Little Egypt (Salt Modern Fiction) Read online

  Little Egypt

  Little Egypt was once a well-to-do country house in the north of England. Now it’s derelict and trapped on a small island of land between a railway, a dual carriageway and a superstore, and although it looks deserted it isn’t. Nonagenarian twins, Isis and Osiris, still live in the home they were born in, and from which in the 1920s their obsessive Egyptologist parents left them to search for the fabled tomb of Herihor – a search from which they never returned. Isis and Osiris have stayed in the house, guarding a terrible secret, for all their long lives until chance meeting between Isis and young American anarchist Spike, sparks an unlikely friendship and proves a catalyst for change.

  Praise for Lesley Glaister

  “Pick almost any paragraph on any page in any of Lesley Glaister’s great fat pile of nine novels and you’ll spot a combination of words snazzy enough to make your heart sing. ” —Julie Myerson The Guardian

  “Crime writing of the highest order, creepy ... with satisfying fits of the shivers.” Sunday Times

  “Glaister’s rounded gift is to show life as it really is.” Independent on Sunday

  “Glaister has the the uncomfortable knack of putting her finger on things we most fear, of exposing the darkness within.” Independent on Sunday

  “Glaister’s novels always appear to be as effortless for her to write as they for us to read.” The Times

  Little Egypt

  LESLEY GLAISTER is the prize-winning author of twelve novels, most recently, Chosen. Her stories have been anthologised and broadcast on Radio 4. She has written drama for radio and stage. Lesley is a Fellow of the RSL, teaches creative writing at the University of St Andrews and lives in Edinburgh.

  By the same author

  NOVELS

  Chosen (Tindal Street Press 2010)

  Losing It (Sandstone Press 2007)

  Nina Todd Has Gone (Bloomsbury 2007)

  As Far As You Can Go (Bloomsbury 2004)

  Now You See Me (Bloomsbury 2001)

  Sheer Blue Bliss (Bloomsbury 1999)

  Easy Peasy (Bloomsbury 1998)

  The Private Parts of Women (Bloomsbury 1996)

  Partial Eclipse (Hamish Hamilton 1994)

  Limestone and Clay (Secker and Warburg 1993)

  Digging to Australia (Secker and Warburg 1992)

  Trick or Treat (Secker and Warburg 1990)

  Honour Thy Father (Secker and Warburg 1990)

  ANTHOLOGIES (as editor)

  Are You She? (Tindal Street Press 2004)

  Published by Salt Publishing Ltd

  12 Norwich Road, Cromer, Norfolk NR27 0AX

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © Lesley Glaister, 2014

  The right of Lesley Glaister to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Salt Publishing.

  Salt Publishing 2014

  Created by Salt Publishing Ltd

  This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  ISBN 978 1 84471 997 6 electronic

  For Andrew, once again

  PART ONE

  SPIKE’S A THIN streak of a boy, American, with silver studs in his face and ears, pale matted snakes of hair, and a distinct whiff of the vegetable about him. He hitchhikes when he needs to travel, or else he walks. He doesn’t believe in money – marvellous!

  We met when he sprang from a skip and landed right in front of me in a tumble of rolling oranges. I screeched and clutched my trolley handle, frightened half to death. He was all solicitation and apology – charm, I’d go as far as to say. We were in the service area behind the supermarket and I’d caught him ‘dumpster diving’.

  U-Save throws out huge quantities of perfectly good food just because it’s out of date. A sinful waste and shame, I say, and have said, but do they take heed? Once I’d regained my composure, Spike showed me his haul and offered me a caramel doughnut – delightful. And then he climbed back into the skip and called things out:

  ‘Carrots? Hummus? Tiramisu?’ and if I said yes he passed them to me and I added them to my trolley. I’ve seen him regularly since then and the same has happened, which does save money, but really the fun is in the sport of it, don’t you know? If I could climb and spring about like Spike I’d do it myself. The beauty of it is that you never know what’s coming next. I’ve been introduced to all sorts of new delights that way: panacotta, globe artichokes, sushi, chicken satay on most useful pointed skewers.

  Spike became a friend to me – like an angel, you might say – and it was Spike who set me free.

  We were sitting on a doorstep in the service area sharing a tub of Kalamata olives. (Not the most salubrious place. Here they keep the bins and skips and bales of flattened boxes. Here the dual carriageway roars above you and occasionally a hubcap or paper coffee cup or strip of rubber tyre flies down. Here stray cats yowl and prowl – there’s plenty of vermin to keep them fed. And here too, the smokers among the U-Save staff emerge to puff on their cigarettes. I’ve spotted I’m Doreen how may I help you?, the sourest faced person I’ve ever met, puffing away there. Seeing me with Spike caused her orange-pencilled eyebrows to shoot into her hairline. Most gratifying.)

  It was a late September day, still quite warm, and I’d rolled up my trouser legs to sun my shins – flaky and crinkled and mapped with veins. However did they get like that? Each time he finished an olive Spike ejected the stone forcefully from between his lips, aiming for an empty beer-tin, but overshooting. I told him he was blowing too hard; he demonstrated that if he blew more softly the stone simply dropped onto his legs. ‘Well, move the tin further away then, dear,’ I suggested, but he merely frowned and desisted from his game.

  We turned to the subject of dreams – in the sense of ambition. His I found grand but disappointingly vague: peace, love, equality, and so on. Visions of the world as it could be. As he waxed lyrical I watched the nervous fidget of his hands – fingers young and straight but stained from smoking, painfully bitten nails.

  When the olives were gone, he rolled himself a cigarette. ‘What’s your dream then, Sisi?’

  (You see how I reverse my name? How much more comfortable it’s made, by such a simple flip.)

  ‘To leave,’ I said, nodding towards my home.

  ‘And go where?’

  ‘Sunset Lodge. Once I’ve sold up.’

  He snorted his derision, but I indulged myself once more in describing the luxury I’d seen in the brochures: reclining armchairs, vast televisions, tempting menus, alternative therapists, a dedicated ‘friend’, parties, seasonal entertainment and a 3-star suite for visitors.

  Spike ground out his cigarette and fiddled with the packet of tobacco. ‘Don’t give in to the fuckers now,’ he said.

  ‘You asked my dream,’ I pointed out.

  We sat in a silence that almost approached the prickly for a while, until he broke it.

  ‘They still hassling you?’

  I shook my head, which was a lie. Stephen, the latest of the developers’ representatives,
waits for me twice a week in the U-Save café where I go each morning for my coffee. I conduct all my business in the café rather than let anyone into the house. (Osi would go berserk at such an invasion.) The U-Save Consortium propose to buy Little Egypt – the last remnant of the family property – to raze to the ground and erect what they call a ‘mega-homestore’ and it’s Stephen’s task to win me over.

  From the scattered litter, Spike picked up a glossy leaflet advertising this week’s special offers and skimmed it, scoffing. ‘Thirty-six fishy nuggets – buy two get one free – that’s 108 fishy nuggets. The oceans will be fished-out before they’re finished.’

  ‘And think of all those fish without their nuggets!’ I jested, but he didn’t laugh.

  ‘What if,’ I said, ‘now don’t go getting on your high horse, dear, but what if a person did want to sell a property to someone like, say, U-Save.’

  ‘Then they’d want their fucking heads examined.’

  He moved to a crouch as if about to spring away, but I caught his arm. ‘But what if, for instance, there was something there, something hidden that got uncovered, dug up, say, during the building work?’

  He cocked his head at me and squinted. ‘Like Roman ruins and stuff?’

  ‘Mmm,’ I said, ‘or a corpse, something in that line?’

  There was a chink of silver against tooth as he puffed out his lip. ‘Huh, they’d cover it up and you’d never know. Think they’d let anything get in the way of profit?’

  Though he was not to know it, these were the magic words that freed me. It was a thought quite new, a revelation. Ever since . . . well for all the years, all these years I’ve supposed that we could never leave, that once it was discovered we’d go to prison; Osi, certainly, and perhaps me, too. That’s what Victor believed and left me believing.

  I needed to be back home to test the thought. To be alone. If Spike was right, then we could sell and go. Could it really be so? But what of Osi? I flailed about until Spike hauled me to my feet. (My knees are really dreadful, the left in particular. You can get new ones, I hear, though not, so far, at U-Save.)

  ‘You really think so?’ I asked him.

  ‘I fucking know so,’ said he.

  1

  ISIS WANDERED INTO her parents’ bedroom, stretched out on the stripped, stained mattress and stared at the ceiling. She could hear a faint stipple of birdsong from outside and Mary banging round the house with her broom – she was always in a temper when Evelyn and Arthur left, till she got things ship-shape. Apart from that it was quiet, except for the usual creaking and settling of the house, as if it too breathed and shifted into another mood with the departure.

  From where Isis lay, the wardrobe mirror reflected only a dull blue swatch of cloud. Crushed in behind it were all the gowns and frocks that Evelyn shunned, preferring trousers – often Arthur’s own. When she was small, Isis had sometimes crept in to watch her parents dress. They hadn’t cared and went on just as if she wasn’t there at all. As they’d talked – usually about bloody Egypt – Arthur would stride about, hair stamped across his chest like two grubby footprints, thing jiggling and sometimes jabbing out like a fried sausage. Evelyn’s bosoms were like empty socks, her belly hair a puff of mould. The hard muscles in her long shins reminded Isis of the fetlocks of a horse.

  Sometimes Isis pictured her mother as a horse, of the thin haughty variety, and Arthur as a big whiskery dog, trotting obediently at her heels.

  They had left in high spirits, convinced more than ever that this time, after all the years, all the false trails, all the disappointments, they would find the tomb of Herihor. Evelyn said she felt it in her bones, and Arthur always expressed great faith in her bones. Besides, they had a new guide now, a Mr Abdullah, a topping fellow who really knew his onions.

  Their leave-taking had been the usual kerfuffle of luggage and lists and last minute panics, the scrunching of wheels on gravel – and swearing this time, when Arthur broke the tread of the third stair while lugging down a trunk. And then the quiet. Only now a trapped fly began to buzz and bat itself against the window and Isis roused herself to let the poor thing out.

  She paused to finger the ornaments on the sill – a shiny black scarab, its base covered in minute columns of hieroglyphs; an ankh of lapis lazuli, and her favourite, Bastet, a cat-headed woman, gold inlaid with turquoise and lapis and carnelian. This last really belonged in the British Museum in Arthur’s opinion, but these were Evelyn’s special treasures.

  Once the house had been full of Grandpa’s collection of Egyptian statues and ornaments, even an enormous gilded mummy case at the turn of the stairs, but over the years Evelyn and Arthur had sold almost anything of value to raise money for their quest.

  Snarling through the quiet came the sound of an engine and Isis peered out of the window in time to see the drawing up of a low, bright yellow motorcar. Once it had stopped, the figure inside, like a gigantic insect in hat and goggles, sat motionless staring up at Little Egypt.

  ‘It’s Uncle Victor!’ Isis cried as she pelted down the stairs.

  For days, Victor, Evelyn’s twin, had been expected back from the nursing home, where he’d been ever since the war. He was still unfolding himself from the motor as Isis launched herself at him, rubbing her face against the stiff twill of his jacket, ‘Oh I’m so glad,’ she said, ‘so, so glad.’

  ‘Steady on,’ he said. ‘By God Icy! You’ve grown!’

  ‘‘Well we haven’t seen you for years!’ She stepped back from him. He seemed smaller than she remembered and rather old and stooped. ‘We’d almost given up on you,’ she added.

  He took off the goggles and helmet and tilted back his head. ‘Good to see the old place again,’ he said. ‘Didn’t always think I would.’ He blinked. ‘Where is everyone?’

  ‘They’ve only just gone,’ Isis said, ‘literally. This morning. Evelyn hated to go without seeing you – but they had to catch their boat.’

  ‘But she wrote they’d be here till the 27th.’

  ‘That was the day before yesterday,’ Isis said. ‘Our birthday, we’re thirteen now,’ she reminded him.

  Before the war, when they were small, Victor had never forgotten the twins’ birthday, always sending something silly and expensive – and nothing to do with Egypt. As the only other person in the family who wasn’t obsessed by Ancient Egypt, Victor was her ally.

  ‘Blast,’ Victor said in a dwindling voice. ‘Not much of a hero’s welcome then.’

  There was a pause and Isis shifted awkwardly, wondering what to say to this man who looked so different now, and so cast down. The lines on his brow and around his eyes were sharp as knife cuts and his skin was grainy grey.

  ‘What a lovely motor,’ she offered and it was the right thing, for Victor brightened and patted the bonnet as if it was a horse.

  ‘Yes. Bugatti. Quite a stunner, eh?’

  The interior was upholstered in pale lemon leather and the dashboard was a glamorous glossy wood, intricate with complex whorls of grain. ‘Walnut,’ he said. ‘Pigskin. 16-valve engine.’

  ‘It’s beautiful.’ She stooped to sniff the leather interior. ‘It smells of money.’

  ‘Dear little Icy.’ Victor reached out to give her a proper hug. ‘Thirteen,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe it.’ Squashed against his chest, she saw the two of them reflected, in grotesque distortion, by the curve and shine of chrome, and below her ribcage felt a pang, a qualm, and pulled herself away.

  Mary came out drying her hands. The sunshine lit up her fair curls and she was smiling. ‘Welcome back,’ she said. ‘You’ve missed Captain and Mrs Spurling. Will you be staying? Only I’m not set up for visitors what with the laundering and them only just gone.’

  ‘You’re looking well, Mary,’ he said. ‘Does a chap good to see those dimples again.’

  Blushing, Mary dipped her head. ‘I’m tolerable. It’s only soup. I ex
pect I can eke it out and we’ve got a bit of ham.’ She slid Isis a look. ‘You can help by laying the table, Miss.’

  ‘I’ve only just had the tablecloth off,’ Mary grumbled. ‘If I’d known I could of stretched it for another day. He’ll have to make do with second best.’

  ‘I don’t s’pose he gives a fig.’ Isis took an embroidered cloth from the sideboard and, together with Mary, flapped it over the table.

  ‘And I had that ham lined up for your tea,’ Mary said, straightening the cloth.

  ‘But don’t you think it’s nice to see someone else?’ Isis said. ‘And he was nearly killed, you know.’

  Mary nodded and went out and Isis wished she could bite her tongue off. Mary had been married briefly to a Gordon Jefferson. They’d tied the knot in July 1914 before he went off to the front. They’d had one weekend together in Hastings, and then he’d sailed off and got himself shot at the Marne. There was a photograph of the wedding day beside her bed, Mary with a smaller, sharper face clutching the arm of Gordon Jefferson: short, uniformed, bespectacled and stern. Mary still wore the ring, a band of gold, thin as wire, embedded in the work-worn puffiness of her wedding finger.

  After she’d washed her hands and combed her hair in readiness for lunch, Isis found Victor standing in the hall, a blank look in his eyes. She paused on the stairs to watch him; he stood as if lost, hands hanging limply at his sides, mouth a little open as if he was stupid, which he most certainly was not.

  ‘You’ll never guess what we got for our birthday,’ she said extra brightly, bounding down to take his arm.

  Victor flinched.

  ‘Come and see.’ Isis pulled him towards the drawing room. She flung open the door to reveal a cage dangling from a stand and inside it, two bright budgerigars – one blue, one green.