your way to the bus and I’ll finish rounding our gang up,’ the tour guide had said brightly as she pointed people in the direction of the buses waiting like gleaming silver monsters in the shimmering heat.
Fresh as a daisy in a royal blue cotton blouse and cream shorts, the tour guide was a young woman named Flora who exuded calm efficiency. She’d need to be calm to deal with that horrible man who’d sat in the row ahead on the plane, Hannah thought. He’d complained throughout the journey, saying the meal was cold when it should have been hot and demanding to know if they’d get a refund for taking off an hour late. What a bully, she thought with disgust.
He’d been rude as hell to the sweet, dark-eyed stewardess who’d haltingly told him they didn’t serve any sort of alcohol on the flight, and during the scramble for visas in the arrivals hall in Luxor, only the deaf would have been spared his sarcastic comments about Egyptian inefficiency.
‘Call this an airport?’ he’d roared when the crowds from the plane began milling around the arrivals hall, looking for their tour guides, trying to change money and queueing for visas in disorganized groups. ‘It’s a bloody disgrace asking Westerners to come into this sort of makeshift place. No signs, no authority, no proper air conditioning, nothing! No wonder these fellas were ruled by foreign powers for so long – couldn’t arrange a piss-up in a brewery, if you ask me. I’ll tell you, I’ll be writing a letter to the Irish Times and the Egyptian embassy when I get back.’
Hannah couldn’t figure out why he’d bothered coming to a foreign country if all he was going to do was whinge about the heat and make racist and jingoistic comments about the inhabitants.
Taking a gulp from her bottle of mineral water, she watched sweating people haul themselves up the bus steps, panting heavily and repeating ‘It’s hot!’ to each other every few minutes.
‘It’s hot,’ gasped her large blonde next-door neighbour from the plane as she shoved her canvas holdall into the luggage rack and flopped heavily on to the seat beside Hannah.
‘That’s what we get for not listening to the travel agent who warned it was unbearably hot in August,’ Hannah said with a grin.
‘Did they say that?’ The woman rummaged around in a bulging black suede handbag until she triumphantly extracted a small orange juice carton. She stuck the tiny plastic straw in, drank deeply and then said: ‘Mine never mentioned the heat. I just said I could only travel in August and they booked it for me. My kids are away for August, you see. I’m Leonie,’ she added.
‘Nice to meet you. I’m Hannah.’
Leonie knew her face was pinker than usual, while her shaggy blonde hair was frizzing in the Gas Mark 7 dry heat. On the plane, Leonie had barely talked to her neighbour at all because she’d been desperately trying to concentrate on reading a thriller for the whole flight, hoping that she’d forget the fact that she was on a plane at all if she could immerse herself in a book. Safely on terra firma, she was all talk, loquacious with relief. Hannah didn’t look hot at all: she looked as if she was used to the sort of temperatures that could cook a chicken out of doors.
‘Wasn’t it mad in there,’ Leonie said, referring to the arrivals hall. ‘These men kept taking my case and trying to stick it on their trolley and I kept having to take it back. I think I ruptured something dragging it off the last time.’ She massaged her shoulder.
‘They’re porters and they’re hoping for a tip if they bring your luggage out for you,’ Hannah explained.
‘Oh. I never thought of that. But I’ve no Egyptian money yet,’ Leonie pointed out. ‘I’m going to change currencies on the boat.’
She began fiddling around in her bag to check for her purse, giving Hannah an opportunity to study her. Leonie’s uptilted nose was strangely childlike, Hannah decided, and her make-up was a bit heavy for the torrid heat of North Africa. But nothing could hide the vibrancy of Leonie’s lively, animated face, which displayed a thousand emotions as she spoke. She wasn’t pretty but there was such warmth in her expression that it made her strangely attractive. And her eyes were the most amazing blue, glittering like Ceylon sapphires. Hannah had never seen anybody with such piercingly blue eyes apart from models in glossy magazines advertising coloured contact lenses. Leonie’s eyes could have been the result of coloured contact lenses, of course, but Hannah bet her life they weren’t. If only she wasn’t wearing all that panstick foundation and the heavy eyeliner. It was like stage make-up, a façade behind which she was trying to hide. Hannah smiled to herself. Everyone hid something. She’d been successfully hiding her lack of education for years.
‘It’d be lovely if we could have dinner together, maybe,’ Leonie was saying, hating herself for chattering away like a blackbird on acid. Terrified at the idea of being away on her own without a single friendly face to talk to, she was thrilled that she’d identified a fellow solo female traveller. But she didn’t want to come across as too lonely or too needy: Hannah, who seemed very self-possessed and assured, might not want a holiday companion. ‘If you don’t mind having dinner with me, that is…’ Leonie said, her voice fading.
‘Course not,’ said Hannah, who was perfectly happy on her own but felt oddly protective about the other woman, who was probably five nine in her socks and at least twice Hannah’s size. ‘It’s lovely to have company and we’ll be much safer from exotic, handsome Egyptians if we’re together. Or is it the male population who should be frightened of us?’ she joked.
Leonie laughed and looked ruefully at her sturdy body. ‘I think I’m quite safe enough and the male population needn’t worry.’ For once, she hadn’t felt the need to make some crack about men and how she couldn’t live without them. Those stupid remarks were only ever covering up her insecurities and she cringed hearing herself say them. Today, she hadn’t felt the need to pretend. Hannah was nice, calming. It’d be lovely sharing the holiday with her.
The bad-tempered bearded man, his wife and daughter got on the bus and plonked themselves at the front. Hannah and Leonie watched the trio with interest as the father kept up a critical monologue while his wife fanned herself weakly with a ridiculously out of place Spanish fan. Her long fair hair held back from her forehead was rather girlish for a woman of her age, as if she was acting the ingénue, while her tight-waisted, wide-skirted dress made her look vaguely as if she’d entered a fancy dress competition. She looked displeased, as if Egypt had been examined briefly and found seriously wanting. The daughter sat silently in the seat behind them, her face pale and her expression distant.
‘I hope to God we don’t end up with cabins anywhere near them,’ Leonie whispered fervently. ‘They look like the sort of people who complain if they don’t have something to complain about.’
‘The father certainly does,’ Hannah agreed, ‘but the person I feel sorry for is the daughter. Imagine being stuck with a loudmouthed tyrant like that.’
Watching the younger woman’s taut little face, Hannah was convinced it was sheer embarrassment at her father’s behaviour that made her look so distant. ‘She looks as if she’s going to cry any minute. Maybe we should get her to sit with us,’ Hannah suggested, overcome with a desire to save another lame dog, now she’d already saved one.
Leonie winced. ‘I’m not so sure…’ she said. ‘What if the other pair insist on making friends with us too and we get stuck with the lot of them for the entire cruise?’
‘Leonie,’ reproved Hannah, ‘you’ve got to live a little, experiment. Anyway, we’ll all end up sitting at tables of six or eight for meals on the boat, so if we’re allocated one with them, we’re stuck
