The Gates of Balawat, Chapter 5
A confused Ella revisits the museum with Caroline, but loses her amongst the crowd. An unexpected deadline makes finding Andy more urgent.
“You ok?” Caroline asked Ella in a quiet moment between customers. She stood at the till, totting up the day’s takings so far as Ella continued putting stock out on the shelves.
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“You lie. What happened with Andy and his mysterious twin brother?”
“Nothing.”
“You lie again. You were all bouncy for a couple of weeks, but now you’re moping about, all quiet and sullen. I swear you’re scaring the punters off!”
“Sorry.”
“Come on. What happened?’
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“It was just weird. He never remembers me.”
“So you don’t think it was a twins thing?”
Ella didn’t know what she thought. She knew what she had experienced, but she also knew what it would sound like if she explained things as they had actually happened. No one would believe her if she said that in the end, she had met dozens of versions of the same person, each one slightly different, whether it was the position of his mole, or a change in his haircut, or a variation in eye colour. A minority were left-handed, the rest right. Mostly they were called Andy or Andrew, with an Anthony and an Antony thrown in for good measure. About half the time the signage said National Museum, half British Museum and once the National English Museum. One thing was consistent, though — she never found herself in the same world twice. She’d even taken to leaving a small mark on the wall, hidden from view, in one of the lesser known galleries, and it was never there the next day.
“So, are you going to take me to meet him?” Caroline asked, breaking the uncomfortable silence.
“What?”
“Come on, let’s shut up shop for a bit and go see if he’s there.”
“No!”
“Yeah, come on. You can just point him out to me from a distance. I promise I won’t say anything.” Ella looked at Caroline in terror, but she was already bustling round, oblivious, readying the shop for a brief sojourn to the museum. As they locked up and walked through the hot summer sun, Caroline kept up a stream of banter, giving Ella no chance to reply and, coincidentally, preventing her from protesting too.
“Wow, I didn’t even knew this door was here!” Caroline said as they approached the Museum’s backstreet entrance.
“Much easier than going all the way round.”
“Yeah, very convenient. So, where is he?”
“Recently he’s been in the Nineveh room,” Ella replied, leading the way along the quiet corridors to the Balawat Gates that opened up into the first major gallery. Hardly anyone came in to the room from this direction, they all tended to come in from the Great Courtyard.
“Just don’t talk to him, ok?” Ella said, her heart racing with the fear that Caroline would embarrass her by saying something horribly blunt or personal. As the silence behind her stretched on, she turned to ask Caroline what was up. Her boss had vanished.
Ella stood, perplexed. A few people were trickling in to the gallery via the Balawat Gates, but Caroline wasn’t amongst them. She must have been distracted by a display, Ella thought, and edged her way back through the Gates against the flow of tourists. But even on the other side, she could see neither hide nor hair of Caroline. There was a bench at the side of the room, so Ella sat and waited, hoping that she would show up soon.
As was her habit, she pulled out her sketch book and started jotting down quick vignettes of the people passing her by. What did they stop to look at? What did they ignore? Where did they go? A tall woman with a shaggy mane of curly red hair entered the gateway, but as Ella blinked she seemed to vanish. Instead, she saw an elderly, stooped man. A group of three children followed by their mum walked through next and Ella stared, keeping her eyes open until she saw them become a gaggle of foreign students. Then a young man entered and no one exited.
The people who left this gallery were not the same people who entered the next.
Ella watched, astonished. She slipped her sketch book and pencil back into her bag and slowly got to her feet, slotting herself into the flow of visitors, walking towards the Balawat Gates. As she neared the threshold, she pulled aside, as if she were going to study the 14 foot high wooden replicas positioned against the walls by the originals. She studied the tourists flowing past her through into the Assyrian gallery. There wasn’t a transition, they didn’t morph one figure into the next as they changed. If anything, from this close, she could almost see two people occupying one space, one superimposed briefly upon the other. It was like looking through a flawed crystal that fractured a single image into two, except these images weren’t identical.
She didn’t need more proof. Although what she had proof of, she wasn’t sure. She slunk back the way she had came, retracing her steps. At each doorway to a new gallery, she scanned for Caroline. Eventually she found herself back at the exit and plopped herself down on the bench again. She whipped out her phone and texted her boss: “Where are you?”
“More to the point, where did you go?” Caroline said as she walked up to Ella, her phone in her hand. “I was following you, and then you were gone.”
“I was right in front of you!”
“No you weren’t. I looked everywhere.”
Ella fell silent, sat pensively for a moment, then stood. “Don’t wander off this time!” she said, taking a different route up a little-used staircase, through some long, narrow galleries, around the Great Courtyard and then down the main stairwell.
Eventually, circuitously, they reached the gallery where she had last seen Andy. No matter how many times she’d heard him give a different name, he’d always be Andy to her. There was no sign of him at all. Ella kept a silent eye on the museum signage and was curious to note no change. Even when she had ended up in a reality where it was still called the National Museum, there were often subtle variations, perhaps a slightly different font in a darker or lighter shade, or sometimes in a totally different colour. This time all was consistent. She checked her phone. She had full signal, five bars. Her phone never worked in these parallel worlds, as she was coming to think of them. So, as far as she could tell this was proof that she was still in her own reality.
“No sign of him,” Ella said, relieved. “Sorry.”
“Are you sure you’re not hiding him from me?” Caroline asked.
“Of course I’m sure,” Ella snapped. “You’ve seen the portraits. You know what he looks like. Have you seen him?”
Caroline hooked her arm through Ella’s, unabashed by Ella’s outburst. “Come on. Let’s get back.”
❦
The next day, Ella left the art shop at her usual time and walked slowly towards the museum. She took the long route, all the way round the Underground dig, round to the front, keeping an eye on her mobile phone signal and looking out for any subtle changes in signage. She saw none. Nor did she see any sign of Andy, despite keeping a careful eye out.
She prowled through the galleries, ignoring the exhibits, searching the building for him top to bottom. She avoided going through the Balawat Gates, keeping herself firmly in her own universe. After her third circuit, she gave up for the day and went home.
After a fortnight of daily searches, she gave up completely. She could only conclude that in this reality, he did not exist. That would explain why there was no sign of the original Andy’s webcomic online. Perhaps he’d never been born, or had died in childhood, or had become a brickie like his dad.
And so it became her habit to seat herself by the Balawat Gates, sketching the comers and goers as they faded into and out of her reality. Here she was in her world, watching them in theirs, a different world each day, a world it seemed no one else could see and that certainly no one else would believe.
Her excitement slowly faded into despondency and after a few weeks she stopped going to the museum at all. What was the point of spending an afternoon getting to know someone whom you could never meet again?
❦
Ella defaulted to drawing whatever presented itself, spending her daily sketching time in the tiny parks in nearby squares. Bedford, Gordon, Haverstock, even tiny cramped Soho, drawing from life instead of old, dead things. It required a slightly different approach, a faster approach: Get the overall feel right, let the details go. The rare summer sunshine should have been a real treat, but Ella found it hard to get enthusiastic about the endless streams of ice-cream eating tourists and overheated business people.
She spent a week just drawing pigeons, studying how they moved, how they flew, how the males wooed their mates, feathers all puffed up, head bobbing, cooing. And she doodled, drawing from memory, sometimes taking up whole pages, all with the same face, the same smile, the same captivating eyes. But there was no going back, no search left to complete.
Ella got to work that day to find Caroline already there, poring over spreadsheets.
“You around Sunday?” Caroline asked.
“Can be,” Ella said, suspiciously.
“Stock check.”
“You're obsessed.”
“Double time?”
“I’m in.” Ella slung her bag behind the counter and picked up the morning newspaper, idly flicking through it.
“Good. Won’t take long if there’s two of us at it.”
“You always say that.”
“Oh, did you see this?” Caroline asked, taking the paper and turning to a story in the international news section.
“What?”
Caroline reached the right page and pointed at a photo of the Balawat Gates under the headline National Museum Donates Gates.
“Didn’t you have a bunch of sketches of these?”
Ella blanched.
“The Balawat Gates, yes.” It was that first time in the Assyrian gallery that she’d spotted him. “What does it say?”
“They’re going back to Iraq.”
“What?”
“Some sort of post-war national identity building thing, celebrating a new democracy. They’re going to a new museum in Mosul, near where they were found. Gift from the English Government to distract from the fact that they’ve bombed the place to hell and back several times in the last fifty years.”
“When do they go?” Ella tried not to sound panicky whilst skim reading the piece. Half the Assyrian artefacts were going to be shipped back to Iraq, she read, to the new United Iraq Museum of Antiquities.
“Couple of weeks, apparently.”
The Balawat Gates, along with Ashurnasirpal II and half the reliefs that she had come to know so intimately would soon be gone, and with them any chance she had of ever seeing Andy again.
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