by Rosie Thomas
‘Busy place,’ she said at last, wanting to make it smaller and less threatening with a casual phrase.
Nafouz shrugged. ‘Who your friends here?’
He was either being nosy, or he was concerned for her. Neither was welcome.
‘Family,’ she said discouragingly.
They were winding down smaller streets now, leaving the main thoroughfares behind. Ruby glanced upwards and saw onion domes and tall thin towers pasted against dark-blue sky. The street was so narrow that there was only room for one car to pass. The women sitting on their steps lifted their heads and stared as the taxi slid by. There was one great dome just ahead, cutting an arc of sky, and a trio of thin spires that rose beside it.
Nafouz stopped when he could go no further. The street had become a cobbled alley and it took a sharp-angled turn just in front of them. A stone pillar blocked the way. In the angle of a pale blank wall was a door with a small flight of stone steps leading up to it.
‘Here is place,’ Nafouz announced.
Ruby stared at the door. She could just see that it was painted blue, old paint that had bubbled to expose wood split by the sun. She hadn’t at all worked out what to expect, but it wasn’t this. There was nothing here to give any clue to what or who might be inside.
She summoned up her resolve.
‘Yeah. How much money d’you want?’ She opened up her nylon sack and her Discman and headphones and an apple and tubes of make-up rolled over the seat.
‘Fifty bounds.’
‘Fifty? D’you think I’m stupid or something? I’ll give you twenty.’ She opened her wallet and fumbled with torn filthy notes.
‘From airport, fifty.’ Nafouz wasn’t smiling any longer.
‘Get lost, right?’ Ruby gathered up her belongings and hopped out of the car but the driver was quicker. He ran round and held down the boot so she couldn’t retrieve her rucksack. They squared up to each other, faces inches apart.
‘Twenty-five,’ Ruby said.
‘Fifty.’
‘Give me my fucking bag.’ She kicked his shin as hard as she could. Unfortunately she was only wearing flipflops.
Nafouz yelped. ‘Lady, lady. You are not behaving nicely.’
‘Really? Now hand over my bag.’
‘You pay first.’ But Nafouz was relenting. This tourist’s resistance earned a glimmer of his respect. Usually they just gave in and handed over the money. ‘Thirty,’ he conceded.
‘Fuck’s sake.’ But she sighed and took another note out of her purse, crumpling it and flinging it against the sleeve of his leather jacket. Nafouz’s smile was restored. Thirty Egyptian pounds was the going rate for a ride in from the airport.
Ruby took her rucksack and hoisted it over her shoulder. With the wires of her headphones trailing and the contents of her other bag spilling in her arms she marched up the stone steps without a backward glance. She heard Nafouz reversing the car the way they had come, then a squeal of tyres as he raced away.
As soon as he was gone she regretted the loss of even this brief relationship. Maybe she should have asked him to wait. What if there was nobody here? What if the address was wrong? Where would she go, in this city where she couldn’t even read the street signs?
Then she lifted her head and straightened her shoulders again.
There was no door knocker, nothing. She knocked on the blistered paint. There was a smell of dried piss in this alleyway, competing with all the other stinks.
There was no sound from within.
Ruby clenched her fist and hammered even harder. Some poem that they had all been made to learn at school floated into her head and, without thinking, she yelled the words in time to the banging: ‘“Is there anybody there,” said the Traveller?’
The door suddenly creaked open, revealing a six-inch slice of dim light. Ruby was so startled that her voice trailed away in a squeak. She could just see a big fat man in a white dress.
She said, ‘I am Ruby Sawyer.’
Having taken one look at her, the man was already trying to close the door again. Ruby’s foot flew out and wedged itself in the crack. She wished for the second time that she was wearing proper shoes. She repeated her name, louder this time, but it clearly wasn’t enough.
She added loudly, ‘I am here to see my grandmother. Let me in, please.’
The resistance diminished a little. Immediately she put her shoulder to the door and pushed hard. It swung open and she fell inwards with a clatter of spilled belongings. The man’s face was a dark purplish moon of disapproval. He frowned, but he did help her to her feet.
Ruby looked around. Her first impression was of the inside of a church. There was a stone floor, musty wood panelling, a pale, weak light suspended on chains inside a glass vessel. A smell of incense, too, and some kind of spicy cooking.
‘Madam is resting,’ the man said frigidly.
The best course was obviously to be conciliatory.
‘I don’t want to disturb her. Or disturb anyone. I’m sorry if I made a noise. But, you know …’ The man didn’t help her out. He went on impassively staring at her. ‘I … I have come all the way from London. My mother, you see … Um, my mother is Madam’s daughter. You know?’
There was another silence. Whether he knew or not, the connection didn’t seem to impress him. But at last he sighed heavily and said, ‘Follow me, please. Leave this here.’ He pointed to her bags. She relinquished them with pleasure.
He led the way beneath an arch and through a bare room. Behind a heavy door there was a flight of enclosed wooden stairs. The lights were very dim, just single bulbs in the angles of walls, shaded with metal grilles. They went up the stairs and along a panelled corridor. It was a big house, Ruby thought, but it was dusty and bare, and all the stairs and corners and screens made it secretive. A place of shadow and whispers. It was much cooler in here than it was outside. A faint shiver twitched her skin.
The man stopped at a closed door. He bent his head and listened. She noticed that his face had turned soft and concerned. There was no sound, so he lifted a latch and eased the door open. There was a light burning in a teardrop of crimson glass, a carved divan seat piled with cushions under a shuttered window. In a low cushioned chair with a padded footstool a very old woman was propped up with her eyes closed. A spilled glass lay on the kelim rug.
Ruby took a step forward and she opened her eyes.
Dream? Someone I used to know who was buried beneath the sand while I was looking elsewhere?
I am afraid of these spectres who loom up out of the past. I fear them because I can’t place them …
Fear makes me angry.
‘Mamdooh, who is this? What do you think you are doing? Don’t let people walk in here as if it’s a public library. Go away.’
The woman, apparition, whoever she is, doesn’t move.
Mamdooh kneels down, picks up the glass, puts it back on the tray. I can see the blotches on his old, bald skull. At once I feel sorry, and confused. I put my hand out to him and it’s shaking. ‘Forgive me. Who is she?’
The woman – very young, strange-looking – comes closer.
‘I’m Ruby.’
‘Who?’
‘Your granddaughter. Lesley’s daughter.’
‘You are not.’
Lesley’s daughter? A memory disinters itself. A pale, rather podgy child, dressed in a wool kilt and hairslides. Silent, yet somehow mutinous. Have I got that right?
‘Yes, I am. You are Granny Iris, my mother’s mother, Cairo Granny. Last time I saw you I was ten. You came for a holiday.’
I am tired. The effort of recall is too much. Poor Lesley, I think.
‘Does she know you are here?’
The child blinks. Now I look at her, I can see that she is hardly more than a child. She has made the effort to appear otherwise, with startling face paint and extraordinary metal rings and bolts driven into nose and ears, and with a six-inch slice of pale abdomen revealed between the two halves of her costume, but I wo
uld put her age at eighteen or nineteen.
‘Your mother. Does she know?’
‘No, actually.’
Her answer is deadpan but, to my surprise, the way she delivers it makes me want to smile. Mamdooh has picked up the tea glass, tidied the tray. Now he stands over me, a protective mountain.
‘Ma’am Iris, it is late,’ he protests.
‘I know that.’ To the child I say, ‘I don’t know why you are here, Miss. You will go straight back where you came from. I’m tired now, but I will speak to you in the morning.’
‘Shall I send Auntie to you?’ Mamdooh asks me.
‘No.’ I don’t want to be undressed and put to bed. I don’t want to reveal to the child that sometimes this happens. ‘Just get her to make up a bed for, for … what did you say your name is?’
‘Ruby.’
It’s a prostitute’s name, which goes well enough with her appearance. What was Lesley thinking?
‘A bed and some food, if she wants it. Thank you, Mamdooh. Good night, Ruby.’
The girl gives a sudden smile. Without the glower she looks even younger.
I make my way to my own room. When at last I am lying down with the white curtains drawn around the bed, the longing for sleep of course deserts me. I lie staring at the luminous folds of muslin, seeing faces and hearing voices.
Majestically disapproving, Mamdooh led Ruby downstairs again. A little old woman, about five feet tall, with a white shawl wrapped round her head and neck, appeared in the hallway. They spoke rapidly to each other.
‘You would like to eat some food?’ Mamdooh asked stiffly.
‘No, thanks very much. Had some on the plane.’
‘Go with Auntie, then.’
Ruby hoisted her luggage once more and followed the old woman up the enclosed stairs and through the shadowy galleries to a small room with a divan under an arched window. Auntie, if that was the name she went by, showed her a bathroom across the way. There was an overhead cistern with a chain, and the bowl was patterned with swirling blue and white foliage. There was an old-fashioned shower head as big as a dinner plate and a slatted wooden board over the drain, and a blue-painted chair with some folded towels.
‘Thank you,’ Ruby said.
‘Ahlan wa sahlan,’ Auntie murmured.
When she had gone, Ruby peeled off her clothes and dropped them on the floor. She got under the thin starched sheet just as she was, and fell instantly into a dreamless sleep.
CHAPTER TWO
‘No, no, don’t worry at all. I just wondered if she and Chloe might be together … Yes, of course. Is she? In Chile? How marvellous. Give her my best wishes, won’t you? Yes, that would be lovely. I’ll give you a call. ’Bye.’
Lesley replaced the receiver. ‘She’s not there either.’
Her neat leather address book lay open on the side table, but there were no more numbers left to try. She had been through them all and none of Ruby’s friends or their parents had seen her recently. None of Ruby’s friends who were also known to her mother, at least. There weren’t all that many of them.
Andrew was sitting in an armchair in a circle of lamplight, a pile of papers on his lap. A vee of wrinkles formed in the centre of his forehead as he stared at her over his reading glasses.
‘She’s nineteen. It’s really time she started taking responsibility for herself. You can’t stand in the firing line for her for ever.’
‘I don’t think I do,’ Lesley answered mildly. ‘Do I?’
Andrew exhaled sharply through his nose, pulling down the corners of his mouth to indicate disagreement without bothering to disagree, and resumed his reading.
Looking away from him, at the pleasant room that was arranged just how she wanted it, with the duck-egg blue shade of the walls that was restful without being cold and the cushion and curtain borders exactly matching it, Lesley felt anxiety fogging the atmosphere. Concern about Ruby distorted the room’s generous proportions and made it loom around her, sharp with threatening edges. The air itself tasted thin, as if she couldn’t draw enough of it into her lungs to make her heart beat steadily. Lesley knew this feeling of old, but familiarity never lessened the impact.
Where was Ruby? What was she doing this time, and who was she with?
One day, Lesley’s inner voice insisted, the unthinkable will happen. She shook her head to drive away the thought.
She never experienced the same anxiety about Edward, Ruby’s half-brother. Edward was always in the right place, doing the right thing. It was only for Ruby that she feared.
Justifiably, Andrew would snap.
Lesley closed her address book and secured it with a woven band. They had eaten dinner and she had cleared it away. The dishwasher was purring in her granite-and-maplewood kitchen, the central heating had come on, the telephone obstinately withheld its chirrup. Ruby had been gone since yesterday afternoon. She had slipped out of the house without a word to anyone.
Just to break the silence she asked, ‘Would you like a drink, darling? A whisky, or anything?’
‘No thanks.’ Andrew didn’t even look up.
‘I’ll go and … see if Ed’s all right with his homework.’
Lesley went slowly up the stairs. At the top she hesitated, then tapped on her son’s door: ‘Hello?’
Ed was sitting at his table. The television was on at the foot of his bed, but he had his back to it and she saw an exercise book and coloured pencils and an encyclopaedia open in front of him.
‘How’s it going?’
‘OK.’ His thick fair hair, the same colour as his father’s, stuck up in a tuft at the front and made him look like a placid bird. He was the opposite of Ruby in every single respect. He rolled a pencil between his thumb and forefinger now and Lesley was aware that he was politely waiting for her to go away and leave him in peace.
‘No word from Ruby,’ she said. ‘I really thought she’d ring this evening.’
Ed nodded, looking thoughtful. ‘You know, I don’t think we should worry. She’s probably staying in town with one of her mates. It’s not like it’s the first time she’s just forgotten to come home, is it?’
For an eleven-year-old, Edward was remarkably well thought-out.
‘No,’ Lesley agreed.
‘Have you tried her mobile again?’
Only a dozen times. ‘Still turned off.’
‘Well, I think we should just tell ourselves that no news is good news. She’ll probably ring you tomorrow.’
‘Yes. All right, darling. I’ll pop in later and say goodnight.’
‘OK.’ He had his nose in his book again before the door closed.
Lesley went along the landing to another door at the far end. The thick sisal matting, expensively rubber-backed, absorbed the sound of her footsteps. She leaned against the handle for a moment, then walked into the room.
It was dark and stuffy, and the room’s close smell had a distinctly brackish quality to it.
Lesley had already looked in here two or three times during the day but the otherness of Ruby’s bedroom, the way it seemed to rebuff her, never failed to take her by surprise. She felt cautiously along the wall for the light switch, then clicked it on.
The smell was from Ruby’s collection of shells. She had lost interest in adding to it at least eight years ago but the cowries and spindles never quite gave up the traces of fish and salt locked in their pearly whorls. The wall cabinets that Lesley had had put up to display them contained a jumbled, teetering mass of sandy jars and broken conches. The collection had never been properly organised or catalogued. Ruby had just wanted to get specimens and keep them, piling up her acquisitions greedily but carelessly, as if she were building a dam.
She moved on to shells after her enthusiasm for collecting autographs had waned, and after shells lost their fascination she became obsessed with beetles. There were boxes and cases of preserved specimens on every flat surface.
Lesley crouched down beside a row of mahogany display cases and peered throu
gh the dusty glass fronts. These had cost Ruby all her pocket money and every Christmas and birthday present for years, and the contents still made Lesley smile and suppress a faint shudder at the same time. Some of the beetles were two-inch monsters with stiff jointed legs, minutely articulated antennae and folded wings with an iridescent polish. Lesley had always recognised that they were exquisite as well as interesting, these skewered trophies of Victorian entomologists that had so fascinated her twelve-year-old daughter.
Other items in the collection were just matchboxes containing tiny shrivelled items that Ruby had pounced on in the garden, trapped and kept. Lesley smiled again at the memory of absorbed Ruby crouching beside a bush of artemisia, her latest discovery caught in her cupped hands.
‘What are they all? Do you know?’ Andrew used to ask.
‘Yes,’ Ruby would answer flatly, offering nothing more.
‘Why do you like them?’
‘They’re beautiful. Don’t you think?’ She would turn away then, not looking for an answer, as if she had already said too much.
‘At least it’s not spiders,’ Lesley had said appeasingly to her husband once she was out of earshot.
The beetle passion eventually faded like its precursors, but Ruby would never consider selling any of her acquisitions or even allowing them to be stored up in the loft. Almost everything, including the shoeboxes full of autographs, was in this room.
Lesley kept her eyes averted now from the case containing a single enormous conker-brown insect that looked like a giant cockroach. There was hardly room to place her feet among the boxes and cartons, the scribbled drawings and pages torn from magazines, discarded clothes and spilt tubes of make-up. It was impossible to tell what, if anything, Ruby had taken with her. She stepped gingerly across the floor and sat down on the rucked-up bed. She placed her hand in the hollow of the pillow, but no warmth lingered there.