‘Nothing,’ he said. He looked angry, almost tearful. ‘Nothing. What can I do? I don’t know your writing. I was lost. It’s OK, I ask in shops and everybody speaks Arabic. I get home. But I found nothing. Somerset House is just the wrong place.’
Of course it was. Somerset House is always the wrong place. You think it’s the right place because it was in Sherlock Holmes or something, but the right place is now in Preston, or care of a privatised company in New Maiden. Poor lost foreigner. I remembered my first days in Cairo, days of lonely chaos before I discovered the bar on the roof of the Odeon, and the flat in the block on Champoleon Street – Château Champoleon, as Orlando the Colombian political correspondent next door called it in his camp Latino/Tennessee accent. Orlando it was who taught me never to say America when I meant the United States. There is a brilliant blind chaotic excitement to a new city, an alien city. But God there is some loneliness too. When there’s too much going on out there, too much cardamom and donkey shit and Arabic, too many Mercedes and veils and babies, and you can’t face it, so you stay in your cheap cockroachy room saying it’s only wise to in the heat of the day, or the danger of the evening, pretending that you’re taking the opportunity to catch up on Proust, but really you’re just building up loneliness and boredom to the point when you have to explode. It’s like the internal combustion engine. Suck squeeze bang blow: Suck in loneliness, squeeze it with boredom until BANG! you are blown out on to the streets of the alien city, and thank God for it. Whereupon you suck in strangeness, squeeze it with fascination till BANG! the top of your head blows off with the excitement of it all and blows you into the next strange and fascinating experience. (I was very much a biker in those days, hence the imagery. Orlando liked the image, said it was just like Hegel, thesis, antithesis and synthesis, only in fourtime instead of a waltz, ‘But it’s all dancing,’ he said. Orlando was a gas.)
I don’t know what London is like to a stranger. I should imagine horrible. Cold, unfriendly, cliquey, snitty, incomprehensible. And grey, and strange, and wet, and cold. Light when it should be dark; dark when it should be light. And expensive. And big. But people come here, people stay here, whole peoples come and live and settle. No thanks to the welcome we give them, that’s for sure. Poor Hakim.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I should have helped you. I’ll come down with you tomorrow morning.’
‘Thank you,’ says Hakim.
‘Shukran afwan,’ said Lily, grinning, waiting for approbation.
‘Bravo,’ said Hakim. She went pink with pleasure, and he smiled and pinched her cheek, and she smiled and pinched his and said, ‘Chubby chops’, and he said, ‘What is chubby chops?’, and generally they were carrying on like love’s young dream.
‘So what is it you’re trying to find out about?’ I asked.
Hakim went very quiet.
I pointed out to him that if I was to find out for him where he was to go I needed to know what he wanted to find out when he got there. For a while he wouldn’t say. Then: ‘If someone is dead or married.’ Nothing more. This was irritating, but Lily needed her tea and if something’s not happening you can’t force it. So I fed her and washed her and did all those small yet vital services that prove love and build love and give love’s object a chance of being well-adjusted in the future. (Interesting those people who claim to care deeply for their children yet leave the actual caring to someone else. It used to be one word, care, what you do and how you feel. Now it is two, and you can feel it yet never do it, or do it yet never feel it.)
‘Who’s dead?’ she wanted to know. ‘Who’s married?’ She’s very interested in death and marriage. Wants me to get married, sometimes. Has proposed to me herself, actually. Best offer I ever had.
*
The next day brought the next letter. The envelope sat there like a toad on the doormat. Lily ran to pick it up; I stopped her. I picked it up quickly, read it quickly: ‘You did it and I mind.’
I didn’t like it. Incomprehensible letters making nebulous accusations against I wasn’t sure who were actually a worse incursion into my enderun (it’s a Turkish word. It means that which is within, private, domestic) than Hakim turning up and being mysterious all over the shop. Or were they? Well that’s the problem, isn’t it. They could be. They have the potential. But by their very nature, you don’t know.
I believe I may have mentioned before my slightly obsessively protective attitude to my gaff. I don’t like things coming in and upsetting me. I like being quiet and safe and calm. I believe this to be beneficial to my child. I live every day with the sole intention of giving her enough calm security to outweigh the drama and weirdness of her birth. A kid snatched at birth from the jaws of death, while the fangs sank into her mother, is a kid who can soak up a lot of calmness. Whether or not she knows it. My God, after five years it still shocks me. Pulled from the jaws of death and her mother’s womb simultaneously.
So now I protect Lily by protecting our home and, as my perceptive Egyptian friend Zeinab and my perceptive Irish friend Brigid have both pointed out, my body. And my heart. There had been signs of a little loosening up: letting Hakim stay, fantasising about maybe finding myself a man. But the potential of these letters sat in the base of the back of my mind, crying out to me.
*
I gave Hakim a little lecture on the bus (St Catherine’s House, it turned out, was the place). At home he was cavalier if courteous, operating all the assumptions of a man who expects a woman to wait on him. Out in the world he found it easier to be a child with me, and hence it was easier for me to mother him.
‘Hakim,’ I said, once we were settled on the 94. ‘Lily has bad lungs and I would appreciate it if you didn’t smoke in the flat. Also you drink too much coffee, it makes you manic and nervous. And please tell me now what you want to find out about who.’
We were sitting on the top of the bus, right up at the front because Hakim wanted to see the sights. Willing as I was to point out Shepherds Bush roundabout, Notting Hill tube station and the great dome of Whiteleys in the distance, I was more interested in getting to the point. To my dismay he started to cry. I put my arm round his shoulder and patted him, murmuring kind things in Arabic, the things Zeinab murmurs to her boys when they fall over.
‘I bring badness to you,’ he said, sniffing. ‘I bring badness to your house.’
‘Well just tell me what it’s all about, and then we can sort it out.’
‘I can’t tell you,’ he said.
‘Yes you can. Open your mouth and speak.’
‘I can’t. I can’t. Too much badness.’
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Come on, just tell me. You can’t keep it to yourself, it won’t make it better. Just tell me.’
‘I can’t.’
I was getting bored.
‘Why not?’ I said.
‘Too much badness.’
‘Tell me why you can’t tell me. It’s not fair to bring badness to my house and not tell me what it is. Tell me something. Tell me why you can’t tell me.’
He stared out of the window at Holland Park Avenue unfolding before us, and the overlong branches of the plane trees slapped at the window as if at our faces. ‘I am in shame,’ he murmured.
‘Hakim,’ I said, in the bad mother voice that brings Lily to heel. ‘Stop it. Tell me.’
He turned his face round to me, tears still sitting in his eyes, and said, ‘It is family, Angelina. Family.’
‘Not Abu Sa’id,’ I exclaimed.
‘Not the father,’ he said. And then, with that slight shift of musculature that denotes the making of a decision, he said, ‘Mother.’
For a moment