Desiring Cairo Read online

  ‘We’re seeing each other now, aren’t we?’ she said, and of course we were, so that threw me. I knew I had a point but I’d lost it already. Oh yes – that it would be easier when one of them died. I didn’t want to mention that, though.

  I’m as bad as them. Not mentioning all over the place. Well, I learnt it from them and they learnt it from their parents and they learnt it from their parents and they learnt it from Queen Victoria.

  I wondered what Sarah and Hakim were talking about, at that moment, in Brighton. If you’ve been separate for fifteen years, do you still not mention? The image of him asleep at her feet haunted me. Hakim sleeping at her feet, Lily sleeping in my arms. And where am I with my mother? Afraid to mention death. As if she didn’t know that people die. Well she does. I know she does, like I know she’s had sex. And what is, can be spoken of. I can speak. I spoke.

  ‘It would be much easier for us to be closer as a family if we lived closer. You haven’t been to my flat for about a year. And what about when you or dad die? Touch wood and all that, but. You will. And then. Um.’ I found I was slightly breathless.

  Mum didn’t take much notice at all. ‘We talked about that when we moved,’ she said, ‘but it didn’t seem that either you or Janie were particularly settled at the time, geographically or otherwise, so we didn’t think we could really take it into account.’

  They’d talked about it?

  ‘You never mentioned it,’ I said.

  ‘Well, we weren’t – we’re not – planning on being a burden, you know,’ she said, with a little sideways smile.

  ‘I don’t think you get much control over how much of a burden you are,’ I said, meaning, over how much grief is felt at your death. She took it differently: ‘Well, we’ve got some money, and we’ve got the house. When one of us goes the other will stay on, and …’

  ‘But you’ll be alone!’ I expostulated.

  ‘People are alone, love, when their husband dies, or their wife.’

  Well that shut me up. Double whammy: my company, love, existence, etc., doesn’t count (nor incidentally Lily’s); and well I wouldn’t know, would I, because I have never had this marvellous thing, this husband/wife thing.

  Evidently I was feeling particularly defensive that day.

  ‘Surely that’s when me and Lily are meant to be a comfort to you,’ I said, rather sadly.

  ‘I’m sure you will be,’ she said.

  I felt about six. I wanted to hug her but I didn’t. Why didn’t Janie’s death break down all this crap? I thought. Then I said it out loud, whoosh, just like that.

  ‘Why didn’t Janie’s death break down all this crap?’

  I don’t know what I expected. That she’d tell me off for saying crap, I suppose.

  ‘What crap exactly?’ she said. Not as if to deny there was any crap, but to know, exactly, which of the many available craps was upsetting me. I’d never heard her use the word before.

  ‘I want to hug you but I won’t because I think you might not like it. I was really scared to mention death. I’m upset that you say you’ll be alone when dad dies because you won’t be, I’ll be here, and Lily. I know it’s not the same but it’s not nothing. That kind of crap.’ I didn’t say this. Well, you don’t, do you? Not if you’re older than six.

  Hakim will be talking to Sarah now. Who he hasn’t talked to since he was five.

  She was looking at me with, well, a fondness, and a sadness. For a moment I was full of hope, girding myself to speak like a raindrop on a leaf swelling before it falls. Then, ‘Come to the kitchen,’ she said. ‘I must see about the carrots.’

  What crap indeed.

  I felt truly embarrassed, for her and for me. Maybe we’re just not capable. Maybe she doesn’t say anything about her feelings because they’re too big and dangerous. Maybe she doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life weeping for Janie. Maybe she thinks I’ve come over all Californian. It’s not that she hates me. Or maybe all that applies to me not to her at all. For Mum read Angeline.

  Elvis Presley was a twin, and his brother Jesse died at birth. His mother used to say to him when he was naughty: ‘Jesse wouldn’t have done that. Jesse wouldn’t have grieved his mama so.’ This was not how I felt about Janie. But the dead, you know … They are elsewhere. There’s nothing you can do about them. So we went in to see about the carrots.

  *

  Over lunch (roast chicken, carrots, potatoes, runner beans chopped into diagonal diamond shapes, stewed damsons from the tree) we talked about the rules of basketball, in which Lily and Dad were interested, and the weather, and Princess Diana’s funeral (which I had hoped to avoid, and so evidently had everybody else, judging by how long the conversation lasted), and Lily’s new school, and the damson crop, and as we talked I became angrier and angrier, cursing the bloody carrots and my mother and the whole thing. She was calm, giving Lily more beans. Our recent conversation didn’t seem to have bothered her. Bothered me though.

  I caught her eye by staring at her. She shot me the same glance, fond and sad. I felt suddenly very patronised. More so because nobody else seemed to feel that anything was going on. Such an adolescent feeling. Bursting with injustice and everybody else just handing round beans. Any minute now I’d be running to my room and throwing myself on the bed yelling, ‘How could you how could you nobody understands me,’ and nobody would have a clue what I was upset about.

  The problem is not that I’m upset and she’s not, it’s that she evaded the conversation. That’s what really annoyed me. She buggered off.

  ‘No she didn’t, she went to see to the carrots. The carrots were going to burn.’

  It was Janie’s voice, in my head. This happens sometimes. I don’t like it. It makes me unsure which of us is, or was, who. It’s sneaky. Particularly because it obviously isn’t her. I don’t know why some part of my head sends another part messages in her voice, usually messages saying very sensible things. Like this one.

  It continued.

  ‘You’re so bloody impatient. Everything doesn’t fall into place the moment you have an idea, you know.’

  ‘I know it doesn’t,’ I said, crossly. Teenage girls doing bitchy character analysis, sniping.

  I said it out loud. Mum and Dad and Lily were looking at me. I smiled like a dog that’s just had an injection.

  NINE

  Sunday Night

  Lily and I were in the bath on Sunday night, porpoising about, when it occurred to me I didn’t want Hakim letting himself in and witnessing this mother and child bacchanalia, which would be too much for his modesty.

  ‘I wonder where Hakim is,’ I said.

  ‘He doesn’t need us now, he’s got his mummy,’ she said. Well, she could be right. She often is. Actually she is the original babe and suckling out of whose mouth truth comes. But I wondered anyway.

  Lily had made me put on a green clay facepack, and was now treating me as a monster. I went under water and blew whale spouts. She laughed and laughed and when I came up she was gone. I could hear her on the phone in the other room. ‘Hello this is Lily who’s that … oh. Goodbye,’ and she hung up.

  ‘Child!’ I yelled.

  ‘Coming, Mummy, don’t shout at me,’ she said.

  ‘Please don’t answer the phone and just hang up. It’s incredibly inconvenient. Now if it rings again just leave it, OK? I would have thought you knew better.’

  She looked cross.

  ‘Well don’t be surprised if I tell you off. It might’ve been someone I wanted to talk to. Oh bugger …’

  I clambered out, steamy and dripping.

  ‘Don’t say bugger say bother,’ she recited. ‘Anyway you didn’t want to talk to him.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘It was Eddie Bates and you don’t like him.’

  What the

  For a moment I felt the world stop. Then it lurched back to reality. The bitch. What a nasty, nasty … I breathed deep a few times.

  ‘Lil,’ I said, ‘if the phone rings,
don’t answer it. Just leave it. OK?’

  She started to object, but she smelt my anger and gave up easily enough. I stomped about the flat in my towel, spitting about the nastiness, the undertoad clammy nastiness of Mrs Bates’s trick, the insidious invasiveness of it. I 1471ed. Number withheld, of course. Then I put Lily into bed and told her monster stories for almost an hour.

  *

  When she was asleep, I tried to let the calm of my lovely flat descend and soothe me. The calm of Sunday night. In my strange little top-corner flat, my curiously separate territory, seemingly tacked on like an eyrie to the rest of the block, it is possible to feel utterly at peace and a million miles away. Only my floor and one wall are attached to the world, the rest of it faces the wind and the sky like a clifftop nest. The A40 swells and ebbs at the cliff’s feet; people and pavement are mere pebbles and beaches. Sometimes the roar of the crowd at the QPR ground comes up to me on the wind, like booming sea in a far-off ocean-bound cave. (Not often, granted. This is QPR, not Manchester United.) I can watch storms coming and going, see rainbows that the rest of the world misses. Once I went to Heir Island, off the very southwestern tip of County Cork, and sat in an outside privy on a heather-clad hillside looking out over yellow and purple hillside to the ever-changing sea, knowing that west of me there was only America, and south only the Canaries, and Antarctica. I feel like that in my flat. West to the sea, south to the world. If you’re high enough you can overlook anything.

  And of course there is plenty to overlook. Plenty of cars and filth and poverty and unkindness. You’d die of grief if you stared my neighbourhood in the face every day. So I don’t.

  Harry does. When I think about it I’m so proud of him. Over the years he has, regularly, broken up fights, and caught murderers, and stopped people doing appalling things to each other. That’s what he’s for. (Don’t tell me I’m being naïve. That is what the police are for. They may not all have it as their top priority but it is what we pay them for. To clear up the most disgusting crap that society produces. I won’t go into detail. We all know.)

  Meanwhile I rest in my eyrie at the end of the balcony, with its deck chair and plants outside and its comfort and hygiene inside, and listen to my child sleep, and count the stillness.

  When I was a dancer, the most important part of the dance for me was the stillness. The moment of collection, concentration, balance. The moment held. If you can’t hold the moment, it doesn’t matter how much or how well you sway and shake and flick and wriggle. I told the teacher who first explained this to me Isaiah Berlin’s story of the hedgehog and the fox; how the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. The fox runs round and round in circles yapping at the hedgehog he wants to eat, but the hedgehog has rolled up into a ball. A motionless ball.

  I’ve always been a bit of a fox, me. But I know about the hedgehog. I appreciate him. Admire him. I am considering becoming a hedgehog. Later. In the meantime I practise, on Sunday nights.

  Lying on the sitting room floor, hedgehogging, fox stuff came flying at me. Eddie’s wife with her tricks. Razor blades. Eddie, in his coffin. The funeral, on Tuesday. Fergus, and what I am going to tell him. If anything. And Harry, and his girlfriend. And Mum and Dad. And Janie, as always, seeping through when my defences are down.

  You see Janie was my best thing. My sister, ten months younger than me. My companion and collaborator. A girl of startling pride and honesty. Once when we were about twelve a man stopped us in the street. Pretending to be lost, pretending to show us a map, or an address on a piece of paper, he showed us a dirty picture that he had torn from a magazine. Janie hit him, thwack across his face. And gave him an earful, about what was right and what was wrong in behaviour to young girls. When building workers yelled at us she’d shout back. ‘Oy, big tits!’ they’d cry, and she’d go into a pantomime of startledness: ‘Oh my God, you’re right, I never noticed! Thank you so much for pointing them out!’

  Janie was beautiful and she made good jokes. When we talked we could leave out every second sentence because we knew without saying what the next step in the conversation would be. People would wonder what the hell this gobbledegook was. We’d climb up on to the roof of our old building, where we used to live off Ladbroke Grove, in the basement flat, and we’d look out over West London and sing T Rex songs, and do harmonies to ‘Hello Darkness My Old Friend’ and ‘Maybe The Last Time I Don’t Know’. She’d fix me up with boys. I’d go shy, and she’d say ‘You look lovely’ as we set out for the evening. And she’d say ‘You can’t have that, it’s not wholemeal.’ We swapped clothes. At moments of crisis we climbed into each other’s beds. She sent me postcards with think bubbles and speech bubbles written in over the picture. Every Friday afternoon we’d draw up an agenda, who we wanted to see, who we wouldn’t be at home to, self-improvement plans to be put into operation, parties not to be missed, enemies to be insulted, friends to be supported. First item was always:

  1) Make agenda.

  For thirty years.

  And then you find out years after her death that for years before she had been betraying you, lying to you, using you, exploiting you.

  Actually, I don’t believe it. I don’t believe she could have done it. It must have been some other Janie.

  Take this Princess Di thing. There are rumours all over the place that there was cocaine in the car, in her bag, in her bloodstream. Typical rumour stuff, but say it was true. What would her people say? The people who love her, feel for her, grieve for her, the people who have bound their teddies to crash barriers across the nation out of love of her? Joe and Josephine Ordinary Brit, lead players in the grievathon? Would they say Oh Diana, how you are besmirched, now we hate you? Would they say Oh Diana, how you are besmirched, but we forgive you? No, they would turn like Actaeon’s hounds on the press and the royal family, and say How low can you sink, after everything you said, to dishonour her memory, to say such a thing, to make that up … They wouldn’t believe it. They couldn’t.

  But I’ve seen the evidence of my sister’s fall. I cannot deny what I found in that tea chest: the tapes, the proceeds. I know it is true but I cannot feel that it is true. My heart won’t accept it. Because, I suppose, I don’t understand it. I don’t understand why she would do such a thing. Isn’t that what the families always say? How could she treat us so thoughtlessly, how could she do this to me. The family’s always the last to know. Etc., etc.

  If I knew why she did it I could feel better.

  I go over this over and over.

  You know how the dance of the seven veils started. Ishtar the Babylonian goddess of fertility and chastity (yes both) went to get her dead husband Tammuz back from the underworld. She went down through the seven times seven gates and at every seventh gate she danced, and took off one of her veils and one of her jewels and gave veil and jewel to the guard, bribing and seducing. It was the dance of Shalome, as in Shalom and salaam, meaning peace and used as greeting and welcome. Salome was named after the dance when she performed it for Herod, to get Jokanaan’s head.

  I have longed to dance that dance. To follow Ishtar the dancer, and Demeter the mother, and Orpheus the lover, and Isis the sister-wife, and get my dead person back. My Tammuz, my Persephone, my Eurydice, my Osiris. But not in this case for love. In this case, just to find out what the hell was going on.

  Someone left a pair of ballet shoes hanging from a tree outside Kensington Palace for the dead Princess, with a letter saying, ‘You always wanted to be a dancer, now you can dance in heaven.’ Another was from a little boy, but written down by his mother. It said that he came to put flowers for her, and on the way back he wanted a milkshake but all the McDonalds they passed were shut, then they started to talk about Princess Diana and what a wonderful person she was, and suddenly they saw a McDonalds and it was open, and they know that this was because of her, and they wanted to thank her.

  We’re silly about death.

  But silly originally meant soulful, as in filled with soul
. Sheep were silly because they were blessed, because Jesus was a lamb. Not because they were foolish. So there you go. (And as for fools – well, we all know they are the wisest of all.)

  And Easter is the same word as Ishtar. Via the Nordic goddess Eostre. Rebirth, spring, cycles.

  Human beings really don’t like death. Never have.

  Bah.

  I jumped to my feet just as the telephone rang. I let the machine pick it up, and went to wash my hands, heart ticking. It was Fergus, wanting to know if I’d decided anything.

  Well I have. I have decided to go to Eddie’s funeral and push his wife into the grave with him.

  I didn’t want to tell Fergus anything about Eddie. I wanted everything to bugger off.

  Lily appeared in the hall, weeping.

  ‘I wet the bed,’ she said.

  I was pleased. Something easy to clear up. I cleared up.

  TEN

  Sa’id

  And then the next morning, Sa’id el Araby turned up. If I said all hell broke loose, I would be exaggerating. A bit.

  I stuck my nose out the door as you do, to smell the morning air, decide how many layers of clothes to put on, that kind of thing, some time during breakfast. There he was, among the pot plants, lounging like a cobra against the wall of the balcony. There was no mistaking him. He looked just as he had done at fifteen, he looked just like Hakim, just like his father. Only, my God … where he had been fifteen he was twenty-five, where Hakim’s face was innocent, his was knowing; where his father’s was noble, his was dangerous. A strong nose, a wide brow, a mouth which I don’t trust myself to describe. He had loose black curls, gleaming, a little too long, alive. And one of those wiry bodies where the muscle wraps on the bone and you can see the pulse beating when you look at his wrist. I didn’t look. I knew. He was gazing down at the ground, then when he looked up he had those Egyptian eyes, pale green grey like the tips of the palms at sunset in Aswan, opaque as the white sun over Cairo when the dust is up. Opaque but not blank. They knew exactly what they were looking at. Me.