A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar

by Suzanne Joinson

  I told Lizzie about Khadega. She dropped the feathers on to the floor and glared at Millicent.

  ‘Now we have the blood of too many dead on our hands, Millicent. They will kill us.’

  ‘You are talking nonsense,’ Millicent said, squinting in her own smoke, rubbing a hand through that atrocious frizz of hair.

  ‘Why do you think they will spare us? Why don’t you tell us what is happening with this trial?’

  It was a shock to hear Lizzie speak to Millicent this way. Yet Millicent simply turned, presenting her back, like a shutter, and said nothing.

  18. London, Present Day

  Norwood

  Materialism is Evil. This was the mantra of Frieda’s childhood, living in a cluster of stationary caravans with her father who made a sort-of living as the caretaker of a Blue Seas Holiday Park in Sheppey. First lesson in life: possessions are meaningless. People spend their lives chasing bigger cars, bigger houses, bigger TVs, Frieda, and where does it get them? What does it mean? The answer is nothing! Nowhere! Look at the sea, at the sky, see: we are the same as them.

  Secretly, in her caravan, Frieda had prayed to an actual God rather than a manifestation of sublime energy. She prayed specifically for an actual house with carpets. She had been to other people’s houses. She had witnessed drawers expressly designated for lunchtime sandwich boxes consisting of recognisable branded goods such as Club bars, Wagon Wheels and Hula Hoops. Frieda prayed to an illicit God for these things. Our Father who Art in Heaven, please may I have a normal lunch and carpets. She did not pray to her father’s Guruji. She did not Sun Salute with her mother at dawn. She suspected Guruji of being responsible, somehow, for the unorthodox meals she was subjected to, the bean-sprout salads and the beetroot goulash and the ghastly celery soup.

  Looking at Irene Guy’s things, she thought she understood these little collections: the melancholy cluster of ceramic dogs, the hopeful stones; the rubber bands and faded envelopes. Still, though, she had found nothing that explained exactly who Irene Guy was and it seemed peculiar, given the level of paraphernalia, that there were no photographs.

  It was chilly in the flat and Frieda now regretted spontaneously offering the place for Tayeb to stay. His strangeness had grown as they had come by cab with the owl cage between them on the back seat. Leaving it behind had felt like leaving a child, a curious feeling of guilt, and so she had decided to bring it; perhaps to leave it in the flat, again. It was an expensive crawl – she insisted on paying – across Battersea Bridge, with the Thames reflecting the orange–black of the city at night.

  She gave him a tour of the rooms: bedroom, living room, kitchen, bathroom, and he had nodded and smiled and did not ask who the flat belonged to. She pointed to the bed.

  ‘That is for you, until Friday.’

  Now, he was in the kitchen, opening and closing cupboard doors. He seemed obsessed with the little old-fashioned pantry and its contents. Frieda felt a need to explain:

  ‘I’m going through the things, to see if there is anything I want to keep. Everything else is being salvaged.’

  ‘OK,’ he said, still not asking. Tayeb carried the birdcage into the living room and spent some time putting it back on to its stand. The owl endured the wobbles and waves with a stoic expression.

  Tayeb turned to her, ‘I can prepare it some meat.’

  ‘Wait.’ Frieda pulled out of her pocket a printout about owls that she had downloaded.

  REASONS NOT TO HAVE AN OWL

  1. Human-imprinted owls become strongly attached to their owners and they don’t like change. This makes it very hard for you to go on holiday or leave it with someone.

  2. Owls have an instinct to ‘kill’ things. They will shred towels, knick-knacks, socks, toys.

  3. You are 100% responsible for every need of a captive owl: what to perch on (to avoid infection), what food to avoid, how to care for talons and beaks.

  4. Mating season involves all-night hooting or tooting and for a human-imprinted owl the noise will be directed at you. You are expected to hoot with the owl and if you don’t it will hoot even louder. Mating season can be for up to 9 months.

  5. Owls don’t like to be cuddled and stroked, but they do like to play and can be rough!

  6. There will be poo, feathers and pellets everywhere.

  7. You need a consistent supply of adult animals for your owl to eat. You will need to cut them open and extract the liver, intestines and stomach, otherwise you will find yourself collecting intestines and stomach off your floor and walls. Owls have an instinct to hide their leftovers. If your owl is not cage-bound then you will find, several days on, stinking meat secreted into hiding places.

  The ready-roasted chicken they had brought suddenly didn’t seem alive, bloody or fresh enough. Frieda watched as Tayeb pushed parts of the chicken carcass into the cage and this act of poking meat into the owl’s cage dispelled the awkwardness between them. She began to think that she might even like being in this unfamiliar house with an unfamiliar person and that perhaps it was where she wanted to be, currently. Ostensibly looking at Irene Guy’s things, she kept glancing at Tayeb. A curious moustache and the sort of physique which folds itself up, neatly, like a dog in a passenger seat. His shoes were very clean. She tried to guess his age: around forty.

  In the bedroom she picked through the once-loved possessions, taking up from the windowsill a shiny, almost perfectly round pebble with a hole through its centre. She held it to her eye and looked through the hole. It was exactly like the one her mother had left the night she went, leaving no real explanation. Just a postcard held down by the pebble. The postcard was of a painting entitled, ‘At the Dressing Table’. It was a self-portrait by a young Russian woman, brushing her hair. Frieda could not understand the significance, then or now, and years later it was a shock when she saw the painting itself, in the Tretyakov. The woman was preparing herself for a sacrifice, she had thought. The note on the back of the card was quite incoherent, saying that she had to go, to work on a cruise ship, that she would be IN TOUCH, and here is a pebble with a hole in it; it is magical. How the pebble was meant to replace her mother, she never knew.

  ‘Look!’ Tayeb’s voice called from the living room. ‘Look, yalla.’ He was pointing at a camera on the bookshelf.

  ‘Do you mind if I have a look at that?’ Before she answered he had it, holding it up to his face, looking closely at the back of it, rubbing it, flicking the winder, and examining the lens.

  ‘Very nice.’ His face was flattened and serious. ‘Actually, this is very nice. It is a Leica. A very early Leica. Could even be a trial model, as I don’t think they went on the market until a little later in the twenties.’

  Frieda watched him hold the camera up to his eye then rub his finger along its back. They both jumped as a metal square sprung up, suddenly, on the top of the camera body.

  ‘One of the first 35mm. Interesting, is it yours?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Frieda said, ‘I just . . . I just found it here yesterday.’

  He lined up the viewfinder to his eye and moved the camera around the room as if running a film.

  ‘You found it?’

  Frieda didn’t answer but took the camera from him and held it in her palm, feeling the weight of it.

  ‘How old do you think it is?’

  ‘Nineteen-thirties,’ he said, without hesitating. ‘No. I think, actually, twenties. One of the very first.’

  ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘I am a filmmaker. Or –’ he coughed, ‘I was a filmmaker and at home in Yemen I collected cameras, whenever I could.’ They both stared at the camera for a moment.

  ‘Could there be a film in it, do you think?’ He ran his hand over the camera, looking at the back, looking all over. He found a small lever and triggered it. The back sprung open but there was nothing inside but dust.

  The door to the kitchen opened and Tayeb walked in having showered, wearing a different shirt. He was spruced and had obviously had a sha
ve. He stood in the doorway rubbing his damp hair. There was a vanity to him, she guessed, watching him stroke his thumb along his eyebrows as if to press down rogue hairs, and open his mouth to stretch the skin of his face. He folded the towel up neatly, put it on the back of one of the chairs and looked at the objects she had placed on the table. Incongruously, Frieda blushed at his presence. To hide it, she looked down at the camera, the Chinese musical toy in its glass dome and a wooden box that she had found at the bottom of a cupboard in the living room. Inside it there seemed to be some sort of printing apparatus.

  ‘Look at this.’

  ‘It’s like a smaller version of the transportable printing press we have in Sana’a.’ He pulled a chair out and sat down. ‘I used to work in a printing room . . . for a while.’

  He examined it for some minutes, and Frieda stood back, leaning against the kitchen sink, watching him. She thought about Sana’a. She could imagine visiting. She has always been more flexible than others in her office, more ready to jump up and fly to wherever is required, unfazed by stop-offs and stopovers and long-hauls. The further, the more unusual, the more distant and other the better. For a long time now there has been nothing to hold her back, or down. No gravity or grounding in her own day-to-dayness that would encourage her to remain still, even for a short time. After spending a week or more in Sana’a she would realise that the narrative of the city would forever remain unfathomable to her but she would work hard to ignore that realisation. She could see the paper now: UK Opportunities for Emancipation in Yemen: the New Sana’a.

  ‘I should try to see if I can get it working,’ he said, ‘I wonder if there is any ink?’

  Five minutes later he had laid out various items from the machine on the table: a roller, an inking plate.

  ‘The printing frame is missing the screen,’ he said.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ Frieda pushed her glasses up her nose and looked directly at Tayeb.

  ‘Always.’

  ‘Let’s have fish and chips. Do you fancy them?’ She didn’t wait for his answer. ‘I know, I know, they always make you feel sick as an after-taste, but the first mouthfuls are glorious, aren’t they?’

  He nodded.

  ‘There’ll be somewhere still open,’ she said. ‘Bound to be. I’ll go.’

  Frieda returned with the fish and chips and a bottle of white wine. She poured each of them half a beaker-full and began to talk as she ate. She told him about the letter, about Irene Guy’s death and the flat, as much as she knew.

  ‘Hmm, what a mystery,’ he said, as he gently worked at pulling off the orange batter from the cod.

  ‘I know. At first I thought it was a mistake, but now I’m not so sure. I asked my dad; he said I should talk to my mum.’

  ‘Have you done this?’ Tayeb asked.

  ‘It’s not that easy. My mum abandoned me years ago.’ She said it lightly.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Would you like a glass of water?’ She got up and moved to the sink.

  ‘No thank you.’

  ‘I wonder who she was,’ Frieda said, looking round at the belongings in the kitchen. ‘An explorer, perhaps?’

  ‘A traveller? She was quite educated, I think,’ Tayeb said. ‘Whoever lived here had taste in books. A surprising range. Texts on Sufism and Afghan literature. I am amazed to see a book on pre-Islamic Arabic poetry.’

  ‘It looks as if she could speak several languages. She was obviously clever.’

  ‘Do you think I can smoke in here?’

  Frieda paused, looked around. ‘I don’t see why not.’

  Frieda’s phone on the table in front of them flashed. She took no notice. It flashed again. Then a third time.

  ‘Someone is really trying to reach you,’ he said, but she ignored him.

  Frieda walked into the bedroom and pulled open the top drawer of a Victorian chest. It was crammed with papers, stencils or transcripts of some sort. Thin, waxy paper with a curious foreign lettering on them. Her pocket began to vibrate. This time she answered.

  ‘Baby. Baby! Don’t hang up.’ She said nothing. ‘Baby, I’ve got to see you.’

  ‘No, Nathaniel.’

  Oddly, she’d forgotten him. For perhaps the first day in years she hadn’t thought of him at all. In the pocket of his leather jacket Nathaniel always carried two items, a blue marble and a crystal tip stolen from a chandelier he once dealt as a sideline to the bicycles. As long as the two items were together and on his person they balanced the universe and were perfectly complete. That he should believe so magnificently and wholeheartedly, like a child, in the talismanic power of objects, had shown her a glimpse of another world, a world where objects came with inherent stories, and had led her to love him.

  ‘No, listen, seriously, this is it. I’ve done it. I’ve done it.’ His voice was hysterical; crackling and vicious.

  ‘What? What have you done?’

  ‘I told Margaret.’ Nathaniel said this in a quieter voice.

  ‘What?’ Frieda stared at the page in her hand. The paper was magically thin, like a layer of skin; the script seemed to be Arabic.

  ‘I told her. I just said it. I said I’m not in love with you Margaret. I’m in love with Frieda Blakeman.’

  There was something, a slight whine in his voice, a tone he used when waiting for praise, exactly like a child, that made her press her nails into her own palms.

  ‘I said it exactly like that.’

  She was cold; her skin seemed to shrink and tighten around her bones and it seemed to her that she was thoroughly lost again, as though she had just woken up in a scrambled, mossy, English wood, with no possible knowledge of how she’d got there or how to get out. She continued to pull out the Arabic-scripted paper from the drawer. Underneath them was a thick black notebook with a leather cover.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I need to see you – now!’ Nathaniel shouted.

  ‘Oh – OK.’ She was stunned. Margaret. The Boys. The bloody Boys.

  ‘Are you at home?’

  ‘No. No. I’m . . .’

  Frieda gave him the address and he hung up. She refused to think about the boys; she would not let herself think about the boys. Those blond-haired, milky-faced nightmares she had only seen in photographs, or once, getting into their Volvo, a tangle of untied shoelaces and petulant voices. Nathaniel was his own, determinable person, entirely responsible for his own fate, his own equations, she reminded herself. Her mouth was dry. She walked into the kitchen holding the notebook and one of the sheets of paper. Tayeb spun round to her, cigarette in his mouth, several parts of the machine in his hand.

  ‘It’s a mimeograph,’ he said, ‘a sort of early photocopier.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. You could probably sell . . . or give it to a museum. It’s interesting.’

  ‘Do you think it’s linked to these papers I’ve found?’ She held one out to him, aware that her hand was shaking.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, looking at them, ‘this is Arabic.’

  He sat down on a chair at the table and held a page close to his eyes; he must be short-sighted, she thought. Then: the bloody boys. Tayeb took the paper and went to the mimeograph machine. He placed a piece into the screen frame.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Look, it fits.’ He smiled at Frieda and she was tempted to catch one of his hands. To squeeze it. She had better not drink any more wine.

  ‘What does it say?’

  He continued to squint, and then read: ‘ ’

  ‘Can you translate?’

  ‘A bird of the air shall carry the voice . . . and,’ he pulled the paper away from his eyes and then back close again, ‘and that with wings . . . which has wings shall tell the truth.’

  He coughed, then read again, ‘Not truth, exactly. Tell the story. Ecclesiastes, ten twenty.’

  There was a noise from the letterbox being slammed up and down and a voice, ‘Frieeeeeda’.

  Tayeb stood up, alarmed. ‘Oh God,’ he said.

  ‘It�
��s OK,’ Frieda said to Tayeb, whose eyebrows were shooting up. ‘I know who it is.’

  At the front door Nathaniel’s top and bottom lips did not fit together properly and his chin seemed more pronounced than usual. He blinked into the light of the room, looked at Frieda, then Tayeb, the mimeograph machine, then back to Tayeb. He started to say something but the swaying overtook him and he clutched forward to get hold of the door, but it swung back and he staggered with it.

  ‘Woah. Steady girl. Who’s your friend?’

  ‘Tayeb this is Nathaniel, Nathaniel, Tayeb. It’s a long story why we are here, but please be careful because none of this stuff is mine.’

  ‘Well, this is a cosy little scene,’ Nathaniel said, sinking in a heap on an armchair as he blinked around the room. Frieda resented his arrival immediately; she had been stupid to give him the address.

  ‘Is this a house clearance? There any good stuff here then? Good enough to flog?’

  Tayeb stood up and put his hand to his chin, looking to Frieda as if for a signal. When she didn’t give him one, he said, ‘If you excuse me.’ He tried a smile and began to walk towards the kitchen.

  ‘Oh no, Tayeb, please don’t go anywhere.’ Frieda looked at him, trying to apologise with her expression. ‘I’ll make us all some coffee.’

  She had brought supplies in a carrier bag: tea, coffee, milk and bread. She began to make coffee in the kitchen and Nathaniel came up behind her, blasting whisky smells into her neck and grabbing at her; he turned her round and tried to kiss her. She pushed him away.

  ‘Come on, baby. I’ve done it!’

  Frieda pushed his face away from hers and looked at him. He looked old.

  ‘Well, what am I supposed to say? Congratulations?’

  ‘Fuck me, Frieda, you’ve been on my case to do this for years.’

  ‘That’s not true.’ The kettle hummed.

  ‘Do you know what it means?’ He grabbed her hand and put it up to his forehead as if acting the part of a patient with a doctor.

  ‘I have some idea, yes.’ Frieda pulled her hand away.