It was only about twenty years ago, and a different world. Answerphones not mobiles, no internet. Tickets and conductors on the bus. And it was before 9/11, and the mass collapse of international innocence which 9/11 and George Bush’s reaction to it dragged in their miserable, brutalising wake. Could I write a story now, where an English girl and her Egyptian lover meet at the surface of the water? Yes, of course – but it could not be this story.
Anyway, I have grown up too thoughtful to write like this now. I exhaust myself even reading it.
I see too that these, my first novels, were the first pressing of thoughts and obsessions which have cropped up again and again in things I’ve written since. It seems I only really care about love and death and surgery and history and motorbikes and music and damage and babies, and the man I was in love with most of my life, who has appeared in various guises in every book I have ever written. I realise I continue to plagiarise myself all the time, emotionally and subject-wise. And I see the roots of other patterns – Baby Love, my first novel, turned into a trilogy all of its own accord. Since then, I’ve written another two novels that accidentally turned into trilogies – and one of those trilogies is showing signs of becoming a quartet.
People ask, oh, are they autobiographical? I do see, in these pages, my old friends when we were younger, their jokes and habits, places I used to live, lives I used to live. I glimpse, with a slight shock, garments I owned, a bed, a phrase … To be honest I made myself cry once or twice.
But, though much is undigested and autobiographical, in the way of a young person’s writing, I can say this: be careful what you write. When I started these novels I was not a single mother, I didn’t live in Shepherds Bush, I didn’t have a bad leg and I wasn’t going out with a policeman. By the time they were finished, all these things had come about. However as god is my witness to this day I never have never belly danced, nor hit anyone over the head with a poker.
Louisa Young
London 2015
When Hakim ibn Ismail el Araby turned up on my doorstep, trailing clouds of chaos in his wake, I naturally assumed that the anonymous letters had something to do with him. Not that they were from him – like the rest of his family, the boy could haggle in ten languages and convert currencies, to his own advantage, faster than I could find a calculator, but writing in English was not one of his accomplishments. No, I rather thought they might be to him.
‘I don’t know if this is for you,’ I said, over the breakfast table on the morning after his arrival. There we were, the three of us: Hakim and Lily tucking into boiled eggs and toast, and me making coffee, washing up, wiping surfaces, fetching the post. I don’t normally make breakfast for young men who turn up out of the blue, but I do boil eggs for Lily. It makes me feel that I am giving her security, which she needs.
‘My letter?’ he said. ‘You open, so you can read.’
I had already seen what it said. I was thinking all the obvious things – considering the nice-quality white envelope (no name, just my address), the perfectly ordinary looking office-type typing, the perfectly ordinary Mount Pleasant postmark (just one of London’s main and busiest post offices). And inside a perfectly ordinary-looking piece of white A4 paper, food of a million photocopiers and printers, with ‘You killed my love’ typed on it.
‘It says “You killed my love”,’ I said.
‘Strange for letter,’ he said. ‘Not mine, I think. Who do you love?’
‘Not my love. The person who wrote the letter’s love. I think.’
‘Their love for you? Or what?’ he said.
‘I don’t think so. Nobody loves me.’
‘I love you,’ said Lily. ‘You know I do. I love you up to the moon and back again. Don’t tell porkies.’
Lily my five-year-old daughter loves me. Big-eyed little-mouthed fat-cheeked clever-browed Lily. I basked in that for a moment. I’ll never be used to it, unimpressed by it. Then I ran through the other love-contenders. Neil my lawyer friend doesn’t love me any more. Harry … Harry who was my love … well (as the Shangri-Las sang) I called it love … Harry doesn’t write letters like that. And we’re on terms now, we speak, we have dismantled our melodrama, more or less. And my mum and dad love me. I didn’t think it was them either. Though I had killed their love, in a way.
There’s something you should know straight off. My sister died. She was pillion on my motorcycle, pregnant, claiming that she needed rescuing from her then boyfriend who she said was violent … Lily is – was – hers. Mine now. It’s a long story and it has given me enough pain and grief over the years, and since everything settled a year and a half ago I do not want to drag over it.
I have grown up into a very private and anti-social person, what with my terrible experiences and my exciting past life. I was seriously fantasising about moving to the country when Hakim appeared. In fact I believe I was looking at a clutch of estate agents’ details at the very moment my doorbell rang. It was September the eighth. Lily had started school that week. I wasn’t worried about her, because she had been going to nursery for years, and we’d done the preview days where she goes in for a few hours before lunch and I hold her hand a bit. We’d bought a duffel coat though it was too warm for it; her Teletubby came to the gates with us although he wasn’t allowed to stay.
So. Mid-morning, September the eighth. Nine days after Princess Diana was killed, two days after her funeral. You can probably imagine why I had been hiding my head under a cushion for a week. Young mothers dead in car crashes upset me no end. Cover their faces, and all that, when they die young. And cover my face too. Deep in the sand.
Watching (because no, I didn’t join in) the national grievathon made me want to spit. This happens every day. Every day death turns people inside out, and when they get themselves right side out again they don’t fit any more. Every day grief craps in the corners of someone’s mind, somewhere where they can’t find it, and if they can they can never get rid of the smell. To see it all writ so large and so sentimental for someone who we only saw on television, made me, what, angry. Resentful. I wasn’t proud of that. Part of me would have liked to unite with the nation – truly. I get lonely out here, being a curmudgeon and an eccentric. But I kept wanting to shout at them. I’ve lost to death, I know what it is – and this is not your loss. Haven’t you any grief of your own?
And for her children it’s just motherlessness. Motherless children. Like so many.
Anyway. That morning. The doorbell rang. I answered it. There stood a young man in beautifully cut but unavoidably vulgar white clothes, with a dark overcoat which didn’t really know what to do with itself slung over his shoulders. Or perhaps it was his shoulders which didn’t know what to do with an overcoat. He looked too young for his clothes, his hair too short. Beside him was a large suitcase. He had a small teardrop-shaped aya of the Qur’an in gold hanging on a chain round his neck, but I didn’t need that to tell me he was Egyptian. There is something about that country, and it was all over him. Furthermore I knew his face.
He smiled a little nervously, the look at odds with his flashy clothes. ‘Salaam alekum,’ he said. ‘Madame Angelina? Good morning. Hello.’
I got the impression that he wasn’t sure which greeting was the correct one for the circumstances. Not knowing quite what the circumstances were myself, I wasn’t able to help him.
‘We alekum elsalaam,’ I replied automatically.
‘Amira Amar,’ he said quietly. Amira Amar means Princess Moon. Amar means beautiful, as well. It is a name some people used to call me when I stayed? lived? when I was in Egypt, ten years ago. After I ran away from Harry because he threw the chair out of the window at me because he thought I knew that