Desiring Cairo

Introduction

I wrote these novels a long time ago. I spent my days correcting the grammar at the Sunday Times, and my nights writing. I could no longer travel the world doing features about born-again Christian bike gangs in New Jersey, or women salt-miners in Gujarat, or the Mr and Mrs Perfect Couple of America Pageant in Galveston, Texas, which was the sort of thing I had been doing up until then. I had to stay still. I had a baby. Babies focus the mind admirably: any speck of time free has to be made the most of.

I had £300 saved up, so I put the baby and the manuscript in the back of a small car and drove to Italy, where we lived in some rooms attached to a tiny church in a village which was largely abandoned, other than for some horses and some aristocrats. A nice girl groom took the baby to the sea each day in my car while I stared at the pages thinking: ‘If I don’t demonstrate some belief in this whole notion of novels, and me as a novelist, then why should anyone else?’

Re-reading these books now, I think, ‘Christ! Such energy!’ I was so young – so full of beans. I described the plot to my father, who wrote novels and was briefly, in his day, the new Virginia Woolf. After about five minutes he said, ‘Yes, that all sounds good’ – and I said, ‘Dad, that’s just chapter one’.

It was only about twenty years ago, and a different world. Answerphones not mobiles, no internet. Tickets and conductors on the bus. And it was before 9/11, and the mass collapse of international innocence which 9/11 and George Bush’s reaction to it dragged in their miserable, brutalising wake. Could I write a story now, where an English girl and her Egyptian lover meet at the surface of the water? Yes, of course – but it could not be this story.

Anyway, I have grown up too thoughtful to write like this now. I exhaust myself even reading it.

I see too that these, my first novels, were the first pressing of thoughts and obsessions which have cropped up again and again in things I’ve written since. It seems I only really care about love and death and surgery and history and motorbikes and music and damage and babies, and the man I was in love with most of my life, who has appeared in various guises in every book I have ever written. I realise I continue to plagiarise myself all the time, emotionally and subject-wise. And I see the roots of other patterns – Baby Love, my first novel, turned into a trilogy all of its own accord. Since then, I’ve written another two novels that accidentally turned into trilogies – and one of those trilogies is showing signs of becoming a quartet.

People ask, oh, are they autobiographical? I do see, in these pages, my old friends when we were younger, their jokes and habits, places I used to live, lives I used to live. I glimpse, with a slight shock, garments I owned, a bed, a phrase … To be honest I made myself cry once or twice.

But, though much is undigested and autobiographical, in the way of a young person’s writing, I can say this: be careful what you write. When I started these novels I was not a single mother, I didn’t live in Shepherds Bush, I didn’t have a bad leg and I wasn’t going out with a policeman. By the time they were finished, all these things had come about. However as god is my witness to this day I never have never belly danced, nor hit anyone over the head with a poker.

Louisa Young

London 2015

ONE

Hakim

When Hakim ibn Ismail el Araby turned up on my doorstep, trailing clouds of chaos in his wake, I naturally assumed that the anonymous letters had something to do with him. Not that they were from him – like the rest of his family, the boy could haggle in ten languages and convert currencies, to his own advantage, faster than I could find a calculator, but writing in English was not one of his accomplishments. No, I rather thought they might be to him.

‘I don’t know if this is for you,’ I said, over the breakfast table on the morning after his arrival. There we were, the three of us: Hakim and Lily tucking into boiled eggs and toast, and me making coffee, washing up, wiping surfaces, fetching the post. I don’t normally make breakfast for young men who turn up out of the blue, but I do boil eggs for Lily. It makes me feel that I am giving her security, which she needs.

‘My letter?’ he said. ‘You open, so you can read.’

I had already seen what it said. I was thinking all the obvious things – considering the nice-quality white envelope (no name, just my address), the perfectly ordinary looking office-type typing, the perfectly ordinary Mount Pleasant postmark (just one of London’s main and busiest post offices). And inside a perfectly ordinary-looking piece of white A4 paper, food of a million photocopiers and printers, with ‘You killed my love’ typed on it.

‘It says You killed my love,’ I said.

‘Strange for letter,’ he said. ‘Not mine, I think. Who do you love?’

‘Not my love. The person who wrote the letter’s love. I think.’

‘Their love for you? Or what?’ he said.

‘I don’t think so. Nobody loves me.’

‘I love you,’ said Lily. ‘You know I do. I love you up to the moon and back again. Don’t tell porkies.’

Lily my five-year-old daughter loves me. Big-eyed little-mouthed fat-cheeked clever-browed Lily. I basked in that for a moment. I’ll never be used to it, unimpressed by it. Then I ran through the other love-contenders. Neil my lawyer friend doesn’t love me any more. Harry … Harry who was my love … well (as the Shangri-Las sang) I called it love … Harry doesn’t write letters like that. And we’re on terms now, we speak, we have dismantled our melodrama, more or less. And my mum and dad love me. I didn’t think it was them either. Though I had killed their love, in a way.

There’s something you should know straight off. My sister died. She was pillion on my motorcycle, pregnant, claiming that she needed rescuing from her then boyfriend who she said was violent … Lily is – was – hers. Mine now. It’s a long story and it has given me enough pain and grief over the years, and since everything settled a year and a half ago I do not want to drag over it.

I have grown up into a very private and anti-social person, what with my terrible experiences and my exciting past life. I was seriously fantasising about moving to the country when Hakim appeared. In fact I believe I was looking at a clutch of estate agents’ details at the very moment my doorbell rang. It was September the eighth. Lily had started school that week. I wasn’t worried about her, because she had been going to nursery for years, and we’d done the preview days where she goes in for a few hours before lunch and I hold her hand a bit. We’d bought a duffel coat though it was too warm for it; her Teletubby came to the gates with us although he wasn’t allowed to stay.

So. Mid-morning, September the eighth. Nine days after Princess Diana was killed, two days after her funeral. You can probably imagine why I had been hiding my head under a cushion for a week. Young mothers dead in car crashes upset me no end. Cover their faces, and all that, when they die young. And cover my face too. Deep in the sand.

Watching (because no, I didn’t join in) the national grievathon made me want to spit. This happens every day. Every day death turns people inside out, and when they get themselves right side out again they don’t fit any more. Every day grief craps in the corners of someone’s mind, somewhere where they can’t find it, and if they can they can never get rid of the smell. To see it all writ so large and so sentimental for someone who we only saw on television, made me, what, angry. Resentful. I wasn’t proud of that. Part of me would have liked to unite with the nation – truly. I get lonely out here, being a curmudgeon and an eccentric. But I kept wanting to shout at them. I’ve lost to death, I know what it is – and this is not your loss. Haven’t you any grief of your own?

And for her children it’s just motherlessness. Motherless children. Like so many.

Anyway. That morning. The doorbell rang. I answered it. There stood a young man in beautifully cut but unavoidably vulgar white clothes, with a dark overcoat which didn’t really know what to do with itself slung over his shoulders. Or perhaps it was his shoulders which didn’t know what to do with an overcoat. He looked too young for his clothes, his hair too short. Beside him was a large suitcase. He had a small teardrop-shaped aya of the Qur’an in gold hanging on a chain round his neck, but I didn’t need that to tell me he was Egyptian. There is something about that country, and it was all over him. Furthermore I knew his face.

He smiled a little nervously, the look at odds with his flashy clothes. ‘Salaam alekum,’ he said. ‘Madame Angelina? Good morning. Hello.’

I got the impression that he wasn’t sure which greeting was the correct one for the circumstances. Not knowing quite what the circumstances were myself, I wasn’t able to help him.

‘We alekum elsalaam,’ I replied automatically.

‘Amira Amar,’ he said quietly. Amira Amar means Princess Moon. Amar means beautiful, as well. It is a name some people used to call me when I stayed? lived? when I was in Egypt, ten years ago. After I ran away from Harry because he threw the chair out of the window at me because he thought I knew that my sister was a prostitute and didn’t care, whereas in fact I hadn’t a clue. I ended up in Egypt because it was somewhere I could work. I stayed there because that is what Egypt is like.

I was a belly dancer.

God, it seems strange even now to use the past tense. If I was a belly dancer, then what am I now? I am now … a single mother, only the child is not mine. Oh well – she’s mine, damn right she is, but it was only a year and a half ago that Janie’s ex-boyfriend Jim decided to claim her as his, and gave us all a bit of a runaround until it turned out that he wasn’t her father after all. So I live with the tiny yet fundamental fear that any Tom, Dick or Harry (and yes it might have been Harry) that my sister shagged in the course of her professional engagements (though she didn’t shag Harry professionally – no, that was personal. As far as I know. Though of course she’s not here to tell me. Harry said he was drunk and thought it was me. God save us) … any Tom, Dick or Harry might turn up and claim her, and have a claim.

So, I am an ex-belly dancer with a slightly gammy leg from breaking it in three places in the accident which killed Janie. (See how cool I am? I say the accident killed her, not that I killed her. Two years ago I would have said I killed her. Now that I know things about her that I could kill her for, I am more forgiving of myself.)

So, I am an ex-belly dancer with a gammy leg and a beautiful child and a dead sister. I know a little about Arab social history and culture – particularly through the dancing and costume – and I earn a living as some kind of small-scale but specific expert on that. I don’t call myself an expert. The first thing you learn about anything worth knowing anything about is that you know nothing. Know about Arab culture? It would take you seven hundred brains and seven thousand years. But I wrote a book on belly dancing, and a few editors and journalists know my phone number, and nobody else whose number they have knows anything about belly dancing, so I am cast. And I write about other things, and teach sometimes, and do some editing sometimes for some of the magazines I’ve written for. Once I was costume consultant on a TV series of The Arabian Nights. It’s not like when I used to jet off to Jordan to dance at weddings. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

What else? I try to lead a quiet life because I think that is best for Lily. Every now and then I yearn for Egypt, and for love, and for the beautiful clear sense of being right in my skin, right in the world, that I used to get when I was dancing. But though I am a bust-up dancer, and know what I have lost, I don’t like to think of myself as broken. So I carry on as normal: working, taking Lily to school, seeing friends. Lily is quite enough joy and glory, so I don’t resent my stationary existence. I love and cherish it. It seems safe. Or did, until Jim came threatening it, and Ben Cooper the Bent Copper started blackmailing me and forcing me into the path of Eddie Bates, bastard, gangster, criminal mastermind and sexual obsessive. I describe him lightly, because he is the most frightening thing I have ever known.

But that’s over. He’s in prison. It’s safe again.

I do keep a list of the men who I hope are not my child’s father: Eddie Bates, Ben Cooper, Harry. Not necessarily in that order.

And so that is me, and I still live up in the clouds in my top floor flat in Shepherds Bush, and on my doorstep holding out his arms and hands and calling me a name from long ago, the name of someone who I certainly am not any more, stands – oh my God, it’s one of Abu Nil’s boys. It can’t be the big one, Sa’id. Then … it must be Hakim. Hakim el Araby. Last seen in Luxor in 1987. Hakim, the sweet little scamp from the alabaster family at Thebes.

TWO

Luxor

‘Hakim,’ I said.

‘Sister,’ he cried, and grinned at me and poured a flood of the beautiful language over me, the precise meaning of much of which passed me by, though the spirit was clear. He was delighted to see me, he was amazed to find me home, what a long time it had been, and how was my health, Alhamdulillah, praise to God, and that of my father and mother, and so on, and so forth.

I invited him to step inside and take coffee. For a moment I wondered if he was old enough to drink coffee. He must have been ten when I saw him last, and here he was, grown up. Sort of. He refused the entrance and the coffee twice and I almost laughed. Here he is with his suitcase, straight from the airport, so recently left Egypt that I can smell the aroma of apple tobacco on his clothes, and his courtesy will hardly let him admit that he is here, and presumably for a reason.

‘Come in, come in,’ I said, and pulled his suitcase inside the door and led him to the kitchen where I found myself making ahwa turky – coffee stewed up the Egyptian way in my old tanaka – instead of a nice pot of espresso as I normally do. Ahwa turky made with Lavazza – it wasn’t bad, actually.

He sat gingerly at my kitchen table and, as you do, looked around, taking stock of me and my life. I had no idea what he made of it. I hadn’t seen him since 1987, in Luxor; he’d been a kid, drawing pictures in the dust, playing football in the street, chasing scorpions, escaping his big brother. There were plans to send them to school in Cairo, and they didn’t want to go. Presumably he had gone – he looked provincial, but not that provincial. More Cairene than Luxori. If I could still pick up those nice distinctions.

His father, now, his father I knew. Well, used to know, when I was there. It’s a bore, this language thing. I could find my way round a newspaper or a novel in Arabic, with a dictionary; I could converse and grow fond and build a friendship, but maintain it? Write? Correspond? No. So there was a man, Ismail el Araby, known in the village way as Abu Sa’id, father of Sa’id. I used to call him Abu Nil, for some reason. Father of the Nile. He was one of the kindest I ever knew, with a face as brown and smooth and fissured as a kabanos, and a sneaky sense of humour, and two handsome sons, and secrets, who I liked enormously, but the friendship died. Killed by circumstance and illiteracy. My illiteracy. I had put it down as one of those magically unlikely friendships, of its time and of its place, like a Bob Dylan ballad, complete.

And now here’s his boy, here in my flat.

There’s no telling what my flat would mean to Hakim. My piles of fruit and laundry and newspapers, Lily’s dolls on the sofa all seated in a row reading picture books, the late roses from Mum’s garden dropping petals all over everywhere, the bag of empties waiting to be taken to the bottle bank. Would he be thinking me profligate, sluttish, what? I had a sudden and sharp resurgence of a feeling I often had in Cairo; an awareness of incomprehension, of the impossibility of complete comprehension: ‘I do not know what all these people know; I have not learned what they all learned, they share something that I cannot share.’ There were times when I hadn’t a clue. Everybody laughing, and me bemused. Everybody worried, and I could not, could not, using all my experience and intelligence and imagination, work out why. Just humans, bred in different habits. Before and after the marvels of the individual, over and under all our common humanity, there is this thing. We are different. It delighted me far more often than it alarmed me, even in a world so very … different, shall we say … for women. But it was always there. I was a foreigner, I could not truly understand. I was not at home. And for a moment, watching Hakim looking at my kitchen, I felt a sudden cold flurry of not being at home.

But of course this flurry was not mine, it was his. I was right in my territory; he was the one who was …

‘Hakim, have you been to England before?’

In the tiny moment that I waited for his answer, I realised he was wondering whether to lie to me. Why would he want to do that?

‘No,’ he said. He looked so damn young. Silky, like a boy who doesn’t shave yet. Chicken-boned.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked, in a completely friendly way, of course. He took his coffee, smiled broadly, ignored the question and offered me a cigarette. Marlboro. Of course. The flash Egyptians always smoked Marlboro, while the amazed foreigners puffed away on Cleopatra 100s at about half a piastre a packet. Hakim, evidently, is baby flash. I refused the fag, and opened the window. He made no ‘oh would you rather I didn’t’ noises. It didn’t matter. Lily, with her smoke-susceptible eczema and sweet delicate little lungs, wouldn’t be home for several hours. The doctor said I shouldn’t let anyone smoke in the flat at all, since the asthma scare, but … oh God. Is he young enough for me to tell him not to smoke? It’s hard to tell an Egyptian anyway: so inhospitable, so northern health-obsessive. Maybe later. Anyway the window was open. The distant hum of the A40 filtered vertiginously up, up and past to diffuse in the clouds.

‘You look well,’ he said.

‘Alhamdulillah,’ I replied. Praise to God.

He started to speak in Arabic again, and I stopped him.

‘My Arabic is not good,’ I said.

‘It was,’ he said.

‘It’s been many years. I’m out of practice.’ I learnt my Arabic initially from love songs. While I danced I soaked up all sorts of useful vocabulary: Habibi, kefaya, enta ’omri – my darling, enough, you are my life. Elli shuftu abl ma teshoufak enaya, what I saw before my eyes saw you … It did get broader after that, but … it was a long time ago.

‘It’s OK. My English is better. You have a husband?’

‘No.’

He looked at the dolls. Their names are Tulip, Liner, Rose, Rosie and Rosabel.

‘Just a child,’ I said.

I wasn’t actually prepared to go through a delicate dance around his sensibilities about this. I don’t explain the whole story to people. It’s too long, too private, too complicated, and, dare I say it, too boring for me to witness their stock reactions of amazement, shock, sympathy, incomprehension, in reaction to the weirdnesses that underpin my life. That are my life. And Lily’s. It’s not their business. If and when it becomes their business, I tell them. But very few new people need to know the whole story. Anyway I’m fifteen years older than him.

He raised an eyebrow.

‘Child, no husband,’ I said. ‘That’s right.’

‘Divorced?’

If we had been in Egypt, I would have said yes, or said that the husband was dead, just to make life easier; here, I may not tell the whole truth, but I don’t need to lie for comfort or protection.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Never married.’ Well, it was true. Janie never was married to Lily’s father, whoever he was. And I have never been married.

Pity crept over his face, and incomprehension, and concern, and distaste, all at once, like the rainbow colours of oil skimming over water.

‘It’s different here, Hakim,’ I said. ‘It’s no shame. No dishonour. If anything, the dishonour is to a man who leaves a woman and child. There is no dishonour to the woman.’ If only that were quite true, I thought. But if I was going to educate him in Western ways, I was bloody well going to educate him in the ways of rational London post-feminism, not in those of hypocritical Tory backbenchers. He looked utterly unconvinced.

‘How is your father?’ I asked, realising that I hadn’t asked before just at the moment that it suited me to change the subject. ‘Is he well?’

Hakim narrowed his pale eyes and murmured something I didn’t catch. This was wrong. The reply should have been a firm and grateful Alhamdulillah. I looked questioningly at him. He flashed me another little smile and said: ‘I have a present for you’, then with a laugh he went to the hall and began to unpack his suitcase, laying small piles of very tidy clothing all over the floor, as carefully as a stream of ants. I peered round the door at him. ‘Give me one moment!’ he cried.

I went back to my coffee. A minute or two later he came in with a small package. It was wrapped in white tissue and looked fluffy and light, but when I took it from him it was heavy. I laid it on the table to unwrap it. When the crisp, clean paper fell aside, there lay a small blue globe; a smooth, hard, polished ball of lapis lazuli, the shape and texture of a tiny cannonball. Its shades of colour shifted a little: murkier islands, paler seas. Flecks of gold streamed across it like clouds. It looked like the world.

I picked it up, felt its weight and gazed at it until its surface began to move and drift of its own accord, whereupon I uttered some absolutely genuine expressions of delight, and sat down with it balanced on my palm. It nestled. A world of my own. I liked it very much.

*

After three hours, during which time Hakim drank five cups of coffee, smoked eight cigarettes, read two Arabic newspapers and asked me a great many shyly phrased questions about my personal life, and I made five pots of coffee, put on a wash, cleared breakfast, washed up, changed Lily’s sheets and accepted three phone calls from my friend Brigid about exactly how many of her children were coming to spend the night on Friday, I decided that lunch, out, would be a good idea. The suitcase stayed. I live in the last flat at the very end of the balcony on the seventh floor. Even with the lift (and I use the stairs. Good for my not-so-good leg) it would have been a drag to move it. And he still hadn’t told me his plans.

Finances being tight, and hospitable urges being still quite strong, we went to the Serbian café and had toasted cheese sandwiches. I wondered if he was rich. He looked it … sort of. Balls of lapis are rarely cheap. But he’s so young. And a little gold proves nothing. That golden Qur’anic verse might be all he has in the world.

‘So why are you here, Hakim?’ I said, open, brazen, and verging on impatient. Arab languor will take its time, and there’s no rushing it, but this was my time too, London time, Western time, modern time. I had things to do, important things. Thinking about Lily, for example, or watering my flowerpots, or hanging the washing over the radiators, or seriously considering getting a job now she was at school. Seriously considering which was my duty; working the absurd hours required by any interesting job or being available to my small child when she needed me. Seriously considering having a word with our lovely new government about it. I couldn’t sit about all day making him coffee, anyway. If only on principle.

Then an image flew across my memory: his father’s grave face as he passed me a dish of water into the darkness of the room, the courtyard dazzling white behind him as he pushed the heavy-weighted mosquito nets aside. Abu Sa’id, bringing the water himself, cool water, every hour or so, for the four days that Nadia was sick. West Bank Luxor, 1987. Abu Sa’id, sitting on the doorstep of his own room at night, staring out into his white courtyard, keeping watch for us, the English girls, who lay in his bed. Sometimes he sat till dawn, sometimes he disappeared silently during the night, and emerged at midday from his son’s room, where he had been lying on a mat.

To begin with I had thought there were no women in the house, only Abu Sa’id and Sa’id and Hakim. One reason why I liked Abu Sa’id so much was that he seemed alone, like me, and unlike everybody else in Egypt, who came arrayed and entangled with uncles and wives and cousins and brothers. Then after a day or two I noticed