11

AFTER A LONG argument with Akil and much spitting on the ground, Haru took them to a quite different class of establishment from the Hotel Cecil. There was no cool marble in this place; it was a low dark room, packed with men sucking smoke through bubbling tubes, men who stared at them all, but mostly at Isis. Her dress was too tight round the chest and stained under the arms with sweat, and it was too hot for stockings so her legs were bare to the knee. Akil had gone off somewhere, and Haru and Victor stood at a counter drinking tiny cups of coffee, while Isis and Osi sat on cushions before a low table drinking something sticky sweet from bleary glasses.

There was an argument going on at the bar, and even though Victor had taken a pill, Isis could see that he was agitated, face twitching to one side, which she recognised as a danger sign, and what would she do if he lost control among all these strangers? There were flies buzzing around the sweet drink and she felt one tickling her upper lip and smacked it away so hard she hurt herself.

‘Ow. Oh Lord preserve us,’ she said, comforted by using a Maryish expression. ‘What are we going to do?’

There was a fly crawling on his lips too.

‘Get that fly off you,’ she said.

He looked at her and sipped his drink and another fly joined it, one at each corner of his mouth. ‘I don’t mind,’ he said.

Isis looked hard at her drink. She didn’t know the taste, it would be something tropical, she expected. ‘Lost in Egypt,’ she said.

‘We’re not lost with Victor here,’ Osi said.

Isis widened her eyes at his faith in Victor.

‘Is it how you imagined?’ she asked him. ‘Egypt?’

‘We’ve seen enough photographs to have given me a good idea,’ he said. His voice sounded like Arthur’s, sensible and grown-up and measured, but his eyes darted about and she was gratified that he too seemed uneasy.

‘I hope they’re are all right,’ she said, watching for his expression. ‘What if . . .’

‘They’re right on the brink of discovery. Perhaps even –’

‘But they can’t not come! You can’t send halfway across the world for your children then not bother to meet them!’ Isis’ voice rose and she sensed a prickling of interest amongst the men. ‘If only Mary were here,’ she added quietly.

‘What could she do?’ Osi was clenching and unclenching his fists and then pulling the lobes of his ears, a childish habit Isis had supposed him grown out of.

She breathed deeply to quell her rising panic and her airways filled with tarry scented smoke. ‘It’s rather thrilling, don’t you think,’ she said with a desperate smile, ‘being somewhere you don’t know and not knowing what’s going to happen next?’ The idea of Mary being here was a stupid one, anyway. Victor was a man of the world, after all; she should trust him. What would Mary know about being lost in Egypt?

Her hands felt dirty and she grew more and more uncomfortable and distracted by her need for the lavatory. Victor was drinking something from a small glass now, and refusing to catch her eye. Haru was slumped across the bar talking earnestly and laughing, she saw him punch someone on the arm and it was the kind of punch, done with the kind of laugh, that could have been a joke or a threat, you couldn’t tell. Akil had come back and was crouched with the other men, sucking smoke through a bubbling pipe. There were no women in the bar, Isis noticed, which probably meant they didn’t have a place for ladies to pay a visit, and in any case, she didn’t feel she could walk about in here, better to stay as small and unobtrusive as possible in the shadows.

She began to play patience, dealing the cards out in seven columns. If it came out right by the fifth time, everything would all be all right, and by tonight they’d have met Evelyn and Arthur. It would all turn out to be a silly misunderstanding and then there they’d be with egg on their faces but none the worse. One day it might be a funny story, something she could tell her children: the time we were lost in Egypt! It’ll all come out in the wash, Mary would say. No black queen, no red seven. She reshuffled for another try.

Osi took out a book and sat with his head over it, gnawing the joints of both thumbs; the spitty scraping of his teeth was maddening. Over and over she got stuck with the patience, kneeling with legs pressed tightly together as the pressure in her bladder grew. The cards picked up a stickiness from the table, the top of which was made of leather tooled with patterns, once gold, but now ingrained with blackish grease. Isis squirmed and dealt again, looking pleadingly over at Victor who ignored her.

Her stomach felt swollen with urine, it was as if a wire was twisting inside her and she felt as if something would break if she couldn’t relieve herself soon. She had no choice but to get up, legs fizzing with pins and needles, and cross the room to pull on Victor’s sleeve. He started and gawped around him as if he’d just woken up. She whispered her need and he shouted to the man behind the bar, ‘My niece needs the toilet,’ so the whole room could hear, and using that dreadful common word, too. Isis was so hot and uncomfortable already that she couldn’t blush any more and she needed to press her fist between her legs, but she could not do that.

Haru grabbed her by the arm and took her through a curtain made of swinging chains and out into a yard where there was a wooden box, like a coffin on its end. ‘There.’ He shoved her towards it.

There was a sound like thunder coming from the place and such a stink she had to open her mouth to breathe and that meant she could taste the filthy air. It was dark except for streaks of light leaking through gaps in the wood, but she didn’t want to see anyway. She pulled her underwear aside and let the urine out in a hot torrent, splashing down the insides of her legs and wetting her shoes as flies zizzed and needled around her face. For a moment there was the bliss of relief, but there was nowhere to wash her hands and she grew afraid of all the germs that there must surely be. Mary said foreign germs were worse and stronger than English ones and you could hear them in here vibrating like something about to boil right over. And now she had to go back and everyone would know where she’d been and the pale leather of her shoes was darkly splattered.

‘We should leave here,’ she told Haru. ‘This is not the place for us.’

He looked down at her, his dark eyes seeming to suck up the light. She noticed how thick his lashes were, each one shiny and live like an insect’s antennae. He considered for a moment before he said: ‘And where would you have us go?’

‘To the boat,’ she said. ‘If they won’t come here, then something important must have held them up, and we’ll simply have to go to them. It’s what they would expect.’ She wiped her hands on her dress and lifted her chin.

Haru kept his serious gaze on her for a moment longer, and then his head went back and he shouted a laugh. ‘It’s what they would expect,’ he said. ‘Well, maybe you’re not so wrong.’

He led the way back into the café, which seemed darker now, and she kept her head high, ignoring the bright sparks of eyes and grinning teeth that flickered through the gloom. Haru and Akil issued the three of them out of the café and into the street, where the sudden brightness made Isis stagger.

Victor was staggering too, for different reasons, and Isis took one arm and Haru the other. ‘So we will go to the boat,’ Haru said. ‘And I must spend my own money for this.’

‘They’ll be sure to pay you, the minute we see them,’ Isis said.

‘They will be sure to,’ Haru said, and he was not smiling now. ‘What can I do?’ He turned to Akil and shrugged and talked Arabic, until Akil nodded and looked up, for the first time, looked properly first at Isis, then at Osi, then at Victor. And then his eyes came back to Isis, and again he nodded.