by Rosie Thomas
Mamdooh beckoned her. ‘Khan al-Khalili bazaar. Follow close to me, it is easy to be lost here.’
He was right. It would be the easiest thing in the world to lose yourself in this maze of tiny alleys leading away from the almost-familiarity of the main street. There were canvas awnings looped overhead, and in their welcome shade the brightness of the crammed-together shops and stalls was dazzling. The merchandise was piled up and hung in tiers so it seemed to drip stalactites of hectic colour. One shop was crammed with interesting-looking brass and ceramic hookahs, another niche was festooned with belly dancers’ costumes gaudy with nylon fringing and glass beads. Another little recess was shelved from top to bottom with hundreds of glass jars containing oils in all the shades of precious stones. Next door open-mouthed hessian sacks spilled ochre- and saffron- and pearl-coloured grains.
The footpaths between the stalls were choked with people and wooden carts and porters with boxes piled on their heads. There were men in Western clothes, and others in galabiyeh and tarboosh like Mamdooh. There were women robed in black from head to toe, others in trousers and sturdy blouses with just a scarf wound over their hair. Ruby was startled and slightly affronted to see that there were numbers of Western tourists, pink-faced and too tall, uncertain in response to the urgent demands of the stallholders. In Iris’s secluded house she had felt as if they were the only two of their kind in the whole of Cairo.
The shopkeepers competed for Ruby’s attention as she went by.
‘Lady, look-see. Just looking, no charge. Very good prices.’
Urchins plucked at her shirt, holding up novelty lighters and boxes of tissues and bottles of water. Even in the shade it was hot, and the air felt saturated with moisture. Her shirt was soon sticking to her back and thick hanks of hair plastered themselves to her forehead and the nape of her neck. There was a continuous ssss-ssss of warning at her back as porters and carters hauled and pushed their loads into the depths of the bazaar.
She followed Mamdooh’s bobbing tarboosh, realising that if she lost sight of him she had no idea which way to turn. A memory came back to her of being a small child, shopping with Lesley in a department store. She had lost herself in a forest of legs and bulging bags, and she fought her way between them, stumbling forward and then back again, a wail of panic and outrage forming in her throat. Big faces had bloomed over her head, and hands reached out to catch her as she screamed and screamed. It could only have been a minute or two before Lesley found her, but it had seemed like hours. She resisted the impulse now to catch and hold tight onto Mamdooh’s white skirts.
An even smaller capillary led away from the alley of shops, this one enclosed by rickety houses with overhanging upper storeys that reduced the visible sky to a thin strip. There were wooden benches lining the house walls, all heaped high with vegetables and fruit. One stall was a mound of figs with skin as smooth and matte as the softest kid leather, another was a tangle of bitter-looking green leaves. Mamdooh stopped, planting his legs apart and surveying the merchandise.
Stallholders surrounded him at once, thrusting up polished aubergines and bunches of white onions for his attention. Some of the offerings he waved away, others he condescended to pinch or to sniff at. Once an item had received his approval, there was a convoluted exchange obviously relating to the price. Finally, at length and with ceremony, a purchase was wrapped in a twist of paper in exchange for some coins and Mamdooh stowed it in his straw basket before moving a couple of paces onwards.
Ruby had never seen shopping taken as seriously as this. She found a space against a dusty wall and watched in fascination.
Mamdooh glanced back once or twice to check on her. When he realised that she wasn’t going to interrupt him, or wander off and cause trouble, he gave her a small nod of approval. And then, when his shopping was complete he tilted his head to indicate that she was to follow him. At the corner he spoke to an old man sitting on a stool beside a couple of rough sacks. Another coin changed hands and now Mamdooh passed the twist of paper straight to Ruby. She bit into a sweet, creamy white nut kernel.
Mamdooh treated her just as if she were a kid, she thought. It was quite annoying, but at the same time – well, it was restful, in a way.
They threaded their way back through the porters and tourists and stallholders and customers, a slow mass of hot humanity that made urgency impossible. Ruby tucked herself behind Mamdooh and watched the faces as they bobbed towards her and were borne past.
Slanting sunlight just ahead revealed an open square. There were walls of sepia-coloured stone, the dust-coated leaves of rubber trees casting patches of shade on broken pavements, and a pair of faded sun umbrellas rooted in pillars of concrete. At two tin tables, bare except for ashtrays and a folded newspaper, sat a handful of old men.
They raised their hands or mumbled greetings to Mamdooh, who responded with two or three brief words. Several pairs of eyes, red-rimmed or milky, turned towards Ruby.
She understood the situation at once. Mamdooh came out to do the household’s shopping, then retired to this café or whatever it was for an hour’s talk with his friends, and her presence was an impediment to this pleasant interval in his day. She lifted her hands and raised her shoulders in apology as Mamdooh prepared to move on.
She said hastily, ‘I can find my way back, you know, if you want to stay with your friends for a bit. I found my way last night, didn’t I?’ She remembered Nafouz and his taxi.
Mamdooh looked genuinely shocked at this suggestion.
‘That would not be at all right, Miss. We will be going home at once. Mum-reese will look for you, perhaps.’
The perhaps, and the pinch of the lips that went with it, betrayed more hope than conviction, but Ruby knew there was nothing more to be said about going back by herself. Farewells were exchanged with the old men and Mamdooh sailed across the square. But now, Ruby sensed, she was walking with him rather than in his wake. The impression was confirmed when he remarked in a conversational voice, ‘Market, very old also.’
‘How old?’
‘Seven hundred year.’
‘Ha. Just think of all the buying of things.’ Centuries, Ruby thought, of leather and herbs and perfume and figs. The notion made her shiver a little.
‘Selling,’ Mamdooh corrected her. He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. ‘Selling, very important.’
They both laughed at that. Mamdooh’s shoulders shook and his head tipped back, but his tarboosh didn’t fall off.
They came to the wide street from a completely unexpected direction and ducked through the stream of buses and cars. They were walking companionably towards Iris’s house when an extra-loud volley of hooting caught their attention. There was a black-and-white taxi parked where the alley finally became impassable to cars. The faded blue of the door was just behind it.
‘Lady, lady! We look for you!’ a voice shouted.
Nafouz was leaning out of the driver’s window and banging with his fist on the car door.
Mamdooh moved fast for a man of his bulk. He streaked across to the taxi and shouted at Nafouz, flapping his big hand towards the open end of the alley. From the passenger side of the car another young man climbed out and hung on the lintel. He looked like Nafouz, but a little younger. He was grinning and shouting back at Mamdooh, thumping on the car roof, clearly enjoying the scene. Two or three small children gathered to stare.
Nafouz slid out of the car. He appealed direct to Ruby. ‘We are friends, yes? I bring you, last night.’
‘No.’
‘Lady?’ Nafouz’s eyes were wide, hurt pools.
‘Yes, I mean, you drove me from the airport. That doesn’t make us friends, does it?’ She had kicked him, for one thing.
Nafouz turned away to burrow inside the car. Ruby looked at the other young man. He had the same slicked-back hair as Nafouz and a similar white shirt, but cleaner. He smiled at her.
‘I come all the way, bring this for you.’ Nafouz had re-emerged. He was holding out a
CD case with a hand-coloured insert, a pattern of swirls and tendrils in red paint and black ink. Ruby looked at it. Her name was spelled out among the tendrils. Jas had painted the insert, and he had burned the CD inside it for her. It was one of his own mixes, just about the last thing he had made for her before … Before he …
She held out her hand. The CD must have fallen out of her bag as she scrambled into or out of the taxi. She would have been sad to lose it.
‘It’s only a thing, baby,’ Jas would have said. ‘Things don’t matter, people do.’
But she had so little of him.
‘Right. Well, thanks,’ she muttered.
She was about to take the case but Nafouz drew his hand back, teasing her. Her fingers closed on thin air, but Mamdooh was quicker. The case was tweaked out of Nafouz’s grasp and slipped into the deep pocket in the seam of Mamdooh’s galabiyeh.
There was a sharp exchange of words before Mamdooh turned back to Ruby. ‘If you like, Miss, you give him a little money. But it is not if you do not want.’
Ruby looked at the two young men and they stared back at her. An awkward flush of colour crept up her face as she felt the space of cobbled alleyway widen between them. She wished she hadn’t denied being Nafouz’s friend; she would have much preferred to be that now rather than the possessor or otherwise of a few Egyptian pounds.
‘How much?’ she muttered, in shame.
Nafouz was equal to the moment. ‘Twenty bounds,’ he said brightly.
Mamdooh clicked his tongue but Ruby rummaged under her shirt for her purse as the two young men watched with interest. She took out a note and Nafouz whisked it away. He winked at her.
‘You take a tour? I show you Cairo. Special Cairo, my brother and me. Not tourist places. Real city.’
Ruby hesitated. She would have loved to pile into the taxi and go cruising through the streets with them. She could smell cigarettes and the plastic seats of the car, and feel the hot diesel-scented air blowing in through the windows.
Mamdooh had already mounted the steps and produced a key for the blue door.
‘Another time, maybe,’ she said lamely. There were priorities, other matters she had to deal with first.
The younger brother came round to Nafouz’s side of the car.
‘I am Ashraf.’
‘Hi.’
The door was open, Mamdooh was waiting with the basket of vegetables at his side. The brothers were waiting too.
‘My name’s Ruby.’
Their faces split into identical white smiles. ‘Nice name.’
‘I’ve got to go now. But I’d like to take a tour, yeah. Have you got a …’ She made a scribble movement in the air for a pen, but Nafouz dismissed it.
‘We find you.’
‘Miss?’ Mamdooh said, holding the door open wide. His forehead was serrated with disapproval once more.
‘See you, then.’
Ruby marched up the steps. The taxi noisily reversed down the street in a cloud of acrid fumes.
In the cool hallway Mamdooh blocked her way. ‘It is important to have some care, Miss. You are young, in this city there are not always good people. Not all people are bad, you must understand, it is just important that you make no risks. Do you understand what it is I am saying to you?’
He was treating her like a child. In London, Ruby did what she wanted. Lesley and Andrew didn’t know what that involved, nor did Will and Fiona who were Andrew’s brother and his wife. She was supposed to be their lodger, but – well, after a while they had given up on telling her what to do and what not to do. That was because of Will. Even though Fiona didn’t know about him, the three of them had ended up in this kind of silent contract, where nobody saw anything or said anything in case it led to somebody seeing and saying everything. That was how Ruby summed it up for herself, at least.
And there had been some bad interludes. Ruby had seen and once or twice done things that she didn’t like to remember. The memories came back anyway, in the night, and they made her sweat and feel sick. The memories had a way of changing and speeding up so that they were like horror films of what might have happened to her. Her skin crawled, and she would twist and turn under the covers to try to make them stop and go away. She even wished for Lesley to come and tell her it was all right and she was safe.
But usually in the end she fell asleep somehow, or the daylight would come and she’d wonder what she had been so afraid of. The important thing to remember was that she had survived. Going back to people’s places when she shouldn’t have done. Doing too much stuff, or just drinking. Not knowing where she was or where she had been. Feeling like nothing, less than nothing. But that happened to plenty of people, didn’t it? Not just her.
Luck or cunning, Jas had said. That’s what you need to survive, in this day and age. It was important to have both. She could just hear his words, see him breathing out a snaky ring of blue smoke as he spoke.
So Ruby was sure she understood exactly what Mamdooh was saying and was certain that she could deal with whatever might happen to her here. She was impressed by her own cunning and her luck wouldn’t desert her.
‘Yes,’ she said stonily. She stood and faced him, giving no ground.
Mamdooh tucked the handles of the basket over his arm.
‘Mum-reese resting now. Later, she will speak to you.’
And order her home. Ruby knew what he meant her to hear, but she gave no sign of it.
Left to herself, she wandered through the house.
It was less opulent than it had looked in last night’s incense-scented darkness, and even more neglected. The great lamps that hung from the vaulted roofs were thickly furred with dust, and more dust lay on the stairs and on the broad sills of the windows. Cobwebs spanned the dim corners. The rooms were barely furnished with odd, unmatching chairs and tables that looked as if they had been brought in by an incoming tide and just left where they landed. There were no books, ornaments, or photographs – none of the cosy decorator’s clutter that Lesley arranged in her own house and those of her clients. There was nothing, Ruby realised, that told any stories of Iris’s past. Nothing accumulated, even after such a long life. She was quite curious to know why.
This morning, Iris had told her that she was becoming forgetful. She had made a swimming movement with her old hands, as if she were trying to catch fish. And there had been tears in her eyes.
Didn’t framed photographs and bits of china and books help you to recollect?
Ruby frowned, trailing her finger through the grey film on a wooden chest and recalling her grandmother’s words. She had said something about capturing what you can’t bear to be without. It was the word capture that resonated.
When she was small, Ruby distanced herself, she had felt all wrong. She couldn’t read and write as well as girls in her class, and she was endlessly in trouble. A way of making sense out of her confusion had been to collect and keep things. By piling them up in her room she could make herself bigger than they were, so even if what she collected represented only a strand, a tiny filament of the world’s appalling abundance, it had still seemed to offer a measure of control. But shells and beetles were inanimate. In that, in the end, collecting had disappointed her because the world was so swarming, inchoate and threateningly living, and it had bulged and gibbered and danced outside her bedroom window, making her boxes of beetles seem nothing more than childish detritus.
‘Growing up is so very hard to do.’ Jas had yawned when they talked about this.
But if you wanted to capture memories that threatened to swim away like fish? How would you do that?
An idea came to Ruby. It was a very neat, simple and pleasing idea that would solve her problem and at the same time be valuable to her grandmother. It was the perfect solution and she was so taken with its economy that she ran up the nearest of the house’s two flights of stairs towards the door that she had worked out must be Iris’s. She hovered outside for a moment, with her ear against one of the dark panels.
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Then she tapped, very gently. When there was no answer she rapped more loudly.
‘Auntie? Mamdooh?’ Iris’s voice answered.
‘It’s me. Ruby.’
There was a long silence. Then the voice, sounding much smaller, said, ‘You had better come in.’
She was sitting in the same low chair as last night. There were pillows behind her head, a rug over her knees. Ruby read bewilderment in her face.
She stooped down beside the chair and put her hand over Iris’s thin, dry one.
‘Am I disturbing you?’
‘No.’
‘I went shopping with Mamdooh. I think I got in the way of his routine, but it was really interesting. He told me there’s been a market there for seven hundred years.’
‘Yes.’
The monosyllable came out on a long breath. Iris was obviously almost too tired to speak and her fragility gave Ruby a hot, unwieldy feeling that she could only just identify as protectiveness. She wanted to scoop up her grandmother and hold her in her arms. But even as she chased this thought to its logical conclusion – Iris would not appreciate being handled like a rag doll – the old woman seemed to summon up some surprising inner strength. She hoisted herself upright against the cushions and fixed Ruby with a glare.
‘Have you spoken on the telephone to my daughter?’
Ruby quailed at this sudden direct challenge. ‘Um, no.’
‘You are disobedient.’
‘I didn’t say I was definitely …’
‘Why have you not done so?’
There was now the opportunity to make up some excuse, or to try a version of the truth. Ruby understood already that it would be advisable to aim for the truth, at least where her grandmother was concerned. She withdrew her hand and took a breath. ‘It’s really because I don’t want to go home. I was hoping you wouldn’t make me.’
Iris studied her. Her gaze was very sharp now, all the weariness and confusion seemed to have evaporated. ‘Why is that?’