by Rosie Thomas
‘Yes. Yes. I see. That’s good. Thank you.’
Lesley shouted at him, ‘What is it? What did they say?’
The police reported that Ruby had been found by a group of camel trekkers, wandering in the desert not more than a mile or so away from a little-used track leading back to the Fayoum oasis road. A search party was about to set out to look for Iris and the car.
‘Oh, thank heaven.’
Lesley leapt out of her chair and blindly ran to her husband. He held her while she fired questions at him. ‘Where is she now? Is she hurt? Can I talk to her?’
Andrew kept one arm round her shoulders and rubbed the free hand over his sagging face.
‘Ruby insisted on going with the searchers.’
Nicolas Grosseteste looked down at his folded hands.
Ruby crouched in the back of the four-wheel drive. Her head bounced against the canvas roof as the vehicle swayed to the crest of a dune and tipped over the other side. It was fully dark now, and the headlamps raked over an unending slice of rippled sand that just showed the faintest impression of her footsteps. The police driver and Hammid next to him were hunched in silence, intent on their task. To the left and right of them were two other trucks, covering as broad a sweep of the desert as possible. They moved forward slowly but steadily. Ruby was shivering, and her eyes stung from staring into the darkness and willing the darker hump of the Beetle to emerge in the next black hollow.
The men were muttering to each other. Then Hammid’s profile was briefly outlined as he half turned to her.
‘You see? You walk almost in a circle.’
‘Are we going to find her?’
‘In time. But you should not have left the car.’ The guide was angry.
Ruby wasn’t surprised, but her own anger flared to match his. ‘So I was supposed to sit there? Just watch my grandmother die of thirst and do nothing?’
The truck was slowing and the driver craned over the wheel, his head turning from side to side as he scrutinised the ground.
‘It is hard enough to find a car, out here. What chance to find one person, just walking alone? I think you do not know how lucky you were, to discover my group in this way. It is much more likely to walk until you drop.’
Ruby’s mind closed that off. There was no available space to consider it. She didn’t think about being hungry or cold or tired either. Every point of her concentration was fixed on catching sight of the Beetle and finding Iris alive.
The driver said something and the truck came to a halt. Hammid jumped down and Ruby watched as he walked round the front of the bonnet. He crouched down in the beam of the headlamps and studied the rampart of sand as the other trucks stopped too. Ruby scrambled from her seat and ran to shake his shoulder.
‘Why have we stopped?’
But she could see why. As they followed the tracks they had become progressively fainter, to the point where there was now nothing to see at all.
Hammid swung a torch in a circle, and only the smooth silent expanse of the desert was revealed. He shook his head. ‘We will go back now and wait for daylight.’
Ruby took a breath, mustering her last reserves. She looked up and overhead were the winking lights of a plane dipping towards the airport. She gripped Hammid’s arm and her fingers dug into his skin as she begged, ‘Please. I know it’s near here. I know it is. If we give up now she might die before the morning.’
Ruby felt as if she were standing outside herself somewhere, watching and listening to this scene being played out by the light of torches and truck headlamps, but at the same time she knew exactly what she must do. This was the most crucial and urgent plea she would ever make. ‘We have got to go on. It’s only a few hours out of your lives but it could make the difference between life and death to my grandmother.’
‘You don’t know the desert. We could search all night and miss by a few metres. It is much better with daylight and more people. A helicopter can come.’
Ruby clenched her fists, raised herself on the balls of her feet, ready to punch the man or claw his face, or fall on her knees in the sand in front of him if that was what it would take. She raised her voice until she was shouting, her own urgency almost deafening her. ‘If you won’t go on, I’m not going back with you. Give me as much water as I can carry and I’ll search until I find her. Understand me?’
Hammid considered. A small breeze fanned across the sand. At last he said, ‘Very well. We go one more hour.’
Ruby ran back to her seat before he could change his mind. She was shivering convulsively now and she bit the insides of her cheeks in an attempt to suppress the shudders.
The trucks started to roll again.
They drove on, up the curved dune faces, down the other side. The grind of the engine in low gear vibrated all the way through Ruby’s bones. They teetered at the crest of yet another summit, hanging in a vacuum before plunging into the descent.
Then Hammid’s head jerked forward and he called out. Ruby pitched forward to look down, over his shoulder, into the depth of darkness below.
There was the car, almost submerged in sand on its windward side.
The driver flashed the lights and hooted, and the other trucks swung inwards from their parallel routes and slowly converged.
Ruby kept her eyes fixed on the hump of the Beetle, fearing that even now it might disappear if she blinked.
Iris was lying on her side in the shelter of the car. She didn’t move as the headlamps swept across her. Ruby flung herself out of the truck before it had stopped moving and ran, sinking up to her ankles as the sand tried to the very end to hold her back. She threw herself down and pressed her head to Iris’s ribcage, praying to hear a heartbeat or feel the faint exhalation of a breath.
There was nothing, but Iris’s skin under her clothes was still warm.
Ruby rocked back on her heels.
After all this, she didn’t know what to do to save her. The men moved her aside and bent over Iris’s motionless body.
Their heads turned this way and that as they exchanged terse words. Hands felt her wrists and touched her throat, then suddenly two of them lifted her from the hollow of sand that looked like a shallow grave. Iris was so light that they ran with her body between them as if she were a feather pillow.
‘She is alive,’ Hammid said. ‘We must get her to the hospital.’
One of the trucks had a stretcher mounted down one side and they strapped Iris on to this. Ruby resisted the hands that tried to restrain her and forced her way in next to the stretcher. The rear doors were slammed shut and at once the vehicle swayed and bounced over the dunes, much faster than they had come. She kept her eyes on Iris, not daring even to reach out and touch her. A man in a blue police uniform held his hand on her chest instead, monitoring the rise and fall of breathing.
Hammid was up in front with the driver. He called back over his shoulder to Ruby, ‘Your mother and father are at the hospital, waiting.’
‘My mother and father, in Cairo?’
‘They came here this afternoon.’
Lesley’s and Sebastian’s faces flashed in front of her. She couldn’t work out how they could be here; reality seemed to be receding under the pressure of her anxiety. If Iris died they would blame her. They would be right to blame her.
‘Will she live?’ she breathed to the policeman. Her eyes were wide in her skull.
‘Inshallah.’
It took only ten minutes to reach the track that she had left so unthinkingly in the Beetle.
A long white car, a private ambulance, was waiting. Iris’s stretcher was rushed into it and Hammid held open the door for Ruby to climb in alongside.
‘You will go to the hospital. I must go back to my group.’
Ruby lifted her smudged face to meet his eyes. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’
They were already moving. Hammid and the desert dropped away.
Lesley and Andrew were in the ante-room where Nicolas Grosseteste had advised the
m to wait.
Lesley thought distractedly about how all hospitals were the same, even though in this one she couldn’t read half the signs or decipher the handwritten notices under peeling laminated shields. There was always the unwieldy pounding of human needs against the fragile struts of medical provision, surf against a rickety pier. A very old woman sat opposite them, soundlessly weeping and holding a folded coat. She kept stroking the folds and turning the coat in her hands as if to settle it more comfortably, and her tears glimmered under the overhead lights. Andrew held his mobile phone and checked the display, over and over again.
Ruby and Iris were both alive, they would be here soon. Lesley would have liked to hold her husband’s hand for the warmth of it, but he was checking his mobile phone. She sat and studied the hem of her skirt instead, smoothing it over her knees and listening to the passing footsteps.
A pair of feet eventually stopped in front of them and an orderly in a grey overall led them down cracked corridors to a cream-painted cubicle with a bed in it. They saw her before she saw them: Ruby was sitting on the bed with her head hanging and her upturned hands resting on the sheet beside her, the fingers loosely curled. She looked utterly exhausted.
‘Ruby.’
Her head came up when she heard her mother’s voice.
She slid off the bed, dragging a corner of the sheet with her and almost tripping over it.
‘Oh, Mum.’ The words came out of her as a choked whisper. Lesley folded her arms round her and cupped her head against her shoulder. ‘I’m so glad you’re here.’
‘It’s all right, it’s all right now.’
Ruby was crying. Her tears were hot against her mother’s neck. This was a much younger Ruby, without the metal studs piercing her skin and with her eyes unpainted, and her hair flattened and gritty like a child’s in a sandpit. She was younger even than a child; she was no more than a baby.
Lesley held her, and as Ruby clung to her she felt a surge of happiness so sharp and complete that it came close to ecstasy.
Nothing else mattered. Not Andrew, not loneliness, not even Edward nor that her own mother might be on the point of death. Ruby was here, the smell and the solid shape of her, and she was safe. The fuse that lit the bright delight for Lesley was Ruby, it always was. And the flare of delight itself now, so white-hot that it blinded her, was that Ruby was vulnerable and knew that she needed her mother and hadn’t concealed it.
‘You’re safe, I’m here,’ she said. She rocked her, smiling with her mouth against Ruby’s matted hair.
A chair squeaked as Andrew heavily sat down.
The moment extended itself, opening as silently as a flower.
‘I was so stupid. I didn’t mean it,’ Ruby sobbed.
Lesley could have flown, out of the door and over the orange glitter of Cairo. All would be well. All would be miraculously well. ‘No, darling. You weren’t stupid. It isn’t stupid to be young,’ she murmured to console her.
Ruby’s shoulders had been boneless, soft as an infant’s, but now a rigid spot developed and she lifted her head an inch. She wiped mucus from her nose with the back of her hand. ‘I drove the car off the road, didn’t I?’
Lesley understood instantly that she was meaning the desert misjudgement had been stupid. It wasn’t a bigger acknowledgement than that; in her own eager haste she had misinterpreted it. It wasn’t that Ruby had looked back over the years of rebellion and defiance, and finally seen them for what they were.
‘Oh. Well, yes.’
Hot dismay flashed through her at the thought that Ruby might register the scale of her misunderstanding. The white light faded to grey and she was heavy again, feet locked to the floor.
‘You didn’t know,’ Lesley said quietly. She let her arms fall, then took Ruby’s hands in hers. ‘What happened?’
Ruby twisted in her grasp. It was still too close to be talked about. ‘I got us lost. We could easily have died.’
‘Shh. You didn’t die.’
Ruby was looking at her now, the old Ruby expression forming somewhere behind the baby-soft, tear-stained mask.
Lesley let go her hand and searched in her pocket for a tissue. ‘Here, blow your nose,’ she said. When she looked round she noticed suddenly that her husband’s face reflected equal parts of relief and exhaustion. She made a small gesture and he stood up at once. The three of them stood linked in an awkward embrace. Even Ruby stood still for a few seconds.
A doctor told them that Iris’s condition was serious. They were briefly allowed into a room where she lay hooked up to bags of fluid, the tubes taped to her thin grey forearms. Her eyes were closed and her mouth hung open, and there was a tube in her nose as well. Andrew and Lesley stood one on each side, and Ruby briefly hovered at the bed end. But these positions made her think of a funeral and she swung away to the corner of the room, crossing her arms and rubbing angrily at the skin of her elbows. Each time Iris took a breath it was like a snore; then it subsided and it seemed that she was never going to take another. Go on. Breathe, Ruby furiously and silently commanded.
There was nothing further they could do, the doctor said. The next twenty-four hours would tell. Nicolas had gone home, but he had left them a message to say that he would see them in the morning.
‘We all need some sleep,’ Andrew said.
Ruby squashed into the back of a taxi between her mother and stepfather. The enclosed space filled up with Lesley’s perfume. She wondered briefly about Ash and what he would have made of her disappearance. Then she asked herself why she had leapt to the conclusion that it would be Sebastian who had come all the way out to Cairo with Lesley. Because that was what she wanted, Mummy and Daddy together, just as if she were a kid?
But it was Andrew who really had come and was sitting solidly beside her in his seersucker summer jacket that she remembered from dull holidays.
She put her hand awkwardly on his sleeve, realising that at the hospital she had hardly acknowledged his presence. ‘Thank you,’ she said humbly. ‘I’m really sorry.’ She had parroted that often enough. But this time she meant it. Lesley stirred on her other side, making Ruby aware that she was grateful for this offering. It was such a very small offering, too, Ruby realised.
‘You’re in one piece. That’s what matters.’ Then he leaned forward. ‘Do you think this driver is taking us all round the houses?’
‘No. This is the right way. Where’s Ed?’ she asked Lesley.
‘Staying with his friend Ollie. It was the best we could do at short notice.’
‘Are we ever going to get there? Where on earth are we?’ Andrew muttered.
‘It’s just down here.’ The sight of the three minarets touching the sky made Ruby’s stomach turn over with renewed anxiety for Iris. ‘You don’t think she’s going to die, do you?’
‘No, I don’t,’ Andrew said.
In that moment she loved him for always having to know best and for always having an opinion to express, right or wrong. It was weird, that, because it was one of the things about him that had always annoyed her most. Lesley didn’t say anything. She had been very quiet since they had left the hospital.
Mamdooh opened the door almost as soon as Ruby knocked. His moon-face was heavy with gloom. ‘Miss, you are safe. And Mum-reese?’
‘They’re looking after her,’ Ruby said.
Auntie appeared and swept Ruby into a flutter of hugging and patting. She was rapidly murmuring in Arabic and Ruby couldn’t understand her any better than she ever had done but she whispered back just the same, telling her that she was sorry and it was all her mistake and Mum’reese was in the hospital and being cared for and they would all have to hope and pray that tomorrow she would begin to get better.
‘Hasal kheir,’ Auntie said. Ruby did understand that, it was one of the phrases Ash had taught her. It meant something like, it could have been worse and we should be thankful that it was not.
‘Inshallah,’ Ruby added. That it might not yet turn out to be worse.
Turning back to Andrew and Lesley she noticed how lost and incongruous they appeared in the dim, bare, stone heart of Iris’s house, flanked by Mamdooh in his galabiyeh and Auntie with her white-shawled head. Andrew was wearing his summer blue chinos with the seersucker jacket, and Lesley had low-heeled sandals and fine tights and a good handbag. They must have hurried to find lightweight clothes that would have been stored away for the winter. Knowing how long and how careful the preparations were for an ordinary holiday, Ruby could only begin to imagine what it must have been like for them to pack for Cairo at a few hours’ notice. Yet here they were. She felt a weight dropping off her as she looked at them. They were only people, as kind and as blinkered and as likely to be correct or mistaken as any others. Maybe the weight was resentment.
‘It’s late. You should go to bed now,’ Ruby said, as if they were the children.
Lesley nodded her head obediently, and then collected herself. ‘But you need some food, darling, and you remember what they said about fluid intake.’
At the hospital, Ruby had been examined. She was dehydrated and hungry and sunburned, that was all. She had felt quite proud of her resilience, and then bitterly ashamed of her thoughtlessness in taking Iris with her, who was neither young nor strong.
Ruby was still wearing the wrap that one of the trekking party had given to her and now Auntie was insistently tugging at the folds of it. She was murmuring about food.
‘Auntie will fix me something in the kitchen. Have you got a bedroom?’
‘If we can find it, in this place.’ Andrew peered up into the shadows of the gallery.
‘Good night, then.’ Ruby hugged them both and thanked them, as best she could. The words were just words but she meant them. Lesley held on to her for a second and then turned away in Andrew’s wake.
‘It’s this way,’ he told her, heading for the wrong staircase.
In the kitchen it was warm and quiet. Mamdooh sat in his chair next to the stove with his hands laced together over his belly, as he always did, and Auntie laid out an earthenware bowl and a dish of flat bread. Ruby tore off papery chunks and soaked them in bean soup, and crammed the rich hot mush into her mouth so the overflow dribbled down her chin and she rubbed it away with the heel of her hand. With her head on one side, Auntie watched her and nodded encouragement.