by Francis King
Ok, Mark, forgive me, forgive me!
Soon Tony wanted to spend every hour of every day with Abdul.
On their second evening together, Abdul insisted on taking him to a restaurant above a spice shop in the souk. The food, piled high on each plate, had been so disgusting that Tony had left most of it. When he had eventually managed to get the bill, it was ludicrously expensive and he had ended up, uncharacteristically and much to Abdul’s dismay, shouting first at the waiter, who knew no English, and then at the proprietor, who had shuffled out from a curtained recess, puffing at a long, malodorous cheroot, to see what the row was all about. Eventually, having realised that he had met his match, the proprietor had murmured ‘Okay, okay. For my friends I take away twenty,’ and had amended the bill. Tony’s only response had been ‘What barefaced cheek!’ – which neither the proprietor nor Abdul had understood, both of them now smiling in relief and gratitude at him.
Tony knew that he was being constantly cheated into paying over the odds. But, if the sums were so small, what did it matter? If one was as poor as Abdul – his father dead, a number of younger brothers and sisters dependent on him, as he had more than once related – it was understandable that, having met a foreigner, he should take him for all he could. To such people all tourists, other than the most youthful, must seem to be millionaires. After all, the Hilton was charging for a night far more than Abdul would ever earn in a month.
A small boy in an overlarge djellabah carried out most of the work of sailing the felucca, at the barked instructions of the stout, taciturn captain, another of Abdul’s ‘cousins’. Unlike most Egyptians, the captain made no attempt to ingratiate himself with his foreign customer. He grunted as he put out a hand to help Tony aboard. He pointed to where he and Abdul should sit on some cushions. Then he turned away, to squat as far away from them as possible.
As the felucca lazily tacked back and forth from one side of the river to the other, Abdul and Tony, perched side by side, held each other’s hands. They talked little but from time to time one or the other would turn his head and they would smile simultaneously.
Once in midstream, the captain began to roll himself a joint. Having puffed at it for a while, eyes half-closed, he slowly got up, waddled over to Abdul and handed it to him. Abdul drew on it three or four times, gave a dreamy smile, and then extended the pinched remains of it to Tony.
Tony drew back. ‘ Oh, no. No, thank you. I don’t smoke.’ From the smell, he knew what he was being offered.
‘Good’, Abdul said, once again holding out the joint. He gave that joyous laugh of his that always had the effect of filling Tony with an answering joy. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘ Make happy.’
Tony wanted to say ‘But I’m happy – wonderfully happy – already.’ But to please Abdul he took the joint and cautiously drew on it. Then he held it out. ‘Thank you.’
‘More, more!’ Abdul urged, laughing.
Tony shook his head.
Leaving the captain and the boy on the felucca, Tony and Abdul wandered through the banana plantation on the island that had been their destination. Recklessly, even though they kept meeting other tourists, Tony would from time to time succumb to the perilous craving to embrace Abdul, his mouth glued to his. Abdul resisted at first, then showed an equal ardour. Tony could feel the boy’s cock hard against him, through the thick, stained fabric of the djellabah. On one occasion three Japanese women came on them in one of these embraces. One put a hand up to her mouth and giggled behind it, one let out a brief squawk, and the third stared round-eyed. Briefly they halted. Then, like startled deer, they swerved off on to another path. Eventually, Abdul caught Tony by the hand and attempted to drag him down an incline towards a rubbish tip. But Tony, remembering the recent case of a group of Cairo men savagely sentenced to four or five years in prison merely for having attended a gay party, pulled away and shook his head.
As they boarded the felucca, he thought what a coward he had been to reject that opportunity. But then, as first the sky and then the waters began to darken, and he sat beside Abdul, an arm round his shoulders and their bodies so close that the two of them seemed to have been melded into one, he had no regrets. I have never been so happy, he thought, Mark totally forgotten. Never. He removed his hand from Abdul’s shoulder and ran the fingers of it through the boy’s dry, dusty hair. Abdul laughed and brushed his own hand slowly down Tony’s cheek.
Soon after that, the felucca was in trouble. Having hugged the west bank of the river for a considerable time, it all but tipped over at a capricious gust of a wind and grated to a standstill. The captain shouted angrily at his diminutive assistant, who, still in his djellabah, at once jumped into the opaque water and began to tug on a rope thrown down to him. The captain then struggled with a metal shaft protruding from the middle of the boat – to raise the rudder, Tony assumed. Abdul joined him. The two men tugged in turn. At last the boat began to move. Abdul laughed and held up his hand. Somehow he had managed to nick his middle finger on the metal shaft. Blood trickled from it.
‘Oh, look what you’ve done!’ Tony cried out in dismay. He felt in the back pocket of his shorts and produced some tissues. ‘Here.’
‘Nothing, nothing.’
‘Don’t be silly. Come here!’
Abdul went across. He held out his hand.
Tony surprised himself by what he did next. Instead of wrapping the finger in the tissues, he raised it to his mouth. He sucked on it.
The blood tasted strangely metallic and bitter. He had never tasted blood like that before. Greedily he sucked on it again. It filled him with a dizzying rapture.
Tony knew that the calèche driver was making a huge detour on the way from the restaurant owned by another of Abdul’s ‘cousins’ back to the hotel. But so far from objecting, he was glad of it. Heavenly, heavenly, to sit like this, so close to Abdul, his hand on his cock and Abdul’s hand on his, with the immense sky, pricked by innumerable stars, above them, and the emaciated horse, from time to time galvanised into a stumbling trot by a lash of the whip, clip-clopping up one narrow, dark, deserted street after another.
There was a removable metal barrier across the entrance to the hotel drive. A soldier was seated on a stool beside it, a rifle across his knees. No calèche, the driver indicated, was allowed to proceed any further. Abdul jumped out and then held out a hand to help Tony down. The driver named a sum and, though he knew it to be exorbitant, Tony paid at once, not grudgingly but with a curious sense of euphoric liberation.
As the calèche creaked round in a half-circle, Tony suddenly thought of how Abdul would get home. ‘Stop! Stop!’ he called out. But the driver either did not hear or decided to ignore the summons for fear that Tony was going to demand back some of the overpayment.
‘We must find a taxi for you.’
‘No, no! Not necessary! I walk to bus.’
‘But will there be a bus at this hour?’
‘Maybe.’ Abdul did not seem at all worried.
‘Oh, I wish I could take you into the hotel.’ Tony said it with an extraordinary intensity of longing. They had spoken about this before. But Abdul had said that it was out of the question, and Tony had known that he was right. Since the events of September 11, two armed policemen frisked anyone, even a tourist, who wished to enter the hotel. With Tony these two men had always been flirtatious. But they would not be flirtatious with Abdul, quite the reverse. There were also at least half-a-dozen men on guard in the grounds.
‘Oh, I so much want to hold you in my arms in my bedroom – to show you how much I love you … Why, why, why do things have to be so difficult?’
‘I find a way.’ Abdul nodded gravely, then repeated: ‘ I find a way.’
‘But how? How?’
The soldier had turned his head and was staring at them. But, as in the banana plantation, Tony, usually so cautious and conventional, did not care. He took Abdul in his arms and kissed him on the mouth. ‘Goodnight, my darling.’ Once again he could feel that cock h
ard against him through the djellabah. He must have been wrong. The boy must, must, must have some feelings for him. It was not just a question of money. ‘We’ll have to say goodbye here.’
Again they embraced. Again Tony felt that cock hard against him.
As, alone now, Tony approached the hotel, he saw a greyish shadow imposed on the hunched shape of a bush to the left of the entrance. Oddly, the shadow seemed to flicker as though it were a paper cut-out in a wind. He halted, peered. He had at first thought that it must be one of the feral cats that, voracious but wary, stalked the area round the poolside restaurant, waiting for someone to chuck over to them a scrap of gristle, a prawn-shell or a fish head. But now he realised that it was a dog. All at once he remembered that jackal-like Anubis dog with the long, pricked ears and slanting eyes, at which Abdul, in a panic, had kicked out. This dog exactly resembled that one. But it couldn’t be the same dog. How could it have crossed the river? The breed must be a common Egyptian one. He was about to push at the swing-door into the hotel, then turned and looked round again. Now you see it, now you don’t.
He heard a faint click, as of a camera shutter. With that click, the dog had vanished …
Oh, no doubt, it had slunk back out of sight into the bush. But as the lift carried him the four floors up to his room, he felt a lingering unease. Yes, there had been a definite click and simultaneously an invisible hand had erased that tremulous, grey shadow. Weird.
Tony, who so often boasted that he fell asleep as soon as his head had touched the pillow, now could not sleep. He lay with his hands crossed behind his head on the vast double bed and stared up at the ceiling. He had forgotten the disquieting mystery of the dog. He still felt sexually aroused. He wondered whether to toss himself off. On his rare nights of insomnia, he had always found that that was the most effective sleeping pill of all. He began to imagine to himself Abdul’s journey home – the waiting for a long deferred and overcrowded bus, the ill-lit, dilapidated ferry nudging its clumsy way across the river, the walk up the steep path to the mud-house, its windows unglazed apertures, that Abdul had pointed out to him …
He was startled from his reverie by a tap-tapping sound. Was it coming from the next-door room, occupied by a young American couple with whom, from time to time, he exchanged a few words? He raised himself on an elbow, his senses alert. He was uncomfortably aware of the hastening beat of his heart. The tap-tapping was coming from the balcony.
He clambered out of bed, hesitated, then crossed over to the window. Cautiously, he pulled back the heavy curtain and peered out, a hand raised to his eyes.
It was Abdul. He was smiling, the tip of his tongue showing between teeth startlingly white in the moonlight. Tony hurried to unbolt the door and then to open the wire screen beyond it. Without saying a word, Abdul slipped into the room and closed the screen and door behind him. He was sweating from the exertion of having reached the balcony.
‘How did you get up here?’
In his halting English, gesticulating and laughing excitedly between sentences and even phrases, Abdul explained. Workmen were renovating one wing of the hotel. There was scaffolding. Hadn’t Tony noticed? He had crossed a field, that field overlooked by the balcony, scaled a low wall, and then climbed up the scaffolding. He had worked his way along the roof of the wing and jumped from that roof on to the one just above the fourth storey. From there he had lowered himself down on to the balcony. It was lucky that the previous evening, as they had walked along the path between the river and the gardens of the hotel, Tony had pointed out his balcony, the last on the fourth floor on that side of the hotel.
‘But you shouldn’t have taken such a risk! Crazy, crazy!’ But secretly Abdul’s courage and enterprise thrilled Tony.
First Abdul had to inspect everything. He opened drawers, examined the various toiletries in the bathroom and even took off the stopper of a small flask of shampoo to sniff at it, flushed the lavatory, turned the air-conditioning up and down, switched the various lights off and on, and bounced on the bed. Then he pulled the dusty, tattered djellabah off over his head and, seated naked on a chair, removed his trainers. Tony went up behind him, stooped and put his arms around him. But first Abdul insisted on having a shower. For a time, Tony watched as the water cascaded over the muscular body. Then, on a sudden impulse, he hurriedly pulled off his pyjamas and himself stepped into the shower. He held Abdul close, his face against his shoulder. He gasped for breath as the water splashed on to the pair of them. They both began to laugh more and more loudly until Tony, mindful of the American couple, put a hand over Abdul’s mouth. ‘Sh!’
Later, after they had made love, Tony scrambled off the bed and looked down at Abdul’s still naked body. ‘Oh, if only I had a photograph of you! If only I had a camera! My friend Mark was always the photographer on our expeditions.’
‘You want photograph?’
‘Oh, yes, yes! So that when I’m back in England, I can look at you.’
‘I bring photograph. Tomorrow. French friend take photograph. I bring.’ Tony felt a wasp sting of jealousy. ‘French friend? What friend?
Do you mean lover?’
Abdul laughed. ‘Not what you think! Married. Travel on cousin’s
felucca, wife, children, two children.’
Tony did not believe him. But he no longer cared.
When the dawn was about to break, Abdul said that he must
go. Otherwise the police might see him. Hurriedly he dressed. Then,
careful to make no sound, he opened first the door to the balcony
and next the wire screen. Tony held out the handful of ten-dollar
notes that he had fetched from his room safe while Abdul had
been dressing.
‘No, no!’
‘Yes. Please! I want you to have this.’
Without any further hesitation Abdul took the money and tucked
it into a pocket inside the voluminous djellabah. ‘See you again.’
‘See you tomorrow. Same place. Eleven.’
They kissed. Then kissed again and yet again.
‘Don’t forget the photograph.’
‘Photograph – yes, remember, remember!’
‘Promise!’
‘Promise. Abdul always keep promise.’
Tony craned his head to watch as, with extraordinary agility,
Abdul swung himself up from the balcony and on to the roof. For
a moment the boy stood there, outlined against a sky now streaked
with the pale yellow of the dawn just breaking. The air was chill.
He waved, smiled, waved. Then he was gone.
Tony remained on the balcony in only his pyjama trousers. He
clutched its rail, looked down. Suddenly, a grey streak seared his
eyeballs, moving at extraordinary speed across the dim garden
below. He thought: the dog!
Then he heard the shot. It was followed by three more.
‘I should have gone down,’ Tony later told an elderly, military-looking gay man, also on holiday alone at the hotel, when they had struck up a conversation by the pool.
‘What would have been the point? He was dead. You would have been implicated. They might have arrested you. They’d have certainly questioned you. You might have missed the plane back to England.’
‘I should have gone down. It was a kind of betrayal.’
‘Don’t be silly.… But what a crazy thing for him to do. Guards everywhere. Armed. Nervous. Trigger-happy. Crazy.’
‘It was my fault. My fault. I’ll never forgive myself.’
After dinner, while the elderly man sat in the library rereading one of his guidebooks, Tony restlessly wandered the garden. He half hoped and half feared that he would once again see the jackal-like dog. But there was no sign of it. Three policemen sat round the pool, each with a gun across his knees. They were talking in low voices, punctuated by boisterous laughter. Perhaps it was one of them who had killed Abdul.
Tony deci
ded to go up to his room. As he entered the lift, his two American neighbours staggered into it after him. This was not the first time when he had seen them drunk after dinner. They greeted him cheerfully and the man said: ‘Having fun?’
Tony merely shrugged.
As the three of them walked down the corridor, the American woman said: ‘You remember those shots last night? Apparently it was someone trying to break into the hotel. That receptionist – the one with the squint – just told us. We’re not supposed to know, of course. The authorities are trying to hush it up. Might put off tourists.’
‘It makes one nervous,’ the man took up. ‘ He could have been a terrorist. He could have blown us all to hell.’
As he put his key in the door, Tony heard the sound of splashing. Had he left the shower on? Hurriedly he opened the bathroom door. The light was on, the floor was awash, as it had been on that night when he and Abdul had stood clutching each other under the battering of the water. But the shower was now off.
Puzzled and in growing apprehension, he left the bathroom and went into the bedroom. The window to the balcony and the wire screen were open. Then he realised that there was something on his pillow. He went over and stooped to pick it up. It was a snapshot of Abdul standing nude by open French windows, with the out-of-focus blur of a tree beyond him. Under the tree there was an amorphous grey shape. Was it – could it be – that jackal-like dog crouching there? Tony stared down at the photograph for a long time. He could not be sure.
Then he became aware of a stickiness on his forefinger and middle finger, and at the same time saw that something had been written across the bottom of the snapshot in Arabic.
He examined his fingers with a mixture of amazement and mounting terror. They were sticky with blood. He put the fingers to his mouth and sucked them. The blood tasted strangely metallic and bitter. He felt that he was about to retch. It might have been a poison.