Into Suez (7 page)

This was the land of the dead, one of the passengers was complaining. It was all mummified corpses and madmen with bombs.

The
Terra Incognita
had berthed at Safaga. Nia and Poppy shuffled down the gangway, hanging on tight to their passports. At last Nia was following Ailsa into the Middle East. Reaching dry land, they looked back at the liner, which towered above them, gleaming white, in contrast to the rusting hulks in the harbour, an opulent, floating island of Britishness. It wasn’t the way Nia had toured India and Swaziland in her time. She’d backpacked, working her way round, getting to know people. And the worst thing was, she was positively
enjoying
being cosseted like a colonist, gorged fat on lavish food.

We are the ship’s babies, she thought as she and Poppy boarded the Egyptian agency bus. And this is our pram.

‘You are all Egyptians now, my good friends!’ said Zahrah, their smiling, headscarfed guide. ‘Please, be
comfortable and make yourselves at home. Egypt is your country today!’

This was the famous hospitality of the Middle East. It was extended even as we bombed their brothers and sisters in Iraq.

‘Yes, you are Egyptians now! We welcome you as our family.’

Nia clapped in appreciation with the others. But she wouldn’t want to be an Egyptian, not if she also had to be a woman: no thanks. The headscarf and the veil; the leering, jeering males who mobbed Poppy and feasted on her bare arms.

They were to join a convoy of a hundred coaches, for unfortunately although Egypt is your home, Zahrah confessed, there are bad people about who want to bomb our honoured visitors. Never in her life had Nia seen so many soldiers or armed policemen.

‘Today we travel to famous and lovely graves,’ Zahrah told them. ‘You will see the Valley of the Kings. Do not worry about Ahmed,’ she added. ‘Ahmed is a very nice policeman travelling with us in plain clothes to ensure our safety.’ The shyly handsome young man in a dark suit napped the four hours to Karnak. His hands lay slack in his lap; a holster bulged at his groin. Armed men were stationed at junctions and bridges, holding up donkey carts and women with bags, to ensure safe passage to the convoy of westerners.

After the parched, dark desert of Safaga, the bus entered the deliquescence of the green country bordering the Nile. It was a sudden and excessive transition from drought to fertility. Village after village of mud brick houses in earth and sky colours, without running water and sanitation,
lined the way. Nia’s heart ached for the pauperdom of people whose lot had hardly changed in millennia. What I am seeing, Ailsa saw, she thought. Families shared quarters with animals. From glassless windows multicoloured washing hung like flags. But villages clearly had electricity, for their roofs bristled with television dishes. How come Nasser, whose socialism had promised so much to the
fellaheen
, had delivered so little? Why hadn’t he succeeded in reforming the
baksheesh
economy, in which inadequate incomes had to be supplemented by tips and favours? Nia felt ashamed of her plenty; possessive of it too.

This was hardly the way to see the Middle East, spying through glass panes under armed guard. But Poppy, exhausted from teaching, had said when she’d seen the last minute cut-price tickets, hey, let’s go for it. Crazy not to.

Do we really fancy it though? What about the Awful People?

Poppy had flinched:
People are people
.

Nia was ashamed. How Poppy could put up with her, she had no idea. In her own twenties, Nia wouldn’t have been seen dead on a cruise with her own mother, so stuffy and po-faced. They’d have brought their own frost to the East. Poppy was so laid-back that they’d never quarrelled, even in her teens: her soft robustness issued in a tactful going of her own way. And Nia, child of the Sixties, had been a parent so compulsively liberal that Poppy would have found little to rebel against except permissiveness itself.

Awful People
, Nia continued secretly to think. Some of her fellow cruise-guests expressed a surly sense of entitlement, bullying the crew. Retirement had brought an unexpected magic to their first cruises, hard perhaps to
recapture as one entered the compromised health and hope of deeper old age. Others were cheerful and adventurous. Poppy chatted to a lovely guy across the aisle who’d been stationed at Tel-el-Kabir after the War. He spoke warmly of Egypt.

Nia kept quiet. It’s my father I fear, she thought: he’s out there somewhere. With every moment she moved nearer to the time when, on its passage through the Suez Canal, the
Terra Incognita
would draw level with Fayid Cemetery and all that was left of Joseph Elwyn Roberts. His scrawl in the diaries was all over the place, with a child’s misspellings and odd abbreviations. Several times she’d opened his book and tried to reconstruct his meaning. A tongue-scramble of impressions that could only be made sense of by weaving in Ailsa’s clearer account. Nia had been so painfully moved that, after skimming a page and hearing his voice, she’d put it away for a braver time, leaving him down there on the quay at Port Said eternally waiting for his wife and daughter to join him.

The veteran from Tel-el-Kebir offered them a mint, which Nia accepted with a smile. His lively eyes were pale blue, almost bleached. He might easily have known Sergeant Joe Roberts, and even remember him. These folk were the last of her parents’ generation, on pilgrimage to the places of their early lives as National Servicemen. For Nia too this was a pilgrimage. The little she remembered was nonsensical: hail stones big as ping pong balls and screaming her head off between a camel’s twin humps. And – this seemed to be her first memory – bleeding creatures in the sea. Perhaps it was some corrupted memory of Mami’s hands gutting fish. But the creatures that bled all over her memory were enormous beings with
intelligent, expressive eyes. Some film perhaps. She blinked it away and listened to the veteran from Tel-el-Kebir. This was the last such voyage the veterans were likely to make, now that the Middle East was well nigh closing down. Nowhere was safe, he said, after our assault on Iraq.

Luxor and Karnak passed like dreams. They trooped through the monumental temple in smiting heat; then after a picnic lunch ventured underground into the tombs of Tutankhamun and those of various Ramses. All in eight hours flat. The sun was sinking and Poppy’s face, arms and neck were gilded by the glorious light. Her child’s goldenness was one with the yellow hills of the Valley of the Kings in the dying sun, the splendour imparted to tawny mud villages on rust-red hillsides, the rich patina of sand gilding the mortuary landscape in this vast necropolis on the Nile’s west bank.

Poppy remained asleep while Nia disembarked at Memnon, where they were to have a ‘photo stop’. The twin colossi were all that remained of a vast temple. Now they sat as sentinels of a portal to – well, nothing. Emptiness. Absence. Faces smashed away, chests weathered, the seated figures preserved in their ruin an intact majesty. They reminded Nia of Henry Moore’s statues of father, mother and child, in a Yorkshire landscape. The relationship of triangles and spheres to the rolling land had made sacred space of landscape and figures. But here the statues sat hieratically apart. And of course there was no child. Nothing to link them. The sun gilded and warmed the colossi’s intact knees and lower legs. Behind them a rust-red mountain rose with a village on its foothills. New busloads of tourists arrived looking for something to photograph and Zahrah beckoned to her
Terra Incognita
charges.

Perhaps it would be the magnificent temple at Karnak that Nia took away with her. But more likely, Nia thought, climbing back into the bus, it will be the memory of that dog slinking through the ruins, an image of destitution. A ginger bitch with swollen teats, head low, consumed by hunger and exhaustion, had curled up at the dead centre of a vast aisle behind twin pylons, completely exposed. Many feet, in sandals, trainers, flip-flops, lace-ups, moved past her, not so much aiming kicks as shoving at the bitch in passing. She did not stir. Nia later saw the scapebitch, as she called it to herself, like the biblical scapegoat – in the coach park, nosing its way into the stink of hot rubber and oil beneath a parked van.

Shy as hell Joe felt, standing on the quay in his KDs, arms folded, wearing a jaunty look. He’d have his two darlings safe in his arms within the hour. The chaos of the quay frazzled his nerves as the towering ship inched in and the ropes were thrown and secured. Petty officials in
self-important
fezes scuffled among themselves, apparently disputing points of procedure; traders of all sorts swarmed round the ship jabbering; a man in a robe called him Johnnie and wheedled Joe to buy genuine Ancient Egyptian scarabs, straight from the Pharaohs’ tombs. In this mess and din and reek, it seemed as if the shore were doing its best to push the
Empire Glory
back out to sea.

Gyppos couldn’t organise a trip to the Pyramids, so Dusty Miller was complaining. But Joe smiled and said good-naturedly to the scarab-man, ‘Not today, my boy, thanks all the same,’ gentle as to a child. He didn’t abuse or scoff at the Egyptians to their faces and disliked it that
others did. They were childlike, as far as Joe could see, incapable of discipline and reason. Their smarmy ways he didn’t much care for but they had a living to get and he bet he’d have toadied in their position. They lived in squalor and owned nothing. And though he’d lived rather too near to the bottom of the heap back home, the Gyppos’ scavenging pauperdom made Joe and Chalkie seem like lords.

So he grinned at the scarab-man as he waved him away and was somewhat unsettled when the chap laughed and said, ‘OK, right you are, Taffy-Effendi.’ Antennae they had like nobody’s business, some of them. Hardly ten words of English to call their own but they could nail an accent. Geordie, Mick, Jock: you name it, they mimed it like parrots.

The other blokes awaiting their families had fallen silent and, in the midst of the furore, they took on the attitude of men at prayer, all gazing upwards.

‘Not so long now, Taf.’ Chalkie was that rare thing, an
old
friend. The two of them had been together in the Western Desert during the war, slept together, messed together. Joe relished Chalkie’s quiet presence, his modesty and funny faces. Slightly built but wiry and strong, Roy White was blessed with an understated sense of humour, a frizz of corkscrew curls close to his head and wire-rimmed specs always at an angle. ‘Poor things,’ said Chalkie. ‘They’ll be worn out.’

‘Aye,’ said Joe, ‘bless them.’ His hands shook as he handed Chalkie a cigarette. Women’s faces peered over the rails. The gangways were lowered. An eternal pause. Then he glimpsed, not Ailsa but Nia, a pale sun rising above the railing by the gangway, only to set instantly.

‘My daughter! My little girl!’

‘Where?’

‘There.’

‘Ah! The wee gingernut!’

Here they came, shuffling down the gangway, the tall, elegant mother holding the hand of the pale child with her golly in one hand. But Nia suddenly stopped. Stuck fast. Holding up the queue behind her. One of the women, seeing the difficulty, reached back and hoisted her up, carrying her down. Joe tussled forward against the
hurly-burly
of husbands.

‘Ailsa,’ he said. ‘
Cariad
.’

Home.

Nia stuck her thumb in her mouth and thus plugged it, so as to remain neutral. The man plunging at her mother had a great and convincing likeness to her Daddy, but was he the same? She felt Mami rip away from her like sticky tape. This man was crying and so was Mami crying. Nia wanted nothing to do with that. Looking up, she saw them disappear into a knot made of both of them. Only Auntie Mona was left faithfully holding her by one hand, with Golly under one arm. Darling Mona who’d suddenly appeared on the quay in her red dress with a wide-brimmed sun hat, grinning down in reassurance. Quietly, Nia gave herself up to imagining a glass of ice-cold Lucozade, seeing in her mind’s eye the rustling yellow paper wrapped around the bottle. She did not look at the Daddy-man but instead secretly uncurled her hand to check that Little Yellow Man was still there and had not changed in any way. Yes, he was the same, exactly, with bite-marks all round his faded face. Having checked, she again mounted vigil, tightening hot, wet fingers around his friendly woodenness.

‘Well well, my beauty?’ He crouched and gentled her with a well-remembered voice – and seemed to want to sweep her up and perch her on his shoulders, where she’d be able to bang on his head with her fists, like a drum. But his close-up face didn’t seem quite right. The one inside her head didn’t have such sunburnt skin, as dark nearly as Auntie Mona’s. The fleck of bloody toilet paper on a shaving nick under his ear and the chin-stubble were not quite right. Only his blue-blue eyes were the same.

‘Say hallo to your daddy, Nia,’ Ailsa urged her.

‘She needs to get used to me, bless her,’ said Joe, with his crooked little smile, as if he knew a joke. He straightened up and took a step back. He was saying that he had some presents for the girlie in his kit bag. Should he give them to her on the train?

‘Oh but Mona – I haven’t introduced you! What am I thinking of? This is Mona, Joe – my good friend – she’s been so sweet to me and Nia. Mona – my husband.’

Joe shook hands cordially. How glad he was, he said, that Ailsa had made a pal on a voyage that cannot have been much fun for anyone. He was grateful to her.
Half-caste
? Dark as weak coffee and not with sunburn, that was for sure. Seemed a decent type though. And
well-spoken
. An educated, superior voice if ever Joe heard one. With this thought, all ease and naturalness drained away: he was the tinplate apprentice, son of a furnaceman, the lowest of the low at the South Wales Canister Company.

Joe gripped Ailsa beneath the elbow, to move her on. But the crush of jubilation made movement impossible and the Military Police were nowhere to be seen. Chalkie jounced both his boys in his arms, whilst kissing his wife. The children’s hair was white as wheat and their cheeks
flushed with heat and over-excitement. Joe was introduced to Chalkie’s ladylike wife, Irene, and spoke to a tearful foreigner who could not find her husband. Corporal Webster, RAF Fanara, she said, did he know him? had he seen him?
My friend Ailsa will help me
, she said desperately, gripping Ailsa’s arm.
My good friend
. Who wouldn’t panic in these circumstances: just off the ship and no husband? With her baby-blonde hair and pale complexion, she looked ready to faint with anxiety.