Arabesk

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  “So why serve them?”

  Idries shrugged. “Have you seen the real thing?”

  Apparently Antonio needed the ethnic dishes for the kind of tourists who thought they wanted to eat local food but never did when actually presented with lumps of goat heart, fatty lamb still on the bone or fish that scowled back from the plate.

  “Swordfish three.”

  “Got it,” said Raf and reached for a dish, realizing suddenly that it was empty. “I’m…”

  “Fucking amateur,” said a dark boy, dumping a pile of swordfish by Raf’s station. He was wearing check trousers and clogs, a white jacket and a scarf to keep curling hair out of his eyes; only his grin removed sting from the words. “Next time, call me before you get eighty-six.” They both knew the boy should have got there first.

  A quick flick with a blade to free a steak from the frozen stack and Raf rattled it, still hard, onto the griddle, following it with a second and a third. Ninety seconds later the fish was seared.

  “Chicken, fire five.” Antonio grabbed a ticket from a teller he felt was working too slowly and shouted out the orders, hanging each yellow slip from a peg when the list was done.

  “Come on,” he howled at Raf. “What are you waiting for?”

  Fallout from the oil that hissed in his pan worried Raf not at all. He’d assigned the pain to colours, running the rainbow according to intensity and length. Most of his double shifts sped by in a low-level intensity of blue with the occasional flashes of purple.

  Already his wrists were freckled with tiny burns and his first finger raw from pressing down on a knife. There would be real calluses later, Isabeau had explained to Raf the day before, turning over her own hands. Somehow he’d felt the need to check and then, holding her hands, had not known how to give them back.

  Which, obviously enough, was the point Hassan slammed into the cold locker. And the sudden snatch of her fingers had looked like guilt to all of them.

  “Chicken,” Raf shouted and scooped blackened breasts onto kitchen paper, rolled them over, then dumped them into a heated dish. Someone else would dress the plates. Glancing over to the hatch to see what other orders were headed his way Raf found the teller leaning against the wall, a cigarette ready for lighting.

  A redheaded Australian waitress with a flour handprint on her behind was scowling as she dusted the ghostly fingers from black jeans. Raf looked round for anybody with an answering print on their face but all he got was Hassan looking smug.

  The last order had just been served. Wind-down could begin.

  Café Antonio had a shower room in the basement. This saved the staff from having to climb five flights to their dorm in the attic. Unfortunately there was only one shower and both sexes worked the kitchen, so it alternated as to who got to use it first.

  But today that didn’t matter because Isabeau was doing a morning shift at Maison Hafsid, the Australian waitress refused to wash at all, something about natural oils and the Bosnian dishwasher and the one who wore tights but no knickers had resigned yesterday, shortly after Raf was promoted to work the broiler instead of her.

  “Call for you,” said a pearl diver, soap suds still gloved down both wrists. He held the dripping phone in one hand, a plate in the other and was looking at Idries.

  “Tell them to fuck off,” Antonio ordered. “We’re going drinking.”

  “I think you should take it,” the boy said to Idries, very carefully not looking at the chef.

  “It won’t take a minute,” Idries promised as Antonio scowled.

  Afternoon sessions were banned unless the chef suggested them. In the three days he’d been working double shifts Raf had discovered a dozen such rules. Spoken and unspoken. Along with a web of loyalties, pragmatic friendships and alliances, feuds that simmered below the surface and a few that didn’t. All institutions were the same and few places came more institutional than a restaurant kitchen.

  Small wonder Raf felt at home.

  Over at the vidphone Idries was talking intently. His body hunched around the phone in his hand.

  “Time’s up,” said Antonio. His voice hard. A tumbler of cooking brandy away from developing a dangerous edge.

  “It’s Isabeau,” Idries said over his shoulder. “She needs to talk to Raf.”

  “You like snakes?” Isabeau’s voice was neutral. All the same Raf knew it was a loaded question because he’d sensed her distance grow as he went from one dirty window to the next, matching labels to the reptiles inside. By the time they’d reached the third row she barely bothered to glance into the cases at all.

  She was lost somewhere inside herself. Arms folded across her front. Shoulders hunched as she walked beside him. Dressed in what looked like new jeans and a pink T-shirt with three-quarter-length sleeves. A blue scarf hid her face.

  If Raf hadn’t known better he’d have said she was afraid.

  Maybe he was meant to have reacted more to her news. That strange men were searching for him. At least, they were searching for someone. A soldier on the run. Only, Raf knew there was no soldier, was there…

  Or if there was it wasn’t him.

  “Put it this way,” said Raf. “Snakes remind me of my childhood.” Absentmindedly sliding his hand into the pocket of his own jeans to touch the memento Eugenie had given him, Raf added, “You could call it a family interest.”

  His mother had once shot a series in the Amazon with the working title Good Snakes Gone Bad, probably for the Discovery Channel. It became Renegade Reptiles and paid less than zilch and took eight months out of her life. She came back with dysentery, ringworm, different colour hair and a brooding Brazilian boy who lasted two months in New York before demanding a ticket home.

  Before this was footage for Channel5 involving a python and a naked baby, taken using a table-mounted Sanyo with remote control, so she could also be in shot. A thin woman in her early twenties, bare-breasted and with hennaed toes on a Berber rug beside the snake and child. Because she showed no fear of the reptile, the infant showed no fear and because the infant lacked fear it yanked happily at the sleepy python, digging small fingers into snake flesh and pushing the python around like a toy.

  When this didn’t elicit a response, the child dragged a heavy coil to its mouth and tried to chew its leatherlike skin. Finally the infant got bored and crawled out of shot, leaving the woman smiling into the camera.

  A fifteen-second snip later got used for a campaign selling life insurance.

  It was years before Raf realized the child was he.

  “But do you like them?” Isabeau insisted.

  Raf shook his head.

  “Then why suggest we meet here?”

  “You wanted to talk…”

  She would age, Raf realized as he watched her frown. Her compact body would fill out and her face acquire lines. That residual puppy fat on her arms would become less puppyish, more obvious, her looks would go and breasts lose their battle with gravity. She would put on weight and grow old, something the fox once promised would never happen to him.

  “Sometimes,” said Raf. “I get voices that tell me what to do…”

  Or maybe that was invent? Raf was uncertain. For as long as he could remember there had been a fracture between mind and body, observed and observer. A rupture of identity that kept him distanced from himself, often thinking of himself as he. What if the fox was right and it didn’t exist… If his memory wasn’t as perfect as he pretended?

  What if he was just running away?

  Isabeau stared back. Worried but not frightened, not yet.

  “And these voices told you to look at snakes?”

  “Actually,” Raf’s smile was rueful, “I think that was my idea.”

  “Your…” And after a second Isabeau almost smiled back. It was a nervous smile but it lifted her face and bled some of the anxiety from her eyes.

  “These voices?”

  “Once there was a fox,” said Raf, staring into a darkened case. “A dangerous and deadly ghost. Alw
ays waiting, always there.” On the other side of the filthy glass a bootlace tasted the air with a sullen tongue. Around its nostrils splashed colours that no human eye could see. Knowledge Raf could tell Isabeau or keep to himself. “And then it wasn’t.”

  “What happened?”

  Raf looked at her. There were no colours hidden in her face. Nothing Isabeau couldn’t see in her own reflection.

  “To the fox?”

  She nodded.

  “Someone repaired the bloody thing…”

  Hammered into a grassy bank between the ring road and the main fence surrounding the zoo were enamel signs every hundred paces or so, to warn visitors not to climb over. A crude silhouette of a wolf reinforced that message.

  At the bottom of the track stood metal gates and on the far side of those, just before a main road, was a neat ornamental lake crowded with wading birds and waterfowl. Around the edge strolled what looked like smart Tunis. Girls walking hand in hand and young men with their arms around each other’s shoulders in expressions of friendship that could only have been political back in Seattle.

  A small wading bird with clockwork legs and a blue bottom raced across damp concrete and plopped into the lake, bobbing beneath the spray of a fountain on its way towards a tiny island in the middle. The concrete was damp because the fountain plumed straight out of the water and every gust of wind carried fine droplets towards the shore.

  The scene was sickeningly normal.

  “Let me buy you a coffee.” Raf nodded to a low café across the lake, its tables almost as crowded as the paths. “Then you can tell me about Maison Hafsid and who these men were who came looking for me…”

  In reply, Isabeau glanced at her wrist.

  “You need to be somewhere else?”

  Isabeau looked suddenly embarrassed, even slightly panicked; a blush suffusing her face. “No,” she said hastily, “being here is good.” They finished the stroll in silence. Only this time it was a quieter, less strained silence and could almost pass for friendship if not for the anxious glances she kept throwing in Raf’s direction.

  All that changed when Raf saw a child feeding bread to a duck. No one he’d ever seen before. Just a girl of about nine wearing a headscarf and feeding crusts to a duck so full it could barely waddle. She had long hair, tied back, white sneakers and cheap dark glasses that kept sliding down her nose. So wrapped up was she in watching the duck that the rest of the world might as well have not existed…

  “Raf,” said Isabeau. She was pulling at his arm.

  “What?”

  “What are the voices saying?” Worried eyes watched him. “And why are you staring at that child?”

  “No reason,” said Raf. And was shocked to discover he was crying.

  “You miss your kid?” Isabeau demanded when the waiter had gone.

  Raf put down his coffee, thought about it…“Yes,” he admitted finally.

  “Because he lives with his mother?”

  “She,” Raf corrected, “and I think her mother’s dead.”

  “You think…” Isabeau tried hard not to be shocked. Divorce was more common in Ifriqiya than in other North African countries. But not in the way it was in the West. All the same, Isabeau obviously figured she’d know if a person she’d married was alive or not.

  “You were married to her mother?”

  “I’ve never been married,” Raf said. “Although I was engaged once but that was to someone else.” He caught Isabeau’s expression and smiled. “It’s a messy story,” he said.

  “They usually are.” Glancing round the café terrace with its noisy children and couples relaxing after a stroll in Jardin Belvedere, she shrugged. “You don’t have to tell me that.” When Isabeau spoke again it was to ask a question that appeared to have been troubling her. Her voice was hesitant, as if Isabeau was uncertain of the wisdom of asking.

  “You’re not really who you say you are, are you? If you know what I mean…”

  Inside Raf’s head the other Raf grinned, all teeth and no smile. “Okay,” it said smoothly, “answer that and stay human.”

  Raf couldn’t. Which he guessed was Tiri’s point.

  The capuchin was milky, came in glass mugs and had a scum of thin froth across the top. Raf promptly embarrassed himself by mishearing the price and blithely handing the waiter a note roughly equivalent to U$5, a good portion of Raf’s wages for that week.

  “Does Your Excellency have anything smaller?” It was obvious the old man thought Raf was trying to impress Isabeau.

  Raf shook his head. “Wednesday’s payday,” he said. “That’s how I was given it.”

  “Must be a good job.”

  “Kitchen work, seven shifts in a row,” Raf said wryly and saw rather than heard the old man suck his teeth.

  “No so good… I’ll get you change.”

  A dozen grubby notes and a fistful of change, some of it old enough to be real, arrived on a chipped saucer, while Raf and Isabeau sat at their table and watched two toddlers, an old man wearing a red felt chechia and a young woman cross the wooden bridge leading from the gates of Jardin Belvedere over a narrow strip of lake to where Isabeau and Raf sat nursing warm coffees.

  At Raf’s end stood a camera crew trying to film two laughing girls in red headscarves, arms tight around each other’s waists as they strolled across the same bridge, but every time the girls got halfway some toddler would run into the shot or a passing family would halt and stare. Once, an old woman halted the two girls just as they reached the café end of the bridge. She wanted to ask them the time.

  “Who are they?”

  Isabeau snorted. “Now I know you don’t come from around here,” she said and named a famous Tunisian soap that had been running for eighteen years. “They’ve been friends since before kindergarten,” Isabeau explained. “But their fathers have hated each other ever since Jasmine’s father had Natasha’s mother’s kiosk at Gare de Tunis torn down because she hadn’t applied for a tobacco-sellers’ permit. So now they have to meet in secret.”

  “Are they lovers?”

  Isabeau’s eyes went wide. “Such things don’t happen in Ifriqiya. Especially on television.”

  “Don’t happen or aren’t talked about?”

  “Both,” said Isabeau. And for a moment Raf was looking through a broken window into the darkened basement of her soul.

  “So why the fear?” Raf asked.

  Part of Isabeau obviously wanted to ask what fear? And for a second, Raf was afraid she might just get up and walk away. Instead she sipped at cold coffee and watched two twenty-three-year-old actresses pretend to be fifteen.

  “In America,” Raf said, “they’d close this café, hire extras to drink coloured water and have police tape off the road both sides of the gate. Everything would be done in one shot… The only people allowed near that bridge would be the actresses and the crew. And if the actresses decided to fuck each other it would be out of boredom.”

  “You’ve been to America?” Isabeau sounded disbelieving.

  “Once,” said Raf. “Years back. When I thought I was somebody else.”

  “Why tell me this?”

  “Because I can?”

  “And I can’t tell anybody.” Isabeau nodded, as if that was obvious. “Without you telling them about me…” Her voice was thoughtful.

  “So Hassan doesn’t know?”

  “Hassan!” Raf could almost taste her irritation. “Oh, Hassan wants to marry me, all right. So he can get his hands on my quarter of the café.” It took a second for Raf to work out that Isabeau meant the smoky tunnel in Souk El Katcherine where he’d first met Idries. “That won’t be happening…”

  “You already have a lover?”

  The broken window was instantly back. The room inside darker than ever. As black as those places where the fox hid. In the days before Raf finally accepted that the fox was him.

  “Okay,” Raf said. “No lover.”

  “No,” Isabeau agreed. On the far side of the bridge t
he camera crew began packing equipment into a white van, faces relieved; and both the actresses now sat in an old green Lincoln that waited to pull out into traffic, watched by a crowd of schoolchildren.

  “What about you?” Isabeau asked, her eyes never leaving the car.

  What indeed. Any answer Raf might be prepared to give was aborted by a sudden buzz from Isabeau’s bag.

  “It’s me,” she said, having reached for a cheap cell phone. “What?”

  The answer froze Isabeau’s expression. One second, she was watching a distant schoolgirl with bare legs and checked dress; the next blood drained from Isabeau’s cheeks and her mouth went slack. Spiralling adrenergic hormones. Textbook shock.

  She turned off the Nokia without saying another word.

  “I have to go.” Eyes unfocused.

  “Go where?” said Raf. And when Isabeau didn’t answer he reached forward to take the cell phone from unresisting fingers and put it back in her bag. Without thinking he also wiped a fingertip of sweat from her forehead and absentmindedly licked it. Shocked and scared, the Raf inside Raf decided, been there/done that/probably about to do it again.

  “You in trouble?” Stupid question really.

  “I have to go.” Metal scraped on concrete as Isabeau pushed back her chair and three tables away people winced. “My brother, Pascal…”

  “I’ll come with you,” said Raf.

  She shook her head.

  Raf sighed. “Whatever it is,” he said. “I can help. And if you’re really in trouble, then a couple is less easy to spot than a single girl in a city like this.” His nod took in the café crowd and the busy sidewalk on the other side of the bridge.

  “How can I trust you?” Isabeau demanded. “And how do I know you are who you say you are?”

  “You don’t,” said Raf. “And I’m not.” He tossed some change onto their table for the waiter and gripped Isabeau’s hand, refusing to let her pull free. “Smile as you walk away,” Raf ordered, and Isabeau’s face twisted in misery.