Spiderweb (6 page)

There were boys from school there, a whole bunch of them. Nudging and muttering. Not that they gave a shit. All those people at school were rubbish, like she said.

They met up at the Pick ’n’ Mix. ‘Going to the fair?’

So there was a fair, was there? Shooting galleries. The boys thought of this.

Now they were sniggering, that lot from school. Whispering. Got to get back to their mum – that’s what they’d be saying. Fuck them. Fuck the lot of them.

They could beat them at shooting any day, given the chance. They were good at shooting. They’d shot pigeons with their father. Shot them dead and seen them fall.

‘We’re going down there now.’ Grinning fit to bust, beginning to move off.

‘Suit yourself,’ Michael said. ‘We’re not bothered.’ He nodded at Peter and they made for the video display and stood there as though they were trying to decide what to get. When they looked round the others were gone.

But they were pissed off now, thinking of the fair, thinking of that stupid lot from school. Then Peter said, ‘We could do one now.’

‘We got to get back to meet her.’

‘We can do it quick.’

They had to buy a lighter because they’d not brought one. Then they went down to the front and had a look round. At one end there was no one about. They weren’t longer than a few minutes. It was an easy job.

They were a bit later than she’d said they were to be when they got to the café and she let them have it, of course. Where’ve you been? What do you think you’ve been doing? D’you think I’ve got nothing better to do than sit around waiting for you?’ And they’d left out two of the things on the list for the supermarket.

But they didn’t care by now. They didn’t care about her slagging them off so half the town could hear. They didn’t care about those other boys or the stupid bloody fair.

She said, ‘And what are you so pleased with yourselves about, I’d like to know?’

In the car she said it again. ‘I’m talking to you, Michael. I’m asking you a question. And you, Peter.’

They looked out of the window, mouths slammed shut. They were at the roundabout now, on the outskirts of the town, in a knot of traffic. A police car whooped past, going the other way. Somewhere, they could hear a fire engine. They were cock-a-hoop, riding high. Stuff them, that lot from school. Stuff her, too. She thought she knew everything. Well, she didn’t, did she?

Dogs are to be found in the
Yellow Pages,
like everything else, Stella had discovered. The Animal Rescue Centre was at the end of a long winding lane, tucked into a hillside, and announced itself with a cacophony of barking which advanced and receded behind the hedgebanks as she drove onwards and upwards.

The place was run by a Miss Clapp, a huge woman in overalls, herself faintly dog-like – some stolid dependable St Bernard perhaps. She interviewed Stella in a room overflowing with sacks, tins of dog food and rusty filing cabinets, which seemed to double as office and food store. She said, ‘There are several possibilities. Dog or bitch?’

‘I hadn’t thought.’

They advanced along the line of wire pens in which dogs either raced up and down or stood with nose pressed to the mesh. There were uncomfortable overtones of some prison compound or refugee encampment.

‘You won’t want her,’ said Miss Clapp briskly. They were passing a German shepherd, sprawled asleep on the concrete. ‘Came from a Chinese take-away in Bristol. Shut all her life in a back yard ten feet by six, poor beast.’

‘What for?’

Miss Clapp rolled her eyes. ‘Don’t ask.’ After a moment she added, ‘Well, they’re said to eat puppies, aren’t they?’

At the next enclosure she halted. ‘There’s this,’ she said doubtfially. ‘But I shouldn’t think he’d do, really.’

The dog in question was hurling itself at the wire and bouncing off. The creature was so engulfed in dirty greyish fur that you could barely tell which end was which – an animated bath mat sprang to mind.

‘What breed is it?’ asked Stella.

Miss Clapp shrugged. ‘A cross. There’s some old English sheepdog somewhere, hence the coat.’

She moved on. They passed two more enclosures, both containing animals that seemed to have been assembled from miscellaneous spare parts – a plumey tail erupted from a sleek low-slung chassis, a hound-like creature flaunted the curly coat of a poodle. It struck Stella that this was like the windows of a department store at sale time – marked-down goods from discontinued lines in styles and colours that had been a designer mistake in the first place. She paused before a small terrier-like creature that gazed imploringly.

‘What about this one?’

‘I wouldn’t,’ said Miss Clapp. ‘She’s in pup. Though I suppose you could have her spayed and abort all in one go.’

An appallingly high-handed way in which to start a relationship, thought Stella. I think not. ‘What kind is she?’

Miss Clapp inspected the dog. ‘Looks like Jack Russell and toy poodle to me. Not a cross that would have sprung to mind, I must say. But this chap next door might be a possibility.’ She stopped again. ‘He’s more or less a springer spaniel. Something else has got in at some point – the legs are wrong – but you could say he’s springer all but.’

Stella considered the dog. Not too large. Not too shaggy a coat. Posture expectant but amenable. Like the cottage, he seemed to fit the bill in all the basic essentials, so why look further?

‘He’s from a broken home,’ said Miss Clapp. ‘His mummy and daddy got divorced.’ Catching Stella’s startled look, she added, ‘The previous owners. Both moving into flats and couldn’t keep him – terribly cut up about it. I said, look, he’s a sweetie, he’ll walk out of here, you see. I’ve only had him ten days. D’you want to look him over?’

She undid the door of the pen. The dog emerged with a sidling movement as though to make himself as unobtrusive as possible, unable to believe his luck. He squirmed around their legs. When Stella bent to pat him he pressed himself to the ground in a convulsion of humility, like an acolyte in the presence of some priestly figure.

‘Of course, they’re anybody’s – springers,’ said Miss Clapp. ‘Not the dog if you’ve been used to something that’s entirely owner-oriented.’

‘I’ve never had a dog before.’

Miss Clapp looked at Stella in astonishment. ‘Oh, I see. Well, in that case I should think a spaniel – spaniel-type – would make as good a starter as any.’

Her previous relationships with animals had been transitory ones. There had been a little white cat in Greece, who arrived uninvited to share with her the room over the coffee shop. In Orkney a collie from the farm had elected to accompany her on her rounds. This bestowal of trust by another species was a startling gratification, she had noted. How can it thus assume that I will not abuse it, that I am kindly and well disposed? One felt charmed and chosen.

There are and have been few societies in which the concept of a pet is unknown. But the cult of intense communion with a dog or a cat is that of Western affluence. New Guinea tribes are entirely indulgent towards the pigs which roam free and root around their villages. But the pigs are currency and indicators of status. The Hindu sacred cow enjoys a form of protection which would mystify the RSPCA. The hen in the kitchen of an Orkney farmhouse was not there out of sentiment but expediency. The curious elevation of domestic animals to quasi-human status is peculiar to certain societies and unknown in other places.

An atavistic instinct told Stella to give dogs a wide berth. A dog may be rabid. In the Middle East, in the Far East, in Greece and Turkey, over much of the world – she automatically moved aside from any dog or cat. In Egypt, in the Delta village in 1964, there was always a stone or two in her pocket to keep away the pye-dogs.

Extract from the diary of Stella Brentwood, February 1964. Quarto-size ruled exercise book. Green cover with black lettering: CAHIER. Some pages stained. The cover faded and with further stains.

I don’t understand why the pye-dogs are tolerated. To a considerable extent they are not, of course. They are driven off and maltreated. The children torment puppies – no one interferes. The pye-dogs are not fed, but allowed to scavenge. So what are they for? When I ask, people shrug. They are there, said Dina – uninterested.

Questions, questions. All day long I ask questions. I put down question and answer in the field-diary, which is as dry and detached as these things are supposed to be.

This is a different kind of diary. One in which I try to answer questions myself.

How can I get a glimmering of how these people see the world? How can I shed all my own assumptions, beliefs, prejudices, etc., and get some murky intimation of what goes on in Dina’s mind as she sits there outside the house door making fuel for the fire out of dung and straw?

One possibility is to go back in time. This is not to say that Dina is a chronological freak, that she is stuck in a time-warp, that she is historically retarded. None of that. Simply that one way for me to understand how she sees the world is through my knowledge of other societies within time as well as within space. I am an agnostic. Dina is deeply religious. I am a sceptic. Dina believes in ghosts. She also believes that her donkey sickened and died because of the malevolent thoughts of a neighbour. She believes that she must shield her baby from my glance because my blue eyes might do it harm (though she would concede that this would be quite inadvertent on my part – I am a perfectly decent person, it is simply that I have blue eyes, which is unfortunate). The baby wears a string of blue beads which help to avert the evil eye, it seems. I am puzzled by the logic of this. Why blue, if it is blue which is suspect in the first place? And when a pedlar came through the village hawking similar beads, Dina advised that I should invest in some myself, which I have duly done. Best not to reason why. But is she suggesting this as a precaution against self-inflicted injury, or malevolence from elsewhere?

If I look at these beliefs within a different context I see that they would be entirely familiar and reasonable to – say – a resident of rural France or England in the seventeenth century. Dina’s system for dealing with the irrationality of fate would be instantly recognizable. The ghastly things that happen cannot be arbitrary – someone or something must be manipulating events. God ordains, and has to be appeased. Spirits, neighbours and the devil conspire to do evil but can be foiled if you know the right recipe. Dina has called in another neighbour, known to have powers of sorcery, who will do some stuff with various potions and incantations that will put paid to the donkey-slaying neighbour. And she would no more dream of passing up her daily prayers, or her observance of Ramadan, than she would cease to eat, drink and care for her family.

I am not treated as one of the family but as a combination of honoured guest, gullible customer and wayward child. I rent a room in this house – the home of Saleh and Dina and their offspring – which is one of the more substantial village houses. By my standards the house is a mud hut topped with a stack of straw and invaded from time to time by poultry and goats. By theirs, it is the enviable and appropriately superior abode of one of the village’s leading families.

I am mildly unwell a good deal of the time and distinctly ill on occasions, despite stringent precautions. The family watch with fascination and amusement my daily water-boiling ritual. They are equally intrigued by my medicine box, though they would not wish to avail themselves of its contents. Dina looks upon my quinine tablets and antibiotics with just the same scepticism as I view her sorcerer neighbour’s pills and potions.

I am covered in mosquito bites. I have had three boils, a bout of impetigo, a septic foot, flu, bronchitis – and diarrhoea more times than I like to recall. I am also continuously stimulated, invigorated and excited. Everything about these people is either illuminating or mysterious or both.

I am a problem to Dina’s husband, Saleh, as indeed I am to everyone in the village. I am not married, which is patently a personal disaster, attributable either to catastrophic lack of charm or some other more sinister factor such as proven ill-temper or perhaps some hereditary ailment (these speculations have been passed on to me, of course, with apparent innocence – in fact inviting either confirmation or denial). It is difficult for the men of the village to rate my sexual appeal (or lack of it) since I am so far removed from any recognizable benchmark – tall, fair, the physical opposite of their own women. So I become a kind of neuter so far as they are concerned, but since I am technically female, this question of my non-marriage remains baffling. The women are especially sorrowful on my behalf. They shake their heads in regret – at thirty-two what hope is there for me? Some of them are grandmothers at that age.

The expectation of life in the Nile Delta is not much above forty.

The villagers are curious about my private life – or rather about my apparent absence of private life – but they are surprisingly incurious about my role amongst them. They seem to accept without query my intense interest in their lineage structures and give equable though incomprehensible answers to my barrage of questions about the number of their cousins and their relations with their maternal uncle. Of course, family is a favourite subject the world over. Here am I, willing and indeed eager to listen for hours on end to a breakdown of emotions, affiliations and resentments which is no doubt as therapeutic for them as it is rewarding for me.

Everyone in this community is related to everyone else, pretty well. There are three main families, though the dividing lines are blurred by inter-marriage. So in a community of around two hundred, all are known to each other and anyone over the age of ten would have a pretty clear idea in their head of who stood in what relationship to whom. The place is ruled by blood and genes. Everything that anyone does is determined by his or her position within this complex network with its inflexible set of obligations and taboos.

Certain people may walk unannounced into Saleh’s house. Others may not cross the threshold under any circumstances, on grounds of social inferiority or some ongoing feud. The class system flourishes, even within what is in effect an extended family. Some are more equal than others in the village. One of the most conspicuously unequal, a half-blind elderly widow, is Saleh’s uncle’s wife’s cousin, but this connection does not inhibit Saleh, Dina and everyone else in the household from treating this neighbour with lofty contempt. ‘She is a very poor sort of person,’ explains Saleh. ‘She is not important. There is no need for you to talk to her, ya sitt.’ Saleh considers that he has a duty to monitor my researches.

Trachoma, the eye complaint that frequently leads to blindness, is endemic in the Delta. In the village there are eighteen blind adults, a further group who are partially blind, and a whole raft of children who exhibit disturbing signs of incipient disease.

Dina’s third child, a two-year-old boy, has a dubious-looking eye. Dina has it in mind to take him to the eye clinic which comes once a month to the large village five miles away, of which ours is a sort of satellite. So far a convenient opportunity has not arisen – either Dina is too busy when the day comes, or the lorry which serves as a bus service between the villages is full up. In the meantime Dina is having Yussuf’s eye treated by the neighbour with the line in sorcery who attended to the matter of the donkey. This man’s treatment is known to be highly effective, she explains – probably just as good as the clinic and with the advantage that you know what you’re getting, no nonsense about new-fangled pills and creams that you don’t understand, let alone those needles in the arm.

Yes, I have made my opinion known. There is a point when professional detachment becomes inhuman. Strictly speaking, I should be here simply as a pair of eyes, a pair of ears, an interpretive mind. But I am stuck with the tiresome human tendency towards emotional response. And in any case all social anthropologists meddle. They meddle by the very fact of their presence. Better to meddle constructively when the opportunity offers.

Dina heard me out tolerantly. Maybe next month. If the cotton is harvested. If the sweet potatoes are planted. If there is room in the lorry.

My other frailty, in the eyes of the village, apart from my lack of a husband, is my poor Arabic. I improve, both in speech and comprehension, but I am still woefully deficient. This is hilarious to anyone under eighteen and a matter of faint solicitude to everyone else. Few people here have come across a foreigner at close quarters before. Some of the older generation remember the war years, when the Delta ran with foreign troops, but none of the army bases were nearby and there was little or no personal exchange. So I am their first experience of an otherwise normal adult who cannot talk properly. They correct me – kindly or impatiently according to temperament. And of course this crippling inadequacy has an ambivalent effect upon their perception of me – I am an educated person (though a woman), a doctor – but I talk like a child. They know well enough that I have my own language in which I am presumably competent, but all they hear is this fractured Arabic. They know who and what I am, but they cannot help feeling that I am also – well, a bit simple.

And within the context of this place, that is perfectly true. I am a simpleton, an ignoramus. Almost every subtlety of social exchange is lost upon me. Saleh and his family, who feel responsible for me, have to tell me how to behave correctly, as you would a child. They have to tell me how to address whom, how to come and go, what should or should not be said. My many expensive years of education have left me quite unequipped for life in this mud village with two transistor radios, one moped, one petrol-driven engine and two hundred people, many of whom cannot write their names. What it has given me is the urge and the ability to cast a cold eye upon them and their way of life.

Do I find this uncomfortable? Of course.

Yesterday I took my notebook out into the fields, which offers good opportunities for one-to-one interviews, if you can find someone taking a rest from field-work, or watering animals, or just sitting down for a gossip. Nobody labours flat-out in these parts. That is one great advantage of the revolution – with the overseers gone and their land to some extent their own, the fellahm can adjust to their natural pace, which is slow.

Ibrahim and his son Ali were comfortably installed in the shade of the fig tree by the water wheel, while their gamoose clumped round and round, blindfolded and harnessed to the wheel. There is something deeply soothing about the creak and groan of the wooden water wheels.

‘Sa’ida, ya sitt,’ said Ibrahim.

‘Sa’ida, ya Ibrahim,’ said I.

Greetings completed, I sat down beside them. I am never able to squat as the fellahin do – there seems to be some anatomical difficulty – and have to sit with legs outstretched or leaning upon one elbow like someone at a picnic. Naturally enough, this is thought eccentric and amusing.

Some preliminary chat. Then, with Ibrahim’s consent, I embarked on routine kinship questions. Ali, a cheeky fourteen-year-old, interrupted with embellishments and elaborations, mostly libellous. His father slapped him down half-heartedly.

‘In your country, ya sitt,’ said Ali, ‘who are the people who ask many things and write in notebooks?’

An unsettling question. An illuminating question, furthermore. Ali is on to something. Ali has looked over my shoulder and beyond my notebook and perceived that this set-up has implications. His question nicely nails the problem.

Everyone in the village is aware of the reason for my presence, that I have no official status and that co-operation with my enquiries is entirely voluntary. In the event, virtually everyone has volunteered – to be left out is seen as social annihilation.

And now here is Ali with his beady fourteen-year-old eye upon the matter.

I try to explain. I say that such questioning does indeed go on in my country and that I myself could be one of the questioners. But all this stretches my Arabic to its utmost and beyond. Not surprisingly, both Ali and his father lose interest. I give up and seize the opportunity offered by a pair of pye-dogs who are lurking just beyond our oasis of shade. I put the pye-dog question. Why are they tolerated? Do they serve some purpose?

Reminded, Ali lobs a stone at the dogs. Unlike me, he aims to hit. The foremost dog departs, squealing.

‘They are created by Allah,’ says Ibrahim, nicely begging the question.