Emma steps forward, and offers him the money you gave her earlier. He counts it slowly, carefully. Then gives her too a nod. “Hello,” you say, and he looks at you for the first time, and then you get the nod, nod number three—it’s not a friendly nod, and again it’s without a smile, but it’s at least respectful, and it feels like the first proper acknowledgement you’ve had since you arrived in the country.
“May I?” asks Emma, and Ali says, “Yes.” And Emma takes your hand, excited, and Ali frowns at that. And Emma doesn’t care, she’s already pulling you out of the door, out of the house.
“Where are you taking me?” you say.
“To meet my husband.”
She pulls up the garage door. Inside there’s a family car, nicely polished, new. And to its side, on a bed of straw, a camel rests, kneeling.
“This is Abdul,” Emma says, at last lifting her burqa, and you can see how her face is glowing with pride.
Abdul is very definitely a camel. Now that you’re there, face to face, confronted with the full camel bulk of it, there’s really no escaping the fact. It isn’t a donkey, or some strange humpy shaped horse, this is your actual bona fide ship of the desert—and he’s big, and he’s hairy, and he looks at you with clear disdain.
“So,” says Emma. “Here we all are!”
“Nice to meet you,” you say to the camel, but your new brother has already turned away.
“Isn’t he wonderful?” enthuses Emma. “Just look at his eyes!” But you can’t, Abdul is demonstrating only his arse, it’s clear he has eyes only for your sister. “So deep and, and soulful. Oh, I could drown in them. And these long eyelashes, wouldn’t you just die for eyelashes like that? And he has, you know, three eyelids.” She kisses the side of his face, and the camel’s breathy groan turns into a harrumph. “Camels are the most beautiful creatures in the world, and Abdul is the most beautiful camel, so.”
“That’s great,” you say, and “How long do camels live for?”
“About forty years.”
“Right.”
“Abdul’s only seven now, so the chances are we’ll die about the same time. That’s what I’m counting on, I don’t want to outlive Abdul. Only seven, he’s my toyboy, really!” And she laughs.
“Right.”
She nuzzles at his face. He harrumphs again.
“Right. Well, look, I best be getting to bed. . . .”
“You can’t go yet,” says Emma. “Please.”
“I’m really very tired.”
“You don’t understand. This is a Muslim wedding. I’m not allowed to see the groom beforehand unless I’m chaperoned. No one wants to chaperone me. I haven’t seen Abdul in ages.”
And it occurs to you that your sister barely even knows this camel she’s getting hitched to. And then something else.
“Wait a moment,” you say. “Are you telling me you haven’t yet . . . you know . . . ?”
“We can’t have sex until we’re married. Obviously.”
“But . . . for God’s sake . . . I mean, how can you tell if . . . ?” Before you married Kirsten, she insisted she tried you out in all manner of positions. When she found one you were good at, she allowed you to propose.
“The anticipation,” whispers Emma, “is wonderful,” and she licks her lips.
Abdul harrumphs, but it’s a very different sort of harrumph this time, it’s directed at you.
“Oh, hello,” you say. And you back away a bit.
“Don’t worry, he’s just wanting to know you better.” Abdul gets to his feet, those spindly legs straighten, you think they’ll never carry such a bulky lump, but no, he’s upright and tall and without so much as a stagger he’s bearing down on you. “Keep still,” says Emma, so you keep still, and the camel sticks his pointed head right at you, he opens his mouth, out of it pops a red sac that bulges at you querulously. He harrumphs louder, and it’s clearly not a happy harrumph, he’s agitated now, he’s shaking from side to side and that red sac seems to be pulsating, “Oh dear,” says Emma, and he hawks a sea of spit into your face.
“Quick!” your sister says. “Take off your jacket!”
“But it’s my best jacket. . . .”
“Take it off!”
And you do, and you hold it out to Abdul, and now he’s ripped it from your hand, he’s tearing into it, he chews it and spits out patches from it onto the ground, he’s jumping on it and destroying that jacket as if it were his mortal enemy.
“I don’t think he entirely trusts you,” says Emma. “But he’ll come to understand in time how much you mean to me.”
“I want to go to the hotel now.”
The taxi arrives. You don’t think it’s the same driver, but really, they all look much the same. “Thanks for coming all this way,” Emma tells you through the car window as she sees you off.
“You bet.”
And she can’t help it, she can’t keep in the giggle. “I’m getting married! Me! Just think!”
But it isn’t marriage, not really. The technical term for it is civil partnership. And yet that still isn’t enough for some people, it’d seem—they say that their relationships are not given proper respect by society, that they demand equal rights. They’re always going on some demonstration march or another, they’ll be asking that their animal spouses get the vote next!—and when you go to work each morning some creaturehugger with a placard is always soliciting for your signature outside the train station at Flinders Square.
You consider yourself a tolerant and open-minded sort of man, but you do wish they’d stop making a fuss. Because they’re bloody lucky, really, haven’t they got enough? A hundred years ago they’d have been locked up for what they’re now allowed to do in public. They ask that their animal loving be treated as something natural and normal—but it isn’t natural, it’s not normal, you can’t say it is, if God had wanted humans to fall in love with animals then the union would be able to produce children. Not that you’re religious, but the religious groups are correct on that, at least, surely—and you’re not arguing about the ethics of bestial relations here, as you say, you’re a tolerant and open-minded person, but there’s no arguing that it makes any kind of biological sense. And yet when you try to say this in the office you’re shouted down as being bestiophobic. It really makes you sick.
But the law now states that sexual relations are permitted between a human and a consenting animal. For a while it was hard to determine what actually proved the animal was consenting—after all, it wasn’t as if they could tell us whether they were up for it or not, and if we simply all waited until they were eighteen years of age the vast majority of them would be dead. At last it was agreed that an animal’s suitability should be judged on body mass, and that the four-legged bride or groom in question must weigh at least one and a half times the amount of its human counterpart. The theory being that if you try to make love to a horse or a rhino or an elephant, and it’s not too happy about the arrangement, it will have the strength to resist—but try to shag a reluctant gerbil, say, and there’s really precious little the gerbil can do about it. One and a half times the body weight guarantees a beast’s complicity in any carnal act you might share—and if you try it on with a gerbil, no matter how much she might seem up for it, or how flirtatiously she twitched her whiskers, then it’s statutory rape, clear and simple.
You suppose your sister is now one of those people who would go on marches. Which is funny, because you can’t picture her being the sort who’d want to march about anything.
You’ve got nothing against creaturehugging per se (so long as it’s within the privacy of their own homes, so long as you haven’t got to see it, so long as it’s not shoved down your throat), you say live and let live, you say they’re not hurting anybody (except themselves), you’re not a bigot, you’re not a bestiophobe, you’re tolerant, and you’re open minded, and. . . And you’re just lucky you’re normal, and in
a normal relationship, one that is healthy and clean and childbearing. But coming face to face with your sister’s fiancé has made you upset, and you don’t like that, it’s annoying to discover you’re just a little bit prejudiced after all. It wouldn’t be so bad, you reflect, if she’d found an ordinary animal, something close to home; you can imagine you’d be very accepting if your brother-in-law were a horse of good Anglo Saxon stock. But no—she had to go and find something exotic, some zoo creature—she had to go and fall for some fucking Arab.
In your hotel room you open up your laptop and fire off a quick email home. “Hello from sunny Egypt! It’s very hot! Wish you were here. Miss you loads. Lots of love, give Tammy a hug from Daddy.” And then you go on to Google, and type into the search engine “camel sex.”
You read about the camel penis, and are shown a diagram that measures its length and breadth. You read how, when aroused, the penis is in a different axis to most mammals, and when erect enters the female from the reverse direction. You find out that the camel’s right testicle is slightly bigger than the camel’s left testicle.
You break into the mini bar.
You read how a camel in heat is referred to in Arabia as the “hadur,” literally, “the braying one.” You suppose there’s a lot of braying in camel sex. You read that, when he’s rutting, the camel will secrete behind the ear a sticky smelly residue. That he’ll grind his teeth uncontrollably during copulation. That his mouth will froth, he’ll gargle, he’ll spit. He’ll piss, and he’ll swing his tail back and forth through the stream of piss to swish the piss about. That all this water loss, this very deliberate waste of precious fluids, is part of a courtship ritual designed to impress the female. That he’ll blow out his soft palate (the dulla) to turn her on the more; that, for his part, he’ll sniff at his partner’s genitalia, and the smell of urine from a non-pregnant female will excite him to no end.
You drink the mini bar dry.
When at last you sleep you dream of fat, hairy, hooked cocks impregnating your urine-drenched sister, and though she’s wearing her burqa, you can somehow tell throughout the whole thing that she’s grinning from ear to ear.
Emma phones you in the morning. She’s been given permission to take a whole afternoon off work so you can explore Cairo together. The taxi pulls up outside the hotel, she waves at you to get inside. Once again she is wearing her burqa. She hands another burqa to you. “Put this on,” she says.
“What for?”
“I want to show you where Abdul works. Abdul’s marvellous at his job! But Ali doesn’t like me being there, he says I’ll distract him, bless.” And she gives a very dry and very un-Muslim-like chuckle. “I don’t want us to be recognized, you’re going to have to cover your face like me.”
So you put on the burqa. The air conditioning of the taxi makes the cloth ripple across your face, and the sensation is not unpleasant.
You pay the driver, and you and your sister stand and watch Abdul and his master work. Ali is transformed; the surly and serious man you met last night is now all smiles, he wheedles his way around the tourists, he invites them all to inspect his camel, to see what a fine beast it is, to take a ride to the Great Pyramid in such style—and he’s so good at it, no one seems able to blank him or walk away, no one, not even the Americans. He’s such a good actor. And Abdul is a good actor too, because whenever a foreigner approaches he lowers his head toward them and flutters his eyelashes and even parts his lips into some sort of camel smile, he doesn’t seem to mind when the children pull his ears or pick at his coat or dribble ice cream on him, he’s the very picture of patience, the very model of Oriental dignity—and amongst all the sphinx snow globes and mummy paperweights and postcards of the pyramids, amongst all these imitations of history made cheap and plastic, he looks like the genuine article, he looks himself like a piece of antiquity, so old and so very wise. And for the first time you understand why your sister could have fallen in love with him. “Hoosh hoosh!” says Ali, and Abdul stoops to let tourists onto his back; “Hoosh!” and he straightens up, and the tourists are raised high in the air, each one of them laughing and crying out in surprise at the sudden speed of it. And you picture your sister up there, mounting her camel husband as much as she wants for the rest of her life.
You watch for a good hour and a half. Emma never gets bored. “Isn’t he wonderful?” she’ll say. You begin to get tired, and there’s a reservoir of sweat pooling at the top of your thighs. You suggest that maybe there’s more to see in Cairo than her husband, what would Emma recommend? And she says she doesn’t know, she hasn’t done any of the tourist stuff. “You never do, do you, when you’re at home?” And you resist the urge to remind her she’s only been here in Egypt for two weeks.
You go to the Cairo museum, you pay for two tickets. You walk around the exhibits, and the collection is vast. Everywhere there are mummies and canopic jars and little stone pots with heads of jackals. But it seems to you that you’ve seen it all before, in dozens of other museums all around the world, and you really might as well be in London or Paris or Prague; my God, for a civilization that collapsed thousands of years ago they certainly left an awful lot of stuff behind, didn’t they? But Emma is happy. She says to you at one point, “It’s beautiful, I’m so proud that my country could produce all this,” and she talks a little of Mother Egypt. “I’m so proud you’re here,” she whispers too, and she takes you by the arm, and the eyes behind the burqa slit are wet with tears, and you can’t tell whether she’s crying out of awe and admiration for the pharaohs or out of love for you—and then you realize with a start you’ve spent all this time looking out of a slit too, you forgot to take the burqa off, you’ve been walking all around the Cairo museum wearing a bloody burqa, you feel like an idiot.
“Come on,” you say, and take her to the café. The food there costs a fortune. You buy two coffees, and two sandwiches, and a pastry, you pay for it all. Emma gobbles down her sandwich. She looks so hungry suddenly, and you let her eat your sandwich too.
“You’re a good person,” she says suddenly. You don’t know where that’s come from. You then see she’s eaten the pastry as well. “You’re a good guy. I think you’re kind, and I don’t think you’ve got the easiest life, and you put up with a lot. And me. I think you put up with me.”
“Oh,” you say. “I don’t know about that.”
“I never found good guys. I always ended up with the other sort of guys. The selfish shit sort of guys. If I’d met someone like you, God, I don’t suppose I’d now be marrying a camel.”
You blush, and you wish you were still wearing your burqa. She doesn’t say anything else for a bit, and you wonder whether she’ll do her usual trick, whether now she’s let show a little emotion or humanity that she’ll sweep it away with some dismissive gesture. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t.
“I always thought you saw me as a bit of an idiot,” you say.
“No.”
You don’t look at her. “You pulled my hair. You kicked me. I never thought you even liked me very much.”
“I haven’t pulled your hair.”
“Not recently. I mean. But when we were kids.”
“Well. You’re my little brother.” As if that explains everything.
“Are you sure you want . . . Are you sure that . . . Emma?” And you’d like to carry on, but you mustn’t ask, and you’re still not looking at her, you still don’t dare, and even if you did what would be the point, her face would still be veiled, wouldn’t it? “I just want you happy,” you say, and you leave it like that, and maybe that’s just as well.
That evening at the hotel you check your email and there’s nothing from your wife, so you write to her again. “Hello from sunny Egypt! It’s still very hot here! I haven’t heard from you, are you all right? Wish you were here. Today I went to the Cairo museum. I think you’d have liked it. I know you like museums, and it was a very big one. Lots of pots everywhere. I wish yo
u’d been here to see them. I miss you. How are you, are you all right? Write soon. Give Tammy a hug from her Daddy.”
Then you decide to take a walk. As you leave the hotel the doorman stands to attention and calls you sir. He looks funny dressed up posh like that, like an English gentleman from a hundred years ago, top hat and spats. (He must be baking.) You walk around the streets for an hour. This is Cairo, the real Cairo, isn’t it? Your clothes cling to you, damp and sticky, you wonder why anyone would choose to live here. I mean, you know that historically people just settled where they were born, but nowadays, in these days of international travel, why do all of these Egyptians stay? The roads are noisy. The sand is everywhere, it looks like dirt. You go back to the hotel, and the doorman stands to attention once more, once more calls you sir, so efficient—you bet he doesn’t even recognize you from last time—and you wish he wouldn’t call you sir, you didn’t ask him for that, you didn’t ask for anything.
In the room you check your email. Still nothing from your wife, but then, you suppose, she’s probably asleep. You consider phoning, but you’d only wake her. You’d only make her cross. You write to her once more.
“Me again! I’ve been thinking. I may extend my visit here, if that’s all right. I don’t know how long. But I think my sister needs me.”
You open the mini bar and it’s empty. Not so fucking efficient after all, for all their fancy doormen, for all their top hats, they’ve let you down. You phone reception, you demand they restock your mini bar at once. A waiter in a red velvet jacket comes up soon after, lines the shelves with little bottles, smiles at you widely, says “Sorry, sorry.”
They Do the Same Things Different There Page 13