Into Suez (34 page)

Dusty in the driving seat was fired up and blasting on all cylinders.
Get the golliwogs, get them, get them,
he repeated.

Joe saw where they were. He remembered, with a black, sick qualm, the wrong that had been done to him. His wife had been seduced. His child had had to be farmed out to another woman, and that woman not the brightest button in the box. The pervert Wing Co who’d blown a bloody great hole in Joe’s life lived just down here in Masurah. He knew the house; had reconnoitred.

‘Turn right, boy,’ he told Dusty. ‘By there, go on. Now right again. Straight ahead. Left! – I said left! Now stop.’

All the windows of the bungalow were lit up, none of the blinds or shutters being closed. Its whiteness was as milky as the three-quarters moon that hung above the roof. They piled out of the car into the chilly air; mounted the steps to the veranda. Stealing to the window, they peered through. Some kind of concert. All the faces were turned to the source of the singing, just out of Joe’s vision. If you could call it music – a tuneless dirge that took Joe back to the caterwauling of the Great Oom at the De Lesseps House, to which he’d been treated. The mooing of a passionate cow. He scanned the profiles of the audience, standing round with drinks in their hands. White, brown and black faces. He was sure he could see Black Sambo, the Ethiopian golliwog saffragi who’d been at the bus stop with Nobby Bowen and claimed to be a prince in his own country. And Bowen was here too, with his tart of a Gyppo wife. Bowen who’d recognised Joe’s wife that Saturday morning as they got off the Liberty bus, causing Ailsa to skip off sharpish before she was caught in her deceit. So: not just Jacobs but Bowen. They’d all had her. They’d educated her. To kneel on hands and knees like a bitch on the carpet, to be taken from behind. Joe retched. He felt sick to his stomach. His view tilted, righted itself and swooped sideways: he propped himself against Dusty’s back, chin hooked over his pal’s shoulder.

‘Fucking A-rabs,’ whispered Dusty. ‘And niggers. In with bleeding RAF officers. Would you believe it, Taf?’

‘Oh aye. I’d believe anything. Roomful of fucking degenerates.’

There was a cat in the window. A huge creature like a lynx. It sat back on its fat haunches; bared its teeth and snarled.

‘Puss! Puss!’ cried Dusty, making a chirruping sound between his lips. ‘Come on now, nice pussy!’

The cat poured itself away from the window sill. The song seemed to be over in there. They could hear clapping. Some geezer laughed, a peal of laughter. Want to share the joke? Come out here and share the joke. A record was put on the turntable: some wailing nonsensical female
wog-noise
without a fucking tune. Joe was paralytic. He swayed where he stood. Passing out. Dots in front of his eyes. Everything he saw was a seething mass of dots. It made him livid. Shoving his mate out of the way, Joe craned at the window to try and spot his wife among the crowd. He saw the hind quarters of some lanky bastard in a cream polo neck sweater with lah-de-fucking-dah
swept-back
hair, holding forth on some subject with camp hand gestures. No way to see if he was talking to Joe’s lawful wedded wife. But the lady of the house was there, wearing a low-cut blue gown, bending to light a fag from a lighter offered by a bald bloke in a grey suit. Even in full evening dress, she was untidily put together, strands of hair escaping from a pearly slide. Straightening up, Mrs Jacobs caught sight of him; locked on to his gaze.

Yoo hoo!
He waved.
Décolletage
was the word they used, wasn’t it? That was the word.
Yoo hoo, slut!

This was the woman who had prostituted Joe’s wife to her own husband. Ailsa must be in there with her. Under her wing. Not really her fault. Sleeping beauty.

Joe was round at the side of the bungalow before he knew what he was about to do. He laid his shoulder to the door but it was on the latch and he tumbled in, striking his forehead a ringing blow on the wall opposite. Stunned, he stood still a moment. Where was she? He was
taking Ailsa home. She’d come with him if he had to drag her. It was not anger that he felt for her, he had no wish to punish her, although she must be taken, by force if necessary.

Joe lurched into a room where the bastard party was going on. The room froze and all at once unreality set in as if Joe had stumbled on to a theatre stage. Faces gazed at Joe’s hands in horror. Or at his genitals. Flies undone? He glanced down: no. In looking down, he realised the revolver was pointed straight at them.

He at once lowered it to his side. His stomach gave a violent heave and he was aware that he might throw up any minute. Serve the wankers right if he puked up all over them.

Dusty was not far behind him. He came cannoning into Joe. Joe stumbled forward. Stopping dead, he gaped round at the wogs in the officers’ quarters.

‘Fucking bastard niggerloving traitors!’ he yelled. ‘What have you done with her?’

It all happened at once. The fair-haired nancy who followed Psycho Jacobs around like a bitch on heat stepped forward with a smile on his face, offering a hand to Joe. ‘Come on, Mr Roberts, have a drink, you don’t need that, do you?’

‘Sergeant to you!’

Joe brought the gun up and motioned the pansy back. He looked round for his wife. She was not apparent.

The room suddenly seemed to explode. Joe’s head exploded with it, and the main light went out.

Dusty had fired his revolver into the chandelier and splinters of glass were raining down on their heads. Screams.

The queerboy was coming forward again, very slowly.

‘Let me have it, Joe, come on.’

Let him have it, thought Joe.

The queerboy yelped the moment before the gun went off. The shot went wide, as it had been intended to do. But some other man at his shoulder gave a gargling, rasping shout and a body slumped. Frothing blood leapt out of the skull of that man who was falling, falling, behind the queer boy.

Something launched itself slithering at Joe’s legs. Something nightmarishly soft and fleshy. That cunt of a cat, of course. He wheeled and shot down towards it.

The pandemonium of screaming and the woman singing her dirge on the gramophone went on and on.

Joe reeled round and shot the gramophone to pieces with an ear-splitting report. The cat appeared on the window sill, outside the pane.

Dusty looked down, shrieked like a woman and ran, whimpering.

Joe did not run. He looked down where Dusty had been looking.

It was a child. He hadn’t known there was a child in the room. Mother and daughter had been sitting behind the door. Joe looked down and saw the child’s scarlet hand, held out in bewilderment. Blood leapt from the hand to saturate the woman’s turquoise head scarf. 

A vast crowd in the square roared and surged. The noise was deafening.

It woke Ailsa up, half dreaming she was at a rugby match at St Helen’s and all the Welsh boys roaring in ecstasy over the genius of Haydn Tanner or Bleddyn Williams. For a moment she was foxed: but oh yes, of course, they were at Irene’s flat in Ish. Dainty and dinky, Irene had said it was, just the job. They needed to be nearer to Joe, Ailsa had brusquely told Mona, unable to look her in the face. Punishing her friend. But for what? Mona would cry; she’d cried already. How beastly Ailsa had been. But it couldn’t be helped, it had to be done. Ailsa marvelled at her own ruthlessness and at the way her tender feeling had turned round into animosity. She remembered Nia thrusting Mona out of the door when they’d returned from Palestine, butting her in the stomach, her head a weapon. Children registered everything. Babes and sucklings. Nia knew Mona was death.

Whether this was fair or not, Ailsa neither knew nor cared. It was probably an injustice. But this was a matter of survival.

Oddly enough she’d slept deeply, Nia in her arms, hopeful now of reconciliation with her husband. A stronger character than Joe, she had the power – if she used it tactfully, bit her tongue, acted weak, as she’d signally failed to do – to build peace between them. After a good night’s sleep, she’d awakened to the sound of this pandemonium of anger in the square.

Irene, padding round in her white quilted dressing gown, said, in a no-nonsense voice, not to worry, she’d barricade the door to the flat: they’d be safe as houses, no one could get in – and up here on the fourth floor they were well out of range of the mob. Ailsa, peeping through a chink in the shutters, wondered at Irene’s composure. She’d always been such a mouse. Chalkie’s temperate spirit seemed to live again in her.

The two women peered down on a choppy sea of countless heads. Demonstrators still poured out of the station, presumably from Cairo and Port Said, to swell the tide in the square. Their arrival had been timed to the hour after the mass departure of the husbands from the flats and Army Mansions for Moascar Garrison. Astounding numbers kept on arriving, greeting one another in an ecstasy of brotherhood. Young, excited faces raised from the crowd, looked up, straight into Ailsa’s eyes, or so it seemed, with glittering smiles. Many were in
gallabiyyas;
others were students in shirtsleeves. It fascinated Ailsa to be up here, out of harm’s way, at a point of vantage and able to study a crowd from above. A bird’s eye view. The mob was one organism; it flowed here
and there, with no head and no tail, an elated creature of the moment.

Ailsa thought of the boy protester who’d run slap bang into her in Ish last year. They’d punched out his front teeth. The military police had carted him off to who knew what humiliation. British violence had been the hammer to his anvil. He’d been waiting for, praying for, planning for this day. He’d be one of these youngsters in the crowd beneath her. He’d have known beyond all doubt that this day would dawn, for
Allahu Akbar! God is great!
The crowd cried as one voice, raising fists to the infidel women in the flats. The individual was nothing; even the mob was nothing; their lives were nothing. God was great.

The crowd nearest to the flats began to direct its protest against the women and children inside and on the flat roof. Would they come flooding up the stairwell, assault and loot? Would they rape the women, exposed without their menfolk, torch the flats? Rage swelled from a hubbub to a baying chant in English.
Filthy British Infidels Go Home! Unity of the Nile Delta! Aggressors Out of Misr!
Women in the block who’d gone up to the flat roof with their Kodaks to get a view retreated as the hail of stones and bottles began.

‘Hallo there! Coo-ee! Don’t worry, it’s only Mrs Grey!’ a voice chirruped outside the barricaded flat door. How this petty official was enjoying herself. What a platform for the battle-axe’s officiousness. Learned, Ailsa guessed, in the war and always seeking a heroic outlet. ‘Come up to the fifth floor, please, ladies. We’ve set up an emergency committee. This may take a while and it will be nice for the kiddies to play together – and we’ll all keep one another’s spirits up.’

Community singsong,
Ailsa mouthed, shaking her head with a grimace. Irene raised her eyebrows. No, they wouldn’t come – but thanks anyway.

There was a pause. Then Mrs Grey said, ‘Well, on your own head be it, Mrs Roberts. If you wish to come, Mrs White, do not let yourself be swayed.’

Doubtless the woman had recognised Ailsa’s voice, remembering her transgressions on the
Empire Glory
and keeping up with the gossip ever since. Odious to think one had been the centre of tattle amongst such women as
that.

Nia, who had been making cats’ cradles, held up a string shape on spread fingers and thumbs, asking in a casual sort of voice, ‘What are those nasty men doing, Mami? Are they coming in here to kill us?’

Ailsa and Irene swooped on her with comfort and endearments. Perhaps they ought to have gone up with the others? They agreed to go at any sign of immediate danger.

‘I expect Daddy will be here soon,’ Nia said, glancing across at the door which Irene had barricaded with a table.

As Nia looked up, anticipating her father’s arrival, the expression in her green eyes, somewhere between trust and bewilderment, so reminded Ailsa of Joe that she ached to hold him close and be held by him. Joe and she were mutually present in their daughter, almost as a haunting. They were married in the bone structure of Nia’s face, her build, the shapes of hands and feet. The inheritance of Joe and herself intricately braided, intimately dissolved together in the chemistry of Nia. She sat Nia on her lap and prompted her to a new cat’s cradle.

She picked the web off Nia’s fingers; Nia plucked it off hers. Soon, Ailsa and Nia and Joe would be back together. All they needed for the road was a bit of decency and tact.
And this Ailsa must supply, she saw, because at those times when he saw red, Joe probably couldn’t.

‘Oh yes, the daddies will be here in two ticks,’ Irene promised. And it was surprising how she rose to the occasion. ‘You won’t see those nasty men for dust then!’

‘We shall see Daddy very soon, sweetheart,’ Ailsa said. ‘And we shall all be lovely and together again.’ She would eat a fair-sized portion of humble pie if that was what it took – and the rest they would talk through like sensible folk.

The mob hurled itself against the NAAFI. Setting the perimeter fence on fire with torches, it stampeded the entrance, breaking through by sheer pressure of numbers, aided by several Egyptian policeman. Out the men staggered with loot. Crates of food. Carrier bags of cigarettes. Taking back a token share of what was due to them. Flames burst from the store and smoke billowed high in the air. Two cars had been overturned and torched.

Gunfire. The sound of lorries and Jeeps from Moascar. A cry went up from the top floor: ‘The Lancashire Fusiliers!’ Cheers and applause upstairs, Rule Britannia, wild whooping and stamping as the women swarmed up to the roof.

Now the darkie devils were for it! a lady shrieked. By God those stinking savages had it coming!

Bren guns were set up. Lorries with a platoon of troops from Moascar made for the store, shooting presumably over the mob’s heads or down at its feet, till the crowd wavered and fell back, spilling into the surrounding streets. A blanket of near-silence lay over the square, like a fog that mutes all sound. The two women tremblingly smiled, thumbs-upped at one another. They clasped hands briefly.
Tying on her pinafore and bustling out into the kitchen, Irene put the kettle on and promised bacon and eggs.

‘That’s enough excitement for one day,’ she said.

The deafening report and echo of Sten-guns from the nearby streets came with such sudden violence that it seemed to erupt just outside their rattling window-pane. Irene rushed back in. They peered out into the square: soldiers with fixed bayonets were haring along. The shattering echo of the guns in Ailsa’s skull triggered a storm. The shots went on and on. She reeled away from the excessive light. Ergot, she must have ergot.

Order had resumed, with the installation of barbed wire; the carting off of corpses. The firing that had sounded so near was actually coming from side-roads. ‘For they are jolly good fellows!’ sang the British women on the roof. Men in
gallabiyyas
were herded across the
Place de la Gare
, hands bound behind their backs, Irene reported. Now they were being loaded into trucks. ‘Off with the velvet gloves!’ cried a woman on the roof. The disorder in Ailsa’s head gathered force. Fragments of light whirled in her right eye; her stomach turned over.

She slumped down in a chair, shading her eyes. There was an impression of being back at the Old Brewery. The girls next door had flown. Ailsa was alone in the eerie silence between doodlebug explosions. Joe was in the Western Desert, far beyond summoning, there was no Nia at all, and Ailsa was left cowering, imminent death suspended above her head. She was going to die. She’d had it. Now. The bomb fell – elsewhere. The partition between the flats, with its flaking, bile-green skin of paint, shook convulsively. Windows rattled; crockery jangled on the shelf; a naked light bulb swung around on its lead.

‘Mrs White! Mrs Roberts!’ Rapping on the door. ‘Open up, please!’

The door was opened. A whispering took place.

‘She’s not very well.’

Ailsa looked up between one bolt of lightning and the next. What was the word for what she’d got? She pointed to her temple to try to alert Irene. Meanings were there but not the words for them. But when she’d searched around and the words reappeared, they’d been deserted by their meanings and fell away into limbo. She saw Irene usher the two RAF policemen into the flat. Hats in hands, they looked at her with anxious, compassionate eyes, holding back from whatever message they had come to deliver.