The Exodus Quest

THIRTY-ONE
I

Augustin arrived home weary and apprehensive. Farooq had treated him with such contempt since he'd decked him with his right hand that the spirit had gone completely out of him. He'd asked to visit Knox at the police station. Farooq had laughed in his face. He was normally an ebullient man, Augustin, but not tonight. He couldn't remember ever feeling this low.

A madwoman leaned over the banisters to bark at him about his rapist house guests. He lacked the energy even to yell back.

He half filled a tumbler with ice, opened a new bottle of single malt, took both glass and bottle through to his bedroom, set them down on his bedside table. Then he opened his wardrobe and lifted his stack of T-shirts. The folder had moved. No question. No surprise, either. Knox hadn't said anything on the phone earlier; of course he hadn't, he was a man; men discuss such things, thank Christ. But Augustin had heard that slight hesitation in his voice. At the time, he'd put it down to his predicament. Only later had he realized that Knox would have needed a clean shirt, that of course he'd have seen the folder. It was the way fate worked. It gave you the punishments you deserved.

He drew out the photographs; spread them on his duvet. His favourite was the first, not least because Gaille had given it to him herself. It showed the three of them out in the desert late one afternoon, arms around each other's shoulders, grinning happily, against a backdrop of red-gold dunes, lengthening shadows, low slivers of mauve and orange cloud in a blue-wash sky. A grizzled Bedouin had taken it; they'd happened across him trudging the sands between nowhere and nowhere with the gloomiest-looking camel he'd ever seen. Augustin, Gaille, Knox. Something had happened to him that day. When Gaille had given him the photograph, he'd found it impossible to put away. He'd added to it, photos of her and Knox; others just of her.

His tumbler had somehow emptied. He refilled it.

Why have one woman when you could have twenty? In his heart, he'd always scorned fidelity. Every man would behave like he did if only they could. Monogamy was for losers. Maybe he was just getting old, but evenings with Knox and Gaille had made him aware of the shabbiness of this life. He'd found it increasingly hard to pick up women. He'd lost his nerve, or perhaps his hunger. He'd developed a different hankering. He couldn't say what for, just that it was there, that it kept growing more severe, that it wouldn't be sated by his usual conquests. One morning, a couple of months back, he'd woken up effervescent with purpose, had leapt out of bed and had torn down a great strip of wallpaper, satisfying as a gigantic scab. He'd called in the builders that same day, had had his apartment gutted and redecorated.

The nesting instinct! Good grief! How had it come to this?

And yet it didn't feel like love. That was what Knox wouldn't understand. He was fond of Gaille, sure, but he didn't covet her or plot ways to win her. It didn't stab him in the heart when she looked at Knox in that way she had. Because it wasn't Gaille who'd got beneath his skin. It was the two of them together, the thing that had happened between them without them even knowing.

One of the unexpected hazards of archaeology was how you were constantly reproached by the lives of others. Ancient Alexandrians had had a life expectancy of some thirty-five years, less time on earth than he'd already spent. Yet so many of them had achieved so much. And he'd achieved so little.

His life was shit. He'd started buying whisky by the crate.

He lay back on his bed, his hands clasped beneath his head. He stared up at his freshly whitewashed ceiling, aware it was going to be a long night.