Tom McCarthy - C

“Serge, my boy!” Widsun beams from an odd angle: tall and vertical.

“My own Dr. Arbus,” Serge replies. “How are the Whitehall Gods?”

“Recruiting,” Widsun says. “I’m working in Communications now, with special responsibilities for North Africa. Thought you might appreciate a short stint on our team in Egypt.”

“ Egypt?” Serge asks. “What have they got there?”

There’s broken masonry along the Rue des Soeurs: window recesses and door frames with chunks missing where bars and hinges have been ripped out, façades chipped and crumbled under battery.

“Last year’s riots,” Petrou tells Serge.

“That too?” Serge asks as they wander past a row of damaged balusters outside the Bourse.

“No, that’s the ’19 revolt. Bourse took a hammering, so to speak.”

“And this?” Serge asks a little later as they come across a pile of giant slabs toppled over one another in a vacant lot on the Rue Stamboul.

“ ’Eighty-two bombardment-although these,” Petrou continues, pointing at the oldest-looking ones, “were probably torn down from some other edifice when the Persians sacked the place in the seventh century; and from another one before that too, when Octavian routed Antony. That’s the thing about Alexandria: these periods just kind of merge together…”

Petrou works in the Ministry of Communications. He’s charged with co-ordinating names. There seem to be three different names for every street and square in town: English, French and Arabic-beside which a controversy is raging over whether Arabic names should be translated into French or English on official street maps and, beyond this, which of three English systems, each backed by a rival government department, should be used. Petrou speaks about seven languages himself. He’s British, legally speaking, although, apart from a childhood stint in Liverpool, he’s never lived in Britain. His family hail from Greece, via Byzantium, or maybe Trieste, Odessa or the Levant, though he’s never lived in any of those places either. But he seems to have soaked up the idioms and affects of the cities, countries, islands and homelands-in-exile or -abeyance that lurk in his history, and to exude them to the satisfaction of the Bosnian florists, the White Russian dressmakers, the Syrian weavers, Armenian saddlers, Prussian carpenters, Cypriot haberdashers and Italian gunmakers whose premises he visits, Serge traipsing in behind him, on a daily basis, census-taking, plotting the linguistic layout of the city block-by-block.

“I’m doing epsilon through theta today,” he tells Serge as they down a Turkish coffee and a glass of arak pressed on “dear Morgane” (the tradesmen all call him by a variant of his first name: Morgané, Morjan, Morganovitch) and his “new friend” by a kindly proprietor.

“Yesterday was alpha-delta,” Serge replies. “Sounds like we’re walking through the alphabet.”

“Blocks here have always been labelled like that,” Petrou says, adding after a short pause: “This place and lettering go way back together. It was here that the fourth-century Copts devised their alphabet by transcribing spoken Egyptian into Greek figures, then adding hieroglyphs. This city’s where it all began: cultures and languages slamming into one another, making new ones. Where co-ordination started too: Rosetta’s just a short train-ride away. Just think: a single slab that fits all tongues together; second Babel in three feet of stone. The Rue Rosette’s my favourite in all of Alexandria, by virtue of its name alone. Infuriatingly, they’re changing that as well…”

Serge works in the Ministry of Communications too. As he rode from Versoie to London in Widsun’s car, his godfather explained to him what he’d be doing: compiling a report, or reports, that, in ways not yet entirely clear to him, assessed, abetted or advanced, or at least paved the way for the advancement of, the (still largely prospective) Empire Wireless Chain.

“The whole project was mooted years ago,” Widsun told him in the backseat of the chauffeured Ford. “The Egyptian station’s licence was issued in ’14. Why it’s still not up and running is beyond me.”

Serge, staring through glass at racing countryside, was distracted-neither by memories of his crash nor by pharmaceutical cravings (these have been bizarrely absent ever since his re-awakening; the odd faded track-mark on his arm is the only residue of past drug dependency) but rather by his recollection of the fact that, as the vehicle pulled away from the house and up the sloping path, gravel crunching beneath its wheels, he’d looked back to see that, of the people gathered there to wave him off, it was Bodner alone whose face had displayed signs of sadness.

“ Norman ’s committee proposed eight stations,” Widsun went on, voice blending with the motor’s drone, “each two thousand miles apart, relaying from here to every corner of the Empire. The Milner-Eccles report seemed to confirm that this was feasible. But the Dominions are being irksome, and the Cabinet now seem to want to set up a new committee and commission new reports, while simultaneously pushing ahead with the Egyptian station that’s been sitting around half-built for seven years. You’ll be working for Macauley, in Cairo: he’ll be having you prepare a sub-report that he’ll doubtless amalgamate into his own report to the Telegraphy Committee, who, in turn, will report up to the Imperial Communications Committee, who in turn…”

His voice trailed off, and they sat in silence for a while. Then Widsun, shifting his position, stretched his arm out horizontally across the leather bench-seat behind Serge and added, in a confidential tone:

“And if it’s okay with you, I’d like an appendix.”

“An appendix?” Serge asked.

“An appendix,” Widsun repeated. “Addendum, apocrypha, postscript, prolegomena-what you will. A section just for me. Think of it as the lost chapter.”

“What should it contain?”

“If I knew that I’d write it myself,” Widsun chuckled. “You’ll be there; I’ll leave it to you to decide what things should come to my attention.” He looked out of the window himself, as though scanning the blur of vegetation for a pattern, then continued: “These are ‘interesting times,’ as the old Chinese curse would have it. There’s… stuff happening in Egypt that I’d like to keep abreast of.”

“Like an Amazonian,” Serge muttered.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a… nothing. Carry on.”

“Send it to me separately. Think of it as our direct line: one that bypasses chains, committees and the like.” He brought his head right down to Serge’s and half-whispered: “You’ll be my little spy.”

Serge, digesting this rather cryptic commission, felt a sour taste gathering inside his mouth-a taste that returned each time he subsequently pondered Widsun’s request: bitter, and massing from further inside, like some peptic reflux.

After disembarking in Alexandria and reporting to the Ministry’s office on the Rue de France, expecting to be handed tickets for that evening’s Cairo train, he was informed that he’d be staying here for a while, “surveying damages.”

“Damages to what?” he asked.

“His Majesty’s communication network,” Major Ferguson, head of the Alexandria section, told him. “After we deported Zaghlul, the Egyptians chose to vent their anger not just on our businesses and residencies, but also on telegraph wires, phone lines and the like. Even the poles sometimes: hacked them down with a real vengeance, like a tribe of Red Indians wreaking sacrilege against enemies’ totem posts. Which they were, in a way.”