by Rosie Thomas
Ruby laughed. She still felt the lightness inside her. ‘Yeah.’
Ash was vital, springing with energy. He wasn’t bored or disgusted with everything, as she quite often felt in London, and he was different from Jas. Jas used to lie on his bed for days at a time, smoking weed and listening to music.
‘So now you have made a tour, eh? Citadel, Mamluk tomb, my family.’
‘Yeah.’ The shock of the tomb houses still reverberated. She needed some time to absorb what she had seen.
‘Ruby, it is not possible for everyone to live in a house the same as your grandmother.’
‘I know that,’ Ruby said.
‘Now. It is time. I take you back.’
‘Will we go out again soon?’
‘Of course we will.’
They rode back to Iris’s door. When she looked up at the high wall, with not a light showing anywhere, Ruby thought of Iris sitting alone inside with only the two old people to look after her. Ash’s grandmother seemed the luckier, with her children and grandchildren around her and the dead too, everyone together.
Why was Iris cut off from her own daughter, and Lesley from her mother?
She would ask, Ruby decided. She would find out.
She scrambled off the bike and kissed Ash goodnight.
‘Ma’ as salama,’ she said. Go in safety.
‘Good,’ he crowed. ‘Soon you speak Arabic as well as me.’
CHAPTER NINE
The child has been to the cemeteries. As we are drinking our tea together she tells me about it and I can see that the experience has shocked her.
‘People live right on top of the graves. In the little tomb houses. There are sinks and electric lights and kids’ toys, just like anywhere else.’
Ruby’s appearance is changing. This morning her face is bare of the black paint and most of the studs and metal-work, and without this angry disguise she is becoming more familiar, as if history is seeping under her skin and bringing family contours to the surface. I can see something of my mother in the set of her mouth, and I notice for the first time that she has Lesley’s hazel eyes. She still tries to be hard-boiled, but I am beginning to see more of the underlying innocence. She is even swearing less than she did when she first came.
I tell her, ‘The cemeteries are poor areas, but they are quite respectable. There are schools, sewerage, clinics. Further on towards Muqqatam are real slums. Don’t go there, please.’
‘Ash said the one they live in is his family tomb.’
‘That’s right, it would be.’
‘But …’ She shivers a little. ‘All the dead people.’
‘Are you afraid of the dead? Of death?’
Of course she is; she is young.
‘No. Well, not of ghosts or … djinns. But I wouldn’t like to sleep the night in a cemetery.’ Her face changes, a shiver passing over it like wind across still water. ‘I don’t want to die.’
‘Someone close to you has, haven’t they?’
I was expecting to hear about a family dog, or perhaps even a school friend in a car accident. Her answer surprises me.
Ruby tells the story quickly, without embellishment, but her mechanical delivery hardly disguises the depths of horror. The last image of the crumpled boy with his head in a pool of dark blood will stay with me, too. I am filled with concern for her.
‘Ruby, who knows about this?’
‘I told Ash. But then I felt bad, like I was using Jas’s death to get sympathy or attention or something.’
‘No one else? Not your mother or father?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Why didn’t I tell them that Jas was on one then fell off a balcony and died?’
‘That would be the normal expectation, I suppose. You witness a tragedy, the violent death of a young man who is a close friend. Your mother would comfort you, wouldn’t she? She would want to do that.’
Ruby looks me straight in the eye.
‘You didn’t.’
She is very sharp, and I deserve that stinging observation.
‘No.’
‘The thing is, Lesley and Andrew didn’t really know about Jas. He wasn’t the kind of person they would go for. Don’t get me wrong, there wasn’t anything bad about him. He was kind, never wanted to do anything to hurt people, and he was funny, but he wasn’t plugged in to things most people care about, like money and jobs. I suppose some people might have thought he was a bit messed up. Lesley would have done.’
Ruby sighs. ‘She’s my mother and all that, and you know how that works.’
Her expressive hands sketch in the air, miming a smooth ball and then suddenly turning into claws, raking the layer of space trapped between them.
‘Lesley likes everything to be in order. She’s really controlling. I suppose it’s partly her way of keeping us safe, looking after us. But it can be a real pain. For example we’ve got some glass shelves in the kitchen at home, and all the mugs and milk jugs and stuff are kept there. But they have to be in a straight line and they have to be plain white. You know? They’re just mugs for drinking tea out of, but if there’s a patterned or coloured one it has to be kept out of sight in a cupboard. You can’t really drop someone like Jas in the middle of a world like that.
‘So I kept him separate. I liked having him all to myself, anyway. I’d just go off from Will and Fiona’s place and stay with him. He had a room in a squatted house, but he’d made it nice. He’d decorated it with postcards and pictures of flowers and leaves and trees, cut out of magazines, stuck all over the walls, on top of each other, so the whole room looked like a garden that had exploded. We’d just lie and look at it. He used to say, “It’s just the two of us, babe. Just you and me. This is our Garden of Eden.” I loved that. But then, after he … died, it was like he’d never been there. That was really hard. I didn’t want to think that he was so close to nothing.’ Her voice sinks to a whisper. ‘As if I was the only memorial he had.’
Now I can see the shape of ideas crossing her mind. I am sad to think that Ruby might have been allowed to believe that she is stupid, because she is anything but.
‘Are you afraid of death?’ she asks.
‘No. Nor will you be, I hope, when you get to my age. But I am afraid of what might intervene between now and then.’
Her hands move, trying to catch a slippery shape in the air.
‘I know. Of forgetting.’ Her eyes flick briefly towards the open door of my bedroom where Xan’s photograph stands on the table next to the bed. ‘Has anyone close to you died?’
‘Almost everyone,’ I say drily.
She laughs and then guiltily catches herself, reckoning that amusement is inappropriate in this context. What she is trying to do, as gently as she knows how, is to give me the opportunity to talk about Xan. She’s curious about him on her own behalf, but it’s also part of our odd bargain. I am supposed to reminisce and she will remember for me.
But it is hard.
Ruby put it well. I wanted to be the memorial, not to Xan himself because his family and his friends and his regiment remembered him too, but to our love. I had nothing else of him, and for a long time looked for nothing else.
For sixty years, the best part of a lifetime, I have jealously guarded these memories. I never spoke of them to my husband, or to my daughter, and I am aware that that was an act of selfishness. Lesley always knew, with the inarticulate, visceral intuition of a child, that I withheld myself from her. Even by the time she had learned to speak, the distance between us was almost palpable.
And if I believed that I might be punished for what I have failed to do, or believed in anything except the random cruelty of life, I would agree that the slow burial of my memories under the desert sand of forgetful old age is an exquisitely appropriate form of punishment.
Ruby is watching me, trying to work out where I am, waiting for me to say something. I have forgotten what we were talking about a minute ago.
In the end she prompt
s me, ‘I met Ash’s mother and his grandmother.’
Yes. The cemeteries.
‘Ash’s grandfather must be buried there,’ she adds.
‘Perhaps.’
Silence falls again while we separately speculate.
The desert is one immense tomb, unmarked.
‘I can see in a way that must be quite comforting. You know, having everyone really close around you, dead and alive, the family all together. With no – what’s the word – taboo about it, like we have. And I suppose you don’t feel lonely, either.’
She is making a direct comparison, Ash’s grandmother with her own. Yes, I have been lonely. And I am so used to it that it is only the lessening of loneliness, through her company, that has made me aware of it. I have not always been so brusque, in my words or in my judgements: this is what too much solitude does. You forget how to be tactful and gentle. But Ruby doesn’t seem to mind and I’m glad of this.
She leans forward, tilting her chair closer to mine. ‘Iris? What happened? Why don’t you and Lesley get along?’
I want to answer her, but the words and reasons and recollections jumble together and then swirl away, out of my reach …
… No. That won’t do. It would be easier to take refuge in the windy spaces of forgetfulness, but this truth is still sharp enough in my memory and I have to admit it: I didn’t want to be a mother. Not then, not to Gordon’s child, not to Lesley.
Maybe I never was cut out to be anyone’s mother. Even if everything else had been different, my lack of maternal inclination might have been the same.
I was a good doctor. I loved my work and surely I must have been good at it. To one or two people, maybe, I was a good friend. Can’t that be enough?
‘I think Lesley and I respect each other,’ I say.
Ruby feels rebuffed, I can tell. Silence spreads through the room as I try to work out a way to undo this.
Outside, the sky is overcast. Winter is coming, and it brings a damp chill that seeps through Cairo like mist off the Nile. I don’t mind the heat of summer, spending the days as I do within these thick walls or in the tiled shade of the garden, but nowadays I am like Faria – I feel the cold.
I try to ward off the automatic shiver. Ruby is here, and I can imagine how the silence in this old house must be dispiriting for her. Ideas suddenly jostle in my head and I clap my hands, making her jump.
‘When did you get here?’
She looks startled. ‘What? Do you mean, when did I arrive? Um, it was twelve days ago.’
‘Is that all? It seems longer than that.’
‘Does it? I mean, I don’t want to get in the way or anything, just say if I am.’
‘In the way? Of course you are not in the way. I am only thinking that you have been in my house for nearly two weeks and I haven’t taken you anywhere, or shown you anything except for that one outing with your friends, and it is high time that I did. I promised your mother that I would educate you.’
I clap my hands again, louder this time.
‘We’ll go out now. We’ll have an excursion. I know, we’ll go to Giza.’ The idea develops its own momentum. I am overtaken by a longing to leave the house and walk a different route, away from the repetitive circuit of my thoughts. ‘We’ll drive out there, visit the Pyramids and then watch the sun set over the desert. What do you think?’
‘Drive out there? Nafouz and Ash aren’t here today. That was last week, when we went to Groppi’s, remember?’
I stand up. Ruby picks up the blanket as it falls from my knees and folds it over the back of my chair.
‘Will you call Mamdooh? Tell him I will need the car.’
She follows me into my bedroom. In the cupboard hangs my warm deerskin coat.
‘You have a car?’
I am thinking of the sky fading to the colour of amethysts and the way that you have to steer a car when the wheels turn wayward in loose sand.
‘Of course I do. Hurry up, or we will miss the sunset.’
Mamdooh’s face was dark.
‘Mum’reese, it is not a good idea. For Miss, I can arrange to make a visit with a guide who will speak English. Tomorrow, or even better the next day.’
Ruby followed Mamdooh through the kitchen, both of them in Iris’s wake. He had given her one furious glare, indicating that all this must be her fault, and Ruby had done her best to signal back that it was nothing to do with her.
‘Where is the key? Mamdooh?’
‘It is here.’ Auntie stood aside and Mamdooh took a set of keys out of a drawer in one of the old cream-painted cupboards.
‘Very good. Come on.’
Auntie picked up a duster and polishing rag. In a small procession, with Ruby at the back, they passed through a door she had never seen opened before. It led from the kitchen into a small scullery, very small but high, with a tiny window let into the thick wall far above their heads. Mamdooh slid several bolts and opened another door. Ruby saw that it led into a cobbled alley at the back of the house. The blank walls out here were scabbed and blistered, and a thin trickle of grey water ran down the central gutter. The smell of sewage was powerful.
Iris stepped over the gutter and stood expectantly beside a pair of wooden doors secured with a chain and padlocks. Mamdooh very slowly went about the business of unlocking and withdrawing the chain. Finally he folded back the doors.
There was faint scurry in the dim interior, unmistakably a rat making for safety in the darker recesses of what must once have been a barn. There were wooden feed troughs along one wall, and a cobwebbed harness hanging from a peg.
And there was a car.
Auntie moved first. With her bunched-up duster she made a little swipe over the bonnet. Under the thick coat of Cairo dust and gritty sand, it was just possible to tell that the car had once upon a time been black.
Iris looked mystified. She opened the driver’s door and leaned into the interior, dust rising in little puffs under her fingers as she twisted the steering wheel.
‘Not any insurance, not any service, oil, benzene,’ Mamdooh muttered. ‘Look, tyres all flat.’
Ruby wandered round to the back and rubbed the rear insignia plate clean. Even though it was ancient, the car seemed quite familiar. It was a Volkswagen Beetle, not so very different from the new one owned by Lesley in which Ruby had learned to drive.
‘Mum had one of these.’ She smiled as she came round to the front again.
‘What?’
‘A Beetle. Until last year, then she got an Audi.’
Now Mamdooh stood back with his fists clenched on his hips. ‘It is not possible to drive this car.’
Iris gently closed the door again. ‘I bought it in the seventies, when I was living in Swakopmund, from a German dentist called Werner Esch. He was going back to live in Europe but he didn’t want to ship the car home, and he gave me a good price. When I moved up here to Cairo I drove all the way, and everything I wanted to bring with me fitted into here.’ Absently she patted the hood, her fingertips leaving little marks like the blurred footprints of birds.
Auntie had been rubbing the chrome door handle but her eyes were watering from the dust and she coughed into a fold of her white headscarf. Reluctantly Iris stepped away from the car although her hand still stretched out as if she didn’t want to relinquish the memory and promise of adventure that went with it.
‘We’ll get a taxi instead.’
‘Mum-reese, it is too late today. When you get to Giza it is dark.’
‘I have been out after dark in my life, you know.’
‘Miss will not see anything.’
Iris’s eyes glittered. He had outflanked her, but she wouldn’t be deflected. ‘We’ll go somewhere else, then. Ruby, tell me, where would you like to go?’
Without waiting for an answer she clicked her fingers. ‘The museum. We’ll go to the museum and that will give you some history before we go out to Giza. I don’t suppose you know any, do you? We’d better be quick about it.’
W
ithin half an hour a black-and-white taxi, much newer than Nafouz’s, circled the vast traffic roundabout of Midan Tahrir and drew up outside the dark-pink block of the museum. Iris sat up in the front next to the driver and Mamdooh, who had insisted on coming with them, was squeezed in the back next to Ruby.
In the mornings the front of the building was choked with tourists and their guides and buses, but at the end of the day there was only a handful of stragglers and postcard sellers loitering in the dusk. As they swept through the gates they made an unusual threesome, but it was Iris with her stiff back and profile like a face on a coin who drew the attention. Ruby slouched with her hands in her trouser pockets. She didn’t care for the wholesome, family-day-out aspect of most of the museums she had been dragged to at home, but at least this outing was a diversion. As they reached the doors she was even experiencing a flutter of mild interest.
Mamdooh negotiated for tickets, then they walked inside.
Ruby tilted her head to look upwards. Dim galleries rose round a central well crowned with a span of murky glass. Radiating away from where she stood were tall wooden cases filled, heaped, overflowing with a wild profusion of exhibits. She drifted down the wood-and-glass avenues, gazing at the displays. There were tiny carved wooden figures from tombs and huge imperious pharaonic statues. There were primitive boats and earthenware pots, broken shards and scratched hieroglyphs and curled papyrus, massive jewellery in gold and cornelian and glass, amulets and bracelets, and humble leather sandals that looked as if they had been discarded only a day ago. The artefacts were all dusty and most of the labels were written in scratchy, faded Arabic, but for Ruby this only added to the appeal. This was a museum, not a museum experience. It was rich and darkly disordered and abundant, and tantalising because she didn’t know enough to begin to comprehend it. It was a vast collection of innumerable collections, a multi-magnification of her own one-time passion that made her hungry and awestruck at the same time.
