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
I was in the bath when trouble came for me for the third and, pray god, the last time.
My habit in winter when I have nothing better to do is to lie in the bath, keeping warm, reading ancient novels, steamed fat from previous sessions. Comfort reading. I’ve done it since childhood: it makes me feel safe. Georgette Heyer, Catcher in the Rye, Raymond Chandler, Naguib Mahfouz, Madame Bovary. That’s where I was, one Tuesday morning in early December 1997, taking comfort after a time of turbulence; settling down and attending to the correct healing of wounds and to the immense and profound change which had come over my life. Out of all that the past months had thrown at me – and there was plenty, let me tell you – one thing stood out: I had discovered that my daughter had a father.
You may think that unsurprising – that she has one. Or surprising – that I didn’t know. You may have a point. But in my life many things are inside out or upside down. Here in the bath, I lie safe and warm with my hair swirling round me and only the tip of my nose out of the water, and think about them, think about the shape and nature of our life to come.
I raised my head from its underwater reverie because I could hear, through some strange relationship of vibrations between the telephone and the floorboards and the water, the ring of the telephone and the formal tones of a voice on the machine. Through the rush of water down from my hair and over my ears as I rose, I could hear that it was not a voice I knew. This made me a little nervous, because unexpected and unwelcome phone calls had been something of a feature of the recent … turbulence. Not the domestic turbulence. Another part. Anyway, I wouldn’t be getting out of the bath for whoever it was, so I turned on some more hot water, removed one of Lily’s sponge letters of the alphabet (G, purple) from under my arse where it had fallen, and resubsided, putting from my mind echoes of the dangers I had come through. It wasn’t Eddie Bates’s voice, and that’s all that mattered.
I lie, actually. It wasn’t Sa’id el Araby’s either. But I wasn’t even entertaining that thought. (Hey, thought, please don’t go, I’ll put on a floorshow for you …)
*
Three quarters of an hour later I trailed into the study, wrapped in a bath towel, and listened to my messages. My message. Simon Preston Oliver, please could Evangeline Gower return his call without delay, phone number on which to do so. Formal, polite, authoritative. No explanation, no introduction beyond his name. He could have been a fitted-kitchen salesman, except that he obviously wasn’t. Or someone from the accounts department ringing to cut off my electricity. I sniffed and pulled my towel up and went to turn up the heating, and I forgot all about him. I don’t want anything new.
First I’m just going to tell you what you need to know for any of the rest of it to make sense.
I’ll start with Janie, my sister, because I did start with Janie. I only ever had eleven months of my life without her – we were true Irish twins – until she died, and since then I’ve had her memory, and her child. My child now, since her birth and her mother’s death, five years ago. Lily, the light of my life and the most beautiful, kind, intelligent, magical creature God ever made, bar none, and no, that’s not bias.
Janie died in a crash. I used to think I killed her because I was riding the motorcycle she was on the back of, but I accept now that I didn’t. It’s taken a little while to realize that. In fact I’m still so … satisfied … with accepting it that I’ll say it again: I didn’t kill Janie.
Before the crash ruined my leg I was a bellydancer. I loved four things: bellydancing, motorbikes, Harry Makins and Janie. A year or two ago, I found things out about Janie which I don’t so much hold against her any more, though I did then. There’s no reason to withhold it though it’s not my favourite subject.
OK. She was a prostitute and a pornographer. I didn’t know until after she was dead. She lied to me. She used film of me dancing in her dirty movies. She wore my costumes while selling sex to my admirers, pretending to be me. Then she died, and left me alone with all that to deal with.
I’ve put all that down and my heart is not beating faster, my belly is unclouded. I don’t hate her any more.
Harry thought I knew about her … activities, and condoned them. This misunderstanding contributed to his throwing a chair out of the window at me, and me absconding to the Maghreb and Egypt for a couple of years to get over it. That was, oh, about ten years ago now.
Then a year and a half ago Janie’s hitherto absent boyfriend appeared, wanting Lily. He didn’t get her (that’s another story) but in the middle of this – not a good time for my family – a mad bastard called Eddie Bates turned up, with a psychotic crush on me, which had first blossomed without my knowledge twelve years ago, when I was a table-hopping bellydancer in the Arab clubs and Levantine restaurants of the West End of London, and he was a diner, a stage-door Johnnie who never – as far as I knew – approached me. Eddie – I am being deliberately light here, just giving the facts – did me wrong in many ways, and ended up in prison, though not for anything to do with me. Just because he was a rather successful drug baron and vice lord. Harry helped put him away. Harry, who when I used to know him had been a wideboy biker, had grown up into a policeman. Not that I knew, until it was all over.
I’m sorry if this is confusing. It confused me too.
Then Harry told me that Eddie had died in gaol, and I thought I was free. As free as I could be.
But then. Then I started getting curious and unpleasant letters and phone calls. I thought they were from Eddie’s wife, Chrissie. And then – well Eddie wasn’t dead, after all. He was alive, if you please, and in Cairo, having turned evidence on his nasty cronies and won himself in return a secret new life, from which he decided it would be fun to carry on tormenting me. By a peculiarly unpleasant and clever trick he got me out there. I went, and ended up saving him, maybe saving his life, by mistake I can assure you. I believed – and believe – sincerely and with good reason that as a result, he is granting me freedom from his attentions.
All these things seemed more or less resolved by November 1997. I had learnt something about Eddie, a realization and a resolution: I could ignore him. I could deal with him. I wouldn’t want to, but if I had to I could. I had done before. Twice. Three times – god, you see, I lose count. The time he pretended to have kidnapped Lily; the time he did kidnap me; and the time in Cairo. So now, if he wants to tweak my chain, as Sa’id said, so what? I have taken the chain off.
And Janie’s secrets were known and settling in the slow, drifting, mumbling way that revealed secrets do settle, finally joining the pile of family history like autumn leaves. Mum and I had talked.
And Lily, my little darling, my honey-gold curly-haired loud-mouthed