They Do the Same Things Different There (16 page)

In your hotel room you open up your laptop and fire off a quick email home. “Hello from sunny Egypt! It’s very hot! Wish you were here. Miss you loads. Lots of love, give Tammy a hug from Daddy.” And then you go on to Google, and type into the search engine “camel sex.”

You read about the camel penis, and are shown a diagram that measures its length and breadth. You read how, when aroused, the penis is in a different axis to most mammals, and when erect enters the female from the reverse direction. You find out that the camel’s right testicle is slightly bigger than the camel’s left testicle.

You break into the mini bar.

You read how a camel in heat is referred to in Arabia as the “hadur,” literally, “the braying one.” You suppose there’s a lot of braying in camel sex. You read that, when he’s rutting, the camel will secrete behind the ear a sticky smelly residue. That he’ll grind his teeth uncontrollably during copulation. That his mouth will froth, he’ll gargle, he’ll spit. He’ll piss, and he’ll swing his tail back and forth through the stream of piss to swish the piss about. That all this water loss, this very deliberate waste of precious fluids, is part of a courtship ritual designed to impress the female. That he’ll blow out his soft palate (the dulla) to turn her on the more; that, for his part, he’ll sniff at his partner’s genitalia, and the smell of urine from a non-pregnant female will excite him to no end.

You drink the mini bar dry.

When at last you sleep you dream of fat, hairy, hooked cocks impregnating your urine-drenched sister, and though she’s wearing her burqa, you can somehow tell throughout the whole thing that she’s grinning from ear to ear.

Emma phones you in the morning. She’s been given permission to take a whole afternoon off work so you can explore Cairo together. The taxi pulls up outside the hotel, she waves at you to get inside. Once again she is wearing her burqa. She hands another burqa to you. “Put this on,” she says.

“What for?”

“I want to show you where Abdul works. Abdul’s marvellous at his job! But Ali doesn’t like me being there, he says I’ll distract him, bless.” And she gives a very dry and very un-Muslim-like chuckle. “I don’t want us to be recognized, you’re going to have to cover your face like me.”

So you put on the burqa. The air conditioning of the taxi makes the cloth ripple across your face, and the sensation is not unpleasant.

You pay the driver, and you and your sister stand and watch Abdul and his master work. Ali is transformed; the surly and serious man you met last night is now all smiles, he wheedles his way around the tourists, he invites them all to inspect his camel, to see what a fine beast it is, to take a ride to the Great Pyramid in such style—and he’s so good at it, no one seems able to blank him or walk away, no one, not even the Americans. He’s such a good actor. And Abdul is a good actor too, because whenever a foreigner approaches he lowers his head toward them and flutters his eyelashes and even parts his lips into some sort of camel smile, he doesn’t seem to mind when the children pull his ears or pick at his coat or dribble ice cream on him, he’s the very picture of patience, the very model of Oriental dignity—and amongst all the sphinx snow globes and mummy paperweights and postcards of the pyramids, amongst all these imitations of history made cheap and plastic, he looks like the genuine article, he looks himself like a piece of antiquity, so old and so very wise. And for the first time you understand why your sister could have fallen in love with him. “Hoosh hoosh!” says Ali, and Abdul stoops to let tourists onto his back; “Hoosh!” and he straightens up, and the tourists are raised high in the air, each one of them laughing and crying out in surprise at the sudden speed of it. And you picture your sister up there, mounting her camel husband as much as she wants for the rest of her life.

You watch for a good hour and a half. Emma never gets bored. “Isn’t he wonderful?” she’ll say. You begin to get tired, and there’s a reservoir of sweat pooling at the top of your thighs. You suggest that maybe there’s more to see in Cairo than her husband, what would Emma recommend? And she says she doesn’t know, she hasn’t done any of the tourist stuff. “You never do, do you, when you’re at home?” And you resist the urge to remind her she’s only been here in Egypt for two weeks.

You go to the Cairo museum, you pay for two tickets. You walk around the exhibits, and the collection is vast. Everywhere there are mummies and canopic jars and little stone pots with heads of jackals. But it seems to you that you’ve seen it all before, in dozens of other museums all around the world, and you really might as well be in London or Paris or Prague; my God, for a civilization that collapsed thousands of years ago they certainly left an awful lot of stuff behind, didn’t they? But Emma is happy. She says to you at one point, “It’s beautiful, I’m so proud that my country could produce all this,” and she talks a little of Mother Egypt. “I’m so proud you’re here,” she whispers too, and she takes you by the arm, and the eyes behind the burqa slit are wet with tears, and you can’t tell whether she’s crying out of awe and admiration for the pharaohs or out of love for you—and then you realize with a start you’ve spent all this time looking out of a slit too, you forgot to take the burqa off, you’ve been walking all around the Cairo museum wearing a bloody burqa, you feel like an idiot.

“Come on,” you say, and take her to the café. The food there costs a fortune. You buy two coffees, and two sandwiches, and a pastry, you pay for it all. Emma gobbles down her sandwich. She looks so hungry suddenly, and you let her eat your sandwich too.

“You’re a good person,” she says suddenly. You don’t know where that’s come from. You then see she’s eaten the pastry as well. “You’re a good guy. I think you’re kind, and I don’t think you’ve got the easiest life, and you put up with a lot. And me. I think you put up with me.”

“Oh,” you say. “I don’t know about that.”

“I never found good guys. I always ended up with the other sort of guys. The selfish shit sort of guys. If I’d met someone like you, God, I don’t suppose I’d now be marrying a camel.”

You blush, and you wish you were still wearing your burqa. She doesn’t say anything else for a bit, and you wonder whether she’ll do her usual trick, whether now she’s let show a little emotion or humanity that she’ll sweep it away with some dismissive gesture. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t.

“I always thought you saw me as a bit of an idiot,” you say.

“No.”

You don’t look at her. “You pulled my hair. You kicked me. I never thought you even liked me very much.”

“I haven’t pulled your hair.”

“Not recently. I mean. But when we were kids.”

“Well. You’re my little brother.” As if that explains everything.

“Are you sure you want . . . Are you sure that . . . Emma?” And you’d like to carry on, but you mustn’t ask, and you’re still not looking at her, you still don’t dare, and even if you did what would be the point, her face would still be veiled, wouldn’t it? “I just want you happy,” you say, and you leave it like that, and maybe that’s just as well.

That evening at the hotel you check your email and there’s nothing from your wife, so you write to her again. “Hello from sunny Egypt! It’s still very hot here! I haven’t heard from you, are you all right? Wish you were here. Today I went to the Cairo museum. I think you’d have liked it. I know you like museums, and it was a very big one. Lots of pots everywhere. I wish you’d been here to see them. I miss you. How are you, are you all right? Write soon. Give Tammy a hug from her Daddy.”

Then you decide to take a walk. As you leave the hotel the doorman stands to attention and calls you sir. He looks funny dressed up posh like that, like an English gentleman from a hundred years ago, top hat and spats. (He must be baking.) You walk around the streets for an hour. This is Cairo, the real Cairo, isn’t it? Your clothes cling to you, damp and sticky, you wonder why anyone would choose to live here. I mean, you know that historically people just settled where they were born, but nowadays, in these days of international travel, why do all of these Egyptians stay? The roads are noisy. The sand is everywhere, it looks like dirt. You go back to the hotel, and the doorman stands to attention once more, once more calls you sir, so efficient—you bet he doesn’t even recognize you from last time—and you wish he wouldn’t call you sir, you didn’t ask him for that, you didn’t ask for anything.

In the room you check your email. Still nothing from your wife, but then, you suppose, she’s probably asleep. You consider phoning, but you’d only wake her. You’d only make her cross. You write to her once more.

“Me again! I’ve been thinking. I may extend my visit here, if that’s all right. I don’t know how long. But I think my sister needs me.”

You open the mini bar and it’s empty. Not so fucking efficient after all, for all their fancy doormen, for all their top hats, they’ve let you down. You phone reception, you demand they restock your mini bar at once. A waiter in a red velvet jacket comes up soon after, lines the shelves with little bottles, smiles at you widely, says “Sorry, sorry.”

You write another email.

“I don’t think it’s working out. I don’t think I love you anymore.”

You drink a whisky. And then think, why not? And send it.

And you think, oh, Tammy. Tammy. You’d have grown into such a beautiful woman. And you try to picture how beautiful, like a model maybe, like a girl on the cover of a glossy magazine, like a pin-up.

You lie on the bed. You turn on the
TV
. There’s some sort of game show on. You can’t work out what the rules are, but the host is quite funny, all the audience seem to be laughing at him, what a character.

It’s now the day before the wedding, and Emma and Abdul have to be weighed. It’s a formality, of course. Your sister is a fat woman, but it’s obvious that her camel is big enough to resist her sexual advances should he want to. But everyone has to be weighed regardless, that’s the law of the thing.

Ali has booked an early morning appointment for the marriage weigher. He wants Abdul out there at the tourist sites as soon as possible, the groom still has a full day’s work ahead of him. The marriage weigher arrives promptly, wearing a suit and carrying all the paperwork. He brings with him a couple of assistants who are responsible for lugging the large set of scales.

The weighing takes place within the garage. Your sister goes first, and she’s easy; she strips off completely naked, climbs onto the scales. It seems so strange to see her exposed when, since you’ve arrived, she’s always been smothered in purdah. She stands still for a few seconds, breasts drooping, minge flashing, but nobody is interested in what she looks like, it’s the digital reading of her weight that they care about. She comes in at 167 pounds. Even though it’s hot and sweaty here, and she doesn’t appear to eat much, she’s still a big girl.

Abdul is harder work. He simply doesn’t want to be weighed. Ali does his best to coax him, he says “Hoosh, hoosh!”, he tries smiling, he tugs at the rope running through his nostrils. The weigher’s assistants try to push him onto the scales by force, they take one bottom cheek each, but Abdul doesn’t like that at all, he harrumphs his misgivings about the matter most insistently. “Let me try,” says your sister, “he’ll listen to me.” And as she approaches Abdul, he does indeed calm down, he stops jerking his head from side to side, he seems to concentrate on the words she breathes into his ear. “Please, darling,” she says. “Because without this, we can’t get married. We can’t be together, and I love you so much.” Abdul nods his head a bit. He considers what she says. He trots forward to the scales, contemplates them studiously. Then pisses on them.