Tree of Pearls

by Louisa Young

  Later he was telling them the story of the Frog Prince and halfway through it became apparent that the frog in question was the wide-mouth frog. Their joy as they realized made them quiver.

  ‘Now you finish the story,’ he said.

  ‘We don’t know how this version ends,’ they said.

  ‘Nor do I,’ he replied.

  Some things are Dad things.

  I didn’t tell him about Chrissie, about going. I was happy just to be able to exchange so-far-so-good glances with him, and smile at the antics of children. I was happy, too, on Christmas Day, sitting with my parents, Harry and Lily, everything being all right, the unorthodox family getting used to itself with turkey and tact. I was pleased when Harry gave Lily a bicycle, pleased to be annoyed because it would be me having to lug it up and down stairs when the lift wasn’t working, pleased because this was such a nice little everyday family thing to be annoyed by. Pleased with Mum and Dad’s semi-detached courteous acceptance of Harry. There have been times when I have felt frustrated by their lack of involvement in my life, their seeming lack of concern; now I was happy that they respected what we were doing and didn’t ask questions or tread, even lightly, on tender points. And Lily climbed on Harry all day, and he only told her to get off twice; and I was happy to keep my secrets wrapped up – even from myself – and sample this new normality.

  *

  Oliver wanted me to go and see him on Boxing Day, but I refused. I talked to him instead on the Saturday, having had a chance to think. I told him I wanted £300 a day plus expenses including childcare and insurance. I told him I would not spend more than a week away, and expected to be paid for preparation and for the time we had spent discussing it so far. He agreed too easily to everything and I wished I had made it more. I intended to do as little as possible, and come back as soon as possible. I also intended Oliver to believe that having capitulated to his blackmail I was indeed going to do my duty. He said he felt I was somebody who did not have it in her to do a job badly. I smiled.

  Then I had to tell Lily.

  She didn’t like it.

  ‘We were both going to be swallows,’ she said. It took me a moment to realize what she was talking about: The Happy Prince. ‘My friends are waiting for me at the Second Cataract …’, but the second cataract is drowned now, along with so much else, under Lake Nasser, since the High Dam was built at Aswan. I hate that damn dam.

  ‘Can I come?’ she said, after a moment of quiet.

  Bugger. I don’t want her thinking god is going to send an angel to pick up her little corpse off the municipal dump, if she doesn’t fly south. (This is what happens to the swallow – it ends up in the garden of paradise, but that’s not the point.)

  ‘Next time,’ I said. I am not the kind of mother who says next time without meaning it. Lily knows that.

  ‘You always go. You went last time,’ she said. True, I had. I resolved to take her somewhere very nice, very soon. Oliver’s money – call it three grand – could buy some nice time at the seaside. Maybe Sinai, Dahab perhaps … Alternatively I could pay off my overdraft.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I want to see the yellow lions with eyes like green perils and the king of the mountains of the moon and the river horse on a couch among the bulrushes and the great green snake eating honeycakes and the pygmies at war with the butterflies,’ she said, quoting Oscar Wilde, sort of.

  ‘It’s not entirely like that any more,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I still want to go.’

  ‘Next time,’ I said, and thanked myself for all the effort I had ever put into keeping my word to her, so that at moments like this I am trusted, and she accepts it.

  ‘Who will look after me?’ was the next question.

  ‘Who would you like?’ I answered. ‘You could stay with Grandma and Grandpa, maybe, or we could see if you might go and stay with Brigid, or with Zeinab and the boys, or …’ (I wasn’t sure about this. But I had to suggest it) ‘… if you liked, you could maybe be with Harry. Your dad.’

  Her face went scarlet.

  ‘With Daddy?’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied tentatively. Was this fabulous or terrible?

  She was blinking.

  ‘Would he like that?’ she said.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Does he know how to look after children?’

  ‘You can tell him,’ I suggested.

  ‘And anyway, he is a daddy so he should,’ she said. ‘Oh Mum,’ she said. ‘Oh Mum.’

  It was joy. It was incredulous joy. She hadn’t thought that such a blessing could be hers. I wished Harry could have seen it.

  ‘We’ll talk to him about it,’ I said. But in her mind it was already happening.

  I had to talk to him anyway. Tell him about Oliver, about Chrissie. He was going to be pissed off.

  *

  ‘I thought you weren’t going,’ he said.

  I told him what Oliver had said. How he had pulled the Ben Cooper line.

  ‘Bastard,’ said Harry.

  ‘My sentiments,’ I said. ‘But Harry …’ and this too had been on my mind ‘… say they track him down, then what? How can you arrest a dead man? Or do they somehow arrest du Berry instead? Or how could they gaol him? Or do they just keep on keeping tabs on him? It’s becoming somehow surreal …’

  ‘That’s what I’ve been thinking about,’ said Harry. ‘And I suspect … well, I’ll tell you. I don’t know if I’m right. But you know it was a senior officer who arranged this whole scheme with Eddie, giving him the fake death and the new identity in exchange for shopping those Colombians, and that Oliver didn’t want it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I suspect. I suspect … that Oliver is going to pull the plug on it, and the superior. Bring Eddie in, flush the whole thing out. Which’ll just mean another couple of corrupt officers on eternal sick leave, but they’ll be out of our hair, and that’s got to be good. I think he’s doing it for the right reasons.’

  I didn’t quite follow.

  ‘The whole scheme was only a little bit official,’ he said. ‘I thought you knew that.’

  I gulped.

  ‘No.’

  ‘The superior officer – I don’t even know who it was – was not necessarily acting entirely legally when he did this. There are a lot of grey areas around this, and people don’t like it. You remember there was a Yardie brought over from Jamaica to give information, and he murdered someone? While under police protection? Well, exactly. So perhaps Oliver wants to get Eddie back in and clear out the … the superior. If that’s what he’s doing it’s extremely brave of him actually. And also it might be why he’s cutting me out – he might be … um … protecting me from involvement, if it all goes wrong. No one likes to admit this stuff goes on, you know, and if this goes public it is going to be a fucking racket, I can tell you.’

  I liked this idea. Being part of something that was going to clean up corruption and put Eddie in prison was much more appealing than being bullied and blackmailed into a wild-goose chase the only possible benefit of which would be to continue the protection of my enemy. And I liked there being an alternative to me being the reason why Harry’s mentor was coldshouldering him. And I liked the idea of Oliver being a goodie, even if he was being an utter bastard to me. Why? Because it made me feel safer.

  ‘I wish he’d told me,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, I wish he’d told me,’ said Harry. ‘I may be completely wrong, anyway.’

  ‘So what about Lily?’

  ‘But honey, if you’re going I’ve got to …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You can’t go alone. I know he’s not there but – you can’t.’

  ‘I’m not. Chrissie Bates is coming.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘Now I’m lost,’ he said.

  ‘She knows he’s alive.’

  ‘Jesus fuck – how the—’

  ‘The gravedigger told her.’ Well he did. It wasn’t a lie. ‘S
he was up there getting slaughtered on the grave every day and the gravedigger joined her and told her – in vino Veritas – this little urn is empty. She hasn’t had a drink for six weeks, she’s pretty wobbly, and if I don’t help her track Eddie’s footprints through Cairo she’s going to do it herself, thank you. Leaving, for example, now.’

  ‘If it’s a party booking I am definitely coming too,’ he said.

  ‘What about Lily?’

  ‘She can stay with your parents.’

  I was silent.

  ‘Some schoolfriend,’ he said.

  I paused a moment. It wasn’t that I didn’t want Harry around on this … escapade. Harry is a good safe man to have by your side.

  ‘Harry,’ I said. ‘Listen. She wants you. If you had seen her face when she asked for you. She’s only known about you for three weeks. It would not be good to – I’m sorry the word is too strong but I can’t think of another – abandon her. I mean, it would be incredibly good if you didn’t. If you were able to be there now, when I’m not, it would be of huge benefit. It would prove things for her here and now which you will never get the same opportunity to prove. It would be unspeakably marvellous and you should do it. Take that paternity leave, and be with her. You will never regret it.’

  ‘But I must go with you.’

  ‘Welcome to parenthood, Harry. You can’t always do what you want.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘Jesus, boy! When they talk about parental sacrifices they don’t mean you only have to sacrifice things you don’t mind about. They mean this. Difficult choices. And I know this is difficult from where you stand but from where I stand it’s easy. You sacrifice your desire to protect me, for Lily’s sake. And I sacrifice having your help and support, for Lily’s sake. You appearing is one of the biggest things ever to have happened in her tiny little life and she does not need both of us buggering off a week later. Evidently, I must go. So you must stay. End of story. Khalas.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What what?’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Oh. Khalas. It’s Arabic. Means finished. End of story.’

  He was silent a moment. I imagined torch beams flicking into the various sections of his mind, looking for an alternative, a reason, a way out. But I was right.

  ‘OK,’ he said.

  Also, in the back of my mind, if I flashed a torch in there, was the fact that I didn’t want Harry around when I was seeing Sa’id.

  EIGHT

  Yalla, let’s go

  We left on New Year’s Day. The plane was delayed three hours before we even took off from Heathrow. We were given meal vouchers to make up for this: we spent the vouchers on chocolate and the time in a Japanese restaurant, where I ordered two platters of sushi and two glasses of champagne before remembering that I couldn’t eat raw fish and neither of us should be drinking. So Chrissie ate the sushi – and only the salmon and yellowfin and tuna, squandering squid because there was so much – and I drank the champagne. I can’t imagine that champagne could possibly hurt my child. My Egyptian child. Well … I won’t be bringing him (her) up as a Muslim. Ha ha! The gaiety with which I assume that. But I won’t. Anyway Sa’id is not devout in that way. He drinks sometimes. He’s half English. (No I’m not, he said, laughing, when I had mentioned it once. But he is.) And anyway he …

  There we go, you see. I don’t know what he is, or what he is to be, to me. To us. But I am already doing things, deciding things. The seeping and tangling beginnings of potential confusions and assumptions are already seeping and tangling in. I am assuming things. I am beginning to see the great volume of work that one way or another this is going to involve.

  I’d never been on expenses before. Well, not my own. In itself, it was fun.

  The flight was long and dull, but at least it was direct. I listened to Qur’anic chanting on the headphones to counteract the champagne and to start the job of giving Nippyhead a balanced view of his bi-cultural heritage. Flicking the channels, I found Barry Manilow, some energetic German-sounding classical music, an opera I didn’t know, something quite indecipherable which may have been in Japanese, and then – oh glorious joy – Umm Khalthoum singing ‘Enta ’Omri,’ You Are My Life. Our song. I know – it’s the whole of Egypt’s song too. It’s like having ‘We’ll Meet Again’ for your song. Mixed with ‘And Did Those Feet’, ‘Respect’, ‘Cwm Rhondda’, ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, Beethoven’s Ninth and ‘Che Gelida Manina’. Famous, yes, but so fucking gorgeous. She is Aretha Franklin, Edith Piaf, Frank Sinatra, Puccini, Callas and Elvis, she is … oh lord. Patsy Cline and Gladys Knight, Victoria de los Angeles and Miriam Makeba. Do you know how Gladys Knight can sing ‘uh huh’? How James Brown grunts? You know how Patsy has a teardrop in every note? You know how sometimes, just occasionally, even the best American things seem a little bit facile and obvious; and you know how sometimes when you watch the Muslim demonstrators walk down Bayswater Road, striking their hearts with such fervour and you think, ‘Oh, that faith, such faith, where do they get that …’? When Umm Khalthoum sings ‘Ahh …’ I have broken wine glasses I thought I was just holding in my hand listening to this woman sing ‘ahh’. And when she starts in with the Ya habibi …

  ‘Enta ’Omri’ is about redemption through love. Is there any better subject? It is also a dream to dance to. It’s one of the first Egyptian songs I ever knew, all those years ago, when I was a dancer, and when I ran away after breaking up with Harry, in my old life, before Lily. Whenever I hear it my backbone grows longer and my foot arches, my ribcage starts to move around on the stalk of my spine, I begin to sway and to feel a mild but definite yearning for the weight of a heavy sequined band around my hips.

  Umm Khalthoum. The Nightingale of the Nile. The Star of the East. For thirty-seven years she broadcast live from the Qasr el-Nil cinema on the first Thursday of every month, and the whole Arab world tuned in. There’s an Umm Khalthoum radio station in Cairo, every evening from five till ten. Her funeral was bigger than Nasser’s: two million people on the streets of Cairo. Her mourners stole her body and carried it from Midan el-Tahrir, downtown, three miles to Midan el-Hussayn, wanting to bury her next to the head of Hussayn, the prophet’s grandson.

  There it was on channel 12. Our verse: ‘Elli shuftu, elli shuftu, abl ma teshoufak enaya … enta ’omri.’ ‘What I saw before my eyes saw you is a lost age – you are my life’. I haven’t been listening to it lately. Sa’id sang it for me at dawn on the flyover down to al-Azhar, in the old city, not so long ago. It was one of the completely perfect moments of my life.

  Next on the headphones came ‘Fakkarunt’, They Made Me Remember. ‘They spoke to me again of you, reminded me, reminded me … They woke the fire of longing in my heart and in my eyes … they took me back to the past, with its ease, with its joys and its sweetness … and its pain and harshness, and I remembered how happy I was with you, and oh my soul I remembered how we came apart.’

  Chrissie looked at me oddly and passed me a handkerchief. So I was crying and I hadn’t noticed. I didn’t think that boded well.

  *

  Cairo was chaos. Even I found it so. It wasn’t that I had forgotten that it was Ramadan, I just hadn’t remembered. We arrived in the late afternoon and everybody was hungry and ratty having fasted all day, and rushing around trying to get home in time for Iftar, desperate for the first cigarette since five that morning.

  Chrissie took one look and wanted to go home. I said I hoped she wasn’t going to be wet. She said she hoped I wasn’t going to be mean. We both burst out laughing and I dragged her through the crowd. She had no experience with which to make sense of a Third World airport. By the time I had baksheeshed us through the queues, sassed a couple of heavily armed teenagers masquerading as soldiers and let a pair of total strangers (aged about eight) carry off our baggage, she was almost gibbering.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, sitting her down in the back of Farag’s cab, which I had rung him to ask for the night before. ‘Everyth
ing’s cool. Don’t worry.’ What I had forgotten, in my initial reluctance to come, was what I forget every time. That being here just gives me pleasure. I am happy to be here. Today I was happy in a new way: happy to have Egypt in my womb and in my life forever. It is mine and I am its. I looked out, as at a new land, through new eyes, fed by the Arab blood swapping nutrients with mine, inside me.

  What I had noticed, in the airport, was that Chrissie and I were almost the only khawagaat there. (Khawagaat? Gringo, obroni, gweiloh. You know – paleface.) The usual crowds of slighty bemused looking Swiss/American/Japanese/German tourists in shorts and cameras, with their guardian tourguides and dragomen, and their aircon coaches to ride around in, were just … not there. How Nadia and I used to laugh at them, in our independent pride. Oh let us avoid the Great God Tour-Group, we would say, with his High Priest Charabanc and his terrible hymns of Constant Comment through his spokesman Megaphone, and his hordes of devotees in their awful outfits. Let us find out the hours of their devotions (which was easy: any taxi driver would tell you when the coaches came in, and when they left) and avoid them. But they weren’t here, and I knew why they weren’t.

  On the way into town the trees were garlanded with fairy lights, and the buildings festooned with little model mosques, made of paper and card and cloth and ribbons, lit up from within with a lightbulb. Like me, I thought. I’m lit up from within, by Nippyhead, happy to be here.

  I’d made Oliver book me into the Oberoi out by the pyramids. At least I could see the pyramids over breakfast, and rest in relative elegant simplicity. I thought Chrissie would like it, too. Really I wanted to stay at the Marriott as it was years ago, before they filled it with shops and Mexican theme restaurants, and chopped the beautiful garden into barbecue corners and swimming pools. It used to be a lovely pile of nineteenth-century marble and mashrabiyya gorgeousness, with brass lamps and padding servants and doves to sing you to sleep. Khedive Ismail built it for Empress Eugénie, in 1869, for the opening of the Suez Canal. That’s how gorgeous it was. In my previous life in Cairo, whenever I was feeling a bit five-star, I’d get Orlando from the Château and we’d go up there and drink champagne. But like so much, it’s not the same any more.