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    The Felucca Ride: A Vegas - Nile Caper
    The Felucca Ride: A Vegas - Nile Caper
    The Felucca Ride: A Vegas - Nile Caper
    Ebook100 pages1 hour

    The Felucca Ride: A Vegas - Nile Caper

    By Sedley Proctor, Tony Henderson and M T Sands

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    About this ebook

    From Vegas, gangsters, playboys and loan sharks, to Cairo, bi-planes and motorbikes, do you choose a smooth Egyptian gent, or a New Jersey self-made skunk? What other unenviable choices lie before grifter, Felicia "Cleo" Portman as she heads down the Felucca Ride in search of fame, fortune, and a Bastet cat.


    "Another story from

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLeopard Publishing Ventures Ltd
    Release dateDec 23, 2020
    ISBN9781838178734
    The Felucca Ride: A Vegas - Nile Caper
    Author

    Sedley Proctor

    Sedley was born in Poole, Dorset and grew up in West London where visits to the local library instilled in him a life-long love of books. Sedley always loved writing and English. In fact, when he was eleven, he began a historical novel, now lost to posterity, but, if memory serves, in the style of Henry Treece and Ronald Welch. At school in Winchester he started to dream about a writing career, and was even lucky enough to win a prize for a short story, the title of which he has now forgotten. For some reason, however, the final line sticks in his mind. "Was it a living or waking dream? - No, she must be dead." After a brief flirtation with archaeology, he studied English at Nottingham University where he was tutored, for a term, by the Northern Irish poet, Tom Paulin. In the 1990s, he worked in fringe theatre and was involved in productions of Macbeth and Bertolt Brecht's In the Jungle of Cities. His own play, Salt Lake Psycho about the notorious murderer, Gary Gilmore was put on at the now defunct Man in the Moon theatre in Chelsea. Salt Lake Psycho was directed by Sean Holmes, current associate artistic director at Shakespeare's Globe. For the best part of two decades, Sedley lived and worked as a teacher and translator in Southern Italy. Here he collaborated with French writer, Claude Albanese on the screenplay of Dirty Waters. Dirty Waters, which is a political thriller, written with Italian blood, English sweat and French tears, received a commendation at the 2003 Montpellier Festival. In Italy Sedley continued to experiment with his writing, devising an invented dialect for a novel about a young female brigand of the Risorgimento. He also experimented with performance poetry, accompanying local blues band, Big Daddy Lawman on their tours of Apulian taverns, churches and bars. Returning to Britain in 2013, Sedley wrote The Half Days (2015), an ex-pat adventure set in Southern Italy. He struck up a writing partnership with Tony Henderson. Together they quickly published two books: Over & Under i (2015) and Over & Under ii (2016), a series of naughty tales, inspired by the tales of the Arabian Nights. The Over & Under Series has subsequently morphed into the Naughty Stories Series. The first in this series, Ten Naughty Stories was published in 2019 under the pen name, M. T. Sands. Sedley has also published the sequel to The Half Days under the title, Accidental Death of a Terrorist. Accidental Death of a Terrorist (2019) is the second part of the Mezzogiorno Trilogy. Sedley and Tony have written a children's book, The Wolf Garden, under the alias F. M. Frites: A Totally, Completely, and Utterly Bodacious Adventure with Unicorns and Gnomes.

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      Book preview

      The Felucca Ride - Sedley Proctor

      The Felucca Ride

      A Vegas – Nile Caper

      M.T. Sands

      This story is for Charlie Stringer and Jeff Cohen. Guides, conspirators and companions. From poolside to bar-side and into the desert. What starts in Vegas is supposed to stay in Vegas. In this case they stayed with me as friends forever. - Tony

      FOREWORD

      W

      hen a writer listens to a story, she must always be attentive to nuance, lest she misses something hidden from the teller as much as herself told. Of course, I had known Felicia a long time, and I have always been struck by her boldness. From the days when she came to the school in West London, where I was working; I happened to be in the staff room when she arrived, plonked her bag down on the communal desk, and took out – what appeared to be – an enormous chocolate croissant (of the type you could only get in a rather crafty bakery up the road). Felicia, I recall, who was ravenous, ate the croissant there in front of me without licking her lips. At that age, Felicia has a very pretty mouth, and two dimples that creased very pleasingly as she smiled at me - several flakes of croissant mingled with chocolate spread on the sides of her mouth. Dimples do not always last; in Felicia’s case she has been fortunate, even if at the time fortune did not favour her (nor indeed myself). Felicia’s contract expired at the end of the week; mine two or three weeks later. The school itself was dying a death; our boss - a certain Mr. Kenyon, who had a house in the Cotswolds, an extremely expensive wife and two precious little gems with pigtails to obey as well as a Fulham truck that was garaged on the other (dangerous) side of the Hammersmith flyover, absconded with the money of all the home stay families. Our Japanese students disappeared overnight without so much as a bow or a sayonara scrape, and Mr Kenyon’s partner, a certain Mr Takemoto of Kyoto, politely refused to foot the bill. In the fallout from the scandal, and our jobless commiseration, Felicia and I became the firmest of friends. When I started my hat business, Felicia would sometimes help out on the stall or in the shop (we used to spend particularly desolate Sunday afternoons playing backgammon and watching Bergman movies) until she went off – if I recall correctly – with a footballer from Austin, Texas. Although we do not see each other often, whenever she is in this country, it is always a delight to catch up and shoot the breeze over a bottle of something light and fizzy, or red and full… But to return to the nuance of the story; when Felicia introduced me to the aging Egyptian star who became, in some sense, the catalyst for the events that unfold here, she described him as being somewhat fearful. I questioned her once or twice on this point, but she insisted. Omar, she said, was beset by nightmares. Yet, evidently, that must have been a later impression, since she could not have possibly known what she did about him at the very beginning. - Felicia is rarely self-deceiving, though I think – as you will see – she can be quite charmingly deceiving. Which is why I think you will agree, dear reader, you are owed some explication regarding various aspects of this story, which Felicia insists must be called the Felucca Ride.

      Mary Sands

      Contents

      Death in the Nile

      Part One

      Part Two

      M.T. Sands Interview

      Death in the Nile

      T

      he couple insisted on paying Abid before the boarded the Felucca.

      He was curious, but never overly so as they had already included a large tip.

      How far you want to go, Mister?

      Just out into the channel as far away from land as possible.

      The breeze whispered across the Nile and Abid got on with his work.

      Abid loved nothing more than to be out on the river. He was at peace there and nothing could touch him except the sun, the wind, or the rain.

      There was a splash; the woman sat alone. The man was nowhere to be seen.

      Where is he, where is he? shouted Abid, clambering up onto the bow.

      The woman seemed unmoved.

      He is gone, she said.

      What do you mean he is gone? shouted Abid.

      The penalty for having a tourist drown on his boat was unthinkable.

      He is gone, my son, said the woman. Please take me back.

      Abid scrambled all over the boat trying to see if the man was in the water, but it was no use.

      They sailed back to shore and Abid wearily went with her to the Tourist Police.

      The Police, who were surprisingly calm, took both of them out in a river search boat.

      They did not find anything.

      As they reached the shore, Abid had tears in his eyes.

      The woman reached over and hugged him.

      Thank you, she said. He loved the river as much as you.

      Part One

      Vegas

      W

      hen he awoke from the nightmare, his body was still in it, and his legs where were he’d left them, thrashing around under the sheet; somehow he forced himself up and staggered, naked, into the bathroom. He turned on the basin tap and threw water over his face. Then he turned, staring down at the toilet bowl as he peed. To his relief, he found everything was just about in working order. There was no pain, no blood. He blinked up at the mirror above him. Honestly, he thought, gazing into his haunted face, is this still you, old

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