The prince Amira was setting her sights on this time was not like the minor royalty who did not know all the names of their relatives because their families were so large. He was the exact opposite, someone who went into the tiniest of details, especially where his brothers and sisters and close relatives were concerned. He believed in honour, and the importance of a good name, and did not hesitate to discipline his young relatives if he heard scandalous tales about them.
When he heard stories of the Arab prostitute who was passing herself off as a princess and as a member of his family, he did not laugh as the others did, nor did he fly into a rage then forget all about it. He had made up his mind to find her and he did this in such a cunning way that he outsmarted Amira, who thought she was the one who was out looking for him.
She knocked once, twice, and, under her breath, told God she loved Him as He’d always taken care of her.
Amira stood looking down at the floor, arranging the fine black scarf half over her face so that her mouth and brown skin showed and one eye told half the tale. She smelled of incense, and her feminine modesty was designed to arouse, saying, ’I’m at your mercy. Even a drop of water will be enough.’ And yet at the same time she presented herself as an impregnable fortress, living as she did surrounded by women and children.
’London can be frightening sometimes,’ she murmured to the Prince, averting her eyes shyly and not explaining why. If the conversation were limited to a few words, that would count as the height of respectability between a male and female relative. She told him that she was weak and defenceless because she’d had so little experience outside the security of her family and country. She hoped he would get excited right away so that his mind would stop turning. When a man got an erection, his brains buried themselves in the earth.
She stole a glance at him and he appeared to be frozen to the spot. Everything about her made the situation more confusing for him: her clothes, behaviour, voice, accent, manner, smell, but he had her registration documents in front of him and her real name was Habiba Mustanaimi and she was Moroccan.
In order to make him flustered, to convince him, and to give herself the courage to continue with her charade - since he looked as fierce as a hawk - Amira asked him if she could use the phone.
’Please do.’
She had obliged him, the Prince, to respect her as a princess. Thank God! She dialled a number.
’Awatif, what did you have to eat? Tell the driver to go to Maroush to get food, and then pick me up at the hotel in an hour. And turn off the television.’
’Please. Have a seat.’
The Prince sat her down on the sofa and asked her what she’d have to drink. This was the first time she’d met somebody of his social standing and she wished she wasn’t only playing the role of a princess; he had gentle manners, a beautiful voice and was impeccably dressed. When he asked her what the problem was, she decided on a different scenario: she wasn’t going to tell this man she needed urgent medical treatment and was still waiting for the money to arrive from home; some people didn’t like to go near a sick woman. She told him her flat had been burgled and, certain that he would forget the whole affair as soon as she left, she added that naturally her brother would reimburse him in full.
’Who? Muhammad?’
She nodded her head shamefacedly.
’Don’t worry,’ he said. Then he called another room. ’Can you come here for a minute, please.’
The rapidity of her thoughts distracted her and she could not decide how much to ask for. Any sum seemed either too big or too small, as she wondered uncertainly whether to thank him graciously or merely mutter that it was his duty to help a member of his family, especially a woman.
Should she cry, or tell him the story of her husband leaving? But they all married more than once. She could give him the one about not being able to have children, or tell him she liked composing poetry.
No, not tonight. Another time. He didn’t seem to be in the mood for stories. He looked extremely serious, and so did the man who knocked at the door and came straight in without being required to identify himself.
One word had given her away: television.
She looked at the man’s empty hands and they balled into fists and he began aiming blows at her face, her head, her chest and her arms. When she cried out in pain, he hit her harder, on the legs and thighs, and she did not know where to put her hands. The blows came harder and faster as if she were being hit by more than one person.
She put her hands up to protect her face, like a boxer who’s lost all ability to defend himself in the ring, who forces his opponent to aim his punches at specific places. She opened her eyes to see if the man was wearing a ring. That was what made scars. When she couldn’t see one she sighed with relief. He was her father, brothers, cousins, any number of men from home beating her up. This was what she’d feared each time she went back to Morocco on a visit. If the Prince himself had hit her, she would not have felt so humiliated. She couldn’t bear the thought that this sidekick felt superior to her.
The Prince must have humiliated him, so now he’s getting his own back. The harder he hits me, the freer he feels, she moaned to herself, and then she wondered if she’d spoken out loud and not heard her own voice. The Prince didn’t seem to hear her either, even though she could see his expensive slippers. Only when he cleared his throat and began to speak did the beating stop.
’It’s very wrong for an Arab woman to play such tricks. Very wrong. At least next time, say you’re a princess from your own country. Don’t involve our country in your degrading behaviour.’
She was sure she couldn’t stand up, but the Prince picked up some papers from the table and read out ’Habiba Mustanaimi’ and, as if she was at school, the minute she heard her name she rose laboriously to her feet.
’You see, everything about you is down here in black and white. What happened tonight is a warning. But watch out! If I find there’s been another occurrence, I’ll ... There’s no need for me to threaten you. You know what will happen.’
She said words without any meaning, perhaps because her mouth was now closer to one ear than the other, but she was afraid she’d be forced to leave London. She could no longer breathe through her nose. She went down in the lift holding on to anything she could for support, her movement further impeded by the fact that the black veil had fallen down over her face. It was in order to be able to walk into hotels like this with her head held high that she’d become a princess. Now the dim lights pierced her eyes like skewers and she put up a hand to shade them. Her leg hurt. She must have bumped into the table, or else the man thought he was fighting Rocky Marciano. She started to cry. She’d tasted the violence of pimps and the resentment of malicious men towards people like her for the first time. All the men she’d done business with up until then had left their authority at the door, and succumbed to her affection and her willing ear. For this reason she’d never understood why foreign prostitutes were subjected to violence and relied on an English pimp instead of selling direct to Arab punters.
But the pain of knowing she hadn’t defended herself was fast overtaking the physical pain. Why had she let him hit her if she didn’t feel she deserved it? He’d not even hit her in that vicious way because she’d impersonated a princess and extorted money and slept with her victims: he’d done it because she was a prostitute, a whore.
As a favour to one of her clients she’d once agreed to talk to an Arab student who was doing a dissertation on the wholesale transfer of Arab society, including prostitution, from Beirut to London. At the end, when he finished his interview, she asked him what he would do if he found out his sister was on the game.
’Impossible,’ he repeated, then finally, when she kept goading him, ’I’d put a knife through her heart.’
Now, since she’d been unable to defend her pride, it seemed that she’d joined the ranks of the other foreigners and the English. Her expensive clothes and diamond watch hadn’t helped her,
nor had her affiliations - she refused to sleep with Iraqis after they invaded Kuwait, then stopped sleeping with Kuwaitis because they drove other Arab nationals out of Kuwait. But she’d stopped getting involved in politics - prostitutes, whores were not a part of society. They weren’t born of a mother’s womb: they grew on trees, without fathers or brothers or sisters or relatives of any sort. One punter was shocked when she told him she was an experienced chef, as if she wasn’t entitled to any other job.
She’d often escaped from dangerous situations before, so what had gone wrong tonight? Had she lost sight of her own fallibility, as she became convinced that all men were carbon copies of one another, like trucks discharging their loads in a single uniform manoeuvre? She remembered a punter screaming at her, pulling her hair, ’I want to ... I want to ... will you let me or not?’
’Of course I’ll let you,’ she’d answered. ’You’ve paid me and it’s my job. You’re hurting me. Please stop it.’
She let the dark, thin scarf cover her face, as if not wanting her mother to see her in that state, even though her mother was far away in Morocco. On one of her visits, her mother had shaken her in the middle of the night. ’Get up! Get up! Don’t sleep here, it’s not right. Your sisters are pure. You must make up a separate bed.’
So Amira had got out of bed, still warmed by the breath of her little sisters, each of whom wore around her neck a gold chain brought by Amira on a previous visit, from which dangled miniature Qur’ans or the words ’Ma sha’ Allah’ (What God wills) written in decorative calligraphy, or blue beads to ward off the evil eye. She pulled her mattress away from her sisters, wishing she were only as old as they were. Her sisters’ breathing rocked her to sleep, but she woke up the next morning to her mother cursing as the milk boiled over, then her sister banging on the door to hurry her up as she squatted in the privy, and she was glad to be going back to London to live in comfort with hot water, taxis, foreign perfume, restaurants, entertainment, health-care, all in easy reach.
Amira loved her mother and understood why she could not accept the money she brought her and would not let any of her sisters touch it. Her mother left it on the table, waiting for Amira to go out so she could call her pious old neighbour, who would climb the stairs and sit down with her prayer beads twined around her fingers, drinking tea and asking for another spoon of honey, before she started on the cleansing of the polluted money, not with water but with her prayers and incantations. Then she blessed it by leaving it on top of a closed Qur’an for a few moments before Amira’s mother began drawing a blue eye on each note and stowing it away in a secret place.
What would she do if she gave up her job? Even her mother had stopped asking her to repent and come home and get married. Who was she without it? How could she back out now when she’d given it all her youth and energy and intelligence? For its sake she hadn’t become a wife, a mother, or even a mistress. She knew the men who slept with her were, on balance, more interested in owning a fast car or an expensive coat. Still, she reminded herself of her good fortune; she’d come a long way since her first few months in London when she used to walk around in the freezing cold without tights or women friends or a permanent roof over her head, going from one maid’s job to another. In a few hours her strength would return to her and the violent pain subside. In any case, she was lucky: she was free; she wasn’t an Englishwoman on her way to the police station, after being caught in a squad-car’s lights trying to pick up a john, nor was she from the provinces, bussed in with others like sheep to spend a few days in London, opening their legs in cockroach-infested hotels. And she’d never been sexually abused when she was a child, or cheated by a punter.
She stopped a taxi and asked the driver to take her to Regent’s Park Mosque. When they arrived she asked him to wait while she went in to find out if her mother’s body had arrived from the undertaker’s. She believed her own lie and started crying, and the kindly driver assured her that he would switch off the meter. ’Take as long as you like. I’ll be here.’ She took a few steps, then on an impulse went back and paid the driver off and gave him a pound tip. She entered the mosque. Nahid was a poor thing. ’I used to think of myself as worthless. That’s why I did what I did,’ Nahid had told Amira one day. Amira didn’t know whether she was crying for Nahid or herself. She thought of herself as highly intelligent, as possessing an instinctive calculator for assessing time and money - just five minutes with a man ...
The warden at the desk asked if he could help her, and she enquired whether her mother’s body had arrived. After establishing her mother’s name, and the time the corpse was supposed to be delivered, he went away, then came back and asked her if she was quite sure.
’That my mother’s dead?’ She began to cry.
’I didn’t mean that. Please. Just wait there. Do have a seat. If you could wait a moment. Shall I make you a cup of tea?’
Her tension disappeared. She felt secure and sipped the tea as if she were tasting its sweetness for the first time in her life. She raised the veil from her face to take a sip, then put it back.
She thanked the man and got up to leave, saying perhaps she’d got the date wrong after all. As usual on such occasions she took a ten-pound note from her bag and pressed it into his hand and he thanked her, murmuring that he hadn’t done anything.
She came out into the biting cold and looked around her. If anyone had followed her they would have decided she’d gone into the mosque to repent. She couldn’t see a soul, but she had to be on her guard. She waited some time before getting into a black taxi. Was it because she covered her face that the other taxis didn’t want to stop for her? One of the drivers even spat at her, and another asked her, before he knew where she was heading, how big a tip she was going to give him.
’Fuck you,’ she said in English. He looked thunderstruck for a moment then gave her the finger and drove off.
If only she were in the Rolls-Royce with her attendants, waiting for the drama to begin, and anticipating the success that would leave her heart beating like a drum with excitement and happiness. The memory of it made her able to move her stiff leg more easily. No, she didn’t want that way of life to disappear, or to exchange it for the pre-princess mode, the life of ordinary people. She was so secure and dignified, even those closest to her felt her power and had become respectful, including Wasim and Samir. People had stopped calling her anything except Princess - even a relative who came over from Morocco and stayed with her until he found a job. She’d heard him asking Samir if the Princess was there. And she behaved like a princess with everyone she met. She would sit in her flat listening to stories, being entertained by the people who’d begun to flock around her in the hope of benefiting from her connections with generous Gulf Arabs.
’Your highness,’ one of the English drivers had said to her, ’can you help me get cheap petrol, since you’re from one of the oil states?’
’I’ll try,’ she said, looking at him solemnly. ’You’re a good man.’
She didn’t want to go back to chasing men in casinos and cafés, who, as they grew older, wanted younger and younger women; and London was packed with young girls. She was no longer the actor she used to be, someone who knew all her roles and adapted to the other actors who’d forgotten theirs. Going on like that she might have become a madam, or a ’mother’, like the woman with a headscarf she had seen working Edgware Road.
She couldn’t, and indeed didn’t want to, induce others to follow her way of life: she wanted to be responsible only for herself. What others did was no concern of hers.
She allowed Samir to wail at the sight of her, then cut him short and told him she’d slipped and fallen on her face. He brought cold compresses of crushed ice wrapped in a towel, and laid them on her face. She burst into tears and, like a child who hasn’t learned how to talk, she pointed at her face and moaned, and when he pleaded with her to tell him what had really happened she said she’d walked into a lamp-post. Then she laughed and said she’d finally me
t a super-jealous prince who’d had her beaten. He was very sexy, she went on, especially the smell of his robe, and the way he spoke.
’You’re hallucinating, Amira. Hallucinating. God preserve you! A lot of people have it in for you.’
He led her over to her bed and laid her down on it.
’Don’t worry, Amira. I’ve always said if you touch sand, it turns to gold.’
Unimpressed by his faith in her on this occasion, she closed her eyes and whispered to herself, ’What shall I do? What shall I do?’
III
The fog transformed the dimly lit BT tower into a rocket that was slowly starting to burn. It drew Lamis in along the streets and through the different neighbourhoods like a lighthouse guiding a ship. She reached it finally, happy because she’d not resorted to a taxi or worried about getting lost.
She stopped at the foot, where the tower began, her gaze travelling upwards until it reached the top. Everything starts from a single point. The engineers had stood where she was standing now and said, ’Here.’ It was as if, by looking at its base in daylight, she was divesting the tower of the fanciful attributes she’d projected upon it. From now on, if she looked at the tower again from her window at night, she’d be able to picture the ground floor, where employees went to and fro, as in any other building.
She stepped inside and asked, ’Is it possible to go up the tower?’
’It’s not open to the public.’
’But it’s really important!’
’Call the BT information office. Here’s the number.’
She noticed that she’d used her non-English accent, whereas a short time before she used her proper English accent to reply to an American tourist who asked for directions to Oxford Street. She’d swallowed the ’r’ and ’e’ in the word ’here’; she said ’I dare say’, and added an ’actually’. She was exercising the power that came from living here, and from being here: she knew what lay beyond a certain street, what you could buy in a particular shop. When the buses drew up in early December and regurgitated passengers from outside London coming to shop beneath the decorations of Regent and Oxford Streets, she knew how they felt and walked ahead of them with a superior air when she saw them clutching street maps. Poor things, they were strangers in London.
Only in London Page 27
