by Rosie Thomas
‘Which way?’ Ruby asked after a while.
Iris didn’t say anything and Ruby drove a little further, wrestling with the wheel without knowing quite what to do when the steering broke away from her. The car’s bonnet slewed disconcertingly across the snout of the dune ahead before she brought it under control again. The effort made her suddenly sweaty and she realised that the sun was hot on the black roof of the old car.
Iris was humming to herself.
It was time to turn back, Ruby decided. She checked automatically in the rear-view mirror and there was nothing there. Not only no other traffic: nothing except the dunes and the sky.
‘Right. Home time.’
She braked and the car slithered. The reassuring road had dwindled into a rough track and even that was almost invisible; there was a wind blowing that sent a fine swirl of sand fuming over the ground and covering everything. Their tyre marks were already fading into twin blurred furrows. Ruby swung the steering wheel hard right and the car ploughed a slow half-circle. She estimated it was a half-circle, and that would mean that they were facing back in the direction they had come. She glanced up at the sun, a whitish disk behind a haze of heat. Was it still in the east, or had it already slid to the south?
She drove another hundred yards, but the track was gone. The veil of blown sand was chased and harried by the wind, and it was getting harder to keep the tyres turning. She would have to stop and get her bearings.
Iris turned her head. She was smiling disconnectedly. ‘Why are we stopping?’
‘I want to take a look, make sure of the way back.’
‘Back?’
‘Yes,’ Ruby said loudly.
She opened the car door and stepped out, and the wind tugged at her. Blown sand stung her ankles. She scrambled to the low crest of the nearest dune, surprised by how steep it was and how deep her feet sank. From the top she had expected that she would see the main road heading out to the oasis, whatever it was called, and the insect progress of trucks and buses. But there was only a vista of close identical dunes, rippled by the rising wind.
She ploughed down the slope and back to the car. The floor and her seat were already thinly coated with sand. She slammed the door and wound up the window, then sat with her hands on the steering wheel.
Ruby said, ‘I don’t know where we are.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The sun was now only visible as a dim eye, pale as wax, behind a thickening veil of greyish umber haze. The wind steadily rose, whipping sand off the crests of the dunes like spray off a breaking wave. The desert was shifting, unleashing itself.
Ruby crawled into the back of the car and yanked on the window winders, forcing them round as far they would go to lock the glass into the frames. The rubber of the seals was perished in places. She leaned across Iris and did the same thing to the passenger window, then checked that all the doors were properly shut. She pulled the handles into the locked position for good measure. The wind was scouring up sand and flinging it against the windscreen and the door panels, making a noise like tiny hailstones drumming on the metal. The floor and the seats were already coated with pale, gritty dust that forced its way through holes in the floor and the cracks in the door and window seals.
‘It’s a sandstorm,’ Iris said wonderingly.
‘Looks like it.’ Ruby’s throat was dry and tight, and her eyeballs still stung just from the quick dash she had made to the crest of the nearby dune. The air inside the car seemed smoky, thicker than it was comfortable to breathe, irrelevantly reminding her of the way dry ice fumed in a club.
‘A desert sandstorm can be very dangerous, you know. We should turn round and drive straight home.’
Ruby leaned forward in the driver’s seat, gripping the wheel as if that might anchor them. ‘I think it’s too late for that now.’
The sepia-freckled skin stretched over Iris’s temples and cheekbones looked thin enough to tear. Her eyes were very wide and clear, innocent and without comprehension. ‘What did you say?’
Ruby opened her mouth, ready to vent her anxiety as anger, but she stopped herself. Instead, she took one of Iris’s hands and held it. ‘We’ll have to sit here until it blows itself out.’
‘Sit here?’
‘Yes.’ Ruby formed the word crisply, raising her voice a little, lending herself a conviction that she was far from feeling. It might have been her imagination but the car seemed to rock and shudder under the force of the wind. Let’s think, Ruby advised herself. Decide what to do for the best. She tried to be rational, but fear suddenly prickled down her spine.
At the same moment a huge gust of wind sliced the entire top off the nearest dune and flung it against the car and for a second they were in darkness. Then more wind stripped the sand from the car windows. The light when it did come back was clotted, yellow-brown, swirling like soup. There was nothing to think about, she realised, not until this storm was over. Driving even another metre was unthinkable. There was no visibility, no tracks, no sun by which to steer, nothing except gravity even to define up or down.
The air banged and thundered. It couldn’t last, a wind like this, could it?
Surely it would die down as suddenly as it had risen.
‘Are you all right?’
Iris slowly nodded. ‘A desert sandstorm,’ she repeated. ‘The men used to fear them. Even Hassan.’
‘I’m not surprised.’
Inside the partly sealed car it was now uncomfortable to breathe the dust-laden air and Iris coughed, gasped for breath, then coughed some more. Ruby burrowed in her grandmother’s bag, brought out her white headscarf and wrapped it round the lower half of her face for her. She pulled up her own T-shirt to cover her mouth and nostrils.
How had they come to land in this predicament?
She thought back to leaving the house, heading for Giza, bypassing the tourist crowds, following the desert road and deliberately taking the turnings that led away from the oasis traffic. Stupid, all right. But the sequence of turns was clear enough in her head, and to fix them there she forced herself to run them through her mind’s eye again and again. Once the wind had stopped howling and whipping the sand, she could reverse the sequence. When she had got her immediate bearings.
‘Ruby?’ Iris’s voice was very quiet and muffled even further by the folds of her scarf.
‘Yes. Here, give me your hand again. We can talk to pass the time, can’t we?’
‘I’d like a drink of water.’
There was an instant’s panic when Ruby thought we haven’t got any, then with relief she remembered the two bottles she had bought at the café. She reached into the back of the car for one, twisted off the cap and handed it to Iris. Iris pulled back her scarf and gulped thirstily, and some of the water ran down her chin and splashed on the front of her dress.
‘That’s better,’ she said, like a child, and handed the bottle back to Ruby.
The car seats creaked as they both sank lower, covering their noses and mouths, and preparing for the wait against the wind.
‘Hassan?’ Ruby prompted, almost automatically now.
‘Yes, Hassan. He was Bedouin. Xan used to say that he knew the desert in every season, every mood. He knew it as well as the smile in his mother’s eyes. Even the Qattara Depression. That was the key to it. The route across. Everyone said it couldn’t be done.’
‘Why not?’
Ruby’s eyes were fixed on the blank that the desert had become, a solid blank, wind-driven, more to be feared than fog, than snow, because it was so unknown. She felt uncomfortably thirsty, the silvery idea of water collecting in the margins of her thoughts wherever she tried to direct them.
‘Soft sand, impassable to tanks. That’s what the generals all thought. Xan showed them.’
‘Did he? How did he do that?’
It was difficult to talk through the face coverings and harder still to hear what was said. The cracks and gaps in the old car were mouthpieces for the wind, and it sighed and blared an
d moaned across them. Iris didn’t try to answer. Her chin drooped on her chest and after a little while Ruby saw that she had fallen asleep.
Ruby sat and stared at the opaque world. Her eyes still stung, and although she tried not to she couldn’t stop swallowing and catching the dusty rasp in her throat. She made some mental calculations about the two bottles of water and the fruit that Auntie had pressed on her. That already seemed ages ago. How long would these minimal supplies last?
A day, two days at the very most.
But they wouldn’t be here for anything like that long. Once the wind dropped, they would be on their way again.
It was a good thing that Iris was asleep, although in this gale Ruby couldn’t imagine how she did it. The sandstorm was beating against the car, trying to get inside, sending in the hot fingers of dust that clawed all over them. She shuddered and rubbed her face to dispel the image, finding that her fingers and cheeks and eyelids were painfully gritty.
Ignore this. Think about something else.
She began with Ash. His face, white teeth flashing in a smile, the way his eyes slanted, all came easily. But he was saying that it was not a good idea for her to take Iris out in the Beetle. And in the end agreeing the compromise – Well, then, just so far as Giza.
Ash thought they were visiting the Pyramids. He wouldn’t guess that they had come all the way out here. But this was not a helpful line of thought, so she pictured the museum instead. It was comforting to recall the filtered light and the sepulchral halls. She took herself past the lines of wooden display cases and the fantastical assemblages of pots, shards, papyrus, scarabs, stone carvings and huge golden ornaments. Ancient civilisation. Much of it too remote for her to begin to comprehend, but it was still commanding the desert margin and drawing the tourist tides, and the durable bits and pieces of it were washed up in glass cases, labelled and left for her to speculate about.
This was the perspective she needed as a counter to the bald, threatening desert.
People had lived here for thousands of years. Hassan, whoever he was, had known it like he knew his mother’s smile. Captain Molyneux had heroically plotted a way across some particularly treacherous stretch of it. Was that where he had been killed?
This was not a useful speculation either. Ruby drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms round them to contain her anxiety, doing it quietly so as not to disturb Iris.
The museum. Go on thinking about the museum.
The Mummy Room and the quiet rows of long-dead pharaohs. Desiccated by time, and wind and sand …
No.
Collections. Inanimate objects, lined up, order among disorder, that was more like it. The glass cases. Her own bedroom at home, for that matter. Shoeboxes full of the scribbled names of pop stars and children’s TV personalities. Shells, with grains of sand still trapped in their pearly crevices …
No.
The fucking wind. If only it would let up for a second she could think straight. Just let the car stop rocking and howling like some demented musical instrument.
Home. Matchboxes and polished wooden frames, giant cockchafer beetles and tiny spotted ladybirds, her best collection of all. Lesley had hated them.
And now Ruby was suddenly and deeply frightened, the fear coming at her like another gust of wind. The thought of home and Lesley made her almost double up, stabbed with the longing to be there, to be safe, to hear her mother telling her not to do something.
Lesley was a thousand miles away.
Iris was so old, and she didn’t know what was happening half the time.
She couldn’t look to Iris for help: the only person who could save them was herself.
But I can’t save anyone, Ruby’s voice yelled inside her head. I’m only a child, what am I supposed to do?
She rocked in her seat, clenching her fists until her fingernails dug so hard into the palms that the pain almost distracted her.
You’re not a kid.
Stop it! What’s the matter with you?
It’s just a sandstorm. It will die down in the end, it has to. What would Jas do?
Probably roll one, smoke it and then fall asleep. Like Iris, except for the rolling and smoking part. Ruby realised that she was laughing only when her lower lip painfully cracked open. She ran the tip of her tongue over the raw place and tasted a tiny drop of blood.
Jas, think about Jas and his Garden of Eden cut out of magazines and pasted on the walls of his room, fat green leaves and wide-eyed daisies and trees and roses and dark pointed firs.
That’s better.
When Ruby looked at her watch she was startled to see that it was two o’clock.
It was important to keep track of time, wasn’t it? Maybe the violence of the wind was diminishing at last. Through the pall of driven sand she caught a glimpse of the dune she had climbed earlier, only it had shifted so it was now ahead of them instead of out to the left. No, that couldn’t be right. Surely it was the car that must have been blown sideways, so that it had ended up facing in a slightly different direction?
But that was impossible too. They had been sitting in it all the time, sitting for so long that her legs and back ached. It must have been the dune that had moved. The wind had carved it into a different shape. This one, and its neighbours as well, probably. How different would the new landscape look from the one she had been fixing all morning in her mind’s eye?
Ruby turned her head to look at Iris. Her eyes were open and she was also looking at the ghosts of the dunes as they swam in the hanging dust.
‘You’re awake,’ Ruby murmured.
‘Have I been asleep?’
* * *
We were going to look for Xan, driving deep into the desert in search of him: we had to hurry or he would be gone and I would never see him again. The anxiety was intense and my eyes stung and burned with the effort of searching the monotony for the smallest sign of him.
Either I imagined this, or I dreamed it. And now I am awake again and I remember that I am with the child, and we are caught in a sandstorm.
‘Ruby, how much water have we got?’
Wide-eyed, she studies my face. ‘Two litres, minus what you drank earlier. Some fresh fruit, some dried apricots.’
‘You had better drink some. Go on. Let me see you do it.’
She opens the bottle and tilts it to her mouth. I see the muscles convulsively clutch in her pretty throat, and the effort it costs her to lower the bottle long before her thirst is quenched. She holds the bottle out to me and I take a few swallows. When I hand it back she screws the cap on very carefully and stows the bottle out of our sight on the back seat.
‘Are we in trouble?’ she asks in a flat voice.
‘I don’t think so.’ I peer out of the windscreen. There is nothing to see but yellowish murk, but it seems to me that this is now dust hanging in the air rather than sand torn off the dune backs. In time it will settle. ‘Mamdooh and Auntie will send someone to look for us.’
‘But they don’t know where we are. I avoided seeing Mamdooh this morning, I didn’t want the hassle. You know? I talked to Auntie in the kitchen and she talked to me, but she didn’t know what I was saying. She doesn’t, does she? And I told Ash that we were just going to the Pyramids.’ Her voice rises. ‘No one knows we’ve come out here.’
I try to remember how we reached this place, but it has gone.
I can recall the exact layout of the rooms in our Garden City apartment, remember how the sequins on the costume of Elvira Mursi the belly-dancer glittered under the spotlights at Zazie’s, but to save my life I cannot remember this morning.
I’m very tired. I rest my head against the window and see how everything is coated in dust. The backs of my hands are grey, my lap, my knees, the metal curve of the dashboard.
If no one knows where we are, no one will be coming to look for us. There is an inevitability in this that does not particularly disturb me.
‘Don’t worry,’ I say.
After Xan slipp
ed into my room that night and then slipped away again, I began making preparations for our wedding. From the proper department at the embassy I found out what it would take to obtain a special licence for two British nationals to marry at short notice and made the application. Sandy Allardyce helped me with the formalities.
‘Are you happy, Iris?’
‘Happier than I have ever been in my whole life.’ I was becoming almost used to saying this. But that it was true was still startling, and miraculous.
Just briefly a shadow of regret, or perhaps envy, showed in his plump, pink face. In all the times that we had met at parties or embassy functions we had never again referred to Sandy’s feelings for me, real or imagined.
‘What about you?’ I asked. Even this conversation was a long way beyond the boundaries of our usual exchanges.
‘Me?’ He coughed and shuffled a little. ‘It seems possible, ah, likely that Mrs Kimmig-Gertsch and I may make some, ah, formal arrangement.’
‘How marvellous. That’s wonderful. I hope you will both be very happy.’
The shadow was still in his face. ‘I am sure that it will be useful for us.’ I thought that useful was an odd word in the context. ‘But happiness … I don’t know. And now when I look at you, Iris, at your face at this minute, happy seems too mundane a concept to use for you. Transfigured is closer.’
There was a little silence. Outside the window of Sandy’s office the tall trees of the embassy garden made an oasis of shade in the exhausting afternoon heat. He came round his desk and planted an awkward kiss on my cheek, then patted my shoulder to dismiss me.
Xan was in a camp at the fringe of the Qattara, although I deduced this by guesswork rather than from anything he told me. We communicated by letters. His scribbled, creased pages reached me erratically, dropped off by the Tellforce plane whenever it touched down in Cairo or carried by the infrequent messengers who travelled between GHQ and his patrol. The smart Indian NCO called at Garden City to deliver them, and there was always a batch of my letters waiting to be taken away. So Xan and I planned our wedding.