Shadows on the Nile (6 page)

‘Please,’ I beg. ‘Please. It’s Saturday. Let Timothy come and I promise I will eat that foul slop you call food.’

They give me paper. Clean white sheets of it, quarto size, no lines, just as I asked. Dr Churchward pushed it across his desk at me and did that odd thing with his mouth that I used to think was a snarl but you explained to me that it is what is called a nervous tic. What has he got to be nervous about? Does he still think I will jump on his desk and kick my bare foot in his face the way I did when I was twelve and he told me that none of my letters to Jessie had ever been allowed to reach her? I broke two toes but I broke his nose too. I didn’t like his blood on my skin.

Sometimes during our interviews I stare hard at the bump on the bridge of Dr Churchward’s nose where it is not straight even now, thirteen years later, and I watch the veins in his neck thicken and the colour of his cheeks change to plum red. He doesn’t like me. That’s all right, I don’t like him. But I say ‘thank you’ when he gives me the paper I asked for, the way Jessie taught me and which for years I forgot until you reminded me.

I sit at my desk. It’s not really a desk, it’s a wobbly bentwood chair that I like and a small mahogany table, but to me it is a desk. The paper waits in front of me. Alongside it sits the
ink, a squat fat bottle of Quink. Royal-washable blue, not permanent blue, I was adamant about that. Permanent blue is an ugly colour, neither blue nor black, like the colour of sin, but washable blue is the colour of your eyes. No. I won’t think it. It will make the ache in my chest grow too fierce and I need to think clearly today. It is not always easy because of the drugs they put in my food. This morning I refused to eat breakfast, so I can think with precision, and I remember everything with perfect clarity.

I pick up my Swan fountain pen, dip its nib in the wishing-pool of blue ink and work the tiny metal lever to make the rubber tube inside fill with ink. I find it pleases me, this small simple action. I like the efficiency of it. The cleverness. I make a mental note to discover who invented the fountain pen.

I have decided to start at the beginning. It is the only way to discover why you have not come. At first I planned to start at the end and work my way backwards but no, that would be a mistake. During the night while I sat on my chair by the window, waiting to see if you would flash a signal from your torch in the garden, I realised that I was going about it the wrong way, that I need to study everything in the correct order. In a straight line. Logically. That way, I will not miss any clues.

Sherlock Holmes never missed any clues. If I follow his methods, I will, as Dr Watson says of his brilliant friend, ‘see deeply into the manifold wickedness of the human heart’.

The first time. It was as sharp and unexpected as a stamp on the foot. Two fourteen-year-old boys taking bites out of each other with their words. It was July 25th 1921. I am eating breakfast, the same one I’ve eaten for the last twenty years. Two fried eggs on toast, three fried tomatoes and three fried mushrooms. I always eat my food in an anti-clockwise spiral around the plate leaving the bright yellow heart of the eggs till last.

There are twelve
of us in the room – twelve people, I mean. I don’t count the staff as people. Their faces are false. Behind their masks they are guard-dogs and their teeth are needle-sharp, spilling poison into my blood. The twelve of us look towards the doorway where you materialise unexpectedly, all windblown blond curls and legs too long for you and a way of holding yourself that has the scent of freedom about it. It makes me want to howl with fury.

The skin of my neck prickles, tiny spiky points of pain, which I know means the start of an episode. That’s what they call them – when I lose control.
Episodes.
Like part of a story. Episodic. The story of my life. I look away and concentrate on my egg, adding salt and cutting the toast into small triangles. I sit alone at the small square table, it’s how I like it, no one too close. When I hear you place a chair opposite me and see your blazer-clad elbows on my table, I have to fight back the words that charge onto my tongue and clamp my hands between my knees to stop them hitting you. If I have an episode in the dining room in front of everyone, it will be more than just the needles coming for me.

‘Good morning, Georgie. I’m Timothy.’

Georgie. Georgie. Georgie.
Only one person ever called me
Georgie.

‘Go away.’ I don’t look at you.

‘I’d like to talk to you.’

‘No.’ I back away to the limits of my chair, as far from you as I can get.

‘Please, Georgie. I have gone to a lot of trouble to find you.’

‘You haven’t found me. I wasn’t lost.’

‘You were to me.’ You hesitate. ‘And to Jessie.’

I take my handkerchief from my pocket, unfold it neatly and place it over my face, holding it there with the tips of my fingers. ‘Go away. Go away.’

You reach out and snatch the handkerchief from my face, leaving me naked, but still I don’t look at your face. I see that your sleeve is smeared with yellow from my egg yolk. I bite my tongue so hard it bleeds, coppery and slick inside my mouth, but I notice your hands. They are not the hands that belong to your glossy blond curls, or to your voice that says love-me each time you speak, they are hands that do things. Build things. Dig things. Make
things. There is a long jagged scar down the thumb of your left hand, the skin of it silvery white. Where a saw slipped? Or a rock-edge tore it open? If I do not leave now I will put my fork through your wrist, so I push myself to my feet but you lean forward, too close but you do not touch. As though you know you mustn’t touch me.

‘Georgie,’ you say softly in your love-me
voice, ‘talk to me. Please.’

The British Museum looms like a mighty fortress of antiquity in Blooms bury, tucked deep in the heart of London. The building was designed by Sir Robert Smirke in 1823 to house the finest and largest collection of ancient artefacts in existence anywhere in the world. The original collection was established by Sir Hans Sloane and added to by avid collectors like the 7th Earl of Elgin who removed the marble statues from the Parthenon and Acropolis in Athens.

Pillaged
was the word that always leapt to Jessie’s mind. Not
removed
. Pillaged the statues.

She glanced at the grandiose neo-classical exterior of the museum, guarded by forty-four colossal ionic columns, each one forty-five feet high. Jessie’s head was full of these facts.
Robert Smirke. Hans Sloane. 1823. Forty-four columns.
It was Tim’s fault. He was always bombarding her with them.

She approached along Great Russell Street, a tree-lined thoroughfare, dodging a lumbering dray hauling beer barrels as she crossed the road from Bloomsbury Square. A massive pediment loomed over the museum’s main entrance and immediately she heard Tim’s voice chattering in her head, full of enthusiasm
and brimming with knowledge.

‘See the sculptures on it, sis?’

Jessie had scowled at the fifteen allegorical figures poised above the entrance.

‘They’re by Sir Richard Westmacott. Installed in 1852,’ he informed her. ‘Superb, aren’t they? It’s a shame they are so high up and people are—’

‘People are thinking,’ Jessie cut in with a shake of her head, ‘what a monument to British hubris and greed they are.’

‘Now, Jess, don’t start on that.’

‘How would you like it if the Egyptians or Italians or Greeks came over and stole all the remains of our history the way we stole theirs? You would be the first to shout, ‘“Whoa, something is not right here!”’

He had turned solemn blue eyes on her. Reproachful eyes. Eyes that made her sigh and want to snatch back her words. He could do that to her.

‘Jess,’ he laid both his hands on her shoulders, pinning her to the pavement, ‘if explorers and archaeologists hadn’t devoted their lives to rescuing these exquisite moments of history from the sand and the sea and the dank cellars where they were languishing, they would have been lost to civilisation for ever. Look at Henry Salt! Look at Howard Carter!’

He released one of her shoulders and waved a hand towards the monolithic building in which he worked. Despite herself, Jessie was always impressed by it.

‘We owe them so much,’ Tim reminded her.

‘Thieves,’ she muttered.

‘Caretakers of the world’s creative instinct.’

‘Robbers.’

‘Just wait until you see Amenhotep’s head.’ Her brother’s eyes were shining. His hair, worn longer than their father liked, gleamed honey-gold in the sunlight.

Jessie had slipped her hand in his with a sigh of resignation. ‘Lead on, “my intimate friend and associate”.’

He had thrown back his head and
laughed, and it was impossible not to laugh with him. How many times had those words of Sherlock Holmes to his dear Dr Watson tightened the knot between Jessie and her brother when it threatened to fray?

She ran up the front steps now. Tim would be there, she was sure he would. Back at work today, caressing and numbering his ceramics and potsherds, talking to them. He couldn’t keep away. An indulgent laugh escaped her, snatched away by the icy wind that skittered up from the trees that lined Great Russell Street.
Be there, Tim. Stop sulking. You’ve given Ma and Pa enough of a scare.

She walked with quick steps through the cavernous entrance-hall, but the past came at her, not with a gentle touch and a sleepy murmur, but with claws unsheathed. The milky blind eyes of the towering statues from Rome and Greece scraped her nerve ends and made her indifferent to their beauty. Her footsteps hurried, heels tapping on the York stone flooring, the breath of history coming fast and cold on her neck. Yet she saw other visitors ambling slowly from exhibit to exhibit, taking time to admire the fold of a marble cloak or the sweet delicacy of a maiden’s arm.

Why can’t I do that? Just stand and stare.

Tim was enraptured by this place. Why couldn’t she be? She forced herself to a halt in front of the next exhibit and gazed up at the ten-foot-high colossal head of red granite. She knew who it was without looking at its plaque. Amenhotep III. One of Tim’s favourite pieces, vast and regal. A great Egyptian pharaoh whose fist once held power over life and death, and whose head bore a massive granite
pschent
, the towering double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. Part of his face was missing, a frailty that pleased Jessie.

‘It was Giovanni Belzoni who found him,’ Tim had told her. ‘He brought him from Luxor in 1817. It took eight days to transport the three-thousand-year-old head, plus its eighteen feet long left arm, just one mile from the Temple of Mut in Karnak to the river. From there it was shipped on the Nile to Alexandria
and on to London. Just imagine it!’

Jessie didn’t care to imagine it. Instead she marched off down a side corridor, away from the hypnotic grip of that vast red granite face. But as she raised a hand to knock on one of the doors, she couldn’t help wondering what went on in a person’s head when he worked every day with objects and people who were thousands of years old. Did death become more real to him than life?

Jessie didn’t look back. She could never bear to look back.

‘Mr Kenton?’ The man in the small stuffy office ruffled his moustache in a friendly manner. ‘You should ask Anippe Kalim. She works with him downstairs in the basement, but he’s not in today.’

‘Have you seen him recently?’

‘Miss Kenton,’ he said with a chesty chuckle, ‘I see many things in this place, more than you’d ever imagine.’ He pushed his peaked cap to the back of his head. ‘But no, I ain’t seen your brother these last few days. When you do find him, tell him from me, old Charlie, that the last tip he gave me was a beauty.’

‘Tip?’

‘Lightning Lad. Won a nice little packet, I did.’ He looked at her blank expression and added, ‘At White City.’

Realisation dawned. ‘Greyhound racing?’

‘That’s right.’

Tim, a gambler? Jessie frowned. She had no idea.

She tried not to feel like an intruder as she entered the room where Timothy worked. It was long and high-ceilinged, the walls lined with glass-fronted cabinets containing historic artefacts. Ceramic pots and silver amulets stood alongside extraordinarily beautiful sets of bead jewellery, laid out with loving care on sheets of cotton wool. Alabaster figurines and bronze sculptures stared at Jessie with ancient eyes. Underneath the cabinets were dozens of mahogany drawers and she could imagine them tightly packed with items that would make her brother salivate with anticipation, the way he did over a box of dates when he was a child. The electric light was harsh and bounced off the large rectangular worktables
that filled the centre of the room, and the smell of gypsum hung in the air, as well as a chemical that tasted waxy on the back of her tongue.

One person stood alone in the room, bent over one of the tables. It was a young woman. Her thick black hair was braided into a loop at the back of her head and her skin was the colour of dusky eggshell. Jessie watched her at work for several moments before she spoke.

‘Miss Anippe Kalim?’ she asked.

Only then did the woman’s eyes lift to her, though she must have heard her visitor enter the workroom. Her eyes were black. Not black like coal is black, but black like the night sky, black within black. Layer after layer of it, with strange lights shifting inside it.

‘Yes, I am Anippe Kalim.’

This was the kind of woman who looked you straight in the eyes.
But she doesn’t want me here.
Jessie could feel it in the room, the unexpected animosity, like ants crawling over her skin.

‘I’m sorry to interrupt you when you’re obviously busy,’ Jessie said.

When she approached, Anippe Kalim’s hands hovered protectively over the fragments of bone in front of her, as though to ward off inspection. She was wearing an old-fashioned brown dress that reached almost to her ankles under a crisp white buttoned overall, and she slid her hands into its pockets as she turned to face Jessie.

‘What is it you want?’ she asked.

‘My name is—’