Amira had to intervene, even though she knew she would lose Samir. ’Thank God a hundred times that you have such beautiful children, Samir, so disciplined, so ... Go, go and hug them.’
He hurried to hug his children, looking at them as if he were seeing them for the first time, while the jealous Cappuccino let out a series of shrieks that gave them all a fright, except for Isaaf, who stared at his jacket, wishing she’d pretended to hold him close so she could have dug into his pockets. Then she snatched his bag from around his wrist, certain it must contain some of his secrets.
IV
Lamis woke up in the middle of the night, called Nicholas in Oman and told him that she wanted to live with him. As usual, she didn’t go into any details, not even mentioning the friendship she’d struck up with Anita whom she called often and tried to see nearly every day. After all, who had she met who knew Nicholas better? And she really wanted to know Nicholas.
He wouldn’t have understood her need to do so anyway, especially after that night at Anita’s just before he went to Oman, where the three of them had intertwined like three ribbons on a maypole. Anita flirting with Nicholas openly and laughing at his rejection, encouraged by Lamis, whispering in Lamis’s ears, asking her the simplest questions, and by the end of the evening, the three of them laughing - everything between them defined.
Later that night in bed, Nicholas asked Lamis very gently, ’Why were you teasing me? Just tell me. I’m confused. Is it because I had a relationship with her and you’re punishing me? Do you want to show me you’re daring? What is it? Tell me, please?
Lamis enjoyed her friendship with Anita - with her, she was seeing the other London, the one wrapped in a big scarf, tucked away from the tourists and the isolated people like her. Anita took her to have tea at a graveyard, to walk among butterflies in a butterfly house. With Anita, Lamis became almost uninhibited, she even found herself posing for Anita’s camera lens and enjoying what it demanded of her, fascinated by this revealing of her body in its natural state, not wanting to arouse or be aroused, but alive, moving, sitting, uncovered. She was like a child undressed for the beach, drumming happily on her bare stomach before rushing to embrace the sand and the sea. Of course, her ex-husband, or her son, or her own mother and father, never saw her body. All they knew was her face. If her mother had known her daughter’s body, or thought about it, she wouldn’t have been capable of marrying her off as she did.
Lamis decided to live with Nicholas after visiting Edgware Road with Anita, who was looking for a particular shop that she had heard sold women’s shoes in off-the-wall styles. Anita chose a pair with red hearts that lit up and flashed on and off, as if the hearts were beating, and another pair in the shape of lips.
That night when Lamis closed her eyes the smell of the cigars that her husband and his friends used to smoke filled her nostrils. She dreamed she was a cigar and each time her husband took a puff, her head began to burn. Her visit that afternoon convinced her that she had gone over to the other side; she’d grown away from the society of Arab men she had seen there, confident that they belonged, despite the fact that they were as ignorant of life here as it was of them.
The next day she wrote on a sheet of paper:
My son
Love
Learning English ?
Work: I still can’t decide whether to do flower-arranging or learn to make silver jewellery ?
She plucked up the courage to open one of the boxes in the hall but was distracted by the sight of the buildings outside the window. Even the BT tower had changed its nature over the years. This notion inspired her finally to attack one of the boxes.
She pounced on the clothes putting them in suitcases and black bin liners. Every time she closed a bag, she sealed off a phase of her life, and as she forgot what she had put in the previous bag, she rejoiced. She left the flat quickly, before she could change her mind, and took a taxi to a charity shop. The assistant was an elderly woman who was reluctant to take charge of all the bags; she asked Lamis to wait, or come back when she had more help. Lamis stopped another taxi to take her and her bags to a place behind Harrods, where her mother-in-law used to buy second-hand clothes with famous labels to send as presents to her relatives in Iraq and Beirut, and even Germany.
Lamis let the woman there open one of the cases. There was a rustle of cellophane, yards of lace, then finally a wedding dress emerged. The woman froze in shock: How could you? You people are sometimes so tremendously selfish and greedy. What about the memories? Your daughters? But she said only, with consummate hypocrisy, ’Oh, that’s wonderful! You must have looked like a princess in it! I understand completely. The cupboards in our houses can’t accommodate dresses like these. Oh, it’s marvellous! A friend of mine took the train off hers and turned it into a perfect evening dress. This embroidery, you’re right ... You want another bride to enjoy it. There’s a shop that specialises in selling wedding outfits. Anyhow, I’ll buy it from you. I won’t put you to the trouble of going there. I’ll do that for you.’
Lamis shot across the shop like an arrow, scared of bumping into her mother-in-law, and heard someone calling to her. She ignored the voice, but it pursued her. It was Amira, who fell on her, kissing her.
’This is incredible! Madame Lamis, you’re not going to believe it. We were talking about you, Samir and me, yesterday. Your ears must have been burning. I called Nicholas the other day and he told me you were friends, well, lovers, and that he was off to Oman for a while.’
’Yes, Nicholas is in Oman and he’s coming home tomorrow. But how are you? You’ve changed your hair. How’s Samir, and his monkey?’
’Yes, yes ... Samir and the monkey. That’s a real story. They were living with me, until his family arrived. Listen, come with me now for a few moments, then we’ll go to Harrods or Richoux. Like a fool, I bought four bags all the same, in different colours. I need to sell three and just keep one. What about you, what did you sell?’
’Nothing. Actually I have to go home now.’
’Actually, you’ll have a cup of tea with me, and I won’t take any excuse. Shall I keep the black or the maroon, what do you think?’
’The maroon.’
Lamis agreed to wait for Amira, who was back in no time, her carrier bag still in her hand.
’They’re robbers! I’ll give them away or throw them away rather than sell them for nothing. I had a fight with her. Imagine! She examined the buckle to see if it was real! Then she came up with an excuse worse than the offence - she said a lot of women cut real buttons and buckles off the genuine articles in the shops and put them on their imitations at home. I told her, I’m an Arab, not an American. I only want the real thing. On the whole I don’t like giving or receiving second-hand clothes, because the diseases and troubles and bad luck contained in a person’s body heat must be transferred to them. Look, I get goose pimples just thinking about it!’
Lamis wondered for a split second whether whoever bought her clothes would be happier than she had been in them. She tried to sit as near to the back of the café as possible; her mother-in-law had always insisted on sitting by the glass door to observe the Arab women coming in, as if to mark them out often for their appearance.
Amira objected to the position of the table. ’Are we being punished? Come and let’s watch people.’
’It’s quiet here,’ said Lamis.
’Who wants quiet?’
She pulled Lamis to a table near the entrance, but the minute they sat down, she stood up again. ’You’re quite right to be afraid when you’re with me,’ she said, ’but I promise you round here I’m a respectable woman just like the rest!’
Lamis tugged on her arm, trying to make her sit down again. ’God forbid! I swear the thought hadn’t crossed my mind for a second. I just don’t want my mother-in-law to see me.’
’But you’re divorced! Your ex-mother-in-law must be a terror if you’re still scared of her. Lamis, don’t you think it’s strange that we bumped into each oth
er today?’
’To tell you the truth, I feel bad for not phoning you and apologising about dinner, that day we arrived from Dubai and you kindly gave us a ride in your taxi.’
’Apology accepted. Don’t you know the saying, "Older by a month, wiser by a lifetime"? And I’ve got a bigger bottom than you as well as more experience.’ Amira laughed. ’Meeting you like this today makes me shiver. I told Samir that I’d phoned you when I hadn’t, and that we were going to meet today. Honestly.’ She put her hand on her heart. ’And so we shouldn’t waste the opportunity. I mean, I shouldn’t. Have you got half an hour to come with me to the casino?’ she begged. ’Please. Your face brings me luck.’
’The casino? Now? In the daytime?’
’Please. You’ll be doing me a favour. I won’t forget it. Stand beside me while I place the numbers. That’s all.’
’But I’ve got to ... I can’t. Sorry.’
’Five minutes. Please.’
Amira called the waiter and opened her bag and, despite Lamis’s attempts to pay, held out a ten-pound note. Lamis found herself following Amira. I must be a weak character, she thought. But she smiled at Amira’s bottom, a world unto itself as it bobbed happily along. The men enjoyed watching it and Lamis felt secure when she looked at its huge expanse, and then remembered her mother-in-law saying to her, ’What happened to you? Did you leave your bum behind when you got up off the couch?’
Amira took a pen out of her bag to write the letter ’k’ in Arabic on her right ring finger, then stopped and laughed. ’I forgot you were with me!’
Lamis laughed back. ’Verses from the Qur’an to bring you luck in the casino!’
She’d heard of the new fashion among the women of the Arab community: they wrote initials from Qur’anic verses on their fingertips to bring them luck, and spread out their fingers in the face of difficulties. An Egyptian woman had been responsible for popularising the heresy. Her daughter failed her driving test several times until she agreed to go along with her mother’s beliefs, and did her test with her fingers spread out so that the letters transmitted their magic to the steering wheel.
Lamis was astonished by what she saw in the casino. It was obvious from the hairstyles and faces that most of the women gathered around the tables were Arab and Iranian, and a fair number of them divorcees.
The air was thick with greedy pleasure and tobacco smoke, a pall that prevented the players’ eyes from meeting and made them disbelieve the losing numbers. The older women’s hands were spattered with freckles and their fingers bulged with protruding veins that stopped their rings from sliding off. Amira pulled Lamis along with her and stopped by a table.
’Give me five numbers. Single or double figures, as you wish.’
’Five, eight, nineteen, twenty-four, thirty-one.’
’You play them. Go on.’
Lamis hesitated. She had nearly been imprisoned in Dubai for drug trafficking, then become a tart, so why not a gambler? The notion made her reach her hand out recklessly as if a weight had fallen from her shoulders: five, eight, nineteen, twenty-four, thirty-one.
Then she drew back her hand and Amira grabbed it, closing her eyes and muttering prayers, then opened them to see five, eight, nineteen, twenty-four, thirty-one.
Later, as Lamis soaked in the bath, the phone rang. She was afraid that Nicholas might have postponed his return, but he was about to board the plane back to London, and reproached her for not answering his calls. She was embarrassed, afflicted by a sudden stammer, unable to tell him that she’d been thinking about him all day, even while with Amira, and getting his flat ready, with flowers, bread, wine, chocolate and fruit. She had hesitated when buying the cheese, but bought it anyway and promised herself she wouldn’t eat it, so her breath wouldn’t smell. She had derived great pleasure from choosing all these things by herself and hurried back to Nicholas’s flat to put everything away in its place before she began preparing herself for him.
She tossed and turned all that night expecting that when the bell rang in the early morning she could jump out of bed quickly, gargle with peppermint mouthwash and put a bit of red on her cheeks before she ran to open the door. In the event she found that even her famous insomnia slept sometimes. Nicholas came in when she was fast asleep. She sat up suddenly when she sensed he was in the room, but he undressed and slipped into bed beside her and she waited, like an open goal or a basketball hoop, to see which way he was going to approach her. Later that morning he unpacked the presents he had bought her, including a cheap doll in a wedding dress with a wedding crown on her head.
’She’s someone very important in my life,’ he said.
Lamis laughed and picked up the doll and its leg fell off.
Chapter Seven
I
Her meeting with Nicholas after his second trip to Oman was not like the first - not even the kiss, which the first time had been like a distillation of yearning, such was the love and longing it expressed. So she had been expecting more than a brief embrace, but now he was breathing regularly, and she felt herself deflating as she realised he’d fallen asleep like barrels of whisky in a distillery, sleeping for years and years.
She got up and tiptoed about like a ballet dancer, restraining herself from rolling around on the floor in an anguish of disappointment. Her eye fell on the letter, or rather the collage he had put together and sent her from Oman. She opened it at the sketches he had drawn, of coconut palms and Arab men reading women’s magazines, and of bathers jumping up and down as the burning sands scorched the soles of their feet, and ugly-looking frankincense trees, and he had pasted in an advertisement-an expanse of blue sea and a woman spraying herself with cologne - next to a photo of Sultan Qabus in a blue abaya. Eagerly she studied these images in case she could read anything between the lines.
She tried to remind herself that making love sometimes had nothing to do with love. There were men who made love to prostitutes, ’sellers of passion’ as they were called. But that thought plunged Lamis into even deeper depression, and she thought: If men can have sex with women like that, then why doesn’t he do it with me, unless he’s stopped wanting me?
She remembered him talking to her from Oman about how much he missed her, and urging her to visit him. ’It’s ridiculous for you to be alone in London while I’m alone here.’
She had changed the subject, sure that telephone operators in Oman listened in on calls, and must have heard him asking, ’Do you only want a sexual relationship?’ That must be it: the way she had cut him off without an explanation. Or was it because she brushed aside the subject of the flat in Fulham every time he asked if she’d checked on whether it was still available? Or had the happy times that she’d imagined were piling up waiting for her, now that she was divorced, already slipped away?
Nicholas got out of bed and kissed her and hugged her and took her earlobe into the warm oven of his mouth. He counted three tiny warts, the size of pinheads, on her neck. One had come in his absence. He kissed them all, but in spite of this he didn’t make love to her. Instead he asked her what she wanted to do that day. She decided she wouldn’t hold back. She wanted to understand. So she asked him what had changed.
’Sometimes I like to love you like this, and save you up,’ he replied. ’Like a child saving chocolate for later.’
’I didn’t know I was a lucky penny you were keeping for a rainy day.’
He did not argue with this notion. He laughed and held her face like a determined mother who, tired of giving her daughter the same advice so many times, had decided to make her listen. ’I want us to live together, as you promised. Please, please. Think about it and give me your answer.’
’Yes, I want to, I want to.’ Lamis found herself pacifying him. They made love after all, but not as in the past. As she watched him going into the bathroom she was terrified by the thought that he’d stop loving her one day, and felt again as if her hand or foot had been cut off.
She began to tell him that she was still loo
king for a flat and that he shouldn’t be disappointed about losing the Fulham one. If it had been meant for them, it wouldn’t have been sold to someone else so quickly.
The next day she fetched one small suitcase and moved in with him. No one would ever know about her change of address and the mobile phone was the solution to all her problems and of course her son could reach her any second he wanted. In the morning, however, she found herself going back to her own flat as usual for a few hours.
She did not ask what was wrong with him the third time he returned from Oman, even though he got out of bed on his first morning back after giving her a quick hug, saying he wasn’t tired, and went into the kitchen to switch the kettle on.
She ignored him and went to get herself some orange juice, without putting any clothes on. When she saw him dressing she asked, ’Are you cold?’
She sat on his knee as he pulled on his socks. He dropped a little kiss on her shoulder as if he was shooing her away. She lifted herself up from him and began to dress.
In the evening, however, when he stood up, avoiding her caresses and attempts at seduction, she was reminded of some of the excuses she had used with her husband: ’I’ve got a headache’ or ’My throat hurts’ or ’I’ve got a period’ so that her husband had suggested innocently that she should visit the gynaecologist as she’d had a period for more than two months.
’Have you got a period, Nicholas?’ she asked him.
He hugged her and kissed her, and she sighed with relief, responding, rising above the sofa like a yogi in her ecstasy. Just as she began thinking how happy she was that everything was back to normal between them, he seemed to read her thoughts and stopped suddenly. She left him for a little, then asked what was wrong.
Only in London Page 21