A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar (19 page)

Father Don Carlo was in the tent, sweating, smelling of his wine, his wide lips parted and spitting and muttering.

‘There has been a clash. Shots. A Tundra man killed, two Moslem men stabbed.’ He was rambling. ‘I think it would be wise for us to leave immediately.’

‘If you think it is for the best,’ Millicent said. She was rolling up the Jaeger sleeping bags and putting them into the holdall. Lizzie was singing softly to Ai-Lien. Father Don Carlo had his back to me and so did not see my companion. Khadega did however. As if hypnotised, she rose and stood still. Millicent and Lizzie looked at her. Saying nothing, she walked towards Mohammed and together they left, without glancing back at us, or touching each other.

Dusty bodies, woeful children, weary fathers, all on the long walk home. A stoat-sized man jumped into our path waving one of the pamphlets that Millicent had distributed, spat on it and ripped it up in front of us.

‘Just keep walking,’ Millicent said.

‘What was that?’ Lizzie asked.

‘Some resistance to our message,’ Father Don Carlo answered.

‘You should be careful,’ I said to Millicent. I remembered Mr Steyning’s warnings and Mohammed’s face in the flickering light.

‘He doesn’t like your methods. I don’t think anyone does. Don’t send out these pamphlets any more.’

But Millicent didn’t hear me. I had spoken to a moth, instead.

July 10th

She fell into the river they say, though of course everyone knows it was Mohammed who drowned her. Perhaps she was dead before she touched the water. His fury was bright. It could be that she was beaten to death, strangled, shot? The news came through the dust and I looked at Lolo’s face as he looked to the floor.

‘Tell me, Lolo, what is it?’

‘Memsahib –’

We had been making a cake, using the remains of Millicent’s funds. Churning cream to make butter, sifting flour and crushing Russian sugar lumps in the mortar. We shelled, blanched and pounded the almonds. As we worked, I taught Lolo nursery rhymes –
Little Mary Esther sat upon a tester eating curds and whey
– which he repeated with great seriousness, stroking his long, extraordinary eyebrows. A dust-covered boy sidled in and whispered something to him.

‘Memsahib –’

It falls to me to tell Millicent and Lizzie that Khadega is dead and Millicent’s conversion experiment has gone dreadfully wrong. They have been out all day. I hold on to the knowledge like a secret tattoo.

Lolo is uneasy and asks for Ai-Lien but I refuse. I respond to a death by holding on to a life. I call her my tiny bird and keep her close, in the folds of the fabric of the sling her little hands squeeze me. Loving her and being her mother, which is what I’ve become, is like a private waltz between the two of us. A dance of soft touches, fingers underneath her chin, a stroke of the softest place below her ear, and the dance moves faster until I am spun completely, lost to a love that will be life-long.

Ai-Lien’s hair is the same colour as Khadega’s. Khadega sank into a fetid river to become part of the desert and her unhappy face lies at the bottom, staring as if to make something out that is blurred around her, but she can’t quite see it.

Later: Millicent did not cry. She smoked, and said not a word about Khadega’s death and her complicity in it. She comes in, pretends to be calm and serene, she acts the Missionary. It is a great act. Is this my problem? And who am I, to be accusing another of acting? The act and the demonstration, the tedious putting forward of opinion: I do not like any of it. I do not find it nourishing or pleasant. I counsel myself: be polite, but really, I cannot bear it. Her motivations are suspect, the way she controls Lizzie is suspect. It occurs to me that she is harsh with Lizzie.
You haven’t done this right, Elizabeth. You are not adequate as an assistant to my work, Elizabeth
.

Lizzie came in finally, looking battened down, holding three feathers. They were brown with white tips and lightly speckled. She held them out towards Millicent.

‘Eagle feathers, I think.’

Lizzie’s smock was stained and rumpled, and her hair in knots. Altogether she looked somehow undone. I wanted, very suddenly and in a rush, to protect her, but what a word – protect – how does one sister do this for another? Stars and fishing lines decorate the inside of my eyelids as I write this. I want to steal her back. My sister knows things that I have yet to learn; that terrible thought, of Millicent and her – yet, Ai-Lien is here, close to me, with her nostrils defined and breathing steadily. If I put her to sleep on my chest my dreams might be sweeter.

I told Lizzie about Khadega. She dropped the feathers on to the floor and glared at Millicent.

‘Now we have the blood of too many dead on our hands, Millicent. They will kill us.’

‘You are talking nonsense,’ Millicent said, squinting in her own smoke, rubbing a hand through that atrocious frizz of hair.

‘Why do you think they will spare us? Why don’t you tell us what is happening with this trial?’

It was a shock to hear Lizzie speak to Millicent this way. Yet Millicent simply turned, presenting her back, like a shutter, and said nothing.

18.
London, Present Day

Norwood

Materialism is Evil. This was the mantra of Frieda’s childhood, living in a cluster of stationary caravans with her father who made a sort-of living as the caretaker of a Blue Seas Holiday Park in Sheppey. First lesson in life: possessions are meaningless. People spend their lives chasing bigger cars, bigger houses, bigger TVs, Frieda, and where does it get them? What does it mean? The answer is nothing! Nowhere! Look at the sea, at the sky, see: we are the same as them.

Secretly, in her caravan, Frieda had prayed to an actual God rather than a manifestation of sublime energy. She prayed specifically for an actual house with carpets. She had been to other people’s houses. She had witnessed drawers expressly designated for lunchtime sandwich boxes consisting of recognisable branded goods such as Club bars, Wagon Wheels and Hula Hoops. Frieda prayed to an illicit God for these things. Our Father who Art in Heaven, please may I have a normal lunch and carpets. She did not pray to her father’s Guruji. She did not Sun Salute with her mother at dawn. She suspected Guruji of being responsible, somehow, for the unorthodox meals she was subjected to, the bean-sprout salads and the beetroot goulash and the ghastly celery soup.

Looking at Irene Guy’s things, she thought she understood these little collections: the melancholy cluster of ceramic dogs, the hopeful stones; the rubber bands and faded envelopes. Still, though, she had found nothing that explained exactly who Irene Guy was and it seemed peculiar, given the level of paraphernalia, that there were no photographs.

It was chilly in the flat and Frieda now regretted spontaneously offering the place for Tayeb to stay. His strangeness had grown as they had come by cab with the owl cage between them on the back seat. Leaving it behind had felt like leaving a child, a curious feeling of guilt, and so she had decided to bring it; perhaps to leave it in the flat, again. It was an expensive crawl – she insisted on paying – across Battersea Bridge, with the Thames reflecting the orange–black of the city at night.

She gave him a tour of the rooms: bedroom, living room, kitchen, bathroom, and he had nodded and smiled and did not ask who the flat belonged to. She pointed to the bed.

‘That is for you, until Friday.’

Now, he was in the kitchen, opening and closing cupboard doors. He seemed obsessed with the little old-fashioned pantry and its contents. Frieda felt a need to explain:

‘I’m going through the things, to see if there is anything I want to keep. Everything else is being salvaged.’

‘OK,’ he said, still not asking. Tayeb carried the birdcage into the living room and spent some time putting it back on to its stand. The owl endured the wobbles and waves with a stoic expression.

Tayeb turned to her, ‘I can prepare it some meat.’

‘Wait.’ Frieda pulled out of her pocket a printout about owls that she had downloaded.

REASONS NOT TO HAVE AN OWL

1. Human-imprinted owls become strongly attached to their owners and they don’t like change. This makes it very hard for you to go on holiday or leave it with someone.

2. Owls have an instinct to ‘kill’ things. They will shred towels, knick-knacks, socks, toys.

3. You are 100% responsible for every need of a captive owl: what to perch on (to avoid infection), what food to avoid, how to care for talons and beaks.

4. Mating season involves all-night hooting or tooting and for a human-imprinted owl the noise will be directed at you. You are expected to hoot with the owl and if you don’t it will hoot even louder. Mating season can be for up to 9 months.

5. Owls don’t like to be cuddled and stroked, but they do like to play and can be rough!

6. There will be poo, feathers and pellets everywhere.

7. You need a consistent supply of adult animals for your owl to eat. You will need to cut them open and extract the liver, intestines and stomach, otherwise you will find yourself collecting intestines and stomach off your floor and walls. Owls have an instinct to hide their leftovers. If your owl is not cage-bound then you will find, several days on, stinking meat secreted into hiding places.

The ready-roasted chicken they had brought suddenly didn’t seem alive, bloody or fresh enough. Frieda watched as Tayeb pushed parts of the chicken carcass into the cage and this act of poking meat into the owl’s cage dispelled the awkwardness between them. She began to think that she might even like being in this unfamiliar house with an unfamiliar person and that perhaps it was where she wanted to be, currently. Ostensibly looking at Irene Guy’s things, she kept glancing at Tayeb. A curious moustache and the sort of physique which folds itself up, neatly, like a dog in a passenger seat. His shoes were very clean. She tried to guess his age: around forty.

In the bedroom she picked through the once-loved possessions, taking up from the windowsill a shiny, almost perfectly round pebble with a hole through its centre. She held it to her eye and looked through the hole. It was exactly like the one her mother had left the night she went, leaving no real explanation. Just a postcard held down by the pebble. The postcard was of a painting entitled, ‘At the Dressing Table’. It was a self-portrait by a young Russian woman, brushing her hair. Frieda could not understand the significance, then or now, and years later it was a shock when she saw the painting itself, in the Tretyakov. The woman was preparing herself for a sacrifice, she had thought. The note on the back of the card was quite incoherent, saying that she had to go, to work on a cruise ship, that she would be IN TOUCH, and here is a pebble with a hole in it; it is magical. How the pebble was meant to replace her mother, she never knew.

‘Look!’ Tayeb’s voice called from the living room. ‘Look, yalla.’ He was pointing at a camera on the bookshelf.

‘Do you mind if I have a look at that?’ Before she answered he had it, holding it up to his face, looking closely at the back of it, rubbing it, flicking the winder, and examining the lens.

‘Very nice.’ His face was flattened and serious. ‘Actually, this is
very
nice. It is a Leica. A very early Leica. Could even be a trial model, as I don’t think they went on the market until a little later in the twenties.’

Frieda watched him hold the camera up to his eye then rub his finger along its back. They both jumped as a metal square sprung up, suddenly, on the top of the camera body.

‘One of the first 35mm. Interesting, is it yours?’

‘I don’t know,’ Frieda said, ‘I just . . . I just found it here yesterday.’

He lined up the viewfinder to his eye and moved the camera around the room as if running a film.

‘You found it?’

Frieda didn’t answer but took the camera from him and held it in her palm, feeling the weight of it.

‘How old do you think it is?’

‘Nineteen-thirties,’ he said, without hesitating. ‘No. I think, actually, twenties. One of the very first.’

‘How do you know this?’

‘I am a filmmaker. Or –’ he coughed, ‘I was a filmmaker and at home in Yemen I collected cameras, whenever I could.’ They both stared at the camera for a moment.