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.
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