Desiring Cairo Read online

  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

  Next

  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’l
l 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

  Tell Mama

  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.