Beneath a Burning Sky

by Jenny Ashcroft

  Then there was that favour Jeremy had pleaded of Edward, the very morning before those torn-up threats had arrived: that deserted hut he’d sent him to in Montazah. Those silent children; the wary way that maid-girl, Nailah, had stared. Edward couldn’t shake it from his mind.

  It all meant something, he was sure. But until he worked out what, he didn’t want to burden Olly with half-cut suspicions.

  She looked up at him, gaze questioning, impatient.

  ‘I don’t know what to tell you,’ he said truthfully. ‘I’m back because I was ordered back.’

  She narrowed her eyes.

  He drew on his cigarette, lips touching the imprint hers had left on the paper.

  She asked, ‘Have nationalists taken Clara?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But you believe she’s been taken?’

  ‘Yes,’ he frowned, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Do you think you can get her back?’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘What were the two of you talking about, at the Sporting Club?’

  ‘Olly,’ he grimaced. ‘Don’t.’

  She stared. ‘Edward, what the hell has happened?’

  He said nothing. Her beautiful face, just inches from his, was miserable. Abruptly, he could take it no more. Being here with her, watching her become less and less like the person he’d first met, more and more unhappy. ‘I don’t know how much longer this can go on,’ he said. ‘I can’t stay.’

  She inhaled sharply. She looked as if he had struck her: the very last thing he could do.

  ‘So I’m losing you too,’ she said.

  ‘Olly, no. That’s not what I meant.’ He took a step towards her, she took a step back. There was so much he wanted to say to her now. But if ever there was a time to talk of India, it wasn’t tonight. He should never have raised it. ‘You must stay here until we find out what’s happened to Clara,’ he said. ‘No going off on your own. God knows if you’re in danger now too.’

  ‘Why should I be?’

  ‘Just promise me, Olly.’

  She made no reply. She neither promised nor refused to before she turned, shoulders heavy, and walked away.

  ‘Olly, wait.’

  She didn’t. She didn’t even look back.

  He cursed. He scrunched the burning end of his cigarette into a ball, and threw it into the darkness. Idiot. He leant the heels of his hands on the terrace rail, breathing deep.

  ‘Sayed?’

  He started, looked around.

  It was Fadil, at the foot of the terrace stairs. Returned, at last. His black eyes looked every bit as gritty with tiredness as Edward’s felt.

  With an effort, Edward pushed Olly from his mind. He asked Fadil for an account of his day.

  Fadil gave it. As he talked, Edward dropped his head, frowning, trying to make sense of all Fadil said.

  When Fadil was finished, Edward asked, ‘Why didn’t you come and find help sooner?’

  ‘I didn’t want to waste time, sayed.’

  Edward nodded, accepting it. He stood silent, thinking. ‘Whoever has Clara,’ he said at length, ‘they know this city like the back of their hand.’

  ‘Yes, sayed.’

  Edward looked to the sea. Light was seeping from the horizon. The day would break soon. The mosques around the city would be opening their doors for dawn prayers. In less than an hour, the streets would be full of locals. The police would be all over them, of course, asking questions. As though anyone who knew anything would admit it to them.

  Edward stood straighter, an idea taking root. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? He needed to go into town. Now. Sleep would have to wait for later.

  He couldn’t waste time if they were to have a hope of finding Clara.

  THE SECOND DAY

  Chapter Seven

  The low melodic notes of the muezzin’s call to worship rang through the narrow streets of Alexandria’s old Ottoman heart, the Turkish Quarter, and entered into Nailah’s dreams of whispers amidst jacaranda trees, slowly drawing her from them. She opened her eyes in the watery dawn light, taking in the dusty, sparsely furnished room, and remembered with a jolt that it was where she lived now. It felt even meaner for the beauty of the sleep-world she’d just left.

  She shifted her weight on the straw mattress. Her hip ached from where it had pressed against the floor all night. Her ten-year-old cousin, Cleo, lay beside her, still dreaming. Her hand was resting on Nailah’s arm, just as it had been when they fell asleep. Three-year-old Babu nestled between the two of them, bottom wedged in Cleo’s tummy, head tucked under Nailah’s chest. They had become like three pieces of a puzzle this past month, slotting together in this hovel.

  A door slammed. Then another. Footsteps sounded in the stairwell as the men leasing the other rooms in their terraced dwelling set off for mosque. Their murmured greetings to one another, ‘Sabah el-kheir’, drifted upwards. The floorboards vibrated as one after another they left. Nailah waited for the front door to swing shut for a final time, and, with all the men now safely out of the house, she eased herself away from her cousins, moving carefully so as not to wake them. She picked up the pail of last night’s urine, and went down to the yard to empty it into the latrine. She held her breath, as she always did, and squatted over the hole in the floor herself, nightgown clutched high above the rank puddles at her feet. Her eyes watered in the stench of the men’s waste. She tried to blank her mind of where she was, the humiliating filth. She hurried to finish and scrambled back outside, then upstairs to dress.

  Her body was grimy with sweat, she yearned for a bath, but since there was none in the house, she made do with a flannel and bucket. She rubbed herself brusquely, clenching her jaw against the discomfort of the cold water. With the sound of the children’s steady breathing in her ear, she reflected habitually, longingly, on her life before their mother had died. Back when she had worked as a maid for the Anglo-Egyptian Benjamin Pasha and his wife, Amélie, up near Montazah on the Aboukir Peninsula. She sighed, remembering the sun-filled starts breakfasting on platters of fruit with the other maids, the ease of the week’s work caring for Amélie’s beautiful clothes, arranging her hair, sympathising with her worries over who should be sitting with whom at a dinner. And every Sunday spent at her Aunt Tabia’s hut, barely ten minutes’ walk away, cooking and talking, playing with the children. Nailah squeezed her eyes shut. It hurt too much to think of Tabia. As for the rest of it, it was becoming harder and harder to recall: her life back then, the old version of herself. The one who was never hungry, who didn’t fret, but who had always had one ear cocked for the sound of that voice, his voice… No.

  Nailah’s eyes flipped open.

  She looked around at the scrubbed floor, the lopsided table, the rising sun through the one grimy window. Don’t torture yourself. This is your life now. With a nod of resolution, she reached for her brush and went to the mottled looking-glass.

  As she coiled her greasy hair into a bun, she stared into her own dark eyes. She turned her head, tucking in a pin here, a flyaway strand there. She was one of the few not to wear a headscarf in these tight Muslim streets. Most of the women here wore full hijab, as much, Nailah thought, to protest against the British rule banning it as anything else. But it hadn’t been part of the uniform at the Pashas’. Before that, Nailah had never been expected to wear one; her mother, Isa, who earnt her living as a singer and dancer, was hardly one to bother with such matters, whilst Nailah’s father had died before she was even born. Isa swore blind he’d married her first; she could go on for hours about the wedding ceremony: fellow actors who’d come to celebrate, the way she’d done her hair… But still, there was gossip. (Marry Isa? Why would he have bothered? She’s anyone’s for a penny when she’s on tour, never mind the example she’s setting to that daughter of hers. Oh, but the way she leaves her here, all alone, weeks on end. She’s entertaining the army in Luxor this month, you know, and not just with singing, I’d wager. The bare-faced shame of it.)
<
br />   ‘Don’t listen to them,’ Isa would say on the rare occasions she could be coaxed off stage to visit home. She’d press Nailah’s school fees into her hand. ‘Study hard, escape, we’re better than this, my love. You should have seen them cheer for me at the encore…’

  Nailah had used to believe that she could be better. But for all she’d slogged at school to perfect her English, her French, and haunted the steps of the city’s grand salons, offering to sweep, clean, anything to watch the women there work, learn, make herself skilled enough to be employed by a woman like Amélie Pasha, she was right back where she had started: in the neighbourhood she’d killed herself to leave. Only this time she had dragged her cousins down with her.

  She looked at their sleeping forms; lips parted, cheeks flushed with the night. So vulnerable. She hadn’t wanted to bring them back here from Montazah after they’d lost their mother, dear Aunt Tabia, five weeks before, but she hadn’t known where else to go. I’m sorry, she told them silently. She bent to kiss their olive skin. She frowned as her lips touched Babu. He had another fever. She crooned endearments to him, hoping the words might soak into his sleepy thoughts as the call to prayer had done into hers, and that he might manage to understand them, mute as he was. He stirred and rolled over, stretching arms that had grown too lean around his oddly proportioned head. She ran her hand over his tufty hair, the lines of his distorted skull, and willed away the burning in his skin. She felt the familiar pull of grief that he, with his soul full of smiles and sloppy kisses, should suffer so. God had surely been looking in the other direction the day he was born.

  ‘You look sad.’

  Nailah started at the high childish notes of Cleo’s voice. She watched as Cleo pushed herself to sitting, legs crossed beneath her. Her hair fell in silken folds around her shoulders. Her face was soft and round, her oversized eyes the colour of syrupy coffee. The image of Tabia. As she yawned, her little mouth opened reluctantly, as though fighting her greedy instinct to breathe.

  Nailah said, ‘You mustn’t worry about me, habibi,’ then winced. Habibi, my beloved, was what Tabia had used to call them all. Suddenly, she was there; an invisible shadow in the air. From the way Cleo dropped her head, she felt her too.

  Nailah searched the room, trying to come up with a distraction, for her as well as Cleo.

  Her eyes settled on the fruit bowl. ‘Will you help me with breakfast?’ They made it each morning for the men in the house. They washed the sheets too. In exchange, the landlord took a couple of pennies off their rent. Cleo always seemed to like popping the pomegranate seeds, stirring them through the yoghurt, gap-teeth pressed to her lip in the effort not to make a mess. Nailah went to the bowl, tossing one of the fruits to her cousin.

  Cleo caught it, smiling in a way that barely moved her pretty cheeks, then set to work.

  By the time the men returned, Babu was awake, heavy on Nailah’s hip, and Cleo had laid out the meal: goat’s yoghurt, fruit, nuts and day-old bread. Nailah and the children stared as the men fell upon the spread. Nailah’s stomach pinched in hunger. But she didn’t move to eat, none of them did. They waited silently to satisfy themselves with whatever the men left.

  It was only once the meal was done, the room cleared, and the first of the day’s linen scrubbed and hanging in the yard, that Nailah said she had better go to market. She thought she might drop into the baths too; the morning’s work had added a new layer of sweat to her grimy skin, she was longing for a proper wash. ‘Will you mind Babu?’ she asked Cleo. She touched her fingers dubiously to his forehead. ‘He’s hot, I don’t want to make him worse by taking him out. Will you be all right?’

  Cleo told her they’d be fine. ‘I used to watch him all the time for Umi, remember? I watched him all that night…’

  ‘All right,’ said Nailah, interrupting. It came out shorter than she’d intended, but she didn’t want to talk about that night. She patted Cleo’s shoulder to take the sting from her words. ‘Thank you.’

  Steam filled the cavernous rooms of the public baths, the sound of women’s chatter and cackling laughter echoed off the tiled walls, bouncing from shiny surfaces dripping with condensation. Nailah handed her coin to the attendant and murmured her thanks as the lady gave her a brush and soap in exchange. For the second time that day, she slipped from her clothes and slid quickly, self-consciously, into the hot water, hiding her skinny frame. She kept her eyes averted from the brazenly exposed flesh around her, the careless way the black-toothed matrons lounged, flabby arms stretched behind them, revealing thick clumps of damp hair. Clenching her soap in her cracked, work-roughened hand, Nailah set about making herself clean for the first time in a week. She unbound her hair, poured water over her head, and rubbed at her scalp until she was swathed in lather and could smell nothing but citrus-tinged carbolic.

  The voices of the other women trickled through to her: conversations about the birth of daughters where sons had been hoped for, miscarriages, marriages. Police visiting homes that morning enquiring about a missing British woman.

  Nailah’s head jerked up. ‘What’s that?’ she asked. ‘Who are they asking about?’

  ‘Ha,’ said Sana, a woman not much older than Nailah’s twenty years, but married to a fisherman and with two screaming brats already. ‘She honours us, ladies, by speaking. God is good this morning, we must thank Him.’

  Nailah didn’t rise to the taunt; she was used to Sana’s sharp tongue by now, and besides, it wasn’t the time for a sparring match. She repeated her question, ‘Who are the police asking about?’

  ‘A Madame Gray,’ Sana said, pronouncing the name in a mocking accent that made her disdain for the moneyed British clear. ‘Why?’ She snorted. ‘Do you know her, Miss Hoity-toity?’

  Nailah knew Ma’am Gray, of course she did, but she was hardly likely to tell Sana that. ‘What do they think’s happened to her?’

  ‘They don’t know,’ said Sana. ‘She disappeared yesterday. The police are trying to find her. The army too. I saw an officer outside mosque this morning. He was talking to some men.’

  ‘What were they saying?’

  Sana shrugged. ‘Whatever it was, they’re fools to be speaking to that officer at all.’ She narrowed her black eyes. ‘You get between an onion and its peel, all you end up with is a bad smell. You watch, anyone who gets dragged into this around here will find themselves in the shit.’ She laughed humourlessly. ‘The way the British leave us to rot, then come scuttling over when they need our help. Pathetic. They’ll never find her, you watch. Useless, the lot of them.’

  ‘I’m not so sure they are,’ said another woman uneasily. ‘I saw that soldier too, and he looked as if he knew what he was about, I wouldn’t want to mess with him. I don’t like it, them all coming here. They must think someone in the quarter was involved.’

  ‘Why would they think that?’ asked Nailah.

  ‘Because they always think it’s us, stupid,’ said Sana. ‘Anything goes wrong, what do they do? They blame us natives. Look at what happened to that poor man after your Aunt Tabia copped it.’

  Nailah flinched at the thought of the Bedouin peasant who’d been arrested for allowing his horse to escape, then punished with twenty lashes for the horse mowing Tabia down. He’d died in jail afterwards.

  Sana laughed again. ‘You’ve forgotten what it’s like here, that’s your problem, cocooning yourself in that palace of infidels in Aboukir. You need to get used to how things are. You’re back in the slums now.’ Sana folded her arms over her sagging chest and looked at Nailah challengingly.

  Nailah summoned up a tight smile. ‘As you’ve said, God is good.’

  ‘I hope he is,’ said another lady, ‘and that they find the poor lady. It’s said she has five sons.’

  ‘I heard six,’ said someone else.

  Try two, Nailah corrected them silently.

  ‘They won’t find her,’ said Sana. ‘A white woman, alone, missing. She’ll be dead already, mark my words.’

  Chapter Eight<
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  Sana’s proclamation plagued Nailah as she left the baths, damp hair dripping down her neck. She tried to shake it from her mind as she wove her way through the narrow, baking streets to the market and immersed herself in her shopping. She concentrated as she never had before on rooting amongst the cages of pigeons for a skinny one to barter for, sniffing the herbs, tapping the watermelons for ripeness. But as she looked despondently at the cost of fever medicine, her thoughts returned stubbornly to Ma’am Gray. Ma’am Gray who had been such a frequent visitor at the Pashas’. Ma’am Gray who played so carelessly with fire.

  Distracted as she was, it was mid-morning by the time she completed her shopping and set off, lopsided with the weight of her basket, towards home. She paused to gather her breath, pressing the heel of her free hand to her sweaty forehead, then stopped short as she caught sight of the man staring at her across the crowds: oiled hair impatient to escape, eyes the shape of almonds, slight body taut beneath his well-laundered business suit. Sweet Mother. She swallowed hard. His amber gaze met hers. Could it be?

  He nodded, as though he’d heard her silent question. He took a step towards her.

  Nailah looked around her at the shouting stallholders, the veiled women haggling, arms raised, coins glinting in the sun. One reached into a cage and grabbed a chicken, breaking its neck with a snap.