A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar (6 page)

She could hear Nathaniel in her living room, pacing about like a polar bear in a cage, pretending that he was relaxed and at home. She was still a little jet-lagged and a little wired. On the floor was her carry-on bag containing the knickers she had changed for fresh ones in the cramped toilet on the plane, magazines and one of the crinkled ‘ethnic’ scarves she always wore in Islamic cities, as if a scarf draped across the shoulder and paired with complicated earrings made her sympathetic and sensitive to a cultural and religious manifestation about which she knew nothing, really, despite her fellowship, her Ph.D, her Government-sponsored paper entitled
The Youth of the Islamic World
, et cetera. Her current research job was a thankless, limitless task: to interview the ‘youth’ of the Islamic world, to surmise their concerns neatly and to present ideas and ‘solutions’ to a European-funded think tank (no, sorry: ‘think-and-do-tank’) with a secret name. This is why she had been away for months, travelling, moving and dissolving.

She was such a fraud.

‘So.’ Nathaniel took up the entire door frame. ‘How was it? Did you get to the bottom of the veils? Did you unpick the Muslim Brotherhood?’

The lines on his face joined and folded. She did not mind his age, but she did mind that he looked unwholesome, not merely unwell but seedy, as if his seams were undone. How to begin? The soldiers? The strange looks? The woman in the mosque who hit her across her calf with her walking stick?

‘You have an hour to spare, I guess?’ She looked at his face, which was frowning.

‘What? Less?’

‘Well, I . . .’

‘What?’

‘Got to be in Brixton for ten to open up.’

She said nothing.

Nathaniel groaned, ‘I don’t know what you want, Frie’. Things aren’t going well. The shop’s struggling and Margaret’s been banging on about me going back to teaching again. I would rather barbecue my own spine.’

‘You don’t know what I want?’ She said it quietly.

‘No, Frieda darling, I don’t know what you want, but I do know I’d rather drown myself than teach the vile children of London.’

‘I’m not the one telling you to teach.’

This wasn’t quite the reunion she’d imagined. There was a five-week bundle of mail on the table. Junk. Bills. An official letter. She’d been to fifteen countries in seven months, and by now most of her friends had given up calling. Standing in her kitchen, swaying a little, it was as if she were only slightly connected to the floor. So much of this year had been spent in trans-border international zones, a blur of boarding passes, CNN, free drinks. The hotels had all become indistinguishable, televisions showing American films dubbed with Egyptian Arabic, and water features in identical lobbies where she was eternally checking in, or out, or eating hummus for breakfast, or smoking shishas or being looked at by black-suited American oil-company workers. Or sitting alone, for too long, in a lukewarm jacuzzi, trying to remember why she was there.

Why, indeed? Usually on an assignment. Reporting on the
Bibliotheca Alexandrina
(magnificent library, a shame it has no books) or interviewing the young women along the corniche (To veil or not to veil? We are so tired of this question). Writing a report for a government-funded scheme brilliantly entitled, ‘Belief in Conversation and Exchange Between East and West’. Frieda’s rudimentary Arabic and a willingness to jump on a plane at any time, any day, has taken her to these places.

Nathaniel had launched into a complex anecdote involving his neighbours, bicycle thieves and local councillors. She murmured as if listening and looked at the junk mail. The offer of loans, pizzas, and cleaning services (let Agnieska clean for you, only £9 per hour!) felt reassuringly local. Frieda held up the official-looking letter and examined the envelope. It was postmarked yesterday, SE1 stamp.

Dear Ms Blakeman,

We offer our condolences regarding the recent death of Mrs Irene Guy. According to our records you are the next-of-kin of Mrs Guy. One of our key workers tried to contact you by telephone regarding the funeral for Mrs Guy, which took place on the 31st August but we were unsuccessful, we are sincerely sorry.

We request that you contact the Deaths, Marriages, Births department as soon as possible to organise a time to visit her accommodation at 12A Chestnut Road to remove her belongings.

Demand for Council properties is extremely high, therefore we can only give you one week in which to complete a full clearance. As of 21st September we will be authorised to enter and remove all remaining property. Please contact us at your earliest convenience to make arrangements.

Yours sincerely.

R. Griffin

Deaths Manager

‘You don’t understand’, Nathaniel was saying, ‘what it is like for me.’ He walked towards the door rubbing his forehead with vicious thumbs. It was something he did when really he wanted a drink.

Irene Guy? She didn’t know the name, she was sure. She looked up at him, this man she had been implicated with for many years now and he was looking back at her with an odd expression. It took her a moment to work out that it was the expression of a father who acknowledges for the first time that his child is not beautiful, or clever, or funny.

‘I know,’ she said to the closing door, ‘you’ve got to go.’

She touched the lily stamen and let the bright orange pollen stain her finger. Presumably that was some kind of incident, though God knows what about. Nathaniel could create an argument with an empty portion of wordless, soundless air. She could always follow him. To be fair, it was true that almost all of the time she didn’t know what she wanted.
I must be less . . . absent
. Instead, she looked again at the letter in her hand. Irene Guy? Outside, a train screeched past, giving the foundations of the building a thorough shake. On the other side of the tracks was a similar residential block to Frieda’s, housing association, red-bricked, Victorian Gothic with its chimneys and peaks. It was dull enough outside for her reflection to be layered on the window. She looked at herself. In that awful hotel room she had cut her fringe snip snip snip with nail scissors – a bad idea, her fringe was left wonky – and it occurred to her now that she looked like her mother, as much as she remembered her. Frieda blinked to break the memory before it came, but couldn’t stop it: the tickle of her mother’s long hair on her arm, a low voice saying, ‘Don’t cut your hair, baby, it’s your power.’ A pair of scissors in Frieda’s hand digging grooves into her little fingers.

She stood up and went to the door. Nathaniel was walking slowly down the stairs, obviously stalling, waiting for her to call him. He looked up at her but she flattened herself against the wall and said nothing. She turned and looked at the drawings on the wall, the seagulls floating, wings touching. She liked them, though Peabody probably wouldn’t.

The Art of Wheeling a Bicycle:
Steering is a subject for serious consideration; a sharp eye, quick determination, constant care and a steady hand are needed.

7.
A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar – Notes

May 6th

I write this by the light of a linseed lamp accompanied by the tapping of too many insects throwing themselves against the paper windows like souls struggling to be allowed in. Or out. Millicent’s sleeping breath is fast, Lizzie’s is soft and dull; they are so close, these days, that even their breathing seems to call to one another. This heat hangs like a dead weight over all of us and still we do not know when the trial will be, or, indeed, what it means. Officials from the magistrate visited tonight, there were whispered meetings between Millicent and Mohammed but she explains nothing to me.

I am watching her, Millicent. I need to understand why my sister worships her so. She is always in an agitation. There is no humility to her, interesting, for one who is supposed to be humble in the Lord’s name, she rubs her heel to the sound of her own ambition. Her neck shows the strained length of a person in a hurry to achieve a personal quest. She will do anything to achieve it. Her fingers are bony, and untrustworthy.

Dinner was on the floor in the reception room. We sat tailor-fashion on the large rug in the central room to eat and were served mountains of knotted meat bones, spiced yoghurts and almond breads. Rami arranged small pieces of mutton skewered on to long pokes of metal on trays before us. I dipped them into a thick, brown, fruity sauce, and then a spicy red one. Lizzie ate almost nothing and I remembered the day Mother brought home a baby sister, Nora. Appalled at our mother’s evident fresh love for this imposter, Lizzie and I made a pact to be together for ever. We believed this as children do, with our hearts complete and true, our eyes wide and clear. I now watched as occasionally, she put the camera up to her eye, as if to take a photograph of the scene before her, although she never did.

The skinny, dark-skinned slave girls, to whom we are not allowed to speak, brought out dishes of baked figs in a red sauce and another impressive tray of meat. I ate what I could with the baby asleep behind me in a bundle. Millicent turned, suddenly, from Mohammed and Khadega and leaned towards me, pointing at the baby.

‘She needs a name.’

‘Is it our place to name her?’

‘The Lord has placed her in our arms as a gift,’ she amended herself. ‘She is a symbol of His bond of love and so I suggest we call her Ai-Lien.’ Millicent put down her metal poke of kebabe meat. ‘Which means Love Bond.’

Mohammed was smiling at the great spread of food surrounding him and the women attentive like sparrows. The older women wear dark abayas and brown conservative veils.

Millicent lowered her voice, ‘Christians are not wanted here. Mohammed is making arrangements.’

I was alarmed, thinking that we were to be arrested.

‘Are we leaving?’

Millicent nodded, ‘Mohammed introduced me to a Suchow merchant, Mr Mah. He has a house we can rent very cheaply outside the city. A good one, built as a pavilion. It stands in a beautiful, cool garden.’

‘Outside of the city? Where?’

‘Just outside the Old Town city walls. We will remain under house-arrest.’

I was silent. My sister sat on the other side of the room like a fulgurite, her eyes fixed on a point in the distance, refusing food, cradling her camera on her knee as though it were her own babe, looking as incongruous as I felt. I wanted to lean across to her, as we did when children, at night across the ocean of the nursery floor so that we were not alone and our fingers would touch.

‘Regardless of the house-arrest I believe that there have been a number of powerful signs indicating that we should set up a Mission in Kashgar.’ Millicent blew smoke into my face. ‘Don’t you agree?’

‘What signs do you mean?’

‘Well. The child delivered directly into our arms, for one.’ She blew smoke again, away from me.

‘But to be stuck in this terrible desert. Surely there is a better spot?’

‘Have you looked around?’ Her voice grew louder. ‘There are immense possibilities for our missionary work here.’

I coughed, trying to get Lizzie’s attention, but she would not meet my eye. That Leica! I should like to stamp on it, that box of images, its trickery. I am still appalled that she used it to photograph Father as he died. I remember raging at Mother in the drawing room: why should she be allowed to photograph him? What about dignity and peace? Poor Mother sighed and stroked my hair, agreeing with me, but said that this was Lizzie’s way of coming to terms with death and we could not take that away from her.

As Father grew weaker she talked of capturing the transformation of his body from flesh into spirit and then Mother even agreed to a dealer visiting from London. In he came, with his cases, an elderly German gentleman, placing his various photographic models across the dining-room table as if precious jewels, emitting a long-drawn-out whistle-wheeze each time he exhaled. His assistant, I remember, was a squat piggish man called Jones (I don’t recall the name of the dealer) who winked at me as he polished lenses and pointed to each model as the elderly man talked through the various components of the folding vest cameras. The Leica was a limited edition, a prototype, extremely technically advanced; needless to say the most expensive. Lizzie pretended to be interested in the inferior models, but she had already seen it, already wanted it. Aunt Cicely was mortified, and not just at having a German in the house, but Mother was too faded and shrunk with exhaustion at that stage to argue so agreed, with a wave of her small pale hand, to the purchase of the most expensive model on the table that had the advantage of being used with or without a tripod – the perfect thing for a traveller.

I remember watching this new zealous Lizzie fluttering about Father’s bed, examining the quality of the light, impervious to his pain.

‘Where did she catch it?’ Mother asked the room at large in Southsea. Ours is a family of gentle Anglicans with a strong Fabian streak of educationalist reform; Mother is a believer in suffrage for women and progress in general.

‘An Anglican is one thing,’ I remember her saying, ‘but an evangelist is another.’

The day Father died the afternoon light was thin, as if worn down in anticipation of his departure. Or perhaps it was a trick to be played on Lizzie’s photography. Aunt Cicely cried unprettily into her handkerchief but Mother had more restraint, simply holding his hand and rubbing at his gold wedding ring with her finger. I stood at the door as quietly as I could, leaning my head against the oak panel. Lizzie fretted with the aperture on the camera at the end of the bed and the shutter click-clacked as her finger repeatedly pushed at the button. Father was barely there. He hadn’t spoken for a fortnight, he certainly hadn’t recognised us for perhaps a month; for weeks he sang to the stars and the nurse gave him laudanum. What made me the angriest was that it was just like Lizzie to steal that moment from him and make it her own.