The Child

First Draft 

Alexandria, 1798

It is summer in Alexandria and I am a girl of fifteen. The French have invaded our city and the world lauds a military officer I have not heard of until his troops stormed into Egypt and murdered my family. They say his name is Napoleon.

We are of the Mamluk, who had saved themselves from their fate through mutinous advancement. It is a proud and vengeful heritage. My father, the soldier and slave Murad once said a man never stops being contained. He never wins his dignity back no matter what he achieves, no matter how many wars he wins, he will always have to prove himself again. He distrusted the Europeans too much because of his fears about his own fatalism. He should have been more concerned about the people he ruled. They did not love him enough. If they did they would not listen to the whispers. They would not be so easily swayed. We have high ranking officials dressed in the Western manner. When the French invaded they did not care about this.

From the shore we could see them as they swarmed, 400 flying ships from the basest quarters of Hades, 30 000 men to a city of 7000. There was no garrison strong enough to defend us. We have been left to protect ourselves. Our men are running and I am scared but will do what I must. I, with only the yelek I was wearing and my melaya luf to carry provisions for food and warmth, my face concealed in the style of the bur’a like a woman from the city of Cairo. My face hidden for the crimson blush that now cannot be wiped away.

They have set up a government and we cannot stay here under their authority, it is impossible. Peace is impossible. They take what they want, what is majesty they decimate. When you kill someone, you do not have to shed their blood by your own hands. There are sinister ways to murder. They have found how to be sinister.

_________________________

 

They chased us across the desert then followed our camp along the West bank of the Nile. The scouts saw them and warned us, but too late. At nightfall they attacked while we slept. We had been safer in the dunes of sand and scorpion stings where many of them died of dehydration as they do not know the terrain as we do. But this luck did not last long nor did it stop them.

It was dark and the night was still at first. Throughout the century I recall the stillness the most. We lay in the tent unable to dream contented dreams. I heard my mother’s voice as she spoke to me in my childhood, “A Muslim is never ungrateful,” she smiled, “everything that happens is the will of God, and we accept this.”

She sat now weaving my hair, my head falling between her arms listlessly resting against her bosom. War exhausts you but only in the moments when there is quiet. When you’re running you barely realise that you are there and that your limbs might weary and feel tired. You’re just running and you keep moving until the danger subsides and then there’s the stillness and you stop and you want to rest but you are too scared to breathe.

I put my hand to my stomach. My mother could not see, but I knew.

I knew.

On the other side of the camp my father slept with the menfolk around the fire. “He doesn’t get scared,” I said.

My mother smiled and caressed my temple. “Your father is a courageous man,” she said, “but do not be fooled by pride that conceals true feelings. A wise man is often scared. Fear is where wisdom begins.”

There were voices outside. Women, talking, and the voices grew more urgent and greater in congregation. Panic set in, signalling that danger might be near and my mother and I sprang to our feet to check outside the tent. In the darkness an abhorrent unified scream rang out across the sky equal in malignance to a shrill eagle hovering above its prey, and from across the other side of the water a single flame came towards us and behind it the scream of invisible men rushing on behind it towards us.

As the flame grew closer, I saw it. The face of my father in the hands of a man, a man in a muddied French uniform carrying it as if it was no more than sinew and skin. I could not bare to witness it. My father: when I was a girlchild he taught me how to hold his sword although it was almost a size equal to my height. In the wooded area near our house he showed me how to wield it, how to defend my territory so that no one could attack me. How to pluck a chicken so I would have food to eat. How to spear a fish. Even though I was not my brother he wanted me to be strong. And yet when I bruised my leg he wrapped it in leaves so it would heal and I would not be frightened and cry. My father who on the days I was born picked a wildflower for my hair. My father, who cautioned Abdul that if he wanted to have me as a wife he would have to prove himself a man worthy. That I was not to be had by an infidel. As I said this my heart shook and I clenched my palm over my belly. 

The French solider rushed among the crowd waving his spoils triumphantly and my body seared with pain but my legs did not feel feint, yet grew stronger and a stamina overtook me like a madwoman, a strength I did not know I had, and I ran towards them as they came forth setting tents alight.

I grabbed the sword and ran into the crowd, pushing my mother back but she would not have this. Alongside me she ran, screaming, fighting. In the men’s camp nothing was left. Not my father. Not my brother. He had been seven.

After we fell they ransacked the bodies and stole from the dead. Took whatever valuables they could find sewn into our clothes. They took my ring. The one Abdul had given to me when we fled, promising marriage when the war was over.

He grabbed my hair, pulled it in the place my mother had made the weave, dragged me through the mud, pierced my stomach with his knife and then I fell. I fell a second time submerged in the waters of the Nile, water pluming red, holding my belly. I let out a wail more frightful then than the eagle I had seen flying overhead before.  It perched on my arm, observing, pecked at my womb. And when it rose to fly away it carried me and I saw it all from the sky. I wanted to hug them, those who had fallen, but they were out of reach.

Paris, 1830

He lives in a chateaux outside Paris and is rarely alone, yet often feels that he is. He is merely a drunken descendent who occupies a vestige of his family’s history, enraptured in nightly jaunts with his array of women. The demi-monde cannot harm a spiritless ghoul. And so he thinks he is safe. From them perhaps he is.

He plunders into the kitchen in the dark of night stumbling against the body of a woman who holds him up so he does not fall down. His eyes diluted and weak from his search for escape. She steadies him on the kitchen chair and pulls off his boots.

“There, there,” she says in French. And when she says it he falls sideways and mutters drunkenly that he does not want her to leave him alone.

“I must go,” she says, “Pierre is waiting.”

He slaps her but so slovenly that she does not defend herself and steadies him again, upright in the chair.

“My father, remember, he is waiting,” she says.

She is overcome with sentimentality and holds his face in her hands, kisses him on his cheek softly and says, “you will be fine. After all, you do not need someone like me. You have all the others,” and her face dulls and she looks at him sadly, although she knows he is too drunk to feel what she is trying to tell him. “Besides, it is not safe on the streets. The workers are protesting. They want blood.”

“What others,” he says, not too drunk yet to amuse himself with her emotions. “Go,” he mutters with disillusion, “go to your father and be safe. You cannot be docile and trust men who are starving.”

“Will you be alright?”

“I will be as I should. I have a bottle of spirits and my absinthe for courage.”

 “You speak as a man with not the whole world to fight for.”

“Fight? For what?”

“And what of your uncle, a man of social prestige. He wields some influence. They will be after people like him.”  

“And his brother, my father, a soldier. And for what? He fought bravely in Alexandria. I cannot lick his bootstraps. I was a child then and I don’t forgive him. His brother does not forgive him. My mother does not forgive him. Their causes like camphine and water. He conquered but the people bear no gratitude.”

“You are in danger.”

“I am no aristocrat.”

“France loves revolution.”

A vague childhood memory filters through his mind’s eye as he drifts into his drunken slumber, he recalls his father’s letters. How jubilantly he wrote to his mother about the victory that belonged to them, then the despondency in the months that followed, the homesickness, the lost cause when the English followed them into Cairo and took it all. When he returned home he was a broken man, brought with him a young girl to work for the family, wretchedly disfigured, whom despite having a tongue never uttered a single word. Not even when she died. It was not long after that when his father was found hanged in his sleeping chambers, succumbing to the despair that had followed him since the days of the war in Egypt. A soldier did not speak piteously of his anguish, if he understood the source of what ailed him.

Between recollection and regret his head dropped to his chest and arms and legs grew listless, and he fell asleep. She went to his sleeping quarters and found a blanket in a closet by the door, brought it to the kitchen, not being strong enough to carry the weight of his body over her shoulders. She unbuttoned his coat and threw it over the chair, arranged the blanket over him where he rested in the chair and brushed a stray strand of his brown curly hair from his forehead, leaving the touch of her mouth in its place. Then she opened the kitchen door and the moonlight shone through, alighting him as if on a stage. She turned back to glance, sighed softly, and that was how she left him.

___________________________

A tap drips slowly. Outside the night is dark and still. The droplet falls into a bathtub making a tiny whirlpool and a noise so loud it whips the air. A woman’s feet are visible in the water of the bath and a soft groan of pain is diluted by the steady fall of droplets. A plume of red is injected into the whirlpool and the woman’s scream becomes so loud the bathroom window cracks.

In the tree outside the window an owl’s eyes glow like bright lanterns amid the blackened sky. From inside the bathroom the woman’s scream drapes through the night, tapering off into the distance. No one hears her. 

The woman lies submerged beneath the bathtub of water, it is now dripping over the edge of the bath and makes a pool across the floor. She is draped in a brown dress that stops above her ankles and clings to her body from the damp. Her face is moistened wet, her head turned sideways, her eyes closed, she is quiet now. In her neck there is small scar in the shape of a half moon. In her arms, there is a newborn baby. A shrill scream rings out from the child’s mouth, the scream of meeting the world and finding it for the first time as it is.

The world fades into black.

The woman is now standing in the kitchen bent over a metal pot on the stove. She is boiling an egg. Inside the pot air bubbles around the shell cloistered in fat pockets and bristle to the top lightly. Her dress is still wet and it drips from her hem onto the kitchen tiles. Her stare vacant as she watches the egg boil, the wind outside in the night blows sharp as it calls to her, behind her is a man in a chair, his coat strewn over the armrests, resting like a baby tucked into a blanket. The woman hums a lullaby.

Rockabye baby

On the tree top

When the wind blows

The cradle will rock

When the bough bends

 The cradle will fall

And down will come baby

Cradle and all.

 

She strolls slowly past the chair, circling around the man, her nails growing as she passes him, long as a pitchfork. Her shadow is visible against the wall, an ominous spectre, three times the size of her actual form.

From somewhere a radio starts to play. It begins with static, then the sound of an announcer commentating a football game from the future, then the wavelength switches to the lullaby she was humming earlier. The radio plays the singing of her voice to the soft murmur of children laughing in the background.

 

Rockabye baby, rockabye baby,

Children’s laughter rings out. He is one of the children, the man in the chair, but he is seven years old.

 

The baby is another room, swinging from side to side in a crib, there is a flower placed behind her ear. On the table beside the crib there is a photo of a man and a woman smiling bright, he dressed in a soldier’s uniform. On the wall there is a clock but the two hands of time are gone. The watch bears only numbers as it ticks loud. The woman enters the room and stops in the doorway as the door creaks open. Her hair is long and black and straight, parted in the middle, her face is pale, wan, her lips crimson. In her hand she is carrying the egg and a spoon. Her nails are brown, her fingers slim. Sternly she looks out towards the baby and steps towards her. The baby does not cry anymore.

The baby makes a gurgling noise and laughs. She picks the baby up and sits down on the floor in the middle of the room which is mostly vacant, she feeds the baby the runny egg. The baby begins to cry so tormentingly it wakes the man, and he stirs in his chair, calling out:

“Qui est la; Who is there?”

Dubiously he gets up and stares out towards the sound of the crying and the humming. From the kitchen he picks up his father’s old sword, slung behind the back of the door, a valued keepsake now his defence and he slowly opens the door to the next room as it creaks on its hinges and the wooden floorboards echo. It is so dark he cannot see and he turns back to get the lamp on the kitchen table.

As he turns a sound like a screaming banshee penetrates the void of the room and pierces his ears as sharp as a knife. In pain he folds over and holds his ears dropping the sword to the floor. When he tries to pick it up a pale stringy hand with long brown nails sharpened into points touches him and a chill of freezing cold blisters through him like he is in an ice bath. His lungs close and he cannot breathe. As he gasps his eyes become accustomed to the dark and right in front of his face is a woman, half beautiful, half disfigured with a sunken eye. He screams and falls back, crawling on his hands in reverse.

The woman weeps and shows him the baby, and starts to hum the lullabye, “Rockabye baby on the treetop,” she sings repeatedly, and in tears. “When the wind blows the cradle will rock.”

“Please leave me,” the man weeps. You come back so often, please leave me.”

The woman rises up into the air, her dripping wet feet floating above him, she turns around her back to him and her voice becomes as sweet as honeysuckle as she sings the lullabye then her voice degenerates into a coarse harsh demonic bass. Then her face turns to him vividly and fast and her hair grows from her head like tree branches that entrap him so that he cannot move.

Outside there is a noise, a mob on the street, a crowd is making its way past the chateaux and they seek justice, alighted in their suffering. As they walk they chant, “Freedom,” and raise their flames to the sky vengefully. He turns his head to the window, to the growing noise outside and the woman stops humming and the baby stops crying and they both disappear.

______________________

The crowd does not desist nor vanish with the mother and child, their cries can be heard through the night, their torches bright as stars. Through the window he hears a crash, rushes to find the streets ravaged with looters knocking down doors, breaking windows, and pillaging houses. Any moment they could rush into his house. He shudders and bolts the front and back doors, retreats to his bedroom and draws the curtains. There is nothing left to do but hide. He crosses the room and opens the drawer in his bedside table, fumbles through it. Inside there is a bible which he pulls out and holds to his chest uttering a prayer. An explosion, and a rock falls through his window, leaving splintered glass across the floor. He bends to pick it up and the words “Freedom” are scrawled across. The crowd outside chants madly.  

He wipes his brow from sweat. “They are possessed,” he says to himself fearfully and holds the candle to the dark room so he can find what he is looking for.

Fifteen minutes later he is in the bathroom, sitting on the floor behind a locked door. He closes his eyes and he hears his name being called so very sweetly. “Philippe, Philippe,” a voice calls to him, “oh my dearest Philippe, you are mine, don’t you know that? You can never run away.”

The most beautiful light comes towards him and when he reaches out to touch it, it kisses him on the mouth and when he opens his eyes his mouth it is filled with worms oozing out of from his throat, and it starts to nibble at his flesh, crawls all over his face and into his hair, into his nostrils, nibbles on his eyes. He starts to scream hysterically and gets up trying to beat it off with the bible but it turns to ash and burns his skin, then falls to the floor in a pile of dust.

Through the mirror the woman and her baby appear and he steps back in fear as she moves towards him, half of her face covered with crawling worms.

“What are you,” he mutters.

“Philippe, Philippe, you talk to me as if we are strangers, don’t you recognise me,” she says softly and reaches her hands with its black nails out to touch his face, where there are still maggots, just like hers.

“Look,” she says, “we are the same now.” She touches the worms affectionately as he writhes in anguish. “Do you not love us,” she cradles the baby to and fro in her other arm, and as she does so her fingernails sprout into treetrunks that ensnare him so that he cannot move.

A blinding light shines into the bathroom and Philippe is a young boy of seven. He is playing outside in the meadow, running with friends and then he calls out to them, “Goodbye,” and goes home, entering the chateaux.

He walks in slowly and cannot find his mother or the helper his father brought from Alexandria, they are missing, he walks upstairs slowly and enters the father’s bedroom, there is nothing there. Opens the door to the bathroom, turns the handle slowly, and finds it, his father hanging from the chandelier above the bath, water dripping from his feet. He looks down to his feet and there is the bible on the floor, in a pile of ash. On the floor crawling away, a forlorn and lost maggot.

“It must have crawled in from outside,” he thinks as the doctor signs the death certificate and pulls his uncle aside to talk about the necessary arrangements.

_______________________________

It was a night of fire and revolt. Workers had been thrown onto the streets, unemployed by merciless men of business who closed their factories, refused to lend money, newspapers had ceased publication in compliance with new legislation, police raiding the press were met with angry mobs, and the country was alive with defiance. Looters rampaged the streets and street lamps in Paris were torn down.

Houses burned and the flames could be seen throughout the city.

At the chateaux more stones were flung through windows. Glass splintered and the front door was torched, breaking the lock and the wooden barrier behind it. At the back door someone hacked the wood with an axe and a hand slipped over from outside and unlocked it from within. Footsteps sounded through the kitchen as the lounge burned. More people entered the house and began to pillage, salvaging what they could and running to the streets with any valuables they could find, leaving nothing, not even kitchen silver.

The house burned, while upstairs a man rummaged through the bedroom. Picked up the stone that lay

 on the floor and rummaged through the half open bedside drawer. It was dark and he could not see very

 well. A door creaked and the sound of a crying baby rang out from within. The man followed the sound

 into the bathroom and turned the doorknob cautiously. The door moved slowly open, stumbling over a

 pile of ash on the floor. He pushed past it so the door could open, and there he saw, hanging from the

 chandelier of the roof, Philippe, with his feet dripping wet and a few stray maggots crawling on his

 clothes, and in the mirror behind the looter, the reflection of the woman with half of her face beautiful,

 swaying from side to side, holding a crying baby, humming.