Loving Monsters

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  – The thing I remember best from the whole encounter with Agnes was her erotic silence. Until then she had been quite chatty, but now she took her clothes off without a word. I found myself doing the same; and it was as if she had drawn a curtain around the bed enclosing us and excluding everything else so the traffic noise and the hawkers’ shouts filtering through the shutters from the street below seemed to withdraw. I suppose no-one ever forgets the first time he embraces someone completely naked. The entire body turns to nerve-endings and becomes precarious from head to foot. I remember thinking that this was it, this was what I was meant to be, a lover. Not a shipping clerk, not a pornographer, not an empire-builder. Just a lover, albeit a still very inexperienced one. I was apprehensive about knowing what to do and in what order, and in my nervousness made some facetious remarks; but she knew everything and spoke not a word. Soon I became too distracted for speech. That sense of having been invited into a private world was the thing which most touched me about her: that she should have chosen me as company. Her silence was inclusive. We must have been on that bed for three hours and in all that time I believe she spoke only one word, though several times: Again. If ever I began some post-coital pleasantry, such as wondering whether all Egyptian flats smelt of Flit and paraffin, she laid a finger on my lips. It made the whole experience serious, not at all casual. For long afterwards the memory of her small command Again was deeply erotic to me.

  – We repeated this scene quite a lot in the following weeks. I must have asked her pointedly if she made a habit of doing this with every young man she met, since male vanity inevitably asks. Oddly enough I can’t remember her answer, if indeed she ever bothered to reply. Was the key to her friend’s apartment an answer? Not definitively, no, not even in Cairo in those days. I had the impression that the morning we first caught sight of each other in Zubi’s was the day Agnes had decided to commit adultery, come what may. Not flattering to me, in some ways, but I did believe in her story of the squashed cat. For a month or two I walked tall until the novelty wore off and I grew to dislike the smell of the rosewater she used. That and a certain quality I could only think of as ‘provincial’. She was … well, she was an army wife, and people don’t become army wives by accident. It’s a highly specialised social scene. Her mind was like that of so many Britons I met in Egypt, something of a closed loop. But Agnes had glimpsed something outside the loop to which she had partial access in a shuttered room on Kasr el Nil, and maybe that sufficed. Not for me, though. I was too young to appreciate what it might have meant to her as an older person, that the very precariousness of bodily contact is strangely consoling. It is not actuality that threatens to collapse, only the pretence and fantasy in which we clothe it. The immediate tactility, the electric curiosity that bodies have for each other: that is real. It is a fuel that keeps one benign and going, something to make the world expand no matter that one day the same world will abruptly contract to measure six feet by two. To say Again in a kerosene-scented room in Egypt is, at that moment, to have made no bad choices and not to have failed.

  – But teenagers can’t think like that, of course. Just then they want as much gratification as they can lay their hands on. They’re too young to have failed yet. They’re running on biochemistry. The only certainty they have is that you can’t add too many of your own drops to the human gene pool. There’s nothing mellow about first-time sex.

  – Looking back at that period now I’m amazed at my energy, all the more since it contrasted strongly with the lassitude that afflicted so many of my fellow countrymen. The heat, the flies, the prevailing culture of maalesh and bukra used to knock the stuffing out of them. Their summoned efforts, constantly met by the bland ‘Never mind, my friend. Tomorrow, insh’Allah,’ seldom induced a philosophical patience. Instead a peevish weariness overtook them until the most ordinary things seemed to require huge effort. But whatever it was in the air that drained them seemed to pump me full of fizz.

  – I was living pretty dangerously, really. I had at last found some customers among the diplomatic community. At the same time, through one of my private pupils, I had acquired some student contacts up at Al Azhar, the great university which in those days, as later, was home to radical Islamic movements like the Moslem Brotherhood. Retrospectively I was able to re-interpret some of the things Mansur had said in Suez that had slightly puzzled me at the time. I remembered a remark about the British effectively holding the whip-hand in Egypt and his not being sure how long this state of affairs would be allowed to continue. Would be allowed. When I was newly arrived in Suez I naturally assumed that where their colonies were concerned the British would hold the whip-hand for exactly as long as it suited them. A bunch of natives were in no position to do anything about it that couldn’t swiftly be settled by a gunboat or a detachment of Royal Marines. That was a pretty typical attitude at the time, especially for an untravelled kid a long way from home seeing chaps in pith helmets ordering Gyppos around. I don’t think I even knew Egypt wasn’t part of the Empire.

  – But living in Cairo on the fringes of Sayyida Zeinab I soon gained a different perspective. This immense and ancient country was part of Islam, not an adjunct of the House of Windsor. As in any Islamic home we foreigners were welcome as guests, but we were not at all welcome as self-appointed rulers of the household. I began to take an interest in the students’ nationalism, an interest that was cautiously, very cautiously, reciprocated. They were naturally wary that I was some kind of spy, a plant by the British Embassy’s dirty tricks department to infiltrate the Moslem Brotherhood. My improving Arabic was seen as potentially dangerous as much as an earnest of good intentions. You can hardly blame them for being suspicious. El Banna was a deadly serious organisation that had secret training camps in the Mokattam Hills. Really, my interest was little more than an emotional response to what I saw as ordinary Egyptians’ daily subservience to English men and women. I hadn’t the maturity and experience to know that if one could remove the British presence overnight, the same Egyptians would simply go on being subservient to their own pasha class. Despite all that communism I’d heard from Michael at school I was politically juvenile. All I understood was that subservience and oppression had been part of life in Egypt for at least five thousand years and that people could deal with it so long as they were oppressed by their own kind. Being oppressed by foreigners, no matter how enlightened they claimed to be, was another matter. So bit by bit I found myself drawn towards the nationalist cause and increasingly opposed to the ruling presence of my own countrymen.

  – Meanwhile, though, I was having a good deal of fun going to the oppressors’ parties and selling them pornography. It’s a waste of time looking for consistency or principle in someone on the lam in his early twenties, especially a born impostor. However, I was a good conspirator because I was discreet and could always remember my own lies. I never forgot who I was supposed to be with whom, just as I never allowed the various strands of my activities to touch. That was particularly true where sex was concerned. Since I was so keen on this fatuous idea of myself as a great lover I may as well give you a couple of illustrations.

  – I had wormed my way into a party somewhere along the Giza Road. It was at a big house painted yellow which for that reason was known as the beyt dahabi or Golden House. I really can’t now remember whose the Golden House was but it was a focus for social events. The name of Lady Orpington comes to mind, or is she one of Saki’s characters? That’s exactly the problem: so many of the people one met in Egypt in those days were straight out of Saki. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter. It was a party with a band, of course, with fairy lights rigged in the garden and elegant servants dressed in long white galabeyas with plum sashes around their waists. Somewhere between all the rumbas and tangos I found myself next to a girl called Joy, which is not a name one hears much nowadays. We were standing in the garden under a magnolia eating a fearful dessert out of glasses, very English, a ghastly compound of mangoes and condensed milk with green gl
acé cherries on top: I can remember those perfectly. Joy was a member of what was known as ‘the fishing fleet’, débutantes who had been presented at Court back home but who hadn’t yet landed the right husband by the season’s end. The fishing fleet sailed far and wide, quite a few girls going to India and even beyond. Can there have been aristocratic rubber planters? It seems very unlikely. Anyway, Joy was staying with cousins in Cairo although I never did find out who they were. She was my age, very ‘fresh’, as we would have said, something of a charming little vamp and therefore not quite fishing-fleet material. I also thought she had far too much sense of humour to be a good fisher-girl if she were hoping to hook some dashing young officer who played polo in a pipeclayed helmet. We were both rather drunk and in need of relief from the band and the condensed milk, so we found ourselves drifting towards the end of the garden well beyond the last fairy lights. By that time she was kissing with a degree of ardour one didn’t at all associate with the fleet, most of whom were canny indeed with their favours until they were sure they’d netted the right bachelor. I now suspect that Joy was slumming with me in between more serious attempts on truly eligible young men, but that was fine by me. We found a promising-looking garden shed but no sooner had we groped our way inside than there was a guttural challenge from the darkness and an oil lamp was lit to reveal a gardener and what seemed to be his entire family. Of course this was Egypt, we told each other as we stumbled away helpless with laughter. What else would one expect to find in a garden shed but a gardener and his family asleep? We found a way out of the garden, nearly fell into a canal, and reached the road. Well, where to but the pyramids by moonlight? What could be more romantic? So we prodded a gharry driver awake and off we trotted to Giza.

  – In those days the pyramids were still curious relics rather than nationally sacrosanct, and you could climb them if you had a head for heights and were reasonably fit. Indeed, there were native pyramid runners who specialised in racing up and down the Great Pyramid for visiting dignitaries who paid well for a good display. Winston Churchill signed a photograph for one champion and years later I saw it hanging behind the reception desk in a hotel in Cairo, the proprietor having made good on his youthful success as an athlete. And athletic you needed to be if you were going to make a race of it. As you know, most of the pyramids’ casing was looted over the millennia since the dressed stones were ideal for building. Quite a few houses in the older parts of Cairo are built of blocks taken from the pyramids. The denuded slopes of the Great Pyramid are now a series of giant steps up the exposed courses of the big slabs used for the main construction. Believe me, it’s hard work climbing a staircase four hundred and fifty feet high with steps that come halfway up your thigh.

  – In the cool of the night, though, taking one’s time and with the prospect of carnal pleasure at the summit, to say nothing of a bottle of tepid champagne one of us had thoughtfully liberated from the Golden House, it was a spree. The inevitable guides, guards and dragomans wrapped in their galabeyas at the bottom had woken up and needed pacifying with piastres. By now my Arabic was good enough for me to make a joke of it while warning them sternly that their job was to stay at the bottom and ensure we were not disturbed. I wasn’t too confident about that. It was clearly impossible for them to guard all four faces of the Pyramid at once and like everyone else the Egyptians are keen voyeurs. I was also worried about parties from the nearby Mena House Hotel, which ran special excursions to view the pyramids by moonlight. Still, we were lucky because that night the moon wasn’t quite full and we turned out to be the only couple sitting on top among the graffiti of tourists who stretched all the way back to Herodotus’ day. The three-quarter yellow moon shed its radiance over an astounding view. Endless desert at one’s back and the lights of Cairo ahead. The palms below glistened with a buttery sheen. In the distance the Nile’s dark stain and, away beyond it, the Mokattam Hills with a few scattered points of light. It was magical and immensely sexy. I was never much affected by all that mystic hokum surrounding Egyptology, so I didn’t feel that by having intercourse on top of the Great Pyramid I was somehow participating in an age-old fertility ritual. Nonetheless, the mere fact of having taken a girl away from a party and brought her to this highly pregnant place beneath an audacious moon was itself aphrodisiac. I couldn’t resist playing up to Joy and pretending I felt the presence of the spirit of Osiris or some such. Hokum can be deployed to good effect. And I must admit it was a powerful experience, screwing on a little square plateau held aloft by the most massive and ancient building on earth, exposed to the eye of that yellow moon. It was remarkably like being on a sacrificial altar, which is what Joy said as she enthusiastically offered herself as a far from silent victim.

  – This, too, was a revelation. In terms of lovemaking Joy was as distant from Agnes as it was possible to be. Rather than lapsing into silence she became voluble. She wanted to hear me say what I was going to do before I did it, she wanted gutter language, she yelped at the moon. I was distracted at first but then old Osiris came to my aid, bless him, and the whole thing turned into rather an animal affair. Definitely pre-Christian. I remember binding her hands with a chiffon scarf. One of the fishing fleet tied up in port for the night and unable to sail away before dawn at least. We drank the champagne and made curious use of the bottle. It was all a bit perverse and mad and we had a thoroughly enjoyable time until we made the mistake of falling asleep.

  – I was woken by the first rays of the rising sun striking the tip of the Pyramid even as everything below lay still in shadow. I was stiff with cold but even so it was impossible not to gaze out across the Nile and the desert and think that this was living: to watch the Mokattam Hills outlined against a gold and salmon blaze while in the gulf between lay various shades of lavender and indigo pierced here and there by the pale fingers of minarets. And then the dawn chorus of muezzins rising out of the lavender mist like white shoots piercing soil, each out of phase with the others and giving the impression of spontaneity rather than ritual. For about five minutes it made me want to become a Moslem because it seemed such a perfect expression of a landscape. How else would a desert religion sound, and what more natural than to allow one’s early prayers to ascend with dispersing mists even as the last stars are fading? Hugely exposed to the sky as I was up there, I suddenly perceived how important the heavens were in a landscape like a fatal ocean that men had to cross by faith and navigation. The crescent moon on top of every minaret was exquisite and correct. I understood why the Arabs had been such wonderful astronomers. I also understood why Christianity had always failed to move me. It was a misplaced religion, a transplant, a hybrid, fundamentally out of tune with the English landscape.

  – Then Joy woke and I was annoyed because I’d almost forgotten her, scrumpled and sandy, my reason for being here at this moment, watching this unrepeatable but daily-repeated drama. It was she who pointed out that during the hours of unconsciousness someone had climbed up and relieved her of her handbag and me of my wallet. We clambered back down in two separate silences of very different origins though at least neither had any connection with shame. –

  *

  Why are you telling me these things?

  – I thought you’d be interested. They’re part of my life. –

  Just sexual exploits, surely. We’ve all had them, even those of us who haven’t.

  He is a little aggrieved and falls silent, gazing fiercely at a nearby lavender bush. But so am I aggrieved, feeling that his life is after all turning out to be nothing but a succession of conquests in ever more bizarre locations. I want to hear what has hurt him, what has made him weep in the night. I want to hear what he did when the magic of being young began to bore even him. I want to know if self-proclaimed impostors are like a fennel root, whose successive layers can be shucked off to leave nothing beyond a stunted green shoot at the centre. And why might a person claim to be an impostor, anyway? Isn’t it like the Cretan in the famous paradox who says all Cretans are liars? The
re is no way in logic to know which of his claims is true and which false. So why do it? Offhand, I could think of three possible motives. One was to reassure himself that he had had an interesting life; another was to convince other people that he had; the third was in order to conceal something. In any of these cases it was dissembling, hence tedious. So why had I initially been seduced by it? I supposed because we actually do expect people to be honest about themselves. If their confessions seem not greatly to their credit, their degree of honesty intrigues us and we assume other revelations will follow. In Jayjay’s case I was right.

  – They’re part of my life. –

  So you said. Of course they are, Jayjay. I had no business interrupting you. I’m sorry.

  – You’ve put me off my stroke now. Though to be honest I no longer know what to talk about where my years in Egypt are concerned. It all seems so much of a piece I can’t separate out some of the vividest memories or much of the chronology. Everything from this period seems to be sliding gradually towards the war. But I did say I would give you another example of myself in the guise of a lover, and it’s a bit disgraceful so I’d better tell you or else you will think I’m presenting you with too rosy a view of my former self. –