Iris and Ruby

by Rosie Thomas

  There was no need for any of them to speak. Their thoughts were with Iris and the collective wish for her pooled between them in the silence.

  When she could eat no more – and she was surprised by how little she had managed, believing that she was ravenous – Ruby washed up her own plate and spoon even though Auntie tried to stop her. She touched each of the old people on the shoulder, reaching up to Mamdooh and down to Auntie, and told them that they should try to sleep. Then she went upstairs, passing along the gallery where the faint light from below shone through the crescents and stars in the pierced screen. She was dirty, her skin and hair were caked with dust, but she was too tired to do more than strip off the borrowed shawl and her stiff clothes, and drop them in a heap on the floor. She crawled under the covers and closed her eyes.

  The desert rose up, with Iris lying in what looked too much like a shallow grave scraped beside the car.

  ‘It’s not time for you to die,’ Ruby told her. She listened in the dark room, but she couldn’t hear Iris’s response.

  The metal clash and footstep squeaks of hospital. Familiar from layers of memory and experience, but I can’t place myself in any of them.

  Pain at the periphery, or rather within a separate place that I don’t want to re-enter. So I am the patient, not the doctor.

  Either way I would prefer oblivion and I am trying to retreat into it, but awareness scratches and then batters at me. There are voices, talking across me, and as soon as I can decipher the words pain sweeps in. It is no longer on the margins but everywhere, behind my eyeballs and within my ribcage and in my mouth like a hot stone that I can’t spit out.

  I open my eyes and pain shoots through my frontal lobes.

  In my immediate field of vision there is a doctor’s face; he has thick eyebrows and nasal hair and a deep cleft in his chin in which a line of bristles is embedded. Beyond him, standing against a window so that it is haloed in light, is another figure. A woman in a flowered dress, not a nurse. The woman steps forward, away from the sunlight, and the troubling familiarity surrounding it like another light halo suddenly crystallises.

  It is Lesley.

  ‘She’s awake,’ the doctor says, in English.

  There are painful – agonising – prods and shifts of examination. My wrist is lifted and turned, then my head. I close my eyes against the intrusion.

  When I look again, Lesley is close at hand. Her face leans down over me, her forearms are resting on the bedsheet. The doctor has gone. Lesley lifts a hand and touches her fingers to my forehead. She is smiling, rather tremulously, her characteristic smile that might at any moment melt into tears.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she whispers. ‘You’re going to be all right.’

  I look past her, to where an IV pack hangs on its stand. The tube is taped to my arm. They’re putting in fluids, that’s all. We were in the desert, I remember, without water. The pain is mostly in my head, I realise; the after-effects of severe dehydration. Lesley is correct, then. I am not going to die today, or even tomorrow.

  A shadow falls for a moment, a compound of weariness and exasperation.

  But then I look back at my daughter’s face. I don’t know why she is here and the effort of working it out is too much. But I have the sense that Lesley has been in my mind. It was her absence that was like a butcher’s hook, holding me up and stopping me from slipping down and away. Now the negative is reversed to positive, absence has become presence, and I realise that I am profoundly glad.

  I make an effort of concentration and lift the fingers of my left hand. The plastic IV tubing faintly chafes my skin and Lesley sees the movement. She takes my hand and laces her fingers with mine.

  I say her name. The smile flowers all over her face.

  ‘Yes. I’m here, Mummy. Everything is going to be all right. I love you.’

  Love. The wide sea that one word conjures up, all the currents and tides and storms and oily swells of it. But I manage to nod my head.

  As soon as she woke up Ruby knew that she had been asleep for a long time. The light was bright behind her half-closed shutters and Auntie was at the door of her bedroom. She was bringing morning tea; at least, a glass of hot water with a Lipton’s tea bag laid in its yellow envelope in the saucer. A cup of tea English-style, a special treat.

  Mamdooh eased into the doorway and decently hovered there. Ruby instantly hoisted herself upright, keeping the sheet pulled up to her chin.

  ‘Mum-reese?’

  ‘Today better. She is weak, but now awake. Your mother with her.’

  The cup and saucer rattled. ‘God. Oh, what a relief. That’s so good. She’s going to be all right, isn’t she?’

  ‘God is merciful,’ Mamdooh agreed. ‘Your friend has called to the house. He waits for you outside.’

  ‘Ash?’ Ruby wanted to see him, very much. She began to get out of bed and Mamdooh hastily withdrew. Auntie dipped the tea bag into the hot water and pressed the glass of cloudy brownish fluid into Ruby’s hand. She was very thirsty, sticky-mouthed with the taste of sand and the residue of bean soup, so she drank it in a single draught. She shook her head like a horse and Auntie tittered.

  Ruby pulled on the nearest clothes that were not actually in the reeking desert heap, raked her fingers through her hair and leaned to open the shutters. Ash was standing against the opposite wall, one knee bent and the foot propped under him. He was wearing his leather jacket and a red Coca-Cola T-shirt. She rapped on the window to attract his attention but he was smoking, frowning and looking away down the alley.

  She ran down the stairs and out of the front door.

  Ash straightened up and threw his cigarette aside. ‘You look very terrible,’ he said.

  She stopped short. ‘Well, thanks very much.’

  He caught her by the wrist. ‘It is not being rude, it is the truth.’

  Her hair was flat to the back of her head and stood up in matted spikes from the crown. Her lips were swollen and cracked, and her cheeks and eyelids were reddened and puffy from sun and windburn.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he added.

  Ruby pulled angrily back but then she realised he was only shocked at the sight of her. She hadn’t bothered to consult a mirror and wondered briefly just how bad things were.

  ‘I’ve been in the desert. Three days. It was … it was …’ She stopped there and shrugged. She supposed that in time she would develop a routine for describing the experience, it would become her desert story, but she was nowhere near that yet. How it had been was too unwieldy to put into words. ‘Can we go somewhere? Not in the house.’

  ‘I will never put foot in there again,’ Ash almost spat.

  ‘Why? Why not? What happened?’

  ‘Let us go somewhere, yes.’

  ‘I want something to eat.’

  ‘Come, then.’

  He took her hand. They went down the alley and into the street that led to the busy road. Ruby looked all around her, at the crowds of people in which each person had his own precious history, and at the garish colours of the overbearing advertisement hoardings, and the peeling walls and telephone wires and glinting traffic and exuberant density of ordinary Cairo, and she was almost overcome with gratitude for it. Her legs felt unsteady and even though she was hungry her stomach contracted and rose as if she was about to be sick.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Ash wanted to know.

  ‘Yes.’ She was shocked, Ruby thought, with another faint frisson of surprise that she should be knowledgeable enough, somehow old enough, to recognise this so precisely. But that was what it was. She swallowed the sharp taste of delayed terror and followed Ash’s leather jacket as he shouldered through the crowds. At a café on the edge of Khan al-Khalili Ash pulled out a chair for her and Ruby quickly sat down. Immediately the usual crowd of newspaper vendors and shoeshine boys and children trying to sell lighters and bottles of water swarmed around them. Ash waved them away, and from the waiter in a stained white jacket he ordered yoghurt and coffee and fried eggs wit
h flat bread for Ruby, the same as he had ordered for her first breakfast in the bazaar.

  Ruby helped herself to one of his Marlboros. Inhaling the smoke brought a wave of giddiness.

  ‘The suffragi, and your mother and father, they think I have taken you and Madam Iris and done harm to you,’ Ash blurted out.

  ‘Did they? Why?’

  ‘How should I know this? The suffragi came to Nafouz and my mother, and talks about the police. And then of course, to help in any way I come to the house as soon as I can and your mother and father …’

  ‘My stepfather,’ Ruby interrupted, but Ash only stared at her.

  Angrily he said, ‘… They look at me as if I am guilty for something. Why do they think that when I am your friend and you are mine? I tell you why. It is because I am Egyptian boy and you are English girl.’

  They were looking at each other across a gulf that had not been there before.

  ‘I’m sorry for whatever it was they said, or did. It was probably worrying about me that caused it, and my stepfather’s like that with pretty much everyone, not just you. My mother always tries to do the right thing. And weren’t you concerned about what had happened to us, or were you only thinking about yourself?’ she snapped back at him.

  ‘Ruby, Ruby. What do you think, since you know me?’ Ash reached out and took her hand. He was very good-looking, especially when he was angry and serious. She felt raw and needy, and the need translated itself into wanting him. She held on to his hand, turning it over and studying the flat purplish ovals of his fingernails. ‘And besides this, did I not tell you not to go past Giza, in the car with your grandmother?’

  Anger flashed in her too. She banged the tin table with her free hand and the holder of paper napkins and the plastic menu card in its claw holder rattled and bounced. ‘I am not your possession, to be told what to do and not do.’ She was shouting, and the tourist couple at the next table glanced curiously at them.

  ‘There are good people in Cairo, and some bad. I was afraid that you were dead,’ he muttered.

  ‘I was afraid that I was dead.’

  She said it in such a way that he caught her hand more tightly and hauled the rest of her closer to him so that their mouths awkwardly met across the table. He kissed her very hard and it was the more startling because Ash never made demonstrations in public.

  Ruby caught her breath with difficulty and sank slowly back in her seat. The cracks in her mouth stung and she touched her fingers to them.

  ‘You see?’ Ash whispered.

  She was the first to look away. Her face was burning twice over.

  The waiter came and banged down the plate of fried eggs. Ruby looked at the clouded yellow eyes and the brown lace-work at the edge of the glistening white and her mouth watered. ‘I’m so hungry.’

  Ash smiled at her, a sunny smile from which the anger had melted away. ‘Eat, then,’ he said.

  Lesley sat beside Iris’s bed, letting the time pass.

  Andrew told her that he had work calls to make and needed to check and respond to his e-mails.

  ‘Couldn’t have happened in a worse week, all this,’ he sighed. ‘If you’re going to sit here with your mother, I’ll come back later. Will you be all right?’

  Lesley smiled at him. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We will all be all right.’

  Iris woke up and Lesley told her that she loved her. During the night, lying awake in the dusty bedroom while Andrew snored beside her, she had resolved that she would tell her mother this much before anything else. She had said it as soon as Iris seemed briefly aware of her surroundings, and she thought that Iris had heard her and even nodded her head. It was a comfort to Lesley that they had made this connection, at least.

  Ruby had been deeply asleep when they left the house, and she was glad of this too. It was a different world from this time yesterday. She had Iris’s life to be grateful for, and Ruby’s youthful resilience. The edge of loneliness, the sense of never being quite what any of the people she loved wanted or expected her to be, was nothing compared with this.

  ‘Hello?’ an English voice said.

  Lesley looked up and saw a woman in a khaki T-shirt with the LandRover logo on the front, only it had been changed to read SandLover instead.

  ‘Hello,’ Lesley answered uncertainly.

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘A bit better. She woke up about an hour ago.’

  ‘That’s good news. And your daughter?’

  ‘She was asleep when I left the house. Um, do we know each other?’

  The woman laughed, then hurriedly looked around in case she had disturbed any of the other patients.

  ‘I’m sorry, my fault. I was in the group who found your daughter last night, or perhaps she found us, I’m not sure which. She was marvellous, you know. We just wanted to make sure everything had turned out all right. I’m Ros Carpenter, by the way.’

  Lesley came round the foot of Iris’s bed and shook the woman’s hand, and the woman gave her a friendly hug and said that she was sure Iris would soon be on the mend and this seemed quite a good hospital, better than you would expect, really, at least it looked clean, and what kind of treatment would you hope to get at home these days? The other members of the group were having coffee at a place round the corner, actually, and would she like to take a break for a few minutes and come and meet them?

  ‘Well …’ Lesley hesitated, looking back at Iris. Then she decided quickly, why not? Ruby was marvellous, this woman had said. She smiled at her. ‘Just for half an hour. I want to say thank you to all of you. My name’s Lesley Ellis.’

  The other four women were gathered round a table, and they waved them over and shuffled up their chairs to make room.

  ‘This is Lesley,’ Ros announced proprietorially. ‘Her mum is recovering and our desert wanderer is at home fast asleep.’

  There were exclamations of relief and satisfaction, and the largest of the women cheered. Lesley looked around the table, touched by their warmth.

  The blonde one said, ‘Your daughter was very brave. She was exhausted, terribly thirsty, sunburned – she had walked all that way, but she didn’t think about herself at all. The one thing she had in her mind was to get help to her grandmother. Our guide tried to send her to the hotel with us but she just stood there and shouted at him until he said she could join the search.’

  Lesley smiled. ‘Yes, that’s Ruby.’ It was, too. It came to her that her beloved child was a different person from the one all her misgivings and anxieties had rested upon. ‘That’s Ruby,’ she repeated, almost to herself.

  A woman with sunglasses pushed up on her head took Lesley’s hand and patted it. ‘This must have been a horrible few days for you.’

  They gave her coffee and a croissant, introduced themselves, told the story again of how Ruby had stumbled from between the sand dunes and almost collapsed at their feet.

  ‘Our guide, Hammid …’

  ‘Lindy’s in love with Hammid.’ The one called Clare laughed. ‘Can’t stop saying his name.’

  ‘No, I’m not. I’m just saying that he said you should always stay put if you lose yourself in the desert, but if Ruby had done that it might have been days before anyone found them and by then it might have been too late.’

  ‘She did the right thing in this instance,’ Jane agreed.

  ‘I’d never have been able to do what she did,’ Louise added. ‘How did it happen, by the way? How did they get lost?’

  ‘We don’t really know yet. I expect we’ll get the full story when Ruby has recovered.’

  Or maybe not, knowing Ruby.

  Even though they were praising Ruby, Lesley wanted to shut out the rest of it; to think of how lucky she had been and what would have happened if she hadn’t met the safari party was too much for now. She made the right faces and responses to the talk, but to distract herself she studied the women. They were about the same age as she was, and Lesley recognised their clothes and their discreetly highlighted hair, but there w
ere other aspects that were less familiar.

  Their friendship, for one thing. They seemed very comfortable together. Lesley had friends of her own, from business and from the village, but she couldn’t imagine setting off to ride a camel across the dunes with any four of them. And the other unusual factor was the absence of men; husbands, specifically. For Lesley, holidays meant Andrew and the boat. Or, rarely, Andrew and not the boat.

  They were ordering more coffees now, and debating whether it was too early to think about lunch and maybe a glass of wine.

  ‘We have just spent five days sitting on a camel’s back.’

  ‘And it is our last day but one.’

  ‘I don’t want it to be over,’ Ros sighed.

  ‘Do you always take your holidays together?’ Lesley asked them.

  They all laughed. ‘Last year it was Sri Lanka. Next year we’re thinking Machu Picchu,’ Clare said.

  ‘Well, you might be,’ Lindy protested.

  ‘But yes, we do. Three of us are divorced, two still married …’

  ‘Just about.’

  ‘… and we don’t all like the same things. Some of us will spend this afternoon at the Egyptian Museum, for example, others … well, they won’t. But we all like each other. And it works.’

  Lesley smiled, envying them their apparent freedom. Then she looked at her watch. ‘I’d better go. Wait, did any of you lend Ruby a shawl yesterday?’

  ‘That was me,’ Ros said.

  ‘How can I get it back to you? Where’s your hotel?’

  ‘Tell you what,’ Clare suggested. ‘Why don’t you meet us for dinner tomorrow? Our last night?’

  To her surprise, Lesley agreed without even thinking about it. Nor did she say that she would have to bring Andrew with her.

  ‘See you tomorrow, then,’ she said. ‘Enjoy the museum.’

  ‘Or a nice sleep by the pool,’ Lindy murmured.

  When she reached Iris’s side ward again, Ruby was sitting in the visitor’s chair. She looked clean and almost her normal self, apart from her cracked and swollen lips.