As we watched the truck drive off I asked Roy, ‘D’ye reckon it will be all right? Our bags won’t get knocked off?’
‘I knows that driver, Charlie, and he knows that I knows him. That’s all it takes to move things around safely in the British Army.’
‘So, what next?’
‘Seen yer first belly dancer yet?’
‘No.’
‘Time to complete yer education then.’
She was small, much smaller than I’d imagined, and I was entranced. The two Egyptian pounds she cost me was worth every piastre. I was glad that I’d taken the SWO’s advice. This is the sort of encounter a soldier doesn’t tell his girl or wife about, or if he does, it’s not until after he’s an old man. I still have one of the filmy blue pieces of material she made me keep for a souvenir. I pull it out from time to time, and remember it low on her hips as she moved in the shadows, and the smell of limes from our drinks.
We took the last British night bus from Ismailia’s geometric government centre to the accommodation. Roy didn’t want to walk past the Arab quarter in the dark. Waiting for the transport with a noisy group from the Ordnance Depot up the road, I caught an unexpected rich seam of flower scent on the air. That was when colours and scents first began to overlap in my mind. These flower scents were blue, of course: a fine thin veil of aquamarine carried on the night air. There was the sound of a motorbike starting near the Army HQ, and a rowdy crowd of Kiwis being turned out of the NAAFI a block away. Somewhere a donkey brayed, and then another animal coughed. Camel. From where I stood I could look down a narrow boulevard overhung with trees. That was where the scent breezed in from. I distinctly saw a large shadowy lion cross from one line of trees to the other. She paused momentarily on the roadway, and looked directly at me. Eye contact. The hair stood up on my neck.
I told Roy but he only laughed. ‘They haven’t had any free lions in Egypt for over a hundred years.’
‘I saw it.’
‘Then you saw the past.’
I didn’t tell him that that had happened before, either.
I lay under an awning at the Abu Sueir swimming pool the next morning sweating off a hangover. I was getting good at being under sunshades in the sun. Susan Haye with an e lay within arm’s reach, but she would have torn mine off if I’d made a move, and I didn’t feel strong enough for that yet. She wore one of those new two-piece swimsuits that look like matching but substantial pieces of underwear. It was a dull pinky-red, with big white printed flowers. I could see the fine hairs on her stomach, and wanted to touch it.
She said, ‘I’m going to have a swim. Coming?’ There weren’t that many couples around at that time of the morning: mostly just families.
‘I can’t. I never learned.’
‘You will out here. It’s one of the substitution therapies the services dreamed up to take our minds off each other. Everyone learns to swim; has to. Even you.’
‘That’ll be the day.’
‘Bet you. Bet you a fiver?’
‘That I learn to swim? That’s not fair on you. All I have to do is avoid it.’
‘I still bet you.’
‘OK.’ We shook on it.
‘At least come in the pool, and wash away that awful perspiration – you smell like a brewery.’
I wasn’t sure that the families around us would have given me top marks for hygiene, but I complied. Susan swam a slow breaststroke; each time her arms thrust forward, her head sank beneath the surface and then popped up again like a seal’s. I stayed at the shallow end hanging with my arms along the bar. Each time she came back to me she paused before the turn, and held her body touching mine. I got a hard on, of course, and she knew it. What had she warned me about? We are all stir-crazy here. Something like that.
‘You’re a horrible flirt,’ I told her. ‘You’re just trying to embarrass me.’
‘Am I, Charlie?’ Her voice sounded very close to me.
‘Everyone can see us.’
‘. . . and so they know that nothing is really happening. Not in front of the kids, anyway. All the women know that I’m only ever going to tease you, while the men misread my intentions and are jealous. They’ll hate you.’ It was more like torture than tease. Then she turned, and did another couple of lengths. I had to wait on for five minutes in the pool after she climbed out, and she was rubbing her hair dry as I walked back.
I asked her, ‘Do you want me to do that?’
She laughed. ‘You really don’t get it, do you, Charlie? Then they would know something was going on.’
‘But it isn’t.’
She laughed again. ‘You need some lessons. I’ll round up the Lost Wives’ Club to teach you.’
‘Did your fellah come back?’
‘Yes. Now he’s gone away again.’
My headache was lifting, and I fancied a beer again. Maybe that’s why I asked, ‘Are you sure you don’t want to sleep with me?’
She said, ‘Almost,’ and giggled. It was almost like her brushing up against me in the pool.
‘I’m going to get us a couple of beers then.’
She nodded, turned on her stomach, and pulled a big straw hat over the back of her head.
I took that as a yes. For the beer, that is.
Up at the bar I found myself alongside a man who’d nearly killed me. The Port Said doctor was smoking a large cigar, and had a self-satisfied look on his face. So would I with seven or eight empties lined up in front of me.
I greeted him, ‘Hiya, Doc. Who’ve you come to poison today?’
‘That was almost funny,’ he responded. ‘For some reason everyone’s greeting me
