by Naomi Jacobs
I hope you come back.
Love,
Teen Nay x
My eyes grew heavy as I thought of creation and the invisible energy that was responsible for vibrations, and as I drifted out of consciousness and into subconsciousness, my mind seemed to, like, stop for a second in the space in between. I wasn’t fully asleep, but I wasn’t awake either.
And that’s when I saw it.
To the right of my bed on the wall was the biggest, longest, blackest scorpion I had ever seen. Well, I had never seen one, so had nothing to compare it to, but I could swear it was the size of a small cat. I stared at it, as it sat perfectly still, watching me. Then it leapt from the wall, flew across me, and landed on the other side of the room.
‘WHAT THE F**K WAS THAT?’ I screamed. I flicked on the light and sat up in bed. My heart was beating so loud and fast I could hear it hammering against my chest. I rubbed my eyes and stared at the wall. There was nothing there. It must have been a dream, I thought. But it had felt so real.
I was majorly scared. I lay down and pulled the covers up to my chin, watching the walls warily for its reappearance. I kept the light on, just in case.
In the morning, I woke up feeling like I hadn’t really slept at all. This wasn’t how I’d wanted to start off my holiday. By the time I got myself showered and dressed, I’d missed breakfast but I was in time for Marvellous Mark’s induction and I listened as he outlined the excursions the holiday company offered. I couldn’t seem to wake myself up fully from a kind of trance state. I kept thinking about the flying scorpion. It had seriously freaked me out.
I hadn’t eaten since arriving the night before and it was a while before lunch, so I went to buy some chocolate. Coming out of the shop, I noticed an empty stool outside another, brightly coloured shop. The windows were filled with glass and golden brass smoking pipes of all colours, shapes and sizes. The top shelves were packed with the prettiest glass bottles I had ever seen. I walked in and was hit with a barrage of smells that slapped my sleeping mind awake in an instant. Several large sticks of incense were burning from a table at the back of the room; the rest of the scents came from rows and rows of bottles of perfume on glass shelves lining the dark blue and yellow silk-draped walls. Near the entrance of the shop at the left wall were two small sofas facing each other and a table scattered with magazines. I started to feel a little dizzy, so I sat down. A soft female voice was singing in the background and I looked up to see a small handheld CD player on the table. I watched the blue display, thinking how beautiful her voice sounded and how hypnotic the Arabic music was, when the old man I’d seen yesterday walked through a curtained door from the back of the shop, carrying a silver pot. I stood up quickly and, feeling my head rush, tried to fight the urge to flop back into the chair. I needed to get out of there.
‘Tea?’ asked the tiny old man. He had a kind voice.
I wasn’t sure if I should drink the Egyptian water, but I really needed a drink at that moment so I nodded and watched him pour tea into a small glass. He sat on a stool next to the table and beckoned for me to sit on the other stool opposite him. I took the glass, said, ‘Shukran,’ which I’d found out from Marvellous Mark was Egyptian for ‘thank you’, and sat down. As he poured himself a glass, I took a good look at him. He was dressed in dark trousers and a frayed, dark blue jumper with orange and yellow stains. The crumpled red collar of his shirt stuck out from the top of it. He seemed old, but his hair was jet black and thick with only a few grey hairs above his ears, which I noticed immediately because they were way too big for his small head. He had little black oval-shaped eyes that disappeared when he smiled and his deep laughter lines reminded me of small fans placed on the side of his face. He had a large nose, thin lips, and when he smiled, he revealed that several of his front teeth were missing; the rest were coffee- and tobacco-stained. His skin was a red-brown colour, weathered by so many years in the sun, and he had grey stubble across his jaw and underneath his chin.
Like an Egyptian Mr Miyagi25, I thought.
I took a sip of the hot, sweet tea and it tasted really good, so I took another, larger sip.
‘Mmm, good.’
He smiled and drank his with a loud slurping noise. He spoke to me in Arabic.
‘Oh, I’m not Egyptian. I’m from the UK,’ I laughed.
‘Oh.’ He chuckled. ‘Engalish?’
‘Yes.’ I laughed again, not sure of the joke.
‘Your first time in Egypt?’ Laden with a thick, throaty Arabic accent, this man’s English was impeccable.
‘Yes, it is.’ I sipped some more. The dizziness had gone and the tea was lifting my spirits.
‘You are alone?’
I nodded. ‘Yes, I came to Egypt all by myself.’ I threw my shoulders back slightly and stuck out my chest, proud as a peacock. This made the old man laugh again. I shrank and sipped my tea. What is so funny?
‘No husband?’ he asked me, frowning.
‘Totally not!’ I replied, thinking of Adult Naomi’s saddo diary entries about my two dads.
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘You will be married,’ he said matter-of-factly, as if he knew something I didn’t.
And then he looked into my eyes intently. ‘You deserve a good husband, good love for beautiful woman, yes?’ The last word was a question and all of a sudden I felt like I wanted to cry. I didn’t understand why what he had said wigged me out, so I took another sip of tea instead.
He smiled again. ‘My name is Mo, Mohammed.’
‘My name is Naomi.’
‘Yoni?’
‘Nay-omi.’
‘Yomi,’ he tried again.
Okay, so maybe his English wasn’t as impeccable as I’d thought. I later realized that he wasn’t actually trying to pronounce my name as he had heard it; he was trying to come up with words he knew that sounded similar, if not the same as Naomi.
I took out a pen and a piece of paper from my bag and wrote NA-OMI in big black letters. He repeated after me and said, ‘Na (nah) Omi (homie),’ and that’s what he called me from then on. ‘Nahomie’, which, said quickly enough, sounded like he was saying ‘Ma homie’, which to me sounded like Tupac rapping poetic lyrics to his friend. I liked it and I decided not to correct him again.
When I finished my tea, I suddenly felt very calm. I yawned and threw my hand up to my mouth to hide my tiredness, not wanting him to take offence and think I was bored. He didn’t; instead, he laughed his strange laugh, lit a filter-less cigarette, and offered me one. I refused politely.
‘You are tired, Nahomie.’
I laughed and nodded.
‘You like the perfumes?’ He pointed to the intricately designed bottles on the walls.
‘Yes.’ I inhaled and braced myself for the sales pitch. Here we go. I should have seen it coming – the tea, the friendliness, the ‘you need a good husband’ spiel was all to soften me up so he could get me to part with my cash. Duh!
He reached his hand through the curtain and pulled out a blue glass bottle with a golden yellow stopper, opened it, and tipped red oil onto his nicotine-stained fingers. He rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger, testing the consistency, then gestured for me to hold out my hands palms up. I held them out and he poured two drops of oil on both wrists. He demonstrated with his own wrists that I should rub them together. The oil was one of the most gorgeous scents I had ever smelled. It was thick and sweet like treacle, mixed with the musky smell you get from damp wood after an autumn rain. I took another breath and could smell the new-born baby smell and the old-lady lavender and rose otto scent. A weird mix that somehow smelled great together. ‘Oh, it’s beautiful,’ I exclaimed. It made me want to lie down, curl up with my nose next to my hands, and sleep.
‘You go, you sleep, Nahomie,’ Mo said.
‘Yes, yes, I will and maybe no dreams of scorpions,’ I mumbled to myself.
‘Scorpions?’ His eyes widened and his smile dropped.
‘Erm . . . yes . . . Scor-pi-ons,’ I said slowl
y and quietly.
He went very quiet and stared at me through squinted eyes. The silence was deafening; my heart started to drum to the same beat as the night before. I decided to explain.
‘You see, what happened, right, was, like, I was really tired last night and I fell asleep, except I wasn’t asleep, and then there was this, like, big, HUGE (I opened my arms to indicate the size of the beast) black, shiny scorpion on my wall and it flew across the room, across my body. And landed on the wall opposite.’ I narrowed my eyes and whispered, ‘And it was, like, watching me.’
‘Yes?’
‘Err, and then, well, I woke up and . . . erm . . . nothing.’
He seemed mesmerized by my words. He was silent for what felt like aeons while I stood nervously biting my lip, wondering why, and then he said just one word.
‘Serket.’
‘Sorry.’
‘No sorry. Serket.’
I shook my head to show him I didn’t understand.
‘Serket,’ he repeated.
I was majorly confused. ‘Circuit?’ I said. Maybe he was talking about racing cars, but what did this have to do with scorpions?
‘Yes, Serrrrr-ket.’
Mo took the same pen and paper I had pulled out before and wrote on it the word ‘SERKET’. I looked at it and then at him. Was I just supposed to keep repeating this word?
‘Serrrrr-ket,’ I tried.
‘Yes! Serket. Queen of the Scor-pi-os, the Scorpion Queen.’
As soon as he said this, everything seemed to, like, lift completely and the trance-like state was gone. It was like when I had seen the phoenix the day before. The dying, the burning, the rising from the ashes, and starting again. Like the Phoenix. The Scorpion. Like me. I was supposed to be in the future.
‘Serket,’ I said out loud.
‘Yes. The Scorpion Queen. She come from the darkness, the night, into the light, the sun.’ He put his hand to his chest and pointed the other hand to the sky and then down at me. ‘She very powerful, very, very, very old. She sent to protect you, she will protect you.’
‘Protect me?’ I thought about the night I tried to kill myself. Protected – hadn’t I heard that when I was praying I wouldn’t die? And hadn’t I heard it again when I read the diaries?
‘Serket,’ I repeated.
‘Yes, she . . . she grab the throat . . . of your enemies.’ He grabbed the air with his hand as if throttling an invisible neck. ‘She heal the pain, the sting of your pain; she make you better.’
The pain, my pain, Adult Naomi’s pain. I felt like I wanted to cry, but good tears, tears of relief.
‘Protection,’ he said.
The door opened and I turned around to see an old couple walk in. I turned back to Old Man Mo (my nickname for him) but he was messing around with the CD. I didn’t know what else to do; what he had told me had left me speechless. Protection!
‘Aaah, good afternoon. You like the perfumes?’ His eyes lit up and he was addressing his new customers, like I had disappeared, so I picked up my bag quietly and said ‘Shukran’ to him. He nodded without looking at me, and I made my way out of the shop. From the shop to my room, only one word swam inside my head: ‘Serket’.
I fell into my bed listening to the waves, smelling the perfume on my wrists, and thinking of my visit the night before from Serket the Scorpion Queen.
I was exhausted but picked up the diary.
Dear Adult Naomi,
I think I got one of those universal messages you always write about. Okay, so I did get sent a big black scorpion the size of Steven Seagal’s ponytail, but I met this weird old man from one of the shops today and I think I understood what he was saying. I kinda get it: like, no matter what you have been through – no, what we have been through – we have somehow been protected. I didn’t get it at first but am thinking maybe it was this Serket. Old Man Mo said she is the Scorpion Queen and I think maybe that stopped things from getting all Silence of the Lambs for you so you didn’t end up locked in a padded jail cell, making weird noises with your tongue. Maybe me turning up isn’t necessarily a bad thing, maybe I am helping Serket, maybe I am your protector, or maybe I am the Scorpion Queen and I have woken up in the future to sort your – no, our – life out. Heal the pain, heal the sting, heal your pain, my pain, and make it better.
Yes, I think that’s right; it feels right anyway.
I will try and make it better In fact, I think things are already getting better.
Yeah!
Love,
Teen ‘Scorpion Queen’ Nay x
11
Teenage Dreams
Woman cannot discover
new oceans
until she has courage
to lose sight of the shore.
ANDRE GIDE
I spent the next eight days of my holiday in the company of MEN!
After eating breakfast and being waited on hand and foot by the waiters (all men), I would drink tea and have my daily talk with Old Man Mo, discussing everything from Egyptian politics to David Beckham. He never mentioned Serket again, but it was okay. I got it.
I would call Simone and say hi to Leo and then sunbathe on the beach until lunchtime, where I would be waited on hand and foot by more men and write in the diary. I eventually gave in to Adult Naomi’s strange taste in music and, after listening to her on the iPod, realized Kylie had dropped the Minogue and had obviously become sexy since leaving Ramsay Street. I found, much to my disgust, that as the days went past I was actually becoming a bit of a Kylie fan! I figured Adult Naomi had never really been open and free with her womanliness and she had spent way too much of her life in fear. So I deemed it my feminine responsibility to flash a big smile at any man I could and swing my hips in time to the Kylie theme tunes in my head, creating a kind of mental magnetism.
I snorkelled in the Red Sea amongst a pod of dolphins, alongside the underwater guide Muktarr, who held my hand and showed me his moves. I floated carelessly, brazenly watching his lithe, muscled chocolate-brown arms carry his toned body across the water, and was seriously impressed with his talent for making jungle animals out of towels.
I hung around with Bebo and his Marlboro-smoking boys, drinking Pepsis and laughing at the wack jokes he would tell. Bebo was the hotel’s go-to guy when you wanted an excursion into the desert and the rest of the hotel’s young workers seemed to look up to him. He spoke Italian, German, English and Arabic, and had learned all of his English from MTV. This guy’s every second word was taken from a line from a rap or rock song. It was this strange mix of ‘Yeah, Dude’ and ‘G UNIT’ at the end of every sentence and some words had an almost Texan drawl while others could not disguise his thick Egyptian accent, so sounded like a strange Scottish-cockney hybrid. I called him and his gang the United Colours of Bebotton and he sang Enrique Iglesias songs and taught me Arabic swear words. I taught him how to do the running man dance and the MC Hammer ‘swing your pants’ one!
Through chilling with Bebo and his boys, I met Paulo and his quad bike. Paulo was tall, full of major muscles, and totally fit. His slicked-back hair and ponytail gave him this Italian sexiness, which was mental, because he was, like, Egyptian.
Before I knew it, I found myself on the back of Paulo’s bike, speeding through the desert, arms wrapped around his rock-hard torso, screaming wildly and thinking of Serket.
And then there was Ali, a very intelligent, poised young man who took me on a beautiful horse called Warda through the desert to meet the Bedouin people, where I drank tea and tried a shisha pipe (bluuurgh). We talked about how badly the indigenous Bedouins were treated. He gave me a lecture on smoking and I quote, ‘Really bad for you and you will die a slow and horrible death,’ and this prompted me to write only one entry into the diary that night.
6 July 2008
Dear Adult Naomi,
A few points I must make for you for when you come back:
1. First, get rid of those friends! Not ’cause they are bad, they are just sooooo not like you an
d that’s not, like, cool at all! (And listen to TLC’s song ‘What about your friends’ if you forget.)
2. Second, quit smoking! ’Cause I am having a really hard time with this body! Your chest feels like it’s wrapped in elastic bands.
3. When you get some sun, the spots and dark circles disappear, so, like, go on regular holidays!
4. Totally stop with the needy puppet-lookin’ boyfriends! There’s way too many totally fit gorge men out there, who are, like, strong, sexy and really smart and, like, so INTO YOU!
5. You are confident, sexy, strong and smart and DON’T YOU FORGET IT!!
Love from me!
Teen ‘Ooohh, on a TLC tip’ Nay x
And last, but certainly not least, was Ahmed; romantic, dreamy Ahmed, who I flirted with on a regs – well, every time he came to clean my room. And who left me pretty arrangements on my bed made from flowers and swans constructed out of white towels, leaving me to wonder if all Egyptian men went to some sort of terry towel origami college?
I fluttered my eyelashes at Ahmed so much that he asked me out on a date. I freaked out. Date? Me? I was only fifteen. My dad would’ve killed me! But he didn’t quite get this answer and I mumbled something about a messy break-up and not wanting to get him fired and scuttled sheepishly to the balcony until he had finished cleaning the room.