Desiring Cairo. Louisa Young

out and tell them to slow down a bit because they were disturbing her budgies. Harry and I circling each other in the fallout, coming round, making up, moving on … who knows.

      ‘So why did you become a policeman, Harry?’ I asked.

      He looked very sheepish. Having been undercover, I suppose he wasn’t accustomed to talking about it. I suppose. I don’t know. What do undercover people do or feel? What do I know about undercover? But he’s not very accustomed to talking anyway. Joking, yes. Charming, yes, in his tall, laconic way. But not talking. I used to like it: I could read anything I wanted into his handsome silences, and did. But now I’m older and I’m not so insecure, and I like to know what’s going on.

      ‘Um,’ he said.

      I waited encouragingly.

      ‘Well actually,’ he said, and looked a little puzzled, and then sort of took a breath, and almost laughed a little. He shot me a glance, sideways. This is what he has always done when preparing to confide. It pleased me that he still did it. Made me feel that I knew him. Made me feel secure, at one with the world. A bit.

      ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Because of High Noon.’

      I was silenced for a moment.

      I began to hum, ‘Do not forsake me, oh my darling,’ without realising I was doing it.

      ‘Well, you asked,’ he said.

      High Noon. Where Sheriff Gary Cooper had to deal with the bad guys even though he had a ticket out of town with the lovely Quaker girl who didn’t believe in violence, and none of the cowardly townsfolk would help him, so he did it alone.

      ‘High Noon,’ I mused.

      ‘I wanted to do the right thing,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’

      He seemed so uncomfortable admitting that he had some notion of morality, and that it had made him do something, that I didn’t push him. I think he was truly embarrassed. Identifying with Gary Cooper.

      But certainly it changed my view of him. From black leather to white stetson, just like that. The bastard cross of Marlon Brando and Del Boy turns out to be Gary Cooper.

      Of course all this coincided terribly conveniently with my own sweeping gavotte through life. Here was the peripatetic biking belly dancer grounded and mature with a bad leg and a baby; here was the bad man turned good and willing to consider that he might be said baby’s father. ‘I want to do the blood test,’ he’d said, on the evening of the day of comeuppance. And, ‘I want to see her. And you.’ And, ‘I want you to change the birth certificate. Even if it’s only to Father Unknown.’

      But who knows what they want? And who knows whether it’ll make them happy? As I can’t remember which country singer (in a white hat) sang: ‘Some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.’

      All I wanted was peace and quiet. I wanted to sit on the bench in the playground with my boots in the dust and the fag ends and the dead plane leaves, and watch Lily climb ropes. I wanted to bathe her and tuck her in and read Thumbelina to her. I wanted to watch her eat, and to make myself a cheese sandwich in the evening knowing she was asleep in the next room, not scratching her eczema (I wanted her eczema gone). I wanted it to be how it was before Jim and Eddie Bates and Ben started to upturn our lives with their blackmail and lies and obsessions; how it was in the gilded imaginary quotidian past. I didn’t want to upturn it even further with the very serious, very real question of her dad. In other words, I wanted to bury my head in the sand. And I did.

      But then, sitting on the balcony that night, talking about Gary Cooper, Harry said: ‘Part of it, you know, is …’

      ‘Is what?’ I said.

      ‘Lily,’ he said.

      ‘What about her?’

      ‘What I said that night.’ He didn’t have to say what night. We knew what night. The night that chaos dissolved.

      ‘Mm,’ I said.

      ‘The blood test,’ he reminded me, gently.

      ‘Mmm.’

      I knew he was right, within his rights. I knew it was fair. I knew, rationally, that I didn’t have a leg to stand on. I knew that I probably couldn’t stop him doing it anyway. But my heart cried out against it. Cried and wept. Why? Fear, I suppose. Simple fear.

      ‘I can’t do it, Harry,’ I said, knowing as I said it what a daft and pathetic thing it was to say.

      ‘It’s not you that’d do it,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to do anything. I’d just get it done, and then I’d tell you, and we’d … we’d take it from there.’ We hadn’t a clue, then, either of us, of the practicalities. Let alone the repercussions. (Nice word, repercussion. Re-percussion. There’s a verb: percuss, to strike so as to shake. Well there you go.)

      ‘Shut up,’ I said.

      He was looking at me, quite kindly, twiddling the empty beer bottle in his big skinny hands, leaning forward a little.

      ‘How long for?’ he asked.

      ‘How long what?’

      ‘How long shall I shut up for? I mean, I can see you probably need a bit of time, having just had Jim breathing down your neck being the bad father, and maybe a father is not what you want right now, but, well, the question’s been asked now, hasn’t it? So how long, do you think, before you’ll want to know? Because you’re going to want to.’

      ‘I don’t want to know.’

      ‘No, but you will.’

      ‘Don’t patronise me, Harry. I don’t want to know. It’s a positive act of not wanting. I actively want not to know. I desire ignorance.’

      ‘Why? Are you scared?’

      ‘No I’m fucking not. Don’t give me that crap.’

      ‘Why not? I’m scared. I’d think it was incredibly scary.’

      ‘I like things as they are. That’s all. Harry—’

      ‘What?’

      ‘Please can we leave it.’

      ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But for how long?’

      ‘Oh for God’s …’ Well. OK. Buy time. ‘Fifty years,’ I said, rather idiotically.

      ‘It might be worth pointing out, Angel, that you aren’t the only person involved in this,’ he said.

      ‘I’m sorry?’ I replied, cold suddenly, and deadly courteous.

      ‘Lily …’ he began, poor fool, but he did no more than begin before I bit him off: ‘Do you think that I’m not aware of that?’ I snapped. ‘Do you think that every single thing I do isn’t for her wellbeing? Do you imagine that I ever for one moment stop considering what’s best for her? Do you think I don’t know? My whole fucking life for nearly four years has been based on what she wants and what she needs and I do not need you muscling in and telling me that I need to take her into consideration. I do take her into consideration. I do every bloody thing that is ever done for that child including protecting her, when she needs it, from people she doesn’t know who think they have something to do with her. If I’d told her Jim was her father how do you think she would feel now? Now that he’s decided that oh no, he isn’t after all, silly me it’s just my wife fancied having a kid. Who her father is and what happens about that is an incredibly bloody serious issue and if I’m not up to thinking about it and controlling what happens about it then it is not to happen, that’s all. The damage it could do her is immeasurable. And it’s down to me. I decide when and how. And I say no. No.’

      So I was ranting. Harry has never been impressed by my ranting.

      ‘It’s not just Lily,’ he said, calmly. If anything he was even more unflappable now. Unpercussable.

      ‘What?’