by Louisa Young
I decided to assume the worst. He is psychotic, he is obsessed with belly dancing, he’s going to try to rape me because I am a belly dancer. Jesus, he’s mad. He might want to kill me.
How does he know I’m a belly dancer?
Did Harry tell him? After I asked him not to? Why am I still fantasizing about trusting Harry?
The music grew suddenly louder as the door opened.
‘I’m waiting!’ came his playful tones. He sounded just like Lily on the loo: ‘I’m ready!’ Wait for the end of the introduction, fool. I was still trying to work out if the gun was good news or bad news. He didn’t know I knew it was there. Only half an hour.
The takasim started, and I walked in. He might be ready but I was not going to dance until I was. The audience does not control the performance. The dancer has all the strength, the mystery, the power. When I dance I am not me; I am every dancer who was ever lusted after by a man who could not have her. I am protected. I am other.
I was waiting for the nay. Still, calm, in control, my very stillness speaking full-on disdain. Ishtar, Scheherazade, Salome and Morgiana, I thought. Awalim and ghawazee. My feet became the rhythm, my hips became the rhythm, my spine began to rise out of it, the lifting, rising, elongating. The stillness in motion. It was all still there. Here we go.
*
Scheherazade had her sister to help her, you know. Every morning it was her sister, Dunyazad, her only permitted visitor, who asked leave for a story to be told to beguile the cool hours before the daylight reddened the sky. She set Scheherazade up, morning after morning, for three years, neglecting her life and her youth to bring her sister through, to hand her up each time again on to the trembling tightrope of that day’s chance of survival. Every day, with that psychopathic caliph, Shahriyar, wife murderer, serial killer, the two women sat and talked their way out of it, one because she had no choice, and one because she loved her sister. Picture them in the courtyard, surrounded by luxury, fountains, jasmine, soothing sherbets, slaves, silks, enchanting the madman. Entertaining as though their lives depended upon it. And when Scheherazade danced, she ravished wits and hearts and ensorcelled all eyes.
Of course by that stage Dunyazad was the last remaining beautiful maiden in the city, all the others having fled in terror. If Scheherazade failed, the Sultan would take Dunyazad as his bride, and she too would be slaughtered the following morning.
And of course it was all a woman’s fault in the first place: if Shahriyar’s first wife hadn’t been having it away with a handsome black eunuch he would never have had to kill all the others, would he?
*
Bates was an easy audience. I gave him a top-class show all the same. I was dancing for me, and gave him the works, as far as I was physically capable of it. The tape was about twenty minutes: pacing myself, and bearing in mind my leg, I might be able to do an encore, and then Liam would be getting help over here. I could not think of any way to detain Bates other than dancing for him. Anyway, didn’t he have a flight to catch? I would dance, and something or someone would turn up, and then we would knock Bates out and tie him up and have the police take him away and find Lily and Harry and everything would be all right and I’d only have Jim to worry about, and how in God’s name all this started.
I love to dance. The falling inside. I can enjoy it even like this. Bates enjoys it too. He’s practically slavering. This is a sexual thing, I was right. Can’t take his eyes off me.
I turned on my heel and flicked my hip at him as I drained my champagne glass. Flick flick flick, figure eight, and on. My muscles liked it. My leg felt OK. My soul was rising and my spine became so long that I gave him some back arching with teasing hands and draping hair. He lit a cigarette.
Set fire to me would you? Bastard.
His cigarette is nestling in his crotch. Oh, you dirty old bastard. Why don’t you just get it out and have done with it?
I don’t like to be humiliated.
I moved back to the drinks cabinet and poured pepper vodka into a shot glass, shimmying the while. She’s OK, nobody’s going to hurt her. When I turned round to him he was lying back on the sofa, visibly touching himself up, and I had the glass between my teeth for the rose-water trick. I danced for a few more minutes, closing my eyes. If he gets his dick out he’s getting pepper vodka all over it. That probably hurts, doesn’t it? Otherwise, his face.
What good would that do?
Make me happy.
I opened my eyes.
He got his dick out.
‘Oh, you bitch!’ he shouted, but he didn’t seem unhappy about it. ‘Lick it off.’
Oh, dear, he thinks it’s a game. A lovely little sex game.
I don’t want to play sex games. Yes, well we all know what you don’t want. It’s not exactly the point at the moment.
Yes it is, it’s exactly the point.
‘You dance a million times better than your sister but I wonder if you’re as good as her at that,’ he said, leaping to his feet, sneering, laughing.
Don’t stop dancing.
I can think and dance at the same time. OK, just take it in. Keep moving. I backed off from him. Retreat and regroup. Sway figure eight, sway figure eight, sway figure eight. Simple, repetitive movements. My leg is my pivot, my axis, I am rooted, moving, but rooted. He cannot unbalance me unless I let him. Think. Slowly.
He has seen Janie dance. He has had sex with Janie. I don’t know which surprises me more. Keep dancing. Don’t let it show. God bless you, body, keeping on.
I can’t think this through. Accept the facts. Accept that this is more complex than you thought. Dance.
He came towards me, dick in hand. If this were a movie I could just kick him in the face, try to overpower him. Would it help?
He’s not angry. He’s bigger than me.
I just want to know everything. He won’t tell me anyway.
He might.
Can’t talk and dance at the same time.
If I stop dancing, can I avoid sex? Can I turn it to talk? He likes talking.
I whisked away from him, back round to the drinks cabinet (black, oriental, inlaid with mother of pearl, little figures of fishermen under droopy dripping trees; very pretty).
‘More champagne?’ I said, smiling nicely at him. The music continued and I found myself still moving in time with it. I was trying to keep the mood, the enchantment, the sense of audience and performer. I shouldn’t have broken it with my spitting trick. Regain it. An audience knows its place. Put him in his.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said.
He was astonishingly easy to please.
‘Sit down, I’ll bring it to you,’ I said, and he did. I sashayed across, jingling my coins, swinging my weighted cloth.
‘Here,’ I said, so dutifully, so charmingly, and knelt in a semi-formal dance attitude not quite at his feet. I didn’t catch his eye. He thought that the energy going on was sex; he thought that at any moment our mutual attraction was going to burst into flames and I was going to fall into his arms. He didn’t recognize that the spirit coming off me was pure defensive aggression. He thought it was … a lust power game. He thought I was withholding permission because withholding permission makes it so thrilling when you give up. His arrogance was my strength.
‘You lovely girl,’ he said, and took a draught from his glass. ‘You sweet ambiguous creature.’ I smiled dreamily. Sherbets and courtyards and fountains and jasmine. If I’m to be his whore I’ll be an Almeh. I am intelligent and learned. We’ll talk. This is my game too.
‘Tell me about Janie,’ I said, as if it were all quite normal.
‘Lovely fuck,’ he said. ‘Does that make you jealous? I can imagine that might be the sort of thing to annoy a girl. Specially a girl like you. Proud sort of girl. I do like that. Janie wasn’t very proud, was she?’
When I was young I used to read Barbara Cartland novels on the bus and there was always a scene where a middle-aged nobleman with a fleshy mouth and corrupt eyes would proposition the red-haired heroine in the lib
rary, enchanted by the flashing of her angry green eyes and the whiteness of her throat. Any moment now he was going to call me a plucky filly and express his intention to tame me. This is all very old stuff. I don’t need to lose my temper or my bottle over this. Here I am and this is what’s happening. No, Janie wasn’t proud. Irritable, but not proud.
‘I didn’t know you knew each other,’ I murmured. I don’t need to react. We’re here because of Janie. If I set him off, he’ll talk. (They only want to talk, half the time.)
‘Oh, I know everyone,’ he said. ‘And so did Janie!’ This he found very amusing. I didn’t see why and couldn’t seem to bring myself to smile along.
Suddenly he leant forward. ‘I know you,’ he said. ‘Don’t I?’
I said nothing.
‘Do you know me too?’
‘Yes,’ I said. He was talking about the fire. Or about some deep inner link we had that neither of us could deny and that would any moment bring us to our destiny – bed. Git.
He was talking about the fire.
‘You should have taken the money. The fact that you didn’t made you far more interesting to me. Even a whoring man like myself has a deeper yearning for a girl who won’t take money. You can’t rape a whore, you know, because you know she’d sell it anyway. Raping a whore is just stealing. No fun at all. Making an honest girl take your money is much more fun. But making an honest girl give it to you … making her want it …’
How much can I smile at this crap? I can smile. I smile.
‘You do, don’t you? You’re so polite and you know it and you think I can’t tell. Poor little Harry! What could a simpleton like him have done with you! What a waste! Well, you won’t be wasted any more, my dear, don’t worry.’
He was dimmer than I had thought. If he thought Harry a simpleton then he was very dim. Or perhaps he believed only what he wanted to believe, which even the cleverest can do. No, I should not imagine him to be dim.
‘But you didn’t take my money. So I knew I would have to take you. And here you are! After all those poor imitations … poor Janie. Not that she wasn’t a lot of fun. Lots of fun. And it wasn’t just the money for her, you know – I can tell. She liked it too.’
I’d been avoiding it but it was coming through too clear.
He was looking at me – at my face, not my body.
‘I believe that perhaps you don’t know about this.’
I said nothing.
‘Did you not know?’
Is this what I didn’t know?
‘Oh! Oh, God, oh, I’m sorry,’ he said.
He was sorry. He slipped to the floor beside me and slipped his arm around me and held me. ‘I am so sorry. I am so sorry. I wouldn’t have told you like this. I had no idea you didn’t know. No idea. I am so sorry, here, here.’
I was crying. He was giving me a handkerchief. He was being kind. It was honest – it was the first honest reaction I had ever seen in him. That was how I could tell.
I was thinking about his reaction to my reaction to what he had said. I was not thinking about my reaction. I was not thinking about what he had said. What had he said?
He had said that my sister was a prostitute. He was telling the truth.
The doorbell rang.
‘Get dressed, darling, get dressed. Go on, go on upstairs. I’ll be with you in a moment.’
He was being absolutely kind. I scurried, grabbing my clothes from the bottom of the stairs. In the bathroom I swiftly changed back into my jeans, washed my face, and considered stealing his gun. I decided against. I don’t want to kill anybody.
I know my power in my dance clothes: the power of sex, of legend, of mystification in rhythm, of performer over audience, the hypnotic female power over men’s desire. The power of that unreal woman that I become when I perform, that painted, costumed archetype, that dream woman we all can be. But, Lord, I preferred the freedom of jeans and boots. I was more and more convinced of Fatima’s argument. Both the seer and the seen are cursed. Put a man and a woman together alone and there is always a third person present: the devil.
Downstairs, I heard voices. Harry’s voice. Behind him another, a man’s.
I emerged calm. Eddie was saying, ‘No, I don’t think so,’ to a uniformed policeman. Harry was standing back, separate.
‘Well, sir,’ the policeman was saying. He seemed to want to come into the house. I swept down.
‘Miss?’ he said.
‘Hello?’ I said.
‘DC Tom Stevens, miss. Is there any problem? We had a report …’
‘Oh! I don’t think so. No!’ I acted bemused, and gave Bates a big brave thank you, darling, now-we-have-bonded smile. I think he thinks I’m his girlfriend now.
‘You’re sure now, miss?’ said the copper.
‘Everything’s fine!’ I said. ‘Why, did someone …?’
‘I’m so sorry to have disturbed you, sir, miss,’ he said. ‘Seems to have been a time-waster. If anything does turn up, you give me a ring …’
He got my drift, and left.
‘Bloody snoop,’ said Eddie.
‘Harry,’ I said, ‘where is my daughter?’
‘At Brigid’s, with Maireadh,’ he said, ‘having her bath.’
‘You don’t know where Brigid lives,’ I said.
‘Lily does,’ he said. ‘Where the fuck were you?’
I asked Eddie if I could make a telephone call. Of course! I rang Brigid. Lily said Brigid made her eat her fish fingers even though she had only wanted bread and jam. I said quite right too. Brigid came on the line and said she was awful sorry about the mess up and was Lily to spend the night only she had to go back to the hospital to Caitlin but Maireadh would be here with the boys. I said I’d be over shortly and if Brigid had left I’d sort it out with Maireadh and was Caitlin OK? Brigid said yes it was all just a bit sudden but they’d had her on a nebulizer and she was sleeping now and they’d be letting her out in the morning almost certainly. I said thanks, Brigid, for everything, I’ll speak to you in the morning then, and Brigid said she liked the look of that Harry, by the way. I looked at Harry. He was looking blank.
‘I must go, Eddie,’ I said.
‘Of course, darling,’ he said, and gave me a fond kiss and a proprietorial hug and a reassuring squeeze, and said, ‘I’ll call you later,’ just to put a cherry on it. ‘As soon as I get to Paris.’ Paris! ‘Don’t be too upset. We’ll talk it all through. Just get some sleep.’ It was as if he had suddenly slipped into a different part. His kindness at my shock may have been true, but this was … another stroke in the repertoire. Changing channels on the radio. The same actor saying lines from a different film. There’s a fault somewhere.
‘I’ll drop you,’ said Harry.
Eddie looked up.
‘I’m going back to Ealing anyway,’ Harry offered.
‘What did you come for anyway?’ said Eddie.
‘Oh – to drop this off.’ He gave Eddie a packet. ‘Thought you’d like it as soon as possible, and I was coming this way.’ It wasn’t quite too much explanation, but I knew it wasn’t the whole story.
I started for the front door, thinking that I’d just hail a taxi. Harry was immediately with me.
ELEVEN
Learning
It must have been eight o’clock. The evening was beautiful: sunlight on London, the white stucco, the blue sky, the gentle warmth. I was almost surprised to be alive. I was tired. The vodka and champagne were beginning to retreat, leaving their refugee trail of dirty mental detritus behind them: a cloudiness, a taste in the mouth, an underbelly of fear. The laurel leaves of the gardens gleamed beneath their dust. A couple walked by, party clothes, laughing. Lilac. This weather was unbelievably lovely. My legs began to quiver a little. I was going to be stiff tomorrow. This sunlight. My mind and heart suddenly filled with an image of a window, a bed, a shaft of late-afternoon sunlight. It made me catch my breath.
We walked on.
‘Here,’ said Harry, and handed me into the Ponti
ac. He drove me home without a word. I dozed a little. I don’t know to this day if his silence was anger or concern or … if I had been thinking, I might have thought that he had just lost interest. But I wasn’t thinking, and he wasn’t talking.
He dropped me outside the flats, and just said good night as he pulled off.
Maireadh said Lily was sleeping, so why didn’t I leave her? I looked in on her, head to toe with Michael in his bed, peaceful.
I ambled home. I could hardly walk. The weather made me want to cry. The lilac made me want to cry. My legs made me want to cry. Lily made me want to cry. Harry made me want to cry. Janie.
Once Janie and Robbie Turner had tied me up in Mrs Harris’s garage and left me there when it was time for tea, and Mum had said, ‘Where’s Evangeline?’ and Robbie had giggled but Janie had said, ‘We tied her up in the garage and left her there so she’d be late and you’d be cross with her.’
We used to go out on the old fire escape outside Mum and Dad’s bedroom window and twine the pale green tendrils of wistaria round and round the rusty iron railings, and sing, ‘Oh, soldier, soldier, won’t you marry me with your musket, fife and drum?’ Each spring last summer’s tendrils had turned to dry twigs, except for a few which had turned to strong living wood, twined tighter than we could ever undo. The living tendrils were velvety, silver, tender. We would discuss our wardrobes for when we were queen of the world. Janie wanted a wedding dress made of magnolia petals. I wanted a tunic and hose made of wistaria velvet, and a helmet carved from flint. Our beds would be emerald green moss cushions. Or hammocks, from willow leaves. Once she threatened to burn my teddy at the stake. We found a dead frog and tried to give it a Viking funeral on the duck pond in Holland Park but it wouldn’t catch fire.
The last time Janie lied to me was …
… was when she stole something from me, what was it? Sweets … a lollipop or something. A sherbet dab! She ate half of it and put it back and said she hadn’t, and then that night she crept into my bed in tears and said she had, and she was so sorry.
Janie was always greedy but she didn’t lie.
When could she have been a prostitute without me knowing? How?
