Desiring Cairo

by Louisa Young

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  He was still smiling.

  ‘So what do you have for me?’ he said.

  He didn’t think that I had anything very much. He didn’t know that I was about to leap straight into the heart of territory that he didn’t even know I knew he had. I was about to gatecrash, to overwhelm my natural urge to respect privacy. I was about to connect. I was scared, a little. Did I think he would bite me? Was I afraid that he wouldn’t?

  ‘Your mother,’ I said softly.

  His smile just wasn’t, any more. I don’t know where it went. It was like the Cheshire Cat in reverse.

  I am in no man’s land until he responds. I started to map it. For myself, and for him.

  ‘Hakim came here to find her,’ I said, ‘and he did find her. I helped him. She’s been here. She’s very worried about him. He knew that you and your father wouldn’t like his plan so he didn’t tell you. That’s all.’

  He was silent. Silent like ancientness. Silent like a sphinx or a desert dawn. Like a million picturesque things.

  Then he stood up.

  ‘You helped?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It was not your business.’

  ‘He was living in my house.’

  ‘He is a child.’

  ‘He was here, staying with me. Of course I looked after him.’

  ‘It is not your business.’

  ‘Please don’t accuse me, Sa’id. How could I keep a child from his mother?’

  When I looked there were tears in his eyes.

  ‘I told her you were here,’ I said.

  ‘What did she say?’

  Oh shit.

  I couldn’t say it.

  I couldn’t lie.

  ‘She wondered if you knew where Hakim was.’

  He started to laugh, and then he left the room and went into the el Araby dorm. He left the door open and I went and sat on the floor in the passageway outside, like a servant, my back to the wall and my knees drawn up, and I sat there till both my good and my not-so-good leg ached. After about twenty minutes he came out and took my hands and pulled me up, and as I came level with him he kissed my face, and he carefully wiped the lipstick from my mouth with his fingers and I took hold of one of them – the middle one, strong, brown, clean – with my teeth as it passed and then his hands ran into my hair and my hands ran into his and the blood began to shimmer and the breath to fall.

  One kiss and I am flying, flying over the cliff. The kiss is it.

  I broke away and looked at him. His eyes were there, full on mine. Those pale eyes. But it wasn’t the lust, the immediate fire. It wasn’t what I had wanted from the moment I opened the door. It was something … else. More. Other. Bigger? Different. To do with the known him, not the unknown him.

  He kissed me again. And again. Just a kiss. Just a flight over the—

  My breath was gone and my words with it.

  He put his hand on my waist, just settled on the curve like a butterfly on blossom. ‘May I?’ he said.

  I couldn’t speak. But I assented.

  Deep, deep, melting, strong.

  And he took me to my own bed under my own window, and laid me down, and as my clothes came off he said, ‘I’m not doing this because of my mother, I’m doing it because of you. It’s just timing. The two are not conflated.’ And as he started in a part of me was wondering at an Arab man who uses a word like conflate, and at such a moment, and the rest of me was screaming out the naked strength of joy. Flesh to flesh, cock to cunt. The rest is history.

  *

  Afterwards we slept. Of course. I was electrified and knocked out, simultaneously. This was my first sex since Eddie, a year and a half ago; my first real sex for five, six years. By real I mean consensual. And wasn’t it just. At some stage we half woke and did it again.

  Even as I slept I couldn’t imagine why I didn’t spend every hour God had given me fucking. I could not conceive any more glorious pastime, any nobler activity. Feeling my limbs slipping back into place, my not-so-good leg forgetting itself, my heart swelling and relaxing, my blood flowing clearly for the first time in years. Feeling the life and youth and immediacy of this man who had seemed so ancient and mysterious. After the poeticals comes the body.

  I know virginities don’t grow back, but something was blown away that afternoon.

  It occurred to me that he’d produced, used and disposed of a condom – two – and I had hardly noticed. I think I love him.

  No, that was a joke.

  It was a hejeb on his leather cord. An amulet: verses of the book, bound in leather and hung by three small loops. For protection. Worn smooth and dark by the years next to his skin.

  SIXTEEN

  ‘You are dearer than my days, you are more beautiful than my dreams’

  It must have been nearly four when I was woken by the rattle of the door. Opening, then closing, and Maireadh’s voice in the background calling out, and I was out of bed grabbing my Turkish gown, then Lily was running in, and grinning, and saying, ‘What’s Sa’id doing in your bed, Mummy, and why haven’t you got any clothes on?’

  So the first time I let myself go, the first time I do it, what happens but the very thing that I feared, that was half the reason why I didn’t do it for so long.

  There’s a moment before things fall into place when they are suspended, when they could fall anywhere: into the right place, the wrong place, a place that will do, just about. Or all over the floor in pieces, crashed and burned, mendable or not. During that moment you are powerless. You cannot nudge. No levers respond, nothing has any effect. You watch, in slow motion, as pieces fall.

  Lily was grinning. That seemed to be all right. Sa’id was rising up from among the cumulus of white duvet, sleepy, smiling, looking clean and for once young. Beautiful naked torso. I was watching, watching. There was no time even to consider what I wanted.

  ‘Hallo, habibti,’ he said. ‘Can you make coffee?’

  ‘Of course not. I’m five,’ she said. But she was flattered.

  ‘Can you make a glass of water?’

  ‘Of course I can.’

  ‘Will you, please?’

  ‘Of course.’

  And off she ran.

  I think that’s all right.

  Yes, that seems all right. For now.

  He held out his hand, and I went to the side of the bed, and sat, and took it. I didn’t know what to say. I kissed his fingers quickly to show friendliness, and ran after Lily. She’d made Maireadh put the kettle on. Maireadh was grinning too. Laughing at me. She and Brigid have just the same laugh. Silent, superior, very good-humoured and benevolent. I began to hit my forehead with my hand, and sat at the kitchen table, and began to laugh too. Lily came and sat on me. I hugged her, and hugged her, and realised that it was only me who was worried.

  ‘You smell funny,’ said Lily.

  My first reaction was to shriek and push her off me, but I didn’t. She doesn’t know what I smell of. She doesn’t need to know. For a moment I had been careless with protecting her, but no damage seems to have been done, so I don’t need to punish myself. Not yet, anyway. We’ll see.

  Maireadh was positively sniggering.

  ‘Hello darling,’ I said to Lily.

  ‘You are funny,’ she said. ‘You smell funny and you are funny. Can I have HobNobs?’

  ‘After your proper tea,’ I said. (Why do anarchists drink camomile? Because proper tea is theft.)

  ‘I must go,’ said Maireadh, covering her mouth with her hand. ‘I’ve left the kids with Reuben.’

  ‘No tea?’ I said. She laughed at me again.

  ‘You’ve enough on your plate,’ she said. She’s going to tell Brigid all about this, and it’s going to become one of those myths, like the time Caitlin and Lily tied themselves together at the wrists and nobody noticed all afternoon. She left, carrying the story with her like a bag of particularly nice buns to share.

  I made an omelette for Lily, and coffee for Sa’id, a
nd he emerged in a gallabeya to drink it. It was one of those curious moments; perfect yet skew-whiff. Man woman and child, sitting and eating. But we’re eating breakfast though it’s tea-time, he’s my lover but not her father (Is he my lover? And to be technically nice, I’m not her mother). I should be just looking after my child but in fact I am fainting with desire. It looks normal. But it’s not. But then again, it is. Because it is normal not to be normal. On some levels.

  I felt quite perfectly divided. Here is my child. Object of my total love and loyalty, number one candidate for attention. She may just have had a bit of a shock. Or perhaps not – I can’t tell yet. And here is the man who was just in my bed, for the first time. ‘Normally’ he would be object number one under such circumstances.

  God, even his feet are beautiful. The long parabolic struts of his instep, the arch of his toes. Dark honey to my milk white.

  Thank God it’s nearly Lily’s bedtime.

  I was torn. They were perfectly happy. Chatting to each other. It’s only me who feels weird.

  *

  The happy families scenario lasted for about an hour. Then the question arose: which bed was I going to put Lily in? I started thinking about this as soon as she was sitting down in front of her omelette – my mind moving on, as always, to the next stage. I became conscious, for the first time, of how crowded my flat was with other people living there. Not in the way it had been with Hakim and Sarah, or even with Sa’id before. It wasn’t a physical issue, an issue of space. It was emotional. Before, they had retreated to Lily’s room. Now he didn’t. I was pleased. But. If he was not using her room as his territory, this could mean he was already moving out of it, in his mind. And into where? Well, my room. I liked this and I didn’t like it. Well, I liked it but I felt … threatened? Unconsulted?

  Ach, I was leaping ahead. He wasn’t moving out of Lily’s room. He just hadn’t been in there. And anyway, he had, to get his gallabeya. So perhaps I should stop panicking, and worry about what I wanted, not what he wanted. Let him sort that out.

  Everything is becoming fraught with meaning. Stop it. Stop it right now. You’re not seventeen, to decide what everybody else is thinking.

  Lily was playing with her egg, chasing it up the knife with the fork, then dividing it into little piles and putting them together in gangs.

  ‘If Sa’id wants to be in your bed can I be in mine again?’ she said.

  A toad appeared in my belly. Why, I didn’t know.

  Five years of protecting your child from adult sexuality and now, over tea, by chance, without discussion, a man seems to be moving in with me.

  I looked at him.

  He looked at me. His eyes said yes, yes. But he doesn’t know what I have at stake here. He doesn’t see that great bird at my back; he doesn’t know the slow-moving dance I have been doing round Harry. He doesn’t know the great reluctance in me to have a man too close.

  I am not imagining that if he sleeps in my bed tonight and tomorrow he will move in and stay forever, marrying me and controlling me and taking over my child and forbidding me things. Even in the European way, let alone the Arab. But if he sleeps in my bed tonight Lily will start to know about things that I didn’t want her to know yet. Adult sexuality. Which I didn’t want her to see until, unless, it was … well, until it was as I chose to represent it, i.e. perfect. Nuclear. Come on, be honest – until it was husband and wife forever domestic with the little child and all that. Until it was what I grew up with. What my parents gave me. Or the nearest facsimile I could manage. Which I couldn’t, so, nothing.

  In other words I’m being a controlling illusionist, suspending my child miles from reality in a frozen fantasy of my own. Using her as an excuse, not a reason, to lock myself away. If I can’t have my girlish dream of mutually independent domestic bliss, then I’ll have nothing.

  Angeline, get over yourself. Perfection does not march fully formed into your life and lie down on a plate waving its legs in the air. And if it does, it’s only perfection in one area – and there he is. Sexual perfection. Human perfection. The lover. Don’t throw him out because he is not domestic perfection, forever perfection. And anyway how do you know what he is? What he will be? Or even what he thinks – what this means to him?

  ‘Aiwa?’ I said to him.

  ‘Aiwa,’ he said to me.

  ‘I know what that means, that means yes,’ said Lily.

  ‘Aiwa,’ I said to her.

  ‘Can I get down?’ she said, as she slipped from the table and ran to her room, where she started to rearrange dolls on the bed. I kissed Sa’id hard, burnt up like one of those amaretti papers that float to the ceiling, then went to change the sheets, my knees giving way.

  *

  As I put Lily to bed I lay beside her, murmuring that I loved her, in case she should feel the emotions in the flat, and miss me.

  ‘I know you love me, Mummy, you don’t have to go on about it,’ she said.

  ‘Are you getting enough attention from me?’ I asked.

  ‘Give me lots now and that’ll do till morning,’ she said, holding out her arms, so I piled her arms up with attention until she said it was too heavy and could I put it under the bed so she could get it when she wanted it. I lay with her till she slept, then went to Sa’id, and lay with him. Divided? Yes and no.

  Later Sarah rang. I wasn’t going to answer the phone, but I heard her voice from the other room as I lay counting the hairs on her son’s chest (seventeen). I tensed a little.

  ‘Who is that?’ he said. Which he hadn’t said before, to other disembodied voices floating down the hall.

  I was silent for a moment.

  ‘Your mother,’ I said.

  For a moment I heard reality flooding up the balcony and crashing up against the door. Tendrils of it snuck into the flat. One seeped as far as the bedroom, and tapped on the foot of the bed.

  Sa’id shifted, turning his head, moving his arm. He didn’t turn his back on me.

  He said nothing. Sarah was still talking but I couldn’t tell if he was listening. I was. Hakim, when, tomorrow, okay. I couldn’t really make it out. But the tone wasn’t happy. She wasn’t calling with good news.

  Hakim.

  ‘Sa’id,’ I said. Tentative. ‘Please don’t …’

  He turned his face to me, then extended his neck back a little as if to get me in focus.

  ‘Please,’ he said. ‘No more opinions about my family.’

  ‘She’s worried about Hakim,’ I said. ‘So am I. Aren’t you?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Why not?

  ‘Why should I be?’

  I stared at him. A cold streak of alienation flowed down my bed.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s OK,’ said Sa’id. ‘More or less. What’s the problem?’ He looked a little surprised at my reaction.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘I sent him back to Cairo.’

  I stared at him.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he said.

  ‘We didn’t know where he was,’ I said.

  ‘He’d finished his work here. He didn’t do it very well, so—’

  ‘What work?’

  ‘The samples he had brought over, the people he was to see. Why he came. You know. The business.’

  ‘Samples?’

  ‘He brought over some of the things we make, and some other things, for some new – potential new – business partners. And he made some payments, and collected some, and paid some compliments and so on. That’s why he came.’

  ‘And why did you come?’

  I felt like a cross child, squeaking for explanation to a patient adult.

  ‘Because he hadn’t come back,’ Sa’id said. ‘And because when I was speaking to people on the telephone from Luxor it became apparent he was not doing what he had been told, and he wasn’t returning my calls, and he wasn’t at the hotel, and you know I’ve mentioned these people in Cairo he’s going round with … So I came and sent him home.’

/>   I thought of the ball of lapis and the beautiful Nut boxes. And the thousand pounds he’d given his mother.

  ‘Well for God’s sake,’ I said. ‘For … Sa’id, why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I didn’t know you needed to know.’

  It is such a shock when a person who has so far understood everything suddenly demonstrates total lack of understanding.

  ‘He’s my friend, Sa’id. He stayed here. Lily loves him. I helped him. I was worried about him. Jesus. I’m going to ring Sarah.’

  ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Wait.’

  So I waited. Naked beside him, sitting up as he lay, surrounded by the detritus of passion. Our clothes embracing each other in cast-aside piles on the floor. He didn’t sit up. Even as I sat, his complexity and his authority remained, horizontal, silent but unavoidable.

  ‘Come back down,’ he said. ‘Come back to me.’

  So I did. He pulled me on top of him, arms around my waist, breast to breast, face to face, and he stared me in the eye.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know you were worried. You didn’t show that you cared for him. I should have known.’ I stared him back, and kissed him. I could hardly take my mouth from his face. I couldn’t move away but he was still talking so I just put my face against his neck, under his ear, and held on to him. I remembered when he might have told me, and when instead I had told him Sarah was here, and we had become … distracted.

  ‘But Angeline,’ he said. ‘Angeline. Do not think to bring my mother and I to each other. Do not waste your kindness on this.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to,’ I said. He turned and craned his head to look at me again.

  ‘Yes you were,’ he said.

  It occurred to me he might be right.

  I thought about it for bit.

  Then: ‘But I must tell her Hakim is safe.’

  ‘Why must you?’ he said.

  ‘Because she is in pain.’

  ‘I don’t care about her pain,’ he said. And for a moment I understood, and I sat with him in that separate land of his self-protection, cushioned by decisions he made years ago about how to feel, and more precisely how not to feel, about his mother and the pain she had given him.