Grains of Sand
The driver leans on his car horn as Tep crosses Brixton High Street, the clamor echoing off the shopfronts like a barge bell on the Nile, wind gusting sand into the pilot’s eyes, making him mistake a floating log for a crocodile—sleeping but always hungry.
“Get out of the road! Raghead freak!”
Tep barely notices. He sees the girl in front of the TKMaxx, braids pulled back from a familiar high forehead, sloping down to a nose that was carved in stone four thousand years before these people were born. Something within him has awakened.
* * *
He meets Dennis for a drink after work, his bandaged head attracting stares in the trendy microbrewery. The tabletop is sticky with spilt beer; someone has scratched a crude heart into the wood, the varnish thin where the staff have tried to scrub it off. Dennis is two pints in and monologuing.
“What they don’t understand is that stock rotation isn’t something you can do every day.
Harley’s been regional manager for, what, six months?
He’s never got his hands dirty, he’s barely older than my sister’s kids.
Put him on the shop floor and see how he copes with twenty pallets of frozen goods at six a.m. Not well, is how. ”
Dennis is under the mistaken impression that he’s the deputy manager of a branch of Tesco Metro, when in fact he is the earthly reincarnation of Nakhtpaaten, Vizier of the 18th Dynasty.
Tep tried to tell him this not long after they met, but Dennis misinterpreted it as a joke, then forgot the conversation once he was sober the following morning.
Tep inclines his head. He lifts his glass, not letting it touch his bandages, then places it on the table again. Dennis never notices that he doesn’t drink a drop. They’ve been doing this for almost a year.
“Anyway, I told them, you either let me run my shifts my way, or I’m gone. They can’t afford to lose me, not with Linda on indefinite leave, so that should shut them up. Chalk one up for the worker bees.” He pauses, sips.
“You alright? You’re quiet tonight, even for you. You gave up chasing those kids earlier, too. What’s eating at you?”
The “kids” were two teenage boys who’d tried—unsuccessfully—to smuggle out a four-pack of Budweiser under their jackets.
Dennis was right—most days he would have run them down, pressed their faces into the dirt until the red and blue flashing lights arrived.
It satisfied him to show how weak and dependent on his mercy they were.
He didn’t have it in him today, though, and they gave him the slip round the back of the Academy.
“I have seen her.” His voice is dry and rasping, ancient stone being ground to sand. “My princess is here.”
Dennis raises his eyebrows.
“Old Tep has found love, has he? Well, can’t say I’m surprised.
Happens to the best of us, you know. Myself, I like my own space too much, know what I mean?
I want to kick my shoes off and eat a kebab on the couch on Friday night, not pretend we’re playing happy families.
But whatever rings your bell. You get her number? ”
Tep shakes his head, dislodging a wisp of dust that settles in a thin layer across his shoulders.
“I followed her. I know where she lives.”
“You need to be careful with that.” Dennis drains his glass, stands unsteadily and gestures toward the bar. “You want another? I’ve got a thirst on.”
Tep nods. He will pour his drink into the fire bucket in the corner while Dennis is at the bar. He isn’t sure why, but it’s important to maintain the pretense. He’s one of them, just another security guard on the door at the supermarket, another pale face in the crowd.
“Won’t be long then. She got a name, this girl?”
“I call her Hrere. I believe you would call her ‘Daisy.’”
* * *
Tep feels filthy when he gets home. The dirt of the car fumes, the alcoholic fug of the bar, the chemical stink that rises from the city—they soak his bandages until he can barely breathe.
It’s always the same when he’s out in the world for too long, especially on his nights out with Dennis.
The modern world leaves a residue that never scrubs clean.
He feeds the cats, then locks himself in his flat’s tiny bathroom.
Leaning across the toilet so he can see himself in the mirror, he unwinds the bandages from his head, careful to fold them as he goes lest they trail in the bowl.
He made that mistake once before, and the brown, stagnant toilet water stained them beyond repair.
Once his head is uncovered, he tucks the neat roll into the top pocket of his uniform.
It pains him to see his reflection. In his thoughts he is still a young man, High Priest of the Temple of the Sun, the youngest ever to hold his position and the envy of all Egypt. They composed songs about his majesty, his beauty. They built him thirty feet high.
Now, his head is nothing but a desiccated husk. It’s dry and papery to the touch, like a ball of reeds left to dry in the sun, his mouth puckered and lipless. The lobe of his left ear is missing, crumbled away several centuries ago. He is a man of leather and dust.
He tried a moisturizer once, when he grew tired of his sunken cheeks, his wrinkled chin.
The liquid had felt cool in his hands, but where he rubbed it into his forehead it stung like a swarm of hornets, until he feared he would go mad with the pain.
Instead, he has resigned himself to this new existence, dried-out and lifeless.
The feeling of sand on his skin soothes him better than any cream or unguent, so he takes a fistful now from the bag in the bathtub, rubs its coarse grains across his bald pate, down the back of his neck.
It’s not like the old days, but at least the stench recedes.
The grit on his shirt collar feels like home.
* * *
Dennis calls him into the manager’s office two days later. Harley is there too, the boy they call “regional manager.”
“Tep, sit down, won’t you.” Dennis is unusually formal, which tells him something is wrong. He has been through this charade a hundred times before.
“We’ve had some complaints…” Dennis begins tentatively, before Harley jumps in.
“One of our customers. A girl? She says you’ve been following her—‘stalking’ was her exact word—and since it happened when she shopped here the other day, she’s filed a complaint against you.
We have to take this very, very seriously, as you can imagine.
You’re lucky she hasn’t called the police, frankly.
Given the previous incidents, the injuries sustained by that boy back in March, we’ve made the decision to end your contract.
Please leave your keys with us here, now, and you can return the uniform before the end of the week.
Washed, or we’ll deduct that from your final paycheck. ”
Tep has never liked Harley. He sometimes whiles away the quiet mornings imagining twisting the regional manager’s entrails around a stick.
Dennis keeps his eyes to the ground, and Tep feels something that might be sympathy for him.
It cannot be easy for a High Priest to have fallen so low.
Still, it always ends this way. This conversation was waiting for them from the day he first walked through the door.
“The girl? Her name is Hrere. She is my beloved.”
Harley shakes his head, runs his thumb and finger down the bridge of his nose.
“I don’t have time for this. I need to be in Camden by lunchtime. Can you just hand over your keys, please?”
Tep takes his time unclipping the chain from his belt, weighing the metal in his own palm before dropping it into Harley’s.
“Good.” Harley stands, pushes past him to the door.
He stinks of rose water. “And a word of advice? Stay away from this girl. Daisy. She says you’ve been creeping her out, that she saw you standing across the road from her flat the other day.
It’s not our problem anymore, but for your own sake—give it up, yeah?
Or it’ll be the police you hear from next time. ”
Dennis gives him a thin smile when he stands to leave. Tep barely acknowledges it. Another chapter has closed in the book of his life, but there are still pages without end.
* * *
A week later he sees Harley at Hrere’s door.
Tep is standing behind a bush in the park opposite, his feet brushing up against abandoned beer cans and faded food wrappers.
The security uniform had to be returned, so he’s wearing a hoodie with a logo across the chest that might almost be a hieroglyph, a pair of stained sweatpants.
He can smell dogshit, sun-dried and crumbling into the dirt.
The girl greets Harley with a hug and a kiss on the cheek.
It’s easy enough to follow them. Harley is so self-obsessed he’s barely aware of anyone else, while the girl hangs on his every word, creating a bubble around them that excludes the world. They don’t notice Tep trailing in their wake, even when someone shouts abuse at him from a passing bus.
He sees his chance when they duck into an alleyway round the back of the Wendy’s.
Tep quickens his step, pulls his hood up to cover the bandages.
As he steps around the garbage bins, piled high with half-eaten chicken carcasses and oily boxes, he focuses his thoughts and calls upon Khepri, the scarab god.
The words are cracked and ancient, losing any sense they once had.
Still, he can feel something, a tickling where once he had veins, a spark within his chest. Somewhere, something is listening.
It would be easy to miss them at first. There are no scarab beetles in twenty-first-century London.
They are crumbled to dust, half a world away.
But their cousins are still here. The leaf eaters and the longhorns, the Rusty Click Beetles and Devil’s Coach-horse.
They come, gradually at first, then in their hundreds, their carapaces black and red and emerald green, gleaming in the sun.
Tep even spies a couple of ladybirds, their harlequin coats dancing among the carnage.
Harley swats at them, but within seconds they overwhelm him, his scream swallowed as they pour down his throat and devour him from the inside, a wave of chitinous assassins called from their hiding places among the rot and the stink.
Tep sees a large stag beetle, a male, its pincers almost an inch long, digging them into Harley’s cheek and tearing at the flesh before its smaller brethren finish the job.
The girl stands in shock for a moment, a faint whimpering barely audible beneath the buzz of a million wings.
Then they consume her too, her body crumpling to the concrete to become nothing more than food, the greasy carcass of humanity.
He’s hit by a sudden stench as the lining of her intestine is ruptured and its contents spill out.
Tep had considered sparing her, briefly, but in the end the decision was easy.
She was not Hrere; had never been his betrothed.
There was a passing resemblance, that was all. He has sent her the way of all flesh.
* * *
It’s toward the end of the month that he receives a phone call from the British Museum. He’s sitting with a takeaway from a Lebanese cafe on his lap, savoring the smells of baharat and animal fat, the heat of another country’s sun. Uneaten, he tosses it in the bin.
They say they were impressed with his interview, would like to hire him for the night shift. He laughs, a dry bark inside the bandages. His interview was terrible, he barely spoke at all, but he supposes he looks the part.
Predictably, on his first shift they put him on the Ancient Egyptian Sculpture exhibit.
It’s quiet and cool after the bustle of the city, and something within him stirs at the sight of so much of the old world, the relics of a time when he felt at home.
It’s sterile, though, and clean—nothing like the Egypt of his day.
He finds himself craving the stench of sweat, the screams of the slaves as they’re flogged in front of him. The grains of sand beneath his feet.
He smuggles it into the museum a pocketful at a time, emptying it into the sarcophagus when he’s alone.
During the daytimes he finds drifts of it pushed into the corners of his pockets, hiding in the folds of fabric.
It takes him almost a month to create a bed of sand, but when he finally lowers himself onto it, the giant bust of Rameses II staring dispassionately at his transgression, he sighs with relief.
On this tiny island he can recoup his strength, gather his thoughts.
Then, when the time comes, he will find another Hrere.