Desiring Cairo

For a moment I thought he was calling me mother. Then I realised no, he’s just saying it.

Mother.

‘Mother?’ I repeated, intelligently.

He leaned forward and rested his forehead against the glass.

‘I have a mother,’ he whispered.

‘Ah,’ I murmured.

He leaned.

‘And?’ I suggested.

He leaned back. ‘I have a mother.’

There’s nothing you can do really but sit it out.

I sat.

‘An English mother,’ he murmured.

‘English mother!’

I was surprised. I was very surprised. All I had known was absent mother, gone mother, unspoken-about mother, maybe dead mother, maybe shamed mother. English mother, though, was something new.

‘English mother gone back to England. I want her. I look for her. Please don’t tell my brother or my father.’

Not bothering to point out how unlikely it was that I would happen to be talking to either of them, I just goggled at him.

‘But Hakim, that’s good! Finding a mother isn’t – yes, it might be complicated and everything but it’s basically a good thing to do. It’s … and English! So you’re half English! Blimey! … but why did she … I mean, tell me the story …’

I was rather pleased to see a boy so distraught at disobeying his parent. It seemed so old-fashioned, so honourable, so decent and right and endearing. And I was sorry for him, and I was excited about it, and relieved that it wasn’t something horrible. Also I know, as adult to adult, that Abu Sa’id is not an unreasonable man, and would probably, I thought, forgive his son for his natural curiosity and desire for his mother. But then – I’m not family. And I’m not Egyptian. And I’m not him. I cannot know where his limits are.

‘I don’t know the story,’ he said. ‘I was small. Five years. Sa’id was ten years. He never talked of her. Never. My father said nothing. Never. Not to talk of her, not allowed. When I cried for mama, there was Mariam.’

‘Who’s Mariam?’ I asked.

‘The woman in my father’s house. Second wife. New mama. The sad woman nobody love.’ I remembered the woman who moved like a fish, and hid from me. His wife. The woman in his house. I remembered his unwonted kindness to two English girls. A clear picture sprang up of a man heartbroken by a deserting wife, who still loved her enough to be kind to her countrywomen for her sake. And two bereft boys being foul to a substitute mother. And that poor woman, whom nobody loved. I was nearly in tears myself.

‘And you want to find her.’

‘Yes.’

‘What will you do when you find her?’

‘I will … ask her why she leaved. See if she is a good woman or bad. See what is my English me.’

Well, you can’t fault that.

‘I’ll help you, then,’ I said.

He smiled at me. I found myself thinking ‘You big softy’, and I wasn’t sure if I meant myself or him.

I took one look at the endless shelves of huge volumes in the high institutional halls of the Public Search Room and decided to leave Hakim to it. But of course I couldn’t.

‘What was her maiden name?’ I said. Hakim tried and tried to pronounce it but the sounds just didn’t work in his mouth.

We got it in the end. Tomlinson (I think. Could be Tompkinson). It only took another half-hour to find that in 1984 she had married a man called Stephen John Lockwood, in London.

*

I’d arranged to meet Harry in a sandwich shop in Strutton Ground, near Scotland Yard. I had toasted cheese and salami with gherkins, and he sneered slightly at my choice. He had a cappuccino with his ham roll, and I sneered slightly at that. I don’t think men should drink frothy things with chocolate on top. So it wasn’t great even before we started.

‘Well, to put your mind at rest, I didn’t drag you here to talk about Lily,’ he said, straight off. I was so pleasantly surprised that I almost forgave him for sneering at my sandwich, but then I got pissed off again about his power to relieve me by saying he wasn’t going to mention that which I thought he had no business mentioning anyway.

‘Good,’ I said, more briskly than I might have. ‘So what is it?’ Oh shit, I thought, it’s all going wrong. I don’t want not to get on with him. Oh bugger. (Not bugger, mummy, bother.)

‘I thought you might like an update on Ben Cooper and your friend Eddie,’ he said, rising to the mood of the occasion. Eddie is no friend of mine and Harry knows it.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Yes, I would.’

‘Well,’ said Harry, ‘as you know, Ben has been evading the police inquiry into his misdemeanours by claiming ill health.’ I did know. The slimy bastard had got a psychiatrist to say that the stress of having to account for himself might drive him to suicide. (Eddie Bates had tried a similar ploy – they’d said he wasn’t well enough to stand trial, but he’d had to, in the end.) Cooper had kept it up for over a year now. And because he hasn’t had his fair hearing yet, he can’t be sacked, so he’s still sitting about on sick leave, on full pay, the slug, and I’m still sitting about wondering whether I’m going to be called to help put him away. Which I would be happy to do, because he was at least in part responsible for my sister’s downfall. Because he was in business with her making the nasty little videos, and because he was the one who, when Eddie Bates saw me dance and wanted me, arranged for Janie to wear my costumes, masquerade as me, and sell herself, as me, to him.

Even as I write it a damp toad settles again in my belly. For Janie, for Eddie, and for my own shame.

‘Well now his lawyers are saying that it was too long ago,’ Harry was saying, ‘and the case should be dropped.’

My jaw dropped to match.

‘Surely not,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe it. He can’t get away with it. I …’ Mouthing like a goldfish. Pointless.

‘Well no, he probably won’t,’ said Harry. ‘But he might.’

‘Anyway that’s not all,’ he said. I looked up.

‘Um,’ he said.

‘Yes?’

He looked tired and sad.

‘Eddie Bates is dead,’ he said.

It all stood still for a moment.

And another. Then …