Tom McCarthy - C

They pause at the compound’s edge. Serge stares out at the desert. In the distance, a caravan, or perhaps a line of joined-up, sleepwalking schoolchildren, seems to glide across a shimmering, reflective lake.

“Mirages are real,” he says to Macauley, suddenly remembering his conversation with the optician on the Alexandria-to-Cairo train. “They’re caused by the light’s gradient as it…”

But Macauley’s gone, headed towards the urn. Serge watches his figure shrink beneath the station’s geometric mesh, then turns away from this to face once more the utterly ungeometric desert. A squeal carries towards the compound from the slaughterhouse-and makes him think, again, of Abigail, her high-pitched, squeaky voice. He recalls what she told him about feeling sick at Gizah, her impression of watching what she called an “obscene spectacle.” Perhaps she wasn’t wrong. What if the whole of Egypt were one big, endlessly repeating pornographic film, Love’s Madness on a loop? The camel-schoolchildren turn into dancing girls with flailing limbs, then flowers or umbrellas opening, or perhaps bodies being torn apart: tricks of the light casting a flickering pageant of agony and remorse across a dense and endless sheet of matter.

He’s to travel upriver on a steel-hulled dahabia, departing from quay 29 at Boulaq. He arrives to find the boat already being towed out into the river.

“Not again!” he moans to the docker repositioning the fenders hanging from the berth’s edge.

“What’s the problem?” the man asks.

“I was meant to be on that,” Serge tells him.

The docker stares at him for a few moments, then breaks out in laughter.

“What’s so funny?” Serge asks.

“It’s not leaving yet,” the man says. “They’re only sinking it.”

“Only sinking it?”

“They sink it to get rid of all the rats. Then they refloat it and kit it out with clean stuff; then you board it, it’s towed out again, they hoist the sails and set off properly. Understand?”

“It’s a sailing boat?” Serge asks.

“Has to be for this trip,” the docker answers. “Vibrations not good for the instruments.”

He jerks his thumb towards a group of men carrying large wooden boxes from a warehouse to the quayside. Overseeing them is a bespectacled European girl; barking orders at both her and the porters is a bearded European man.

“Careful with that box!” the latter calls out in an English accent. “If the theodolite gets damaged, the whole expedition’s stuffed. Lawrence & Mayo label upwards.”

He looks about the same age as Serge’s father.

“Are you Falk-?” Serge begins to ask.

“Label upwards!” he shouts. “Who are you?”

“Serge Carrefax. From the Ministry of Communications.”

“Ah, yes: Pylon Man. I know thee, and I know thy name, and I know the name of the god who guardeth thee!”

He speaks these last few words as though somehow performing them: arms straight by sides, head up, voice measured and incantatory.

“I’m sorry?” Serge asks.

“Look: it’s sinking,” says the girl, pointing over the men’s shoulders.

Serge and Falkiner both turn round. The dahabia’s hull, deck and cabins have all disappeared beneath the Nile, leaving only two bare masts to mark its watery burial site. Small eddies whirl around these, giving over to more violent eruptions as air from the boat’s interior rises to the surface.

“Rats abandoning: not a good sign,” another English voice at Serge’s back says, ominously. Turning round again, Serge finds a man in his mid-thirties, in plus-fours and a chequered yellow waistcoat. “You Macauley’s scout?” the man asks.

Serge nods, a little apprehensively. “And you?”

“I’m from Antiquities. Alby’s the name! Seems we’ll be shipmates on this jolly spree.”

As Serge and Alby shake hands, an argument breaks out beside the warehouse. This time the voices aren’t English: one of them’s Egyptian and the other, which belongs to a man wearing a long, black jacket and a matching bow tie, is native to the language in which the argument’s being conducted.

“C’est marqué dans le manifeste!” the bow-tied man’s trying to convince the clipboard-holding Egyptian, over and over again.

“Pas marqué dans mon manifeste, Effendi,” the Egyptian’s insisting, tapping his board. “On nous en a donné des nouveaux hier.”

“A mon insu!” the Frenchman cries, turning his palms out.

“Désolé: je ne peux pas les embarquer,” replies the Egyptian, shaking his head.

“Ce sont mes utils!” the other hisses, gesticulating with his hands in a way that reminds Serge of M. Bulteau’s gunpowder-act in Kloděbrady. Running his eye along the quayside, Serge can see the object of the argument-objects, rather: a new set of boxes, smaller ones, have been unloaded from a taxi and stacked up next to Falkiner’s surveying instruments.

“Pacorie,” Alby mutters to Serge. “Heaven knows what he’s got with him.”

“No magnets, I hope!” Falkiner barks, walking over to inspect the rival boxes.

“Only minuscule ones,” whines Pacorie, casting a hurt look back at him.

“Magnets play havoc with my compasses,” Falkiner snaps.

“So: I leave behind the magnets, and you tell this clown to sign the other boîtes for embarkation; is okay?”

Negotiations rumble on for the next hour or so. Serge introduces himself to the girl. She’s called Laura and must be about twenty-three or -four, like him. She’s been working for Falkiner for six months, she informs him, both in London and here “in the field.”

“Field?” asks Serge.

“Desert, delta, bank, whatever,” she corrects herself. “Territory.”

“You’re heading towards some tomb or other, right?” Serge asks her.

“Not just one,” she tells him, rubbing her palm against her forehead as she speaks. “Sedment’s an enormous burial site. There are thousands of tombs, all stacked on top of one another. Professor Falkiner’s one of the men who first excavated there. I studied his work at university.”

“So why’s he going back again?”

“The layers are-”

She doesn’t get to finish: Alby’s wandered over and is asking Serge if he’s brought picaridine with him.

“No: he came on his own. He’s a chemist or something-”

“No, picaridine: insect repellent. You’ll be needing plenty of it.”

“Aren’t those mosquito nets?” Serge asks, pointing to a pile of fine-mesh webs folded up on the quayside next to an assortment of mattresses, carpets, blankets, sheets, towels and pillows.

“Nets don’t catch everything,” Alby tuts in the same ominous tone he used earlier.

“Oh, look: the boat’s rising again,” Laura says.

The men turn round once more, and see the white hulk break the surface like some wood-and-metal Aphrodite. Muddy water gushes from her every orifice.

“Won’t it take a while to dry out?” Serge asks.

“We don’t leave until tomorrow,” answers Alby.

“I was told today.”

“Today’s loading. Where’s your stuff?”

“I’ve just got this,” Serge says, pointing at the small suitcase by his feet.

“May as well go home, then; get a last night’s sleep on solid ground.”

Serge does this. Back in his flat, he shuffles aimlessly through a stack of papers and finds, wedged among them, the small, unused pocket notebook he bought back in Alexandria. He slips this into his jacket: it’ll be where he sets down his thoughts about the suitability or otherwise of Sedment as a site for the parallel mast. Beneath it lies the sheet of paper with “PUDENDUM ADDENDUM” typed across it. It occurs to him that he should send the third and final copy of his détaché dispatch to Widsun: since it seems that no one else is going to read it, it will, indeed, be-as requested-just for him. He digs this out: its print is weak and carbon-smudges cloud the paper’s surface, but it’s legible. He slips the thing into an envelope that he addresses and is just about to seal when he changes his mind. He slides the report out again and, in its place, inserts the Horticultural Society’s illustrated menu-card: the “Metamorphosibus Insectorum,” the sick palisade, the hungry and rapacious grubs and moths that scrape and prod at words and world alike with their blunt carapaces and sharp antennae. Then he seals it and leaves it in his post out-basket, to be picked up and sent tomorrow.