by Louisa Young
‘I suppose …’ said Harry, then stopped himself. I looked at him but he didn’t want to continue.
Later, on the way home, I realised that probably he had been about to say something about Lily visiting Janie’s grave, and had thought better of it, thinking that I would not want his comments and input, as some people might term it, to start so soon after I had admitted him to the next stage of the process. He probably thought I would have snapped at him, ‘God, Harry, all I said was do the blood test, I never said take over her life.’
I probably would have. I probably do make him nervous. I must try not to.
TWELVE
Dinner with Sa’id
Lily came out of school with a picture she’d done. ‘It’s our family,’ she said. ‘That’s what we’re doing at school. Our family. Miss Pengelly says can I bring in a baby picture.’
The drawing was a piece of A4, with a big wobbly cross drawn on it to divide it into four. In one box was me: long hair, big grin, legs growing straight out of my neck. In the next was Lily, wearing a crown and holding a guinea pig on a lead. In the next was Janie. I knew it was Janie because she had a halo and wings. In the fourth was a man. Just a man. She’d written who we were underneath: mummy, me, mummy, daddy.
I remembered what the dead princess said: there were three of us in the marriage. Sometimes it makes me sad that I have no role model, no pattern to follow, no one to look at and think ah, you did this before me, how did you do it?
Actually there is one. Isis’s sister Nephthys, who was married to their brother Set, got Isis’s husband (also their brother) Osiris drunk, and seduced him, and conceived Anubis, who she abandoned, and who Isis took in and brought up. I had completely forgotten this story but Lily was so taken with Nut and her tummy and Amun Ra’s habit of putting his beloved daughter to his nose as a mark of affection, that I had looked out my Egyptian mythology books, and there it was. My role model family. The incestuous ancient Egyptian gods of five thousand years ago. Osiris, apparently, didn’t realise it was Nephthys – just like Harry. So I can be Isis, left carrying the can, and Nephthys can be Janie, which makes Lily both Anubis (dog-headed god of the dead) and Horus, saviour of the world, avenger of his father Osiris – Osiris who you remember was killed by Set, out of jealousy, only Isis brought him back to life again (having seduced him while he was dead and conceived Horus). Unfortunately Set then killed him again, and dismembered him into thirteen parts and scattered them far and wide. Well, Isis found them all except his phallus which was eaten by a Nile crab, and the other twelve became the months of the year.
It makes me laugh. Harry being dead then alive then dead, impregnating me while dead and my sister while dead drunk, and then ending up dickless.
Actually there’s a lot of single mothers in mythology. So I can find comfort. When my life seems weird, I can just look back and ask: ‘How would Horus have drawn his family for Miss Pengelly?’
Over tea Lily asked me if I minded her putting a daddy in our family when we didn’t actually have one yet. It was all right, she suggested, because we were going to get one soon, weren’t we? I kissed the sweet parting of her sweet hair and chubbed her sweet fat cheeks, and we just melted into one of our love fests. ‘You are love and attention and beautifulness and kindness,’ she said, ‘from your head down down down both your legs to your toes.’ ‘Is that what I am full of?’ I said, deeply touched. ‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s what you are.’
What I am. Love and attention and beautifulness and kindness.
Well that’s all right then.
And I didn’t get the love hangover – am I laying too much on her, am I warping her by giving her all my love when presumably in a normal life I would be giving lots of it to some man, am I laying down guilt for her to feel when she grows up and leaves home and leaves me alone, without that love. Though I can usually dispel the hangover anyway. A few shots of ‘what’s normal?’ and ‘love isn’t a cake’ and ‘oh for God’s sake’ usually sort it out. And if they don’t Brigid does. ‘Hitting children, starving children, putting them in armies, having sex with them: bad. Loving children: good. You great banana.’
Harry as daddy. Harry as daddy. Independence gave a warning shake of its wings on my shoulder.
*
Sa’id returned as I was feeding Lily, and proposed that we go out for dinner.
‘Can I come?’ she said.
‘No,’ said Sa’id. ‘I will take you for lunch on Saturday instead.’
That was all right by her.
‘Can we go to Tootsie’s?’ Tootsie’s has chips, and paper tablemats that you can draw on, and chocolate ice cream.
‘La’ah, habibti,’ he said. No, my darling. ‘I’ll take you to Maroush.’ God, he’s finding his feet quickly. And stylish feet, too. Only one of the best Lebanese restaurants in London.
‘Can I come?’ I said, echoing Lily. Just a throwaway joke. Of course I could go, she’s my daughter.
‘La’ah, habibti,’ he said, and gave me a very snaky look. It took me about half a second to work out what that was about. It worked like this: as Lily’s mother it was of course my right to go anywhere and everywhere with her. Now, in courtesy, I would have to let him, if he wanted, take Lily out alone. I had squandered a degree of my position of authority for the sake of a tiny joke, and he was playing with that to see how I would respond. I was pleased. It meant he expected something of me, which I found reassuring given that I had, I felt, already squandered and forfeited my advantages at every turn. I had told him about Hakim, I had let him stay in my flat, I had desired him. Hell, I was handing cards over to him hand over fist.
He had an air of knowing everything. He looked ancient. I had still managed to find no fault in him. Looking at him, reincarnation had begun to look like the only logical explanation. Maybe he, not Harry, is Osiris. Such a desirable name. Say it out loud. I don’t suppose there is any limitation on who can be Osiris. Actually all dead ancient Egyptians (so all of them by now) were known as ‘the Osiris’. Unless they were female, in which case they were ‘the Isis’, or ‘the Hathor’. So really, I can identify whoever I want with whoever I want. I suppose.
‘What a shame,’ I said, turning to do something else entirely – something really important like squeezing out a J-cloth. ‘Lily and I will have to go alone.’
For a moment I wasn’t sure I would get away with it. Lily is getting quicker by the day: would she just say, ‘What do you mean? It’s my date with Sa’id!’ or would she … She did. She immediately set up a rumpus – the right rumpus. Of course Sa’id must be allowed to come with us, she insisted. Gracefully, after some toing and froing, I conceded that he might come.
He smiled at me broadly. A wide smile, admiring my reclamation of territory. What pleasure he takes, I thought.
I keep getting these absurd double entendres. I think a phrase like that and I nearly blush. And then he looks at me as if he knows what I’m thinking.
I am fully aware of how absurd a cliché that is. Don’t imagine that makes it any easier to live with.
*
I was also aware that it was quite a bad idea to have dinner with Sa’id. Because in order for me to go out Lily would go and stay the night with Brigid. And because of the funeral. Funerals always make people want sex. Death shall have no dominion: quick, fuck it away, out of sight, right now – yah boo, I’m alive! We’re alive! Look at us!
The night was warm. The funereal weather had gone with Eddie’s ashes (Where to? Who cares?) and Indian summer snuck out again, lying confusing on the London pavements like trade objects out for sale. We went to Queensway, street of a thousand nations, and sat at a pavement table outside an Egyptian café between a Greek café and a Turkish estate agent, across from the French bread shop and the Texan (Schmexan) diner. When I went to school up the road from here there were 56 nationalities among 400 children. Now there are more. Faces with cheekbones from here and colouring from there and clothes from way over yonder, muttering in languages you
never heard before. West London, the world.
Sa’id ordered a shisha and smoked it silently and aromatically. I never order shisha in London although I love it. Not because I’d feel a prannit, but because I would feel surreal; to be tasting that cool taste and hearing that gentle murmur of breath through water, and not be in Egypt. He held the mouthpiece to the side of his mouth, almost vertical. You’d wonder how the smoke could get into him from that angle. He looked unbearably purely unmitigatedly other. Even here, on these streets of otherness. London had not touched him, not polished his edges, nor ruffled his sleekness.
I’d spent all day doing things that I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to do, and I had achieved no satisfactory result to anything. I’m losing the plot a little, I thought. Time to straighten up. What do I want?
‘What do you want?’ said Sa’id, alarmingly. He was looking at the menu.
I want to kiss your mouth, I thought. I want a free mind. I want Harry to be Lily’s father. I want to control what happens when he is. I want the dead to leave me be. I want everybody to be happy. Except Janie.
‘Fish kebab,’ I said.
He ordered koshari – Egyptian for complex carbohydrates. Macaroni, rice and lentils with crunchy brown caramelised onions on top, and two sauces – hot pepper and sour lemon. I was surprised. Koshari is common food (the word even means it). It’s what bus drivers have on their way to work, off stainless steel plates in cafés with fluorescent crimson woodshavings on the floor, with a stainless steel mug of water. It is not what I would have expected Sa’id to eat with me.
He ate. I ate.
‘Are you always sad?’ he asked, without looking up.
Well, I was surprised.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Only today?’
I smiled. ‘I went to a funeral,’ I said.
I do like a decent silence. An undemanding silence.
‘Of someone I hated.’
‘Ah.’
‘And who I had wronged.’
Silence.
‘But not as badly as he had wronged me.’
‘Then you have won,’ he said.
‘Is it about winning?’
He looked up then. Palm tip eyes.
‘You are alive, he is dead.’
‘He’s escaped,’ I said.
‘Oh. No. He is nothing. Nothing for you to worry about any more. He’s out of your hands.’
‘Oh?’
‘It’s not yours any more. Leave it. God has taken him. Leave them to it.’
God has taken him. Leave them to it.
I ate.
His eyes really shouldn’t have been pale. The rest of his face was so completely Arab. Cheekbones, nostrils, brow. I want to describe him but the words turn purple. He was like leather, like a horse. He was still.
He looked at me. I looked at him. For a moment I thought ‘It’s now’ and my belly reared up within me.
But it wasn’t. He looked away and drank water and wiped his mouth, and I thought, ‘I could marry you.’
I was quite shocked at the thought, and sent it away. I became embarrassed at even having thought it. It was a joke! I only thought it because it was unthinkable! I would never have thought it for one second if I’d thought there was the slightest possibility that I would take it seriously!
He looked kindly at me, because I was rubbing my forehead, and said, ‘What?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. Crossly.
We passed the rest of the meal in civilised conversation. He said he liked London. Why? ‘Because nobody cares what I do. Like in Berlin or Paris. Nobody knows me, nobody cares. But here I can smoke shisha too. I can sit with a woman in public and smoke shisha and nobody cares.’
As he said it a friend of Zeinab’s who I knew from the park passed by, calling hello as she disappeared behind the racks of threadbare scented geraniums that protected the tables from the road. I called back to her, not in a ‘come back and talk to us’ kind of way, but she did come back, and I had to introduce them and I couldn’t remember her name, and the waiter clocked Sa’id’s name and gave him a look, and when it was all done I said: ‘You see that is just because it’s not your town. It’s only because you don’t have people here who are interested in you. It’s not to do with the town itself.’
He said it wasn’t just that. He said: ‘London has every religion. In Egypt and every Islamic country your Islamic brothers who share your religion feel responsible for your upkeep of it. And tell you so.’
‘But there are plenty of Muslims in London, quite enough to disapprove of each other if they want, surely,’ I suggested.
‘In Europe they are not so bold with their judgement,’ he said, and we began discussing whether or not Muslims in London were, simply by virtue of being here, likely to be less strict and more open-minded, more broadly educated, and thus less judgemental than those who had remained all their lives in an Islamic society, or whether being among (and outnumbered by) members of other religions (and none) in fact made people more tenacious in their own religion. (We resolved that of course it depended on the individual.) We compared London with Paris, of which I knew next to nothing, but where he had been as a student, sharing with an accountant from Mali and two Algerian musicians in Barbes. He told of the old Barbes legal system for the Arab community – unofficial, thorough, and utterly unconnected with, and respected by, the French police. We got on to his boyhood in Luxor and Cairo, how he used to work in his school holidays on the digs; and how at the Sorbonne although his own subject was economics he had come across so many European Egyptologists keen to teach him about his own things, and teased them that he would study a little and become a Europologist and teach them to suck their own eggs. And we got on to what exactly the term ‘developing country’ means for an Arab state at the end of the twentieth century, and Palestine, and so on. These were good topics. Interesting in themselves, and serving to remind me of our cultural and religious differences, and unlikely to lead to sexual innuendo. Except that knowledgeable intelligence is extremely sexy. And there was the moment when he told me he’d always been half in love with Isis.
And we talked about Cairo, about Ibn Tulun (the most beautiful mosque, and possibly the most beautiful building, even the most beautiful thing, in the world). He told me that from the top of the minaret you could look out over the Old City and weep for the damage done first by the earthquake, and then by the government, using the earthquake as an excuse. ‘You look out and see the missing,’ was the phrase he used. He told me that the City of the Dead was now populated as much by the living corpses of the druggies as by the actual dead and – on holidays – their living descendants, paying their respects with a picnic and chairs and some songs. Visiting the dead as they would visit the living. Deceiving death, pretending it didn’t happen. Like the ancients. I used to love the City of the Dead. Such beautiful strange, empty mausoleums: Shagaratt ad Durr, Tree of Pearls, the slave queen, with her neglected mother-of-pearl mosaics. And just ordinary little houses, on blocks, on streets, but the dead have no cars, so it’s quiet and the air is clear of all but dust. Though during the khamseen – during that sneaky spring wind anybody would want a veil … And we talked about Hussein Ali Mohammed, a jeweller I knew with a shop in Khan el-Khalili who was a true devotee of the dance, whom Sa’id knew too, and of course we talked about dancing, about raqs sharki, and some of the clubs, and comparing Cairo to London …
Of course I was talking in the past tense.
Of course he picked up on that.
So I told him why I didn’t dance any more.
‘How long ago was that?’ he asked.
So I told him.
Of course he picked up on the timing.
So I told him that Lily was Janie’s, and Janie was dead.
For the second time that night, death spent a moment fluttering its wings over our table.
‘And can you leave her alone?’ he asked.
Me leave her alone?
I was just about to s
ay something when a small kerfuffle broke out in the café behind us: a fat young man in baggy clothes pushed past the table and ran off down towards Bayswater Road, and the waiter came out shouting and swearing after him. Something had been grabbed, something stolen. The waiter was kicking the rack of geraniums, which showered us with fragrant dust and bits of leaf like scraps of desiccated shammy-leather. He was pissed off. Sa’id watched him, with his eyebrows drawn up. I watched Sa’id. Then the waiter ceased kicking and went inside again, to call the police.
I hate it when these things happen because I like to live in my own semi-deluded world where things are nice.
Sa’id went in and paid, as the waiter was not coming out again. I went in too. The waiter was so upset.
Then we went home. I don’t know why it upset us so much but it did. Which is just as well, because I was really beginning to feel quite unnerved about him and the whole thing, and anything which stopped us in our tracks and sent us home was a good thing.
On the way home he said ‘And what about Lily’s father?’, and I said, ‘We don’t know who it is.’ It seems I didn’t want to talk about it with him.
*
I didn’t sleep well. Sa’id was only ten feet away beyond that wall. I lay and thought in great and sculptural detail about his hands and his head and his throat and his feet and the corner of his mouth and his shoulderblades as he turned away, and the thin leather cord around his neck, and the shadow where it disappeared into his shirt. The only thing which took my mind off that was wondering where Hakim was. Neither line of thought was in the least bit soporific.
*
The next day he was out before I was up, which was just as well because my baser self was trying to concoct ways of walking in on him in the bathroom, which frankly would not be respectful and I knew he was not the kind of man you could do that to. He wasn’t back by evening, when Harry rang. Lily was in the bath, telling me about Melanie’s pink hairband, at some length, and I asked him to ring back after 8.30. He didn’t sound too happy about it.
Then Sarah rang. She’d had a message on her machine from Hakim. My little flurry of excitement soon shrank down again. He said he was well, not to worry, he’d be in touch soon. But he didn’t say where he was. We had a moment’s unhappy silence. Then we sighed, simultaneously but not in unison. Hers was fear, mine was exasperation.