A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar

by Suzanne Joinson

  ‘Millicent, what’s happening?’

  ‘I’m being summoned, presumably to the General,’ she said, and then began to cough, a wracking cough that threatened to bring up blood.

  ‘Do let her sit down,’ I said, but both men stood aggressively. They talked in a fast, thick Chinese to Millicent directly. I could not understand what they were saying. She sighed, then turned to me.

  ‘I have to go with them.’

  ‘Don’t, don’t take her.’ They pushed her unnecessarily, as she was walking with them, then each of them gave her another harsh shunt forward, more vicious than before.

  ‘Don’t hurt her.’

  They forced her to walk fast towards the gate. Millicent has disturbed me of late, but I was suddenly terrified of them taking her away. I stood redundant, an imbecile, paralysed.

  ‘What should I do, Millicent?’

  As they reached the gate her eye-glasses fell off and the guard to her left trod on them, cracking the glass. She turned to me, blinking. ‘I will get a message to you as soon as I can,’ she said. She threw the clutch of door keys over to me and leaned down for her eye-glasses, but the men moved her, roughly, through the gate.

  I picked up the keys and gestured to the glasses. ‘Please,’ I said, ‘she is very blind – do take them.’ They ignored me. I gathered up the broken frames.

  ‘Millicent,’ I called. She twisted and looked round, but her face oddly blank. She could see nothing I realised. A lizard flickered past my foot, and I stood at the gate with the eye-glasses in my hand, thinking now everyone had gone.

  Lizzie lay on the kang under one of the thick, silk-covered wadded quilts that we carry for the winter months. Each papered window was covered with a kashgari silk scarf so that the room had an underground feeling, with light filtering through patches of clashing colours.

  ‘Lizzie, Millicent wouldn’t let me near you. She’s been taken away. Lolo’s gone.’ I bent over to look at her, talking too fast. My poor sister’s lips were dry, cracked, she had the beginning of a sore in the corner of her mouth and her skin was pallid. I went to the kitchen to get her water.

  ‘Drink.’ She shook her head and would not look at me. Instead she was staring at the Missionary Map on the wall, at the river and the tributaries.

  ‘I am fasting,’ she whispered.

  ‘For Ramazan? That is a Moslem tradition, not a Christian one.’

  ‘No. To be clean.’

  ‘Well you must drink water.’ I held the cup to my sister’s mouth and she let me tip the water in.

  ‘Why are you fasting?’

  ‘Millicent is helping me.’

  ‘But she is starving you,’ I said, confused. ‘Is she at least giving you water?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered once she had drunk a little, ‘I simply want to hold it: love.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Of course you don’t.’ She turned away from me then as if she was weary of my company but I took her hand regardless. I thought of us as children, walking along the Rue de Thérouanne on a spring morning and the devastation we felt at the sight of our favourite trees felled. They were chopped down to prevent a disease from spreading, leaving bare, brutally cut stumps. Little Lizzie took my hand, Don’t be sad, Eva, look, it is in fact easier to see the river without them.

  ‘Of course you don’t understand,’ she repeated. She began to talk, rambling, and it was difficult to follow, about Khadega in the river; that she should have found her and photographed her, because there should be something to remind us that she was real.

  ‘But you didn’t like Khadega.’

  ‘No.’

  I knew we were both thinking the same thing, culpability. In the dense heat of the room I was nauseous and weary.

  ‘It is important to keep the images, to hold them,’ she turned in the kang, away from me, but continued to talk:

  ‘I can print it on exquisite paper. Monochrome. Take the print and nail it to the wooden frame, the weightlessness of the paper. The edge of the paper rising up like an insect’s wing. A simple powder cover, the light and the shadow. I can hand-write it on the print.’

  ‘I don’t know, Lizzie, what you are saying.’

  She sat up, becoming very alert. ‘Millicent says I am lovely and sacred, like Saint Wilgefortis.’

  Again that image of Millicent and my sister together in the kang room. Then I remembered long afternoons in Southsea when Millicent was hard at work convincing Mother of the importance of our journey. Maps were laid out, and books, and endless talk of travelling, of it being more than a physical journey, it being a pilgrimage. Talk of conversion, persuasion, of an ambassadorial role, of making strides for England and the Church. Talk through the night until eventually mother was brow-beaten into agreeing.

  ‘Millicent has been taken away,’ I said again. Lizzie simply looked at me. ‘And Lolo has gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  Ai-Lien, whom I had carried in with me, bundled in her shawl-wrap and left on the floor, began to snuffle and snort. Lizzie sat up, pushed herself upward and forward, like a teacher waking up from a daydream to a room full of pupils, aware and bright suddenly.

  ‘I loved a baby too,’ she said. She was facing away from me. I stood completely still. Was she feverish?

  ‘It never had a chance to grow, but it was inside me. Millicent helped me to send it back to heaven. That’s how we met. I went to the Church for help.’

  The heat overcame me then, for a moment, as I looked at the back of my sister’s head and at her angel-white hair gone dull. I longed for rain, or greyness. The flat grey of Geneva, or Southsea, even. I was homesick for a place that wasn’t even home. I wanted Lizzie to stop talking, but at the same time I needed to know because even though I wanted to dismiss it as feverish talk, I knew that I couldn’t.

  ‘You want to know who the father was?’

  ‘Well. Of course.’

  ‘Mr Wright.’ It took a moment for me to recall him, the tall, curly-haired gentleman with a guttural face and the overloud voice of a publican-man, who had been keen to visit us as soon as we arrived from Geneva. He was an acquaintance of Aunt Cicely’s.

  ‘You remember when we went to Kew to photograph the palms?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He managed to lose the chaperone. He forced himself upon me, against a sycamore tree.’

  I held the cup of water up to my mouth, not to drink it, but to cover my mouth, to have something to rest my lip against. I had been jealous of her friendship with Mr Wright. He never noticed me, he made me feel ugly. When he did look at me he appraised me viciously, his expression turning to pity before refocusing on Lizzie. She began to cry; my gosling.

  August 5th

  I am nurse and mother and sister, attentive to Ai-Lien and to Lizzie. Wipe, clean, feed them and with each action I hollow myself out. I am a vessel for their requirements and this relentless giving has begun to hammer a new shape inside of me. It is the selflessness of mothers and wives, I suppose, carving rooms inside oneself and allowing love to come running into them like water. The danger is that the water could engulf and erase me entirely. Even so, I pity those who have not felt such reconfiguration from a simple self-serving do-as-thou-will soul. It does not bring me peace, however.

  There has been no message from Millicent yet. Each time the gate clangs I jump. The heat is up, thick in the air and deadening. The natives milling in drones along the track are dirty and evil. I cannot think of where to go or whom to speak to. Lizzie sleeps for most of the day but I barely sleep. When I do, it is in short exhausted bursts with my head on my knees and I dream of Khadega, her body dragging and buffered at the bottom of filthy water.

  Ai-Lien cries through the night, she holds my hair and pulls it, sucks on to the skin on my neck. She wakes every hour or two at night now and exhaustion leaves me dull and stupefied. The only way to calm her is to sing, and my singing voice is terrible. There is no one else to hear it, though.

  It is August a
nd much of the fruit in the orchard is turning. The walls of this house sag and groan, suffering with the heat. The leaves in the courtyard and garden have grown large, the tendrils wander unchecked, the climbing plants are strident, shifting through the yard, strangling whatever they can as they progress. The pavilion is too hot. The insects are shrill, louder than usual, and I think about the sensation of life in the womb, flickering like a candle. These things – and others – my sister has tasted, meanwhile I become dry as bones in the desert sun. I take dumplings or dough strings to Lizzie hoping to thwart her starving herself in her kang but, despite her frailty, jealousy creeps over me, perverse as it is. I fear that Millicent will take Lizzie or that Lolo will take Ai-Lien but then I remember that they have all gone. I must sleep. I do not know what to do.

  26. The A21, Present Day

  En route to Sussex

  The owl was quiet. It did not seem to mind the car journey, or at least, it hadn’t protested, though quite how owls would go about protesting Frieda was not sure. The cage was next to her in the back seat of the car. Tayeb had offered to drive and Frieda accepted, surrendering to passenger status, letting the grey lines of the road’s edge and scrubland wash past in a blur. She read the notebook. In fact, she could not stop reading it. The handwriting was mesmerising, slanting as it did ferociously to the right. Mostly, it was written in black ink, but sometimes in pencil, though the pencil sections were faded. There were dates at the beginning, and quotes from Marco Polo, or Bunyan.

  Reading it was like being submerged, a ducking into another realm, though not into water; instead into a dry, hot place. The description of the desert’s heat consumed Frieda’s mind so much so that it was a shock to look up finally, after an hour or so in the car, at the English sky outside, layers of grey working through steel and iron hues to silt. A voice in her head said: you are in a car with a man you barely know on your way to meet your mother whom you have not spoken with since you were seven. This voice combined with the sonorous tones of the Radio 4 gardening expert who spoke of geraniums and slugs and the problems of growing broad beans in snow. The leather notebook in Frieda’s hand smelled powerfully of elsewhere.

  At the service station she queued to buy water and thought of Nathaniel, in particular of his thumb on his bottom lip, pulling it down absentmindedly when talking to her, a habit of his which always annoyed her. Back in the car, she counted the trees, allowing herself to return to the motorway slipping past, the rain and the moustachioed man in the front seat. There were things she would like to ask him, such as why he was here. Why this country? But it was difficult to ask such personal questions. What, she wondered, would he think of her recent project for the think tank, ‘Belief in Conversation between the West and East’, and how could she bring herself to admit to that title? She wasn’t sure she could stand it much longer, this work, this scratching of the surface, the vulgarity of it, and the ongoing colonial power assertion under the guise of dialogue. It was like the time in Saudi, once, when the young women students invited her into their part of the café, the back part, or the family room, and as there were no men they all took off their abayas and she willed them to put them back on. Surfaces are often preferable; sometimes we don’t want to look underneath.

  ‘That’s it.’ Tayeb turned the radio down and looked over his shoulder at Frieda. ‘That road there.’

  He was going too fast to make the turning so pushed the brakes quickly and Frieda was shunted forward. She put her hand on the back of his seat to steady herself, then sat back, pulling a piece of paper out of her bag. Her father had given her the address, some sort of a ‘village’ in rural Sussex.

  A sign indicated the A21 to Battle and Hastings and underneath it was a smaller sign saying, ‘Prima Village’. They turned into the road and drove at a slower speed along its winding country contours. The hedges were thick and heavy with dipping clusters of elderberries. The road veered to a sharp left and they emerged facing a triangle of grass surrounded by a row of toy-house cottages. At the peak of the triangle sat a vibrant-looking pub and on the opposite corner was a neat, Norman church.

  ‘Yalla,’ said Tayeb, ‘this is the kind of England I imagined as a child. So it does exist.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  These white-washed cottages were a long way from the caravans of Sheppey. Here, window boxes did not contain a single dead plant. The complex arrangement of recycling bins on driveways, all with significantly different coloured lids, indicated that the rules for rubbish collection were strictly adhered to in every household, and in every window net curtains hung with perfectly weighted hems.

  ‘It gives me the heebie-jeebies.’

  ‘What is this?’ Tayeb asked, ‘the heebie-jeebies?’

  ‘Oh, you know,’ she put one finger against the car window pane, ran it slowly down the glass, ‘the willies.’

  ‘The willies?’

  ‘It’s terrifying, Tayeb. Look at it. Can you imagine living here?’

  Tayeb pulled the car to a stop at the junction.

  ‘I think it is beautiful. Tranquil. Peace. I could happily live here until old age, drink tea and die happy.’

  ‘No you wouldn’t. You’d go insane. Imagine all these people, knowing your business, looking in your windows.’

  ‘I would smile graciously at them all, be friends with them.’

  ‘But they wouldn’t want to be friends with you, Tayeb; you’re way too foreign and scary.’

  Tayeb laughed. ‘I could live here for ever, even if the neighbours all hated me.’ He patted the steering wheel twice.

  ‘Where now?’ Her father’s directions said: edge of the village. Prima Foundation. Tayeb slowly followed one edge of the village green.

  ‘I don’t think we can go any further this way.’ He flicked his cigarette out of the window. ‘Dead end.’ He began to reverse, nearly hitting the back of a parked grey Citroën.

  ‘Careful, Tayeb, or they will come after us with their knitting needles.’

  Tayeb drove in triangles, two more times around the village green, each time taking a turning off and meeting a dead end.

  ‘It’s like a maze,’ he said, ‘bigger than it looks.’

  ‘Maybe we should ask someone?’ Frieda lowered her window and leaned out, slightly. Tayeb slowed down alongside two elderly ladies walking so close together it was as if they were holding each other upright.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Frieda called to them. They looked at Frieda as if she were an abomination to their sense of reality.

  ‘We are looking for the Prima Foundation. Do you have any idea where it is?’

  One of the ladies whispered something to the other and then looked directly at Frieda, before, in unison, the two scowled and turned their soft white curls away and walked off in a rustle of tutting.

  ‘Okaaay.’ Frieda sat back. The car cruised on a little further.

  ‘Let’s try him,’ she said, seeing a middle-aged man wearing long green shorts, walking along with a small dog on a lead.

  ‘Excuse me.’ She was all smiles. The man looked up at her, unsmiling, and raised his chin up as if to fend her off with it.

  ‘Hello, we are a bit lost. I wonder if you could help?’

  He stepped nearer to them. ‘Where you going?’ he said, yanking the straining white dog back towards him.

  ‘Thanks. We’re looking for the Prima Foundation. Any idea where it is?’

  The man frowned and then shook his head. ‘Nah.’

  ‘Right.’ Frieda sniffed.

  ‘Oh, hold on, is it the commune?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  The man’s face shadowed. He looked at Tayeb for the first time, then back at Frieda, then at the owl in the cage. Frieda’s breath rose in her throat and for a slip of time, she was tempted to jump out of the car and abandon Tayeb. The familiar and the unfamiliar crossed into one, like light on water and for an instant she had absolutely no idea who she was.

  The man coughed. ‘The weirdos,’ he sneered.


  ‘Hmm, I bet they are,’ Frieda said, trying for complicity. The man was checking Tayeb out again, his nostrils flaring as he did so. Begrudgingly, he pointed back in the direction they had come.

  ‘You have to go back along the main road, hundred and fifty yards or so, take the first exit. Keep going up the track. It’s not a proper road. They’re at the top of that.’ Under his breath he said, ‘Dirty buggers.’

  ‘Thank you so much,’ Frieda said. She smiled at him, as if thanking a photocopier-room boy for printing off a range of documents, ‘That’s really very helpful.’

  The response was a grunt as the man and his dog walked off.

  Tayeb lit a cigarette as he pulled out on to the main road.

  ‘See what I mean, Tayeb? Friendly, aren’t they?’

  He smiled as they reversed back down the road. Frieda watched a kestrel loop above a large, recently dug field.

  ‘That must be it.’ He nodded towards a track that led off the road, then drove on to it, winding for quite a while until, finally, they turned a corner and a panorama of yellow rapeseed fields and rolling hedges lay out before them.

  ‘What’s that?’ Tayeb said. Frieda looked over. It was a great tall structure of some sort, like a totem pole.

  ‘I fear it’s some kind of art sculpture or installation.’

  Standing in the middle of the field, about twelve feet high, was a pole decorated with an entwined network of legs, breasts, mouths and other dismembered body parts. The whole creation was painted in chewing-gum pinks and obscene shades of yellow and green.

  ‘Hideous.’

  Other art works appeared further along the track. There was an upside-down car with a ladder sticking out of the chassis leading to the sky, or nowhere; a massive fish of rusted iron with a chicken balancing on its fin; more abstract forms mostly made out of disused cars. At last there was a gate, covered with paper flowers and bits of ribbon, bells, wind chimes and peace symbols. Tayeb pulled up the car next to a huge sign that said WELCOME TO THE PRIMA FOUNDATION with three giant ladybirds painted below the lettering. Frieda, with her window wound down, pushed her glasses up to her eyes and squinted at the quote below the ladybirds: When the knowable, and the knowledge, are both destroyed equally, then there is no second way.