Felaheen a-3

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  Shutting her eyes, Sally decided to be asleep; remaining asleep as Per's fingers crept up from her ankle to knee before smoothing down towards her ankle again. He moved his fingers in time to the lurch of the wheels. As if that somehow made it coincidental, merely part of the journey. And she kept feigning sleep as Per's stroking became heavier and his hand moved higher, until the top of every stroke almost reached her buttocks.

  Part of Sally, the part to which she usually refused to listen, regretted changing out of her shorts, because those were baggy and, well, short really.

  "You awake?" His voice was soft, concerned.

  Sally almost shook her head.

  Shifting in her seat, she moved lower so she was almost balanced between the seats. At the same time she kept her eyes shut and her breathing regular, even when his fingers found the backs of her thighs and slipped between them, smoothing along a seam.

  That was where Per's fingers stayed, their movement so slight Sally could barely sense it though the effect was like water rising behind a flood wall. The warmth between her legs more than mere body heat, the dampness not just sweat.

  "Per . . ."

  The Swedish boy stopped. One bare arm still hooked round her leg and his hand crushed between her thighs. A barrier was formed by his half-turned body, screening them from the others, those sleeping children with their cruel haircuts and faces made soft by rest and dreams.

  "Too much?"

  Sally wondered what he'd do if she said yes. Not that she would.

  "Wait," she told him and sat up in her seat. Switching sides quickly, Sally snuggled down facing Per. Only this time round she was the barrier between the woken world and the snoring conscripts.

  "Better," she said.

  "Much," Per agreed.

  They kissed or rather Sally kissed Per. And when his hand reached for her, Sally didn't move away but put her own fingers over his and snuggled closer, holding it there.

  Per skipped several of the stages she'd come to expect from boys her own age, stages that Wu Yung had also ignored. And when Per removed his hand it was to reach between the buttons of Atal's shirt and expose one breast.

  "Small," she told him.

  "Perfect," he replied, dipping his head.

  When Sally eventually opened her eyes, it was to see one of the conscripts watching her in the window, his distance doubled by reflection. The boy said nothing but neither did he look away.

  "Okay?" Per asked, his head still buried between her small breasts, licking salt and a distant echo of cheap soap from a bath she'd taken in Catania; so distant as to be almost lost under the dirt of five days' travelling without a break.

  "Sure," said Sally, "everything's fine."

  Per's back was to the window and his head was bent, his arms tight around Sally and little doubt could exist as to what his reflection tasted. On the other hand, for two strangers making out in a railway carriage they were being unusually discreet. So Sally shrugged and shut her eyes again.

  Somewhere between barest dawn and reaching the Italianate Gothic monstrosity of Tarabulus station Per dropped his fingers to the waist of Sally's jeans and discovered she'd already freed the top button. As she wouldn't let him ease the jeans past her hips, he made do with sliding his hand inside.

  She bit his shoulder so hard when she came that Per was the one who cried out. A muffled yelp, hastily swallowed. Although had Per turned round he'd have discovered how redundant that was. Every conscript in the carriage was already awake, wide-eyed and envious.

  Discreetly, so that her move wasn't too obvious Sally put her hand down and held Per, watching him tense. She waited until he shut his eyes at the intensity of her grip, then let go.

  "Your turn after Tarabulus," she said. "That is, if you're not getting off at this stop."

  Per hesitated.

  "I'm going on to Gabes," Sally added.

  "Take a break," he suggested. "Spend a few days in Tripoli."

  "No time." Sally shook her head. "I've got stuff to do."

  "What stuff?"

  Sally dropped her hand into his lap, making it look casual. "I'm on a quest," she said.

  "For what?"

  "The Libyan striped weasel," said Sally, and gave his trousers a squeeze.

  As they pulled out of Tarabulus less than an hour later, sat in a carriage that was once again theirs alone, Per asked what had been troubling him from the first moment they met beside the stopped train.

  "How old are you?"

  Without even stopping to think Sally lopped three years off her age. And tried not to grin when the Swedish boy looked suddenly appalled.

  CHAPTER 17

  Monday 14th February

  "Yeah," said Raf, "I already know . . ."

  A life of brain-rotting boredom awaited Tunisia's last bey, who took with him into exile his wife, his German mistress (standard Thiergarten -issue, one), a dozen, French-educated ministers, most of his children and a 392-piece set of china made in the Husseinite colours by Noritake.

  And while the brave speech made from the door of his departing train was enough to make some doubt the probity of supporting Colonel al-Mansur's plot to overthrow the government, the convenient discovery two days later of an empty beyical treasury was enough to make those same people realize how right Colonel al-Mansur had been to propose himself for the new position of Emir.

  "You done now?" Raf asked.

  Inside his head, Tiri nodded and smiled, glad to be back. Raf's refusal to talk had lasted a whole bus trip and half a train journey. So now the fox was sticking to easy thoughts and simple facts. Which was why it didn't mention what was happening up ahead.

  The secret police were waiting for Raf on platform three of Gare de Tunis. It was nothing personal. They were waiting for everyone. Although, to be honest, Raf didn't care. He was being someone else for the day, maybe longer.

  Maybe forever.

  Slung under the arms of each mubahith was a new-model HK7, the complete works right down to Zeiss laser scope and double-length magazine. Since Ifriqiya was on the UN embargo list for weapons sales and the ministry in Berlin responsible for overseeing HK shipments obeyed the ruling when it suited them, shipping must have been via false end-user certificates. Presumably the same applied to the military-issue BMW bikes parked on the concourse behind.

  Their black uniform wasn't one Raf recognized but whatever force they represented it seemed to require them to wear steel-capped eighteen-rivet boots cut from shiny leather. Always a bad sign. For his part, Raf still wore sandals cut from an old tractor tyre and a filthy jellaba. His skull was hidden under a cheap Dynamo's cap and three-day stubble accentuated rather than hid the scar on his jaw; he looked rough, made worse by the fact that seventy-six hours of not eating had hollowed his cheeks and put dark circles round his naked eyes.

  The smile on his face was that of an idiot savant. Or maybe just an idiot.

  That the mubahith wore aviator shades went without saying, since mirror shades and big boots went together across most of North Africa like midsummer riots and tear gas. Raf's own dark glasses were missing and in their place he wore cheap contacts that turned his eyes brown and overlaid the world with a haze of ghostly smoke.

  "You." A hand clipped his shoulder, sending him stumbling. "Can't you read?" A soldier with corporal's stripes was pointing to a sign. A dozen soldiers and an officer in khaki were there to do the actual work. The mubahith just stood around in black uniforms looking bored.

  Raf shook his head mutely and the corporal sucked his teeth.

  "Into line," he ordered and indicated a row of barriers set up to funnel passengers through one of two metal arches. Men, who made up the bulk of the crowd, jostled and pushed their way towards one arch, where a bored soldier sat off to the side, chain-smoking in front of a bank of screens.

  The few women alighting from Raf's train had their own arch with no screens visible. All results of their strip scans were hidden within the walls of a tall black tent and seen only by tra
ined nurses. Sécurité's gesture to common decency.

  "Come on."

  Most of those who passed through the arches raised little interest. Although a few of the men were pulled out of line and made to turn out their pockets just for show.

  "Your turn," said the fox and Raf nodded, dropping his bidi to the platform and grinding it under heel. Raf had no real idea why he did that. Unless it was meant to be polite.

  Shuffling forward with the felaheen gait of those too poor to own correctly sized shoes, Raf passed under the arch. And all might have been well if he hadn't looked up and stared straight into the eyes of Sergeant Belhaouane, recently promoted to the mubahith.

  "You," the man jerked his heavy chin. "Come here."

  Raf did what he was told.

  "Look at me."

  Reluctantly Raf raised his head then looked away. He stank of sweat and his jellaba was rotten beneath the arms from lack of washing.

  "Your papers." The order was barked out. It didn't take the fox to tell Raf that the security man was enjoying himself, which didn't stop the fox from telling him anyway.

  "What did you say?"

  "Nothing." Raf shook his head. "Nothing, Captain."

  Sergeant Belhaouane looked almost mollified by his sudden promotion. Although that didn't stop him from clicking his fingers loudly to hurry Raf along.

  "Come on . . ."

  Raf hurried. Scrabbling in his jellaba pocket, then in all the pockets of the tattered trousers he wore beneath. Finally, when the sergeant's patience was almost gone he found his wallet.

  "Your Excellency," said Raf, producing it.

  The mubahith flipped open the battered square of leather and looked inside. Then he checked the pocket behind the empty slots where credit cards would have been were this felah the kind of man to have credit cards.

  A hundred US dollars hid there, in tatty green ten-dollar notes. One month's wages to the sergeant, three months' wages to someone like Raf. About as much as a family might scrabble together to send one of them to the city to find work.

  "These your identity papers?"

  Raf shuffled his feet.

  "Thought so." The man pocketed the notes with a twist of the wrist as deft as any magician making cards disappear. "Right," he said when that was done. "What's your business in Tunis?"

  "Work," said Raf. "I came to find a job."

  "Doing what?"

  "Unloading ships . . . There's a strike."

  Sergeant Belhaouane snorted. Work at the docks passed from father to son, strike or no strike. The only way an outsider like Raf could ever get dock work was to marry the daughter of a stevedore and hope that, when the time came, the jetty bosses were open to bribes and the man about to retire didn't already have a son.

  "What's your village?"

  Raf named a place so small it didn't occur on most maps.

  "Where?"

  In reply he named a town nearby not much larger. Although the sergeant appeared to have heard of it this time, probably because Segui was known as a place of annual pilgrimage for Soviet nasrani who spurned UN sanctions and raced the salt lakes with sail boards on wheels.

  It was obvious from the sergeant's dismissive gaze that he held out little hope of Raf finding work enough to send money back to his village. The concrete-stained sandals and filthy jellaba identified Raf as a man mostly used to casual graft. And construction in Tunis was run by one family. If you didn't pay for an introduction, you didn't work. Life was that simple. And since the last thing Tunis needed was another itinerant from the south Sergeant Belhaouane decided his best course of action would be send the idiot back to Segui on the next train.

  Unfortunately the fox disagreed.

  "Run," suggested the fox. But Raf was already running through a crowd that didn't so much move out of his way as trip over their own feet in their haste to let him get to the exit on Rue Ibn Kozman. A woman screamed, Raf noticed, freezing an image of the chaos around him. An old man burst into tears and a boy put a hand to his mouth like he was about to vomit.

  "Ditch that gun."

  "What gun?"

  "Heckler & Koch, fifty-two-shot magazine. Laser targeting. Night sights . . ."

  The one with blood on its stock.

  "Fuck."

  "Yeah," said the fox. "Something like that."

  Jinking round a fat man wearing white robes that marked him out as from the Trucial States, Raf sprinted for the black Zil from which the man had just alighted, only to have it pull away in a squeal of tyres, back door flapping.

  The driver behind took one look at the gun in Raf's hand and reversed hard, straight into a taxi. Headlights shattered, fenders tore and then it too was gone, followed by the cab trailing diesel fumes and fear.

  When Raf next bothered to look he was running down a slip road with a shunting yard to his right and overlooked on his left by redbrick tenements. Dark windows, mostly shuttered. A car without wheels raised on cinder blocks. It could have the wrong side of the tracks anywhere. Although the air smelled different to that of El Iskandryia. Fresher somehow, owing less of its taste to the sea. Fewer cars. Not so heavy on the hydrocarbons.

  "This way . . ."

  Raf ignored the voice. Only to freeze when a hand grabbed his sleeve and swung him round, pushing him towards a metal fence.

  "Through here," insisted the voice. It wore an old uniform with a peaked cap and fat leather belt, black tie and pale blue shirt. The belt was new and the uniform slate grey, with silver-piped epaulettes on a narrow jacket and a cheap metal monogram adorning each lapel, letters intertwined so tightly that it took Raf a second to make out SBCF.

  "Société Beyical des Chemins de Fer," said the fox.

  Raf shrugged. "Whatever."

  "Come on," hissed the small man, still gripping Raf by the sleeve. "Do you want them to catch you?"

  "Who?"

  "Kashif Pasha's sécurité, of course . . . He's taking control," added the man as he bustled Raf through a mesh door in an inner fence and simultaneously pulled a key from his pocket to lock it behind them. "Everyone knows his father is dying."

  Raf frozed.

  "You must know," said the man. "A week ago in Tozeur the Emir was bitten by a poisonous snake. They're keeping the seriousness a secret."

  Raf knew all about them and they. Most of his childhood had been spent in their hospitals and special schools. Suits, smoked-glass windows, pretty little mobile phones. And endless lies, half of them his.

  "I thought the Emir was unharmed?"

  "That's what they want you to believe."

  "What proof do you have?" Raf demanded, regretting it immediately.

  "What proof . . . ?" Key still in the lock the man halted then started to scrape the key in the opposite direction, infinitely slowly. This time round the man was worrying about his own escape route. Raf's tone had been wrong. Not just his question but the position from which that question was asked . . . One that posited a right to make such demands and an expectation that these would be met; assumptions totally at odds with Raf's ragged jellaba and homemade sandals.

  Of course the small man didn't think of it like that, he just felt tricked, his closing down into sullen imbecility the defence of the weak against someone who might represent those who were strong.

  Raf took a deep breath. "Forgive me," he said and shrugged, then shrugged again and switched into Arabic. "My French is not good. Only what I learnt as houseboy at a hotel when I was young. I was just asking if the illness of the Emir was true . . ."

  Between being a houseboy at a hotel and an itinerant labourer lay a whole life's worth of wrong choice that the old railway worker was much too polite to investigate. So he smiled instead and shrugged in his turn. "That explains your accent," he said. "It's very elegant. And yes, it's true about the Emir."

  He hustled a silent Raf towards a shed that stood dark and near derelict at the foot of an abandoned signal box, pushing his new friend inside.

  "Wear this," he ordered as he rippe
d an orange boiler suit from a locker. "And carry that." The bag he offered was long and made from oiled canvas. On both ends the SBCF logo could just be seen inside a faded circle. "It's for the gun," he said with a sigh when Raf just stared at the thing.

  "Sorry." Raf ripped the magazine from the HK, wiped it with a rag taken from the floor, then did the same for the weapon, dropping both into the bag before zipping it shut. The rag he returned to the floor.

  "Who are you?" he asked the man.

  "Someone whose eyes are open," the man replied and grinned, exposing a row of crooked teeth. "You can call me Sajjad. I work the Gare de Tunis. How about you?"

  "Me?" Raf glanced round the tiny hut and spotted a two-ring Belling in the corner, plates thick with grease. A stack of take-out trays next to it said the old-fashioned cooker didn't get much use. "I'm a chef," said Raf. "One who's looking for a job. Name's Ashraf. My mother was Berber."

  Which wasn't exactly true. It was his father who'd been Berber according to everyone from Eugenie de la Croix and the Khedive to Raf's Aunt Nafisa, but she was dead and most of what she'd told Raf had turned out to be lies anyway.

  "And your father?"

  "I never knew my father," Raf said and was shocked to realize that he probably never would. And even more shocked by how much he minded.

  Sajjad shrugged. "These things," he said as he clicked on a kettle and reached for a tin, "they happen." Such unhappy beginnings went altogether better with the torn jellaba than did Raf's earlier question, abrupt and barked as it had been.

  "Lose the jellaba in a locker," said Sajjad a minute or two later, pouring water onto coffee grounds. "We'll find you another," he added when Raf looked doubtful.

  Any residual doubt Sajjad had about Raf got forgotten the moment he saw the scar tissue mapped onto the young man's back. A veritable landscape of pain, with ridges of scarring that fed between a star-shaped city on Raf's shoulder to ribbon developments of raised tissue around his ribs and abdomen.

  To Raf the only thing remarkable about it all was how little of the pain he'd actually felt, mostly that had been the fox's job.