Louisa Young - Desiring Cairo

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 …

‘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.’