The Landlady
The comfort of old friends
I felt pretty miserable all the way to Cairo on the plane. There was no booze – a dry Air Egypt flight – and an empty seat next to me where The Ex Boyfriend would have been sitting, had I not discovered he’d been cheating on me two weeks earlier. It did cheer me up rather to see my old Egyptian friend – Mr H – waiting for me in the arrivals hall, looking exactly the same as he had done the last time I’d seen him back in 1994. With him were his two friends, Mr W – who turned out to be our taxi driver – and Mr N – who said nothing at all to me. Well, they couldn’t speak any English and my Arabic comprises of two words, both of them quite rude, so it’s hardly surprising. I was immediately offered a Marlboro Red and remembered that the last time I’d seen Mr H, I’d been a chain smoker.
Although I’d booked a hotel for the first couple of nights, Mr H insisted I stay in his spare room. He lives with his very ancient mother in a crumblingly splendid Art Deco Parisian-style 1920s flat in a working class area called Shubra, the equivalent of Whitehawk in Cairo terms. In fact, when stallholders and camel drivers asked where I was staying and I answered ‘Shubra’ – rather than the Hilton, I assume – they laughed and looked at me as if I was crazy. Mr H’s father – an engineer who’d worked in Yorkshire building the railways in the 1920s – had first rented the flat in the 1920s and Mr H still paid the same rent for it – a grand total of 75p per month.
Over a few beers – and a bottle of Jameson Mr H produced from somewhere – we sat and chatted about the good old days of the London club scene and our old colleagues – some long departed and others not – like Leigh Bowery, Steve Walsh and Tim Westwood. I told Mr H about The Boyfriend and warned him that I was not my usual jolly self, as a result. I was mildly alarmed when Mr H told me he had been due to get married to a Lebanese woman in Beirut that very day, but that he’d postponed it because I was coming. I wish now that I’d paid a little more attention to my instincts.
“I was sitting outside a tiny café with a man who kept smiling and saying ‘Sawry no Ingleesh‘ ”
The following morning, after way too little sleep, I was awoken early because Mr W – the taxi driver – had been booked to take me to the pyramids. Mr H would not be attending and assured me that Mr W would take good care of me. Moreover, he’d been instructed to take me to ‘the worst café in Cairo‘ for tea en route.
So, at 9.30am, there I was, sitting outside a tiny café in a downtown area, feeling very much like a sore thumb, with a man who kept smiling and saying “Sawry, no Ingleesh”. Eventually, we left for Giza. The entire 10K journey, Mr W valiantly and very proudly pointed out famous ‘landmarks‘ – ‘Four Seasons Hotel, Hilton Hotel, Sofitel Hotel, hospital‘ – not really the kind of landmarks I’d been anticipating, but hey. Travelling along in Mr W’s ancient (at latest 1970) taxi, whose passenger door was jammed shut with the aid of a rusty screwdriver, I noticed that there were no traffic lights in Cairo.
Then, in the blazing morning sun, Mr W’s taxi got stuck on a hill in fourth gear. Alas, this hill happened to be squarely in the main entrance to the pyramids… more next week.
