‘Oh yes, I was there,’ she’d tell her new pals. Imagine friends, with houses you could visit, other girls to talk to and confide in. She could learn to dance and all the plumpness would fall away. She would grow her hair long and wear it pinned up with a silvery comb, and Osi, he would make friends too, perhaps, or just become an Egyptologist himself and spend his whole life grubbing happily in the desert. It seemed what he was born for – the only thing.
The lorry stopped in a leafy street where wide verges of shorn brown grass separated the road from the footpaths and, set back behind palms and clambering greenery, was a row of great mysteriously-shady houses. Haru jumped down from the cab to find the home of the Hudsons. Isis climbed out stiffly; her posterior and legs were bruised by all the jolting and her head ached. She ran her fingers through her stiff, tangled hair; it hadn’t been washed since they’d left home and she must look a perfect fright. Uncle Victor didn’t care about such things, but she didn’t want the Hudsons to think she was a guttersnipe. Osi climbed out of the back of the lorry and she looked at him with despair, he was at his awkward worst and resembled nothing more than the bedraggled nestling of a bird of prey crammed into human clothes.
Victor lit up a cigarette and leaned his back against a tree. Looking up into the waving fronds, Isis saw branches of dates. Arthur always made a great to-do of presenting a crate of dates to Mary when they arrived home, as if she should be delighted and surprised. ‘I suppose we can live on them when Mr Burgess strikes us off his books,’ Mary had muttered last time, when Arthur had left the room. The dates on this tree were tight and green and the ground beneath was strewn with crunchy broken palm fronds. A bird screeched and screeched, though Isis couldn’t see it, and a skeletal dog skulked along the pavement.
‘Poor thing!’ she said and went to pet it, but one of its eyes was missing and the socket weeping yellow pus and she shrank away disgusted.
Haru came back frowning, speaking rapidly to Akil, who shrugged his shoulders and spat.
‘They are not at the address I have.’ He waved a piece of paper at Victor who took and examined it as smoke leaked from his mouth.
‘Perhaps we have the number wrong?’ he said.
‘I have tried, no one knows this address or the names of these people.’
‘Maybe it’s the wrong road?’ Isis suggested.
Haru shook his head and puffed out angrily. ‘Wrong road!’ he said. ‘What am I to do?’ He snatched back the paper from Victor and stamped off across the road again.
‘What if we can’t ever find them?’ Isis’ voice rose into a childish wail.
Victor had no answer to that; he simply stood watching for Haru’s return, a baffled expression on his face. They waited for an age while Haru tried the rest of the houses in the street. He found the right one at last, but it was shut up, and a servant told him the Hudsons had gone away.
‘Gone away?’ Isis felt a plummeting sensation in her belly. ‘Gone where?’
‘I say, that’s the bally limit,’ Victor said weakly.
‘I’m sure it’ll be all right,’ Isis said. She took his hand. ‘It’s just a misunderstanding.’
He looked down at her with a dent between his eyes, and she noticed the flaring of his pupils.
‘Let’s not panic,’ she said. He was a fragile man still and the only time he was all right, really, was when he was with a lady. Now that Melissa had gone she would have to manage to keep him calm somehow or other.
‘Do you think you should take one of your pills?’ she suggested.
He gave her a glazed look, but nodded and took a tablet from the little brown bottle in his pocket.
‘We need refreshment,’ she decided, ‘while we think what to do.’
11
AFTER A LONG argument with Akil and much spitting on the ground, Haru took them to a quite different class of establishment from the Hotel Cecil. There was no cool marble in this place; it was a low dark room, packed with men sucking smoke through bubbling tubes, men who stared at them all, but mostly at Isis. Her dress was too tight round the chest and stained under the arms with sweat, and it was too hot for stockings so her legs were bare to the knee. Akil had gone off somewhere, and Haru and Victor stood at a counter drinking tiny cups of coffee, while Isis and Osi sat on cushions before a low table drinking something sticky sweet from bleary glasses.
There was an argument going on at the bar, and even though Victor had taken a pill, Isis could see that he was agitated, face twitching to one side, which she recognised as a danger sign, and what would she do if he lost control among all these strangers? There were flies buzzing around the sweet drink and she felt one tickling her upper lip and smacked it away so hard she hurt herself.
‘Ow. Oh Lord preserve us,’ she said, comforted by using a Maryish expression. ‘What are we going to do?’
There was a fly crawling on his lips too.
‘Get that fly off you,’ she said.
He looked at her and sipped his drink and another fly joined it, one at each corner of his mouth. ‘I don’t mind,’ he said.
Isis looked hard at her drink. She didn’t know the taste, it would be something tropical, she expected. ‘Lost in Egypt,’ she said.
‘We’re not lost with Victor here,’ Osi said.
Isis widened her eyes at his faith in Victor.
‘Is it how you imagined?’ she asked him. ‘Egypt?’
‘We’ve seen enough photographs to have given me a good idea,’ he said. His voice sounded like Arthur’s, sensible and grown-up and measured, but his eyes darted about and she was gratified that he too seemed uneasy.
‘I hope they’re are all right,’ she said, watching for his expression. ‘What if …’
‘They’re right on the brink of discovery. Perhaps even –’
‘But they can’t not come! You can’t send halfway across the world for your children then not bother to meet them!’ Isis’ voice rose and she sensed a prickling of interest amongst the men. ‘If only Mary were here,’ she added quietly.
‘What could she do?’ Osi was clenching and unclenching his fists and then pulling the lobes of his ears, a childish habit Isis had supposed him grown out of.
She breathed deeply to quell her rising panic and her airways filled with tarry scented smoke. ‘It’s rather thrilling, don’t you think,’ she said with a desperate smile, ‘being somewhere you don’t know and not knowing what’s going to happen next?’ The idea of Mary being here was a stupid one, anyway. Victor was a man of the world, after all; she should trust him. What would Mary know about being lost in Egypt?
Her hands felt dirty and she grew more and more uncomfortable and distracted by her need for the lavatory. Victor was drinking something from a small glass now, and refusing to catch her eye. Haru was slumped across the bar talking earnestly and laughing, she saw him punch someone on the arm and it was the kind of punch, done with the kind of laugh, that could have been a joke or a threat, you couldn’t tell. Akil had come back and was crouched with the other men, sucking smoke through a bubbling pipe. There were no women in the bar, Isis noticed, which probably meant they didn’t have a place for ladies to pay a visit, and in any case, she didn’t feel she could walk about in here, better to stay as small and unobtrusive as possible in the shadows.
She began to play patience, dealing the cards out in seven columns. If it came out right by the fifth time, everything would all be all right, and by tonight they’d have met Evelyn and Arthur. It would all turn out to be a silly misunderstanding and then there they’d be with egg on their faces but none the worse. One day it might be a funny story, something she could tell her children: the time we were lost in Egypt! It’ll all come out in the wash, Mary would say. No black queen, no red seven. She reshuffled for another try.
Osi took out a book and sat with his head over it, gnawing the joints of both thumbs; the spitty scraping of his teeth was maddening. Over and over she got stuck with the patience, kneeling with legs pressed tightly together as
the pressure in her bladder grew. The cards picked up a stickiness from the table, the top of which was made of leather tooled with patterns, once gold, but now ingrained with blackish grease. Isis squirmed and dealt again, looking pleadingly over at Victor who ignored her.
Her stomach felt swollen with urine, it was as if a wire was twisting inside her and she felt as if something would break if she couldn’t relieve herself soon. She had no choice but to get up, legs fizzing with pins and needles, and cross the room to pull on Victor’s sleeve. He started and gawped around him as if he’d just woken up. She whispered her need and he shouted to the man behind the bar, ‘My niece needs the toilet,’ so the whole room could hear, and using that dreadful common word, too. Isis was so hot and uncomfortable already that she couldn’t blush any more and she needed to press her fist between her legs, but she could not do that.
Haru grabbed her by the arm and took her through a curtain made of swinging chains and out into a yard where there was a wooden box, like a coffin on its end. ‘There.’ He shoved her towards it.
There was a sound like thunder coming from the place and such a stink she had to open her mouth to breathe and that meant she could taste the filthy air. It was dark except for streaks of light leaking through gaps in the wood, but she didn’t want to see anyway. She pulled her underwear aside and let the urine out in a hot torrent, splashing down the insides of her legs and wetting her shoes as flies zizzed and needled around her face. For a moment there was the bliss of relief, but there was nowhere to wash her hands and she grew afraid of all the germs that there must surely be. Mary said foreign germs were worse and stronger than English ones and you could hear them in here vibrating like something about to boil right over. And now she had to go back and everyone would know where she’d been and the pale leather of her shoes was darkly splattered.
‘We should leave here,’ she told Haru. ‘This is not the place for us.’
He looked down at her, his dark eyes seeming to suck up the light. She noticed how thick his lashes were, each one shiny and live like an insect’s antennae. He considered for a moment before he said: ‘And where would you have us go?’
‘To the boat,’ she said. ‘If they won’t come here, then something important must have held them up, and we’ll simply have to go to them. It’s what they would expect.’ She wiped her hands on her dress and lifted her chin.
Haru kept his serious gaze on her for a moment longer, and then his head went back and he shouted a laugh. ‘It’s what they would expect,’ he said. ‘Well, maybe you’re not so wrong.’
He led the way back into the café, which seemed darker now, and she kept her head high, ignoring the bright sparks of eyes and grinning teeth that flickered through the gloom. Haru and Akil issued the three of them out of the café and into the street, where the sudden brightness made Isis stagger.
Victor was staggering too, for different reasons, and Isis took one arm and Haru the other. ‘So we will go to the boat,’ Haru said. ‘And I must spend my own money for this.’
‘They’ll be sure to pay you, the minute we see them,’ Isis said.
‘They will be sure to,’ Haru said, and he was not smiling now. ‘What can I do?’ He turned to Akil and shrugged and talked Arabic, until Akil nodded and looked up, for the first time, looked properly first at Isis, then at Osi, then at Victor. And then his eyes came back to Isis, and again he nodded.
12
OSI CLAMBERED INTO the back of lorry, without complaint, and Akil climbed in after him. Isis and Victor resumed their positions in the cab, and Haru drove with one hand, smoking continuously till the air was filled with greyness, bad breath and temper. Victor lolled against Isis, making her hot and squashed and she was parched – but after that awful visit to the lavatory she resisted drinking from the bottle of scummy water.
The drive was long, with just a stop or two, one to buy fuel, one when Haru stood and relieved himself in clear sight, shocking Isis with the accidental glimpse of a yellow arc, and then Victor staggered out and did the same, not even bothering to go far from the lorry. Hearing the heavy splatter made Isis need to go again and she had no choice but to jump down and hide behind a wheel to squat.
They drove and drove on dry brown roads through the dry brown land. What would they do when night fell? Where would they sleep? And the night did fall – one moment there was a fiery balloon low in the saffron sky, the next it had burst into scarlet shreds – and swiftly the sky went dark. Victor woke up and smoked at some point, and then the lorry began making stuttering sounds and ground to a halt. Haru swore and jumped out, shouting something to Akil in the back.
Isis allowed herself a small sip of water and climbed stiffly out to check that Osi was all right. It was cold and the sky was crammed with stars, crushed together far too tightly so it was like a scrumple of silver foil.
‘Osi?’ she called, but he didn’t answer and she couldn’t see him. Akil was standing a little way away with Haru, who was talking in a fast, terse undertone. She clambered up, barking her shin on the rusty metal. ‘Osi?’ She made out the small hump that was he, put her hand out to reach him and caught hold of his shin, ice-cold and stiff and prickled with hairs. She let out a cry.
‘What is it, Icy?’ called Victor.
Her breath had caught like something thick, like wadding in her throat. He was stone cold dead and she opened her mouth to scream but no scream came, and then she felt him move.
‘What is it?’ Osi said and she sat down with a thump beside him. ‘I was asleep,’ he said crossly, but she didn’t care how cross he was, she hugged him, so cold he was like a statue of a boy. He needed to wear more clothes if he was to continue in the back of the lorry. He would freeze to death and if Victor wasn’t going to look after him then she bally well would.
‘We need to open the trunk and get some clothes out,’ she called. ‘We’re perishing cold.’
‘I’m all right,’ Osi said. He never felt the cold, but Isis was shivering now. Where did all that heat go? In summer at home it never got so hot, but on scorching days it stayed warm in the evening. This heat was like bathwater, all run away in the dark, as if down a plug hole.
‘Why have we stopped?’ Osi’s voice was cross and scratchy with sleep.
‘We’ve broken down,’ Victor said. ‘Here, Icy, you open up the trunk – I could do with a pullover myself.’
Isis reached over and took the key. The trunk that contained clothes for all three of them was behind a partition; she’d seen Akil and Haru load it.
‘Help me,’ she said to Osi. She was thinking of putting on a cleaner dress, stockings and a cardigan. There were cakes of soap in there, the ivory sort that Evelyn liked best. They could pour water from the bottles over their hands and wash them properly at least.
But behind the partition there was nothing. It was too dark to know for sure at first, and horrible to put your hands into a space you could not see, but she had to make herself feel and she felt and felt and came across nameless bits and pieces but nothing the size or shape of the trunk. She would not believe it but kept feeling about, measuring the space with her hands until she was certain she’d covered every nook and cranny.
‘It’s gone!’ she wailed at last.
‘Don’t be such a clot,’ Victor said.
‘You find it then.’
Osi was on his knees now, feeling about. ‘Not here,’ he confirmed.
Victor got up onto the back of the lorry and stumbled towards them. Isis’ eyes were growing used to the dark now and she could see the absence of the trunk, she could see how Victor was holding out his hands like a sleepwalker.
‘Here,’ she said, guiding him. ‘It was just here. I saw them put it in.’
She caught Victor’s hand to put it into the absence and felt that it was trembling.
‘It must be here,’ he said. ‘Perhaps they moved it.’
‘Haru!’ Isis called and her voice came out querulous and panicky, and when he came to see what she wanted, she
smoothed it down. ‘We can’t seem to locate the trunk. We need some warmer clothes.’
‘It’s there,’ he said, ‘pull away the …’ and then he clucked his tongue and jumped up to show them. And he did seem surprised that it wasn’t there. As far as Isis could tell in the darkness, he really didn’t seem to know.
‘It’s all our things.’ Her teeth were chattering now and her voice wobbled. Mary had spent ages washing and ironing and folding, and Isis happened to know there were some treats hidden amongst the clothes – she had seen the humbugs and aniseed balls. Uncle Victor’s things were in there too – though they had made a fearful squash – as it had been decided at the last minute that travelling with one trunk only would be cheaper and easier. There was silence in the back of the lorry, and for the first time it struck Isis how very, very quiet it was out there, a different kind of quiet from that at home. All you could hear was the hissing of the stars as if the sky had a million punctures.
‘Akil!’ Haru leapt off the back of the lorry into the darkness and they heard shouting.
‘What shall we do?’ Isis asked Victor. ‘I want my cardigan.’ Her voice wobbled on this last, homesick kind of word.
‘Buggered if I know.’ Victor slumped down and put one arm round Isis, and one round Osi. At least there was some warmth that way. They sat stunned for a long time, listening to the silence of the desert, punctuated at first by quarrelling and the thwack of someone being hit, and later sounds of the engine being tinkered with, and at last the stuttering roar of success.
Haru shouted over the back. ‘We’ll stay here till dawn.’
‘Can you offer an explanation for the trunk?’ Victor called, but there was no answer, only the slam of one cab door, and then the other. Isis gave him the key back, though there was no point in it now. Through the removed partition they could hear the rumble of Haru’s and Akil’s voices. They all listened but could make out nothing, of course, but their tempers.
Little Egypt Page 10