Shadows on the Nile Page 9

  I shut my eyes but you lean over me, so close I can smell your chocolatey breath.

  ‘It was hard on our parents, as well as on you and Jessie,’ you say.

  I push you away from me and roll off the bed. I stand facing the window with its bars, my back to you, and I rub my chest hard with both hands because the pain inside is so sharp.

  ‘Georgie,’ you say softly, ‘what can I do to help?’

  I think about it for a long time. ‘Nothing. Nothing can help. Dr Churchward thinks his needles do. But numbers help more.’

  ‘Numbers?’

  ‘I count.’

  ‘What do you count?’

  ‘I count Jessie’s heartbeats.’

  ‘Oh hell, Georgie, sometimes you scare me.’

  ‘Sometimes I scare myself.’

  Like now. The pain is choking me, squeezing my throat in its grip. My lungs are starved of air, clawing at me, and my vision grows blurred, and I know an episode is coming. It rolls down from my brain, black and suffocating. I am frightened. My hands are shaking and I try to shout to you but no sound emerges. Death dances with heavy feet in my ears. I panic. Panic. Panic …

  My hand seizes one of the heavy Encyclopaedia Britannica volumes piled up on the floor and rams it against the glass pane. The window shatters. Explodes in my face. Fresh clean air slams against my skin but still I can’t breathe, my lungs are collapsing, dark and lifeless, a coal mine inside me. Lights flash and fade. Silence roars into my head.

  I am dying.

  I fall to my knees and feel a whisper of pain. Dimly I am aware of glass snapping like brittle bones under me and I grope blindly for a piece of it, annoyed when it bites my fingers and gouges into my kneecap. I lift a long icicle of glass and start to rake my chest with it. To let in the air. To make a hole for life to crawl back in.

  Your hands are on me. I try to fight them off but my limbs are heavy and slow. I hoist up my eyelids and see you at the end of a long long tunnel. I am shocked to see your cricket whites are covered in blood and your mouth is moving but I hear nothing.

  Nothing.

  Just Jessie’s heartbeat.

  11

  The music throbbed through Jessie’s veins. It took her to new places that set her pulse racing. Up to cliffs she could leap off and all the way down to velvety whirlpools she could dive into. She took a swig of the whisky on the table in front of her and felt it burn away the day’s images that were imprinted on the underside of her eyelids. She started to relax. Stretched out her legs in the small booth, elbows on the table, chin settled on her hand as she listened.

  Something by Duke Ellington, she reckoned, something nice and low. Something to break your heart. The nightclub enveloped her in its twilit world, and she narrowed her eyes with pleasure as a sudden swoop of discordant notes chased each other around the crowded room. It sent a shiver down her spine. Shook her up. Dislodged her thoughts with its strange startling rhythms and sharp spiky edges. She liked it. Liked jazz. Liked the club with its smoke and its laughter and its salty hidden tears.

  And she liked watching Tabitha play. Her flatmate knew how to handle a saxophone: as if it were her lover, caressing it, swaying her slender body close to it, her fingers darting over its silvery skin, her lips pressed to its mouth. Jessie often came to see her friend perform, to admire the way she laid out her soul for all to see, unafraid that it would be trampled on. Tabitha was the only girl on stage, the only white face in the band. The other musicians – on double bass, piano and trumpet – boasted varying shades of dark gleaming skin, as did many of the audience at the tables and tucked into the booths.

  ‘My black brothers,’ Tabitha always called them, flashing her small white teeth.

  ‘Brothers,’ Jessie told her whisky glass, ‘are a commodity worth holding on to.’ She took another stiff swig of the drink. Why was Tabitha clearly a whole lot better at holding on to them than she was?

  ‘Can I bring you a drink?’

  Jessie glanced up. A face hovered close. Too close. Male, with a loose self-indulgent mouth and blue eyes. She was always a sucker for blue eyes.

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘I don’t like to see a lovely young lady on her own.’ The blue eyes sparkled at her.

  ‘I’m not on my own.’

  He looked pointedly at the empty bench opposite her in the booth.

  ‘I’m with a friend,’ she told him and tapped her glass. ‘My whisky.’

  This struck her as so funny she started to laugh and once she’d started she couldn’t stop. Everything seemed to break loose inside her and got all jumbled up. She laughed until fat tears were sliding down her cheeks and her hands flapped the man away from her booth. An elderly waiter waddled over and grinned at her, his curly hair stark white against his black skin.

  ‘You okay, Jessie girl?’

  ‘I’m just fine, Gideon.’ But she accepted the napkin he gave her to mop her face and she hiccupped into it while he went off to fetch her a glass of water. ‘Make it a beer,’ she called after him but he shook his finger at her and chuckled to himself.

  Jessie closed her eyes and let her mind drift on the tide of the music. But however hard she listened, however many times she ran with the notes in an escalating wail of longing, nothing was going to fill the brother-shaped hole inside her. It was too deep. Too turbulent. Too blood-stained. How long she remained like that she had no idea, but when she opened her eyes again a beer stood in front of her and Tabitha was seated on the opposite bench. Someone was playing ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing’. Jessie picked up the beer.

  ‘You got style,’ she told Tabitha. ‘Real classy finger-work.’

  In the near darkness, Tabitha’s pale face seemed to swim above her slinky black gown as if disconnected. The thought brought Jessie up sharp. Is that perhaps what Tim saw at the séance, ghosts in the room, disembodied faces that twisted in and out of his conscious mind? She downed some beer to drown that thought.

  Tabitha stretched out a hand and patted Jessie’s cheek affectionately. ‘You don’t look so good tonight, honey.’

  ‘I’m fine.’ She balanced the words carefully on her tongue. ‘Just fine. It’s Saturday night and I’m out with my good friend.’ She looked for her whisky glass but it had gone, so she offered her beer to Tabitha instead.

  ‘Yeah, thanks.’ Tabitha flicked back her thick plait of black hair, sipped the beer and pulled out an enamelled cigarette case packed with hand-rolled cigarettes. She lit one and dragged the smoke into her lungs with a sigh of pleasure.

  ‘Still up in the castle, are you?’ she laughed.

  ‘It wasn’t a castle,’ Jessie insisted. ‘It was a very magnificent but decrepit mansion.’

  ‘You’re crazy, you know that? Chasing after ghosts.’

  ‘Timothy is not a ghost.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, honey, he’s just gone off for a wild week or two, I bet you. Let him enjoy himself.’

  ‘It’s not like him. Honestly, Tabitha, he’s not like that.’

  ‘People change.’

  Jessie wanted to say, No. No, they don’t. Not really. But she was beginning to doubt how well she knew her brother after today. Who are you, Timothy? How much of yourself have you been hiding from me? She reached for the beer.

  ‘Tell me, Tabitha, do you think Tim has changed?’

  ‘Let it go, Jess. For tonight, just let it go.’

  Jessie leaned back in the booth. ‘You’re right. People do change. Look at you. When I first knew you three years ago, you were struggling.’ She raised the beer in warm salute to her friend. ‘Now look at you. The toast of clubland.’

  ‘Hah! Don’t remind me of those bad days. I couldn’t even afford a decent instrument back then.’

  It was true. The golden sound she coaxed from her sax now was a whole different animal and they both knew how much Jessie had helped her out. Fed her. Dressed her. Driven her to auditions. She had dried her tears and hidden her blasted cigarettes that wiped whole days from her life,
even though Tabitha begged and cursed.

  ‘Those bad days are gone,’ Jessie echoed. ‘You’ve changed.’

  ‘We both have. You’re much …’ Tabitha’s mouth suddenly dropped open. ‘Oh, Christ. Alistair.’

  Jessie shot upright on the bench and her head swivelled sharply. ‘Where?’

  Tabitha burst out laughing. ‘You should see your face! No, he’s not here now. He came in earlier. I’ve only just remembered.’

  ‘Looking for me?’

  ‘’Fraid so, honey. He left a message. Said he’d pick you up at two o’clock tomorrow. Something about an arrangement to go to Kew Gardens.’

  Jessie rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, damn. I have to telephone him to cancel. I’ll be chasing after a medium tomorrow.’ She rose to her feet and picked up her purse. ‘Order me a scotch, will you?’ she said as she clambered out of the booth. ‘I’ll need it after this.’

  As she wove a path through the tables, she heard Tabitha’s laugh behind her.

  ‘I’m sorry, Alistair.’

  Jessie counted to ten in her head, then added, ‘I have to do this tomorrow if I’m going to find my brother. It’s important to me, Alistair. But I promise we’ll go to Kew Gardens another weekend.’

  The silence expanded, trying to unsettle her with short stubby fingers of guilt. She pushed them away and gave a chuckle. ‘Come on, Alistair, don’t fall asleep.’

  The silence burst. ‘Where are you?’ he demanded.

  She looked around her quickly, checking on the dimly lit foyer and the greasy stains on the wallpaper. She thought about saying At home.

  ‘You’re at the Shoes and Blues club, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I knew it.’

  ‘You don’t like jazz,’ she reminded him.

  ‘You could have asked me, anyway.’

  ‘Next time,’ she said. ‘I’ll give you a call during the week.’

  ‘I miss you, Jessie.’

  ‘I know,’ she said gently and blew him a kiss. ‘Goodnight.’

  On impulse – hell, why not? – Jessie picked up the telephone again, pushed more pennies into the slot and dialled. It rang for some time.

  ‘Hello?’ The voice on the other end didn’t sound pleased.

  ‘Hello, Pa.’

  ‘Jessica! What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Have you found him?’

  ‘No.’

  She heard his sharp intake of breath. Imagined him in his striped pyjamas and striped dressing gown, standing at the hall table, pushing his spectacles up his nose with annoyance.

  ‘So why are you calling?’

  ‘I thought you’d want to know that I have traced Tim to somewhere on Friday night where he went to a …’ She hesitated. The word séance felt like a huge balloon in her mouth. It wouldn’t come out.

  ‘Where he went to a what?’ her father urged with impatience.

  ‘To … a meeting.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I don’t know yet.’

  Another silence, as prickly as a fistful of thistles, nudged against her ear.

  ‘Jessica, do you know what time it is now?’

  ‘Er … not exactly.’ She squinted at her wrist-watch but the foyer was too dark. ‘It’s …’ she stumbled on her words, ‘… lateish.’ She fell silent.

  ‘It’s nearly one o’clock in the morning.’

  Damn! It couldn’t be.

  ‘Oh. Sorry, Pa. Did I get you out of bed?’

  ‘Jessica, are you drunk?’

  ‘Of course not, I’m tired. I’ve been running around after Tim all—’

  ‘Go to bed, Jessica,’ her father said tightly. ‘Go home and sleep it off.’

  Without a goodbye, he hung up on her.

  She stared at the piece of black Bakelite in her hand, as if it were responsible for the pain that felt like an axe was carving the back of her head off.

  ‘Goodnight, Pa,’ she whispered into it. ‘Sweet dreams to you too.’

  12

  Jessie knew. The moment she opened the door to her flat, she knew.

  ‘Who’s there?’ she called out.

  The room lay in darkness. She listened intently for movement, the hairs rising at the back of her neck, then flicked the switch, flooding the spaces with light, forcing the shadows into the corners. Her heart hammered in her chest.

  ‘Who’s there?’ she called again.

  As if a burglar would say, Hello, don’t mind me, I’m just rummaging through your cupboards.

  Something touched her ankle, making her jump.

  ‘Jabez!’ she hissed as the cat rubbed its cheek against her shin. The animal seemed unconcerned, uttering a purr of welcome. That was a good sign, unlike the open drawers in the sideboard and the wanton scattering of papers and books on the floor.

  Someone had been here. She searched each room in the flat. They had broken in through the kitchen window which now stood wide open, letting in the dank night air. The cupboards in the kitchen, in the bathroom and in Tabitha’s room were untouched, but in her own bedroom and in the living room every drawer and every cabinet hung open with its contents disturbed.

  Oddly, Jessie wasn’t frightened. She should be. Alone at two o’clock in the morning in an empty flat that had been burgled – she knew she should be scared witless. But she wasn’t. She was angry. Angry and sad. She strode over to the telephone and started to dial the emergency number for the police but she stopped after only the second number. She stood there for a long moment, earpiece in one hand, its cord swaying, thoughts charging through her mind, and then she hung up.

  She couldn’t do it to him.

  Instead she walked into Tabitha’s room, a space he hadn’t violated, and sat down on the bed. Jabez was on her lap in a flash, green eyes half-closed with contentment, his claws kneading through the material of her dress to her skin underneath. A mixture of pleasure and pain. That’s what she felt whenever she let Georgie into her head – pleasure and pain, in unpredictable combinations that she couldn’t control. It could be an ordinary burglar who had done this, of course it could, most probably was. She knew that. But what if it wasn’t? Could she take that risk?

  Because in a hard immutable place in the centre of her brain she was convinced it was Georgie who had tracked her here and broken into her flat. Examined her belongings. Thrown them around. Brought disorder into her life, the same way she had brought chaos into his by not looking after him better when he was a child. By not locking her arms around him and refusing to let him go. Where was she when he cried out for her that night twenty years ago? Sobbing on her carpet. What use was that to a frightened little boy?

  Her breathing came fast and shallow. She did not know how she would feel if she had walked in while Georgie was still here, seeing one of her drawings or even her pillow in his hands. She would want to hold him, to hug him close, to press him back into that precious Georgie-shaped hole that bled inside her, and he would hate that. She tried to imagine his adult face and his adult hands, but couldn’t. They would be a stranger’s face and a stranger’s hands.

  She leaned forward and brushed her cheek against her cat’s silken fur. ‘Did you see him?’ she whispered into the pointed black ear. ‘Did he touch you?’

  Jabez purred and closed his eyes on his secrets.

  Do you have a cat, Georgie? Can you tolerate such contact now?

  Not for a minute did Jessie think there would be pink clouds of happiness if they met now. He must hate her. She had abandoned him. And sometimes she hated him. Because … the words struggled to form in her head … because if he had acted just a bit more like a normal brother and done the small things she had told him to do, like let Ma touch his hair once in a while or not tell Pa his breath stank like a cowpat after a cigarette, they would have let her keep him. None of this need have happened. That’s why – sometimes – she hated Georgie.

  It took her over an hour to tidy up the mess and there was nothing missing that she
could see, but by the time Tabitha arrived home with her yawns and tousled black hair released from its plait, the flat was back to its usual state.

  ‘What are you doing up at this hour?’ Tabitha asked as she flopped down on the sofa, kicking off her shoes and stretching her feet up on the cushion.

  Outside, the night had turned raw and the air hung black and matted with fog. The flames of the gas fire murmured quietly to themselves as though drifting off to sleep.

  ‘Not in the mood to sleep,’ Jessie said cheerfully and vanished into the kitchen. She returned a few minutes later with a cup of milky cocoa for them both and a ginger biscuit for Tabitha.

  ‘Thanks,’ Tabitha said and dunked the biscuit in her drink, her eyes on Jessie. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Huh!’ Tabitha sipped her cocoa. ‘Tell me, Jess, what’s got your eyes so bright all of a sudden? Met someone special on the way home, did you?’

  ‘Don’t be foolish,’ Jessie laughed. It sounded almost convincing. ‘I’m just on edge about tomorrow. Each day that goes by, Tim could be in worse trouble, needing my help.’

  With a lazy grin Tabitha rolled her eyes and pointed her biscuit at Jessie. ‘You’re crazy, you know that?’

  ‘That’s not the way to talk to someone who has just brought you a life-sustaining cocoa.’

  Steam from their cups drifted between them, warm and sweet-smelling.

  ‘It’s not your job, this seeking for Timothy. He may be your brother, but you’re not his keeper.’

  You’re not his keeper. How wrong could she be?

  ‘Of course it’s my job.’

  ‘It’s not. It’s your father’s and your mother’s. Or it’s the job of the police. Not yours.’ Abruptly Tabitha swung her feet to the floor and leaned forward, the tips of her elbows balanced on her knees. ‘I don’t want to see you get your fingers burnt, honey. Honestly I don’t. Stay out of it.’

  The sudden severity of her friend’s tone and the sharpness in her dark eyes startled Jessie.