Louisa Young - Desiring Cairo

‘How long what?’

‘How long shall I shut up for? I mean, I can see you probably need a bit of time, having just had Jim breathing down your neck being the bad father, and maybe a father is not what you want right now, but, well, the question’s been asked now, hasn’t it? So how long, do you think, before you’ll want to know? Because you’re going to want to.’

‘I don’t want to know.’

‘No, but you will.’

‘Don’t patronise me, Harry. I don’t want to know. It’s a positive act of not wanting. I actively want not to know. I desire ignorance.’

‘Why? Are you scared?’

‘No I’m fucking not. Don’t give me that crap.’

‘Why not? I’m scared. I’d think it was incredibly scary.’

‘I like things as they are. That’s all. Harry—’

‘What?’

‘Please can we leave it.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But for how long?’

‘Oh for God’s …’ Well. OK. Buy time. ‘Fifty years,’ I said, rather idiotically.

‘It might be worth pointing out, Angel, that you aren’t the only person involved in this,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry?’ I replied, cold suddenly, and deadly courteous.

‘Lily …’ he began, poor fool, but he did no more than begin before I bit him off: ‘Do you think that I’m not aware of that?’ I snapped. ‘Do you think that every single thing I do isn’t for her wellbeing? Do you imagine that I ever for one moment stop considering what’s best for her? Do you think I don’t know? My whole fucking life for nearly four years has been based on what she wants and what she needs and I do not need you muscling in and telling me that I need to take her into consideration. I do take her into consideration. I do every bloody thing that is ever done for that child including protecting her, when she needs it, from people she doesn’t know who think they have something to do with her. If I’d told her Jim was her father how do you think she would feel now? Now that he’s decided that oh no, he isn’t after all, silly me it’s just my wife fancied having a kid. Who her father is and what happens about that is an incredibly bloody serious issue and if I’m not up to thinking about it and controlling what happens about it then it is not to happen, that’s all. The damage it could do her is immeasurable. And it’s down to me. I decide when and how. And I say no. No.’

So I was ranting. Harry has never been impressed by my ranting.

‘It’s not just Lily,’ he said, calmly. If anything he was even more unflappable now. Unpercussable.

‘What?’

‘It’s not just Lily.’

‘Oh. So, what. It’s you. You need to know. You feel odd. You want to know.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

I looked him a look.

‘It’s not unreasonable,’ he said.

‘It’s not possible,’ I said, in only half-fake disbelief. The nerve of him.

‘Yes it is.’

‘No it’s not.’

‘You can’t say that.’

‘Just did,’ I retorted, maturely.

‘Angel,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to … but you can’t control it. It’s not just you. It’s the truth – you’ll have to face it. You can’t just boss it around.’

‘I can have a damn good try.’

‘Why do you have to be in charge of everything?’

‘Because I am. Aren’t I? Who else is?’

‘You could let someone help you.’

‘This is getting a little clichéd, Harry. I get plenty of help, thank you, so you needn’t bother offering. I really don’t think you’d be much use, frankly.’

‘Yes I would.’

‘You. Yeah. Very likely. Teach her to drive and check the gap on a sparkplug, babysit and embarrass my boyfriends when we get home. I don’t need it.’

‘You don’t know what a father might give …’

‘You don’t know whether you’re her father.’

‘I know. It doesn’t make it any easier. She’s asleep in there and … Let me find out. Let me try.’

‘No. Or – OK, yes. Try this. You’re her father, you want to give her what she needs. What she needs right now is a period of calm after a period of upset. She needs it as much as I do. She also needs me to have a period of calm after a period of upset. I’m not confusing our needs here, I’m recognising that they are the same. That’s what she wants, what she needs. You can give that to her. Will you?’

I couldn’t read his face at all. His expression was remote – his Mongolian face, I used to call it. Narrowed eyes and inscrutable and handsome.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘How long a period of calm?’

I could have kicked him. ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘Amazing!’ he murmured.

‘What?’

‘Something you don’t know!’

‘Don’t be like that.’

‘I’m not being like that,’ he said. ‘I have no intention of being like that. OK, tell me how long within three months, or I’ll enquire again. And if you need anything, ring me. I’m assuming,’ he said, ‘that you’re keeping me hanging on, not counting me out.’

My oh my, is he a different man in this white hat. What kind of a comment is that from an emotional illiterate?

I gave him a rather pathetic smile, and he left. Since then, we’d maintained a quiet and sparse rapprochement. During Eddie’s trial, which came up gratifyingly quickly, I didn’t see much of him. He wasn’t directly involved himself – undercover, see – but he kept me posted. If there is one thing I should be grateful to Harry for, it is that he managed to see Eddie put away without my having to give evidence, without my role in the drama coming out. Eddie was guilty of quite enough other things – mister-bigging it for gangs of drug dealers and smugglers and pornography and God knows what. Kidnapping little old me and attacking me was peanuts to his real career, and didn’t come up in court, which was just as well.

I didn’t go to the trial. Didn’t follow it in the papers. It was enough for me that the drama was over. Harry it was that told me the verdict and the sentence. Guilty, fifteen years. I was happy. It was over.

Happy? I was over the fucking moon. I love safety. Safety and calm make me sing and dance. I bless every morning when nothing happens. Dullness and boredom do not exist in a life where activity has been motorbikes flying out of control and sisters dying and babies being orphaned and madmen imprisoning you and bastards claiming paternity of your child. I don’t ask for much. Just for nothing much to happen ever again. Maybe a few little quiet ordinary things. A calm ordinary little love affair, or an everyday kind of marriage. Some job or something. Don’t talk to me of self-fulfilment. I’ve survived; so has Lily. This is my achievement.

After that Harry had spent six months in Arizona on some exchange training thing, sending us postcards of giant jackrabbits in cowboy clothes, and views of downtown Tucson by night. His calls, on his return, had been infrequent, and they were a fly in the calm ointment of our reconstituted lives.

He was out there, and I couldn’t tell whether the big thing that he was was ever going to happen. Maybe he had just gone away. Then again he might reappear, any time, wanting things. Wanting to know. I’d been through it before with Jim, Janie’s ex, in the days when we believed him to be Lily’s father; been through that knowledge that someone outside of you can turn your life upside down and claim that which you treasure above all. And I’d been through it in a different way with Ben Cooper the Bent Copper, when he was blackmailing me to spy on Eddie Bates. I know what it is like when someone has power over your life. It’s bloody horrible.

The one thing that Harry didn’t mention again was his suggestion, at the end of That Day, when I said was knackered and going to bed, that he come with me.