by Louisa Young
‘Sa’id!’ I cried.
He smiled.
I slammed the door on him and hurtled into my study, slamming that door too. No no no no no. No. Oh shit.
I have a weakness. It’s called sex. Sometimes it hits me. Not often. As you can surmise from the fact that I didn’t fuck for three years after Lily was born. Until I … until the thing with Eddie.
But when it does, it does. I’m old enough to recognise it. And then …
A phrase from another of those ancient Egyptian poems came to me out of the blue. ‘He brings a blush to my skin, for he is tall and lean.’
I was about to become putty in a man’s hands. A man ten years younger than me, Hakim’s brother, Lily … Sarah … Harry. Oh my God. I mustn’t open the door. I sat and talked sense to myself while Lily ate her cornflakes. It seemed to work. Just because something is strong doesn’t mean you have to give in to it. You don’t have to roll over and wave your legs in the air. As it were.
I imagined putty waving its legs in the air, and the absurdity of my mixed metaphor gave me hope.
Twenty minutes later I peeked through the study window and the foliage outside to see if it was safe to take Lily to school. There was no one in the chair, and I couldn’t see much beyond it.
I opened the door gingerly. He wasn’t there. I could have wept. Then I saw the suitcase – a match for Hakim’s – parked under the vine and I cursed. Lily scampered down the stairs and I followed sedately, like a respectable woman, a woman to whom sexual passion with a … oh God … is out of the question. Maybe he has a squeaky voice, I was saying to myself. Maybe he likes Whitney Huston. I had a horrid feeling it wouldn’t matter.
I dropped Lily at school.
Coming home I trod slower and slower.
Up the stairs, I took a little rest on each landing.
I paused on the last but one step before the top floor, admiring the grimy concrete with its grey Rorschach splats of trodden-in chewing gum and its interestingly various texture of stone and cement. I held the iron railing, and wondered when if ever we were due for a repaint. I breathed, glad that the fresh air from the balcony dispersed the smell of piss so prevalent in enclosed parts of the estate. I girded my loins. I stepped up, and looked right, to the end of the balcony, to my doorstep and my little pretend garden. And there he was, in the chair, smoking a cigarette. The smell of it came to me on the air. It wasn’t a Marlboro by a long way. I wondered whether the smoke I smelt was his exhalation; whether what I was breathing in had been inside his body.
I had to walk the length of the bloody balcony while he watched. I did my very best to keep my hips rigidly in line. No swinging. No giveaways. But I knew the worst before I got anywhere near him. He knew.
It’s always the same. I couldn’t feel like this about a man who didn’t recognise it in me immediately. Recognition is part of the package.
Don’t look him in the eyes, I told myself. I smiled at the large yucca just over his left shoulder and said: ‘Sa’id, how extraordinary, do come in, Hakim’s not here at the moment.’
I knew immediately that that had been the wrong thing to say. Hakim had said that Sa’id didn’t know what he was doing here. That Sa’id had forbidden him to try and find his mother. Was Sa’id meant to know that Hakim had been chez moi at all? I could have kicked myself.
Well, I shall reveal nothing else. I shan’t land Hakim in it. Specially not just because I’ve turned into a sex-crazed sponge.
I walked into the house, leaving the door open for him to follow and calling out ‘Come in!’ behind me. By the sense of him he is considerably more westernised than Hakim. Plenty of tourists in Luxor. Plenty of cosmopolitan life in Cairo.
No, not more westernised. But more … more something.
He’s brought his suitcase. Think sense. And don’t look at him. Not for his sake, Lord no. Not to try and make him think I’m virtuous. For my sake. If I look at him I might disintegrate.
For God’s sake. I’m meant to be a grown-up.
I busied myself at the cooker. I assumed that coffee ran in the family. He still hadn’t said a word. I prayed for a squeaky voice. Anything to put me off. I had the impression he was laughing at me. It didn’t make me want him any the less.
Well when I’d made the damn coffee of course I had to turn and give it to him. Have you ever tried to give someone a cup of coffee without looking at them? It’s like trying to eat a doughnut without licking your lips.
His eyes were full of kindness. It was almost as if he pitied me my predicament. And he was laughing at it. The scenario ran before my eyes: I sit down opposite him, he grins at me, I come out in goose pimples and within two minutes we’ll be at it on the kitchen table.
I went and sat on the old sofa. The scenario ran through my mind. He comes and sits next to me and that’s it.
He stirred some sugar into his coffee and said, ‘Angelina, you look well. My father sends his best wishes, his compliments. He will be happy to hear that you are in good health.’
I think this is going to be worse. It’s just as inevitable, but … worse.
His voice wasn’t squeaky, by the way. Far from it.
‘How is he?’ I said brightly. ‘Well, I hope?’
‘He is very well, very well.’
Not squeaky. Light, languid, accent not so heavy as Hakim’s, language more colloquial, as far as I could tell. For a moment I thought I must be wrong. He doesn’t know, he can’t tell. Then he laughed, and I looked at him quickly, and he gave me a fair and solid look of knowing exactly, before quite deliberately dropping the shutters and continuing the conversation.
This pissed me off. I don’t mind being overwhelmed by animal instincts but I did not fancy being played like prey.
‘So Hakim is here?’ he said.
‘Well he was,’ I said, ‘but he’s gone away for a few days.’
‘Where to?’ he said.
I lied. Rather I obfuscated.
‘To tell the truth I’m not sure. He just said he was going off, and would give me a ring. He left his stuff, though, so I daresay he’ll be back soon.’
‘Hmm,’ he said. There was something quite unavoidably authoritative under his languidity. He cannot be as cool as he looks, I thought. He’s very young. He’s in a strange city. Don’t overestimate him. Look at his big Luxori scarf, a white-on-white paisley weave, folded the Luxori way and wrapped round him because even glowing autumnal London is too cold for him. He’s a big fish wandered far from his small pool. He’s not dangerous.
I found I was gnawing the flesh of my wrist.
He has got something round his neck. I was right! It’s in the genes! Not gold though. It looked like thin leather, a cord. I couldn’t see what was on it.
I know Brigid and Zeinab think I need a good shag but this is not the sort of thing they had in mind.
I decided I had better lie about everything, just in case. For protection. For me, and for Hakim. And for Sarah. I wondered if she would mind her son sleeping with an older woman. I slapped myself down. This is not going to happen, and I am going to demonstrate to this boy that he was mistaken in what he saw in my eyes. Time for nice English smalltalk, and amiable Arab courtesies.
‘So,’ I said brightly. ‘Are you here for long?’
‘As long as it takes,’ he said, looking me in the eye.
I looked back at him – not his eyes, but his face, looking for something wrong with it, something to cancel this out. Nothing. He looked beautiful, strong, complex, and almost unknowable.
‘What?’ I said. ‘As long as what takes?’
‘My business,’ he said.
I hate it when people say ‘business’. Usually it means applying for a bank loan they’re never going to get to set up with someone’s brother-in-law to get this brilliant thing manufactured, only they can’t tell you what it is because of the patent situation, right, only it’s going to be made in Spain because of the exchange rate, but there’s this licensing problem … Or buying a five-qui
d deal of spliff from a man in a pub. ‘Business’ means you’re trying to make it sound more important that it is.
But of course these rules do not apply to people whose first language is not English. And just because I don’t like the idea of business doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have any.
‘Oh, what’s your business?’ I said, gaily ignoring any intended off-putting.
‘Import export,’ he said.
Well of course.
‘Alabaster?’ I enquired.
I remembered him in his father’s workshop. Long and skinny and dusty. A kid. I’d loved the workshop. The showroom was not so gorgeous, full as it was of over-polished ashtrays that look like browning egg white, and Tutankhamun heads with blue paint to match the We Accept Barclaycard sign. We had gone there, Nadia and I, to try to buy some raw alabaster for her – she’s a sculptor, and was travelling the world to learn the tricks and qualities of different stones. She had just arranged with Abu Sa’id to hang around in the yard, the fabrique, to learn alabaster, when she fell ill. That’s how we met them, why we stayed.
As she convalesced I lurked. My favourite place was round the back of the showroom, where the wiry brown men in their dust-covered white gallabeyas squatted under the blue sky, and carved, and bored, and sliced, and held, and burnished. They bury solid columns in the sand, wrapped in cotton like a mummy, before hollowing them out with ancient iron hooks. Raw alabaster is more like incense than like stone – it needs support. It almost crumbles in your hands. It dissolves in water. Veins and fractions seem to shatter its solidity, yet it holds shapes as round and generous as a flower. Like ice, like crystallised ginger. I used to sit about and play with shards of it, crushing it, eating it. Three colours: the white, a stone of spun sugar, or moonlight; the red, peach flesh made crystal; and the green, oily like soap, deep like seaweed, and when you scrape the oiliness with your fingernails it becomes dust. I can stare at alabaster the way other people look at clouds: spotting shapes, losing your sense of balance. At every stage and degree of polishing it changes and shifts. I see feathers and blood, the history of geometry, rivers, faces, fractal chaos. It’s a stone sea to me. And that’s before you hold it up to the light, or put a living, flickering candle inside it, whereupon it becomes the gates of heaven. When I’m dead I want alabaster windows, like there are in mediaeval mosques and churches.
I discussed this with Abu Sa’id once. He didn’t want to talk about it. Evil eye stuff. (He also said that Princess Di shouldn’t be called Princess Di, because every time anybody says it it is like a curse on her, an invocation. Princess, Di. Lady, die. So perhaps he has a point.) I wanted him to make me a tomb with alabaster windows. Or at least give me a quote. I wondered if he didn’t regret the former speciality of the alabaster-maker’s art, the canopic chests, in which parts of well-born ancient Egyptian corpses were preserved. You would get four chests, or one divided into four, carved as simply or as ornamentally as you like. (Tutankhamun did have that head on the stoppers of his, in gold and lapis on the white gleam of the alabaster, four heads, facing inwards, nose to nose in two pairs, staring each other out over the centuries.) In one went your lungs. In one your stomach. In one your liver. And in one your intestines. And there they stayed, while the rest of you was soaked and bound and soaked and bound and finally put away for the life hereafter, with Osiris in the West. Your kidneys and heart stay in. Over your heart a scarab of stone, engraved with a chapter of the Book of the Dead, which adjures the heart not to rise up as witness against the deceased when ibis-headed Thoth, Lord of History, inventor of writing, weighs it against the feather of truth, in the next world. Brain? Sucked out and binned. Unclean. Well, yes. You get a new one in heaven. Just as well, probably.
Which is worse, getting a new perfect body to put your Christian soul in, or getting a new brain to put in your mummified ancient Egyptian skull?
You see what digressions I send my mind on to divert from the unavoidable. Miles away and centuries ago.
Didn’t change a thing. The man was still sitting there in my kitchen. Still looking the same. Saying: ‘Some alabaster, yes. Different things.’ Then as if he became aware that his reticence was verging on both the rude and the challenging, he stood and enquired most politely about the bathroom, and removed himself. Subject changed.
I didn’t like it. Reticent young men. There seemed to be stuff going on that I didn’t know about, which is fine, but not in my kitchen. Anyway, he couldn’t stay here, that much was clear. I am already fulfilling my obligations. I can’t actually fit two of them.
He lives in Qurnah – Thebes West Bank. Among those tombs. On that line where the green of the Nile becomes the red Sahara.
He stepped back into the kitchen. He was very quiet, a light mover. Not that tall. Shoulders broad but lean. He stepped past me most courteously, showing a delicate awareness of the space around me, and sat again by his coffee. His suitcase stood by the doorway like an unanswered – unasked – question.
I wanted him to leave.
He drank his coffee, taking his time.
It was a curious rerun of Hakim’s arrival. How gaily I had leapt into allowing Hakim’s presence here. How safe I must have been feeling to run the risk. How forgetful of the perils of the world. Other people fuck things up, Angeline.
Sa’id was perfectly at home with silence. Too much at home.
I sat.
He sat.
After while I began to feel like one of Tutankhamun’s canopic stoppers. Gazing immobile over the centuries, bound by your own silence and that of your companions. Irresistible, yet dull.
We’re going to sit here forever.
Nothing will ever happen.
Well I’m not breaking it.
I have nothing to offer him, nothing to tell him. If he wants anything he can ask.
We sat.
And sat.
It could have been embarrassing but it wasn’t. Neither of us were fiddling or fretting. Just sitting. My mind was wandering up the Nile again: if Osiris is the Nile, and his brother Set (who killed him out of jealousy) is the desert, what is alabaster? Is it of Set, or of his returned-to-life brother? Is it the bones of Osiris? (Wear it round your neck like an aya, or the eye of Horus, or the hand of Fatima. And there’s always the testicle of Thoth. You don’t know about the testicle of Thoth? Well …)
Just sitting.
Then after several hundred years, or about four minutes, he sighed and stood and said, ‘I will sleep in Hakim’s room, as he’s not here.’ Then he picked up his suitcase, went into Lily’s room and closed the door.
I remembered something a nurse told me five years ago, when I was in traction with my recently shattered leg, and Lily was in intensive care, and Janie was newly dead, when all I wanted was to have Lily, and Dolores the nurse said ‘so take her’. Her exact words were: ‘Nothing succeeds like a fait accompli.’
Well there you go then.
*
I worked, without conviction. Sa’id went out – I gave him the spare spare keys (Hakim had the spares). Picked up Lily and Caitlin and the boys, took them to the park. When I got back there was a message from Sarah. I made some tea, and then rang her back.
‘How’s Hakim?’ she wanted to know.
‘What?’
‘How’s Hakim?’ she repeated.
‘Um – I don’t know. I haven’t seen him. Should I have?’
‘He went back to London at lunchtime …’
‘Oh. I … No, I haven’t seen him. Was he coming straight here?’
‘Where else would he go?’
‘I don’t know.’
We were silent a moment.
‘What did he say?’ I asked her.
‘Just that he was going back, and he’d ring when he got there, and he’d be back in a day or two. I thought he’d rung you.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Were you in?’
‘No.’
Pause.
‘Well we probably don’t need to wor
ry,’ she said. She wanted me to agree.
It was a bit odd. All the Egyptians I’d ever known were forever getting in touch with their families, and here’s Hakim and his mobile phone not telling anybody anything. But then they aren’t typical, the el Arabys.
Perhaps we should worry. Maybe not yet.
‘Which train was he catching?’ I asked.
‘Twelve twenty,’ she said. ‘Gets in about one fifteen.’
It was now five something. Four hours.
‘He could have gone somewhere,’ she said. ‘He didn’t say specifically that he was going straight back to you.’
‘That’s probably it,’ I said. ‘Walk in the park or something. Shops. He wouldn’t know we’d be talking to each other, so he wouldn’t think we’d worry.’
‘No, of course not.’ She sounded relieved. It stood as a decent explanation.
I wanted to ask her how it all went, but I didn’t want to invade her privacy. She wasn’t my friend, Hakim was.
‘OK then. Let me know if you hear anything,’ I said.
‘Of course,’ she said.
We hung up.
I hadn’t told her Sa’id was here. Now why not?
ELEVEN
The Funeral
Lily was surprised to find yet another young man moved into her bedroom, but she took it in her stride when I said he was Hakim’s brother. She liked all these relatives turning up out of nowhere. It made her think that perhaps relatives of hers might turn up too, baby sisters, daddies, that kind of thing. Interestingly she showed no signs of falling in love with Sa’id as she had with Hakim. Convenient, really. At this rate we could already end up sisters-in-law, but I really didn’t fancy our being co-wives.
It was the day of the funeral.
I don’t like funerals.
I didn’t know if I was going to go or not.
Except that I knew I had to. Realistically I had no other way of getting hold of Mrs Bates, my charming correspondent, and though there had been nothing yesterday and, so far, nothing today, I wasn’t going to let her carry on wasting her stamp money on me.
At ten, I was sitting on the side of my bed, pretending to think, ‘If I leave it a little longer it’ll be too late anyway, and then I won’t have to decide.’ But then of course I found that I was putting on my only pair of respectable trousers, and brushing my hair. I walked in and out of the kitchen six times looking for things and forgetting once I was in there what it was I’d gone in for. Finally I fixed myself bodily in the halfway and said: ‘Keys. Money. Scarf. Coat.’ I said it several times. I could have added, ‘Brain.’