On holiday by the shore, Rania Khallaf ends up chasing ghosts The requirement to produce an article during my week-long vacation took its toll. But in coming up with an appropriately loose brief - "cultural activities on the North Coast during the summer" - little did I know that my muse would turn out to be the young and talented actor Ahmed Ezz, star of Al-Shabah (), an action flick that was released before I set off. Ghosts have been the bane of my existence since age six, when they acquired a strange connection with something just as frightening: sea water. Because within weeks of almost drowning in the Mediterranean, I was moved to a separate bedroom and there - honest to God - I saw a ghost. This wasn't my imagination; it was real, it even had two little horns. And I grew up with this dual obsession: sea water, and ghosts. I never learned to swim, nor did the image of that little thing with horns depart my mind. The thought of a movie called therefore sent shivers down my spine: I would stare at the billboards, resisting the urge to go watch it and see what happens. Little did I know that right next to the chalet where we would stay in Aida Resort, where I eventually found my way with the family, I would find the reservation desk of the resort cinema advertising two films: Morgan Ahmed Morgan with Adel Imam and, yes, . And wondering who was chasing who as I inhaled the sea air, I couldn't help trembling, reassuring myself that it was, after all, just a movie, that I would not see that movie, and that all will be well with the world. After a short nap we headed for the swimming pool, which was crammed with mostly fully-dressed swimmers: one middle-aged man waddled along in shorts and T-shirt, and around him women waded through the water, covered head to toe; the same scene was to recur at the ladies-only pool, with hijab defying the injunction with which we all grew up, that no one should be allowed in the water without proper swim wear - the subject of a tense conversation with one of the resort attendants the next day - it was depressing. Later in the week I noticed that bright-coloured hats had happily landed onto headcovers. And while I watched a sudden proliferation of birds Aida suddenly took on the aspect of the The Birds - more ghostly feelings; still, it was on the fact that women were so intently covering themselves up, even on the beach, that my sense of suffocation centred. And knowing that elsewhere on the North Coast the opposite tendency occurred, I asked my 15- year-old niece, who lives in the Emirates with her family, why she too took the veil. And when she gave no meaningful answer other than to say that it helped protect her from male gazes at the mall - the only public space she had ever known - I could no longer stand it and I headed for the shower thinking I'd wash away this madness. Which is when I got another phone call from work to make sure I really would be writing an article. I told them I would be writing about ghosts; tentatively, almost unawares, I mentioned the name of the film. And going up the stairs alone, in my swimsuit, I had a horror-film experience when I was scared enough to scream at my image in the mirror. The laughter that ensued made for a sense of relief, and I wondered, calmer now, what will become of this society. With the red flag warning against swimming in turbulent waters, even the marvellous turquoise see turned into a scary ghost, let alone the woman sitting on the beach in full black niqab with her husband, staring blankly into the void. It wasn't until the holiday was almost over that I did battle with the ghost and, dragging my feet under protection of the aforementioned niece - minutes before the show she would tell me she thought hijab was a fashion statement - entered the smelly auditorium and poised myself for terror. As it turned out, rather anticlimactically, I must say, the film had no ghosts in it. Directed by Amr Arafa, it is the story of a young man who committed numerous crimes without once getting caught but then, because of having the same name as a spoilt rich man, he is forced to take responsibility for a murder the latter committed. To the disappointment of the gang, however, he loses his memory after being hit on the head with the butt of a gun. Despite a unique performance by Ezz, the movie recalled a Karim Abdel-Aziz vehicle with a similar theme. The hero's confusion - "Who am I? Inside me are so many mixed feelings, but nothing is related to anything..." - seemed to reflect this holidaymaker's. Wael Abdallah's script made excellent use of the flashback technique, too, but there was nothing vaguely scary. "Believe me, Mummy," my six-year-old daughter kept saying when I told her about the murders in the film, "there is no such thing as ghosts." What would it mean, however, if there are no ghosts in this world? Amnesia improved this hero's character, at any rate: he became a peaceful, well-mannered young man; he started treating his girlfriend well and rejected the money the gang now offered him in return for a few years in prison. And I thought maybe we should all lose our memories, the better to deal with the horrors of life. In Arab culture, the words for "death" and "ghost" are so recurrent and so closely related they might as well be synonyms for living. If covering up our bodies at the beach turns life into death, at some level, then maybe we are actually our own ghosts.
