Tree of Pearls Read online

  Our bodies. Our poor dear bodies. Up to their own things.

  I resolved to start dancing. Gently but frequently. Bellydancing always was the woman’s dance, the fertility and pregnancy and childbirth dance. And if my body is going to do this thing, this thing which seems to have nothing to do with my brain or my thoughts or my decision-making faculties, then I had better open up those channels of communication that I used to have with my body. Sex and dancing – those are the links. And this is where sex has got me. So I will dance again. I will dance as a damaged woman can dance.

  I remember once going to an extravagant baladi wedding in the City of the Dead in Cairo. The family that lived there (it’s not unusual to move in with your dead relatives, or someone else’s, among the tombs and mausoleums; Cairo’s a very crowded city) had put up a sheder between two tombs, a huge tent lined with canvas hangings decorated with curls and arabesques in black and white and red and blue, patterns that look like the love-child of a classical Arabic script and a bank of lotus flowers. Everyone seemed very stoned; hashish and frankincense hung on the air. And, of course, there were dancers: men doing the stick dance (the one which ended up over here as Morris dancing, Morris from Moorish – it’s rather more dashing the way they do it in Cairo), and four big vulgar bellydancers, great fake blondes with shining eyeshadow and wicked tongues. There was an old tradition of verbal abuse called radh: when a working-class Cairo matron really wanted to insult someone, she would throw her shawl on the ground, put one hand on her hip, cock the other at her temple, and let rip a diatribe in rhyme. I could just picture these babes doing that. Swagger? God could they swagger. I ended up hunkering down next to an old woman, as stoned as everybody else but unimpressed by the dancers. ‘You don’t need all this to dance,’ she muttered, sitting like a cobbler and gesturing to the sequins and the flash. ‘You don’t need anything.’ And with that she took my hand, and put it on her black-clad belly – and danced. Without standing, without it showing, without an outwardly visible movement she moved her muscles and her flesh, under my hand, in a dance as interesting and entertaining and passionate as any I have ever seen. I thought of her a lot when I gave up dancing for a living, after I left the perfect youthful strength and alacrity of my leg there on the roadside with Janie; I thought of her now.

  The nurse was talking about share care, home birth, St Mary’s, Queen Charlotte’s. ‘You won’t need to decide yet,’ she said, ‘but if you can get the home midwives I can tell you they’re very nice, the ones here, they’re a lovely lot. Oh, you won’t know what’s hit you!’ she said, with a sudden spurt of pleasure. It occurred to me that for them, medical staff, dealing constantly with death and disease, a newborn baby must be their professional antidote. Their nice thing.

  *

  I went straight to Zeinab’s to get Lily. She was in a sulk, about what was unclear. Probably it would all come out at bedtime, when we lie and talk between stories. And one of these bedtimes I was going to tell her that she’s going to have a real Nippyhead.

  It’s such a lot to take on. A father she’s only had for a couple of weeks, and now a sibling. Well, not now, but soon enough. I resolved to tell her quite late, to give her time to settle with Harry. In a few months. As late as possible, but before she notices, because she hates to feel left out. She will be happy about it in principle – but how will it be in practice?

  I remembered something she said ages ago. ‘If you have a new baby will it have a daddy?’ And when I said yes, she said, ‘Can I borrow its daddy?’

  It’s that word normal again. It’s normal to have a daddy. It’s also normal to go to work every day, and to think Chris Evans is funny. So I’m not normal. Well, we find our own level. And then we destroy it again. Just as I start to set up something approaching a version of liveable normality with Lily and Harry, something else crops up. Nippyhead.

  And of course Nippyhead does have a daddy. And so does Lily. From no daddy to two, in a few weeks.

  And what am I going to do about Nippyhead’s daddy? Wait a few a months? As late as possible? How would he feel about being left out?

  When Jim was accepted as Lily’s father, I was righteous for his cause even though I despised him. A father is a father, I said. Whatever we think of him, it’s his blood and he has the right. The fact that he never exercised it for three years, and then when he did it turned out he wasn’t the father, and had no rights anyway, made it easier for me to be so righteous.

  And now?

  Well. I will have to tell him.

  There on the Uxbridge Road, coming home, in the chill of a small soft winter rain, a flood of joy came over me. I have to tell him – it’s right to do so. I have to contact him. I will see him, or speak to him, again. God it made me happy. For that split illogical second. Then I remembered that it would come to no good, so … And I allowed myself a moment to fantasize … maybe it could come good. Maybe …

  And then Lily and I had our daily ‘no-we’re-not-going-to-the-sweet-shop’ session, followed by one of our regular ‘what do you think I mean when I say no? Do you think I mean that if you whine and go on about it I’ll say yes in the end? Or do you think I mean no? On account of how I have never in your life changed a no to a yes on account of whining and going on?’ sessions. She played it just long enough for real irritation to be on the verge of getting the upper hand (‘How many times do I have to say the same thing? Why don’t you listen? Why don’t you remember, for god’s sake? Haven’t you noticed that if you go on and on I get cross and then you get upset and then it’s all horrible? Why not just drop it, and we can be happy and nice? It’s your choice’) but I caught the irritation just as it was about to jump out, and threw it under a bus, and started tickling her instead, and it was all right. Then she wanted me to tell her about the little bugs that would try to eat her teeth if she ate too many sweets, and how the toothpaste soldiers would fight them off because they have to protect the buried treasure, which is her new grown-up teeth that she will get when she’s six. Then we had the usual problem with the tooth thing, which is, why is it that we have to brush our teeth to stop them falling out, when they’re going to fall out anyway and that’s a really exciting thing, to be looked forward to and the fairies bring us money? When we got home we drew pictures, and then she told me that Omar was meant to be the baby in their game but he wouldn’t go to sleep, so Hassan had frightened him to sleep with a rotten plum. I was musing on how the rotten plum had escaped me as a sleep aid for restless babies when she started reading me a schoolbook about a dragon, and she could read. ‘Look here. Look. Here. Here. Look!’

  ‘It’s not very interesting, is it Mummy?’ she said, and started reading the milk carton (‘Pure dairy milk. Homo. Homog. What’s that?’) and the blue stencilled writing on the bread bin (‘Bread. That says bread!’) and then she got a book she loves called Amazing Grace and had a go at that.‘Once upon a time there was a girl called Grace who loved stories.’

  She must have been building it up inside, and now out it spills. Accumulated knowledge becoming a useable skill. Reading. All that singing the alphabet song, all that Lucy Lamp Lady and Harry the Hairy Hat Man (she’d laughed about that when she first met Harry). Paying off. I hugged her a lot.

  While she was eating her tea Chrissie rang.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ she said. ‘I was thinking if you haven’t been sick so far you probably won’t be, which some people say means it’s a boy. How was it at the doctor’s?’ And I found myself telling her, quietly, from the study, because I didn’t want Lily picking up on anything. I found myself telling her how irritating it was people being such know-alls, and how I didn’t like the feeling that I was entering some kind of production line of people who did this every day. Not the nurse, but the doctor. I told her I hated hospitals, and she said if I did share care then I wouldn’t have to go to the hospital more than a couple of times, and anyway what about a home birth, and I said that the doctor had said I was elderly (if you please) and didn’t adv
ise it, and she said I shouldn’t really listen to him on things like that, because if I didn’t feel he was sympathetic probably I was right, and he would just be trying to arrange things to his own convenience, which plenty of them still do, and I should just remember that it’s my business, my baby, my body, and do what I want. I found myself telling her that I didn’t really know what I wanted. And she said not to worry, everybody I spoke to would tell me what they wanted, and I could pick and choose from the options everybody else would give me. Including her, she said, and that made me laugh. Had I told people yet, she wanted to know, and I said no, not really. I thought of her going off for six months and telling nobody. And I asked her how the wagon was going, and she said it was rattling along, not that comfortable, but a nice view. It felt funny to like her but I did.

  *

  Tuesday morning I rang Oliver.

  ‘I’ve considered everything you’ve said,’ I told him, ‘and it adds up to nothing. I won’t be going.’

  There was silence at the other end.

  ‘I hope you find him,’ I said. ‘If there’s anything I can do that doesn’t put me at risk, I’d be glad to do it. If I hear from him, I’ll let you know. I wish you luck.’ I paused a moment more, and as he didn’t seem to be saying anything I was about to say goodbye and put the phone down when I heard a sigh.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said.

  ‘Well, I’m sure you understand my position,’ I said.

  ‘Sadly yes,’ he said. ‘Better than you.’

  I had no time really to wonder what he meant by that.

  ‘I didn’t want to do it this way,’ he said.

  I said nothing.

  ‘But if you insist.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘I have on file,’ he said. And stopped, waiting for me to twig, or stop him, or something. I must have been a bit dim that day because I didn’t twig. ‘Some unpressed charges,’ he said.

  I began to twig.

  ‘Drink driving, and so on. And attempting to bribe a police officer.’

  ‘Succeeding,’ I pointed out, saying the obvious while the actual nub of what he was saying sat there like a lump I couldn’t bear to look at.

  ‘Whatever,’ he said. ‘Makes no difference.’

  No.

  He let me mull on it for a moment.

  Two years ago, during the time when Jim had been laying claim to Lily and I was concerned to keep my reputation utterly clean, in order not to seem unsuitable at any custody hearing, through no fault of my own (my designated driver having stomped out during a row, in the middle of Piccadilly Circus) I got done for drunken driving. Ben Cooper offered to lose the charges – OK, I asked him to. It seemed worth it. And he did, and proceeded to blackmail me over it, making me chum up (lord, how the phrases come back) with Eddie Bates, who he knew to have a thing about me. He didn’t tell me that bit. Just shoved me into danger for his own purposes. He knew Eddie Bates was about to go down, and didn’t want to go with him. They’d been in the vice business together. With my sister. You know. All that. So Ben thought perhaps I could find out something to save his skin. I was the straw he clutched at. But in the end they all sank and I swam, except that they came bobbing up again – Cooper on perpetual sick leave, claiming to be too ill and upset to face trial, and Bates bouncing around Egypt sending me letters and bribes and trying to carry me off up the Nile.

  And now up from the depths floats the old original drink-driving charge that Cooper put in a file and lost two years ago, and one he must have added on the side – trying to bribe him. Funny old thing that he is. Laying it up like wine, for use when he needed it. Only it’s not him using it, it’s Oliver.

  ‘So?’ I said. Trying to face it out. If he is going to try and use what I think he is then I want to hear him say it.

  However good a mother I’ve been to her, I am not her mother, and thanks to Jim and his custody bid social services know about us. I remember Harry saying to that woman, the court welfare officer, ‘It would be a shame if Ms Gower has to lose her good reputation just through being a witness to criminal behaviour.’ Something like that.

  ‘So if the charges were reactivated, social services might be interested,’ said Oliver.

  My turn to be silent.

  ‘Of course, apart from that it’s quite nebulous,’ he continued, ‘but there’s a possible assault charge, on Eddie Bates, there’s the abduction you mentioned, now why didn’t you report it, not to mention the goings-on in Egypt a few weeks ago. Why did a convicted criminal give you £100,000? And there’s your connection with those young men wanted by the Egyptian police …’

  ‘He was dead all along and they’re in the clear,’ I said.

  ‘I thought you were going to let me know if you heard anything about them,’ he snapped. ‘Anyway. As I was saying. All this could be investigated. The welfare of your child could become an issue.’

  He gave me a moment or two to think about that. Then continued.

  ‘However, I believe you to be an innocent person caught up in some bad events. All I need is for you to prove it to me.’

  Oh yes.

  ‘By doing your civic duty.’

  Bastard.

  ‘You wouldn’t go through with it,’ I said. Rather pathetically, because I knew it didn’t matter if he did or not. He could, and that was all the leverage he needed.

  ‘Yes I would. Just start it off, set it going. It would take forever.’

  ‘Nothing would stick.’

  ‘So what? It could ruin your life anyway. And Lily’s.’

  ‘You unutterable bastard,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, well, I dare say. You’ll need to go soon. My secretary will be in touch.’

  *

  Unutterable, unutterable bastard. The whole point of anything, ever, had been to protect Lily, to keep her safe, with me. Years ago, I saw Jim, violent boyfriend, father as we thought of the child, as the enemy whose rights I respected, and I tried to arm myself against him. Now, again, my own weapons rise up to get me. I did one wrong thing, for all the right reasons. And here I am.

  I went out on to my balcony and looked out over the A40, watching the cars creeping under the rain, and felt panic rising in my throat.

  I have to go. And if I go, I will see Sa’id.

  SEVEN

  Making friends

  Chrissie rang again that night, while I was in the bath with Lily. She left a message: she was feeling a bit … a bit down, and did I want to go to the pictures? I rang her back, saying I couldn’t because of babysitting –‘Oh stupid me!’ she said – and I found myself inviting her over. She said would I mind if she brought her pregnant lady yoga book, it was way out of date probably but she’d found it so useful, but she didn’t want, you know, to be one of those bossy friends who give you stuff all the time … I said, no, bring it, I’d be interested.

  Then I did a doubletake on the word friend.

  I sat and thought about it for a moment.

  Then I called Fergus Droyle. Fergus is a semi-divorced Irish Catholic crime correspondent with a taste for Russian literature, and he drinks too much. We met in a holiday camp in Algeria, of all ridiculous places. His line was on voicemail – leaving a pager number, a mobile number and the number of a secretary. Or I could leave a message. Or fax him. Or e-mail him. All numbers given. I decided that today I would honour the pager.

  He rang me back almost immediately.

  ‘Droyle, you rang,’ he said. I thought he probably hadn’t recognized my number and thought I was some hot informant or policeman or something. I let him know that I was me.

  ‘Finally!’ he said. Fergus was always wanting the full Eddie Bates story from me; I am always ringing him for confirmation and information and refusing to tell him anything. ‘You picked one of the worst moments though,’ he said.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Trying to get off with a teenager,’ he said. ‘She ordered green Chartreuse and it’s only eight o’clock. Should I give
up on her?’

  ‘How old is she?’

  ‘Oh, twenty-five. I don’t know.’

  ‘Twenty-five’s OK,’ I said. Depending, of course, on the twenty-five-year-old. Sa’id is twenty-five. Well, twenty-six. And nobody would call him a teenager.

  ‘Yippee!’ he cried. ‘But she won’t want me. I’m a fat balding self-pitying drunken slob – what are you doing? I’ll lose her and take you out instead.’

  ‘Ah well,’ I said. ‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about …’ For a moment I heard him wondering if he’d heard right, and translating what I’d said as a come-on, so I talked over it.

  ‘Mrs Bates,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, lord, not Madame again. Is she apologizing to you now for the letters and that? Yeah, I know. She’s on the twelve steps. She’s – Jesus, I feel sorry for her, I do.’ (Fergus attempted the twelve steps once but got stuck on the fact that they kept going on about a superior being: ‘I’m a fucking Catholic,’ he’d say. ‘Do you mind if I call him God?’)

  ‘She wants to be my friend,’ I said.

  ‘She was always flakey as fuck,’ he said. ‘I’d’ve thought you had enough flakey friends already. But you know, she had a time of it with that man – he put her through it. And she loved him! The way she loved that man was a crime. The lies he told her. You remember her at the funeral? Of course you do.’ He laughed. He’d introduced us there – our first meeting. He’d been pissed off with me because I wouldn’t be quoted for his valedictory piece on Eddie. So he’d pitched me into the drunken Chrissie’s den.

  ‘How much did she know about him?’ I asked.

  ‘To be honest, I think not that much. About what he did, you mean? I think she just thought he was a businessman. She’s not what you would call stringent in the brains department. Not rigorous. Listen – can I call you in the morning? You’re not going away for Christmas, are you? Or tonight, you know, if I don’t achieve my teenage nirvana with this wench. Wish me luck. I’ll speak to you.’