Shadows on the Nile (8 page)

‘The police will be waiting for them,’ she warned in a voice too quiet for the men in the next room to hear.

‘That’s why you must tell no one. Promise me, Jess.’

She nodded. ‘Of course I won’t. But you know you are taking a risk.’

He leaned his back against the door, and kicked a cigarette butt that lay squashed on the floor. ‘Someone has to. Poor bastards. I am ashamed of this government.’ He raised his eyes to hers. ‘Ashamed of my father’s part in it.’

For a moment in the miniscule kitchen with its greasy walls, they exchanged a look, as a thread of understanding stretched between them. It was what had always bound them together as friends, their mutual disconnection from their fathers. Never mentioned. Never discussed. As if words would inflict too much damage, spill too much blood.

‘I’m sorry, Archie.’ Jessie lightly touched her fingers to his sleeve. ‘But don’t get yourself into trouble. Those men are spoiling for a fight.’

‘Wouldn’t you be?’

‘I don’t want that pretty nose of yours to get into an argument with a policeman’s truncheon.’

The muscles of his face relaxed, making him suddenly younger, turning him into the boy who used to be the conker king at school. He reached out for the dented tin kettle, ran water into it and placed it on a gas ring, all without moving more than a foot.

‘So,’ he rumpled his fiery hair and gave Jessie his full attention, ‘what has that bally idiot brother of yours done now?’

‘He has disappeared.’

‘What?’

‘Vanished.’

He laughed, a burst of sound that stirred up the chill air.

‘Don’t laugh,’ she told him seriously. ‘He’s been gone a week. Nobody has seen him since Friday of last week.’

‘Last Friday?’

‘Yes. Do you know where he is?’

‘Damn me! Vanished, you say.’

‘Do you know where he went on that Friday night?’

‘Yes, actually I do.’ He held his hand out to the blue flame
of the gas burner for warmth. ‘The same as he did most weekends. He was obsessed with it.’

‘Tim? Obsessed? He never mentioned anything to me – except the museum’s Egyptian collection, of course.’

‘That’s because he knew you would disapprove. You know what he’s like, always desperate for big sister’s approval.’

Jessie frowned.
Is he?
He had hidden that from her too.

‘So where did he go?’ she urged.

Archie hesitated.

‘Where?’ She shook his arm. ‘Where?’

He looked away, suddenly awkward. ‘To a séance.’

‘What kind of idiot would do that?’

‘For heaven’s sake, Jess, it was only a stupid séance. Don’t look like that.’

She snatched her car key from her coat pocket. ‘Just tell me where.’

Séance.

A word that hissed and slithered. It crawled up her back and made her shiver.
Timothy, what were you thinking of?
She felt a tightness grip her chest. She wanted to sit down with her brother and talk to him calmly about this extraordinary secret obsession of his, but instead she was hurtling along the A40 at breakneck speed, knuckles white on the steering-wheel. Her little Austin Swallow swooped around a Saturday morning charabanc and a sign to Denham Village flashed past.

Who was it he was reaching out to? Who was he so keen to contact?

She shook her head, exasperated.

It was all the fashion, this idea of seeking out the spirits of the dead, a nation in chaos trying to find guidance in the past. As if the previous generation hadn’t made enough of a mess of things without dabbling their interfering fingers in the present. Everyone was doing it. Biddy Brad shaw, a girl who worked alongside Jessie at the studio, was always threatening to bring in her ouija board for a session during their lunch break. It was society’s latest craze, drawing in the hard-nosed intellectuals as readily as the fragile young
widows bereaved in the Great War. It worried Jessie. That a nation could be so gullible, so eager to hear the voices of the dead when it should be listening to the voices of those starving on the streets.

How could she have missed it in Tim? Shouldn’t she have spotted something so huge sitting on his shoulders and something so opaque clouding his mind?

She stamped on the brake as a cyclist with his dog trotting alongside came around a blind corner as if he owned the road. She sounded the horn.

Slow down. Think straight.
She cast her mind back to the last time she’d seen her brother. They had gone to the cinema to see Johnny Weissmuller in
Tarzan the Ape Man
and she had cooked Tim liver and bacon, his favourite. She could picture him now, grinning at her across the table, his eyes a clear innocent blue. No clouds. No veil. No obsession.

She felt betrayed. Tim was the only person in her life with whom she could let her guard down, the one she could dare trust. The one she could dare love. Because she had learned at a young age that love was too dangerous, like a time-bomb in your chest waiting to go off. And yet again it had proved itself unreliable. It could not be depended on. Recently her life had been going well, so – stupidly – she had relaxed and forgotten to be watchful. She had looked away. Just for a moment.

So what did it mean?

‘Timothy!’

It was the tone she always used to him when he was young and had pinched one of her carefully sharpened drawing pencils or when he bounced a tennis ball against her wardrobe while she was trying to read. She was never any good at reprimanding him, yet now she wanted to shake him till his eyes fell out – just as she did the very first time she found him in Georgie’s bed.

Had death become more real to him than life?

As she turned left into a rural lane edged with thinning hedge rows, signposted Lower Lampton, she fought off a ferocious urge to jam her fist on the horn. To blast the quiet smug country
air into pieces.

Georgie

England 1921

In the early days of your visits, you grow impatient easily. You do not know me yet, do not understand that my brain works in a different way from yours and takes twisted paths. You suggest that we sit and talk in the public room downstairs.

‘Why?’ I ask.

‘Because it’s more acceptable than sitting here in your bedroom.’

‘I hate downstairs.’

‘Why? What’s wrong with it?’

‘It’s full of …’ I try to explain. ‘Full of Others. I laugh when someone spills a drink or trips over. Dr Churchward tells me that my responses are “inappropriate” and that I have no social skills. He says I cause trouble downstairs.’

You sit in my desk chair and study me, until I
feel my cheeks burn and my head is filling up with rage, though I don’t know why. I stare hard at my blank white wall.

‘You don’t like being looked at, do you?’ you whisper.

‘No.’

‘You don’t like being touched.’

‘No.’

‘You don’t like loud sounds.’

‘No.’

‘You don’t like people.’

‘I like you.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you don’t ever look me in the eye.’

I say nothing. The wall is flat and cooling. I try to squeeze some of the rage out of my head and onto the wall instead. I do like you but I have never said those words before to anyone except my sister and I am frightened that you might disappear now that I have said them to you. I stand up without looking at you and take off all my clothes.

‘Wait a minute,’ you say quickly, ‘what the hell are you doing?’

‘I want you to see me truly, without the bits that are hidden, because I know parts of me are ugly but I want you to know that they are there, so that you won’t run away when you see them at some point in the future.’

I tear off my socks and stand naked.

‘Christ, you’re crazy.’

It feels bad when you say that to me. It feels the same as when the boy downstairs with the droopy eye – one of the Others – stabbed me in the cheek with his fork and the prongs went right through to my tongue. I chased him up the stairs with the fork hanging out of my cheek, my blood dripping on the carpet. When I caught him, I—

‘All right, Georgie,’ you interrupt my thoughts. ‘I’ve seen you now, so you can put your clothes back on, thank you.’

‘Did you see the bad parts?’

‘You look perfectly normal to me.’

I feel sick. I pull on my vest. ‘Didn’t you see the bad bits, the bits inside that are ugly
and deformed?’

‘Oh, Georgie, let me tell you a secret.’ You lean forward, making me leap back towards the window in a panic, one leg in my trousers, one out, and I fall flat on my back. My head hits the skirting board. You stare at me, shocked. But you sit back down on your chair, wait for me to stand up and continue talking as though nothing has happened. I think that is the moment I start to love you.

‘My secret,’ you say, ‘is that I also have bad bits inside that are ugly and deformed. But I hide them better.’

I listen to your voice, your soft sad voice, and I rub the back of my head.

‘Show me one,’ I say.

You think for a long moment. You run a hand through your thick curls and tug at them so hard it must hurt.

‘I hated you, Georgie, when I was a child, even though I didn’t know you. I hated you because Jessie loved you so much, and I wanted her to love me instead. I blamed you for making me miserable when I wanted to be so happy in my new family. I slept in your bed and each night in the dark I plunged one of Ma’s hatpins – one I had stolen – into your pillow. And do you know what I imagined it to be?’

I shake my head. My heart is so cold it barely moves.

‘I imagined it,’ you continue in a tone that I have never heard in your mouth before, ‘to be your eye. I wanted to do the worst thing I could think of to you, to blind you.’

‘It was only a pillow.’

‘Yes. Only a pillow.’

‘Why do you come here?’ You are surprised by the question, yet it is an obvious one. ‘Why shut yourself in this prison for half a day each week when you have the whole of freedom waiting out there for you?’

You shrug, careless. ‘Because you interest me.’

‘Why? You think I am crazy.’

‘We are all a bit crazy in this life.’

I don’t know when you lie to me. I can’t tell. So I don’t know whether you are speaking the truth or doing
what you call
teasing
. I want to lie down on my bed and pull the blanket over my head but I know that if I do that, you will leave. So I stand there in front of you, watching the way you tap your fingers on the leg of the chair. I don’t know why you do it. Is it a tune? Or is it a signal that I cannot understand?

‘You never lie, do you, Georgie?’

‘No. I say what is in my head.’

You smile. ‘I’ve noticed.’

‘Why do you come here?’ I ask again.

You take out a cigarette and light it with a match. I am shocked but excited by the action, surprised by the smell. I have never smelled tobacco before and it is not pleasant, but it doesn’t worry me and I hold out my hand. You give me the cigarette and I put it between my lips, inhale the way you did and cough till my eyes water. But I like it. You laugh and I laugh with you. We pass the cigarette back and forth between us until it is a tiny stub which I stamp out with the heel of my foot. I smile at the dead white stub, when really I want to smile at you.

‘That was fun,’ you say, giggling.

‘The attendant will be angry. It smells in here.’

‘So what? What can they do to you? Nothing much.’

I nod. It is my first ever lie to you. I do not tell you how much they can do to me with their needles.

‘Why do you come here?’

‘Christ, Georgie, you don’t give up, do you?’

‘Why should I?’

You laugh. ‘You have a point. No wonder you’re good at learning things. Not lazy like me. All right, I’ll tell you why I come here.’

You are suddenly so intense, you frighten me. I stare at the white wall and say nothing.

‘I come because you and I are two halves of the same person.’

‘That is a lie. How can we be …?’

‘Not literally, Georgie. It’s just a way of saying that you
and I need each other.’

I nod. ‘That is true.’

‘I grew up wanting to be you. Wanting my sister to love me the way she loved you, but always knowing I was second best. I could never do the things you did, the clever stuff of remembering lists and patterns and reciting pages of Sherlock Holmes stories by heart. Jessie admired you more than she will ever admire me.’

I feel a heat in my chest, in my cheeks, in the palms of my hands. Jessie admired me. I didn’t know. ‘I thought she wanted me to be sent away,’ I say and you shake your head.

‘No. It was because of me that they got rid of you. I was responsible.’ You tug at your hair too hard, much too hard. ‘If our parents had not found me, you might have stayed there with Jessie and she would have taught you to behave properly. She can teach anything. She taught me to be you in many ways, to like the things you liked, to do the things you did, but I wasn’t much good at it.’

My mind feels as if somebody’s hands are inside it, taking it apart.

‘Tim, did she talk about me?’

‘Yes. But our parents never did. They would not let your name be spoken in the house, so I knew I had to make them love me or they would send me away as well. But Jessie told me how you used to stand up to them, how you defied them, and I envied you your courage.’ You smile at me and I long to give you whatever it is you need.

‘You have courage,’ I say. ‘You come to this place every Saturday. I would run away.’

You laugh and I am happy. I made you laugh. You stand up but you know better than to come close.

‘So you see, Georgie, I could never allow myself just to be me. For Jessie I tried to be you and for our parents I tried to be the perfect son. And I’m still doing it.’ You point a finger at me and then at my room. ‘Only here can I be myself, no pretending, no lies. Just me. Just you. With all our ugly and deformed bits on view.’

I raise my eyes and make myself fix them
on your face.

‘Understand?’ you ask.

‘Let’s have another cigarette.’

Chamford Court was not what Jessie expected. Some sort of pretentious Victorian pile built by a local merchant who had made his fortune out of wool or tin mining in the last century. A dreary home built to impress the local gentry. Solid and dull. That’s what Jessie had expected and she had no patience with bad architecture. It grated on her nerves worse than sandpaper on teeth. But bad architecture wasn’t what she found.