Louisa Young - Desiring Cairo

3) There’s an animal thing, a …

OK, I can’t.

OK.

When Eddie jumped on me, and I hit him with the poker and knocked him out

This is quite hard to explain because I don’t know why I did it. And I don’t know how I did it.

So there he was, with his

I can’t describe this. He’s dead.

OK. I fucked him then, while he was unconscious. I was as surprised as you are that it was physically possible. I was more surprised that I wanted to do it. I didn’t know I wanted to do it. I still find it hard to believe that I did do it. But I did.

I can only suppose that for some reason I still don’t understand I wanted to have sex with him, but I didn’t want him to have sex with me. Because I hated him and despised him. I am absolutely not happy with the fact that I fancied him. Not happy at all.

Silly word, fancied. From ‘fantasy’, I imagine. I fantasied him. And then I realised him.

So there is some animal thing, about a man you’ve had sex with (even though he didn’t have it with you) being dead. And there’s something about him being unconscious then, and dead now. Horizontal.

So there I am, quasi-necrophiliac, fancier of scumbags, flattered by a scumbag’s attentions. Just how I like to see myself.

Let alone about having contributed to his death. Let alone his wife.

*

I got off at Shepherds Bush Green and got to Lily’s school in good time. Just seeing her, love flowed through me, drenching and drowning the poison, flushing it through. You can feel warmth and cleanness in your veins. Palpable goodness, inside you, displacing and unmanning the badness and the shame. Simplicity clearing confusion. Redeemed by love. It happens. All the time.

I bought her a choc ice and we went to the park to chase squirrels.

*

When we got home Hakim was sitting at the kitchen table with all the telephone books, looking sad.

‘There is just one Sarah in London, is not her,’ he said.

I expressed doubt. He showed me how he had identified the S section of the book, and found Sarah’s Hair Fashion Studio in Lower Norwood, and told me that he had rung, but they hadn’t been his mother. I found myself thinking that I really ought to look after him better, and said that after I’d put Lily to bed I would help him. During tea he let her wear his Qur’anic verse pendant, so she ran to put on two of her tiaras and her plastic glittery Cinderella slippers. He didn’t know the story so she told him, then he had to be the prince and I had to be the Ugly Sisters and she was – as she is most days anyway, when she’s not being a baby animal of some description – Cinderella. When the time came for them to live happily ever after she almost burst with joy. Then he told her the story of Rhodopis, the girl with the rose-red slippers who married Pharaoh Amasis five hundred years before Christ. When I tucked her up later she announced that Hakim was her boyfriend, and could he live with us forever. Probably not, I said. We could marry him, she said, then he would. She wanted him to come and tell her Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and he did, including all the boiling oil and dismemberment of corpses, which I had been keeping from her.

When Lily the love fountain was asleep, I was at risk again. Eddie lurked, alive or dead. Spooking me with his … he threatened and hurt me, I hated him, I fucked him, he’s dead. That handsome, thrilling, madcap fellow; that dangerous violent psychotic liar.

Luckily Hakim wanted to cook my dinner. My gratitude was immense. Not for the meal – it was pretty much on the same level as Lily wanting to cook my dinner. Very sweet, hopeless, and more work for me than if I’d done it myself. But for the distraction. After half an hour or so of him being very confused by the contents of my kitchen (the garlic press delighted him), I taught him how to make pasta with sauce out of a pot. He had bought a couple of beers too, which was a relief for me because I am very bad at judging whether the Muslim I am sitting with is a drinking Muslim or not, and I hate to get it wrong. There are clues: if a man has a prayer mark on his forehead, a permanent bruise from the frequency and energy of his devotional prostrations, then I do not offer. If a woman is veiled, I do not offer. But here in London, where so many people are out of kilter with what they would be doing if they were at home, who is to know what to do? Many, many are the nebulous rules, the adjustable rules, the friable rules. I was once warned fair and square to have nothing to do with any man who drinks alcohol and reads the Qur’an: OK to do one or the other, but not both, because hypocrisy is the great sin. I was young and firm and unforgiving in those days, and I took that rule to heart; nowadays I’m a little gentler. Weaker. My standards have slipped. Anyway I am pleased that Hakim takes out his mat and prays in Lily’s bedroom, and I am pleased that he is willing to crack a beer with me and gossip, and with his youth and sweetness keep madcap monsters from my mental door.

‘So, is Sa’id married yet?’ I asked, flinging around for a subject, as we sat down to eat.

Hakim looked surprised at the suggestion. ‘Oh no,’ he said.

‘But he’s, what, twenty-five?’

‘No one is married now at twenty-five,’ he said. He peered at his beer and looked less than completely happy.

‘No one?’ I was surprised. Shagging about was definitely not on in Upper Egypt in my day, and not much in Cairo either, and where there is no shagging about there tends to be early marriage. Or some other arrangement.

Hakim screwed up his eyes and ran his fingers over his forehead, pressing above his eyebrows as if to dislodge something stuck inside. ‘No one,’ he said crossly.

‘Don’t be cross with me about it,’ I said mildly.

He looked up. ‘Not cross with you,’ he said, heartfelt, fearful of giving offence. ‘Of course not with you.’

He held my gaze, eye to eye, steady. It made me realise how seldom he caught my eye, let alone held it.

‘Things are strange to me here,’ he said. ‘At home you are tourist and the tourist, perhaps you know, is number one. And number two and number three and number four and so on. In Luxor for thousands of years we have been guardians of our palaces and graves, and people – you – have come to visit, and have brought money for the people who tend to visitors.’

It was one of those moments which make me want a cigarette. When someone starts to talk.

‘Let me tell you,’ he said. ‘During the Gulf War, when I was quite small. Not so small. After the houses where the people lived were knocked down and the big hotels all built, and the tourism schools teach that the tourist is always right; after they build the walls to hide the villages because the village isn’t so pretty, so they build the walls not the drains, anyway. Then there was the bombardment of Baghdad and the tourists don’t come, and everyone is scared, because so much is … spent for the people who will come. Just before the bombardment of Baghdad, when everything was just so … you know … I went with a visitor from Cairo to the grave of Thutmosis, in the valley of the kings, I think you know the one. There is a metal steps up the cliff, and climbing, and a pit, and steps down inside. My friend’s great-uncle was a guard in this grave. It is shaped like an egg, pale cheese colour with black pictograms, beautiful. The king made it hard to find, and now you just go every day.

‘You know photographs are not allowed in these graves without a pass. The flash destroys the picture. Too much light, too many people. One time, this day, four tourists come in and just start to take photographs with flash. The old man, the guard, says to them no photograph. All he can say in English, in French, in German (except also “Welcome Luxor”). He says it, in English, in French, in German. The tourists take no notice. He stands in front of them, in front of the pictograms. Then one tourist knocks him down. We came in next – me small boy and the lady visitor, the friend of my mother. The old man is on the floor, blood … the tourist taking photographs. The lady visitor picks him up, the tourist police come, fuss and bother, no one saw but everybody knows the old man is telling truth.’