Desiring Cairo

by Louisa Young

  I don’t know what London is like to a stranger. I should imagine horrible. Cold, unfriendly, cliquey, snitty, incomprehensible. And grey, and strange, and wet, and cold. Light when it should be dark; dark when it should be light. And expensive. And big. But people come here, people stay here, whole peoples come and live and settle. No thanks to the welcome we give them, that’s for sure. Poor Hakim.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I should have helped you. I’ll come down with you tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Thank you,’ says Hakim.

  ‘Shukran afwan,’ said Lily, grinning, waiting for approbation.

  ‘Bravo,’ said Hakim. She went pink with pleasure, and he smiled and pinched her cheek, and she smiled and pinched his and said, ‘Chubby chops’, and he said, ‘What is chubby chops?’, and generally they were carrying on like love’s young dream.

  ‘So what is it you’re trying to find out about?’ I asked.

  Hakim went very quiet.

  I pointed out to him that if I was to find out for him where he was to go I needed to know what he wanted to find out when he got there. For a while he wouldn’t say. Then: ‘If someone is dead or married.’ Nothing more. This was irritating, but Lily needed her tea and if something’s not happening you can’t force it. So I fed her and washed her and did all those small yet vital services that prove love and build love and give love’s object a chance of being well-adjusted in the future. (Interesting those people who claim to care deeply for their children yet leave the actual caring to someone else. It used to be one word, care, what you do and how you feel. Now it is two, and you can feel it yet never do it, or do it yet never feel it.)

  ‘Who’s dead?’ she wanted to know. ‘Who’s married?’ She’s very interested in death and marriage. Wants me to get married, sometimes. Has proposed to me herself, actually. Best offer I ever had.

  *

  The next day brought the next letter. The envelope sat there like a toad on the doormat. Lily ran to pick it up; I stopped her. I picked it up quickly, read it quickly: ‘You did it and I mind.’

  I didn’t like it. Incomprehensible letters making nebulous accusations against I wasn’t sure who were actually a worse incursion into my enderun (it’s a Turkish word. It means that which is within, private, domestic) than Hakim turning up and being mysterious all over the shop. Or were they? Well that’s the problem, isn’t it. They could be. They have the potential. But by their very nature, you don’t know.

  I believe I may have mentioned before my slightly obsessively protective attitude to my gaff. I don’t like things coming in and upsetting me. I like being quiet and safe and calm. I believe this to be beneficial to my child. I live every day with the sole intention of giving her enough calm security to outweigh the drama and weirdness of her birth. A kid snatched at birth from the jaws of death, while the fangs sank into her mother, is a kid who can soak up a lot of calmness. Whether or not she knows it. My God, after five years it still shocks me. Pulled from the jaws of death and her mother’s womb simultaneously.

  So now I protect Lily by protecting our home and, as my perceptive Egyptian friend Zeinab and my perceptive Irish friend Brigid have both pointed out, my body. And my heart. There had been signs of a little loosening up: letting Hakim stay, fantasising about maybe finding myself a man. But the potential of these letters sat in the base of the back of my mind, crying out to me.

  *

  I gave Hakim a little lecture on the bus (St Catherine’s House, it turned out, was the place). At home he was cavalier if courteous, operating all the assumptions of a man who expects a woman to wait on him. Out in the world he found it easier to be a child with me, and hence it was easier for me to mother him.

  ‘Hakim,’ I said, once we were settled on the 94. ‘Lily has bad lungs and I would appreciate it if you didn’t smoke in the flat. Also you drink too much coffee, it makes you manic and nervous. And please tell me now what you want to find out about who.’

  We were sitting on the top of the bus, right up at the front because Hakim wanted to see the sights. Willing as I was to point out Shepherds Bush roundabout, Notting Hill tube station and the great dome of Whiteleys in the distance, I was more interested in getting to the point. To my dismay he started to cry. I put my arm round his shoulder and patted him, murmuring kind things in Arabic, the things Zeinab murmurs to her boys when they fall over.

  ‘I bring badness to you,’ he said, sniffing. ‘I bring badness to your house.’

  ‘Well just tell me what it’s all about, and then we can sort it out.’

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ he said.

  ‘Yes you can. Open your mouth and speak.’

  ‘I can’t. I can’t. Too much badness.’

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Come on, just tell me. You can’t keep it to yourself, it won’t make it better. Just tell me.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  I was getting bored.

  ‘Why not?’ I said.

  ‘Too much badness.’

  ‘Tell me why you can’t tell me. It’s not fair to bring badness to my house and not tell me what it is. Tell me something. Tell me why you can’t tell me.’

  He stared out of the window at Holland Park Avenue unfolding before us, and the overlong branches of the plane trees slapped at the window as if at our faces. ‘I am in shame,’ he murmured.

  ‘Hakim,’ I said, in the bad mother voice that brings Lily to heel. ‘Stop it. Tell me.’

  He turned his face round to me, tears still sitting in his eyes, and said, ‘It is family, Angelina. Family.’

  ‘Not Abu Sa’id,’ I exclaimed.

  ‘Not the father,’ he said. And then, with that slight shift of musculature that denotes the making of a decision, he said, ‘Mother.’

  For a moment I thought he was calling me mother. Then I realised no, he’s just saying it.

  Mother.

  ‘Mother?’ I repeated, intelligently.

  He leaned forward and rested his forehead against the glass.

  ‘I have a mother,’ he whispered.

  ‘Ah,’ I murmured.

  He leaned.

  ‘And?’ I suggested.

  He leaned back. ‘I have a mother.’

  There’s nothing you can do really but sit it out.

  I sat.

  ‘An English mother,’ he murmured.

  ‘English mother!’

  I was surprised. I was very surprised. All I had known was absent mother, gone mother, unspoken-about mother, maybe dead mother, maybe shamed mother. English mother, though, was something new.

  ‘English mother gone back to England. I want her. I look for her. Please don’t tell my brother or my father.’

  Not bothering to point out how unlikely it was that I would happen to be talking to either of them, I just goggled at him.

  ‘But Hakim, that’s good! Finding a mother isn’t – yes, it might be complicated and everything but it’s basically a good thing to do. It’s … and English! So you’re half English! Blimey! … but why did she … I mean, tell me the story …’

  I was rather pleased to see a boy so distraught at disobeying his parent. It seemed so old-fashioned, so honourable, so decent and right and endearing. And I was sorry for him, and I was excited about it, and relieved that it wasn’t something horrible. Also I know, as adult to adult, that Abu Sa’id is not an unreasonable man, and would probably, I thought, forgive his son for his natural curiosity and desire for his mother. But then – I’m not family. And I’m not Egyptian. And I’m not him. I cannot know where his limits are.

  ‘I don’t know the story,’ he said. ‘I was small. Five years. Sa’id was ten years. He never talked of her. Never. My father said nothing. Never. Not to talk of her, not allowed. When I cried for mama, there was Mariam.’

  ‘Who’s Mariam?’ I asked.

  ‘The woman in my father’s house. Second wife. New mama. The sad woman nobody love.’ I remembered the woman who moved like a fish, and hid from me. His wife. The woman in his house. I r
emembered his unwonted kindness to two English girls. A clear picture sprang up of a man heartbroken by a deserting wife, who still loved her enough to be kind to her countrywomen for her sake. And two bereft boys being foul to a substitute mother. And that poor woman, whom nobody loved. I was nearly in tears myself.

  ‘And you want to find her.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What will you do when you find her?’

  ‘I will … ask her why she leaved. See if she is a good woman or bad. See what is my English me.’

  Well, you can’t fault that.

  ‘I’ll help you, then,’ I said.

  He smiled at me. I found myself thinking ‘You big softy’, and I wasn’t sure if I meant myself or him.

  I took one look at the endless shelves of huge volumes in the high institutional halls of the Public Search Room and decided to leave Hakim to it. But of course I couldn’t.

  ‘What was her maiden name?’ I said. Hakim tried and tried to pronounce it but the sounds just didn’t work in his mouth.

  We got it in the end. Tomlinson (I think. Could be Tompkinson). It only took another half-hour to find that in 1984 she had married a man called Stephen John Lockwood, in London.

  *

  I’d arranged to meet Harry in a sandwich shop in Strutton Ground, near Scotland Yard. I had toasted cheese and salami with gherkins, and he sneered slightly at my choice. He had a cappuccino with his ham roll, and I sneered slightly at that. I don’t think men should drink frothy things with chocolate on top. So it wasn’t great even before we started.

  ‘Well, to put your mind at rest, I didn’t drag you here to talk about Lily,’ he said, straight off. I was so pleasantly surprised that I almost forgave him for sneering at my sandwich, but then I got pissed off again about his power to relieve me by saying he wasn’t going to mention that which I thought he had no business mentioning anyway.

  ‘Good,’ I said, more briskly than I might have. ‘So what is it?’ Oh shit, I thought, it’s all going wrong. I don’t want not to get on with him. Oh bugger. (Not bugger, mummy, bother.)

  ‘I thought you might like an update on Ben Cooper and your friend Eddie,’ he said, rising to the mood of the occasion. Eddie is no friend of mine and Harry knows it.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Yes, I would.’

  ‘Well,’ said Harry, ‘as you know, Ben has been evading the police inquiry into his misdemeanours by claiming ill health.’ I did know. The slimy bastard had got a psychiatrist to say that the stress of having to account for himself might drive him to suicide. (Eddie Bates had tried a similar ploy – they’d said he wasn’t well enough to stand trial, but he’d had to, in the end.) Cooper had kept it up for over a year now. And because he hasn’t had his fair hearing yet, he can’t be sacked, so he’s still sitting about on sick leave, on full pay, the slug, and I’m still sitting about wondering whether I’m going to be called to help put him away. Which I would be happy to do, because he was at least in part responsible for my sister’s downfall. Because he was in business with her making the nasty little videos, and because he was the one who, when Eddie Bates saw me dance and wanted me, arranged for Janie to wear my costumes, masquerade as me, and sell herself, as me, to him.

  Even as I write it a damp toad settles again in my belly. For Janie, for Eddie, and for my own shame.

  ‘Well now his lawyers are saying that it was too long ago,’ Harry was saying, ‘and the case should be dropped.’

  My jaw dropped to match.

  ‘Surely not,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe it. He can’t get away with it. I …’ Mouthing like a goldfish. Pointless.

  ‘Well no, he probably won’t,’ said Harry. ‘But he might.’

  ‘Anyway that’s not all,’ he said. I looked up.

  ‘Um,’ he said.

  ‘Yes?’

  He looked tired and sad.

  ‘Eddie Bates is dead,’ he said.

  It all stood still for a moment.

  And another. Then …

  ‘Sorry?’ I said.

  ‘Eddie Bates is dead,’ he repeated.

  I couldn’t quite breathe. My eyes started flickering around and I felt myself shaking. To my horror I felt I was going to cry. I heard Harry’s voice.

  ‘Angel? Angel?’

  I shook myself and came back to myself. Back to myself but different.

  ‘Dead,’ I said.

  ‘Dead,’ he said.

  I reached for a cigarette but there weren’t any. I don’t smoke any more. Harry reached over to the next table and helped himself to one from the packet belonging to the man sitting there. ‘Thank you,’ he said to him, in a voice that brooked no denial, and he lit it with the man’s lighter, and gave it to me.

  ‘Dead,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  My face was screwed up and I tried to untangle it. It wouldn’t go. We sat there in silence for a few minutes. Then Harry said: ‘Forgive an indelicate question, Angeline, but why the fuck do you mind so much?’

  I couldn’t answer. Not only because I couldn’t speak, but because I didn’t know, and if I had known I couldn’t have told Harry anyway.

  My enemy is dead. I should be singing and dancing my delight. If I was made safe by his imprisonment, how much safer am I now?

  More minutes of silence.

  ‘What did he die of?’ I asked.

  More silence, maintained this time by Harry. Then:

  ‘He hasn’t been well.’

  Oh.

  ‘How not well? Not well of what?’ You see, I couldn’t speak.

  ‘Um,’ said Harry.

  Into my state of shock came a sliver of … not fear, but … awareness.

  ‘What?’

  He sighed. ‘I didn’t tell you because I thought it would just … go away. I thought he’d get better.’

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘Was it what he was talking about before the trial? What was it?’

  I could just about register how difficult Harry was finding this, but I no longer let him get away with not saying things. We are way past the silent understandings, or more often misunderstandings, of our optimistic youth. In theory, at least.

  ‘You know when he was arrested,’ said Harry, ‘he had a head wound.’ I did know. I had inflicted it on him. I had hit him on the head with a poker when he was trying to jump me. Harry knew that. I had told him in the confusion of the end of the day of comeuppance. I seem to remember he had said, ‘Attagirl’. Anyway, some such unpolicemanly expression of approval.

  Harry was not looking at me. ‘He has been suffering ever since from dizzy spells. That’s one thing his lawyers put up when they were trying to delay the trial. He’s continued to have them inside. Last week a new inmate arrived, who for reasons best known to himself took the first opportunity he could to punch Eddie’s lights out. Two days later Eddie was found dead on the floor of his cell. They haven’t done the post-mortem yet but it looks like a fractured skull.’

  Now my skin was burning up.

  ‘He may have fallen,’ said Harry.

  I took a drag on the cigarette and started coughing. Harry took the stub from my fingers and put it out.

  ‘So did I kill him?’ I asked.

  ‘He never said in court what had caused his initial head injuries,’ Harry continued, conversationally. ‘That was one reason why the application wasn’t accepted. The doctors agreed that he was not in the best nick, but he just said he’d fallen, and the damage wasn’t consistent with that, so they couldn’t accept it.’

  I stared down at my plate. A gherkin had fallen out of my sandwich. I picked it up and ate it, and a huge sadness washed over me. Why do only mad psychotic scumbags love me, and is that love?

  ‘You didn’t kill him, legally or otherwise. But you did something,’ he said.

  ‘Yes I did.’

  Bad people around me die, but I don’t kill them, but I do something. Oh for God’s sake. Janie wasn’t bad. Not bad. Not like Eddie.

  ‘When’s the funeral?’ I as
ked.

  Harry was shocked. ‘You’re not going to go?’ he said. Aghast.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Why? Why the fuck?’

  ‘To see that he’s really dead,’ I said. ‘Because … because I thought it was over with the court case, and it wasn’t, and I want to make sure it’s over now.’

  His face was amazed but kind. ‘There you go again,’ he said. ‘You want to do something absurd and ridiculous and stupid, but you’ve got a completely good understandable reason for it.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Is that what I do?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You should be a lawyer.’

  Is that good or bad?

  ‘But it doesn’t mean you’re right,’ he said.

  ‘Right about what?’

  ‘About going to the funeral.’

  ‘You think I shouldn’t?’

  ‘I think it unwise,’ said Harry.

  ‘I’m sure you do,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ he said.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Whether to tell you where it is,’ he said.

  ‘There you go again,’ I said, a little pointedly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Telling me what to do. Acting like you’re in charge.’

  ‘I daresay,’ he said, unmoved. Only one step beyond his admirable unflappability lies his bossy pain-in-the-arse stubbornness. It reminded me of how he’d been when I first met Eddie, through him; when he warned me off making friends with him, not knowing that I was only doing so because Ben was making me. It reminded me of how jealous he’d been then, when he’d thought I didn’t know Eddie was a villain, when he’d thought that I fancied him. Harry protecting me for my own good, keeping things from me because I couldn’t be trusted to behave sensibly. Harry being a patronising sexist git. Harry watching over me, looking out for me, still caring what happens to me. Knowing me.