A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar (20 page)

‘Could there be a film in it, do you think?’ He ran his hand over the camera, looking at the back, looking all over. He found a small lever and triggered it. The back sprung open but there was nothing inside but dust.

The door to the kitchen opened and Tayeb walked in having showered, wearing a different shirt. He was spruced and had obviously had a shave. He stood in the doorway rubbing his damp hair. There was a vanity to him, she guessed, watching him stroke his thumb along his eyebrows as if to press down rogue hairs, and open his mouth to stretch the skin of his face. He folded the towel up neatly, put it on the back of one of the chairs and looked at the objects she had placed on the table. Incongruously, Frieda blushed at his presence. To hide it, she looked down at the camera, the Chinese musical toy in its glass dome and a wooden box that she had found at the bottom of a cupboard in the living room. Inside it there seemed to be some sort of printing apparatus.

‘Look at this.’

‘It’s like a smaller version of the transportable printing press we have in Sana’a.’ He pulled a chair out and sat down. ‘I used to work in a printing room . . . for a while.’

He examined it for some minutes, and Frieda stood back, leaning against the kitchen sink, watching him. She thought about Sana’a. She could imagine visiting. She has always been more flexible than others in her office, more ready to jump up and fly to wherever is required, unfazed by stop-offs and stopovers and long-hauls. The further, the more unusual, the more distant and
other
the better. For a long time now there has been nothing to hold her back, or down. No gravity or grounding in her own day-to-dayness that would encourage her to remain still, even for a short time. After spending a week or more in Sana’a she would realise that the narrative of the city would forever remain unfathomable to her but she would work hard to ignore that realisation. She could see the paper now:
UK Opportunities for Emancipation in Yemen: the New Sana’a
.

‘I should try to see if I can get it working,’ he said, ‘I wonder if there is any ink?’

Five minutes later he had laid out various items from the machine on the table: a roller, an inking plate.

‘The printing frame is missing the screen,’ he said.

‘Are you hungry?’ Frieda pushed her glasses up her nose and looked directly at Tayeb.

‘Always.’

‘Let’s have fish and chips. Do you fancy them?’ She didn’t wait for his answer. ‘I know, I know, they always make you feel sick as an after-taste, but the first mouthfuls are glorious, aren’t they?’

He nodded.

‘There’ll be somewhere still open,’ she said. ‘Bound to be. I’ll go.’

Frieda returned with the fish and chips and a bottle of white wine. She poured each of them half a beaker-full and began to talk as she ate. She told him about the letter, about Irene Guy’s death and the flat, as much as she knew.

‘Hmm, what a mystery,’ he said, as he gently worked at pulling off the orange batter from the cod.

‘I know. At first I thought it was a mistake, but now I’m not so sure. I asked my dad; he said I should talk to my mum.’

‘Have you done this?’ Tayeb asked.

‘It’s not that easy. My mum abandoned me years ago.’ She said it lightly.

‘Oh.’

‘Would you like a glass of water?’ She got up and moved to the sink.

‘No thank you.’

‘I wonder who she was,’ Frieda said, looking round at the belongings in the kitchen. ‘An explorer, perhaps?’

‘A traveller? She was quite educated, I think,’ Tayeb said. ‘Whoever lived here had taste in books. A surprising range. Texts on Sufism and Afghan literature. I am amazed to see a book on pre-Islamic Arabic poetry.’

‘It looks as if she could speak several languages. She was obviously clever.’

‘Do you think I can smoke in here?’

Frieda paused, looked around. ‘I don’t see why not.’

Frieda’s phone on the table in front of them flashed. She took no notice. It flashed again. Then a third time.

‘Someone is really trying to reach you,’ he said, but she ignored him.

Frieda walked into the bedroom and pulled open the top drawer of a Victorian chest. It was crammed with papers, stencils or transcripts of some sort. Thin, waxy paper with a curious foreign lettering on them. Her pocket began to vibrate. This time she answered.

‘Baby. Baby! Don’t hang up.’ She said nothing. ‘Baby, I’ve got to see you.’

‘No, Nathaniel.’

Oddly, she’d forgotten him. For perhaps the first day in years she hadn’t thought of him at all. In the pocket of his leather jacket Nathaniel always carried two items, a blue marble and a crystal tip stolen from a chandelier he once dealt as a sideline to the bicycles. As long as the two items were together and on his person they balanced the universe and were perfectly complete. That he should believe so magnificently and wholeheartedly, like a child, in the talismanic power of objects, had shown her a glimpse of another world, a world where objects came with inherent stories, and had led her to love him.

‘No, listen, seriously, this is it. I’ve done it. I’ve done it.’ His voice was hysterical; crackling and vicious.

‘What? What have you done?’

‘I told Margaret.’ Nathaniel said this in a quieter voice.

‘What?’ Frieda stared at the page in her hand. The paper was magically thin, like a layer of skin; the script seemed to be Arabic.

‘I told her. I just said it. I said I’m not in love with you Margaret. I’m in love with Frieda Blakeman.’

There was something, a slight whine in his voice, a tone he used when waiting for praise, exactly like a child, that made her press her nails into her own palms.

‘I said it exactly like that.’

She was cold; her skin seemed to shrink and tighten around her bones and it seemed to her that she was thoroughly lost again, as though she had just woken up in a scrambled, mossy, English wood, with no possible knowledge of how she’d got there or how to get out. She continued to pull out the Arabic-scripted paper from the drawer. Underneath them was a thick black notebook with a leather cover.

‘What?’

‘I need to see you – now!’ Nathaniel shouted.

‘Oh – OK.’ She was stunned. Margaret. The Boys. The bloody Boys.

‘Are you at home?’

‘No. No. I’m . . .’

Frieda gave him the address and he hung up. She refused to think about the boys; she would not let herself think about the boys. Those blond-haired, milky-faced nightmares she had only seen in photographs, or once, getting into their Volvo, a tangle of untied shoelaces and petulant voices. Nathaniel was his own, determinable person, entirely responsible for his own fate, his own equations, she reminded herself. Her mouth was dry. She walked into the kitchen holding the notebook and one of the sheets of paper. Tayeb spun round to her, cigarette in his mouth, several parts of the machine in his hand.

‘It’s a mimeograph,’ he said, ‘a sort of early photocopier.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. You could probably sell . . . or give it to a museum. It’s interesting.’

‘Do you think it’s linked to these papers I’ve found?’ She held one out to him, aware that her hand was shaking.

‘Ah,’ he said, looking at them, ‘this is Arabic.’

He sat down on a chair at the table and held a page close to his eyes; he must be short-sighted, she thought. Then: the bloody boys. Tayeb took the paper and went to the mimeograph machine. He placed a piece into the screen frame.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Look, it fits.’ He smiled at Frieda and she was tempted to catch one of his hands. To squeeze it. She had better not drink any more wine.

‘What does it say?’

He continued to squint, and then read: ‘
’

‘Can you translate?’

‘A bird of the air shall carry the voice . . . and,’ he pulled the paper away from his eyes and then back close again, ‘and that with wings . . . which has wings shall tell the truth.’

He coughed, then read again, ‘Not truth, exactly. Tell the story. Ecclesiastes, ten twenty.’

There was a noise from the letterbox being slammed up and down and a voice, ‘Frieeeeeda’.

Tayeb stood up, alarmed. ‘Oh God,’ he said.

‘It’s OK,’ Frieda said to Tayeb, whose eyebrows were shooting up. ‘I know who it is.’

At the front door Nathaniel’s top and bottom lips did not fit together properly and his chin seemed more pronounced than usual. He blinked into the light of the room, looked at Frieda, then Tayeb, the mimeograph machine, then back to Tayeb. He started to say something but the swaying overtook him and he clutched forward to get hold of the door, but it swung back and he staggered with it.

‘Woah. Steady girl. Who’s your friend?’

‘Tayeb this is Nathaniel, Nathaniel, Tayeb. It’s a long story why we are here, but please be careful because none of this stuff is mine.’

‘Well, this is a cosy little scene,’ Nathaniel said, sinking in a heap on an armchair as he blinked around the room. Frieda resented his arrival immediately; she had been stupid to give him the address.

‘Is this a house clearance? There any good stuff here then? Good enough to flog?’

Tayeb stood up and put his hand to his chin, looking to Frieda as if for a signal. When she didn’t give him one, he said, ‘If you excuse me.’ He tried a smile and began to walk towards the kitchen.

‘Oh no, Tayeb, please don’t go anywhere.’ Frieda looked at him, trying to apologise with her expression. ‘I’ll make us all some coffee.’

She had brought supplies in a carrier bag: tea, coffee, milk and bread. She began to make coffee in the kitchen and Nathaniel came up behind her, blasting whisky smells into her neck and grabbing at her; he turned her round and tried to kiss her. She pushed him away.

‘Come on, baby. I’ve done it!’

Frieda pushed his face away from hers and looked at him. He looked old.

‘Well, what am I supposed to say? Congratulations?’

‘Fuck me, Frieda, you’ve been on my case to do this for years.’

‘That’s not true.’ The kettle hummed.

‘Do you know what it means?’ He grabbed her hand and put it up to his forehead as if acting the part of a patient with a doctor.

‘I have some idea, yes.’ Frieda pulled her hand away.

‘Do you realise it means we can be together, now? Properly.’ The kettle finished its boiling and Frieda tried to listen beyond its steam, beyond Nathaniel’s drunk monotone voice, to Tayeb. He was still and quiet and probably extremely uncomfortable.

‘But what about the kids? Edward? Sam?’

‘Yes, I know the names of my own kids, thank you. You forgot Tom.’

She undid the coffee jar and spooned its golden seal savagely. ‘You know what I mean.’

‘They don’t know yet. I will have to tell them, have to talk to them.’ There was silence as Nathaniel looked around the kitchen.

‘So, who’s pretty boy in there, anyway?’

‘Shush,’ Frieda said, jabbing at him. ‘He’s a friend.’

‘Right.’ A cuckoo clock pinged on the wall and a desolate-looking bird on a stick poked in and out. Nathaniel wandered back into the living room and Frieda spent a moment putting cups on a tray, aware of the murmur of their voices. When she walked in Tayeb was standing awkwardly, rubbing his hands.