in her voice, ‘of course I like being with you and Mum, but we’re not joined at the hip. I want to sunbathe and I don’t want to play cards. Enjoy yourself.’ She got up and kissed him lightly on the cheek, hoping to defuse her words with the gesture. It worked. Her father remained uncharacteristically silent.
Or plain old shocked because Emma had stood up to him, Hannah guessed shrewdly. If she’d been a psychiatrist, she could have written an entire thesis on Jimmy O’Brien. After five days of watching him, she’d decided he was a horrible man with an inflated opinion of himself.
On Wednesday, he’d insulted the pretty young belly dancer who’d arrived on the boat with a band of musicians by telling her loudly that she ‘should put some clothes on and not strut around with everything hanging out like some common floozie’. Only Flora’s immediate interference had prevented an international incident, because the lead musician looked as if he was ready to smash his electric keyboard down on Jimmy’s head.
‘Let’s not be hasty,’ Flora had said soothingly, placating all around her and gently leading Jimmy and Anne-Marie off to another part of the bar where she had to listen to ten minutes of a lecture on ‘Why It Was A Shame These People Weren’t Respectable Catholics’. Emma had been crimson with shame and had barely been able to look the belly dancer in the eye.
Somebody as self-effacing as Emma didn’t stand a chance of standing up to her father, Hannah realized, taking another sip of her cocktail. Her mother was plain odd. Chatty one minute, she’d lapse into silence the next, staring off into the middle distance with a vacant expression on her face.
‘She’s not normally like that,’ Emma had said worriedly one day when Anne-Marie had broken off what she was saying mid-sentence and begun humming. ‘Dad insists the heat is affecting her badly, but she’s normally so alert. I can’t imagine what’s wrong.’
The three women had spent a blissful afternoon sunning themselves on the top deck, reading, chatting, sipping mineral water and listening to the endlessly replayed disco classics record that emanated from the boat’s speakers. Whoever was in charge of the music on the boat had a limited selection and veered between seventies disco hits and songs from old musicals.
‘If I hear “Disco Inferno” one more time, I’ll kill someone,’ Leonie said, finishing her Fuzzy Navel and wondering if she’d have another before dinner.
‘At least they’ve lowered the volume,’ Emma interjected.
‘Only because it was frightening the cows,’ Leonie pointed out.
In places where the river widened, there were isolated grass banks surrounded by water, where cows grazed serenely, none of them appearing concerned that there was no obvious way back to the land.
‘There must be strips of land back to the bank, a pathway we can’t see,’ Hannah said, peering at the latest batch of cows on a marshy island, her eyes peeled for a walkway. ‘They couldn’t swim, surely? The crocodiles would get them.’
‘Sobeks would get them – descendants of the crocodile god, Sobek,’ said Leonie, who loved hearing about the Egyptian gods and studied her guide book every night to learn more about the sights they were going to see the next day.
‘Teacher’s pet,’ teased Hannah, lobbing her drink’s cocktail umbrella over at her.
‘You’re just jealous,’ retorted Leonie good-humouredly, throwing the little umbrella back. It bounced on the table and flew off over the side of the boat. ‘I’m going to get a gold star on my copybook for figuring out the great mystery of the fish sacrifice.’
‘That was a marvellous piece of deduction,’ Hannah admitted.
They’d all laughed heartily the night before when Leonie had come up with a reason why fish were never shown as offerings to the gods on the various temple carvings. Flora, the guide, usually left them with an unanswered question at the end of a tour and told them that she’d explain it the next day.
Yesterday, Flora had answered the question about why Hatshepsut was the only queen buried in the Valley of the Kings and had posed another conundrum – about the fish sacrifices.
Leonie, who was fascinated with Egyptian myths, decided that the answer to the question lay in the story of the god Osiris. Hannah and Emma, sitting in the comfort of Hannah’s cabin sharing a bottle of peach schnapps as a nightcap, laughed so much at her solemn explanation that they nearly fell off the bed.
‘When Osiris’s evil brother, Seth, killed Osiris and dismembered his body, scattering it around Egypt, Osiris’s distraught wife, the goddess Isis, found all the pieces and put them back together,’ Leonie explained enthusiastically. ‘The only part she couldn’t find was his penis, which had been eaten by a fish. So that’s it.’
Hannah crowed with laughter. ‘You’re telling us that fish can’t be used as a sacrifice because a fish ate Osiris’s willy?’
‘Yes, it’s perfectly sensible to me.’
Emma, who had discovered that she really liked peach schnapps, got a fit of the giggles. ‘But we had fish for dinner tonight,’ she managed to say, between laughs. ‘I think I’m going to puke!’
‘You’re a right pair of cultural illiterates,’ Leonie said loftily. ‘I don’t know why you came to Egypt at all. You should have gone off to Ibiza with a couple of blokes with tattoos and a ghetto-blaster.’
Emma fell off the bed with a resounding bump. She put a hand over her mouth and giggled at the noise she’d made.
‘Your father will be up in a moment to haul you off to bed,’ Hannah squealed. ‘I’ll tell him I’ll set Seth on him…geddit, set Seth…’ She roared with laughter and Emma joined in.
‘I’d like to see his face with his willy gobbled up by a fish,’ roared Emma.
Leonie, who’d been so intent on her ancient Egyptian theory that she’d only had a quarter as much peach schnapps as the other two, gave up. She hauled Emma back on to the bed and then poured herself a huge drink. If you can’t beat them, join them, she decided.
‘I don’t know what I’m going to tell people when I get home and they ask me who I met in Egypt,’ she said, downing her drink in three gulps. ‘They’ll all think I had this cultured time talking about ancient civilizations with like-minded people, when in fact, I’ve been stuck with two insane, sex-mad alcoholics who think the pyramids are secretly flying saucers.’
‘You mean they aren’t?’ demanded Hannah.
‘Shut up and have another drink,’ Leonie ordered.
The Fuzzy Navels they were drinking on the upper deck the following evening helped with the hangovers.
‘Wave at the waiter and order us another round, will you?’ Hannah asked Emma, who was facing the small upstairs bar where the waiters hung out.
‘I need to go to the loo,’ Emma said, ‘but I can hear my father from here. He’s downstairs and I don’t want to have to go down or he’ll try to make me sit with him.’
‘He’s a bit bossy,’ Leonie ventured. She’d love to have said that Jimmy O’Brien was a domineering bully but knew she couldn’t.
‘You have no idea,’ Emma said fervently. The Fuzzy Navels were going to her head. ‘He has to be in charge and he has to be right all the time. It’s a nightmare.’
‘But you stood up to him earlier,’ Leonie pointed out.
‘And I’ll have to pay later. He hates his authority being questioned publicly.’
‘Do you see much of your parents at home?’ Hannah enquired.
‘I see them all the time,’ Emma explained. ‘They live around the corner from us. Pete and I couldn’t have afforded a house on our salaries so Dad loaned us the deposit, then he insisted on our buying this house he liked. It’s about five minutes from my old home.’