Gender Genre Competition

The Top Ten Stories

A Yellow Daisy

She had been in Egypt four days. The winter storms that stirred the Red Sea waters like a cauldron beyond the reef were subsiding at last. Every day, she had walked out to the jetty, enjoying the bitter wind lashing her hair into her eyes. That morning, though, the jagged Red Sea mountains that imprisoned the resort against the coast were outlined crimson and gold against a cloudless sky.
          Her friends, Jamie and Tracey, had gone back to bed after a sleepless night with the toddler. Now, the day stretched ahead, as empty and as full of possibilities as the Eastern Desert. Jumping off the jetty, she spread her towel on the sand. She closed her eyes, enjoying the sun poking its fingers under her eyelashes, and the breeze caressing her bare collarbones with a lover’s hand. 
          She might have dozed a moment, or half an hour. Against the murmur of air on water, of ocean massaging coral, it was hard to focus. But she heard and smelled him before she saw him. A drift of sandalwood on ozone and the crunch of shingle told her she was no longer alone. Half opened, her eyes came to rest on two square, sunburned feet. 
She closed her eyes again, confident that the intruder would move on, if she lay still enough and willed it. But the shingle spoke no more. 
          “You are alone,” he said.
          She sighed, her limbs tensed. 
          “I am Hamoudy,” he said. “And I have seen you in my dreams.”
          She shook her head. What was it with Egyptian men? 
          “Nice to meet you, Hamoudy. But I’m not looking for company.”
          She jerked backwards as his face approached hers. Focusing, she met the gaze of two walnut-coloured eyes. 
          “What’s your name,” he asked.
          “Does it matter?” she shrugged. “I could be Helga, or Ingrid, or Francesca, or Delphine. You will tell me the same thing, whatever.”
          His lips twitched. “Your name?”
          She sighed. “Lucy,” she said. 
          “From where?”
          “From Manchester.” 
          “Lucy from Manchester, you are very beautiful,” he said, offering a dark, square-tipped hand. His fingers had a rough, Velcro rasp that meshed with hers a beat too long. 
          “I have to go,” she said.
          “Will I see you again?” he asked.
          She side-stepped him, but paused at the foot of the jetty and turned back. 
          “I’m a married mum, with two kids,” she said. “Best you don’t.”
          That evening, she was waiting for her friends when she saw Hamoudy again. He carried a volleyball and his cheekbones shimmered under a light veil of sweat. A white sports logo singlet was plastered against his torso. His legs were bare in orange shorts. He had a mischievous, lively face, close-cropped and goatee-bearded. A genie in sportswear. She slipped her phone into her handbag, her text home to Phil abandoned. 
          “I dreamed you were calling me,” he said, pulling up a chair. 
          She rolled her eyes. “Maybe it’s God, calling to tell you to stop imagining things,” she said.
          He smiled. “I look into those eyes, and imagine everything.” 
          “Hamoudy, I’m married,” she said.
          He stared at her, shameless. “And where is he?” he said. “You are alone in my country, and it isn’t a crime to invite you to tea.”
          A television blared across the lobby. Lucy caught the gaze of a couple from the north-east. She had endured them over breakfast; Trevor and Barbara. Barbara was staring at Hamoudy’s brown knees, lips like dropped stitches. Lucy struggled not to smile. Whether or not she said yes to Hamoudy, Barbara had framed the scandal. Not that she was saying yes.
          “It’s not a good idea, Hamoudy,” she said. “I’ve told you already that I’m married and a mum.”
          His eyes sparked back at her. “Your husband, then, is very lucky,” he said at last.
          Lucy smiled to herself, grimly. “Well, I like to think so.” 
          “If I was your husband, I would never leave your side,” Hamoudy murmured. “Not for one moment.”
          Next day, at lunchtime, babysitting Millie and Henry, Tracey’s kids, Lucy chatted to Momeen, the sad-eyed waiter. He worked sixteen-hour days, seven days a week in six week blocks, with two weeks off in between. He took home barely a hundred and fifty pounds a month to feed four kids. Lucy looked at Momeen. Her handbag was stuffed with a wedge of musty Egyptian pounds – more than he would earn that month.
          And then she thought about Hamoudy. Hamoudy, still young enough and smart enough to hustle to get by. And she saw herself – too white; too soft, too easily burned by the African sun. And everything was clear. What kind of idiot got caught up in such nonsense? Such lies? Was she needy enough – desperate enough – to have her head turned by a gigolo?
          She went back to her room, threw herself on the huge empty bed and sobbed. She woke some hours later. She had missed dinner, but was too awake to sleep. Outside, the wind had fallen, leaving the sky brittle with stars. She walked down to the beach through a plantation of hibiscus bushes and pomegranate trees. It was a man-made plantation, tended inch by inch by an army of thin, dark labourers. 
          The moon hung low and swollen in the eastern sky, its icy collar shimmering a spectrum of frosted colours in the opaque blackness. Waves slapped the jetty in warning as the drift of sandalwood cut through the thickening night. She felt the warmth of his hand before it connected with her arm.
          “I can’t eat; I can’t sleep. I see only your eyes,” he said, and something liquid and molten threatened to engulf her. 
          “That’s enough, Hamoudy,” she said.
          He moved closer, until they were almost touching, and she was breathing his air, drifting on his scent. Drowning in him.
          “There is something between us,” he said. “And we both feel it.”
          She tried to pull away from him. 
          “There is nothing between us,” she said. “And for you to speak to me like this, for you to touch me, means you don’t respect me.”
          He pulled backwards. “I feel what I feel,” he said. “And what I feel, I have to say. It’s like that.”
          “Yes, I’m sure it’s like that,” Lucy snapped. “With every foreign woman.”
          “I meet a hundred women every day,” he said. “You think I tell them all the same thing?”
          She squared herself. “It’s a very easy thing to say.”
          “You think it’s easy?” he asked. “It’s not easy to say I love you to a woman. It’s not easy even to say I like you. It’s not easy. Not ever. Not for me.”
          “It is easy,” she insisted.
          “You think I say this to all those women?”
          “All? Oh, no,” she said. “I’m sure it’s not more than ten percent.”
          He backed away, hands clenched. “If you believe this, then my whole life is a lie,” he said. 
          They stared at each other, hot-eyed and breathless. 
          “Whatever,” she said. “See you around.”
          She fled to the bar and ordered an arak. She downed it in two gulps, and slammed the glass on the counter. She turned to see Barbara, a fructose smile frosted on her lips. 
          “We missed you at dinner tonight.” 
          “I wasn’t well,” Lucy snapped.
          “You look better now, though,” Barbara said. “So. Is it true?”
          “Is what true?” Lucy asked.
          “What my friend Shirley says – that once you’ve been with an Egyptian man, you’ll never go back to a white man again.”
          Lucy stared at Barbara. “I couldn’t say,” she said finally. “Go do your own research.”
          Barbara giggled too loudly. “Ooh, I don’t believe it,” she said. “Most of them are so lazy and stupid, it’s a wonder they built the pyramids.”
          Phil called, moaning about the weather and the housework. She listened patiently, and felt nothing, old loyalties reduced to ashes by the African sun. 
          Days merged with days. She played with Millie and Henry, and watched Hamoudy marshal teenage Italians into football teams, joke with the English single mums, and dive-bomb the water polo-playing Germans. His small, loping presence was everywhere. And she wanted to pluck out her eyeballs and throw them to the moray eels that lurked below the churning reef. On the last day, she walked out after breakfast to see Hamoudy sprawled on a sun lounger next to an Italian goddess of a certain age. They looked intimate, and when he saw her, he froze. 
          Later, she was supervising the kids splashing in the pool. She enjoyed her godchildren’s neediness – the relentless demands for attention that her teenage sons had long outgrown. She was paddling her toes in the freezing water, when Hamoudy materialised beside her. Close up, she could see his hair starting to thin, with a sprinkling of grey at the temples. His face was tired and resigned. 

          How many more years could he have, depending on the whims and moods of package tourists? She looked at the sunbathers lounging in the heat. All of them gifted with a thousand more choices; all of it an accident of place and time. Compassion hit her with tsunami force. 
          “Hamoudy, don’t take it to heart,” she said quietly. “Good things come to good people. That’s our only hope.”
          His face flushed. “Wait,” he said, melting into the undergrowth. He reappeared, transformed, disjointed words pouring from his lips. 
          “I know you told me not to say,” he gasped. “You told me not to say, but I have to say it.”
          From behind his back, he produced a flower, and handed it to her with a courtly flourish. It was a large daisy, yellow and gleaming like the sun in miniature. He smiled, then turned and loped away with that stride that had become so familiar – the stride too long for his compact frame. 
          She looked at the flower. A yellow flower for thwarted passion. Yellow, the colour of cowardice. The colour of jealousy. The colour of gold. All around, the bushes were bursting with hibiscus blooms, blatant in their scarlet shamelessness. Throbbing with heat. The yellow daisy gleamed with a subtle purity. She put the flower inside her novel, and squeezed the covers shut. Even a pressed flower would outlive whatever fleeting nonsense had bloomed between them. 
          That afternoon, in the pool, Hamoudy grabbed her hand under the water, and held it. She shook her head, and pulled away.
          In the evening, she joined her friends to say goodbye to Momeen, and Ali and the small army of Egyptians who had spent two weeks catering to their moods and whims. They defied the resort’s no-cash rule, slipping banknotes directly to their favourites. 
          Hamoudy lingered in the shadows, his face blazing out from the black. Finally, despairing, she walked over. 
          “And so it ends,” she said quietly. 
          He glared at her. “It ends for you.”
          They stared at each other. Finally, he reached out of the darkness and a rough fingertip brushed aside the hair that fell into her eyes. “Can I kiss you goodbye?” he asked. And it was all she could do to nod, and raise cheek to lips, cheek to lips. 
          “Take care,” she whispered. And she walked away.
          In the morning, as the airport bus swung round the corner, she half hoped that he would appear beside her and beg her to stay. But later, as mile after mile of desert unrolled between them, she sat alone, fighting tears. And when she closed her eyes, she saw Hamoudy turn away from her, long steps loping away into the hot Egyptian sun. 
          In the weeks and months that followed, she consoled herself that she hadn’t let Hamoudy close enough to do her lasting damage. And she settled back into the familiar, ever-decreasing cycle of her life. 
          But she thought about him, sometimes. And wondered if he remembered her name.