Baby Love
Louisa Young
A fast-paced literary thriller in which ex-belly dancer Evangeline’s fight to protect three-year-old Lily draws her into the seedy underworld of her past – the first book in Louisa Young’s celebrated Anglo-Egyptian trilogy of Evangeline Gower novels.Evangeline is a single parent whose child is the daughter of her sister, who was killed in a motorbike accident. Evangeline, who was driving the bike, sustained injuries which put an end to her belly dancing career. She now leads an exemplary life, writing and looking after Lily. But when she gets into trouble with the police, she is drawn into the shadowy world of drug dealers, pornographers and bent coppers that seems to have bizarre connections with her sister’s past.With a plot that makes you rush to the end, this is a thriller without violence, a romance without sentiment and a brilliantly exciting novel.
BABY LOVE
The Angeline Gower Trilogy
Louisa Young
Copyright (#ub48330bd-c5fd-5b1d-97fe-5ea89185924b)
The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Published by The Borough Press 2015
First published by Flamingo, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1997
Copyright © Louisa Young 1997
Louisa Young asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Cover images © Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com)
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007577989
Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780007397006
Version: 2015-09-07
Praise for The Angeline Gower Trilogy: (#ub48330bd-c5fd-5b1d-97fe-5ea89185924b)
‘Funny, sexy and tender’ ESTHER FREUD
‘A stylishly literate thriller’ Marie Claire
‘You will keep coming back to this book when you should be doing something else’ LOUIS DE BERNIÈRES
‘Exciting, compelling and tense’ Time Out
‘Funny and scary. In writing honestly and unsentimentally, Young celebrates the unequivocal nature of parental love with verve and style’ Mail on Sunday
‘Wry, perky, entertaining’ Observer
‘Engaging, wise-cracking, likeable, brilliantly sustained … funny, humane and utterly readable’ Good Housekeeping
Dedication (#ub48330bd-c5fd-5b1d-97fe-5ea89185924b)
For Yaw Adomakoh, the good father
Contents
Cover (#u254cdcc7-451b-5533-afca-79c31d084e3c)
Title Page (#u3e1eef99-178f-5fb4-bae1-ba0e99e9cf24)
Copyright
Praise
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter One: An Argument
Chapter Two: In the Pub with Ben
Chapter Three: Us Then
Chapter Four: Tea with Jim
Chapter Five: In the Park with Harry
Chapter Six: Harry in His Showroom
Chapter Seven: Eddie’s House
Chapter Eight: Dinner with Eddie
Chapter Nine: Lunch with Harry
Chapter Ten: Looking after Lily
Chapter Eleven: Learning
Chapter Twelve: Flowers from Eddie
Chapter Thirteen: Janie’s Tea-chest
Chapter Fourteen: Unsettling
Chapter Fifteen: Eddie Again
Chapter Sixteen: Out
Chapter Seventeen: Showtime
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Louisa Young
About the Publisher
Introduction (#ub48330bd-c5fd-5b1d-97fe-5ea89185924b)
I wrote these novels a long time ago. I spent my days correcting the grammar at the Sunday Times, and my nights writing. I could no longer travel the world doing features about born-again Christian bike gangs in New Jersey, or women salt-miners in Gujarat, or the Mr and Mrs Perfect Couple of America Pageant in Galveston, Texas, which was the sort of thing I had been doing up until then. I had to stay still. I had a baby. Babies focus the mind admirably: any speck of time free has to be made the most of.
I had £300 saved up, so I put the baby and the manuscript in the back of a small car and drove to Italy, where we lived in some rooms attached to a tiny church in a village which was largely abandoned, other than for some horses and some aristocrats. A nice girl groom took the baby to the sea each day in my car while I stared at the pages thinking: ‘If I don’t demonstrate some belief in this whole notion of novels, and me as a novelist, then why should anyone else?’
Re-reading these books now, I think, ‘Christ! Such energy!’ I was so young – so full of beans. I described the plot to my father, who wrote novels and was briefly, in his day, the new Virginia Woolf. After about five minutes he said, ‘Yes, that all sounds good’ – and I said, ‘Dad, that’s just chapter one’.
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
ONE (#ub48330bd-c5fd-5b1d-97fe-5ea89185924b)
An Argument (#ub48330bd-c5fd-5b1d-97fe-5ea89185924b)
I had had one hell of an evening one way or another. I didn’t want to see the guy in the first place, but when you’ve known someone twelve years it’s never quite the right time to tell them to go away, specially when you owe them, and I owed him. Well, let that be a lesson to me.
Neil likes me more than I like him. Neil used to ring up and say, ‘When can I see you? Tonight tomorrow Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday or any day next week? Or the week after?’ I liked Neil too – still do – he’s funny and kind, a clever lawyer, probably too good for me anyway. But I’m not the kind of woman who gets a kick out of a good man trailing his unrequited love around in front of her like Raleigh’s muddy cloak. So I tell him, and then he starts saying, ‘No, look, it’s fine, really, it’s not the same as it was, look, I can accept it. Really.’
And I say OK, because I’m not so vain as to believe a man’s in love with me when he’s saying he’s not any more. And then two weeks later something comes up and there is occasion to say, ‘But you said you weren’t in love with me any more!’ and he turns and says, ‘Don’t ever believe me if I say that.’
So that was Wednesday evening. My friend Brigid, who is a star, and the sort of woman I’d really like to be if things – including me – were different, came round to babysit and I thought Neil and I might go to the pictures. That way we could avoid being pissed off at each other over a dinner table all evening. He wasn’t having it. He’d booked a table. He was going to insist on paying, too, and he was going to get his money’s worth of making me feel bad because he felt bad because I didn’t like him as much as he liked me.
So we ended up in one of those unpleasantly modern Italian restaurants in Soho, in which plate glass and cackling pretentious drunkards have replaced all the perfectly nice straw-wrapped Chianti bottles and Sicilian donkeys hanging from the ceilings which used to be there in the old days. I picked at my over-cooked tagliatelle and drank too much over-priced Soave, and he bitched at me.
Neil doesn’t drink. I do. We’d fallen into this habit over the years where after a night out he’d drive me home in my car – or on my bike in the old days – and then get a minicab from round the corner. He never asked to come in except sometimes in the old days when we were young and skint, when he’d sleep on the sofa and I’d resent his presence the next morning. He never tried to kiss me. It was a great relationship.
Anyway that night I lost my temper with him. We were at a red light on Shaftesbury Avenue and he said, ‘So are you free next week?’ It’s a ridiculous question. He knows I stay home with my kid anyway, but what gets me is that if I did spend all my time in nightclubs dancing the lambada with a camellia behind each ear and a handsome Argentinian in my arms it would be none of his damn business. And I said, ‘Neil, don’t interrogate me.’
He looked at me, and then he did something that he loves to do – he walked out. This is normally nothing more than irritating (or a relief) but at a red light just by Piccadilly Circus on a Friday night at closing time it was actively inconvenient. He stepped out of the car, slammed the door and walked off into the crowd.
‘For fuck sake!’ I yelled, and the lights changed, and the cars behind started honking. So I slid into the driver’s seat and took off.
I turned into the first side street I could. Rupert Street. Unfortunately it was one way. The other way. The policeman hanging around on the corner couldn’t believe his luck. I couldn’t believe mine either.
*
Getting done for drunken driving and driving the wrong way up a one-way street is not necessarily the end of the world but it was near as dammit for me.
After all the ritual humiliation – it really is a drag not being in the right – they let me out of the station at about three in the morning, but they wouldn’t give me my car keys. I made them unlock the car for me to take out a bottle of vodka I had on the back seat. It just confirmed their suspicions. I found a taxi – I think the driver knew what time they let the drunk drivers out and made it a regular pick-up point – and got home. They hadn’t let me ring home either so Brigid was lying in half-hysterical half-sleep on the sofa when I let myself in. I looked in on Lily. She was deep in the sleep of the ignorant, golden-pink and fragrant. I could hear her tiny breathing.
Brigid’s a lovely woman but she can shriek when she has a mind to.
‘Where’ve you been?’ she shrieked. Well, it was a fair question. I’d told her not a minute after midnight. Brigid is the nearest thing I’ve had in a long time to parents wanting me home on time. She has pale red hair and four children and every human quality except beauty. How does a woman with four children come to be babysitting? By a precious combination of every human quality and a gaggle of sisters, all in the neighbourhood, who fight among themselves for the privilege of babysitting their nephews and nieces, thus liberating Brigid to sit for me. It’s an unspoken thing among them. Brigid needs money, I need time, women need to help each other. It works. Brigid’s been babysitting for me and worrying about me ever since I got Lily, and I like her. Actually she’s a friend. And so are Maireadh and Siobhan and Eileen and Aisling.
‘Don’t shriek,’ I said. ‘Just don’t shriek or I’ll cry.’
‘Don’t cry!’ she shrieked. I looked at her and she must have understood my look because she went to the fridge.
‘I’ve got it here,’ I said, opening the bottle of vodka.
‘I was looking for the milk,’ she said. ‘I was going to make you a cup of tea.’ She got me a glass and an ice-cube anyway. ‘What happened?’ she said.
‘I’ve been in gaol,’ I said. She knew that was a joke so she laughed. Even as I let her laugh the repercussions were running through my brain. My threat to cry may prove not idle yet, I thought. But I don’t cry. And I didn’t need to cry, I needed to think.
Brigid was still saying, ‘So what happened?’ I told her, briefly. I didn’t think she’d pick up the ramifications and she didn’t. I told her to go home. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘Maireadh’s there with the boys. She’s been arguing with Reuben so she’s staying.’
‘Where’s Eileen then?’
‘Still there. Maireadh’s on the settee … I’ll sit with you a while.’
It was an honourable thought, so I let her for five minutes or so, then I made her go.
I poured the vodka and stared out the window at the stripy petunias in the hanging basket across the way, glowing in the midsummer midnight half dark. Only about half the bulbs in the streetlamps on my estate are ever working at one time, but in summer along the dim dirty red-brick walkways there is always the gleam of petunias in a hanging basket.
*
My baby isn’t mine. It sounds strange to say it, because she is so much mine it hurts, but technically she’s not mine. My sister Janie was killed three years ago in the same crash that screwed up my leg. She was on the back of my bike. I was riding it. I was not responsible. Like hell. Technically, I was not responsible.
Lily was born just as Janie died, snatched from her belly and the jaws of death. It must be weird doing a Caesarean on a dying woman. I wasn’t there. But as soon as I was conscious I knew.
The baby was in intensive care. Janie was in the morgue. My mother was in despair. My father was incandescent with rage. I was in traction. And where was Jim, Janie’s about to be ex-boyfriend, or so she swore though she never got round to telling him, or he never got round to listening. We didn’t know where Jim was.
‘You mustn’t worry about it,’ my mother repeated like a mantra over the hospital soup. ‘You just take time to get better. You mustn’t worry. You mustn’t worry.’
She was talking to herself, of course, telling herself not to worry. Just chanting, quietly, for comfort. She was in shock, I suppose. Dad just strode the green-tiled corridors, up to the baby unit, down to me, up to the baby unit, down to me. He was like one of those depressed animals in the zoo, repeating and repeating his movements, up and down, up and down, to and fro, to and fro, in the cage of his disbelief. I was no different: my thoughts spun to and fro like her words and his feet. ‘Where’s Jim, how can we keep the baby from him, when can I walk, when can I walk, where’s Jim, I’ve got to get the baby, when is Jim going to walk in here, when can I walk, where’s the baby?’ You never know how grief will get you, until it does. All I wanted was to do things, as if doing things might change the big thing. But I couldn’t do anything. Not even the normal things you do whether or not there is grief. Couldn’t go out, or be at home, or cook, or move … I filled my time by demanding to see doctors, as if the more I saw of them the quicker I could be better. All that happened was they began to hate me.
There was a nice nurse, Dolores. She was on nights, and didn’t make me take my pain-killers. ‘I have to think,’ I said. ‘Don’t make me drugged.’
She went along with me for a while and then said: ‘You’re only thinking the same things over and over, why bother? If you’re not going to do anything, you should just get some proper rest.’
‘How do you know what I’m thinking?’ I asked her.
‘You’re talking in your sleep,’ she said.
I told her about it. How Janie was only on the back of my motorcycle eight and a half months pregnant because Jim had made one of his fairly regular phone calls that he didn’t give a fuck about any fucking injunction she said she’d take out and he was coming over now. How he’d done it before. How Janie preferred a dashing escape courtesy of her sister. How I didn’t know for certain that what she escaped from would have been as bad as what she got.
What if Jim comes for Lily?
‘What if he comes!’ I was shouting, shouting and fighting through flame, floating, clutching a child, someone was holding my ankles and my leg came off in their hand, and I floated on up and up without it …
I woke to find myself in Dolores’ arms, my head on her shoulder. The nightlights glowed, the plumbing rumbled. Hospital smell, hospital heat. Dolores’ big brown eyes in the dimness. Why am I so comforted by the idea of an African night? She gave me a glass of water and wrapped a blanket round my shoulders.
‘I looked upstairs before I came in,’ she said. ‘The little one’s OK. She’s weak but she’s OK. No one going to take her anywhere, that’s for sure.’
‘He’s her father,’ I mumbled.
‘She registered yet?’
‘No.’
‘Nobody knows who’s her father then. We don’t know him. Her mother dead.’
‘He’s a pig.’
‘You can’t do anything yet,’ she said.
‘He could turn up any time.’
‘Child’s on a tube. She’s not travelling.’
‘I must have her. I must, you know.’ I knew. There was never any question. Little Janie, my little sister, all of ten months younger than me.
‘Think about that then,’ said Dolores.
‘Yes.’
‘Can you keep her? Can you feed her? You a sensible woman? What your husband say?’
‘No husband.’
‘That’s hard.’ I looked up at her. She knew how hard it was.
‘How many do you have?’ I asked.
‘Three,’ she said. ‘Kwame, Kofi and Nana. My mother helps.’
I can keep a child. I can work. (Jesus. I’m a dancer. My leg is in traction. I’ll have to be something else, then. Can I work? Yes. There is no question.)
‘But he’ll be able to take her.’
‘Fight for her.’
Fight. How? In court? Adoption? How does that work? He’d have to agree. Would he agree? Would he have to agree?
‘I tell you two things,’ murmured Dolores. ‘Possession is nine-tenths of the law. And nothing succeed like a fait accompli.’
‘When can I walk?’
‘Consultant coming round in the morning.’
He won’t tell me anything. They never say anything in case you sue them when it takes longer, or doesn’t work out the way they said it might. Got to walk, got to walk.
I slept again, and dreamt of faits accomplis.
*
The next morning I had the day nurse wheel the ward pay-phone over to me and called Neil.
‘Janie’s dead and I want to keep her child.’
Neil was silent for a moment.
‘Janie’s dead.’
‘Yes.’
He started crying. I sat there. Fed in another 10p. I didn’t cry. He continued.
‘I’m so, so …’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘How?’ he said.
‘Crash.’
‘But the baby …?’
‘Fine. Early, but fine.’
‘And Jim?’
‘Neil, we haven’t seen him. I don’t know if he knows. But Neil – you mustn’t tell him. They had a row … Look, come and see me. Please.’
‘Yes, yes … of course.’
‘I’m in hospital.’
‘Oh, God – are you all right?’
I burst out laughing. Then crying. ‘Come this afternoon. This morning. Come now.’
When he came he said the only thing to do was to get the baby out of hospital as soon as it was safe to do so, take her home, and hold tight. Apply for parental responsibility. If Jim showed an interest, fight it out. ‘Get her home and love her and be a good parent,’ he said. ‘Any judge will respect that. And get married.’
*
You see why I find it hard to be mean to Neil. The petunias gleamed at me like clear thoughts in a mist of confusion. It’s been three years and for those three years Jim has not turned up. I kept track of him. He is well off and well respected, and his nature remains better known to me than to the police or to anyone with any influence over the situation. It’s up to me to make sure he never sees Lily again.
Therefore I don’t need anything on my record. Anything at all. I could make a living without the car, that’s not the problem. The licence itself hardly matters. What matters is the good name. I need my good name to keep her.
I’d been balancing it up. Seventeen unreported black eyes that he gave her (I kept count) and one injunction that she never brought versus several thousand quids’ – worth of lawyers saying that I’m a drunkard, irresponsible, incapable, single and not the child’s parent. That’s what I was thinking about. That and the fact that that morning, the morning of the night I was out with Neil, Jim had rung up and left a message saying he wanted to talk to me.
*
I slept a little because you have to. At around seven I came out of a bleak doze to find that my mind was made up. An hour later I got on the telephone to a certain police station. I didn’t think Ben Cooper would be there but it was possible and I felt I should move as quickly as I could. I was in luck, I suppose. He was there.
Ben Cooper. We first met when we were both instructors on a motorbike road safety course – he as a young cop, me in one of many attempts to prove myself normal, fit, helpful, a credit to the community and in steady employment. Ben Cooper the Bent Copper.
‘Hello, stranger,’ he said when he came on the line. He always said that. It was his little joke. In fact we saw each other occasionally. Not by design, but just because he made a point of never letting anyone go, just in case. I’d been trying to let go of him because I don’t like the guy, and in fact I don’t think I’d seen him to talk to since Janie died.
I didn’t want to ask him, but I honestly thought it was the right thing to do. Perhaps my thinking was screwed. Perhaps the cold light of dawn that you see things clearly by is meant to come with sobriety after a good night’s sleep, not still half-drunk after a night of fretting. Whatever.
‘Ben,’ I said. ‘Can we meet?’
‘Mmm,’ he said.
‘Slight problem,’ I said.
‘Want to cry on my shoulder?’ he said.
‘Mmm,’ I said.
‘Professional shoulder?’ he said.
‘Mmm,’ I said.
‘Anything you want to tell me now?’ he said.
‘Can I?’ I said.
‘I’ll call you right back,’ he said.
Two minutes later he had the gist. He took the arresting officer’s number and my registration number and the case number and a load of other numbers and I took the number 500, which was how many quid his professional advice cost these days. Cheap at the price if he could do it.
‘Oh, I can do it,’ he said. ‘You get some sleep. You sound terrible.’ I didn’t tell him Lily was due at nursery in an hour and a half.
TWO (#ub48330bd-c5fd-5b1d-97fe-5ea89185924b)
In the Pub with Ben (#ub48330bd-c5fd-5b1d-97fe-5ea89185924b)
I took Lily into nursery on the bus. It seemed years since I’d been on one. It smelt the same; grimy London Transport smell, like coins. The day was getting ready to be warm. The clippie gave Lily the dog-end of the ticket roll and told her it was toilet paper for her dolly. Lily went bug-eyed with delight and the clippie crooned at her. I was impressed. A nice old-fashioned bit of London-ness on the Uxbridge Road.
I left Lily with the hamsters and wax crayons and went up west to fetch the car (yes I know the West End is east of west London but the West End is Up West, it has to be). My blood alcohol level was probably not much lower than it had been when they pulled me, but no one was counting at nine in the morning. I drove back to Shepherd’s Bush and slept for two hours.
The phone woke me. Usually I’d just roll over and let the machine take it but I was nervous and so I found that I had answered it before I was even awake. It was Jim.
‘I want to see my daughter,’ he said.
‘Fuck off,’ I said.
‘Angie, listen,’ he said. Arrgghhh! Don’t want to listen won’t listen why should I listen?
He went into a speech. He must have prepared it carefully but its niceties were wasted on me, drowned in hangover, sleeplessness and anger. I could hardly hear his voice for the NO NO NO ringing in my head.
Then I woke up. Woke up too to the fact that he was being reasonable and I wasn’t; he was being civil and I wasn’t; that everything from here on in can be taken and used in evidence.
‘Hello?’ I said. ‘Hello? Who is that?’
‘Angie? It’s Jim.’
‘Jim! God – hello. Oh …’ I tried to convey double confusion: natural confusion at it being him, and further confusion to give the impression that I had thought that it wasn’t him.
‘Jim, I’m sorry, you woke me up …’ Shite, should I admit that? Bad mother sleeps late in morning, answers phone when incompetent, what if it had been an emergency call from the school?
‘What? Er … did you hear what I was saying?’
‘No. I mean. Jim – why are you calling? What do you want?’
He relaunched. He sounded nervous – not surprisingly – and somehow well-intentioned. He was breathing as if he was reminding himself to.
‘Angie. Um. I know it’s been a long time and I know this is going to come as a shock to you but as you know I never intended that my separation from my daughter should be permanent and the time has now come when I think it would be the right thing for … for us to meet. I want to meet her. To see her. Meet her …’ His voice fizzled out. He’s as nervous as me, I thought. He really wants this.
Fear took my heart in both its hands and squeezed.
‘I don’t think I can say anything about this until I’ve had some advice,’ I said finally.
‘Please don’t make things difficult,’ he said quickly.
‘Things are difficult,’ I said. ‘Um. Thank you for telling me what you want, it’s registered, I’m going to have to think about it. You understand I can’t just say “Yes of course” or “No way”. I have to think about this. I’ll try and think how it can be done. If it can be done. You must think too. This is a big upset, Jim …’
‘I only want to see her, for God’s sake …’
Immediately I knew that that was not all he wanted. This was a first step. This was a softening up. I don’t know how I knew. Because I knew him, I suppose, and knew the way he would apply first sweetly and charmingly and then the moment he was crossed in the tiniest things he would become petulant, stamp his tiny feet, sulk. Then hit out. His nerves did not make him any the less dangerous.
‘I’ll ring in the next few days, Jim,’ I said, making it cordial. ‘I have to speak to some people. I’m not saying it’s not possible—’
‘That’s not actually for you to say, you know.’
‘I’m not saying it, Jim. Just that it needs some thought. You think too. Think on this, for example: she doesn’t know that you are her father. She has only just realized that other children have fathers, and she hasn’t yet registered that she might have one …’
‘All the more reason,’ he said.
‘Perhaps. Perhaps. But let’s take it slowly. I’ll call you.’ I was placing my words carefully. ‘Very soon. And we will talk. But this is right out of the blue, Jim. Give a little time please. We’ll speak.’
He seemed not to disagree. I hung up. He knows nothing about children, I thought. Well, that’s probably to my advantage.
*
At lunchtime I went up to the Three Johns in Islington to meet Cooper. I’d always fancied arranging to meet three guys called John there and having a cheap laugh. Anyway. No Johns, just one Ben.
He looked much the same as he always had, plump and benevolent with a very clean neck. He wasn’t in uniform. His idea of plain clothes were the kind that shriek ‘plain clothes’ at you. ‘Slacks’, ‘Sports Jacket’, that kind of thing. At least I assume that’s what they are. Not really my kind of wardrobe. He was there at a tiny round table in the corner, looking almost actively innocuous. ‘Oh, no, don’t look at me,’ his posture cried out, ‘I’m really not interesting at all.’ It makes you wonder how he got as far as he has.
‘Well, hel-lo,’ he said, with a chummy emphasis on the ‘lo’. He made as if to stand up but obviously wasn’t going to. He’d have knocked the table over for one, and anyway he only wanted to make a show of politeness, not actually to be polite. ‘What’ll you have?’ he said. ‘Cider still?’
One of Cooper’s creepiest habits is that he remembers everything, even the tiniest things. It must have been three years since I’d seen him, and he remembered I drank cider. He’d have made a great gossip columnist. It obviously helped in a policeman too.
I sat on a childish urge to order something else entirely – partly because I couldn’t think immediately of anything else to order that wouldn’t carry some other connotation. Anything non-alcoholic and he’d know I had a hangover, and I just didn’t want him knowing anything about me, even that. Vodka? He’d think I’d gone dipso. Beer? He’d think I’d gone dyke. Cinzano? He’d think I’d gone off my trolley. What’s the opposite of cider anyway? And then I sat on an even more childish urge to say ‘No, let me get them’, which would just have made him laugh up his acrylic sleeve to think that it was that important to me not to be indebted to him. Which considering what I’d come for was a bad joke. I had a half of cider.
First he wanted to make small talk. What was I riding now, he said. That uncanny police perspicacity at work again – I’d come in wearing thin cotton trousers, a cotton shirt and lace-up sandals like a Roman soldier’s; no leather, no helmet, no nothing. I told him I wasn’t riding bikes any more.
‘Why’s that then? Trying to lead a clean life?’ he said wittily. Cooper has this idée fixe that owning, riding or even thinking too much about motorcycles is an indictable offence. This despite the fact that he rides one.
‘Doctor’s orders,’ I said. I wasn’t going to point out to him the elongated map of scars on my left leg where many talented doctors had poked their fingers and scalpels and helpful metal pins in an attempt to restore it to something like a useful condition. They did their job well. It works OK now. Pretty much. Nor did I tell him about Lily, and my absolute unwillingness to put her little body, or mine for her sake, anywhere near anything cold or hard or loud or sharp or dirty.
‘Heard you had a smash,’ he said. ‘Would have thought it would take more than that to put you off.’ I smiled. Not a big smile. I’ve been given that line so often that I have no problem at all about feeling absolutely no need to explain myself.
‘Lucky you didn’t smash up last night,’ he continued. Ah. To business. I reined in my impatience and pulled my eyes up to meet his. This was not the time to stand on details like what had actually happened. My dignity was not the point – my licence was.
‘That would’ve cost a lot more.’ He let me stew on that for a moment or two. ‘But as it is,’ he said, pulling himself up on his chair, ‘you’re in luck. This one’s on me.’
I looked at him blankly. If he meant what it sounded as if he meant I didn’t understand. Why would he do that? There could be no earthly reason why he should. There could be no earthly reason that I would be glad to hear about, anyway.
‘HGT 425Q,’ he said. It didn’t help my blankness.
‘Pontiac Firebird,’ he said. ‘Eight-cylinder 455, fully-powered, nineteen sixty-nine or seventy but Q registered …’
A little recognition must have crept into my eyes.
‘… when it was imported from New Orleans in 1986 and still so registered …’
And a little more.
‘… illegally, as it happens, and, as it happens, in your name.’
I couldn’t see why he was interested in dredging up an ancient bit of registration bureaucracy. Of course, if you bring a car in from the States you are meant to have it registered as a Q only until you can find out the exact six months in which it was first registered in the States, rather than just the year which is all they need over there. But nobody ever gets round to it. There are hundreds of vehicles going round on Q plates and nobody gives a damn.
And anyway, I knew the car, but it wasn’t mine. It never had been. Harry Makins had registered it in my name years ago because he had so many old wrecks registered in his own, at his own address, that he was afraid some officious official would work out that he was a dealer and come around demanding to see his insurance and his tax papers and his fire precautions and whether or not he had a window in the room where he kept his electric kettle. Or so he had said. So I had said, of course, register it to me, no problem. I had been under the impression that I was in love at the time, and it had amused me to have a car in my name when the nearest I had ever come to driving anything with four wheels was the dodgems on Shepherds Bush Green. And anyway, he’d junked the car within months, taken the engine out to put it in a classic Oldsmobile – a Rocket 88 if I remember right – and had a breaker’s yard haul away the remains. At least that was what I’d heard. And it hadn’t been parked outside my building any more. I had been living in Clerkenwell at the time: a narrow Georgian house full of despatch riders, a few doors down from Charles Dickens.
But Harry and I had broken up soon after … so what do I know, I found myself thinking.
Cooper was looking at me.
‘It’s all coming back, isn’t it?’ he said kindly.
I put what I hoped was a look of innocent confusion on my face. ‘The Pontiac,’ I said. ‘Of course. I’d completely forgotten. I only had it for, oh … a couple of weeks. Anyway it’s been junked now.’
‘Really?’ he said. ‘And when was that?’
‘Eighty-eight?’ I said. ‘Maybe eighty-seven?’
‘Oh,’ said Cooper, in that tone of whimsical sarcastic disbelief that you’d think only policemen on the telly use. ‘That’s funny.’
I wasn’t going to say anything more until I knew what he was getting at. I am not a person who by nature lies to policemen, but I find a quietly uninformative courtesy is normally least trouble to all concerned when you don’t know what the hell’s going on. Unfortunately, Cooper seemed to have the same idea. I looked at him politely, he looked at me politely. Mexican standoff at the Three Johns.
Well, all I wanted was to give him the five hundred pounds that was burning a hole in my pocket and get his word that his infallible system for the disposal of unwanted drink-driving charges was on my case. I had no desire to get into a discussion about a car that as far as I knew had been squished into a little metal cube and buried in some slagheap in the Essex flatlands. He looked at me, I looked at him.
‘Eddie Bates,’ he said.
‘Who’s Eddie Bates?’ I said, in totally genuine and relieved ignorance. Whatever it was he wanted, I couldn’t help him. I’d never heard of any Eddie Bates.
‘Of Pelham Crescent SW7,’ he said. Blank.
‘Outside which address Pontiac Firebird HGT 425Q has been observed on twelve separate occasions in the past two months. Averaging one and a half times a week. A regular caller.’
‘Ben,’ I said, leaning over the table in an open and friendly fashion. ‘You’ve lost me. I don’t know anyone rich enough to live round there. I don’t go to Joseph or the Conran shop. The last time I set foot in South Ken I was eight years old, visiting the dinosaurs with twenty of my little schoolfriends. I haven’t seen that car since nineteen eighty-seven and I’ve never heard of any Eddie Bates.’
He gave me his clean, steady look. An innocent-looking look, trying to judge innocence. He decided to believe me. I think.
‘How it works is this,’ he said finally. ‘The reason your little misdemeanour last night is not going to be pressed is because I let on that me and my section just happen to be keeping an eye on you in connection with something else entirely which is none of the business of the little street copper who so efficiently picked you up. Your paperwork comes to me and I open a file in your name and pop the papers in and there they stay till kingdom come or till that other case entirely comes to court, whichever is sooner.’
‘Clever,’ I said. I’d been wondering, actually.
‘But,’ he said.
I looked at him politely.
‘There’s already a file in your name.’
I felt a little slow.
‘You actually are under surveillance.’
Alarm was just a tiny, vicious twist in my belly. Anger was swift to follow. I said nothing.
‘You’re not being watched and followed around. We haven’t got that kind of manpower,’ he said. ‘But your car, and your name, are significant in a situation that we are most certainly watching. Now I don’t know why it’s so important to you not to lose your licence, but I imagine the same reasons might hold if it came to being connected with Eddie Bates.’
‘Ben, I don’t know the man …’
‘So you said. That’s irrelevant. The point is that you are in a position to …’
I rather feared I was.
‘… and if you were to I would consider it a great personal favour.’
My heart sank. I had a horrible feeling I had no choice.
‘You’ve got no choice,’ he said.
THREE (#ulink_70779caf-b4b8-5f94-b664-a4e957d53076)
Us Then (#ulink_70779caf-b4b8-5f94-b664-a4e957d53076)
What he wanted me to do was, as he put it, ‘chum up to Harry Makins’. He knew perfectly well the Pontiac was Harry’s. He was unimpressed when I told him I hadn’t seen Harry since the winter of 1988 and my last view of him was obscured by a chair he was throwing out the window at me. I was to chum up with Harry and chum up with Eddie Bates and await further instructions. That was it.
Chum up with Harry. Chum up with Harry. Like, what, ring him? After eight years? Out of the blue? Hey, Harry!
*
I first met him in a bar, of course. Janie, a Cynthia Heimel fan, said that I’d never meet my dream man in a bar, because my dream man had better things to do than hang around drinking. This wasn’t that kind of bar, though – it was the kind where people hang around drinking on expenses and call it a meeting, a place in Soho full of Mexican beer, sharp, fleshy foliage and men with silly hair.
I noticed Harry because he looked completely wrong. No Paul Smith suit, no pony tail, no eyes leaping to the door at every entrance. He was too naturally cool for such a posy place. He wore his leathers like only very long skinny people can: as if he had been born with one skin too few, and the leather was it, filling the body out to its right and harmonious proportions. Also, he looked very slightly dangerous. Very slightly.
He came in with a bunch of Paul Smiths as I was sitting at the bar, and after some brief backchat wanted to know was that my bike outside – I was in leathers too – because if so he had some blue-dot rear-light covers one of which would probably do for it if I was interested in that kind of thing.
As it happened that’s just the kind of thing I was interested in in those days, and as they are not usually available in this country and as (as I told him) I didn’t know you could even get them for a 1963 Dynaglide (same year as me – one reason I bought it) I said yes, and had taken his phone number before he leaned forward and whispered rather cosily, I thought, considering the brevity of our acquaintance, into my ear: ‘Just checking. You can’t get them for the Dynaglide. But I had to know you weren’t a git.’
And then as I leaned back a little and turned round a little to look at him, he said, ‘Can I just kiss you now? It would save so much time …’
Yee-hah! So I said, ‘You can kiss me now and then not again for a month.’ So he did, and we had this fantastic snog in the middle of the pretentious bar and when he let me go (yes he let me go) five minutes later my knees wobbled slightly as I leant back against my tall stool.
‘I’ve got to go and see a man about a Chevrolet,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you four weeks from Saturday at Gossips.’ And then before I could sneer at his cheek the barman said, ‘You Angeline? Mr Herbert’ll see you now,’ and I had to go because I too was there on business.
‘Mr Herbert?’ Harry said, laughing, as he turned away. ‘You a waitress, or what?’
‘No, I’m a belly dancer,’ I replied. The grin that split Harry’s face was something to see. ‘Belly dancer on a Harley?’ he said. ‘Oh, yes!’
Gossips. Harry and I used to go there every week and dance in revoltingly sexual fashion to the slinky reggae. I’d do a camel walk to Gregory Isaacs. Harry loved that place. Perhaps he still goes there.
*
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.
A black man at the other end of the bar was looking at me. I turned away from him and stared out to the dancefloor, glimpsing ghosts among the dancers. Harry and I, intertwined. Janie looning about, shimmying her bum out of time and waving her arms like an Indian warrior goddess. She never could dance. Janie and me laughing and Harry not knowing why. Harry and me laughing and Janie sulking because she didn’t want to be a gooseberry.
I could feel the man coming towards me, so I was prepared when I heard him speak. ‘Old timer,’ he said, in the particular hoarse voice of someone accustomed to making themselves heard above loud music. ‘Angeline, init?’
I turned round and squinted at him. Familiarity took its time to seep into my brain. A neat number two now gleamed where shaggy locks used to hang, and a rather tidy shirt covered up what I realized I had never seen in anything other than a string vest, but there was no mistaking the teeth. Dizzy Ansah, as I live and breathe.
‘Hey, Dizzy,’ I said, with some genuine pleasure.
‘My man,’ he said, inaccurately but affectionately.
‘What happened to the hair?’ I couldn’t help it. His hair used to be a major topographical feature of Notting Hill: a fair three feet of big, clean, good locks. No onion bhajis on Dizzy. They were the best-kept, best-looking and best-loved-by-their-owner locks in WII. His devotion to them was only one of the things that made him so boring.
‘Put me in a box, man. People see your hair, think they know who you are. Got fed up of that box, right, wanted to fly up out of it, float around a bit, see the world, before I landed down in some other box, maybe fit me better. How you doing, man?’
So then it was easy. Easy to mention Harry, easy to find that Dizzy used the same gym as him (Harry uses a gym?), easy to say I was here every Saturday, easy to mention how jolly it would be to see Harry after all these years. If Dizzy was still the gossip he used to be, and if Harry was half the man I thought him, I would either get a phone call or see him here next week.
*
Going home on the night bus I wondered what man was it, that I thought Harry to be? And if I thought that of him, how come it ended with a chair flying out the window?
Harry was a wideboy. ‘Yeah,’ he’d say, flashing his grin. ‘Don’t always fit in the lift.’ Harry was in the motor trade. Harry knew everything. For example: I knew I didn’t have to give Dizzy my number. I was ex-directory – not because I’m flash, but because there’s an old old tradition of not knowing the difference between a belly dancer and a prostitute (I should know, I did my dissertation on it) – but Harry would find my number. Harry had energy and guts and morals and we lived together – more or less, he never gave up his flat – for three years. And we had a blast.
I can’t remember what the row was about.
Oh, yes, I can.
He was never jealous or pissed off about my work. Then one night …
I was booked to dance at Shiraz, one of my regular spots, a Lebanese restaurant just north of Oxford Street. It’s calm, classy and intensely wealthy. Exquisitely dressed obsidian-haired diners greet each other with ‘salaam’; rows of lanterns throw patterned shadows and jewel-coloured light. I liked it there. You could sit at the bar beforehand and drink a tiny coffee and nobody gave you grief. Ali let me change in his office, not like most places where you’re in the loo, washing your feet in the sink and trying to dry your hair under the hand-drier. I was wearing the green and gold. How it floods back.
Zayra and Noor were there, so damned glamorous they looked like transvestites. Noor had just been sacked for dancing too rudely: God, you should have seen her, licking her fingers, writhing on the floor, hands down inside her belt. I don’t mind floorwork – the Indian temple priestesses, the Yakshini, were doing floorwork in the fifth century B.C., but that was for God not Mammon, and there has to be some kind of line between dancing and pornography. The girls were giving me fish-eyed looks: to them rival really means rival. They’d spent too long in the Arab clubs, where you have to hostess as well, and do your second spot at four in the morning. You were sitting there from ten till four with nothing to do except chat up the punters, so if you didn’t want to you were fucked. Half the time if you did want to you were fucked too. Half the time that’s what the girls wanted anyway. The money was good and the dancing was just an advertisement. Well, that’s part of the tradition too. There was a tribe in Algeria – the Ouled Nail – who brought up their daughters to dance and whore from the age of twelve: they would travel from oasis to oasis around the Sahara, till they had saved enough money for their dowry, then they’d marry and bring up their daughters just the same. The French had a whale of a time with them in the nineteenth century. I met some of their great-great-granddaughters in Biskra, after I ran away from Harry. They were still wearing massive feathers in their tiaras and about five dresses each. They were sorry for me with my meagre single dress, and offered me a few of their own to make me decent. Their dance was so different from the cabaret stuff you see in London, and to the languorous Egyptian form, and to the Moroccan Chikats. Those girls could instruct their muscles individually. They visibly, violently, pulsed muscles that I don’t even have. That’s where I learnt to wriggle one breast at a time.
Noor was murdered. They never found who did it. Didn’t care, I think. As they don’t when it’s a prostitute. Or a dancer. Well, you know, not a virgin. Probably. And you know, she was brown, nearly black, so really, so what? When they find a nice pink schoolgirl in a ditch you never hear the end of it. But Noor merited only a quick flurry of press attention, just enough for the front pages of the tabloids to use the studio photos she’d had done to try and get an agent. Little Noor, drop-dead gorgeous in her sexy chiffon outfit, her twenty-year-old body on display, Miss pouting exotic erotic. No family that cared to claim her. I think she was Pakistani originally. She was a bitch, but from what I knew of her life it wasn’t surprising.
So that night: Ahmed and the band started up – live music here, a luxury – and I swept on to the floor, completely ignoring the waiters, who were possibly the world’s most talented men, the way they danced around me carrying their precarious three-storey puddings with sparklers on top. Then I’m up on the table, kebab-hopping. I play to every diner at every table, circling the men’s heads with my snakey wriggling arms; clicking my little finger cymbals for the children (they love us, they think we’re that Princess Jasmine out of Aladdin); grinning at the women, who discuss my technique among themselves. The women tip better than the men, half the time. Belly dancing started out, after all, as a fertility dance for the Goddess, before any of these male religions started in. Then when the Goddess was banned and women put away, it evolved in the harem, as a dance by women for women. It was done as exercise for pregnancy. The belly-rippling movements imitate the contractions of labour as much as those of sexual abandon. Then the men cottoned on, and took to peeking through the silken curtains, wanting for themselves one of the few pure joys that permeate that harem miasma of tension and boredom. At the Topkapi harem in Istanbul during the Turkish Empire, cucumbers were delivered ready chopped, in case the women tried to amuse themselves. Only a few years ago fundamentalists in Egypt suggested banning aubergines altogether. God, what we might do with them! In some countries, the same Arabic word, fitna, can mean chaos, disaster and sexual desire for a woman, and hence the beautiful woman herself.
But that night: within half an hour my jewelled cleavage and glittering waistband were erupting with sweat-dampened five- and ten-pound notes. It was a good night, and it didn’t go wrong until Harry came into Ali’s office when I was changing back in civvies.
He was meant to be taking me over to Soho for another booking. Why wasn’t I on the bike? Don’t know. Can’t remember. Once we were in the car he started in. He said he’d had it up to here and he couldn’t stand it and had I no respect and all kinds of stuff like that. He said the girls were nothing more than whores and if I thought I could get away with not being one I was a bloody fool and he couldn’t stand by and let any woman of his – and I quote – make a living shaking her arse because any way you shake it it’s the same damn thing.
I begged to differ.
He drove me straight back to his house (thus jeopardizing one of my regular jobs) and told me he wasn’t a fool.
I told him I had never taken him for a fool.
He said if I didn’t know what was going on, then I must be a fool.
I said I knew perfectly well that some of the girls worked as strippers too, and that some of them were on the game.
‘You know about it,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Of course I do. I’m not blind and I’m not stupid.’
‘And you think it’s all right.’
‘Of course I don’t think it’s all right. But I can’t tell people what to do,’ I said. ‘It’s not right for me. But, you know, I’m not my sister’s keeper.’
‘You know about it.’
His face had changed. It changed colour, went hard and difficult. Then he launched into a sort of frenzy of fury, anger such as I had never seen. I didn’t really know what I was being accused of. I thought he thought I was turning tricks – but he seemed to believe I wasn’t. I couldn’t believe he thought I was. He knew me. He knew I loved him. He knew – oh, God, he knew lots of things, but he was acting as if he didn’t know any of them.
Actually, he was frightening me. So I left. And he threw the chair out the window. I went round to Janie’s on the tube, still clutching my plastic bag of dancing frock.
‘Harry’s lost his marbles,’ I said, and burst into tears.
She crawled out of bed, made tea, hugged me, wanted to know what it was all about. I told her the gist and she started crying too. ‘How could he?’ she kept saying. ‘How could he think that of you? How could he?’ She was gratifyingly upset on my behalf.
I tried to ring him but there was no answer.
‘Can I stay here?’ I asked, and so I did, wearing her T-shirt and sharing her bed. I couldn’t face the despatch riders and their laddish sympathy. Janie kept funny hours so half the time the bed was occupied in shifts. I kept funny hours myself and didn’t really notice where she was. But she looked after me. We had twice-daily sessions where I would update her on how many times I had rung and got only his voice on the answering machine, on who else I had tried, on where I had left messages, and confirming that no, he hadn’t rung back. I carried on working, dancing with all the allure of a worn-out j-cloth. After four days I went round to his flat and picked up some clothes that had emigrated there as things do when you half live together. He wasn’t there – I’d hoped he would be. I rang mutual friends, who hadn’t seen him. To say my world was falling apart would not be an exaggeration.
I rang, I went round, I wrote to him. I rang his mother even, and God help me I swallowed my pride and rang each of his four sisters and two brothers, including Jason with whom he wasn’t on speaking terms. Then I kissed Janie and told her to be good, climbed on the bike and rode to Gibraltar, where I looked across at the Atlas mountains and decided not to go home for a while.
FOUR (#ulink_ae0556a1-e049-509d-bd9f-8fc84f389f19)
Tea with Jim (#ulink_ae0556a1-e049-509d-bd9f-8fc84f389f19)
But that was in another country, and besides the wench has changed. Now, and in England, there is no ‘not going home for a while’. Home exists. Home is not just me, wherever I happen to put myself. It’s my loved and protected place, my own little sceptred isle. I built it on the safest ground I could recover, in that panicky time, dreaming and lecturing myself in images of trees and compost and roots and how the rigid dies and the flexible survives, but the earth must be good when the winds are high. For six months I had the same Elvis song on my mind: I’m not an oak, I’m a willow, I can bend. Things will shift around you anyway, whatever you do, and you must allow for it. I always thought, in my girlish dreams, that safe ground was love, romantic married love, the everyday realistic kind, and that from that ground grew roses round the door. Perhaps it is and they do. I wouldn’t know.
But I know what safe ground is not. Safe ground is not what I have. What I have is not safe ground. Despite the true true love in my house, underpinning is constantly necessary. You cannot underpin your house with falsehood. Well, of course you can’t. So you must do it with truth. No matter that you don’t like the truth. No matter that I don’t like the fact that Jim is Lily’s father, or that he wants to see her. No matter that I don’t like him.
So my first response to Jim’s request, straight anger at him, was neither here nor there. Jim is a fact, Jim is not doing anything wrong in the long run. Wrong by me, yes, but not actually wrong. Which made me even angrier.
No mention of the three years I have fed her, paid for her, loved her. No mention of the first six months when I couldn’t really walk, and of what my parents did for us then. No mention of why he never wanted her to be with him before. No mention of his complete lack of interest in her – oh, no, he sent her a present once. A bottle of Postman Pat bubble bath. He doesn’t even know she has eczema. Doesn’t even know she can’t even use soap without her skin erupting into an unbearable heat and itching that has her trying to claw it off, and raking flakes off beneath her fingernails. Hasn’t heard the crunching sound of compulsive midnight scratching. Doesn’t know that I change her sheets every day when it’s bad. Hasn’t seen the bloodstains, the tiny scars made by four little nails tearing, a miniature bear’s claw, on her shoulders and her legs and her arms. Doesn’t even know that it’s quite hard to explain to a two-year-old (as she was) why she can’t have her present. I poured out the bubble bath and put her medicinal bath oil in the bottle. But it wasn’t pink. Oh, the tragedies of small lives. I considered adding cochineal. But would that make her skin worse? Or dye her pink? I made her a pink mermaid tail, covered with sequins like a dance costume. I killed her mother.
*
I had followed Neil’s advice. Jim never turned up at the hospital. Mum and I sat there waiting for him, talking through what Neil had said.
‘I should look after her, shouldn’t I?’ I said. Mum said I needed looking after myself.
‘In the long run.’
‘We’ll all go home, and we’ll all see how it goes,’ said Mum. Sometimes she gets firm. Sometimes her little fears drop away and in the face of something big, she becomes big. She was a teacher. She can make me feel like a little child.
‘Your father and I will make the parental responsibility application, and we’ll all stay put a while, and when things have settled we’ll see how they settle. It’ll be better coming from a couple.’
‘Why can’t we just have her!’
‘We can’t because we can’t. She’s the law’s. But they’ll see it our way. Neil says we have a good chance. Don’t you worry, not now.’
They were still telling me to rest my leg when I lost all my patience in a rush, and hobbled upstairs to the baby unit, soul racing on ahead, and said, Look, can she come out, please, please, please, is she ready, can we take her? Mum and Dad came up after me. A nice kind devoted family, trying to triumph over tragedy, wanting to take their baby home.
Mum had been in every day. The nurses liked her. The doctors liked her. They felt, as much as hospital staff can allow themselves to feel, for our tragedy. One little junior nurse cried whenever she saw Lily and had to be moved to a different ward. So Mum was there and I was there and Dad was there and Jim was not.
Neil said he had seen him, and he had not heard about what had happened. It seemed unbelievable. Apparently he had sobered up and imagined that Janie was taking a break and decided to let her stew a little before fetching her home. It had happened before. I think he was glad it had happened then – gave him an excuse not to be around for the birth. Like so many hard men, Jim can’t take anything really hard.
Neil said I was never again to ask him not to tell someone something. ‘Your girlfriend’s dead, by the way, only I’m not meant to tell you.’ Well, Jim must have found out sooner or later.
I was all for just taking her, once she was off her tubes. I was going to sneak upstairs on my crutches, tuck her inside my leather jacket, and ride her home on the Harley with my sick leg dangling in the wind. Never mind that the Harley was a write-off, that I could hardly walk, that the hospital authorities would chase me up, that it was a truly idiotic scheme. I was on drugs. It seemed a great idea to me. Mum repeated her mantra. Neil said no, and organized a little meeting at the hospital.
We sat in a greenish room. Pigeons were nesting somewhere outside the aquarium windows and their babies’ caterwauling sounded like serial murder. There were fag ends on the floor and plastic chairs that you couldn’t wrest apart from each other. My leg hurt. Mum looked as if she were in shock, Dad looked determined, Neil looked worried. God knows what I looked like.
We told them that Jim was out of the picture, not interested. He hasn’t even been here, we said. They said they would have to make inquiries, let him know. We said why? Anyway he does know. He knows she was pregnant. He knows how long pregnancy takes. He knows our phone numbers. If he’s interested let him come and ask. It’s not as if they were married. What rights did he have? They said someone had to find out. We said let whoever is interested find out. We said that formal adoption procedures were being put into place. We said that Mum and Dad had applied for parental responsibility under the Children Act 1989. We said the court would sort it all out but in the meantime Lily should be with her granny. Neil blinded them with legal science. They were understaffed. We were there. Dolores kissed me as we left.
So we took Lily home, and she was ours. A member of our family. Out into the world, out of intensive care, safe and to remain so. The only fly was when Jim rang me, a month after she was born, the day we got home to Mum’s.
‘Hello, Angeline,’ he said, sounding serious and sober. I could just picture him: clean shirt, clean-shaven, his bog-brush hair brushed, his face pink. Jim is a very big man and specializes in bonhomie. He used to wear tartan trousers when he was younger, but he doesn’t think it appropriate any more. He used to be quite funny before he got a job and started taking himself seriously. He’s quite good at his computers apparently. Men like him; women find him attractive, even now – well, then – when his face was already going a bit blobby. He worked out, but the flesh was creeping up though he was only, what, thirty-three. When he’s angry his face goes red and he shouts and shouts and shouts. He’s a bully. He drinks too much and cries when he apologizes. I don’t imagine that he’s changed. I’d like to be able to tell you what Janie saw in him but I don’t really know.
‘Hello, Jim,’ I said. I was quivering. Anger and fear. It’s a bad combination.
‘I suppose we ought to talk,’ he said.
‘Don’t see why,’ I said.
‘It’s mine, you know,’ he said.
‘It?’ I said. ‘Yeah.’
‘I heard it was a girl.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She is.’
‘She’ll need to be registered,’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ I said. I was so glad Mum hadn’t answered the phone. She didn’t know the half of it, but she knew enough.
‘Call her Jane,’ he said.
‘Fuck off,’ I said. Janie had chosen Lily. Lily for a girl, Edward for a boy. If he didn’t know that he didn’t deserve to know.
‘Well,’ he said.
I said nothing.
‘I don’t know why you’re being so high and … sorry,’ he said.
I said nothing.
‘You’ll have to put my name on the birth certificate,’ he said.
I said nothing. Then, ‘yes’.
Well. It was true. You can’t dodge truth. Janie didn’t. And I can’t.
‘I insist,’ he said.
‘I said yes,’ I said.
He began to blurt: ‘Look, it’s not been easy for …’
I hung up.
Mum was furious when I told her. Dad nearly blew a fuse. He stormed out of the house, and came back half an hour later saying, ‘She’s right, you know.’
‘It doesn’t seem right,’ said Mum. But it was true. So.
*
So I rang Jim the morning after I saw Dizzy and told him he could come. I told him I would not tell Lily that he was her father. I asked him as a favour not to tell her himself.
‘Just come and see her, see how it goes, see what is going to happen, and tell her later. If you bugger off again how will it be for her?’ (‘Yes, you have a daddy, here’s your daddy, oh, yes, but you won’t be seeing him again.’ This is me fantasizing about the result I want, for God’s sake. The best possible result.)
‘What’s the point of that?’ he wanted to know. I tried to explain.
‘Angie,’ he said, ‘I’m not doing this on a whim. I want to do it. I’m not going to disappear again. Three years is a long time and things have changed. I’m her father and I want to be her father. It’s not anything personal against you and if you could stop being so prickly for a moment and work with me for Lily’s benefit …’ (He’s had counselling. He’s been talking to a social worker or something. That’s not his voice.) ‘… I would tell you that I appreciate everything you’ve done for her …’ (he appreciates what I’ve done? It’s not for him to appreciate that … who is he to appreciate what is done for Lily?) ‘… but things are going to change now. I’m sorry if it upsets you. I have every right to … visit my daughter and I intend to use that right. And my wife is coming too.’
Wife.
It occurred to me that it might be a good idea to make notes of our telephone calls, of what he said. Perhaps even tape them.
‘I’ll tell her that friends of Janie’s are coming. Please don’t tell her you’re her father.’
‘You’re asking me to lie to her.’
‘Please don’t tell her. She’d be upset.’
We arranged that they would come on Wednesday at four. This was Sunday. Just coming to tea.
*
Cooper kept ringing me wanting to know how I was doing. I started to hate the answerphone. I told him I was on the case but I wasn’t. I was starting to think that I really didn’t like what was going on. Not to fuss about it, of course not. I don’t fuss. Usually. I just get on with things. That’s what women do. Then occasionally you start to feel a little powerless. My least favourite feeling.
I made the mistake of trying to imagine what Jim was going to do. Wasted a lot of energy that way when I should have been concentrating, getting some work done.
I did become something else after the accident. I put together all the notes and things I’d written when I was in North Africa, dragged out my intellect from where I’d parked it after doing my degree, and wrote a book about the history and culture of Arab dance through western eyes. It was full of beautiful pictures and wild stories and did rather well, and now I am known to be the person who knows about belly dancing, harems, women in Islam, Orientalism and almost anything else in that direction that a journalist in need of a quote, or a researcher in need of a radio guest, might want. I work from home, my time is my own and I make a decent living.
Why do I feel I am writing this down in an affidavit?
*
Lily was on edge. I think she smelt it. She was excited about the visit. Friends of Mummy’s!
‘People who knew her, and want to see you. But you know lots of people who knew her, Granny and Grandpa and everyone …’
You can’t lie to children. It’s one of the great true cliches. She knew damn well this was important, because she saw it in my face and heard it in my voice.
They arrived exactly on time. Jim looked older, fatter, more unpleasant. There’s a certain nasty look that prosperity gives to some faces, and he had it. The wife was small and dark with neat hair. Early thirties, well looked after. I couldn’t make her out. She looked almost as if there were nothing to her – nothing to make her herself, rather than just anyone. Just small, neat, dark femininity. A sort of cipher, in expensive clothes.
I showed them into the kitchen. I had thought so hard about this and now all I could think was, ‘I wish we’d met somewhere else’. I felt a profound unease at not being able to read the wife at all.
‘My wife,’ said Jim. ‘Nora.’
Nora. Nora. Well that tells me nothing at all. Hey, stranger, who the hell are you and what are you doing here?
She smiled, a closed smile. I put the kettle on. What else?
Lily was upstairs. She’d said she didn’t want to come down because some friends of her teddy’s mummy were coming round. I called her. I was Judas. That woman there replaced my sister in this creep’s affections and they want you … I don’t know what they want of you but they want you.
Lily came down slowly, bringing the teddy, looking at the floor.
Jim’s face was set, still.
Nora looked up at her and started to laugh.
‘Oh, what a little darling!’ she exclaimed. Lily is a darling. A dark golden creature, with long dark hair and curving golden cheeks. She’s quite like an animal: furry, tempestuous on occasion. Clever, kind, but won’t be patronized. I suppose she got her darkness from Jim, but the quality of it was so different. His is Celtic, hers is like blondeness made dark. Like honey.
‘Hello, Lily,’ said Jim. He held his arms out as if to hug her. Nora leaned forward to take her arm. These fuckwits know nothing about children. Lily went behind my legs, twining like a cat. I sent her ‘hate them’ messages through my knees, and regretted them, and didn’t regret them. It is wrong to make a child hate her father. With any luck she’ll hate him of her own accord.
Nora looked at me as if she expected me to shoo Lily off my legs and into their arms. Expect on, sunshine. I did nothing. Lily twined, and wanted to climb me. I picked her up, put her on my hip, went to a chair on the far side of the table, and pushed a plate of biscuits towards them. What the hell do they expect?
‘What a beautiful little girl,’ said Nora again. Lily didn’t look at her. Jim looked as if he couldn’t believe that I wasn’t even going to say ‘come on, darling’, as mothers do whenever they ask their children to betray themselves.
Nora was flummoxed. She looked at Jim. Jim looked at me. Nora looked at me. Lily looked at the stitching on my shirt. Almost visibly, Nora fell back and regrouped.
‘I brought you a present,’ she said to Lily’s back. Oh, so it’s going to be like that.
The present, like the clothes, was expensive. Harrods bag, tissue paper, little tag (wrapped by shop assistants, at a guess). Lily uncoiled enough to accept it, and murmur thank you.
‘Aren’t you going to open it, then?’ said Jim, in a Father Christmas voice. Lily looked at him for the first time. He flushed. With his face so determined and his voice so fake I considered sympathizing with him, but decided against.
He has a wife for Christ’s sake! They can have their own damn child!
Lily pulled at the tissue paper.
‘Here, let me help,’ said Jim, suddenly standing and coming round the table. Lily pulled the package away from him. He sat down, squashed. So small, and yet so effective when it comes to squashing people four times their size.
It was a Polly Pocket Fairy Princess Ballroom; pink, plastic, spangly, shiny, with electric lights that worked. It had four little dolls a quarter of an inch high with fairy dresses on, and wings. It had a balloon that went up and down, with a basket you could put the dolls in. It had a dancefloor that spun round when you turned a tiny silvery knob. The whole thing closed up into a pink star-shaped handbag that you could carry with you wherever you went. It was beautiful. Lily gazed at it.
‘Thank you,’ Lily murmured, and climbed down between my feet to play with it on the floor.
Nora wanted more than that.
‘Do you like it, Lily?’ she said, calling down to between my knees.
‘Yes,’ came the reply. Nothing more.
Nora looked at Jim again. I touched Lily’s head gently, and said, ‘I’ll make some tea.’ They couldn’t leave immediately and actually I didn’t want them to. I wanted them to see exactly how difficult, uncomfortable and completely out of their depth this situation was. I wanted them to know in their blood that Lily was nothing to do with them; to present them with a clear view of the shining armour that encircled the two of us, protecting us and hiding us yet at the same time revealing with brilliant and brutal clarity that secrets and intimacies and love such as they could never hope to know dwelt within. I wanted them to go home crying.
Lily shuffled herself and the new toy over to be between my feet at the cooker as I poured the water into the teapot. ‘Move back, love, it’s hot,’ I said, but she shook her head. I moved the teapot to the very back of the work surface. I will not be faulted.
After shuffling back with me to the table, not looking up, she jumped up and whispered to me that she wanted to show the ballroom to the teddies, and ran upstairs.
‘She seems a very affectionate little girl,’ offered Nora. Yes, to me. I murmured a nothing.
Jim’s face was set again. He too had prepared, and had had no idea what would happen.
‘Love’s not automatic, you know,’ I said suddenly. ‘It’s not like eyes meeting across a crowded room. You have to earn a child’s love.’ I stopped just as I realized that my words might come over as a comfort, rather than a gibe.
Nora took them as comfort.
‘I’m sure we will earn it. Won’t we, darling?’
Won’t we, darling. Won’t we, darling. The mantra of the happily nuclear. I don’t hate their being happy. The happiness they have is not the happiness I don’t have. Anyway, I am happy. Quite. I think.
‘Uh, yes, yes,’ Jim said.
He wanted to see pictures of her as a baby. I pointed to one stuck in the door of a glass-fronted cupboard, then relented and handed it across to him. It showed her grinning and curly-mopped in front of a Christmas tree, a dark pixie aged about six months.
‘She’s so beautiful,’ he said. Then, ‘How’s it been? Practically? Financially, if you like?’
I didn’t like.
‘Fine,’ I said.
‘You go to work and everything? Who looks after her?’
Do I have to answer these questions?
Well I decided I would. My reluctance to do anything civil was apparent enough. I wasn’t going to give them actual ammunition.
‘I work from home. She goes to a nursery, and spends some afternoons with a friend’s children.’
‘But that can’t give you enough time, surely …’
‘It does.’ I work in the evenings sometimes, while she sleeps. But I’m not going to tell him that.
‘But you don’t have a nanny or anything …’
‘We don’t need one,’ I said. ‘Do you work, Nora?’
It turns out she is a travel agent. Turns out she is rather high up, actually, in travel agenting. Well, I suppose someone has to be.
Actually I am glad. Judges don’t take babies away from happy homes to give them to career women.
Lily’s voice came down the stairs: ‘Mu-um, I need you …’
‘Excuse me.’ I went up. She wanted to go to the loo.
‘Have the persons gone yet?’
‘No, love.’
‘Can they go soon?’
‘I hope so.’
‘I hope so back,’ she said. I smiled. ‘I love you,’ I said. ‘I love you back,’ she said. I wiped her bum and said, ‘Do you want to come down?’
‘You’re not my mummy but you are my mummy,’ she said.
‘That’s right, honey. Janie was your mummy but she died so I’m being your mummy.’
‘Who will be my mummy after you?’
‘I’ll always be your mummy if you want me,’ I said.
‘I want you,’ she said.
‘I want you back,’ I said.
‘Do they know my mummy?’
‘They did, when she was alive. Well, the man did. The woman is his wife.’
‘The lady.’
‘Yes.’
‘She’s not my mummy.’
‘No.’
‘Children have daddies,’ she said.
Not now. Why now? How does she know?
‘Yes, love.’
‘I haven’t got a mummy or a daddy.’
I hugged her. ‘You’ve got me and Grandma and Grandpa and Brigid …’
‘And Caitlin and Michael and Anthony and Christopher and Maireadh and Aisling and Reuben and Zeinab and Larry and Hassan and Omar and Younus and Natasha and Kinsey and Anna and …’ She was off on the game of listing the ones she loved. Reassuring herself.
‘And I love mummy even if she is dead.’
‘Of course. And so do I.’
‘And so do I.’
‘And so do you.’
‘And so do you. And she loves me too.’
‘Yes she does.’
‘And when she comes back to life she can come and live with us.’
‘She won’t come back to life, darling.’
‘But if she does.’
‘Yes, if she does. But she won’t.’
‘So I’ll live with you for ever and ever.’
What do you say?
‘Mummy?’
‘Yes, hon?’
‘If you have a baby in your tummy will it have a daddy?’
Oh, blimey. Maireadh’s pregnant and so’s one of the teachers, so it was bound to come out at some stage.
‘Yes, love. But I haven’t got a baby in my tummy.’
‘Can I borrow its daddy? If I want one?’
‘Do you want one?’
‘Yes.’
We went downstairs. Jim tried to play with the ballroom with Lily but he didn’t have a clue. Anyway his fingers were too big. After another fifteen minutes or so they left. The tea was cold, untouched. Like Nora, I thought, irrelevantly. Though presumably she wasn’t untouched.
*
If he wants regular visiting rights it will be very hard for me to get a court to refuse him. No one will accept now that he was violent. Nobody ever proved anything. He hasn’t been, to my knowledge, since Janie’s death. I could try to find out. Funnily enough, Harry might know. Harry always hated him. He might know. If there’s anything to know. Perhaps there is.
If he wants parental responsibility he will have to apply for it. Because they weren’t married, he has no claim on anything unless Janie or the courts give it to him. And she’s not going to, is she?
I have parental responsibility jointly with Mum and Dad. I have three years of looking after her. I have something he doesn’t have.
I don’t think I frightened them off for good. Each of them, separately, seemed to have something in them that meant they would cling on. The tidiness of her clothes and her dark head hummed with efficiency, achievement, the chosen object in the correct place, priorities listed, and carefully polished successes ticked off. She wouldn’t go for what she couldn’t get. But she doesn’t know everything. She doesn’t know children. Perhaps she is beginning to know the desire for them … mother-hunger. Mother-hunger would eat her alive. And those who are astounded by the force of mother-hunger when it hits them are not usually prepared for the force of the tidal wave that follows: the love of a child. The love of a child can destroy nations. Love for a lover is a game next to baby love.
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