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– A ‘story’ by Tina Bexson

Prologue

She’d been back in the city for four days, photographing his film crew at work. From the Pyramids to Downtown’s delights, and the Nile’s exclusive floating restaurants. So, what if it was the height of summer, pollution at its peak, sweat clouding her vision, dripping into the viewfinder at times? In the end she’d got what he wanted. An ego-boosting record of him and his young crew filming what this ‘oh so wonderful’ country had to offer. Not just the tourist hotspots, but ‘real’ Egypt too, its fetid underbelly. At least that was how he liked to describe it.

Cairo

But, right now, she squatted in the shower of this pretty UN owned flat, clothed in a sarong and vest. Her hands covering her head, fingers tangled up in her tight red curls.

---

Thirty minutes earlier she’d been using those hands along with their forearms to fight back. She’d been in the living room then. Fearless. In control. Even telling him she’d call the police if he hurt her again. Even laughing at him. Well, almost.

But he’d just lunged for her phone on the table, thrown it at her, and told ‘her’ to call them. Told her that if she did, they’d do nothing and if needed, he’d just pay them off.

‘Wasta, wasta, wasta’, he’d taunted. ‘Remember what I always told you about that word, ‘Wasta’?’ [Wasta means ‘connections’]

Then he’d lunged for ‘her’, dragged her off the sofa while forcing his Birkenstock sandal, right ‘boat’ of a foot into her stomach. That had shut her up. Then he’d dragged her into the shower room.

---

So here she is right now trapped in this tiny shower cubicle, inside this tiny windowless bathroom. Cowering as he hit her in her face, ear, head, neck, body. Again, and again, and again.

It was when he paused, finally, to catch his breath, that she found herself able to speak.

‘If I don’t get to a hospital soon you may kill me, Rafi’ she said. Calmly.

Shocked by witnessing her own voice resonating in the shower for it was so flat, so calm, and so distant, she could barely hear it.

 ’You have to clean up this mess first,’ he snarled.

Then he yanked the shower handle from its holder. Forced it into one of her hands. Turned the water on. Cold water.

‘Now clean up your fucking mess.’

He hovered over her. A colossus of a man, sweating beer, spirits, tobacco, and paranoia, his eyes raging with fury and confusion. She’d never seen him like this. After all the months they’d known each other, after all their time discussing this or that project, this or that topic. After all their time socialising with their mutual friends’ they’d been no hint of derangement. Not one iota of it. How had she missed it? Or had there been, and she’d simply filtered it out?  Of course, the must have been.

Still, he just may take her to the hospital. Small mercies. Oh, ‘God’. Please.

She looked down at the mess. ‘Her’ mess.

Wobbling around on a thin layer of red water, lay four large Portobello mushrooms of thick viscous spongy blood. Were these what she’d felt slide from her tiny left ear?

‘Don’t just stare at it. Clean. Clean. Clean. And don’t forget the walls. You got your filthy blood on those too.’

She glanced up. Yes, he was right. Blood ran down the pristine white tiles.

Her eyes blinked away a trail of it originating from a gash in her head. That must be where the blood running down the tiles had come from. But it was the thick bobbling large scarlet Portobello Mushrooms that concerned her. Could they really have come from her ear?

‘Get to it. Clean up your fuckin’ mess. And don’t say another word.’

She crept upwards. Her hands reached for the shower’s thick silver pipe. Then she slid back down to the floor.

‘Get me to a hospital, Rafi.’

‘Forget it. You’re going nowhere.  Maybe the desert later. Ha, ha, ha. Yeah, I can arrange that too. Or just Dump you on the ‘Alex Desert Highway’. Like they did with Giulio Regeni. Ha! Regeni! Another one of your fuckin’ obsessions here. Now you can find out how he felt.’

She said nothing and did nothing.

‘Well, that shut you up.’

Another punch. Then a slap. Though both felt weaker than before. Was he getting tired, or was she now numb?

Something clicked. Robotically she began to move the shower head across the tiles using her other hand as a cloth to help remove the blood.

She looked down. The mushrooms were floating in a red pool on the shower floor. So, she stamped on them with her little bare feet. Broke them into pieces that resembled freshly cut raw liver. Stamped more until they were small enough to enter the drain.

‘Don’t bother.’ He muttered.

‘It will all be clean soon,’ she promised.

‘I said, don’t bother. I’m already going to be jailed for what I’ve done to you now. But I want to be put away for something bigger than this. I want to be jailed for murder. At least then I’ll have a title. ‘Murder-RER’.’

Later, much later, she would remember the interviews she’d done in London’s prisons. The murderers’ sense of pride and joy for the status accrued them for being inside for murder rather than mere GBH. How relieved they were to be at the top of the pecking order.

A knuckle hit her eye, or was it a ring on his finger? She dropped the shower head. Then watched it spin around, spurting water across the bathroom floor that eased into a small stream around his fat feet fastened tightly inside those annoying fashion-statement sandals.

‘Stupid bitch. You stupid fuckin’ bitch.’

Whack. Punch. Whack.

She sunk. Again. No, not more damn blood. Her eyes shot for the door. He turned, following her gaze.

As he did, he lost his balance on the now slippery floor and fell. A look of abject surprise fanned across his expansive face. Weeks later she would praise the failure of his Birkenstocks’ so-called ‘non-slip soles’.

Her body sprang, leapt over him, toes, feet gripping the sodden tiles. Within a second, she was through the door of that rabbit hole of a bathroom, that ceramic padded pure white cell. Free. Maybe.

Splat, splat, splat. A trail of blood as she sprinted along the hallway, across the Turkish carpeted living room floor for the front door. Couldn’t risk the seconds it would take to grab her phone, or purse, on the way out.

A few seconds later she was on the stairwell, five floors up. Too risky to wait for the lift. Too risky to wait for a neighbour to answer their door. It was the dead of night anyway. Or was 4 am the dead of the morning? But she still knocked at each door on every landing as she belted down to the ground. No one bothered to answer. Her bare feet bouncing off every filthy stone stair. Her blood following her. The cleaner would have a nightmare tomorrow, poor love.

The street was empty. Of course, it was. Perhaps they’d be someone at the nearest crossroads. Nope. Oh, but a figure hovered outside the Seoudi supermarket. Security? Maybe, but he wore a Djellaba. A Bawab [building security man], perhaps.

‘Min-fud-luk … please!’

No reply. But he heard. He saw. He just stared. Blank faced. Then he looked away. Indifferent. Nothing stirred in his eyes. NOTHING stirred, not even in his body. She approached him. Worried she had nothing to cover her arms or head. She gestured. Mimicked putting a veil over her head.

No response.

Why doesn’t he respond? He can see I need to be covered. I want to be covered.

So, she ran. But within seconds felt faint. She’d lie on the side of the road until a car came.

Hard to tell how long it took. Ten or thirty minutes, or anything in between. Then one came. He wasn’t going to stop. So, she pushed herself into the middle of the road. He’d have to, or she’d be run over.

He stopped. And he spoke English. Oh ‘God’, thank you.

But he refused to take her to a hospital.

‘No, I must call the police first,’ he said, dialling into his phone.

She realised she could barely hear properly. Her left ear was blocked.

‘Sorry? Did you say you need to call the police?’

He nodded.

‘No. No police. Please. No police.’

‘They have to be told. Ambulance second.’

‘No!’

‘Why not? What ‘are’ you so afraid of?’

She said nothing. She watched him dial into his phone then collapsed back onto the road with Rafi’s threats echoing throughout her.

After he closed his phone, he went to sit inside his car. Avoiding eye contact.

She noticed him dial a four-digit number and then speak quickly into the phone mic.

She eased herself back down to the ground.  Instinctively slid into a child’s pose. Her head prostrated into the tarmac. Ha. Perhaps she looked like she was attempting to perform Fakr, the dawn prayer. Doubtful, though perhaps it was some kind of prayer, for what she knew not.

A rusty dirty dark blue pickup truck arrived. The police. Apparently. Four of them.

A kerfuffle. Too much Arabic to understand though the air was scented with the essence of a troublesome khawaga [foreigner]. A protocol began its lengthy course with no clear conclusion.

Shameful of her inability to comprehend. Shameful that she still was only wearing the damn vest and sarong. Though the bleeding had almost ceased. No more of her ‘filth’ to line the filthy tarmac.

From what she could make out, they wanted to know who, what, where, how. Though no ‘why’. Typical, they don’t care about why.

They did not take her to the hospital. They told her to take them to the man that did this to her. So, she did.

She led them back to the place where it happened, the lovely UN apartment in Degla, a relatively salubrious area of Cairo’s gentrified Maadi.

The stairs she’d descended, not so long ago, she now climbed. The police and the stranger who had stopped his car, took the lift. She was surprised at the amount of blood she witnessed on the stairs. There were large spots and pools of it on every step.

At the fifth floor the police knocked. He answered. She was certain he would have fled.

It was as though he’d adopted another personality. Now so calm. Collected. Though the same dead eyes, that roamed suspiciously.

An exchange in Arabic. Not even heated. Bizarre. She saw him nodding as though in agreement with what one of the officers said to him.

Then he turned to her, coldly looked her straight in the eye, said her name, and then, ‘get your things.’

What the hell. A personality transformation. How could he have sobered up so quickly. And how dare he tell her what to do.

She slipped past him into the apartment. Went straight for where she’d left her phone and the bag with her purse. Then packed any of her remaining items into her travel bag.

‘I need to put more clothes on,’ she said firmly.

‘They want us both at the station now. Be quick.’

‘Jesus,’ she muttered.

She changed in the kitchen. Fully covered, including scarf to shield the dried blood.

She took the stairs backdown. They went back down in the lift. Yet another safe enclosure they knew would protect every single one of them.

Back on the street, the man whose car she’d stopped glanced briefly at Rafi. He caught his glance and muttered something in Arabic. The man chuckled in response. Then Rafi uttered more, a full sentence. It contained the word shamoota. Did that mean whore? She turned to Rafi.

‘What does that word mean?’

‘Don’t be stupid Tori, you know what it means’

‘No, I don’t’.

But she did. He’d told her about a band, called ‘The Shamoofers’. Their name was a play on the word shamoota.

He must have told the man she was a whore.

Jesus. AGAIN.

‘It sure is a man’s world’, she mumbled.

‘Welcome to Egypt’, he said calmly, almost indifferently.

Bastard.

The man heard her too. She looked across at him. He looked down at the road. And walked ahead so he was not in hearing shot of either of them.

Rafi eased near her.

‘And what has happened to you, Tori? Why are you bleeding? Did you have a visitor when I was out earlier? This is what you must tell the police. This is the story. I came back after a night out and I found you like this.’

Fuck!!

She almost vomited. Not from the physical injuries. Simply from what he just told her.

It was farcical. They walked. Three police officers, the car man, Rafi, and her.

Ah, an ambulance. At last

The nurse was young. Male of course. He gestured for her to lie on the stretcher. He asked her questions she did not fully understand.

It was clear Rafi had to be in the ambulance too. To translate.

What a joke.

This was a farce beyond belief. Both the police and the ambulance crew seemed completely out of their depth.

The ambulance followed the police van.

An interaction between Rafi and the ambulance nurse began.

The nurse turned to her.

‘You love Rafi don’t you?’

What the hell.

He asked it after Rafi spoke to him in Arabic of course.

How could the nurse even think to ask that. But then, yes, of course this was Egypt. Welcome to Egypt. This is what happened in Egypt. Sanctioned violence in the home.

She could not answer. She felt in shock. Because of what he said or for something she had yet to realise.

The nurse reached forward to pull the ambulance doors shut. The were no windows she could see out of.

‘Please don’t close the doors.’

‘Why not?’

‘Ana claustrophobic. Ana asif.  I’m sorry,’ she said, breathlessly.

He did not understand her accent.

Rafi translated in Arabic. Simply and bluntly.

So, they drove with the doors slightly open. But not to the hospital, to the police station. Why hadn’t they taken her to the hospital first?

---

She’d met him first in south Sinai, near the start of 2013. They’d bonded over middle eastern politics. He’d torn the coup apart, angry at how the Tamorod movement had been manipulated.

She’d listened attentively.

He’d sometimes end his long discussions with jokes. One day they’d turned dirty though she’d managed to side track them. Eventually her lack of response put a stop to them altogether. Many months later though she wondered why she didn’t stop contact with him earlier. Why? Because, she’d thought, he’d answer any question she had. About his adopted country, his birth country, about the revolution, the coup. About Mubarak, Morsi, Sisi. Anyone and everything. About Giulio Regeni! And of course, about himself. Though he’d needed no prompting there.

(END of first section)

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Tina Bexson is a British freelance journalist, photojournalist, and author whose work spans hard news, investigative features, and literary fiction. She is the Middle East Editor for Ars Notoria, splitting her time between London, Cairo, and the Sinai. Bexson has written for The Guardian, The Times, London’s Evening Standard, Mental Health Today, and numerous other publications. Her subject areas are wide-ranging: war and the military, crime, criminology, prisons, psychiatry, health, social issues, the environment, film, and the arts. Her journalism is complemented by her photography, an integral part of her reportage, and her original short stories and paintings. Her creative work, like her journalism, explores the darker corners of human experience with unflinching clarity. For more information go to her website.