Free Shadows on the Nile by Kate Furnivall

enough of a mess of things without dabbling their interfering fingers in the present. Everyone was doing it. Biddy Brad shaw, a girl who worked alongside Jessie at the studio, was always threatening to bring in her ouija board for a session during their lunch break. It was society’s latest craze, drawing in the hard-nosed intellectuals as readily as the fragile youngwidows bereaved in the Great War. It worried Jessie. That a nation could be so gullible, so eager to hear the voices of the dead when it should be listening to the voices of those starving on the streets.
    How could she have missed it in Tim? Shouldn’t she have spotted something so huge sitting on his shoulders and something so opaque clouding his mind?
    She stamped on the brake as a cyclist with his dog trotting alongside came around a blind corner as if he owned the road. She sounded the horn.
    Slow down. Think straight.
She cast her mind back to the last time she’d seen her brother. They had gone to the cinema to see Johnny Weissmuller in
Tarzan the Ape Man
and she had cooked Tim liver and bacon, his favourite. She could picture him now, grinning at her across the table, his eyes a clear innocent blue. No clouds. No veil. No obsession.
    She felt betrayed. Tim was the only person in her life with whom she could let her guard down, the one she could dare trust. The one she could dare love. Because she had learned at a young age that love was too dangerous, like a time-bomb in your chest waiting to go off. And yet again it had proved itself unreliable. It could not be depended on. Recently her life had been going well, so – stupidly – she had relaxed and forgotten to be watchful. She had looked away. Just for a moment.
    So what did it mean?
    ‘Timothy!’
    It was the tone she always used to him when he was young and had pinched one of her carefully sharpened drawing pencils or when he bounced a tennis ball against her wardrobe while she was trying to read. She was never any good at reprimanding him, yet now she wanted to shake him till his eyes fell out – just as she did the very first time she found him in Georgie’s bed.
    Had death become more real to him than life?
    As she turned left into a rural lane edged with thinning hedge rows, signposted Lower Lampton, she fought off a ferocious urge to jam her fist on the horn. To blast the quiet smug countryair into pieces.

8

    Georgie
    England 1921
    In the early days of your visits, you grow impatient easily. You do not know me yet, do not understand that my brain works in a different way from yours and takes twisted paths. You suggest that we sit and talk in the public room downstairs.
    ‘Why?’ I ask.
    ‘Because it’s more acceptable than sitting here in your bedroom.’
    ‘I hate downstairs.’
    ‘Why? What’s wrong with it?’
    ‘It’s full of …’ I try to explain. ‘Full of Others. I laugh when someone spills a drink or trips over. Dr Churchward tells me that my responses are “inappropriate” and that I have no social skills. He says I cause trouble downstairs.’
    You sit in my desk chair and study me, until Ifeel my cheeks burn and my head is filling up with rage, though I don’t know why. I stare hard at my blank white wall.
    ‘You don’t like being looked at, do you?’ you whisper.
    ‘No.’
    ‘You don’t like being touched.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘You don’t like loud sounds.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘You don’t like people.’
    ‘I like you.’
    ‘Really?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘But you don’t ever look me in the eye.’
    I say nothing. The wall is flat and cooling. I try to squeeze some of the rage out of my head and onto the wall instead. I do like you but I have never said those words before to anyone except my sister and I am frightened that you might disappear now that I have said them to you. I stand up without looking at you and take off all my clothes.
    ‘Wait a minute,’ you say quickly, ‘what the hell are you doing?’
    ‘I want you to see me truly, without the bits