Shadows on the Nile

by Kate Furnivall

  The window is nailed shut. But I show you that the two nails are rusty and the wood rotten. I loosened them long ago and can easily slot them in and out of their holes, so that the window will open. This is the tricky bit. We have to climb out onto the narrow window ledge one at a time. I show you how and you are aghast when I flatten myself against the outside wall, perched forty feet above a concrete yard, and throw myself sideways. I hear your gasp. It amuses me.

  I cling to a sturdy iron drainpipe of good Victorian construction. A scrabble of my feet and I slither up to the roof edge which has a low stone parapet all around it. I hook a hand between the ornamentation work and drag myself up and over. Easy.

  Now you.

  I turn to look at you down on the window sill and my chest locks solid. You look so small. The drop so massive. You will die if you miss the pipe. I vomit. The wind blows dregs of it over you as you jump and I know I have killed you. I crouch behind the parapet and shut my eyes. I start to think of swallowing the table-tennis ball. Then you are there beside me.

  ‘That was bloody exciting, Georgie!’ You slap me on the back. ‘I’m impressed. I didn’t think you had it in you.’

  Had what in me? I don’t know and don’t care. You are alive. I swear to the sky that I will never bring you up on the roof again … assuming that I get you safely back down again. Going down is harder. I lean back against the slope of the roof slates and try to stop my heart plunging and kicking like a crazy horse in my chest.

  ‘Come on. Show me around.’ You drag me to my feet. ‘You can see for miles.’

  I do not want to see for miles. I want to sit quietly like I always do in the V-shaped centre of the two parallel sections of the roof. There no one can see me and I can see no one. Just the sky and the birds. But you go bounding all over the roof. It scares me. On the inside of the parapet is a narrow walkway used for maintenance which you trot around as if it is a garden path instead of a tightrope up in the clouds.

  I beg you to sit with me. Reluctantly you do.

  ‘This is wonderful,’ you say. ‘No wonder you get sunburnt. Why did you keep it a secret from me?’

  ‘Because I thought you would tell Dr Churchward.’

  ‘Why would I do that?’

  ‘To stop me coming up here. Because it’s dangerous.’

  ‘Georgie boy, I would never begrudge you a little danger in your life. How often do you come up here?’

  ‘Only when I am feeling well.’

  You nod. ‘Good. That makes sense. The fresh air will blow the cobwebs away.’

  ‘I do not have cobwebs.’

  ‘Just a saying, Georgie.’ You stretch out on the warm slates and I do the same.

  We stay like that for a long time, longer than I would normally risk being away from my room, but the whitecoats don’t usually interrupt when they know you are with me. Anyway, on a Saturday afternoon there are fewer staff. We stay there even when the sun leaves and clouds thicken above us, we stay there because it is the first time we have ever been like this together, outdoors and relaxed. We don’t talk much but we both smile a lot.

  When the rain comes, I panic. I did not notice the clouds turn purple. I have never been up here in the rain. In seconds the roof slates become wet and slippery, and the wind tries to buffet us off our feet.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ you say.

  But I do worry.

  ‘We must be very careful,’ you say. The rain is smacking you in the face, making you squint. Your hair sticks to your head.

  A sound screeches out of me and makes you jump.

  ‘Shut up, Georgie. For God’s sake, stop that racket.’

  I clamp a hand over my mouth but I cannot climb like that, so I have to let it go. We scramble out of the V-section of the roof.

  ‘I’ll go first,’ you say.

  ‘No!’

  If we are going to fall, I want to fall first.

  I slither down to the parapet and hear your feet skidding behind me. I don’t wait, in case you push in front of me. I swing over to the outside of the parapet and start to lower myself to the drainpipe. But a strange gurgling noise is roaring out of it and I do not want to touch it.

  ‘Georgie, let me …’

  I let go and grasp the drainpipe. It is so wet and feels so vile under my hands that I instantly drop six feet down. Above me you shout my name. I steady myself by jamming my feet against the wall, sticking my bottom over the void. Hand over hand I crawl back up till I am on a level with the window ledge, which is several feet to my left.

  This is the danger.

  Usually I hold on with my hands and swing my body in an arc sideways, so that my feet just reach the ledge. I have to release my hands at that precise moment or I will be stuck with my feet on one side and my hands still on the pipe, with my body suspended over the chasm below. I have done it so often, my heart normally doesn’t miss a beat. But never in the rain. Never with your face peering down at me, fear in your stunned eyes.

  Fear kills people. Fear brings failure.

  I am shaking. But my mouth is shut hard, my teeth locked on my lip, and I make no sound as I hurl myself to the side. Feet touch, hands release, smooth as silk. I am on the window ledge, safe, unhurt, alive and exhilarated. I even open my mouth to the rain.

  ‘My turn,’ you shout.

  Everything drains out of me except fear. My knees buckle and I clamber down, so that my legs are in the washroom, my bottom on the sill. I look up and the rain slaps me hard in the face. Through a blur I watch you slide down the drainpipe until you are on a level with me. I stretch out my hand but I cannot reach you.

  ‘Don’t die!’ I shout. ‘You might die.’

  ‘Thank you, Georgie, for that comforting thought.’

  ‘Stay there. I’ll fetch Dr Churchward.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ You’re spitting out raindrops. ‘It’s only a short jump. I’ll make it.’

  You brace yourself. Both hands on the wet drainpipe, feet against the wall, bottom sticking out, as you saw me do. I can’t breathe. I feel myself wet my pants.

  ‘I love you,’ I shout against the wind.

  ‘Not now, Georgie.’

  You jump. Your feet touch easily, a toe, then a heel firmly on the ledge, but you release your hands a fraction too late. For a heart-wrenching second you almost make it, but your top half is off balance and you start to tilt backwards away from the window, arms cart-wheeling in mid-air.

  I scream and seize your legs. I wrap my arms around your knees with the grip of an octopus and I know I will never let go, even if it means you drag us both to our death in a bloody heap far below. I bury my face in your thighs, clenching your trousers between my teeth, squeezing you to me, feeling my own feet lift off the floor of the washroom.

  For a lifetime we hang there like that. I feel an odd rush of peace pass through me and I can breathe again, smell the tobacco stink of your trousers. Because we are going to die together. Clutching each other. Locked together in our last breath. Your hand seizes my hair and pulls so hard that I scream, but with that one handhold and with me attached to your legs, you haul yourself upright and get a hand on the window frame. With no hurry, you sit down and duck back inside with the cases.

  ‘Well,’ you say with a grin, ‘that was quite an adventure, wasn’t it?’

  We are drenched to the skin. Your knuckles are skinned and I am shuddering in my skin so badly that I am frightened it will split and spill my flesh onto the faded lino of the floor. My breath is now coming in great whoops of sound and my trousers are stuck shamefully to my legs.

  ‘That was fun, Georgie!’

  ‘Fun,’ I echo through chattering teeth.

  ‘Let’s get you to your room and changed into dry clothes.’

  As you push the nails back into the wood of the window frame, you chuckle to yourself. ‘I think I’ll bring a short length of rope next time I come, to tie to the drainpipe. Wouldn’t want any accidents, would we, Georgie?’

  ‘No. We wouldn
’t want any accidents.’

  ‘I shall worry about you until I know you have the rope.’

  After you leave, I think about what you have said. That night I lie awake in bed and I am smiling. Happy. Because I know you are worrying about me.

  34

  Dust and cinders from the steam engine flew in their eyes. Jessie was impatient to climb aboard the train but she was touched that Maisie Randall had taken time to come to the station at this early hour to see them off, so she lingered on the platform instead of taking her seat in the first-class compartment.

  ‘I look forward to seeing you again soon,’ she smiled at the tall woman. ‘You’ll be coming down to Luxor?’

  ‘You bet your life I will. In a day or two, I’ll be on my way.’

  The train uttered a shrill whistle, making them jump.

  ‘Christ Almighty,’ Maisie declared, ‘does this city never shut up?’

  All around them there was noise and bustle. Porters pushing forward with suitcases, hawkers shouting their wares and thrusting cheap copies of scarabs and basalt cats or bracelets of glass beads under the traveller’s nose. Boys squirmed through the crush on the platform in an effort to sell dates and figs, while native passengers crammed themselves and their animals onto the heaving train with such determination that Jessie feared the carriages would burst before they even set off.

  She hugged Maisie, all bony hips and skinny ribs and smelling of lemon balm. She would miss the woman’s ready smile and quick wit, and worried about her travelling alone, but Maisie seemed blithely indifferent to any dangers.

  ‘You take care, my girl,’ Maisie said, hoisting her umbrella against the sun. ‘I hear it’s hot as a baker’s oven down there in those tombs of the pharaohs. And be bloomin’ careful of the wretched water.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘And steer clear of any bombs.’

  The mention sent a tremor through Jessie’s mind. The dull reverberation of that sound had echoed through her head all night, refusing to dissipate. It was still there, a soft relentless booming, like distant thunder in the mountains.

  ‘We should be safe,’ she told Maisie. ‘The unrest seems to be centred here in Cairo.’

  Maisie stared around and shook her head sadly at the sight of the beggars, at the bare feet and gaunt cheeks. ‘You can’t blame them, can you? Us westerners are too greedy for our own good. We want to suck the world dry of everything worth having.’ Her narrow face wrinkled in disgust. ‘We leave ’em the desert because it’s no bloody good to us.’ She paused and looked directly at Jessie. ‘I feel for the poor buggers. I remember a time when I had no shoes on my feet or slop in my belly.’

  Jessie was startled by the sudden intimacy of the remark. She touched Maisie’s arm and realised how her loose jacket disguised the sparseness of flesh on it. ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ she said warmly. ‘With shoes on your feet and coffee in your belly.’

  The woman smiled. ‘Not half as glad as those little beggars in Luxor will be when I get there. They’ll fleece me something dreadful,’ Maisie chuckled and the moment passed.

  The train gave a jolt. Everyone fluttered handkerchiefs and Monty, who was standing on the carriage steps, called Jessie’s name.

  ‘Go to him,’ Maisie urged. ‘You got a good ’un there.’

  Jessie hugged her once more. ‘I’ll see you in Luxor. Don’t get into any mischief.’

  ‘Nor you.’

  As Jessie turned to board the train, she took a good look at Monty. The engine’s steam was ruffling strands of his brown hair and he stretched his long arms, looking for all the world as though he belonged there in that exact spot, like a cat in the sun. He had that knack. Of belonging. It made her want to rest her cheek next to his, to breathe the same air, to place her feet where his had been. Maybe then she’d belong too.

  Three hundred and twenty miles. Twelve idle hours of shaking and rattling and feeling the hot air being stirred by the fan till it stuck to Jessie’s skin. The first-class carriage was well appointed but was packed full of German tourists in shorts above the knee and Egyptian businessmen in sombre suits and ties. The stifling air smelled of garlic and when Monty presented her with a slice of melon to suck on, Jessie almost wept with relief.

  The train moved to its own tune. It would speed up or slow down for no obvious reason, creaking and cracking like an old man’s joints. Stopping at flimsy stations with names that looked like paintings, so ornate were they in Arabic script, and speeding through the level crossings that had no barriers, so that goats and children wandered onto the line with alarming indifference. Jessie was enraptured by the buff-coloured landscape that nudged its way into distant folds of hills at the far edges of the Nile valley. She’d expected that a journey of twelve hours would be tedious, but oddly, it didn’t turn out to be.

  First there was the hypnotic quality of the scenery through which the train was travelling. It hardly varied for hundreds of miles. The rail track was laid on a raised embankment running alongside the Ibrahimiya Canal, a stretch of brownish water about forty feet across, one of the longest artificial canals in the world. It was a huge undertaking by Ismail Pasha in the nineteenth century to supply irrigation water from the Nile to the fields between upper and lower Egypt.

  The flatness of the Nile valley – except for the graceful minarets announcing each town – would have been dull and repetitive, but reaching out on either side of the canal was a mile or two of cultivation. It ran like a green river on both sides of the train, startlingly vivid against the half-hearted colours of the distant desert and the white milky sky. Dotted throughout the patchwork of fields were the tiny bent backs of the fellaheen, the peasants cutting their feathery maize and their tall stalks of sugar-cane, working their ditches and vegetable strips, their brown galabayas part of the landscape.

  In the sleepy villages and towns Jessie spotted an occasional black and white cow or a handful of knobbly goats. And everywhere small brown donkeys. Donkeys and women were clearly Egypt’s beasts of burden, but the sight of a camel was cause for celebration to break the monotony.

  As the hours passed, the sky turned a blazing blue that scorched the land and glossed over the rotting piles of rubbish heaped on the banks of the canal outside towns. Jessie was conscious this water was a vital artery of life – men fished on it in long pointed rowboats, women in black garb washed their clothes and their pots in it and packs of wild urchins urinated into it before leaping into its cool murky depths with shrieks of laughter. It proved endlessly fascinating to Jessie.

  The only thing she missed were trees. It wasn’t that there weren’t any; there were, offering shade in ribbons along the edge of the canal. But there was no variety – they were always palm trees, tall graceful date palms whose delicate fans of greenery leaned over the water like women trying to catch a glimpse of their own reflection. Beside them the banana palms fluttered their large succulent leaves in competition, but their trunks were stunted, like ugly sisters to the date palm.

  Men gathered in threes or fours on the canal bank or on a wall outside a house, smoking and taking time to put the world to rights while the figures in black laboured on. It was a world that absorbed Jessie totally. And all the time in the far distance an escarpment or an ancient line of low hills would drift out of the haze unexpectedly, soft petal-pink, never allowing anyone to forget that the desert lay out there. Relentless. Implacable. Unforgiving.

  The second reason for the lack of tedium was Monty. His hip touching hers. His eloquent eyebrow raised in amusement when two of the Egyptian businessmen goaded each other into argument over a certain horse running in a race at the Gezirah Club the next day. Their voices were deeper than Europeans’, their gestures bigger, their eyes fiercer. Jessie pictured Tim in their midst – blond, soft-featured, mild-mannered Tim, and her stomach swooped with fear for him.

  Monty must have sensed it, because he said in a low voice, ‘Tell me one of your Egyptian stories, one of the myths about their gods.’


  So she told him the tale of the war between the brothers, Osiris and Set.

  ‘Osiris was the wise god of the afterlife, ruler of the dead and of fertility, eldest son of the Earth god, Geb, and the sky goddess, Nut. Set was his jealous younger brother, god of the desert and storms.’

  ‘It bodes ill already,’ Monty smiled.

  ‘I know how irritating younger brothers can be,’ Jessie murmured and he laughed.

  ‘So what did Set get up to?’

  ‘Nothing good. He wanted his brother’s throne, so he did what all wicked brothers do in stories – he killed Osiris.’

  ‘Nasty.’

  ‘Sadly, he didn’t stop there. He chopped poor Osiris into fourteen pieces and scattered them over Egypt.’

  ‘Painful!’

  ‘Ah, but you are reckoning without the powers of Osiris’ devoted wife, Isis. She was also his sister, by the way.’

  ‘Tell all.’

  ‘Well, she and her sister went searching for these pieces, but they could only find thirteen of the fourteen. Fish had swallowed the last piece.’

  Monty opened his eyes in horror. ‘Don’t tell me. I can guess which piece.’

  ‘Exactly!’

  ‘Poor Osiris!’

  ‘But Isis was a resourceful goddess. She created a new …’ Jessie’s voice dropped to a whisper, ‘phallus for him of gold, and used a magic spell to put her beloved husband back together for one last marital fling.’

  Monty laughed delightedly and one of the Germans gave him a dour frown. ‘Don’t stop now,’ he urged.

  ‘The inevitable happened, I’m afraid. She became pregnant and gave birth to the beautiful Horus, whom she had to protect desperately from the wicked Set who kept trying to kill him off. But he managed to grow up to become the powerful falcon-headed god of the sun and of war.’

  ‘Not surprising, I suppose. But don’t keep me waiting on tenterhooks. Did old Set manage to do for Horus too?’

  ‘It was a close run thing, I can tell you. They had many struggles. For eighty long years. One involves,’ she put her lips to his ear, ‘semen and lettuce, but we will pass over that.’