by Louisa Young
So that night: Ahmed and the band started up – live music here, a luxury – and I swept on to the floor, completely ignoring the waiters, who were possibly the world’s most talented men, the way they danced around me carrying their precarious three-storey puddings with sparklers on top. Then I’m up on the table, kebab-hopping. I play to every diner at every table, circling the men’s heads with my snakey wriggling arms; clicking my little finger cymbals for the children (they love us, they think we’re that Princess Jasmine out of Aladdin); grinning at the women, who discuss my technique among themselves. The women tip better than the men, half the time. Belly dancing started out, after all, as a fertility dance for the Goddess, before any of these male religions started in. Then when the Goddess was banned and women put away, it evolved in the harem, as a dance by women for women. It was done as exercise for pregnancy. The belly-rippling movements imitate the contractions of labour as much as those of sexual abandon. Then the men cottoned on, and took to peeking through the silken curtains, wanting for themselves one of the few pure joys that permeate that harem miasma of tension and boredom. At the Topkapi harem in Istanbul during the Turkish Empire, cucumbers were delivered ready chopped, in case the women tried to amuse themselves. Only a few years ago fundamentalists in Egypt suggested banning aubergines altogether. God, what we might do with them! In some countries, the same Arabic word, fitna, can mean chaos, disaster and sexual desire for a woman, and hence the beautiful woman herself.
But that night: within half an hour my jewelled cleavage and glittering waistband were erupting with sweat-dampened five- and ten-pound notes. It was a good night, and it didn’t go wrong until Harry came into Ali’s office when I was changing back in civvies.
He was meant to be taking me over to Soho for another booking. Why wasn’t I on the bike? Don’t know. Can’t remember. Once we were in the car he started in. He said he’d had it up to here and he couldn’t stand it and had I no respect and all kinds of stuff like that. He said the girls were nothing more than whores and if I thought I could get away with not being one I was a bloody fool and he couldn’t stand by and let any woman of his – and I quote – make a living shaking her arse because any way you shake it it’s the same damn thing.
I begged to differ.
He drove me straight back to his house (thus jeopardizing one of my regular jobs) and told me he wasn’t a fool.
I told him I had never taken him for a fool.
He said if I didn’t know what was going on, then I must be a fool.
I said I knew perfectly well that some of the girls worked as strippers too, and that some of them were on the game.
‘You know about it,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Of course I do. I’m not blind and I’m not stupid.’
‘And you think it’s all right.’
‘Of course I don’t think it’s all right. But I can’t tell people what to do,’ I said. ‘It’s not right for me. But, you know, I’m not my sister’s keeper.’
‘You know about it.’
His face had changed. It changed colour, went hard and difficult. Then he launched into a sort of frenzy of fury, anger such as I had never seen. I didn’t really know what I was being accused of. I thought he thought I was turning tricks – but he seemed to believe I wasn’t. I couldn’t believe he thought I was. He knew me. He knew I loved him. He knew – oh, God, he knew lots of things, but he was acting as if he didn’t know any of them.
Actually, he was frightening me. So I left. And he threw the chair out the window. I went round to Janie’s on the tube, still clutching my plastic bag of dancing frock.
‘Harry’s lost his marbles,’ I said, and burst into tears.
She crawled out of bed, made tea, hugged me, wanted to know what it was all about. I told her the gist and she started crying too. ‘How could he?’ she kept saying. ‘How could he think that of you? How could he?’ She was gratifyingly upset on my behalf.
I tried to ring him but there was no answer.
‘Can I stay here?’ I asked, and so I did, wearing her T-shirt and sharing her bed. I couldn’t face the despatch riders and their laddish sympathy. Janie kept funny hours so half the time the bed was occupied in shifts. I kept funny hours myself and didn’t really notice where she was. But she looked after me. We had twice-daily sessions where I would update her on how many times I had rung and got only his voice on the answering machine, on who else I had tried, on where I had left messages, and confirming that no, he hadn’t rung back. I carried on working, dancing with all the allure of a worn-out j-cloth. After four days I went round to his flat and picked up some clothes that had emigrated there as things do when you half live together. He wasn’t there – I’d hoped he would be. I rang mutual friends, who hadn’t seen him. To say my world was falling apart would not be an exaggeration.
I rang, I went round, I wrote to him. I rang his mother even, and God help me I swallowed my pride and rang each of his four sisters and two brothers, including Jason with whom he wasn’t on speaking terms. Then I kissed Janie and told her to be good, climbed on the bike and rode to Gibraltar, where I looked across at the Atlas mountains and decided not to go home for a while.
FOUR
Tea with Jim
But that was in another country, and besides the wench has changed. Now, and in England, there is no ‘not going home for a while’. Home exists. Home is not just me, wherever I happen to put myself. It’s my loved and protected place, my own little sceptred isle. I built it on the safest ground I could recover, in that panicky time, dreaming and lecturing myself in images of trees and compost and roots and how the rigid dies and the flexible survives, but the earth must be good when the winds are high. For six months I had the same Elvis song on my mind: I’m not an oak, I’m a willow, I can bend. Things will shift around you anyway, whatever you do, and you must allow for it. I always thought, in my girlish dreams, that safe ground was love, romantic married love, the everyday realistic kind, and that from that ground grew roses round the door. Perhaps it is and they do. I wouldn’t know.
But I know what safe ground is not. Safe ground is not what I have. What I have is not safe ground. Despite the true true love in my house, underpinning is constantly necessary. You cannot underpin your house with falsehood. Well, of course you can’t. So you must do it with truth. No matter that you don’t like the truth. No matter that I don’t like the fact that Jim is Lily’s father, or that he wants to see her. No matter that I don’t like him.
So my first response to Jim’s request, straight anger at him, was neither here nor there. Jim is a fact, Jim is not doing anything wrong in the long run. Wrong by me, yes, but not actually wrong. Which made me even angrier.
No mention of the three years I have fed her, paid for her, loved her. No mention of the first six months when I couldn’t really walk, and of what my parents did for us then. No mention of why he never wanted her to be with him before. No mention of his complete lack of interest in her – oh, no, he sent her a present once. A bottle of Postman Pat bubble bath. He doesn’t even know she has eczema. Doesn’t even know she can’t even use soap without her skin erupting into an unbearable heat and itching that has her trying to claw it off, and raking flakes off beneath her fingernails. Hasn’t heard the crunching sound of compulsive midnight scratching. Doesn’t know that I change her sheets every day when it’s bad. Hasn’t seen the bloodstains, the tiny scars made by four little nails tearing, a miniature bear’s claw, on her shoulders and her legs and her arms. Doesn’t even know that it’s quite hard to explain to a two-year-old (as she was) why she can’t have her present. I poured out the bubble bath and put her medicinal bath oil in the bottle. But it wasn’t pink. Oh, the tragedies of small lives. I considered adding cochineal. But would that make her skin worse? Or dye her pink? I made her a pink mermaid tail, covered with sequins like a dance costume. I killed her mother.
*
I had followed Neil’s advice. Jim never turned up at the hospital. Mum and I sa
t there waiting for him, talking through what Neil had said.
‘I should look after her, shouldn’t I?’ I said. Mum said I needed looking after myself.
‘In the long run.’
‘We’ll all go home, and we’ll all see how it goes,’ said Mum. Sometimes she gets firm. Sometimes her little fears drop away and in the face of something big, she becomes big. She was a teacher. She can make me feel like a little child.
‘Your father and I will make the parental responsibility application, and we’ll all stay put a while, and when things have settled we’ll see how they settle. It’ll be better coming from a couple.’
‘Why can’t we just have her!’
‘We can’t because we can’t. She’s the law’s. But they’ll see it our way. Neil says we have a good chance. Don’t you worry, not now.’
They were still telling me to rest my leg when I lost all my patience in a rush, and hobbled upstairs to the baby unit, soul racing on ahead, and said, Look, can she come out, please, please, please, is she ready, can we take her? Mum and Dad came up after me. A nice kind devoted family, trying to triumph over tragedy, wanting to take their baby home.
Mum had been in every day. The nurses liked her. The doctors liked her. They felt, as much as hospital staff can allow themselves to feel, for our tragedy. One little junior nurse cried whenever she saw Lily and had to be moved to a different ward. So Mum was there and I was there and Dad was there and Jim was not.
Neil said he had seen him, and he had not heard about what had happened. It seemed unbelievable. Apparently he had sobered up and imagined that Janie was taking a break and decided to let her stew a little before fetching her home. It had happened before. I think he was glad it had happened then – gave him an excuse not to be around for the birth. Like so many hard men, Jim can’t take anything really hard.
Neil said I was never again to ask him not to tell someone something. ‘Your girlfriend’s dead, by the way, only I’m not meant to tell you.’ Well, Jim must have found out sooner or later.
I was all for just taking her, once she was off her tubes. I was going to sneak upstairs on my crutches, tuck her inside my leather jacket, and ride her home on the Harley with my sick leg dangling in the wind. Never mind that the Harley was a write-off, that I could hardly walk, that the hospital authorities would chase me up, that it was a truly idiotic scheme. I was on drugs. It seemed a great idea to me. Mum repeated her mantra. Neil said no, and organized a little meeting at the hospital.
We sat in a greenish room. Pigeons were nesting somewhere outside the aquarium windows and their babies’ caterwauling sounded like serial murder. There were fag ends on the floor and plastic chairs that you couldn’t wrest apart from each other. My leg hurt. Mum looked as if she were in shock, Dad looked determined, Neil looked worried. God knows what I looked like.
We told them that Jim was out of the picture, not interested. He hasn’t even been here, we said. They said they would have to make inquiries, let him know. We said why? Anyway he does know. He knows she was pregnant. He knows how long pregnancy takes. He knows our phone numbers. If he’s interested let him come and ask. It’s not as if they were married. What rights did he have? They said someone had to find out. We said let whoever is interested find out. We said that formal adoption procedures were being put into place. We said that Mum and Dad had applied for parental responsibility under the Children Act 1989. We said the court would sort it all out but in the meantime Lily should be with her granny. Neil blinded them with legal science. They were understaffed. We were there. Dolores kissed me as we left.
So we took Lily home, and she was ours. A member of our family. Out into the world, out of intensive care, safe and to remain so. The only fly was when Jim rang me, a month after she was born, the day we got home to Mum’s.
‘Hello, Angeline,’ he said, sounding serious and sober. I could just picture him: clean shirt, clean-shaven, his bog-brush hair brushed, his face pink. Jim is a very big man and specializes in bonhomie. He used to wear tartan trousers when he was younger, but he doesn’t think it appropriate any more. He used to be quite funny before he got a job and started taking himself seriously. He’s quite good at his computers apparently. Men like him; women find him attractive, even now – well, then – when his face was already going a bit blobby. He worked out, but the flesh was creeping up though he was only, what, thirty-three. When he’s angry his face goes red and he shouts and shouts and shouts. He’s a bully. He drinks too much and cries when he apologizes. I don’t imagine that he’s changed. I’d like to be able to tell you what Janie saw in him but I don’t really know.
‘Hello, Jim,’ I said. I was quivering. Anger and fear. It’s a bad combination.
‘I suppose we ought to talk,’ he said.
‘Don’t see why,’ I said.
‘It’s mine, you know,’ he said.
‘It?’ I said. ‘Yeah.’
‘I heard it was a girl.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She is.’
‘She’ll need to be registered,’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ I said. I was so glad Mum hadn’t answered the phone. She didn’t know the half of it, but she knew enough.
‘Call her Jane,’ he said.
‘Fuck off,’ I said. Janie had chosen Lily. Lily for a girl, Edward for a boy. If he didn’t know that he didn’t deserve to know.
‘Well,’ he said.
I said nothing.
‘I don’t know why you’re being so high and … sorry,’ he said.
I said nothing.
‘You’ll have to put my name on the birth certificate,’ he said.
I said nothing. Then, ‘yes’.
Well. It was true. You can’t dodge truth. Janie didn’t. And I can’t.
‘I insist,’ he said.
‘I said yes,’ I said.
He began to blurt: ‘Look, it’s not been easy for …’
I hung up.
Mum was furious when I told her. Dad nearly blew a fuse. He stormed out of the house, and came back half an hour later saying, ‘She’s right, you know.’
‘It doesn’t seem right,’ said Mum. But it was true. So.
*
So I rang Jim the morning after I saw Dizzy and told him he could come. I told him I would not tell Lily that he was her father. I asked him as a favour not to tell her himself.
‘Just come and see her, see how it goes, see what is going to happen, and tell her later. If you bugger off again how will it be for her?’ (‘Yes, you have a daddy, here’s your daddy, oh, yes, but you won’t be seeing him again.’ This is me fantasizing about the result I want, for God’s sake. The best possible result.)
‘What’s the point of that?’ he wanted to know. I tried to explain.
‘Angie,’ he said, ‘I’m not doing this on a whim. I want to do it. I’m not going to disappear again. Three years is a long time and things have changed. I’m her father and I want to be her father. It’s not anything personal against you and if you could stop being so prickly for a moment and work with me for Lily’s benefit …’ (He’s had counselling. He’s been talking to a social worker or something. That’s not his voice.) ‘… I would tell you that I appreciate everything you’ve done for her …’ (he appreciates what I’ve done? It’s not for him to appreciate that … who is he to appreciate what is done for Lily?) ‘… but things are going to change now. I’m sorry if it upsets you. I have every right to … visit my daughter and I intend to use that right. And my wife is coming too.’
Wife.
It occurred to me that it might be a good idea to make notes of our telephone calls, of what he said. Perhaps even tape them.
‘I’ll tell her that friends of Janie’s are coming. Please don’t tell her you’re her father.’
‘You’re asking me to lie to her.’
‘Please don’t tell her. She’d be upset.’
We arranged that they would come on Wednesday at four. This was Sunday. Just coming to tea.
*
I made the mistake of trying to imagine what Jim was going to do. Wasted a lot of energy that way when I should have been concentrating, getting some work done.
I did become something else after the accident. I put together all the notes and things I’d written when I was in North Africa, dragged out my intellect from where I’d parked it after doing my degree, and wrote a book about the history and culture of Arab dance through western eyes. It was full of beautiful pictures and wild stories and did rather well, and now I am known to be the person who knows about belly dancing, harems, women in Islam, Orientalism and almost anything else in that direction that a journalist in need of a quote, or a researcher in need of a radio guest, might want. I work from home, my time is my own and I make a decent living.
Why do I feel I am writing this down in an affidavit?
*
Lily was on edge. I think she smelt it. She was excited about the visit. Friends of Mummy’s!
‘People who knew her, and want to see you. But you know lots of people who knew her, Granny and Grandpa and everyone …’
You can’t lie to children. It’s one of the great true cliches. She knew damn well this was important, because she saw it in my face and heard it in my voice.
They arrived exactly on time. Jim looked older, fatter, more unpleasant. There’s a certain nasty look that prosperity gives to some faces, and he had it. The wife was small and dark with neat hair. Early thirties, well looked after. I couldn’t make her out. She looked almost as if there were nothing to her – nothing to make her herself, rather than just anyone. Just small, neat, dark femininity. A sort of cipher, in expensive clothes.