Shadows on the Nile (30 page)

‘That’s not the outside world,’ you say firmly.

‘Why? Why do you want me to go?’

‘Because I know you will enjoy it and because …’ You swing around in the chair and I can feel your gaze fixed on me, though I am staring at your shoes, ‘because I want you to see the world outside.’

I almost tell you then. My secret. The one about the roof. I want you to know, but I am scared of what you might say. I clamp a hand over my mouth.

‘Please, Georgie,’ you say so warmly that the words melt between us. ‘Do it for me.’

For me.

I want to hate you for this. But I can’t. I pull my sweater over my head, so that I can see nothing.

‘Georgie?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes, you’ll come?’

‘Yes.’

The word is there. In the room. Immutable.

*

I make myself think of Petrie, instead of you.
It is easier. I am interested in his ideas.

As well as setting up the first degree course in archaeology and establishing it as a recognised professional science, this amazing man is a dedicated believer in eugenics.

Eugenics.

They are calling it a mathematical science that can predict the traits and behaviour of humans. Believers are convinced that we can improve the human species by controlled breeding, like bulls or pumpkins, so that only the best genes would reproduce.

It is a fascinating theory.

The American Eugenics Society was founded in 1923 and is flourishing. They state that ‘scientifically’ it has been proven that certain racial stock is superior to others. That certain races possess the traits of intelligence, diligence, cleanliness and all the other good qualities. While others are inferior. Can you breed out the bad things like crime, alcoholism, pauperism, epilepsy … and mental disease?

Mental disease like mine?

I know I am diseased. Dr Churchward has told me so.

In 1924 America passed its Immigration Act. It set strict quotas on immigration from other countries. Even President Coolidge stated: ‘America should be kept American. Biological laws show that Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races.’

By ‘other races’ eugenicists like Petrie – and Sir Francis Galton, half cousin to Charles Darwin, and Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, Marie Stopes, H.G. Wells and many many more prominent intelligent people – mean particularly those from countries of Southern Europe, Africa and Asia. That’s an awful lot of countries.

Yet I can see it. To pull up the human weeds and cast them aside. To rid us of social ills. To purify hereditary. To remove defects. It is the dream of human advancement.

So what next, Professor Flinders Petrie?

Sterilization?

I know Dr Churchward would sterilize me if he
could. The thought of such manipulation fills me with dread. I am never likely to have children, but I am me. To sterilize me makes me fundamentally worthless as a human being. I bang my head against the door of my room to let them know I am not worthless.

Not to me.

And I can disprove all their science. Eugenics does not work. If it did, why would my parents – two intelligent sane people with an intelligent sane daughter – produce me? An aberration. Something flutters behind my eyes. The soft wing of something brushing my mind, an awareness that I am not safe. What if my father stops paying and Dr Churchward stops medicating? What if they grow tired of me and decide to rid themselves of a weed?

What then?

I
must
work harder. To be normal. To fool them all. Even you, Tim. To fool you, I will go to Petrie’s lecture.

I shake all day. The whitecoats make me eat but I vomit over the table, a creamy mess of mashed potato and steamed tasteless fish. I run to my room and hide under the bed but at five o’clock you come and find me.

‘Ready?’

‘No.’

‘You promised.’

‘I can’t do it.’

‘Yes, Georgie, you can.’

You drag me out from under the bed where I have counted the number of bedsprings three thousand and sixty times this afternoon. I stand there, limp, while you inspect me. You have brought me a black raincoat with a big collar that you turn up around my neck and a floppy cap, the kind a farmer wears in books, with a peak that you pull down over my eyes and a pair of black gloves. I like the gloves.

‘You look like a spy,’ you say.

I want to smile but my cheek muscles are rigid.

‘You have to stop that noise.’

‘What noise?’ I ask.

‘That noise.’

There is a clicking sound. Coming from my tongue. I make
it stop.

‘Now, I’ll go and check that the landing is clear,’ you say. You take a look and beckon me over. My feet stick to the floor. You grab my sleeve and pull me out the door.

Downstairs is silent.

Everyone is napping in their room before supper. That’s why you chose this time but I know the front door is locked. That’s where we got stuck last time. It is only unlocked when a visitor arrives or leaves – which is not often – or when we file outdoors for our exercise in the garden. We will be stuck again. Dr Churchward will take me to the treatment room and strap me in a chair and put the wires on my head that make my brain implode, so that I have no thoughts at all and cannot even say my own name.

My heart is splitting inside my chest, it is beating so hard, and when a whimper escapes from my mouth you scowl at me. I shut my eyes but bump into a wall.

‘Shh!’

At the bottom of the stairs, instead of crossing the huge reception hall with its echoing oak floor and its grandiose oil paintings which are meant to impress visitors at the front door, and instead of turning right to the dining hall and day-room, we turn left.

I have never turned left before.

Screams start to build up inside my head, stacked against each other like a pack of cards, but I jam a hand over my mouth.

I have never turned left before.

You lead me through a green baize door into a narrow corridor. The walls are yellow and lean towards me and I can smell cabbage on them, years and years of watery cabbage. My breathing is all over the place. The air is thick in my throat.

You turn to me.

‘This is to make it easier,’ you say, and before I can push you away you fix a dog’s leather collar around my left
wrist and I am attached to you by a thin lead.

I blink. I am not a dog. I am a human being. I feel tears sting my eyes.

‘Come on, Georgie,’ you whisper. ‘You’re doing really well.’

I am not doing really well.

You tug on the lead and I force my feet to follow you because you ask it of me, but I can feel panic tearing at my guts with claws six inches long. We pass through another door and into an empty kitchen. It has a high ceiling and cream walls but there is more air here and I drag some past the lump of rock in my throat.

‘Hush, Georgie! Be quick. We’ve only got a minute before someone comes.’

I follow my wrist to a back door. You turn the handle but it is locked. Relief comes to me like an angel, bright and warm, because now I can run back to my room. I try to undo the collar with my other hand but you snap at me.

‘No, Georgie. Don’t.’

You produce a key from your pocket. I stare at it. I am going to die. I know it.

‘How?’ I ask.

‘Don’t shout! It doesn’t matter how I got a key, the point is that I have it.’ You put it in the lock and turn it.

‘How?’

I will not move until you tell me and you know it.

You sigh. ‘I’ve been courting one of the kitchen maids here, so that I could make a copy of it.’ You shrug. As if it is nothing.

It is too much. Your words crash against the screams in my head and my mouth opens to let out the pain but at that moment you pull the door wide and darkness hurls itself at my face. You drag me outside and the darkness swallows me.

I am going to die.

‘It’s all right, Georgie, it’s all right. Try not to make that noise.’

What noise? The only noise I hear is the darkness tramping up the gravel path to get at me. I have never been outside at night. Darkness has always existed safely on the other side of a
glass window-pane, but now I am breathing it into my lungs and I will never get it out.

‘Well done, Georgie.’ The lead tugs at my wrist. ‘The back gate is at the end of this path and I have a taxi waiting around the corner for us.’ Another tug, harder this time. ‘Come on.’

I don’t move.

‘Do you want me to blindfold you?’ you whisper.

My mind is splintering. No. No blindfold. No. One thin sliver of my brain can still function. Walk. If I walk, there will be no blindfold.

One foot, second foot. One foot, second foot. I watch them through the black air. I am walking. A gate that I have never seen before materialises in front of us.

‘George Kenton, what are you doing out here?’

The voice booms out of the darkness. My wrist is yanked hard. My heart explodes in my chest and something cold and hard and dead takes its place.

‘George! What are you doing out here?’

It is Dr Churchward.

‘I am taking him out for the evening,’ you say. ‘He’ll be back in a few hours, don’t worry.’

You are so calm. So unafraid. I love you so fiercely.

‘That is not allowed, as you well know, Mr Kenton.’ Dr Churchward’s hand is gripping the middle of the lead.

‘Come along, George. Back inside.’

His face is white, floating in the blackness, and his voice is smooth. But I have heard that smoothness before. Before the needles. Before the treatment room. It is the smoothness of ice before it breaks and drowns you in the icy water beneath. I step up close to him and slam my right fist into the middle of his chest. He makes an odd sound. His knees buckle and he folds up like a piece of paper. He hits the ground.

You cheer. A big boisterous cheer, and then you drag me through the gate. You make me run. I have never run, not that I can ever remember. But my legs do it beautifully. They
astonish me. While I am running and my fist is throbbing, I am happy, but you climb into the back seat of a car and pull me in after you.

I know immediately that this is where I will die. It is small and cramped and crushing me. All the screams stacked up in my head burst out in a great roar of sound. The car shakes with it. I scream louder. My limbs thrash at the stinking seats, at the glass, at you, and I can do nothing to stop them.

‘Stop it, Georgie. Hush, hush, you’re safe with me.’

You try to pin me down but I am too strong for you. I flail violently and sounds screech from my mouth.

‘Bloody ’ell, guv, I’m not taking that thing anywhere, it’s crazy,’ a man shouts from the driving seat. ‘Get it out of my cab.’

I am not an
it.

The door next to me is opened suddenly from outside and a figure stands there. I am trapped between you inside and him outside. The darkness is winning. I scream at it.

‘Now, now, George. Enough of this.’ The figure is Dr Churchward. I thought I had killed him. He seizes my wrist and I feel the familiar quick sting in my flesh.

A needle is always the death of me.

The screams vanish. I wait. I know what comes next. The top of my head lifts off and my brain is sucked out, so that my skull is cold and empty. The damp darkness flows into it.

‘Would you like to go back to your room now, George?’ Dr Churchward asks, each word precise and polite.

I nod.

‘Good. Come along.’

‘No, Georgie, don’t go, stay with …’ But you look at my face and the words stop. You look at the syringe in his hand. ‘What have you done to him?’

Dr Churchward takes the collar off my wrist. ‘Young man,’ he says to you, ‘you do not understand his condition if you think you can take him out for an evening without causing major trauma. I expected better of you.’

He guides me out of the cab and back to the gate.
You follow behind. There is something I want to say to you but I cannot find my tongue anywhere in my head. I stumble through the gate but he shuts it on you, barring your way. I have lost my cap.

‘Mr Kenton,’ he says to you, ‘if anything like this ever happens again, I will be forced to ban you from visiting your brother. And we both know what that would do to him, don’t we?’

You say nothing. Your shoulders are hunched and you look smaller, as if the darkness has eaten up parts of you. Your gaze is on me and for a brief instant our eyes meet.

You smile and blow me a kiss.

‘Goodnight, Georgie. Sleep well.’

We never talk of it again.

Jessie woke. She lay very still on her back in the dark,
eyes closed. Warm limbs lay entwined with hers, the scent of Monty rose from her pillow and from her skin, and a solid weight of happiness sat on her chest like a cat.

She moved a foot. Just enough to make certain his long bones were real and not part of her dream. Because she had been dreaming of him. A joyful dream of drifting down the Nile in a small boat, her head on his lap, but the boat was packed with street urchins who scrambled up out of the brown waters of the river. Holding out stick-thin hands and crying,
‘Baksheesh
!’ Monty had been tossing them back into the river one by one, like unwanted fish, when she woke.

She was smiling. Without even knowing it. She was smiling in her sleep because the memory of last night was still vivid. The touch of his fingers branded on her flesh, the taste of his lips seared on her tongue, the feel of him deep inside her creating a heat so intense that it seemed to melt her bones. Now they lay soft and shapeless on the sheet, with a sense of lethargy that was something totally new to her. In fact, it slowly dawned on her,
she
was new to her. This person who didn’t wake up alert and watchful. This person who didn’t carry her fear of being hurt around in her pocket
the way other people carried their pocket-watch. This person who thought nothing of taking the risk of getting too close. This was a new Jessie. A Jessie who made her smile.

Of course she’d had lovers before. At twenty-seven most of her friends – except Tabitha – were already married and up to their elbows in nappies, much to her mother’s chagrin, but it had held no appeal to Jessie. When anyone – like Alistair back in London, still waiting for his visit to Kew Gardens – tried to squeeze under her skin, she would put up her
Closed for Refurbishment
boards and move out. She knew it. Didn’t like it. But was powerless to stop it.