by Louisa Young
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m waiting to be charged with murder in a foreign land. I can’t go home until strangers have decided what to do with me. I tried to ring Darla and I can’t get through. He turns up,’ she nodded towards Harry, ‘which is really terribly confusing. The policeman took away my passport. I want to go to a meeting because if I don’t I know there’s a bloody bar in this hotel, and I have been imagining from your descriptions the large and very bad-quality martini that’s waiting down there with my name on it. In Arabic. There’s a limit to what a girl can take, Angeline, I’m sure you know that. But I’m … oh. I’m glad to see you. Did you tell him yet?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘No!’ said Harry. ‘Jesus, girl, what’s the matter with you?’
I looked up at him, looked at his face, and said, ‘Oh please. Please, Harry.’
‘This can’t last,’ he said.
‘Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold,’ said Chrissie.
We both stared at her.
‘Clearly it’s time to get drunk,’ she said. ‘Harry, you must do it for us.’
‘I don’t think so,’ he said.
‘Did you see Shezli?’ I asked.
‘Elvis?’ said Harry.
‘Yes.’
‘So did I,’ said Chrissie. ‘Little man, big power over me …’
I was watching her. Still wobbly, definitely.
‘What did he say?’ I asked Harry. Elvis indeed. But it made me giggle.
‘More of the same,’ he said.
I was putting myself down on a sunlounger, but it was useless. I was too wet, and the sun was heading west. It wouldn’t be long till Iftar. Sa’id would be eating soon. Can I call him when he’s eaten, when he’s balanced again?
Balanced! I’m a fine one to talk.
Can I call him at all after what I’ve just been thinking?
‘Go and get changed,’ said Harry. ‘You’ll catch your death.’
I stood up again. Uselessly, and stood there, uselessly.
‘Come on,’ said Harry, and not for the first time in my life he took me by the arm and led me to safety.
*
‘What’s it been like, having my name on your arm?’ I asked him in the corridor.
He looked at me.
‘Well, there are situations where it doesn’t help,’ he said. ‘Specially not your name.’
‘Why specially mine?’
‘When Amygdala saw you … she took one look at you and left me.’ Amygdala was his girlfriend, last summer.
‘When did she see me?’
‘Queensway. That night. You were with Sa’id.’
‘Oh.’ I remembered that night. We’d been eating, they’d passed by, I hadn’t seen them.
‘I’d told her you were a horse I had won on … she didn’t fall for it. Specially not once she saw you.’
I laughed all the way to the door. Then as he opened it he turned to let me pass, and he stood there, and he said, ‘Well?’
‘Well what?’ I replied, in time-honoured fashion.
‘Well why didn’t you tell him?’
‘The time wasn’t right,’ I said after a sulky pause.
He stepped into the room, and prowled around it a little.
‘Do you want me to?’ he said, not unkindly. ‘I can call him now.’
‘Don’t you fucking dare,’ I said.
‘So?’ he said. ‘What?’
I stood there in my wet dress.
‘It hasn’t been possible,’ I said. ‘Believe me I’ve tried.’
‘What are you holding out for?’ he said. ‘He loves you, he wants you, he’ll have you, you want him, you love him, what the fuck’s the problem? I wish,’ he said, suddenly vehement, ‘that you would get on with it.’
‘He doesn’t want to want me,’ I said.
Harry looked at me.
‘That’s bollocks,’ he said. ‘That’s just bollocky – that’s nothing.’
‘No, it’s not,’ I said, because I knew what it was. I could quite understand why he would want not to want me. He knows that I would stay here for him, if that’s what it took …
Oh, but would I? Look at that list of potential problems again. Where would Lily go to school? How would she take to Arabic? How would living in the desert affect her asthma? How are the hospitals? What would the climate do to her eczema? A hundred and twenty degrees, sometimes, in the summer? There’s no way Lily could bear a Luxor summer. And next June, when I give birth, insha’Allah – do I want to give birth here?
And my total and complete loss of independence … what kind of burden would I be on him, with no wings? The independent weigh twice as much, when they become dependent. There is a liberty for him in London that I could never find here.
And Mum and Dad. Friends. Work. Finance. Even if it were Cairo, not here in the desert …
And …
Harry? Lily’s just-found father? After all we’ve been through? I tried to imagine telling Harry that Lily and I were moving to Luxor. It made my stomach shake. I wondered if he had thought of it, all the times he encourages me to talk to Sa’id. How could he not have? Or does he assume … as Sa’id thinks I do … that we would live in London?
Whether or not Sa’id believes I would stay, he thinks I would leave, later. Like his mother did. Like I did before. And he doesn’t fancy that, and who can blame him.
And yet, and yet. It’s so negative.
And yet that which I understand I must respect. Which put me in what I think is called a double bind. Or a triple. Thought of Chrissie’s large martini. I’ll have a triple bind, please, on the rocks.
Actually I’d rather not.
‘Anyway, he won’t do anything, or say anything, till I’m saved,’ I said.
‘Well, that I can understand,’ said Harry.
‘I think he doesn’t believe in “mixed marriages”,’ I said, putting a self-conscious emphasis on the phrase because it’s stupid.
‘All marriages are mixed,’ said Harry. ‘Anyway, in that case he shouldn’t have been shagging you without a Durex.’
‘How tenderly you put things,’ I murmured.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’
I sat on the bed. ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s true.’
‘Have a bath or something,’ he said. ‘Go on.’ He knows what my comfort thing is. Sweet. Tender, in his way.
I went and turned on the taps, pulled off the cold wet dress. Felt stupid.
‘Do you want me to talk to him?’ said Harry, from the bedroom. I thought about that a little.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘In case,’ he said.
There was a great deal unspoken between us.
I climbed into the bath even though it was only an inch or so full. Just to do something, to make some change to a situation in which I was powerless. The water flowed in, hot, and the room started to steam.
‘We could try another way,’ he said.
‘Another way of what?’
‘Another way out.’
‘Like what?’
‘From London,’ he said.
But we both knew there was no other way out of this mess. Not one as swift and effective as this would be. If it worked.
I tried to sink down into the water but there wasn’t enough. A question which had been lurking in the recesses came floating out.
‘Hon?’ I said.
‘What?’
‘What you said this afternoon, about British law … Is that true?’
‘Pointless question,’ he said.
‘I’m asking it anyway.’
I could feel his silence through the bathroom door.
‘Get to the point then,’ he said.
I thought about that for a moment. It pleased me.
‘Did you lie to protect me?’
I waited, thinking it was just another of those silences. But no answer came.
A while later I murmured: ‘Poor Chrissie.’ My mind had wandered on.
He la
ughed, quietly.
‘What?’
‘I love your ridiculous sympathy,’ he said.
Yeah, well.
*
She came and knocked at the door about half an hour later. Harry called her in and she entered shyly.
‘I didn’t know …’ she said.
He smiled at her. I could tell, though I was still in the bath, topping up hot water. I think he’d been reading.
‘Says it all,’ he said.
The bathroom door was still open, the steam creeping around.
‘Should we eat?’ she said.
We didn’t answer, so she ordered a bucketload of room service, and we sat, and we ate. We were all very quiet. All of us knew there was absolutely nothing we could do.
*
When Chrissie went to bed, I sat for a while with Harry, still not saying much. There was a very deep fatigue about, part calm after a storm, part calm before the storm. Part calm in the eye of the storm. The windows were open and the rivery smell had crept across the Corniche and all the way up to the room.
‘You remember when Eddie died before?’ he asked suddenly.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Does it feel different this time round?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know why … Last time, I suppose, it was a shock. This time I’m used to the idea. Last time, even though he was the danger, it felt dangerous that he was dead … in case I had done it. Of course it’s dangerous this time too. But last time I thought I might have contributed, and this time I know I didn’t.’
‘Even though last time there was no question of legal proceedings, and this time there is?’
‘Evidently I mind more about being innocent than I do about being thought innocent.’
‘So far,’ he said. ‘It could go very wrong, this.’
‘If it does I will just throw myself on the mercy of … whoever seems to have any mercy.’ I’m not thinking about it. There’s nothing I can do.
He grunted.
‘How about you?’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Him being dead?’
‘Ah.’ Silence, for a while. ‘You spend years chasing someone, catch them, have them swiped from under your nose, then they die anyway. There’s that. And there’s him, himself.’
‘Your ex-boss.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well?’
He wrapped his long arm around himself again, to scratch his back. ‘He was a corrupter, a bastard, a mad person.’
‘Did he corrupt you?’
‘In a way.’
Harry had grown so much more communicative in recent years that I had almost forgotten how reticent he could be when he was uncomfortable: his umms, and pauses, and diversions.
‘How?’ I asked.
‘Have you forgotten?’ he asked.
I tried to think of what I might have forgotten.
He seemed a bit amused that I couldn’t think of anything. Bemused too.
‘All the lies I told you? Not telling you I was a copper, letting you think I was working for him, telling you he was dead …’
‘You thought he was dead …’
‘Not telling you when I learnt he wasn’t …’
‘You couldn’t have – well, you could have, but …’
An echo of our old joke – I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.
‘I deceived you, a lot,’ he said. Sitting on the bed, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, hands hanging heavy in between. Looking up at me under his brow with his muddy green eyes. ‘I did. I’m sorry.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘I trust you.’
We sat a while longer. The moon sailed by outside. The world carried on spinning. The river flowed on.
*
Later I went out for a walk. Strolled up the Corniche, past the great Temple of Luxor, its columns huge in the night, and hanging above it the green lights of the mosque of Abu al-Haggag, perched above the great court of Ramses II, twinkling away above his massive monuments to his own self-importance. The Ramadan children’s funfair twinkling along too. Up to the right past the Brooke Animal Hospital, listening for the soft breath of the retired calèche horses, smelling the warm smell of it, mixed with frankincense, and the hot oil of the felafal stand up on the corner by the police station. Past the man who sells clay pots: yellow ochre, moth grey, burnt brown, powdery dry, every desert colour in rows on the streetside.
I went over to the felafal stand and ordered myself a sandwich. The felafals were still sizzling away in their iron pan over the gas burner, not quite ready yet. We stood about and waited, and chatted.
‘Tell me,’ I said, because I was in that kind of a mood, ‘do you think a khawageyya and an Egyptian can marry and be happy?’
That perked them up.
‘You want a husband?’ cried the felafal man. ‘Ya Ahmed! Come here!’ He summoned an array of his friends from around the place. ‘OK: this is Ahmed, this is Yussuf, this is Ali, this is – well, his name means Scarabeo, scarab, because he pushes shit – excuse me – and this is Boutros, he’s a Christian, you know Copt. You are Christian? OK. But no, they won’t do. Ahmed is too fat.’ (He was quite fat.) ‘And Yussuf is too stupid, and Ali can’t afford another wife, and Scarabeo is too dirty – marry me! You like me?’ he grinned, most appealingly. ‘I’m very nice! But do I like you? I don’t know. Can you cook?’
The others were joining in – objecting to his descriptions of them, assessing my charms.
‘Can you cook?’
‘Prove it!’
‘Well, these are ready,’ I said, looking at the crispy little felafal bouncing in their hot oily bed. Someone handed me the cross between a sieve and a ladle that they use for taking them out.
‘You do the bread,’ I said to the felafal man (‘Ah, she’s bossy!’ said Scarabeo) and he neatly split the pittas open while I checked who wanted pickles and who wanted tahina and who wanted hot sauce, and in moments everybody had their sandwiches.
‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘Now put on a new lot.’
I turned down the gas, swiftly squished little patties out of the tacky green and white gloop of beans and parsley in its tin bowl, slid them hissing into the oil, watched as they started to turn golden, filling the air with the scent. God, this smell, if you haven’t eaten since Imsaak …
‘OK,’ said the felafal man. ‘You can marry me.’
I laughed. We all laughed. I started to eat my delicious sandwich.
‘It’s not you she wants,’ said a policeman lounging on the periphery. ‘Sa’id el Araby will fry you like one of your felafals if you try to marry her.’
I stopped laughing. Then started again.
‘Goodnight, boys,’ I said. Walked off, eating, laughing.
‘Don’t go!’ they called behind me. ‘Stay with us! Stay in Luxor! You can marry Sa’id, we don’t mind!’
There’s a lot of sugarblood around here.
*
Later still I went and sat on the cold balcony outside Chrissie’s window. Looked out over, to the mountain beyond, and tried to think of his mind, but I couldn’t see into it any more. Remembered moments of connection. Ran through moments of joy.
‘It doesn’t heal,’ he’d said. And I’d said, ‘It can.’ Because I have healed so much. He doesn’t know healing. He resists it. How reluctant he was to let the wound of his mother heal. He sees perfect, and he sees broken.
That’s all. He sees us as broken. I saw him, swiftly, as an idealistic boy.
Went to bed in the end. Lay there like nothing, holding on to my hip bones. Wanted Lily so much that I might have rung her.
SEVENTEEN
A little touch of someone in the night
Harry was touching my shoulder, in darkness.
In my sleep I rolled over, as if to roll into the embrace of the man who is always beside you when you sleep.
‘Sa’id’s on the phone,’ he said softly. ‘It came through to the other room.’
&nbs
p; I stumbled through. Harry stood there by the window, towel round his waist, his torso long and grey in the pre-dawn. Pre-Imsaak, even.
*
‘Forgive me,’ said Sa’id. ‘I can’t say this to your face.’ I felt he hadn’t slept.
‘What?’ I said, standing half naked.
‘I have a …’
His voice was all … all impossible.
‘What?’ I said.
There was a long silence.
‘What?’
Nothing.
‘I’ll meet you,’ I said.
‘No,’ he managed.
‘Where?’
‘No.’
‘I’ll be on the pontoon.’
‘No,’ he said.
‘I’ll be there,’ I said.
I dressed against the morning chill. Took his scarf: the huge, thick, white one. White on white. The one which had … that one. Harry was leaning in his doorway as I padded down the corridor; I took his hand for a moment as I passed and for a split second I wanted to throw myself into his arms, on to his mercy, at his feet. Didn’t. Walked out, down the filmstar stairs, and on to the Corniche, beneath the ilexes and the palms in the fairy-light necklaces, neon colours against the dark lapis blue sky, and across the main road and its flowerbeds and over to where the pontoons stretched out into the river, where obsidian covered the surface of the water, and the colours of night lay unmoving. Behind the Winter Palace the stripey thing was imminent: green, and gold, and crimson. Indigo, and pearl, and crawling darkness. To the west, on the mountain, the strange echo.
Pearl. Does he really think he is grit in my oyster?
I sat on the wall with my back to the dawn and my face to the river. The fairy lights hung in the trees above me, gleaming, jewel-like artificial fruit among the dark and sober leaves. Orion – Osiris, to the ancients – hung above them.
A little while later he came up beside me and touched me on the shoulder, and left his arm lying along me as he leant on the wall.
‘Sweet sweet darling,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘What is it?’
Silence.
‘Habibti,’ he said, after a while.
We’re sitting on the fucking Corniche again.
But my heart lifted to it, because he had used the female endearment.
The silences were long, though.
‘You can go,’ he said. ‘You and Chrissie, all free, all done, if I ask him.’ He paused. ‘Not if I don’t. He is waiting for me to say.’
