by Louisa Young
He was just starting to tell me when I noticed something.
What I noticed was that in the shifting of the order of the cars in the traffic, we had ended up behind a blue and white Luxor taxi which had, in the back seat, Chrissie. Beside her was a man. I noticed that it wasn’t the German from the Winter Palace. It was her husband.
I closed my eyes, pulled my scarf up around my head and interrupted him, said, ‘I think we should fall back one car.’
‘We can’t,’ said Sa’id. ‘It’s the police van behind us.’
‘Can we let someone overtake?’
‘If they want to, of course.’
‘Don’t you want to know why?’
‘I know why. I’ve been trying to. For the same reason.’
‘Why didn’t you say?’ I squeaked.
‘Would it have helped? Made any difference?’
No. Of course not.
‘This is bizarre,’ I said. ‘This is utterly bizarre. What the fuck is going on?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Can you explain to me a bit please? Just, what you know?’
‘I’m beginning to think I don’t know anything,’ I said. ‘Excuse me.’ A very sedate panic was making me try to climb into the back seat. Fear had taken me. I just did not want to be sitting in a car behind Eddie. I wanted, as I had pointed out, to be as far from him as possible. Into the back seat seemed like a move in the right direction, albeit a small and useless one. Only it wasn’t possible.
‘What are you doing?’ he said.
‘Trying to escape.’
‘Fil mish mish,’ he murmured. In the time of the apricots. Like, you should be so lucky. Because the apricots are not in season for very long.
I sat back, and endeavoured to go into total purdah, there and then, under my scarf. It was hot, but it was better.
‘Open the window, would you?’
He did.
‘Has he noticed us?’ I asked.
‘No. Nor has she. They are what you might call engrossed.’
‘Are they now.’ An easy comment, to cover. Why cover? Who would be convinced? Not me. Not Sa’id.
Where the hell had she found him?
‘It’s a small town,’ said Sa’id, reading my mind as he is apt to do.
‘It’s bizarre. Where are the Germans? And why the hell is Eddie tooling about the countryside with a police escort, when the British police have been told he’s left the country?’
Sa’id laughed.
‘What?’
‘Well, probably, because of baksheesh, habibti.’
Sometimes I feel very young.
‘But this is serious, this is Interpol and stuff.’
‘And money is serious. And these boys are very busy with their duties here now. And the big boys are very caught up with the terrorism, and very pissed off with the English because of your asylum laws. They think London is crawling with el Jama’at el Islamiyya. They may be right. Why should they give up your villain when you won’t give up ours? Specially if your villain is paying well.’
‘Fucker,’ I murmured, admiringly. About Eddie, or the notion, or police morals, or something.
Then: ‘What do we do now?’
‘We can only drive. If the convoy stops … I don’t know. It’s about twenty minutes to Qus. Let’s think of something.’
I could only think of hiding in the back seat. He agreed that was a good idea, but mentioned also that it wouldn’t get us very far.
‘But–’
There was still a big problem.
‘What the hell is she doing with him?’
‘Reuniting, by the look of it.’
‘I don’t understand! I don’t understand!’
‘Have a cigarette and mull it over,’ he suggested. He seemed so deliciously unperturbed.
‘I stopped smoking,’ I said.
‘Good.’
We sat in silence for about three minutes. I could have told him then. I’ve stopped smoking, and this is why. I should have. It would have saved trouble later on.
‘If she’s reuniting,’ I said, ‘she won’t want to be taken away.’
‘Probably not. If that is what she’s doing.’
‘So there’s no point our being here. We should just turn round when we can, and I’ll just leave, and …’ The other ramifications of my words twinkled quietly in a row along the dashboard like a taxi driver’s fairy lights. ‘Just leave’ was not really an available phrase in my current vocabulary. ‘I’ll rephrase that,’ I said, shooting him a kind look. ‘You will just take me somewhere, and …’ And I’ll just tell you about your child and then we’ll go and live happily ever after. Somewhere. Somehow.
He was smiling again.
Five minutes later I found I was humming ‘There’s a place for us’ from West Side Story, and he was laughing out loud, his beautiful teeth gleaming.
Ten minutes after that he said, ‘But you don’t want to leave her here with him.’
‘No,’ I said. Funny thing, loyalty. How it pops up.
I didn’t think she was reuniting. Remembered all that she had said on the subject. But I didn’t know.
We were coming in to Qus: more donkeys, more children. A donkey cart was waiting at a petrol pump. No one was sticking the hose up the donkey’s bum. Or in its ear. Then a man brought it a pile of greenery – clover, something like that. It stood there by the pump and ate.
‘I think,’ I said, ‘that I haven’t a clue what’s going on. I know that she’s a flake. A vulnerable person. She gave up drinking, only a few weeks ago.’ Do they have alcoholism in Egypt? Can this restrained, when it comes to the booze, nation (and man) understand the seriousness and precariousness of her position? ‘And she said she hates him. She’s hated him a long time. And been in love with him too. God, I wonder what he said when he saw her …’
‘Don’t,’ said Sa’id. ‘Don’t wonder.’
‘And I feel,’ I said, continuing on, because he was right, ‘that no good can come of this. And I brought her.’
A wobbly bicycle cut us up, and then ran into a goat. Sa’id swerved around the ensuing small fracas. Fracas must be an Arabic word.
‘So we follow, at a polite distance?’
‘Are you happy to do that?’
After a while he said, ‘Till we think of something better.’
*
We didn’t think of anything better. We followed them all the way to Abydos. At Qus, at Qft, at Qena and at Dendara they stayed in their car, so we had to stay in ours, because we didn’t know when they might get out, and because we hoped and believed that they had not seen us. At least soon after Qena a truck came in between us and them, and I stopped having to worry quite so virulently about whether or not Eddie would recognize Sa’id, who he had met twice, after all, if in very strange circumstances both times. Luckily he is the kind of man to whom all Arabs would look the same, or at least stereotypical: the handsome ones and the fat ones. The ones in scarves and gallabeyas or the ones in pleat-fronted trousers and patterned shirts. But then Sa’id had held a knife to his throat, back in the beige marble halls of the Nile Hilton in Cairo all of seven weeks ago, and maybe you would always recognize someone who did that to you. And – whoops, my belly didn’t like this memory at all – Eddie had kissed him. In that bare-throated sacrificial moment. His way of claiming something back from a situation where he was losing. Sa’id had been about to walk out with the money and the girl. So Eddie just – oh fuck him. Fuck Eddie and what he does, how he plays.
Hafla staying with Germans. German guy in the bar. Small town. And Hafla is often where Eddie is.
We still hadn’t seen the Germans or Hafla. If they were all on the trip together surely someone would have got out of the car and strolled over to the other car for a chat, on one of these long boring stops? If they’re not here, does that make a difference? I didn’t know. My head was getting hot.
‘Does your phone do international?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he said, and
passed it.
Bugger. I didn’t know Oliver’s number. My address book was at the hotel. 222 1234, for Scotland Yard? Or is that London Transport Enquiries? Or should I dial 0044 171 999, and ask to be put through?
It was 8.45. 10.45 in London.
I rang Harry.
‘Makins,’ he said.
‘Harry …’
‘Where are you?’ Alert, not worried. These calm men. I am less calm when they are around to be calm.
‘Outside Qena.’ Oh lord, that means nothing to him. ‘In the countryside. Near Luxor.’
‘What’s going on? Why’s the line so bad?’
‘I’m on a mobile …’ I swear at any given moment 60 per cent of all conversations on mobile phones are people telling other people that they’re on a mobile.
‘Why? What’s …’
It was curious to hear him. So incredibly out of place. It was slightly cruel, too. Cruel of me to be speaking to him when he was powerless. In a way.
‘Can you put me through to Oliver?’ I said.
‘No, I can’t. Talk to me. What’s happening?’
‘Eddie’s here, Harry. He’s in Luxor, has been for a week. I have a number back at the hotel, where he’s staying. He’s not staying at the hotel, sorry – he’s staying with some Germans, and I have their number. Or if he’s not staying there he’s in contact with them. The Turkish girl is there. But I can’t get you the number yet. I’ll call you later …’
‘Do you know where the place is?’
I asked Sa’id. He said, yes, by the river, north end of town on the way out, past the airport road. I repeated this to Harry.
‘Fat lot of good,’ he said. ‘Where will you be?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, uselessly. Then with more energy: ‘Listen, Harry, Chrissie has hooked up with him …’
He started talking.
‘Wait – no, he hasn’t seen me. I don’t know if he knows I’m here. I don’t know if she told him, I haven’t spoken to her … yes, …’ I couldn’t make it clear without explaining my immediate situation, and I didn’t want to, because I didn’t want him worried, because what good would that do?
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’ll be leaving as soon as I can, I’m not staying, don’t worry. There’s not that many flights in and out at the moment, or trains, but I’ll go straight back to Cairo, and get the flight the day after tomorrow. I just don’t want to leave Chri …’ He began to speak very quickly and angrily. ‘Yes, I know,’ I said. ‘But I can’t leave her.’
‘Yes, you can,’ he said. ‘Just get out. Leave. You’ve done your bit.’
We went silent: a humming through the distance, electronic nothing over the miles.
Suddenly I missed him, sudden and hard. I looked across at Sa’id, driving, inscrutable. Sa’id. Harry. I was biting my lip with a deeper fear than my fear of Eddie.
‘How’s Lily?’ I asked. Oh lord, my other world.
‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘She’s fine, she’s at school, she misses you but we’re doing OK. She’s looking forward to you getting back.’ He put a little emphasis on it. Just a little.
‘Don’t tell her I rang. Just tell her I love her.’
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Give me the mobile number – who’s is it?’
‘Sa’id’s,’ I said.
‘Can’t he drive you to Cairo?’
‘It’s not that simple.’
‘Bollocks, either he can or he can’t.’
‘Foreigners can’t just roam around the country, Harry, there are security measures …’
‘Well, get on to the Luxor police and arrange some then. Or Sa’id can. Or I will.’
‘Harry—’
‘What?’
‘I will leave as soon as I can.’
‘Let me talk to Sa’id,’ he replied.
What, and let the pair of you decide what I should do? I don’t think so.
I said nothing.
‘Angel!’
‘Please. Harry. I’m not an idiot.’ Another empty electronic pause.
‘Have you told him yet?’
‘No.’
More emptiness.
Sa’id just drove. Looking nothing, saying nothing, following.
‘Not the time to talk, I suppose.’
‘No,’ I said, and disliked the deception involved even in that.
I asked Sa’id the number, and repeated it for Harry to stop his line of enquiry. Sa’id gave me a sideways glance.
‘I’ll be in touch,’ Harry said. ‘Don’t do anything. Let me know when and how you’ll be leaving. Make it soon. Like, immediately. And don’t do anything. Please.’
We rang off, and I put my head on the dashboard.
Sa’id said: ‘He’s right, you know.’
‘Of course he is,’ I said. ‘But I’m not leaving her with Eddie.’
We drove in silence.
‘How is Lily?’ he said, after a while.
‘He is her father,’ I said.
‘Oh,’ he said. Nothing more.
Before long we were drawing into the car park down the hill from the Temple of Seti at Abydos, where Isis found Osiris’s head. Years ago I lost a pearl earring here, and left it, happily, as an offering. This is the sweetest temple. Full of love. All the carvings giving each other lemons, and flower pots, and life. Osiris sat on Isis’s lap. Apart, that is, from the strange sunken temple round the back, the Osireion. It’s low, like a stone-lined tank, open to the sky, made of slabs of Aswan granite, grey and massy as the dawn of time, and surrounded by lone and unlevel mounds of desert. The water table has risen since it was built (because of the High Dam) and it stands ankle deep in green immobile water, with feather-topped reeds growing, an occasional wind-ripple moving across the surface, the stone pavement visible beneath the shallow water. Darkened doorways lead off the main chamber, but you can’t go there; it is chained off. Last time I was there there was nothing but some chattering sparrows and a lone grey-black catfish gliding along the floor to give it semblance of life. It is a very dim and mysterious place.
One of the policemen came over to have a chat with Sa’id. I curled up like a good reticent woman, and left them to it. The plastic interior was hot now that we had stopped, and the dust swirled up by our arrival began to settle. Chrissie and Eddie’s car had drawn up to the left of us: to go to the entrance of the temple they wouldn’t walk past us. I tried to peer past Sa’id’s head and the leaning policeman’s bum to see if they were getting out yet.
There they go. Walking over to the gateway, and up towards the ramp. Eddie tall and elegant, in typical well-dressed European gentleman clothes. Including a panama hat. You could almost see the copy of Herodotus in his baggy linen pocket. I laughed at the image. Herodotus held that the origin of all East/West divisions was a bout of ancient tit-for-tat woman-stealing between various Greeks and various occupants of Asia Minor, and that the Greeks overreacted terribly to Paris’s theft of Helen, because it was impossible, he held, for a woman to be stolen against her will. Right up Eddie’s street. Plus all that stuff about the Lacedaemonians: every Lacedaemonian woman had at some stage of her life to go to a particular temple and sell herself to whatever man selected her. Tall handsome women, he observed, would last only about five minutes, but plain women could wait outside for up to three years, waiting for someone to take pity on them, chuck them a coin and fuck them so they could go home again and lead a decent life.
Lovely place names though. The plain of Magnesia, the Ceramic gulf and the river Meander. Stuck in my mind from all those years ago when I was getting my education.
I realized that I had hardly ever seen Eddie out of doors. Not since the day we went to the exhibition of Islamic Art at the Royal Academy in London, and he had shoved me into his car with a pad of God knows what over my mouth, and taken me off. Oliver’s question reverberated in my mind: why hadn’t I reported any of the things Eddie had done to me to the police? Because of Ben Cooper, I told myself, as good an example of why you shouldn’t trust
a copper as any girl ever needed. Because of that clean nose I wanted, in case of any risk of losing Lily. And because I was complicit: in bribing Ben, in lurking around Eddie, and in my own curious revenge on him.
I have never seen him in sunlight. It didn’t suit him. Maybe the back of a motorboat might, some gin-palace-type sunlight, cast green by the shade of a smoked windshield, but this pure Egyptian sun showed him up as the lizard he is, even from here. May it shine on his head and burn up his brain. Take him, Amun Ra, he’s all yours.
And Chrissie? Dammit I should have paid more attention. Oh, how could I? This was the one place he wasn’t meant to be. I couldn’t have known. But why didn’t she tell me that she had found him? Did she see him yesterday? A rivulet of chill ran down my back as these questions followed each other through. When she invited me to come on this trip, did she know he was coming? Had she, and the chill settled in the small of my back, been setting me up?
I tried to remember how she had been last night. Excited. I had thought it was Egypt that had done it to her. But perhaps it was her husband. I ran through the possibilities: he’s got her again, and she’s going away with him, happily reunited. She’s warning him off – but then he would have left already. They’re plotting together, some badness for me. She knew all along, arranged to meet him here and deliver me to him. She’s been lying all along. Or she saw him for the first time this morning; she’s a rabbit under his spell, she hasn’t told him I’m here, and she wants and needs me to save her. It was just possible. And as long as it was possible, I had a responsibility.
Could she have spent the best part of a day with the German and his friends, and Eddie not have been mentioned? Oh. The Germans, of course, know someone called François du Berry. Perhaps he heard that they had a Mrs Bates visiting, and chose to join the party. So where are the Germans now?
It’s surreal. After all this, Chrissie and her dead husband are going sightseeing.
Sparrows were hopping around the car. One of them could have eaten my little pearl.
Only she knows what’s going on, and I can’t ask her. I can’t trust her. Even though somehow I do.
Yeah – trust her to do what, exactly?
Say I got to her, away from him, she could still just go back and tell him – and then what? I could try and seize her – oh, please, Angeline, you’re pregnant, you’re surrounded by police.
