Louisa Young - Tree of Pearls

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.