by Louisa Young
He lumbered up out of the deckchair and turned to lean against the balcony wall, looking back at the chair in disgust. He swallowed his drink in one.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Here’s the deal. You are to continue on good terms with Eddie. You are to see as much of him as possible, keep him liking you, and ring me twice a day or more to tell me how he is, what he is doing, where he is going, who he is seeing, what they are saying, what he is wearing, where they are eating and who is serving the drinks. I want the colour of their socks. I want all sightings of documents, particularly passports, address books, diaries, any kind of contact list. I want copies of anything you can get copies of – tapes, videos, business papers. If you have to fuck him, so be it. And – before you blow your mouth off – if you don’t, I shall be releasing your arrest for drunk driving to the relevant authorities, along with details of how you tried to bribe me, and sending details of the whole thing, plus your relationship with Eddie Bates, to Jim Guest, his lawyers, the social worker on your case and the court, out of a spirit of public duty.’
‘Why should Jim be interested?’ I asked blandly. ‘What are you talking about?’ Useless of me, really.
He gave me his old patronizing chirpy look. ‘And to let you know just how serious this is to me, I’m going to tell you just a little of what is going on.’
I could see it was hard for him. I wondered why he had decided to tell me. Then I realized. He wanted to frighten me.
‘It is quite likely that Eddie will soon be leaving us. He may be going to rot his days away in a horrible little cell; he may be going to Casablanca or Buenos Aires. It is not yet apparent. If the former, he intends taking me with him. If the latter, the possibility of the former will always remain. I need a little insurance. There are things I know about Eddie which others do not know. A little proof – which you will get for me – will cover me. And as long as I am covered, so are you. If I go down, I intend taking you with me.’
‘If he goes to prison anyway, it won’t matter what you know.’
‘The things I know, Ange, are rather different, and rather worse.’
‘What are they?’
‘Why should I tell you?’
‘Because you’re sending me off to spy on him? Because you’re encouraging me to sleep with him?’
‘Sleep with him enough and you’ll probably find out for yourself,’ he said. ‘Oh, come on, Angie, just use your wiles. You don’t have to know. Better you don’t know. Just stick close, gain his trust if you can, let me know when he shows signs of going anywhere, and pinch anything significant.’
‘How will I know what’s significant?’
‘Ring me and ask. Ring me anyway. And if you get into trouble ring me and I’ll come and rescue you.’
‘Yeah, like you did last time,’ I muttered.
‘What last time?’
‘Yesterday!’
‘What happened that you needed rescuing from yesterday?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing you need know about.’ A pathetic kind of yah boo sucks. ‘Anyway, he’s not going to trust me an inch. He knows I nicked the address book for you.’
‘Have you noticed he’s a little mad? I don’t think he will hold that against you. Not by your report.’
‘I’m not going to do it, Ben.’ Suddenly I saw the image of flame, and Eddie’s face. ‘It’s a completely mad idea. It’s not going to do you any good and it’s putting me in an impossible position …’
‘Kiss bye-bye to Lily then.’
‘Please don’t do that.’
‘If you won’t save me, why should I save you?’
‘It won’t save you from anything.’
‘It might. Think of yourself as a straw, and me clutching at you.’
I wondered if I should tell Ben about when Eddie tried to set fire to me. To show him exactly why I was reluctant. To give him a chance to let me off the hook. Give him a chance to redeem himself, and me, and call a halt to this whole stupid thing. What the hell, give it a go.
‘Ben … once when I was dancing, in a restaurant, um … a man tried to set fire to me.’
‘And?’ he said.
‘It was Eddie.’
‘There, you see!’ he said. ‘You do know something after all!’
And so do you, I thought. And knew all along. And don’t give a shit. Yes, Ben, we were always friends.
‘That’s why I’m not doing it.’
There would have to be another way. We could emigrate. Take her to Egypt. Zeinab’s mum would put us up for a bit. I could … I could … oh, shit.
‘Call me tomorrow, love,’ he said, and left.
‘Well, you’ve only yourself to blame,’ I said, and thanked myself for my kind and sympathetic words.
THIRTEEN
Janie’s Tea-chest
I spent Sunday prowling. I prowled into the kitchen. Then out again. Into my study. Down to Lily’s room. Into my bedroom. Out again. The phone kept ringing and I didn’t answer it. I put on a tape of Umm Kalthoum, the most beautiful voice in Egypt and the most Egyptian of voices, in an attempt to soothe. When talking came on the answerphone I put my fingers in my ears and sang loudly along with her.
‘Why don’t you answer the phone?’ said Lily.
‘Because I don’t want to,’ I replied.
‘I’ll get it, then,’ she offers helpfully. She loves the phone, thinks it’s for talking nonsense into. ‘Hello, Banana-head,’ she says.
I discourage her. And prowl back into the kitchen.
‘Can we go to the park?’
Good idea. Go to the park before I go off my trolley. I cannot actually think of a single person with whom I am on pure and honest good terms. Everybody I know, either I’m lying to them, or they’re lying to me, or I’m concealing things from them, or they’re concealing things from me, or I hate them, or … God, the list is endless. For a moment I wished I were a Catholic so I could let it all out.
I prowled back into my study and stared at the most recent bank statement, lying unopened on my desk like a not-to-be-trodden-in cowpat. I have to do some work. All my Lily-free time is being taken up with this stuff. In three months’ time there’s going to be a sudden hiatus in cheques coming in. I’ve got nothing outstanding to do … I should be out chasing things up, putting myself about. Oh, shit, yes, I have got something – an unopened jiffy bag under some papers suddenly reminded me that it was a book I was meant to be reviewing. Two hundred pounds! When the hell is the deadline? I’ll take it to the park, put Lily in the sandpit and start reading it. Birds and stones, birds and stones. Then I won’t hear the telephone, and it’ll take my mind off Cooper’s ultimatum, and how incredibly angry I am with him.
*
That night when Lily was asleep I went into my study and decided it was time to brave Janie’s tea-chest.
I’d already been through her things when Lily was tiny: pinching her history books, sorting her clothes for the charity shop, discarding her gubbins ruthlessly. Or trying to. I’d sat with my leg stretched out in its plaster, and Mum passed me things and Zeinab helped. I don’t know if it was harder physically or emotionally.
Her things were so like my own yet so different. Her clothes were better than mine, yet equally badly kept: eighty quid Ghost dresses that looked like Indian rags from the Portobello because she’d never hung them up or had them cleaned; beautifully cut leather jeans going dry and musty because she didn’t wear them any more. (At least I always kept my bike leathers in good condition.) Beautiful little Kenzo suits for work – I’d never realized that she had so many because they all looked exactly the same to me, grey and disgustingly tasteful. She’d been wearing them at twenty-three, and we all laughed at her for wearing grown-up clothes. They all went to Oxfam. In Ghana they call second-hand clothes Obroni we tvu – the white man died. Her make-up – again expensive, again in a big mess, leaky bottles of Clinique foundation, powder falling about, lipsticks bought in 1984.
Everything which might have been somethi
ng I’d have had, I’d put in with my own things, and let them get jumbled up, and absorbed them into my life until I forgot what was originally whose. Thinking about those tribes where you take on the strength and qualities of the person you have killed. I didn’t want her strengths and qualities. Let alone her weaknesses. But I didn’t want to lose her. Anyway I didn’t kill her in competition, in battle. I just happened to be there. Well.
I’m not going to start on that again now. Everybody in the whole wide world except for me says I was not to blame. But what do I care what people think? I should have been able to prevent it. Enough. Enough.
Anything identifiable went. I gave Zeinab her beautiful long black velvet dress. Threw away all her food, her half-used box of tampax.
We’d cleared the flat in two days. I’d set aside some things for Lily: the sequin jacket, her diaries, her letters, a bit of jewellery, lots of old unwritten-on postcards, photographs. She wasn’t sentimental like me and there wasn’t that much. I poured drops of cedar oil in the bottom of a wooden chest, then sealed it all up, rather romantically.
Her underwear, come to think of it, had been quite something. I binned it all except a completely delicious black bustier-corset affair from Rigby and Peller, a good five hundred quid’s worth I found out when I took it there to have it adjusted to fit me. Even the adjustment cost fifty quid. We were very nearly the same size, but my waist was a little smaller. The dancing did it. I’d forgotten all about that item. Haven’t had much call for that sort of thing. I was glad now that I’d never got round to wearing it for any dirty passionate true-love tryst of my own.
I just wanted to know what she did and with whom. How it worked. Did she hang out on street corners? I think not. Expensive hotels? Company flats? Escort agencies? Hostess bars? Did she have a pimp? How the hell did she get into it?
Quite apart from why.
Who would know?
I went and rang Harry. Hung up after one ring. I was doing the box now. I’d put it off for days. I’d thought that we’d done it all, back then, but I was wrong. Go on, dig up bones, off you go.
I didn’t know what was in this box, or why. Neither Mum nor I had packed it up. I supposed it must have been old old stuff that Janie herself had packed away years ago. I was expecting feather boas and old invitations to drinks parties at Magdalene, photobooth pictures of laughing young people with long hair and plucked eyebrows, all squashed in together. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
I dragged it into the kitchen and pondered the best way in. From the top, girl, don’t put it off. Just pull off that bit of blanket – God, I remember that, it was one we had as children, green tartan, we used to use it for a kilt when we played Bonnie Prince Charlie. OK, back and forth through the layers of time. Start pulling things out. It wasn’t actually that full.
Under the blanket was a large old-fashioned black metal money box, the kind with a red stripe around the edge and a ring in the lid and little trays you could take out. I put it on the table and opened it. It was unlocked. It had no trays. Inside it was nothing but wads of fifty-pound notes. I blinked, and closed it again. Opened it again. Closed it again. I put a pile of newspapers on top of it. It still showed. I took it over to the old armchair in the corner and tucked it under the seat cushion, at the back, in the black hole of old upholstery. I put the newspapers on the seat. Then I put the kettle on.
This is how I lie, you see. If I put a cushion and a pile of newspapers on something then it doesn’t exist and I don’t have to deal with it.
‘I just want everybody to be happy!’ I’d say, and Janie would look at me and say, ‘Well, they won’t be, will they?’
I took my cup of tea back over to the chest. Another piece of our childhood blanket covered a stack of videotapes, each in a white card cover, and labelled only with a date, in Janie’s large semi-italic handwriting. I pulled one out. The sticker too had nothing but a date, written with one of those nice fine black felt-tips: 21 March 1989. My twenty-sixth birthday. I’d been in Casablanca. I’d run out of money and was dancing in a hotel there, a tourist hotel. The northerners were rather disappointed in me; they hadn’t wanted a blonde belly dancer. Local guys thought I was great, though, and I worked there for four months, I suppose, till the manager decided that he had had enough of my virtuous refusals, and that I should accept that I really was his own harem, and proceeded to try and enforce it. The owner of the hotel came to me in tears saying that all he wanted to do was sack the manager for his behaviour, but he couldn’t because the manager’s brother-in-law had put up half the money for the investment, and he was mortified but he could not protect me. I have seldom seen a man so sad and ashamed. Casablanca.
I shook off the memory and pulled the tapes out of the chest. There were about ten. I hadn’t ever known Janie to use a video camera. Perhaps they were just TV things. But no – her TV tapes had gone to Oxfam with her movies and her exercise tapes (including Belly Dancing for Fitness and Fun – we loved that one) three years ago. All the labels on those were scribbled and Tipp-Exed and scribbled over again. I stacked the tapes up and supposed I’d have to go over to Brigid’s to have a look at them.
Apart from that there was a bundle of what looked like bank statements and a small jewel box. Inside the jewel box was a little stash that even I could tell were not rhinestones. It was flashy-looking stuff. An English lady would not wear this. Ivana Trump might. A couple of diamond rings, cut ugly and modern; emerald earrings that looked like something out of a cracker, but weren’t, and three heavy gold chains. I’d never seen Janie in any of it, which was hardly surprising. I’d no idea what it was worth.
So. She’d been good at her job and well paid. So she’d put her pension in a chest and hidden it under the bed. My little sister the Ouled Nail. I drank my luke warm tea and looked out the window at the petunias. They were looking the worse for wear.
I don’t disapprove of prostitutes. We all sell something, that’s what you realize when you grow up. You sell your time, your strength, your skill, your knowledge, your looks, your youth, whatever you have. Harry’s sold his soul. I sold my body for years. Who am I to say a woman shouldn’t do that? Then I see, what … brutalized emotions, exploited teenagers, greedy cows who do it because they think it’s easy, and they have no contact with their own hearts anyway. I see women who have no alternative: that’s all they have to sell. I see women who assume it’s all they have to sell because they have been told so often that they are worthless. I see men living off the back of it. I see violence and loss and heartbreak and lies. I see Noor.
The independent woman who does it and can do it, who has the strength, I say good for her. But I don’t believe her.
And Janie? Janie wasn’t that kind of woman. I very much minded her doing it. Because I believe – OK, I know – that it fucks up your emotional life and your relationships, it puts you in danger of disease and violence, it makes you disrespected, and it makes you lie. She lied to me and now she would never be able to explain, to apologize, and I would never be able to forgive. One lie like that makes a mockery of everything you thought was true. My sister, who may have been lying about everything else too. My sister, who was my confidante for thirty years. Did she laugh when I moaned on to her about the men at the restaurants who would make passes at me, and offer me money? What did she think when I told her how I scorned them, and hated them, and couldn’t believe they would be stupid enough to imagine I would take their money? (I was very young then. And so was she.) And later when I was a little clearer-eyed, and told her that I knew now they didn’t imagine anything about me except what I looked like with my knickers off, did she laugh at my carefully protected virtue? Or did she cry?
Here it was fucking up her relationship with me when she’d been dead three years.
Did Jim know what his girlfriend was up to?
If he didn’t that’s a reason for her keeping this secret box of goodies. And her career was another reason, of course, for her always refusing to live with him
. She always said it was because of the violence. And was she lying about that? Did she make that up as an excuse to me, to explain why she didn’t live with him? No. I saw the results. Yes, but I didn’t see them being delivered, or who delivered them. Or why.
You see? One lie, and you set off a train of doubt and mistrust. Not because you were a whore, Janie, but because you never told me you were, I now don’t know if I believe that Jim used to beat you up.
That’s stupid, said Janie.
‘No, it’s not, it’s completely rational,’ I said.
‘Rational’s got nothing to do with it,’ she replied. ‘You know it’s true. And if you don’t you should do.’
‘I know that you told me. But what’s that worth now?’
‘You have no faith, do you? No faith in me, no trust …’
‘Well, how am I meant to? Now?’
‘You never did anyway – you just wrote me off. You thought my job stank and my boyfriends were gits, you weren’t even interested in me …’
‘I bloody was!’
‘If you had been you would have known what I was doing. How could you have not noticed that your own sister was a prostitute? Eh? You should have known!’
‘What do you mean I should’ve known?’
‘You’re my sister, you’re my friend. You should have known.’
‘You should have told me.’
‘I shouldn’t have needed to. If you were a proper friend you would have known. I thought you did, half the time.’
‘How could I?’
‘A real friend would have. If you had been thinking about me and paying some attention to me instead of cruising your broken heart all over the Maghreb you would have known. You just didn’t notice. Because you weren’t interested.’
A boy ran down the balcony after a ball, breaking my fantasy.
In Egypt, twins turn into cats at night and go out to find food. If anyone beats them or throws stones at them they tell their parents the next morning and the parents remonstrate. Everyone accepts it. If you kill a cat it is terrible, because it might be someone’s child. You grow out of it when you’re about eleven. It explains why there are so many more cats about at night, too.