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