Desiring Cairo

by Louisa Young

  ‘I’m going to come up to London tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I’ll come to you about lunchtime.’ And perhaps you’ll meet your other son, I thought, the one who doesn’t like you.

  Last week, I hadn’t seen this family for ten years, I thought – well, that reluctant churlish anti-social part of me that always wishes everybody would fuck off and leave me alone thought it. That side just wanted to sit with Lily and admire the name-tags I had sewn in, to read Madeline books and hear about the playground. That side of me wanted to still my life down to nothing and live only in the sweetness of her and hers. It’s a bit sick, really.

  ‘Sarah –’

  ‘What?’ she said, suddenly, frightened.

  ‘Sa’id is here too.’

  Silence. Poor woman. Poor lucky woman. Long-lost sons coming and going like cue-balls.

  ‘Where?’ she said.

  ‘Well …’ I was rubbing my brow again. What was I doing with all these sons of hers? ‘He’s here. He’s staying here.’

  ‘Does he know where Hakim is?’

  In a second I knew it, I felt it. Why? Because I knew personally, I’d seen it before. The preferred child. The sweetest flower. She prefers Hakim.

  ‘No. But why don’t you come and ask him?’ I didn’t prefer Hakim, but I didn’t prefer Sa’id either. Yet, look, I’m already being a sneaky protector of him who I see as unpreferred. How it never changes. Show me the unpreferred, or the assumed to be unpreferred, and I will prefer them.

  I suppose the shock of Hakim appearing took the edge off the shock of Sa’id appearing so soon after. Either way she didn’t seem too alarmed. I suppose once she realised she was going to have to deal with any of it, then she was halfway to dealing with all of it.

  ‘I’ll come up. Around lunchtime,’ she was saying. ‘Let me know if you hear anything.’

  ‘I’ll have to tell Sa’id you’re coming,’ I said. ‘He might not be going to be in.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, not picking up the other possibilities behind my cover-all statement. Like ‘he might choose not to be in’.

  *

  Then I rang Harry back. He answered slightly coldly but I couldn’t be bothered with that.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘It’s a DNA test now, and it’s pretty damn accurate. The only thing is, it does need DNA from both parents, um, from me and Janie, so that could be a …’

  I dropped the telephone.

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘What?’

  I was shaking, and at the back of my mind a little thought appeared: ah, here it comes. The breakdown is starting. The front of my mind had turned tornado. I was gasping and stuttering and sitting on the floor.

  I thought we were going to have to dig Janie up.

  There were dark wings flapping beside my eyes and I was saying ‘we can’t, we can’t’, but somewhere inside me there was a gleeful little shiny stone saying, ‘Goody. Serve her right.’ Stir her up, resurrect her, bring her back, get her up, and then she will do something – just like alive people do. She will have an effect and change our lives and it will be all right. She will tell us who her child’s father is!

  I was so happy.

  But I knew it was disgusting, of course I did.

  Flesh and worms.

  Five years.

  But I could see her again!

  Harry’s voice was squeaking my name from the telephone receiver on the floor.

  I hadn’t seen her since she climbed on the back of the Harley, in my spare helmet and her stupid shoes, which I told her to change because I wouldn’t take anyone pillion if they weren’t wearing proper boots. She said none of her other shoes fitted her, her feet were so swollen with pregnancy. And they were. She’d gone up to about size eight, usually she was four and a half. Size smaller than me. I gave her all my too-tight shoes, and she gave me her gone-baggy ones, which suited us fine because she got new shoes and I got old ones, and that was the right way round for us.

  We were laughing about her being so huge. Pregnant all over. Could the suspension take it, could she reach round me to hold on? Absolutely not. And if she held on to the sissy bar would that not upend the bike backwards? I was instructing her to stick her arse out and lean forward, almost resting her huge belly on the seat between us. ‘Just don’t lean,’ I said. ‘Just be cool.’ Hell, Janie knew how to ride pillion, she’d done it for years, but not for a while. But you don’t forget that kind of thing.

  She had weak fingernails and plump earlobes and she used to whistle when she was annoyed.

  I hadn’t seen her.

  The bike landed on my leg, so I was trapped, but she had been thrown far away.

  I was unconscious anyway.

  Not being there for the things that change everything. Not saying goodbye to the person who was always there.

  It wasn’t that she left without saying goodbye. She didn’t leave, you know. It was me stuck under the cylinder head, true, but it’s me that has moved on, on my one good and one improving, always improving leg. She’s still there on the side of the road.

  What was it Sa’id said? ‘God has taken him. Leave them to it.’

  I remember the moment the car sideswiped us, cutting us up on the inside as we turned left. If I’d been further over there would have been enough room, or no room at all. But I was indicating. I was pretty central in the lane (no one is saying you weren’t). I remember the feeling of my stomach falling, falling, falling – the same feeling you get on any little skid before you rectify it, any time your back wheel goes dancing without your permission, or the bend you are committed to turns out to have been too tight. That feeling, only it didn’t stop. It was just overwhelmed. It became the undertow. I remember pain, and lights. I don’t remember very often. I don’t care to.

  I don’t remember thinking about Janie for one second. It’s the moments of crisis that reveal you for what you actually are. I actually am selfish. Evidently. So I don’t care to think about that either.

  And the driver? Never got him, did they.

  And no I never think about that either. I’m past spiralling in unalterable misery.

  Dig her up.

  I picked up the phone. I was not having the breakdown after all. Just as well.

  ‘Angel?’ he was saying. ‘Angel, please!’

  ‘Hello!’ I said, perkily, like a children’s TV presenter.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Do we have to dig her up?’ I demanded.

  ‘What? What are you – NO!’ he shouted.

  ‘Oh.’

  Silence.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, no. Oh, I’m sorry. I – no, you can get it from loads of things. I’m sorry, it is a bit … Oh.’ He seemed to think it was his fault that I was upset – as if he had phrased it insensitively or something.

  ‘I would’ve liked to,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I would’ve liked to. Like Old Nile.’ Old Nile was our alligator that died, and we buried it, and I dug it up to see how it was.

  ‘Angel, you mad girl,’ he said, tiredly. ‘You mad girl. Jesus. Only you would admit that.’

  ‘You know what I mean, though.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, but I wasn’t. I was glad, because he understood.

  More silence. Our timeless silences.

  ‘They need DNA from both parents to make a full match. I send them blood through my GP, and we can get Janie’s from, well, if you have any of her hair or anything, or by getting blood from both your parents.’

  ‘But mine is from both my parents and mine wouldn’t be identical to hers.’

  ‘The pattern’s different but the ingredients are the same. Sort of. Bands and markers. I’ll send you the leaflet.’

  ‘Oh.’

  I was thinking about my parents. About what they know and what they don’t know. And what I was going to have to tell them.

  ‘Shall I?’ said Harry, a little impatiently. Or perhaps it was nervously.

  ‘Yes
please,’ I said. ‘Yup, fine, OK. I’ll speak to Mum and Dad.’

  ‘And then …’

  ‘Then you do it. Yes.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  I don’t know if he likes me any more, I thought. Then I realised that I didn’t know if Sa’id liked me either. ‘Blah,’ I said, and went to bed, to Lily, who likes me so much.

  THIRTEEN

  Tell Your Own Mama

  Sa’id didn’t come back that night. When we got up in the morning there was no sign of him. This made me cross, partly because I started to imagine things about his personal life and partly because of course Lily wondered where he was and I couldn’t answer her, which meant I was failing in my duty of omniscience and constant reassurance. I am meant to know everything, you know.

  ‘No wonder you get so tired,’ says Brigid.

  ‘You can talk,’ say I.

  And there were no letters. So that was good. None since Saturday. If she’d been going to send anything as a direct result of our little chat I would’ve had it by now. Probably. So. Five days and counting. But it didn’t occur to me to wonder if I’d ever be able to stop counting.

  Over breakfast Lily says she wants her friend Caitlin to move in. I point out we already have two people staying. She points out that neither of them are here. I snap at her.

  ‘Don’t snap at me,’ she said, ‘it’s not me you’re cross with.’

  I could not deny it.

  I took her to school and revelled momentarily in the gorgeous free freedom of knowing your kid is being looked after and you’re neither paying nor beholden, then I subsided a little as I picked up the day’s work. I managed a couple of hours of some particularly unexciting proof-reading (I’m afraid my finances have got that bad) before Sarah arrived. (No I haven’t forgotten the wads in the upholstery. But. They’re not mine. They … they can be added to the list of things I don’t think about. Shit, now I’ve thought of them. Yes well. All in good time.)

  So Sarah arrived. Actually I was fed up with all these people arriving. My poor little doorstep. My poor exhausted welcoming smile. I took her arm and walked her downstairs with me. Yes, she left a holdall. But we were going out.

  Down the scruddy stairs, past the mouldy cars, over the dogshitty lawns and on to the real streets outside the estate. The swimming pool café? The greasy spoon with wrapping paper on the walls for wallpaper? The not-so-nasty park? We went to the park.

  ‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘and I wasn’t sure I was going to tell you this, is that before he went off, well …’

  We went into one of those obligatory reluctant moments. I ignored it. It wasn’t Sarah I was cross with either, but I was cross. ‘You can’t stop the birds of sorrow from fluttering in your hair, but you don’t have to let them nest,’ as the ancient Chinese proverb says. Ditto birds of crossness. They were, I think, preparing to lay.

  ‘He gave me some money.’

  ‘Lucky you,’ I said facetiously.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  I looked round at her. The sun was bright but low and it shone up at her. She looked rather like an angel. A middle-aged angel. Twigs and leaves splayed out behind her.

  ‘A thousand pounds,’ she said, and looked at me enquiringly. ‘It’s quite a lot, isn’t it?’

  ‘Where did he get that from?’ I asked, not particularly intelligently.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  I admired some worm casts down by my left foot, and wondered whether to walk towards the litterbin or the dog exercise area, where the dogs exercise nothing so much as their right to crap everywhere.

  ‘You don’t know. I don’t know.’ I was beginning to sound like Sylvester Stallone, leaning up against the bathroom door in Rocky. ‘I dunno, y’know. Who knows?’ And what is there to know anyway?

  Her face took on a crumpled look, a very sad look, with fear in it. Unforgiving thoughts were in my head: you left him, you have had no idea of his welfare for fifteen years, you have another son who didn’t come home last night.

  ‘And Sa’id,’ said Sarah. Oh Lord, her face.

  Well yes, that probably was another reason for my crankiness.

  Anyway she wept until her eyes looked like pickled eggs, and I told her everything would be all right, and tried to do so without promising my help. But when you reassure people they hear promises whether or not you make any.

  ‘I have to make it right,’ she said after a bit. ‘It’s my family.’

  Well there’s a battle cry for our times. Not so easy, Sarah. And last time you tried you ended up running away.

  I wondered if when I talked to my mother about how I needed her blood so I could find out whether my ex-boyfriend was Lily’s father she too would weep and scrawl in a public park.

  Sarah was saying something about trust. And fear. And I remembered how I had felt when I had thought that Eddie Bates had kidnapped Lily, and though Hakim is much older and male, I could see the edge of the same maternal terror.

  ‘I thought he’d run away from me but perhaps it’s something more – Angeline do you think he could be in danger?’

  ‘We could talk to the police,’ I said. ‘In fact …’ It occurred to me that I should talk to Harry about it. (And then just as quickly – but would he think I was asking him a favour? Would I mind if he did think it? Would I mind being beholden? I laughed to myself. Get used to it, girl. You’re letting him in. So let him in. My independence flapped its wings furiously but it didn’t fly. Stay put, you.)

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘We can ask a friend of mine,’ I said. ‘He’s a detective.’ Well he is. It sounded absurd to say it aloud, that’s all.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. She looked weak and puzzled. Poor thing, I thought again. Sons coming and going, and weeping in the park with strangers who know detectives.

  ‘I’ll talk to him if you like,’ I said. ‘What are you going to do?’

  She breathed in deep, flopped her shoulders, squinted a little.

  ‘I’ll go and see my father. I should anyway. It’s possible Hakim may have been in touch with him. And I’ll … I … can I come back and use your telephone later? I mean – I can go somewhere else, I …’

  Yeah, sure. Come and stay, with the rest of your family. Plenty of room, as they’ve all pissed off without notice.

  ‘OK,’ I said. She wanted to be where he had been. Where he might return. Fair enough.

  ‘Don’t ask your detective. Not yet,’ she said.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Of course, Sa’id may be back.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  Oh?

  I looked at her.

  ‘You haven’t even asked about him,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t judge me,’ she said. Not very snappily, but a bit.

  ‘Don’t snap at me,’ I murmured.

  She gave me a hot look.

  ‘Sarah,’ I said. ‘I didn’t choose to be involved in any of this.’

  ‘Oh yes you did,’ she retorted. ‘You let him stay. You rang me.’

  Which was true. But she said ‘him’ not ‘them’. I was getting pissed off with her about that, but then I was pissed off with Sa’id too.

  ‘I didn’t turn up on anyone’s doorstep out of the blue, and then disappear without a word,’ I said, ‘and two of your sons have now done that to me. I’m not sorry, I’m not angry, but I’m not prepared to …’ I made a noise. ‘I have become involved in this and sorry, but I do have opinions, and I’m wondering whether you have any interest in your other son, who didn’t come home last night either.’

  Her eyes skittered.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Of course. I’ll ring you later. Of course.’

  And off she went.

  Back in the flat I tripped over her bag. Fuck it, these people.

  *

  Putting Sarah’s bag on top of Hakim’s things in Lily’s room (which was now serving as Sa’id’s), so that el Araby property was now three layers deep, I noticed that Hakim’s stuff had been rearranged. No
t just tidied up, but rearranged.

  Well, a brother would go through his missing brother’s things. No doubt I should, too. No. Sarah can, later. I don’t like going through other people’s things. Not since I went through Janie’s.

  Later, in my study (I know it sounds grand. It’s eight feet by nine and has a window), I realised that my own things had been … not moved, not tidied or changed but just – picked up and laid down by other hands than my own. If you have a desk that no one else ever touches you will understand how I know. An angle, an air – a fingerprint of otherness. My mouth tightened and my breasts grew warm. The birds flapped. There may be intimations of intimacy, Sa’id, but this is not what’s going on.

  Then there was a knock at the front door – Brigid’s sister Maireadh with the children. They came in and ate biscuits and drank their school milk in its little cardboard cartons (Sydney!). Maireadh and I had tea, and the enforced idleness of adults looking after lots of children having fun together. Sit and wait till you’re needed to call an ambulance or provide more food. Lily took no notice of me because she had big kids to run around after. I love to see that. How she runs and flexes and tries it all out.

  A long, narrow game of football was developing on the balcony when Sa’id came gliding up through the bevy of children and into the flat. He was wearing a greenish suit. Maireadh took one look at him and went rather silly about the middle of the face.

  ‘Who’s that?’ she breathed. I was rather annoyed to see that his effect was universal. Some childish part of me takes some pride in liking men who other women think strange, and I didn’t care to appear (if only to myself) as just fodder for some obvious sex god.

  ‘Maireadh Brennan, Sa’id el Araby,’ I grunted.

  ‘Maireadh,’ he said. ‘Excuse me. Angelina. I must go away for a few days. I am sorry to abuse your hospitality. I hope you will let me return.’

  ‘I didn’t know where you were,’ I said.

  ‘I left a note,’ he said. ‘On the table. I’m sorry, it was sudden. Didn’t you see it?’