Читать книгу: «Desiring Cairo»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Epigraph

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

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
Hakim

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
Luxor

‘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
Talking about Gary Cooper

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.