When he set out again hardly any time had passed at all but the sun had dropped completely and the sand, once gold, now shimmered blue and he was lost in an eternal darkness and a silence that echoed with nothingness. No bird called nor lizard ran and he flicked the bikes headlamp on and it fluttered and went out again and he hit it with the butt of his hand and it popped to life and threw a tiny pale glow across the few feet of sand in front of him.
Along the road, dead acacias, barely recognisable, clustered where a wadi had stood by a homestead of stone buildings and at the horizon tiny white eyes of light peered through the dark at him and they grew steadily in number and the sky around them took on a faded glow and he knew that on the horizon in that place he would reach Ismailia.
A mile or so further at a desolate place without feature two men stood at the roadside in Bedouin clothes of black and white and their faces covered completely and both armed with assault rifles.
His heart raced and though he feared what may happen, he knew the decision to speed up the bike on his approach was most likely the right one.
He pulled back the throttle and the bike screamed towards them and they watched him pass with keen interest, though neither made any move to him and he knew that their being in that place meant that there were most likely many others in that expanse, regardless of how empty it may have seemed.
He rode with his eyes glued to the black desert around him.
Somewhere in the distance to the north he heard riflefire and he flinched and his head spun around and for a moment he feared he was spotted but the shots were far away and he turned the throttle further and pushed forward.
Lights flickered in the desert to the south and he saw the slow arcing of white headlamps from a vehicle in the dark and he turned the headlamp off to hide himself.
It took a moment for his eyes to adjust and he rode blind until he could see in the dark and he rode that way from then on.
The road kept straight and dark and after some time buildings appeared slowly around him, battered and deserted and covered in sand and some time further the acacia and palm skeletons multiplied until he reached the road bridge at Timsah Lake. He flicked the headlamp back on and followed the road to the edge of the mighty Suez which had burst its banks long ago but which had been kept mostly tamed and he silently thanked the motorbike and he smiled to himself, for though his journey was not done, he had made it safely from the desolate outpost at Bir Gifgafa.
He had not eaten in a day and a half and was exhausted and beaten from his trek and he would find food and rest there for that evening and set out north the following morning on the single road to Port Said and to the Mediterranean Sea.
He felt so close.
Ismailia was dark and quiet and smelled of burning rubber and earth and entire roads were blackened with soot where they had been torched long ago and riders and raiders roamed the streets, unrestrained and unpoliced. Bedouin militants from the Sinai had blockaded quarters of the town and riflefire popped around the low horizon.
The kid rumbled the old Norton along the edge of the dusty parkland at Forsan and around the white stone buildings to the south. He rode quickly with his head low and dodged trucks and dogs in the street and bumped the bike onto the scrubland at the cemetery and pulled the bike up under an old sycamore.
He stood for a moment in the dark amongst the gravestones, wrapped in the thawb all sandbattered and torn like a wraith of the underworld. Clouds blew across the pale moon and the sycamores swayed and a bony dog appeared ahead of him and watched him with empty white eyes.
He had no currency and no weapon and did not speak any of the languages of that place and he knew he could be killed in an instant for turning the wrong corner and he moved quickly and quietly out onto the street. At the end of the road two armoured personnel carriers rolled by slowly, the red caps of the men inside glinting in the moonlight. He kept to the edges of the buildings and walked east through the houses. There were no shops there, open or otherwise, and when he reached the canal again he turned back into the quiet residential streets.
The houses were dark and many looked abandoned but he didn’t know what the time was and could not know whether the occupants had deserted them or were merely asleep inside.
He looked along the street in both directions and stepped between two homes and pushed open an old chain gate into the back yard and listened.
He was sure there was nobody inside.
He pushed the tin door on the back of the house and though it was locked it rattled on its hinge and he pushed it with his shoulder and it buckled and he stood back and kicked the lock with the heel of his boot and it flung open with one kick and crashed against the wall inside. He listened again and still there was nothing to hear.
He went inside the old house and walked through the abandoned rooms, thick with dust and the smell of rot and sewage and he found the kitchen and searched the cupboards. They were empty from top to bottom and he cursed under his breath.
He looked around the rooms for anything of use to him but there was nothing there but the fixtures and some old boxes and old wooden furniture. He took a length of splintered wood and tapped it against the wall to test its strength and carried it with him as a weapon should he need it. He went back into the yard and climbed across the smashed fencing to the next home and peered in through the smashed window. It was in much the same state as the first and he knocked the remaining glass from the frame and clambered inside and again went to searching the kitchen. He found locust beans, though they had moulded, and vegetables in a crate so rotten he couldn’t identify them and then, to the back of the kitchen in a wooden cupboard, he found peanuts in their shells and a glass bottle of red liquid. He took it from the shelf and studied it and it looked like blood in the dim light but when he opened the lid it smelled sweet and he dipped his finger in and tasted it and it tasted of hibiscus and he sat on the floor and drank it and ate the peanuts, the length of wood next to him, his eyes on the door.
When he had eaten he went to the bedroom upstairs and looked out of the window into the black street and assured himself that he was safe there and found some old torn and dusty blankets and fashioned himself a bed on the wooden floor.
He laid awake for some time listening to the crackling gunshots and calls from the dark and when eventually he fell asleep his dreams were of war.
He woke early and as his vision cleared he had no idea where he was and he looked around the old room, glowing amber in the morning sun. The room wasn’t carpeted and the floorboards were rotting and filthy and there were squares of pale colour on the wall where photographs had once hung and he assumed them removed when the homeowners had fled.
The world outside was quiet.
He looked through the detritus of the home for anything worth taking with him and found a small kitchen knife with a brass handle and a box of matches and he pocketed both and took also a small bag of grains without a label. As he was walking back through the kitchen he spotted the small plastic radio sitting on the sideboard and he flicked it on but there was no electricity to that place and he took it with him regardless.
The motorcycle was still parked underneath the sycamore. It took some time to start but it did and he followed the road north, block after block through the grey town, past bodies in the street and fires at the rooftops. Where the road forked east, a blockade had been erected of concrete and wire and a flag hung that he didn’t recognise and men sat on the roofs with assault rifles. He kept his eyes on the road and, as he passed, a piece of rubble was launched at him but it missed and he twisted the throttle and the bike roared and quickened and within a single minute he had reached the ring road at the north of the city where the land opened up ahead of him, dry and dead and skeletal.
He sat the bike again and it coughed and didn’t sound entirely right, though he had no alternative but to push forward with it.
The road from Ismailia tracked alongside a branch of the canal where it turned to the west
and rejoined the Suez at El-Qantara where the banks had broken entirely and the town and fields were black with water. Camps had been made in the surrounding scrublands where thousands of displaced people lined under sheets and coverings and in shacks of tin and palm and folk music played and children ran, ignorant of the inevitable. The highway bypassed the flooded town and, as the kid followed it back to its northerly course, it slowly submerged into the canalwater and disappeared completely.
He pulled from the tarmac into the dry countryside and forced the bike across the fields where the wheels bounced and the engine sputtered until he found again a track heading north. At Shader Azzam the road stopped at a t-junction with only filthy floodwater ahead of him and the burst Suez away to the east. Old buildings rose from the water and nothing moved and beyond that a body of blackness too deep and too wide to cross by bike or foot.
He stopped the bike at the water’s edge and let the engine settle and it rattled as it cooled. He took the glass bottle from the compartment in the chassis and went to the water and filled it with the dirty brown liquid and poured it onto the bike’s engine and it steamed and hissed and he poured a second bottle on it and a third to cool it as much as he could and put the bottle down on the dead ground and sat.
The sun was swelteringly hot, though he knew it no other way, and his skin had darkened more than he had ever seen it. Thin wisps of silver cloud streaked from horizon to horizon and the sky beyond was white.
As he sat, a mule appeared across from him sniffing at the scrubby ground. It hobbled forward and stopped and watched him for a moment and blinked slowly and looked away to the south and then back at him and blinked again.
The kid smiled at it and the mule stared blankly.
He rose to his feet and the mule watched as he walked slowly towards it and it didn’t flinch nor move away from him and, as he reached out to pat its rough head, it leaned into him slightly and cocked its neck so that he could stroke it better and he smiled again. It wore no bridle or strap and was flybitten and scrawny but otherwise tame and calm and not old. He took the bag of grain and poured some out onto the ground and stood back and the mule watched it for a moment and sniffed it from a distance and looked again at him before stepping forward to eat.
He spent that moment with the animal and bid it farewell and walked back to the motorbike. The mule watched blankly as the engine coughed to life and as he turned it west along the water’s edge it watched after him for a moment and returned to sniffing at the dead earth.
Half a mile further, the crumbling footbridge was just wide enough and secure enough for the motorbike to cross and the kid revved the bike and hit the curve of the bridge at full speed so that should it fall under his weight he may at least be propelled further across it for doing so, and he bounced over to the other side and crashed through the shallow floodwater where it rose out onto the canal bank and he managed to get the bike onto the scrubland beyond still upright.
As he straightened the bike and looked up he was being watched.
A man stood not ten feet away from him with a tall dog and a longrifle. He was short with a long grey tunic which hung from him and a keffiyeh pulled around his face and sunglasses beneath it. He held the carbine rifle by the muzzle and the dog stood still behind him.
As the kid pulled his scarf across his face to ride away the man spoke.
“Where are you going?”
The kid couldn’t place his accent but his English was nearly immaculate.
The kid regarded him for a moment.
“Why?”
“I’m asking”
The kid squinted in the sun and rubbed dust from his eye with the back of his finger.
“Port Said”
“There is no Port Said anymore”
It came as no surprise to him.
“Then the coast. Wherever”
The man watched him.
“What money do you have?”
The kid shook his head.
“None”
The man nodded.
“What do you have?”
The kid shrugged.
“This bike and these boots”
He pulled the scarf back up over his mouth and took hold of the handlebars.
“You speak Egyptian?”
The kid looked again to him and shook his head and said the language was Arabic and that he didn’t speak it anyway. He revved the bike and nodded to the man and wished him a good day.
The man spoke again.
“You trying to get back to England?”
The kid shrugged.
“Austria”
“Maybe you can help me”
The kid stopped and looked again to him. It was not what he had expected to hear.
“How?”
“I’m going to Warsaw”
The kid frowned and looked at him.
“You’re not from here?”
The man shook his head.
“Do I look like I’m from here?”
The kid nodded and said that he did and the man said that was a good thing and that it was his intention to, and that he had spent so long in that hot place he felt like he was from there anyway.
“How are you getting to Warsaw?”
The man shrugged.
“However I can. Walking at the moment”
“And you wanna come with me?”
The man shrugged.
The kid looked around and then back at the man.
“You can get on the back of this but not with your dog?”
“It’s not my dog”
The animal stood next to him watching.
“It sure looks like it’s yours”
The man looked down at it.
“Well it is now, but it’s just following me because I can find it food. I guess it’d be dead otherwise. It’s not stupid”
The kid nodded and said he was sure it wasn’t and regardless of whose dog it once was, it was entrusted to him now even if only through its own choosing and to leave it there in the desert was not an option and the man agreed and said it was a shame but he was right.
“Well I ain’t getting off and walking with you”
“I can carry the dog”
The kid smiled.
“It’s bigger than you”
The man shrugged.
“I can. I have no bag”
The kid thought for a moment and then shook his head.
“That’s ridiculous. No. Good day”
He pulled his keffiyeh up across his face and wished the man luck and as he turned back to the road the muzzle of the longrifle appeared next to his head.
“Either you, me and the dog on that bike, or just me”
The kid nodded. He held no cards with which to play.
The man swung the rifle onto his back and scooped up the dog with both arms and the dog fumbled awkwardly and the man swung his leg over the bike behind the kid and the kid shuffled forward. The dog kicked and grunted and after a few moments the man had the animal pinned against the kid’s back with his arms round it holding on to the kid’s thawb.
“Where do you think we’re going like this?”
“North” the man called from behind him.
“Do you have anywhere in mind?” he said sarcastically.
“You want to get to Europe then you need to get to the sea first”
The kid nodded and said that as much was already obvious to him and that he would drive north but that this was not a plan nor a destination and the man called again that it was better than nothing.
“How do you know Port Said is gone?” he asked.
“I don’t”
The kid turned his head to look at him and the dog stared back.
“You said that”
“I did”
“You’re making it up?”
“No”
“Have you been there?”
“Not recently”
The kid shook his head. He didn’t know exactly what was going on and he felt
an unwilling participant in some comedic sideshow.
“You said before that it was gone. How would you know if you haven’t been?”
He looked round again and the man looked back at him.
“Port Said was built to serve the Suez and it’s built on a spit of land beyond the Al Manzalah lake. Everything has flooded. There is no doubt it has flooded too”
The kid said nothing. He thought the man a fool or sorts but the man knew more than he had first let on, even if only on that subject and nothing more.
“There may be ferries and boats there, but for sure they will all be taken now”
He shuffled on his seat and the dog kicked.
“What do you suggest?”
“I suggest we go, there is no need to just sit here with this stupid thing kicking away”
The kid nodded and turned the throttle and they pulled away into the dust.
They hadn’t been riding more than half an hour when they saw ahead of them the expansive floodlands of the north. The Suez and the Al Manzalah lake and the Mediterranean were together as one, black and brown and blue and shimmering and eternal.
Further than the eye could see, tiny boats dotted around the horizon and the clouds rolled out to meet them. The kid slowed the bike and, as it coasted to a stop, the dog leaped from the man’s grip to the ground below and stumbled and fell awkwardly and regained its footing and shook itself and stood watching them with its tongue hanging from its mouth.
“Come here you stupid thing” the man called, stepping down from the bike.
The dog jumped back a few feet and turned and stood again, watching him with its tail upright and its ears pricked. Two old women stood by a farm building to the east, watching them.
The man moved towards the dog and again it jumped back but didn’t run.
“Come here” he called but the dog thought it a game.
“He doesn’t want to get back on the bike” the kid called and the man batted him away with his hand and stepped slowly towards the dog.
Where Men Once Walked Page 31