скачать книгу бесплатно
‘Because it’s out of our hands, anyway – we’re the regional crime squad. Witness protection is nothing to do with us. Oliver’s just keeping track of it. It’s bureaucracy. And pride. No one can quite let go of a catch like Eddie. And resentment. It was a fucking insult when he got cut this deal, actually. Those who knew – Oliver, and me – were insulted on behalf of the other lads, too, because a lot of work went into this, as well as a lot of taxpayers’ money. Though of course I shouldn’t know anyway. So I can’t complain, or have an opinion. Except to Oliver.’
‘But why is he cutting you out?’
‘That I don’t know. That I don’t know.’
We sat in silence for a moment.
Big bony hands wrapped round the beer bottle. I spend half my life round this table.
‘Does he … does he think that you’re too closely involved with me, and I’m too closely involved with it, if you see what I mean?’
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Could be.’
I would be sorry if that were the case. I don’t like to see Harry feeling sidelined; I wouldn’t want it to be because of me. And I want to be uninvolved. I was becoming uninvolved. I thought I had done so well. But now it’s back, but it’s all so intangible, I don’t know what to do. Live with it? Is that the moral of the story? Learn to live with it?
‘I rang Sarah,’ I said.
‘I thought you weren’t going to,’ he said. Not unkindly.
‘I wasn’t.’
‘What did she say?’
‘That everyone’s fine and the police have gone. But she didn’t want to talk to me.’
‘Do you mind?’
‘No. I don’t need to talk to her. She says they’re OK, Oliver says they’re ok, so I don’t need to worry. It’s only them I felt bad about.’
So why do I still feel bad?
Because I’m disappointed. Because if Sa’id had been in trouble I could have gone and rescued him and …
Oh shut up.
And because I can feel Eddie tweaking. He may not be tweaking me directly, the chain may not be round my neck, but it’s on the floor beside me, I can hear it tripping up people I love. He’s still out there.
‘Chrissie rang me,’ I said.
‘Yikes,’ said Harry. ‘The mad lady. How is she?’
I told him. He laughed. ‘Oliver did that too. But he’s too proud to admit that that’s what he was doing. Just went round saying to everybody: “I haven’t always been very … well anyway sorry.”’
‘She was kind of sweet,’ I said.
‘Well, off the booze, away from Eddie, who knows.’
‘Still mad though. Wanted me to confide in her.’
He laughed and laughed. ‘Doesn’t know you very well then,’ he said.
‘What’s that meant to mean?’
‘Oh, you know.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Mrs Do-it-Yourself,’ he said.
‘Well who the hell else is going to do it?’ I said, crossly. It pisses me off, when people castigate my naturally independent cast of mind, when they should know full well that I have nothing else to depend on anyway.
‘Yeah. Anyway you’re getting better.’
Then I got a bit crosser, because I don’t like to be judged, specially not by an emotional fuck-up like Harry (though actually he is getting better too). But we cheered up again, then it was time for him to go, and as he stood up he put an envelope on the table, and looked at it, and looked up at me.
‘What’s that?’ I said.
‘Five hundred quid,’ he said.
I raised an eyebrow.
‘I’m getting it estimated properly – there’s a proportion of my salary that is, umm, the proper amount. But in the meantime.’
I hadn’t even thought about money. Jesus, he’s going to support us. Well, her.
Ha ha. I’m being helped.
‘Thanks,’ I said. There was a tiny voice inside that said, ‘What, you think I can’t do it alone? I’ve done it without you for years and I don’t need your bloody money thank you very much …’ but that was some other voice, nothing to do with anything. ‘Do you want to back-date it?’
For a moment he looked worried. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Yeah. I mean – I don’t want to barge in. But whatever you need. Do you need more? Have you got debts? Because I can, absolutely. I mean, up to a point.’
‘Fuck off,’ I said, kindly. ‘I’m not telling you about my financial situation.’
‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘But I mean it.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. And meant it.
If I’d ever imagined this scene I would have imagined that Harry would look sheepish. But he didn’t, not in the slightest. He looked everything a man should under such circumstances. Courteous, firm, a little proud. Decent. But the word made me laugh, because I remembered very clearly how very indecent he can be when he wants.
FIVE (#ulink_4a54bbf6-1cfc-5772-82bf-bfcff3c9c136)
Kicking (#ulink_4a54bbf6-1cfc-5772-82bf-bfcff3c9c136)
I was kicking a rotten cauliflower in the middle of Portobello Road, shopping bags on one hand and Lily on the other, feeling weak, trying to get through the crowd to go down to Ladbroke Grove and catch the tube home. Serve me right for coming out on the Saturday before Christmas. Should’ve gone to Shepherd’s Bush Market, but Lily said she was bored of Shepherd’s Bush and wanted to eat prawns at the tapas bar on Golborne Road, so after I gave her a swift and sweet lecture on what a useless word (indeed concept) boring was, and feeling flush with child support, we came up here, even though I don’t really like to any more. Because before there was Agnès B and Paul Smith on Westbourne Grove, when the pubs were still called the Elgin and the Rose, not Tuscany or the Ferret and Foreskin or Phoney McPaddy’s, when the Italian restaurants were run by Italians, not by people called Alastair who charge ten quid for a plate of pasta and pesto in a room which ten years ago was a squat … before all that, I lived here.
A gust of incense came from a shopfront hung about with paper lanterns. Indeed they all seemed to be hung about with paper lanterns, star-shaped with holes cut in like a child’s paper snowflakes, cut from white A4 on a rainy afternoon. Except that on rainy afternoons when I was a child I used to come up here and hang around with Fred the Flowerman (his name wasn’t Fred), who had a faceful of florescent broken veins, and let me think I was helping out on the stall. ‘Oh no, here comes trouble,’ he’d say when I appeared, and pretend to hide from me. I’d learn the prices of all the bunches and tell the customers, and I’d roll up what they bought in cheap printed paper. Five salmon-pink tulips in cellophane; daffs, the powdered yellowness of their petals, no leaves, milky stickiness from their short-cut stems. Rain or shine, when I was about eight. His son was a cabbie, and sometimes he would appear in his cab on the corner of Blenheim Crescent and yell down to his dad.
The groovy stalls crawl further up into the vegetable market every year. Well, I don’t know, I haven’t lived around here for years now. I’ve been priced out of my childhood neighbourhood, like so many Londoners, by people who think they can buy what my neighbourhood was, and who, by their very arrival, change it. My neighbourhood was mixed, funny, bohemian, black, Irish, liberal intellectual, Greek, Polish, hippy, posh, full of cherry blossom and rotten cauliflowers; now it is full of bankers who go round moaning about the Carnival and congratulating each other on how mixed, liberal, intellectual, bohemian, funny etc. they are. But they’re not. It’s gone. It’s too fucking expensive for those things to survive.
But I don’t care. I was there when it was good, and today we had been in a remnant of it, and we’d had our tapas, bought our vegetables, and fulfilled our purpose. Breaking away into Lancaster Road, losing the cauliflower, I sat down on someone’s stoop for a moment to rationalize the plastic bags that were garrotting my wrist. I felt odd. Lily was looking at me, her big intelligent eyes, her day-before-yesterday plaits with aureoles of fluff from the wind and damp. I must redo them.
‘Mum?’ she said.
I couldn’t stand up. Neither my good leg nor my not-so-good leg wanted to. So I didn’t. Unbelievably weak. I felt as if I had some wasting disease. Maybe I’d caught something in Egypt. No. Too long ago, eight weeks or more.
During which time.
I hadn’t menstruated.
Now I come to think of it.
So perhaps I am ill.
Or perhaps not.
‘Mum?’ she said.
Yes, I thought.
‘OK,’ I said. OK Lily, my love, my darling, I’m still here. I’m just sitting down having a little rest.
Was it possible?
Sa’id was the king of condoms – the most elegant, efficient user of condoms that woman has ever witnessed. We had had no noticeable leakages or spillages or splits. We had had no … I looked back up the road to the market.
We had, of course, had that moment when he had thought that I had thought that he was becoming caught up in his traditional, formal conventionality, and had decided to disabuse me of the notion by fucking me swiftly and beautifully in a doorway in the alley beside Mahmoud’s Fancy Dresses, in the heart of Khan el-Khalili, under the wooden scaffolding, behind the braid seller and left at the oil drums, wrapped in his big scarf, with a scrawny cat looking on and the bazaar chuntering along within feet of us. We had.
‘Mum?’
‘Come on, honey, we must go to the chemist,’ I said, and dragged my legs back to themselves.
*
I loved Lily that afternoon. Fed her, read to her, bathed with her, talked to her, held her, tickled her, loved her. Stared at her. Flesh not quite of my flesh, child but not of my loins. My child. In the bath she blew bubbles on my belly, and scrubbed my back, and sang a song about broad beans sleeping in their blankety beds. She used to have an imaginary baby brother called Nippyhead.
She wanted The Happy Prince so I read her The Happy Prince. ‘I am waited for in Egypt,’ said the Swallow, describing the cataracts of the Nile, the hippos and crocodiles, the gods and mummies, things that exist no longer, that never existed, that exist still, unchanged after all.
‘Mama wants to go to Egypt,’ she said, half asleep. ‘I’ll come with you. We’ll be swallows and then I won’t die and be put on the rubbish dump.’
Bloody story always makes me cry at the best of times.
‘Tell me about Egypt,’ she said. ‘Tell me about cataracts.’
Sitting on an island, on a mass of pink granite, the Nile the liquid child of obsidian and malachite lapping twenty feet beneath us. It moves like oil. Granite gleams up from beneath the surface of the water before disappearing into the depths – are the rocky outcrops knee deep, or ankle deep, or up to their necks? We can’t tell. The sails of feluccas glide by, in front, behind, sliding like theatre flats. Tips of sails appear and disappear behind low islands, Elephantine, Ile d’Amoun. Date palms arch and wave. Turtle doves – hamam in Arabic, minneh in that Nubian language whose name I never remember. A gentle cooing and chattering of birds carries from one island to the next: wagtails, ibis, egrets, herons, kingfishers, swallows. There is eucalyptus, bougainvillaea – pink, scarlet, crimson and purple – high shaggy pampas grass, and sixty-foot pebbles, sitting there. A primeval landscape. It is easy to see the hippopotami and crocodiles wallowing by the banks, beneath hieroglyphs carved in the rock. Pink granite, very like every statue of Ramses you see. We could be sitting on his massive knee, this vast and trunkless leg of stone. The rock looks as if it were melting, and you couldn’t blame it if it did. Hard sun. The swirls of water against the rock beneath us make patterns like Greek friezes, like mosaic sea, folding over and over itself. Where it’s calm, amber-green weed floats like Ophelia’s hair. Above, the clouds are a stippled pattern, a melting mashrabiyya screen between us and the pale lapis sky; beneath it the leaves and branches of eucalyptus make another screen, foliate like a beautiful script, the curved blades of the leaves like each ligature and flourish, bismillah. Behind us, low-swaying branches of mimosa like soft yellow pearls. Patterns in repetition and constant movement. Beyond, ranges of apricot-yellow Sahara, layer upon layer shaped by the winds into lagoons and plateaus, baboon’s brows and natural sphinxes.
But the cataracts have been drowned by the High Dam. What I am remembering is a different thing. Half real, half dreamed. Oh lordy, Sa’id.
I lay with her until she fell asleep, and then I lay there a while longer, and then I got up and went and pissed on the stick, and then I waited, and then I looked.
Blue dot or no blue dot?
Oh – which means which?
Look at the instructions again.
Ah.
So I went and lay down with Lily again, and hugged her to me and remembered how she had felt as a tiny baby in my arms, her hair then, her face, changing shape every time you looked at it; her little boneless arms, her growing strength, her words, her tongue, her belly button and the creases of her neck, her sweet greedy mouth, her lengthening limbs. This long girl-child, whose feet now kick my knees when we lie down together, where once they only reached my ribs. She had learned to walk at the same time as I had learned to walk again after breaking myself in the accident, hobbling and wobbling together at Mum and Dad’s when we were staying there, stumbling together, seeing each other through. Coming back to the flat together for the first time, on our own four feet. Not now my only child.
I didn’t think that I could love this new thing as much as I love Lily. I didn’t think it was entirely right to grow my own-flesh-child when I had Lily. It might make her sad. She might feel left out.
And at the same time, despite that, I was very profoundly happy.
*
On Sunday I sat very still. Lily played around me, my satellite. I was actually in a trance of some kind. I stared a lot. Lily was gentle with me. Brigid called with the children and took her to the park. I declined, in favour of sleep. Brigid gave me a long look but I said nothing. Brigid, my friend and neighbour, mother of four, knows me well. I was afraid to speak to her because she would guess. Zeinab, my Egyptian friend from our schooldays, rang to see if we wanted to go and play. I let the machine take it.
While they were out, Chrissie turned up on my doorstep, standing on the communal balcony looking like a rich person who has strayed from her red carpet by mistake into some grubby area of reality, beyond the limelight of money.
‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’
She was carrying a handbag and wearing big hair and sunglasses, which she took off immediately I answered the door. I could see she had been crying.
‘Are you drunk?’ I said.
‘Absolutely not,’ she replied. ‘Still clean and planning to remain so but, please, I need your help.’
Oh no. No no no.
‘What?’ I said. Now why did I say that? Something in her face made me. Something in my heart. I didn’t say fuck off, madwoman. I said, ‘What?’
‘I want to tell you something because I can’t think of anyone else to tell. I don’t know what to do. I am going out of my mind. I terribly don’t want to. I want to be normal and I – can I come in?’
I let her in. I don’t have much truck with words like normal – either we’re all normal or we’re all strange. In which case it’s perfectly normal to be strange – indeed it might be strange to be normal. None of which is any help to anything – so why bother to mention it? But I knew what she meant. I knew about desiring the safety you perceive other people’s lives to contain. We went through to the kitchen.
‘I see in you that you like to be normal too,’ she said. ‘But you’re not. So I thought you might understand. And you might tell me if I’m crazy. Which I might be anyway because of the drying out but I cannot tell the people at the clinic about this because it is the kind of thing they section you for. I would, if I was them.’
‘What.’ I said.
I was still standing.
‘I’ve been visiting Eddie’s grave,’ she said.
I said nothing.
‘Well his – filing cabinet. Like they have in Italy. Little cupboard, for his urn.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
