Hakim was looking into his thick dark coffee, twiddling his spoon and making an irritating little clinking sound. He looked about ten, like when I’d first met him. He lifted only his ambiguous eyes to answer my question.
‘I will tell you,’ he said. ‘I will tell you, but now I cannot tell you. For now I need just your trust.’
Oh?
I looked.
‘I will stay just for one week,’ he said.
‘In London?’ I asked, but I knew what he meant.
‘In your house. Please? Then all will just become clear in the fullness of time.’
I was sad that he had sensed unwelcome from me, though I knew I was giving it off. I was ashamed. You cannot be unwelcoming to an Arab. There is something so wrong about it. What churls we are, we English, with our privacy and our territory and our cold cold hearts. In Egypt when men speak to you on the streets what they say is ‘Welcome’. There are signs in the streets of Hakim’s home town saying ‘Smile you are in Luxor’. Yes I know it’s for the tourists but even so. When I think of the kindness, the generosity, the hospitality of people I knew – and hardly knew – in Egypt, let alone of Hakim’s father … Shame.
‘You must stay as long as you need,’ I said, and I meant it.
The sitting room is also the kitchen, and I wasn’t putting him in there, so I had the choice: put him in Lily’s room, in which case she would be in with me, and probably in my bed; or put him in my study, in which case I would have to get a job because I certainly wouldn’t be doing any work at home. I don’t want a job. I don’t want Lily back in my bed, I’ve only just got her out of it.
I put him in Lily’s room. She was narked at the idea, initially. Wouldn’t you be? Finish your first day at big school, and what do you find but your normally very territory-protective mother has moved a man into your bedroom. I told her about him as we walked back from school. She was on ‘Mummy there’s a guinea pig can we have a guinea pig please please can we have a guinea pig’ and I took the opportunity to mention the new living creature that we already had.
‘I don’t want a man, I want a guinea pig!’
‘He’s more a boy than a man,’ I said, hoping to endear him to her. ‘And he’s quite like a guinea pig. He has lovely silky hair.’
‘A boy? You said a man.’
I still hadn’t decided quite which I thought him. A boy, of course, would be easier. I could mother him.
‘How old is he?’ she wanted to know.
‘I think he’s about nineteen.’
‘That’s a grown-up,’ she said, disappointedly.
‘Wait till you see him.’
‘Is he going to live with us?’
‘Just for a little while,’ I said.
‘Will he be my daddy?’
The way they come at you. Out of nowhere. She doesn’t mention daddies for months on end and then, matter-of-fact as you like, something like that.
‘No honey, he won’t.’
‘But daddies are the men that live with children.’
‘Not only, love. Some daddies live with children and some don’t, and some men that live with children are daddies and some aren’t, but Hakim isn’t in our family, no – he’s just coming to stay, like Brigid’s boys do, and Caitlin. Just for a bit.’
‘But we don’t know him.’
‘I know him, love.’ Sort of. ‘I knew him in Egypt before you were born.’
‘Mummy you’re very clever.’
‘Oh good. Why?’
‘You know so many things I don’t know.’
My heart filled with joy at her sweet absurdity. Such are the everyday pleasantries of my life.
*
She started coughing the moment she walked through the door.
‘Lily, hon, this is Hakim, Hakim, this is Lily.’
She took one look at him and then she started to curl. Curled her face into my stomach, her arms around my waist, her feet around her legs, her mouth into a simper, her eyelashes into a flutter. Oh, it’s going to be like that, is it. The last one was cousin Max, on my father’s side: six foot one of teenage Liverpudlian love-god, with long yellow hair and a playful disposition. He gave her a piggyback and she just went around saying ‘Max Max Max’ for a week.
‘Hello, Lily,’ said Hakim encouragingly.
‘Hello,’ she whispered, and then pulled me down and started hissing in my ear like a ferocious little boiler.
‘What?’ I said, trying to edge my head away from her and get the words into focus. ‘What?’
She was telling me that he could sleep in her bed and if he wanted he could have one of her teddies, not old brown teddy but one of the others, the one with the pink pyjamas. Pushover.
*
And that is how we all came to be sitting around the breakfast table reading anonymous letters.
Hakim denied all knowledge. I had no knowledge. But then that is how it’s meant to be with anonymous letters. I didn’t like it.
Then there were three calls where whoever it was said nothing at all, just left the line hanging open. The first time it was only a few minutes, the second about ten, and the third nearly quarter of an hour. I 1471ed them, but of course they’d been blocked. So I called BT to get them to do something about it. But it didn’t happen again. I tried to file it under irritating, but I couldn’t quite.
Then it was chased out of my mind by a call from Harry, saying could he come round. Harry worried me more than the letter. These uncommunicative communications were new, and external, unknown. Harry is deep in me.
Harry is a half-settled negotiation, a half-healed wound.
You need to know a bit more about Harry, other than that he was my darling, for years, years ago.
I had of course wondered how he came to be a policeman after so many years of being a bit wide and a bit flash, automotive man with his fully-powered V8 Pontiacs and his James Dean jeans. We’d been sitting on the deckchairs on the balcony outside the flat, a few days after Jim’s claim to Lily had crashed and burned. The fallout was fairly spectacular, what with Eddie Bates being arrested, Ben Cooper the Bent Copper getting his comeuppance, Harry turning out to be a policeman, and Jim turning out not to be Lily’s father after all.
*
I realise that I’m still not mentioning it. The offensive thing. The other things I found out. The bit I hate and have not … OK. These are the things:
a) My sister never told me she was a prostitute.
b) She made pornographic films using religious accoutrements, specifically clothing more usually worn by devout Muslim women for reasons of modesty, and used in these works of art bits of film of me dancing.
c) She pretended to be me in order to sell sex to men who had admired me in performance.
I don’t like to think about these things.
I recall sitting there with my feet up on the balcony wall,