Loving Monsters (16 page)

For the purposes of this book, at any rate, this is a story soon ended. Middle-aged men who have lived mostly as wanderers cannot easily re-invent themselves just because they become fathers. In theory the idea of ‘settling down at last’ ought to imply a degree of relief: no more returning to an empty house, no more roaming the cruddier parts of the globe with a frayed nylon bag and sour trousers. I’m afraid for me it has overtones of scuttling for refuge. I began to yearn to find the house empty, while the cruddier parts of the globe increasingly returned to me in dreams positively aglow with the ache of association. I adored Emma; but then I have adored quite a few people over the decades. Can one construct a life around adoration unless one is religious? The truth is I am no good at exclusive relationships. I never have been
and never will be. Deep down I lack the interest as well as the requisite skill. It took me years to discover this plain fact and longer still before I could admit to it. So powerful is my native culture’s propaganda I grew up accepting that to fail in one’s relationships was to fail in life itself. Even in university days we would bandy about words like ‘inadequate’ and ‘immature’ with the confident earnestness that meant they applied only to others. The ready equation was drawn: unloving, unloved. But no, that was not me at all. I like easygoing, rather masculine friendships such as Victorian men favoured and many cultures still do. They have entirely sufficed and I have never wished for more. (Sex, of course, is an unrelated matter.) So for most of my adult life I have been content to leave ‘relationships’ to the majority of people who clearly think they’re good at them. I know my limits. Or thought I did. How on earth, it will be wondered, could I ever have imagined I might enter a committed domestic relationship and become a father at the age of forty? How indeed. There probably is an answer; but teasing apart the various layers of self-delusion, contingency and the nearing rumble of the damned Chariot’s wheels would be wearisome.

Enough to say that less than two years went by before Frances left to marry a dullard who owned a sound studio in Ladbroke Grove. I might have imagined for her a man from the shires nearer her own age and background, someone more solid, less verbal than me. What she chose was a decaying hipster of fifty who kept up an unwitty patter about the famous pop stars and voice-overs who had recently been in his studio, his voice made even louder by a lifetime’s talking while wearing headphones. I hope he reads this, but I don’t believe he’s read a book in his life other than the odd technical manual: thus do the sublimely ignorant protect themselves from thought. In any case Frances took our daughter with her to join his own vague and extended family who apparently spent much of the time lying around in a haze of cannabis fumes or worse. So what
was
the missing ingredient? I would ask the walls of our empty house, still marked with odd
streaks of crayon, and receive no satisfactory answer. Me, I presume. I also presumed money (of which this man had a good deal more than me) but without ever completely believing it. These things are opaque, mysterious. What was not mysterious was the sheer pain of missing Emma, who will be sixteen next April. I still cannot quite believe it was all snatched away through my own fault; but it was, and it can never be restored or caught again. Children slough off so many skins so fast, together with former fathers.

So now when I watch Jayjay playing doting grandfather to Dario’s equally doting grandson and note with a pang the boy’s own grubby little fingernails, it can mobilise something within me that comes perilously close to jealousy. For a while I bought myself off by imagining that by the time I was in my sixties Emma might have presented me with an honorary grandchild. This, I pretended, would sop up the love which had once begun to well but which was never permitted to flow for long enough to become part of the main stream of someone else’s private history. These days, at the moment of arriving home when the pickup’s headlights crest the last slope and cut the silent house out from the edge of black space on which it stands, I no longer rely on its ever happening. We make our own luck, and isolation often seems like a refuge from far worse.

Such, then, was Jayjay’s domestic ménage, and such my own. And if I was secretly surprised at finding his so rich, I was correspondingly downcast by the unintended reminder that my own lacked by comparison. It seemed like another reason for feeling slightly inferior to the person whose life I was supposed to be writing, a very bad state of affairs indeed. Even if his subject is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart a biographer still holds in reserve one final incontrovertible superiority: that he is not at this moment lying somewhere beneath the foundations of a launderette in Vienna but alive in living air, making himself cups of coffee, tripping over the cat and whistling about the house as if immortal. Shorn of such an advantage over Jayjay I resolved to discover in
him either something I could openly admire or else something I could secretly despise, either of which may serve as the basis of a workable alliance.

*

– Suez was my nursery, and I wasn’t ready to leave it until nearly six months were up. By then Richards had left and there was no-one to cover for me so I took a week’s wages and walked out on Anderson & Green, a mutually unregretted move. I had also seen and heard the last of my involuntary room-mate Simpkins and his cavernous farts. I was whizzing, picking up the language, learning the rackets, discovering Mansur’s limits as a fixer. His limits as a lover were quickly reached, thank goodness, although I did grow quite fond of him. At least, it seems to me I did; but then the whole of that era in my life when I was shaking out my new plumage in the Middle Eastern sun seems to glow. Nostalgia, you know. Lost youth, all that. No doubt things were a bit more equivocal at the time.

– It was now 1937 and I had already made a few useful contacts in Cairo and elsewhere. The time had come to say goodbye to Milo, whose rackets had afforded me some modest savings, and start travelling. I decided to go up the Nile, partly because I really needed to get out of Suez and partly because I very much wanted to see this mythical river. A further reason was that Milo had given me an introduction to a German anthropologist named August Moll-Ziemcke who was working in what in those days was the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. I think his village was called Hamir, but maybe that was the name of the district. It’s so long ago. It was somewhere past the Fifth Cataract, on the east bank of the Nile near Atbara. More Nubian than desert Arab. I knew he was planning to spend a couple of months in Khartoum, possibly to get the manuscript of a book
*
finished, so I arranged to meet him there. I took a train to Cairo and set off in a series of river steamers, allowing myself a leisurely eight weeks for the journey.

– And what a journey! You must remember that with the exception of river steamers taking Cook’s tourists up to Luxor that part of the world was still little touched by the twentieth century. Well before one reached Upper Egypt one could imagine that the view from the Nile was essentially unchanged from what it had been a thousand years ago, maybe even two or three thousand. And once one had passed Wadi Halfa it was like being lost in time. Both sides of the river were pretty much nomad territory, the tribes moving about seasonally with their flocks. It would in theory have been possible to set off due west across the Sahara and not to see a living soul until one reached the Atlantic ocean 2,500-odd miles later. The winter rains had only just ended and there were some lush savannahs still visible with great carpets of wildflowers and misty green acacia trees. Egrets, hornbills, kites, and those kingfisher-blue Abyssinian Rollers: it was unbelievably beautiful and
primordial.
One could easily believe in the Garden of Eden. I gather it’s virtually gone now because the climate has changed and there have been ten-year droughts recently that have decimated the vegetation. The wretched nomads have mostly been driven south to fill the slums of places like Omdurman and Khartoum or else north to work in Libya. A millennia-old culture and way of life broken up and destroyed in only a few decades. The longer I live, the less I enjoy talking about those pre-war days of travel, of places and people which are either all changed beyond recognition or vanished entirely. It isn’t the same planet today. It feels as though a different sun rolls from an exhausted sea to light up lands that bear little relation to those I knew. My exact roads are effaced for ever; they can’t be wandered again. Nor should one try, of course. But it’s not true that it was ever thus. The degree of change has never before been so huge or so swift, and it will never now be reversed.

– I got off a rusty little boat at a nowhere town called Abu Dom, all because I’d met a young Sudanese official on board who was connected with the NAO. That was the Native Administration Ordinance which the British had set up as a way of
keeping the dozens of different tribes, with their conflicting migratory traditions and ancient rivalries, in some sort of harmony. In fact it was a scheme that worked quite well and depended on power being given back to local leaders such as
nazirs
and
omdas.
This fellow I met on the boat was some sort of policeman. He had been on an official mission downstream and was badly delayed in his home village by a wedding or a circumcision or other vital ceremony. So there he was, due back in Omdurman in ten days with getting on for seven hundred river miles to cover. At our rate of progress it would have taken him a month because the steamer’s boilers kept leaking. He proposed we went overland from Abu Dom to Omdurman, which would have been about a hundred and eighty miles because it cut off a great loop of river. Since he was hoping to arrange for us to travel with a caravan, and since he said we ought to do it in little more than a week, I volunteered to join him. He explained it was a route that was fairly frequently travelled, unlike most other desert routes, and we might even strike lucky and get a lift on a Citroën half-track or something like that.

– Well, we didn’t, and retrospectively I’m glad we didn’t. We found ourselves with a group of Kababish – I forget now which tribe they were. Nurab? That rings a bell. They were taking camels to sell in Khartoum, about two hundred head. It was an astonishing journey and hellishly tough since I’d never sat on a camel before. Twelve hours’ slogging by day, riding or else walking when the going was too soft. I’d fancied until then that I was getting on reasonably well in Arabic, but I was floored by the dialect they were speaking. Not only was their accent peculiar but half their words referred to parts of camels or species of bush or qualities of sand. It certainly resembled no language that would get you by in the back streets of Suez.

– The thirst was awful. Just when you thought you would die they stopped and brewed up scalding sweet tea and stuff called
kisri
that I’ve never forgotten. It was a kind of primitive polenta, but don’t confuse it with our polenta here. Ours is either maize
flour or chestnut flour and liberally covered with
ragú
sauce. Theirs was made of millet, and I think it was rotten millet at that: rancid and bitter. If you were lucky they put a dab of goat butter on it. At night you slept on skins in the lee of the camels which hunkered down on their knees in the sand. It was mortally cold, so cold you couldn’t sleep properly. Besides, there were always people astir. They set watches and patrolled all the time because they were terrified of being caught asleep by camel rustlers from other tribes. I’m not sure the Kababish ever did go to sleep completely.

– I can’t now remember exactly how many days it took us. It seemed to last for a period impossible to measure by ordinary means. I have always thought of it as being ten days and I expect that is about right. In all that time we passed one oasis with a village, if you could call it a village. Four or five cane huts with straw roofs. There was a well there and even an
umbasha,
a sort of police corporal, so it was practically a township. I saw into one of the huts and there was almost nothing in it. A carpet, a rope bed, some pots and hangings. Nothing that couldn’t be rolled up and loaded on to a camel in a matter of minutes for the next migration to pastureland. They didn’t want to settle, those people. Their whole culture was centred on nomadism and I had the impression they felt no sentimentality about places as such. All they cared for was wandering, and they paid the minutest attention to landscape and season and vegetation so as to know whether it was worth trekking a hundred miles to a particular pasture. Sometimes we met other travellers and the greetings seemed to go on for ever before they got down to the real gossip. Although to me the desert looked completely empty I gradually formed the idea that there were surprising numbers of people purposefully roaming it and swapping news so that the vast emptiness was to some extent knitted together by an efficient bush telegraph.

– Certainly I came to admire the people I was with. They weren’t at all friendly, actually, especially towards a foreigner like me. I was too ignorant of all the things which to them made a man
and was not even worthy of their contempt. I had no animals of my own, no wife, not even a single slave. I knew nothing about camels, couldn’t make a hobble for one, didn’t know how to make a gazelle trap, didn’t know what to do if a
simun
blew up, couldn’t navigate by the stars … You name it and I couldn’t do it, apart from knowing how to use a typewriter and a wireless and find my way around the London underground system and all the other things that to them counted for nothing. Mine was a world so far beyond their universe it didn’t exist at all. It literally meant nothing to them that I was English and therefore represented the ruling power in the Sudan. It meant something to my policeman, which is why he was so friendly, but not to the Kababish. To them Khartoum was the terrifying outer fringe of another world in which they had no part. ‘Sudan’ itself was just a name they’d heard in the mouths of travellers. I was nothing more than baggage on that journey. No, worse than baggage because neither was I useful nor could I be sold at the end. Really, being surrounded by hostility and contempt, especially in conjunction with the hardships of the trip, ought to have made it a miserable experience.