Desiring Cairo
Desiring Cairo
Louisa Young
The sparky, funny sequel to Louisa Young’s acclaimed first novel of belly-dancing, motorbikes and single-parenthood.Angeline Gower, ex-bellydancer, ex-biker, single mother of a little girl who is not actually her child, is mired in problems again in this wonderful sequel.Her relationship with Harry, the lover turned cop, remains fraught, the lure of the glamorous but no good Eddie hasn’t gone away. And there is yet another element complicating things know – the seductive and mysterious Sa’id. With Angeline older and a little wiser, Louisa Young weaves a tale that is richer, sexier and more moving than ‘Baby Love’, while remaining just as exciting. Shifting between Shepherd’s Bush and Cairo, full of the contrasts between the West and the Middle East, ‘Desiring Cairo’ thrills and enthralls while at the same time making us think and feel deeply about the love between mother and child, man and woman, friend and friend.Louisa Young has skilfully written this so that it is equally enjoyable read on its own, or as part of the trilogy that starts with ‘Baby Love’ and ends with ‘Tree of Pearls’.
DESIRING CAIRO
The Angeline Gower Trilogy
Louisa Young
Copyright (#u4c205b74-8012-598e-bbb0-a212cb33e034)
The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Published by The Borough Press 2015
First published by Flamingo, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1999
Copyright © Louisa Young 1999
Louisa Young asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Cover images © Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com)
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007577996
Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780007397013
Version: 2015-09-07
Praise for The Angeline Gower Trilogy: (#u4c205b74-8012-598e-bbb0-a212cb33e034)
‘Funny, sexy and tender’ ESTHER FREUD
‘Spectacularly worth reading’ The Times
‘A stylishly literate thriller’ Marie Claire
‘You will keep coming back to this book when you should be doing something else’ LOUIS DE BERNIÈRES
‘Exciting, compelling and tense’ Time Out
‘Funny and scary. In writing honestly and unsentimentally, Young celebrates the unequivocal nature of parental love with verve and style’ Mail on Sunday
‘Wry, perky, entertaining’ Observer
‘Engaging, wise-cracking, likeable, brilliantly sustained … funny, humane and utterly readable’ Good Housekeeping
Dedication (#u4c205b74-8012-598e-bbb0-a212cb33e034)
For Isabel Adomakoh Young, the lovely daughter
‘I do believe that, with all its drawbacks, Egypt is the most interesting and convenient country that a lady can travel over’
ELIOT WARBURTON, 1845
Contents
Cover (#u7cae2adc-c738-5a82-9089-8047a1e544b9)
Title Page (#u6a5fb39e-bb55-5abd-9076-c744886d1f9d)
Copyright
Praise
Dedication
Epigraph (#u4a874807-e007-5e9f-af1c-45f768ad7de1)
Introduction
Chapter One: Hakim
Chapter Two: Luxor
Chapter Three: Talking about Gary Cooper
Chapter Four: Hakim’s Business, Harry’s News
Chapter Five: Next
Chapter Six: Tell Mama
Chapter Seven: Brighton
Chapter Eight: Harry Cooks Dinner
Chapter Nine: Sunday Night
Chapter Ten: Sa’id
Chapter Eleven: The Funeral
Chapter Twelve: Dinner with Sa’id
Chapter Thirteen: Tell Your Own Mama
Chapter Fourteen: Chrissie, Get Out of My Bath
Chapter Fifteen: Sunday Night Coming Down Again
Chapter Sixteen: ‘You are dearer than my days, you are more beautiful than my dreams’
Chapter Seventeen: I Wish I Was in Egypt
Chapter Eighteen: What Harry Knows
Chapter Nineteen: The Madness Sets In
Chapter Twenty: Cairo
Chapter Twenty-One: Family Life
Chapter Twenty-Two: Let’s Go to the Bank
Chapter Twenty-Three: Give Me Your Hands
Chapter Twenty-Four: Semiramis
Chapter Twenty-Five: God, when he created the world, put a great sea between the Muslims and the Christians, ‘for a reason’
Chapter Twenty-Six: The End, and the Beginning
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Louisa Young
About the Publisher
Introduction (#u4c205b74-8012-598e-bbb0-a212cb33e034)
I wrote these novels a long time ago. I spent my days correcting the grammar at the Sunday Times, and my nights writing. I could no longer travel the world doing features about born-again Christian bike gangs in New Jersey, or women salt-miners in Gujarat, or the Mr and Mrs Perfect Couple of America Pageant in Galveston, Texas, which was the sort of thing I had been doing up until then. I had to stay still. I had a baby. Babies focus the mind admirably: any speck of time free has to be made the most of.
I had £300 saved up, so I put the baby and the manuscript in the back of a small car and drove to Italy, where we lived in some rooms attached to a tiny church in a village which was largely abandoned, other than for some horses and some aristocrats. A nice girl groom took the baby to the sea each day in my car while I stared at the pages thinking: ‘If I don’t demonstrate some belief in this whole notion of novels, and me as a novelist, then why should anyone else?’
Re-reading these books now, I think, ‘Christ! Such energy!’ I was so young – so full of beans. I described the plot to my father, who wrote novels and was briefly, in his day, the new Virginia Woolf. After about five minutes he said, ‘Yes, that all sounds good’ – and I said, ‘Dad, that’s just chapter one’.
It was only about twenty years ago, and a different world. Answerphones not mobiles, no internet. Tickets and conductors on the bus. And it was before 9/11, and the mass collapse of international innocence which 9/11 and George Bush’s reaction to it dragged in their miserable, brutalising wake. Could I write a story now, where an English girl and her Egyptian lover meet at the surface of the water? Yes, of course – but it could not be this story.
Anyway, I have grown up too thoughtful to write like this now. I exhaust myself even reading it.
I see too that these, my first novels, were the first pressing of thoughts and obsessions which have cropped up again and again in things I’ve written since. It seems I only really care about love and death and surgery and history and motorbikes and music and damage and babies, and the man I was in love with most of my life, who has appeared in various guises in every book I have ever written. I realise I continue to plagiarise myself all the time, emotionally and subject-wise. And I see the roots of other patterns – Baby Love, my first novel, turned into a trilogy all of its own accord. Since then, I’ve written another two novels that accidentally turned into trilogies – and one of those trilogies is showing signs of becoming a quartet.
People ask, oh, are they autobiographical? I do see, in these pages, my old friends when we were younger, their jokes and habits, places I used to live, lives I used to live. I glimpse, with a slight shock, garments I owned, a bed, a phrase … To be honest I made myself cry once or twice.
But, though much is undigested and autobiographical, in the way of a young person’s writing, I can say this: be careful what you write. When I started these novels I was not a single mother, I didn’t live in Shepherds Bush, I didn’t have a bad leg and I wasn’t going out with a policeman. By the time they were finished, all these things had come about. However as god is my witness to this day I never have never belly danced, nor hit anyone over the head with a poker.
Louisa Young
London 2015
ONE (#u4c205b74-8012-598e-bbb0-a212cb33e034)
Hakim (#u4c205b74-8012-598e-bbb0-a212cb33e034)
When Hakim ibn Ismail el Araby turned up on my doorstep, trailing clouds of chaos in his wake, I naturally assumed that the anonymous letters had something to do with him. Not that they were from him – like the rest of his family, the boy could haggle in ten languages and convert currencies, to his own advantage, faster than I could find a calculator, but writing in English was not one of his accomplishments. No, I rather thought they might be to him.
‘I don’t know if this is for you,’ I said, over the breakfast table on the morning after his arrival. There we were, the three of us: Hakim and Lily tucking into boiled eggs and toast, and me making coffee, washing up, wiping surfaces, fetching the post. I don’t normally make breakfast for young men who turn up out of the blue, but I do boil eggs for Lily. It makes me feel that I am giving her security, which she needs.
‘My letter?’ he said. ‘You open, so you can read.’
I had already seen what it said. I was thinking all the obvious things – considering the nice-quality white envelope (no name, just my address), the perfectly ordinary looking office-type typing, the perfectly ordinary Mount Pleasant postmark (just one of London’s main and busiest post offices). And inside a perfectly ordinary-looking piece of white A4 paper, food of a million photocopiers and printers, with ‘You killed my love’ typed on it.
‘It says “You killed my love”,’ I said.
‘Strange for letter,’ he said. ‘Not mine, I think. Who do you love?’
‘Not my love. The person who wrote the letter’s love. I think.’
‘Their love for you? Or what?’ he said.
‘I don’t think so. Nobody loves me.’
‘I love you,’ said Lily. ‘You know I do. I love you up to the moon and back again. Don’t tell porkies.’
Lily my five-year-old daughter loves me. Big-eyed little-mouthed fat-cheeked clever-browed Lily. I basked in that for a moment. I’ll never be used to it, unimpressed by it. Then I ran through the other love-contenders. Neil my lawyer friend doesn’t love me any more. Harry … Harry who was my love … well (as the Shangri-Las sang) I called it love … Harry doesn’t write letters like that. And we’re on terms now, we speak, we have dismantled our melodrama, more or less. And my mum and dad love me. I didn’t think it was them either. Though I had killed their love, in a way.
There’s something you should know straight off. My sister died. She was pillion on my motorcycle, pregnant, claiming that she needed rescuing from her then boyfriend who she said was violent … Lily is – was – hers. Mine now. It’s a long story and it has given me enough pain and grief over the years, and since everything settled a year and a half ago I do not want to drag over it.
I have grown up into a very private and anti-social person, what with my terrible experiences and my exciting past life. I was seriously fantasising about moving to the country when Hakim appeared. In fact I believe I was looking at a clutch of estate agents’ details at the very moment my doorbell rang. It was September the eighth. Lily had started school that week. I wasn’t worried about her, because she had been going to nursery for years, and we’d done the preview days where she goes in for a few hours before lunch and I hold her hand a bit. We’d bought a duffel coat though it was too warm for it; her Teletubby came to the gates with us although he wasn’t allowed to stay.
So. Mid-morning, September the eighth. Nine days after Princess Diana was killed, two days after her funeral. You can probably imagine why I had been hiding my head under a cushion for a week. Young mothers dead in car crashes upset me no end. Cover their faces, and all that, when they die young. And cover my face too. Deep in the sand.
Watching (because no, I didn’t join in) the national grievathon made me want to spit. This happens every day. Every day death turns people inside out, and when they get themselves right side out again they don’t fit any more. Every day grief craps in the corners of someone’s mind, somewhere where they can’t find it, and if they can they can never get rid of the smell. To see it all writ so large and so sentimental for someone who we only saw on television, made me, what, angry. Resentful. I wasn’t proud of that. Part of me would have liked to unite with the nation – truly. I get lonely out here, being a curmudgeon and an eccentric. But I kept wanting to shout at them. I’ve lost to death, I know what it is – and this is not your loss. Haven’t you any grief of your own?
And for her children it’s just motherlessness. Motherless children. Like so many.
Anyway. That morning. The doorbell rang. I answered it. There stood a young man in beautifully cut but unavoidably vulgar white clothes, with a dark overcoat which didn’t really know what to do with itself slung over his shoulders. Or perhaps it was his shoulders which didn’t know what to do with an overcoat. He looked too young for his clothes, his hair too short. Beside him was a large suitcase. He had a small teardrop-shaped aya of the Qur’an in gold hanging on a chain round his neck, but I didn’t need that to tell me he was Egyptian. There is something about that country, and it was all over him. Furthermore I knew his face.
He smiled a little nervously, the look at odds with his flashy clothes. ‘Salaam alekum,’ he said. ‘Madame Angelina? Good morning. Hello.’
I got the impression that he wasn’t sure which greeting was the correct one for the circumstances. Not knowing quite what the circumstances were myself, I wasn’t able to help him.
‘We alekum elsalaam,’ I replied automatically.
‘Amira Amar,’ he said quietly. Amira Amar means Princess Moon. Amar means beautiful, as well. It is a name some people used to call me when I stayed? lived? when I was in Egypt, ten years ago. After I ran away from Harry because he threw the chair out of the window at me because he thought I knew that my sister was a prostitute and didn’t care, whereas in fact I hadn’t a clue. I ended up in Egypt because it was somewhere I could work. I stayed there because that is what Egypt is like.
I was a belly dancer.
God, it seems strange even now to use the past tense. If I was a belly dancer, then what am I now? I am now … a single mother, only the child is not mine. Oh well – she’s mine, damn right she is, but it was only a year and a half ago that Janie’s ex-boyfriend Jim decided to claim her as his, and gave us all a bit of a runaround until it turned out that he wasn’t her father after all. So I live with the tiny yet fundamental fear that any Tom, Dick or Harry (and yes it might have been Harry) that my sister shagged in the course of her professional engagements (though she didn’t shag Harry professionally – no, that was personal. As far as I know. Though of course she’s not here to tell me. Harry said he was drunk and thought it was me. God save us) … any Tom, Dick or Harry might turn up and claim her, and have a claim.
So, I am an ex-belly dancer with a slightly gammy leg from breaking it in three places in the accident which killed Janie. (See how cool I am? I say the accident killed her, not that I killed her. Two years ago I would have said I killed her. Now that I know things about her that I could kill her for, I am more forgiving of myself.)
So, I am an ex-belly dancer with a gammy leg and a beautiful child and a dead sister. I know a little about Arab social history and culture – particularly through the dancing and costume – and I earn a living as some kind of small-scale but specific expert on that. I don’t call myself an expert. The first thing you learn about anything worth knowing anything about is that you know nothing. Know about Arab culture? It would take you seven hundred brains and seven thousand years. But I wrote a book on belly dancing, and a few editors and journalists know my phone number, and nobody else whose number they have knows anything about belly dancing, so I am cast. And I write about other things, and teach sometimes, and do some editing sometimes for some of the magazines I’ve written for. Once I was costume consultant on a TV series of The Arabian Nights. It’s not like when I used to jet off to Jordan to dance at weddings. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
What else? I try to lead a quiet life because I think that is best for Lily. Every now and then I yearn for Egypt, and for love, and for the beautiful clear sense of being right in my skin, right in the world, that I used to get when I was dancing. But though I am a bust-up dancer, and know what I have lost, I don’t like to think of myself as broken. So I carry on as normal: working, taking Lily to school, seeing friends. Lily is quite enough joy and glory, so I don’t resent my stationary existence. I love and cherish it. It seems safe. Or did, until Jim came threatening it, and Ben Cooper the Bent Copper started blackmailing me and forcing me into the path of Eddie Bates, bastard, gangster, criminal mastermind and sexual obsessive. I describe him lightly, because he is the most frightening thing I have ever known.
But that’s over. He’s in prison. It’s safe again.
I do keep a list of the men who I hope are not my child’s father: Eddie Bates, Ben Cooper, Harry. Not necessarily in that order.
And so that is me, and I still live up in the clouds in my top floor flat in Shepherds Bush, and on my doorstep holding out his arms and hands and calling me a name from long ago, the name of someone who I certainly am not any more, stands – oh my God, it’s one of Abu Nil’s boys. It can’t be the big one, Sa’id. Then … it must be Hakim. Hakim el Araby. Last seen in Luxor in 1987. Hakim, the sweet little scamp from the alabaster family at Thebes.
TWO (#u4c205b74-8012-598e-bbb0-a212cb33e034)
Luxor (#u4c205b74-8012-598e-bbb0-a212cb33e034)
‘Hakim,’ I said.
‘Sister,’ he cried, and grinned at me and poured a flood of the beautiful language over me, the precise meaning of much of which passed me by, though the spirit was clear. He was delighted to see me, he was amazed to find me home, what a long time it had been, and how was my health, Alhamdulillah, praise to God, and that of my father and mother, and so on, and so forth.
I invited him to step inside and take coffee. For a moment I wondered if he was old enough to drink coffee. He must have been ten when I saw him last, and here he was, grown up. Sort of. He refused the entrance and the coffee twice and I almost laughed. Here he is with his suitcase, straight from the airport, so recently left Egypt that I can smell the aroma of apple tobacco on his clothes, and his courtesy will hardly let him admit that he is here, and presumably for a reason.
‘Come in, come in,’ I said, and pulled his suitcase inside the door and led him to the kitchen where I found myself making ahwa turky – coffee stewed up the Egyptian way in my old tanaka – instead of a nice pot of espresso as I normally do. Ahwa turky made with Lavazza – it wasn’t bad, actually.
He sat gingerly at my kitchen table and, as you do, looked around, taking stock of me and my life. I had no idea what he made of it. I hadn’t seen him since 1987, in Luxor; he’d been a kid, drawing pictures in the dust, playing football in the street, chasing scorpions, escaping his big brother. There were plans to send them to school in Cairo, and they didn’t want to go. Presumably he had gone – he looked provincial, but not that provincial. More Cairene than Luxori. If I could still pick up those nice distinctions.
His father, now, his father I knew. Well, used to know, when I was there. It’s a bore, this language thing. I could find my way round a newspaper or a novel in Arabic, with a dictionary; I could converse and grow fond and build a friendship, but maintain it? Write? Correspond? No. So there was a man, Ismail el Araby, known in the village way as Abu Sa’id, father of Sa’id. I used to call him Abu Nil, for some reason. Father of the Nile. He was one of the kindest I ever knew, with a face as brown and smooth and fissured as a kabanos, and a sneaky sense of humour, and two handsome sons, and secrets, who I liked enormously, but the friendship died. Killed by circumstance and illiteracy. My illiteracy. I had put it down as one of those magically unlikely friendships, of its time and of its place, like a Bob Dylan ballad, complete.
And now here’s his boy, here in my flat.
There’s no telling what my flat would mean to Hakim. My piles of fruit and laundry and newspapers, Lily’s dolls on the sofa all seated in a row reading picture books, the late roses from Mum’s garden dropping petals all over everywhere, the bag of empties waiting to be taken to the bottle bank. Would he be thinking me profligate, sluttish, what? I had a sudden and sharp resurgence of a feeling I often had in Cairo; an awareness of incomprehension, of the impossibility of complete comprehension: ‘I do not know what all these people know; I have not learned what they all learned, they share something that I cannot share.’ There were times when I hadn’t a clue. Everybody laughing, and me bemused. Everybody worried, and I could not, could not, using all my experience and intelligence and imagination, work out why. Just humans, bred in different habits. Before and after the marvels of the individual, over and under all our common humanity, there is this thing. We are different. It delighted me far more often than it alarmed me, even in a world so very … different, shall we say … for women. But it was always there. I was a foreigner, I could not truly understand. I was not at home. And for a moment, watching Hakim looking at my kitchen, I felt a sudden cold flurry of not being at home.
But of course this flurry was not mine, it was his. I was right in my territory; he was the one who was …
‘Hakim, have you been to England before?’
In the tiny moment that I waited for his answer, I realised he was wondering whether to lie to me. Why would he want to do that?
‘No,’ he said. He looked so damn young. Silky, like a boy who doesn’t shave yet. Chicken-boned.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked, in a completely friendly way, of course. He took his coffee, smiled broadly, ignored the question and offered me a cigarette. Marlboro. Of course. The flash Egyptians always smoked Marlboro, while the amazed foreigners puffed away on Cleopatra 100s at about half a piastre a packet. Hakim, evidently, is baby flash. I refused the fag, and opened the window. He made no ‘oh would you rather I didn’t’ noises. It didn’t matter. Lily, with her smoke-susceptible eczema and sweet delicate little lungs, wouldn’t be home for several hours. The doctor said I shouldn’t let anyone smoke in the flat at all, since the asthma scare, but … oh God. Is he young enough for me to tell him not to smoke? It’s hard to tell an Egyptian anyway: so inhospitable, so northern health-obsessive. Maybe later. Anyway the window was open. The distant hum of the A40 filtered vertiginously up, up and past to diffuse in the clouds.
‘You look well,’ he said.
‘Alhamdulillah,’ I replied. Praise to God.
He started to speak in Arabic again, and I stopped him.
‘My Arabic is not good,’ I said.
‘It was,’ he said.
‘It’s been many years. I’m out of practice.’ I learnt my Arabic initially from love songs. While I danced I soaked up all sorts of useful vocabulary: Habibi, kefaya, enta ’omri – my darling, enough, you are my life. Elli shuftu abl ma teshoufak enaya, what I saw before my eyes saw you … It did get broader after that, but … it was a long time ago.
‘It’s OK. My English is better. You have a husband?’
‘No.’
He looked at the dolls. Their names are Tulip, Liner, Rose, Rosie and Rosabel.
‘Just a child,’ I said.
I wasn’t actually prepared to go through a delicate dance around his sensibilities about this. I don’t explain the whole story to people. It’s too long, too private, too complicated, and, dare I say it, too boring for me to witness their stock reactions of amazement, shock, sympathy, incomprehension, in reaction to the weirdnesses that underpin my life. That are my life. And Lily’s. It’s not their business. If and when it becomes their business, I tell them. But very few new people need to know the whole story. Anyway I’m fifteen years older than him.
He raised an eyebrow.
‘Child, no husband,’ I said. ‘That’s right.’
‘Divorced?’
If we had been in Egypt, I would have said yes, or said that the husband was dead, just to make life easier; here, I may not tell the whole truth, but I don’t need to lie for comfort or protection.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Never married.’ Well, it was true. Janie never was married to Lily’s father, whoever he was. And I have never been married.
Pity crept over his face, and incomprehension, and concern, and distaste, all at once, like the rainbow colours of oil skimming over water.
‘It’s different here, Hakim,’ I said. ‘It’s no shame. No dishonour. If anything, the dishonour is to a man who leaves a woman and child. There is no dishonour to the woman.’ If only that were quite true, I thought. But if I was going to educate him in Western ways, I was bloody well going to educate him in the ways of rational London post-feminism, not in those of hypocritical Tory backbenchers. He looked utterly unconvinced.
‘How is your father?’ I asked, realising that I hadn’t asked before just at the moment that it suited me to change the subject. ‘Is he well?’
Hakim narrowed his pale eyes and murmured something I didn’t catch. This was wrong. The reply should have been a firm and grateful Alhamdulillah. I looked questioningly at him. He flashed me another little smile and said: ‘I have a present for you’, then with a laugh he went to the hall and began to unpack his suitcase, laying small piles of very tidy clothing all over the floor, as carefully as a stream of ants. I peered round the door at him. ‘Give me one moment!’ he cried.
I went back to my coffee. A minute or two later he came in with a small package. It was wrapped in white tissue and looked fluffy and light, but when I took it from him it was heavy. I laid it on the table to unwrap it. When the crisp, clean paper fell aside, there lay a small blue globe; a smooth, hard, polished ball of lapis lazuli, the shape and texture of a tiny cannonball. Its shades of colour shifted a little: murkier islands, paler seas. Flecks of gold streamed across it like clouds. It looked like the world.
I picked it up, felt its weight and gazed at it until its surface began to move and drift of its own accord, whereupon I uttered some absolutely genuine expressions of delight, and sat down with it balanced on my palm. It nestled. A world of my own. I liked it very much.
*
After three hours, during which time Hakim drank five cups of coffee, smoked eight cigarettes, read two Arabic newspapers and asked me a great many shyly phrased questions about my personal life, and I made five pots of coffee, put on a wash, cleared breakfast, washed up, changed Lily’s sheets and accepted three phone calls from my friend Brigid about exactly how many of her children were coming to spend the night on Friday, I decided that lunch, out, would be a good idea. The suitcase stayed. I live in the last flat at the very end of the balcony on the seventh floor. Even with the lift (and I use the stairs. Good for my not-so-good leg) it would have been a drag to move it. And he still hadn’t told me his plans.
Finances being tight, and hospitable urges being still quite strong, we went to the Serbian café and had toasted cheese sandwiches. I wondered if he was rich. He looked it … sort of. Balls of lapis are rarely cheap. But he’s so young. And a little gold proves nothing. That golden Qur’anic verse might be all he has in the world.
‘So why are you here, Hakim?’ I said, open, brazen, and verging on impatient. Arab languor will take its time, and there’s no rushing it, but this was my time too, London time, Western time, modern time. I had things to do, important things. Thinking about Lily, for example, or watering my flowerpots, or hanging the washing over the radiators, or seriously considering getting a job now she was at school. Seriously considering which was my duty; working the absurd hours required by any interesting job or being available to my small child when she needed me. Seriously considering having a word with our lovely new government about it. I couldn’t sit about all day making him coffee, anyway. If only on principle.
Then an image flew across my memory: his father’s grave face as he passed me a dish of water into the darkness of the room, the courtyard dazzling white behind him as he pushed the heavy-weighted mosquito nets aside. Abu Sa’id, bringing the water himself, cool water, every hour or so, for the four days that Nadia was sick. West Bank Luxor, 1987. Abu Sa’id, sitting on the doorstep of his own room at night, staring out into his white courtyard, keeping watch for us, the English girls, who lay in his bed. Sometimes he sat till dawn, sometimes he disappeared silently during the night, and emerged at midday from his son’s room, where he had been lying on a mat.
To begin with I had thought there were no women in the house, only Abu Sa’id and Sa’id and Hakim. One reason why I liked Abu Sa’id so much was that he seemed alone, like me, and unlike everybody else in Egypt, who came arrayed and entangled with uncles and wives and cousins and brothers. Then after a day or two I noticed a tall silent figure, who slipped out of sight when she saw me, like a fish in dark waters. I asked young Sa’id who she was, and he shrugged, as if to say she’s nothing. A servant, I assumed, and counted his manners against him.
Abu Sa’id never told me what happened to his family, if he ever had one. Never spoke to me of the boys’ mother. We just sat on the step, drinking karkadeh, the tart crimson tea made from hibiscus flowers, smoking, listening to music on his old Roberts radio, listening for Nadia to wake. He would play his ney for me, and sometimes I would dance a bit, imagining myself a snake in the Nile to the serpentine warp of the flute, and he would break off and tell me to sit down, with an old person’s laugh at a young person’s foolish pleasures, though he wasn’t so old. Fifty, perhaps. Once he played me a tape of Yaseen el Touhami, the Sufi poet, and rapidly translated his improvisations for me. El Touhamy never goes anywhere to be recorded. If you want to record him, you have to go where he is. And they do – to the mosques and the moulids, to the streets. We can have recordings if we want, in our poor necrophiliac way, but he and life and creation are doing their living business. I loved that. I wanted to be elevated enough to refuse to listen to him on tape. Wanted to share the purity of his creative transcendence. But alas I am not a Sufi, I am a mere London girl. And I was enchanted by the sound of him reproduced and preserved on the slightly stretched tape, crackling slightly on the banks of the Nile, with the palms black against the rose and gold of the beautiful sphinx-shaped cliffs behind Qurnah, to the west, and Abu Sa’id murmuring the words for me, a low and clarificatory counterpoint to the rhythms. He spoke beautiful English, too, though he didn’t write it.
Abu Sa’id, his kindness. I wondered that he had sent Hakim alone, without getting in touch.
Hakim was looking into his thick dark coffee, twiddling his spoon and making an irritating little clinking sound. He looked about ten, like when I’d first met him. He lifted only his ambiguous eyes to answer my question.
‘I will tell you,’ he said. ‘I will tell you, but now I cannot tell you. For now I need just your trust.’
Oh?
I looked.
‘I will stay just for one week,’ he said.
‘In London?’ I asked, but I knew what he meant.
‘In your house. Please? Then all will just become clear in the fullness of time.’
I was sad that he had sensed unwelcome from me, though I knew I was giving it off. I was ashamed. You cannot be unwelcoming to an Arab. There is something so wrong about it. What churls we are, we English, with our privacy and our territory and our cold cold hearts. In Egypt when men speak to you on the streets what they say is ‘Welcome’. There are signs in the streets of Hakim’s home town saying ‘Smile you are in Luxor’. Yes I know it’s for the tourists but even so. When I think of the kindness, the generosity, the hospitality of people I knew – and hardly knew – in Egypt, let alone of Hakim’s father … Shame.
‘You must stay as long as you need,’ I said, and I meant it.
THREE (#ulink_1f61c985-8dbe-566f-a7d3-dbaeeb0c6b73)
Talking about Gary Cooper (#ulink_1f61c985-8dbe-566f-a7d3-dbaeeb0c6b73)
The sitting room is also the kitchen, and I wasn’t putting him in there, so I had the choice: put him in Lily’s room, in which case she would be in with me, and probably in my bed; or put him in my study, in which case I would have to get a job because I certainly wouldn’t be doing any work at home. I don’t want a job. I don’t want Lily back in my bed, I’ve only just got her out of it.
I put him in Lily’s room. She was narked at the idea, initially. Wouldn’t you be? Finish your first day at big school, and what do you find but your normally very territory-protective mother has moved a man into your bedroom. I told her about him as we walked back from school. She was on ‘Mummy there’s a guinea pig can we have a guinea pig please please can we have a guinea pig’ and I took the opportunity to mention the new living creature that we already had.
‘I don’t want a man, I want a guinea pig!’
‘He’s more a boy than a man,’ I said, hoping to endear him to her. ‘And he’s quite like a guinea pig. He has lovely silky hair.’
‘A boy? You said a man.’
I still hadn’t decided quite which I thought him. A boy, of course, would be easier. I could mother him.
‘How old is he?’ she wanted to know.
‘I think he’s about nineteen.’
‘That’s a grown-up,’ she said, disappointedly.
‘Wait till you see him.’
‘Is he going to live with us?’
‘Just for a little while,’ I said.
‘Will he be my daddy?’
The way they come at you. Out of nowhere. She doesn’t mention daddies for months on end and then, matter-of-fact as you like, something like that.
‘No honey, he won’t.’
‘But daddies are the men that live with children.’
‘Not only, love. Some daddies live with children and some don’t, and some men that live with children are daddies and some aren’t, but Hakim isn’t in our family, no – he’s just coming to stay, like Brigid’s boys do, and Caitlin. Just for a bit.’
‘But we don’t know him.’
‘I know him, love.’ Sort of. ‘I knew him in Egypt before you were born.’
‘Mummy you’re very clever.’
‘Oh good. Why?’
‘You know so many things I don’t know.’
My heart filled with joy at her sweet absurdity. Such are the everyday pleasantries of my life.
*
She started coughing the moment she walked through the door.
‘Lily, hon, this is Hakim, Hakim, this is Lily.’
She took one look at him and then she started to curl. Curled her face into my stomach, her arms around my waist, her feet around her legs, her mouth into a simper, her eyelashes into a flutter. Oh, it’s going to be like that, is it. The last one was cousin Max, on my father’s side: six foot one of teenage Liverpudlian love-god, with long yellow hair and a playful disposition. He gave her a piggyback and she just went around saying ‘Max Max Max’ for a week.
‘Hello, Lily,’ said Hakim encouragingly.
‘Hello,’ she whispered, and then pulled me down and started hissing in my ear like a ferocious little boiler.
‘What?’ I said, trying to edge my head away from her and get the words into focus. ‘What?’
She was telling me that he could sleep in her bed and if he wanted he could have one of her teddies, not old brown teddy but one of the others, the one with the pink pyjamas. Pushover.
*
And that is how we all came to be sitting around the breakfast table reading anonymous letters.
Hakim denied all knowledge. I had no knowledge. But then that is how it’s meant to be with anonymous letters. I didn’t like it.
Then there were three calls where whoever it was said nothing at all, just left the line hanging open. The first time it was only a few minutes, the second about ten, and the third nearly quarter of an hour. I 1471ed them, but of course they’d been blocked. So I called BT to get them to do something about it. But it didn’t happen again. I tried to file it under irritating, but I couldn’t quite.
Then it was chased out of my mind by a call from Harry, saying could he come round. Harry worried me more than the letter. These uncommunicative communications were new, and external, unknown. Harry is deep in me.
Harry is a half-settled negotiation, a half-healed wound.
You need to know a bit more about Harry, other than that he was my darling, for years, years ago.
I had of course wondered how he came to be a policeman after so many years of being a bit wide and a bit flash, automotive man with his fully-powered V8 Pontiacs and his James Dean jeans. We’d been sitting on the deckchairs on the balcony outside the flat, a few days after Jim’s claim to Lily had crashed and burned. The fallout was fairly spectacular, what with Eddie Bates being arrested, Ben Cooper the Bent Copper getting his comeuppance, Harry turning out to be a policeman, and Jim turning out not to be Lily’s father after all.
*
I realise that I’m still not mentioning it. The offensive thing. The other things I found out. The bit I hate and have not … OK. These are the things:
a) My sister never told me she was a prostitute.
b) She made pornographic films using religious accoutrements, specifically clothing more usually worn by devout Muslim women for reasons of modesty, and used in these works of art bits of film of me dancing.
c) She pretended to be me in order to sell sex to men who had admired me in performance.
I don’t like to think about these things.
I recall sitting there with my feet up on the balcony wall, bandaged up from my dashing getaway after Eddie abducted me and … well, anyway there we were, in the evening sun, drinking beers from the bottle, admiring the sunset over the A40 and watching Lily and Brigid’s children careering about on their bicycles up and down the balcony, waiting for Mrs Krickic next door to come out and tell them to slow down a bit because they were disturbing her budgies. Harry and I circling each other in the fallout, coming round, making up, moving on … who knows.
‘So why did you become a policeman, Harry?’ I asked.
He looked very sheepish. Having been undercover, I suppose he wasn’t accustomed to talking about it. I suppose. I don’t know. What do undercover people do or feel? What do I know about undercover? But he’s not very accustomed to talking anyway. Joking, yes. Charming, yes, in his tall, laconic way. But not talking. I used to like it: I could read anything I wanted into his handsome silences, and did. But now I’m older and I’m not so insecure, and I like to know what’s going on.
‘Um,’ he said.
I waited encouragingly.
‘Well actually,’ he said, and looked a little puzzled, and then sort of took a breath, and almost laughed a little. He shot me a glance, sideways. This is what he has always done when preparing to confide. It pleased me that he still did it. Made me feel that I knew him. Made me feel secure, at one with the world. A bit.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Because of High Noon.’
I was silenced for a moment.
I began to hum, ‘Do not forsake me, oh my darling,’ without realising I was doing it.
‘Well, you asked,’ he said.
High Noon. Where Sheriff Gary Cooper had to deal with the bad guys even though he had a ticket out of town with the lovely Quaker girl who didn’t believe in violence, and none of the cowardly townsfolk would help him, so he did it alone.
‘High Noon,’ I mused.
‘I wanted to do the right thing,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’
He seemed so uncomfortable admitting that he had some notion of morality, and that it had made him do something, that I didn’t push him. I think he was truly embarrassed. Identifying with Gary Cooper.
But certainly it changed my view of him. From black leather to white stetson, just like that. The bastard cross of Marlon Brando and Del Boy turns out to be Gary Cooper.
Of course all this coincided terribly conveniently with my own sweeping gavotte through life. Here was the peripatetic biking belly dancer grounded and mature with a bad leg and a baby; here was the bad man turned good and willing to consider that he might be said baby’s father. ‘I want to do the blood test,’ he’d said, on the evening of the day of comeuppance. And, ‘I want to see her. And you.’ And, ‘I want you to change the birth certificate. Even if it’s only to Father Unknown.’
But who knows what they want? And who knows whether it’ll make them happy? As I can’t remember which country singer (in a white hat) sang: ‘Some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.’
All I wanted was peace and quiet. I wanted to sit on the bench in the playground with my boots in the dust and the fag ends and the dead plane leaves, and watch Lily climb ropes. I wanted to bathe her and tuck her in and read Thumbelina to her. I wanted to watch her eat, and to make myself a cheese sandwich in the evening knowing she was asleep in the next room, not scratching her eczema (I wanted her eczema gone). I wanted it to be how it was before Jim and Eddie Bates and Ben started to upturn our lives with their blackmail and lies and obsessions; how it was in the gilded imaginary quotidian past. I didn’t want to upturn it even further with the very serious, very real question of her dad. In other words, I wanted to bury my head in the sand. And I did.
But then, sitting on the balcony that night, talking about Gary Cooper, Harry said: ‘Part of it, you know, is …’
‘Is what?’ I said.
‘Lily,’ he said.
‘What about her?’
‘What I said that night.’ He didn’t have to say what night. We knew what night. The night that chaos dissolved.
‘Mm,’ I said.
‘The blood test,’ he reminded me, gently.
‘Mmm.’
I knew he was right, within his rights. I knew it was fair. I knew, rationally, that I didn’t have a leg to stand on. I knew that I probably couldn’t stop him doing it anyway. But my heart cried out against it. Cried and wept. Why? Fear, I suppose. Simple fear.
‘I can’t do it, Harry,’ I said, knowing as I said it what a daft and pathetic thing it was to say.
‘It’s not you that’d do it,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to do anything. I’d just get it done, and then I’d tell you, and we’d … we’d take it from there.’ We hadn’t a clue, then, either of us, of the practicalities. Let alone the repercussions. (Nice word, repercussion. Re-percussion. There’s a verb: percuss, to strike so as to shake. Well there you go.)
‘Shut up,’ I said.
He was looking at me, quite kindly, twiddling the empty beer bottle in his big skinny hands, leaning forward a little.
‘How long for?’ he asked.
‘How long what?’
‘How long shall I shut up for? I mean, I can see you probably need a bit of time, having just had Jim breathing down your neck being the bad father, and maybe a father is not what you want right now, but, well, the question’s been asked now, hasn’t it? So how long, do you think, before you’ll want to know? Because you’re going to want to.’
‘I don’t want to know.’
‘No, but you will.’
‘Don’t patronise me, Harry. I don’t want to know. It’s a positive act of not wanting. I actively want not to know. I desire ignorance.’
‘Why? Are you scared?’
‘No I’m fucking not. Don’t give me that crap.’
‘Why not? I’m scared. I’d think it was incredibly scary.’
‘I like things as they are. That’s all. Harry—’
‘What?’
‘Please can we leave it.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But for how long?’
‘Oh for God’s …’ Well. OK. Buy time. ‘Fifty years,’ I said, rather idiotically.
‘It might be worth pointing out, Angel, that you aren’t the only person involved in this,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry?’ I replied, cold suddenly, and deadly courteous.
‘Lily …’ he began, poor fool, but he did no more than begin before I bit him off: ‘Do you think that I’m not aware of that?’ I snapped. ‘Do you think that every single thing I do isn’t for her wellbeing? Do you imagine that I ever for one moment stop considering what’s best for her? Do you think I don’t know? My whole fucking life for nearly four years has been based on what she wants and what she needs and I do not need you muscling in and telling me that I need to take her into consideration. I do take her into consideration. I do every bloody thing that is ever done for that child including protecting her, when she needs it, from people she doesn’t know who think they have something to do with her. If I’d told her Jim was her father how do you think she would feel now? Now that he’s decided that oh no, he isn’t after all, silly me it’s just my wife fancied having a kid. Who her father is and what happens about that is an incredibly bloody serious issue and if I’m not up to thinking about it and controlling what happens about it then it is not to happen, that’s all. The damage it could do her is immeasurable. And it’s down to me. I decide when and how. And I say no. No.’
So I was ranting. Harry has never been impressed by my ranting.
‘It’s not just Lily,’ he said, calmly. If anything he was even more unflappable now. Unpercussable.
‘What?’
‘It’s not just Lily.’
‘Oh. So, what. It’s you. You need to know. You feel odd. You want to know.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
I looked him a look.
‘It’s not unreasonable,’ he said.
‘It’s not possible,’ I said, in only half-fake disbelief. The nerve of him.
‘Yes it is.’
‘No it’s not.’
‘You can’t say that.’
‘Just did,’ I retorted, maturely.
‘Angel,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to … but you can’t control it. It’s not just you. It’s the truth – you’ll have to face it. You can’t just boss it around.’
‘I can have a damn good try.’
‘Why do you have to be in charge of everything?’
‘Because I am. Aren’t I? Who else is?’
‘You could let someone help you.’
‘This is getting a little clichéd, Harry. I get plenty of help, thank you, so you needn’t bother offering. I really don’t think you’d be much use, frankly.’
‘Yes I would.’
‘You. Yeah. Very likely. Teach her to drive and check the gap on a sparkplug, babysit and embarrass my boyfriends when we get home. I don’t need it.’
‘You don’t know what a father might give …’
‘You don’t know whether you’re her father.’
‘I know. It doesn’t make it any easier. She’s asleep in there and … Let me find out. Let me try.’
‘No. Or – OK, yes. Try this. You’re her father, you want to give her what she needs. What she needs right now is a period of calm after a period of upset. She needs it as much as I do. She also needs me to have a period of calm after a period of upset. I’m not confusing our needs here, I’m recognising that they are the same. That’s what she wants, what she needs. You can give that to her. Will you?’
I couldn’t read his face at all. His expression was remote – his Mongolian face, I used to call it. Narrowed eyes and inscrutable and handsome.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘How long a period of calm?’
I could have kicked him. ‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Amazing!’ he murmured.
‘What?’
‘Something you don’t know!’
‘Don’t be like that.’
‘I’m not being like that,’ he said. ‘I have no intention of being like that. OK, tell me how long within three months, or I’ll enquire again. And if you need anything, ring me. I’m assuming,’ he said, ‘that you’re keeping me hanging on, not counting me out.’
My oh my, is he a different man in this white hat. What kind of a comment is that from an emotional illiterate?
I gave him a rather pathetic smile, and he left. Since then, we’d maintained a quiet and sparse rapprochement. During Eddie’s trial, which came up gratifyingly quickly, I didn’t see much of him. He wasn’t directly involved himself – undercover, see – but he kept me posted. If there is one thing I should be grateful to Harry for, it is that he managed to see Eddie put away without my having to give evidence, without my role in the drama coming out. Eddie was guilty of quite enough other things – mister-bigging it for gangs of drug dealers and smugglers and pornography and God knows what. Kidnapping little old me and attacking me was peanuts to his real career, and didn’t come up in court, which was just as well.
I didn’t go to the trial. Didn’t follow it in the papers. It was enough for me that the drama was over. Harry it was that told me the verdict and the sentence. Guilty, fifteen years. I was happy. It was over.
Happy? I was over the fucking moon. I love safety. Safety and calm make me sing and dance. I bless every morning when nothing happens. Dullness and boredom do not exist in a life where activity has been motorbikes flying out of control and sisters dying and babies being orphaned and madmen imprisoning you and bastards claiming paternity of your child. I don’t ask for much. Just for nothing much to happen ever again. Maybe a few little quiet ordinary things. A calm ordinary little love affair, or an everyday kind of marriage. Some job or something. Don’t talk to me of self-fulfilment. I’ve survived; so has Lily. This is my achievement.
After that Harry had spent six months in Arizona on some exchange training thing, sending us postcards of giant jackrabbits in cowboy clothes, and views of downtown Tucson by night. His calls, on his return, had been infrequent, and they were a fly in the calm ointment of our reconstituted lives.
He was out there, and I couldn’t tell whether the big thing that he was was ever going to happen. Maybe he had just gone away. Then again he might reappear, any time, wanting things. Wanting to know. I’d been through it before with Jim, Janie’s ex, in the days when we believed him to be Lily’s father; been through that knowledge that someone outside of you can turn your life upside down and claim that which you treasure above all. And I’d been through it in a different way with Ben Cooper the Bent Copper, when he was blackmailing me to spy on Eddie Bates. I know what it is like when someone has power over your life. It’s bloody horrible.
The one thing that Harry didn’t mention again was his suggestion, at the end of That Day, when I said was knackered and going to bed, that he come with me.
*
I rang him back. He wanted to meet. It seemed to me like a tiny nasty echo of when Jim had reappeared, wanting to meet, wanting to see Lily, wanting to take her from me. How soon before the lawyers’ letters start up again? At the same time I recognised the absurdity: this was Harry, who had been my Harry, Harry who wasn’t a bad bloke, Harry who now wore a white hat, Harry who wasn’t even definitely her father. And I knew I couldn’t avoid it forever, because he was right, you cannot avoid what exists. This question existed, no doubt about it. I knew that all I’d said to him that night on the balcony was untenable. A father is a father – if he is then he is. I’d even agreed that about Jim.
So I agreed to meet him the next day. He wanted to make it the evening, I said no, lunch is easier, Lily will be at school. How much they have to learn.
FOUR (#ulink_ba21373d-39b0-5e28-baf9-bbed4d71ce1b)
Hakim’s Business, Harry’s News (#ulink_ba21373d-39b0-5e28-baf9-bbed4d71ce1b)
After the first day, spent drinking coffee and reading Arabic newspapers, Hakim had expanded his repertoire to drinking coffee, reading Arabic newspapers and making and receiving telephone calls. He had a mobile phone, of which he was proud. By day three he wanted an A to Z. However he doesn’t read English too well. This was obviously going to make life a bit of a problem for him, and for me by default. He decided that the simplest thing would be for me to teach him. I thought it would be far easier if I just showed him where Somerset House was on the map, and wrote out CHARING CROSS in big letters so he could tell when he’d reached the right station. I instructed him in English, he wrote it down in Arabic. I didn’t want to think about it actually. ‘You killed my love’ was on my mind. I didn’t want it to be. I know the form. You ignore anonymous letters, you put odd phone calls down to the vagaries of the system. You have better things to worry about. And I do. I have Harry.
But it was on my mind. Latching on to that which is always on my mind. Because I did … kill. Janie. And however much you may know, reasonably, and accept everybody else’s convictions, there is always … It’s always there. However much an accident is an accident. The sense of responsibility. Guilt at surviving when she didn’t. Helplessness at not having preserved your parents from it. Whatever she may have done makes little difference to that, and the punishment that I had, in losing my fitness to dance, makes little difference either. It matters, but it makes little difference.
I couldn’t think what the letter was to do with. But it had touched a nerve. A ganglion actually. So it wasn’t till Hakim had left that I wondered what he was going to do at Somerset House.
When he got back, five hours later, I made him a cup of coffee and asked him.
‘Nothing,’ he said. He looked angry, almost tearful. ‘Nothing. What can I do? I don’t know your writing. I was lost. It’s OK, I ask in shops and everybody speaks Arabic. I get home. But I found nothing. Somerset House is just the wrong place.’
Of course it was. Somerset House is always the wrong place. You think it’s the right place because it was in Sherlock Holmes or something, but the right place is now in Preston, or care of a privatised company in New Maiden. Poor lost foreigner. I remembered my first days in Cairo, days of lonely chaos before I discovered the bar on the roof of the Odeon, and the flat in the block on Champoleon Street – Château Champoleon, as Orlando the Colombian political correspondent next door called it in his camp Latino/Tennessee accent. Orlando it was who taught me never to say America when I meant the United States. There is a brilliant blind chaotic excitement to a new city, an alien city. But God there is some loneliness too. When there’s too much going on out there, too much cardamom and donkey shit and Arabic, too many Mercedes and veils and babies, and you can’t face it, so you stay in your cheap cockroachy room saying it’s only wise to in the heat of the day, or the danger of the evening, pretending that you’re taking the opportunity to catch up on Proust, but really you’re just building up loneliness and boredom to the point when you have to explode. It’s like the internal combustion engine. Suck squeeze bang blow: Suck in loneliness, squeeze it with boredom until BANG! you are blown out on to the streets of the alien city, and thank God for it. Whereupon you suck in strangeness, squeeze it with fascination till BANG! the top of your head blows off with the excitement of it all and blows you into the next strange and fascinating experience. (I was very much a biker in those days, hence the imagery. Orlando liked the image, said it was just like Hegel, thesis, antithesis and synthesis, only in fourtime instead of a waltz, ‘But it’s all dancing,’ he said. Orlando was a gas.)
I don’t know what London is like to a stranger. I should imagine horrible. Cold, unfriendly, cliquey, snitty, incomprehensible. And grey, and strange, and wet, and cold. Light when it should be dark; dark when it should be light. And expensive. And big. But people come here, people stay here, whole peoples come and live and settle. No thanks to the welcome we give them, that’s for sure. Poor Hakim.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I should have helped you. I’ll come down with you tomorrow morning.’
‘Thank you,’ says Hakim.
‘Shukran afwan,’ said Lily, grinning, waiting for approbation.
‘Bravo,’ said Hakim. She went pink with pleasure, and he smiled and pinched her cheek, and she smiled and pinched his and said, ‘Chubby chops’, and he said, ‘What is chubby chops?’, and generally they were carrying on like love’s young dream.
‘So what is it you’re trying to find out about?’ I asked.
Hakim went very quiet.
I pointed out to him that if I was to find out for him where he was to go I needed to know what he wanted to find out when he got there. For a while he wouldn’t say. Then: ‘If someone is dead or married.’ Nothing more. This was irritating, but Lily needed her tea and if something’s not happening you can’t force it. So I fed her and washed her and did all those small yet vital services that prove love and build love and give love’s object a chance of being well-adjusted in the future. (Interesting those people who claim to care deeply for their children yet leave the actual caring to someone else. It used to be one word, care, what you do and how you feel. Now it is two, and you can feel it yet never do it, or do it yet never feel it.)
‘Who’s dead?’ she wanted to know. ‘Who’s married?’ She’s very interested in death and marriage. Wants me to get married, sometimes. Has proposed to me herself, actually. Best offer I ever had.
*
The next day brought the next letter. The envelope sat there like a toad on the doormat. Lily ran to pick it up; I stopped her. I picked it up quickly, read it quickly: ‘You did it and I mind.’
I didn’t like it. Incomprehensible letters making nebulous accusations against I wasn’t sure who were actually a worse incursion into my enderun (it’s a Turkish word. It means that which is within, private, domestic) than Hakim turning up and being mysterious all over the shop. Or were they? Well that’s the problem, isn’t it. They could be. They have the potential. But by their very nature, you don’t know.
I believe I may have mentioned before my slightly obsessively protective attitude to my gaff. I don’t like things coming in and upsetting me. I like being quiet and safe and calm. I believe this to be beneficial to my child. I live every day with the sole intention of giving her enough calm security to outweigh the drama and weirdness of her birth. A kid snatched at birth from the jaws of death, while the fangs sank into her mother, is a kid who can soak up a lot of calmness. Whether or not she knows it. My God, after five years it still shocks me. Pulled from the jaws of death and her mother’s womb simultaneously.
So now I protect Lily by protecting our home and, as my perceptive Egyptian friend Zeinab and my perceptive Irish friend Brigid have both pointed out, my body. And my heart. There had been signs of a little loosening up: letting Hakim stay, fantasising about maybe finding myself a man. But the potential of these letters sat in the base of the back of my mind, crying out to me.
*
I gave Hakim a little lecture on the bus (St Catherine’s House, it turned out, was the place). At home he was cavalier if courteous, operating all the assumptions of a man who expects a woman to wait on him. Out in the world he found it easier to be a child with me, and hence it was easier for me to mother him.
‘Hakim,’ I said, once we were settled on the 94. ‘Lily has bad lungs and I would appreciate it if you didn’t smoke in the flat. Also you drink too much coffee, it makes you manic and nervous. And please tell me now what you want to find out about who.’
We were sitting on the top of the bus, right up at the front because Hakim wanted to see the sights. Willing as I was to point out Shepherds Bush roundabout, Notting Hill tube station and the great dome of Whiteleys in the distance, I was more interested in getting to the point. To my dismay he started to cry. I put my arm round his shoulder and patted him, murmuring kind things in Arabic, the things Zeinab murmurs to her boys when they fall over.
‘I bring badness to you,’ he said, sniffing. ‘I bring badness to your house.’
‘Well just tell me what it’s all about, and then we can sort it out.’
‘I can’t tell you,’ he said.
‘Yes you can. Open your mouth and speak.’
‘I can’t. I can’t. Too much badness.’
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Come on, just tell me. You can’t keep it to yourself, it won’t make it better. Just tell me.’
‘I can’t.’
I was getting bored.
‘Why not?’ I said.
‘Too much badness.’
‘Tell me why you can’t tell me. It’s not fair to bring badness to my house and not tell me what it is. Tell me something. Tell me why you can’t tell me.’
He stared out of the window at Holland Park Avenue unfolding before us, and the overlong branches of the plane trees slapped at the window as if at our faces. ‘I am in shame,’ he murmured.
‘Hakim,’ I said, in the bad mother voice that brings Lily to heel. ‘Stop it. Tell me.’
He turned his face round to me, tears still sitting in his eyes, and said, ‘It is family, Angelina. Family.’
‘Not Abu Sa’id,’ I exclaimed.
‘Not the father,’ he said. And then, with that slight shift of musculature that denotes the making of a decision, he said, ‘Mother.’
For a moment I thought he was calling me mother. Then I realised no, he’s just saying it.
Mother.
‘Mother?’ I repeated, intelligently.
He leaned forward and rested his forehead against the glass.
‘I have a mother,’ he whispered.
‘Ah,’ I murmured.
He leaned.
‘And?’ I suggested.
He leaned back. ‘I have a mother.’
There’s nothing you can do really but sit it out.
I sat.
‘An English mother,’ he murmured.
‘English mother!’
I was surprised. I was very surprised. All I had known was absent mother, gone mother, unspoken-about mother, maybe dead mother, maybe shamed mother. English mother, though, was something new.
‘English mother gone back to England. I want her. I look for her. Please don’t tell my brother or my father.’
Not bothering to point out how unlikely it was that I would happen to be talking to either of them, I just goggled at him.
‘But Hakim, that’s good! Finding a mother isn’t – yes, it might be complicated and everything but it’s basically a good thing to do. It’s … and English! So you’re half English! Blimey! … but why did she … I mean, tell me the story …’
I was rather pleased to see a boy so distraught at disobeying his parent. It seemed so old-fashioned, so honourable, so decent and right and endearing. And I was sorry for him, and I was excited about it, and relieved that it wasn’t something horrible. Also I know, as adult to adult, that Abu Sa’id is not an unreasonable man, and would probably, I thought, forgive his son for his natural curiosity and desire for his mother. But then – I’m not family. And I’m not Egyptian. And I’m not him. I cannot know where his limits are.
‘I don’t know the story,’ he said. ‘I was small. Five years. Sa’id was ten years. He never talked of her. Never. My father said nothing. Never. Not to talk of her, not allowed. When I cried for mama, there was Mariam.’
‘Who’s Mariam?’ I asked.
‘The woman in my father’s house. Second wife. New mama. The sad woman nobody love.’ I remembered the woman who moved like a fish, and hid from me. His wife. The woman in his house. I remembered his unwonted kindness to two English girls. A clear picture sprang up of a man heartbroken by a deserting wife, who still loved her enough to be kind to her countrywomen for her sake. And two bereft boys being foul to a substitute mother. And that poor woman, whom nobody loved. I was nearly in tears myself.
‘And you want to find her.’
‘Yes.’
‘What will you do when you find her?’
‘I will … ask her why she leaved. See if she is a good woman or bad. See what is my English me.’
Well, you can’t fault that.
‘I’ll help you, then,’ I said.
He smiled at me. I found myself thinking ‘You big softy’, and I wasn’t sure if I meant myself or him.
I took one look at the endless shelves of huge volumes in the high institutional halls of the Public Search Room and decided to leave Hakim to it. But of course I couldn’t.
‘What was her maiden name?’ I said. Hakim tried and tried to pronounce it but the sounds just didn’t work in his mouth.
We got it in the end. Tomlinson (I think. Could be Tompkinson). It only took another half-hour to find that in 1984 she had married a man called Stephen John Lockwood, in London.
*
I’d arranged to meet Harry in a sandwich shop in Strutton Ground, near Scotland Yard. I had toasted cheese and salami with gherkins, and he sneered slightly at my choice. He had a cappuccino with his ham roll, and I sneered slightly at that. I don’t think men should drink frothy things with chocolate on top. So it wasn’t great even before we started.
‘Well, to put your mind at rest, I didn’t drag you here to talk about Lily,’ he said, straight off. I was so pleasantly surprised that I almost forgave him for sneering at my sandwich, but then I got pissed off again about his power to relieve me by saying he wasn’t going to mention that which I thought he had no business mentioning anyway.
‘Good,’ I said, more briskly than I might have. ‘So what is it?’ Oh shit, I thought, it’s all going wrong. I don’t want not to get on with him. Oh bugger. (Not bugger, mummy, bother.)
‘I thought you might like an update on Ben Cooper and your friend Eddie,’ he said, rising to the mood of the occasion. Eddie is no friend of mine and Harry knows it.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Yes, I would.’
‘Well,’ said Harry, ‘as you know, Ben has been evading the police inquiry into his misdemeanours by claiming ill health.’ I did know. The slimy bastard had got a psychiatrist to say that the stress of having to account for himself might drive him to suicide. (Eddie Bates had tried a similar ploy – they’d said he wasn’t well enough to stand trial, but he’d had to, in the end.) Cooper had kept it up for over a year now. And because he hasn’t had his fair hearing yet, he can’t be sacked, so he’s still sitting about on sick leave, on full pay, the slug, and I’m still sitting about wondering whether I’m going to be called to help put him away. Which I would be happy to do, because he was at least in part responsible for my sister’s downfall. Because he was in business with her making the nasty little videos, and because he was the one who, when Eddie Bates saw me dance and wanted me, arranged for Janie to wear my costumes, masquerade as me, and sell herself, as me, to him.
Even as I write it a damp toad settles again in my belly. For Janie, for Eddie, and for my own shame.
‘Well now his lawyers are saying that it was too long ago,’ Harry was saying, ‘and the case should be dropped.’
My jaw dropped to match.
‘Surely not,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe it. He can’t get away with it. I …’ Mouthing like a goldfish. Pointless.
‘Well no, he probably won’t,’ said Harry. ‘But he might.’
‘Anyway that’s not all,’ he said. I looked up.
‘Um,’ he said.
‘Yes?’
He looked tired and sad.
‘Eddie Bates is dead,’ he said.
It all stood still for a moment.
And another. Then …
‘Sorry?’ I said.
‘Eddie Bates is dead,’ he repeated.
I couldn’t quite breathe. My eyes started flickering around and I felt myself shaking. To my horror I felt I was going to cry. I heard Harry’s voice.
‘Angel? Angel?’
I shook myself and came back to myself. Back to myself but different.
‘Dead,’ I said.
‘Dead,’ he said.
I reached for a cigarette but there weren’t any. I don’t smoke any more. Harry reached over to the next table and helped himself to one from the packet belonging to the man sitting there. ‘Thank you,’ he said to him, in a voice that brooked no denial, and he lit it with the man’s lighter, and gave it to me.
‘Dead,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said.
My face was screwed up and I tried to untangle it. It wouldn’t go. We sat there in silence for a few minutes. Then Harry said: ‘Forgive an indelicate question, Angeline, but why the fuck do you mind so much?’
I couldn’t answer. Not only because I couldn’t speak, but because I didn’t know, and if I had known I couldn’t have told Harry anyway.
My enemy is dead. I should be singing and dancing my delight. If I was made safe by his imprisonment, how much safer am I now?
More minutes of silence.
‘What did he die of?’ I asked.
More silence, maintained this time by Harry. Then:
‘He hasn’t been well.’
Oh.
‘How not well? Not well of what?’ You see, I couldn’t speak.
‘Um,’ said Harry.
Into my state of shock came a sliver of … not fear, but … awareness.
‘What?’
He sighed. ‘I didn’t tell you because I thought it would just … go away. I thought he’d get better.’
‘What?’ I said. ‘Was it what he was talking about before the trial? What was it?’
I could just about register how difficult Harry was finding this, but I no longer let him get away with not saying things. We are way past the silent understandings, or more often misunderstandings, of our optimistic youth. In theory, at least.
‘You know when he was arrested,’ said Harry, ‘he had a head wound.’ I did know. I had inflicted it on him. I had hit him on the head with a poker when he was trying to jump me. Harry knew that. I had told him in the confusion of the end of the day of comeuppance. I seem to remember he had said, ‘Attagirl’. Anyway, some such unpolicemanly expression of approval.
Harry was not looking at me. ‘He has been suffering ever since from dizzy spells. That’s one thing his lawyers put up when they were trying to delay the trial. He’s continued to have them inside. Last week a new inmate arrived, who for reasons best known to himself took the first opportunity he could to punch Eddie’s lights out. Two days later Eddie was found dead on the floor of his cell. They haven’t done the post-mortem yet but it looks like a fractured skull.’
Now my skin was burning up.
‘He may have fallen,’ said Harry.
I took a drag on the cigarette and started coughing. Harry took the stub from my fingers and put it out.
‘So did I kill him?’ I asked.
‘He never said in court what had caused his initial head injuries,’ Harry continued, conversationally. ‘That was one reason why the application wasn’t accepted. The doctors agreed that he was not in the best nick, but he just said he’d fallen, and the damage wasn’t consistent with that, so they couldn’t accept it.’
I stared down at my plate. A gherkin had fallen out of my sandwich. I picked it up and ate it, and a huge sadness washed over me. Why do only mad psychotic scumbags love me, and is that love?
‘You didn’t kill him, legally or otherwise. But you did something,’ he said.
‘Yes I did.’
Bad people around me die, but I don’t kill them, but I do something. Oh for God’s sake. Janie wasn’t bad. Not bad. Not like Eddie.
‘When’s the funeral?’ I asked.
Harry was shocked. ‘You’re not going to go?’ he said. Aghast.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Why? Why the fuck?’
‘To see that he’s really dead,’ I said. ‘Because … because I thought it was over with the court case, and it wasn’t, and I want to make sure it’s over now.’
His face was amazed but kind. ‘There you go again,’ he said. ‘You want to do something absurd and ridiculous and stupid, but you’ve got a completely good understandable reason for it.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Is that what I do?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You should be a lawyer.’
Is that good or bad?
‘But it doesn’t mean you’re right,’ he said.
‘Right about what?’
‘About going to the funeral.’
‘You think I shouldn’t?’
‘I think it unwise,’ said Harry.
‘I’m sure you do,’ I said.
‘I’ll think about it,’ he said.
‘About what?’
‘Whether to tell you where it is,’ he said.
‘There you go again,’ I said, a little pointedly.
‘What?’
‘Telling me what to do. Acting like you’re in charge.’
‘I daresay,’ he said, unmoved. Only one step beyond his admirable unflappability lies his bossy pain-in-the-arse stubbornness. It reminded me of how he’d been when I first met Eddie, through him; when he warned me off making friends with him, not knowing that I was only doing so because Ben was making me. It reminded me of how jealous he’d been then, when he’d thought I didn’t know Eddie was a villain, when he’d thought that I fancied him. Harry protecting me for my own good, keeping things from me because I couldn’t be trusted to behave sensibly. Harry being a patronising sexist git. Harry watching over me, looking out for me, still caring what happens to me. Knowing me.
I would like to be able to take Harry’s concern for me and appreciate it. I would like to be able to maintain my independence without having to spit in his eye. I would like to think that I can rise above daily tribulation and problems of communication to a superior level of transcendent human understanding, but I can’t.
‘Then I’ll find out from somebody else,’ I said, in a very slightly nyaaah nyaah voice.
‘Who?’ he said.
‘I’ll ring …’ I said, in one of those sentences that you begin, hoping that you’ll find an end for it by the time you get there, but I didn’t. Who would I ring? We didn’t exactly have friends in common. His wife! I’d track down his wife.
His wife.
You killed my love.
You did, and I mind.
Oh.
Well perhaps his wife would ring me. Perhaps in fact she has been ringing me.
‘Tell me,’ I said to Harry. ‘Do people who send anonymous letters ever get violent, generally? Is that the sort of thing that happens. Do you know?’
Harry looked tired. ‘What?’ he said. ‘What a …’
It suddenly hit me like a hammer. Eddie’s dead. His wife thinks I killed him. I burst into tears, stared at Harry in horror, and hurtled to the back of the café in search of the ladies. Only there wasn’t one. The sandwich shop man gave me a handful of paper napkins from a chrome dispenser and turned me round again. The napkins soaked up nothing; just smeared and redistributed. Harry was standing up, wobbly through my tears, tall and a little menacing as he unfolded himself from behind the café table. I remembered his father telling me how he used to stop fights just by unfolding himself out of the squad car and being exceptionally tall. Young miscreants would simply stop toughing each other up and gaze in amazement as more and more of the length of the copper unfolded. He’s six foot seven. Harry’s a shrimp in comparison, a mere six foot four. I forgot for years that Harry’s father was police. So strange. I daresay it helped to get Harry in, despite his past. Though he was never convicted of anything. Nor charged with much, come to think of it. Perhaps his father helped with that too. Not consciously, not on purpose.
The miscreant in me folded.
I was still crying.
‘Come on, lover girl,’ he said. ‘I’ll get you a cab.’ He looked disgusted. I remembered when he’d told me he was disgusted one time before. Over Janie. When he thought I’d known, and I hadn’t.
He took my elbow and walked me into the bright street. I could see reflections of Petty France on the teardrops that shook on my lower lashes. Like a hall of mirrors, a ball of mercury. Like the chrome rims of the surgeons’ lights as they pored over my leg, and I gazed desperately into the distorted reflections of my joints and ligaments, yellow and scarlet and black, trying to see what the hell they were doing inside me. Discomfiting and weird reflections. Harry hailed a cab.
Lover girl?
‘Remember,’ I said, ‘you were wrong last time. Don’t jump to conclusions.’
‘Wheee,’ he said, his face hard. ‘Wheeeee, splat.’
FIVE (#ulink_758be9cf-efed-5ab8-a502-567148bd849c)
Next (#ulink_758be9cf-efed-5ab8-a502-567148bd849c)
I can’t afford to take a cab all the way to Shepherds Bush so I got out at the top of Whitehall and took the bus. The cabbie tried to get stroppy about it but I told him that if he thought the quickest way to Shepherds Bush from Victoria Street was via Trafalgar Square he must be used to passengers walking out on him. At the bus stop I wondered whether Hakim had got home all right, and whether I would be on time to pick up Lily. On the number 12 I wondered whether Sarah Tomlinson el Araby Lockwood would be in London still, in the phone book perhaps, even. At Piccadilly Circus I wondered why London Transport had changed the system so that instead of getting a 12 all the way through you had to change to a 94 at Marble Arch or Oxford Circus. At Oxford Circus I wondered why you wait for half an hour and then three come along at once. Then on Bayswater Road, having wondered every damn boring other thing available, I started to wonder why I was so upset at Eddie Bates being dead. It wasn’t just that I may have contributed. Or that his wife seemed to think I had. There was something personal. And I came up with some fairly unwelcome reasons.
1) Although he was a scumbag of the worst order, he had expressed a fairly devoted devotion to me, and I liked that, even from a scumbag of the worst order. Which makes me something of a scumbag.
2) Although he was a scumbag of the worst order he had an enormous amount of passion in him. Energy, enthusiasm, life force. He was a big, pulsating character. And it’s a shock to think of that gone. Pff, just gone.
3) There’s an animal thing, a …
OK, I can’t.
OK.
When Eddie jumped on me, and I hit him with the poker and knocked him out
This is quite hard to explain because I don’t know why I did it. And I don’t know how I did it.
So there he was, with his
I can’t describe this. He’s dead.
OK. I fucked him then, while he was unconscious. I was as surprised as you are that it was physically possible. I was more surprised that I wanted to do it. I didn’t know I wanted to do it. I still find it hard to believe that I did do it. But I did.
I can only suppose that for some reason I still don’t understand I wanted to have sex with him, but I didn’t want him to have sex with me. Because I hated him and despised him. I am absolutely not happy with the fact that I fancied him. Not happy at all.
Silly word, fancied. From ‘fantasy’, I imagine. I fantasied him. And then I realised him.
So there is some animal thing, about a man you’ve had sex with (even though he didn’t have it with you) being dead. And there’s something about him being unconscious then, and dead now. Horizontal.
So there I am, quasi-necrophiliac, fancier of scumbags, flattered by a scumbag’s attentions. Just how I like to see myself.
Let alone about having contributed to his death. Let alone his wife.
*
I got off at Shepherds Bush Green and got to Lily’s school in good time. Just seeing her, love flowed through me, drenching and drowning the poison, flushing it through. You can feel warmth and cleanness in your veins. Palpable goodness, inside you, displacing and unmanning the badness and the shame. Simplicity clearing confusion. Redeemed by love. It happens. All the time.
I bought her a choc ice and we went to the park to chase squirrels.
*
When we got home Hakim was sitting at the kitchen table with all the telephone books, looking sad.
‘There is just one Sarah in London, is not her,’ he said.
I expressed doubt. He showed me how he had identified the S section of the book, and found Sarah’s Hair Fashion Studio in Lower Norwood, and told me that he had rung, but they hadn’t been his mother. I found myself thinking that I really ought to look after him better, and said that after I’d put Lily to bed I would help him. During tea he let her wear his Qur’anic verse pendant, so she ran to put on two of her tiaras and her plastic glittery Cinderella slippers. He didn’t know the story so she told him, then he had to be the prince and I had to be the Ugly Sisters and she was – as she is most days anyway, when she’s not being a baby animal of some description – Cinderella. When the time came for them to live happily ever after she almost burst with joy. Then he told her the story of Rhodopis, the girl with the rose-red slippers who married Pharaoh Amasis five hundred years before Christ. When I tucked her up later she announced that Hakim was her boyfriend, and could he live with us forever. Probably not, I said. We could marry him, she said, then he would. She wanted him to come and tell her Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and he did, including all the boiling oil and dismemberment of corpses, which I had been keeping from her.
When Lily the love fountain was asleep, I was at risk again. Eddie lurked, alive or dead. Spooking me with his … he threatened and hurt me, I hated him, I fucked him, he’s dead. That handsome, thrilling, madcap fellow; that dangerous violent psychotic liar.
Luckily Hakim wanted to cook my dinner. My gratitude was immense. Not for the meal – it was pretty much on the same level as Lily wanting to cook my dinner. Very sweet, hopeless, and more work for me than if I’d done it myself. But for the distraction. After half an hour or so of him being very confused by the contents of my kitchen (the garlic press delighted him), I taught him how to make pasta with sauce out of a pot. He had bought a couple of beers too, which was a relief for me because I am very bad at judging whether the Muslim I am sitting with is a drinking Muslim or not, and I hate to get it wrong. There are clues: if a man has a prayer mark on his forehead, a permanent bruise from the frequency and energy of his devotional prostrations, then I do not offer. If a woman is veiled, I do not offer. But here in London, where so many people are out of kilter with what they would be doing if they were at home, who is to know what to do? Many, many are the nebulous rules, the adjustable rules, the friable rules. I was once warned fair and square to have nothing to do with any man who drinks alcohol and reads the Qur’an: OK to do one or the other, but not both, because hypocrisy is the great sin. I was young and firm and unforgiving in those days, and I took that rule to heart; nowadays I’m a little gentler. Weaker. My standards have slipped. Anyway I am pleased that Hakim takes out his mat and prays in Lily’s bedroom, and I am pleased that he is willing to crack a beer with me and gossip, and with his youth and sweetness keep madcap monsters from my mental door.
‘So, is Sa’id married yet?’ I asked, flinging around for a subject, as we sat down to eat.
Hakim looked surprised at the suggestion. ‘Oh no,’ he said.
‘But he’s, what, twenty-five?’
‘No one is married now at twenty-five,’ he said. He peered at his beer and looked less than completely happy.
‘No one?’ I was surprised. Shagging about was definitely not on in Upper Egypt in my day, and not much in Cairo either, and where there is no shagging about there tends to be early marriage. Or some other arrangement.
Hakim screwed up his eyes and ran his fingers over his forehead, pressing above his eyebrows as if to dislodge something stuck inside. ‘No one,’ he said crossly.
‘Don’t be cross with me about it,’ I said mildly.
He looked up. ‘Not cross with you,’ he said, heartfelt, fearful of giving offence. ‘Of course not with you.’
He held my gaze, eye to eye, steady. It made me realise how seldom he caught my eye, let alone held it.
‘Things are strange to me here,’ he said. ‘At home you are tourist and the tourist, perhaps you know, is number one. And number two and number three and number four and so on. In Luxor for thousands of years we have been guardians of our palaces and graves, and people – you – have come to visit, and have brought money for the people who tend to visitors.’
It was one of those moments which make me want a cigarette. When someone starts to talk.
‘Let me tell you,’ he said. ‘During the Gulf War, when I was quite small. Not so small. After the houses where the people lived were knocked down and the big hotels all built, and the tourism schools teach that the tourist is always right; after they build the walls to hide the villages because the village isn’t so pretty, so they build the walls not the drains, anyway. Then there was the bombardment of Baghdad and the tourists don’t come, and everyone is scared, because so much is … spent for the people who will come. Just before the bombardment of Baghdad, when everything was just so … you know … I went with a visitor from Cairo to the grave of Thutmosis, in the valley of the kings, I think you know the one. There is a metal steps up the cliff, and climbing, and a pit, and steps down inside. My friend’s great-uncle was a guard in this grave. It is shaped like an egg, pale cheese colour with black pictograms, beautiful. The king made it hard to find, and now you just go every day.
‘You know photographs are not allowed in these graves without a pass. The flash destroys the picture. Too much light, too many people. One time, this day, four tourists come in and just start to take photographs with flash. The old man, the guard, says to them no photograph. All he can say in English, in French, in German (except also “Welcome Luxor”). He says it, in English, in French, in German. The tourists take no notice. He stands in front of them, in front of the pictograms. Then one tourist knocks him down. We came in next – me small boy and the lady visitor, the friend of my mother. The old man is on the floor, blood … the tourist taking photographs. The lady visitor picks him up, the tourist police come, fuss and bother, no one saw but everybody knows the old man is telling truth.’
‘So what happened?’
‘The old man was made to apologise.’
He looked at me straight, to see what I thought.
‘Luxor is a beautiful place but it is not good,’ he said. ‘No one is married before thirty because they have not enough money. Business is good for us but even for Sa’id to make enough money for himself to marry will take time. All the money is spent for him going to university, to Sorbonne, business studies – he did only one year, said he knew more than the professors, then economics. But everybody else is leaving school and not going to university. People come by so rich, tourists, Egyptians, Saudi, Europeans. And we are rich, my family. My father employs people. Sa’id does business with Cairo for him. We sell abroad, in Khan el-Khalili, we have the shop in Luxor and the fabrique on the West Bank. But Sa’id cannot marry. How is it for the poorer people? Wages are not good. The richness does not travel from the rich people to the poor. The poor people live in places that are built without permission and then the officials say they will knock them down and they will have nowhere to live. In Qurnah because the old village is just among the graves of the Nobles they are always trying to knock it down. They send in tanks, the village people come out with sticks. Just to show that they are people, who can hold sticks, not just some bit of litter. And now they build New Qurnah, and we are all to leave and go there.’
This was making me sad.
‘It’s the same everywhere, to one degree or another,’ I mumbled. Like that’s any comfort. But I have no sophisticated analysis of these situations. I just feel sad, and sometimes want to punch someone for not making the world a fair and just place. A reaction which has hardly changed since I was Lily’s age. Janie used to say there was no point because you can’t punch God. We stopped talking to him, though. Remained silent during ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, and hoped he’d take the hint.
‘Many people at home are very unhappy,’ he said finally. ‘Things happen you don’t hear about here. The last years … But Egypt doesn’t make a big noise of it to the world because they don’t want the world to stop to come. And it’s just Egyptian people, so the world doesn’t mind.’
Of course I knew what he was talking about. Those single paragraphs you read in the sidebars of the foreign pages: four policemen killed in an ambush at Naqquada; train shot at, suspects, fundamentalists, reports say. Like any one of a thousand problems, that only flick our conciousnesses when they happen in places where we’ve been on holiday. If I lived in Qurnah I could never leave. The Nile before you, five thousand miles of Sahara at your back, ancient Thebes the bones of your home.
Hakim was looking at me. I couldn’t remember the last thing he’d said.
‘I make coffee,’ he said, and did.
Oh yes. It was, ‘It’s just Egyptian people, so nobody cares.’
Then Zeinab rang. What with one thing and another I hadn’t spoken to her since Hakim’s appearance, so I told her about him. Or as much as I could with him in the room. He gestured me furiously not to mention his mother, so I didn’t. She wanted to come and see him, to welcome him and to check him out. Of course I’d told her about Abu Sa’id, over the years. We decided she should come at the weekend, and bring the boys. Then Brigid rang, was I still on for tomorrow. Yes indeed I was. How many of them? Three boys and Caitlin. All night? Fine. They could go on the lilos on the floor in my room, in with me and Lily. Squashy!
Perhaps a midnight feast might be in order. It’ll be Friday after all. Hakim announced his intention to go to the mosque. Then my mother rang, saying would we come for lunch on Sunday; then Harry rang, saying he was sorry he rushed me off like that, and was I all right, and I lied that yes I was, and we had an awkward pause, and said well all right then, ’bye then.
And then Hakim and I sat down with the phone books and I showed him how we needed to look for Tomlinsons or Lockwoods rather than Sarahs, and after a long and interesting chain of calls I was able to give Hakim a piece of paper with two phone numbers on it. ‘There you go,’ I said. ‘Your mother. She’s a lecturer at a university by the sea. It’s about an hour away. She teaches Arabic.’
SIX (#ulink_589c0589-bc07-5c85-a477-bd3be522cfd7)
Tell Mama (#ulink_589c0589-bc07-5c85-a477-bd3be522cfd7)
I think there’s only one other thing I haven’t mentioned. Deep in the upholstery of the saggy old red armchair I keep in my study there is a very large sum of money. It is Janie’s ill-gotten gains from her career in pornography. I hid it there just over a year ago, having found it in a last tea-chest of her things that Mum had redeemed from the attic but not been able to face looking at. I hid the money in the hope that it would go away, because I didn’t want to face the ethical and emotional problems that it brought with it. Of course at the same time I didn’t want it to go away, too. It is a very large sum of money and I am after all a single mother of uncertain employment living in a council block, albeit in a separate kingdom on the most distant and salubrious storey of a pretty nice one. I haven’t counted it.
Mum asked me once, months later, what had been in the chest. I didn’t tell her, about the money or about the jewellery or about the peculiarly nasty pornographic videos. I think I said: ‘Oh, nothing, just some clothes and stuff.’
We don’t talk enough in our family. We’re so quietly convinced that we’re doing all right that we don’t discuss it. We’re all so rational that nothing needs to be said. And yet when I think what I have in my heart that I haven’t ever mentioned … Janie’s death, obviously. Not the fact of it but the niceties of the feelings it produced. Nobody ever blamed me for it, except myself. So I never had a chance to justify myself, defend myself, except to myself. I would have welcomed a judgement by a jury of my peers. Because you know it could have been my fault. There could have been greasy dead leaves or a manhole cover that I should have avoided. I could have been riding like a fool, or over-excited, or not paying attention. Over-accelerating on that dangerous corner, misjudging the surface, slipping gear. But the parents assumed that I wasn’t. Assumed. No proof. Then when the police had no doubts about it, that was proof enough for everybody. Everybody except me.
Of course it wasn’t my fault that the car came up inside us on the turn. But then I didn’t see it. I didn’t avoid it. I couldn’t accelerate away, escape from the bend I was committed to. I wasn’t skilful enough. In the same circumstances I would never expect somebody else to have been able to. But it wasn’t somebody else, it was me. I never told Mum and Dad that I blamed myself for my lack of skill. The fact is I was – would be still, if I still rode – a perfectly skilful rider, experienced, calm, patient, swift to react, observant at all times. But not skilful enough.
Of course it was in their interests for me not to be to blame. If I had been they would have lost two daughters. Unless of course they would have been able to forgive me.
Anyway, easier for them to assume there had never been a fault, than to face it and forgive it. And do I blame them for that? No.
The other thing, of course, is Janie’s career. About which they know nothing and will know nothing. All our lives our parents protect us and then suddenly one day we’re protecting them.
Janie, Janie, Janie. Janie’s money, Janie’s death, Janie’s career. Not to mention Janie’s memory, and all that Janie was to me before … well exactly, before when? Before she died? Before I discovered she was a lying treacherous whore, who prostituted my very identity? We have to go back further … but I don’t know how far back, because I don’t know when it all started, and damn it I can’t ask her. Not for dates, not for clarification, for denial, for explanation, for apology. How can I get her off my back when she’s not here?
*
I was woken on Friday by the call to prayer, which didn’t half take me back.
I was dreaming that I was in Cairo, a clear, intense dream of something absolutely ordinary, of its time, but its time was ten years – no, nine years ago. I was dreaming of going home after work, as I did five or six nights a week. Heading home to Château Champoleon through the dusty, colourless dawn after a night dancing on the Nile boats or in the clubs. In the back of a cab, rhythms sweeping through my blood, my flesh warm and my muscles soft and my brain transcendent from hours of dancing. I could have danced all night – hell, I did dance all night. Every night.
In my dream I had been at the Niagara, which was run in those days by a lady of uncertain age who modelled herself on late-nineteenth-century French lesbians, with claret-coloured velvet and frogging and a cigarette holder. She liked me because I was English. ‘I most like the English,’ she would say. ‘Most of all like.’ ‘Don’t mock me,’ I’d reply. ‘I’ve read Naguib Mahfouz. I know you hate me.’ ‘Who’s that?’ she would say, even though he was terribly famous and soon to win the Nobel prize for literature and have a café named after himself in Khan el-Khalili. ‘Oh, just some tuppenny ha’penny little novelist,’ I’d say, and she’d say ‘Novelist? What is?’ and then she’d snort, and say, ‘Une danseuse doit être illiterée.’
In my dream I was walking to my building and thinking about her and revelling in the near-emptiness of the streets. Only at this time of night are the streets finally empty, empty of all but the pattering footsteps of the jackals that come in from the desert in the heart of the night to eat the garbage, and leave empty plastic bags whirling like tumbleweed down Champoleon Street. For a moment, at 4.53 or thereabouts, the streets are empty, but even as you think it, there are people mysteriously starting to do their mysterious jobs in holes and alleyways. The first fuul stand is starting to set up, ready to sell breakfast. A degree of rattling can be heard behind the closed doors of the cafés. Dogs are barking.
I dreamed I stopped off up on the roof of the Odeon for a soothing bowl of omali before bed. I dreamed of the terracotta bowl, the baked sultanas and nuts and milk, the softened, pudding-baked bread, the hot sweet smell of it, the best of the new day before I collapse at the end of the old one. Five a.m., and the pre-dawn muezzin calls the fajr: ‘It is better to pray than to sleep,’ and me thinking, as you do at five a.m., ‘It is better to sleep than to do anything else in the world.’ I dreamed I passed Mohammed, the bauwab, fast asleep on the stone bench at the foot of the monumental beige granite staircase, by Cecil B DeMille out of Ramses the Great. Walked up so as not to rouse the whole Château with the clanking and wheezing of the ancient lift. I woke up just as, in my dream, I fell into bed. Curiously, the muezzin continued.
It was Hakim, celebrating Friday by teaching Lily the call to prayer in the kitchen. She had Allah u Akbar perfectly, and a bit more, but then he sang her something including Bismillah, in the name of God, which made her giggle because she calls her navel her bizz. Because when she was smaller her granddad used to blow raspberries on her tummy, making a Bzzz noise. She was explaining this to Hakim. He was giggling too because bizz is the Arabic for tit, and he wasn’t sure if I knew. I felt a surge of love for both of them, for Egypt, for life, and decided to make pancakes in celebration, before I remembered that Lily now went to a school where she had to be on time.
By the time I returned from taking her, the post had arrived. There was another letter. It said: ‘He was the best of men, he was the worst of men, but with that man to be alive was very heaven.’ Irrelevantly, the first thing I thought was what an irritating name Carton was for a romantic antihero, evoking as it does cardboard boxes of long-life apple juice, though no doubt it didn’t then. Empty cardboard boxes, actually. And Sydney Carton was not an empty cardboard box. The pitfalls that lie in wait for authors, years down the line … My next thought was that if all she wanted to do was send me semi-poetic notes and paraphrases then I didn’t necessarily mind that much. But.
I tried to remember anything that Eddie had ever said about his wife, and realised that he had never mentioned her to me. So how did I know about her? Through Harry? Maybe, when he was warning me off Eddie, when he thought Eddie and I were about to develop into love’s young dream. Or maybe through Fergus Droyle, my crime correspondent buddy, who I’d asked about Eddie right at the beginning. I had the idea that she lived in Monaco. Well, if so she’s not there now.
Does she mean me harm? ‘You did, and I mind.’ She might do. And she knows where I live, as they say. She could, if she wanted, come and visit. This wasn’t a pleasant idea. I wasn’t exactly scared, but I wasn’t keen. As you wouldn’t be. It seemed it might be a good idea to have a word with her. Pre-empt her. Fergus would be the logical place to start, if I wanted to track her down. Except …
I didn’t want to ask him. I’d sworn him to secrecy and told him, finally, some of what went on with Eddie and me, and the poor man had gone mauve as his desire to use the story fought with his friendship for me and respect for my privacy. Later, after the trial, he’d written a piece about Eddie, and had rung me, but I’d refused to say anything. I didn’t want to try his loyalty any further by bringing the subject up again. Specially when Eddie was so topical, having died. Some things you should not expect a journalist to bear. It would be unkind.
She would presumably be at the funeral. But I didn’t really want to go to the funeral. He was dead and that was that. Also I thought Harry might be there, out of courtesy as one of the men who nicked him (or as his former employee, if he was still keeping that persona going), and I was sorry that Harry had witnessed the hysteria of my immediate response to the news of his death. I seem to have a little bug that jumps out to wind Harry up. It seemed a good idea to avoid further opportunities for it. And no, I didn’t want any wild graveside scenes with a vengeful Mrs Bates.
But I did want to locate her. If only to feel better equipped. Fergus or Harry, which would be worse?
Hakim leaned over my shoulder.
‘Evangelina,’ he said. ‘May we ring my mother?’
He’s started to say ‘may’ because Lily corrects him when he says ‘can’. Actually she’s having quite a good effect on his grammar, but it’s a little alarming for me to hear echoed back so precisely what I say to her.
I half wanted to confide in Hakim about the letters but decided that it would be a complicated and useless exercise, so I desisted. One issue at a time, girl. Let’s put off the ones that matter most to me. There’s a sensible approach.
First we rang the home number. ‘Hi, this is Sarah, you can leave a message and we’ll get back to you, or you can send a fax, after the beep.’ Relaxed, not warm not cold, middle-class, southern. She sounded nice. I held out hope, but I kept quiet about it. I didn’t want to influence Hakim.
I hung up, and told him it was a machine, and did he want me to leave a message, or to leave one himself, or what.
He paused for a second, then picked up the receiver and pressed last number redial (another trick he’d learnt from Lily, who uses it to ring Caitlin after I’ve been talking to Brigid). I watched his face as he heard his mother’s voice. Expressionless, it just grew softer and softer. I thought he might melt away completely, so I offered him my hand as something solid to hold. He took it and gripped it, and hung up the phone.
‘If she is not a good mother,’ he said, ‘I want you to be my mother. The English mother.’
I kissed him on the forehead and narrowly stopped myself from telling him that I would do anything in the world for him.
‘May we ring the other number?’ he said.
I called directory enquiries, got the number of the university, called the switchboard, got the extension, called the extension.
‘Hello, Sarah Tomlinson,’ said the same voice.
I had decided to do it on a wing and a prayer. I could not have worked out a script and stuck to it. This is what came out.
‘Hello, Sarah, my name’s Evangeline Gower, I’m a friend of Ismail.’
‘Ismail?’ she said.
‘El Araby,’ I said.
She was quiet. I heard voices in the background.
‘If this isn’t a good time I can …’ I said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No. One moment.’ She spoke at the other end, and then came on the line again. ‘What’s it about?’ she said.
‘Hakim and Sa’id,’ I said. I could almost hear her heart-rate change.
‘What about them?’ she said, her voice completely different, narrow-throated, nervous, tense.
‘Hakim is in London,’ I said.
‘Oh my God,’ she breathed, and spoke again to the voices in the background. I could hear them retreat, and a click, some shuffling, and some breathing, and then, ‘Is he with you?’
‘Beside me, yes.’
‘Oh my God,’ she whispered, again, and she began to cry, very softly. Hakim was all eyes.
‘What’s she saying?’ he asked. ‘What?’ I held my hand up, mouthed ‘wait’.
She carried on crying. I spoke to her: ‘Listen – do you want to ring him back? Can you take down a number? Otherwise … he wants to see you, you know. He wants to talk. Take my number, and if you don’t ring he’ll ring you tonight. OK?’
She didn’t sound negative. I gave her the number and I thought she got it down. She was still crying. ‘I don’t want to leave you like this,’ I said.
‘I don’t even know who you are,’ she snapped suddenly, through the tears. ‘Who are you anyway?’
‘Evangeline Gower, friend of the family,’ I said.
‘Family,’ she said. She sighed. ‘I’ll ring in a couple of hours,’ she said. ‘Tell him … is he well?’
‘Very well,’ I said.
‘Tell him … say I’m not sorry he’s here.’
‘OK,’ I said.
‘’Bye.’
‘’Bye.’
I put the phone down and said, ‘She’s not sorry you’re here, she said to say so. She’ll ring back.’
‘Alhamdulillah,’ he said, four times, and smiled, and went to Lily’s room, where if I put my ear to the door I could hear him saying el fateha, the opening of the Qur’an.
*
I tried to do some work: an article about an exhibition of Orientalist paintings that was coming up in Birmingham. The exhibition wasn’t open yet and there was some doubt about which paintings were going to be in it, because of some insurance problems. Doubt hung over, among others, an extremely famous and interesting pair with all sorts of splendid and evocative anecdotes attached. One, fairly innocent, harem scene had originally been painted as a cover for the other, more erotic, work, of which it was an almost exact copy, except that the harem ladies were covered up in various cunning ways. The main houri, for example, was sitting with her legs wide because she was holding a great platter with a watermelon on it, rather than displaying herself; another was adjusting her scarf rather than her nipple. The cover lived in the same frame, on top of the naughty picture, and the owner could remove it for selected guests, after dinner, and thus preserve both his pleasures and his reputation. The two paintings had been separated over the years and were now to be reunited. Or not. I was going to have to write two articles, so that they had something to use whatever the outcome. I wrote an introduction that would do for both versions, then admitted that I was not concentrating and rang Fergus.
‘Fergus, Evangeline,’ I said, in my brisk talking-to-people-in-offices voice.
‘Evangeline darlin’,’ he said, emphasising the Irish. ‘What can I do for you?’ This made me feel bad because of not having been able to do anything for him on recent occasions, but I don’t think he did it on purpose.
‘Mrs Bates,’ I said. Fergus fancies himself utterly ruled by deadlines and important busyness; he appreciates you getting to the point.
‘Oh my God, would you get out of my hair with that,’ he said, which was not the response I’d been expecting.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve had it up to high dough with that woman,’ he said (at least that’s what I thought he said – I assumed it was something to do with bread rising; later he told me no, it’s high do, as in do re mi, as in top C, when you’re singing). ‘She’s off her flaming trolley, in fact if she and her trolley were ever intimately connected I’d have my doubts. Serious doubts. I can understand a widow woman being upset but she is the most abysmal specimen of a … why?’
It never takes him long to get to why.
‘I think she’s been writing me letters.’
‘Does she think you killed her husband?’
‘Well yes she does, actually.’
‘Join the club, darling. We’re a flaming conspiracy, evidently. I killed him, by writing that article, which apparently affected his heart. Every policeman you ever saw killed him, by being a policeman, which was contrary to what he liked. The jury killed him, separately and together, by finding him guilty when he would have preferred not. The prison warders killed him; the prison doctors killed him, the judge killed him and chopped him up into little pieces and left him out for the birds. How did you kill him then? By being the object of his unrequited desires?’
‘I suppose so … God, Fergus, that’s a relief.’
‘Did you think it was only you? So did I, till I got to gossiping. You should get out more. You know Harry killed him too, and Ben Cooper, only no one’s told him yet that everybody else did too because they like to see him suffer. What has she done to you then? Letters? Phone calls?’
My journalist filter went up.
‘Are you going to be writing about this?’
‘I’ll just say “a girl he admired”. Nothing to identify you. Promise.’
‘Oh Fergus …’
‘Please. For colour. There’s no sex in it so far. Please.’
I thought for a moment. I did quite want to give him something, because he’s a friend and he’s helped me in the past. I did also want very much to keep my nose clean.
‘I tell you what,’ I said.
‘What,’ he said.
For a second I was about to say ‘I’m not telling you’. That’s Lily’s great joke: ‘You know what?’ ‘What?’ ‘I’m not telling you.’
‘I think … let me think about it.’ I was thinking that perhaps I wanted to see her first, clear the air, then I thought no, if she’s feeling that way about so many people I don’t need to. She’s not going to firebomb the lot of us.
‘Is anyone taking it seriously? Has she made any threats at all?’ (This Irishness is contagious. I don’t know if it’s my dad’s Liverpool Irish blood coming out in me but whenever I talk to an Irish person I start using their accent. It makes Brigid, Cork born and bred, piss herself laughing.)
‘Not to my knowledge. I think they’re all taking it with a pinch of salt. I was exaggerating a little bit, you know. I don’t think she’s been pestering the judge. The woman may have some sense. Have you met her? She’s a funny woman and that’s for sure.’
‘What’s she like?’ I realised I had a clear picture of her as being a bit like the Queen, but younger. Respectable, pretty, pearls, elegant in a dull way. Grace Kelly. Handbag. Why? Because she lived in Monaco? Because Eddie had classy taste and modern art?
‘Oh, she’s basic gangster Euro-trash, a Marbella queen. Army father, boarding school, home counties, ran wild, ex-model, still wearing the make-up that was in style when she was young and gorgeous, and her heyday hairdo. Brigitte Bardot without the class. White stilettos, shiny eye-shadow. Permatan. Permapissed, as well. Drinks like a Mexican maggot. When Eddie started ignoring her she took to astrology and small dogs. And possibly younger men, but she’s always been crazy about Eddie. And terrified of him. Flaming lunatic, basically. There’s a lot of them around.’
Oh.
‘What’s her name?’
‘Didn’t your boyfriend tell you, then?’
I hung up on him.
He rang back ten seconds later, apologising profusely.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘OK, you mean it. I’m sorry. Her name’s Chrissie. She’s born Christine Louise Evans, then Chrissie de Lisle, no less, and for no reason other than sheer pretension, in her salad days, and now she goes as Christina Bates. So we’ll speak on Monday, will we, or over the weekend?’
‘Yeah. No promises. Would you let me know if anything else … you know …’
‘My darling, I’m gossip central on Mrs Bates. Short of anyone blowing a fuse and trying to sue, I don’t think anything’s going to happen except more of the same. And you know what our friends in the Bill are like, till the stalking law comes in they can’t move on this stuff till she’s pouring petrol through your letterbox. But I don’t think she will. She’s an old bat exorcising her sad old life, if you ask me. Ignore her and she’ll go away.’
‘Thanks, Fergus. I’ll speak to you.’
‘Indeed you will,’ he said.
It occurred to me as I hung up that Fergus didn’t know I’d hit Eddie on the head with the poker, and that I didn’t know if Mrs Bates knew or not. And I didn’t know if she’d been visiting him in prison, and I didn’t know when the funeral was. Which I wanted to know, even though I didn’t want to go. So I rang back and asked him. Yes she had, she’d been regularly, and there had been something of a rapprochement between them; and next Tuesday, 11 a.m., at Southgate. The same cemetery where Janie is buried.
I was relieved by our conversation, but not that relieved.
Then I ate a bowl of cornflakes and went to get Lily.
*
When we got back from the park Hakim was standing in the middle of the kitchen with stars in his eyes.
‘I speak to her,’ he said. ‘I go tomorrow. I want to tell you.’ Then he grabbed my face and kissed me, grabbed Lily’s and kissed her, then disappeared into the bathroom, presumably to wash off our touch because moments later he reappeared and then disappeared again, out the front door, crying, ‘I go to mosque.’
Lily looked bemused.
‘His mother,’ I explained. ‘He hasn’t seen his mother for fifteen years, and tomorrow he’s going to see her. After fifteen years.’
She gazed after him. ‘So will I see my father after fifteen years?’ she said.
Childish logic. I sat on the floor and drew her to me.
‘Oh, darling, I don’t know,’ I said.
She wouldn’t sit with me. ‘Well you should know,’ she said. ‘You know everything else.’ Then she looked at me, and then she went into my room and sat silently on the bed.
For a moment I was dumbstruck. Then I followed her in.
‘I wanted to go into my room,’ she said in a tiny voice, ‘but it’s not really mine.’
I sat by her. ‘Sweetheart?’ I said.
‘I don’t want to cry,’ she said.
‘You don’t have to,’ I said. ‘You can if you want.’
‘I feel bad but I haven’t done anything bad.’
There are times when you feel completely bloody useless.
‘Sometimes bad things happen to us even if we’re good,’ I said. ‘What’s making you feel bad? Do you know?’
‘It’s too difficult to explain,’ she said. Her lower lip was sticking out, just a tiny bit. The tears stayed in her eyes. Full and curved. Their shape echoed the shape of her cheeks.
‘Well what’s it about? Just tell me the subject. You don’t have to explain it all.’
‘I don’t want to,’ she said.
‘Why not?’
‘I want you to know already,’ she whispered.
And of course I did know. There was only one thing about her that I’d ever claimed not to know, that I’d ever claimed not to understand. Or rather – that I’d ever known was there, but not talked about, not shared, not dealt with. There was such closeness between us that I knew if she would choose an orange or an apple, if she wanted a bath or not, what story she wanted at night out of twenty to pick from. I always knew which hand she’d hidden the coin in. I knew every damn thing about her, and I knew this.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll find him.’
When she looked up at me I swear her eyes were twice the size they had been. She grinned like a maniac.
‘You do know! You do know!’ she yelled.
‘I know what you want, darling. I don’t know where he is or when we can find him …’
‘But you know I want him!’
That was all she needed. God, she was happy. I felt so small that I hadn’t admitted I knew it all along. To myself, quite apart from her. Going to bed that night she was telling herself a story. ‘Well a daddy might be in the zoo, but only if he had other children, because he wouldn’t go to the zoo if he didn’t have a child with him, so a lost daddy wouldn’t go there, unless he was a zookeeper MUMMY! IS MY DADDY A ZOOKEEPER?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘It’s quite funny you not knowing things,’ she said, with an echo of Harry. I kissed her and we did the rituals: ‘I love you up to the moon and back again’; ‘I love you too, now shut up and go to sleep’; ‘Will you scratch my back?’ ‘No I won’t.’ ‘But it was worth a try, wasn’t it Mummy?’ ‘Yes now shut up and go to sleep’; and then I went and rang Harry.
Because frankly, out of the choice I had, he was the best.
He was out. I didn’t leave a message. Anyway then Brigid and Caitlin and the boys appeared bearing sleeping bags, and Lily got out of bed, and the lilos had to be blown up and the whole thing turned into a hoopla of considerable proportions. Around ten I gave up and left them to it, and went to watch the news. It was all about the dead princess and her boyfriend. (‘It was her own fault,’ said Lily. ‘She was a mummy. Why didn’t she have her seat-belt on?’)
Halfway through Hakim came in and said: ‘He’s no good that man. No good for Egypt. Rich as ten thousand men. And he did not look after your princess. In Egypt they say your government killed them because they hate Islam and want no Muslim man in your royal family. I say bollocks.’ At the same time as I was amused by his finding so soon the grosser end of our lovely language, and pronouncing it like the young bull he so reminded me of, I could see the sincerity of his distaste.
SEVEN (#ulink_91c8be11-139f-5770-8943-4cea8f8d6fc7)
Brighton (#ulink_91c8be11-139f-5770-8943-4cea8f8d6fc7)
The next day, Saturday, there were two letters. One contained a razor blade, the other a poem.
Distracting is the foliage of my pasture
The mouth of my girl is a lotus bud
Her breasts are mandrake apples
Her arms are vines
Her eyes are fixed like berries
Her brow a snare of willow
And I the wild goose!
My beak snips her hair for bait,
As worms for bait in the trap.
I knew this poem. Not that it’s famous, out of its field. It’s from an ancient papyrus. It’s, I don’t know, three thousand years old. I didn’t like it – I’d never liked it. Hair as worms, bait in a trap. Ugly. Violent. Fixed berries, vines, snares. It speaks to me of desire and resentment – a bad combination.
And a razor blade.
How very unpleasant.
Each one gave me a cold shudder. I didn’t know, actually, which was nastier.
I burnt the poem and broke the blade in half with a pair of pliers, then wrapped it in cotton wool, soaked the package in baby oil and threw it in the rubbish, which I then took out on to the balcony and dropped – plop! – into the wheelie bin seven storeys below. I’m pretty ritualistic on occasion.
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Louisa Young
The sparky, funny sequel to Louisa Young’s acclaimed first novel of belly-dancing, motorbikes and single-parenthood.Angeline Gower, ex-bellydancer, ex-biker, single mother of a little girl who is not actually her child, is mired in problems again in this wonderful sequel.Her relationship with Harry, the lover turned cop, remains fraught, the lure of the glamorous but no good Eddie hasn’t gone away. And there is yet another element complicating things know – the seductive and mysterious Sa’id. With Angeline older and a little wiser, Louisa Young weaves a tale that is richer, sexier and more moving than ‘Baby Love’, while remaining just as exciting. Shifting between Shepherd’s Bush and Cairo, full of the contrasts between the West and the Middle East, ‘Desiring Cairo’ thrills and enthralls while at the same time making us think and feel deeply about the love between mother and child, man and woman, friend and friend.Louisa Young has skilfully written this so that it is equally enjoyable read on its own, or as part of the trilogy that starts with ‘Baby Love’ and ends with ‘Tree of Pearls’.
DESIRING CAIRO
The Angeline Gower Trilogy
Louisa Young
Copyright (#u4c205b74-8012-598e-bbb0-a212cb33e034)
The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Published by The Borough Press 2015
First published by Flamingo, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1999
Copyright © Louisa Young 1999
Louisa Young asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Cover images © Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com)
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007577996
Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780007397013
Version: 2015-09-07
Praise for The Angeline Gower Trilogy: (#u4c205b74-8012-598e-bbb0-a212cb33e034)
‘Funny, sexy and tender’ ESTHER FREUD
‘Spectacularly worth reading’ The Times
‘A stylishly literate thriller’ Marie Claire
‘You will keep coming back to this book when you should be doing something else’ LOUIS DE BERNIÈRES
‘Exciting, compelling and tense’ Time Out
‘Funny and scary. In writing honestly and unsentimentally, Young celebrates the unequivocal nature of parental love with verve and style’ Mail on Sunday
‘Wry, perky, entertaining’ Observer
‘Engaging, wise-cracking, likeable, brilliantly sustained … funny, humane and utterly readable’ Good Housekeeping
Dedication (#u4c205b74-8012-598e-bbb0-a212cb33e034)
For Isabel Adomakoh Young, the lovely daughter
‘I do believe that, with all its drawbacks, Egypt is the most interesting and convenient country that a lady can travel over’
ELIOT WARBURTON, 1845
Contents
Cover (#u7cae2adc-c738-5a82-9089-8047a1e544b9)
Title Page (#u6a5fb39e-bb55-5abd-9076-c744886d1f9d)
Copyright
Praise
Dedication
Epigraph (#u4a874807-e007-5e9f-af1c-45f768ad7de1)
Introduction
Chapter One: Hakim
Chapter Two: Luxor
Chapter Three: Talking about Gary Cooper
Chapter Four: Hakim’s Business, Harry’s News
Chapter Five: Next
Chapter Six: Tell Mama
Chapter Seven: Brighton
Chapter Eight: Harry Cooks Dinner
Chapter Nine: Sunday Night
Chapter Ten: Sa’id
Chapter Eleven: The Funeral
Chapter Twelve: Dinner with Sa’id
Chapter Thirteen: Tell Your Own Mama
Chapter Fourteen: Chrissie, Get Out of My Bath
Chapter Fifteen: Sunday Night Coming Down Again
Chapter Sixteen: ‘You are dearer than my days, you are more beautiful than my dreams’
Chapter Seventeen: I Wish I Was in Egypt
Chapter Eighteen: What Harry Knows
Chapter Nineteen: The Madness Sets In
Chapter Twenty: Cairo
Chapter Twenty-One: Family Life
Chapter Twenty-Two: Let’s Go to the Bank
Chapter Twenty-Three: Give Me Your Hands
Chapter Twenty-Four: Semiramis
Chapter Twenty-Five: God, when he created the world, put a great sea between the Muslims and the Christians, ‘for a reason’
Chapter Twenty-Six: The End, and the Beginning
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Louisa Young
About the Publisher
Introduction (#u4c205b74-8012-598e-bbb0-a212cb33e034)
I wrote these novels a long time ago. I spent my days correcting the grammar at the Sunday Times, and my nights writing. I could no longer travel the world doing features about born-again Christian bike gangs in New Jersey, or women salt-miners in Gujarat, or the Mr and Mrs Perfect Couple of America Pageant in Galveston, Texas, which was the sort of thing I had been doing up until then. I had to stay still. I had a baby. Babies focus the mind admirably: any speck of time free has to be made the most of.
I had £300 saved up, so I put the baby and the manuscript in the back of a small car and drove to Italy, where we lived in some rooms attached to a tiny church in a village which was largely abandoned, other than for some horses and some aristocrats. A nice girl groom took the baby to the sea each day in my car while I stared at the pages thinking: ‘If I don’t demonstrate some belief in this whole notion of novels, and me as a novelist, then why should anyone else?’
Re-reading these books now, I think, ‘Christ! Such energy!’ I was so young – so full of beans. I described the plot to my father, who wrote novels and was briefly, in his day, the new Virginia Woolf. After about five minutes he said, ‘Yes, that all sounds good’ – and I said, ‘Dad, that’s just chapter one’.
It was only about twenty years ago, and a different world. Answerphones not mobiles, no internet. Tickets and conductors on the bus. And it was before 9/11, and the mass collapse of international innocence which 9/11 and George Bush’s reaction to it dragged in their miserable, brutalising wake. Could I write a story now, where an English girl and her Egyptian lover meet at the surface of the water? Yes, of course – but it could not be this story.
Anyway, I have grown up too thoughtful to write like this now. I exhaust myself even reading it.
I see too that these, my first novels, were the first pressing of thoughts and obsessions which have cropped up again and again in things I’ve written since. It seems I only really care about love and death and surgery and history and motorbikes and music and damage and babies, and the man I was in love with most of my life, who has appeared in various guises in every book I have ever written. I realise I continue to plagiarise myself all the time, emotionally and subject-wise. And I see the roots of other patterns – Baby Love, my first novel, turned into a trilogy all of its own accord. Since then, I’ve written another two novels that accidentally turned into trilogies – and one of those trilogies is showing signs of becoming a quartet.
People ask, oh, are they autobiographical? I do see, in these pages, my old friends when we were younger, their jokes and habits, places I used to live, lives I used to live. I glimpse, with a slight shock, garments I owned, a bed, a phrase … To be honest I made myself cry once or twice.
But, though much is undigested and autobiographical, in the way of a young person’s writing, I can say this: be careful what you write. When I started these novels I was not a single mother, I didn’t live in Shepherds Bush, I didn’t have a bad leg and I wasn’t going out with a policeman. By the time they were finished, all these things had come about. However as god is my witness to this day I never have never belly danced, nor hit anyone over the head with a poker.
Louisa Young
London 2015
ONE (#u4c205b74-8012-598e-bbb0-a212cb33e034)
Hakim (#u4c205b74-8012-598e-bbb0-a212cb33e034)
When Hakim ibn Ismail el Araby turned up on my doorstep, trailing clouds of chaos in his wake, I naturally assumed that the anonymous letters had something to do with him. Not that they were from him – like the rest of his family, the boy could haggle in ten languages and convert currencies, to his own advantage, faster than I could find a calculator, but writing in English was not one of his accomplishments. No, I rather thought they might be to him.
‘I don’t know if this is for you,’ I said, over the breakfast table on the morning after his arrival. There we were, the three of us: Hakim and Lily tucking into boiled eggs and toast, and me making coffee, washing up, wiping surfaces, fetching the post. I don’t normally make breakfast for young men who turn up out of the blue, but I do boil eggs for Lily. It makes me feel that I am giving her security, which she needs.
‘My letter?’ he said. ‘You open, so you can read.’
I had already seen what it said. I was thinking all the obvious things – considering the nice-quality white envelope (no name, just my address), the perfectly ordinary looking office-type typing, the perfectly ordinary Mount Pleasant postmark (just one of London’s main and busiest post offices). And inside a perfectly ordinary-looking piece of white A4 paper, food of a million photocopiers and printers, with ‘You killed my love’ typed on it.
‘It says “You killed my love”,’ I said.
‘Strange for letter,’ he said. ‘Not mine, I think. Who do you love?’
‘Not my love. The person who wrote the letter’s love. I think.’
‘Their love for you? Or what?’ he said.
‘I don’t think so. Nobody loves me.’
‘I love you,’ said Lily. ‘You know I do. I love you up to the moon and back again. Don’t tell porkies.’
Lily my five-year-old daughter loves me. Big-eyed little-mouthed fat-cheeked clever-browed Lily. I basked in that for a moment. I’ll never be used to it, unimpressed by it. Then I ran through the other love-contenders. Neil my lawyer friend doesn’t love me any more. Harry … Harry who was my love … well (as the Shangri-Las sang) I called it love … Harry doesn’t write letters like that. And we’re on terms now, we speak, we have dismantled our melodrama, more or less. And my mum and dad love me. I didn’t think it was them either. Though I had killed their love, in a way.
There’s something you should know straight off. My sister died. She was pillion on my motorcycle, pregnant, claiming that she needed rescuing from her then boyfriend who she said was violent … Lily is – was – hers. Mine now. It’s a long story and it has given me enough pain and grief over the years, and since everything settled a year and a half ago I do not want to drag over it.
I have grown up into a very private and anti-social person, what with my terrible experiences and my exciting past life. I was seriously fantasising about moving to the country when Hakim appeared. In fact I believe I was looking at a clutch of estate agents’ details at the very moment my doorbell rang. It was September the eighth. Lily had started school that week. I wasn’t worried about her, because she had been going to nursery for years, and we’d done the preview days where she goes in for a few hours before lunch and I hold her hand a bit. We’d bought a duffel coat though it was too warm for it; her Teletubby came to the gates with us although he wasn’t allowed to stay.
So. Mid-morning, September the eighth. Nine days after Princess Diana was killed, two days after her funeral. You can probably imagine why I had been hiding my head under a cushion for a week. Young mothers dead in car crashes upset me no end. Cover their faces, and all that, when they die young. And cover my face too. Deep in the sand.
Watching (because no, I didn’t join in) the national grievathon made me want to spit. This happens every day. Every day death turns people inside out, and when they get themselves right side out again they don’t fit any more. Every day grief craps in the corners of someone’s mind, somewhere where they can’t find it, and if they can they can never get rid of the smell. To see it all writ so large and so sentimental for someone who we only saw on television, made me, what, angry. Resentful. I wasn’t proud of that. Part of me would have liked to unite with the nation – truly. I get lonely out here, being a curmudgeon and an eccentric. But I kept wanting to shout at them. I’ve lost to death, I know what it is – and this is not your loss. Haven’t you any grief of your own?
And for her children it’s just motherlessness. Motherless children. Like so many.
Anyway. That morning. The doorbell rang. I answered it. There stood a young man in beautifully cut but unavoidably vulgar white clothes, with a dark overcoat which didn’t really know what to do with itself slung over his shoulders. Or perhaps it was his shoulders which didn’t know what to do with an overcoat. He looked too young for his clothes, his hair too short. Beside him was a large suitcase. He had a small teardrop-shaped aya of the Qur’an in gold hanging on a chain round his neck, but I didn’t need that to tell me he was Egyptian. There is something about that country, and it was all over him. Furthermore I knew his face.
He smiled a little nervously, the look at odds with his flashy clothes. ‘Salaam alekum,’ he said. ‘Madame Angelina? Good morning. Hello.’
I got the impression that he wasn’t sure which greeting was the correct one for the circumstances. Not knowing quite what the circumstances were myself, I wasn’t able to help him.
‘We alekum elsalaam,’ I replied automatically.
‘Amira Amar,’ he said quietly. Amira Amar means Princess Moon. Amar means beautiful, as well. It is a name some people used to call me when I stayed? lived? when I was in Egypt, ten years ago. After I ran away from Harry because he threw the chair out of the window at me because he thought I knew that my sister was a prostitute and didn’t care, whereas in fact I hadn’t a clue. I ended up in Egypt because it was somewhere I could work. I stayed there because that is what Egypt is like.
I was a belly dancer.
God, it seems strange even now to use the past tense. If I was a belly dancer, then what am I now? I am now … a single mother, only the child is not mine. Oh well – she’s mine, damn right she is, but it was only a year and a half ago that Janie’s ex-boyfriend Jim decided to claim her as his, and gave us all a bit of a runaround until it turned out that he wasn’t her father after all. So I live with the tiny yet fundamental fear that any Tom, Dick or Harry (and yes it might have been Harry) that my sister shagged in the course of her professional engagements (though she didn’t shag Harry professionally – no, that was personal. As far as I know. Though of course she’s not here to tell me. Harry said he was drunk and thought it was me. God save us) … any Tom, Dick or Harry might turn up and claim her, and have a claim.
So, I am an ex-belly dancer with a slightly gammy leg from breaking it in three places in the accident which killed Janie. (See how cool I am? I say the accident killed her, not that I killed her. Two years ago I would have said I killed her. Now that I know things about her that I could kill her for, I am more forgiving of myself.)
So, I am an ex-belly dancer with a gammy leg and a beautiful child and a dead sister. I know a little about Arab social history and culture – particularly through the dancing and costume – and I earn a living as some kind of small-scale but specific expert on that. I don’t call myself an expert. The first thing you learn about anything worth knowing anything about is that you know nothing. Know about Arab culture? It would take you seven hundred brains and seven thousand years. But I wrote a book on belly dancing, and a few editors and journalists know my phone number, and nobody else whose number they have knows anything about belly dancing, so I am cast. And I write about other things, and teach sometimes, and do some editing sometimes for some of the magazines I’ve written for. Once I was costume consultant on a TV series of The Arabian Nights. It’s not like when I used to jet off to Jordan to dance at weddings. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
What else? I try to lead a quiet life because I think that is best for Lily. Every now and then I yearn for Egypt, and for love, and for the beautiful clear sense of being right in my skin, right in the world, that I used to get when I was dancing. But though I am a bust-up dancer, and know what I have lost, I don’t like to think of myself as broken. So I carry on as normal: working, taking Lily to school, seeing friends. Lily is quite enough joy and glory, so I don’t resent my stationary existence. I love and cherish it. It seems safe. Or did, until Jim came threatening it, and Ben Cooper the Bent Copper started blackmailing me and forcing me into the path of Eddie Bates, bastard, gangster, criminal mastermind and sexual obsessive. I describe him lightly, because he is the most frightening thing I have ever known.
But that’s over. He’s in prison. It’s safe again.
I do keep a list of the men who I hope are not my child’s father: Eddie Bates, Ben Cooper, Harry. Not necessarily in that order.
And so that is me, and I still live up in the clouds in my top floor flat in Shepherds Bush, and on my doorstep holding out his arms and hands and calling me a name from long ago, the name of someone who I certainly am not any more, stands – oh my God, it’s one of Abu Nil’s boys. It can’t be the big one, Sa’id. Then … it must be Hakim. Hakim el Araby. Last seen in Luxor in 1987. Hakim, the sweet little scamp from the alabaster family at Thebes.
TWO (#u4c205b74-8012-598e-bbb0-a212cb33e034)
Luxor (#u4c205b74-8012-598e-bbb0-a212cb33e034)
‘Hakim,’ I said.
‘Sister,’ he cried, and grinned at me and poured a flood of the beautiful language over me, the precise meaning of much of which passed me by, though the spirit was clear. He was delighted to see me, he was amazed to find me home, what a long time it had been, and how was my health, Alhamdulillah, praise to God, and that of my father and mother, and so on, and so forth.
I invited him to step inside and take coffee. For a moment I wondered if he was old enough to drink coffee. He must have been ten when I saw him last, and here he was, grown up. Sort of. He refused the entrance and the coffee twice and I almost laughed. Here he is with his suitcase, straight from the airport, so recently left Egypt that I can smell the aroma of apple tobacco on his clothes, and his courtesy will hardly let him admit that he is here, and presumably for a reason.
‘Come in, come in,’ I said, and pulled his suitcase inside the door and led him to the kitchen where I found myself making ahwa turky – coffee stewed up the Egyptian way in my old tanaka – instead of a nice pot of espresso as I normally do. Ahwa turky made with Lavazza – it wasn’t bad, actually.
He sat gingerly at my kitchen table and, as you do, looked around, taking stock of me and my life. I had no idea what he made of it. I hadn’t seen him since 1987, in Luxor; he’d been a kid, drawing pictures in the dust, playing football in the street, chasing scorpions, escaping his big brother. There were plans to send them to school in Cairo, and they didn’t want to go. Presumably he had gone – he looked provincial, but not that provincial. More Cairene than Luxori. If I could still pick up those nice distinctions.
His father, now, his father I knew. Well, used to know, when I was there. It’s a bore, this language thing. I could find my way round a newspaper or a novel in Arabic, with a dictionary; I could converse and grow fond and build a friendship, but maintain it? Write? Correspond? No. So there was a man, Ismail el Araby, known in the village way as Abu Sa’id, father of Sa’id. I used to call him Abu Nil, for some reason. Father of the Nile. He was one of the kindest I ever knew, with a face as brown and smooth and fissured as a kabanos, and a sneaky sense of humour, and two handsome sons, and secrets, who I liked enormously, but the friendship died. Killed by circumstance and illiteracy. My illiteracy. I had put it down as one of those magically unlikely friendships, of its time and of its place, like a Bob Dylan ballad, complete.
And now here’s his boy, here in my flat.
There’s no telling what my flat would mean to Hakim. My piles of fruit and laundry and newspapers, Lily’s dolls on the sofa all seated in a row reading picture books, the late roses from Mum’s garden dropping petals all over everywhere, the bag of empties waiting to be taken to the bottle bank. Would he be thinking me profligate, sluttish, what? I had a sudden and sharp resurgence of a feeling I often had in Cairo; an awareness of incomprehension, of the impossibility of complete comprehension: ‘I do not know what all these people know; I have not learned what they all learned, they share something that I cannot share.’ There were times when I hadn’t a clue. Everybody laughing, and me bemused. Everybody worried, and I could not, could not, using all my experience and intelligence and imagination, work out why. Just humans, bred in different habits. Before and after the marvels of the individual, over and under all our common humanity, there is this thing. We are different. It delighted me far more often than it alarmed me, even in a world so very … different, shall we say … for women. But it was always there. I was a foreigner, I could not truly understand. I was not at home. And for a moment, watching Hakim looking at my kitchen, I felt a sudden cold flurry of not being at home.
But of course this flurry was not mine, it was his. I was right in my territory; he was the one who was …
‘Hakim, have you been to England before?’
In the tiny moment that I waited for his answer, I realised he was wondering whether to lie to me. Why would he want to do that?
‘No,’ he said. He looked so damn young. Silky, like a boy who doesn’t shave yet. Chicken-boned.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked, in a completely friendly way, of course. He took his coffee, smiled broadly, ignored the question and offered me a cigarette. Marlboro. Of course. The flash Egyptians always smoked Marlboro, while the amazed foreigners puffed away on Cleopatra 100s at about half a piastre a packet. Hakim, evidently, is baby flash. I refused the fag, and opened the window. He made no ‘oh would you rather I didn’t’ noises. It didn’t matter. Lily, with her smoke-susceptible eczema and sweet delicate little lungs, wouldn’t be home for several hours. The doctor said I shouldn’t let anyone smoke in the flat at all, since the asthma scare, but … oh God. Is he young enough for me to tell him not to smoke? It’s hard to tell an Egyptian anyway: so inhospitable, so northern health-obsessive. Maybe later. Anyway the window was open. The distant hum of the A40 filtered vertiginously up, up and past to diffuse in the clouds.
‘You look well,’ he said.
‘Alhamdulillah,’ I replied. Praise to God.
He started to speak in Arabic again, and I stopped him.
‘My Arabic is not good,’ I said.
‘It was,’ he said.
‘It’s been many years. I’m out of practice.’ I learnt my Arabic initially from love songs. While I danced I soaked up all sorts of useful vocabulary: Habibi, kefaya, enta ’omri – my darling, enough, you are my life. Elli shuftu abl ma teshoufak enaya, what I saw before my eyes saw you … It did get broader after that, but … it was a long time ago.
‘It’s OK. My English is better. You have a husband?’
‘No.’
He looked at the dolls. Their names are Tulip, Liner, Rose, Rosie and Rosabel.
‘Just a child,’ I said.
I wasn’t actually prepared to go through a delicate dance around his sensibilities about this. I don’t explain the whole story to people. It’s too long, too private, too complicated, and, dare I say it, too boring for me to witness their stock reactions of amazement, shock, sympathy, incomprehension, in reaction to the weirdnesses that underpin my life. That are my life. And Lily’s. It’s not their business. If and when it becomes their business, I tell them. But very few new people need to know the whole story. Anyway I’m fifteen years older than him.
He raised an eyebrow.
‘Child, no husband,’ I said. ‘That’s right.’
‘Divorced?’
If we had been in Egypt, I would have said yes, or said that the husband was dead, just to make life easier; here, I may not tell the whole truth, but I don’t need to lie for comfort or protection.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Never married.’ Well, it was true. Janie never was married to Lily’s father, whoever he was. And I have never been married.
Pity crept over his face, and incomprehension, and concern, and distaste, all at once, like the rainbow colours of oil skimming over water.
‘It’s different here, Hakim,’ I said. ‘It’s no shame. No dishonour. If anything, the dishonour is to a man who leaves a woman and child. There is no dishonour to the woman.’ If only that were quite true, I thought. But if I was going to educate him in Western ways, I was bloody well going to educate him in the ways of rational London post-feminism, not in those of hypocritical Tory backbenchers. He looked utterly unconvinced.
‘How is your father?’ I asked, realising that I hadn’t asked before just at the moment that it suited me to change the subject. ‘Is he well?’
Hakim narrowed his pale eyes and murmured something I didn’t catch. This was wrong. The reply should have been a firm and grateful Alhamdulillah. I looked questioningly at him. He flashed me another little smile and said: ‘I have a present for you’, then with a laugh he went to the hall and began to unpack his suitcase, laying small piles of very tidy clothing all over the floor, as carefully as a stream of ants. I peered round the door at him. ‘Give me one moment!’ he cried.
I went back to my coffee. A minute or two later he came in with a small package. It was wrapped in white tissue and looked fluffy and light, but when I took it from him it was heavy. I laid it on the table to unwrap it. When the crisp, clean paper fell aside, there lay a small blue globe; a smooth, hard, polished ball of lapis lazuli, the shape and texture of a tiny cannonball. Its shades of colour shifted a little: murkier islands, paler seas. Flecks of gold streamed across it like clouds. It looked like the world.
I picked it up, felt its weight and gazed at it until its surface began to move and drift of its own accord, whereupon I uttered some absolutely genuine expressions of delight, and sat down with it balanced on my palm. It nestled. A world of my own. I liked it very much.
*
After three hours, during which time Hakim drank five cups of coffee, smoked eight cigarettes, read two Arabic newspapers and asked me a great many shyly phrased questions about my personal life, and I made five pots of coffee, put on a wash, cleared breakfast, washed up, changed Lily’s sheets and accepted three phone calls from my friend Brigid about exactly how many of her children were coming to spend the night on Friday, I decided that lunch, out, would be a good idea. The suitcase stayed. I live in the last flat at the very end of the balcony on the seventh floor. Even with the lift (and I use the stairs. Good for my not-so-good leg) it would have been a drag to move it. And he still hadn’t told me his plans.
Finances being tight, and hospitable urges being still quite strong, we went to the Serbian café and had toasted cheese sandwiches. I wondered if he was rich. He looked it … sort of. Balls of lapis are rarely cheap. But he’s so young. And a little gold proves nothing. That golden Qur’anic verse might be all he has in the world.
‘So why are you here, Hakim?’ I said, open, brazen, and verging on impatient. Arab languor will take its time, and there’s no rushing it, but this was my time too, London time, Western time, modern time. I had things to do, important things. Thinking about Lily, for example, or watering my flowerpots, or hanging the washing over the radiators, or seriously considering getting a job now she was at school. Seriously considering which was my duty; working the absurd hours required by any interesting job or being available to my small child when she needed me. Seriously considering having a word with our lovely new government about it. I couldn’t sit about all day making him coffee, anyway. If only on principle.
Then an image flew across my memory: his father’s grave face as he passed me a dish of water into the darkness of the room, the courtyard dazzling white behind him as he pushed the heavy-weighted mosquito nets aside. Abu Sa’id, bringing the water himself, cool water, every hour or so, for the four days that Nadia was sick. West Bank Luxor, 1987. Abu Sa’id, sitting on the doorstep of his own room at night, staring out into his white courtyard, keeping watch for us, the English girls, who lay in his bed. Sometimes he sat till dawn, sometimes he disappeared silently during the night, and emerged at midday from his son’s room, where he had been lying on a mat.
To begin with I had thought there were no women in the house, only Abu Sa’id and Sa’id and Hakim. One reason why I liked Abu Sa’id so much was that he seemed alone, like me, and unlike everybody else in Egypt, who came arrayed and entangled with uncles and wives and cousins and brothers. Then after a day or two I noticed a tall silent figure, who slipped out of sight when she saw me, like a fish in dark waters. I asked young Sa’id who she was, and he shrugged, as if to say she’s nothing. A servant, I assumed, and counted his manners against him.
Abu Sa’id never told me what happened to his family, if he ever had one. Never spoke to me of the boys’ mother. We just sat on the step, drinking karkadeh, the tart crimson tea made from hibiscus flowers, smoking, listening to music on his old Roberts radio, listening for Nadia to wake. He would play his ney for me, and sometimes I would dance a bit, imagining myself a snake in the Nile to the serpentine warp of the flute, and he would break off and tell me to sit down, with an old person’s laugh at a young person’s foolish pleasures, though he wasn’t so old. Fifty, perhaps. Once he played me a tape of Yaseen el Touhami, the Sufi poet, and rapidly translated his improvisations for me. El Touhamy never goes anywhere to be recorded. If you want to record him, you have to go where he is. And they do – to the mosques and the moulids, to the streets. We can have recordings if we want, in our poor necrophiliac way, but he and life and creation are doing their living business. I loved that. I wanted to be elevated enough to refuse to listen to him on tape. Wanted to share the purity of his creative transcendence. But alas I am not a Sufi, I am a mere London girl. And I was enchanted by the sound of him reproduced and preserved on the slightly stretched tape, crackling slightly on the banks of the Nile, with the palms black against the rose and gold of the beautiful sphinx-shaped cliffs behind Qurnah, to the west, and Abu Sa’id murmuring the words for me, a low and clarificatory counterpoint to the rhythms. He spoke beautiful English, too, though he didn’t write it.
Abu Sa’id, his kindness. I wondered that he had sent Hakim alone, without getting in touch.
Hakim was looking into his thick dark coffee, twiddling his spoon and making an irritating little clinking sound. He looked about ten, like when I’d first met him. He lifted only his ambiguous eyes to answer my question.
‘I will tell you,’ he said. ‘I will tell you, but now I cannot tell you. For now I need just your trust.’
Oh?
I looked.
‘I will stay just for one week,’ he said.
‘In London?’ I asked, but I knew what he meant.
‘In your house. Please? Then all will just become clear in the fullness of time.’
I was sad that he had sensed unwelcome from me, though I knew I was giving it off. I was ashamed. You cannot be unwelcoming to an Arab. There is something so wrong about it. What churls we are, we English, with our privacy and our territory and our cold cold hearts. In Egypt when men speak to you on the streets what they say is ‘Welcome’. There are signs in the streets of Hakim’s home town saying ‘Smile you are in Luxor’. Yes I know it’s for the tourists but even so. When I think of the kindness, the generosity, the hospitality of people I knew – and hardly knew – in Egypt, let alone of Hakim’s father … Shame.
‘You must stay as long as you need,’ I said, and I meant it.
THREE (#ulink_1f61c985-8dbe-566f-a7d3-dbaeeb0c6b73)
Talking about Gary Cooper (#ulink_1f61c985-8dbe-566f-a7d3-dbaeeb0c6b73)
The sitting room is also the kitchen, and I wasn’t putting him in there, so I had the choice: put him in Lily’s room, in which case she would be in with me, and probably in my bed; or put him in my study, in which case I would have to get a job because I certainly wouldn’t be doing any work at home. I don’t want a job. I don’t want Lily back in my bed, I’ve only just got her out of it.
I put him in Lily’s room. She was narked at the idea, initially. Wouldn’t you be? Finish your first day at big school, and what do you find but your normally very territory-protective mother has moved a man into your bedroom. I told her about him as we walked back from school. She was on ‘Mummy there’s a guinea pig can we have a guinea pig please please can we have a guinea pig’ and I took the opportunity to mention the new living creature that we already had.
‘I don’t want a man, I want a guinea pig!’
‘He’s more a boy than a man,’ I said, hoping to endear him to her. ‘And he’s quite like a guinea pig. He has lovely silky hair.’
‘A boy? You said a man.’
I still hadn’t decided quite which I thought him. A boy, of course, would be easier. I could mother him.
‘How old is he?’ she wanted to know.
‘I think he’s about nineteen.’
‘That’s a grown-up,’ she said, disappointedly.
‘Wait till you see him.’
‘Is he going to live with us?’
‘Just for a little while,’ I said.
‘Will he be my daddy?’
The way they come at you. Out of nowhere. She doesn’t mention daddies for months on end and then, matter-of-fact as you like, something like that.
‘No honey, he won’t.’
‘But daddies are the men that live with children.’
‘Not only, love. Some daddies live with children and some don’t, and some men that live with children are daddies and some aren’t, but Hakim isn’t in our family, no – he’s just coming to stay, like Brigid’s boys do, and Caitlin. Just for a bit.’
‘But we don’t know him.’
‘I know him, love.’ Sort of. ‘I knew him in Egypt before you were born.’
‘Mummy you’re very clever.’
‘Oh good. Why?’
‘You know so many things I don’t know.’
My heart filled with joy at her sweet absurdity. Such are the everyday pleasantries of my life.
*
She started coughing the moment she walked through the door.
‘Lily, hon, this is Hakim, Hakim, this is Lily.’
She took one look at him and then she started to curl. Curled her face into my stomach, her arms around my waist, her feet around her legs, her mouth into a simper, her eyelashes into a flutter. Oh, it’s going to be like that, is it. The last one was cousin Max, on my father’s side: six foot one of teenage Liverpudlian love-god, with long yellow hair and a playful disposition. He gave her a piggyback and she just went around saying ‘Max Max Max’ for a week.
‘Hello, Lily,’ said Hakim encouragingly.
‘Hello,’ she whispered, and then pulled me down and started hissing in my ear like a ferocious little boiler.
‘What?’ I said, trying to edge my head away from her and get the words into focus. ‘What?’
She was telling me that he could sleep in her bed and if he wanted he could have one of her teddies, not old brown teddy but one of the others, the one with the pink pyjamas. Pushover.
*
And that is how we all came to be sitting around the breakfast table reading anonymous letters.
Hakim denied all knowledge. I had no knowledge. But then that is how it’s meant to be with anonymous letters. I didn’t like it.
Then there were three calls where whoever it was said nothing at all, just left the line hanging open. The first time it was only a few minutes, the second about ten, and the third nearly quarter of an hour. I 1471ed them, but of course they’d been blocked. So I called BT to get them to do something about it. But it didn’t happen again. I tried to file it under irritating, but I couldn’t quite.
Then it was chased out of my mind by a call from Harry, saying could he come round. Harry worried me more than the letter. These uncommunicative communications were new, and external, unknown. Harry is deep in me.
Harry is a half-settled negotiation, a half-healed wound.
You need to know a bit more about Harry, other than that he was my darling, for years, years ago.
I had of course wondered how he came to be a policeman after so many years of being a bit wide and a bit flash, automotive man with his fully-powered V8 Pontiacs and his James Dean jeans. We’d been sitting on the deckchairs on the balcony outside the flat, a few days after Jim’s claim to Lily had crashed and burned. The fallout was fairly spectacular, what with Eddie Bates being arrested, Ben Cooper the Bent Copper getting his comeuppance, Harry turning out to be a policeman, and Jim turning out not to be Lily’s father after all.
*
I realise that I’m still not mentioning it. The offensive thing. The other things I found out. The bit I hate and have not … OK. These are the things:
a) My sister never told me she was a prostitute.
b) She made pornographic films using religious accoutrements, specifically clothing more usually worn by devout Muslim women for reasons of modesty, and used in these works of art bits of film of me dancing.
c) She pretended to be me in order to sell sex to men who had admired me in performance.
I don’t like to think about these things.
I recall sitting there with my feet up on the balcony wall, bandaged up from my dashing getaway after Eddie abducted me and … well, anyway there we were, in the evening sun, drinking beers from the bottle, admiring the sunset over the A40 and watching Lily and Brigid’s children careering about on their bicycles up and down the balcony, waiting for Mrs Krickic next door to come out and tell them to slow down a bit because they were disturbing her budgies. Harry and I circling each other in the fallout, coming round, making up, moving on … who knows.
‘So why did you become a policeman, Harry?’ I asked.
He looked very sheepish. Having been undercover, I suppose he wasn’t accustomed to talking about it. I suppose. I don’t know. What do undercover people do or feel? What do I know about undercover? But he’s not very accustomed to talking anyway. Joking, yes. Charming, yes, in his tall, laconic way. But not talking. I used to like it: I could read anything I wanted into his handsome silences, and did. But now I’m older and I’m not so insecure, and I like to know what’s going on.
‘Um,’ he said.
I waited encouragingly.
‘Well actually,’ he said, and looked a little puzzled, and then sort of took a breath, and almost laughed a little. He shot me a glance, sideways. This is what he has always done when preparing to confide. It pleased me that he still did it. Made me feel that I knew him. Made me feel secure, at one with the world. A bit.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Because of High Noon.’
I was silenced for a moment.
I began to hum, ‘Do not forsake me, oh my darling,’ without realising I was doing it.
‘Well, you asked,’ he said.
High Noon. Where Sheriff Gary Cooper had to deal with the bad guys even though he had a ticket out of town with the lovely Quaker girl who didn’t believe in violence, and none of the cowardly townsfolk would help him, so he did it alone.
‘High Noon,’ I mused.
‘I wanted to do the right thing,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’
He seemed so uncomfortable admitting that he had some notion of morality, and that it had made him do something, that I didn’t push him. I think he was truly embarrassed. Identifying with Gary Cooper.
But certainly it changed my view of him. From black leather to white stetson, just like that. The bastard cross of Marlon Brando and Del Boy turns out to be Gary Cooper.
Of course all this coincided terribly conveniently with my own sweeping gavotte through life. Here was the peripatetic biking belly dancer grounded and mature with a bad leg and a baby; here was the bad man turned good and willing to consider that he might be said baby’s father. ‘I want to do the blood test,’ he’d said, on the evening of the day of comeuppance. And, ‘I want to see her. And you.’ And, ‘I want you to change the birth certificate. Even if it’s only to Father Unknown.’
But who knows what they want? And who knows whether it’ll make them happy? As I can’t remember which country singer (in a white hat) sang: ‘Some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.’
All I wanted was peace and quiet. I wanted to sit on the bench in the playground with my boots in the dust and the fag ends and the dead plane leaves, and watch Lily climb ropes. I wanted to bathe her and tuck her in and read Thumbelina to her. I wanted to watch her eat, and to make myself a cheese sandwich in the evening knowing she was asleep in the next room, not scratching her eczema (I wanted her eczema gone). I wanted it to be how it was before Jim and Eddie Bates and Ben started to upturn our lives with their blackmail and lies and obsessions; how it was in the gilded imaginary quotidian past. I didn’t want to upturn it even further with the very serious, very real question of her dad. In other words, I wanted to bury my head in the sand. And I did.
But then, sitting on the balcony that night, talking about Gary Cooper, Harry said: ‘Part of it, you know, is …’
‘Is what?’ I said.
‘Lily,’ he said.
‘What about her?’
‘What I said that night.’ He didn’t have to say what night. We knew what night. The night that chaos dissolved.
‘Mm,’ I said.
‘The blood test,’ he reminded me, gently.
‘Mmm.’
I knew he was right, within his rights. I knew it was fair. I knew, rationally, that I didn’t have a leg to stand on. I knew that I probably couldn’t stop him doing it anyway. But my heart cried out against it. Cried and wept. Why? Fear, I suppose. Simple fear.
‘I can’t do it, Harry,’ I said, knowing as I said it what a daft and pathetic thing it was to say.
‘It’s not you that’d do it,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to do anything. I’d just get it done, and then I’d tell you, and we’d … we’d take it from there.’ We hadn’t a clue, then, either of us, of the practicalities. Let alone the repercussions. (Nice word, repercussion. Re-percussion. There’s a verb: percuss, to strike so as to shake. Well there you go.)
‘Shut up,’ I said.
He was looking at me, quite kindly, twiddling the empty beer bottle in his big skinny hands, leaning forward a little.
‘How long for?’ he asked.
‘How long what?’
‘How long shall I shut up for? I mean, I can see you probably need a bit of time, having just had Jim breathing down your neck being the bad father, and maybe a father is not what you want right now, but, well, the question’s been asked now, hasn’t it? So how long, do you think, before you’ll want to know? Because you’re going to want to.’
‘I don’t want to know.’
‘No, but you will.’
‘Don’t patronise me, Harry. I don’t want to know. It’s a positive act of not wanting. I actively want not to know. I desire ignorance.’
‘Why? Are you scared?’
‘No I’m fucking not. Don’t give me that crap.’
‘Why not? I’m scared. I’d think it was incredibly scary.’
‘I like things as they are. That’s all. Harry—’
‘What?’
‘Please can we leave it.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But for how long?’
‘Oh for God’s …’ Well. OK. Buy time. ‘Fifty years,’ I said, rather idiotically.
‘It might be worth pointing out, Angel, that you aren’t the only person involved in this,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry?’ I replied, cold suddenly, and deadly courteous.
‘Lily …’ he began, poor fool, but he did no more than begin before I bit him off: ‘Do you think that I’m not aware of that?’ I snapped. ‘Do you think that every single thing I do isn’t for her wellbeing? Do you imagine that I ever for one moment stop considering what’s best for her? Do you think I don’t know? My whole fucking life for nearly four years has been based on what she wants and what she needs and I do not need you muscling in and telling me that I need to take her into consideration. I do take her into consideration. I do every bloody thing that is ever done for that child including protecting her, when she needs it, from people she doesn’t know who think they have something to do with her. If I’d told her Jim was her father how do you think she would feel now? Now that he’s decided that oh no, he isn’t after all, silly me it’s just my wife fancied having a kid. Who her father is and what happens about that is an incredibly bloody serious issue and if I’m not up to thinking about it and controlling what happens about it then it is not to happen, that’s all. The damage it could do her is immeasurable. And it’s down to me. I decide when and how. And I say no. No.’
So I was ranting. Harry has never been impressed by my ranting.
‘It’s not just Lily,’ he said, calmly. If anything he was even more unflappable now. Unpercussable.
‘What?’
‘It’s not just Lily.’
‘Oh. So, what. It’s you. You need to know. You feel odd. You want to know.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
I looked him a look.
‘It’s not unreasonable,’ he said.
‘It’s not possible,’ I said, in only half-fake disbelief. The nerve of him.
‘Yes it is.’
‘No it’s not.’
‘You can’t say that.’
‘Just did,’ I retorted, maturely.
‘Angel,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to … but you can’t control it. It’s not just you. It’s the truth – you’ll have to face it. You can’t just boss it around.’
‘I can have a damn good try.’
‘Why do you have to be in charge of everything?’
‘Because I am. Aren’t I? Who else is?’
‘You could let someone help you.’
‘This is getting a little clichéd, Harry. I get plenty of help, thank you, so you needn’t bother offering. I really don’t think you’d be much use, frankly.’
‘Yes I would.’
‘You. Yeah. Very likely. Teach her to drive and check the gap on a sparkplug, babysit and embarrass my boyfriends when we get home. I don’t need it.’
‘You don’t know what a father might give …’
‘You don’t know whether you’re her father.’
‘I know. It doesn’t make it any easier. She’s asleep in there and … Let me find out. Let me try.’
‘No. Or – OK, yes. Try this. You’re her father, you want to give her what she needs. What she needs right now is a period of calm after a period of upset. She needs it as much as I do. She also needs me to have a period of calm after a period of upset. I’m not confusing our needs here, I’m recognising that they are the same. That’s what she wants, what she needs. You can give that to her. Will you?’
I couldn’t read his face at all. His expression was remote – his Mongolian face, I used to call it. Narrowed eyes and inscrutable and handsome.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘How long a period of calm?’
I could have kicked him. ‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Amazing!’ he murmured.
‘What?’
‘Something you don’t know!’
‘Don’t be like that.’
‘I’m not being like that,’ he said. ‘I have no intention of being like that. OK, tell me how long within three months, or I’ll enquire again. And if you need anything, ring me. I’m assuming,’ he said, ‘that you’re keeping me hanging on, not counting me out.’
My oh my, is he a different man in this white hat. What kind of a comment is that from an emotional illiterate?
I gave him a rather pathetic smile, and he left. Since then, we’d maintained a quiet and sparse rapprochement. During Eddie’s trial, which came up gratifyingly quickly, I didn’t see much of him. He wasn’t directly involved himself – undercover, see – but he kept me posted. If there is one thing I should be grateful to Harry for, it is that he managed to see Eddie put away without my having to give evidence, without my role in the drama coming out. Eddie was guilty of quite enough other things – mister-bigging it for gangs of drug dealers and smugglers and pornography and God knows what. Kidnapping little old me and attacking me was peanuts to his real career, and didn’t come up in court, which was just as well.
I didn’t go to the trial. Didn’t follow it in the papers. It was enough for me that the drama was over. Harry it was that told me the verdict and the sentence. Guilty, fifteen years. I was happy. It was over.
Happy? I was over the fucking moon. I love safety. Safety and calm make me sing and dance. I bless every morning when nothing happens. Dullness and boredom do not exist in a life where activity has been motorbikes flying out of control and sisters dying and babies being orphaned and madmen imprisoning you and bastards claiming paternity of your child. I don’t ask for much. Just for nothing much to happen ever again. Maybe a few little quiet ordinary things. A calm ordinary little love affair, or an everyday kind of marriage. Some job or something. Don’t talk to me of self-fulfilment. I’ve survived; so has Lily. This is my achievement.
After that Harry had spent six months in Arizona on some exchange training thing, sending us postcards of giant jackrabbits in cowboy clothes, and views of downtown Tucson by night. His calls, on his return, had been infrequent, and they were a fly in the calm ointment of our reconstituted lives.
He was out there, and I couldn’t tell whether the big thing that he was was ever going to happen. Maybe he had just gone away. Then again he might reappear, any time, wanting things. Wanting to know. I’d been through it before with Jim, Janie’s ex, in the days when we believed him to be Lily’s father; been through that knowledge that someone outside of you can turn your life upside down and claim that which you treasure above all. And I’d been through it in a different way with Ben Cooper the Bent Copper, when he was blackmailing me to spy on Eddie Bates. I know what it is like when someone has power over your life. It’s bloody horrible.
The one thing that Harry didn’t mention again was his suggestion, at the end of That Day, when I said was knackered and going to bed, that he come with me.
*
I rang him back. He wanted to meet. It seemed to me like a tiny nasty echo of when Jim had reappeared, wanting to meet, wanting to see Lily, wanting to take her from me. How soon before the lawyers’ letters start up again? At the same time I recognised the absurdity: this was Harry, who had been my Harry, Harry who wasn’t a bad bloke, Harry who now wore a white hat, Harry who wasn’t even definitely her father. And I knew I couldn’t avoid it forever, because he was right, you cannot avoid what exists. This question existed, no doubt about it. I knew that all I’d said to him that night on the balcony was untenable. A father is a father – if he is then he is. I’d even agreed that about Jim.
So I agreed to meet him the next day. He wanted to make it the evening, I said no, lunch is easier, Lily will be at school. How much they have to learn.
FOUR (#ulink_ba21373d-39b0-5e28-baf9-bbed4d71ce1b)
Hakim’s Business, Harry’s News (#ulink_ba21373d-39b0-5e28-baf9-bbed4d71ce1b)
After the first day, spent drinking coffee and reading Arabic newspapers, Hakim had expanded his repertoire to drinking coffee, reading Arabic newspapers and making and receiving telephone calls. He had a mobile phone, of which he was proud. By day three he wanted an A to Z. However he doesn’t read English too well. This was obviously going to make life a bit of a problem for him, and for me by default. He decided that the simplest thing would be for me to teach him. I thought it would be far easier if I just showed him where Somerset House was on the map, and wrote out CHARING CROSS in big letters so he could tell when he’d reached the right station. I instructed him in English, he wrote it down in Arabic. I didn’t want to think about it actually. ‘You killed my love’ was on my mind. I didn’t want it to be. I know the form. You ignore anonymous letters, you put odd phone calls down to the vagaries of the system. You have better things to worry about. And I do. I have Harry.
But it was on my mind. Latching on to that which is always on my mind. Because I did … kill. Janie. And however much you may know, reasonably, and accept everybody else’s convictions, there is always … It’s always there. However much an accident is an accident. The sense of responsibility. Guilt at surviving when she didn’t. Helplessness at not having preserved your parents from it. Whatever she may have done makes little difference to that, and the punishment that I had, in losing my fitness to dance, makes little difference either. It matters, but it makes little difference.
I couldn’t think what the letter was to do with. But it had touched a nerve. A ganglion actually. So it wasn’t till Hakim had left that I wondered what he was going to do at Somerset House.
When he got back, five hours later, I made him a cup of coffee and asked him.
‘Nothing,’ he said. He looked angry, almost tearful. ‘Nothing. What can I do? I don’t know your writing. I was lost. It’s OK, I ask in shops and everybody speaks Arabic. I get home. But I found nothing. Somerset House is just the wrong place.’
Of course it was. Somerset House is always the wrong place. You think it’s the right place because it was in Sherlock Holmes or something, but the right place is now in Preston, or care of a privatised company in New Maiden. Poor lost foreigner. I remembered my first days in Cairo, days of lonely chaos before I discovered the bar on the roof of the Odeon, and the flat in the block on Champoleon Street – Château Champoleon, as Orlando the Colombian political correspondent next door called it in his camp Latino/Tennessee accent. Orlando it was who taught me never to say America when I meant the United States. There is a brilliant blind chaotic excitement to a new city, an alien city. But God there is some loneliness too. When there’s too much going on out there, too much cardamom and donkey shit and Arabic, too many Mercedes and veils and babies, and you can’t face it, so you stay in your cheap cockroachy room saying it’s only wise to in the heat of the day, or the danger of the evening, pretending that you’re taking the opportunity to catch up on Proust, but really you’re just building up loneliness and boredom to the point when you have to explode. It’s like the internal combustion engine. Suck squeeze bang blow: Suck in loneliness, squeeze it with boredom until BANG! you are blown out on to the streets of the alien city, and thank God for it. Whereupon you suck in strangeness, squeeze it with fascination till BANG! the top of your head blows off with the excitement of it all and blows you into the next strange and fascinating experience. (I was very much a biker in those days, hence the imagery. Orlando liked the image, said it was just like Hegel, thesis, antithesis and synthesis, only in fourtime instead of a waltz, ‘But it’s all dancing,’ he said. Orlando was a gas.)
I don’t know what London is like to a stranger. I should imagine horrible. Cold, unfriendly, cliquey, snitty, incomprehensible. And grey, and strange, and wet, and cold. Light when it should be dark; dark when it should be light. And expensive. And big. But people come here, people stay here, whole peoples come and live and settle. No thanks to the welcome we give them, that’s for sure. Poor Hakim.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I should have helped you. I’ll come down with you tomorrow morning.’
‘Thank you,’ says Hakim.
‘Shukran afwan,’ said Lily, grinning, waiting for approbation.
‘Bravo,’ said Hakim. She went pink with pleasure, and he smiled and pinched her cheek, and she smiled and pinched his and said, ‘Chubby chops’, and he said, ‘What is chubby chops?’, and generally they were carrying on like love’s young dream.
‘So what is it you’re trying to find out about?’ I asked.
Hakim went very quiet.
I pointed out to him that if I was to find out for him where he was to go I needed to know what he wanted to find out when he got there. For a while he wouldn’t say. Then: ‘If someone is dead or married.’ Nothing more. This was irritating, but Lily needed her tea and if something’s not happening you can’t force it. So I fed her and washed her and did all those small yet vital services that prove love and build love and give love’s object a chance of being well-adjusted in the future. (Interesting those people who claim to care deeply for their children yet leave the actual caring to someone else. It used to be one word, care, what you do and how you feel. Now it is two, and you can feel it yet never do it, or do it yet never feel it.)
‘Who’s dead?’ she wanted to know. ‘Who’s married?’ She’s very interested in death and marriage. Wants me to get married, sometimes. Has proposed to me herself, actually. Best offer I ever had.
*
The next day brought the next letter. The envelope sat there like a toad on the doormat. Lily ran to pick it up; I stopped her. I picked it up quickly, read it quickly: ‘You did it and I mind.’
I didn’t like it. Incomprehensible letters making nebulous accusations against I wasn’t sure who were actually a worse incursion into my enderun (it’s a Turkish word. It means that which is within, private, domestic) than Hakim turning up and being mysterious all over the shop. Or were they? Well that’s the problem, isn’t it. They could be. They have the potential. But by their very nature, you don’t know.
I believe I may have mentioned before my slightly obsessively protective attitude to my gaff. I don’t like things coming in and upsetting me. I like being quiet and safe and calm. I believe this to be beneficial to my child. I live every day with the sole intention of giving her enough calm security to outweigh the drama and weirdness of her birth. A kid snatched at birth from the jaws of death, while the fangs sank into her mother, is a kid who can soak up a lot of calmness. Whether or not she knows it. My God, after five years it still shocks me. Pulled from the jaws of death and her mother’s womb simultaneously.
So now I protect Lily by protecting our home and, as my perceptive Egyptian friend Zeinab and my perceptive Irish friend Brigid have both pointed out, my body. And my heart. There had been signs of a little loosening up: letting Hakim stay, fantasising about maybe finding myself a man. But the potential of these letters sat in the base of the back of my mind, crying out to me.
*
I gave Hakim a little lecture on the bus (St Catherine’s House, it turned out, was the place). At home he was cavalier if courteous, operating all the assumptions of a man who expects a woman to wait on him. Out in the world he found it easier to be a child with me, and hence it was easier for me to mother him.
‘Hakim,’ I said, once we were settled on the 94. ‘Lily has bad lungs and I would appreciate it if you didn’t smoke in the flat. Also you drink too much coffee, it makes you manic and nervous. And please tell me now what you want to find out about who.’
We were sitting on the top of the bus, right up at the front because Hakim wanted to see the sights. Willing as I was to point out Shepherds Bush roundabout, Notting Hill tube station and the great dome of Whiteleys in the distance, I was more interested in getting to the point. To my dismay he started to cry. I put my arm round his shoulder and patted him, murmuring kind things in Arabic, the things Zeinab murmurs to her boys when they fall over.
‘I bring badness to you,’ he said, sniffing. ‘I bring badness to your house.’
‘Well just tell me what it’s all about, and then we can sort it out.’
‘I can’t tell you,’ he said.
‘Yes you can. Open your mouth and speak.’
‘I can’t. I can’t. Too much badness.’
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Come on, just tell me. You can’t keep it to yourself, it won’t make it better. Just tell me.’
‘I can’t.’
I was getting bored.
‘Why not?’ I said.
‘Too much badness.’
‘Tell me why you can’t tell me. It’s not fair to bring badness to my house and not tell me what it is. Tell me something. Tell me why you can’t tell me.’
He stared out of the window at Holland Park Avenue unfolding before us, and the overlong branches of the plane trees slapped at the window as if at our faces. ‘I am in shame,’ he murmured.
‘Hakim,’ I said, in the bad mother voice that brings Lily to heel. ‘Stop it. Tell me.’
He turned his face round to me, tears still sitting in his eyes, and said, ‘It is family, Angelina. Family.’
‘Not Abu Sa’id,’ I exclaimed.
‘Not the father,’ he said. And then, with that slight shift of musculature that denotes the making of a decision, he said, ‘Mother.’
For a moment I thought he was calling me mother. Then I realised no, he’s just saying it.
Mother.
‘Mother?’ I repeated, intelligently.
He leaned forward and rested his forehead against the glass.
‘I have a mother,’ he whispered.
‘Ah,’ I murmured.
He leaned.
‘And?’ I suggested.
He leaned back. ‘I have a mother.’
There’s nothing you can do really but sit it out.
I sat.
‘An English mother,’ he murmured.
‘English mother!’
I was surprised. I was very surprised. All I had known was absent mother, gone mother, unspoken-about mother, maybe dead mother, maybe shamed mother. English mother, though, was something new.
‘English mother gone back to England. I want her. I look for her. Please don’t tell my brother or my father.’
Not bothering to point out how unlikely it was that I would happen to be talking to either of them, I just goggled at him.
‘But Hakim, that’s good! Finding a mother isn’t – yes, it might be complicated and everything but it’s basically a good thing to do. It’s … and English! So you’re half English! Blimey! … but why did she … I mean, tell me the story …’
I was rather pleased to see a boy so distraught at disobeying his parent. It seemed so old-fashioned, so honourable, so decent and right and endearing. And I was sorry for him, and I was excited about it, and relieved that it wasn’t something horrible. Also I know, as adult to adult, that Abu Sa’id is not an unreasonable man, and would probably, I thought, forgive his son for his natural curiosity and desire for his mother. But then – I’m not family. And I’m not Egyptian. And I’m not him. I cannot know where his limits are.
‘I don’t know the story,’ he said. ‘I was small. Five years. Sa’id was ten years. He never talked of her. Never. My father said nothing. Never. Not to talk of her, not allowed. When I cried for mama, there was Mariam.’
‘Who’s Mariam?’ I asked.
‘The woman in my father’s house. Second wife. New mama. The sad woman nobody love.’ I remembered the woman who moved like a fish, and hid from me. His wife. The woman in his house. I remembered his unwonted kindness to two English girls. A clear picture sprang up of a man heartbroken by a deserting wife, who still loved her enough to be kind to her countrywomen for her sake. And two bereft boys being foul to a substitute mother. And that poor woman, whom nobody loved. I was nearly in tears myself.
‘And you want to find her.’
‘Yes.’
‘What will you do when you find her?’
‘I will … ask her why she leaved. See if she is a good woman or bad. See what is my English me.’
Well, you can’t fault that.
‘I’ll help you, then,’ I said.
He smiled at me. I found myself thinking ‘You big softy’, and I wasn’t sure if I meant myself or him.
I took one look at the endless shelves of huge volumes in the high institutional halls of the Public Search Room and decided to leave Hakim to it. But of course I couldn’t.
‘What was her maiden name?’ I said. Hakim tried and tried to pronounce it but the sounds just didn’t work in his mouth.
We got it in the end. Tomlinson (I think. Could be Tompkinson). It only took another half-hour to find that in 1984 she had married a man called Stephen John Lockwood, in London.
*
I’d arranged to meet Harry in a sandwich shop in Strutton Ground, near Scotland Yard. I had toasted cheese and salami with gherkins, and he sneered slightly at my choice. He had a cappuccino with his ham roll, and I sneered slightly at that. I don’t think men should drink frothy things with chocolate on top. So it wasn’t great even before we started.
‘Well, to put your mind at rest, I didn’t drag you here to talk about Lily,’ he said, straight off. I was so pleasantly surprised that I almost forgave him for sneering at my sandwich, but then I got pissed off again about his power to relieve me by saying he wasn’t going to mention that which I thought he had no business mentioning anyway.
‘Good,’ I said, more briskly than I might have. ‘So what is it?’ Oh shit, I thought, it’s all going wrong. I don’t want not to get on with him. Oh bugger. (Not bugger, mummy, bother.)
‘I thought you might like an update on Ben Cooper and your friend Eddie,’ he said, rising to the mood of the occasion. Eddie is no friend of mine and Harry knows it.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Yes, I would.’
‘Well,’ said Harry, ‘as you know, Ben has been evading the police inquiry into his misdemeanours by claiming ill health.’ I did know. The slimy bastard had got a psychiatrist to say that the stress of having to account for himself might drive him to suicide. (Eddie Bates had tried a similar ploy – they’d said he wasn’t well enough to stand trial, but he’d had to, in the end.) Cooper had kept it up for over a year now. And because he hasn’t had his fair hearing yet, he can’t be sacked, so he’s still sitting about on sick leave, on full pay, the slug, and I’m still sitting about wondering whether I’m going to be called to help put him away. Which I would be happy to do, because he was at least in part responsible for my sister’s downfall. Because he was in business with her making the nasty little videos, and because he was the one who, when Eddie Bates saw me dance and wanted me, arranged for Janie to wear my costumes, masquerade as me, and sell herself, as me, to him.
Even as I write it a damp toad settles again in my belly. For Janie, for Eddie, and for my own shame.
‘Well now his lawyers are saying that it was too long ago,’ Harry was saying, ‘and the case should be dropped.’
My jaw dropped to match.
‘Surely not,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe it. He can’t get away with it. I …’ Mouthing like a goldfish. Pointless.
‘Well no, he probably won’t,’ said Harry. ‘But he might.’
‘Anyway that’s not all,’ he said. I looked up.
‘Um,’ he said.
‘Yes?’
He looked tired and sad.
‘Eddie Bates is dead,’ he said.
It all stood still for a moment.
And another. Then …
‘Sorry?’ I said.
‘Eddie Bates is dead,’ he repeated.
I couldn’t quite breathe. My eyes started flickering around and I felt myself shaking. To my horror I felt I was going to cry. I heard Harry’s voice.
‘Angel? Angel?’
I shook myself and came back to myself. Back to myself but different.
‘Dead,’ I said.
‘Dead,’ he said.
I reached for a cigarette but there weren’t any. I don’t smoke any more. Harry reached over to the next table and helped himself to one from the packet belonging to the man sitting there. ‘Thank you,’ he said to him, in a voice that brooked no denial, and he lit it with the man’s lighter, and gave it to me.
‘Dead,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said.
My face was screwed up and I tried to untangle it. It wouldn’t go. We sat there in silence for a few minutes. Then Harry said: ‘Forgive an indelicate question, Angeline, but why the fuck do you mind so much?’
I couldn’t answer. Not only because I couldn’t speak, but because I didn’t know, and if I had known I couldn’t have told Harry anyway.
My enemy is dead. I should be singing and dancing my delight. If I was made safe by his imprisonment, how much safer am I now?
More minutes of silence.
‘What did he die of?’ I asked.
More silence, maintained this time by Harry. Then:
‘He hasn’t been well.’
Oh.
‘How not well? Not well of what?’ You see, I couldn’t speak.
‘Um,’ said Harry.
Into my state of shock came a sliver of … not fear, but … awareness.
‘What?’
He sighed. ‘I didn’t tell you because I thought it would just … go away. I thought he’d get better.’
‘What?’ I said. ‘Was it what he was talking about before the trial? What was it?’
I could just about register how difficult Harry was finding this, but I no longer let him get away with not saying things. We are way past the silent understandings, or more often misunderstandings, of our optimistic youth. In theory, at least.
‘You know when he was arrested,’ said Harry, ‘he had a head wound.’ I did know. I had inflicted it on him. I had hit him on the head with a poker when he was trying to jump me. Harry knew that. I had told him in the confusion of the end of the day of comeuppance. I seem to remember he had said, ‘Attagirl’. Anyway, some such unpolicemanly expression of approval.
Harry was not looking at me. ‘He has been suffering ever since from dizzy spells. That’s one thing his lawyers put up when they were trying to delay the trial. He’s continued to have them inside. Last week a new inmate arrived, who for reasons best known to himself took the first opportunity he could to punch Eddie’s lights out. Two days later Eddie was found dead on the floor of his cell. They haven’t done the post-mortem yet but it looks like a fractured skull.’
Now my skin was burning up.
‘He may have fallen,’ said Harry.
I took a drag on the cigarette and started coughing. Harry took the stub from my fingers and put it out.
‘So did I kill him?’ I asked.
‘He never said in court what had caused his initial head injuries,’ Harry continued, conversationally. ‘That was one reason why the application wasn’t accepted. The doctors agreed that he was not in the best nick, but he just said he’d fallen, and the damage wasn’t consistent with that, so they couldn’t accept it.’
I stared down at my plate. A gherkin had fallen out of my sandwich. I picked it up and ate it, and a huge sadness washed over me. Why do only mad psychotic scumbags love me, and is that love?
‘You didn’t kill him, legally or otherwise. But you did something,’ he said.
‘Yes I did.’
Bad people around me die, but I don’t kill them, but I do something. Oh for God’s sake. Janie wasn’t bad. Not bad. Not like Eddie.
‘When’s the funeral?’ I asked.
Harry was shocked. ‘You’re not going to go?’ he said. Aghast.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Why? Why the fuck?’
‘To see that he’s really dead,’ I said. ‘Because … because I thought it was over with the court case, and it wasn’t, and I want to make sure it’s over now.’
His face was amazed but kind. ‘There you go again,’ he said. ‘You want to do something absurd and ridiculous and stupid, but you’ve got a completely good understandable reason for it.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Is that what I do?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You should be a lawyer.’
Is that good or bad?
‘But it doesn’t mean you’re right,’ he said.
‘Right about what?’
‘About going to the funeral.’
‘You think I shouldn’t?’
‘I think it unwise,’ said Harry.
‘I’m sure you do,’ I said.
‘I’ll think about it,’ he said.
‘About what?’
‘Whether to tell you where it is,’ he said.
‘There you go again,’ I said, a little pointedly.
‘What?’
‘Telling me what to do. Acting like you’re in charge.’
‘I daresay,’ he said, unmoved. Only one step beyond his admirable unflappability lies his bossy pain-in-the-arse stubbornness. It reminded me of how he’d been when I first met Eddie, through him; when he warned me off making friends with him, not knowing that I was only doing so because Ben was making me. It reminded me of how jealous he’d been then, when he’d thought I didn’t know Eddie was a villain, when he’d thought that I fancied him. Harry protecting me for my own good, keeping things from me because I couldn’t be trusted to behave sensibly. Harry being a patronising sexist git. Harry watching over me, looking out for me, still caring what happens to me. Knowing me.
I would like to be able to take Harry’s concern for me and appreciate it. I would like to be able to maintain my independence without having to spit in his eye. I would like to think that I can rise above daily tribulation and problems of communication to a superior level of transcendent human understanding, but I can’t.
‘Then I’ll find out from somebody else,’ I said, in a very slightly nyaaah nyaah voice.
‘Who?’ he said.
‘I’ll ring …’ I said, in one of those sentences that you begin, hoping that you’ll find an end for it by the time you get there, but I didn’t. Who would I ring? We didn’t exactly have friends in common. His wife! I’d track down his wife.
His wife.
You killed my love.
You did, and I mind.
Oh.
Well perhaps his wife would ring me. Perhaps in fact she has been ringing me.
‘Tell me,’ I said to Harry. ‘Do people who send anonymous letters ever get violent, generally? Is that the sort of thing that happens. Do you know?’
Harry looked tired. ‘What?’ he said. ‘What a …’
It suddenly hit me like a hammer. Eddie’s dead. His wife thinks I killed him. I burst into tears, stared at Harry in horror, and hurtled to the back of the café in search of the ladies. Only there wasn’t one. The sandwich shop man gave me a handful of paper napkins from a chrome dispenser and turned me round again. The napkins soaked up nothing; just smeared and redistributed. Harry was standing up, wobbly through my tears, tall and a little menacing as he unfolded himself from behind the café table. I remembered his father telling me how he used to stop fights just by unfolding himself out of the squad car and being exceptionally tall. Young miscreants would simply stop toughing each other up and gaze in amazement as more and more of the length of the copper unfolded. He’s six foot seven. Harry’s a shrimp in comparison, a mere six foot four. I forgot for years that Harry’s father was police. So strange. I daresay it helped to get Harry in, despite his past. Though he was never convicted of anything. Nor charged with much, come to think of it. Perhaps his father helped with that too. Not consciously, not on purpose.
The miscreant in me folded.
I was still crying.
‘Come on, lover girl,’ he said. ‘I’ll get you a cab.’ He looked disgusted. I remembered when he’d told me he was disgusted one time before. Over Janie. When he thought I’d known, and I hadn’t.
He took my elbow and walked me into the bright street. I could see reflections of Petty France on the teardrops that shook on my lower lashes. Like a hall of mirrors, a ball of mercury. Like the chrome rims of the surgeons’ lights as they pored over my leg, and I gazed desperately into the distorted reflections of my joints and ligaments, yellow and scarlet and black, trying to see what the hell they were doing inside me. Discomfiting and weird reflections. Harry hailed a cab.
Lover girl?
‘Remember,’ I said, ‘you were wrong last time. Don’t jump to conclusions.’
‘Wheee,’ he said, his face hard. ‘Wheeeee, splat.’
FIVE (#ulink_758be9cf-efed-5ab8-a502-567148bd849c)
Next (#ulink_758be9cf-efed-5ab8-a502-567148bd849c)
I can’t afford to take a cab all the way to Shepherds Bush so I got out at the top of Whitehall and took the bus. The cabbie tried to get stroppy about it but I told him that if he thought the quickest way to Shepherds Bush from Victoria Street was via Trafalgar Square he must be used to passengers walking out on him. At the bus stop I wondered whether Hakim had got home all right, and whether I would be on time to pick up Lily. On the number 12 I wondered whether Sarah Tomlinson el Araby Lockwood would be in London still, in the phone book perhaps, even. At Piccadilly Circus I wondered why London Transport had changed the system so that instead of getting a 12 all the way through you had to change to a 94 at Marble Arch or Oxford Circus. At Oxford Circus I wondered why you wait for half an hour and then three come along at once. Then on Bayswater Road, having wondered every damn boring other thing available, I started to wonder why I was so upset at Eddie Bates being dead. It wasn’t just that I may have contributed. Or that his wife seemed to think I had. There was something personal. And I came up with some fairly unwelcome reasons.
1) Although he was a scumbag of the worst order, he had expressed a fairly devoted devotion to me, and I liked that, even from a scumbag of the worst order. Which makes me something of a scumbag.
2) Although he was a scumbag of the worst order he had an enormous amount of passion in him. Energy, enthusiasm, life force. He was a big, pulsating character. And it’s a shock to think of that gone. Pff, just gone.
3) There’s an animal thing, a …
OK, I can’t.
OK.
When Eddie jumped on me, and I hit him with the poker and knocked him out
This is quite hard to explain because I don’t know why I did it. And I don’t know how I did it.
So there he was, with his
I can’t describe this. He’s dead.
OK. I fucked him then, while he was unconscious. I was as surprised as you are that it was physically possible. I was more surprised that I wanted to do it. I didn’t know I wanted to do it. I still find it hard to believe that I did do it. But I did.
I can only suppose that for some reason I still don’t understand I wanted to have sex with him, but I didn’t want him to have sex with me. Because I hated him and despised him. I am absolutely not happy with the fact that I fancied him. Not happy at all.
Silly word, fancied. From ‘fantasy’, I imagine. I fantasied him. And then I realised him.
So there is some animal thing, about a man you’ve had sex with (even though he didn’t have it with you) being dead. And there’s something about him being unconscious then, and dead now. Horizontal.
So there I am, quasi-necrophiliac, fancier of scumbags, flattered by a scumbag’s attentions. Just how I like to see myself.
Let alone about having contributed to his death. Let alone his wife.
*
I got off at Shepherds Bush Green and got to Lily’s school in good time. Just seeing her, love flowed through me, drenching and drowning the poison, flushing it through. You can feel warmth and cleanness in your veins. Palpable goodness, inside you, displacing and unmanning the badness and the shame. Simplicity clearing confusion. Redeemed by love. It happens. All the time.
I bought her a choc ice and we went to the park to chase squirrels.
*
When we got home Hakim was sitting at the kitchen table with all the telephone books, looking sad.
‘There is just one Sarah in London, is not her,’ he said.
I expressed doubt. He showed me how he had identified the S section of the book, and found Sarah’s Hair Fashion Studio in Lower Norwood, and told me that he had rung, but they hadn’t been his mother. I found myself thinking that I really ought to look after him better, and said that after I’d put Lily to bed I would help him. During tea he let her wear his Qur’anic verse pendant, so she ran to put on two of her tiaras and her plastic glittery Cinderella slippers. He didn’t know the story so she told him, then he had to be the prince and I had to be the Ugly Sisters and she was – as she is most days anyway, when she’s not being a baby animal of some description – Cinderella. When the time came for them to live happily ever after she almost burst with joy. Then he told her the story of Rhodopis, the girl with the rose-red slippers who married Pharaoh Amasis five hundred years before Christ. When I tucked her up later she announced that Hakim was her boyfriend, and could he live with us forever. Probably not, I said. We could marry him, she said, then he would. She wanted him to come and tell her Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and he did, including all the boiling oil and dismemberment of corpses, which I had been keeping from her.
When Lily the love fountain was asleep, I was at risk again. Eddie lurked, alive or dead. Spooking me with his … he threatened and hurt me, I hated him, I fucked him, he’s dead. That handsome, thrilling, madcap fellow; that dangerous violent psychotic liar.
Luckily Hakim wanted to cook my dinner. My gratitude was immense. Not for the meal – it was pretty much on the same level as Lily wanting to cook my dinner. Very sweet, hopeless, and more work for me than if I’d done it myself. But for the distraction. After half an hour or so of him being very confused by the contents of my kitchen (the garlic press delighted him), I taught him how to make pasta with sauce out of a pot. He had bought a couple of beers too, which was a relief for me because I am very bad at judging whether the Muslim I am sitting with is a drinking Muslim or not, and I hate to get it wrong. There are clues: if a man has a prayer mark on his forehead, a permanent bruise from the frequency and energy of his devotional prostrations, then I do not offer. If a woman is veiled, I do not offer. But here in London, where so many people are out of kilter with what they would be doing if they were at home, who is to know what to do? Many, many are the nebulous rules, the adjustable rules, the friable rules. I was once warned fair and square to have nothing to do with any man who drinks alcohol and reads the Qur’an: OK to do one or the other, but not both, because hypocrisy is the great sin. I was young and firm and unforgiving in those days, and I took that rule to heart; nowadays I’m a little gentler. Weaker. My standards have slipped. Anyway I am pleased that Hakim takes out his mat and prays in Lily’s bedroom, and I am pleased that he is willing to crack a beer with me and gossip, and with his youth and sweetness keep madcap monsters from my mental door.
‘So, is Sa’id married yet?’ I asked, flinging around for a subject, as we sat down to eat.
Hakim looked surprised at the suggestion. ‘Oh no,’ he said.
‘But he’s, what, twenty-five?’
‘No one is married now at twenty-five,’ he said. He peered at his beer and looked less than completely happy.
‘No one?’ I was surprised. Shagging about was definitely not on in Upper Egypt in my day, and not much in Cairo either, and where there is no shagging about there tends to be early marriage. Or some other arrangement.
Hakim screwed up his eyes and ran his fingers over his forehead, pressing above his eyebrows as if to dislodge something stuck inside. ‘No one,’ he said crossly.
‘Don’t be cross with me about it,’ I said mildly.
He looked up. ‘Not cross with you,’ he said, heartfelt, fearful of giving offence. ‘Of course not with you.’
He held my gaze, eye to eye, steady. It made me realise how seldom he caught my eye, let alone held it.
‘Things are strange to me here,’ he said. ‘At home you are tourist and the tourist, perhaps you know, is number one. And number two and number three and number four and so on. In Luxor for thousands of years we have been guardians of our palaces and graves, and people – you – have come to visit, and have brought money for the people who tend to visitors.’
It was one of those moments which make me want a cigarette. When someone starts to talk.
‘Let me tell you,’ he said. ‘During the Gulf War, when I was quite small. Not so small. After the houses where the people lived were knocked down and the big hotels all built, and the tourism schools teach that the tourist is always right; after they build the walls to hide the villages because the village isn’t so pretty, so they build the walls not the drains, anyway. Then there was the bombardment of Baghdad and the tourists don’t come, and everyone is scared, because so much is … spent for the people who will come. Just before the bombardment of Baghdad, when everything was just so … you know … I went with a visitor from Cairo to the grave of Thutmosis, in the valley of the kings, I think you know the one. There is a metal steps up the cliff, and climbing, and a pit, and steps down inside. My friend’s great-uncle was a guard in this grave. It is shaped like an egg, pale cheese colour with black pictograms, beautiful. The king made it hard to find, and now you just go every day.
‘You know photographs are not allowed in these graves without a pass. The flash destroys the picture. Too much light, too many people. One time, this day, four tourists come in and just start to take photographs with flash. The old man, the guard, says to them no photograph. All he can say in English, in French, in German (except also “Welcome Luxor”). He says it, in English, in French, in German. The tourists take no notice. He stands in front of them, in front of the pictograms. Then one tourist knocks him down. We came in next – me small boy and the lady visitor, the friend of my mother. The old man is on the floor, blood … the tourist taking photographs. The lady visitor picks him up, the tourist police come, fuss and bother, no one saw but everybody knows the old man is telling truth.’
‘So what happened?’
‘The old man was made to apologise.’
He looked at me straight, to see what I thought.
‘Luxor is a beautiful place but it is not good,’ he said. ‘No one is married before thirty because they have not enough money. Business is good for us but even for Sa’id to make enough money for himself to marry will take time. All the money is spent for him going to university, to Sorbonne, business studies – he did only one year, said he knew more than the professors, then economics. But everybody else is leaving school and not going to university. People come by so rich, tourists, Egyptians, Saudi, Europeans. And we are rich, my family. My father employs people. Sa’id does business with Cairo for him. We sell abroad, in Khan el-Khalili, we have the shop in Luxor and the fabrique on the West Bank. But Sa’id cannot marry. How is it for the poorer people? Wages are not good. The richness does not travel from the rich people to the poor. The poor people live in places that are built without permission and then the officials say they will knock them down and they will have nowhere to live. In Qurnah because the old village is just among the graves of the Nobles they are always trying to knock it down. They send in tanks, the village people come out with sticks. Just to show that they are people, who can hold sticks, not just some bit of litter. And now they build New Qurnah, and we are all to leave and go there.’
This was making me sad.
‘It’s the same everywhere, to one degree or another,’ I mumbled. Like that’s any comfort. But I have no sophisticated analysis of these situations. I just feel sad, and sometimes want to punch someone for not making the world a fair and just place. A reaction which has hardly changed since I was Lily’s age. Janie used to say there was no point because you can’t punch God. We stopped talking to him, though. Remained silent during ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, and hoped he’d take the hint.
‘Many people at home are very unhappy,’ he said finally. ‘Things happen you don’t hear about here. The last years … But Egypt doesn’t make a big noise of it to the world because they don’t want the world to stop to come. And it’s just Egyptian people, so the world doesn’t mind.’
Of course I knew what he was talking about. Those single paragraphs you read in the sidebars of the foreign pages: four policemen killed in an ambush at Naqquada; train shot at, suspects, fundamentalists, reports say. Like any one of a thousand problems, that only flick our conciousnesses when they happen in places where we’ve been on holiday. If I lived in Qurnah I could never leave. The Nile before you, five thousand miles of Sahara at your back, ancient Thebes the bones of your home.
Hakim was looking at me. I couldn’t remember the last thing he’d said.
‘I make coffee,’ he said, and did.
Oh yes. It was, ‘It’s just Egyptian people, so nobody cares.’
Then Zeinab rang. What with one thing and another I hadn’t spoken to her since Hakim’s appearance, so I told her about him. Or as much as I could with him in the room. He gestured me furiously not to mention his mother, so I didn’t. She wanted to come and see him, to welcome him and to check him out. Of course I’d told her about Abu Sa’id, over the years. We decided she should come at the weekend, and bring the boys. Then Brigid rang, was I still on for tomorrow. Yes indeed I was. How many of them? Three boys and Caitlin. All night? Fine. They could go on the lilos on the floor in my room, in with me and Lily. Squashy!
Perhaps a midnight feast might be in order. It’ll be Friday after all. Hakim announced his intention to go to the mosque. Then my mother rang, saying would we come for lunch on Sunday; then Harry rang, saying he was sorry he rushed me off like that, and was I all right, and I lied that yes I was, and we had an awkward pause, and said well all right then, ’bye then.
And then Hakim and I sat down with the phone books and I showed him how we needed to look for Tomlinsons or Lockwoods rather than Sarahs, and after a long and interesting chain of calls I was able to give Hakim a piece of paper with two phone numbers on it. ‘There you go,’ I said. ‘Your mother. She’s a lecturer at a university by the sea. It’s about an hour away. She teaches Arabic.’
SIX (#ulink_589c0589-bc07-5c85-a477-bd3be522cfd7)
Tell Mama (#ulink_589c0589-bc07-5c85-a477-bd3be522cfd7)
I think there’s only one other thing I haven’t mentioned. Deep in the upholstery of the saggy old red armchair I keep in my study there is a very large sum of money. It is Janie’s ill-gotten gains from her career in pornography. I hid it there just over a year ago, having found it in a last tea-chest of her things that Mum had redeemed from the attic but not been able to face looking at. I hid the money in the hope that it would go away, because I didn’t want to face the ethical and emotional problems that it brought with it. Of course at the same time I didn’t want it to go away, too. It is a very large sum of money and I am after all a single mother of uncertain employment living in a council block, albeit in a separate kingdom on the most distant and salubrious storey of a pretty nice one. I haven’t counted it.
Mum asked me once, months later, what had been in the chest. I didn’t tell her, about the money or about the jewellery or about the peculiarly nasty pornographic videos. I think I said: ‘Oh, nothing, just some clothes and stuff.’
We don’t talk enough in our family. We’re so quietly convinced that we’re doing all right that we don’t discuss it. We’re all so rational that nothing needs to be said. And yet when I think what I have in my heart that I haven’t ever mentioned … Janie’s death, obviously. Not the fact of it but the niceties of the feelings it produced. Nobody ever blamed me for it, except myself. So I never had a chance to justify myself, defend myself, except to myself. I would have welcomed a judgement by a jury of my peers. Because you know it could have been my fault. There could have been greasy dead leaves or a manhole cover that I should have avoided. I could have been riding like a fool, or over-excited, or not paying attention. Over-accelerating on that dangerous corner, misjudging the surface, slipping gear. But the parents assumed that I wasn’t. Assumed. No proof. Then when the police had no doubts about it, that was proof enough for everybody. Everybody except me.
Of course it wasn’t my fault that the car came up inside us on the turn. But then I didn’t see it. I didn’t avoid it. I couldn’t accelerate away, escape from the bend I was committed to. I wasn’t skilful enough. In the same circumstances I would never expect somebody else to have been able to. But it wasn’t somebody else, it was me. I never told Mum and Dad that I blamed myself for my lack of skill. The fact is I was – would be still, if I still rode – a perfectly skilful rider, experienced, calm, patient, swift to react, observant at all times. But not skilful enough.
Of course it was in their interests for me not to be to blame. If I had been they would have lost two daughters. Unless of course they would have been able to forgive me.
Anyway, easier for them to assume there had never been a fault, than to face it and forgive it. And do I blame them for that? No.
The other thing, of course, is Janie’s career. About which they know nothing and will know nothing. All our lives our parents protect us and then suddenly one day we’re protecting them.
Janie, Janie, Janie. Janie’s money, Janie’s death, Janie’s career. Not to mention Janie’s memory, and all that Janie was to me before … well exactly, before when? Before she died? Before I discovered she was a lying treacherous whore, who prostituted my very identity? We have to go back further … but I don’t know how far back, because I don’t know when it all started, and damn it I can’t ask her. Not for dates, not for clarification, for denial, for explanation, for apology. How can I get her off my back when she’s not here?
*
I was woken on Friday by the call to prayer, which didn’t half take me back.
I was dreaming that I was in Cairo, a clear, intense dream of something absolutely ordinary, of its time, but its time was ten years – no, nine years ago. I was dreaming of going home after work, as I did five or six nights a week. Heading home to Château Champoleon through the dusty, colourless dawn after a night dancing on the Nile boats or in the clubs. In the back of a cab, rhythms sweeping through my blood, my flesh warm and my muscles soft and my brain transcendent from hours of dancing. I could have danced all night – hell, I did dance all night. Every night.
In my dream I had been at the Niagara, which was run in those days by a lady of uncertain age who modelled herself on late-nineteenth-century French lesbians, with claret-coloured velvet and frogging and a cigarette holder. She liked me because I was English. ‘I most like the English,’ she would say. ‘Most of all like.’ ‘Don’t mock me,’ I’d reply. ‘I’ve read Naguib Mahfouz. I know you hate me.’ ‘Who’s that?’ she would say, even though he was terribly famous and soon to win the Nobel prize for literature and have a café named after himself in Khan el-Khalili. ‘Oh, just some tuppenny ha’penny little novelist,’ I’d say, and she’d say ‘Novelist? What is?’ and then she’d snort, and say, ‘Une danseuse doit être illiterée.’
In my dream I was walking to my building and thinking about her and revelling in the near-emptiness of the streets. Only at this time of night are the streets finally empty, empty of all but the pattering footsteps of the jackals that come in from the desert in the heart of the night to eat the garbage, and leave empty plastic bags whirling like tumbleweed down Champoleon Street. For a moment, at 4.53 or thereabouts, the streets are empty, but even as you think it, there are people mysteriously starting to do their mysterious jobs in holes and alleyways. The first fuul stand is starting to set up, ready to sell breakfast. A degree of rattling can be heard behind the closed doors of the cafés. Dogs are barking.
I dreamed I stopped off up on the roof of the Odeon for a soothing bowl of omali before bed. I dreamed of the terracotta bowl, the baked sultanas and nuts and milk, the softened, pudding-baked bread, the hot sweet smell of it, the best of the new day before I collapse at the end of the old one. Five a.m., and the pre-dawn muezzin calls the fajr: ‘It is better to pray than to sleep,’ and me thinking, as you do at five a.m., ‘It is better to sleep than to do anything else in the world.’ I dreamed I passed Mohammed, the bauwab, fast asleep on the stone bench at the foot of the monumental beige granite staircase, by Cecil B DeMille out of Ramses the Great. Walked up so as not to rouse the whole Château with the clanking and wheezing of the ancient lift. I woke up just as, in my dream, I fell into bed. Curiously, the muezzin continued.
It was Hakim, celebrating Friday by teaching Lily the call to prayer in the kitchen. She had Allah u Akbar perfectly, and a bit more, but then he sang her something including Bismillah, in the name of God, which made her giggle because she calls her navel her bizz. Because when she was smaller her granddad used to blow raspberries on her tummy, making a Bzzz noise. She was explaining this to Hakim. He was giggling too because bizz is the Arabic for tit, and he wasn’t sure if I knew. I felt a surge of love for both of them, for Egypt, for life, and decided to make pancakes in celebration, before I remembered that Lily now went to a school where she had to be on time.
By the time I returned from taking her, the post had arrived. There was another letter. It said: ‘He was the best of men, he was the worst of men, but with that man to be alive was very heaven.’ Irrelevantly, the first thing I thought was what an irritating name Carton was for a romantic antihero, evoking as it does cardboard boxes of long-life apple juice, though no doubt it didn’t then. Empty cardboard boxes, actually. And Sydney Carton was not an empty cardboard box. The pitfalls that lie in wait for authors, years down the line … My next thought was that if all she wanted to do was send me semi-poetic notes and paraphrases then I didn’t necessarily mind that much. But.
I tried to remember anything that Eddie had ever said about his wife, and realised that he had never mentioned her to me. So how did I know about her? Through Harry? Maybe, when he was warning me off Eddie, when he thought Eddie and I were about to develop into love’s young dream. Or maybe through Fergus Droyle, my crime correspondent buddy, who I’d asked about Eddie right at the beginning. I had the idea that she lived in Monaco. Well, if so she’s not there now.
Does she mean me harm? ‘You did, and I mind.’ She might do. And she knows where I live, as they say. She could, if she wanted, come and visit. This wasn’t a pleasant idea. I wasn’t exactly scared, but I wasn’t keen. As you wouldn’t be. It seemed it might be a good idea to have a word with her. Pre-empt her. Fergus would be the logical place to start, if I wanted to track her down. Except …
I didn’t want to ask him. I’d sworn him to secrecy and told him, finally, some of what went on with Eddie and me, and the poor man had gone mauve as his desire to use the story fought with his friendship for me and respect for my privacy. Later, after the trial, he’d written a piece about Eddie, and had rung me, but I’d refused to say anything. I didn’t want to try his loyalty any further by bringing the subject up again. Specially when Eddie was so topical, having died. Some things you should not expect a journalist to bear. It would be unkind.
She would presumably be at the funeral. But I didn’t really want to go to the funeral. He was dead and that was that. Also I thought Harry might be there, out of courtesy as one of the men who nicked him (or as his former employee, if he was still keeping that persona going), and I was sorry that Harry had witnessed the hysteria of my immediate response to the news of his death. I seem to have a little bug that jumps out to wind Harry up. It seemed a good idea to avoid further opportunities for it. And no, I didn’t want any wild graveside scenes with a vengeful Mrs Bates.
But I did want to locate her. If only to feel better equipped. Fergus or Harry, which would be worse?
Hakim leaned over my shoulder.
‘Evangelina,’ he said. ‘May we ring my mother?’
He’s started to say ‘may’ because Lily corrects him when he says ‘can’. Actually she’s having quite a good effect on his grammar, but it’s a little alarming for me to hear echoed back so precisely what I say to her.
I half wanted to confide in Hakim about the letters but decided that it would be a complicated and useless exercise, so I desisted. One issue at a time, girl. Let’s put off the ones that matter most to me. There’s a sensible approach.
First we rang the home number. ‘Hi, this is Sarah, you can leave a message and we’ll get back to you, or you can send a fax, after the beep.’ Relaxed, not warm not cold, middle-class, southern. She sounded nice. I held out hope, but I kept quiet about it. I didn’t want to influence Hakim.
I hung up, and told him it was a machine, and did he want me to leave a message, or to leave one himself, or what.
He paused for a second, then picked up the receiver and pressed last number redial (another trick he’d learnt from Lily, who uses it to ring Caitlin after I’ve been talking to Brigid). I watched his face as he heard his mother’s voice. Expressionless, it just grew softer and softer. I thought he might melt away completely, so I offered him my hand as something solid to hold. He took it and gripped it, and hung up the phone.
‘If she is not a good mother,’ he said, ‘I want you to be my mother. The English mother.’
I kissed him on the forehead and narrowly stopped myself from telling him that I would do anything in the world for him.
‘May we ring the other number?’ he said.
I called directory enquiries, got the number of the university, called the switchboard, got the extension, called the extension.
‘Hello, Sarah Tomlinson,’ said the same voice.
I had decided to do it on a wing and a prayer. I could not have worked out a script and stuck to it. This is what came out.
‘Hello, Sarah, my name’s Evangeline Gower, I’m a friend of Ismail.’
‘Ismail?’ she said.
‘El Araby,’ I said.
She was quiet. I heard voices in the background.
‘If this isn’t a good time I can …’ I said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No. One moment.’ She spoke at the other end, and then came on the line again. ‘What’s it about?’ she said.
‘Hakim and Sa’id,’ I said. I could almost hear her heart-rate change.
‘What about them?’ she said, her voice completely different, narrow-throated, nervous, tense.
‘Hakim is in London,’ I said.
‘Oh my God,’ she breathed, and spoke again to the voices in the background. I could hear them retreat, and a click, some shuffling, and some breathing, and then, ‘Is he with you?’
‘Beside me, yes.’
‘Oh my God,’ she whispered, again, and she began to cry, very softly. Hakim was all eyes.
‘What’s she saying?’ he asked. ‘What?’ I held my hand up, mouthed ‘wait’.
She carried on crying. I spoke to her: ‘Listen – do you want to ring him back? Can you take down a number? Otherwise … he wants to see you, you know. He wants to talk. Take my number, and if you don’t ring he’ll ring you tonight. OK?’
She didn’t sound negative. I gave her the number and I thought she got it down. She was still crying. ‘I don’t want to leave you like this,’ I said.
‘I don’t even know who you are,’ she snapped suddenly, through the tears. ‘Who are you anyway?’
‘Evangeline Gower, friend of the family,’ I said.
‘Family,’ she said. She sighed. ‘I’ll ring in a couple of hours,’ she said. ‘Tell him … is he well?’
‘Very well,’ I said.
‘Tell him … say I’m not sorry he’s here.’
‘OK,’ I said.
‘’Bye.’
‘’Bye.’
I put the phone down and said, ‘She’s not sorry you’re here, she said to say so. She’ll ring back.’
‘Alhamdulillah,’ he said, four times, and smiled, and went to Lily’s room, where if I put my ear to the door I could hear him saying el fateha, the opening of the Qur’an.
*
I tried to do some work: an article about an exhibition of Orientalist paintings that was coming up in Birmingham. The exhibition wasn’t open yet and there was some doubt about which paintings were going to be in it, because of some insurance problems. Doubt hung over, among others, an extremely famous and interesting pair with all sorts of splendid and evocative anecdotes attached. One, fairly innocent, harem scene had originally been painted as a cover for the other, more erotic, work, of which it was an almost exact copy, except that the harem ladies were covered up in various cunning ways. The main houri, for example, was sitting with her legs wide because she was holding a great platter with a watermelon on it, rather than displaying herself; another was adjusting her scarf rather than her nipple. The cover lived in the same frame, on top of the naughty picture, and the owner could remove it for selected guests, after dinner, and thus preserve both his pleasures and his reputation. The two paintings had been separated over the years and were now to be reunited. Or not. I was going to have to write two articles, so that they had something to use whatever the outcome. I wrote an introduction that would do for both versions, then admitted that I was not concentrating and rang Fergus.
‘Fergus, Evangeline,’ I said, in my brisk talking-to-people-in-offices voice.
‘Evangeline darlin’,’ he said, emphasising the Irish. ‘What can I do for you?’ This made me feel bad because of not having been able to do anything for him on recent occasions, but I don’t think he did it on purpose.
‘Mrs Bates,’ I said. Fergus fancies himself utterly ruled by deadlines and important busyness; he appreciates you getting to the point.
‘Oh my God, would you get out of my hair with that,’ he said, which was not the response I’d been expecting.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve had it up to high dough with that woman,’ he said (at least that’s what I thought he said – I assumed it was something to do with bread rising; later he told me no, it’s high do, as in do re mi, as in top C, when you’re singing). ‘She’s off her flaming trolley, in fact if she and her trolley were ever intimately connected I’d have my doubts. Serious doubts. I can understand a widow woman being upset but she is the most abysmal specimen of a … why?’
It never takes him long to get to why.
‘I think she’s been writing me letters.’
‘Does she think you killed her husband?’
‘Well yes she does, actually.’
‘Join the club, darling. We’re a flaming conspiracy, evidently. I killed him, by writing that article, which apparently affected his heart. Every policeman you ever saw killed him, by being a policeman, which was contrary to what he liked. The jury killed him, separately and together, by finding him guilty when he would have preferred not. The prison warders killed him; the prison doctors killed him, the judge killed him and chopped him up into little pieces and left him out for the birds. How did you kill him then? By being the object of his unrequited desires?’
‘I suppose so … God, Fergus, that’s a relief.’
‘Did you think it was only you? So did I, till I got to gossiping. You should get out more. You know Harry killed him too, and Ben Cooper, only no one’s told him yet that everybody else did too because they like to see him suffer. What has she done to you then? Letters? Phone calls?’
My journalist filter went up.
‘Are you going to be writing about this?’
‘I’ll just say “a girl he admired”. Nothing to identify you. Promise.’
‘Oh Fergus …’
‘Please. For colour. There’s no sex in it so far. Please.’
I thought for a moment. I did quite want to give him something, because he’s a friend and he’s helped me in the past. I did also want very much to keep my nose clean.
‘I tell you what,’ I said.
‘What,’ he said.
For a second I was about to say ‘I’m not telling you’. That’s Lily’s great joke: ‘You know what?’ ‘What?’ ‘I’m not telling you.’
‘I think … let me think about it.’ I was thinking that perhaps I wanted to see her first, clear the air, then I thought no, if she’s feeling that way about so many people I don’t need to. She’s not going to firebomb the lot of us.
‘Is anyone taking it seriously? Has she made any threats at all?’ (This Irishness is contagious. I don’t know if it’s my dad’s Liverpool Irish blood coming out in me but whenever I talk to an Irish person I start using their accent. It makes Brigid, Cork born and bred, piss herself laughing.)
‘Not to my knowledge. I think they’re all taking it with a pinch of salt. I was exaggerating a little bit, you know. I don’t think she’s been pestering the judge. The woman may have some sense. Have you met her? She’s a funny woman and that’s for sure.’
‘What’s she like?’ I realised I had a clear picture of her as being a bit like the Queen, but younger. Respectable, pretty, pearls, elegant in a dull way. Grace Kelly. Handbag. Why? Because she lived in Monaco? Because Eddie had classy taste and modern art?
‘Oh, she’s basic gangster Euro-trash, a Marbella queen. Army father, boarding school, home counties, ran wild, ex-model, still wearing the make-up that was in style when she was young and gorgeous, and her heyday hairdo. Brigitte Bardot without the class. White stilettos, shiny eye-shadow. Permatan. Permapissed, as well. Drinks like a Mexican maggot. When Eddie started ignoring her she took to astrology and small dogs. And possibly younger men, but she’s always been crazy about Eddie. And terrified of him. Flaming lunatic, basically. There’s a lot of them around.’
Oh.
‘What’s her name?’
‘Didn’t your boyfriend tell you, then?’
I hung up on him.
He rang back ten seconds later, apologising profusely.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘OK, you mean it. I’m sorry. Her name’s Chrissie. She’s born Christine Louise Evans, then Chrissie de Lisle, no less, and for no reason other than sheer pretension, in her salad days, and now she goes as Christina Bates. So we’ll speak on Monday, will we, or over the weekend?’
‘Yeah. No promises. Would you let me know if anything else … you know …’
‘My darling, I’m gossip central on Mrs Bates. Short of anyone blowing a fuse and trying to sue, I don’t think anything’s going to happen except more of the same. And you know what our friends in the Bill are like, till the stalking law comes in they can’t move on this stuff till she’s pouring petrol through your letterbox. But I don’t think she will. She’s an old bat exorcising her sad old life, if you ask me. Ignore her and she’ll go away.’
‘Thanks, Fergus. I’ll speak to you.’
‘Indeed you will,’ he said.
It occurred to me as I hung up that Fergus didn’t know I’d hit Eddie on the head with the poker, and that I didn’t know if Mrs Bates knew or not. And I didn’t know if she’d been visiting him in prison, and I didn’t know when the funeral was. Which I wanted to know, even though I didn’t want to go. So I rang back and asked him. Yes she had, she’d been regularly, and there had been something of a rapprochement between them; and next Tuesday, 11 a.m., at Southgate. The same cemetery where Janie is buried.
I was relieved by our conversation, but not that relieved.
Then I ate a bowl of cornflakes and went to get Lily.
*
When we got back from the park Hakim was standing in the middle of the kitchen with stars in his eyes.
‘I speak to her,’ he said. ‘I go tomorrow. I want to tell you.’ Then he grabbed my face and kissed me, grabbed Lily’s and kissed her, then disappeared into the bathroom, presumably to wash off our touch because moments later he reappeared and then disappeared again, out the front door, crying, ‘I go to mosque.’
Lily looked bemused.
‘His mother,’ I explained. ‘He hasn’t seen his mother for fifteen years, and tomorrow he’s going to see her. After fifteen years.’
She gazed after him. ‘So will I see my father after fifteen years?’ she said.
Childish logic. I sat on the floor and drew her to me.
‘Oh, darling, I don’t know,’ I said.
She wouldn’t sit with me. ‘Well you should know,’ she said. ‘You know everything else.’ Then she looked at me, and then she went into my room and sat silently on the bed.
For a moment I was dumbstruck. Then I followed her in.
‘I wanted to go into my room,’ she said in a tiny voice, ‘but it’s not really mine.’
I sat by her. ‘Sweetheart?’ I said.
‘I don’t want to cry,’ she said.
‘You don’t have to,’ I said. ‘You can if you want.’
‘I feel bad but I haven’t done anything bad.’
There are times when you feel completely bloody useless.
‘Sometimes bad things happen to us even if we’re good,’ I said. ‘What’s making you feel bad? Do you know?’
‘It’s too difficult to explain,’ she said. Her lower lip was sticking out, just a tiny bit. The tears stayed in her eyes. Full and curved. Their shape echoed the shape of her cheeks.
‘Well what’s it about? Just tell me the subject. You don’t have to explain it all.’
‘I don’t want to,’ she said.
‘Why not?’
‘I want you to know already,’ she whispered.
And of course I did know. There was only one thing about her that I’d ever claimed not to know, that I’d ever claimed not to understand. Or rather – that I’d ever known was there, but not talked about, not shared, not dealt with. There was such closeness between us that I knew if she would choose an orange or an apple, if she wanted a bath or not, what story she wanted at night out of twenty to pick from. I always knew which hand she’d hidden the coin in. I knew every damn thing about her, and I knew this.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll find him.’
When she looked up at me I swear her eyes were twice the size they had been. She grinned like a maniac.
‘You do know! You do know!’ she yelled.
‘I know what you want, darling. I don’t know where he is or when we can find him …’
‘But you know I want him!’
That was all she needed. God, she was happy. I felt so small that I hadn’t admitted I knew it all along. To myself, quite apart from her. Going to bed that night she was telling herself a story. ‘Well a daddy might be in the zoo, but only if he had other children, because he wouldn’t go to the zoo if he didn’t have a child with him, so a lost daddy wouldn’t go there, unless he was a zookeeper MUMMY! IS MY DADDY A ZOOKEEPER?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘It’s quite funny you not knowing things,’ she said, with an echo of Harry. I kissed her and we did the rituals: ‘I love you up to the moon and back again’; ‘I love you too, now shut up and go to sleep’; ‘Will you scratch my back?’ ‘No I won’t.’ ‘But it was worth a try, wasn’t it Mummy?’ ‘Yes now shut up and go to sleep’; and then I went and rang Harry.
Because frankly, out of the choice I had, he was the best.
He was out. I didn’t leave a message. Anyway then Brigid and Caitlin and the boys appeared bearing sleeping bags, and Lily got out of bed, and the lilos had to be blown up and the whole thing turned into a hoopla of considerable proportions. Around ten I gave up and left them to it, and went to watch the news. It was all about the dead princess and her boyfriend. (‘It was her own fault,’ said Lily. ‘She was a mummy. Why didn’t she have her seat-belt on?’)
Halfway through Hakim came in and said: ‘He’s no good that man. No good for Egypt. Rich as ten thousand men. And he did not look after your princess. In Egypt they say your government killed them because they hate Islam and want no Muslim man in your royal family. I say bollocks.’ At the same time as I was amused by his finding so soon the grosser end of our lovely language, and pronouncing it like the young bull he so reminded me of, I could see the sincerity of his distaste.
SEVEN (#ulink_91c8be11-139f-5770-8943-4cea8f8d6fc7)
Brighton (#ulink_91c8be11-139f-5770-8943-4cea8f8d6fc7)
The next day, Saturday, there were two letters. One contained a razor blade, the other a poem.
Distracting is the foliage of my pasture
The mouth of my girl is a lotus bud
Her breasts are mandrake apples
Her arms are vines
Her eyes are fixed like berries
Her brow a snare of willow
And I the wild goose!
My beak snips her hair for bait,
As worms for bait in the trap.
I knew this poem. Not that it’s famous, out of its field. It’s from an ancient papyrus. It’s, I don’t know, three thousand years old. I didn’t like it – I’d never liked it. Hair as worms, bait in a trap. Ugly. Violent. Fixed berries, vines, snares. It speaks to me of desire and resentment – a bad combination.
And a razor blade.
How very unpleasant.
Each one gave me a cold shudder. I didn’t know, actually, which was nastier.
I burnt the poem and broke the blade in half with a pair of pliers, then wrapped it in cotton wool, soaked the package in baby oil and threw it in the rubbish, which I then took out on to the balcony and dropped – plop! – into the wheelie bin seven storeys below. I’m pretty ritualistic on occasion.
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Louisa Young
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: The sparky, funny sequel to Louisa Young’s acclaimed first novel of belly-dancing, motorbikes and single-parenthood.Angeline Gower, ex-bellydancer, ex-biker, single mother of a little girl who is not actually her child, is mired in problems again in this wonderful sequel.Her relationship with Harry, the lover turned cop, remains fraught, the lure of the glamorous but no good Eddie hasn’t gone away. And there is yet another element complicating things know – the seductive and mysterious Sa’id. With Angeline older and a little wiser, Louisa Young weaves a tale that is richer, sexier and more moving than ‘Baby Love’, while remaining just as exciting. Shifting between Shepherd’s Bush and Cairo, full of the contrasts between the West and the Middle East, ‘Desiring Cairo’ thrills and enthralls while at the same time making us think and feel deeply about the love between mother and child, man and woman, friend and friend.Louisa Young has skilfully written this so that it is equally enjoyable read on its own, or as part of the trilogy that starts with ‘Baby Love’ and ends with ‘Tree of Pearls’.