Louisa Young - Baby Love

*

Saturday night I got Brigid in to look after Lily, and headed up west on the bus. I might need to drink.

I leapt off at Oxford Circus just after closing time, into a crowd of disconsolate tourists with no clue what happens in London when the pubs are shut. I cut through Soho, passing one of the Greek restaurants where I used to dance all those years ago. The fairy lights were glittering round its steamed-up window, and I knew if I went in Andreas would be there, fatter than ever in his cummerbund, and he’d give me a big smelly hug and gaze at me with such sympathy in his fat brown eyes and say, ‘How is leg, my darling, how is leg?’ Well, I can leap off buses, and cart a three-year-old around, and camel-walk to make her laugh, but I’ll never wriggle for a living again and that is that. Nothing to say on the subject so I don’t pop in to be hugged by Andreas.

You may wonder why I was a belly dancer. You probably think belly dancing is a joke. I really hate to explain things – especially myself – but I’ll try.

When I was sixteen my Egyptian friend Zeinab and I absconded from home one night (hers was strict, mine wasn’t) to go out with some naughty cousins of hers who were eighteen and rather rich. They were fresh from Cairo and not used to girls who went out and drank. They took us to an expensive but deeply tacky Arab nightclub where we all got slaughtered among the smoked glass, much to the disapproval of the maitre d’ who had my companions down as the fallen generation, shaming their families and their country and their religion – in which he wasn’t far wrong. As for me, I was just a no-good Farangi bint, so what would you expect. He wasn’t in the least surprised when, after the floorshow – a belly dancer, of course – ended, I got up and imitated her. He was surprised that I wasn’t altogether atrocious. I was amazed – not that I was any good, because I wasn’t, and wouldn’t have known anyway, but by how completely lovely the movements felt. He said – with an eye to having a sixteen-year-old blonde working at the club – would I like to come back and audition. The boys thought it very funny. Zeinab said I could, but I would have to learn how to dance properly first, and she would have to come with me. So I became a cabaret-style belly dancer without knowing a thing about it.

Not knowing is a situation I have never liked, so I found things out. Took classes, talked to the other girls, persuaded Zeinab to help me out on the cultural stuff. She taught me a few smart retorts in Arabic to remind the boys that though I was blonde, a foreigner and half-naked I still deserved a little respect. (My favourite is ‘Mafeesh’, ‘you’re not getting any’.) There were problems. Like the time I innocently expressed to the other girls my desire that a man in the audience would be so moved by my performance that he would empty a bottle of champagne over me, as I had seen happen to a girl at another club.

‘Habibti,’ said Aisha, who was at least forty and looked after the little ones, as she termed us. ‘He does that to show that he has bought her for the night.’

Initially I just loved the movements and the music, the pause after the introduction before the takasim, the solo, would take off, the slow slow changes of mood. I loved the nay – the flute. The nay transported me. Still does. The moment before the player takes his breath, when my stillness would be perfect, and the moment of shifting … the music is visible. I’d learnt ballet – how to be stiff and fake and eternally fleshlessly prepubescent and unnatural – and had given it up because I’d grown tits. This was something else: it was something my newly female body felt at home in, not ridiculed by like ballet. And I loved the fact that I could make lots of money, and hell yes I loved the glamour, and the men fancying me (though I kept my distance) and the other girls with their mysterious lives, and I loved the fact that I didn’t tell my parents I was doing it. Hassan, the manager, soon leant that I wasn’t always drunk, and that to have me at all he had to put up with my conditions, which were that I would work only one night a week, Friday or Saturday, and that I had to be home by one. I don’t think he knew that these incorporated my parents’ conditions on my social life, and allowed me one night a week where I could go to parties and watch Janie getting off with boys and pay for our taxi home.

And I loved not thinking. All week at school doing differentiation and the causes of the First World War, Saturday night just being in my body. Just like John Travolta.

When I was at university I used to come down to London at weekends to dance. I paid my own way – finally I told the parents, and they took it. Aisha told me she still hadn’t told hers, because dancing was such a low profession. That made me feel bad. I was a secure girl, playing. I knew my parents wouldn’t like it but nobody was going to shoot me or be shamed. I’d passed all my exams, hadn’t I?

Later I learnt about the symbolic significance of the veil, of revelation and concealment; about Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess of love, a virgin who took lovers, symbol of both chastity and fertility, and how when her husband Tammuz died she went in search of him, down through the seven times seven gates of the underworld. At every seventh gate she gave up one of her veils and one of her jewels as the price of admission, tempting and seducing the guards into letting her through. By the last gate she was naked. It was called the dance of Shalome, of Welcome. Salome was named after it when she did it for Herod. I learnt about Demeter resting at the Well of the Beautiful Dances at Eleusis, during her wanderings in search of Persephone (after whom she too went down into the Underworld) and about the Eleusinian Mystery dances, and about the woman called Baubo – belly – who danced for Demeter and made her laugh. I read Carlo Suares’s commentary on the Song of Songs, about the Shulamite – same root as Shalom – and his alternative translation, which had her as a dancer. I learnt that seven was the number of the universe, because the ancient Mesopotamians, who knew most about that kind of thing, knew of seven planets. I loved all that stuff. But I was just a cabaret dancer. I pierced my navel to wear a fake jewel in it. Do you know why a belly dancer should have a ruby in her tummy? Because in the 1930s and ’40s in Hollywood, when a belly-dancing scene in a biblical epic was a good excuse to get some female flesh on the screen, the navel could not be shown. Too erogenous. So stick a ruby in it.

I was just a London girl, with a part-time job and a weakness for large motorcycles and the ancient and universal roots of belly dancing. That’s what I was then.

Harry wasn’t at Gossips, of course. Why should he be? After all this time, just hanging round there waiting for me to look in. I ordered a vodka and tonic and looked around at the relics of a life I no longer lived. All that smoke, all that noise, strangers to me now that I lived in baby-land. You don’t think it’ll happen to you but it does. If the infant wants the fridge door to be adorned with plastic letters of the alphabet, and admiring them keeps the kid occupied for ten minutes when you want a cup of tea and a look at the paper, believe me dignity goes out the window and plastic letters of the alphabet go up on the fridge door. If the infant has eczema and the doctor says smoking around her makes it worse, you stop smoking round her. If George Jones makes the infant laugh and Skunk Anansie makes her cry, then you put on the George Jones. And sooner or later Skunk Anansie sounds ugly and loud to you too, and cigarette smoke is more than you can bear. It’s a damn shame. There I was, fully equipped for a night out, babysittered up, and I didn’t like what I used to like.