Sphinx (36 page)

‘Hang on, land formations don’t appear overnight.’ I yawned; my jaw ached and there was the throbbing balloon of a headache over one eye.

‘Of course, but there was the earthquake a few weeks ago.’

‘Around the fourteenth of May?’

‘That’s right - how do you know about it?’

‘Fartime told me about it - it was the same tremor that killed my wife. I just hadn’t realised the fault line extended that far. Have the original well and field definitely held?’

‘There’s no leakage - it appears unaffected. But it’s this new reservoir rock that is so promising - a trap has appeared, it’s like the substructure itself has altered. Even from the air it looks different - you can see signs of the shear. It must have been a thin fault line that ran down from Alex.’

Moustafa usually erred on the side of caution. I’d never heard him so animated.

‘Okay, I’ll bring my flight forward,’ I said. ‘I’ll be in Port Said in a couple of days.’

‘Thank you, Oliver. You won’t regret it, I know it.
Inshallah
.’

As I put the phone down I noticed the outline of the astrarium gleaming in the electric glow of the alarm clock.

My suitcase sat in the corner of the hotel room; it contained a couple of pairs of jeans, a suit and an old denim jacket. I would pick up anything else I needed in Cairo. Fifteen minutes later I had a seat on the evening flight to Egypt.

The running man. But running to what?

 

Gareth’s vocals, dancing above the pounding bass, competed with the droning commentary of a football match playing on the television hanging above the bed. The song finished in a lingering note that swept through the hospital room like light. My brother, looking flushed and comparatively healthy, clicked the tape machine off.

‘There was a rep at The Vue gig, he’s asked us to come in - Stiff Records, could lead to something, you know.’ He collapsed back on his pillows.

‘That’s great, Gareth. The band deserves a break.’

‘I get out of here tomorrow - they’re just finishing the last tests on my kidney and liver functions. It’s all looking pretty good considering I was dead all of two days ago.’

‘Not exactly dead. Comatose.’

‘Headbanging in Heaven. And thanks for the upgrade to a private room. I feel like a right toff.’

‘It’s the least I could do.’

On the television, the stadium broke into a roar as Carlisle United scored. We both swung around to watch. I knew that stadium from my childhood: the wooden railings, the old billboard running along the pitch, the hard men of the north up on their feet roaring.

‘Da will be happy,’ I murmured.

‘Happy? He’ll be hanging the bloody flag out.’

There was another beat between us; the quiet, undefined pleasure of being with family. Then Gareth spoke.

‘Thanks for not telling him . . .’

With my face still turned to the television, I reached across and took his hand. We sat there watching the football, our hands clasped.

‘I wasn’t trying to kill myself.’ Gareth pulled his hand away, a man again.

‘I know that.’

‘It won’t happen again, I promise.’

‘I know that as well.’ I met his gaze. ‘But this is a chance to really clean up,’ I ventured.

To my dismay he sank back into a sullen defensiveness.

‘Fuck it, I made a mistake, that’s all. I haven’t got a problem. I’m going to be a bloody great success, you’ll see.’

‘Just promise you won’t do anything stupid again.’

He stayed silent.

I stood and picked up my overnight bag, the astrarium packed safely inside.

Gareth looked up. ‘Don’t be away too long this time, will you?’

‘I don’t plan to be. And remember, if you phone the office they can get hold of me easily enough.’

I leaned towards him, determined to embrace him however awkward the gesture. As I did, I noticed a sketchbook sitting on the side table, folded open to a pencil sketch of a woman’s face. She looked familiar. I lifted it up to examine it: Banafrit. I recognised her from the photographs in Amelia Lynhurst’s thesis and, more disturbingly, from the shadow that the astrarium had cast that evening in Egypt. The deep-set eyes, the heavy eyebrows and full mouth were unmistakable.

‘Who’s this?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. She was in my head when I came out of the coma. Zoë insisted I draw her. It was as if she’d visited me. A face like that could turn a man to crime.’ Gareth looked at the drawing thoughtfully. Then he changed tack so quickly I barely had time to react, ‘I was right about the astrarium, wasn’t I, Oliver?’

I shut the door and sat down again.

‘Listen, if anyone should turn up asking questions, you know nothing, and you’ve never worked with Isabella, understand?’

‘Are you in trouble?’

‘Someone broke into the flat - smashed up the whole place.’

‘She found it, didn’t she, Oliver?’

I barely nodded.

‘Christ, do you know how amazing that is!’

‘Please, Gareth, this is serious. There are people out there who want it, dangerous people. I want you to forget we even had this conversation.’

‘I’ve already forgotten - but what are you doing going back to Egypt? Surely it’s only going to be more dangerous there?’

‘I have business to carry out, and I made a promise to Isabella.’

I began to make my way to the door.

‘One last thing,’ Gareth said. I swung around.

‘Don’t do something stupid like getting yourself killed, promise?’

‘Promise.’

 

There was an hour of the British Airways flight left and already the Mediterranean was visible below, the shadow of the plane rippling across the blue waves. I glanced back at my copy of the
New York Times
: news of the German anarchist gang Baader-Meinhoff, and the fallout of the Chilean Junta the year before and the horror of the new regime ‘disappearing’ thousands of young people seemed to fill the pages in a depressing maelstrom of fatalism.

So many events this year had made me feel as if an era was coming to an end. Perhaps it was just that the naive optimism of my generation was now history, to be replaced by scepticism and a growing awareness of a moral void. People younger than myself - Isabella’s peers - were angry and understandably disenchanted. Where did I stand in all this now?

Staring down towards Cairo as we flew across the Nile Delta, I realised that I too had started to change. I didn’t like to dwell on the real reasons why I had set the astrarium to my birth date; it wasn’t just the Newtonian in me challenging the mechanism, it was also a perverse desire to discover whether Isabella could have possibly saved herself. At least by returning to Egypt there was a chance I might resolve the enigma of the astrarium and put Isabella to rest. I couldn’t bear the idea, however superstitious it seemed to a non-believer like myself, that she could be trapped in a kind of purgatory.

I glanced up at the overhead locker. The astrarium was safely stored inside. At the departure gate I’d told the airline that I was carrying geological apparatus. Initially suspicious, they had waved me on when I showed them my first-class ticket. I glanced back down the plane. Three rows in front of me I noticed a tall distinguished-looking man of Arabic appearance staring back at me. As soon as he saw me looking he swung back to face the front. I’d first seen him when we’d taken off from Heathrow. Had I been followed to London and now back to Alexandria? How far did Prince Majeed and possibly Hugh Wollington’s tendrils stretch? I stared down the plane, torturing myself with the worst possible scenarios, only to be jolted in my seat by sudden turbulence as the plane began its descent. Without warning, it dropped, then stabilised. Stumbling, the hostess steadied herself against the back of my seat. I glanced out the window - Cairo was below, a mirage of high-rise buildings and sandstone. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

‘Clear-air turbulence?’ a passenger near me asked the air hostess. ‘I fly myself - but usually Cessnas.’

After checking that the other passengers weren’t listening, she leaned towards him. I strained to listen. ‘Confidentially, there seems to be some disturbance with the instruments. Something’s gone wrong with the autopilot; it began at take-off and hasn’t corrected itself. So we’re landing the old-fashioned way. But don’t worry, the captain is an excellent pilot - ex-air force, the best.’

I glanced at the overhead locker again, imagining that I could hear the magnets spinning. Could the magnetic qualities of the astrarium be affecting the plane’s navigational instruments?

The jet wobbled again, the fasten-seatbelt sign flicked on and I leaned towards the window. The three pyramids were visible as we passed over Giza. Standing in silent communion, they were a monumental testimony to humanity’s attempt to conquer the finality of death. Ten minutes later, the plane made a smooth final approach and, with the usual shudder, the wheels hit the runway.

Once I was out of the arrivals gate, I watched the tall Arab disappear without a backward glance, then headed to the set of lockers that British Airways reserved for their first-class passengers. I’d given a lot of thought to where I could hide the astrarium while I went to the desert. After the raid on my flat, I was no longer sure whether it was safest to carry it on my back and I was worried something might happen to it while it was in the oilfield. The first-class lounge was policed and one of the very few places in Egypt I knew that you couldn’t bribe your way into. After making sure the cloakroom was empty, I placed the astrarium in a locker, locked it, and then hid the key between the upper sole of my shoe and the leather beneath - a place where I also concealed my money when travelling in Africa.

The next morning, after an early breakfast, I hired an old Honda and drove to Port Said. Every few miles or so was a sign:
Foreigners must not leave the road
. I crossed a bridge and waved at the guard sitting on an upturned wooden crate, his rifle slung casually across his lap. Because of potential military conflict all bridges were guarded and it was forbidden to photograph them.

It was hard to imagine this land had ever been peaceful. On the opposite border at the western edge of Egypt I knew that gun battles had broken out between Libyan and Egyptian troops, and already land and air clashes had started between the two countries. Sadat was at war again.

Meanwhile, here on the other side of the bridge I began to see debris from the Egyptian-Israeli conflicts: burnt-out gun emplacements; old army tanks, some of them upended; the wreckage of a military helicopter half-buried in the sand, the blue Star of David still visible on its side. The tragic remnants of an age-old hostility lay tossed aside like toys that had once belonged to a giant child. I continued along the desert road, a single dirt track, swerving around potholes and the occasional goat. The car engine rattled like a cheap moped and I prayed that it wouldn’t break down, troubled by the possibility of ghosts, imagining the faint shimmer of a soldier smiling shyly by the roadside, hitching a ride back to a world that no longer existed.

I turned the radio on - immediately Elvis’s deep voice filled the car: ‘In the Ghetto’ sounded out, broadcast from an American military base in Iraq. I drove on, the desert sky rolling over me. Lulled by mile after mile of track, I felt my recent experiences in London evaporate into the wavering glasslike horizon that constantly hovered just in front of the car. As I travelled, a dust storm blowing up behind the Honda’s tyres, a keener sense of myself - stripped back, liberated from memory - settled into the man in the driver’s seat. For all its irritations and eccentricities, I now remembered why I loved this country.

The four-seater Cessna swung to the left, its wing tilting up to the sun as it circled back over the area we’d just covered. I watched the horizon go from horizontal to diagonal and a thrilling feeling of omnipotence flooded through me, as it always did when I was surveying. It was the exhilaration of seeing the whole formation of the landscape spread out below - the glorious impression of being above humanity, above millions of years of Earth’s history, as if reading the topography of the mountains and river beds enabled me to see that remote past and also the faraway future. I could see how the world had stretched and shrunk, how the oceans had eaten the coast, how the continents themselves had moved, how volcanoes had etched their fury down sweeping slopes. More importantly, I could see where the Earth was hiding her treasures in folds of shale and carbonate reefs.