Little Egypt (Salt Modern Fiction) (14 page)

Everything will turn out in the wash
, she told herself.
Look on the bright side
. It was lovely to watch the wake unfurling like watery ferns behind them, and the other craft sailing past. Sometimes a small boat would come close, trying to sell fish or trinkets, but Haru would send them off with a shout and a threatening jerk of his hand. And once there was a legless child hand-paddling a tiny raft and begging for baksheesh. Isis’ heart hurt to see him, but all she could do was look away, just like the others.

As the day wore on, the heat pressed down and Osi’s nose turned a nasty crimson. They should have sun hats. Victor should have thought of it. He wasn’t really looking after them at all. He had his own Panama that he kept in a tube like a fat cigar, which popped into shape when he released it, and Isis had been looking forward to receiving one the same. Now the sun beat down and she could feel her skin burning, her hair seeming to sizzle in its own grease. When she talked and smiled, she could feel the skin of her cheeks pull tight. The sun reflected off the water like daggers in her eyes. She did not feel quite well, she realised – perhaps a touch of sunstroke.

She lay down on one of the wooden benches with her handkerchief over her face. She could see dots of light coming through the weave and it made her think of the neat rows of holes in the Cribbage board and of Mrs Grievous saying goodbye to her son, and fancy a mother going all that way for that reason, while Evelyn and Arthur had not even bothered coming to meet them at all.

The voyage took three days. At night Rhoda slept aboard the
Marguerite
, Akil and Haru went goodness knows where and Victor found rooms for himself and the children, poor rooms that scuttled with scorpions and black beetles, where bed was a shelf and a sheet, sometimes not even a pillow. They grew used to kneeling on the floor to wash their hands and faces with cold water from a bowl and eating in darkened rooms or sitting outside in the cool of the evening when bats and great moths swooped and looped in the air around them. In the garden of one such place, Isis was entranced to see a swarm of fireflies rise from a shrub, so that it seemed the bush itself was rising and flickering, and settling back elsewhere.

As they neared Luxor, they stopped at a place run by American friends of Rhoda’s, who sold ice-cream which was heavenly, though as she ate her dish of creamy yellow, Isis was made uncomfortable by the dark eyes of the other customers watching her in the too-tight frock where her chest itched and grew, looking at her legs where the skirt was rather too short. She felt grubby and cramped and childish, but not in a pretty, pettable way any more. It was as if the hot sun and the fertility that oozed out into the desert from the Nile was forcing her, like a hothouse flower, to swell till she did not fit herself.

14

‘
G
OOD LUCK, KIDS,’
Rhoda said when they had disembarked at Luxor. ‘You’re sure gonna need it.’ She pinched her cigarette between her lips as she reached forward to tie a rope around a stanchion. Isis watched her clever monkey fingers tighten and secure the knot.

‘Why don’t you come and have a cup of tea with us?’ she said, finding herself unwilling to say goodbye. ‘My folks will certainly want to thank you.’

Rhoda’s face twisted into its wonky smile and she patted her pocket. ‘I’ve all the thanks I need.’ She jerked her head over her shoulder. ‘You need eyes in the back of your head in these parts. Be careful.’ She came close to Isis and whispered, ‘Most of the Arab fellas you could trust with your life. But till you know them, best trust no one.’ And then she lifted her hand and stalked off. Her gait was as skewed as her face. Isis watched until she was lost amongst the crowd of men in jellabas, the porters and traders, the dogs and donkeys and camels, the mothers holding the hands of tiny dark-haired children.

‘Nearly there,’ Victor said. Isis smoothed down her smutty dress. She felt a perfect fright. Victor’s bristles practically constituted a beard now, glinting an unexpected gingery colour under his pale flop of hair. Osi simply didn’t bear looking at.

Haru bade them wait while he and Akil went to find some transport. Isis sat on a low wall, Osi and Victor on either side, and hugged her knees, watching the traffic of horses and camels and a few motors. A Cooks’ steamer went past, the faces of its passengers startling pink and white, like a row of marshmallows under shady hats. She could see a lady sipping something long and cool through a straw and felt she would explode with longing. Now that they were near, her pent up anger with Evelyn and Arthur caused her nails to dig sharply into her palms, nails that needed cutting, palms that needed, as always, to be washed.

A man with one white, blind eye bowed and knelt, laying out his wares on a cloth in front of them – beads, scarabs, cats, ankhs and pyramids. There was a tiny turquoise cat that Isis coveted, but before she could reach for it, Victor had sent him packing, shaking his fist and shouting in nervy English that they wanted none of his tat. Hawking a long brown stream of spittle, the man gathered up his merchandise, muttering curses. As he left, he twisted his head over his shoulder and fixed on Isis with his sightless eye and though she knew it couldn’t see her, she was filled with a strange sick shame.

‘We could have bought
something
from the poor blighter,’ she said.

‘They weren’t genuine artefacts, Isis,’ Osi said, in Arthur’s voice. ‘It’s only tourist tat.’

The man had gone now, but he’d left a speck of white in Isis’ vision that she couldn’t quite blink away. Victor said nothing, only scratched his neck where the beard was growing round the edges of his scar, the ginger horrible against the livid shiny red.

Another fellow approached them with straw hats, a column of them nested into each other, balanced on his head.

‘We do need hats!’ Isis said. She jumped up and the man smiled and clowned, moving his head in such a way that the tower of hats swayed and almost toppled.

‘We’ll take two.’ Victor held up two fingers. And as soon as he had bought them, other men and boys came crowding round, with toys and drinks and food wrapped in banana leaves, offering bags of spices, sweets and taxi rides and boat trips, ignoring Victor’s pleas for them to go away. It was with great relief that Isis spotted Haru and Akil returning with a donkey and cart.

For hours they all sat on the cart in the lumpy, sweltering heat. It was dangerous for there was nothing to stop them falling off, and Isis kept a tight hold of Osi’s ankle though he tried to wrench it from her sweaty hand. Whenever the donkey slowed or stumbled, Haru jeered and whipped it with bamboo.

‘Poor donkey,’ she whispered to Victor. ‘Can’t you tell him not to hit it?’

‘Leave him to it,’ Victor said. ‘It’ll be the only language it understands.’

She thought she would get off and walk to save the donkey that extra weight, but in truth she was too stunned by heat to shift herself. They would probably have died without the hats, she thought, grateful for the speckled shade across her eyes. When the cart stopped, at last, the sun was already slumping towards the horizon, a swollen, feverish red. The place they were in looked like no place at all, except that a camp had been set up there, with a stove built of sand-coloured stones, one large khaki tent and several smaller. They were far enough away from the river that the surrounding trees appeared as nothing but a green stain shimmering in the distance.

Here, Haru had expected that they would meet Evelyn and Arthur – though there was no sign of them and no message.

‘Where are they?’ Isis shouted at the only person there, a tall youth, too young to have a proper beard yet.

The boy opened his hands and looked helplessly at Haru.

‘Aren’t we even going to a proper
house
?’ she said, looking at Victor, who only gave a miserable shrug.

‘Selim.’ Haru embraced the boy in such a way that Isis guessed he was his son or nephew, and skidded her eyes away from this show of familial affection. After their greeting, Haru and Selim fell into a rapid, furious conversation, and she sensed a horrid twinge of wrongness in the air. The anger she had pent up ready for Evelyn and Arthur had no choice but to drain uselessly away.

‘Where is their house?’ she said, ‘Where do they live?’ But no one answered and she went to pet the donkey, who had at least been given a bucket of water, but at her touch he jerked his head and went for her with his great yellow pegs of teeth.

‘Leave him,’ Haru called peremptorily and muttered something disparaging in Arabic before he showed them where to wash and relieve themselves – in a structure like a khaki sentry box – and pointed out the tents in which they were to sleep. Isis crawled inside hers and sat within the mosquito net on the thin sleeping mat, hugging her knees, glad for some moments on her own. But it was stuffy in the tent and there were ants in the seams. She spent some time trying to flick them away but gave up, crawled out and wandered off.

The flat, dry smell of the sand was like the smell of old books, which she had always known would be the scent of Egypt, a breath of something dry and sour and ancient that coated her tongue, a taste impossible to rinse away.

In her wandering she came upon some ruins, a sort of rubbish dump of broken columns, and bits of statue – the toes of an enormous foot protruding from the ground as if a stone giant had plummeted into the earth. Many of the fragments were etched with sand-scoured hieroglyphs – which Osi was already copying urgently into his diary as if they wouldn’t still be there tomorrow.

She wandered about exploring, though in truth there was nothing much to explore, and any moment the sun would fall away. She found a few fragments of shell and stooped to pick them up. How could there be shells so far – she had no idea how far – from the sea? Already there were dark red shadows on the gritty ground and the air was heavy with the buzz of flying things. She was unnerved by the sideways slithering of a little snake and shrieked as she caught the movement of a larger animal, but it was only a dog – in fact, there was a small pack of dogs prowling near – one of them a tufty black pup. She moved towards it, clicking her fingers and clucking encouragement, but Haru came roaring over and hacked the pup in the ribs so that it yelped and slunk away.

‘How dare you!’ Isis shouted, angry enough to kick Haru and see how he liked it, but he turned and scowled so darkly into her face that she quailed. And he told her that these were scavengers and scroungers, not soppy British pets. You had to keep them scared or they’d steal food and bring in fleas. And there was also every chance, he added, that they were rabid.

15

A
T FIRST LIGHT,
Haru sent Selim off with the donkey to locate Evelyn and Arthur, and it was left to Osi and Isis to amuse themselves. With no spare clothes or books there was little to arrange and, for Isis, absolutely nothing to do.

Victor was sitting on a canvas chair outside his tent, smoking. ‘Do you suppose they’re all right?’ she asked him, and thinking of what Rhoda had said. ‘Do you think we can trust Haru and Akil?’

‘You can’t trust your Arab further than you can throw him,’ Victor said. ‘But what choice do we have?’

‘Selim seems nice,’ she said.

‘
Nice
!’ he laughed. ‘Christ almighty. Don’t go making eyes at Arabs.’

‘I didn’t mean it like that.’ Blood surged to her cheeks.

He tilted his head back to observe her from under the brim of his Panama. ‘Any of them touch you and they’d be stoned to death,’ he said. ‘That or have their hands chopped off. Now leave a chap in peace, there’s a good girl.’

Isis stamped away, shocked and scowling.
Hands chopped off?
She avoided Victor for a while and mooched about collecting cusps of shell that were shaped liked smiles or frowns depending on how you looked at them.

When her hands were full she went to show Osi, who was sitting cross-legged in his tent, reading. She knelt and put her head inside; it smelled awfully strongly of dirty boy. He took a piece of shell, fingered it and held it up to the light. ‘From the Great Flood, I suppose,’ he said, ‘three thousand years ago.’

‘What,
Noah’s
flood?’

His face sharpened. ‘Ah, interesting question –’ he began and cleared his throat, preparing for a lecture.

‘It’s all right,’ she said, and scrambled up, hurrying towards the WC tent in a pantomime of urgency.

Later, she lay in her tent scratching a new set of bites on her leg and watching the sun sparkle through the weave, noticing how it showed up like shadow puppets the flies and other creatures crawling on the exterior. She fell into a trance watching the patterns of their separate journeys. It was perfectly true what Victor said. There was no option but to trust.

She arranged the bits of shell inside her tent to make flowery patterns. Shells that were 3,000 years old – or even older, and they did have a tiredness about them, worn smooth of detail by time and scouring sand.

All she had to read was
Desert Longing
, which at least was appropriate in terms of landscape, though the story desert was far more picturesque than the real one, with not a single mention of the flies that landed on traces of damp at the corners of your mouth and tried to crawl inside your eyes. Not a mention of the grit that got everywhere, between your fingers and toes, into your belly button and the backs of your knees, into the roots of your hair and between your teeth, crunching in everything you ate.

The story desert was full of shifting silken sands and sweetly scented breezes, of full moons and plangent birdsong in cool, leafy oases. She already knew her favourite sections of the book off by heart and would murmur them when bored and baking and alone in her tent.

Nobly silhouetted by the full moon, the Arab Prince stood motionless but for the stirring of his robes. Lady Fleur approached with trepidation, velvet-clad feet treading as silently and delicately as the paws of a cat. She thought him unaware of her presence, of her very existence, so transported by his reverie was he. In consequence she took courage and crept near enough to see the moonlight glisten on the ebony of his hair and his fine stately profile. And then with one sudden movement he turned and reached for her, his breath cool on her burning face, and she could not prevent a cry and a shudder as he grasped her so strongly. With midnight eyes he gazed down into her face, those cheeks so pale with shock, her curls dishevelled in the desert breeze.

‘I did not see you there,’ she said, ashamed to have been discovered in her stealth. ‘I will leave you to your thoughts.’

‘My thoughts were but of you,’ he said, lips held so close to hers that she could feel their warmth and smell the sweet aniseed of his breath.

Sweet aniseed. She would like to smell that on someone’s breath. Neither Haru’s nor Akil’s could possibly smell of anything but tobacco and dirty teeth, and as for the reek of Uncle Victor’s . . . She cupped her hands round her own mouth and breathed and sniffed and sighed, longing for a toothbrush.

When Selim returned it was with news that Evelyn and Arthur would follow, so that the atmosphere became freshly taut with expectation. Haru cuffed Selim round his ears for returning without them, which Isis thought tremendously unfair.

‘Why don’t we go and see
them
?’ she said. ‘They can’t be that far away.’

‘Unsuitable conditions, Icy,’ Victor said.

‘But if it’s unsuitable for us, it must be for them,’ she pointed out. ‘Anyway, surely
these
are unsuitable conditions?’

Victor only shrugged. Isis stamped away from him, but it was too hot for temper. Mutinously, she imagined the horse and hound in their unsuitable conditions – eating from nosebags and dishes on the floor, no doubt, and bedding down in straw. Unsuitable conditions! From a little distance she looked back at the shabby khaki encampment. If you half closed your eyes and squinted through your lashes the tents dissolved against the brown desert as if there was nothing there at all.

At least Selim was back. That cheered her. She watched from a distance as he stood with Haru, talking and laughing. He was friendly, and at least when no one else was looking, would return her smiles. He seemed to be about her age, or maybe a little older? If only he spoke English she would ask him – she didn’t dare ask Haru who was in a permanently bad humour. Though he was tall, Selim was slight, with thick, shadowy lashes and his nose was as absolutely, fascinatingly straight as if someone had drawn it using a ruler.

A fine stately profile
.

Behind the pile of ruins, the dogs slept and Isis went there each day, to visit the pup. The other dogs, three of them, were bigger and yellow-haired and after an initial sniff took no notice of her, but the pup, whom she called Sweep, began to run up to her and lick her fingers when she fed him scraps of food. He had a way of tilting his head and looking up at her with his ears forward and his brown eyes fixed intently on her face that made her heart contract. No one had ever paid her quite so much attention.

He did have fleas, it was true, that often jumped from their camouflage in his coat to visibility on her arm, and now she had flea bites along with the marks of ants and mosquitos all over her.

It was a sort of torture to be tense with expectation, yet at the same time bored, as hour followed hour followed tedious hour. Victor was no company, Osi was busy with his ‘work’ and Haru only spoke to any of them when it was necessary; Selim didn’t have more than a word of two of English and besides Isis had the sense that Victor was watching, ready to preclude any friendship which might grow between them. And Akil rarely spoke at all, only to Haru in rapid tetchy volleys of Arabic.

Isis gave up on the lot of them and spoke to herself instead, muttering the words of
Desert Longing
, or rehearsing the scolding she would give her parents when they arrived, and when Haru wasn’t looking she crept away to train the pup.

Akil washed their clothes each night and they all – even Victor – wore robes while their own garments dried. Everything was too long for the twins, but Victor rather fancied himself in Arab dress, Isis thought, since he kept his blue robe on long after his own clothes were dried to a crisp in the sun.

After a few days, the camp began to seem an ordinary place to be. In the mornings Haru would take the donkey to a nearby village, and sometimes Selim went with him. Isis would be filled with envy as she watched them shrink and shimmer away towards the vague green haze of the river valley. Why could not the camp be there, instead? Why could they not be in the village? Or in Luxor? Evelyn and Arthur
must
have a house, after all. Why could they not wait there? Or in an hotel?

Oh for some waving green and cool shade. But at least she knew Haru would return with water, vegetables and lemons, coconuts and pineapples, fish and sticky pastries, coffee and tobacco. Sometimes he’d bring an English newspaper and Isis would devour every word of it. The weather in England had been unseasonably warm – a proper Indian summer – which Isis hoped Mary had enjoyed; something awful was happening in Ireland and George Cadbury, the chocolate man, had died. She hoped that didn’t mean an end of Cadbury’s Chocolate Flakes, of which she intended, one day, to eat a lot.

She was relieved there was nothing about Mr Carter or King Tut. If anyone
were
to make a big find it might as well be Evelyn and Arthur. The paper left newsprint on Isis’ sweaty hands and she transferred smutty fingerprints onto the pages of her book, making deliberate patterns like daisies on the flyleaf.

Now that he had achieved his purpose and delivered his charges as far as he could, Victor had gone meek and flaccid. And he was having nightmares again, screaming and vomiting in the deep of the night, dreaming, she must suppose, of Gallipoli. Whatever Haru, Selim and Akil must think of him, she could not imagine. If white chaps were supposed to be superior, then he wasn’t a very good example. When such thoughts occurred to her, she would look at Selim, going so gracefully about his tasks, at his delicacy and beauty – somehow he looked fresher than everyone else, fresh and vivid – and then her eyes would return to the disgraceful, reeking slump of Victor and she would be ashamed of her own kind.

Early in the mornings, the air would be cool and carry wisps of green scent from the Nile, which soon became blurred with the smell of cigarettes and coffee. Each morning, Victor would drink cup after cup of it, as he emerged from his nightmares to settle into his daytime idleness. She should try and distract him, she thought. He had run out of pills, not expecting to be away so long, and probably he needed more than pills. Perhaps he would need to go back to hospital for more electric shock treatment when they got back to Blighty.

She went and squatted down beside him. His glass cup was half full of coffee grounds, thick as tar.

‘How can you drink that stuff?’ she said, and when he didn’t answer: ‘Will you play cribbage with me?’

He peered at her with bleary, sore-looking eyes and shook his head.

‘If Mary was here, she’d play,’ she said.

He snorted. ‘Can you imagine Mary here?’

‘I can’t actually imagine
me
here,’ she said, and Victor harrumphed.

‘Dear little Icy.’

Noticing a fond sort of thickening in his voice, and too hot for any petting, she moved an arm’s length away. He was missing the company of women, of course, perhaps secretly pining for Melissa, but when she asked him he only shrugged as if Melissa was gone from his mind. Whenever she read
Desert Longing
, the pages darkening under her sweaty hands, she was troubled by the memory of Melissa, the smoky violet scent, the way her body was there, hidden by her clothes, but still shouting
here I am
. Uncle Victor had probably kissed her in the dark of the cabin, kissed her and done more, hot and naked secret things. Her stomach felt dark and tight when she thought like that, and she stood and stamped and swung her arms to drive away the feeling, which was surely wrong.

‘We should take a present back for Mary,’ she decided. ‘What shall it be?’

Victor only lit himself another cigarette.

‘Do you think she’d like a dog?’ she said.

‘A dog!’ he scoffed, and added startlingly: ‘Hot stuff, Mary.’

Isis gaped. ‘Do you mean to say
you
like Mary?’

‘How could anyone not like Mary? She’s a peach.’

‘But in a romantic way?’

He sighed out feathers of smoke.

‘Victor?’ Isis looked at him with fascination, as a new notion occurred to her. ‘Have you ever kissed Mary?’

‘Not for want of trying,’ he said with a shame-faced grin.