‘I think that’s what they call “damning with faint praise”,’ smiled Nina, absent-mindedly forming the words GLUM BOY with one finger. All the same she was pleased. Guy wasn’t given to idle flattery.
He gave a laugh of acknowledgement. ‘There,’ he pointed to his completed anagram, picked out in Scrabble tiles. BLOW MY ROGUE, it said.
‘Blow it yourself,’ said Nina, heading off to the fridge for more Cokes.
She ran through this exchange in her head as she lay in the dark waiting for the pummelling in her chest to ease off. It was unnaturally quiet indoors: she had grown used to sleeping through the rustle of insects and the racket of In Salah’s youth, catcalling and practising handbrake turns in their clapped-out cars on the deserted market square. It was black as ink, too, without the moonlight. After five minutes only the faintest outlines began to suggest themselves.
Was it possible, Nina was wondering, to feel guilty about something one may never have the opportunity to do? Was it a rehearsal for the greater shame and remorse to come? She got no further with this line of inquiry because now that she was fully awake she realized just how maddeningly thirsty she was. Her tongue was fused to the roof of her mouth and had to be peeled away with one finger. It was no use, she’d have to get a drink. She swung her legs over the edge of the camp-bed, feeling the cool tiles under her feet, took two steps towards the fridge and blundered into the spiral of flypaper. Her shrieks brought Guy running in from the courtyard. Martin was practically comatose, and Hugo was sleeping the sleep of the stoned. A snort of laughter escaped Guy when he located the light switch and saw her there, writhing like a maggot on a hook. Her frantic attempts to free herself had only served to snag more of her hair. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,’ was all he could say.
‘Don’t stand there laughing, you callous bastard,’ she hissed, her eyes smarting at the indignity of it all. ‘Do something.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, still chuckling, and walking around her to take in her predicament from all angles. ‘But you’re so funny.’
‘And you’re so smug and annoying!’ she replied.
He tutted. ‘I’m afraid you’re in no position to complain, so keep still and stop whining. He was enjoying himself enormously. Revenge for the ant incident, no doubt, Nina thought. If only she’d stayed in bed. If only she’d stayed in England! Glancing up she saw a tiara of dead flies in her fringe and twitched violently, nearly scalping herself. ‘Oh my God!’ she yelped, gooseflesh breaking out on her bare arms and legs.
‘I may have to shave your head,’ Guy was saying, as he began, strand by strand, to disengage her hair, which was thick with glue and crushed insects.
‘Why not just cut my head off?’ Nina suggested, making a final bid to recover her sense of humour in the face of this monumental loss of cool.
‘No, no, you’ll never keep your sunhat on without it,’ he replied. ‘God, this is a horrible job. What’s in it for me?’
‘My undying gratitude. Is that good enough?’
‘I suppose it’ll do to be going on with. I wish I had a pair of chopsticks, like the nit nurse at school. This glue is revolting.’
‘Do you think I’ll ever get it out of my hair?’ Nina asked as he freed the last clump, and she let it fall heavily against her neck.
‘I don’t know. Have you got any shampoo?’
‘In my rucksack.’ She hadn’t had the opportunity to use it since leaving Italy.
‘Come on then.’ He helped wash her hair under the tap in the courtyard. Even the rattle of running water against the drain, and Nina’s yelp of shock at the cold didn’t wake Hugo. Guy had propped a flashlight in a niche in the wall beside them and a succession of giant moths, crickets and other winged insects battered themselves against the lamp and fell twitching at their feet. Hamid was right about the water. It did feel different – almost silky to the touch.
‘You’re being very thorough,’ Nina said, as Guy massaged away at her scalp, working his fingers into the roots of her hair, so that creamy spilths of lather dropped on to the dust.
‘It’s the only way to get this glue out from under my nails,’ he confessed. Afterwards they sat on Guy’s camp-bed and shared a packet of strong Algerian cigarettes, while Nina took a comb to her hair and tugged the tangles out with a severity which made Guy wince.
‘This is the nicest time,’ he said, looking up at the stars, spellbound again by their sheer profusion. He would never get used to it. ‘The temperature’s just about bearable now.’
‘It’s a shame we’re never awake to enjoy it,’ said Nina, wrenching the comb through a particularly stubborn knot.
Another shower of meteors grazed the sky: Guy put his head back and stared into deep space. Try as he might, he couldn’t recapture that sense of the divine that he had experienced out in the wilderness. ‘It’s almost enough to make you believe in God, isn’t it?’ he said, and then stopped, embarrassed, as though he’d just admitted to sucking his thumb, or some other infantile habit.
‘Not for me,’ said Nina. ‘It’s enough to make me not believe. I mean,’ she made a sweeping gesture with her cigarette, taking in the Milky Way in an arc of rippling smoke, ‘why would He bother?’
‘I don’t know. And the more I think about things, the less I understand. All I’m doing is uncovering vast new tracts of ignorance.’ He ground his cigarette out in the dust.
‘How can you say that?’ laughed Nina. ‘Here we are at the cutting edge of geological research . . .’
‘Oh, don’t remind me. We’ll be back out on that sodding dune again tomorrow.’
‘I suppose we’d better get some sleep,’ said Nina, standing up to shake out her hair, which was silky and tangle free now, and already almost dry.
‘Pray for another day without wind,’ said Guy, lying back on his camp-bed, hands behind his head.
‘But to whom?’ asked Nina, as she turned to go back indoors.
Guy watched her departure with a smile. Who on earth still used the word ‘whom’ in the course of normal conversation?
29
There was no wind again. Hugo and Hamid climbed to the top of the dune and released a dozen or so helium balloons, one at a time, so that Hugo could study the spiral patterns of their ascent in the thermals, which he filmed with a cine camera. On their way down Hamid’s boot had come off and he had tripped half a dozen paces without it and blistered his foot badly on the burning sand. Hugo had helped him hop the rest of the way back to Hamid’s car and then, untutored, unlicensed and uninsured, had driven him back into town. Unable to walk or drive, Hamid was now resting at his cousin’s attended by the tubercular doctor and effectively invalided out of service.
Fortunately this setback coincided with an improvement in Martin’s condition: on the morning after Nina’s skirmish with the flypaper he rose from his bed and took an unsteady walk around the courtyard. ‘You look different,’ he said to Nina, who was washing out some of her clothes in a bowl and pegging them on the guy-ropes to dry. Her hair, bleached blonder by the sun, and clean at last, was worn in two long plaits behind her ears.
‘I am different,’ she said, but didn’t elaborate. ‘You look better. Better than yesterday, anyway.’ By which she meant that although his ribcage was more prominent than usual, and his hair was as dull and matted as the fringe of an old afghan coat, and there were shadows like bruises under each eye, he was at least vertical, which had to be considered progress.
He managed a bowl of porridge for breakfast and some plain boiled rice for lunch without relapsing, and even began to talk of putting in an appearance at the dune, at some unspecified future date. Nina was doubtful about the wisdom of this, but Hugo, whose impatience with each fresh obstacle to his schedule was growing daily, was eager to deploy him as soon as possible.
Hugo informed them that he was hoping to extend their stay in In Salah by a few days in almost the same breath that he broke the news of Hamid’s accident. Nina and Guy were furious when they discovered tha
t the first day’s data, so painstakingly collected, was now redundant. ‘It’s continuity I’m after,’ Hugo explained. ‘Not random snapshots. Ideally I’d like an unbroken week’s figures. I may have to settle for five or six days, I accept that.’
Nina looked mutinous. ‘We’re hostages to the weather, now, are we?’ she grumbled. ‘We could be here indefinitely if that’s the case.’
‘Listen: the longest continuous period of recorded sand-dune activity prior to this expedition is six hours. If I can get six full days’ data I’ll be able to rewrite history.’
‘Geography,’ Guy corrected him, earning himself a glare from Hugo who tended to lose his sense of humour when talking about matters close to his heart.
‘I know it’s all a pain in the arse,’ he went on, through a mouthful of tuna kedgeree. ‘But I’m not asking you to do anything I’m not prepared to do myself. You don’t think I like sitting out there on my own in that heat writing down rows of numbers, do you?’
Nina didn’t answer. It sounded to her precisely the sort of obsessive, anti-social activity he’d enjoy. Besides, quarrelling with Hugo was rather like trying to untangle a snarl of metal coat-hangers. It was impossible to stay calm, in spite of one’s best intentions.
‘I’ll give you full credit when I publish,’ he said, with his usual towering condescension.
Behind him Guy mimed puking.
It was during the early evening that the wind began to pick up again. Nina noticed the pages of her book fluttering and little eddies of dust gathering in the courtyard. She was rereading A Glastonbury Romance, regretting having skimmed it first time around. If she had known how heavily time would hang on her hands she would have been more thorough and made it last. Martin had gone back to bed after lunch, weakened by his morning’s exertions, but insistent that he no longer required round-the-clock surveillance. The others were free to go out if they wanted: he had inconvenienced them enough. He would be up and about tomorrow, thought Nina, and that would be the end of her cosy chats with Guy. She was ashamed at how much this bothered her, and how readily she could view Martin’s illness solely in terms of its inconvenience to her. But she couldn’t help noticing how much more attention Guy paid her while Martin was out of the way. She had dropped off to sleep after the flypaper incident, in the comfort of a delicious certainty that Guy was interested. Patience was all that was required. And then, to compound her frustration at Martin’s imminent recovery, she discovered that, on what might prove their last opportunity to be alone, Guy had chosen instead to accompany Hugo to Adji’s. In a fit of pique, poorly disguised as a headache, she had stayed behind, to experience all the satisfaction of having punished no one but herself.
Jamming her feet into her clogs, she hoisted herself off the camp-bed, which had been backed into a corner by the advancing sun. The courtyard faced west, and soon there would be no shade left at all. The knickers and T-shirts which she had pegged out earlier were baked dry and swinging stiffly in the new breeze. They crackled as she rolled them up and stowed them in her rucksack. In the annexe Martin was still asleep. She was tempted to take a pair of scissors to his beard – the side she could reach, at least – but decided instead to drain the undrinkable iced water from the dispenser and use it to wash her feet, in the hope that the rest of her would be deluded into feeling cool and clean. She was standing in a bucket in the main office of the met. station, observing the unsightly phenomenon of a suntan that came to an abrupt stop halfway down each foot, when she heard voices outside, and the door swung open.
‘Wind’s up. We’re in business again,’ announced Hugo, cheerfully, giving one of her plaits a playful tug. ‘Why are you standing in a bucket? Don’t you know the old saying – “pissing on his feet keeps no man cool for long.”’ He was in a good mood again, now that things were going his way. In the doorway she could see Guy trying not to smile.
‘God, you’re coarse sometimes, Hugo,’ she said, stepping daintily out of her footbath and back into her clogs, leaving a pattern of prints on the tiled floor.
‘Coarse I am,’ he said, plucking the car keys off the table and tossing them to Guy. ‘So who’s going to volunteer, then? The twilight shift – very pleasant.’
‘I’ll do it,’ said Nina, surprising herself.
‘Excellent,’ said Hugo, delighted to find her so co-operative. ‘Don’t forget you’ll have to take the counter back and rewire it to the anemometers. Obvious, really,’ he conceded, as Nina raised her eyes to the ceiling.
‘Is your headache all right now?’ Guy asked, when the two of them were on the road.
‘What? Oh, yes, just a dull ache,’ Nina improvised, having forgotten her trumped-up excuse for staying behind.
‘You should have come to Adji’s,’ he went on.
‘I didn’t feel like it. Until about ten minutes after you’d gone,’ she said, mollified by his concern.
‘We could have done with your French,’ Guy went on, unaware that in Nina’s current mood this would be wilfully misread.
I’m just the interpreter, she thought. There was silence as the Land Rover bumped along the pitted track, heading south, leaving the squat brownstone bunkers behind them. In the west the sun was dropping towards the horizon; a huge globe of molten wax. The hard, bright landscape of the day was softened by the dusk, the dunes trailing long velvet shadows. Everywhere she looked Nina could pick out naked human forms: here a raised knee, there a shoulder, here the curve of a breast. In the distance, the tiny tent, fluorescent orange and angular, was the only aberration.
‘You seem a bit preoccupied. Is everything okay?’ Guy asked eventually, glancing sideways at her.
‘Yes,’ said Nina, snapping to attention. It was impossible for her to be natural with him now that she’d admitted to herself how desperate she was for his approval. I must be giving myself away with every gesture, she thought, her whole body feeling leaden and awkward.
‘Oh look.’ Guy pointed out of his window. Two Algerian soldiers, dressed in khaki, rifles on their backs, were walking across the dunes hand in hand. ‘They do that a lot here, apparently. Men.’
‘I think it’s nice,’ said Nina.
‘I can’t see it catching on in the British Army,’ said Guy. He was thinking of his father, who had always found physical contact with his own sons uncomfortable, unless of course he was administering a walloping.
‘It must be comforting,’ Nina said. ‘When there’s just two of them in all this empty space.’
They pulled up alongside the road by the observation tent. Guy switched off the engine and they listened to its dying shudders being absorbed into the surrounding silence.
‘Well, here we are,’ said Guy, jumping out and fetching the digital counter from the back. Nina shouldered her raffia bag containing cold drink, cigarettes, towel, torch, book, clipboard and pen, and followed him over the sand, dragging her feet in the furrows left by his boots. ‘No. Here I am,’ she thought.
By the time he had wired up the anemometers and checked that the counter was working the sun had almost sunk out of sight. In a couple of minutes it’ll be dark, thought Nina, fear tightening like a rope around her neck.
‘I suppose I’d better leave you to it,’ said Guy, hands in the pockets of his shorts, transferring his weight awkwardly from foot to foot. ‘Will you be all right?’
Nina nodded, not quite trusting herself to speak. Don’t go, she was thinking. She had spread out her towel in the cramped space under the canvas, with her book and her bottle, as though she was at the beach. ‘You won’t go off and get stoned somewhere with Hugo and forget to pick me up,’ she said, staring down at her two-tone feet.
‘Of course I won’t.’ Guy, who had taken a few steps back, now stopped.
‘What if you have a puncture or break down or something?’
‘I’ll hijack a donkey.’
She couldn’t help smiling at this, in spite of herself. ‘Okay. I’m totally reassured. I don’t know why I’m being so feeble. I thin
k the heat has affected my brain.’ She picked up the clipboard and wrote the time and date at the top of the page. Don’t go.
‘Bye then. See you in two hours.’ He turned away with a wave, and walked back to the Land Rover.
‘Don’t go!’ For a second she wasn’t sure if she’d actually said the words out loud. She certainly hadn’t meant to, but she heard them differently this time, from outside as well as inside her head. But Guy didn’t stop or falter; he just climbed into the driver’s seat and set off without a backward glance. She had simply imagined it after all. Just as well, she thought, blushing with relief at such a near miss. That would have been a Big Mistake.
She leant forward. The Land Rover had stopped about two hundred yards down the road. It was now reversing, fast and erratically the way it had come, churning dust from under the wheels. Yes! She was on her feet before Guy had even got the door open: before he had put a foot to the floor she was racing down the slope towards him, tripping and stumbling the last few steps of their downfall.
Afterwards Nina said, ‘They’ll wonder what took you so long. What will you tell them?’ Her hands were still shaking as she lit two cigarettes and passed one across to him.
‘I’ll say I got lost.’
‘It’s a straight road.’
‘I’ll say I stopped to look at the stars and fell into a trance.’
‘Be serious.’
‘I am serious. In fact I may well do just that on the way back, then I won’t even have to lie.’
At the thought of the deception and concealment that would now be necessary Nina’s feeling of euphoria rapidly drained away. She was glad of the darkness now. It offered some protection against self-exposure and embarrassment. There was just the moonlight and the glowing tips of their cigarettes as they inhaled.
‘You’ll have to cook up some figures for Hugo,’ Guy said, passing her the clipboard, on which he’d been lying. ‘You seem to have neglected to take any readings.’
A Dry Spell Page 25