Little Egypt (Salt Modern Fiction)

by Lesley Glaister

  Isis gave up on the lot of them and spoke to herself instead, muttering the words of Desert Longing, or rehearsing the scolding she would give her parents when they arrived, and when Haru wasn’t looking she crept away to train the pup.

  Akil washed their clothes each night and they all – even Victor – wore robes while their own garments dried. Everything was too long for the twins, but Victor rather fancied himself in Arab dress, Isis thought, since he kept his blue robe on long after his own clothes were dried to a crisp in the sun.

  After a few days, the camp began to seem an ordinary place to be. In the mornings Haru would take the donkey to a nearby village, and sometimes Selim went with him. Isis would be filled with envy as she watched them shrink and shimmer away towards the vague green haze of the river valley. Why could not the camp be there, instead? Why could they not be in the village? Or in Luxor? Evelyn and Arthur must have a house, after all. Why could they not wait there? Or in an hotel?

  Oh for some waving green and cool shade. But at least she knew Haru would return with water, vegetables and lemons, coconuts and pineapples, fish and sticky pastries, coffee and tobacco. Sometimes he’d bring an English newspaper and Isis would devour every word of it. The weather in England had been unseasonably warm – a proper Indian summer – which Isis hoped Mary had enjoyed; something awful was happening in Ireland and George Cadbury, the chocolate man, had died. She hoped that didn’t mean an end of Cadbury’s Chocolate Flakes, of which she intended, one day, to eat a lot.

  She was relieved there was nothing about Mr Carter or King Tut. If anyone were to make a big find it might as well be Evelyn and Arthur. The paper left newsprint on Isis’ sweaty hands and she transferred smutty fingerprints onto the pages of her book, making deliberate patterns like daisies on the flyleaf.

  Now that he had achieved his purpose and delivered his charges as far as he could, Victor had gone meek and flaccid. And he was having nightmares again, screaming and vomiting in the deep of the night, dreaming, she must suppose, of Gallipoli. Whatever Haru, Selim and Akil must think of him, she could not imagine. If white chaps were supposed to be superior, then he wasn’t a very good example. When such thoughts occurred to her, she would look at Selim, going so gracefully about his tasks, at his delicacy and beauty – somehow he looked fresher than everyone else, fresh and vivid – and then her eyes would return to the disgraceful, reeking slump of Victor and she would be ashamed of her own kind.

  Early in the mornings, the air would be cool and carry wisps of green scent from the Nile, which soon became blurred with the smell of cigarettes and coffee. Each morning, Victor would drink cup after cup of it, as he emerged from his nightmares to settle into his daytime idleness. She should try and distract him, she thought. He had run out of pills, not expecting to be away so long, and probably he needed more than pills. Perhaps he would need to go back to hospital for more electric shock treatment when they got back to Blighty.

  She went and squatted down beside him. His glass cup was half full of coffee grounds, thick as tar.

  ‘How can you drink that stuff?’ she said, and when he didn’t answer: ‘Will you play cribbage with me?’

  He peered at her with bleary, sore-looking eyes and shook his head.

  ‘If Mary was here, she’d play,’ she said.

  He snorted. ‘Can you imagine Mary here?’

  ‘I can’t actually imagine me here,’ she said, and Victor harrumphed.

  ‘Dear little Icy.’

  Noticing a fond sort of thickening in his voice, and too hot for any petting, she moved an arm’s length away. He was missing the company of women, of course, perhaps secretly pining for Melissa, but when she asked him he only shrugged as if Melissa was gone from his mind. Whenever she read Desert Longing, the pages darkening under her sweaty hands, she was troubled by the memory of Melissa, the smoky violet scent, the way her body was there, hidden by her clothes, but still shouting here I am. Uncle Victor had probably kissed her in the dark of the cabin, kissed her and done more, hot and naked secret things. Her stomach felt dark and tight when she thought like that, and she stood and stamped and swung her arms to drive away the feeling, which was surely wrong.

  ‘We should take a present back for Mary,’ she decided. ‘What shall it be?’

  Victor only lit himself another cigarette.

  ‘Do you think she’d like a dog?’ she said.

  ‘A dog!’ he scoffed, and added startlingly: ‘Hot stuff, Mary.’

  Isis gaped. ‘Do you mean to say you like Mary?’

  ‘How could anyone not like Mary? She’s a peach.’

  ‘But in a romantic way?’

  He sighed out feathers of smoke.

  ‘Victor?’ Isis looked at him with fascination, as a new notion occurred to her. ‘Have you ever kissed Mary?’

  ‘Not for want of trying,’ he said with a shame-faced grin.

  Isis was careful only to go behind the ruins when Haru was away from the camp. With some success she was training the pup to sit, and she planned for him also to learn to play dead and to walk on his hind legs. Once Evelyn and Arthur saw him at his tricks, how could they resist him? On the day she first got him to sit on command, she looked round, bursting with pride and wishing someone could witness her success – and discovered that Selim was watching.

  If she had not already been so hotly red she would have blushed. He was leaning against a broken pillar, arms folded, definitely watching her from beneath the sweep of his lashes. She lifted a hand and he smiled, teeth dazzling in his brown face, and her own mouth stretched into a grin.

  ‘Hello,’ she called softly.

  He only continued to watch and smile. She ordered Sweep to sit again, but perhaps there was less conviction in her voice now and he only jumped up at her legs, yapping for a treat and when she looked back over her shoulder, Selim had gone.

  16

  FLOPPED ON HIS side in the shadow, Sweep was fast asleep. Isis longed to poke him awake, but it wouldn’t be fair. His paws were twitching as if he was running in his dream. She sat on the giant toes that projected from the sand, it was quite comfortable if you wiggled your bottom into the cleft between the big toe and the next one, and hugged her knees. With her ears full of the hum of flies, she was on the brink of dozing off, when she sensed movement. She turned her head and found that Selim was standing close beside her, his robe almost brushing her shoulder.

  He said something, pointed to the pup and smiled. She loved that smile, she thought, and was shot through with fright. Love? Such smooth lips, the colour of milky cocoa, such white teeth, eyes deeper black than ink. How could anything so black be so bright and sparkling? His eyes held hers and she flushed and looked away. No, not love, just a beautiful smile in the midst of all the boredom.

  Still smiling, he crouched beside her, pointed to the pup and said a word, tilted his head on one side.

  ‘Dog,’ she said.

  ‘Dog,’ he repeated.

  ‘That’s right! Dog!’

  ‘Dog,’ he said again, and they both laughed with the pleasure of this communication.

  She put her hand on her own chest. ‘Isis,’ she said, although he probably already knew her name, but it was lovely to hear him say it in his heavily-accented, slightly gruff, boy’s voice. It was probably the proper Egyptian way of pronouncing it and she repeated it back, like him. He was close enough for her to smell – not aniseed, just a healthy scent of skin and hair. The pup twitched and whimpered in his sleep and they smiled at each other.

  ‘Hair,’ Isis said, pointing to her own, then wishing she hadn’t drawn attention to it, such a dirty mess.

  ‘Hair,’ he said, pointing to his own.

  ‘Mouth.’ She touched her lips.

  ‘Mouth.’

  His face was very close to hers and as if someone else was lifting her hand, she reached out and with her index finger touched hi
s exquisitely straight nose. ‘Nose,’ she said.

  His eyes flickered, but smiling steadily he touched the tip of her nose and a bolt of electricity shot through her.

  ‘Nose,’ she said, her voice faltering.

  Akil called and he stood abruptly.

  ‘Nose,’ he said and grinned before he walked away.

  She sat blinking, hardly able to believe that she had dared to touch his nose and that he had touched hers. There was a feeling as if a firework was trying to go off in a cramped space inside her as she went over it again and again, the surprisingly cool, firm feeling of his nose, his finger pressing on hers. That flicker in his eyes. And then she looked down at her thick, red, bare knees and groaned. What must he see when he looked at her but a girl with dirty hair and bitten legs, bursting out of her too-small dress? What ever must he think?

  She waited till she was sure he had gone before she trailed back where Victor was sitting under an awning on his canvas chair, smoking.

  ‘They better bally well arrive soon or he’ll slit our throats,’ Victor said nodding across at Haru, who chose that moment to eye them fiercely.

  ‘Don’t be such a chump,’ she said. ‘What a perfectly ridiculous thing to say.’ She tore her eyes away from Selim, who was telling Haru something. They both laughed, looking at her, she was sure. Her face burned. Haru was saying something and moving his hands in the air, making rounded shapes like bosoms. No, he couldn’t be, he wouldn’t be, she must stop imagining things to do with bodies, she was driving herself demented.

  ‘Oh, I dare say they’ll arrive soon,’ Victor said. ‘Perhaps today, you never know.’

  ‘Or we could insist on being taken to them?’ Isis said.

  ‘No, best stay put. They know best.’

  Isis unfolded a little canvas stool, and though she guessed he’d rather be left alone, seated herself beside him. ‘Victor. I don’t feel at all myself,’ she said.

  Victor smoked silently for a moment. His beard was thick round his mouth now, flecks like iron filings amongst the messy gingery thatch.

  ‘No more do I,’ he said, at last.

  His fingers were dark yellow from all the smoking, and his teeth too, and with his red and staring eyes he looked really frightful, as if he were metamorphosing into something from his own nightmare. She recalled the terrible sounds he’d made in the night, the deep terrified bellowing, followed by the retching.

  ‘You had another of your dreams,’ she said. He grunted. ‘What’s in them?’ she dared to ask and watched as his leg began to jump. He sucked in smoke and held it down.

  ‘Mine are frightful at the moment too,’ she said, encouragingly. ‘I keep dreaming about being lost, or hearing bad news.’ She stopped and frowned; she’d forgotten until that moment how last night she’d seen Evelyn and Arthur, tiny as dolls, dead and floating on a tea tray down the Nile.

  ‘Rats,’ said Victor. Roughly, he grasped her hand and held it against the jumping leg. ‘The rats were bloody enormous in the trenches,’ he said. ‘You know how they got so big?’

  Isis shook her head.

  ‘By eating flesh. They were like this.’ He let her go and jerked his hands a couple of feet apart. ‘And their heads were white from eating all that man-meat. They were like fucking great luminous ghosts. But they were real. And they weren’t scared. They’d look up at you and go right on gnawing at a fellow’s face.’

  ‘Oh,’ whispered Isis, squeezing and rubbing her eyes to try and rid them of the image. It was stupid of her to have asked, and now his leg was jumping as if it wanted to be free of him and hop off on its own. ‘Oh, fuck, fuck,’ he was saying and trying with his fists to press it still. He shouldn’t be saying that awful word, but he couldn’t help it, she could see that, he was beside himself. What could she say? She looked for help to Haru, who was with Akil and Selim on the far side of the stove, but when she met his eyes he crossed his arms and turned away.

  ‘Remember, you’re a hero,’ she said in a small voice.

  He hacked up a rotten bit of laugh.

  ‘They’ll be here soon,’ she said. ‘And then everything will be all right. You see, Victor, it’ll turn out all right.’

  He laughed again, but it was more like vomit than anything joyful. Selim was staring at her, as if to see what she would do.

  ‘I’m going to lie down,’ she said, and slunk off to her tent.

  Late the following morning, she lay propped on her elbows in her tent, draped in mosquito net, scratching at a swollen bite – flea, mosquito or some other desert creature. Her mind was in another desert, more picturesque than this, and her mind was filled with Lady Fleur and Lord Greatorix, and the love affair they conducted, even as they fled the handsome Arab Prince who, now that they had kissed, wanted Lady Fleur for his harem.

  The Prince had a hooked and noble nose, eyes of liquid black, long, hard limbs; Selim, she thought, but older, and she changed the hooked nose to one that was beautifully straight, and she added thick shadowy lashes. Although he was bad in the book, the Prince made Isis’ heart beat faster than Lord Greatorix did, especially when he tried to force his way into Lady Fleur’s tent.

  Lady Fleur had a tiny waist and tumbling, unruly curls and whenever she read that description, Isis’ hand would go to the flat and dusty greasiness of her grown-out pudding-basin cut and it almost hurt to think what a fright Selim must think her. She thought about Victor, about the mewing sounds of Mimi and of Melissa’s flagrant fleshiness, but always her thoughts returned to the darling straightness, the firm coolness, of Selim’s nose. She rolled over on her back and mouthed the words on the final page.

  And at last Lady Fleur was enfolded in the safe masculine strength of his embrace. ‘Forever,’ he murmured into the rosy shell of her ear.

  ‘Truly? ‘ she questioned, exquisite lips aquiver.

  ‘Forever,’ he repeated, stilling her mouth with his fervent kiss.

  She turned over to stare at the sun-bleached canvas above her. ‘Forever,’ she whispered, ‘forever and everandeverandever.’

  17

  IT WAS CHOKING hot in the tent within the mosquito net; her underarms itched and there was a real pain in her belly now. ‘I don’t feel quite well,’ she said aloud. ‘I really don’t feel myself.’ But that is ridiculous, how can you not feel yourself? Though you can be beside yourself, or beyond yourself. When Victor had his nightmares that is exactly what he was: beyond himself.

  She realised that there were new voices out there – longed-for voices. She sat up, struggled with the mosquito net, fought her way out of the tent and flung herself at Evelyn, who embraced her, though rather crossly, then pushed her away and stood looking at both twins.

  ‘Look what a state they’re in!’

  Evelyn herself was darkly burned and, peering out from beneath a pith helmet, looked horsier than ever.

  ‘It’s not our fault!’ Isis said. ‘Where were you? Why didn’t you meet us?’

  ‘Well, evidently we were unable to come immediately.’

  ‘But –’ Isis’ mouth hung open. All the worry and the waiting and the disappointment, even the fear, shrivelled in the scorching light to nothing but silly childish temper.

  ‘And we’re here now, aren’t we? And you – you’re here safely. What’s the matter then?’

  Isis’ bottom lip begin to curl down as it used to when she was small, and then it would pull cords in her neck and make her sob. But not now, she was too grown-up now for that, and besides, Selim might be watching.

  ‘Icy!’ Arthur came striding across. His beard was a ridiculously whiskery fuzz reaching halfway down his chest, he was wearing a dirty pith helmet too and his pipe dangled from the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Are we going to the excavation?’ Osi said. ‘Today? Now?’

  Arthur cleared his throat. ‘We’ve had, um, a bit of a . . . hiatus.’

&n
bsp; ‘Another wild goose chase?’ Isis said.

  ‘Truth is,’ Arthur continued, ‘most of our labourers have gone off to work on Lord Carnarvon’s dig. That bastard Carter seems to be getting warm.’

  ‘Warmer than you?’ Osi said. ‘No! Let’s go.’

  ‘While we, um, regroup and so on, we thought we’d take you for an outing.’

  Isis looked out at the hopeless desert.

  ‘Children like outings,’ Evelyn told her.

  ‘Hello, there.’ Victor had crawled out his tent. Isis saw how Evelyn recoiled when she saw him – bearded, red-eyed, shambling, the borrowed robe streaked filthily with food and coffee. ‘You took your bally time.’

  ‘Well, we’re here now. I say, you do look a sight, Victor. Are you all right?’

  ‘He’s dreaming every night, of rats,’ Isis told them. ‘He needs more treatment, electric shock, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  Arthur eyed him dubiously and exchanged glances with Evelyn. ‘Come here, Icy.’ He gave her a hard hug amongst the smoky tickle of his beard and turned to Osi. ‘How’s my boy? As predicted, Haru’s making a fuss about the funds,’ he remarked to Evelyn over the children’s heads.

  ‘I’ve had devil of a job keeping him sweet,’ said Victor.

  Arthur grunted. ‘Sweet’s hardly the epithet I’d choose!’

  ‘What’s the matter with the fellow?’ Evelyn said.

  ‘We were stuck with no money and no nothing and not even a toothbrush!’ Isis could not prevent her voice from rising to a shout.