I Am Heathcliff

  He only used his Twitter to promote art shows and stuff, and his Facebook was frustratingly locked-down. My finger hovered over the friend request button, but in the end, I decided against it. I wouldn’t be able to bear the wait for his acceptance. What if he never accepted?

  He did however follow me back on Instagram, which I (giddily) took to be a good sign. I quickly raked back through a couple of years of pictures, deleting any in which I looked fat or basic. Taylor Swift gig in Hyde Park? Erased. Fourteen separate pictures of avocado on toast? Gone.

  I quickly altered my username to Kit instead of Catherine. It’s funny, isn’t it, how our social media is really just a collage of the fictional version of us we want people to see. Online, I could be Kit so much more easily than in real life.

  I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it sooner. This way I could show Dane I was someone he could fall in love with. Better still, his Instagram was a menu of the things, the bands, the food he loves most. All I had to do was mirror him.

  Dane loves ‘doggos’. I started stopping poor dog owners on the street to grab a selfie with their pooches. Dane favours ‘real’ dogs over little floofy ones, so I – cautiously – threw my arms around every staffie and mongrel in East London. Sure enough, Dane double-tapped my ‘doggos’.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised, but was a little disappointed to see Dane was also partial to a gym selfie. He was always self-deprecating: ‘man, @trainersaffiq KILLED ME today #personaltrainer #goals #actuallydead’, but I couldn’t help but notice he looked suitably shirtless, sweaty, and poised in front of the changing-room mirrors.

  I started echoing his routine. I made use of a gym membership I rarely troubled with. A couple of spinning classes in the week, and yoga on Sunday mornings. I didn’t post as many selfies though. If girls post too many selfies, they’re conceited.

  I bet – in fact, I know – Miss Peroxide doesn’t work out, so that was something we had in common that they did not. I found her in his follower list. She’s called Sanne Vanderburg, and she’s Dutch. Well, of course she fucking is. She barely posted, and when she did they were deliberately melancholic beach huts, dropped teddy bears, animal bones, and cool graffiti she’d discovered. I bet she’s never posted a single picture of her dinner, the fucking witch.

  I will never be as tall, thin, and striking as Sanne, but I supposed the good thing about getting my arse into the gym was that I could tone up a little. After a few weeks of my new regime, my friends, if not Dane, noticed. You look amazing babes! SMOKING HOT! and also Are we calling u Kit now??? Naturally, the number of creeper pervert men sliding into your Requests inbox is directly proportionate to the number of selfies on your account, so they increased. Instagram also started trying to sell me liquid meal replacements and ‘tummy teas’, whatever they are.

  But from Dane, only the occasional like.

  On the day Beyoncé Instagrammed a caption saying MAKE IT HAPPEN, I decided to do just that. It had been a couple of months since he last worked at Roaster, and I wasn’t brazenly going to ask him out, but I needed to get us into a situation where he could ask me on a date.

  He’d sent a single tweet promoting his friend’s band. Lockwood were playing that night at the Troxy. I wasn’t planning on going out, but I saw from the chain that followed his tweet that he was going too.

  A rational part of my brain told me this behaviour was getting ridiculous, bordering on stalking. But the fact I had never before felt compelled to act in such a manner made me all the more certain this was something worth exploring. If I hadn’t sensed a seed of something between us, I don’t think I would have felt so drawn to him.

  It would go like this: I’d run into him in the crowd and be surprised to see him. I’d ask to buy him a drink because I think guys secretly quite like it when we take some of the ambiguity out of these things. We’d skulk off to some quiet corner, and I’d ask him what he’d been up to these last few months. Tipsy, we’d kiss, and miss the band’s whole set.

  I tinted my hair and shaved my legs and bikini line (just in case). I couldn’t convince anyone to see the band, so headed to the Troxy alone. If anyone asked, I decided I was going to say I knew the bass player.

  For a little-known act, the venue was humming, full of guys who looked like extras from Peaky Blinders, and girls who looked like Sanne. Strangely, now, so did I. The pink hair; the skinny jeans on a skinnier ass; some Converse; black eyes. I blended in. As I entered the venue and paid, I sensed some of the guys checking me out, and felt that strange cocktail of pride and discomfort.

  The warm-up act was already on, and the queue was five-deep at the bar. People mostly seemed to be drinking pints of Fosters in plastic cups. I was nervous, and I needed something to take the edge off. I ordered a double vodka and soda.

  Drink in hand, I wove through the crowd, politely stopping to watch the support act for a few moments. The lead singer looked scarcely out of puberty, and I wondered when I’d become an adult.

  I was watching him mutter – an affectation – into the microphone, when Dane walked right past me. He’s so tall he almost seemed to fly overhead before I could even register it was him. He was carrying two pints, spilling foam as he went.

  This was it. My heart thundered. I followed him. I didn’t want to lose him.

  He slipped out of the fire exit into the smoking area. As I stepped into the night air, I felt the first nip of winter at my arms. I hadn’t brought a coat. I embraced myself, cold.

  Dane lit a cigarette, balancing his drinks on the ledge. I suddenly felt very exposed, almost naked. I couldn’t go through with it. I went to turn back, when he looked up from his phone and saw me. Too late.

  ‘Hi,’ I said, forcing a bright smile.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, but there was a flicker in his eye. A flinch. Oh God, he was trying to work out where he knew me from.

  ‘It … I’m … from the coffee shop.’

  The question mark fell from his face. ‘Ah yeah. Sorry! You OK?’

  ‘Yes, thanks, you?’

  ‘Grand …’

  A girl appeared at his side and claimed one of the two pints. Her wrists were weighed down by grubby festival wristbands. Not Sanne, but she might as well have been. Pastel-pink hair, sure, but somehow more effortless than I will ever be. ‘Mate, the queue in the ladies, seriously.’ She was Australian. Well, of course she fucking was. Australians are cool. They have all the ease of a cold beer at a barbeque. She realised I was standing with him, not just near him. Not as near as she was, though. She was pressed to his hip. ‘How’s it going, darl?’

  I hate her, but …

  Dane sprang to life. ‘Oh sorry. Taryn, this is … um …’

  ‘Catherine,’ I said.

  MY EYE IS A BUTTON ON YOUR DRESS

  * * *

  HANAN AL-SHAYKH

  translation from Arabic by Catherine Cobham

  My beloved Amal,

  Come and take my breath away.

  Yusuf

  I CLUTCHED AT MY heart for fear it would roll away, just like people in films and books. ‘Come and take my breath away.’ I became my own private earthquake: the ground was no longer in its normal place beneath my feet, my job didn’t matter any more, my relationship with Simon had lost all meaning, in fact it seemed like a sheet of newspaper I’d fixed over a broken windowpane to keep out the draught. Freezing-cold London vanished in the warmth of his letter, and the Eye of Horus on the postage stamp looked kindly at me, pleading with me to return to the land of the sun where I was born and raised, and where I’d been madly in love with a man for ten years until he clipped my wings and I crashed to the ground.

  I hurry to answer to Yusuf’s email address, my fingers conveying my eagerness: ‘I’m coming, I’m coming, I’m coming.’ Then I rush to ask my boss if I can take a week off, clutching the letter and lying that I have to go to Cairo for a family emergency. I text Simon, telling him that my mother has to have an operation, reserve a seat on the plane for the next day, and
return to my emails. I read Yusuf’s reply: ‘Your body will gather up the fragments of my body like Isis gathered Osiris and made him whole again.’

  ‘I’m flying to you tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow? Not now? How can I wait till tomorrow?’

  ‘You’ve lived without me for five years while I’ve suffered the torment of having you always here with me, on the sofa, in the bathroom, in the book I’m reading, in my bag, in the street, while I eat, wash my hair, dress and undress, sleep, yet despite all of that I never see you, touch you, hear from you.’

  I don’t write any of that, but ask if we can talk on Skype or FaceTime.

  ‘Don’t you think that would diminish the impact of our meeting, like someone fasting and breaking his fast on an onion?’

  His refusal kindled my desire and made my passion grow.

  He was a husband and a father. I never once asked him to divorce his wife, or to take me as a second wife. I was perfectly happy with our arrangement. I didn’t try to make him jealous by telling him if men asked me out, or wanted to marry me, and I never tried to turn him against his wife. I remember when he used to tell me that she knew about our relationship and was threatening to leave, I just pretended to be busy moving the hands of my watch forwards or backwards.

  But one day, five years, two months, and three days ago, he took my hands in his, telling me that we had to end our relationship for the time being.

  We were in a nightclub called Aladdin, in Pyramid Street. I remember that everyone in the club was having a siesta, even the cats, as he had insisted on seeing me in the middle of the day. I was surprised when he asked to meet me there, and I suggested instead that we meet on the balcony of the Mina House Hotel, but he objected, and not as gently as usual.

  ‘No, no.’ And surrounded by the scary pictures of artistes, singers, and dancers, and the smell of cigarettes, he announced, the moment I sat down opposite him, that he loved me more than anyone else in the world, even more than he loved himself, and would love me for ever, for I had entered the pores of his skin and lived inside him, but that present circumstances were against us continuing our relationship.

  ‘But why? I don’t understand. Why?’

  ‘Circumstances. The circumstances are very difficult.’

  ‘Is there someone else?’

  ‘You’re totally crazy.’

  ‘Your wife then?’

  He shook his head uncertainly, then stood up and said, ‘Yes, my wife.’

  When he left without even a glance in my direction, I threw myself into my car, crying and screaming. I drove and joined the sit-in in Tahrir Square, pulling frantically at my hair, and people crowded around me telling me that I should calm down and that the people’s will was strong and destiny would respond to them.1 I suddenly felt embarrassed and got up to leave, claiming that I was needed at work at the radio station.

  I pursued him like a dog following its master, to his workplace, to the flat where we used to meet. I turned the key in the lock as I always did before, trembling at the thought of what was going to happen between us shortly, but the keyhole rejected my key. So Yusuf had changed the lock even before ending our relationship. I went to the street where he lived, waiting for him opposite his house. I wrote letters to him because I thought they were safer than texts or emails, delivering them by hand to his secretary, and I hung around outside his barber’s, his dentist’s.

  I also cut up the sheet stained with the blood of my virginity, which he’d kindly relieved me of, and sent it to his newspaper. I visited his sister, who’d always hated his wife, and clung to her, weeping, for her eyes were exactly like his, honey-coloured. She cried too, and told me that her brother was being followed by the security services, that his life was in danger, and he was scared somebody might expose our relationship and use it against him in revenge for the way he’d reversed the politics of the newspaper he edited, so that now it was anti-regime. Then she begged me to think about my future. ‘My future!’ I shout. ‘He’s my future. I don’t want to marry or have children.’

  ‘No, you’ll regret it. You’re still young and beautiful, and you’ll resent him, and life when you get older, especially if you don’t have a child.’

  ‘But I’m scared of pregnancy and childbirth. You can see how skinny I am!’

  Cairo had risen up against its leader in protest against hunger, humiliation, injustice, and because people were treated like animals. The Arab Spring quickly gained momentum, and blazed like a firework display, bringing joy to all our hearts. The energy and excitement of the events going on around me and Yusuf began to have an effect on our relationship too. Despite the fact that I stayed in Tahrir Square all the time, and he never left his work except to go home in the early hours of the morning, we kept in touch on the phone and exchanged text messages: he asked me if I preferred chocolate to kissing, and I asked him if birds suffered from indigestion; he asked me if anyone had pinched my bottom in Tahrir Square, and I answered ‘Yes, you.’

  I pound away on the computer: ‘You’re quite right. It’s better if we postpone our meeting till tomorrow when we’re face to face,’ and I’m thinking that the computer screen might show how crushed and depressed I look after our long separation.

  ‘Tell me, are you married? Any kids?’

  ‘No. I’m not married and I don’t have children.’

  ‘If you were waiting for me, now’s the chance for us to be together, and I’ve arranged everything, that’s of course if you want the same thing as I do.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘For you to be in my arms day and night. But you haven’t told me why you went off to England?’

  ‘Because I like fog!’

  I’d decided to leave when I became like a sunflower, with a twisted neck from following him everywhere, and eyes stumbling unfocused and multiplying interminably as they searched for him and cried for him.

  ‘We’ll talk about everything. The important thing is that I’m waiting for you, waiting for your skinny body that must be dry as a stick, craving love and life!’

  ‘I can hardly believe that you still remember your letters to me word for word. Do you remember what you wrote when I moved from my own radio programme to co-present with that idol of the masses, Hussam?’

  The computer almost ignites when he answers me after a quarter of an hour. ‘Sorry, I was making coffee. I remember I said, Watch out, my eye is a button on your dress, observing all your comings and goings!’

  As I read this, all I can see is the balcony of the Mina House Hotel, and the pyramids reassuring me that everything will be fine between us, just as it used to be, and that I hadn’t been in too much of a hurry to decide to travel the next day, even though when he kicked me out of his life, it was as if he’d cut off both my arms.

  But what about his wife? Had they separated? Was she dead? I never hated her or felt jealous of her at any time in my relationship with him. Quite the contrary, I thought we shared something, our love for him, even though I did deliberately leave a pair of my tights in his house in Fayyoum when he’d asked me to put everything including the sugar jar and the packet of coffee back in its place, claiming his wife had begun to suspect that he took me to this holiday house of theirs. She’d even left home one day in protest at his relationship with me, and he’d finally come across her car parked in front of a hotel in the Cairo suburbs.

  I write back to him, slyly trying to find out more about the situation with his wife. ‘I want to hear your voice. Let me call you. Is your number the same as it was? I still remember it.’

  ‘I’ll call you, darling. Can you send me your number straight away?’

  I send him my number and wait more than five minutes.

  ‘Sorry, the electricity’s been cut off and the lines are down. But maybe that happened for a reason, in case all the phone networks between Egypt and England burst into flames the moment we hear each other’s voices.’

  My phone rings again and I shout ‘Hello! Hello!’ but I only
hear a crackling before the line is cut. Then I receive an email from someone whose name I don’t recognise, telling me that it’s hard for our friend to contact me by phone, because it seems his phone is being tapped, but that there’s no time to go into detail. I thank the writer of the email, only to receive a few seconds later a line from my beloved: ‘Are you being unfaithful to me with my best friend? And I haven’t asked you if you are happy in London, and in your work at the BBC?’

  My heart thumps. Does he want to emigrate to London like millions of other Arabs, and that’s why he’s contacting me? I answer, ‘I’ve got used to living in London and I like my work. Do you still like your work at the paper?’

  ‘Should I understand from this that you’re not coming back to Cairo for good any time soon? Be in no doubt that we’re in dire need of you and all those like you who have emigrated and abandoned their homeland!’

  I used to follow the news about Egypt, as it still affected me in London: how freedom had become a collar tightening around people’s necks, the press was controlled by businessmen, poverty was almost at famine level, the streets had become car parks, the president wanted to amend the constitution to suit his own interests, friends rarely got together, and everyone complained of being hard up.

  ‘We’ll talk tomorrow, and I’ll think about coming back to Cairo permanently.’

  I get ready for the trip. I dye my hair its natural colour, honey brown, buy a new dress, shoes, handbag. I have to look as if I live a normal life in England. Since arriving in London I’ve neglected my appearance. I don’t want it to seem that I take it more seriously than my job. What’s more, the cold and rain, the public transport, and the long working hours don’t encourage me to take the same interest in how I look as I did in Cairo. Back there, appearance, beauty, good looks are the first step to getting a job, and some kind of a smile from the world.