Desiring Cairo

by Louisa Young

  Just as I was leaving Sa’id appeared in the hall, wearing a white gallabeya, with his hair loose, tucked behind his ears, curling on to his shoulders. He looked taller, and distracted. Older than he is. He smiled kindly. ‘Good morning,’ he said. I tried to tell myself that he looked like an extra from Jesus Christ Superstar but he didn’t.

  I looked at his feet because I hadn’t seen them before. Long and brown and clean. Shape of Bernini, colour of dark sand.

  I found it very hard to leave.

  Driving up to north London, taking my place as one of the metal lice encrusting the North Circular, I kept getting that horrible sense of coming to having been unconscious for the past ten minutes. It’s something I’ve always suffered from, a kind of chronic disengagement. Since the accident, as you can imagine, it frightens me.

  Sometimes I wonder why I’ve never had a nervous breakdown. You’d think I would have, what with everything. But I haven’t.

  Oh bollocks, I know perfectly well why. Lily. One, she wouldn’t like it, and two, I’m too busy. And three, I love, and four, I am loved.

  Pale hooded eyes.

  *

  The cemetery looked windblown, bare, a hillside above nothing. Perhaps they always do. The – what’s it called – burning place. Mortuary? No. You know. Assiduary. Crematorium. That one. Well anyway – it was bleak. Institutional. Cheap benches. Blonde piano with no one to play it. There were only about ten people, including Eddie, though of course he wasn’t included, he was boxed away, kept safely from us, already elsewhere, different status, don’t look don’t touch, he is not one of us now. He is packaged for delivery … elsewhere.

  I was ushered down towards the front. A good dollop of me wished I hadn’t come. I hid, as best I could, in my collar. An image of Eddie’s neck came to me; of the tendon running down the side, and its tautness as his head lolled. And my stomach turned.

  There was a tune in my mind, a wild tune.

  Soon enough a man in a suit appeared and said he commended our brother Edward to the arms of the Lord, though fuck knows what the Lord was meant to do with him, and soon after that the Albinoni dirge came over the tannoy – the default soundtrack for funerals and cremations, I imagine and – then the dark, dull, nothing-looking coffin rolled off down the conveyor belt like a lost suitcase at Heathrow, and Eddie was consigned to flames. I observed a little burst, a fretwork of sparks, as the horrid little curtains drew back to let him in. Of course I remembered our first contact, when he had tried to set fire to me as I danced barefoot and bejewelled on a restaurant table in Charlotte Street. Of course I felt the irony of the moment. There was a dark gladness in me. But death requires respect. Whoever’s death.

  Strauss’s Salome, the end when she sings to Jokanaan’s head. The maddest scene of any opera. I’d seen Maria Ewing do it years ago. I heard it in my head now and my spine was lifting, straightening, as if I were going to dance. Jokanaan you should have looked at me. Jokanaan I will kiss your mouth. Exactly the opposite. He shouldn’t have. I shouldn’t have.

  Shame’s hands are still strong in my belly.

  I was holding flowers but they were not for him. They were for Janie, half a mile away across this great flat open necropolis. White snapdragons. Not for any special reason.

  The Albinoni faded out mid-bar and after a hypocritical moment of silence I stood to face my duty. Turning round, I saw that the little chapel had filled up a bit. There was a group of unhealthy looking men in bad suits who I realised were the police, and Harry of course separate from them. Harry was here as the dead villain’s former boy, Gary Cooper in disguise. He stood alone. I made one dim smile do for him and Fergus, and trawled the chamber for Mrs Bates. Fergus caught my eye, and nodded and gave a pointed look towards a woman in black fur and sunglasses and an astonishing pair of stilettos. A great look. Very rich widow, very Jackie O. Herodias. Unmistakably Christina.

  I wished again that I hadn’t come. Absurd, really. What had I come for? I couldn’t remember. Oh yes, to make sure he was really dead. Well, there we go then. No one was crying, but that doesn’t prove anything.

  Christina Bates.

  I’ll get her outside.

  Fergus’s hand was under my elbow as I left. He’s going to do it for me, I realised, to punish me.

  ‘You could have called me,’ he said, as we walked out into the nothing weather, on the nothing tarmac with its treacherous covering of damp dead leaves. I still see them with a biker’s eye: damp leaves read imminent crash.

  I was beginning to feel more and more depressed.

  ‘Christina,’ he said, gently, and led me firmly up to Mrs B. ‘This is Evangeline Gower. She knew Eddie.’ He smiled at me nastily and walked off. I assumed he’d done the obligatory exchange of mendacious platitudes with her earlier. I couldn’t summon up the energy to be pissed off with him.

  Ok let’s get it over. I looked at her.

  None of her visible face was actually her. Even not knowing her I could tell. There was lipstick and dark glasses and a mask of grief which could have sat on any face. It grimaced gently and then she took my arm and tucked it into hers, patting it, too often. ‘Come and have a fag,’ she said, in a gravelly and affected ac-tress voice. Her usual voice, I imagined.

  ‘Only if you take off your glasses,’ I said.

  She stared at me – I think. I couldn’t quite tell. Then she said, ‘Eddie was awfully fond of you,’ and took them off, and gave me a kind of smile, and then put them on again. Perhaps this was the bond between her and Eddie. He had RSC diction and profile; she spoke lines out of third-rate soaps. I found myself reminding myself that she was a human being, and wondering whether I believed it. I allowed myself to be led towards a bench and then remembered what happened last time I allowed myself to be led by a Bates while wondering what to do. Remembered his fistful of chloroform or rohypnol or whatever it was over my mouth, and the great insult of being carted off.

  I wasn’t frightened of her as I had been of him. And I had survived him. Beat him, if you like. Ha ha! He’s dead!

  I took my arm from hers and, as sympathy for her circumstances and antipathy to her played across my consciousness, walked myself to the bench, sat, and gestured to her to sit. She was crying. For a moment I feared that I wouldn’t be able to challenge her. Not here, not now. I looked round rather desperately for someone I could give her to. Harry and Fergus were both in groups, talking and smoking and out of reach of me. She cried and cried. She was reaching the strangled sob stage when she started trying to talk. I couldn’t prevent myself from putting my arm round her fur-clad shoulder. Dead animals, dead husband. She was saying her mum and dad wouldn’t even come. I think. Anyway she was unhappy.

  Then she sat up and wiped her snivelly face and took off her glasses and looked me in the eye. ‘Did you kill him?’ she said.

  It’s a hell of a question.

  It wasn’t that I was beginning to doubt my answer. It was just that there being no knowing, I didn’t know. But I said no. Looked her in the eye and said no.

  She stared a bit longer.

  Or perhaps the reason why I haven’t had a nervous breakdown is because I am very strong. Or stupid. Or unimaginative.

  I was looking at her fiendish shoes. She caught me.

  ‘He liked all that,’ she said. ‘Well – you know.’

  She said it as if she were the new girlfriend and I were the old girlfriend and she had caught herself telling me something I of course would have known, and she didn’t want me to think she was being, oh, patronising or idiotic. She was exhibiting deference to my position. But I had no position.

  I blinked slowly, to pass the time until this should change.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind,’ she said, ‘if you had. No that’s not true, I would mind. But not for the reasons you’d think.’

  What?

  All I wanted was for her to go away and leave me alone. Entirely. Now and forever. People do. Jim has. Eddie has! But he’s left her behind. Of course I could go awa
y. But I have to make her stop sending me horrible things first, stop her trick phone calls. There’s no rule that says just because it’s her husband’s funeral and I might have helped kill him I have to sit here partaking of her mad grief, or whatever it is; but I do have to protect my life.

  ‘Look,’ she was saying, conversationally. ‘I’m not myself today, but I’d very much like to see you again. Could we meet for a drink? Sometime? Soon?’ It was accompanied by an ‘aren’t I charming how can you turn me down’ smile, designed originally for casting agents I should imagine. Not sexual but using the same repertoire. Two along from the smile that says ‘if you do what I suggest who knows maybe these stilettos will wave in the air for you …’ It looked macabre over her tearstains. It would have looked macabre anyway.

  In for a penny, I thought. Death cuts through crap. Or should do.

  ‘Did you send me those letters?’ I said bluntly.

  She picked at the corner of her lipstick with her little fingernail, and looked at me sideways. ‘Yes,’ she said. And batted her red eyelids at me.

  ‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘It’s very unpleasant.’

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘So will you have a drink with me?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Please.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because you sent me anonymous letters.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. And smirked.

  Well she would have to be a piece of work to be married to that piece of work Eddie.

  ‘I don’t give a shit if you’re sorry.’

  ‘Have a drink then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh why?’

  ‘I’m nothing to do with you.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘If you’ve something to say, say it now,’ I said.

  Harry was looking at us. I made a please-come-over face. He raised his hand and looked around. Fergus had disappeared.

  ‘I don’t know what to do with his ashes,’ she said.

  ‘Well I don’t want them,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not offering them to you. I’m just – oh shit shit SHIT SHIT’ and then she began to cry again and then to rant and rave and weep and curse, and Harry came over and we looked at her helplessly and she flung herself into my arms and I stared at Harry over her shoulder and tried not to breathe in fur, Giorgio and hysteria in equal proportions.

  ‘Oh fuck,’ he said.

  ‘Didn’t your training tell you what to do in these situations?’ I asked him. Christina threw herself back down on the bench and began to kick.

  ‘Yes,’ he said wearily, and he sat beside her, pulled her up and said kindly but loudly, ‘Chrissie, didn’t anybody come with you today? Where are your friends?’

  To which she yelled more, and tried to hit him, and jumped up and ran into the graveyard, or tried to, only her stiletto betrayed her and she fell, and lay on the tarmac like a weird great insect, fluttering in rage. I remembered sitting under one of these very trees in my wheelchair, feeling more helpless than I had ever felt in my life, nearly six years ago, unable to manoeuvre myself through the graves to solitude.

  ‘Maybe she’s hurt herself,’ I said. ‘Then we could call an ambulance.’

  So we did.

  Harry picked her up and sat her on the bench, and we sat either side propping her up, and I held her hands and whispered kind things to her, and she gurgled and shook. When she fell quiet her head sank on to Harry’s shoulder like a melting candle, and then I told him that if he still wanted to do the blood test I was willing, and I’d help. He looked across at me over her tumbled dark hair, and something in his face changed a little, and I thought how old we are now, and how foolish we still are.

  ‘Oh good,’ he said.

  ‘I know the timing isn’t …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Isn’t great, I mean …’

  ‘What?’ he said again.

  I found I didn’t want to say what I had started.

  ‘Well, with Amygdala and everything …’

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ he said.

  I’m sorry to say my heart leapt.

  ‘I don’t mean she doesn’t matter,’ he said. Humiliatingly, my stomach quivered.

  ‘She does matter,’ he went on. Oh bugger. ‘But the timing doesn’t matter, I mean, it’s just the time that it is, it’s real whenever we do it, is what I’m trying to say.’

  Yes. Yes, God bless him.

  But I didn’t like that ‘She does matter’. And I didn’t like not liking it. I’ve never liked jealousy, and inappropriate jealousy least of all.

  Then the ambulance came. They wanted one of us to go with her. Harry explained the circumstances; explained that it had been her husband’s funeral, explained that there was nobody of hers here, that we were not hers. As she was being lifted in she looked at me, fixed me like something from a horror film, and said loudly and clearly: ‘Four abortions. Four abortions. How much can you hate a man? I’d have killed him myself. I should have. I should’ve done it. He wasn’t yours to kill you fucking bitch and I’ll have him back. I’ll have his life back off you. Don’t think that I won’t.’

  I stood back, as if hit.

  I’ll admit I was scared. I don’t like mad violent people flinging their emotions all over me.

  The paramedic was wondering if she was on anything. I’d seen a sign saying ‘low cost’ that morning and read it as lost cow. What kind of woman would marry Eddie Bates anyway? What kind of selfish stupid woman?

  But I fucked him, so I’m not so great.

  And we are all more than the sum of our faults.

  Harry told them her name, and talked them out of us having to go too.

  OK, so now I had seen her, talked to her, warned her off. And now what?

  ‘Are you all right?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Aren’t you always,’ he said, and I looked up quickly to see if he was being sarky, but in fact there was if anything a little resigned admiration in his attitude.

  ‘Shall I take you home?’ he asked.

  I waved my flowers pathetically. ‘I’m going to see Janie,’ I said.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, and we walked over there with his arm over my shoulder like twelve years ago, until I detached myself because I couldn’t bear it.

  Jane Oriole Gower, 1964–1993

  Death lies on her like an untimely frost upon the sweetest flower

  Mum had wanted the full quote because, she said, you couldn’t cut Shakespeare in half. She had wanted ‘like an untimely frost upon the sweetest flower of all the field’. Dad said no, because, because. I think it was because of me. Because if she was the sweetest flower of all the field, then what was I? Whereas she could be the sweetest flower without it being quite so unremitting that she was the very sweetest of all.

  It could have been because Mum was his sweetest flower too.

  Anyway there she was, dead, under there. I mused a little on flesh and bones and worms because I can’t not. (Worms for bait in the trap.)

  There was Marina Siokkos next to her, as always, with her oval black and white enamelled photograph and her writing in Greek: MAPINA. And Hubert James Smith on the other side. No room for us. Mum and Dad I think were planning to be cremated and go in with her. I don’t fancy it, myself. All lying in there together, with our lies and our resentments and our unresolved deceits. Like Christmas, only worse.

  So I looked at Janie, and Janie didn’t look at me, and I wondered yet again what if anything I would ever be able to tell Lily about her mother. And whether it was for me to tell her, and whether it was for me to keep it from her. Brigid said to me once, ‘You’re the moralest person I ever saw, and don’t think it’s a compliment. You and your decisions and your shoulds.’

  It’s not just external morality. It’s not some theoretical disconnected right or wrong. It’s what it does to you. I should not have fucked Eddie.

  Harry had gone to look for coffee. I sat on Mrs Sio
kkos’s white marble slab and stared at nothingness and hit my head with my hands a few times to see if any clarity would be forthcoming. It wasn’t. I put my fingertip in a snapdragon and let its tender white jaws bite me. Nothing. The cold was seeping through my trousers – not just cold, but graveyard death cold – by the time I saw Harry coming over the hill. I stood and went to meet him. We drank our too-hot coffee from polystyrene cups leaning against a mausoleum, our feet in dandelions and dandelion clocks, the overgrowth of summer beginning to fall apart around us.

  ‘Do you ever bring Lily up here?’ he asked.

  ‘In theory yes, but I never have done.’ Of all the moods and circles I go through and round about Janie, not one of them is right for bringing her child to her grave. Her child. Oh God, I’m even starting to resent that. Not Lily! I don’t resent Lily, God no! But that she’s Janie’s.

  Ah well, but she’s not. Janie’s dead and she’s mine.

  Four abortions.

  Sometimes I wonder about children I might have had if things had been different. Then it seems disloyal to Lily. And I might not have had them anyway. And I might have them yet. And what might have been is pointless. Anyone can hang a string of what might have been round their own neck, to adorn them, weigh them down, garotte them.

  In Japan they have little cemeteries for aborted babies, where the parents can go and mourn. They seem unashamed about admitting themselves to be some kind of murderers. Here we just pretend it’s not murder, as if that makes it all right.

  I’m not surprised she wanted to kill him.

  God but how weird.

  I propped Janie’s snapdragons among the tufts of long grass at the base of her stone. There’s no vase. Mum brings plants in pots. They die almost as quickly, without watering.