Desiring Cairo

by Louisa Young

He rang back ten seconds later, apologising profusely.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘OK, you mean it. I’m sorry. Her name’s Chrissie. She’s born Christine Louise Evans, then Chrissie de Lisle, no less, and for no reason other than sheer pretension, in her salad days, and now she goes as Christina Bates. So we’ll speak on Monday, will we, or over the weekend?’

  ‘Yeah. No promises. Would you let me know if anything else … you know …’

  ‘My darling, I’m gossip central on Mrs Bates. Short of anyone blowing a fuse and trying to sue, I don’t think anything’s going to happen except more of the same. And you know what our friends in the Bill are like, till the stalking law comes in they can’t move on this stuff till she’s pouring petrol through your letterbox. But I don’t think she will. She’s an old bat exorcising her sad old life, if you ask me. Ignore her and she’ll go away.’

  ‘Thanks, Fergus. I’ll speak to you.’

  ‘Indeed you will,’ he said.

  It occurred to me as I hung up that Fergus didn’t know I’d hit Eddie on the head with the poker, and that I didn’t know if Mrs Bates knew or not. And I didn’t know if she’d been visiting him in prison, and I didn’t know when the funeral was. Which I wanted to know, even though I didn’t want to go. So I rang back and asked him. Yes she had, she’d been regularly, and there had been something of a rapprochement between them; and next Tuesday, 11 a.m., at Southgate. The same cemetery where Janie is buried.

  I was relieved by our conversation, but not that relieved.

  Then I ate a bowl of cornflakes and went to get Lily.

  *

  When we got back from the park Hakim was standing in the middle of the kitchen with stars in his eyes.

  ‘I speak to her,’ he said. ‘I go tomorrow. I want to tell you.’ Then he grabbed my face and kissed me, grabbed Lily’s and kissed her, then disappeared into the bathroom, presumably to wash off our touch because moments later he reappeared and then disappeared again, out the front door, crying, ‘I go to mosque.’

  Lily looked bemused.

  ‘His mother,’ I explained. ‘He hasn’t seen his mother for fifteen years, and tomorrow he’s going to see her. After fifteen years.’

  She gazed after him. ‘So will I see my father after fifteen years?’ she said.

  Childish logic. I sat on the floor and drew her to me.

  ‘Oh, darling, I don’t know,’ I said.

  She wouldn’t sit with me. ‘Well you should know,’ she said. ‘You know everything else.’ Then she looked at me, and then she went into my room and sat silently on the bed.

  For a moment I was dumbstruck. Then I followed her in.

  ‘I wanted to go into my room,’ she said in a tiny voice, ‘but it’s not really mine.’

  I sat by her. ‘Sweetheart?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t want to cry,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t have to,’ I said. ‘You can if you want.’

  ‘I feel bad but I haven’t done anything bad.’

  There are times when you feel completely bloody useless.

  ‘Sometimes bad things happen to us even if we’re good,’ I said. ‘What’s making you feel bad? Do you know?’

  ‘It’s too difficult to explain,’ she said. Her lower lip was sticking out, just a tiny bit. The tears stayed in her eyes. Full and curved. Their shape echoed the shape of her cheeks.

  ‘Well what’s it about? Just tell me the subject. You don’t have to explain it all.’

  ‘I don’t want to,’ she said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I want you to know already,’ she whispered.

  And of course I did know. There was only one thing about her that I’d ever claimed not to know, that I’d ever claimed not to understand. Or rather – that I’d ever known was there, but not talked about, not shared, not dealt with. There was such closeness between us that I knew if she would choose an orange or an apple, if she wanted a bath or not, what story she wanted at night out of twenty to pick from. I always knew which hand she’d hidden the coin in. I knew every damn thing about her, and I knew this.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll find him.’

  When she looked up at me I swear her eyes were twice the size they had been. She grinned like a maniac.

  ‘You do know! You do know!’ she yelled.

  ‘I know what you want, darling. I don’t know where he is or when we can find him …’

  ‘But you know I want him!’

  That was all she needed. God, she was happy. I felt so small that I hadn’t admitted I knew it all along. To myself, quite apart from her. Going to bed that night she was telling herself a story. ‘Well a daddy might be in the zoo, but only if he had other children, because he wouldn’t go to the zoo if he didn’t have a child with him, so a lost daddy wouldn’t go there, unless he was a zookeeper MUMMY! IS MY DADDY A ZOOKEEPER?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘It’s quite funny you not knowing things,’ she said, with an echo of Harry. I kissed her and we did the rituals: ‘I love you up to the moon and back again’; ‘I love you too, now shut up and go to sleep’; ‘Will you scratch my back?’ ‘No I won’t.’ ‘But it was worth a try, wasn’t it Mummy?’ ‘Yes now shut up and go to sleep’; and then I went and rang Harry.

  Because frankly, out of the choice I had, he was the best.

  He was out. I didn’t leave a message. Anyway then Brigid and Caitlin and the boys appeared bearing sleeping bags, and Lily got out of bed, and the lilos had to be blown up and the whole thing turned into a hoopla of considerable proportions. Around ten I gave up and left them to it, and went to watch the news. It was all about the dead princess and her boyfriend. (‘It was her own fault,’ said Lily. ‘She was a mummy. Why didn’t she have her seat-belt on?’)

  Halfway through Hakim came in and said: ‘He’s no good that man. No good for Egypt. Rich as ten thousand men. And he did not look after your princess. In Egypt they say your government killed them because they hate Islam and want no Muslim man in your royal family. I say bollocks.’ At the same time as I was amused by his finding so soon the grosser end of our lovely language, and pronouncing it like the young bull he so reminded me of, I could see the sincerity of his distaste.

  SEVEN

  Brighton

  The next day, Saturday, there were two letters. One contained a razor blade, the other a poem.

  Distracting is the foliage of my pasture

  The mouth of my girl is a lotus bud

  Her breasts are mandrake apples

  Her arms are vines

  Her eyes are fixed like berries

  Her brow a snare of willow

  And I the wild goose!

  My beak snips her hair for bait,

  As worms for bait in the trap.

  I knew this poem. Not that it’s famous, out of its field. It’s from an ancient papyrus. It’s, I don’t know, three thousand years old. I didn’t like it – I’d never liked it. Hair as worms, bait in a trap. Ugly. Violent. Fixed berries, vines, snares. It speaks to me of desire and resentment – a bad combination.

  And a razor blade.

  How very unpleasant.

  Each one gave me a cold shudder. I didn’t know, actually, which was nastier.

  I burnt the poem and broke the blade in half with a pair of pliers, then wrapped it in cotton wool, soaked the package in baby oil and threw it in the rubbish, which I then took out on to the balcony and dropped – plop! – into the wheelie bin seven storeys below. I’m pretty ritualistic on occasion.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked the children, interested in any new form of inexplicable behaviour from a grown-up. I was stymied for a moment – what was I doing? Frightening off baddies? (Didn’t want to admit to the presence of baddies in case it frightened them.) Nothing? (They wouldn’t fall for that.) I concentrated on the razor blade, and turned it into a small lecture on domestic safety and what to do with any sharp object, disposal thereof. It worked.

  I thought again about protection. There would be
absolutely no point taking this to the police. And – well, there is nobody whose business it is to protect me. I am the protector round here. This is my lot, chosen by me and ordained by circumstance. Price of freedom, nature of my generation.

  Of course I could talk to Harry about it.

  But I won’t. I’ll talk to Mrs Bates. I also rang one of those telephone insurance companies and arranged household cover, which was very unlike me.

  Worms for bait in the trap. Ugh.

  Put it away. Now the children are hungry – feed them. First things first.

  I made pancakes for everybody for breakfast. After waiting for Brigid to come and take her offspring away, and for Zeinab and her two younger boys to arrive, which they did in the middle of the pancakes so I had to make more, Hakim, Lily, Zeinab, Omar, Hassan, and I all piled into the small car and headed for Brighton, where Hakim was to meet his mother and we were to lie about on the beach in the sweet Indian summer, eating chips from The Meeting Place and breathing in ozone and vinegar, one of life’s most beautiful smell combinations. Hakim quivered all the way down the M23, and Lily held his hand. ‘It’s all right,’ she told him helpfully. ‘Mummies are very nice and kind. It’s their job.’

  It was hot, and the fumes and rancid pizza smell of London fell away from us as we piled out on the seafront at noon. Hakim wanted to look at the sea before meeting her. Then he wanted to pray. He was erratic in his praying, but fervent. It was time for zohr, midday prayer, and meeting his mother, well … He did his abolitions, as he called them. I pictured him washing in a smidgeon of sand, like Bedouins do in the desert. He prayed there on the beach, prostrating himself among a few late prostrate sunbathers, an Arab of the north in the wrong kind of desert. The sunbathers looked upside down beside him. I left the children throwing pebbles at the West Pier with Zeinab, and drove Hakim up the hill to his mother’s address.

  It was a sweet house. Low eaves, tall staring yellow daisies in the garden, peeking windows facing out to sea, green door, wellies in the porch. I half-expected Mrs Tiggywinkle. It seemed a very long way from Qurnah.

  ‘Please knock,’ said Hakim.

  ‘You knock,’ said I. ‘It’s your mother.’

  He knocked. His poor eyes, his sweet nose, his bumfluff sideburns. As the door was answered he stared across to me in naked terror.

  I stood aside, and noted a smallish woman, late forties, dark tunic and trouser type ensemble, chestnut hair not naturally so, and a small gold necklace with a pendant of a hieroglyphic cartouche. Perhaps the disposition to wear culturally significant jewellery is genetic: Hakim’s aya, her cartouche. Her face was almost as scared as Hakim’s.

  I made to go but Hakim grabbed me.

  ‘Mama,’ he said, ‘this is Evangeline, my friend, may she stay?’

  I tried to look as if I wasn’t his sugar mummy.

  Sarah stared at him. They had the same chin.

  She moved aside and we went in. Hakim went and stood in front of her and took both her hands in his and bent his head forward, almost as if worshipping at her. Then he gave a package. ‘It is not the best present from son to mother but it comes …’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, and opened it, and stared at it. Then she went and made a pot of tea. We could hear her sniffing in the kitchen. Every now and then she peeked round the kitchen door and stared at him. It was the most extraordinary scene I have ever witnessed. I actually couldn’t bear to look at either of them. Too intense. I feared for my retinas, and looked at the present instead, a small plaster box, in the shape of Nut, the sky goddess, on all fours as she always is. Inside the lid you could see her belly and breasts, spattered with stars, the moon, and the sun at the meeting of her thighs. The bottom of the box was Geb, the earth, her lover. According to the legend the world came to be when her father, Shu, came and separated her body from Geb’s. Shu still holds the earth and the sky apart; he is the air. We live between separated lovers, breathing in jealousy. She gives birth to the sun every morning. The Milky Way is milk spilled from her breast. When Lily is pretending to be a baby animal she pretends to breastfeed from me because she thinks it is such a lovely idea. It used almost to break my heart but no longer.

  It was a lovely thing. It reminded me of the ceiling in that beautiful side chapel at the temple of Hathor at Dendera. I wondered if it was a replica of something old, but now wasn’t the time to ask.

  Sarah liked it, but she liked Hakim more.

  ‘How is your father?’ she said.

  ‘They don’t know I am here,’ he said.

  She poured him tea but he didn’t touch it.

  ‘I’ll tell you everything,’ she said. ‘Every little thing. It would be a shame now to hate each other.’

  ‘No way José,’ he said. She was puzzled, but she didn’t laugh. He didn’t mean her to. He didn’t know it was a joke phrase.

  ‘Oh my boy,’ she said. ‘Oh my little boy.’

  And he was. There was no question now but that he was a boy. His vestiges of adulthood fell away in her presence. I swear he was getting shorter by the minute. She was sitting in an armchair, and he left his own seat and went over to sit on the floor by her. He took her hand, and leaned his head against her knee, and closed his eyes, and the swoony bliss that you only ever see on the face of a well-fed baby engulfed him. He sighed deeply. Then I realised that he was asleep.

  ‘He’s asleep,’ I said.

  ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed, and looked down at the top of his silky head, and said, ‘Oh, my God, this is the – oh.’

  I wasn’t embarrassed because I was so interested. I compared it with the Madam Butterfly day that Jim, thinking (or at least claiming) that he was Lily’s father, came to tea with his unpleasant wife. He’d wanted me to tell Lily he was her father, but I’d refused. I remembered that total lack of anything between them. No similarity, no communication, no understanding, no pleasure in each other, no blood, no link … I should have known then that he wasn’t her father.

  And look at these two. Meets his mother, and the first thing he does is curl up and sleep, as near to in her arms as is physically possible. He was five when she left – Lily’s age. And they must have had love, for them to be like this now.

  ‘He looks like he’s taking up where you left off,’ I said. Then kicked myself. I meant you plural, but she might hear you singular and take it as blame: ‘you left’. I wasn’t about to blame her. I hadn’t, as the American Indians say, walked two miles in her shoes.

  ‘This is where we left off,’ she said. ‘The night I left he fell asleep on my lap, and I carried him to bed. Sa’id was out on the river with his felucca friends. I saw them in the distance, coming in, as I crossed over to Luxor.’

  I couldn’t quite envisage how she had left. The English wife of the alabaster merchant, in Qurnah, in the early eighties. On the West Bank, which tourists visit for sure – to see the Valleys of the Kings and Queens, the Temple of Hatshepsut, the colossi of Memnon, one of which used to wail at dawn, until it was mended and the crack in the rock no longer sounded as it shrank in the morning sun, the statue that the Happy Prince’s swallow so longed to see, and so does everybody else. But having seen, they don’t on the whole stay on the West Bank, in that small and intricately connected community. She would have been known. Was she in the habit of crossing over to the city on her own at night, without her husband? Even during our comparatively short stay, five years later, Nadia and I became quickly known, greeted by name. But Sarah was there twelve years, a wife, a mother, a true attempter at the link between cultures. She couldn’t have left in secret.

  I couldn’t ask. It wasn’t my business. But I couldn’t not.

  ‘Did you want to leave?’

  Hakim had let her hand drop, and she was gently, wonderingly, stroking his hair.

  ‘I still don’t know,’ she said after a while, as if she wasn’t thinking about it. ‘I thought I did. Perhaps.’

  ‘Then …’

  I was thinking about what she’d said on the ph
one: ‘I don’t even know who you are!’

  She made to stir herself, then didn’t. ‘You see that picture on the mantelpiece? The photograph? Could you pass it to me?’

  It was old, faded, taken in bright sun, with the bright whited-out colours that say high summer, long ago, late seventies. In Britain these pictures are usually of people in low-slung orange crocheted bikinis, or tight brown flares and stripy scarves, squinting at the sun. This was Hakim and Sa’id, one chubby, one lean, aged say four and nine, in clean white shirts and clean white smiles, standing in front of one of the great carved pillars of the temple of Karnak, with their massive curves and scant memory of green and red, faded out and out of frame. The bleached-out colours gave it the look of a David Roberts watercolour. Behind them, and behind the pillar, half a Japanese face peered round, inquisitively.

  ‘I sent this to my father,’ she said. ‘He gave it back to me when I came home.’ It seemed clear to me that there was a great deal of pain here. She was still stroking Hakim.

  I had got up to stand behind her to see the photograph. She balanced it carefully on her knee.

  Sarah’s face crumpled up.

  She didn’t really want to talk to me at all. I thought perhaps I should make it easier for her.

  ‘I’ll leave you two,’ I said, and did.

  *

  In the car on the way home Zeinab talked about Hakim and his situation for twenty minutes without pause. She liked him, admired his courage, felt for the uncertainty of his future, was looking forward to cooking him some decent Egyptian food and having him round to talk Arabic with the boys, thought him very nice-looking and nice-mannered, wondered how devout he really was and how long that would last, and thought it would and hoped he wouldn’t get into bad company (‘There are some terrible Egyptians in London you know. The worst.’) and wanted to know was I doing his laundry for him.

  In the end Lily said: ‘Zeinab, he’s ours not yours, but you can play with him but you have to give him back when we ask.’

  Though actually I agreed with her, I had to point out that people don’t belong to other people.

  ‘If they love each other they do,’ she argued, ‘and we love him so he’s ours and he loves me.’