Sphinx (33 page)

‘Thought you might have.’ She lit up, exhaling against the sky. ‘Tell me, what’s that bird that follows you around?’

Shocked, I sat up. ‘What bird?’

‘C’mon, you know what I’m talking about - it’s like a small hawk. I saw it that night at the gig, just about here . . .’ She waved her hand around my shoulder.

‘There is no bird.’

‘There is, but if you don’t want to admit it, that’s fine. Is it something to do with Isabella?’

Amazed, I stared at her. ‘There is no bird,’ I repeated.

‘If that’s what you want to believe.’ Zoë blew smoke into the silvery air. ‘Gareth will live, won’t he?’

Her question pulled me sharply back into the moment. ‘I don’t know.’ I closed my eyes again, the sun a dancing red dervish against my eyelids.

‘I wish there was a way of turning back time,’ Zoë said. ‘I used to fantasise about that, you know, when my father died. There’s the minute before and the minute after. If only it was possible to undo events - or at least to manipulate the outcome. But we can’t. We just stumble on, thinking we’re in control, until we’re confronted with our own death.’

Her words seemed to drift like the pollen in the air. But as she talked on an idea began to manifest in my mind; crazy, irrational but persistent. What if Enrico Silvio’s theory about the astrarium were true? If I turned the key, would I influence my brother’s destiny? An absurd thought, but, as hard as the rationalist in me argued, I couldn’t repress the idea that at least it would be like rolling the dice.

‘What if you could manipulate destiny?’ I found myself saying out loud.

Zoë turned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘What if a person’s death date is the result of a combination of circumstances - a belief that you’re fated to die on that day, which leads to a subconscious vulnerability as you abandon the precautions you usually take instinctively? And what if there’s a way of changing that date?’

‘I suppose it might be possible,’ she answered cautiously.

The urge to get to the astrarium was overwhelming. I leaped up and reached into my pocket for two five-pound notes.

‘Here,’ I said, handing them to Zoë, ‘this is the cab fare back to the squat. Get some sleep. I’ll go back to Gareth,’ I lied.

She stared at me, her green eyes questioning.

 

By the time I reached the Turkish baths it was almost six o’clock. The locker room was full of day workers finishing their evening workouts - amateur bodybuilders, city businessmen looking for a way to unwind. I went straight to my locker and collected the astrarium, abandoning all vigilance.

 

I ran up the stairs to my flat without looking right or left, thinking only of Gareth. Once inside, I hurriedly unpacked the astrarium and set it on the kitchen table, the key beside it. I felt as if it was coaxing me, calling me in some insidious way. I took the key between my trembling fingers and studied the mechanism.

In the oilfields I had witnessed the potential of belief; it amazed me how many oilmen were susceptible to superstition. I’d even known geophysicists who performed their own special rituals before the final test to separate the oil from the porous rock cuttings - the test that would decide whether they’d hit black gold or not. Men with IQs of well over 150 would cross themselves, kiss a good-luck charm, rub a lucky talisman, before leaning over the UV box to watch whether the dripping perchloroethylene would change the colour of the sandstone chips from milky white to shimmering blue. The more spectacular the hue, the better the quality of oil detected - many described it as the colour of heaven. Was I succumbing to the same irrationality? Despite my inherent scepticism I could feel my own belief system changing, shifting into the realms of the extraordinary. Was this sheer desperation, the overwhelming drive to help my brother survive? There was no time for analysis; I knew I had to act, not think.

Despite Professor Silvio’s tutelage, I barely recognised the hieroglyphs on the astrarium, and the Babylonian numbers were completely incomprehensible. I searched the shelves for a reference book that I’d seen Isabella use in her translation work. It contained a graph correlating the Ancient Egyptian calendar with the Christian calendar, with a projection forward that Isabella had boasted was accurate to the day.

I calculated the day, month and year of Gareth’s birth according to the ancient calendar then turned on the lamp and directed its beam onto the astrarium’s dials. The tiny etched symbols danced under the bright light. Holding my breath, I turned the outer dial so that the marker was aligned with my brother’s zodiac sign: the two twisting fish, Pisces. Then I turned the other dials to the corresponding year, month and day of his birth. To my mortification, I found myself muttering the Lord’s Prayer and my hand was trembling as I lifted the Was.

I inserted it into the machine and turned it.

I waited. Nothing had happened. Scepticism swept through me; I teetered between disappointment and vindication as the scientist fought the romantic. I couldn’t believe I’d let myself be swayed by the power of a mere legend. Then, just as I was about to give up, a faint ticking sounded somewhere within the ancient jumble of cogs. I stood up and stepped away from the machine, amazed and nervous. It was hard not to feel some reverence for the ancient device. I bent down to listen. It was extraordinary, but as I strained my ears the ticking became stronger and stronger. Images of previous owners flashed into my mind: Moses bent over the small bronze instrument as he stood before a churning sea, Nectanebo II dressed in his ceremonial robes, the Pharaonic headdress tilting forward as he too listened apprehensively for the clicking of the mechanism, Cleopatra, her hair streaming behind her, in the bow of a battleship. Disbelief, panic and awe collided in a medley of emotion. What had I set in motion?

Bronze teeth clicked over one another as the cogs moved. As Professor Silvio had predicted, the death-date pointer slid into view: it was blackened silver and tipped with a miniature sculpture of a doglike creature with a forked tail and long hooked snout, like the elongated nose of an anteater.

The death-date pointer ticked past the tiny dashes that marked the decades and arrived at the year 2042 AD. The astrarium had given its verdict. Gareth would live until the age of ninety-five. I exhaled slowly. I’d actually turned the key, invested belief in this ancient tangle of dials and dates. Isabella’s desperation suddenly seemed easier to understand than before. I sat back and waited . . . for what? The telephone to ring? For my brother, resurrected, to walk through the door? But at least I had acted. It was a consoling thought.

On the street below, a group of revellers from the nearby pub strolled past. Their conversation was reassuringly pedestrian: one man complained about his sister-in-law, another boasted about his football team’s prowess - normal life, twentieth-century realities. Yet here I was, gambling with arcane sorcery, a desperate man resorting to desperate measures.

A slight whirring sound, almost imperceptible, interrupted my thoughts. I bent my head to listen, then peered inside the astrarium. The two magnets were now spinning, revolving around each other at a speed that amazed me. The heartbeat of the machine appeared to have been activated.

I remembered the spinning stones that Isabella had shown me in the dream. If Professor Silvio was right then she had wanted to set the machine in motion to postpone her own death. It should have been Isabella who turned the key all those weeks ago, and perhaps our own lives would have spun on untouched, seamless, innocent.

‘If not Isabella, then Gareth, please,’ I prayed. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d made such an entreaty. And to whom?

It was after hours, but the night nurse had taken pity on me and allowed me into the ward provided I didn’t wander into any other area of the hospital. I sat by the bed watching the shadowy angles of Gareth’s face under the dim night-light. In his unconsciousness the softness of boyhood eclipsed the sharpness of age. I’d been sitting beside his thin, motionless body for over an hour. The astrarium, packed in its rucksack, was on the floor beside me.

Gareth’s breathing reverberated through the room like some distant sea breaking on an invisible shore. My mind wandered back over the past few weeks and fastened on Isabella that last night, her face bent over her research, her expression one of apprehension. Her frantic search for a way to cheat death. I reached down and laid my hand on the rucksack, the shape of the astrarium pressing up between my fingers.

I thought of the promise that I’d made to my father. If Gareth died, I would have failed both my father and my brother, in the same way I’d failed Isabella. Was I inherently incapable of protecting the people I loved? The minutes ticked by as I sat there, gripped by fear and guilt, with the device at my feet. Suddenly something made the hair on my arms prickle. I had the sudden and disturbing sensation that I was being watched. Glancing up at the frosted-glass window set in the door of the ward, I saw the blurry shadow of a large man outside. Terrified, I watched as the bulk moved, then turned left and right. Leaping up, I bolted across the floor, then stopped and spun around to kick the bag so that it slid underneath the bed. When I whipped the door open the corridor was empty. The night nurse, her long thin face pasty in the subdued light, came out of the back room. ‘Are you all right, Mr Warnock?’ Her Scottish voice was reedy, and for a moment I imagined it was also disingenuous.

‘Did you see anyone a moment ago, just there by the door?’

The night nurse smiled patronisingly. ‘Not a soul. That’s the danger of the night shift, Mr Warnock - the imagination is always a little overactive.’ I glanced back down the pea-green corridor - nothing but a couple of empty trolleys and an abandoned wheelchair. Perhaps I had been imagining things - but the figure had seemed too real and my sense of being observed lingered on. I went back into the ward.

No longer able to bear the sound of Gareth’s regular breathing - a deception when he seemed so far away from life - I took the backpack, retreated to the waiting room and sat in the dim light, barely aware of the television flickering on the opposite wall.

A voice from the TV mentioned Egypt and I looked up. The country was rarely out of the news these days but I was glad of the distraction. The programme was a late current affairs one hosted by the left-wing presenter Robin Day, a man who always reminded me of the armchair socialists I’d known as a student, annoying in their middle-class prophesying. Muted, the debate appeared to be in full flight - with much gesturing. To my amazement I recognized Rachel Stern sitting at the end of the panel. I put the sound up - the four panelists were arguing about the situation in the Middle East; a debate that seemed to pivot around the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and its impact on Egyptian-Israeli relations. I recognized the Egyptian ambassador; the other two panelists appeared to be academics. Then Rachel Stern spoke up: ‘The situation has some hope - President Sadat is in dialogue, I believe.’ The familiarity of her voice flooded through the waiting room. Fleetingly, I had the impression that my life was folding in on itself, youth and adulthood smashing up against each other as if time had become irrelevant.

Robin Day interjected: ‘Sadat is making noises that suggest some appeasement towards America. Do you think there might be a peace agreement with Israel itself?’

‘I believe he’ll make some very unexpected moves in the next couple of months towards that goal,’ Rachel said. She radiated a brittle intelligence. ‘You have to remember that Sadat wants to push Egypt into the world marketplace. He wants trade and stability. There have been hunger riots in the past twelve months, and there are internal pressures arising from the shift from Nasser’s socialism to Sadat’s economic policies - this hasn’t been an easy transition. Another element to consider is that President Carter wants to make his mark on the Middle East and Sadat has his ear. Of course, there are potentially disruptive factors in the scenario - Colonel Gaddafi in Libya, who has just ordered all Egyptians working in Libya to leave the country by July the first or face arrest; the President of Iraq, Saddam Hussein; President Assad of Syria; and various wild cards. Prince Majeed, for example, has a huge amount invested in disrupting such an alliance. For years there have been rumours that he would like to destabilise Sadat’s Egypt and fulfil his own ambitions of taking Egypt back to a feudal state with himself at the head. He has some rather flimsy claim to the old ruling dynasty.’

‘Indeed, and we’re lucky enough to have some rare footage of the prince . . .’

The screen cut to shaky black-and-white footage of a group of men in battle fatigues on a barren hillside. At their centre was King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, distinctive in his traditional dress, with a bearded young man by his side - Prince Majeed. Another man, obviously belonging to the prince’s camp, stood on one side. Tall and swarthy, he looked familiar, startling me out of my trance. I pulled my chair nearer, trying to make out more features in the grainy footage. Suddenly, in a sickening rush of adrenalin, it came back to me. It was the man I’d seen in the car talking to Omar. His menacing persona radiated out of the screen across time and space, and it was hard not to feel pulled back into the threat of Egypt. I stared at the television, wondering about the connection. Had this man hired Omar to be on the boat that day? How much did Majeed know about Isabella’s research and the astrarium? Were they behind Barry’s death? I shivered in the darkened waiting room, desperately trying to connect all the disparate pieces of information into something I could understand. One thing was certain: everything led back to me.