Jasmine Nights (9 page)

They waited all afternoon and half the night for the ghostly-looking blacked-out bus to pull up outside the Theatre Royal. Props and wig baskets were loaded, and when they hopped aboard, Saba was surprised to find the interior of the bus half empty. Sitting next to the driver were two ENSA staff: a bossy, relentlessly smiling man, all moustaches and a leather swagger stick, who said his name was Captain Crowley, and that he was responsible for their safety and welfare. Beside him, a pale young soldier was reading a map by torchlight.

The acrobats sat at the back, Willie, the comedian, next to Arleta, Janine pale as death at the front, and Saba in the middle of the bus, her feet, unfamiliar in their clumpy new shoes, resting on her kitbag. When the outskirts of London had given way to the blackness of countryside, Crowley handed them each a cardboard box with two stale cheese sandwiches in it, a tiny bar of chocolate and a bottle of water. He warned them to make it last: it could be some time before they reached where they were going.

Their plane touched down at four in the morning on a narrow strip of tarmac on the edge of a desert, under a night sky dazzling with millions of the brightest stars she’d ever seen. ‘North Africa,’ Arleta whispered, shortly before they landed. ‘I’ve just heard.’

It was heaven to feel fresh air again, even though it was surprisingly cold and stank of petrol fumes. They stood at the edge of the runway, the wind blowing small heaps of sand around their feet. A truck arrived, seemingly from nowhere, with two British army officers inside it. They had guns tucked into their holsters. They shouted at some men wearing what looked like long nightshirts and stained woollen hats who swarmed on to the plane, deftly unloading the portable stage, a generator, and, to Willie’s shouted instructions – ‘ ’Ere, watch it! Mind that!’ – his ukulele case.

They were held up for hours while the paperwork was sorted out, and it was already getting warm by the time they left in a cloud of dust. Saba, peering through the truck’s canvas flaps, felt a shiver of wonder move up her spine, at the sight of the desert stretching out as far as the eye could see, now stained with the beginnings of a blood-red sunrise.

Arleta fell asleep, her head resting on her kitbag, her hair spilling on to Saba’s knee.

‘I’d get some shut-eye if I were you,’ she’d advised earlier. ‘If we’re going south, it’s miles and miles of bugger all – we could be driving for days.’

But Saba was too excited. She’d been sick three times on the aeroplane, and felt, as it rose above the clouds and lurched and swooped, so bad not saying goodbye to Mum and Tan, it was like an empty ache inside her, an actual physical pain as if she’d been kicked. But this! Well . . . already hope was starting to bloom inside her like the sunrise. This was living! What she’d come for. The greatest adventure of her life so far.

Their truck accelerated through an abandoned airfield, lined with rolls of barbed wire and the rusted hulks of old aircraft, and once again she could see desert on either side of the long, straight road. The sand was crinkled and dark like the sea at dusk, and there, flat and parched as an overcooked omelette. A large sand dune, as big as hills at home, and then a waterhole winking like a ruby in the dawn light. The phenomenal space of it – such a relief after the cramped aircraft – dwarfed everything; it made their noisy truck feel as temporary and insubstantial as a child’s toy.

When she woke, they were passing through a small village with flat-roofed mud houses on either side of them. A man standing outside his hovel was feeding a donkey from a bundle of bright green leaves. A woman drawing water from a well stopped and shielded her eyes as they passed.

The sun was frazzling her eyes and sweat dripped down the inside of her blouse and stuck her back to the lorry seat, which was almost too hot to touch. Captain Crowley, changed into khaki shorts and displaying long white legs, was making some sort of announcement. She heard his jaw grind. The matey version of Captain Crowley had gone; he was back in the army now. Janine, who sat on his right, listened as alert as the star pupil in a deportment class; opposite her, old Willie, cradling his head, an exhausted bulldog as he lifted his eyes.

‘It needn’t concern you where we are at the moment,’ Crowley barked. ‘All you need to know is that we expect to arrive in Cairo at roughly thirteen hundred hours. You three girls will be staying at the digs which are on Ibrahim Pasha Street just behind our offices. You chaps,’ he said to the men, ‘have temporary digs at the YMCA.’

The men were too tired and too hot to make jokes about leaving them. Willie in particular looked green with fatigue. Earlier, Arleta had confided in a perfumey whisper that he’d had heart troubles towards the end of his run in
Puss in Boots
, but he didn’t want anyone to know about them. She said he was a tough old bird and that Dr Footlights would see him through, or he’d snuff it on stage, which would probably be the best possible thing for him anyway.

‘At around sixteen hundred hours,’ Crowley continued, ‘assuming we can organise the transport, we’ll pick you up again, and you’ll be taken to our HQ in the Kasr-el Nil Street. If we can’t, get a gharry. At HQ you’ll be briefed about security arrangements, rehearsals and concerts. I’m afraid it’s not going to be exactly a picnic from now on, but at least we won’t be flying for a while.’ He gave Saba a hard look, as if to say:
Listen, girl with three sick bags, I hope you’re up to this
.

Their driver shifted gears and slowed down; they’d reached a ramshackle collection of tents, a grim little town. Saba saw two British soldiers do a perfect double-take as Arleta, freshly lipsticked and combed, gave them a regal wave. The men’s thin faces swam into focus and disappeared into a dusty wake.

‘Those poor sods look done in.’ Willie had joined them at the back of the truck.

‘I’m not surprised,’ Crowley said quietly. ‘It’s been a long, hard slog, and there’s worse to come.’

They were covered in a fine white dust by the time they arrived in Cairo, and the light was so bright that Saba felt her eyeballs shrink back in their sockets.

Their digs were on the top floor of what had once been a hotel but was now converted into flats. It was a narrow, stained building with small rusted wrought-iron balconies that overlooked the street. ‘A bit of a dump,’ Janine was quick to remark, gazing up at it mistrustfully.

An old Egyptian man in a djellaba welcomed them inside with a broad smile. His name, he said in broken English, was Abel; if they wanted anything, he was their man. They followed his battered sandals and cracked heels up to the first floor, where he stopped outside a door labelled
Female Latrines
. Inside, he proudly showed them a dim little bathroom with an old-fashioned geyser and a cracked lavatory with a huge bottle of DiMP repellent resting on the lid.

On the next floor was their small two-bedroomed flat with cool tiled floors. The sitting room, furnished with dark old-fashioned furniture and faded lithographs of desert scenes, gave on to the small balcony with intricately carved shutters on either side which overlooked the street. A woman padded into the room with a glass bowl with three oranges and three bananas in it. Saba’s mouth filled with saliva. She hadn’t eaten a banana since the war began.

‘
Shukran
,’ she said to the woman. ‘They look lovely.’ Adding in Arabic, ‘This is a very nice place.’

‘Blimey,’ said Arleta when the door had closed again. ‘Where did you learn to speak wog?’

Janine, who’d sat down, ankles crossed, on the edge of a cane sofa, looked equally startled, as if Saba had committed a serious faux pas.

‘I grew up near Tiger Bay,’ Saba explained. ‘There were two Arab families living in our street and one of them was my friend, and by the way, it’s not wog, it’s Arabic.’

‘What was an Arab doing in your street?’ Janine had a superior way of lowering her eyelids when she spoke.

‘There were all sorts there.’ Saba resented her already. ‘Greek, Somali – our fathers went to sea together. Still do. My father’s a ship’s engineer.’

Janine thought about this. ‘So he’s an educated man?’

‘Yes. He reads books and everything.’ Stuck-up idiot, Saba was thinking. She had half a mind to boast about how much her father knew about astrology, how many languages he spoke, how his own father had been the headmaster of a school, but decided against it. This was already the most words they’d ever said to each other.

‘Well, gosh,’ Janine said softly, with a slight shake of her head. She rearranged her elegant limbs. ‘It takes all sorts.’ The slight northern nasal twang broke through her carefully pitched voice. They stared at each other for a while.

‘So.’ Arleta leapt to her feet suddenly. ‘I am absolutely pooped. Which bed do you want, darlings? I can sleep anywhere, so you two can fight it out for the spare room.’

Well in that case, Janine said, would it be all right if she slept alone? The slightest thing woke her up, and sometimes she liked to read at night.

‘Absolutely fine, darling,’ Arleta grinned.

Stopping only to pick up a banana, Janine left the room bouncing on the balls of her feet, like a principal ballerina leaving the stage after tumultuous applause.

‘Oh for Christ’s sake!’ said Arleta, when the door had closed behind her. ‘What horse did she ride in on?’

‘I think she was in the corps de ballet somewhere,’ Saba whispered back. ‘She’s quite posh.’

‘Oh.’ Arleta went all bendy for a moment and fluttered her arms in a perfect arabesque. ‘Sorry I spoke.

‘So.’ She pointed towards a piece of faded chintz hanging from a pole. ‘Which side of this beautiful wardrobe do you want?’

Saba didn’t care. Her legs still felt fuzzy from the plane and her head was buzzing. While Arleta unpacked, she lay down fully dressed on the bed, and listened to the babble of sound in the street outside, the honk of traffic, the clip-clop of horses’ feet.

When she woke up, Arleta was sitting on the bed opposite her. She was staring intensely at a photograph and then she put it away and wiped her eyes. It felt like a private moment so Saba pretended to be asleep, but through half-closed eyes examined Arleta.

Her feet were bare, and she’d changed into a peach silk nightdress that emphasised her narrow waist, her perfect bottom shimmering in silk.

She unpacked a pair of pink feathered slippers, the two gym-mistressy shirts that were standard army issue, a delicate pair of silver sandals, a khaki hat, a vanity bag bulging with little bottles, a penknife, a blonde wig, a gorgeously boned corset with satin drawstrings. This weird variety of things reminding Saba of a cardboard doll she’d had as a child that came with clothes to hook on for a marvellous variety of lives: glamour puss, vamp, ice skater, horsewoman.

And now . . . ah! Horrible! She was undoing a cloth bag and had taken a small animal out. She turned and laughed when she heard Saba gasp.

‘Don’t worry, pet, it’s not alive.’ As she held a mink stole against her face, Saba caught a draught of some rich perfume. ‘But isn’t it heaven? A present from an admirer, and absolutely useless here,’ she said, ‘but I couldn’t bear to leave the poor thing behind.’ She spoke about it softly, sadly, as though it really was alive.

Saba wondered who had given it to her, and if he was the one who had made her cry; she didn’t know her well enough to ask yet.

There was a faint tang of soap in the air when Saba went into the bathroom later in the afternoon. She took off all her clothes and washed herself from head to foot. She felt shockingly adrift and needed a job to do. Couldn’t bear to think of home at all. Mum in the floral chair by the fire, how her face would look. Janine had been at the basin before her, laying out her flannel, her toothbrush, her jar of aspirins and her shampoo, so neatly she might have used a set square to do so. Saba changed into a clean uniform shirt, brushed her hair, and gazed at herself in amazement. Was this really her? On her own, in Cairo, and part of a professional company?

They were out in the street now, in the blinding light and an oven blast of heat. Arleta, like the old hand she was, flagged down a gharry and instructed the driver to take them to the ENSA offices.

Crowley had warned them earlier that every hour was rush hour in Cairo at the moment: in the last three months more than 30,000 Allied troops had arrived from Canada, the US, Australia. When Lev, the acrobat, had asked why, Crowley had rolled his eyes and said, ‘Polish, do you spend your entire life hanging upside down on a flaming trapeze? There’s a war on here; the Germans are coming.’ He’d given his hostile smile, and when he’d turned away, Lev had thrust his two fingers violently in the air at him and murmured, ‘Bastard.’ With an ugly look on his face.

Unreal city. Peeping from behind the stained curtains of the horse-drawn carriage clip-clopping through the streets, Saba almost forgot to breathe she was so excited. There were shops bursting with silks and clothes and shoes, dark passages like the mouths of tombs hung with handbags and pots, piles of mouth-watering oranges and peaches. On the narrow pavements, khaki-clad soldiers jostled for room alongside women holding children, a man on a donkey with huge candelabra on his back.

At the crossroads, a policeman stopped them as a red Studebaker car passed, narrowly avoiding a camel airily depositing a load of dung. When they slowed down outside a restaurant called Ali Baba’s, Arleta informed them that this was where the troops drank. ‘Other ranks, you know,’ she said in a posh voice.

A couple of soldiers who seemed to have been drinking all afternoon appeared from the restaurant and did mock staggers at the sight of them. The little one whistled at them like a bird and waggled his hips.

‘Oh honestly!’ Janine shrank behind the soiled canvas of their gharry, her face almost comically prissy. ‘If it’s going to be like this, I’d just as soon go home.’

‘Where are you going, darl?’ the tall soldier asked Saba in an Aussie accent. He had a long scar on his face and a hungry expression.

‘We’re performing artistes.’ Arleta’s hair was dazzling in the sunlight. ‘You’ll have to come to our concerts to find out.’