Into Suez

by Stevie Davies

  Several hours later Joe came home for his shaving tackle. He’d stay over, kip down in the chair. No news, he said. No, nothing yet, cariad. He’d tell her the minute they heard anything.

  ‘How is she?’ Ailsa asked.

  ‘Fast asleep. The MO came and gave her a sedative.’

  ‘How are you managing?’

  ‘Fine. It’s the least I can do. I’ll kip down in

  Christopher’s room if I need to. If that’s all right by you? How are the little ones?’

  ‘Good as gold. Out like lights.’

  Why did he say that, the least I can do? Did he blame himself? The atmosphere between them was stiff and polite, as if some mutual concealment were being practised. Which it was not in Joe to do for long (it is in me, Ailsa thought, oh yes, but it is not in him, he is so open and emotional).

  When she came back downstairs, Joe was sitting hunched with his back to the front window, by the open curtains. From the blind darkness beyond the window, a barrage of insects butted against the pane. The moon was up, a blade-like crescent, the stars pouring phosphorescent light on the sands. Joe rocked himself, his dark curly head in his hands. She went and crouched beside him, briefly fondled his hair. She should not believe the worst of him. Give him a chance.

  ‘Joe. Sweetheart. What?’

  ‘It was my idea.’

  ‘What was?’

  ‘The Tiger-ride. If I hadn’t egged him on, he’d still be here. I don’t think!’ he said. ‘I just don’t think, do I? I never think!’ And he struck the side of his head with the knuckles of his fist.

  ‘How could you have known how things would turn out?

  ‘I know now.’

  ‘No, you don’t, Joe. He may be back any minute.’

  ‘That’s what she says.’

  ‘Well, she’s right.’

  ‘You’ve caught the sun,’ he said, meeting her eyes and drawing tender fingers up her arms to the hot skin at the top. ‘Whatever have you been up to?’

  ‘Nothing important. Oh, the sunburn – yes, I’ll put on some calamine.’

  ‘Let me do it for you. Do be careful, Ailsa. You’re so fair. You’re going to peel.’

  ‘I’ll not do it again,’ she promised, touching the smarting skin with her fingertips. The Habibi household, like Brewers’ Green and the Empire Glory, seemed a theatre of illusion. Nothing that happened there had weight or relevance. ‘And don’t you reproach yourself about the Tiger, Joe. Chalkie’s a grown man, after all. You didn’t make him go with you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well then?’

  ‘You’re so good to me, Aily.’

  ‘What happened in the bar?’

  It all spilled out. The boys had arrived with a thirst on them like nobody’s business. The blokes there were legless. Even so, it had only been meant as a bit of a laugh. Practical joke. They’d been teasing the darkie waiters, he said, his cheeks hotter than her sunburn. Taunting the Gyppos to show what they’d got under their skirts. You know the old kilt-joke, he said.

  ‘But not you, Joe. You weren’t a part of that.’

  ‘Not a part of it, no.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘On the sidelines.’

  He and Chalkie had just been leaning on the piano, he said, if she wanted to know. They were the audience. But Dusty and Lofty joined in, parading up and down wearing table-cloths. Killing it was. Well, seemed so at the time. He was reading her expression greedily.

  ‘Oh Joe – honestly.’

  And she saw it all. Joe clapping and singing along, swaying his beer glass as he lolled at the piano. The life and soul of the party, so easily carried away. The head waiter’s humiliation as men in table cloths mimicked his robes and demeanour. Uproar. Squaddies diving at the Arab’s pristine gallabiyya, calling him a nancy, asking him where his sporran was, snatching at the hem of his garment, threatening to raise it and peek. Insulting Arab manhood. Insulting therefore his religion, the strongest loyalty he had. For the Prophet would be more dear to him than mother or father. And the infidel men and women, whose lewd behaviour scandalised the bar-tender at the best of times, would by their present actions have entered into a depravity that belonged to Satan.

  And for all Ailsa knew, they did not stop at threatening to raise the hem of the robe. She saw them fulfilling the threat, stripping the modest middle-aged man stark naked. To his terror and shame. Throwing glasses maybe. Tussling with the other waiters when they came to his aid. Beery tempers souring. Spilling out on to the rue Negrelli, bawling their raucous way down the pavement arm in arm, straddling the bikes, but sudden sobriety hitting them hard between the eyes: no Chalkie. Where’s Chalkie? Isn’t he here? Nah. Thought he was with you. They’d be calling his name. Then retracing their steps. Nobody in the bar except the one bar-tender. So what did they do to him? Roughed him up to make him speak?

  She saw and heard it as if she’d been there in the flesh, recoiling from her husband and the spaniel eyes that implored not only understanding but wifely complicity, unqualified by intelligence and insight. What was your part in all this? she silently demanded. For you, Joseph Elwyn Roberts, were never one to remain ‘on the sidelines’ of any prank – you’ll always be found dead-centre, having the time of your life.

  The memory of Mona swiftly passed before Ailsa’s vision, dark circles beneath her eyes, surrounded by human need, fending for those who had nothing. Setting Mona against Joe in the scales, she judged her husband. Worthless behaviour, she thought.

  Worthless.

  ‘Aye, I know: it was childish,’ he wheedled. Hardly the word Ailsa would have chosen. She drew a deep breath and held it.

  Sharp as a knife, Joe caught and read her look, then turned away from her, picking up the bag she’d packed. Her expression, that called him worthless, as clearly as if she’d spoken the word aloud, cut him to the quick.

  ‘No fucking sense of humour,’ he murmured, ‘the golliwogs.’ Then he added, ‘Dusty says.’ Looked sheepish. Clearly wished he had not blurted these disgraceful excuses. ‘Well now, look, Ailsa. It was not meant to offend. It just got out of hand. I’m telling you.’

  ‘Not meant … to offend? What if Egypt had colonised the West, then, Joe, and a gang of drunken Arabs came into a bar in Wind Street and pulled the Taffies’ trousers down for a laugh? Your dad, say. To see what you and he had got in your pants?’

  ‘Don’t be disgusting. My dad.’

  ‘So how is it different?’

  ‘You know very well how. You can’t make that comparison.’

  ‘Why not?’ Not worth answering, his shrug said. If the wogs had harmed Chalkie, his look told her, she would have to change her bloody tune.

  For a moment she took a dislike to him. She thought: you are stupid, Joe Roberts, and a little bit despicable. But you are mine.

  14

  Officials brought chitties for signing, information to be absorbed and messages of condolence. Bigwigs visited in limousines. Irene sat like a queen, receiving ambassadors from some strange land whose language was scarcely intelligible. It had been necessary to perform the autopsy with great haste, since corpses decomposed rapidly in this heat – and Chalkie must be buried soon. Joe helped the widow as best he could.

  ‘You’re such a comfort, Joe,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what I’d have done without you. I honestly don’t. I hope Ailsa can spare you. And that, you know, she doesn’t mind.’

  ‘Of course she doesn’t mind.’

  ‘She’s been wonderful with the children.’ Irene spoke in measured phrases, master of herself, and even picked up her knitting. She wanted Joe to have the jumper and he felt bound to agree to this inheritance. She’d been forever measuring poor Chalkie up, embarrassing the bloke as he offered his somewhat puny torso as the model to her calculation. Joe could see him now (and ‘henpecked’ he had thought) on the French Beach kneeling in the sand for Irene to decide on the hang of this very piece of knitwear.

  And now Joe must think of his friend, with
whom he’d survived the Desert War and the push into Italy, dredged up from the foetid Sweet Water Canal in this phoney peace. His body bloated and running with slime, throat slit from ear to ear, genitals sawn off and stuffed in his mouth. Of course Joe had not witnessed the salvage of the corpse. No need to see it to imagine it. He had identified Chalkie. They’d cleaned him up by then, of course. One eye was not quite closed. It seemed to be trying to peep out and make sense of all this, a ball of glazed jelly whose light was dimmed. The other eye was missing from the ruined face. Still you could make out that the features belonged to Chalkie.

  *

  ‘Let me make you a cup of tea, Irene,’ Joe said. He wanted to turn his face to the wall and weep. How did he deserve this trust and gratitude from Chalkie’s widow, who had known from the first that we were unsafe in this hell hole, who had seen the assassin before any of them, and had lost her Roy over and over again before the event.

  Out there in the other world, he could hear a child in a torrent of tears. Nia in a paddy, no doubt, because she couldn’t get her own way now that she had to share her space with two blond boys whose lives would never be the same. But they did not know their loss. He went to the window and squinted sideways to the Roberts garden, where his daughter, purple-faced and raving, was punching the air with her fists.

  Irene joined him with the tea-tray.

  ‘I’ve put out custard creams, in case we feel peckish.’

  ‘Nia’s off again,’ he said.

  ‘I expect she misses her daddy,’ Irene said, and then her mouth fell open and became a hole in her face, which her hands flew to cover, as she realised what she’d said.

  It should have been anyone else but Chalkie, Joe thought. If there was any fucking justice in the world. He patted her quivering, convulsing back, saying, ‘That’s the way, Irene lovely, cry.’ Her shoulder was soft to his hands, much softer than lean Ailsa’s. Irene was a harmless woman to whom those bastard wogs had dealt a blow that, as the RC priest had said, was heinous, it was an impiety. And of course it should have been himself or Dusty fished up from the Sweet Water Canal with his throat cut, since they’d led milky-mild Chalkie into the dark place. Chalkie had not taunted the Arab. He’d sat with his pint cradled to his chest and chuckled quietly on the sidelines. That was Chalkie all over.

  ‘I mustn’t,’ said Irene. ‘Got to stop this. Once and for all.’ She wiped her hot, blubbered face. ‘I can’t start relying on you, Joe, I can’t. It isn’t right.’

  She had to tread her own path from now on, she said, stanching the flow of tears with his handkerchief. Plough her own furrow: was that the phrase? She must guide Roy’s sons through life under her own steam. The first hurdle was the funeral. And Roy’s elder son would be there, standing to attention. Christopher wanted to attend, she said: nothing would stop him, although of course it was none of it real to the child. Even so, she and Christopher would so bear themselves – this was how she put it – as to make her husband proud of them. For Irene felt Roy was watching over them, from up there. Yes, she would bear up, even though it was hard, so hard.

  Egypt killed him, the widow said. It was a fearsome thing. Every native was our enemy, even the dhobi wallah and the chai wallah, yes, and the urchin she gave piastres to because he had only one leg and a pleasing smile, such very white teeth, she said, quite unlike the English kiddies, their teeth rot so young, it is a disgrace – not Nia and the boys of course, we know how important it is to ration the sweeties that get into their mouths and how vital it is to ensure a thorough cleansing of the teeth morning and night, it is vital.

  Her cup rattled as she replaced it in the saucer. Her spoon dropped to the floor and Joe retrieved it, substituting his own,

  She begged him to have a care to his back, whenever he was in or near Wog Town. How right she had been to distrust the wogs. And everybody thought her silly and timid, including Roy – but you understood me, Joe, didn’t you? I know you did, though even you did not realise the extent of their evil. She had not been silly. She had been right. So mind your back, she urged him. I shan’t be here to warn you, Joe, dear, and Ailsa is so reckless.

  Whatever did she mean, he wondered? But Irene swept on with what she was saying and probably she had implied only that Ailsa was not of a fearful temperament. Irene was saying that even the women in their yashmaks were not to be trusted. The black-gowned shepherdesses she’d seen in the fields from the train tending their sheep and goats, whom Ailsa had called bucolic, who seemed so mild and harmless, what did they keep up their robes? Blades. Ailsa is so good with words, she said, and I’m such a twerp, I have to have a translation! Oh, Irene, they are not perfidious, they are just people like you and me who want to live, that’s what Ailsa said! Whereas in fact they were all enemies and would stick a knife in the back of an innocent Yorkshireman just like that! – poof! – gone! – so that you would never see your husband again as long as you lived – which was unthinkable, and she kept seeing Roy come whistling round the corner with his cap on the very edge of his head, it was a scream and always quite a puzzle how it did not fall off, he was the Leaning Tower of Pisa as regards headgear. She must learn, Irene said, looking at the palms of her hands, that these people were not him. They were just ordinary bods, she said, who happened to be alive.

  Later Joe read Irene to sleep, perched on Chalkie’s side of the bed in the glow of a lamp. Strange and wrong it felt, trespassing in his pal’s private world. He peered round at the light and shadow and imagined being Chalkie. He saw how huge a thing it was to lose your marriage bed, the intimate core of your life, and be evicted from your own heart, leaving your side of the bed a dead white sheet. As Irene’s breathing deepened, he gave over the reading and lapsed into a doze. When he awoke there was a gecko on the wall taking advantage of the lamplight to lick up insects with its long tongue. It looked fearsome, like a baby dragon. He let it be. Doing a good job, as long as it didn’t give Irene a turn when she came to.

  He could imagine Chalkie, who took so much care for his wife’s peace of mind, and who was such a gentle bloke, trapping the baby dragon in a shoebox and putting it out of the back door.

  *

  ‘Topher whacked me in the night,’ Nia complained bitterly.

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘You did. You were bawling. You wetted my Mami’s and Daddy’s bed and made it smell, you boobybaby.’

  ‘Stop it, Nia.’

  Mami looked faded and almost rubbed out like a drawing. Nia frowned over Topher’s and Tim’s heads to her mother as she fed the younger boy rose hip syrup. Tim was off his food and Ailsa had resorted to feeding him milk through a dropper. More dribbled out than stayed in. Ailsa gave a huge yawn and said for the fiftieth time, ‘Open wide like a birdie!’ Topher and Nia crunched toast spread with condensed milk. They had pushed away bowls of prunes to keep them regular.

  ‘Don’t be beastly, Nia,’ Mami went on. ‘Be patient. I don’t know what’s got into you. You and Christopher used to get along so well.’

  Nia could not remember such a time.

  ‘When is it going to be just us?’ she asked.

  No answer.

  ‘When?’

  ‘If you don’t stop being nasty, I will send you to your room. I’m sick of it, Nia, do you hear, sick of it!’

  She jounced the heavy boy on her lap, eyes reassuring him that her rage was not meant for him.

  ‘Are you tired, Mami?’ asked Nia.

  ‘Very.’

  ‘I’m tired too.’

  ‘And I am,’ Topher joined in. ‘I’m done in.’

  ‘Well fuck off, boy. Just fuck off.’

  ‘Right!’ shouted Ailsa. ‘That’s it!’

  Tim howled where she dumped him as she rose enormous over Nia and loomed there. Before she could come down on Nia, Nia had thumped Topher for good luck, with venom. He roared; and she roared as she received the hard slap on the top of her arm, the first of her life.

  After the storm had blown itself out, Nia stood
on her bed, where Mami had been spending the night, leaving a delicious smell of talcum between pillow and sheet – a smell that was now so blighted that Nia could not sniff it more than once. Nia looked out at the desert where men ran about pretending to shoot each other.

  Mami crept in, ashamed. She said, ‘Christopher and Timothy are going now, darling. They want to say bye-bye. Sorry I lost my temper.’

  Immediately Nia’s feeling turned right round. She flew to Topher and attached her arms like tentacles, so that Joe said she’d throttle the poor lad, let go now, my beauty, Christopher is to go home with his own mummy. He peeled her off the silent boy and reattached her to himself, carrying her around their newly orderly and quiet house like a baby. He would not let her go, even when she asked to get down and wriggled in his arms and suggested he needed a nice fag, could she hold the match?

  *

  Joe packed the cups from Irene’s delicate china tea service in socks, nestling the saucers in newspapers. Nia and Christopher, now reconciled, helped in this work, their neat fingers wrapping the nice things with care. Nia admired the pink roses on the cups beyond anything she’d ever seen. Christopher took his new status seriously, for he was now ‘the man of the house’. There was something grotesque about this, Joe felt, looking at the child’s narrow shoulders and imagining Irene trying to rest her heavy head on them.

  He looked up at Irene, who was perched on a stool knitting like crazy.

  It must be finished, she was saying. It is for our dear Joe. I must hurry and finish it like a busy bee before we vacate. Mustn’t I?

  Christopher’s eyes swerved from his mother to Joe. He stared. With a sock over one hand, ready to pack a cup, he put out the other to touch Joe’s forearm.

  ‘Hallo, dear,’ said Joe, taking the hand. ‘How are you getting on there?’