Sharm El-Sheikh

by Reece Griffiths (United Kingdom (Great Britain))

I didn't expect to find Egypt

The Christmas after Mom died my whole family went on holiday to Sharm El-Sheikh for two weeks. Even at twelve I could see it was a dead end place. One of those many towns whose residents kill themselves trying to replicate some half-realised simulacra of Westernisation, constructed for tourists, all the buildings prefabricated and painted in off-browns and yellows, and the palm trees placed symmetrically opposite each other on either side of the street. It all gave the impression of a cardboard jungle, littered with corporate monuments to KFC, Expedia and HSBC. Everything looked like it had come out of a printer, like any moment I could have scrolled back, zoomed out, and found myself in a simulation. A single long road stretched out straight along the middle with nothing but desert and mountains at either end. The road was wide as a runway, and at either side stood merchants incessantly bartering, trying to sell cheap jewellery, knock-off perfumes and replicated Rolexes to the passersby who were doing anything they could to ignore them. The whole place reeked of camel shit. Through the windows of a McDonald's one day we watched a British man punch a local to the floor after his camel spat on his fiancé. It was two weeks of lying next to the pool under a sun like a fluorescent bulb in a basement, the room revolving around my head at night and the PTSD making me hallucinate Mom on every corner in her dressing gown, pissing herself and mouthing my name. Mom had died in July and we were all still trying to let the weight of that settle in each of us in our own way, the last thing we needed was to be isolated in a place where we had to rely on each other and couldn’t be alone. Me especially. I was walking around in what felt like a predictable apocalypse, my head stuck in an aquarium, all the people faceless and their voices buzzing around me. I spent the first week kicking my six-year-old cousin in the back of the knees because it felt good to make her cry. The place was so mundane we had to make a spectacle of anything. My cousin found a jellyfish dead on the beach and the adults spent the night celebrating. Thursday nights meant Morrocan lamb shank so me and my Grandad spent the two hours before talking about how much we were going to enjoy it. One night for some reason we went to an oxygen bar made of ice and after an hour we noticed the ceiling was dripping and the lights had dimmed. We turned and watched outside a parking sign float off in the stream the road had become. The taxi we took back to our resort stalled and started at one point to float in the rain. When we finally made it back we found the lobby saturated with the damp, the workers desperately mopping what they could of the water back out the front door. Me, my dad and my uncle ended up meeting a man who offered to take us quad-biking in the desert. We paid in cash. He handed over the keys, and began pointing at the bike rapidly, ‘This to start, this to stop, this to vroom! Ok?’ And so he took us out. After ten minutes we saw in the distance a series of plastic signs that read: DANGER! Minefield ahead. I hugged my dad’s back, and felt something heavy dissolve in me. The surrealism of the scenario made me smile and I thought to myself that anything could happen and it wouldn’t matter. I imagined myself as an insect latched onto the back of an aeroplane, looking out into dunes that could swallow a city and realised life was no different from a video game. I could’ve dropped myself under the wheels and it wouldn’t have mattered. I was tiny, mad and cackling, sat on the back of a quad-bike that was racing through the middle of the desert that no one had bothered to name. Then, with some revelation, I remembered it was Christmas Day.