Desiring Cairo Page 3

  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. Repercussion. 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 bloo
dy 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

  Hakim’s Business, Harry’s News

  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.)