The Book of the Dead (6 page)

This time I’m using a lockup in Leeds, bought outright, with the best security and climate control money can buy. A couple of the others will be checking in on me every now and again.

The ushabti aren’t necessary either, although they make life a little more comfortable in the underworld. I’ve left most of my old ones in Abdju, but I have a small box of them in my improvised tomb: a few servants, some tools and luxuries. Meryetamun went to bed with a crate of teddy bears, last time she went down. I’ve heard they snuffled about in Duat for a year or two, quite useless as servants, but caused something of a stir.

Aside from my tomb, I need to arrange for my current identity to “die” and for my disappearance to be explained. I need to create my new identity, have funds moved and documents created. I have the resources for all of this – I’ve become practised – but the wheels have to be set in motion.

Using the internet on her phone, she’s confirmed that there’s a bus service to get us both on our way again. We’ve a short wait. She’s become brusque, cold. She orders another coffee and another tea, smiles breezily, starts talking about a film she’s seen recently.

I miss her. Not just Phoebe, but already I miss her in herself, this proud, bold, warm, loving woman I met on the platform today. Sitting next to me, the scarf around her neck now, less tangible armour up around that, blowing on her latte and sipping it, and regarding me over the lip of the cup with bright, brittle eyes.

Blue eyes. Clear and open. Phoebe’s had been dark. I actually think I like these more.

She’s hurt, and she’s not sure why. That I’m rejecting her, of course; that we’ve touched each other so and I’m closing up again. But she can’t see why this stranger, this man she’s just met, by chance, one autumn afternoon in a train station in the middle of nowhere, can have such a hold over her. She’s angry with herself for caring that I’m leaving.

We talk for another fifteen minutes or so, on trivialities. The sky’s turned nearly black, now, and the first few stars are coming out. By the time I stand to go – she’ll catch the next one, she says; she wants to work on some poetry before she heads on – she’s entirely fenced in again, as though nothing had happened. A rock has settled in my belly.

I shake her hand, smile mechanically, say goodbye. I use the name on the sheet of paper in my pocket, but my heart screams at her,
Phoebe
. She uses the name I gave her, the name of the identity I will kill in Leeds. On an impulse, I bend over and kiss her on the cheek before I turn to go.

She arrived on a Tuesday morning: the grey drizzly weather doing nothing to deter the crowds or the photographers gathered around the entrance and hoping to catch a glimpse of her, however brief. From a small, square window on the fifth floor of the Sutherland wing, a security guard looked down on the little circus and unclipped a walkie-talkie from his belt.

“Mike? It’s Russ. I know. I know. I see it. Send someone out to help the boys, would you?” He paused, watching the lorry as it reversed into the museum’s loading dock. “And for Christ’s sake make sure they don’t drop this one.”

Dave Blewitt had been with the museum for eleven years – many of which had been spent ambling through the halls and corridors on his rounds late at night with no particular care – and had never seen anything like the pandemonium of the loading bay as the lift-truck backed away from the lorry with a large packing crate balanced on its forks. There were people everywhere, making the already nerve-wracking unloading process even more chaotic. Curators and Keepers, docents, students, security staff… even one man who Dave had never seen beyond the walls of the card catalogue room. All of them were there – just like the crowds outside – waiting for their first look at the Princess.

Dave couldn’t pronounce her name. He’d read it on the bulletin board in the security office, written in neat upper-case letters on the weekly activity sheet. It’d had a lot of ‘i’s in it.

Whatever her name was, she was the jewel of the exhibition: the largest the museum had hosted in a decade. Already she’d caused a sensation in France and riots in Germany (where the demand for tickets to see her had far outstripped supply, even after the Neues Museum’s exhausted Director announced they would remain open twenty-four hours a day for a month in an attempt to keep up with the crowds…). When they had released the first pre-sale tickets to the exhibition,
The Life and Death of a Princess
, the traffic had crashed the museum’s servers so definitively that it took fourteen hours to get them back up and running again. Dave didn’t think he’d seen the IT department get through so many cigarettes or so much coffee in one day before. And that was saying something.

The forklift reversed past him, followed by the crowd of Keepers from the Ancient Egyptian department, and he watched as the crate disappeared into the gloom. He didn’t see what the fuss was all about, really: it looked like every other crate that came through the loading bay; strapped and stapled and stamped with
Customs pre-cleared
in big red letters – and, as always, accompanied by a buzzing little entourage of archeologists. There was a rattle from somewhere in the bowels of the building as the door to the cargo lift slammed shut. Princess or not, she was still coming in through the service entrance.

The Petrie Room had been closed for several weeks ahead of the Princess’s arrival while the exhibition team prepared. Boards were wheeled in, wires taped down and ramps locked into place. Glass cases and black-painted plinths, each carefully arranged and labelled, were rolled into position and hooked up to lighting and climate control systems, to alarms and motion sensors and a thousand other devices. They sat, elegantly lit and empty; waiting for
her
.

The royal procession went on for hours: long after the crowds at the gate had gone, long after the museum had closed for the night and the last curious visitors had been ushered past the Petrie’s doors as crate after crate was wheeled inside. The civilised chaos continued well into the early hours and the sound of electric screwdrivers and hammers echoed around the deserted halls with only the statues to hear them.

The exhibition would not open to the public for some days: not until labels had been checked and rechecked, not until the VIPs had been given their private tours – the donors and the Board and the handful of politicians who had pulled strings at their respective departments – escorted in hushed solemnity from case to case while champagne fizzed in glasses on silver trays; leafing through exhibition catalogues with all the Princess’s otherworldly goods laid out in tableaux, her life dissected and made fit for display. Her death, too. Her afterlife. Her hair combs and bangles. Her cups and her game boards. Her shoes, her pets and her gods. Her heart, neat in its cat-headed jar: a rare find, according to the tag, for by the time she lived and died the fashion was to leave the heart intact and where it had lain in life – a just reward for a job well done.

But the Princess was a princess, in death no less than in life – more so, it seemed, for even a royal household could not have sustained so many Keepers and curators as were crowded around the glass coffin where she lay in state, awaiting her public from seven o’clock the next morning.

That night, that quiet night when the work was done and the last of the VIPs had downed the last of the champagne and accepted their complimentary postcard packs; when the museum was silent and still, Dave found himself on the rota to cover the graveyard shift in the Petrie Room. It wasn’t often that the Petrie had its own guard – after all, for nine months of the year it was a largely empty space, used for lectures or workshops or (to the joy of all the staff) a lunch room for school visits. That night, however, as Dave plodded along the empty corridors, was different.

It would be his own private view of the exhibition – an audience, he thought, with Her Royally Departed Highness. He let himself into the Petrie quietly, turning off the usual motion detectors as he went. The Director had been getting greyer and greyer as the week had gone on, and Dave didn’t think he would thank him for a midnight wake-up call. Not tonight. Not any night, come to think of it.

His feet made no sound as they sank into the thick grey carpet specially laid for the exhibition. Everything was muffled and hushed, and it felt like being in church as he pottered about between the displays, picking his way through the unfamiliar layout. There would be plenty of time to get to know it properly, thought Dave: she’d be there for three months, and with Mike off on holiday soon and Ricky still on paternity leave, he and the Princess would get more of their share of late nights together.

He stopped beside one case, looking in at a bowl inlaid with what was once coloured glass. Or maybe it was enamel. He didn’t read the label. Beside it on the velvet-covered shelf there was a scrap of cloth. “Papy-rus” he said, and the sound of his voice startled him as he read the tag aloud. On the shelf below, a collection of beads – wooden and clay – lay strung together on a golden wire. “Nice enough, if you like that sort of thing.”

The cases were laid out in a loose spiral, forming a labyrinth with
her
at the centre. Raised on a dais, she lay in a gilded sarcophagus – the decorated lid lifted up and away – propped at an angle within the case to raise her head. At her feet, the canopic jars sat in a row, the heart in the middle; the carved animal stoppers watching him as he stepped onto the platform.

Dave leaned as close to the case as he dared, peering down through it at the sarcophagus. His breath misted on the glass.

“So you’re what all the fuss is about, are you?”

Her golden mask stared back at him impassively. Below it, he could see the edges of the linen strips which bound her – and it struck him as strange that the hand which had wound them, had taken such care and pain, was long dead itself and little more than dust by now.

“Makes you think, doesn’t it?” he asked the room. “Makes you feel small.” He turned his attention back to her mask, gazing at it. It was beautifully made: there was no denying it, and as fine after all these years as it must have been the day it was made. What kind of woman, he thought, could command such love? Such attention, such devotion – even in death?

But for all the love and devotion, she was still alone, wasn’t she? Alone, and trapped in a tomb made of glass.

Before he quite knew what he was doing, Dave found himself patting the top of the case. “Don’t you feel lonely, love. I’m here.” Embarrassed, he stopped.

“Well. Best be off.” He tapped a finger thoughtfully on his watch. “Big day for you tomorrow; you’ll be needing your beauty sleep.”

He stepped down from the dais and, pushing his hands into his pockets, began to work his way back through the maze of her possessions to the door, arming the alarm once more as he passed it. The sound of his whistle – an off-key attempt at an aria he’d heard in an advert – echoed through the museum.

In the stillness of the Petrie Room, the Princess slept… but as Dave’s whistle faded into the night, a new sound took its place. A faint, muffled
thump
– almost too quiet to be heard at all.

Thump
.

And then it came again.

Thump
.

Thump-thump.

Thump-thump thump-thump thump-thump.

It was coming from the cat-headed jar at the feet of the Princess.

Dave had never found it easy to get to sleep after a night shift, and that day was no exception. Barely three hours after he had gone to bed he gave up chasing the darkness and dragged himself out of his bedroom and to the sofa. The lunchtime television news was covering the official opening of the exhibition, and there was the Director on the front steps of the museum, the Egyptian department’s Head Keeper beside him. They were framed against the queue snaking through the Grand Plaza, out of the gates and down the street. Dave fumbled for the remote control and turned up the volume. They were talking about the importance of museums, of government funding, of the exhibition, of the artefacts on display… the same things the Director always talked about in interviews, in the vain hope that the more he talked, the less chance there was of their funding being cut. It hadn’t made a difference so far, but that didn’t usually stop him. The picture cut abruptly to the crowds inside, panning across the backs of heads and shoulders to settle on a vase, the sole of a sandal, a scroll… and finally, on
her
; on the Princess herself.

Artefact
. Dave turned the word over in his mind. Was that all she was? A
show
? Was that what she had become? Whoever had wrapped her, tightened those bandages, set the mask over her face… they hadn’t thought that, had they? It didn’t seem right, somehow, to make her the same as the coins and the broken pots and old arrowheads dug up in some muddy field and which now filled gallery after gallery in the museum. She wasn’t the same – not the same at all. She’d been a person, hadn’t she? She had a
name
– even if he couldn’t quite remember what that name was.

Struck by a pang of sudden guilt, Dave wrapped his old grey bathrobe more tightly around himself and shuffled over to the kitchen, switching on the kettle. As he waited for it to boil, he picked up the copy of the exhibition catalogue he had found in the security office at the end of his shift. He flicked through it, listening to the water bubbling and the newsreaders moving on to a heart-warming story about a three-legged dog who rode the escalators at Bank station. The catalogue was full of artful close-ups of bits of old wood, strips of cloth and paintings of men with funny-looking beards – rows of them with their hands raised and all of them wearing what looked like white dresses. Turning further pages showed him torn scraps of papyrus and what looked like a rat wrapped in bandages – but which, on closer examination of the notes printed alongside it – turned out to be a mummified cat.

“Funny bunch, them Egyptians,” said Dave as he poured the milk and the water into his mug and dropped a teabag in after them. Sitting down at the table, he carried on flipping. He turned one more page… and froze, the cup halfway to his lips.

There she was.

It was not a photograph; rather, it was an artist’s impression of how she might have looked (put together, no doubt, by the archeological art department who lived in the museum’s basement and seemed to get through almost as much coffee as the IT department). She had long, dark hair – braided and oiled and swept back from her face. A soft face and a wide mouth. Dark-ringed eyes which stared defiantly out from the page, meeting his gaze and holding it – and he set down the mug with a shaking hand, his tea forgotten. How young she looked – how young and how sad. And just as he had thought before, how
alone
.

He leaned back in his chair.
Alone
. She’d been by herself for so long, hadn’t she? All the Keepers in the world couldn’t change that; alone in a tomb, in the dark and the cold – and now, alone in a sea of people who thought of her as nothing more than another
artefact
. Something to tick off in their guidebooks, something to look at with the same respectful indifference that they would show an antique vase.

… What was her name again?

By the time Dave clocked in for his shift that evening, he had read the entire catalogue. Twice. Sitting at his kitchen table – still in his threadbare robe and slippers – he had scoured the pages looking for… everything. Something. Anything that would help him to understand her. He had read about heart scarabs, about the Field of Reeds and the
Books of the Dead
. He had read about spells to open mouths, to change form or to drive away crocodiles. He had learned about the Princess – about her life and her death (just as the exhibition title promised) and the gods who watched over her. And as he buttoned his collar, he felt like he knew her – at least a little better than before.

Just after midnight, he let himself into the Petrie Room once again, switching off the alarm as he had done the previous night. This time, however, he did not follow the labyrinthine path through the displays – instead, he cut straight to the centre. To her. There she was, just as he had left her: the golden mask still resting across her face… a face that he now knew to be warm and soft and full of life (or had been once). He wondered what her voice would be like if she spoke to him: high and soft, girlish, or confident and commanding? The catalogue could not tell him that.

“Hope you don’t mind…” he said to the quiet of the room. “Brought my tea.” He held up the carrier bag containing a thermos flask and a sandwich wrapped in film. “Thought it might be nice to have a bite to eat together, as it were. I’ve been reading about you.” He whispered the last words as though afraid someone else might hear. Unwrapping his sandwich, he tore it in half and set one piece down on the carpet beside the glass case. “Prawn. I hope you like it – it’s just… I didn’t have a lot in. The book said you ate a lot of fish, so…” He tailed off – embarrassed – and poured a little tea into the lid of the thermos, putting it next to his little offering and chewing thoughtfully.