Desiring Cairo. Louisa Young

was proof enough for everybody. Everybody except me.

      Of course it wasn’t my fault that the car came up inside us on the turn. But then I didn’t see it. I didn’t avoid it. I couldn’t accelerate away, escape from the bend I was committed to. I wasn’t skilful enough. In the same circumstances I would never expect somebody else to have been able to. But it wasn’t somebody else, it was me. I never told Mum and Dad that I blamed myself for my lack of skill. The fact is I was – would be still, if I still rode – a perfectly skilful rider, experienced, calm, patient, swift to react, observant at all times. But not skilful enough.

      Of course it was in their interests for me not to be to blame. If I had been they would have lost two daughters. Unless of course they would have been able to forgive me.

      Anyway, easier for them to assume there had never been a fault, than to face it and forgive it. And do I blame them for that? No.

      The other thing, of course, is Janie’s career. About which they know nothing and will know nothing. All our lives our parents protect us and then suddenly one day we’re protecting them.

      Janie, Janie, Janie. Janie’s money, Janie’s death, Janie’s career. Not to mention Janie’s memory, and all that Janie was to me before … well exactly, before when? Before she died? Before I discovered she was a lying treacherous whore, who prostituted my very identity? We have to go back further … but I don’t know how far back, because I don’t know when it all started, and damn it I can’t ask her. Not for dates, not for clarification, for denial, for explanation, for apology. How can I get her off my back when she’s not here?

      *

      I was woken on Friday by the call to prayer, which didn’t half take me back.

      I was dreaming that I was in Cairo, a clear, intense dream of something absolutely ordinary, of its time, but its time was ten years – no, nine years ago. I was dreaming of going home after work, as I did five or six nights a week. Heading home to Château Champoleon through the dusty, colourless dawn after a night dancing on the Nile boats or in the clubs. In the back of a cab, rhythms sweeping through my blood, my flesh warm and my muscles soft and my brain transcendent from hours of dancing. I could have danced all night – hell, I did dance all night. Every night.

      In my dream I had been at the Niagara, which was run in those days by a lady of uncertain age who modelled herself on late-nineteenth-century French lesbians, with claret-coloured velvet and frogging and a cigarette holder. She liked me because I was English. ‘I most like the English,’ she would say. ‘Most of all like.’ ‘Don’t mock me,’ I’d reply. ‘I’ve read Naguib Mahfouz. I know you hate me.’ ‘Who’s that?’ she would say, even though he was terribly famous and soon to win the Nobel prize for literature and have a café named after himself in Khan el-Khalili. ‘Oh, just some tuppenny ha’penny little novelist,’ I’d say, and she’d say ‘Novelist? What is?’ and then she’d snort, and say, ‘Une danseuse doit être illiterée.’

      In my dream I was walking to my building and thinking about her and revelling in the near-emptiness of the streets. Only at this time of night are the streets finally empty, empty of all but the pattering footsteps of the jackals that come in from the desert in the heart of the night to eat the garbage, and leave empty plastic bags whirling like tumbleweed down Champoleon Street. For a moment, at 4.53 or thereabouts, the streets are empty, but even as you think it, there are people mysteriously starting to do their mysterious jobs in holes and alleyways. The first fuul stand is starting to set up, ready to sell breakfast. A degree of rattling can be heard behind the closed doors of the cafés. Dogs are barking.

      I dreamed I stopped off up on the roof of the Odeon for a soothing bowl of omali before bed. I dreamed of the terracotta bowl, the baked sultanas and nuts and milk, the softened, pudding-baked bread, the hot sweet smell of it, the best of the new day before I collapse at the end of the old one. Five a.m., and the pre-dawn muezzin calls the fajr: ‘It is better to pray than to sleep,’ and me thinking, as you do at five a.m., ‘It is better to sleep than to do anything else in the world.’ I dreamed I passed Mohammed, the bauwab, fast asleep on the stone bench at the foot of the monumental beige granite staircase, by Cecil B DeMille out of Ramses the Great. Walked up so as not to rouse the whole Château with the clanking and wheezing of the ancient lift. I woke up just as, in my dream, I fell into bed. Curiously, the muezzin continued.

      It was Hakim, celebrating Friday by teaching Lily the call to prayer in the kitchen. She had Allah u Akbar perfectly, and a bit more, but then he sang her something including Bismillah, in the name of God, which made her giggle because she calls her navel her bizz. Because when she was smaller her granddad used to blow raspberries on her tummy, making a Bzzz noise. She was explaining this to Hakim. He was giggling too because bizz is the Arabic for tit, and he wasn’t sure if I knew. I felt a surge of love for both of them, for Egypt, for life, and decided to make pancakes in celebration, before I remembered that Lily now went to a school where she had to be on time.

      By the time I returned from taking her, the post had arrived. There was another letter. It said: ‘He was the best of men, he was the worst of men, but with that man to be alive was very heaven.’ Irrelevantly, the first thing I thought was what an irritating name Carton was for a romantic antihero, evoking as it does cardboard boxes of long-life apple juice, though no doubt it didn’t then. Empty cardboard boxes, actually. And Sydney Carton was not an empty cardboard box. The pitfalls that lie in wait for authors, years down the line … My next thought was that if all she wanted to do was send me semi-poetic notes and paraphrases then I didn’t necessarily mind that much. But.

      I tried to remember anything that Eddie had ever said about his wife, and realised that he had never mentioned her to me. So how did I know about her? Through Harry? Maybe, when he was warning me off Eddie, when he thought Eddie and I were about to develop into love’s young dream. Or maybe through Fergus Droyle, my crime correspondent buddy, who I’d asked about Eddie right at the beginning. I had the idea that she lived in Monaco. Well, if so she’s not there now.

      Does she mean me harm? ‘You did, and I mind.’ She might do. And she knows where I live, as they say. She could, if she wanted, come and visit. This wasn’t a pleasant idea. I wasn’t exactly scared, but I wasn’t keen. As you wouldn’t be. It seemed it might be a good idea to have a word with her. Pre-empt her. Fergus would be the logical place to start, if I wanted to track her down. Except …

      I didn’t want to ask him. I’d sworn him to secrecy and told him, finally, some of what went on with Eddie and me, and the poor man had gone mauve as his desire to use the story fought with his friendship for me and respect for my privacy. Later, after the trial, he’d written a piece about Eddie, and had rung me, but I’d refused to say anything. I didn’t want to try his loyalty any further by bringing the subject up again. Specially when Eddie was so topical, having died. Some things you should not expect a journalist to bear. It would be unkind.

      She would presumably be at the funeral. But I didn’t really want to go to the funeral. He was dead and that was that. Also I thought Harry might be there, out of courtesy as one of the men who nicked him (or as his former employee, if he was still keeping that persona going), and I was sorry that Harry had witnessed the hysteria of my immediate response to the news of his death. I seem to have a little bug that jumps out to wind Harry up. It seemed a good idea to avoid further opportunities for it. And no, I didn’t want any wild graveside scenes with a vengeful Mrs Bates.

      But I did want to locate her. If only to feel better equipped. Fergus or Harry, which would be worse?

      Hakim leaned over my shoulder.

      ‘Evangelina,’ he said. ‘May we ring my mother?’

      He’s started to say ‘may’ because Lily corrects him when he says ‘can’. Actually she’s having quite a good effect on his grammar, but it’s a little alarming for me to hear echoed back so precisely what I say to her.

      I half wanted to confide in Hakim about the letters but decided that it would be a complicated and useless exercise, so I desisted. One issue at a time, girl. Let’s put off the ones that matter most to me. There’s a sensible approach.

      First