by Francis King
When, at last sated, he had climbed back up the stairs, the boiling tide of the fever would begin to ebb. At the same time his blood would seem to be similarly ebbing from his body, leaving him feeling inert and cold. Days would then pass, until yet another attack shook him out of his calm daily routine of reading, listening to music, writing long letters to friends whom he now rarely saw, and obsessively completing a number of different crossword puzzles.
Today, his search was not random but focused. He had carried down the stepladder with him. Now he placed it against the breakfront wardrobe, noticing, as he did so, that just below the finial there was the smudge of a palm-print on the highly polished mahogany. Hers, he thought. Swaying a little – his balance was poor these days – he clambered on to the ladder. One step. Two steps. There was a space behind the finial, grey with dust. In it, there lay what looked like a large ledger. He peered down. On the cover of the ledger she had inscribed in her childish hand ‘My Diary!’. It struck him as odd that she had followed the two words with an exclamation mark.
He scooped the ledger up in both hands and, once again precariously swaying, descended the ladder. He perched on the edge of the bed (during his secret visits he had so often stretched himself out on this bed in a mingled anguish and abandonment of longing) and raised the cover tentatively, as though he already sensed what lay beneath it.
Dear Diary … Those were the first words. He had never supposed that anyone nowadays addressed a diary in that way. I am beginning you as I begin my new life here in what must be one of the most beautiful small houses in London, perhaps in the whole of England or even in the whole world! And there’s this secret garden. Unfortunately it’s now in a ghastly state. But I’m already doing something about it. At first MR did not want me to change a single thing but I’m beginning to win him over. MR? It took him a few seconds to realise that the initials stood for himself.
He turned over a few pages. Even though he’s so ancient, he’s really not at all bad looking. Sometimes I even think that I could fancy him! I can see why Mamma fell for him. Or did she? In those days, when things were so bad – who knows?
He sat there, on and on, unaware of the discomfort of leaning forward on the edge of the bed with the ledger resting on his knees. He turned pages at random, back and forth, reading now a few sentences here, now a few sentences there.
H. was thoroughly fed up this evening. He would hardly talk, hardly eat. Then he exploded. He hated what he called This hole and corner business. But what else is one to do? Tell me, Dear Diary. I tried to explain that we must see this thing through. Now that I know for sure that the house is going to be mine it would be MADNESS to throw it all away. Neither H. nor I will ever earn enough to get on the property ladder, the way things are going. We MUST think of the FUTURE!!!
The night before he had been overwhelmed, almost dizzied and nauseated, by the battering of the Liszt Waltz turned to full volume. Now he felt a similar crescendo of battering within him. He could not believe the deviousness, deceit and betrayal that each page revealed. Often a single sentence was like a violent blow. He denied that he was my father but can one believe him? … I feel so silly when he does his ‘adopted daughter’ to people he hardly knows … He spent the whole of dinner trying to explain to me what Romania would have to do to join this European Union thing – oh, boring, boring, boring! … A great battle over the fountain but at last I WON …
He looked at his watch. Impossible! Could he have sat reading this semi-literate stuff for almost an hour? He got up and, holding the ledger to his chest with one hand, he crossed over to the breakfront wardrobe. He reached for the ladder with the other hand. Giddily he climbed the ladder, grimacing with a sudden jab of pain in his right hip each time that he raised his leg. He dropped the ledger into the hollow behind the finial. Some dust rose up, acrid on his tongue and pricking at his eyes.
In the kitchen he awaited her return. Repeatedly he glanced at his watch. She was late. Before him there was a tumbler of vodka on the rocks. He had refilled it twice. He found comforting the trail of fire that each gulp from it set alight in his oesophagus and stomach. Many years ago, after a cancer scare, he had given up smoking. He longed, oh, how he longed, for a cigarette now.
He thought of what he would say to her. I’m afraid I’ve reached a decision. I want you to leave. Just as soon as you can go. I don’t mind giving you some money for a room somewhere else. I just don’t want you here any longer. No, I’m not going to give you any reason. No! I’m sorry but there it is. No, Ana, I’m sorry. I don’t want any argument. Go! Just go!
Then, disrupting this silent speech, he heard the scrape of her key in the door.
‘Hi!’
He did not answer.
‘Are you there? Where are you?’
‘In the kitchen.’
She came in, a heavily loaded carrier bag in either hand. Her smile was radiant. He noticed how, after having sat for most of the previous day, a Sunday, out in the sun-drenched garden, her forehead and cheeks were glowing. So were her bare arms. On them he could see, with extraordinary clarity, the fine golden hairs.
‘I’m sorry I’m so late. You must be starving. I was looking for some of those spectacle wipe things that you said that you wanted. Boot’s in the High Street had sold out, so I took the 328 down to Earls Court. I also got you some of those violet and rose creams.’ She was now taking her purchases out of the two bags and placing them on the kitchen table beside his tumbler of vodka. ‘I’ll get things ready in a jiffy. What a wonderful invention the microwave is!’
Suddenly he found that he could expel not one of that swarm of words that had been angrily buzzing in his brain ever since he had left her room.
He thought: I need her.
He thought: How am I ever to manage without her?
He thought: I must keep her to see me out.
‘What sort of day did you have?’
‘Not bad. Nothing all that interesting. For me one day is now very much like another.’
He had never cared for this young man with his small, myopic eyes behind huge horn-rimmed glasses and his large nose and ears. Odd that his father, who had had so much charm, had produced an only child with so little of it. But charm was not what one required from a solicitor. What one required was efficiency, honesty and discretion.
‘This time I’ve made it easy. I’m doing away with all those different legacies. With the exception of a few small sums, I want everything – everything – to go to my old Oxford college. They can do with it what they like. No stipulations. If they want to use it for some nonsense or other, then good luck to them. I just don’t care.’
The college was the richest in Oxford. That they did not need the money had been his chief incentive in leaving it to them.
‘I’ve put a lot of things in the freezer. You only have to heat them up in the microwave.’
Ana and ‘my friend’ were leaving for a long weekend in France, spent in exploring World War I battlefields. ‘He’s got a thing about them,’ she had explained. ‘Don’t ask me why. I know that I’m going to be horribly bored. But he so often does things that I want to do but he doesn’t, that I feel that I must make the same sacrifice for him once in a while.’
‘Thank you. You shouldn’t have gone to all that trouble.’
‘Are you sure you’ll be all right?’
‘Oh, yes. Thank you. Fine.’
‘I really don’t like leaving you.’ She lowered her head and put her lips to his cheek. ‘Just ring me if you need me. You have my number?’
‘Oh, yes, I have your number.’
As she turned away, he felt exhilarated that she had failed to notice the sardonic double entendre. The lines came back to him: The sunlight on the garden hardens and grows cold. He felt the hardness and coldness within him with a soaring sense of triumph.
Now You See It
In the late afternoon, Tony dawdled along the Corniche. He had thought that this winter visit to Luxor – of whi
ch he had made others in the past, not alone but always with Mark – would thaw out the block of ice, a combination of grief, guilt and a hopeless resignation, in which for weeks now he had felt himself to be rigidly embedded. He had invited a number of friends, both male and female, to come with him, but they had all made their often flimsy excuses. Unhappiness can carry a contagion and they were wary of it.
A tall, muscular boy, sixteen or seventeen at a guess, with large hands, a large nose and a tousled mop of hair, loomed up in his path. He was wearing a tattered, stained djellabah that all but covered his trainers. ‘Hello!’ he greeted Tony.
Tony stared at him, his eyes dull. Then he muttered ‘Hello’ and began to move on.
‘Where you from?’ The boy was at his heels.
‘Where am I from? From England. Have you ever visited England?’ He at once regretted the question. It would make it more difficult to get rid of the boy, and in any case it was a ludicrous one. Was it likely that such a boy had ever travelled even to Cairo?
‘No visit. Never.’ The boy pointed at his chest. ‘Poor. Want visit England. But – poor, poor. No money. How many day Luxor?’
‘Well, I arrived only yesterday.’
Tony was reluctant to say more. He had replied only out of the habit of politeness.
‘You go West Bank?’
Tony slapped out at a fly that kept hovering around him. He might have been slapping out at the boy. ‘Yes, I was there this morning. And I plan to go there again tomorrow.’ The block of ice shifted inside him. The sun suddenly felt warm on his bare arms and forehead.
‘You want taxi?’
‘No. Thank you. I usually get one outside the hotel …’
‘I have cousin. Good taxi. Very cheap. Hotel taxi, much money. I arrange taxi tomorrow. I come with you. Guide. Yes? My name Abdul. Abdul. Everyone know Abdul.’
‘Well … Well, that’s very kind of you. But …’ Then, on a crazy impulse, he nodded: ‘ Oh, all right. Yes. Why not?’
‘Well, where’s this taxi?’
Tony had been obliged to take two Imodium tablets that morning, and the back pocket of his trousers was stuffed with lavatory paper. He had all but decided to spend the day at the hotel.
Abdul pointed up the steep, uneven path that led from the crowded West Bank quay into the village above it.
‘But all the taxis are here.’
‘Cousin wait in cool place. Not far. Taxi cool.’
Tony’s stomach was again churning, and he had suddenly become aware that his new shoes were pinching feet swollen in the heat. Should he swallow one more of the tablets that he was carrying in the breast pocket of his jacket? This was ridiculous. The taxi might be cool, but he was getting extremely hot trudging up the path.
There was a long silence except for Tony’s increasingly laboured breathing. Then: ‘There is taxi!’ Abdul cried. But what he was pointing at was a pristine minibus, with ‘Cleopatra Tours’ emblazoned on its side.
‘That’s not a taxi.’
‘Yes, yes, cousin’s taxi.’
The driver, a middle-aged man with a straggly moustache and a face pitted with either acne or smallpox, put aside the newspaper that he had been reading and descended stiffly from the driving-seat. Unlike Abdul’s brown, stained djellabah, his was white and spotless. ‘Hello!’ he greeted Tony. ‘Me Mohammed.’ He grinned. One of his front teeth was missing.
Tony merely nodded. Then he turned to Abdul. ‘ We’d better first fix a price.’ He turned back to the driver. ‘How much?’
‘One hundred fifty. Egyptian pound. Cheap. Special price. You friend Abdul. Abdul my cousin.’
Tony began to argue. Ridiculous! On his Luxor visit the previous year he had paid a mere fifty Egyptian pounds for a taxi for a whole day. But his heart was not in it. Soon, a sum of sixty was reached. Tony would often tell people that he hated any disagreement, argument or row. Such things made him feel ill, he would say.
‘Well, that’s settled.’ Having clambered into the mini-bus, Tony briefly patted Abdul’s knee with a sigh. ‘ Now we can enjoy a lovely day.’ He was amazed when Abdul took his hand in his and with the other hand began to stroke it. There was something exciting both in the spontaneity of the move and in the abrasive contact of that callused palm.
By now Tony had decided that he had worked out for himself the truth about the ‘taxi’. Cleopatra Travel must employ Mohammed as a driver, ferrying customers from and to the airport and around the town. This was his day off. He had ‘borrowed’ the mini-bus to make some extra money. Of that extra money, Abdul would no doubt get his cut.
The flank of a mountain embraced the whole site of the Hatshepsut temple like the wings of some vast, hovering solar disc. The three terraces, stacked one above the other, radiated an almost unbearable heat and dazzle.
All at once, Tony felt a terrible thirst. Perhaps it was all the sweating he thought. Or perhaps the effect of the over-salted, tough lamb bacon that he had speared from the buffet at breakfast to accompany some dry, floury scrambled egg.
He paused in his ascent, a hand pressed into the small of his back.
‘Thirsty.’
‘You thirsty?’
Tony nodded.
‘I get water. Wait!’
‘No, it doesn’t matter.’
But Abdul had already begun to race down the incline towards a row of kiosks. He was not a bad boy, Tony thought. Willing. And really quite handsome. With a sigh he continued his laborious ascent up the ramp. Then, just as he was about to reach the first of the three terraces, he felt a slithering in his gut, as though some reptile were lazily moving there, followed by a sharp tweak of pain. Christ! He began to hurry back down the ramp. At the bottom, surrounded by jabbering, sweating tourists, he looked frantically around him. No lavatory in sight. No Abdul in sight. Desperate, he lurched off into the blazing heat, across a bare landscape littered with stones and fragments of masonry. Eventually he came on an empty hut, tilted sideways, its door ajar and its wooden floor rotten. He squatted behind it. If anyone saw him, too bad!
Just as he had lowered himself into position, his immaculate trousers trailing in the dust round his ankles, he heard a scrabbling sound. Oh, hell!
But instead of the expected tourist or labourer, it was a long-eared, jackal-like dog, its coat a dusty grey. Having sloped round the hut, it seated itself four or five yards in front of him. It stared at him. Then it closed its slanting, mica-black eyes, raised its head and slowly opened its mouth, revealing small, needle-sharp teeth. Tony thought that it was going to emit a howl, but instead it merely yawned. Once again it fixed its eyes on him. He had seen a head exactly like that in the museum the previous afternoon. It belonged to a statue of the god Anubis, who escorted the souls of the dead into the presence of the judge of the infernal regions. He and the dog stared at each other for several seconds. Then Tony felt passing through him the emotional equivalent of the reptilian gliding through the gut that had brought him to this spot. In panic he defecated in an explosive burst. Half standing, half crouching, he scrabbled in the back pocket of his trousers for some tissues.
As he returned up the ramp to the temple, the dog pattered behind him. But, on their approach to its entrance, it suddenly shot off at an angle, to make for Abdul, who was standing at the far end of the terrace, a bottle of mineral water under an arm as he stared downwards, clearly in search of Tony. The dog jumped up, its paws on Abdul’s knees, making the boy rear away in terror. Then he kicked out viciously. The dog let out a shrill squeal, bared its teeth and, tail between legs, scampered off, zigzag, into the crowd. Tony felt a queasy horror.
Abdul waved the bottle in greeting. It was as though, in a few seconds, he had already forgotten of the incident with the dog. ‘Where you go? I look everywhere.’ He held out the bottle. ‘ Cold.’
Gratefully Tony took the bottle, unscrewed its cap and sipped and then gulped. ‘What do I owe you?’ The boy looked puzzled. ‘How much?’
‘Nothing, nothing. Present.’ He
waved his hand back and forth in front of his face, as though to fan it.
‘Well, that’s very kind of you.’ Tony was grudging. Cynically he had decided that this act of generosity was merely a bait for a larger tip than he might otherwise have given at the end of the day.
With what struck Tony as glee, Abdul now began to speak of the terrorist massacre that had taken place on this spot only two years before. ‘Many, many killed. There – there!’ He pointed. ‘Much blood.’ He gave a staccato laugh, which seemed to erupt from the back of his throat.
‘Where’s Mohammed?’ Tony demanded. He wanted to get away. ‘This place gives me the creeps.’
‘Creeps?’
‘It stinks of death. Haunted by all those wretched murdered people.’
Abdul laughed. He clearly had not understood. He pointed. ‘More blood over there. There! There! Look, look! Blood!’
That night, Tony thought of Mark. Mark had died of leukaemia, but all their friends had decided that he must really have died of Aids. How typical of Tony, they had said among themselves, that he should refuse to own up to the truth. The fact was, they said, that he had always been ashamed that he was gay. That was because of his upbringing, of course – his mother a vicar’s daughter, his father an army colonel, or was it a general?
Tony thought of Mark with a guilt that gnawed at him like the pain that all day had gnawed at his bowels until at long last, late in the evening, the Imodium had had some effect. Against all expectation and against his will, he had been attracted to Abdul. Coming home in the late, cooling dusk, he had moved closer to him in the mini-bus, hoping that Mohammed in front would not notice. Now it was he who had taken Abdul’s hand in his, instead of the other way around. His fingers had moved slowly and gently over the callused right palm, as though tracing the lines on it.
