by Ahmed Mourad
‘Sir!’
Galal waved back with a half-hearted smile. Then he looked inside his right jacket pocket before beckoning him over.
‘How are you, Gouda? All well?’
‘Ya basha, we’ve missed you. There’s no light in this place without you.’
‘It’s dark whether I’m here or not you scoundwel!’
He pressed a dark red note into the hand of Gouda, who bowed and thanked him before returning to Ahmed, who had been observing the scene from afar.
‘What happened?’
‘That’s a lovely man; a proper customer. Fifty pounds every time he visits and without getting his picture taken.’
‘Has he never been photographed?’
‘A long time ago, before he became editor-in-chief.’
Ahmed’s gaze never once left Galal Mursi all night, absorbing everything he saw with the single-minded intent of a man downing a glass of sugar-cane juice on a hot day. Galal went to the bathroom two or three times and went out to the street to conduct a long phone call away from the noise of the main room. The girl sitting beside him looked underage. He fondled the small of her back until he had rubbed it raw before she left her seat and dashed to the toilet to heave up her bellyful of beer. At the end of the evening he was joined by Qamar, a semi-successful actress who had wowed the public with her depiction of a sexy prostitute in two scenes of a film that was currently showing in theatres, in which she wore a dress better suited to a four-year-old, her underwear clearly visible.
Their laughter grew gradually louder and movie gossip and jokes passed back and forth, showing up his speech defect despite all his efforts to conceal it. He had trouble with the letter ‘r’ and would skip over it or hide it amid a torrent of words, or try to choose words in which it didn’t occur.
He took out his mobile phone and showed Qamar a picture on the screen, causing her to laugh so hard that she almost fell off her chair. Then she took out her own phone and showed him something that, judging by the way she surrounded the screen with her hands, must have been sleazy. The pair of them began exchanging files using Bluetooth.
A thought lit up like lightening in Ahmed’s head and he turned to speak to Sami the barman, who was standing next to him.
‘Could I have your phone for a minute, Sami? Sorry, but I’ve almost run out of credit.’
‘Course you can, gorgeous. Go ahead.’
Ahmed’s own phone was not a recent model: one of the earliest generation that could only make and receive calls, it had no Bluetooth of course. He kept himself abreast of the latest models but, as they say, the hand cannot always reach what the eye can see. He trawled through the barman’s phone menus until he located the device, thought briefly of a name that would entice Galal Mursi and re-entered the username as I want it. It looked depraved enough. He pressed ‘send’ and waited for the phone to finish its search for other Bluetooth devices within range. Three names appeared: Qamar, Leila and GM. Ahmed selected the last. It didn’t require any great intelligence to see that these were Galal’s initials. He sent him an invitation: a picture of the room taken from where he was sitting.
Galal’s phone received the message almost immediately. With a self-satisfied grin he looked around for this horny girl but couldn’t see her anywhere. He accepted the invitation then read the message, in which Ahmed had tried his best to act like the fisherman who uses only one type of bait. If 18 is too young for you, he wrote, then don’t call me on this number.
Galal could not resist the call of the wild. He rose to his feet, explaining to Qamar that he had to make a work-related call, and dialled the number of his beguiling quarry. Ahmed smothered Sami’s phone when he sensed it was about to ring. The number showed on the screen and he hung up. The response took Galal by surprise. He tried again and once more Ahmed cut him off. Galal made an expression of disgust at this tiresome joke, hoping that she might realise that her playfulness displeased him. He paused for a moment then returned to the table, his kohl-rimmed eyes inspecting the women in the room. Ahmed closed Bluetooth and restored the phone’s original name, then, having entered Galal’s number into his phone, he erased it from Sami’s and turned the phone off to be extra careful. He thanked the barman but Sami’s hands were full and he wasn’t paying any heed.
The intimate conversation was in full flow once again at Galal’s table. Galal took a small notebook from his pocket and jotted down a few brief words as he listened attentively to Qamar. She appeared to be telling him a story.
Ahmed tried taking a picture of him but he feared being noticed by Galal, Gouda or one of the other employees and arousing their suspicions. He waited until Sally had begun her set then, mingling with the crowd, he rested his camera on the bar and pointed its lens in the direction of the table, his hand casually draped around it. He gave watching eyes time to get used to his presence there and lose interest, and switched off the flash. Trying to aim his camera at the target he fired off a random shot and waited a moment for the image to appear on the screen. It wasn’t clear, so he adjusted its position and fired. This time he hit his target, and he reeled off four more to make sure of the kill, stopping when he sensed he might become the object of attention.
Withdrawing, though never letting Galal out of his sight, he returned to Gouda’s side at the other end of the room and busied himself taking pictures of the customers until the hands of the clock showed half past four in the morning.
Galal got up, gripping his girlfriend’s waist, and bid Qamar farewell with a kiss on both cheeks and a quick hug. He paid the bill with lavish excess and calmly departed, leaving Ahmed with the remaining two hours of his night in which to ponder all that he had witnessed and discovered.
So here was the editor-in-chief of Freedom, a newspaper he had once believed would help him to publish the inadequate pictures he’d taken on the day he said goodbye to his friend. He knew they weren’t good enough but they were all that was needed to open an investigation.
He wasn’t that surprised by the scene in the casino – the way the newspaper reacted at the time of the incident by publishing his pictures as an exclusive made its proclivities clear – but it was the best independent newspaper out there, in his view. Despite all that had happened he still read it every week. In it he saw society naked as the day it was born, a lot of titillation and a little truth. There were conspiracies, set-ups, terrifying sex stories in which only the first initial of the protagonists ever featured, a few political pieces and many on corruption. It was all doom and gloom, even down to the cartoons; a feast to satisfy the reader looking for a stone to fling into stagnant waters, some change that might unleash his pent-up energies and start a wave to set his thoughts rocking, washing them clean, setting them straight, pushing them forward and igniting them. Then, like a barren woman at the end of a draining zar, he could grow calm and sleep, soothed by the dose of morphine he had drunk, relieved of the need to cry out in agony. He was fulfilled by what he read, satisfied by Galal Mursi’s mischief and the blows he dealt against the grandest of heads, as if the world has been put to right and his intervention was no longer required. After all, what could he add to the words of the great whistle-blower, he who unhesitatingly attacked and upbraided the mighty?
His shift ended and Ahmed spent the rest of the night in front of the computer peering at the pictures, zooming in and out, flipping back and forth, as though seeing them for the first time. He saved them in a secure location alongside the pictures from the hotel massacre and a few others dear to his heart, then saved the number he had entered into his phone.
It was as though something was moving him to act. His mind was fizzing with ideas that started to fade as sleep carried him away.
About ten hours earlier, Ghada had been standing by the window inside the shop where she worked, her eyes fixed on the street crowded with luxury vehicles and pedestrians who rushed past like characters in a Charlie Chaplin film.
She observed her face reflected in the glass as it was caught by t
he sinking afternoon sun and began examining her features as though for the first time. Though a little pale, she was beautiful, and she knew it. Her skin was golden brown, her forehead even and her nose small and defined, while her smile uncovered neatly formed teeth laid out meticulously between her full lips. Captivating golden irises swam in her wide eyes, and of the wavy dark brown hair that fell halfway down her back, only a single lock escaped the hijab that she wore tailing down her back. She had an attractive birthmark at the top of her long neck, which crowned a body whose delicate limbs lent this graduate of Helwan University’s Faculty of Fine Arts the look of a pharaonic maiden.
She stared out for some time until she noticed the young man clutching a camera and pointing its lens in her direction. This was the second time he had been spotted. A co-worker had seen him and sworn that he was photographing her and now she had seen him at it again.
‘Ghada. Ghada? The telephone.’
The voice whispered in her ear as though imparting a secret and she reached out her hand to the device that lay concealed inside her ear, artfully hidden by her locks of hair, and checked that the dial was set to three.
Ghada suffered from a hearing impairment. Though born without the problem, an inflammation that she had contracted when she was five had severely weakened the nerves in her ear. She could speak but she heard voices as a hiss and had to follow the movements of her interlocutor’s lips to get the full meaning of their words.
‘Phone call, Ghada. It’s your sister.’
She went over to the telephone.
‘Hello?’
‘Ghada. How are you?’ said Miyada. ‘What time are you getting off today?’
‘At five. Where are you?’
‘I’m at the college. Hazim and I will come and collect you. I’ll give you a missed call when I get there.’
‘All right.’
‘Have you had lunch?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Fine, I’ll bring you something. It’s been taken care of, OK?
‘OK. Don’t be late.’
‘Got you. I’ve got to go: I’m calling from Hazim’s phone. Bye.’
‘Bye.’
Miyada was all she had in the world. Her father had passed away and her mother worked as hard as she could to secure her daughters’ future: daily expenses and dowries and the like. While Ghada had graduated from Helwan University, her sister had bumbled through two years at a private college in Sixth of October City at exorbitant cost.
After graduating, Ghada had taken up work at a furniture gallery of the sort that sells three-thousand-pound chairs, located in a villa on Giza’s Mourad Street overlooking Cairo Zoo. She learnt quickly and despite her youth was soon an old hand at the business, loved by everyone who worked there, especially the gallery’s owner. Otherwise her life was confined to her home and that of her friend Abeer.
She was aware that she was beautiful, but also that she was an outcast. She spent much time fantasising about the man of her dreams on his white charger, a stallion that would stumble as it crossed her doorstep and fall flat on its face at the sight of the hearing-aid that she removed the moment she left work to return to her peaceful world that lay far from life’s maddening din. The love she felt was as silent as her hearing, never going further than the furtive glances of adolescence, and when she realised something major was missing from her that she would never be able to provide, it ended as it had begun, in peace. She had been on the point of getting engaged to a relative once, but the engagement never took place.
Miyada, mischievous and lucky, got all the attention. Carefree and scatterbrained, she was wholly absorbed in coffee-shop gossip, new clothes, her friends, her mobile phone and Hazim. Hazim: the tall handsome young man with gleaming hair and bronzed skin, her fellow student and future fiancé, whose number now glowed on the screen of the phone in Ghada’s pocket, its vibrations informing her that her sister was waiting for her outside. Hitching her bag over her shoulder, she said goodbye to her colleagues and went out. She squeezed herself into the back seat of his car and it took off for their home.
Ahmed had been asleep for two hours when he was awoken by violent knocking that almost wrenched the door of the small room from its hinges. Terrified, he sat up to find the room bathed in a dingy red glow like the lighting once ubiquitous in developing laboratories, which was creeping into the room from a small ventilation shaft in the wall and from beneath the door. Stumbling out of bed, he opened the door to find Sayyid Qadari, the casino’s bouncer.
‘Ahmed, what are doing on your own in here?’
‘What is it, Sayyid?’
‘Don’t you know? The casino’s on fire. Thank God I thought of you. Get your things and let’s go.’
‘What happened? What time is it?’
‘It’s dawn.’
‘Is everybody all right? Where’s Gouda?’
He received no answer; Sayyid had vanished. All of a sudden he found himself inside the casino’s main room, which had been turned to black ash, the place filled with the stench of burning flesh. He saw rigid, blackened corpses, discoloured walls and wild disorder.
His foot sunk into something sticky next to one of the tables and he started when he realised it was a body. A body clutching a benzene lighter. Galal Mursi. His fingers were partially unburnt and their nails were covered with red nail polish!
‘That’s Galal bey.’ It was Sayyid, the bodyguard. ‘He started the fire. His lighter fell on the floor and as he bent down to retrieve it, the flame caught the big carpet and spread everywhere.’
‘Where’s Gouda? Did he go home?’
‘No. When he heard there was a fire he came back.’
‘Where is he?’
‘Over there by the stage.’
Ahmed made his way through the wreckage with great difficulty, as though in slow motion. It wasn’t the chaotic state of the place that slowed him down, but an inner sense that he was incapable of moving any faster, as though his veins were filled with gum not blood.
‘Gouda!’
Then Ahmed saw the strangest sight ever; Gouda was sitting next to the stage, wearing a well-pressed khaki uniform and holding a plate of cake. Half the cake was burnt black and Gouda was devouring it hungrily.
‘Gouda! What are you doing?’
Gouda gave no answer.
‘What are you doing sitting here, Gouda? The smell’s unbearable. Get up and let’s go outside.’
‘Our daily crust’s been stopped for good, Ahmed. Grab anything you can and sell it. You’re coming to live with me in my flat.’
‘But I’ve never been to Amiriya before.’
‘You’ll get used to it in no time.’
Ahmed’s eye had fixed on the naked body of a pale-skinned woman lying face down on the floor. It appeared to be Sally the dancer.
Suddenly, the lights cut out.
‘Gouda! Can you stand up? I can’t see a thing … Gouda? Gouda! Answer me!’
‘You go, Ahmed. I’m waiting for day to break.’
The only thing he could see was Galal’s lighter, glowing in the darkness with a faint phosphorescent light. He had no idea what made him take it. Pulling it with difficulty from a hand whose fingers had fused together, he sprinted for the exit, only to find himself face to face with the door to his flat in Sayyida Zeinab. He took out his key and inserted it in the lock, but it wouldn’t turn. Then his mother opened the door.
Ahmed went white and could not stop himself from crying until he was sobbing out loud. His mother embraced him and he snivelled, breathing in the scent that he had been deprived of for so long.
‘Mama, are you alive?’
‘Of course, my darling. Didn’t I tell you I was coming back? Will you have lunch, my dear?’
‘The casino burned down and I’m so hungry.’
‘Go and wash your face first and then we’ll talk.’
He entered the bathroom to wash his face and when he looked in the mirror he noticed something dark sticking out from behind
the see-through shower curtain. Yanking it back, he saw his sister Aya lying in the bathtub wearing her niqab, her clothes hitched up to her thighs. Sunk in sleep, she snored deeply. He covered her up without attempting to wake her and returned to the sink where he found his camera. He had begun to wash his face when he saw a pale yellow maggot writhing in the soap dish next to the camera. Taking a tissue to throw it in the bin, he caught sight of another and his skin crawled when he saw a third emerge from the camera, which he carried away from the sink. Opening the slot for the memory disks, he was shocked to discover a large number of maggots and black beetles battling within. Frightened, he flung the camera into the sink and left the bathroom to find the girl from the furniture gallery sitting next to his mother engaged in what appeared to be a friendly conversation. It was the girl he had been unable to resist photographing, whose pictures he had saved in a safe place on his computer.
Thick sweat covered his brow, mingling with his hair and sending it sticking out in all directions. His legs were exposed to the knee and the bed sheet wrapped around him several times. He was lying on his face, his breathing smothered and chest constricted. He lurched upright and took in great lungfuls of air, then exhaled violently, looking at the patch of drool that had been leaking from his mouth for more than an hour and forming a puddle on the mattress.
He spent a few moments trying to collect himself. It had been a peculiar nightmare and it made him feel as though he had slept for a week. When he looked at the clock on the phone beside him he saw the hands at half past two in the afternoon. He could not recall having such an eventful dream before. He remembered it like he had lived it: the fire, Galal, Gouda, the naked girl, his mother and sister, the maggots and the girl from the gallery.
He lit a cigarette and stared into the smoke.
‘Prophet Youssef, upon you be peace, where are you now?’
A day passed with its familiar routine. First an expedition to scout for a new restaurant to mollify a stomach fed up with koshari, sandwiches and late-night visits to the corner-store. It was a daily chore, not unlike that which Prometheus, the fire thief, had to endure, whom Zeus punished by suspending between two mountains so that an eagle might eat his liver, which would grow back every evening leaving him to face the same ordeal the following day. He longed for a dish of his mother’s home cooking. The events of his dream returned to his mind every five minutes: there was a hidden message there, he felt; it had been a while since he had experienced a vision of that kind.