and they had to take these cheaper ones. As they left, Dina said she preferred them. He said that if she preferred them, he did too.

Hanif Kureishi, « Four Blue Chairs »