Desiring Cairo

‘Sorry?’ I said.

‘Eddie Bates is dead,’ he repeated.

I couldn’t quite breathe. My eyes started flickering around and I felt myself shaking. To my horror I felt I was going to cry. I heard Harry’s voice.

‘Angel? Angel?’

I shook myself and came back to myself. Back to myself but different.

‘Dead,’ I said.

‘Dead,’ he said.

I reached for a cigarette but there weren’t any. I don’t smoke any more. Harry reached over to the next table and helped himself to one from the packet belonging to the man sitting there. ‘Thank you,’ he said to him, in a voice that brooked no denial, and he lit it with the man’s lighter, and gave it to me.

‘Dead,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said.

My face was screwed up and I tried to untangle it. It wouldn’t go. We sat there in silence for a few minutes. Then Harry said: ‘Forgive an indelicate question, Angeline, but why the fuck do you mind so much?’

I couldn’t answer. Not only because I couldn’t speak, but because I didn’t know, and if I had known I couldn’t have told Harry anyway.

My enemy is dead. I should be singing and dancing my delight. If I was made safe by his imprisonment, how much safer am I now?

More minutes of silence.

‘What did he die of?’ I asked.

More silence, maintained this time by Harry. Then:

‘He hasn’t been well.’

Oh.

‘How not well? Not well of what?’ You see, I couldn’t speak.

‘Um,’ said Harry.

Into my state of shock came a sliver of … not fear, but … awareness.

‘What?’

He sighed. ‘I didn’t tell you because I thought it would just … go away. I thought he’d get better.’

‘What?’ I said. ‘Was it what he was talking about before the trial? What was it?’

I could just about register how difficult Harry was finding this, but I no longer let him get away with not saying things. We are way past the silent understandings, or more often misunderstandings, of our optimistic youth. In theory, at least.

‘You know when he was arrested,’ said Harry, ‘he had a head wound.’ I did know. I had inflicted it on him. I had hit him on the head with a poker when he was trying to jump me. Harry knew that. I had told him in the confusion of the end of the day of comeuppance. I seem to remember he had said, ‘Attagirl’. Anyway, some such unpolicemanly expression of approval.

Harry was not looking at me. ‘He has been suffering ever since from dizzy spells. That’s one thing his lawyers put up when they were trying to delay the trial. He’s continued to have them inside. Last week a new inmate arrived, who for reasons best known to himself took the first opportunity he could to punch Eddie’s lights out. Two days later Eddie was found dead on the floor of his cell. They haven’t done the post-mortem yet but it looks like a fractured skull.’

Now my skin was burning up.

‘He may have fallen,’ said Harry.

I took a drag on the cigarette and started coughing. Harry took the stub from my fingers and put it out.

‘So did I kill him?’ I asked.

‘He never said in court what had caused his initial head injuries,’ Harry continued, conversationally. ‘That was one reason why the application wasn’t accepted. The doctors agreed that he was not in the best nick, but he just said he’d fallen, and the damage wasn’t consistent with that, so they couldn’t accept it.’

I stared down at my plate. A gherkin had fallen out of my sandwich. I picked it up and ate it, and a huge sadness washed over me. Why do only mad psychotic scumbags love me, and is that love?

‘You didn’t kill him, legally or otherwise. But you did something,’ he said.

‘Yes I did.’

Bad people around me die, but I don’t kill them, but I do something. Oh for God’s sake. Janie wasn’t bad. Not bad. Not like Eddie.

‘When’s the funeral?’ I asked.

Harry was shocked. ‘You’re not going to go?’ he said. Aghast.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Why? Why the fuck?’

‘To see that he’s really dead,’ I said. ‘Because … because I thought it was over with the court case, and it wasn’t, and I want to make sure it’s over now.’

His face was amazed but kind. ‘There you go again,’ he said. ‘You want to do something absurd and ridiculous and stupid, but you’ve got a completely good understandable reason for it.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Is that what I do?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You should be a lawyer.’

Is that good or bad?

‘But it doesn’t mean you’re right,’ he said.

‘Right about what?’

‘About going to the funeral.’

‘You think I shouldn’t?’

‘I think it unwise,’ said Harry.