True Love, the Sphinx, and Other Unsolvable Riddles

by Tyne O'Connell

  Something tells me you’re a better composer than I am a poet, but I’m hoping if I show you my offering, you might consider sharing yours sometime?

  P.S. Feel free to laugh. Sam did.

  For Rosie

  A disk of sun with light descending

  Splits the mind, a shrine unfolds

  As light attends to touch the temple

  Through the sense of notes unending.

  Friday, Day 5

  Nefertiti docked at Aswan

  Sunrise: 06:24 Sunset: 17:57

  Wake up at leisure

  Free day of escorted shopping in Aswan

  13:30 Lunch in Nefertiti restaurant

  18:00 Video demonstration of your cruise in the Ankh bar

  20:00 BBQ dinner on pool deck

  Evening at leisure

  Overnight in Aswan

  Chapter 17

  Sam

  The riddle of the sphinx:

  Q: What creature has two hearts?

  I finally gave Octavia my riddle scrawled on a piece of repro parchment we had in our rooms for stationery. I’d struggled long and hard with my riddle. I wanted her to know how I felt without sounding lame. I hadn’t asked for any help from Salah, which, as I passed over the envelope, I suddenly decided was a big mistake.

  Octavia read it and gave me a significant look. I guess I thought she was about to laugh. “It’s just a joke,” I told her, grinning stupidly and wondering why on Earth I hadn’t run my riddle by Salah or Rosie first—or even Mohammed, for that matter.

  I turned to the comfort of my camera. I was photographing the mast from which the large white sail billowed, but I was really spying on Octavia out of the corner of my eye. She trailed her hand over the railing. “Darling, let’s run away tonight,” she suggested, in the kind of voice you would use when ordering pizza, but like most things Octavia said, it felt like a command, not a suggestion. And like most of her commands, it sounded like it could get us in a whole lot of trouble. Naturally, I was more than up for it.

  When we moored on Elephantine Island for our picnic, she took my hand and we made our escape. I paid another felucca some obscene amount of money to take us to the Old Cataract Hotel. I felt all cool and in charge as I negotiated the deal with the guy. Octavia seemed impressed too, which boosted my ego even more.

  From a distance the hotel looked like a grand old palace hugging the bank of the Nile. It definitely called for the Leica, black-and-white film, slow shutter speed, and as wide an aperture setting as I could get away with. But I had the Hasselblad on me just as backup.

  We got to the hotel expecting air-conditioning and luxury but armed guards shooed us away from the gates with their highly polished AK-47s.

  Octavia laughed and swiped at their guns. “Darlings, don’t be so silly,” she told them, and like open sesame, the AK-47s were laid aside and the gates opened.

  “I want to see the manager,” she told the receptionist.

  And tout de suite a haughty French dude with attitude to spare arrived. Octavia slipped her arm through his like they were old buddies and chattered away to him in French. Soon we were being ushered like royalty through the arabesque hallways and down onto the terrace where uniformed staff brought us apple shishas, mint tea, and Campari and sodas.

  After we were left alone, Octavia casually suggested, “Why don’t we stay the night? As tempting as the idea sounded, I knew it would create an international incident if Carol and Ms. Doyle noticed we were gone for even a minute, let alone the night.

  “Isn’t it gorgeous,” Octavia cried, pointing at a brochure as I took some pictures of fellucas on the Nile. “Look Sam, look at all the lovely people who’ve stayed here. Tsar Nicholas the Second, Margaret Thatcher, Winston Churchill.”

  “Margaret Thatcher, lovely?”

  “Darling, she did more for pussy bows and handbag politics than all the great fashionistas of the world put together.”

  “Handbag politics?”

  “It’s like voodoo economics. You have seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, haven’t you?”

  “To handbag politics,” I toasted. “Agatha Christie stayed here too,” I pointed out. “Isn’t this where Death on the Nile was set?”

  “Yes, it says Agatha Christie stayed here while she wrote it. Oh Sam, we’ve got to stay. We can’t miss an opportunity to spend a night in this monument to history. We owe it not just to ourselves but to our friends and family,” she insisted.

  I laughed. Octavia was the sort of girl you instinctively wanted to agree with—or rather, she was the sort of girl who made it impossible not to agree with her. Which is how we came to spend the night in the Agatha Christie suite.

  Chapter 18

  Octavia

  One day when I’m three hundred years old and sailing around the Med on my yacht with my teams of plastic surgeons and life-support systems, I will regale my nurses with this story.

  Sam was a darling but such a worrywart. Honestly, I wouldn’t ever want to be caught in a really tricky situation with him. The poor thing had kittens when they demanded our passports in order to stay in the suite.

  I realized that I would have to be the strong one, so I called Salah on his mobile and asked him to cover for us. Also, I told him we needed our passports for check-in.

  “Octavia, the passports are in the safe,” he told me, as if that should be the end of the matter.

  But I didn’t lose my patience with him. “Yes, but the boys at reception worship you like a demi-god,” I reminded him. Sometimes boys miss the most vital signs. “Anyway, with Sam and me out of the way, you’ll have no excuse not to pull Rosie.”

  “I don’t know about that,” he said.

  “I know you think I haven’t got a clue, Salah, but I know my friend better than you do. You’ve got to trust me.”

  He hesitated for a moment as if weighing what I’d said. Eventually he said, “I’ll see what I can do,” and then he hung up.

  “You’re friend is an absolute vacuum of joie de vivre,” I told Sam after the call. He seemed very pleased that I’d said that.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Sam asked when Salah called back to say he had managed to steal the passports and was sending them over.

  “Anyway, we owe it to Salah and Rosie to give them some space,” I said. I was only half-joking.

  Sam nodded, then he pulled me in for a kiss and I knew he agreed.

  It was all very Mata Hari–like, actually, and I knew it was going to be one of those memories you have forever. You know, the stories you go over and over in your mind and tell and retell until they become mythological in proportion. Only I didn’t want to sound all sappy, so I said, “One day when I’m three hundred years old, as I sail around the Med on my yacht with my teams of plastic surgeons and life-support systems, I shall regale my nurses with this tale.” Sam snaked his arm around my waist and started tickling me. I am still sure it was the best day of my life.

  We rode up in an ancient etched-glass lift. The manager was proud of it—it was all “restoration this” and “restoration that” and “famous him” and “famous her” and film, film, film—when all Sam and I wanted to do was lip-lock.

  The suite was enormous and the first thing the manager did was open the wooden shutters to the balcony, offering up the Nile to us on an azure platter. It was glorious and in that moment I loved everyone: the hotel manager, even Nigel for forcing me to leave the Inner Zones. But especially Sam, who scooped me up in his arms and threw me onto the bed like a parcel of diamonds.

  “Could you send up a bottle of Dom and a bowl of fruit?” Sam requested, handing over an unattractive bunch of crumpled bills. “We can take it from here.”

  I loved him being all manly like that, even if the effect was rather spoilt by the manager’s lack of understanding of the American vernacular.

  “Quoi?”

  I translated Sam’s request into French and the manager clicked his little French heels obediently. After he left Sam threw himself
next to me and kissed me tenderly. To be perfectly honest, at that moment, my heart was pounding and I was feeling vulnerable, and a part of me wanted to say, “Only joking! Let’s go back to the boat.”

  But after all that, I didn’t even have the courage to run. And no, I wasn’t worried that Sam was going to “take advantage of me” like some scoundrel from a Jane Austen novel. It was more serious than that.

  I really, really, really liked Sam, and I knew he felt the same, and that was a place I’d never been before. A place where no one’s in control or trying to prove anything.

  So we stayed up talking all night, instead. Okay, there was quite a bit of kissing and cuddling, too, but that wasn’t the Big Deal.

  The Big Deal was that we told one another everything about each other. As dawn broke, Sam said, “You know, I think you might even know more about me than Salah does.”

  I kissed his forehead and snuggled into his chest. What I didn’t tell him was the rather unsettling fact that I was pretty sure he knew more about me than even I knew about myself.

  Chapter 19

  Salah

  By midnight I finally touched the stars.

  I called an emergency security council in Astin and Yo’s room. It was almost six, which was when we were supposed to watch the video of our cruise. Yo was in the shower and Astin was on his BlackBerry playing a game. Rosie had run off to get Artimis and Perdie. If we were going to cover for Sam and Octavia, then we’d need all the help we could get.

  “Sam and Octavia are spending the night at the Old Cataract in town and we’re going to have to cover for them.”

  “Cool,” Astin replied, slumping back on the bed without taking his eyes off the game.

  Rosie arrived with the girls.

  I watched as she sat neatly on the floor, in exactly the same position she’d been sitting the night I’d run my fingers through her hair. That seemed a long time ago now.

  Yo came out of the bathroom, a towel around his waist, rubbing his wet hair with a bath towel.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “Sam and Octavia are spending the night in that old hotel in town,” Astin explained, still glued to his BlackBerry. “I’m just doing a search on it now. Here we go. Mmmm, nice crib. Hey, listen to this. Remember that DVD we watched the other night? The Agatha Christie lady wrote it there.”

  “She wrote the book, man. They didn’t have DVDs back then,” Yo told him, flicking his wet bath towel at Astin’s head.

  Astin snatched a wet towel from the floor and flicked it back at him.

  “The real issue here is that if Nigel or Mr. Bell finds out about this, Octavia will be expelled,” Perdie pointed out, grabbing the towel from Yo and chucking it back in the bathroom.

  Artimis squealed, “And then we’ll all be grounded or sent back.”

  “Okay, nobody panic. This is the plan,” I told them. “We have to keep up the illusion that Octavia and Sam are on the boat. Like if anyone asks where they are, say something along the lines of, ‘Oh yeah, I just saw them going out onto the deck.’ That sort of thing.”

  “And we could call out to them as well,” Artimis said. “You know, like if we’re leaving a room, we could call out to Octavia to hurry up.”

  “Or say she’s on the phone,” added Perdie, redoing one of her braids.

  “Shame tonight’s not a galabia party, then we could all dress up in disguises,” Rosie offered. “You know, wear those fake mustaches. I’ve always fancied myself in one,” she remarked idly. “But a really neat, groomed one, like Poirot’s in Death on the Nile.”

  I loved that she said stuff like that.

  “Actually, that’s not a bad idea,” Yo threw in. “Why don’t we make it our own galabia party. You get all the girls to wear their galabias from the other night, with mustaches, and we’ll wear …”

  “There’s no way I’m wearing a belly dancer’s outfit,” Astin said, looking up from his phone for the first time.

  “Yeah, let’s not do costumes,” Yo agreed.

  Astin—or any of us for that matter—in a belly dance outfit? “Yeah, let’s not,” we all agreed.

  • • •

  That evening, Nigel was wearing his safari suit and had his hair gelled flat. Carol was in a see-through cheesecloth kaftan looking up at him adoringly. It was kind of cute, really. The teachers insisted the Bowers Boys and Queens Girls sit on opposite sides of the room, which gave a sense of déjà vu—reminding us of that first awkward day on the Nefertiti.

  “Right, well. We’ve all had a jolly nice time on this cruise,” Nigel began, reading from speech notes as Rosie entered the room and took a place with her friends. Even from that distance I imagined I could smell her perfume—a sort of musk that reminded me of the markets of my childhood.

  “I think we’ve all appreciated the cultural aspects of this trip, and not just of Egypt. I, for one, have found getting to know our friends from across the pond a most pleasurable experience.”

  Of course he meant Carol. Yo, Astin, and I whooped and whistled. That set the jocks off and everyone started clapping.

  Nigel smiled and waved his hand to quiet us down. “Now, the cruise isn’t over yet, but the crew have kindly taken the time to record some of our more memorable moments so that we might have a small memento to take back home. So without further ado, let’s settle back and enjoy the show.” Nigel chuckled. “Oh, and if you’d like to purchase a copy, they’re available in the shop for twenty-five Egyptian pounds.”

  The lights dimmed and Arabic music pounded through the bar as the first images came up on the screen—starting with the girls getting of the bus with their luggage and walking up the gangplank to the Nefertiti. Rosie was wearing a white shift dress that showed her endlessly long legs; her strawberry-blond tresses were hanging down her back. I sighed.

  Next, there was the shot of our school arriving and shouting to the girls on deck like the bunch of total jerks we were.

  There were additional images of us coming and going from various sight-seeing trips. We all laughed at Mohammed stumbling around the temple complex at the Valley of the Kings and Queens wearing Yo’s VR visor. There were shots of the girls looking hot in bikinis. Then came footage of the night I rescued Octavia from the other cruise boat. I froze as the video zoomed in on the Kiss. It really didn’t look good. All the guys went nuts and I turned bright red. All I could think of as I watched myself lift Octavia into my arms was how it must have looked to Sam. And to Rosie. To make matters worse, the camera panned away before you could see the bit where I pulled away from Octavia’s kiss.

  I felt ashamed at how I’d treated Sam. No wonder he’d been pissed at me. I could have cleared it up with him and, more importantly, with Rosie, but I hadn’t. I’d just arrogantly expected that Sam would trust me. I turned to make eye contact with Rosie, afraid that she’d be angry with me, but instead she smiled.

  I still felt like a prize jerk.

  By then everyone was laughing at the teachers dancing with the “Nubians” and Mr. Bell threw himself in front of the video screen. “Right, well I think that will be quite enough of that now!”

  But everyone yelled for him to get out of the way, and Carol told him not to be a spoil sport. Mr. Bell marched over to the bar and poured himself a large whiskey.

  The next bit of footage was a brief scene of Rosie, alone, playing the piano at night.

  I’d never seen her play, I realized.

  The next montage was one of Sam carrying Octavia on his back in the pool, followed by a long shot of Yo kissing Perdie, Astin fooling around with Artimis, and Carol and Nigel dirty dancing. No one was likely to forget that particular image in a hurry.

  Everyone cracked up when the film revealed all four teachers in a conga line—at dawn. Nigel was wearing someone’s bra over his polyester safari suit. Then it switched to a montage of each of the couples kissing each other, Sam taking pictures of Octavia, and then another montage of Rosie looking at me, me looking at Rosie, both of us pretend
ing not to be looking at each other. Seeing it frame after frame made it all so obvious, and yet we’d both been totally oblivious of one another’s feelings at the time.

  I looked over at Rosie, who was blushing like crazy, and I thought, what the hell. It was a now-or-never moment and I’d wasted too many of those “never” moments on this cruise. So I did something so unlike me the entire room went silent. I walked through the seated crowds and stood in front of her.

  “I really love the poem—” she began, but I didn’t let her finish. Throwing fate to the wind I kissed her in front of everyone. A huge cheer went up from the jock brigade. But I didn’t care and I don’t think Rosie did either because she kissed me right back. When the lights came on, she sprung off me like a cat. My heart felt like it was going to pump itself out of my chest.

  “Right, well, dinner now I think,” Nigel said stiffly. “No dilly-dallying. By the way, where’s Octavia, Rosie? I haven’t seen her this evening.”

  Great, I finally get a real chance to kiss Rosie and the teachers notice Octavia’s absence. I wanted to put my head in my hands and weep.

  “Octavia?” Rosie repeated, playing for time.

  “She’s got a stomach thing, I think, sir,” Astin told Nigel.

  “Well, perhaps Carol should go down and see her.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” Rosie warned. “She’s sleeping.”

  “I might just go down anyway and make sure she’s keeping her fluids up,” Carol insisted, standing up.

  “That’s okay, I’ll take it. She can get very snappy when she’s sick,” Rosie explained.

  “That’s true,” Artimis added. “She, she, erm, throws things. She had our nurse in hospital for months when she came to school with a tummy bug once.”

  Carol looked at Nigel nervously. “All right, Rosie, you go and make sure she’s keeping her fluids up,” she finally said.

  Rosie stood to leave. “And maybe I’ll go and check on Sam,” Carol added. Is he in as well?”

  “No,” Yo jumped in quickly. “He was just here a second ago. He went to change.”