Little Egypt (Salt Modern Fiction) Read Online Free Page B

capsules, there’s bio and non-bio, special stuff for coloureds, whites, blacks – (and that doesn’t count conditioning or stain removal.) However does a person make a decision like that? And that’s just one decision out of – perhaps hundreds. I’d love to hear Mary on the subject.
    Or I ride the moving pathway that sweeps you up to Clothing, Household and Electrical. They have a pharmacy, a Post Office counter, a bank machine, even a dentist who does a weekly clinic. I do my ablutions in the Ladies; eat and conduct my business in the café (with its panoramic view of Little Egypt); buy my food and clothes there (I have training shoes with flashing lights [£6.99], meant for children I know, but such a lark, how could one resist?); I buy books and batteries for my radio; even find my friends there – take Spike as a for instance.
    I devised the bucket system even before Osi and I ceased to talk, because he was such a lazy blighter and wouldn’t always deign to come down to eat, as well as the fact that my knees were getting bad. Besides, the stairs were becoming too risky for daily traverse – downright dangerous, to speak the truth. Osi would put a note in a bucket rigged to the banister, to indicate what he wanted. In actuality, there was little need for he ate the same thing almost every day – water biscuits and liver paté or Dairylee cheese triangles, and bars of blackest chocolate. And once we ceased to talk we simply carried the system on and it became our only communication. (Though occasionally I’d hear the distant rumble of the lavatory cistern.) From the deterioration of his handwriting I’ve charted his degeneration, but as long as the bucket was going up and down, I knew he was alive at least, and eating.
    I’ve never sent a drink up there so I must suppose he drinks from the tap in the bathroom, as he did as a child, angling his head over the basin and suckling on the steel. (I am partial to a Gin or a lovely drink called a Bacardi Breezer. And of course I like a cup of tea. Coffee I take in the café in my shop, where they make it better than ever I could.) Sometimes for a lark I’ll send Osi something unexpected, once a tin of squid (courtesy of Spike), which remained in the bucket travelling up and down for days until I took it out to try it for myself. (I wouldn’t bother.)
     
    It was a few weeks ago now that the bucket system began to become erratic. A note with nothing on it; a failure to haul it up; a failure to send it down; the bucket lowered but with contents untouched. Once there was a dead pigeon inside, and once something much, much worse that compelled me to discard the bucket and buy a new one (plastic, red, £ 3.99).
    I fear he’s lost his mind.
    I really, really must go up.

3
    I T WAS WEEKS since Evelyn and Arthur had gone. Isis pictured her mother cantering through the desert, Arthur nose to the ground, hot on the scent of Herihor. When they found the tomb, he would raise his snout and howl. There would be a telegram, of course, and then what celebrations! A party in the ballroom, school, friends , perhaps a finishing school in France. And Isis would become tall and slim, she would bloom and win a heart or two, no doubt.
    The gate banged and shook her to her teeth. She was supposed to be helping Mary search out the last of the peas, but instead she was riding the gate – pulling the rusty wrought iron thing open as far as it would go and swinging back on it, a lurch of a ride that ended in a sickening jolt.
    She got off and leaned over the gate, wishing someone would drive by, or at least a person on a horse or a bicycle to say hello, but it was a quiet lane, leading to nothing but a scatter of cottages. George’s cottage was a mile or so away, and she had dared walk to it once or twice. But it was a dull walk to a dull dwelling – not worth the tongue lashing if Mary missed her. The only regular excitement was the trains, but none were due.
    She shut her eyes and