This map is a none-map; rather, it is a hole in a map, an ink stain against the bright turquoise of the wadded quilt below it. I am reminded of the great explorer Burton’s opening words from his Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage:
In the autumn of 1852, through the medium of my excellent friend, the late General Monteith, I offered my services to the Royal Geographical Society of London, for the purpose of removing that opprobrium to modern adventure, the huge white blot which in our maps still notes the Eastern and Central regions . . .
Our current location is the sin-filled other side to Richard Burton’s white emptiness. It is Millicent’s destination, her pilgrimage. From Baku, then Osh, she pushed us further on, further East even though we were warned of bandits and Moslem brigands, and of thieves and soldiers hungry for loot and violence. Millicent’s determination to reach the great strip of blackness untouched by Christian mission, where no Churchmen (nor even many white men) have visited overrode her fear. As far as she is concerned, where the Mission has not been, a wild, unfettered and heathen hole resides, a hole Millicent intends to fill with her own limitless goodness.
The second map is not geological. It is a Missionary Map, rolled up in the same scroll. A river of sin runs like a course of blood through the desert of Eternal Despair. At the bottom is a quote from Bunyan: ‘Know, prudent cautious self-control is wisdom’s root.’
In my mind’s eye I conjure up Sir Richard Burton’s crackling eyes (I once saw a photograph of him in The Times dressed as an Arab, with a machete in his hand and a long-nosed saluki at his side). Give me courage, Sir Richard! I have convinced Millicent of my missionary calling. I have convinced a publisher of the worth of my proposed book. I have even tricked my dear sister who believes that I am here in His name, to do His Good Works. I should be feeling clever. I have escaped England, but why, then, always this apprehension? To my surprise, despite a childhood of examining maps and reading adventure stories, I realise that I am quite terrified of the desert; of its insects that grow louder with the dusk; of its relentlessness; of becoming simply bones, left in a desert to petrify.
6. London, Present Day
Pimlico
‘Now that’s what I like to see,’ a voice from behind an enormous bunch of lilies, looking like a stage prop in their opulence. ‘A half-dressed girl waiting for me at the top of the stairs.’
Frieda pushed her glasses up her nose and watched the flowers as they consumed the corner of the stairwell.
‘Before you say anything,’ the voice continued, ‘I do know that wild moor grass and rare Alpine tulips are much more your thing than these hideous lilies, but it was the best I could do and I know I will remain unforgiven, but . . .’ Nathaniel’s head twisted from behind the bouquet, his hair pushed up from his face as if betraying the after-effects of a recent argument with himself. He reached the top of the stairs.
‘But,’ he went on, ‘I have got some poppies on order from the Kirghiz Pass. Until then . . .’ he held the flowers towards her, arranging his face into a carefully raffish mode. Frieda looked at the creamy, preposterous petals without smiling.
‘I won’t even explain,’ he said. ‘Just make me coffee and I will try my hardest to thaw that chilly, frozen expression on your forehead.’
Frieda turned away. ‘Oh come in,’ she said, finally, leaving him to squeeze the foliage that accompanied the lilies through the doorway.
As always, when he visited, Nathaniel made Frieda’s flat seem reduced and cramped and in all senses inadequate. His six-foot frame and general expansiveness monopolised the limited space in seconds as he nearly knocked over the coatstand, shifting himself about with soft grunts, giving it all the smile of an adult surveying a Wendy house: marvellous. Terribly sweet.
‘Would you like some tea?’
‘Coffee.’ He grabbed her hand, tugging her towards him. ‘Come here, you sulky thing.’
Frieda allowed him to pull her. ‘I am sorry,’ he said, making eye contact.
‘Full marks for earnestness.’
‘Oh, come on, that’s not fair.’ His hand pressed on the small of her back, and then he pulled it away and rubbed it through his hair, sighing. ‘There was no way. I just couldn’t get out. Kids crying all over the place. Margaret crying. It was a disaster area, last night. A war zone.’
Frieda almost asked why Margaret was crying but stopped herself. She had long since forbidden herself to think about Margaret, forcing herself not to analyse her, nor think about their marriage. If uncontrollable thoughts did occur they would be in terms of an empty house, or, more often, a disused church: mouldy, uncomfortable and full of empty sounds that shift uneasily, making a visitor wish to be invisible but rendering that invisibility impossible. Regardless, despite herself images came, hallucinatory, like blown-up balloons: Margaret in a summer dress in their rose-bedecked garden, smiling at the children. Nathaniel on a sun lounger, quaffing wine. Their four-bedroom house in Streatham with its antique furniture, piles of curios (stuffed waders, mounted antlers) and collections of antique bicycles in the shed. Margaret, dead-heading the roses, no doubt wishing she could dead-head Nathaniel. Frieda tried not to care. It was not her concern. She wasn’t going to be one of those sordid losers who meet up with their lover’s wives in cafés to lament his lovable flaws. She clanged about, pulling out coffee things.
On her kitchen table was a yellow pamphlet. It had been left outside her hotel room whilst she was on her last trip, but whoever left it had scurried away. One of the waiters, perhaps? Or a bell-boy. It was odd to see it here, in London. Written in English, it stipulated amongst other things the rulings concerning the removal of body hair of women, as instructed by the Prophet and interpreted by Sheikh Abdul:
1. Removing the hair from the armpits and private parts is Sunnah (part of the tradition).
2. As for the private parts it is better to shave them.
3. Removing hair from the eyebrows on request from the husband (or without it) is not allowed because the Messenger of Allah said: ‘Cursed is a woman who removes (or cuts) the eyebrows of other women and a woman who has it removed (or trimmed) for her.’
In the hotel room she had wondered about this Sheikh and his specific rules, this intense consideration of women’s personal hair. On her table the pamphlet was surreal, or rather, hyper-real, and incongruous, like looking at a shopping list on a wedding day.
She could hear Nathaniel in her living room, pacing about like a polar bear in a cage, pretending that he was relaxed and at home. She was still a little jet-lagged and a little wired. On the floor was her carry-on bag containing the knickers she had changed for fresh ones in the cramped toilet on the plane, magazines and one of the crinkled ‘ethnic’ scarves she always wore in Islamic cities, as if a scarf draped across the shoulder and paired with complicated earrings made her sympathetic and sensitive to a cultural and religious manifestation about which she knew nothing, really, despite her fellowship, her Ph.D, her Government-sponsored paper entitled The Youth of the Islamic World, et cetera. Her current research job was a thankless, limitless task: to interview the ‘youth’ of the Islamic world, to surmise their concerns neatly and to present ideas and ‘solutions’ to a European-funded think tank (no, sorry: ‘think-and-do-tank’) with a secret name. This is why she had been away for months, travelling, moving and dissolving.
She was such a fraud.
‘So.’ Nathaniel took up the entire door frame. ‘How was it? Did you get to the bottom of the veils? Did you unpick the Muslim Brotherhood?’
The lines on his face joined and folded. She did not mind his age, but she did mind that he looked unwholesome, not merely unwell but seedy, as if his seams were undone. How to begin? The soldiers? The strange looks? The woman in the mosque who hit her across her calf with her walking stick?
‘You have an hour to spare, I guess?’ She looked at his face, which was frowning.
‘What? Less?’
‘Well, I . . .’
‘What?’
She said nothing.
Nathaniel groaned, ‘I don’t know what you want, Frie’. Things aren’t going well. The shop’s struggling and Margaret’s been banging on about me going back to teaching again. I would rather barbecue my own spine.’
‘You don’t know what I want?’ She said it quietly.
‘No, Frieda darling, I don’t know what you want, but I do know I’d rather drown myself than teach the vile children of London.’
‘I’m not the one telling you to teach.’
This wasn’t quite the reunion she’d imagined. There was a five-week bundle of mail on the table. Junk. Bills. An official letter. She’d been to fifteen countries in seven months, and by now most of her friends had given up calling. Standing in her kitchen, swaying a little, it was as if she were only slightly connected to the floor. So much of this year had been spent in trans-border international zones, a blur of boarding passes, CNN, free drinks. The hotels had all become indistinguishable, televisions showing American films dubbed with Egyptian Arabic, and water features in identical lobbies where she was eternally checking in, or out, or eating hummus for breakfast, or smoking shishas or being looked at by black-suited American oil-company workers. Or sitting alone, for too long, in a lukewarm jacuzzi, trying to remember why she was there.
Why, indeed? Usually on an assignment. Reporting on the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (magnificent library, a shame it has no books) or interviewing the young women along the corniche (To veil or not to veil? We are so tired of this question). Writing a report for a government-funded scheme brilliantly entitled, ‘Belief in Conversation and Exchange Between East and West’. Frieda’s rudimentary Arabic and a willingness to jump on a plane at any time, any day, has taken her to these places.
Nathaniel had launched into a complex anecdote involving his neighbours, bicycle thieves and local councillors. She murmured as if listening and looked at the junk mail. The offer of loans, pizzas, and cleaning services (let Agnieska clean for you, only £9 per hour!) felt reassuringly local. Frieda held up the official-looking letter and examined the envelope. It was postmarked yesterday, SE1 stamp.
Dear Ms Blakeman,
We offer our condolences regarding the recent death of Mrs Irene Guy. According to our records you are the next-of-kin of Mrs Guy. One of our key workers tried to contact you by telephone regarding the funeral for Mrs Guy, which took place on the 31st August but we were unsuccessful, we are sincerely sorry.
We request that you contact the Deaths, Marriages, Births department as soon as possible to organise a time to visit her accommodation at 12A Chestnut Road to remove her belongings.
Demand for Council properties is extremely high, therefore we can only give you one week in which to complete a full clearance. As of 21st September we will be authorised to enter and remove all remaining property. Please contact us at your earliest convenience to make arrangements.
Yours sincerely.
R. Griffin
Deaths Manager
‘You don’t understand’, Nathaniel was saying, ‘what it is like for me.’ He walked towards the door rubbing his forehead with vicious thumbs. It was something he did when really he wanted a drink.
Irene Guy? She didn’t know the name, she was sure. She looked up at him, this man she had been implicated with for many years now and he was looking back at her with an odd expression. It took her a moment to work out that it was the expression of a father who acknowledges for the first time that his child is not beautiful, or clever, or funny.
‘I know,’ she said to the closing door, ‘you’ve got to go.’
She touched the lily stamen and let the bright orange pollen stain her finger. Presumably that was some kind of incident, though God knows what about. Nathaniel could create an argument with an empty portion of wordless, soundless air. She could always follow him. To be fair, it was true that almost all of the time she didn’t know what she wanted. I must be less . . . absent. Instead, she looked again at the letter in her hand. Irene Guy? Outside, a train screeched past, giving the foundations of the building a thorough shake. On the other side of the tracks was a similar residential block to Frieda’s, housing association, red-bricked, Victorian Gothic with its chimneys and peaks. It was dull enough outside for her reflection to be layered on the window. She looked at herself. In that awful hotel room she had cut her fringe snip snip snip with nail scissors – a bad idea, her fringe was left wonky – and it occurred to her now that she looked like her mother, as much as she remembered her. Frieda blinked to break the memory before it came, but couldn’t stop it: the tickle of her mother’s long hair on her arm, a low voice saying, ‘Don’t cut your hair, baby, it’s your power.’ A pair of scissors in Frieda’s hand digging grooves into her little fingers.
She stood up and went to the door. Nathaniel was walking slowly down the stairs, obviously stalling, waiting for her to call him. He looked up at her but she flattened herself against the wall and said nothing. She turned and looked at the drawings on the wall, the seagulls floating, wings touching. She liked them, though Peabody probably wouldn’t.
The Art of Wheeling a Bicycle: Steering is a subject for serious consideration; a sharp eye, quick determination, constant care and a steady hand are needed.
7. A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar – Notes
May 6th
I write this by the light of a linseed lamp accompanied by the tapping of too many insects throwing themselves against the paper windows like souls struggling to be allowed in. Or out. Millicent’s sleeping breath is fast, Lizzie’s is soft and dull; they are so close, these days, that even their breathing seems to call to one another. This heat hangs like a dead weight over all of us and still we do not know when the trial will be, or, indeed, what it means. Officials from the magistrate visited tonight, there were whispered meetings between Millicent and Mohammed but she explains nothing to me.
I am watching her, Millicent. I need to understand why my sister worships her so. She is always in an agitation. There is no humility to her, interesting, for one who is supposed to be humble in the Lord’s name, she rubs her heel to the sound of her own ambition. Her neck shows the strained length of a person in a hurry to achieve a personal quest. She will do anything to achieve it. Her fingers are bony, and untrustworthy.
Dinner was on the floor in the reception room. We sat tailor-fashion on the large rug in the central room to eat and were served mountains of knotted meat bones, spiced yoghurts and almond breads. Rami arranged small pieces of mutton skewered on to long pokes of metal on trays before us. I dipped them into a thick, brown, fruity sauce, and then a spicy red one. Lizzie ate almost nothing and I remembered the day Mother brought home a baby sister, Nora. Appalled at our mother’s evident fresh love for this imposter, Lizzie and I made a pact to be together for ever. We believed this as children do, with our hearts complete and true, our eyes wide and clear. I now watched as occasionally, she put the camera up to her eye, as if to take a photograph of the scene before her, although she never did.
The skinny, dark-skinned slave girls, to whom we are not allowed to speak, brought out dishes of baked figs in a red sauce and another impressive tray of meat. I ate what I could with the baby asleep behind me in a bundle. Millicent turned, suddenly, from Mohammed and Khadega and leaned towards me, pointing at the baby.
‘She needs a name.’
‘Is it our place to name her?’
‘The Lord has placed her in our arms as a gift,’ she amended herself. ‘She is a symbol of His bond of love and so I suggest we call her Ai-Lien.’ Millicent put down her metal poke of kebabe meat. ‘Which means Love Bond.’
Mohammed was smiling at the great spread of food surrounding him and the women attentive like sparrows. The older women wear dark abayas and brown conservative veils.
Millicent lowered her voice, ‘Christians are not wanted here. Mohammed is making arrangements.’
I was alarmed, thinking that we
were to be arrested.
‘Are we leaving?’
Millicent nodded, ‘Mohammed introduced me to a Suchow merchant, Mr Mah. He has a house we can rent very cheaply outside the city. A good one, built as a pavilion. It stands in a beautiful, cool garden.’
‘Outside of the city? Where?’
‘Just outside the Old Town city walls. We will remain under house-arrest.’
I was silent. My sister sat on the other side of the room like a fulgurite, her eyes fixed on a point in the distance, refusing food, cradling her camera on her knee as though it were her own babe, looking as incongruous as I felt. I wanted to lean across to her, as we did when children, at night across the ocean of the nursery floor so that we were not alone and our fingers would touch.
‘Regardless of the house-arrest I believe that there have been a number of powerful signs indicating that we should set up a Mission in Kashgar.’ Millicent blew smoke into my face. ‘Don’t you agree?’
‘What signs do you mean?’
‘Well. The child delivered directly into our arms, for one.’ She blew smoke again, away from me.
‘But to be stuck in this terrible desert. Surely there is a better spot?’
‘Have you looked around?’ Her voice grew louder. ‘There are immense possibilities for our missionary work here.’
I coughed, trying to get Lizzie’s attention, but she would not meet my eye. That Leica! I should like to stamp on it, that box of images, its trickery. I am still appalled that she used it to photograph Father as he died. I remember raging at Mother in the drawing room: why should she be allowed to photograph him? What about dignity and peace? Poor Mother sighed and stroked my hair, agreeing with me, but said that this was Lizzie’s way of coming to terms with death and we could not take that away from her.
A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar Page 4