‘Probably that they’ve seen a film you haven’t. I wouldn’t worry about it. Can I get you a drink?’
‘I like patients who buy me a drink; it restores my faith in medicine.’
‘Do you have a regular clinic down here, or are you in danger of losing another patient?’
‘Neither. Autopsy. Some poor sod got himself murdered again last night.’ I ran the words in my head, and felt that maybe someone who managed to get murdered again had cracked the secret of eternal life.
‘Who?’
‘A Kiwi who missed his last bus – in more ways than one. Fancy spending the last night of your life in a bloody NAAFI – too depressing for words.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘Gyppoes, my boss tells me: they’re getting worse every day. They broke his neck with a heavy blow, and then defaced his body. The Chief Medical Officer says it was intended to make it look like a ritual killing.’
‘How?’
‘There were groups of parallel slashes on his shoulders and back. Four at a time. I told him I’d seen something like that before – on an animal out in Iraq, which had been attacked by another animal – and he told me to bugger off. So I did. Now I’m going to get drunk.’
‘You think it was something else?’
‘No old boy; I don’t. Not allowed to think. We’re in the Army now.’ He drew a finger across his lips in a zipping motion, and then tried a shaky salute. For a moment it looked as if he would fall over. I steadied him. ‘Thanks; think I shall toddle off for a slash myself. Toodle-oo.’ It must have been the word association that triggered his need.
Outside I asked Haye with an e, ‘Did you hear that someone was killed last night?’
‘Drunk, and lost in the Arab quarter; what do you expect? Thanks for the beer by the way.’ I rested my beer bottle on the small of her back. She said, ‘Oh, that’s lovely.’
‘I want to put my hand on your bum.’
‘If you do I’ll creep up on you in the night with a scalpel, and cut it off.’
‘My hand?’
‘That too. Go back in the pool and cool off.’ Yes ma’am.
She had come down to Ismailia for a weekly early-morning clinic, but had the rest of the day off. When I asked her what the clinic was for, she had replied spontaneous pregnancies, and VD. I didn’t ask any more.
Late afternoon, she borrowed my room in which to shower and change. I didn’t follow her there, and I don’t expect she was disappointed. When she brought me back my key she was every bit a foot soldier of the Grey Mafia again. If anything, I fancied her even more in uniform, but that’s the way it goes . . . You lose some, and you lose some.
That is probably why I was back in the Blue Kettle on my own an hour later.
It was empty. Which is probably why I tried a bit of bad poetry, doodling on the beer mat up at the bar.
’twas empty,
and the Arab girls did twist and tumble like the wave.
But there were no Arab girls either.
There were four-bladed fans on the ceilings. They beat slowly to the rhythm of a New Orleans funeral band. There were flies too. They circled like a squadron of Stukas, spiralling down to feed from the sweat on the back of your neck if you turned your back on them. There was a barman with a flyswat who did his best . . . and his best was far from good enough. He moved like a sleepwalker. The room had the smell of all bars before you are too drunk to notice: disinfectant, stale cigarettes, spilled drinks and last year’s perfume. The disinfectant smelled a livid yellow – the colour of strong urine. The perfume was a ghostly violet. If you need to be told the colour of the smell of stale cigarettes you’ve been living on the wrong planet for a few years: it’s the colour of cancer.
And the joint wasn’t completely empty either. A big man detached himself from a table in one of the shadowy alcoves. He nodded to the bar boy, who reached for another beer from the cold box. This man had a round, olive-coloured face with a small black beard and moustache, a tailored linen suit in need of a dhobi, and an ancient fez on his head. He had six inches on me, but was twice as broad. In fact he probably weighed as much as three of me. He wiped his hand on a handkerchief before offering it to me.
Glancing at my effort on the beer mat he observed, ‘Ah, an English poet.’
‘Hardly. Just a bored Englishman doing a bit of scribbling.’
‘The first word in your first line is incorrect, I think.’
‘Yes?’ I recognized that he was a chancer, but at least he was trying. He made me smile.
‘It should be twat. Soldiers, and even the RAF, come here looking for a bit of twat, not ’twas.’ He laughed as if he had made a joke.
‘Twat?’
‘Yes: an old word. It means cunt: vagina. Woman. You are looking for a woman.’
‘The place was full of them last night.’
‘That was before your unfortunate colleague went to meet our maker. This is the notorious Blue Kettle, after all. Every time something bad happens in Ismailia your Military Police close us down.’
‘For how long?’
He shrugged and smiled, as if the answer was of no account, ‘Two weeks; three . . . who knows? Until a visiting colonel wants a dancing girl, and then we are miraculously safe again, and open for business.’
Another bottle had appeared before me. I hadn’t even noticed the bar boy move. How did he do
