A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar

by Suzanne Joinson

  She had booked the first possible flight home and all through the long journey had thought of Nathaniel. In the airport lounge – that existential zone for the lonely traveller – it occurred to her that lately the balance of control was ambiguous. Nathaniel’s unreliability brought out a brutal, almost paralysing frustration in her. She was feeling something new in herself and with horror realised that it was neediness, or worse, a craving for consistency. For the first time, her work was not enough.

  There was a cough at the door. Damn. Just as she had taken all of her make-up off. She walked towards the door, but stopped. There it was again. It wasn’t Nathaniel. She waited several moments and then walked quietly to the spy-hole. The night light was on in the stairwell and a man was sitting on the floor just outside her door with his back against the wall, legs stretched out in front of him. His eyes were closed but he did not look asleep.

  Frieda jumped backwards with her heart whacking against her chest, but she could not resist peeping out again. He was facing her now, as if he could see right through the door. She thought he was going to stand up, come towards her, but he glanced down at his hand and did not move. He was holding a pen.

  She went as quietly as she could back into the kitchen. There was a number on the pinboard for the City Guardians, a group of volunteers responsible for cleaning up streets and clearing off the homeless; she could always phone that, or the police? There was the double lock on the door, but if she put that on now he would hear it and she would only draw attention to herself. She moved into the living room, instead, and returned to the window. In the street the group of kids with their mobile phones had gone and there seemed to be nobody left out there, just the rain, and the concrete swelling in the wetness and the shake of trees sagging under water. At intervals she heard the cough from the stairwell. A city fox, scrawny and barely coated, flashed underneath the skip bins. Frieda looked down the empty, wet street and made a decision. From a cupboard she pulled out a pillow and a blanket. She took another look. He was curled up on the floor now; she could just see his bent back, his leather jacket, the black scruff of his hair.

  It was undoubtedly inadvisable to let him know that there was a young woman living here, probably alone, but she opened the door anyway. The man immediately scrambled himself up into a sitting position and looked at her. He had a moustache, and sleepy-looking eyes, not an unpleasant face. Frieda didn’t say anything, didn’t smile, but handed him the pillow and the blanket and quickly closed the door. Five minutes later she looked again through the peephole. He was sitting with the blanket wrapped around his legs, leaning against the wall with the pillow propped behind his head, smoking a cigarette.

  In the morning she found the blanket folded up with the pillow balancing on top of it, and on the wall next to her door was a large drawing of a bird: long beak, peculiar legs and a feathery tail. It was not a bird she could identify. There were some words in Arabic and although she actually had elementary Arabic, she wasn’t up to understanding what it said. Below, in English, was written:

  As the great poet says you’re afflicted,

  like me, with a bird’s journey.

  Next to the bird was a swirl of peacock feathers, and alongside that an intricate drawing of a boat made out of a flock of seagulls, the seagulls floating off and forming a sunset. Frieda walked out of the doorway to have a proper look. She touched the black marks with her finger, then leaned over the railing to look down the spiral of the receding staircase. The cleaner was on the ground floor, with his mop. He looked up at her and nodded.

  For Beginners: Mount and Away! How easy it seems. To the novice it is not as easy as it looks, yet everyone, or almost everyone, can learn to ride, though there are different ways of going about it.

  3. A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar – Notes

  May 2nd

  We have been put up in a Moslem inn because we are considered too unlucky for the Chinese to house. We are ‘guests’ at this Inn of Harmonious Brotherhood and I am minded of the words of Marco Polo about this heat-crushed city:

  The people of Kashgar have an astonishing acquaintance with the devilries of enchantment, inasmuch as they make their idols to speak. They can also by their sorceries bring about changes in the weather, and produce darkness, and do a number of things so extraordinary that no-one without seeing them would believe them.

  I can believe it. It would not surprise me to see the devil lurking in every corner of this courtyard to which we are confined.

  This morning as we waited for Millicent, Lizzie and I strained to see the women in veils and drapes as they fluttered back and forth. They wear gaudy scarves over tunics and vibrant headscarves and though faces are covered it is possible to guess who is handsome, and who less so, from the artfulness of the headwear arrangement.

  ‘They are more colourful than I expected.’ We were seated on the floor, on bright bolsters and cushions, in a reception-area room that led on to the courtyard. Lizzie sat opposite me, flicking at her precious camera.

  Outside the main entrance to this inn is a wooden sign with the words ‘One True Religion’ painted across it in red. Tin pots line the shelves in the cramped kitchen and embellished, ornamental teapots with complicated handles made from bone are proudly placed in the divan room. Our host, Mohammed, pours green-coloured bitter tea for us himself, holding his curious teapot high above the cups, allowing the stream of liquid to lengthen like a twinkling rope. Breakfast is served on large copper trays, arranged so that we can look out towards the centrepiece of the house, a small fountain whose running water falls into a shallow pool that is decorated with a scattering of rose and geranium petals. Carved columns of poplar wood lead up the rafters, and a colourful balcony encases a second floor of rooms. The running water, in this thirsty desert area, is, I suppose, an ever-flowing symbol of this Mohammed’s personal wealth.

  ‘There are so many of them. Millicent says it is a combination of wives and daughters.’

  ‘Lizzie, I want to ask about the baby. Do you think she is alive?’

  Lizzie shrugged.

  Mohammed returned and methodically covered the table with pitchers full of the juices of peaches and melons, plates of wobbling, slightly cooked eggs, flatbreads, rose yoghurt and tomatoes sprinkled with sugar. Next came blue earthenware bowls containing honey, almonds, olives and raisins were placed in a row along with bowls of thick, worm-like noodles. Beneath his peculiar beard, Mohammed’s face is thinner and younger than one first suspects, and although he only has a small amount of English, I noticed that when Millicent said grace quietly over her food last night he turned his head and snorted through his nose, like a horse pulling at its reins.

  Lizzie and I both started slightly, and looked up as Millicent emerged from one of the dark rooms, dressed in a blue cotton coat. Her rebellious hair, a frizz that strains against her attempts to control it with wax, was as usual in a cloud around her head.

  ‘The bribery money from the Inland Mission will take several weeks to arrive, which means we have no choice but to remain here in Kashgar,’ she spoke as she knelt down at the breakfast spread without smiling, poking her chin upward as if she were trying to reach a ledge to rest it on. Millicent’s body has the contradictory look of a woman of a certain age who has not borne children: surprisingly girlish about the hips and waist, as if the milk of womanhood has passed her by, though she is not mannish either, despite operating outside of the usual restraints of femininity, which is at odds with her woman’s mouth, laugh and her high voice.

  ‘And the baby, Millicent?’

  ‘They have found a wet-nurse for her. She will be returned to us shortly.’ Millicent took a sip of peach juice, and licked her thin lips. She looked at me.

  ‘The question of the baby is unresolved, but for the time being, you will be responsible for her.’

  ‘Goodness, Millicent, I have no comprehension of how to look after a baby. I merely wanted to reassure myself that she is not dead, or being burned on a pyre.�
� She ignored me and lit a Hatamen.

  ‘Remember, he is tolerating us infidels in his inn because we are women, the undangerous sex – we should not waste this opportunity. I’ve discovered that one of the middle daughters, Khadega, speaks Russian and so we have been able to communicate very well. It is arranged that we will begin phonetic lessons for her. She is keen to “practise her English”.’

  Millicent aspires to capture young women in a holy net as a fisherman catches a minnow and what a catch this would be: directly from inside the false prophet’s house, to be guided into the arms of the only true Prophet.

  ‘How can you be sure she wants to “practise English”?’ I said. ‘She might actually want to learn English.’

  ‘Might I remind you’, Millicent stood up from the table, pushing her eye-glasses up her nose, ‘of Matthew 28:16–20, and of the eleven disciples in Galilee who doubted Jesus. What did he do? He turned to them and said: “All authority in heaven on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you”.’

  I finished the next line for her: ‘ “And surely, He said, I am with you always, to the very end of age.” ’

  She made a light hissing noise. It irks Millicent that I know my scripture, and recently, she has been opting for the more obvious of texts. Lizzie’s eyes, always large and wet, grew larger and wetter: don’t Eva. I would hardly have thought it possible.

  ‘Well, I suppose this is as good a place as another to set up a Mission.’

  Lizzie looked at me. It is many long months since we left Victoria Station (where I picked up my glorious, green BSA Lady’s Roadster bicycle). Our luggage was labelled with fantastical words: BERLIN. BAKU. KRASNOVODSK. OSH. KASHGAR. Before we came, the Reverend James McCraven talked of our destination (such as we had one) as the least-visited place on earth. His craggy fingers poked invisible blisters in the air as he raved of barren deserts full of evil idols and beings no better than animals, his look implying that I was in some way responsible for such barrenness, such empty, heathen terrain. I lay in the stiff, uncomfortable bed at the Inland Mission’s Training School in Liverpool holding a stolen, illicit, and for that reason much-treasured apple underneath the blanket. As my finger scraped the shiny red skin of the apple I tried to picture a desert, conjuring vast, empty spaces full of refractions of light and an infinite variety of shades of sand. I pierced the skin so that juice came out and with the tip of my finger burrowed a hole such as a worm might make into the apple’s flesh, longing to reach an empty place, thinking of the peace and stillness that must be inherent in such a landscape. I have yet to find this blissful void. Instead, there has been an eternal lugging: railway tickets and strange hotels, holdalls full of quinine and sticking plasters, the rolling and unrolling of a Jaeger sleeping bag, arguments with the dragoman, trunks being loaded on and off and sorrowful headaches. Then, once past Osh we were confronted with the appalling jangle of travelling by postal cart; such a clattering of the bone and an incomparable torture of muscle. There is nausea, too, as we recoil at much, if not all, of the food available and the endless trouble with fleas.

  Still, perhaps, after weeks of tramping, Lizzie and I have arrived at the thought that we would travel to the end of the world and round again. I don’t believe either of us ever expected to stop. I was thankful for that look from Lizzie. Lately, it seems to me that Millicent has stolen her, spelled her away from me. Our proximity through travel has annihilated any sense of intimacy so that I am left alone, watching the two of them, but I saw that she, too, does not want to remain here. We are together, at least, in that.

  4. London, Present Day

  Victoria Station

  Tayeb watched Roberto disappear into the rush of commuters like a fat fish, a bottom-of-the-sea grazer, looking exactly like what he was: a short, squat, Portuguese chef. He didn’t look back once.

  So that was that, then; another segment of his life pulled off and discarded like a sour piece of tangerine. No going back to the Hackney flat now.

  Tayeb had waited two hours for Roberto, sitting at a table in the café on Victoria Station concourse, stretching out one cup of tea for the duration. As he waited, he drew dead-straight lines in a grid across the interlaced feathers of a falcon’s wing he had sketched on to a napkin, using a fountain pen stolen from a charity shop. Stealing was easy in this country, unlike in Sana’a, where ancient grandfathers sit in the corner of shops and stalls watching fingers, their cataracts cleared by qat. When Roberto finally did arrive, at first he’d seemed concerned:

  ‘You OK, brother?’ He spoke through his green-toothed smile, not much of an advertisement for a life in the kitchen.

  ‘Yeah, yalla. I’m OK.’

  ‘Well, I hate to say this, Tay’, but I think you’re right to be paranoid.’ Roberto spread his hands across the sticky table, spanning his fat fingers out.

  ‘Really? Why?’

  ‘They came again,’ Roberto squinted down at Tayeb’s doodles on the napkins, wings, talons, bones.

  ‘The police?’ Tayeb leaned back in his chair.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Two of them, in normal clothes. No police gear, which is probably a bad sign, wanted to speak to you.’ Roberto scratched at his face leaving three pink trails across his greasy cheek.

  ‘Anwar was out, thank Gods,’ he continued, ‘but they had a list of names, read ’em out and Anwar’s was on it. Me too, but it was you and Anwar they wanted.’

  ‘Did they say anything else?’

  ‘They asked if you had a visa. And if you knows about . . . Al . . . Al . . . Al . . . jazz, or something.’

  ‘Al-Jahiz?’ Tayeb sat up straight, his foot accidentally kicking a pigeon that was pecking at the plastic stirrer on the floor under his table.

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said I ain’t got a clue what they are on about.’

  ‘Al-Jahiz – “Book of Animals”.’

  Roberto had shrugged then looked at Tayeb, thinking to ask, ‘Where did you sleep last night?’

  ‘Outside a door in a housing block in Pimlico.’

  There was a pause. ‘Listen, mate. I don’t think you should come back for a bit, if your visa’s a bit, you know – dodgy. Could get us all in trouble, yeah? I think Nidal is very worried.’

  Tayeb thought of Nidal in their kitchen, tutting at the KFC cartons and Diet Coke bottles. Nidal’s quietness always agitated Tayeb’s skin. The way he arranged his food, eating certain colours first and a fastidiousness about the contents of cupboards, endlessly checking that the attic door was closed firmly; it made Tayeb itch just to watch Nidal simply exist.

  ‘Look. Tell Nidal not to worry. I’ll stay away. I have some leads.’

  ‘Good.’ Roberto did not look as if he believed him, and although his face had moved into the shape of a smile, it was not one. Roberto stood up then and all but ran away, with a last ‘take it easy’, quickly becoming one of the people filtering through the station on their way to wherever.

  The pigeon continued to peck near Tayeb’s feet as if looking for something in particular. It seemed impossible that so many people should have somewhere specific to go. To calm himself, he drew, circular lines, into dots into dashes. No point in being angry with Roberto, or Nidal or Anwar. Betrayal is too large a word for the flushing away of an inconvenience. The ink bleeding into the napkin calmed him as he talked to himself in his head: if you find yourself lost then the best thing to do is to select a point of focus and keep your eye on it, to steady yourself, to keep yourself from falling off.

  Last night, when Tayeb knew he couldn’t go home, with nowhere to sleep, he had picked a woman, not quite at random – she was a woman after all, and looked youngish – and followed her. She was pushing a red bike along the pavement on Buckingham Palace Road in the rain. He didn’t really see her face, she was looking down a
t the ground as the rain came hard at a vicious angle. National Express coaches crunched the wet tarmac, buses and black cabs wrestled for road space. At a set of traffic lights she’d turned a corner into Ebury Bridge Road and immediately, like a spell, the transient, frenetic atmosphere of Victoria Coach Station disappeared. This steep, hilly road already felt like a quieter London backstreet. The hill was a railway bridge and through a gap in the wall Tayeb saw a great spread of railway tracks laid out like metal roads leading to nowhere, and in the distance Battersea Power Station’s four white towers stood surreal and pointless in the dirty city sky. He winked his right eyelid, like a camera shutter, as if to photograph them.

  At the end of the bridge the woman opened a metal gate and entered a closed housing estate. He watched as she locked her bicycle to a rack against the wall, disappearing into the first entrance of a residential block. There was a sign on the wall: Peabody Estate. Below it someone had scratched into the brick a skull and crossbones. As he entered the building he heard keys. Door. Then he went up, his own footsteps making less of an echo. When he reached the top there was a blue door. Number 12. He sat there for some time. He simply had nowhere else to go.

  Then, much later, she’d given him a blanket; a small miracle.

  He needed another miracle now. Where should he go? He did not belong with the ‘exile’ community. He was not a refugee. He refused to associate himself with ‘immigrants’ from Yemen. The Yemeni social clubs made him feel guilty and guilt made him angry. He did not miss home. He was as adrift here as he had been reluctantly following his father around with a bucket of water to clean out the bird shit at the bottom of his cages. There had been a time when he’d had an identity: he used to film, to be a filmmaker. He used to document and witness, but, since arriving in England, he had not picked up a camera.