I Tried On Your Wedding Dress

Hilary Casey 4

"So, Henry," said Carragher "what is this remarkable plan of yours?"

The fire in Aldridge's eyes, which had faded to almost nothing in Sir Edward's presence, began to murmur signs of life once again and, lighting a cigar as he leaned back on two creaking legs of his chair, he launched into the explanation, wagging his chin as he spoke as if baiting each word from the void that now hung in the air in Sir Edward's absence.

"I have dealt with grave-robbers before, and they are a pretty vicious lot, I can tell you. They deal in death; perhaps they are the worst criminals of all. Not only do they murder anyone who gets in their way; the grave-robber steals the very history of a nation, its lifeblood. He takes from his own people the ties that connect them to their glorious past. They are like the phantoms which went from house to house at the time of the Black Death, violating corpses, pillaging their few meagre possessions…"

"Please, Henry, do not lecture us on theft."

Emil stood at the lobby doors.

"Emil, Emil. These robbers drive their teeth deep into the muscle and sinew of the earth, to suck out the blood of the ages. An archaeologist reveals, and as he does so he inscribes the names of those responsible for these great works. We live to give glory to the name of Ancient Egypt."

"And what about the new Egyptians?" said Emil "Where should they find their history: in a packing crate in the vaults of the British Museum?"

"Just for it to see the light of day is a great miracle."

"How can you claim miracles in your own name?"

"Emil, you know very well that's not what I meant…"

Carragher had been smoking quietly as this argument developed. He chipped in:

"What exactly is your plan, Henry?"

"My plan, Derek, is to seek out and expose these heretics!"

I was drawn into the conversation.

"Dr Aldridge, why do you not alert the authorities to what you have discovered? Surely they have a great deal more power to deal with these things than Sir Edward."

I felt three pairs of eyes alight on me.

Dr Aldridge stood up and began to walk around the table, his gaze held directly ahead of him wherever he went. His baby hands were clasped together behind his back. He had the appearance of a fat old tabby cat with those sharpened whiskers. He followed the pattern of the carpet, as if reading the map of a maze, stopping sharply here and there to proceed in another direction. I tried again.

"Isn't that right, Dr Aldridge?"

"In a manner of speaking; yes. But the Egyptian police are not above suspicion. They have long ignored the problem. Now, I have a way in, a contact, the trader, who has another contact, and who himself has another, and so on. I believe that the entire Luxor organisation can be brought down simply by applying pressure to this one man."

"Anything he tells you will place him in great danger." This came from Emil, who had previously told me frightening stories of the black market in Cairo, where the trade was rife. "You will not be able to get a name from him; if you do, the trader will die, and possibly the next man in the chain also. I have seen this tried many times before, it cannot work."

Aldridge took another turn in his maze. He took two steps and paused as he reached one of the candles. The thick smoke that emanated from it seemed drawn towards him.

"Why does every operation aimed at the black market in Egypt fail? Because of the myth perpetuated that grave-robbers are all-powerful. They are merely common thieves, yet the nature of their work puts them in the arena of the ghoulish. They carry no magical powers!"

"They have power of fear," said Emil "the power to destroy. In a civilised country, in Europe or America, a murderer will be hunted down; there is, in our little Northern world, the power of law. No crime ever completely destroys, the weight of justice is applied and the scales are rebalanced. People know that for every crime committed, retribution is visited. We are mostly godless nations, in the North, yet we still worship one God, and he gives us the power to punish. In Egypt, in the corridors of the bazaars, a knife may be forced between the ribs, a club may dash your brains out, and no-one will ever know. The sand and the dust will cover your bones; just as no-one worries for the dead Pharaoh's injuries, no-one will miss you should you disappear into a market stall and never reappear."

"I am surprised," said Aldridge, with barely concealed disdain, "that such an intelligent young man should be so open to such nonsense. The bazaar is a marketplace, the minaret is a tower; the crescent moon is just a concealed mirror! Spare me this mysticism. You sound like a child afraid of a rocking horse in the dark!"

"That's enough, Henry."

Carragher was running the points of his unused fork in a circle around his wine glass. He passed the heavy bottomed cutlery from one hand to another when it became impossible to complete the circle without its teeth from the table. There was in his bearing, an air of resignation, to what I did not understand. The whole time we had been staying at his hotel, I don't think I ever failed to immediately judge the significance of his actions: he had an unrivalled honesty of intentions. Even he had taken on a mysterious air. Not another word was said by anyone. Dr Aldridge retired to his room, as did Emil and finally Carragher to theirs. I followed Carragher to the door, looking back as I remembered Mrs Capuron sitting by the pool, but the strange lady had disappeared into the night."

My father put me to bed that night. Grandmother slept in my vacant sister's room; she had left for university in Autumn and the room still held her childhood things; photographs in homemade frames, buckets of fluffy pens. Her friends had written their names and messages in biro above the head board of her bed. She was two years older than me, old enough to look down on my naivety, but not really old enough to make it stick. I mean, she was barely older than me, compared to friend's siblings. I knew one lad whose oldest brother was in his thirties. He was almost an uncle, by rights. My sister would always stay just ahead of me, never safe enough in her lead to slow down. That was how I thought at the time.

Dad flung a woollen blanket over my sister's single bed and left two white towels, still warm from lying on the pipes in the airing cupboard. The room stank of baby powder. I couldn't imagine grandma sleeping there, amongst all that pink. Her skin seemed too stylised in perpetual black for such a colour relationship. Black suited her; she'd worn it in mourning for my grandfather since the day he died.

They stayed up late, her and my parents, drinking and laughing, filling my room with the comforting sense of cigarette smoke and alcohol that emanated through the floors, an atmosphere that lived and breathed, spiked by conversation and fuelled by the boiling radiators. Later on, I watched as the old woman emerged groggily from the bathroom; she wore a long black nightgown that hung on her pointed shoulder blades, her hair was messed up. I sat in my room with the door open and the lights off, picturing this venerable old goat and her ragged, hardy frame amongst the unnatural world of my sister's wicker furniture and eyeliner stained pink tissue paper. I could see her dozing silhouetted by the dulled moonlight, a cartilaginous hulk beneath the patched salmon bedspread.

"I had a very strange dream last night, Will."

My grandmother was up and fully dressed as I wandered downstairs that Sunday. She was drinking coffee and smoking out of the back door, leaning on the frame, blowing little clouds into the garden.

At that age I got up around 6 every Sunday morning. I would lie on the couch and watch cartoons with a glass of chocolate milkshake and a handful of biscuits for dipping until they went soft.

She appeared at the living room door; we watched the cartoons in silence. The nervousness I've always experienced around new acquaintances forced a cold wave through my half-asleep muscles. When you are of a nervous disposition, as I have always been, you get used to constantly trying to structure your movements so as to follow a developing code of manners; you become convinced that every action that a person carries out affects the picture that other people form of them.

First impressions are indicative of this. I can tell, just by the way I first communicate directly with other people, whether I am likely to get on well with them, how attractive they find me, how likely we are to forge a meaningful friendship. I am rarely wrong. I had a friend at school, when I first joined my 'big' school at 11, called Steven. He lived not far from me. We were joined by that bond that can only develop between school-friends who live close enough together to seek each-other's company when they are bored, which, at that age, is always. Steven introduced me to objects I had only heard about on TV. Condoms, Drug paraphernalia like rolling tins, cigarette papers (which I had never seen), even a woman's sex toy. We found them in his brother's chest of drawers, lying there, predicting our future. From that day, hundreds of objects and logos took on a new meaning for me.

"I dreamt about Mrs Capuron. We were by the pool, outside the Meridien. She was swimming round and round in circles. I was sitting at the table I would always share with Emil and Carragher, but I was alone. On the table in front of me was sat a fat white rabbit, with the face of Dr Alridge. He had long white ears, and was dressed up in a little white waistcoat with gold buttons, and he was talking to me… He was saying 'I need a little help, Miss Merrion. I'd like you to drain the pool, and to make that horrible woman disappear forever.' Then he pulled out a little tub of wax and started to twirl his moustache."

She crossed my path and sat down beside me. She looked at me, and I returned my gaze to the TV. As I listened a cartoon shark in sunglasses rode an underwater motorbike through a forest of seaweed.

"Emil took me out driving on our final morning at the Meridien. We passed out of the hotel area at a patient speed; Emil didn't seem too interested in thrill-seeking. We hit the main road; I was surprised at how little better it actually was than the old dirt track that had been our only route to civilisation for over a year."

"We picked up a little speed going north, Emil said, towards a village called Uraq, where he stopped the car outside a group of wooden shacks a little away from the main road. Shallow canals gilded the land for miles around with thinly glittering sheaths of greenery. In the distance, close to the Nile, lay fields of sugarcane. There was a low cloud across the whole sky. Emil climbed out of the car and entered one of the shacks. The wind whipped around the vehicle, blasting sand in mini tornadoes across the plains. Emil emerged from the shack.

"Come on in, Hilary."

The shack was filled with farming paraphernalia. Emil motioned me over to where a decrepit plough lay like a human torso, its arms outstretched, as if stricken by an existential grief. The Belgian lifted a floor board and began to dig in the exposed sand with his bare hands; soon he had extracted a tin box, which he held out to me expectantly.

"I got this on Mesparo's last excavation in the Valley of the Kings."

He held my gaze.

"You stole it?"

He smiled but did not answer.

I lifted the lid. Inside lay a child's doll dressed up to look like a Spanish dancer, with a velvety purple skirt and red spots on both cheeks. It looked brand new.

"An Egyptian child gave me it in return for a small statue of Horus I found during the dig. Sir Edward hardly looked at the statue; even Mesparo seemed bored when I presented it to them. Sir Edward said 'For god's sake Emil, you don't need to bring every little thing you find to me! If you like it, keep it quiet.'"

"I brought quite a few things out here in my first couple of years. The fellahin who owned this farm works at the Meridien now; he lets me use it to store whatever I want."

"You stole a lot from digs?"

"Little things, a lot."

I turned the doll over in my hand.

"Where is it all now?"

"I gave it back. Not to Mesparo, to an Egyptian working at the dig. I knew one, a man named Pepi. He had a large family: his mother was unable to look after herself. One day, I gave him everything I had collected. He moved up north to Alexandria on the proceeds. I got a letter from him last year. His mother had died."

I locked my arm with Emil's and led him out into the dreary morning. The tornado danced across the rocky landscape, swelling and receding in the air currents. We got back into the Darraq and he started the engine.

"You should be very proud Emil. You have redeemed yourself in the eyes of our Northern God." I took his hand and kissed the palm. He eased his foot down onto the accelerator