Sphinx (24 page)

The memory of Isabella’s childlike pride at showing me her city, her hand holding mine in this very seat, sputtered on and off like a faulty fluorescent light.

‘The airport?’ the driver shouted over the traffic noise. ‘We go to airport, right?’

‘
Shukran
- thank you.’

I turned back to the window, trying to suppress an unexpected wave of sadness. Leaving is not losing her, and memory is a kind of afterlife, I told myself, but I found no consolation in the observation.

The car headed out towards the airport, past the sewage works and the satellite towns beginning to spring up around the outskirts of Alexandria, and into the cool desert. The oil refinery’s flaming towers roared up against the darkening horizon like great primordial torches and finally my panic began to flatten out. With the blind sky yawning above the speeding car, I thought how Isabella would have loved this night.

 

The hazy English sunlight was a shock after the glare of Egypt. The drive from Heathrow took me through the factorylands, into the outer London suburbs, then on to Chiswick with its large Victorian houses and gardens, into denser Shepherds Bush, past the terraced boarding houses of Notting Hill and finally into West Hampstead. The suburban landscape dragged me back into the smells, sights and sounds of England.

I stepped out of the taxi. There was the faint sound of reggae music, birdsong, and the feel of that particular humidity that always laced the early summer air - a languid sensuality that invariably surprised even the Londoners. I glanced at the Victorian terrace; our flat was located on the top floor. The curtains were pulled across. Staring up it was as if I saw Isabella parting them and peering down, her anxious face searching the street for me in that way she always did when she was expecting me back from a trip. But the curtains stayed closed and my legs almost buckled underneath me from grief.

‘You all right, mate?’ The taxi driver leaned out of his open window.

I nodded, and turned to lift out my suitcase. The cab drove off, and as I carried my luggage up the pavement I noticed the twins from next door watching from their front garden, one nonchalantly picking his nose while the other scratched a scabby knee. Children of a recent divorce, their working mother was rarely home and Isabella had often brought them up to our apartment for tea and the Turkish delight that Francesca sent from Egypt.

‘Mister Warnock!’ called Stanley, the older brother, now hanging from the garden gate, his prematurely aged face peaky and worried. I turned reluctantly: this was the moment I’d been dreading.

‘Where’s Issy?’ he demanded, his voice trembling with anxiety. ‘You’ve not gone and got divorced, ’ave yer?’

‘Stanley, I’ve just got in from a long flight and—’

‘She’s left yer, ’asn’t she?’ Alfred joined his brother on the gate, the two of them glaring at me in defiant accusation, blond hair shaved tight against their narrow skulls, precocious in their distrust of all things adult.

I hesitated. They had both adored Isabella. She’d even taught them a few words of Italian, which they’d repeated solemnly in atrocious North London accents, captivated by her expressive gestures -
buongiorno
,
buonasera
,
arrivederci
. Momentarily overwhelmed, I sat down on my suitcase, unable to reply. There was the creak of the gate as it was swung open. A minute later I felt small cool fingers slip between my own.

‘Mister Warnock, it’s bad, innit?’ Stanley stood in front of me, his eyes wide with a sense of tragedy that belied his age.

I stared up at him. ‘I lost her,’ I whispered.

‘Lost her? How can you lose a whole person?’ Alfred, incredulous, still hovered behind the gate. But one glance at Stanley’s trembling lip and I knew that the older twin had understood.

‘C’mon, Alfred.’ With his eyes screwed tight, Stanley led his brother back to their front garden.

 

Our flat was in West Hampstead, a suburb filled with the dispossessed middle class: the divorced, the bachelors, the perpetual spinsters alone in their studio apartments huddled around the electric kettle. But it was my favourite part of London; I liked the semi-urban location. The apartment was tiny - I’d purchased it at the beginning of my first job, using the position as leverage to secure a mortgage. It had been a momentous occasion: I was the first member of my family ever to own property, and at twenty-four I felt I was already soaring above a cycle of poverty that went back generations.

It was a one-bedroom apartment, really a glorified attic conversion. The kitchen was the size of a large cupboard with a view of next door’s concreted courtyard. The lounge, which doubled as the dining room, was split-level; a small set of wooden steps led up to a sleeping area with just enough space for a double bed. The ceiling was so low that I could hardly stand. The best thing about the place was the small roof terrace that lay beyond the double windows of the sleeping area. It was located between two tall Victorian red-brick chimneys: a sanctuary hidden from the windows of the surrounding buildings that offered an unencumbered view of north-west London. When the weather was good, I’d carry out the large telescope I kept folded against the bedroom wall and set it up on its spindly tripod. Beyond the orange city sky, the stars were my metaphysical ladder, a way to escape the claustrophobia of both London and the apartment.

I pulled my suitcase along the entrance hall and onto the staircase. The paintwork was battered and splintered, the carpet stained and worn by a thousand tenants before us, and the strong smell of curry wafted down from the apartment of the young Indian Sikh couple who lived on the first floor. I paused on the landing.

‘Oliver?’ My neighbour peered through his partially opened front door, the door chain still on.

‘Hello, Raj,’ I said.

Sighing with relief, Raj unlatched the chain and stepped out. He was wearing a sweaty vest, a white turban and the trousers of his bus driver’s uniform. His eyes were tired and anxious.

‘Just come off the night shift?’ I asked, surprised by the pleasure I felt at the familiar sight of him.

‘That is right.’ He reached out, his voice cracking with emotion. ‘Oliver, your brother told us about your terrible loss. My wife and I are most grieved - you know we both loved Isabella very much.’

‘Thank you.’

I could see Raj’s sari-clad wife hovering shyly behind him. Shaking his hand, I tried to hold down the balloon of emotion now banging against my ribcage. Embarrassed, Raj tactfully turned back to the apartment.

‘Aisha, he is back.’

His wife, her slim figure radiating a glasslike fragility, offered me a biscuit tin. ‘Please, you must be tired and hungry, and your fridge will be empty. I made some samosas for you. Please?’

Thanking them both profusely, I slipped the tin under my arm.

After the door closed behind them, I stood staring up at the next landing, my own front door, achingly evocative with its blue paint and brass doorknob, beckoning through the banisters. Clutching the biscuit tin as a drowning man might hold on to a buoy, I made my way up the stairs.

The flat was a darkened cavern that stank of stale cigarette smoke and frying bacon. With all the curtains drawn, it held the gloom of somebody else’s life, a past I now barely recognised. Even in this dim light I could see several dirty plates on the floor, a dressing gown thrown across the television. A lava lamp glowed in the corner, its nebulous wax mass congealing in slow motion like an alien fungus.

Isabella had insisted that Gareth should have a set of keys so he could use the flat as an occasional retreat from the frenetic world he existed in. It was obvious he’d stayed over and failed to clean up after himself. I picked up the plates and carried them into the kitchen. Well, at least he’s eating, I reassured myself. The task of dealing with my brother’s latest bout of addiction loomed; a depressing prospect.

I turned off the dripping tap and went back into the lounge. It was a time capsule, the objects within which might themselves have been submerged - the dust and microscopic human debris from a lifetime before, a lifetime suspended in the still air.

I climbed the wooden steps to the sleeping area. Isabella’s dressing gown hung on a hook on the wall. Burying my face in the silk, I breathed in deeply. The smell of our sex still lingered in the folds, the love twistings of leg and skin.

Kneeling on the floor, I buried my head in this tent of memory, wondering if I could go on. I was free-falling in her absence. If I was entirely honest with myself, I think I might have been waiting for some kind of external sign to give me a reason to continue, for Isabella to talk to me from beyond that invisible wall that divided the dead from the living.

There was nothing but silence. Then, slowly, the sound of a distant ice-cream van playing a tinkling ‘Greensleeves’ and the roar of a plane passing overhead came into focus. And suddenly I wanted to wipe all of it away - the clinging labyrinth of Egypt, the astrarium, the incessant misery of loss.

I grabbed the steel waste-paper bin, pulled open the chest of drawers and began to pull out Isabella’s clothes: sweaters, blouses, skirts, lingerie - all ghost clothes now, a ghost I was determined to exorcise. I stuffed as much as I could into the bin, then carried it onto the roof terrace. I emptied a bottle of lighter fluid over the clothes and held a match to the pile.

Sliding down, I sat with my back to the wall. As each item crinkled and then burst into flames, I remembered the occasions when she’d worn it: an Indian cotton dress flying around her tanned legs as she danced at a rock concert; a business suit she wore for her lectures; a nightdress she would put on, without consciously realising the signal she was sending, when she wanted to make love.

Emotionally exhausted, I curled up and closed my eyes.

 

The sound of footsteps woke me. Silhouetted against the afternoon sky was a young woman, her wild hair framing her face like a mane.

‘Oliver?’ she said.

Disorientated, I stumbled to my feet. I must have slept for hours.

‘I’m Zoë. Gareth’s girlfriend. Sorry.’ She indicated the open window that she must have climbed through to reach the roof. ‘I was audacious. I let myself in. Gareth had the keys. He doesn’t know you’re back or anything . . .’

‘You’re forgiven. So you’re the person who rang my office in Alex?’

Zoë stepped into the shade and finally I could see her clearly. She wore Dr Martens boots, purple fishnets and a blue lurex ball gown that flared from the waist, her hennaed hair fell to her shoulders, and her face had a Pre-Raphaelite beauty that formed a jarring contrast with her dress. Despite the heavy purple eyeshadow, she looked ridiculously young.

She looked me up and down candidly; to my annoyance I found it a disarming sensation.

‘You look like him, only older,’ she said.

I moved the subject onto safer ground. ‘Is Gareth all right?’

‘Depends on what you classify as all right. He’s playing tonight so I thought you could come and see for yourself. Personally, I’ve never seen him so self-destructive.’

‘In what way?’

She looked me fully in the eye, then decided to be honest. ‘Speed. I mean, we all indulge. It’s just that with Gareth it’s got so bad that he’s frightened to sleep. Like really frightened, as if it might kill him to close his eyes. Most of the time he’s rational, but then he’ll start talking about people coming to steal his soul.’

‘That isn’t rational.’

‘Isn’t it?’ Zoë replied with a nonchalant irony.

Reaching into the still-smouldering bin, she pulled out one of Isabella’s half-burnt bras, all underwiring and lace, and held it up. ‘I don’t think everything is rational.’

She waited for an explanation of the burning clothes; I didn’t give her one. She dropped the smouldering bra back into the embers. ‘I think we have a few things in common.’ She flung out the remark as if it were a paradox.

‘Apart from my brother?’

‘An interest in stone, rock . . .’

I glanced at her quizzically.

‘Didn’t Gareth tell you?’ she continued.

‘Afraid not - we’ve never talked much, my fault as much as his,’ I replied, wondering now how much he’d told her about me.

‘I’m a sculptor - I work in marble.’ Zoë’s earnestness was endearing. ‘You’re a geologist, aren’t you?’

‘A geophysicist, that’s far less romantic.’ I smiled. ‘How old are you?’

‘Does my age preclude the possibility of being taken seriously? ’

‘As an artist or a woman?’

‘I’m asking you.’

‘I think’ - I leaned forward to emphasise the point - ‘I’m old enough to be your father.’

‘But you’re not my father. And, if you have to know, he died last year in a road accident and I suspect he was several years older than you.’