by Rosie Thomas
‘See you back in England,’ I said.
The flag was being unfurled. Xan and I jumped back down onto the platform. The train clanked forward and we walked and then ran alongside the window of Albie’s carriage, waving and calling goodbye until we couldn’t keep up any longer.
We dropped back and fell into each other’s arms.
‘I’ve got to go back to work. Roddy’s in a flap,’ I said reluctantly as we threaded our way through the clamour of the station.
‘I’ll see you back to GHQ.’
His hand gripped mine and held it close against him.
‘What was it like?’ I asked.
Xan sighed. ‘I don’t know what to tell you. I took my patrol in to pick up some of David’s men who had parachuted in over Mersa el Brega. It was a bit of a bold scheme to kidnap Rommel, but it didn’t go to plan. Fifty-six of them were dropped, but we only got twenty-one out again. And then we were threading our way back across to the south of Sidi Rezegh, Hassan and me in the armoured car, and we came across a single man trudging through the scrub. You couldn’t tell which side he belonged to. That was what it was like. You couldn’t tell who was fighting whom. You couldn’t see anything except smoke and dust.
‘I wound down the window and shouted to him, “Are you Italian?” And he shouted back in English as good as mine, “I’m not bloody Italian, I’m German.”
‘He was wounded in the arm, so we gave him a lift. He handed over some cigarettes as payment for the ride, English Capstan, taken from one of our supply depots. After about ten miles we came on some German armoury so we stopped and let him walk across to them. He marched a few yards, turned back and called to us, “I’ll see you in London, George.’
‘And I yelled back, “No, it’ll be Berlin.”
‘Hassan kept a rifle sight on him all the way back to his own side, but I told him not to shoot.’
Xan turned to me and laughed, his tired face all creases. ‘That was what it was like,’ he said.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The car was repaired.
The work was done by Nafouz’s friend Husain who was a garage mechanic, and when it was finished Nafouz and Ash returned the car to the alleyway behind Iris’s house. The pitted chrome had been polished as far as possible and the patches of bodywork not consumed by rust were black again.
They stood in a row behind the car, Mamdooh and Auntie and Ruby flanking Iris, and peered at the oily interior. With the engine running the whole vehicle shuddered and coughed like a phthisic old man.
‘Just as fine with engine, see?’ Nafouz beamed.
‘Ace,’ Ruby said.
‘This is not for driving, it is not secure,’ Mamdooh tutted while Auntie stood with her veil drawn across the lower part of her face and her eyes turned down and away from the two boys.
Iris said nothing. Instead, she made a slow tour from the back to the front of the car, touching the door handles and running her fingertips over the blisters of rust that bubbled around the sills. She stroked the bonnet’s slope and completed the circuit to rejoin the four of them. Then she looked Nafouz straight in the eye. ‘I will put my car in the garage now. Then you may come into the house and speak to me.’
‘Lady, Doctor, I will put away …’
‘No thank you,’ Iris snapped. She opened the driver’s door and slid into the creaking seat, grasping the wheel with her freckled hands. She sat up straighter, craning her neck and lifting her chin so she could see ahead through the windscreen. Then with a crescendo of revs she stamped on the clutch and scraped the gearstick into first. The car strained until she remembered the handbrake, and then it sprang forward and Iris spun the wheel to bring it coasting into the garage. She switched off the engine and stepped out, pocketing the ignition key at the same time.
‘Mamdooh will show you the way,’ she told Ash and Nafouz.
Iris and Ruby reached the inner garden first. Iris took Ruby’s arm and hung on to it. She was panting a little but her cheeks were flushed and she looked as excited as a child. ‘You know, I wasn’t sure I could do that.’
‘You didn’t have any trouble at all.’
‘I didn’t, did I? And it was fun. It’s going to be fun.’ She took the keys out of her pocket and flipped them into the air, just managing to catch them again. Ruby thought she was like a teenager who had coaxed the use of his car out of her father for a Saturday night, and the idea made her smile.
Mamdooh escorted the boys out into the garden and stood like a sentinel with his hands clasped in front of him. Ash and Nafouz shuffled a little, staring around them without wanting to stare. The pots of greenery gave off a warm scent of leaves and earth, and the water splashed into its glazed bowl. Above the tiled walls and the haramlek windows the minarets reared against a flat grey sky.
Iris sat down and indicated a bench facing her chair. Nafouz took his place but Ash hesitated, and Ruby hovered beside him instead of drawing her chair to its usual position close to Iris’s. The tomb house was very clear in her mind’s eye, and when she took a sideways glance at Ash she knew that he was making the comparison too. The extreme sharpness of the contrast made her uncomfortable.
‘And so what do I owe you and your friend for servicing my car?’ Iris asked pleasantly.
Nafouz leaned forward, making a deprecatory flat-palmed gesture. ‘I would like to say nothing, this is done for friendship only.’
‘Thank you. But?’
‘My friend is a poor man. He has a wife, children.’
‘Of course. Go on.’
Nafouz mentioned a large sum, in Egyptian pounds, with a mournful shrug.
Equally regretfully, Iris named a third of the price.
Ash and Ruby looked at each other and she saw that Ash was smiling. It was clear that Iris and Nafouz understood each other perfectly.
‘Come with me?’ she murmured to him, tilting her head the way they had come. Mamdooh frowned, but he couldn’t follow them and stand guard over Iris at the same time. Auntie was presumably preparing the inevitable tray of mint tea and sweet pastries. Ash and Ruby slipped back into the house while the negotiations continued their elaborate course.
Ash walked through the celebration hall, gazing up at the carved panelling and painted ceilings and the pierced screens shielding the gallery.
‘All this house belongs only to your grandmother?’ he whispered.
Through his eyes, Ruby saw the grandeur of it instead of the dust and cobwebs. She answered awkwardly, her voice sounding much too loud in the shadowy space, ‘I think so. I suppose so. I never really asked her.’
‘Do you live in a house also like this in England?’
‘No. God, no. Nothing like.’ She laughed, again too loud, and then bit her lip. Nothing like the tomb house, either. There was suddenly a thin shaft of mystified envy splintered with embarrassment between herself and Ash, and she didn’t know how to deal with it. It was as if Jas had been pitchforked into the middle of one of Lesley’s dinner parties for Andrew’s clients.
She grabbed Ash by the wrist. ‘Come on.’ Maybe in her room he would just look into her face and not see anything else.
At first he followed willingly, then he realised that they were heading for the inner stairway.
He stopped dead. ‘I cannot.’
‘I thought you were allowed if one of the women of the household invited you.’
‘Even then it is only for brothers, cousins. Not for stranger.’
Ruby walked round to face him, but he held himself stiff. She reached up and cupped his face between her hands.
‘You are not a stranger,’ she whispered. ‘You’re my friend.’
He blinked, but didn’t move.
Then she pulled his head down so that her mouth touched his.
‘I’d say you were my brother. But actually I love you,’ she said. At the same moment it occurred to her that this wasn’t a blandishment or even a veiled threat. It was the truth, as close as she had ever got to it.
Ash looked
amazed. His eyes widened and he pulled her closer as he kissed her. Afterwards he let her lead him up the stairs and along the gallery. He broke away once to lift open one of the screens and gaze down into the space beneath. Mamdooh swept across the hallway without an upward glance, his slippers swishing on the stone. Ash and Ruby stole to the door of her room and crept inside.
‘My bedroom,’ Ruby said superfluously.
He stood with his hand on the latch and looked at the austere space. There were two or three books on a chair, a small squared-off pile of CDs, the cover on the narrow divan was pulled straight. Everything else was tidied away into the chest. It was the way Ruby liked it, now.
Ash grinned, and she saw that he was recovering himself.
‘I have not visited a girl’s bedroom before. I did not think you would be so tidy, Ruby.’
She aimed a kick at his shin, and he caught her wrists to stop her punching him. They scuffled like puppies, laughing and puffing until they stumbled against the divan in the window arch, then they flopped onto their knees and peered down into the street, their breath making twin mist plumes on the glass.
‘After the first time with Nafouz, I came back to see and I thought this was your window. I saw the light here, just the one, shining in all this big wall. I stood down in the street and looked up, trying to see you.’
‘So you were spying on me. And that time in Khan al-Khalili you’d followed me all the way, hadn’t you? Some people might think that was creepy, you know.’
‘Creepy? What is that?’
Ruby hooked her fingers and distorted her face into an approximation of creepiness and Ash recoiled.
‘I am not like that in any way,’ he said seriously.
‘I know that now. I told you what I feel now, didn’t I?’
‘Yes. I am surprised and I am also pleased of course. But, Ruby, it means that we are not playing any more.’
They knelt upright, facing each other.
‘Is that bad?’
Gently he put his hand to her waist, stroked it upwards, splaying his fingers so they rested in the indentations between her ribs. ‘I am Egyptian boy, you are English girl. I am poor boy, you are rich girl. I am telephone worker, you are … phhh. I do not even know. You can be anything you want, I suppose.’
‘I’m not anything very much. No … wait, Ash, don’t contradict. It’s the truth. I ran away from home to come here because Jas died and because my uncle really is a creep and my mother and her husband think I’m a failure and a waste of time, and I just woke up one morning in England and looked around me and I thought that if I didn’t do something soon they’d be right.
‘If I was someone like you I’d have gone straight out and got a job, any sort of job, just something to support myself instead of taking handouts from my mother and not going to college like I was supposed to. But being me, what did I do? I helped myself to my mother’s credit card, went online and bought a plane ticket to Cairo. She’ll have seen what I did, but she doesn’t want to admit even to herself just how cunning and shitty I can be. And I came here to Iris’s house, thinking it didn’t really matter where I was just so long as it was a different place to feel nothing much in.
‘Then I met you. You took me to the Cities of the Dead and I saw your house and family and you showed me places and … this is going to sound properly cheesy, but it made me understand some things I hadn’t worked out before. I don’t think you should feel sorry for yourself unless there’s good reason, and I really haven’t got one, but I was still feeling sorry for myself without properly acknowledging it. So I was angry as well. But being here with you and Iris and Auntie, and yeah, even Mamdooh, has made me feel different. I like going to the museum because there’s so much history and it’s gone on for so long, and it’s been so … full. Is that what I mean?’
‘I think maybe,’ Ash said gently.
‘… So it makes me feel small, and yet part of it all, like we all are, you and me and Iris and all the people in her history, and mine and yours and everyone in the Cities whether they’re alive or dead, and that’s really comforting.’ Ruby sighed. ‘What am I trying to say? I do want to do something now it’s my turn, not be useless. I just don’t know what it is, yet.’
Her face broke up into a smile that made Ash tighten his grip and draw her closer to him. Their faces were almost touching.
She whispered, ‘What you were saying, about you being Egyptian and me English, rich girl and poor boy?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think the only words that matter out of all of them are girl and boy.’
‘Perhaps you are right.’
Face to face and hip to hip they had begun to slide down onto the bed. A sharp rapping on the door jerked them upright again in a tangle of legs and arms.
‘Miss Ruby?’ Mamdooh shouted.
Ash exclaimed in Arabic and leapt to his feet, staring wildly around him for an escape route.
‘It’s OK’, Ruby said. She strolled to the door and opened it, and Mamdooh loomed into the room.
‘This is not correct,’ he spluttered. Ash was already sidling past him in an attempt to get away but Mamdooh moved with surprising speed to cut him off, and Ash shot an imploring glance at Ruby.
‘What’s wrong?’ Ruby innocently asked Mamdooh.
His big face was puffed with rage. ‘You bring shame.’
Ash began a protestation but Ruby hushed him.
‘Shame? What right do you have to say that?’
Mamdooh wouldn’t look at her. ‘You are Muslim boy,’ he said to Ash.
Ruby darted round and stood next to Ash. ‘Yes, he is, and he has never done one thing wrong or shameful as you call it ever since I have known him. I might have, but he hasn’t. You should apologise to him.’
‘Ruby,’ Ash miserably whispered.
Mamdooh frowned from one to the other. He pushed his lips out so they looked even more like dark fruit. ‘Is this truth?’
‘Yes.’
‘In this country, in this house, it is not for boys to visit the bedroom of a young girl.’
‘In England we figure that if people are going to do something they’ll find somewhere, bedroom or not.’
‘You are being rude,’ Ash told her.
Ruby whirled round, ready to take him on too, but he held her gaze. After a long moment her shoulders dropped. ‘All right. I’m sorry, Mamdooh, OK? I promise I won’t bring any boy up to my bedroom ever again. Will that do?’
Majestically, he inclined his head and stood aside to let them file out of the door.
‘Mum-reese waits for you.’
Iris and Nafouz were sitting in the garden, drinking mint tea and looking like the best of friends.
‘There you are,’ Iris called when she saw them. ‘Did you say you were going out?’
Patiently, Ruby said no, they had just gone off while she and Nafouz were settling up about the car. Iris’s face cleared. ‘The car. That’s right. Have some tea, both of you.’
Ash accepted the glass Ruby gave him but he would only sit on the edge of the bench.
‘It is time for Nafouz and me to go. I am glad car is fixed, Madam Iris.’
Iris smiled gaily at him. ‘You must come for a drive.’
As she saw them out, Ruby asked Ash when they were going to see each other again.
‘Soon. I have to work, Ruby, you know this.’
She watched the two brothers until they reached the end of the street and disappeared in the direction of Khan al-Khalili. They had the same walk, the same watchful way of turning their heads, and their closeness made her feel excluded. Nothing had been said about the night at the club; Nafouz’s charming smile was as wide and implacable as ever and when she asked Ash he shrugged and replied, ‘Sometimes it happens. It is not good but it is not the worst thing.’
They protected and looked out for each other, the two of them. If it came to a test of loyalty, Ruby thought, there was no question where Ash’s would lie.
The garden w
as deserted. Auntie had already cleared away the teapot and glasses.
Ruby found Iris in her room, wearing her outdoor coat.
‘There you are. Are you ready?’
‘Ready for what?’ Ruby asked.
‘For a ride in the car, of course. Come on, where do you want to go?’
‘I don’t know. Are you sure you want to do this right now? And don’t you need … insurance, things like that?’
‘My dear girl, this is Cairo not Tunbridge Wells. All that can be dealt with. I want to go. Look out there, you can see the sky.’
Through the window screens, you could. Ruby said, ‘All right, if you’re sure you’re not too tired and if you promise you’ll drive carefully.’ Then she grinned. ‘Ha ha, will you listen to me? I sound just like Lesley and Mamdooh, only not quite so much fun.’
She put her hand under her grandmother’s arm and they went downstairs together, Iris jingling the keys in her pocket.
They were not to have an easy exit. Mamdooh darted out from the back of the house and saw at a glance where they were heading. He began by insisting that it was too late, the roads would be too busy, Mum-reese would be too tired.
Iris stepped round him.
Then he put his tarboosh on his head and made to follow them.
Iris held up her hand. ‘Thank you, Mamdooh. But this afternoon Ruby and I are going to make an excursion together. You may accompany us another time.’
He still came all the way out into the alleyway with them, and almost tussled with Ruby as she tried to heave open the old wooden doors and he lent his considerable weight to holding them closed. He wouldn’t look directly at Ruby, blaming her as always for bringing all this distraction and disruption into the peaceful household, but he kept up a stream of warnings and gloomy pronouncements to Iris.
She smiled briefly and batted him aside. ‘Thank you. I was driving around this city sixty years ago, you know, when you were just a boy coming to Garden City with your father. Get in, Ruby.’