cuckoo-bird mother

——

‘More coffee?’ the proprietor asked. Joe shook his head, stood up. He paid and left, and stood for a while in the weak sunshine of Edgware Road, thinking. The receipt from Mo’s office was in his pocket. It was too late to follow his other leads. Or too early. What do people do in London? He wondered. And then he thought – of course.

He took a bus back into town. He sat on the top, in the front seat before the big windows, and looked out at the city streets as they passed by, slowly. They were grey and solid, like an accountant. There was something comforting about London, its small distinct neighbourhoods, its narrow lanes, congested roads. He watched another red double-decker bus go past from the opposite direction, looking like an Asian elephant driven by its mahout. Ahead of it were two black cabs, like beetles. He half expected them to open wings and buzz up into the sky. Something inside him felt lost. This was not the future he had expected. There were no flying cars, no silver suits, and the only aliens walking in the streets outside were human. There were Arabs and Indians and Chinese and Malay, Jews and Africans, a whole planet of refugees seeking shelter in the mothership that was London. From here wars had been launched, colonies conquered. From here, this great big sprawling administrative centre, an empire had been managed in triplicate. No wonder we come here, he thought. The city was a cuckoo-bird mother, taking children that did not belong to it, annexing them, bringing them up in a strange mix of missionary activity, trade exploitation and good intentions. When the time came and the children wanted their independence the mother was hurt, and they fought. And now some of the annexed children, who were not children at all, came back, because they had nowhere else to go.

He got out on Oxford Street and walked down the crowded avenue, past large bright stores selling cargo. The city was a hungry, insatiable being, demanding its tea and its medication, its food and its clothes and all the things that came from elsewhere. It was a city of cargo, its giant warehouses filled to the brim with the produce of a hundred different places. He knew where to go, and it was a short walk: down Oxford Street, across St. Giles’ Circus where corpses no longer sighed in the breeze, down New Oxford Street and into Bloomsbury.

There were vineyards there once, and wood for one hundred pigs. Now there were pubs and bookshops, but it was quite likely some of the books, at least, had been bound in pigskin – which said something about progress.

He turned right on Great Russell Street. It was quiet – no. It was peaceful. It was a feeling he had almost forgotten he knew. There were more bookshops here, and they specialised in what the British called the Far East, and the Middle East: there were old books in the windows with pictures of the pyramids on them, and the Forbidden City, once-grand possessions of the British Empire now reduced into the memoirs of soldiers and administrators. There were old looted coins in the windows and the busts of long-gone emperors, and the smell of dry leather and dust, and under his feet the grills of a sewage tunnel echoed as he passed.

What do you do in London, he thought: and the answer came easy, channelled into his mind in Mo’s voice: you go to a museum.

knives, corpses, vases and gods

——

There was a man selling hot dogs outside the gates of the British Museum and the smell of frying onions made Joe hungry. He stopped and bought one.

‘Enjoying London?’ the short man behind the cart said.

‘Having the time of my life,’ Joe said.

He chewed on the sausage in its soggy bun as he entered the courtyard. Eating it did not take long. He cleaned his hands as best he could with the thin napkin and felt grimy. His mouth tasted of onions and cheap mustard. He balled the napkin and dumped it in a rubbish bin and climbed the stairs of the museum. It was then that he thought he saw a pair of familiar black shoes in the crowd, but when he turned they were gone. He had the receipt for the cloakroom but now he decided to be careful before checking it, and so he entered the building and found grand staircases rising on either side of him and another door that led into a large, dim-lighted space.

Up and down stairs he went, checking reflections in reflecting surfaces, examining less the exhibits than the people who came to see them. In the Egyptian collection he saw three thousand year old, giant statues of long-gone Pharaohs. Cat-headed deities seemed to watch him from above. He saw the black façade of the Rosetta Stone, and a fragment of the Sphinx’s beard, and he thought – if there had been enough room they would have dragged the entire Sphinx in, all the way from its sandy residence in Egypt. In one display case he found the mummified corpse of Cleopatra of Thebes. He stared at it for a long moment, then turned away. In another part he saw half of the Parthenon, transported from Greece by the Earl of Elgin. Marble figures, lightly clothed, that looked confused in the cold dimness of the British Museum.

There were statues, sculptures, bas-reliefs, manuscript tablets, paintings, coins, jewellery, knives, corpses, vases, Greek gods, Egyptian gods, Buddhas, books, the loot of an entire world hoarded, stored, collected and guarded. It came from China, from Iraq, from Tasmania and Benin and Egypt and Sudan, from India and Iran and Ethiopia. It was as if the British had gone out into the world, stripped it of its heritage, and returned, laden with their cargo, to decorate their city with it.

It was a terribly arrogant building, it seemed to him. Joe thought again about the books he’d read, about their secret war. Why did they fight? He thought, there at the peaceful museum, that he could see just a hint of that, the fingers of antiquity crawling into the present day and shaking it.

At least the Sphinx was too large to be moved, he thought, and laughed, and he walked up and down stairs, circling the great building until his feet ached, and saw no one following him, until he arrived at last back where he had started and went to get a coat that wasn’t his.

— litter in the desert —

It had been the site of wars for millennia. Human migration travelled back and forth across its expanse of fine yellow sand, from Africa into Asia and the rest of the world, then back in a succession of colonizers. The Ten Commandments shared, in historical order, by the Jews, the Christians and the Muslims, were given to Moses in that desert, as he fled the Egyptian Pharaoh’s army. In 1518 the Sinai was taken over by the Ottomans; in 1906, by the British. In 1942 Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps stormed their way through Egypt, on their way to taking Palestine for the German Reich; in the event they were stopped at El Alamein. In 1948 Egyptian forces travelled through the Sinai in the direction of a Palestine hastily abandoned by the British, and in 1967 Israeli forces made the same journey in the opposite direction. The desert was littered with unexploded bombs, mines, rockets, grenades, the remnants of untold wars, all waiting patiently in the desert sun for someone who had read the Ten Commandments, but had stopped at Thou Shalt Not Kill.

That October saw the usual migration of sun-seeking tourists to the beaches of the Red Sea. They stayed in small sea-side camps, in modest, airy bamboo huts. They came there to sunbathe, to snorkel, to flirt, to relax. The smell of burning hashish was not unknown there. Further down the coast, and more upmarket, stood the Hilton Taba Hotel, a multi-storey building offering the more discerning tourist a place to stay.

The first bomb hit the front of the Hilton Hotel at 21:45. It destroyed the entrance hall, blew the hotel windows inwards into the rooms, and caused the upper floors to collapse. Corpses landed by the swimming pool, and thick smoke prevented families from escaping down the hotel stairs. Others were buried in the rubble. Fifty kilometres away in Ras-al-Shitan, the Devil’s Head, two further explosions erupted, the first one taking out a restaurant and several nearby huts in the Moon Island resort. It seemed, for a while, an appropriate name.