Shadows on the Nile (37 page)

‘Don’t,’ you say.

‘Don’t what?’

‘Don’t pull faces at me.’

I am disappointed. I shrug and let the smile fall off my face.

‘Today,’ you say, ‘big things are going to happen.’

I look at the wardrobe.

‘No,’ you say. ‘Stay where you are.’

I stay.

‘You are going to have to trust me, Georgie. Do you trust me?’

I nod.

‘Good,’ you say.

But I
don’t
trust you. You are going to do something bad to me. I know it, but I don’t know how I know it.

‘Listen hard, Georgie. I am going to get you out of this place today.’

Air drains out of my lungs as I look at your face and see you are completely serious. Not one of your jokes. I throw myself on my knees and slam my forehead on the floor to wake up the snakes again. I want their noise to drown out the sepulchral sound of your voice.

‘I don’t trust them.’ Your words are quiet and you prod me with your foot. ‘Get up.’

I stay down.

‘Georgie, don’t be difficult. We have to leave. I haven’t got long. I went to a séance last night and …’

‘A séance?’

‘Yes. That’s not
the point. Some people want me to go to Egypt immediately.’

I raise my head. ‘Egypt?’

‘Yes. Secretly.’

‘Why?’

‘It doesn’t matter why.’ Your words tumble out in a rush to batter my ears. ‘This is the point. I have told them I can’t leave you here, as I don’t know when I’ll be back. Remember what happened to you last time I was in Egypt two years ago?’

I don’t want to remember.

‘So this time, Georgie boy, you are coming with me.’

My jaw drops. I am too shocked to scream. Slowly I start to crawl across the floor to the wardrobe.

‘No!’ Your grey-flannelled legs stand in front of me. ‘It’s that or …’

‘Or die,’ I finish. ‘I would rather die.’

You – who know better than to touch me – seize me by the shoulders and yank me to my feet. You shake me till my teeth rattle.

‘Well, hard luck, brother. I’m the one making the choices.’ You lift your large heavy canvas knapsack from beside the door and pull out a black eye-mask. ‘With or without?’

‘I’m not going.’

From the knapsack pocket you remove something enclosed in a box. You open the box. It contains a syringe. ‘With or without?’ you ask again.

I look at you, grief-stricken. You have turned into Dr Churchward. My legs are shaking. A high thin wail comes out of my mouth.

You grab my arm and push up my sleeve. I hold it there obediently like one of Pavlov’s dogs. You stick in the needle as if I am a pin cushion.

We are on the roof.

I don’t remember how we get here, how we climb the drainpipe, how you stop the ear-splitting wail coming out of my mouth. All I remember is you taking my cheeks between your strong hands, with your nose so close to mine it feels like the sun has dropped from the sky and is blasting heat in my face. Your mouth is all crooked.

‘Don’t let
me down, Georgie,’ you say.

I think you mean let you down from the roof, so I shake my head. Now we are on the roof and from your knapsack you drag a rope-ladder. I stare at it without realising what it is for, and when you drag me to the far end of the roof where I have never been, I start to sway from side to side, as though the wind is buffeting me. The snakes are silent. So I close my eyes with relief and find I am falling asleep on my feet like a horse.

‘Christ, Georgie. Move!’

I force up my eyelids and prop them open with my fingers. I can’t recall why we’re up here but it is pleasant, with a faint trickle of autumn sunlight fingering the back of my neck. I try to sit down.

‘Here! Georgie!’

You seize my hands and put them on a vent-pipe that is sticking up just behind the low balustrade. You have hooked the rope ladder over it.

‘How did you know it was here?’ I ask placidly.

‘I have prepared for this eventuality.’

You are curt. Rude, I think. But my tongue has settled on the bottom of my mouth and lies there inert. It does dawn on me slowly that you must have been up here without me. I am jealous.

‘Now down the ladder,’ you order.

‘No.’

‘Just do it.’

‘No.’

‘Please, Georgie.’

‘No.’

Before I can object, you push the eye-mask on my head and have me over the parapet, my feet clinging to the ladder. It is wobbly. I screech. You push a brown gob-stopper sweet into my mouth that tastes of flavours I have never before encountered. I roll it round my mouth.

‘Down,’ you hiss. Like one
of the snakes.

I descend. Uncertainly. And slowly. Hand under hand, foot under foot. The taste of sweetness on my idle tongue. You follow above me, and when I reach the ground you jump the last part, snatch off my mask and drag me into a run through a part of the garden I have never seen before.

‘Well done, Georgie. You’d make a spiffing burglar.’

‘But you are the burglar, Tim,’ I say, my words thick and lifeless in my mouth. ‘You are stealing me.’

‘True. Don’t slow down. Keep running.’

I can’t run. Parts of me are shutting down.

‘Over the wall now.’

A wooden ladder stands in front of us, propped up against the high garden wall by two men I’ve never seen before. It’s obvious they know you. They frighten me. Scare my limbs rigid. I can’t move.

You look at me closely and I hear you swear under your breath. Gently, as if I am a kitten, you put an arm around my waist and draw me forward, one step at a time. I have to glare at my feet to make them stumble forward. I want to knock your arm away, I want to run back to the house and bang on the front door to beg them to let me in.

‘Climb,’ you say softly in my ear.

I climb.

Thebes.

King of cities.

City of the king of gods, the great and glorious
Amun-Ra. Fabled capital of Ancient Egypt. Clenched fist of military might.

Centre of learning and profound wisdom, pinnacle of political power twelve hundred years before Christ set foot in this world.

Thebes was all these things.

Waset
was its Egyptian name found in ancient texts and meaning City of the Sceptre. Let all who gaze upon the place bow down in awe to the great god Amun-Ra. Given the name
Thebai
by the ancient Greeks, corrupted to Thebes by Egyptians, it is a city that has stared in the face of Ra, vying with the sun itself for the brightness of its gold and the immensity of its power. But it is a city that has also swallowed the dust of the desert and crumbled to ruins because its hubris inflicted humiliation and destruction.

Thebes became nothing. In its place rose two small villages, Luxor and Karnak, existing like vultures on the tourism of the dead.

Luxor.

Where Jessie had pinned her hopes.

*

The heat of Luxor hit them even at this hour of the
evening. Jessie stripped off her gloves and removed her hat, fanning herself with it, in awe of Monty who had the ability of the English upper classes to regard the heat as nothing more than an unwanted guest at a party and ignore it completely. He strode around in the moonlight gathering their luggage, sweeping aside the begging street urchins, summoning a taxi carriage and producing a native fly-whisk for her, all without breaking sweat or losing his smile.

He found them a suitable hotel, the Blue Nile. Small, discreet and clean. He inspected their rooms for cockroaches before signing the register, declared them habitable, but wanted a torn mosquito net stitched and demanded fresh limes and boiled water to make a drink. The hotel staff in white
galabayas
bowed happily and scurried around to do his bidding. The problem, as Jessie saw it, was not the hotel, the problem was Malak.

The young Egyptian boy weighed on her conscience. He had hopped on the train specially to travel to Luxor with her, so now she had no choice but to feel responsible for him. What would his mother say about it? And his wide-eyed little sisters? Train-travel in Egypt turned out to be extravagantly cheap, so the cost of the boy’s fare was negligible, but she and Monty were not here to be shown around the ancient sites by a child-guide. They didn’t need a puppy at their heels.

‘Here, Malak, take this,’ she told him outside their hotel. ‘Catch the first train home to Cairo in the morning.’

The boy had let his gaze rest on the money she was offering, his mobile young face a mix of emotions. Desire to pocket the Egyptian pounds struggled against his disappointment at being forced to leave her. He wiped his palms on his grubby striped tunic, as though wiping their greed away. He shook his head melodramatically and applied a soulful droop to his eyes.

‘Missie Kenton, I help you. I stay.’ He nodded so enthusiastically, his head was in danger of bouncing off. ‘I stay yes.’

‘No,’ Monty declared sternly. He flipped at the boy with the fly-whisk. ‘Skedaddle! Shoo! Off with you.’

Malak started to do what he was told, but with
sagging shoulders and walking backwards, his sad eyes fixed pleadingly on Jessie.

‘Oh, all right,’ she sighed and he hopped back to her side, grinning broadly. ‘But just one day, that’s all. You can fetch and carry for us tomorrow, but then,’ she wagged a finger at him and pushed the money into his hand, ‘back on the train to your family.’

He danced around her. ‘I much help. Good boy. You kind and beautiful. You goddess angel from the sun. You lovely lady. You …’

‘Enough,’ Monty roared at the boy. ‘Go!’

‘I find uncle. I come back.’

‘Tomorrow,’ Jessie told him.

He vanished into the gloom. Monty gave her a look.

‘Yes, yes, I know,’ she shrugged. ‘I’m stupid.’

‘No,’ he said with a smile. ‘I think the little brat got it right. You goddess angel from the sun.’

‘Shut up!’

‘Don’t blame me,’ he laughed, ‘when the little blighter robs you blind and parades around Cairo in your new sunhat.’

‘You never know, he might come in useful. He knows Luxor.’

Abruptly the laughter drained out of them. Jessie felt it puddle in the dirt road at their feet, as the thought of what tomorrow might hold brought them back to reality.

Reality was Tim.

Monty came to her room that night. His skin wrapped itself around hers, warm and inviting, his hands explored her body bringing forth strange unfamiliar sounds that ripped from her throat. Startling her.

They took their time, lingering over kisses and over the discovery of what pleased, what roused and what drove each to a frenzy of need. He demanded more of her this time, she could feel it, a kind of pulling at her from within. So that she found herself releasing the locks she had put in place for so many years. Opening doors to him. Clinging to the heart of this man. Breathless and consumed by a heat that scorched her. They stretched time. Elongated it. For what felt like hours they luxuriated in each other, and no other moment existed for them. So it sent a ripple of shock through
them both when the dawn call of the muezzin drifted through the shutters, calling the faithful of Luxor to prayer.

Jessie lay contentedly with her head nestled on Monty’s shoulder, their bodies and limbs locked together. Hearts slowing to a steadier beat, as thin threads of sunlight reached for the bed and started to creep up their naked legs.

Monty’s lips touched her forehead. ‘Tell me something about you that I don’t know.’

It was another step. Another flinging wide of a door. Jessie smiled and opened her mouth to tell him of the day when, as a child, she went scrumping apples in a neighbour’s garden very early one morning. While she was perched up in the tree, her mouth full of apple, her feet balanced on a lichen-tufted branch, a mother fox had pranced daintily into the garden. Behind her scampered a shadow of three young cubs. The vixen proceeded to frolic, there was no other word for it. She leapt and gambolled, chased her cubs, bowled them over and nuzzled their pointy little faces. Lovingly she washed their ears and nibbled dirt from their tails. At that moment Jessie wanted more than anything in the world to be one of those cubs.

She opened her mouth to say all this to Monty. To open that door. But those were not the words that came out.

‘I had another brother,’ she told him. ‘Called Georgie. He disappeared.’

She heard his breathing slow.

‘When did he disappear?’ His voice was quiet. Flat as glass.

‘When I was seven. He was five.’

‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know. He was a very difficult child. I think my parents couldn’t cope with him any more and they put him in a home of some sort. They would never tell me.’

‘You didn’t see this Georgie again?’

‘No.’

‘Is he still alive?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Oh, Jessie.’

‘I’ve never told anyone before.’

He wrapped his arms more tightly around her and
pulled her against his bare chest, as though he could thrust her behind his ribs to keep her safe. They lay like that for a long while in silence, except for the wailing call to prayer dying away.

‘Now,’ she said firmly after a while, ‘let’s talk about where we start today.’

He propped himself up on one elbow and looked down at her face, studying it minutely, as though committing every line of every feature to memory.

‘Where do we start?’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘that’s not hard to guess.’

‘The king’s tomb? King Tutankhamen’s resting place.’

She stretched up and kissed his strong chin. Felt the early morning stubble against her lips. ‘Right first time. Nothing gets past you.’ She smiled. To show she was under control once more.

‘Promise me one thing,’ he said.

‘What’s that?’

‘That you won’t leave my side this time.’

She rested her cheek against his chest, listening to the relentless beat of his heart. ‘I promise.’

The Valley of the Kings was nothing like Jessie expected. It was a bleached barren rocky hell-on-earth, where life was not welcome and the sun’s heat roared off boulders and crashed against any uncovered flesh. The sky was an immense blinding blue, the brightness an assault on the eyes. Nothing lived here. Nothing. Even lizards and scorpions thought twice. But flies came, swarms of them drawn by the sweat of the men and women brazen enough to venture into the valley of death and by the steaming dung of the donkeys and camels that brought them here.