Desiring Cairo. Louisa Young

reflections of my joints and ligaments, yellow and scarlet and black, trying to see what the hell they were doing inside me. Discomfiting and weird reflections. Harry hailed a cab.

      Lover girl?

      ‘Remember,’ I said, ‘you were wrong last time. Don’t jump to conclusions.’

      ‘Wheee,’ he said, his face hard. ‘Wheeeee, splat.’

       FIVE

       Next

      I can’t afford to take a cab all the way to Shepherds Bush so I got out at the top of Whitehall and took the bus. The cabbie tried to get stroppy about it but I told him that if he thought the quickest way to Shepherds Bush from Victoria Street was via Trafalgar Square he must be used to passengers walking out on him. At the bus stop I wondered whether Hakim had got home all right, and whether I would be on time to pick up Lily. On the number 12 I wondered whether Sarah Tomlinson el Araby Lockwood would be in London still, in the phone book perhaps, even. At Piccadilly Circus I wondered why London Transport had changed the system so that instead of getting a 12 all the way through you had to change to a 94 at Marble Arch or Oxford Circus. At Oxford Circus I wondered why you wait for half an hour and then three come along at once. Then on Bayswater Road, having wondered every damn boring other thing available, I started to wonder why I was so upset at Eddie Bates being dead. It wasn’t just that I may have contributed. Or that his wife seemed to think I had. There was something personal. And I came up with some fairly unwelcome reasons.

      1) Although he was a scumbag of the worst order, he had expressed a fairly devoted devotion to me, and I liked that, even from a scumbag of the worst order. Which makes me something of a scumbag.

      2) Although he was a scumbag of the worst order he had an enormous amount of passion in him. Energy, enthusiasm, life force. He was a big, pulsating character. And it’s a shock to think of that gone. Pff, just gone.

      3) There’s an animal thing, a …

      OK, I can’t.

      OK.

      When Eddie jumped on me, and I hit him with the poker and knocked him out

      This is quite hard to explain because I don’t know why I did it. And I don’t know how I did it.

      So there he was, with his

      I can’t describe this. He’s dead.

      OK. I fucked him then, while he was unconscious. I was as surprised as you are that it was physically possible. I was more surprised that I wanted to do it. I didn’t know I wanted to do it. I still find it hard to believe that I did do it. But I did.

      I can only suppose that for some reason I still don’t understand I wanted to have sex with him, but I didn’t want him to have sex with me. Because I hated him and despised him. I am absolutely not happy with the fact that I fancied him. Not happy at all.

      Silly word, fancied. From ‘fantasy’, I imagine. I fantasied him. And then I realised him.

      So there is some animal thing, about a man you’ve had sex with (even though he didn’t have it with you) being dead. And there’s something about him being unconscious then, and dead now. Horizontal.

      So there I am, quasi-necrophiliac, fancier of scumbags, flattered by a scumbag’s attentions. Just how I like to see myself.

      Let alone about having contributed to his death. Let alone his wife.

      *

      I got off at Shepherds Bush Green and got to Lily’s school in good time. Just seeing her, love flowed through me, drenching and drowning the poison, flushing it through. You can feel warmth and cleanness in your veins. Palpable goodness, inside you, displacing and unmanning the badness and the shame. Simplicity clearing confusion. Redeemed by love. It happens. All the time.

      I bought her a choc ice and we went to the park to chase squirrels.

      *

      When we got home Hakim was sitting at the kitchen table with all the telephone books, looking sad.

      ‘There is just one Sarah in London, is not her,’ he said.

      I expressed doubt. He showed me how he had identified the S section of the book, and found Sarah’s Hair Fashion Studio in Lower Norwood, and told me that he had rung, but they hadn’t been his mother. I found myself thinking that I really ought to look after him better, and said that after I’d put Lily to bed I would help him. During tea he let her wear his Qur’anic verse pendant, so she ran to put on two of her tiaras and her plastic glittery Cinderella slippers. He didn’t know the story so she told him, then he had to be the prince and I had to be the Ugly Sisters and she was – as she is most days anyway, when she’s not being a baby animal of some description – Cinderella. When the time came for them to live happily ever after she almost burst with joy. Then he told her the story of Rhodopis, the girl with the rose-red slippers who married Pharaoh Amasis five hundred years before Christ. When I tucked her up later she announced that Hakim was her boyfriend, and could he live with us forever. Probably not, I said. We could marry him, she said, then he would. She wanted him to come and tell her Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and he did, including all the boiling oil and dismemberment of corpses, which I had been keeping from her.

      When Lily the love fountain was asleep, I was at risk again. Eddie lurked, alive or dead. Spooking me with his … he threatened and hurt me, I hated him, I fucked him, he’s dead. That handsome, thrilling, madcap fellow; that dangerous violent psychotic liar.

      Luckily Hakim wanted to cook my dinner. My gratitude was immense. Not for the meal – it was pretty much on the same level as Lily wanting to cook my dinner. Very sweet, hopeless, and more work for me than if I’d done it myself. But for the distraction. After half an hour or so of him being very confused by the contents of my kitchen (the garlic press delighted him), I taught him how to make pasta with sauce out of a pot. He had bought a couple of beers too, which was a relief for me because I am very bad at judging whether the Muslim I am sitting with is a drinking Muslim or not, and I hate to get it wrong. There are clues: if a man has a prayer mark on his forehead, a permanent bruise from the frequency and energy of his devotional prostrations, then I do not offer. If a woman is veiled, I do not offer. But here in London, where so many people are out of kilter with what they would be doing if they were at home, who is to know what to do? Many, many are the nebulous rules, the adjustable rules, the friable rules. I was once warned fair and square to have nothing to do with any man who drinks alcohol and reads the Qur’an: OK to do one or the other, but not both, because hypocrisy is the great sin. I was young and firm and unforgiving in those days, and I took that rule to heart; nowadays I’m a little gentler. Weaker. My standards have slipped. Anyway I am pleased that Hakim takes out his mat and prays in Lily’s bedroom, and I am pleased that he is willing to crack a beer with me and gossip, and with his youth and sweetness keep madcap monsters from my mental door.

      ‘So, is Sa’id married yet?’ I asked, flinging around for a subject, as we sat down to eat.

      Hakim looked surprised at the suggestion. ‘Oh no,’ he said.

      ‘But he’s, what, twenty-five?’

      ‘No one is married now at twenty-five,’ he said. He peered at his beer and looked less than completely happy.

      ‘No one?’ I was surprised. Shagging about was definitely not on in Upper Egypt in my day, and not much in Cairo either, and where there is no shagging about there tends to be early marriage. Or some other arrangement.

      Hakim screwed up his eyes and ran his fingers over his forehead, pressing above his eyebrows as if to dislodge something stuck inside. ‘No one,’ he said crossly.

      ‘Don’t be cross with me about it,’ I said mildly.

      He looked up. ‘Not cross with you,’ he said, heartfelt, fearful of giving offence. ‘Of course not with you.’