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Desiring Cairo
Louisa Young
The sparky, funny sequel to Louisa Young’s acclaimed first novel of belly-dancing, motorbikes and single-parenthood.Angeline Gower, ex-bellydancer, ex-biker, single mother of a little girl who is not actually her child, is mired in problems again in this wonderful sequel.Her relationship with Harry, the lover turned cop, remains fraught, the lure of the glamorous but no good Eddie hasn’t gone away. And there is yet another element complicating things know – the seductive and mysterious Sa’id. With Angeline older and a little wiser, Louisa Young weaves a tale that is richer, sexier and more moving than ‘Baby Love’, while remaining just as exciting. Shifting between Shepherd’s Bush and Cairo, full of the contrasts between the West and the Middle East, ‘Desiring Cairo’ thrills and enthralls while at the same time making us think and feel deeply about the love between mother and child, man and woman, friend and friend.Louisa Young has skilfully written this so that it is equally enjoyable read on its own, or as part of the trilogy that starts with ‘Baby Love’ and ends with ‘Tree of Pearls’.
DESIRING CAIRO
The Angeline Gower Trilogy
Louisa Young
Copyright (#u4c205b74-8012-598e-bbb0-a212cb33e034)
The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Published by The Borough Press 2015
First published by Flamingo, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1999
Copyright © Louisa Young 1999
Louisa Young asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Cover images © Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com)
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007577996
Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780007397013
Version: 2015-09-07
Praise for The Angeline Gower Trilogy: (#u4c205b74-8012-598e-bbb0-a212cb33e034)
‘Funny, sexy and tender’ ESTHER FREUD
‘Spectacularly worth reading’ The Times
‘A stylishly literate thriller’ Marie Claire
‘You will keep coming back to this book when you should be doing something else’ LOUIS DE BERNIÈRES
‘Exciting, compelling and tense’ Time Out
‘Funny and scary. In writing honestly and unsentimentally, Young celebrates the unequivocal nature of parental love with verve and style’ Mail on Sunday
‘Wry, perky, entertaining’ Observer
‘Engaging, wise-cracking, likeable, brilliantly sustained … funny, humane and utterly readable’ Good Housekeeping
Dedication (#u4c205b74-8012-598e-bbb0-a212cb33e034)
For Isabel Adomakoh Young, the lovely daughter
‘I do believe that, with all its drawbacks, Egypt is the most interesting and convenient country that a lady can travel over’
ELIOT WARBURTON, 1845
Contents
Cover (#u7cae2adc-c738-5a82-9089-8047a1e544b9)
Title Page (#u6a5fb39e-bb55-5abd-9076-c744886d1f9d)
Copyright
Praise
Dedication
Epigraph (#u4a874807-e007-5e9f-af1c-45f768ad7de1)
Introduction
Chapter One: Hakim
Chapter Two: Luxor
Chapter Three: Talking about Gary Cooper
Chapter Four: Hakim’s Business, Harry’s News
Chapter Five: Next
Chapter Six: Tell Mama
Chapter Seven: Brighton
Chapter Eight: Harry Cooks Dinner
Chapter Nine: Sunday Night
Chapter Ten: Sa’id
Chapter Eleven: The Funeral
Chapter Twelve: Dinner with Sa’id
Chapter Thirteen: Tell Your Own Mama
Chapter Fourteen: Chrissie, Get Out of My Bath
Chapter Fifteen: Sunday Night Coming Down Again
Chapter Sixteen: ‘You are dearer than my days, you are more beautiful than my dreams’
Chapter Seventeen: I Wish I Was in Egypt
Chapter Eighteen: What Harry Knows
Chapter Nineteen: The Madness Sets In
Chapter Twenty: Cairo
Chapter Twenty-One: Family Life
Chapter Twenty-Two: Let’s Go to the Bank
Chapter Twenty-Three: Give Me Your Hands
Chapter Twenty-Four: Semiramis
Chapter Twenty-Five: God, when he created the world, put a great sea between the Muslims and the Christians, ‘for a reason’
Chapter Twenty-Six: The End, and the Beginning
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Louisa Young
About the Publisher
Introduction (#u4c205b74-8012-598e-bbb0-a212cb33e034)
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 (#u4c205b74-8012-598e-bbb0-a212cb33e034)
Hakim (#u4c205b74-8012-598e-bbb0-a212cb33e034)
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.
