Baby Love

by Louisa Young

  ‘Clever,’ I said. I’d been wondering, actually.

  ‘But,’ he said.

  I looked at him politely.

  ‘There’s already a file in your name.’

  I felt a little slow.

  ‘You actually are under surveillance.’

  Alarm was just a tiny, vicious twist in my belly. Anger was swift to follow. I said nothing.

  ‘You’re not being watched and followed around. We haven’t got that kind of manpower,’ he said. ‘But your car, and your name, are significant in a situation that we are most certainly watching. Now I don’t know why it’s so important to you not to lose your licence, but I imagine the same reasons might hold if it came to being connected with Eddie Bates.’

  ‘Ben, I don’t know the man …’

  ‘So you said. That’s irrelevant. The point is that you are in a position to …’

  I rather feared I was.

  ‘… and if you were to I would consider it a great personal favour.’

  My heart sank. I had a horrible feeling I had no choice.

  ‘You’ve got no choice,’ he said.

  THREE

  Us Then

  What he wanted me to do was, as he put it, ‘chum up to Harry Makins’. He knew perfectly well the Pontiac was Harry’s. He was unimpressed when I told him I hadn’t seen Harry since the winter of 1988 and my last view of him was obscured by a chair he was throwing out the window at me. I was to chum up with Harry and chum up with Eddie Bates and await further instructions. That was it.

  Chum up with Harry. Chum up with Harry. Like, what, ring him? After eight years? Out of the blue? Hey, Harry!

  *

  I first met him in a bar, of course. Janie, a Cynthia Heimel fan, said that I’d never meet my dream man in a bar, because my dream man had better things to do than hang around drinking. This wasn’t that kind of bar, though – it was the kind where people hang around drinking on expenses and call it a meeting, a place in Soho full of Mexican beer, sharp, fleshy foliage and men with silly hair.

  I noticed Harry because he looked completely wrong. No Paul Smith suit, no pony tail, no eyes leaping to the door at every entrance. He was too naturally cool for such a posy place. He wore his leathers like only very long skinny people can: as if he had been born with one skin too few, and the leather was it, filling the body out to its right and harmonious proportions. Also, he looked very slightly dangerous. Very slightly.

  He came in with a bunch of Paul Smiths as I was sitting at the bar, and after some brief backchat wanted to know was that my bike outside – I was in leathers too – because if so he had some blue-dot rear-light covers one of which would probably do for it if I was interested in that kind of thing.

  As it happened that’s just the kind of thing I was interested in in those days, and as they are not usually available in this country and as (as I told him) I didn’t know you could even get them for a 1963 Dynaglide (same year as me – one reason I bought it) I said yes, and had taken his phone number before he leaned forward and whispered rather cosily, I thought, considering the brevity of our acquaintance, into my ear: ‘Just checking. You can’t get them for the Dynaglide. But I had to know you weren’t a git.’

  And then as I leaned back a little and turned round a little to look at him, he said, ‘Can I just kiss you now? It would save so much time …’

  Yee-hah! So I said, ‘You can kiss me now and then not again for a month.’ So he did, and we had this fantastic snog in the middle of the pretentious bar and when he let me go (yes he let me go) five minutes later my knees wobbled slightly as I leant back against my tall stool.

  ‘I’ve got to go and see a man about a Chevrolet,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you four weeks from Saturday at Gossips.’ And then before I could sneer at his cheek the barman said, ‘You Angeline? Mr Herbert’ll see you now,’ and I had to go because I too was there on business.

  ‘Mr Herbert?’ Harry said, laughing, as he turned away. ‘You a waitress, or what?’

  ‘No, I’m a belly dancer,’ I replied. The grin that split Harry’s face was something to see. ‘Belly dancer on a Harley?’ he said. ‘Oh, yes!’

  Gossips. Harry and I used to go there every week and dance in revoltingly sexual fashion to the slinky reggae. I’d do a camel walk to Gregory Isaacs. Harry loved that place. Perhaps he still goes there.

  *

  Saturday night I got Brigid in to look after Lily, and headed up west on the bus. I might need to drink.

  I leapt off at Oxford Circus just after closing time, into a crowd of disconsolate tourists with no clue what happens in London when the pubs are shut. I cut through Soho, passing one of the Greek restaurants where I used to dance all those years ago. The fairy lights were glittering round its steamed-up window, and I knew if I went in Andreas would be there, fatter than ever in his cummerbund, and he’d give me a big smelly hug and gaze at me with such sympathy in his fat brown eyes and say, ‘How is leg, my darling, how is leg?’ Well, I can leap off buses, and cart a three-year-old around, and camel-walk to make her laugh, but I’ll never wriggle for a living again and that is that. Nothing to say on the subject so I don’t pop in to be hugged by Andreas.

  You may wonder why I was a belly dancer. You probably think belly dancing is a joke. I really hate to explain things – especially myself – but I’ll try.

  When I was sixteen my Egyptian friend Zeinab and I absconded from home one night (hers was strict, mine wasn’t) to go out with some naughty cousins of hers who were eighteen and rather rich. They were fresh from Cairo and not used to girls who went out and drank. They took us to an expensive but deeply tacky Arab nightclub where we all got slaughtered among the smoked glass, much to the disapproval of the maitre d’ who had my companions down as the fallen generation, shaming their families and their country and their religion – in which he wasn’t far wrong. As for me, I was just a no-good Farangi bint, so what would you expect. He wasn’t in the least surprised when, after the floorshow – a belly dancer, of course – ended, I got up and imitated her. He was surprised that I wasn’t altogether atrocious. I was amazed – not that I was any good, because I wasn’t, and wouldn’t have known anyway, but by how completely lovely the movements felt. He said – with an eye to having a sixteen-year-old blonde working at the club – would I like to come back and audition. The boys thought it very funny. Zeinab said I could, but I would have to learn how to dance properly first, and she would have to come with me. So I became a cabaret-style belly dancer without knowing a thing about it.

  Not knowing is a situation I have never liked, so I found things out. Took classes, talked to the other girls, persuaded Zeinab to help me out on the cultural stuff. She taught me a few smart retorts in Arabic to remind the boys that though I was blonde, a foreigner and half-naked I still deserved a little respect. (My favourite is ‘Mafeesh’, ‘you’re not getting any’.) There were problems. Like the time I innocently expressed to the other girls my desire that a man in the audience would be so moved by my performance that he would empty a bottle of champagne over me, as I had seen happen to a girl at another club.

  ‘Habibti,’ said Aisha, who was at least forty and looked after the little ones, as she termed us. ‘He does that to show that he has bought her for the night.’

  Initially I just loved the movements and the music, the pause after the introduction before the takasim, the solo, would take off, the slow slow changes of mood. I loved the nay – the flute. The nay transported me. Still does. The moment before the player takes his breath, when my stillness would be perfect, and the moment of shifting … the music is visible. I’d learnt ballet – how to be stiff and fake and eternally fleshlessly prepubescent and unnatural – and had given it up because I’d grown tits. This was something else: it was something my newly female body felt at home in, not ridiculed by like ballet. And I loved the fact that I could make lots of money, and hell yes I loved the glamour, and the men fancying me (though I kept my distance) and the other girls with their m
ysterious lives, and I loved the fact that I didn’t tell my parents I was doing it. Hassan, the manager, soon leant that I wasn’t always drunk, and that to have me at all he had to put up with my conditions, which were that I would work only one night a week, Friday or Saturday, and that I had to be home by one. I don’t think he knew that these incorporated my parents’ conditions on my social life, and allowed me one night a week where I could go to parties and watch Janie getting off with boys and pay for our taxi home.

  And I loved not thinking. All week at school doing differentiation and the causes of the First World War, Saturday night just being in my body. Just like John Travolta.

  When I was at university I used to come down to London at weekends to dance. I paid my own way – finally I told the parents, and they took it. Aisha told me she still hadn’t told hers, because dancing was such a low profession. That made me feel bad. I was a secure girl, playing. I knew my parents wouldn’t like it but nobody was going to shoot me or be shamed. I’d passed all my exams, hadn’t I?

  Later I learnt about the symbolic significance of the veil, of revelation and concealment; about Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess of love, a virgin who took lovers, symbol of both chastity and fertility, and how when her husband Tammuz died she went in search of him, down through the seven times seven gates of the underworld. At every seventh gate she gave up one of her veils and one of her jewels as the price of admission, tempting and seducing the guards into letting her through. By the last gate she was naked. It was called the dance of Shalome, of Welcome. Salome was named after it when she did it for Herod. I learnt about Demeter resting at the Well of the Beautiful Dances at Eleusis, during her wanderings in search of Persephone (after whom she too went down into the Underworld) and about the Eleusinian Mystery dances, and about the woman called Baubo – belly – who danced for Demeter and made her laugh. I read Carlo Suares’s commentary on the Song of Songs, about the Shulamite – same root as Shalom – and his alternative translation, which had her as a dancer. I learnt that seven was the number of the universe, because the ancient Mesopotamians, who knew most about that kind of thing, knew of seven planets. I loved all that stuff. But I was just a cabaret dancer. I pierced my navel to wear a fake jewel in it. Do you know why a belly dancer should have a ruby in her tummy? Because in the 1930s and ’40s in Hollywood, when a belly-dancing scene in a biblical epic was a good excuse to get some female flesh on the screen, the navel could not be shown. Too erogenous. So stick a ruby in it.

  I was just a London girl, with a part-time job and a weakness for large motorcycles and the ancient and universal roots of belly dancing. That’s what I was then.

  Harry wasn’t at Gossips, of course. Why should he be? After all this time, just hanging round there waiting for me to look in. I ordered a vodka and tonic and looked around at the relics of a life I no longer lived. All that smoke, all that noise, strangers to me now that I lived in baby-land. You don’t think it’ll happen to you but it does. If the infant wants the fridge door to be adorned with plastic letters of the alphabet, and admiring them keeps the kid occupied for ten minutes when you want a cup of tea and a look at the paper, believe me dignity goes out the window and plastic letters of the alphabet go up on the fridge door. If the infant has eczema and the doctor says smoking around her makes it worse, you stop smoking round her. If George Jones makes the infant laugh and Skunk Anansie makes her cry, then you put on the George Jones. And sooner or later Skunk Anansie sounds ugly and loud to you too, and cigarette smoke is more than you can bear. It’s a damn shame. There I was, fully equipped for a night out, babysittered up, and I didn’t like what I used to like.

  A black man at the other end of the bar was looking at me. I turned away from him and stared out to the dancefloor, glimpsing ghosts among the dancers. Harry and I, intertwined. Janie looning about, shimmying her bum out of time and waving her arms like an Indian warrior goddess. She never could dance. Janie and me laughing and Harry not knowing why. Harry and me laughing and Janie sulking because she didn’t want to be a gooseberry.

  I could feel the man coming towards me, so I was prepared when I heard him speak. ‘Old timer,’ he said, in the particular hoarse voice of someone accustomed to making themselves heard above loud music. ‘Angeline, init?’

  I turned round and squinted at him. Familiarity took its time to seep into my brain. A neat number two now gleamed where shaggy locks used to hang, and a rather tidy shirt covered up what I realized I had never seen in anything other than a string vest, but there was no mistaking the teeth. Dizzy Ansah, as I live and breathe.

  ‘Hey, Dizzy,’ I said, with some genuine pleasure.

  ‘My man,’ he said, inaccurately but affectionately.

  ‘What happened to the hair?’ I couldn’t help it. His hair used to be a major topographical feature of Notting Hill: a fair three feet of big, clean, good locks. No onion bhajis on Dizzy. They were the best-kept, best-looking and best-loved-by-their-owner locks in WII. His devotion to them was only one of the things that made him so boring.

  ‘Put me in a box, man. People see your hair, think they know who you are. Got fed up of that box, right, wanted to fly up out of it, float around a bit, see the world, before I landed down in some other box, maybe fit me better. How you doing, man?’

  So then it was easy. Easy to mention Harry, easy to find that Dizzy used the same gym as him (Harry uses a gym?), easy to say I was here every Saturday, easy to mention how jolly it would be to see Harry after all these years. If Dizzy was still the gossip he used to be, and if Harry was half the man I thought him, I would either get a phone call or see him here next week.

  *

  Going home on the night bus I wondered what man was it, that I thought Harry to be? And if I thought that of him, how come it ended with a chair flying out the window?

  Harry was a wideboy. ‘Yeah,’ he’d say, flashing his grin. ‘Don’t always fit in the lift.’ Harry was in the motor trade. Harry knew everything. For example: I knew I didn’t have to give Dizzy my number. I was ex-directory – not because I’m flash, but because there’s an old old tradition of not knowing the difference between a belly dancer and a prostitute (I should know, I did my dissertation on it) – but Harry would find my number. Harry had energy and guts and morals and we lived together – more or less, he never gave up his flat – for three years. And we had a blast.

  I can’t remember what the row was about.

  Oh, yes, I can.

  He was never jealous or pissed off about my work. Then one night …

  I was booked to dance at Shiraz, one of my regular spots, a Lebanese restaurant just north of Oxford Street. It’s calm, classy and intensely wealthy. Exquisitely dressed obsidian-haired diners greet each other with ‘salaam’; rows of lanterns throw patterned shadows and jewel-coloured light. I liked it there. You could sit at the bar beforehand and drink a tiny coffee and nobody gave you grief. Ali let me change in his office, not like most places where you’re in the loo, washing your feet in the sink and trying to dry your hair under the hand-drier. I was wearing the green and gold. How it floods back.

  Zayra and Noor were there, so damned glamorous they looked like transvestites. Noor had just been sacked for dancing too rudely: God, you should have seen her, licking her fingers, writhing on the floor, hands down inside her belt. I don’t mind floorwork – the Indian temple priestesses, the Yakshini, were doing floorwork in the fifth century B.C., but that was for God not Mammon, and there has to be some kind of line between dancing and pornography. The girls were giving me fish-eyed looks: to them rival really means rival. They’d spent too long in the Arab clubs, where you have to hostess as well, and do your second spot at four in the morning. You were sitting there from ten till four with nothing to do except chat up the punters, so if you didn’t want to you were fucked. Half the time if you did want to you were fucked too. Half the time that’s what the girls wanted anyway. The money was good and the dancing was just an advertisement. Well, that’s part of the tradition
too. There was a tribe in Algeria – the Ouled Nail – who brought up their daughters to dance and whore from the age of twelve: they would travel from oasis to oasis around the Sahara, till they had saved enough money for their dowry, then they’d marry and bring up their daughters just the same. The French had a whale of a time with them in the nineteenth century. I met some of their great-great-granddaughters in Biskra, after I ran away from Harry. They were still wearing massive feathers in their tiaras and about five dresses each. They were sorry for me with my meagre single dress, and offered me a few of their own to make me decent. Their dance was so different from the cabaret stuff you see in London, and to the languorous Egyptian form, and to the Moroccan Chikats. Those girls could instruct their muscles individually. They visibly, violently, pulsed muscles that I don’t even have. That’s where I learnt to wriggle one breast at a time.

  Noor was murdered. They never found who did it. Didn’t care, I think. As they don’t when it’s a prostitute. Or a dancer. Well, you know, not a virgin. Probably. And you know, she was brown, nearly black, so really, so what? When they find a nice pink schoolgirl in a ditch you never hear the end of it. But Noor merited only a quick flurry of press attention, just enough for the front pages of the tabloids to use the studio photos she’d had done to try and get an agent. Little Noor, drop-dead gorgeous in her sexy chiffon outfit, her twenty-year-old body on display, Miss pouting exotic erotic. No family that cared to claim her. I think she was Pakistani originally. She was a bitch, but from what I knew of her life it wasn’t surprising.