Desiring Cairo. Louisa Young
looked him a look.
‘It’s not unreasonable,’ he said.
‘It’s not possible,’ I said, in only half-fake disbelief. The nerve of him.
‘Yes it is.’
‘No it’s not.’
‘You can’t say that.’
‘Just did,’ I retorted, maturely.
‘Angel,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to … but you can’t control it. It’s not just you. It’s the truth – you’ll have to face it. You can’t just boss it around.’
‘I can have a damn good try.’
‘Why do you have to be in charge of everything?’
‘Because I am. Aren’t I? Who else is?’
‘You could let someone help you.’
‘This is getting a little clichéd, Harry. I get plenty of help, thank you, so you needn’t bother offering. I really don’t think you’d be much use, frankly.’
‘Yes I would.’
‘You. Yeah. Very likely. Teach her to drive and check the gap on a sparkplug, babysit and embarrass my boyfriends when we get home. I don’t need it.’
‘You don’t know what a father might give …’
‘You don’t know whether you’re her father.’
‘I know. It doesn’t make it any easier. She’s asleep in there and … Let me find out. Let me try.’
‘No. Or – OK, yes. Try this. You’re her father, you want to give her what she needs. What she needs right now is a period of calm after a period of upset. She needs it as much as I do. She also needs me to have a period of calm after a period of upset. I’m not confusing our needs here, I’m recognising that they are the same. That’s what she wants, what she needs. You can give that to her. Will you?’
I couldn’t read his face at all. His expression was remote – his Mongolian face, I used to call it. Narrowed eyes and inscrutable and handsome.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘How long a period of calm?’
I could have kicked him. ‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Amazing!’ he murmured.
‘What?’
‘Something you don’t know!’
‘Don’t be like that.’
‘I’m not being like that,’ he said. ‘I have no intention of being like that. OK, tell me how long within three months, or I’ll enquire again. And if you need anything, ring me. I’m assuming,’ he said, ‘that you’re keeping me hanging on, not counting me out.’
My oh my, is he a different man in this white hat. What kind of a comment is that from an emotional illiterate?
I gave him a rather pathetic smile, and he left. Since then, we’d maintained a quiet and sparse rapprochement. During Eddie’s trial, which came up gratifyingly quickly, I didn’t see much of him. He wasn’t directly involved himself – undercover, see – but he kept me posted. If there is one thing I should be grateful to Harry for, it is that he managed to see Eddie put away without my having to give evidence, without my role in the drama coming out. Eddie was guilty of quite enough other things – mister-bigging it for gangs of drug dealers and smugglers and pornography and God knows what. Kidnapping little old me and attacking me was peanuts to his real career, and didn’t come up in court, which was just as well.
I didn’t go to the trial. Didn’t follow it in the papers. It was enough for me that the drama was over. Harry it was that told me the verdict and the sentence. Guilty, fifteen years. I was happy. It was over.
Happy? I was over the fucking moon. I love safety. Safety and calm make me sing and dance. I bless every morning when nothing happens. Dullness and boredom do not exist in a life where activity has been motorbikes flying out of control and sisters dying and babies being orphaned and madmen imprisoning you and bastards claiming paternity of your child. I don’t ask for much. Just for nothing much to happen ever again. Maybe a few little quiet ordinary things. A calm ordinary little love affair, or an everyday kind of marriage. Some job or something. Don’t talk to me of self-fulfilment. I’ve survived; so has Lily. This is my achievement.
After that Harry had spent six months in Arizona on some exchange training thing, sending us postcards of giant jackrabbits in cowboy clothes, and views of downtown Tucson by night. His calls, on his return, had been infrequent, and they were a fly in the calm ointment of our reconstituted lives.
He was out there, and I couldn’t tell whether the big thing that he was was ever going to happen. Maybe he had just gone away. Then again he might reappear, any time, wanting things. Wanting to know. I’d been through it before with Jim, Janie’s ex, in the days when we believed him to be Lily’s father; been through that knowledge that someone outside of you can turn your life upside down and claim that which you treasure above all. And I’d been through it in a different way with Ben Cooper the Bent Copper, when he was blackmailing me to spy on Eddie Bates. I know what it is like when someone has power over your life. It’s bloody horrible.
The one thing that Harry didn’t mention again was his suggestion, at the end of That Day, when I said was knackered and going to bed, that he come with me.
*
I rang him back. He wanted to meet. It seemed to me like a tiny nasty echo of when Jim had reappeared, wanting to meet, wanting to see Lily, wanting to take her from me. How soon before the lawyers’ letters start up again? At the same time I recognised the absurdity: this was Harry, who had been my Harry, Harry who wasn’t a bad bloke, Harry who now wore a white hat, Harry who wasn’t even definitely her father. And I knew I couldn’t avoid it forever, because he was right, you cannot avoid what exists. This question existed, no doubt about it. I knew that all I’d said to him that night on the balcony was untenable. A father is a father – if he is then he is. I’d even agreed that about Jim.
So I agreed to meet him the next day. He wanted to make it the evening, I said no, lunch is easier, Lily will be at school. How much they have to learn.
Hakim’s Business, Harry’s News
After the first day, spent drinking coffee and reading Arabic newspapers, Hakim had expanded his repertoire to drinking coffee, reading Arabic newspapers and making and receiving telephone calls. He had a mobile phone, of which he was proud. By day three he wanted an A to Z. However he doesn’t read English too well. This was obviously going to make life a bit of a problem for him, and for me by default. He decided that the simplest thing would be for me to teach him. I thought it would be far easier if I just showed him where Somerset House was on the map, and wrote out CHARING CROSS in big letters so he could tell when he’d reached the right station. I instructed him in English, he wrote it down in Arabic. I didn’t want to think about it actually. ‘You killed my love’ was on my mind. I didn’t want it to be. I know the form. You ignore anonymous letters, you put odd phone calls down to the vagaries of the system. You have better things to worry about. And I do. I have Harry.
But it was on my mind. Latching on to that which is always on my mind. Because I did … kill. Janie. And however much you may know, reasonably, and accept everybody else’s convictions, there is always … It’s always there. However much an accident is an accident. The sense of responsibility. Guilt at surviving when she didn’t. Helplessness at not having preserved your parents from it. Whatever she may have done makes little difference to that, and the punishment that I had, in losing my fitness to dance, makes little difference either. It matters, but it makes little difference.
I