Louisa Young - Desiring Cairo

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.

‘I’m sure you do,’ I said.

‘I’ll think about it,’ he said.

‘About what?’

‘Whether to tell you where it is,’ he said.

‘There you go again,’ I said, a little pointedly.

‘What?’

‘Telling me what to do. Acting like you’re in charge.’

‘I daresay,’ he said, unmoved. Only one step beyond his admirable unflappability lies his bossy pain-in-the-arse stubbornness. It reminded me of how he’d been when I first met Eddie, through him; when he warned me off making friends with him, not knowing that I was only doing so because Ben was making me. It reminded me of how jealous he’d been then, when he’d thought I didn’t know Eddie was a villain, when he’d thought that I fancied him. Harry protecting me for my own good, keeping things from me because I couldn’t be trusted to behave sensibly. Harry being a patronising sexist git. Harry watching over me, looking out for me, still caring what happens to me. Knowing me.

I would like to be able to take Harry’s concern for me and appreciate it. I would like to be able to maintain my independence without having to spit in his eye. I would like to think that I can rise above daily tribulation and problems of communication to a superior level of transcendent human understanding, but I can’t.

‘Then I’ll find out from somebody else,’ I said, in a very slightly nyaaah nyaah voice.

‘Who?’ he said.

‘I’ll ring …’ I said, in one of those sentences that you begin, hoping that you’ll find an end for it by the time you get there, but I didn’t. Who would I ring? We didn’t exactly have friends in common. His wife! I’d track down his wife.

His wife.

You killed my love.

You did, and I mind.

Oh.

Well perhaps his wife would ring me. Perhaps in fact she has been ringing me.

‘Tell me,’ I said to Harry. ‘Do people who send anonymous letters ever get violent, generally? Is that the sort of thing that happens. Do you know?’

Harry looked tired. ‘What?’ he said. ‘What a …’

It suddenly hit me like a hammer. Eddie’s dead. His wife thinks I killed him. I burst into tears, stared at Harry in horror, and hurtled to the back of the café in search of the ladies. Only there wasn’t one. The sandwich shop man gave me a handful of paper napkins from a chrome dispenser and turned me round again. The napkins soaked up nothing; just smeared and redistributed. Harry was standing up, wobbly through my tears, tall and a little menacing as he unfolded himself from behind the café table. I remembered his father telling me how he used to stop fights just by unfolding himself out of the squad car and being exceptionally tall. Young miscreants would simply stop toughing each other up and gaze in amazement as more and more of the length of the copper unfolded. He’s six foot seven. Harry’s a shrimp in comparison, a mere six foot four. I forgot for years that Harry’s father was police. So strange. I daresay it helped to get Harry in, despite his past. Though he was never convicted of anything. Nor charged with much, come to think of it. Perhaps his father helped with that too. Not consciously, not on purpose.

The miscreant in me folded.

I was still crying.

‘Come on, lover girl,’ he said. ‘I’ll get you a cab.’ He looked disgusted. I remembered when he’d told me he was disgusted one time before. Over Janie. When he thought I’d known, and I hadn’t.

He took my elbow and walked me into the bright street. I could see reflections of Petty France on the teardrops that shook on my lower lashes. Like a hall of mirrors, a ball of mercury. Like the chrome rims of the surgeons’ lights as they pored over my leg, and I gazed desperately into the distorted reflections of my joints and ligaments, yellow and scarlet and black, trying to see what the hell they were doing inside me. Discomfiting and weird reflections. Harry hailed a cab.

Lover girl?

‘Remember,’ I said, ‘you were wrong last time. Don’t jump to conclusions.’

‘Wheee,’ he said, his face hard. ‘Wheeeee, splat.’

I can’t afford to take a cab all the way to Shepherds Bush so I got out at the top of Whitehall and took the bus. The cabbie tried to get stroppy about it but I told him that if he thought the quickest way to Shepherds Bush from Victoria Street was via Trafalgar Square he must be used to passengers walking out on him. At the bus stop I wondered whether Hakim had got home all right, and whether I would be on time to pick up Lily. On the number 12 I wondered whether Sarah Tomlinson el Araby Lockwood would be in London still, in the phone book perhaps, even. At Piccadilly Circus I wondered why London Transport had changed the system so that instead of getting a 12 all the way through you had to change to a 94 at Marble Arch or Oxford Circus. At Oxford Circus I wondered why you wait for half an hour and then three come along at once. Then on Bayswater Road, having wondered every damn boring other thing available, I started to wonder why I was so upset at Eddie Bates being dead. It wasn’t just that I may have contributed. Or that his wife seemed to think I had. There was something personal. And I came up with some fairly unwelcome reasons.

1) Although he was a scumbag of the worst order, he had expressed a fairly devoted devotion to me, and I liked that, even from a scumbag of the worst order. Which makes me something of a scumbag.

2) Although he was a scumbag of the worst order he had an enormous amount of passion in him. Energy, enthusiasm, life force. He was a big, pulsating character. And it’s a shock to think of that gone. Pff, just gone.