Desiring Cairo

by Louisa Young

  But he wasn’t a fellow you would trust to react to the same thing twice in the same way. But that’s OK, because I didn’t trust him an inch anyway. It was me, me, with the chain taken off, that I trusted. My capacity to deal with stuff.

  Take Chrissie for example. There had been hang-ups on the phone and it hadn’t occurred to me to 1471. I’d binned three alien envelopes waiting for me on my return, without thinking. There’s a lot to be said for not thinking. Later I might want to give her a ring. Take her for that drink. Or I might not. It did occur to me that I had given Sa’id the money which she may still want. Well, fuck her. Let her try, if she’s hard enough. The threats are theirs, but the fear is mine, and if I choose to cast it from the minarets then there it goes. Gone.

  And the fact that my instinct was to save his life proves that my heart and honour are bigger than my fear anyway.

  ‘I was told there had been a disturbance with a woman in a nightclub …’ said Harry.

  ‘That was me.’

  ‘I thought so,’ he said.

  He wanted something more about all this. He wanted the full story. I felt I would give it to him, one day. He deserved it.

  What am I saying? Will I tell him about fucking Eddie? About protecting him?

  I looked at Harry, looking at me as I mused and digested. Our balance was off. It was as if we didn’t both quite fit in the space available to us. Shifting around, budging up against each other, causing things to spill. Curdling … maybe.

  ‘And Sa’id?’ he asked. Unembarrassed.

  I found my tears were still there. Not that far away.

  ‘He’s very like you in some ways,’ I said, out of nowhere.

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  ‘I got rid of him too,’ I said.

  ‘I wonder what you mean by that,’ he said. His voice was a little tight.

  ‘So do I,’ I said.

  ‘Well,’ said Harry. Carefully. As if he were not at all certain that what he was saying was what he ought to say. ‘He was more dangerous than Eddie, wasn’t he?’

  Now what does he mean by that?

  ‘Well, you know. On a day to day level. If you … let me put this right … if you were going to be in love with a man, and I think you were – are – I don’t know, but if you were to be in love, not racing off to Cairo but just like day to day, being with him, then you would have had to … change. Wouldn’t you? Make room in your sock drawer. Move house or something. Compromise. Not your specialty, really. So if you ditch him, romantically, you don’t have to think about it and you can carry on in cloud-cuckoo land. I mean, where would he have put his shoes? Quite apart from everything else. And,’ he said, anticipating my reaction and putting his hand on my arm to hold me still, not looking me in the eye, not looking at me at all, and speaking quicker, as if to get the words out before he stopped himself, ‘forgive me but since Janie died it seems you’re happy for everything to die, except Lily, of course; it seems you want to kill things. Because of … whatever, how you feel about that. About Janie.’

  I told him to fuck off.

  ‘I’ll be precise,’ he said. ‘Your career. Dancing. Your old friendships. Your parents, at times of … delicacy. This romance with Sa’id. Me, when I approach you. The world. You don’t want it. Since she died. Since you might have died. Since you started hating her.’

  ‘I don’t hate her.’

  ‘Good,’ he said.

  ‘Look at me,’ I said.

  He looked.

  I left the café.

  *

  Back at the flat I tried to make it nice again. Straighten it out. Standards had slipped while I was away and life seemed to have seeped out of my home while I was otherwise engaged. Neglect it and it dies. I washed up and made beds and hung laundry and tried to increase the levels of comfort and hygiene, to make it human, warm. Home. My heart wasn’t in it but superficially it helped.

  Happy for everything to die. Fuck him. I took out my anger on the pillows and the kitchen floor. Shaking out the chair in the kitchen I lifted Janie’s box from its depths, and put it on the kitchen table.

  ‘I don’t hate you,’ I said. It was the one thing I did that morning that was either convincing or convinced.

  *

  Then the news came on the radio saying that 62 people had been murdered at the Temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor, and I cried for another two days.

  When I took Lily to school the billboard on the Uxbridge Road had been papered over in white. I rang Cairo and Sarah said that Sa’id looked as if he was going to die. I wrote him a letter saying I would always love him, but I didn’t send it.

  *

  A week later I was reading Lily her bedtime story – about Emily, a guinea pig who loves to travel – when Harry pitched up.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. There was brightness in his eye, and intensity.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, and let him in.

  ‘When you’ve finished, can we have a chat?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  I went back to Lily’s room and finished the story, and read another one, about a princess. The sun prince had fallen in love with her and she laid three ruby red eggs, and sent him a message via a snow-white crow, but the crow got distracted and never delivered the message.

  Then Lily wanted Harry to come and say goodnight. He sat on her bed and even though my tattered sanity was still floating in a high wind I could tell that he was her father and that he had come to tell me so.

  I stood in the hallway eavesdropping. They were sweet together. Then he came out and she wanted me again. I lay beside her and kissed her and hugged her and stroked her and hugged her and kissed her and she told me to get off.

  I went out into the hallway where he was waiting and said to him: ‘Tell me it’s good.’

  ‘What’s good for you?’ he asked. We hadn’t spoken since I had walked out on him.

  ‘You are,’ I said. I bit my lip as I said it. It didn’t come out quite as I meant. I meant, you as the father. Not you, as you, for me. I was annoyed with myself.

  ‘Me? You remember me?’ he said.

  Did I?

  I opened the cover, swiftly, briefly, over the deep well of him, him and the past. Glimpsed love, pain, pride and misunderstanding writhing like a garland of snakes. Gleaming unbearably on the surface was the knowledge that what he had said about me in the café was true.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Who am I then?’

  ‘Some bloke I used to know.’ I couldn’t not be hard here. I didn’t want to be hard but I was terrified. Terrified.

  He smiled.

  ‘Some bloke who knows you,’ he said.

  He was standing in the landing just where I had been when Sa’id first kissed me. Sa’id would just – oh fuck. Sa’id is not. Sa’id –

  Why do I feel that I’m giving up? That I’m abstaining, losing, conceding, copping out, betraying? Some part of me expects to be tarred and feathered for this. For not being in Egypt right now, for letting Harry in, for giving up something. For compromising, for making the best of it.

  Well exactly.

  ‘What happens now, Harry?’

  ‘I tell you the result.’

  ‘I already know.’

  ‘Are you happy?’ he said. He could see that I wasn’t. He wasn’t either.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m fucking terrified.’

  His eyes filled with something – no of course I couldn’t tell what, I’m no judge. He wanted to say something. Couldn’t think what. Perhaps emotional incompetence was what filled his eyes. Or sympathy. Or his own fear. Or amazement and tenderness that I admitted mine. Could have been any of those.

  I just prayed he wasn’t going to ask me to … marry him, or be with him, or … however they phrase it these days, just because of Lily.

  ‘Last time we reached this point I said it was too convenient,’ I said. Jumping the gun.

  ‘So you did,’ he said. ‘You.’ He started to laugh. ‘Convenient. You’re about as
convenient as a train crash.’

  So I laughed.

  And he laughed.

  But it wasn’t all right.

  After a while he said: ‘I’m still me.’ His throat was tight.

  ‘Yes.’

  We stood like that for several moments. Backs to the wall. But not faces.

  ‘Mu-um,’ came the cry. Oh my God, saved by the Lil.

  ‘Coming,’ I called, and went in. Brushing past him.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ she asked.

  ‘Not sure, really,’ I asked.

  Harry came in too. He was standing beside me, beside the bed. Oh my God. Like a million nursery book illustrations. My backbone wriggled. I turned to look at him – checking it was him, wondering what on earth he was doing there. In the grander, metaphysical way. He caught my eye and said ‘Shall I?’ with his eyebrows. Just like a dad, checking with the mum before saying something. And I acceded, did that ‘OK darling’ mother-agreeing movement of the head.

  Oh my God. It’s as if it’s genetic.

  I don’t know if I want to be a mother with a father around.

  I don’t know how to do it. Fuck.

  Ugh.

  Suddenly we’re – whatever it is we are. Janet and John’s mummy and daddy. I saw us as a line drawing. I was wearing an apron; he was in a casual suit with knife-edge pleats (steamed and pressed by me) and smug expression. I was going to cook some time-saving recipe from Good Housekeeping, with a can of mushroom soup in it. I wanted to run away screaming.

  But I had agreed to this. To something. Promised her, and nodded to him.

  Remember your heart and your honour are bigger than your fear.

  It’s Harry. It’s only Harry.

  ‘We were talking about your father,’ he said. He was white as a sheet. Glowing in the dimness of her bedroom.

  ‘That’s interesting,’ she said. ‘Is it you?’

  He was calm, and strong, and pale. Nice. As I would have wanted him to be. She was round and wakeful and interested. She just wanted to know. I wasn’t worried about her. She was made for this. She’d been waiting for this all her life.

  Her life. My life. This is my life.

  I’m not losing a daughter … she’s not losing a mother. Not.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and as he said it the set of his shoulders changed a little, and something shifted inside him.

  She just stared at him. Stared.

  Didn’t look at me.

  Then climbed out of bed and into my arms, still staring at him. He smiled. Sort of. Put his shoulders back slightly, in a proud way. Something of his loucheness was slipping away before my eyes.

  She put her face in my neck and whispered. ‘Should I cry?’ she asked me. Her tiny body full of emotion. Heavy with it.

  ‘No,’ I said, and felt fear running off me like water.

  *

  I lay down with her and after a while she went to sleep, having said no more. When I emerged an hour later he was in the kitchen, sitting. He looked up as I came in and said, ‘Well?’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I think.’

  After some silence he said he was sorry.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘In the café,’ he said.

  ‘But you’re right,’ I said. If he takes it back I will be so angry.

  ‘I know,’ he said, ‘but I wasn’t gentle.’

  ‘But you were right,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t rub it in,’ he said.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘I don’t need to do it any more.’

  He smiled. Gave me a glass of whisky.

  ‘Harry,’ I said. ‘You have a child.’

  ‘We have a child.’

  It was, in its truth, astounding.

  ‘How the hell did we manage that?’ I asked.

  ‘By the strangest and most roundabout route,’ he said.

  There was an idea floating around the room that this was where we had always been meant to end up anyway. I don’t know whose idea it was. It was just there.

  When I looked up from my glass he was looking at me.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about this,’ he said. ‘As you might imagine, and I’ve worked out what I want to say. Right.’

  He stared at me.

  ‘Go on then,’ I said.

  Later he told me what he had been going to say. He had been going to say, ‘I’ve always respected you and I always will, and I’m your child’s father, and I’m certain that there is a way we can work this out and be good parents and be happy, and that’s what I want to do so how about it.’ And he had been going to say something about wanting to be there but not wanting to invade, and something about money, if he could think of a way to say it without offending me. And he had been going to mention that Amygdala had told him that he was clearly emotionally unavailable what with this paternity thing, and left him. And he had wanted to say something about how much he had loved me, but then the tense seemed wrong.

  But he didn’t. He said ‘oh fuck’, vehemently, and stood, and I caught his eye, and we hung there like moments on a chain.

  ‘Oh fuck?’ I said. With a tiny echo of a laugh.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said.

  It was suddenly both emotionally transparent and very dirty. We stared at each other.

  ‘How about now?’ he said. ‘It would save so much time …’ Which was pretty much what he had said to me within two minutes of our first meeting, twelve years ago.

  I knew what I would be saying yes to. Part of me wanted to say yes.

  I could only manage ‘maybe’.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks are due to Amira Ghazalla for rescuing me from ignorance too many times to mention, to Charlotte Horton for Cairo and Upper Egypt in 1997, to Maureen O’Farrell for Enta ’Omri and Cairo 1998.

  In Luxor, 1997 and 1999, to Hassan Elaraby of Zalat Alabaster of Luxor, for his hospitality, his name, the germ of an idea and the look in his eye, to his nephew Ahmed the scarab maker, to Abu Nagarr for taking me places and showing me things. To Anwar in Aswan, for the mimosa.

  To Umm Khalthoum (RIP) and Khaled for the singing, Laura Lloyd for the walks in the Old City, Tracey for the dancing nights and the Saudi rhythms, the Sufis at Al Ghouri, Mohammed and the staff of the Lotus Hotel for my moonlit desk on the roof, Ottavio for ‘Chateau Champoleon’, Madame Shenouda.

  In England to Sgt Matthew Foley for listening and steering me right, to Tom Porteous for joining in, to Peter, Jennifer and Candida Blaker for hospitality at a vital time, to Cellmark Diagnostics for information on DNA testing, to Susan Swift, David Flusfeder, Derek Johns, Sam North, Linda Shaughnessy and the staff of AP Watt, Rebecca Lloyd, Philip Gwyn Jones, Karen Duffy, and Yvette Cowles at Flamingo, and Yvette’s dancers across the country, John Warr of Warr’s Harley-Davidson. Louis Adomakoh and Clare Brennan, of course. Roger Willis and Andy Shokks. Younus for correcting my Arabic, Ali for his necklace. Elizabeth Jane Howard, Beryl Bainbridge, Julie Myerson, Terence Blacker, Louis de Bernières for encouragement from further down the line. John Walsh for his amusement. Also Francesca Brill, Sandra Yarwood and Brad and Damon of Natural Nylon for their commitment to Baby Love the film, and the judges of the Orange Prize 1998 for the mixed honour of being longlisted.

  Louisa Young, 1999

  About the Author

  Louisa Young was born in London and read history at Trinity College, Cambridge. She lives in London with her daughter, with whom she co-wrote the bestselling Lionboy trilogy, and is the author of eleven previous books including the bestselling novel My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You, which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and the Wellcome Book Prize, was a Richard and Judy Book Club choice, and the first ever winner of the Galaxy Audiobook of the Year.

  Also by Louisa Young

  FICTION

  Baby Love

  Tree of Pearls

  My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You

  The Heroes’ Welcome

  NON-FICTION

  A Great Task of Happiness: The Life of
Kathleen Scott

  The Book of the Heart

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