Only in London by Hanan al-Shaykh

Author:Hanan al-Shaykh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307427137
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

She and her entourage were working at full stretch; Amira the organiser, the brain behind everything, tailoring her schemes to suit the encounter. She always varied her reasons for needing money, adapting her story to fit different faces and personalities. She never gave the same rationale twice, and discovered through experience that the simple explanations worked the best.

Sometimes she had to come up with inventive excuses for not paying back the men who’d given her money. The money order had been lost, and the bank was looking into it. She took pleasure in accusing a bank - it had taken her money and ploughed it into its profits - and telling amusing stories about how her mother sent back her allowance from Saudi Arabia when she saw the travellers’ cheques instead of English pounds, insisting that they were just pieces of paper. ’Where’s the Queen’s head? I don’t want paper, I want real money.’

Sometimes Amira would claim to be afraid of annoying her ’uncle’, or her ’brother’. ’He’s always busy,’ she would say, ’if I bother them I’m afraid they’ll say come back home. Or they’ll never allow the women in our family to go abroad again.’

She would add that it was hard for her because she was a princess, and people were looking at her one hundred per cent of the time.

However, there came a day when Amira found herself paying off her debt in another way, and one that suited her best, leaving her with a clear conscience. She was at Claridge’s for afternoon tea. It was full of American and English women, the latter wearing hats like tea cosies.

Amira’s three attendants, having helped her out of her jacket, poured and distributed the tea, whispering to one another, covering their mouths in embarrassment, and sinking their teeth into their palms when they laughed. Amira sat calmly maintaining her poise despite her growing fears that there was no one to con at the hotel that afternoon. But she was a princess, wasn’t she? Real princesses didn’t suffer anxiety or nervousness, for everything was within their reach - people and their immaterial souls, as well as all the material goods they wanted. Among themselves Amira and her companions began to debate whether or not they should gather up their courage and try the Dorchester, taking a risk on whether the real Princess was there, when a visiting Arab, whom Nahid had recently mentioned to Amira, arrived in the company of three Iranian men. The men looked around and chose a nearby table - Tits-like-Pamela Anderson’s abaya had slipped off her shoulders by then.

Amira took out her mobile phone and tried to use it. She indicated to an attendant that it wasn’t working. Whereupon her attendant managed to manoeuvre the loan of a mobile from the Arab sitting at the nearby table, explaining to him that the battery on the Princess’s phone had run down, and assuring him that they were calling London, not Saudi Arabia.

’What are the children having for tea?’ Amira asked down the borrowed phone.

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