The Book of the Dead

by Carriger, Gail

  “How’s the Met, Daz? Shot any ethnic minorities lately?”

  “I’m not armed response, I’m regular police. I don’t shoot anyone.”

  Amunet lights her cigarette and presses ahead of me.

  “You still snorting cocaine off your boss’ cock every weekend?” She pitches this question at Yvonne as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. Yvonne shivers, her smile has weakened somewhat.

  “I don’t do that anymore,” she says quietly.

  “The coke or the married men?” Amunet smiles like a scalpel.

  “You still fucking unsigned musicians and complaining about ‘the establishment’.” Yvonne actually makes the quote signs on the air as she says it.

  “Not nearly enough of the first,” Amunet winks at the taller woman, “and always too much of the latter.” She blows out a plume of cigarette smoke. “What else is there?”

  “Did you forget the way to Jeremy’s house?” I ask innocently, but Yvonne bristles all the same.

  “I was waiting for you two. I didn’t want to walk there alone. What with the jackals.”

  Amunet and I stare at each other and then burst out laughing for what feels like five minutes.

  “I think I need a TENA Lady,” gasps Amunet, struggling to contain her giggles.

  “The what?” I manage, trying to compose myself.

  “The jackals.” Yvonne speaks, as if to very young, profoundly deaf children. “Three of them escaped from London Zoo. Egyptian ones.” She gives Amunet a piecing look, as if the art student is responsible for the missing beasts.

  “Ah, I was wondering how long I’d have to wait for the casual racism.”

  “Fine, but you won’t be laughing so much if they cross the Thames. Jackals in south London –” Anything else Yvonne says is drowned out by the hooting and howling of, not jackals, but one Amunet Kebechet and PC Darren Butler (off duty).

  We walk in uncompanionable silence, although I try and chip away at the frosty facade Yvonne has put up. She is not an easy conversationalist these days. Gone is her carefree demeanour and self-deprecating humour. Her company strips the assets from failing businesses. Her favourite band is Coldplay. She reads the Mail and holidays in Spain so she doesn’t have to eat “any of that foreign shit”. One of the reasons I like Yvonne is because, even as a member of the much maligned Metropolitan Police Force, she makes me look good.

  We reach the apartment without Amunet or Yvonne exchanging anything more deadly than looks. I rap on the door and drag in an anxious breath. Maybe this will be the yearly get together to end them all. There’s a sort of masochistic streak that compels you to keep measuring yourself against old school friends. Especially old school friends who are no longer friends. And I say this as an expert on masochism. I am, after all, police.

  Jeremy opens the door to his apartment and is haloed with the light in the hall. He is everything I am not. Over six feet of Oxbridge educated, sandy blonde, tanned, suave motherfucker. I’m not being unkind. He did actually bed Jack Durant’s mum after the Sixth Form Prom one year.

  Ergo: motherfucker.

  My parents split up when I was fifteen. I never invited Jeremy over to my place after that. I just couldn’t take the chance.

  Jeremy is a Risk Manager for a large bank that couldn’t afford a name after the bail out and settled for initials instead.

  “Darren, you little fucker!” he bellows at something approaching stadium rock band volume. He has traces of white powder in the stubble on his top lip. His pupils are dilated and I’m willing to bet money that there is a ring of lipstick around his cock. Left there by the prostitute who has spent most of the afternoon in his apartment.

  “Hey, Jeremy, long time no –”

  But I get no further than that as he bear hugs me, sloshing what feels like half a pint of red wine over my shirt. My white shirt. The one I bought because I thought Amunet might like it. Which is clearly bollocks, as she wears nothing but black.

  “Terribly sorry,” says Jeremy. And he means it. “Come in and I’ll lend you one of mine.” He knocks back the remainder of the glass. He drinks not like the proverbial fish but rather the entire shoal.

  “Shirts are in there,” he gestures blindly to the bedroom. I change into a shirt I could never afford and will likely end up keeping because Jeremy will be too wasted to remember I’ve borrowed it. I emerge from his room, buttoning on his Jermyn Street shirt, just in time to see him sweep Amunet up in his arms, squeezing her close. She shrieks and giggles and just for a second I wish I had access to a Taser.

  “Get off me, you filthy Tory pig!” giggles Amunet. Jeremy lowers her to the ground tenderly.

  “Moon, you fantastic rebel,” he slurs, “shouldn’t you have been sold off for fifty camels by now?”

  “All the camels got foot and mouth,” she deadpans, “so we burnt them all.”

  “Really? What, every camel in Egypt? How will anyone get married?”

  “No, of course not. Where is the booze, you sexist fuck?”

  Jeremy leads us into the lounge. I assume he has greeted Yvonne, who is glowering at Amunet. Her face only softens when Jeremy flashes a look in her direction.

  The lounge is outfitted in oversized mahogany and jet-black appliances with a single remote to rule them all. Jeremy once famously said, and I quote, “IKEA is what happens to people in lower tax brackets”. Yvonne found this hilarious, I laughed despite myself, and Amunet raised an eyebrow, telling him she slept on a mattress on the floor, because furniture was lifestyle propaganda and fuck the dictates of consumerism, etc. etc.

  The coffee table looks like the sort of thing that escaped from the set of Tron: Legacy, all obsidian black glass in an abstract design. A design that has been lost due to large amounts of coke now smeared across the surface like fresh snow.

  “I sometimes wonder if me being the fuzz means anything to you at all,” I mutter. Jeremy actually hears me to my surprise.

  “It’s only a little bit.” He shrugs an apology.

  “Jeremy, that’s half of Bolivia on your fucking coffee table.”

  He shrugs again.

  Wine glasses wait for us. And some olives from Waitrose, which are likely out of date, knowing Jeremy. The television sheds a wavering blue light, the people on the screen are silent as ghosts, muted by Jeremy’s remote.

  “The magic wand,” he says gleefully.

  For a second we all stare at the screen. Armed police are escorting three handcuffed men from a house.

  “Probably terrorists,” mutters Yvonne. The scrolling graphics at the bottom of the screen say something about a museum, but I fail to read the whole thing as Amunet is placing a glass of wine in my hand and flashing a rare smile at me.

  “Sure you don’t want a line of the good stuff, Daz?” presses Jeremy.

  “The minute I touch that is the minute they decide to do a random drug test next time I clock on.” I look into my wine glass, blood red in the dim light of Jeremy’s lounge. “That’s a conversation I could do without.”

  Jeremy is not deterred by my refusal and he changes tack.

  “Come on, Moon. You’re an artist. It’s practically law you get fucked on any substance you can get your hands on.”

  Amunet has taken a place on the couch. She looks small and birdlike next to Yvonne. The moment doesn’t last. Yvonne slides onto her knees over the coffee table, brandishing a banknote.

  “I don’t know,” mutters Amunet, swirling her wine. “I’ve never done it before. You always say coke gives you abundance of confidence and arrogance. That it makes you want to talk about yourself.”

  “Yes!” exclaim Yvonne and Jeremy like evangelists. Yvonne pinches her nose, blinks a few times, and then shakes her shoulders in a chemical shiver.

  “How do you know when it’s worn off?” asks Amunet, but neither of them registers the barb as they stare at the television. They are talking over each other, gabbling about what they are seeing sliding across the vast panorama of Jeremy’s scr
een.

  “Bloody terrorists,” mutters Yvonne again, like scratched vinyl.

  “They’re not Islamic extremists,” grates Amunet. “They’re Egyptians.”

  We all look at her. She never discusses race, or rather she discusses racism, but never being Egyptian.

  “And that,” she flicks a finger toward the screen, “is the British Museum.”

  Sure enough, the many columns of that huge edifice loom large on the screen. The camera cuts to the interior, where sections of an exhibit are sealed off with tape. Amunet reaches over and touches my knee lightly.

  “Do you know anything?”

  I shrug. “Somebody stole some jars?” Another shrug. “Not really my area.” I am, after all, a beat cop. It’s my job to give directions to tourists, apprehend pickpockets, and occasionally get spat on.

  “Canopic jars,” says Amunet in a small voice. A second later they are flashed up on the television. Jeremy pauses the image with his black wand.

  “Oh, they’re nice. Do you think they sell them in Habitat?” asks Yvonne, before hoovering up another line from the coffee table. I notice Jeremy is using this moment to get a good eyeful of her arse as she bends over.

  “The one with the jackal head, that’s Duamutef. His consort is the goddess Neith.”

  “Was she sexy, this goddess?” asks Jeremy, managing to pry his eyes from Yvonne’s behind.

  “She was a war goddess.” Amunet turns to me. “They’d place the stomach in that jar. You know, before embalming and mummification.”

  I nod, feeling like I’ve dragged up a seat in class with a favourite teacher.

  “That one’s got a monkey face!” blurts Jeremy.

  “It’s a baboon. That’s Hapi.”

  “Feeling pretty happy myself, right now,” sighs Yvonne. She exchanges a look with Jeremy and they are both dissolve into giggles.

  “They’d put the lungs in that jar.”

  “And did Hapi have a consort?” I ask, keen for her to keep talking. Amunet smiles, clearly warming to the subject, and her captive audience. Of one at least.

  “Yes. Nephthys. Some regard her as the mother of Anubis. The other jar is Imseti,” she says, before I can ask her who Anubis is. “I don’t know much about Imseti, but I think they put the liver in that jar.”

  She plucks at her lip a moment before continuing.

  “The last one is a falcon-headed God. But I’m fucked if I can ever pronounce his name. They put the intestines in that jar. Selket protected him, she was something to do with scorpions.” She bites her lip. “I don’t know.” She drinks from her glass and looks sad.

  Jeremy has unpaused the television, and now the image is focused on the three Egyptian men. Jeremy has become very quiet; his face has taken on a haunted look. Yvonne, however, continues to yap on excitedly, any self-censorship she possessed has been stripped away by the coke. She is confessing and expounding all manner of mental debris I’d rather not listen to.

  “Fuck it,” says Amunet, “you only live once.” She slides off the couch onto the floor and takes the note up from the table, pressing one finger to her opposite nostril in the time-honoured fashion.

  “That’s the spirit!” Exclaims Yvonne.

  A white line disappears.

  “Remind me why we became friends?” I say quietly enough that only Amunet can hear me.

  “Because we were either too rich, or too weird to be friends with anyone else at school. Except you.” She sniffs, and then smiles. “You were the one member of this group that brought us some normality.”

  I am normal. Amunet Kebechet has just damned me to an eternity of faint praise. I find myself wishing fervently for reincarnation. And that’s when I spot them.

  The canopic jars.

  The canopic jars that have just been on BBC News 24. Displayed on a bookshelf behind Amunet.

  “How did you come by those?” I ask casually.

  “Just keeping them for a friend.” Jeremy smiles like a man who has just shat his pants and is trying to act like nothing is wrong. “He said they were props for a film he’s making.” Jeremy is many things, but a good liar isn’t one of them.

  “Just pretend that I’m police for a minute,” I say, “and that I can smell bullshit a mile off.” Jeremy becomes pale. I set my wine glass down.

  “They,” Jeremy points at the screen, “were going to smuggle all this charlie into Egypt in those jars. But the museum freaked out when the jars went missing. We were stuck with stolen artefacts and more coke than Pablo Escobar.”

  Yvonne is looking up at the shelves with a looking of growing horror on her face.

  “That is some overly complicated scheming, Jeremy,” I say.

  “Apparently so.” He actually manages to look sheepish.

  “Didn’t Moon say they keep lungs and intestines in those jars?” whispers Yvonne.

  “Well, yeah,” says Jeremy, “but there was nothing in them when I stored the coke inside. Just a bit of grey dust.”

  “Jeremy! You’re a fucking idiot.” I sound harsh, even to myself, but I can’t believe what he’s done.

  “It was just dust,” he repeats, but the conviction has been pulled from him. Yvonne is crying, nose bleeding.

  “You’ve just managed to cut your cocaine with a dead Pharaoh.” I want to laugh, but there’s only so much gallows humour I can stand.

  “Moon, are you OK? You’re very quiet.”

  She’s sitting on the floor, slumped against the couch, and has been throughout Jeremy’s confession. Her hands lay idle in her lap and her hair has come unwound from the usual chaos, lying about her face in its rainbow profusion.

  “You will address me as Sobeknofru.” Amunet stands, but she is no longer the girl I knew from school. Her eyes are the deep brown of coffee, and the muted shadow that lingers on the wall behind her looks for all the world as if it has a canine head.

  “We have come through a period of great disturbance and unrest, but I, and I alone will lead us out of these times of anarchy.”

  “There haven’t been any riots in London for a couple of years now. It’s hardly ‘anarchy’,” grumbles Jeremy.

  “I will succeed where my sister Ammenemes failed.”

  Amunet, Moon, Sobeknofru, who ever she thinks she is right now, takes off her t-shirt, tying it around her head in an intricate knot.

  “Moon, you’re really freaking me out,” says Yvonne, pressing a tissue to her bloody nose, “smoke some weed or something and have a lie down.”

  “She’s right,” I say, “Just take a minute. There’s no knowing what you’ve just snorted. No wonder you’re a little spaced out.” But the words die on my lips as she turns to face me. She holds herself differently, gone is the art student slouch. The bored sneer has been replaced with an indignant and imperious look. Her hands are folded neatly together, rather than stuffed into the pockets of her jeans. My mouth goes dry as she stares at me.

  “There is no Moon,” the voice that escapes Amunet’s lips bears a harsh accent, “only Sobeknofru. Let all regard me and promise loyalty. I am as fit to rule as any man.”

  “That’s what Thatcher said,” says Jeremy, “and look how that ended.”

  But it’s too late for humour. The three of them are indelibly marked with the fucked-upness of the canopic jars. Sobeknofru drifts to the kitchen with the gait of one who is sleepwalking.

  “Not exactly challenging the patriarchy there, Soberk-nufferu, ruling from the kitchen and all.” Jeremy has rediscovered a seam of his usual bluster, but his confidence is short-lived as Sobeknofru re-enters the lounge with a stainless steel carving knife as long as her forearm.

  “Moon! Put the knife down,” I say. I try to stand up. The prospect of tackling a coked-up, knife-wielding art student is not how I had hoped my Saturday night would play out. My legs refuse to obey. My arms feel as if they have been pressed to my sides.

  Jeremy remains standing, but has sagged, like a man collapsing in on himself. Yvonne has covered her face with
her hands, crying over and over, which means she doesn’t see the knife plunge into her chest.

  “Moon, no!” I plead, but it’s done. I try to move but my legs are numb, arms leaden, chest constricted with fear and helplessness.

  Once.

  Twice.

  Three times.

  The blade is bathed in crimson to the hilt. Yvonne’s arms fall to her side, her mouth falling open in an anguished silent howl. A pool of blood is staining the carpet red, matching Moon’s arms, bloodied to the elbows like evening gloves. Jeremy collapses to the floor, crawling behind the couch as expletives wither on his lips.

  “I will have loyalty,” whispers Sobeknoferu.

  “I can’t move,” I breathe.

  “Sorry,” cries Jeremy, “I put diazepam in the wine. I thought it would be funny.”

  His voice is that of a small boy, hiding behind the couch from the feature film monster. Except the monster in our midst is no monster at all. She is a woman, a woman who lived a few thousand years ago. A woman called Sobeknoferu.

  Or an Egyptian art student having a massive reaction to her first line of coke.

  Yvonne bleeds out with a whimper; her eyes grow dim and unfocused.

  “Christ, Moon, what have you done?”

  The television continues to flicker, Amunet is lit in a spectral blue that only adds to the strange atmosphere. She takes up the remote, dropped by Jeremy in his flight behind the sofa. A flick of her wrist and the television goes black; the room is plunged into darkness.

  I struggle to stand, but can only stumble forwards out of the chair, landing on my knees. The room is silent except for the ragged breathing of Jeremy behind the couch. I limply drag myself forwards and promptly ram my shoulder on the coffee table. My hand presses into something wet, Yvonne’s blood.

  Jeremy is whimpering loudly on each exhalation, like a beaten dog. It is the worst sound I have ever heard, made all the more so for the fact it comes from Jeremy.

  Jeremy the brash, the confident.

  Jeremy the lad, unbeatably assured.