Okay... Not a real Muslim.
If a band of marauding Islamic fundamentalists break into the Pedantic offices and start filtering out the infidels from the faithful, I'd not pass the test, in fact, I'd probably be first against the wall. But it was the done thing to convert when I got married and since, after a prolonged war of attrition, I'd managed to convince the ex - son of eminent small-pond, big-fish Palestinian academic whose maternal uncle was four times Prime Minister of Lebanon and has a traffic-choked boulevard named after him - to marry a left-school-at-16, divorced, working-class, Scot whose mother worked in a Chemist and whose paternal and maternal uncles were coal miners - I was all about conforming.
Suddenly I found myself whisked away from the library where we met in Oxford to a complicated world of women who lived in homes the size of corner blocks in Knightsbridge, with lip-liner and big hair with a fondness for Versace and multi-hued gem-encrusted jewellery whose kohl-rimmed, brown limpid eyes would glaze over like Crispy Creme donuts as they asked me with weary monotony: 'how are ze children?' Given that it took me a year to produce the first baby, that meant there was a whole twelve month period when they didn't say anything much to me at all. I wanted to get cards made up that said: 'The children are fine.' It would have saved us all the bother of politeness. Other cousins were sophisticated and world-weary and lived in Chelsea with Rothkos and Picassos hanging on the wall (it was one of these at a dinner where I mentioned something that happened on my honeymoon from which I'd just that day returned, who asked me at a crowded table 'if that was with my first husband...' just in case there was anyone there who didn't know I wasn't a virgin bride.) When Lebanese women bitch, they're a loss to the armed forces. And they all smoked, and smoked and smoked, filling up ashtrays with waxy red filter-tips that matched their manicures and often their rubies.
I was as alien to them as they were to me. I felt like I had arrived from a distant planet. I wondered if it was because I wasn't posh enough, or rich enough, or clever enough, but my husband put it far more succinctly. I wasn't Arab enough. 'It wouldn't matter if you were Princess Di or had a double first from Cambridge. You're just not Arab.'
Thankfully, they weren't all like the 'pussycats' as I came to call them, and his mother, a tiny, irreverent, unorthodox, powerhouse of a woman quickly became my staunchest ally. 'These women - mish ma'oul (impossible),' she'd say and roll her eyes, then giggle.
Twenty five years on, my mother in law is a flat plaque in a distant cemetry and my father-in-law hasn't spoken to me in over a year. The pussycats are old tabbies now, and no longer ask after the children. I hear second hand from the cousins who were my friends with forwarded text messages. And yet I ride on the bus down Edgeware Road and can read all the signs on all the restaurants. I can swear profusely and, less usefully, can still manage the headline on a newspaper, though most of my Arabic vocabulary has vanished from lack of use. My ex and I used to speak a mangled pidgin franglarabish to each other, mostly so that the kids wouldn't understand what was going on. Gradually they learned, though but now there's no-one to speak it with. I can cook everything from ma'loubi - the Palestinian national dish to molokia - mallow with vinegar, onions and chicken (an acquired taste!) which we eat on plates from the Palestinian pottery in Nablus. My house is decorated with David Roberts prints of places that no longer exist for either of us. There's a carpet on the floor that came from the turetted palace in Beirut where my mother-in-law grew up which is the same as those given by King Hussein of Jordan to the Dome of the Rock. My kids wear hands of Fatima on chains round their necks and all have Arabic names of dead relatives who aren't mine. There's a charred Indian box that was saved from his parents' flat in Beirut after it was hit by an Israeli incendiary bomb, and numerous photographs of speckled Sepia old men in Fezes outside the family library in Jerusalem line the walls of my ex-husband's study where his grandfather's books flake yellow dandruff on to the floor. There's even a signed photograph of old Towelhead dedicated to Ahmad and family because he didn't know how to write Marion in English and was too embarrassed to ask, and a tiny pin cushion that Mrs A sent out when her daughter was born with the obligatory sugar almonds.
What isn't there is the husband who brought all this orientalist memorabilia; or the fax machine which was the only thing he took when he left. My house is a shrine to a life that isn't really mine.
Yesterday, however, I had the front door repainted.
It's bright, Pepso Bismol, Calamine Lotion, Pink.
Now that's definitely mine.
