Osi and Arthur’s camel came up beside theirs and the two creatures twisted their snaky necks to hiss and spit at one another and she found herself laughing, they were so preposterous with their giant liquid eyes and glamorous lashes and she enjoyed the sun-baked tang and rough, dull texture of camel hair.
‘Fun, Beastie?’ said Evelyn from behind her, and Isis gave a nod and smiled.
19
AFTER AN HOUR or so they approached the cliffs and the men commanded the camels to kneel. Isis’ legs were rubbery as she clambered off and sparks flew in her eyes. It was the sun, only the sun, but it pressed down on her with heavy hands, and the ground was so gritty bright it made her squint. Sweat trickled from beneath her hat, stinging her eyes with sharp salt. The lorry had already arrived, and Victor and Haru were leaning back against it, smoking as they waited. Selim shot her a quick bright look and turned his head.
Abdullah paid the camel men and they mounted and rode swiftly away, the soft splayed feet that had plodded so soggily, taking off into a hectic lollop, fast and thrilling, as if it was a race.
Since the Great Place – the Valley of the Kings – was swarming with tourists and journalists, they were to visit a tomb belonging to one of the tomb-makers, Arthur explained, rather than to a pharaoh. Here was quieter, more suitable for a family visit and – though, of course, the mummy and all the grave goods were long gone – there were particularly fine and interesting decorations to be seen.
Before they set out on their trudge, they ate slices of orange and drank warm, goaty-tasting water from a skin bag. First of all, Arthur and Evelyn took them part of the way up the cliff for a good view of Deir El Medina. This had been a village populated by the builders who made the tombs for the pharaohs. They would begin the work, Arthur told them, the moment a new pharaoh was crowned, so that the monarch was able to travel from Thebes and see the progress of his own resting place.
‘Imagine standing in your own tomb!’ Isis said, staring down at the pattern of sand-coloured ruins. You could clearly see the outline of houses and streets.
‘I wouldn’t mind,’ said Osi, and pointing: ‘Is that the Temple of Hathor?’
‘Quite right.’ Arthur patted his head. ‘The tomb-makers were an uppity lot, don’t you know,’ he said, ‘a lot of artistic temperaments and so on – and not above going on strike if they weren’t satisfied with their rations – and they ate like lords. And of course they made their own tombs beautifully. We’ve got some superb examples of 19th an 20th dynasty – you wait and see . . .’ His voice skipped with supressed excitement.
The entrance was nothing but a heap of rubble that you might pass without noticing, but at Abdullah’s instruction, Selim and Haru hauled stones out of the way to reveal a rough panel of planking. At the shifting of the wood, a mouth yawned open in the rock. Though she was hot, goose-pimples riffled over Isis’ skin, and her stomach clenched at the thought of being swallowed down there.
Abdullah issued them all with torches and began to explain about entrances and antechambers while Osi interrupted and contradicted. Before her irritation could overtake her, Isis took the dough from her pocket, dampened it with the sweat from her palms and stuffed it in her ears. The warm dough swelled, blocking Osi’s voice, everyone’s voice, in lovely bready silence. It was a strange effect – the soundless wagging of everyone’s chin – and she became aware of a rushing sound coming from inside herself, that must have been the passage of her own blood, the secret sound of self.
Osi went in first with Abdullah, Haru, Selim and Victor. Evelyn followed and then, reluctantly, shoved along by Arthur, Isis entered the cracked lips of rock and stumbled down the throat, floored roughly with splintery planks. Stuck on ledges in the lumpy rock were candles and beneath them complex gnarly veins of trickled wax. A dry, knowing kind of smell caught in her nostrils and she caught up with Evelyn and clung to her arm; it’ll only be a minute, it’ll only be a minute, she told herself. Evelyn frowned down at her, said something silent and pulled her arm away.
Selim had grazed his knuckle on a rock or the rough wood; she saw him wipe away a trickle of blood and then suck at the wound. His eyes were deeply shadowed by his lashes but he looked up and met hers in a long, unsmiling gaze. She looked away. Abdullah was showing them the three chambers of the tomb, teeth flashing as he pointed out details in the decoration. She stood apart from the group, seeing them as fish in an aquarium with their silently opening and closing mouths.
She turned to stare at the skin of pigment on the walls that in the wavering torchlight appeared so freshly painted as to be still wet. The air was stiff and stale, like the air trapped in a dead person’s lungs, and she felt a flutter of panic. The images made the blood beat harder, like birds trapped in her ears, and she lifted her hands to try and remove or loosen the dough, but it had cooked tight in her ear canals and her fingers were disconnected and clumsy as if she were trying to operate the vast, numb hands of a puppet.
Osi’s mouth flapped open and shut as if his jaw was coming unhinged and Abdullah, Haru, Victor, Arthur and Evelyn all of them were talking excitedly, sliding their torch beams about and pointing at images – here was the richness of lapis and gold, here was a star chart, and images of fish and ducks and cows and suns and sheaves of wheat and here was Anubis and Horus and Bastet and boats and scales and everywhere tiny working figures with their sideways faces and their forward facing eyes and on the ceiling, the Goddess Nut, wings stretched open, swallowing the sun.
Victor caught her eye and winked, but he appeared so ghastly, with his brown teeth emerging through the beard, half lit by wobbling torchlight, that she tore her eyes away, swallowing down a surge of panic. Selim was standing near her, sucking at his damaged knuckle, separate from the crowd of them.
Her eyes snagged on an awful creature – part crocodile, part hippo, part lion – that seemed to quiver into movement. She might have made a noise of fright, Selim was gazing at her steadily, eyes too dark to see but for a flash of white. Evelyn tapped her on the shoulder to point something out, and Isis’ mouth filled up with the taste of dirt.
Time went as stiff and sluggish as the air and she could no longer tell if she were hot or cold, only that her temperature was wrong. The lines were so precise and clear and clean, and stuffed up in her skull she could hear the artist licking the end of his brush, hear his breath, the wet of his tongue, and his brush strokes, feel them on her skin, and there was an incantation or a drum, not her own heart, it was words, ancient words travelling up her through the floor and the mocking grin of a crocodile.
And after some time, she did not know how long, they must have started to move, to leave; Evelyn first, was it? The hole of her mouth opening on darkness to say something, someone shook her, did they? And then she was alone, she thought alone; this was where any clearness ended.
Was there someone behind her, breathing on her neck? Selim? Her hand hauled up to her mouth and her head went back till she saw the Goddess Nut, on the ceiling, a great winged figure with a flat pudding-basin cut and long black eyes. And as she saw Nut she also saw her own face looking up and with a sucking sensation was flattened onto the ceiling, thin as paint and motionless, fingers stiffened into quills, while a commotion went on below: a girl falling – a silly pastel pink amongst the lapiz, azure, gold and dark – and a beast, bird was it? struggling with her. She was nothing but a skin of pigment, an ancient glitter – and then she was plummeting hot and solid, a thud against the floor, and one of the earplugs was dislodged and time, which must have stopped, resumed with an eager hum and there were footsteps thudding away, unless it was her heart.
And after a gap Evelyn was pulling Isis to her feet, then stopping and staring, putting out a finger to touch some wet on Isis’ face, and straightening her frock and frowning at the dirt and shouting for Arthur as she dragged her into the sting of the blinding sun. And they were all round her then, hand to her forehead: ‘She’s burning
up,’ someone said, but no, she was slippery ice, and there were handkerchiefs and water bottles and a dabbing and a cleaning of her face, a worrying at a rip in her dress, at a smudge of blood on her chest, but not at the dark shame of wet between her legs.
Evelyn bundled her in the sidecar and roared back to the camp. Eyes screwed tightly shut, Isis felt the desert wind scouring her face. And then for days she lay alone in her tent, prickling in the light and shivering in the dark, watching the flies on the outside, the ants running along the thick, gritty seams and listening to how the humans went on out there. When her eyelids closed, as they would of their own accord however much she struggled, there was the beast and the pudding-basined Goddess, stiff fingered, painted eyes stretched dry and blind, and there was a coldly grinning crocodile. Sometimes she shivered; sometimes she sweated.
Evelyn told her the sluggish leak of blood between her legs was the curse. ‘Trust you to choose here and now.’ Awkwardly she instructed Isis how to deal with it. Though it was gruesome it was a normal thing, Evelyn told her, but never in her life would Isis bleed without the memory of the tomb and a smothered confusing sensation, a wet filament deep inside her, like a shooting streak of gold.
As well as the onset of the curse, she had a touch of malaria, it was decided, and for days lay swaddled in mosquito nets, watching shadows, listening to life going on outside the tent. She lost all sense of time as she lay feeling her heart thump on and on as if bored with its own repetition. At first she couldn’t make sense of anything anyone said to her. It was as if she had a fever in her brain. She could eat nothing, but drank gallons of water, queerly tinged with quinine. Sometimes Osi came into her tent, and he didn’t talk, just sat turning the pages of a book, and there was comfort in the silent presence of her twin.
20
IT WAS PAST dawn when Evelyn woke Isis by crawling into the tent. The space was too small, and when she was crammed, crouching, knees cricking, beside Isis, her head made the canvas bulge and the light filtering through cast her skin in a greenish hue.
‘I’ve got some fresh water for you here. Hungry yet?’
‘Maybe.’
Evelyn put her hand on Isis’ brow. ‘Cooler, thank Heaven.’
‘I want to go home and see Mary,’ Isis said
‘As soon as you’re well enough to travel.’
‘I am well enough.’
‘Sure?’ Evelyn scrunched down so that her face was too close to Isis’ and peered at her as if she were a curious specimen. ‘So, you’re feeling more like it?’
Isis stretched her toes and fingers and moved her head, which felt like the right-sized head. ‘I do,’ she said. ‘More like myself,’ she added, but that was not quite right. What was herself? She could hardly remember. She propped herself up on her elbow to sip the water.
‘Then it’s about time you told me exactly what happened,’ Evelyn said. She sounded oddly nervous.
‘Don’t remember.’ Isis tried to shrink away from the stale tobacco on her mother’s breath. ‘I suppose I fainted or something.’
Evelyn was silent for a time, and there was a dry click as she swallowed.
‘Don’t be silly. You must remember. You can tell me the truth. I won’t be angry. No one is angry with you.’ She stopped between each sentence as if she was reading from a script, but her eyes were focussed hard on Isis’ face. ‘I do wish I’d taken more notice when we came out. . . So. Who was it?’
‘What?’
‘Who attacked you?’
‘No one.’
‘You were on the floor, your collar was ripped, there was blood on your frock. Which one was it?’
Isis stared up at the wiry hairs on the tip of her mother’s chin, and the dark caverns of her nostrils. Her muddy eyes, whites smeared pink, were like proper caring mother’s eyes, searching her own. Isis felt she must say something to fulfil her expectation.
‘Was it Haru?’ Evelyn’s voice was brusque. ‘Tell the truth. No one will be angry. Not with you. We’ve sent the cad packing, in any case,’ she added.
‘And Selim?’
‘And Akil. It’s only us – and Abdullah now. Abdullah at least can be trusted.’
‘Did you pay them?’ Isis said.
Evelyn hacked out a laugh of incredulity, flecks of spit flying from her mouth and sticking to the canvas.
Isis watched them glitter and fade. ‘It’s not fair if you didn’t pay them,’ she muttered.
‘Well?’ said Evelyn. ‘Haru? Or was it that boy – Selim, was it? Whichever it was, he shall be punished, don’t you worry. He’ll be sorry.’
Isis pictured Selim’s hands, those slim, delicate fingers. She would not have them chopped off. She would not have him stoned. She wasn’t even sure; he’d been close but . . . she’d wanted him to be close, hadn’t she? She’d wanted . . . oh what? There had been the blood on her dress . . . she thought of him sucking his knuckle, eyes so dark beneath the sweep of lashes. But he couldn’t have made her see what she saw, he could not have turned her into pigment on the ceiling or made her fall and forget herself or start the curse or have a fever.
‘Nothing happened. I was only ill,’ she said.
Was he helping her when she fell, or was there more, some sort of touching that she had willed?
‘Your frock was torn,’ Evelyn said. Her voice rose. ‘It was one of them, Isis. Which one?’
‘None, neither!’ Isis scrunched her eyes and shook her head against the slippery, sickly memory, which was all of a piece with the bloated, dirty ache and the eyes everywhere of rats and boys and gods and the white eye of the pedlar, all of a piece with the heat and taste of dirt. ‘I just fainted.’
‘Come on.’ Evelyn’s voice was beginning to crisp with irritation.
‘I don’t know.’
‘That’s not good enough.’
Isis turned her face towards the canvas. Oh, it was so hot, so beastly hot.
‘Wasn’t Selim; wasn’t Haru,’ she said.
Evelyn struggled to say the next thing. ‘If it was neither . . .’ she began. ‘Oh, I wish I’d bally well taken more notice of who’d come out in what order. I got so absorbed with what Abdullah was saying, I just followed him out, didn’t even miss you till . . .’ There was a long ache of silence before she spoke again. ‘I should have been looking after you.’ Her voice cracked and Isis was startled.
‘It’s not your fault,’ she mumbled.
Evelyn swallowed, ‘Please tell me it wasn’t Victor?’
‘No.’
‘And of course not Osi.’
‘No.’
‘Then it must have been Haru or that boy.’ Evelyn sounded relieved.
Isis shut her eyes against the intensity of her stare.
‘Which one? Tell me, Isis, speak. We’ll get the blighter.’
Isis pressed her fists against her eyes and saw a fuzz of floating colour, bright as if still wet.
‘Tell me.’
‘It wasn’t Haru or Selim.’
‘But you said . . .’ Evelyn sighed. ‘Who then?’
Isis’ mind was scrambling. At least Victor would not be punished like them, no chopping off of hands or stoning. He was a hero, after all.
‘You have to say.’ Evelyn’s stomach made a loud, hard gurgle. ‘Look at me, Isis.’
Isis did so and was skewered like a creature on a pin. If she had to keep thinking about it, the feverishness would come back; she could feel it lurking like a bad smell at the fringes of her mind. She just wanted to be left alone and to forget. But Evelyn would not leave her alone, not till she said a name. Someone had been behind her when she’d thought she was alone. Selim? Her memory wavered like torchlight skidding over hieroglyphs. What if it had been Victor, after all? It came back to her how he’d looked in the tomb, the dark yellow of his teeth, like rat’s teeth, and she shuddered.
‘Isis,’ Evelyn insisted.
And so, with great reluctance, she mouthed her uncle’s name.
There was a long silence in which she could hear the drumming of Evelyn’s heart. ‘Are you certain?’ she said at last. Her nostrils gaped as if panicking for air.
Isis nodded once.
‘It’s vital to be certain.’
‘I know.’ Isis shut her eyes, retreating to saffron fuzz.
More silence, not silence, a creaking of bone and sinew, a clicking and swallowing, a scurry of heartbeat, until at last Evelyn crawled out of the tent and it was possible to breathe again. Isis lay looking at an ant walking upside down quite gaily, waving its feelers, and she felt envious of that ant with nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing on its mind.
She turned miserably onto her side, drew her knees up to her chest. Victor would not get into serious trouble, not in the way an Arab would. And she would put it right, as soon as they got home, she would set the story straight. She sipped a little water and let her eyelids close.
Later there was shouting and she lay with her hands over her ears. Apart from staggering out to the WC tent, she lay in a trance all day and no one came to see her until Osi brought her a biscuit and she found some appetite for it – though Mary’s food was what she craved: cheese pudding, perhaps, followed by pink blancmange.
And later still, when sunset flushed the fabric of the tent, she crawled out and blinked. Half the tents had gone by now, and Victor too, of course, and she quailed to think how angry with her he would be, how disappointed. They had always been such chums, such allies. But it would be all right. Once they were back at home she would make it be all right.
‘I am overjoyed to see you so recovered.’ Abdullah bent towards her. Despite the fatness of his lips, his smile was thin and slippery and she shrank from it.
Little Egypt (Salt Modern Fiction) Page 15
