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‘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.’
He held my gaze, eye to eye, steady. It made me realise how seldom he caught my eye, let alone held it.
‘Things are strange to me here,’ he said. ‘At home you are tourist and the tourist, perhaps you know, is number one. And number two and number three and number four and so on. In Luxor for thousands of years we have been guardians of our palaces and graves, and people – you – have come to visit, and have brought money for the people who tend to visitors.’
It was one of those moments which make me want a cigarette. When someone starts to talk.
‘Let me tell you,’ he said. ‘During the Gulf War, when I was quite small. Not so small. After the houses where the people lived were knocked down and the big hotels all built, and the tourism schools teach that the tourist is always right; after they build the walls to hide the villages because the village isn’t so pretty, so they build the walls not the drains, anyway. Then there was the bombardment of Baghdad and the tourists don’t come, and everyone is scared, because so much is … spent for the people who will come. Just before the bombardment of Baghdad, when everything was just so … you know … I went with a visitor from Cairo to the grave of Thutmosis, in the valley of the kings, I think you know the one. There is a metal steps up the cliff, and climbing, and a pit, and steps down inside. My friend’s great-uncle was a guard in this grave. It is shaped like an egg, pale cheese colour with black pictograms, beautiful. The king made it hard to find, and now you just go every day.
‘You know photographs are not allowed in these graves without a pass. The flash destroys the picture. Too much light, too many people. One time, this day, four tourists come in and just start to take photographs with flash. The old man, the guard, says to them no photograph. All he can say in English, in French, in German (except also “Welcome Luxor”). He says it, in English, in French, in German. The tourists take no notice. He stands in front of them, in front of the pictograms. Then one tourist knocks him down. We came in next – me small boy and the lady visitor, the friend of my mother. The old man is on the floor, blood … the tourist taking photographs. The lady visitor picks him up, the tourist police come, fuss and bother, no one saw but everybody knows the old man is telling truth.’
‘So what happened?’
‘The old man was made to apologise.’
He looked at me straight, to see what I thought.
‘Luxor is a beautiful place but it is not good,’ he said. ‘No one is married before thirty because they have not enough money. Business is good for us but even for Sa’id to make enough money for himself to marry will take time. All the money is spent for him going to university, to Sorbonne, business studies – he did only one year, said he knew more than the professors, then economics. But everybody else is leaving school and not going to university. People come by so rich, tourists, Egyptians, Saudi, Europeans. And we are rich, my family. My father employs people. Sa’id does business with Cairo for him. We sell abroad, in Khan el-Khalili, we have the shop in Luxor and the fabrique on the West Bank. But Sa’id cannot marry. How is it for the poorer people? Wages are not good. The richness does not travel from the rich people to the poor. The poor people live in places that are built without permission and then the officials say they will knock them down and they will have nowhere to live. In Qurnah because the old village is just among the graves of the Nobles they are always trying to knock it down. They send in tanks, the village people come out with sticks. Just to show that they are people, who can hold sticks, not just some bit of litter. And now they build New Qurnah, and we are all to leave and go there.’
This was making me sad.
‘It’s the same everywhere, to one degree or another,’ I mumbled. Like that’s any comfort. But I have no sophisticated analysis of these situations. I just feel sad, and sometimes want to punch someone for not making the world a fair and just place. A reaction which has hardly changed since I was Lily’s age. Janie used to say there was no point because you can’t punch God. We stopped talking to him, though. Remained silent during ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, and hoped he’d take the hint.
‘Many people at home are very unhappy,’ he said finally. ‘Things happen you don’t hear about here. The last years … But Egypt doesn’t make a big noise of it to the world because they don’t want the world to stop to come. And it’s just Egyptian people, so the world doesn’t mind.’
Of course I knew what he was talking about. Those single paragraphs you read in the sidebars of the foreign pages: four policemen killed in an ambush at Naqquada; train shot at, suspects, fundamentalists, reports say. Like any one of a thousand problems, that only flick our conciousnesses when they happen in places where we’ve been on holiday. If I lived in Qurnah I could never leave. The Nile before you, five thousand miles of Sahara at your back, ancient Thebes the bones of your home.
Hakim was looking at me. I couldn’t remember the last thing he’d said.
‘I make coffee,’ he said, and did.
Oh yes. It was, ‘It’s just Egyptian people, so nobody cares.’
Then Zeinab rang. What with one thing and another I hadn’t spoken to her since Hakim’s appearance, so I told her about him. Or as much as I could with him in the room. He gestured me furiously not to mention his mother, so I didn’t. She wanted to come and see him, to welcome him and to check him out. Of course I’d told her about Abu Sa’id, over the years. We decided she should come at the weekend, and bring the boys. Then Brigid rang, was I still on for tomorrow. Yes indeed I was. How many of them? Three boys and Caitlin. All night? Fine. They could go on the lilos on the floor in my room, in with me and Lily. Squashy!
Perhaps a midnight feast might be in order. It’ll be Friday after all. Hakim announced his intention to go to the mosque. Then my mother rang, saying would we come for lunch on Sunday; then Harry rang, saying he was sorry he rushed me off like that, and was I all right, and I lied that yes I was, and we had an awkward pause, and said well all right then, ’bye then.
And then Hakim and I sat down with the phone books and I showed him how we needed to look for Tomlinsons or Lockwoods rather than Sarahs, and after a long and interesting chain of calls I was able to give Hakim a piece of paper with two phone numbers on it. ‘There you go,’ I said. ‘Your mother. She’s a lecturer at a university by the sea. It’s about an hour away. She teaches Arabic.’
SIX (#ulink_589c0589-bc07-5c85-a477-bd3be522cfd7)
Tell Mama (#ulink_589c0589-bc07-5c85-a477-bd3be522cfd7)
I think there’s only one other thing I haven’t mentioned. Deep in the upholstery of the saggy old red armchair I keep in my study there is a very large sum of money. It is Janie’s ill-gotten gains from her career in pornography. I hid it there just over a year ago, having found it in a last tea-chest of her things that Mum had redeemed from the attic but not been able to face looking at. I hid the money in the hope that it would go away, because I didn’t want to face the ethical and emotional problems that it brought with it. Of course at the same time I didn’t want it to go away, too. It is a very large sum of money and I am after all a single mother of uncertain employment living in a council block, albeit in a separate kingdom on the most distant and salubrious storey of a pretty nice one. I haven’t counted it.
Mum asked me once, months later, what had been in the chest. I didn’t tell her, about the money or about the jewellery or about the peculiarly nasty pornographic videos. I think I said: ‘Oh, nothing, just some clothes and stuff.’
We don’t talk enough in our family. We’re so quietly convinced that we’re doing all right that we don’t discuss it. We’re all so rational that nothing needs to be said. And yet when I think what I have in my heart that I haven’t ever mentioned … Janie’s death, obviously. Not the fact of it but the niceties of the feelings it produced. Nobody ever blamed me for it, except myself. So I never had a chance to justify myself, defend myself, except to myself. I would have welcomed a judgement by a jury of my peers. Because you know it could have been my fault. There could have been greasy dead leaves or a manhole cover that I should have avoided. I could have been riding like a fool, or over-excited, or not paying attention. Over-accelerating on that dangerous corner, misjudging the surface, slipping gear. But the parents assumed that I wasn’t. Assumed. No proof. Then when the police had no doubts about it, that 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 we rang the home number. ‘Hi, this is Sarah, you can leave a message and we’ll get back to you, or you can send a fax, after the beep.’ Relaxed, not warm not cold, middle-class, southern. She sounded nice. I held out hope, but I kept quiet about it. I didn’t want to influence Hakim.
I hung up, and told him it was a machine, and did he want me to leave a message, or to leave one himself, or what.
He paused for a second, then picked up the receiver and pressed last number redial (another trick he’d learnt from Lily, who uses it to ring Caitlin after I’ve been talking to Brigid). I watched his face as he heard his mother’s voice. Expressionless, it just grew softer and softer. I thought he might melt away completely, so I offered him my hand as something solid to hold. He took it and gripped it, and hung up the phone.
‘If she is not a good mother,’ he said, ‘I want you to be my mother. The English mother.’
I kissed him on the forehead and narrowly stopped myself from telling him that I would do anything in the world for him.
‘May we ring the other number?’ he said.
I called directory enquiries, got the number of the university, called the switchboard, got the extension, called the extension.
‘Hello, Sarah Tomlinson,’ said the same voice.
I had decided to do it on a wing and a prayer. I could not have worked out a script and stuck to it. This is what came out.
‘Hello, Sarah, my name’s Evangeline Gower, I’m a friend of Ismail.’
‘Ismail?’ she said.
‘El Araby,’ I said.
She was quiet. I heard voices in the background.
‘If this isn’t a good time I can …’ I said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No. One moment.’ She spoke at the other end, and then came on the line again. ‘What’s it about?’ she said.
‘Hakim and Sa’id,’ I said. I could almost hear her heart-rate change.
‘What about them?’ she said, her voice completely different, narrow-throated, nervous, tense.
‘Hakim is in London,’ I said.
‘Oh my God,’ she breathed, and spoke again to the voices in the background. I could hear them retreat, and a click, some shuffling, and some breathing, and then, ‘Is he with you?’
‘Beside me, yes.’
‘Oh my God,’ she whispered, again, and she began to cry, very softly. Hakim was all eyes.
‘What’s she saying?’ he asked. ‘What?’ I held my hand up, mouthed ‘wait’.
She carried on crying. I spoke to her: ‘Listen – do you want to ring him back? Can you take down a number? Otherwise … he wants to see you, you know. He wants to talk. Take my number, and if you don’t ring he’ll ring you tonight. OK?’
She didn’t sound negative. I gave her the number and I thought she got it down. She was still crying. ‘I don’t want to leave you like this,’ I said.
‘I don’t even know who you are,’ she snapped suddenly, through the tears. ‘Who are you anyway?’
‘Evangeline Gower, friend of the family,’ I said.
‘Family,’ she said. She sighed. ‘I’ll ring in a couple of hours,’ she said. ‘Tell him … is he well?’
‘Very well,’ I said.
‘Tell him … say I’m not sorry he’s here.’
‘OK,’ I said.
‘’Bye.’
‘’Bye.’
I put the phone down and said, ‘She’s not sorry you’re here, she said to say so. She’ll ring back.’
‘Alhamdulillah,’ he said, four times, and smiled, and went to Lily’s room, where if I put my ear to the door I could hear him saying el fateha, the opening of the Qur’an.
*
I tried to do some work: an article about an exhibition of Orientalist paintings that was coming up in Birmingham. The exhibition wasn’t open yet and there was some doubt about which paintings were going to be in it, because of some insurance problems. Doubt hung over, among others, an extremely famous and interesting pair with all sorts of splendid and evocative anecdotes attached. One, fairly innocent, harem scene had originally been painted as a cover for the other, more erotic, work, of which it was an almost exact copy, except that the harem ladies were covered up in various cunning ways. The main houri, for example, was sitting with her legs wide because she was holding a great platter with a watermelon on it, rather than displaying herself; another was adjusting her scarf rather than her nipple. The cover lived in the same frame, on top of the naughty picture, and the owner could remove it for selected guests, after dinner, and thus preserve both his pleasures and his reputation. The two paintings had been separated over the years and were now to be reunited. Or not. I was going to have to write two articles, so that they had something to use whatever the outcome. I wrote an introduction that would do for both versions, then admitted that I was not concentrating and rang Fergus.
‘Fergus, Evangeline,’ I said, in my brisk talking-to-people-in-offices voice.
‘Evangeline darlin’,’ he said, emphasising the Irish. ‘What can I do for you?’ This made me feel bad because of not having been able to do anything for him on recent occasions, but I don’t think he did it on purpose.
‘Mrs Bates,’ I said. Fergus fancies himself utterly ruled by deadlines and important busyness; he appreciates you getting to the point.
‘Oh my God, would you get out of my hair with that,’ he said, which was not the response I’d been expecting.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve had it up to high dough with that woman,’ he said (at least that’s what I thought he said – I assumed it was something to do with bread rising; later he told me no, it’s high do, as in do re mi, as in top C, when you’re singing). ‘She’s off her flaming trolley, in fact if she and her trolley were ever intimately connected I’d have my doubts. Serious doubts. I can understand a widow woman being upset but she is the most abysmal specimen of a … why?’
