Read Equivocator for Free Online

explain, your soul split into two, the Ba departing every morning to keep an eye on your family, the Ka swanning off to the Land of Two Fields, to enjoy the luxury fruits of the shabtis’ labours. Every night Ka and Ba popped home for a night’s kip in the mummy. But what if your mummy had been raided or your Name erased? The Ba and Ka would be cut off. There was no way home. You would lose yourself forever.
    The conference members are fascinated. I recite to them the infamous Cannibal Hymn inscribed on the antechamber to Pharaoh Unis’s tomb.
    The sky rains down.
    The stars darken.
    The celestial vaults stagger.
    The bones of Aker tremble.
    The stars are stilled against them,
    at seeing Pharaoh rise as a Ba.
    A god who lives on his fathers and feeds on his mothers. 
    Four thousand years back, Unis had been an unusually big eater. How to gain access to the power of the gods? Devour them! What else? Pharaoh’s mummy consumes one-by-one every god it meets. Only a handful of gods elude Unis’s cooking-pots, these being the divine cooks and bottle-washers. Otherwise down Pharaoh’s gullet they go: big gods for lunch, medium gods for dinner and tiddlers for a little light supper. The engorged Unis, I tell them, is a fantasy of omnipotence. And in the end, what is he? Still hungry.
    *
    At dinner Mary and I match one another glass for glass. She describes the Hell Creek Formation in the badlands of Montana, sketching a map on the back of the menu, in case I visit and feel like digging up a dinosaur.
    â€˜Plenty of fossils to go round, Seb. Millions, literally. We make a useful little income for the Centre by charging amateur diggers. Everyone adores a dinosaur, after all.’
    â€˜One day they’ll all be gone.’
    â€˜Yeah. But by then humankind will have given way to the insects.’
    Rhys Salvatore, penned at a corner table amongst admirers, glances across with an expression of helpless yearning. He’s mouthing something: ‘See you afterwards?’
    Mary and I continue drinking through the speechifying. The main course, announces the head waiter, will shortly be served. There are some quite minor hitches in the kitchens. Salvatore waves; he beckons. He rises in his seat. Come, he seems to say, I want you, I need you. And I almost get up, I almost go.
    â€˜Rhys is ogling you,’ Mary says. ‘Don’t look. Unless you fancy him, of course. Sorry. Just joking.’
    â€˜Seriously though, Mary – what do you make of him?’
    â€˜A friend of mine taught with him at Princeton. Brilliant, he said, charming, but a bit of a hyena – always loping after other people’s kills, was how Ben put it. He noticed that Salvatore’s a mimic. He do the Police in different voices! Watch out for when he’s least Valleys and most Dylan Thomas. And light-fingered, my friend said: no grasp of the difference between meum and tuum. But another friend said that was all surface. She said that when she heard her husband had died, Rhys happened to be with her. He held her – and cried with her. He stayed with her all night, just holding her. He fed her with a teaspoon when she couldn’t eat. Said he had been there and knew her grief. So take your pick really. Why?’
    â€˜Oh, nothing. Idle curiosity.’
    At last the main course arrives: risotto that’s been left out in the rain. Before we’ve finished, waiters are removing dishes and side-plates. They do so with baleful courtesy: they’ll not be sorry to see the back of us. One seems to have taken root directly behind me. If I turn my head slightly, I can make out his dark shape.
    Then he places one hand on my shoulder. His other hand comes down on the other shoulder. He gives the gentlest of gentle pushes.
    I swing round. Nobody there. Bloody hell. Too much bad plonk. And bad it is. Why do I never learn? Among the bits and shreds in my pocket, the memory stick seems to buzz. Or was that my