A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar (26 page)

‘I’m sure there must be.’ She smiled at him.

It was good to have a purpose. There was a long queue of unhappy-looking people at a bus stop, shuffling to keep out of the rain. Most of the shops along the parade were boarded up, and at first he could only see a Seven-Eleven which was unlikely to sell what he needed. But then as he walked further on in the rain he saw a red sign, HIGH CLASS FAMILY BUTCHERS.

They had it, oxtail. They even chopped it for him, and not too expensive either. He cooked as Frieda read, occasionally stopping to make tea, or to smoke a cigarette. He extracted a casserole dish from a cupboard. He brought the oxtail to a boil. He added the spices, then the tomatoes and onion. He put a lid on and he left it.

‘Three hours,’ he said.

‘Wow. That’s a lot of simmering.’

‘Oh, that’s just the first stage.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, then I take the lid off and it has to cook for another five, maybe six hours.’

Tayeb looked at the cuckoo clock. ‘It’ll be done by nine.’

The smell of cooking meat brought the flat to life. It was as if by opening her spice jars and by heating up her pans, Tayeb had voodoo-summoned the old lady back to life. He felt her around him, thought he could sense her approval.

It was good to have his hands working. There was perfectly fine rice in the cupboard that he would serve with the meat. Being in a kitchen, or, more precisely, cooking for someone else rather than just himself, brought to his mind the taste of hurs and tawa, and he found himself wanting these childhood breads.

Frieda looked up, sniffed the air and smiled. ‘This is unbelievable.’ She waved the thick black notebook at him.

‘What are you reading?’

Frieda stretched her back in the chair, held the notebook about five inches from her face, flicked to the front and read out: ‘A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar – Notes. It’s someone’s journal, or diary,’ she said, ‘a missionary.’

‘Oh? The Irene lady?’

‘No, it couldn’t be her, the dates are 1923 . . . She couldn’t have been old enough to write this diary then.’

She read out sections as he cooked:

I am beginning to understand the rhythm of this inn. We are all three of us, Millicent, Lizzie and I – well four, if I count the baby – sleeping together in one room with the kangs lined in a row like coffins.

He was enormously hungry by the time the food was ready, late in the evening, and to watch her eat it was a pleasure. Despite her thinness and seeming lack of interest in food, she ate with lush delight. Tayeb could see her enjoying the saturated flavour of the meat.

‘Tayeb,’ she said, as they sat opposite each other at the kitchen table, ‘this is the most delicious meal I have ever had.’

Oh, he was happy, but he hid it. ‘I am sure it is not.’

She pushed her hair back behind her ears and her glasses up her nose. ‘It is! I tell you. The juice of this stew is divine.’

He couldn’t stop himself from grinning.

‘That photograph you found.’ She looked at him.

‘Hmm.’

‘It’s my mother.’

Tayeb nodded, still simmering himself in her praise of his cooking. But then he frowned, ‘Why would a photograph of your mother be here?’

‘That is exactly what I’ve been trying to work out.’

Tayeb felt a flicker of heartburn, but dismissed it. ‘You say you don’t know Irene Guy?’

‘No. Never heard of her.’

‘But there must be some connection.’

She was concentrating. He was not sure if this was the right time, but he decided he should talk about what he intended to do in case she might think that he was . . . after something; a hustler.

‘I have worked out what I am going to do.’

‘Oh, really?’ She leaned back in her chair.

‘Well. Just immediately, I have no idea in the long term, you know.’

She smiled. ‘I can imagine.’

‘I’m going to find my old employer in Eastbourne, he will help me.’

‘Eastbourne.’ She repeated. She moved her hand towards his cigarette packet. ‘May I?’

‘Of course.’

She looked older, as soon as she smoked. Watching her lips move around the cigarette he saw the ghost of nights full of drink, conversation and cigarettes. He could see a decade of talking and drinking in the faint lines around her lips and although it made her look a little ragged and less contained when she smoked, he quite liked it. He liked that the smoke from her mouth mingled with his.

‘I think I need to go and find my mum,’ she said. ‘She’s in Sussex on a commune or something.’

He nodded. There was something about her dark, contained stillness that made him conscious that they operated in parallel spaces. It seemed impossible to cross into her space. Perhaps because of the strangeness of being here, together, in this flat, and both of them a little lost, it was as if they were each talking to themselves, really. Then she sat up straight and smiled at him.

‘We’ll go together. You need to go to Eastbourne, I need to find my mother in Sussex. I’ll borrow a friend’s car and drive us.’ She blew smoke into the air, as if to direct it away from Tayeb, but it didn’t work, some of it crossed his face like a whisper.

‘What about this place?’ he said.

‘I feel like a trespasser. I’m not supposed to be here.’ They both looked at the camera. ‘But I am going to take some things.’

‘Oh?’

They made a pile on the table: the mimeograph machine in its wooden case, the dome toy, the notebook, Bible, camera, some books that Frieda had found all piled together and tied with a piece of fabric that seemed to be a kind of embroidered flat-weave.

‘We’ll take these books,’ Frieda said, ‘and the notebook and the photograph, of course.’

She did not tell him how curious she was, about the ink in the notebook. They looked at each other.

‘Difficult to know if this is stealing,’ Frieda said. ‘It feels odd.’

‘I don’t think so. It is almost as if these things are waiting here, for you to rescue them, take them.’

That seemed exactly right. It was as if each item left in this flat sheltered its own imprint of memories but was left listless and doomed without its curator, Irene Guy. If Frieda were to take and resuscitate them, the embedded memories might then be released. It was as if everything in here might be a witness, watching them navigate the furniture of someone else’s life. She turned to say this, but Tayeb had drifted off and seemed to be engaged in a private conversation with the owl.

Solving a Problem:
When choosing a wheel, you should know what you want and why you want it.

25.
A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar – Notes

August 1st

They came for her and this is how I discovered the names the natives have for us. Millicent is the Grey Lady, I am the Red Lady and Lizzie is the White Lady. I know, because at dawn, in a manner of speaking, my prayers were answered with a kerfuffle at the gate, two Chinamen shouting loudly:

‘Grey Lady, Grey Lady!’

They hustled through the gate and a dog on the track began to bark. Millicent appeared, wearing her faded cotton nightgown, her hair on its ends around her head. I ran out. A Chinaman came forward and pointed at Millicent.

‘Millicent, what’s happening?’

‘I’m being summoned, presumably to the General,’ she said, and then began to cough, a wracking cough that threatened to bring up blood.

‘Do let her sit down,’ I said, but both men stood aggressively. They talked in a fast, thick Chinese to Millicent directly. I could not understand what they were saying. She sighed, then turned to me.

‘I have to go with them.’

‘Don’t, don’t take her.’ They pushed her unnecessarily, as she was walking with them, then each of them gave her another harsh shunt forward, more vicious than before.

‘Don’t hurt her.’

They forced her to walk fast towards the gate. Millicent has disturbed me of late, but I was suddenly terrified of them taking her away. I stood redundant, an imbecile, paralysed.

‘What should I do, Millicent?’

As they reached the gate her eye-glasses fell off and the guard to her left trod on them, cracking the glass. She turned to me, blinking. ‘I will get a message to you as soon as I can,’ she said. She threw the clutch of door keys over to me and leaned down for her eye-glasses, but the men moved her, roughly, through the gate.

I picked up the keys and gestured to the glasses. ‘Please,’ I said, ‘she is very blind – do take them.’ They ignored me. I gathered up the broken frames.

‘Millicent,’ I called. She twisted and looked round, but her face oddly blank. She could see nothing I realised. A lizard flickered past my foot, and I stood at the gate with the eye-glasses in my hand, thinking now everyone had gone.

Lizzie lay on the kang under one of the thick, silk-covered wadded quilts that we carry for the winter months. Each papered window was covered with a kashgari silk scarf so that the room had an underground feeling, with light filtering through patches of clashing colours.

‘Lizzie, Millicent wouldn’t let me near you. She’s been taken away. Lolo’s gone.’ I bent over to look at her, talking too fast. My poor sister’s lips were dry, cracked, she had the beginning of a sore in the corner of her mouth and her skin was pallid. I went to the kitchen to get her water.

‘Drink.’ She shook her head and would not look at me. Instead she was staring at the Missionary Map on the wall, at the river and the tributaries.

‘I am fasting,’ she whispered.

‘For Ramazan? That is a Moslem tradition, not a Christian one.’

‘No. To be clean.’

‘Well you must drink water.’ I held the cup to my sister’s mouth and she let me tip the water in.

‘Why are you fasting?’

‘Millicent is helping me.’

‘But she is starving you,’ I said, confused. ‘Is she at least giving you water?’

‘Yes,’ she answered once she had drunk a little, ‘I simply want to hold it: love.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Of course you don’t.’ She turned away from me then as if she was weary of my company but I took her hand regardless. I thought of us as children, walking along the Rue de Thérouanne on a spring morning and the devastation we felt at the sight of our favourite trees felled. They were chopped down to prevent a disease from spreading, leaving bare, brutally cut stumps. Little Lizzie took my hand,
Don’t be sad, Eva, look, it is in fact easier to see the river without them.

‘Of course you don’t understand,’ she repeated. She began to talk, rambling, and it was difficult to follow, about Khadega in the river; that she should have found her and photographed her, because there should be something to remind us that she was real.

‘But you didn’t like Khadega.’

‘No.’

I knew we were both thinking the same thing, culpability. In the dense heat of the room I was nauseous and weary.

‘It is important to keep the images, to hold them,’ she turned in the kang, away from me, but continued to talk:

‘I can print it on exquisite paper. Monochrome. Take the print and nail it to the wooden frame, the weightlessness of the paper. The edge of the paper rising up like an insect’s wing. A simple powder cover, the light and the shadow. I can hand-write it on the print.’

‘I don’t know, Lizzie, what you are saying.’

She sat up, becoming very alert. ‘Millicent says I am lovely and sacred, like Saint Wilgefortis.’

Again that image of Millicent and my sister together in the kang room. Then I remembered long afternoons in Southsea when Millicent was hard at work convincing Mother of the importance of our journey. Maps were laid out, and books, and endless talk of travelling, of it being more than a physical journey, it being a pilgrimage. Talk of conversion, persuasion, of an ambassadorial role, of making strides for England and the Church. Talk through the night until eventually mother was brow-beaten into agreeing.

‘Millicent has been taken away,’ I said again. Lizzie simply looked at me. ‘And Lolo has gone.’

‘Gone?’

Ai-Lien, whom I had carried in with me, bundled in her shawl-wrap and left on the floor, began to snuffle and snort. Lizzie sat up, pushed herself upward and forward, like a teacher waking up from a daydream to a room full of pupils, aware and bright suddenly.

‘I loved a baby too,’ she said. She was facing away from me. I stood completely still. Was she feverish?

‘It never had a chance to grow, but it was inside me. Millicent helped me to send it back to heaven. That’s how we met. I went to the Church for help.’

The heat overcame me then, for a moment, as I looked at the back of my sister’s head and at her angel-white hair gone dull. I longed for rain, or greyness. The flat grey of Geneva, or Southsea, even. I was homesick for a place that wasn’t even home. I wanted Lizzie to stop talking, but at the same time I needed to know because even though I wanted to dismiss it as feverish talk, I knew that I couldn’t.