Michael Pearce: The Bride Box

‘Heavy!’

‘Too heavy!’

‘Look, they’ve taken the dog out of it. So I gather. It’ll be lighter than it was!’ said the overseer.

‘It’s more than a two-man lift.’

‘Four men at least!’

‘Look, it’s only down to the Bab-el-Khalk!’

‘In this heat?’

‘Just get on with it! Or it won’t be the Pasha who flays your hide!’

‘Bastard!’ muttered Ali.

‘Bastard!’ muttered Hussein.

‘Right! Lift!’

They raised it an inch.

‘Can’t be done!’

‘Not with just two of us.’

‘A bride box? Of course it can be done!’

‘Not just with two of us.’

‘All right. I’ll get Abdul.’

‘And Mustapha.’

‘Mustapha’s doing something else.’

‘We’ll wait.’

‘I’m going to fetch Abdul and Mustapha. And then I’m going to kick your backsides.’

The overseer went off in a fury.

Ali and Hussein sat down on the ground in the shade of the box.

‘Doesn’t smell as bad as it did.’

‘You fancy? It’s still pretty bad.’

‘Maybe it’s just that I’m getting used to it.’

‘You do get used to things, don’t you? This box, for instance, I’ve got used to seeing it here. I shall quite miss it when it goes.’

‘Well, I shan’t!’ said the guard Mahmoud had posted. ‘It’s really hot just standing here. And I can still smell it. And it smells pretty bad!’

‘Stop complaining! You don’t have to carry it.’

‘You just have to stand there.’

‘All day,’ said the guard. ‘All day. And all night!’

‘I’ll bet you don’t stand there all night!’

‘Well, no one would expect me to. But I’m still on guard.’

‘With his eyes closed!’

‘I would know if anyone tried to make off with it.’

‘You’d probably have tipped them off. Then down in the souk with it and split the money!’

‘A bride box?’

‘Well, there’s always a demand for them. Girls are always getting married.’

‘Yes, well, most girls don’t put dogs in them!’

‘Hello, here are Abdul and Mustapha!’

‘This it? We’re not expected to carry this down to the Bab-el-Khalk, are we?’

‘Yes, you bloody are!’ said the overseer. ‘Four of you! Why, I could carry it there myself!’

‘Go on, show us!’

‘I’ll show you something else in a minute! Now bloody get on with it!’

They bent and lifted.

‘Hey! What are you doing with my sister’s box?’ said Leila indignantly. She had just come up the platform with Owen and Mahmoud.

The men put the box down.

‘Your sister’s, is it?’ one of the guards said. ‘Well, it needs a bit of a clean.’

‘It was all right when she took it away!’

‘Well, that was then, and this is now. It’s had something in it since. Something which doesn’t smell too good.’

‘What the hell do you think it can be?’ said Abdul, sniffing.

‘I reckon a rat’s got in there,’ said Mustapha.

‘Got in and stayed, by the smell of it!’

‘A pretty big-sized rat, it must be.’

‘We reckon it was a dog. It’s addressed to a Pasha, see. And we reckon it’s one of his prize dogs. Must be, for them to go to the trouble.’

‘A dog!’ said Leila, bursting into tears. ‘In my sister’s box?’

The men looked at each other uncomfortably.

‘It’s not right, you know,’ said Abdul. ‘You shouldn’t do that to a girl’s bride box.’

‘It’s special,’ said Mustapha. ‘It means a lot to her.’

‘Do you know what I think?’ said Abdul. ‘I reckon the Pasha came along and said: “I need a box. That one will do.” So they just tipped everything out and put the dog inside.’

‘They shouldn’t do that!’ said Leila, crying. ‘It’s my sister’s bride box!’

‘No more they should!’ said Abdul. ‘These Pashas are bastards!’

‘Think they can get away with anything!’ said Mustapha.

‘Bastards!’ all four men agreed.

‘But what about my sister’s things? They were beautiful things. She’d made them herself!’

‘Yes, well, that’s how it is,’ said Abdul, with a sympathy surprising since this was only a girl.

‘Don’t worry!’ said Mustapha. ‘The people in the village will have picked them up.’

‘And gone off with them, I shouldn’t be surprised,’ said Hussein.

‘If they have, her husband will get them back,’ said Abdul. ‘“Give them back or I’ll beat your head in,” he’ll say. And you’ll be surprised at the effect it will have.’

‘They ought not to have done it,’ said Leila. ‘It’s my sister’s box!’

When it was hot, really hot, for it was always hot in Cairo, they slept on the roof. They had fenced off a garden area with trellis work up which they had trained beans. Beans were grown for decoration as well as food in Egypt. On the roof they served as a dense, green screen, with occasional splashes of red from the flowers. Behind the screen they were invisible to the sleepers on neighbouring roofs, like them in search of air during the hot nights.

The drawback was that you woke with the sun. Zeinab merely pulled the sheet over her head and carried on sleeping. But Owen was fully awake from the moment the first sun touched his face. He always was.

This morning he got up and walked to the edge of the roof and looked out over the still, sleeping city to where the Nile curved round the houses and the hawks were already beginning to hover on the upward currents of air. Below him, in the little nearby gardens, the doves were beginning to gurgle in the trees. He always loved this moment of the day before the city woke up, when all was still and quiet and the air fresh, sometimes with dew.

Sometimes, as now, it was even chilly. At least, you could imagine that, and people, English men especially, nostalgic for home, often liked to do that. In the evening you sometimes even lit a fire, which you never really needed to do, but it was nice to imagine it on a frosty morning in England and to stretch out your hands and feel the warmth. Of course, there was warmth all the time but this was a different warmth. He didn’t need that today, though. Already the heat was beginning to build up. Already, over the Nile, there were little heat shimmers.

All the same, he pulled on his cotton dressing gown. In the pocket he felt something. He pulled it out. It was a little trocchee shell and it had been found clutched in the girl’s fingers when they had conducted the post-mortem.

He had shown it to Mahmoud and Mahmoud had asked him where it came from.

‘Probably Flamenco Bay,’ he had said. ‘That’s where most of them come from.’

Flamenco Bay was a little to the north of Port Sudan and was where the red, green, and yellow-painted dhows unloaded their cargoes of trocchee shells in hundreds of thousands.

‘The shells go to the United States and to France, where they’re cut up into buttons. Most of the pearl buttons that you see come from Flamenco Bay.’

He had told Mahmoud to smell it.

‘That’s awful!’ said Mahmoud. ‘It smells like rotten fish!’

‘It is rotten fish. They sort of stew inside the shells. The sun rots them, and then they drop out. But the smell! You should smell it in Flamenco Bay!’

‘I’d rather not!’

‘They grind them up into a powder. There’s a steady demand for it in Arabia.

‘As a fertilizer?’

Owen smiled.

‘As an aphrodisiac.’

It was a button, here, one they had found in Soraya’s hand.

Pulled off from her assailant? That didn’t necessarily mean that the attacker had been a woman. Men wore pearl buttons as well, sometimes on their shirts, if they were posh, on their galabeyas if they were not. Even sometimes among the beads on their skull caps.