by Rosie Thomas
‘I do,’ he said, as solemnly as a vow.
Ruby smiled. ‘All right. If you’re not going to shag me, we could just have a cuddle.’
‘Make love,’ he corrected her.
‘Whatever, yeah.’
He took off his jacket and spread it over their shoulders, a shred of a blanket. Then they lay back with their arms round each other, Ruby’s chin in the hollow of his shoulder, the length of their bodies pressed together. She made a small contented noise, deep in her throat, and let her eyes close.
‘There,’ Ash said softly.
When she opened her eyes again, the sky had turned from midnight blue to pearl grey. She sat up, swallowing a yawn and frowning at the taste in her mouth. The lights beneath them were dimming, and as she watched a whole orange ribbon was extinguished.
‘We have to go,’ Ash said. They stood up stiffly and linked their cold hands together.
The doors of the club were locked and only a handful of cars and mopeds remained in the square of weed-burst asphalt that formed the car park. The taxi was there, but they had to make a tour between the other cars and then down the blank concrete side of the building before they found Nafouz. He was sitting on a rusty oil drum, his hands hanging loose between his knees and his head bent. A hank of his black hair fell forward like a dead animal’s pelt.
Ash darted over and shook him roughly by the shoulder. Nafouz’s head lolled like a puppet’s before he managed to hoist it upright. It was obvious that he was very drunk. Ash shouted a stream of Arabic at him as Nafouz got uncertainly to his feet, and if they hadn’t supported him by taking hold of an arm apiece he would have fallen over. They half dragged and half carried him across the waste ground to the taxi.
‘He can’t drive,’ Ruby said. ‘Get his keys. You’ll have to.’
Ash staggered a little under his brother’s weight as he fumbled through the pockets of his leather jacket. Nafouz’s bloodshot eyes missed focusing on him. The keys emerged in Ash’s fingers and between them they forced open the rear passenger door and bundled him inside. Nafouz tipped slowly sideways until his cheek rested on the torn plastic seat.
‘I have not learned to drive a taxi,’ Ash said.
‘Why not?’
He angled his head, embarrassed. ‘It takes money. For Nafouz, there is driving. For me, school.’
‘I see. So we either leave him here and walk it, stay here with him until he sobers up, or I drive. Right?’
‘You know how to drive?’
Just in time, she stopped herself just from saying of course. In fact, she wasn’t certain that she could actually take this vehicle through the anarchy of Cairo traffic, but the opportunity had presented itself to save the situation and show Ash that she could do something. Go on, a voice murmured in her head. A voice she had heard often enough before.
‘Yeah.’ She held out her hand, and after a second he handed over the keys. ‘You know the way? You’ll have to direct me.’
‘Inshallah.’
But they were already leaping into the front seats. Ruby prodded the key into the ignition, stirred the flabby gearstick to check they were in neutral and started the engine. She reversed the car furiously in a spray of grit and then with a grinding of gears she searched for first, found it, and the car bucked forward. The metal fencing and the gates flew past them, and ahead the pale ribbon of road unwound down through the hills towards the city.
‘Go slower,’ Ash shouted.
By way of an answer Ruby straightened her arms, braced her hands on the wheel and trod hard on the accelerator. The first bend was sharp and turned sharper, doubling into a hairpin. She braked too hard on the crown and almost lost it, but by fighting with the wheel she kept the car on the road. They rounded the corner in a squeal of brakes and pinging gravel.
‘Let’s get back before we bump into the law.’ She laughed at Ash.
‘Let us just get back, please.’
It was easy enough where there was no traffic, but soon they were on a freeway mounted on concrete stilts where a steady flow of speeding trucks and cars built up. At a junction she forgot to drive on the right and a blare of horns made her jump and swerve so hard that the car rocked on its axles. Nafouz shifted and groaned in the back seat. It was almost daylight.
They came into the city, down avenues lined with tower blocks and measured out with huge advertisement hoardings. The drive she had made from the airport with Nafouz seemed long, long ago. Even in the dawn, the traffic here was the usual grinding, hooting maelstrom and Ruby hunched forward in her seat, trying to follow Ash’s directions and concentrating on not hitting anything. Or at least not too hard. At last they came down Sharia el Gheish and passed through the old city walls.
‘I know where we are,’ Ruby shouted. She banged one fist on the wheel. ‘See? We made it.’
‘Thanks be to Allah for all his goodness.’
Ahead of them were the impenetrable alleys of Khan al-Khalili.
‘Where now? Which way?’
‘Wait. Stop here. Here, in this place.’ Ash jabbed his finger at a space across the kerb in front of a shuttered shop. ‘This is my friend’s. We will leave the car here.’
Ruby swung the wheel to the accompaniment of frenzied hooting and they bumped to a halt an inch from a concrete bollard. The taxi coughed and stalled.
‘How did I do?’ she beamed.
Ash passed a hand across his face, dragging his jaw downwards into a disbelieving gape. Then he very carefully got out. Nafouz roused himself and half sat up. His face had turned a strange, livid grey.
Ruby jumped out. ‘He’s going to throw up in a minute.’
Ash flung the door open and hauled at his brother’s shoulders until his head hung out of the car. ‘I am ashamed. I am very sorry that you see him this way.’
‘Ash, it’s not the first time I’ve seen someone drunk. Won’t be the last, either. Does he often get like this?’
Ash sighed. ‘Not very often. It is his way to leave his life behind him for few hours, you see? My father, sometimes the same. Now, we will walk home. I make him drink black coffee before my mother sees him. And you, Ruby? You know to go that way?’ Ash pointed along the street to the busy intersection where Mamdooh had led her out on the first expedition to the bazaar.
‘I know.’ She had been up all night but her head felt supernaturally clear and the blood hummed in her veins. The world was clean and new and full of possibilities.
‘Go home now,’ Ash ordered. Nafouz got out of the back of the car, his hands and knees appearing to bend in all the wrong directions. He rested his head on the roof of the old cab while his body gathered momentum, then he launched himself crabwise towards the driver’s seat.
‘Oh no, you don’t.’ Ruby skipped in front of him and whisked the keys out of the ignition. She dropped them into Ash’s hand.
‘You did very well. To drive the car and everything. I am proud, you know, to be your friend,’ he murmured to her. The sidelong admiration in his eyes made Ruby’s day seem even brighter.
‘My friend? Aren’t you my boyfriend?’
‘Is that what you like?’
She saw that he was blushing. ‘Yeah, I do like.’
Ash slammed and locked all the doors of the taxi and pocketed the keys. Then he put one arm round his brother and said something sharp to him. Nafouz responded by standing up and wagging his head as he stared around, trying to work out how they had got here.
‘I am going to be late for work,’ Ash groaned. The two of them started walking, shoulders colliding, one rigid and the other made of rubber. Ruby watched until they turned the corner, then she walked slowly towards where the three minarets pointed at the sky. The metal shutters of cafés and shops were rolling up, and there were smells of coffee and cinnamon and fresh bread mixed with diesel fumes and singed rubber. The street was flooded with people hurrying towards the day. Her steps led away from the busy road, down the narrow alley that grew narrower to the point where no cars could pass, a
lmost to the great mosque itself, and to Iris’s peeling and unmarked front door.
‘Home again,’ Ruby remarked aloud. The heavy key was still in her pocket, and now she unlocked the door, holding her breath as she pushed it open and praying that the household would be still asleep.
She trod silently up the dim wooden stairs and along the dusty length of the haramlek corridor. It was like creeping back into Will and Fiona’s after a night out.
Then a sharp voice called, ‘Ruby, come here.’
Iris was sitting among her kelim rugs and cushions. There was a book open on the low table, but her grandmother hadn’t been reading; she wasn’t wearing her reading glasses. Ruby took one step forward, raising her shoulders and clenching her fists, ready for the anticipated onslaught. This was familiar ground.
CHAPTER TEN
The child looks guilty, and therefore defensive. She pushes out her lower lip and glares at me.
I am relieved to see her safe: it has been a long night of waiting and imagining, watching the hands of the clock.
‘Did you enjoy yourself?’
She reaches down with one long arm, scratches the back of her knee. There is a piece of blanched twig caught in her hair and her clothes are dirty and even more rumpled than usual. Her eyes look heavy and her mouth is swollen. She has been lying on the ground, no doubt wrapped in her young man’s arms, and the memories of talk and kissing and the desert sky spattered with stars come flooding back to me. A lifetime and no time at all separates me from Ruby.
‘Yes, I suppose so. It was a weird sort of night.’
She is looking aside and over her shoulder, checking to see if we are alone.
‘You have been in your room, asleep, haven’t you?’
Her eyes open wide, and then her shoulders and fists loosen. We are both occasionally obliged to disobey orders or practise mild deception with Mamdooh and Auntie, and the conspiracy strikes us suddenly as very funny. We both laugh as Ruby takes three steps and flings herself down beside my chair, knotting her fingers in mine.
‘I’m sorry if you were worried about me. I thought you were asleep, I just went out for a bit, then one thing led to another.’ She gives a gusty sigh. ‘Story of my life, really.’
‘From what I already know, I think you can take good enough care of yourself. I didn’t always behave in the proper way either, when I was your age, and I can’t say that I regret it.’ I reach out and pick the twig out of her hair, separating it from the dark strands so as not to pull on them, and she takes it from me and thoughtfully cracks it between her fingers.
‘Ruby? Will you reassure me that you are using contraception?’
A spot of red appears high on her cheekbone.
‘Yes. Or no, actually. It’s a bit ironic, you asking about that.’
‘Sexual irony? I would like to hear more.’
Now she sits back on her heels. ‘I’ve been on the Pill since I was fifteen. After Jas died, I … it seemed too casual to go on taking it. As if I was just waiting for the next shag to come along, you know? So now I don’t. But you can always use a condom, can’t you?’
‘Is that ironic?’
‘No, what I mean is, I wanted to, I mean I would, but Ash doesn’t. He says I am more precious than rubies, and it’s not what you do. It’s religion, or culture, or something.’ Now, without looking at me, she is confiding. ‘And he said maybe he loves me.’
I can hear the whisper of sand, whistling, shifting.
‘Good,’ I say quietly.
‘Iris?’
‘Yes, I’m listening.’
‘I really like being here with you. I loved the museum. I like the way you’re easy to talk to, as if there’s nothing between us, as if we’re just ordinary friends.’
Her hand is smooth, brown, with dirty fingers. Mine surprises me with its knotty veins and ugly liver spots.
‘Thank you,’ I say.
We are settled in our routine now, Ruby and me, and although the rhythm of my days is not much changed the house has a new life beating in it.
In the mornings when the sun has risen high enough to warm the air we sit in the garden and drink coffee together. Ruby cuts up fruit and passes the pieces to me one by one, or breaks off strips of flat bread and dips them in honey before arranging them on my plate. As if I am the child, she the attentive parent.
When she is at home I hear her moving about, her feet on the stairs and the small creaks and scraping of her bedroom furniture, or the snatches of song as she takes up some inaudible chorus through her headphones. Then there is the bleat of a motorcycle horn from down in the street and she is off with her friend. I don’t insist on knowing where, although quite often she comes back and tells me anyway.
Ashraf took her out to see the Pyramids and she came home comically disappointed. So many people, she frowned, and queues and dusty souvenir shops and tour guides holding up umbrellas. As if the Pyramids themselves are somehow diminished by the surf of tourism lapping around their skirts.
‘Was it like that in your day?’
‘Not quite, it was wartime. But all the soldiers went out there to take a look, you could get a gharry at sunset when it was cooler, and there were young boys selling picture postcards and camel rides. The British Army had padded the Sphinx’s head with sandbags to protect it.’
‘I wish I could have gone then instead of now. You were allowed to climb the Great Pyramid in those days. Did you?’
‘No. But I know people who did.’
Ruby has also started making solitary visits to the museum, spending hours there at a time. She comes home to relate her discoveries, and to ask questions I can’t always answer.
‘Queen Nefertiti, right?’
‘Yes?’
‘She and the Pharaoh Akhenaten decreed a new religion, and built a whole new capital city at Amarna dedicated to one god, the Aten.’
‘I think that’s it.’
‘There are huge statues of the god in the museum, with a sloping head and thick curving lips, but he’s got a round stomach and thighs like a woman’s. Maybe they were really worshipping a goddess, an earth-goddess, what do you think?’
‘Ruby, I don’t know. I’ve forgotten, even if I ever knew. You could find a book about it.’
Then she is off again, speculating about Nefertiti’s beauty, wondering about the significance of the sphinxes, and telling me that a metre-long piece of the beard of the Sphinx at Giza is in the British Museum.
‘I think we ought to give it back. Don’t you think that would be satisfying, fitting it back on his chin like putting a piece in a puzzle?’
‘Yes, it would, rather.’
We discuss the case of the Elgin Marbles, of which she has never heard. Lesley might even be pleased, I think, with the cultural content of some of our debates.
The child is also picking up some Arabic – a slow but steady accretion of basic words, bread, water, scarf and so on, and the phrases of polite greeting and thanks and blessing. When I compliment her on her quickness she looks surprised and pleased.
‘Thanks. Ash teaches me, you know? I try to learn something new in Arabic each time to say to his mother, to keep on the right side of her. She asked me to stay and eat some food with them last night so it must be working.’
‘Ruby …’
Her face changes, ‘I know, I know. It’s rude to say no, and hospitality means that even if they haven’t got much they try to give everything to the guest and go hungry themselves. So I just had a mouthful or two and chewed for a really, really long time.’
She mimes the effort of registering delighted appetite and at the same time swallowing next to nothing, and I laugh.
‘I like being able to say a few words to Auntie, as well. I come out with something in Arabic and it cracks her up, she goes tee hee hee as if it’s the best joke she’s ever heard instead of just me asking for more soup.’
‘Auntie’s very reserved and she doesn’t take readily to strangers, but she liked you straightaway
.’
‘Yeah? Did she? Pity about Mamdooh, then.’
‘Mamdooh is just doing what he sees as his duty, which is to look after us. He is the protective male in a house full of weak and feeble women.’
‘And that is such crap. You’re not feeble, and neither am I. Nor is Auntie, come to that. She does all the real work in the house, you know.’
‘Ruby, you don’t have to take issue with every single thing. Mamdooh is the way he is, just accept that and try not to outrage him.’
She looks as if she is about to take issue with me, but she bites her tongue and sighs instead. ‘Mamdooh’s OK. Hey, you know your car?’
The sudden changes of conversational direction used to irritate me because I thought she lacked mental discipline, but now I accept that her mind leapfrogs faster than mine. There is so much she wants to absorb and make use of; just to watch and listen to her makes my blood surge. My feet and hands tingle as if I am about to jump up and chase off into a world that I have hardly considered for years. I catch myself looking to the window, and the floating fragments of delft-blue sky visible through the latticework of the mashrabiya screen.
‘My car?’
‘I was telling Ash about it, Ash and Nafouz. You know, about how it’s just sitting there in the garage falling to pieces among the cobwebs, and Nafouz said he’s got a friend who’s a brilliant mechanic who could maybe look at it and get it going again? Then we could go out for drives together, what do you think? We could go to Alexandria or … or on a dune safari.’
She loves pomegranates and has been peeling one as we talk. The skin falls away in a neat coil to uncover pith that she slits to get at the glowing heart. I shake my head in answer to her silent offer; the seeds stick in my teeth.
‘I have been to Alexandria, and into the desert. I’m sure they haven’t improved lately. And of course Nafouz has a friend who will be interested in somehow turning my car into a few pounds of profit for himself. What did you expect?’
‘It was just an idea.’
‘I’ll think about it.’