Iris and Ruby

by Rosie Thomas

  Her breath fogged the glass as she stared at a swarm of bizarre brooches in the shape of golden flies.

  Mamdooh shuffled and huffed at her shoulder.

  ‘Miss, to come this way please.’

  Go away, she wanted to shout. But Iris was beckoning to her too. At the far end of a long vista of columns and crammed niches a phalanx of cleaning women with buckets and mops were swilling the stone floors.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Ruby asked.

  ‘Upstairs.’

  Reluctantly she followed them up shallow stone steps to the first-floor gallery, all the time wishing that she could have this treasury to herself without the distraction of Mamdooh and Iris.

  There was a crowd of visitors in one room, and past the craning heads she caught one brief glimpse of the serene funerary mask of the boy king.

  ‘Here?’ she pointed.

  Iris shook her head. They came to a side gallery, with rows of polished wooden benches in the ante-room.

  ‘I will wait here,’ Mamdooh announced.

  The room beyond was hushed and dimly lit. The mummified remains of the royal pharaohs lay in sealed glass boxes.

  Ruby crept along the line, lingering beside each enclosed mummy. Here were a queen’s dark ringlets and hooked nose, here was a skull showing through skin like dried leather, long yellow teeth bedded in the jawbone, a withered arm circled with a coil of gold. Iris moved in step with her, murmuring the names: Seti I, Ramses II, Tuthmosis IV. Some of them looked as if they were merely asleep, others were withered and collapsed, a bundle of remains more touching than macabre. What struck Ruby most was that these were just people, with wrists and nostrils and fingernails. Outside in the halls were the decorated sarcophagi and tomb ornaments, but here were men and women. They had lived and known glory, and then they were dead. She was alive and they were not, and nothing but a heartbeat separated her from them.

  She murmured to herself, the skull beneath the skin. She didn’t know where the line came from, but she had heard or read it somewhere.

  She understood why Iris had brought her here. The dead were just the dead, neither awful nor remarkable. History separated out these individuals and preserved their names where others were obliterated forever, but there was no real difference between this hushed room and the tomb house where Ash’s family lived.

  I watch Ruby as she tiptoes past the glass cases.

  This is death in formal guise, like in the Cities of the Dead. Inevitably it makes me think of its antithesis, tumbled and shocking and finally forgotten in the sand.

  Xan was away, out of my reach. As I had promised I would, I went to the hospital and up the stairs to the ward full of carved men.

  ‘Hello,’ I said quietly to Albie Noake. The upper half of his face had more colour in it now and he was propped higher against his pillows. Within his reach lay a notepad with a pencil attached to it by a piece of string. His eyes followed me as I moved a chair to the head of the bed, where I could sit with my mouth close to his ear. By the time I put my hand over his where it rested on the bedsheet I knew that he knew what I had come to say.

  ‘Mr Ridley died without gaining consciousness. I’m so sorry. I wish Xan had been here to tell you.’

  Briefly, his eyes closed. I wondered how much they had seen and been through together, Albie and Xan and Private Ridley.

  Then Albie’s hand twitched beneath mine and he indicated with a tilt of his head that I was to pass him the notepad. He wrote carefully and a bead of sweat appeared on his forehead, then ran slowly down his temple, like a tear that was otherwise denied.

  Thank you for teling me, he had written. Poor old Ridley.

  I lifted my head and met his eyes again. There was a look in them that begged me to stay and talk about life and hope, anything that was nothing to do with dying in the desert.

  ‘I’ll sit here and chat to you for a bit, shall I?’

  At first I stammered and started down avenues that all seemed to lead back to the war, so I would have to retrace my steps and cast around for a different topic. In desperation I told him about the letter I had had from my mother, and that led on to Evie, my aunt by marriage, and her three small children who played in the afternoons among the hydrangea bushes in my mother’s garden. Albie listened, nodding and looking past me as if he could see the billows of dead leaves whirled up and then trodden underneath skidding gumboots, and the footprints in mud whiskered with lank grass, and hear the rooks cawing in the elm trees along the wall of the churchyard. Maybe he came from a village not dissimilar to my parents’, and my irrelevant mumbling helped him to remember it. Or maybe he came from the East End, and Hampshire meant nothing to him except a blanking-out of much worse.

  I talked until I forgot he couldn’t answer.

  ‘Do you have children, Albie?’

  He picked up the notepad. No, not married. And Missed my chance with you! Mr Molynew beat me to it.

  ‘I bet there’s a girl or two waiting for you at home.’

  There sending me back soon on a hospital ship.

  ‘When? Albie, that’s good news. They’ll repair your jaw, they can do all kinds of amazing surgery nowadays. You’ll be as good as new.’

  That was what Ruth had said to the soldier with no legs who wanted to dance.

  We’ll see. Will you come again before?

  ‘Of course I will. I’ll come every day, if you can bear it.’

  I can. Thanks.

  He looked tired, and he made no objection when I took the notepad out of his hand and awkwardly tried to settle his pillows.

  ‘Good night, Albie. See you tomorrow.’

  I hadn’t seen Ruth, but she came up behind me as I left the ward. We stood at the top of the stairs, looking down at the comings and goings of nurses and visitors across the stone-floored entrance hall.

  ‘I told Albie that his friend died.’

  ‘How did he take it?’

  ‘Stoically.’

  Ruth nodded. ‘They are almost always stoical. I wish sometimes that the men would cry or show their feelings in some way. Such terrible things have happened to them. They’ve been brave enough already.’

  Thinking of the quiet ward full of men with their hideous wounds, I could only agree with her.

  ‘At least you’re doing something to help them.’

  ‘It isn’t much. Look, as it happens Daphne’s off this afternoon and I’m going home in an hour. Would you like to come out to the flat and have some food with us? It won’t be anything very grand, I’m afraid.’

  It occurred to me that Ruth must think I was grand. I blushed and mumbled that I’d love to come.

  ‘Fine. About half past eight?’

  I told her that I would look forward to it very much.

  When I was with Xan I felt utterly happy and complete, and there was something similar with Ruth Macnamara. In their company I felt the rightness of the world and of myself in it, more than I did with Sarah and Faria, far more than I had ever done at any other time in my life.

  After their slow tour of the mummies they came back to the doorway. When Iris raised her eyebrows in enquiry Ruby took one more glance back over her shoulder at the quiet figures.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  Mamdooh’s bulk rose up from the bench. They made their way down the stairs once more. The women with mops had almost reached the main doorway and the floors behind them were shiny with damp. The museum was about to close for the night.

  ‘I think we can go back home now,’ Iris announced. Mamdooh summoned a taxi from the waiting line.

  Back at Iris’s house, Ruby helped her off with her coat. Iris’s face had gone papery with fatigue, but there was a gleam in her eyes.

  ‘You were interested in that, weren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought you would be,’ she crowed.

  On impulse, Ruby took her grandmother in her arms and hugged her. At first Iris held herself rigid, pulling away, but then she relaxed. Ruby felt how lig
ht she was, like a leaf, with the bones of her shoulders as tiny as a bird’s.

  ‘I loved it.’ She planted a kiss on top of Iris’s head. ‘And death, after all, when it’s right there it doesn’t seem too huge and terrible to let into your mind. That was what you meant, wasn’t it?’

  Iris went to bed early, fussed away into her room by Auntie. Ruby wandered into her own bedroom and took out Jas’s CD. She lay down on top of her covers and thought about him, and for the first time since the night at the top of the tower block it wasn’t his crumpled shape in a halo of blood that superimposed itself over all the others. She saw him in his exploded garden of cut-out flowers instead, and heard his slow mumbling voice explaining to her just what the music meant.

  The first ping of a pebble at the window startled her, at the second she scrambled up and looked out. She could just make out the upturned oval of Ash’s face framed in the white collar of his shirt.

  She slipped silently down the stairs and palmed the heavy front door key from where Mamdooh always left it, on a little ledge concealed by a wall hanging. Catching her lip between her teeth with the effort of concentration, she slid the key into the lock and turned it, wincing at the way the silence amplified the smallest scrape and click. Mamdooh and Auntie were almost certainly already in their beds, but it was all too easy to imagine how Mamdooh might massively materialise in a doorway and catch her in the act of breaking out. The door swung slowly open, the ancient hinges faintly protesting, and there stood Ash, beckoning her out.

  Grinning at him, Ruby put one finger to her lips. She pushed the door shut as carefully as she had opened it and locked it behind her. Then she linked hands with Ash and they ran away down the alley towards the open street. Once they had rounded the corner he nudged her up against a wall and kissed her, briefly sliding his hands inside her shirt. Catching her breath, she let her head fall back against the wall. The crescent moon at the top of a minaret lay like a black shadow of the real moon against the dark-blue sky.

  ‘Nafouz is waiting for us,’ he whispered.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘To a club, just like you go to in London.’

  Ruby’s eyebrows peaked in surprise. ‘Lead me to it,’ she said and laughed.

  The taxi was parked close to the bazaar. Nafouz nudged the door open and Ruby fell in beside him with Ash pressing close on the other side. The car skidded away. Nafouz’s teeth flashed at her. He was wearing a leather jacket over a T-shirt with Armani written across the front.

  ‘Hello, Ruby, my good friend.’

  ‘Hello, Nafouz. I hear we are going clubbing.’

  ‘You are right. How is your grandmother?’

  ‘Asleep.’

  They all laughed as the taxi sped eastwards, towards the low, solid line of the Muqqatam hills.

  The club was housed in a nondescript slab of a concrete building overlooking the burnt-orange and neon-white glitter of the city. Inside was a packed crowd, dancing under a layer of cigarette smoke that fumed blue in the lights. Ash took Ruby’s hand and drew her after him.

  Ruby had seen nothing like this in Cairo. Here were throngs of made-up Egyptian girls in tiny spandex skirts and spangled tops that showed their midriffs and most of their breasts. There were boys in leather and backpackers in braids and combats and Jamaicans with dreads and singlets, and a DJ working the decks up on a low podium. There was the same smell as in all clubs; perfumed sweat and greasy hair and the mineral tang of adrenalin. It was utterly familiar and at the same time Ruby felt completely out of place with a naked face and the long-sleeved cotton shirt over loose jeans that had become her Cairo uniform.

  ‘You might have told me,’ she hissed in Ash’s ear.

  ‘You are most beautiful girl in the place, no competition.’

  Nafouz’s hands already spanned the bare milk-chocolate waist of a girl with her hair piled up on top of her head. She slid her hips up against him and at the same time craned her neck away as he tried to kiss her. Ash flicked a glance at Ruby and led her on through the crowd to the back of the room where there was a bar. He bought a bottle of Coca-Cola and put it into Ruby’s hand, then from the deep pocket at his hip he produced a bottle identical except that it was uncapped, and had been temporarily resealed with a whittled cork. He bit the cork out and spat it aside, took a swig from the bottle and passed it to Ruby. The gulp she took made her cough. It was neat whisky.

  ‘Hey. I thought you were a good Muslim boy and didn’t drink.’

  ‘Every man is a contradiction.’

  Ruby started laughing, and took another drink of whisky. The DJ was bringing the crowd up, and through the mass of dancers she saw Nafouz also tilting a Coke bottle to his mouth. With Ash, she merged willingly into the mass and the music. The noise and the press of unknown bodies swallowed them up.

  Much later, with their hair sticking in thick hanks to their foreheads and their clothes soaking, they pushed their way up some steps and along a narrow concrete corridor, and emerged into the darkness. Out here the music was no more than a murmur of vibration in the skull and the fingertips, like the onset of pain. Ash stumbled and put his hand out to a fence post to steady himself. The first whisky-Coke bottle had been emptied and Nafouz had produced another. As he barged towards them it was clear that he had downed all of his first bottle.

  ‘Let’s sit,’ Ash muttered. They walked a few yards and found an angle of broken wall enclosing some flat-topped rock. The ground was littered with cans and broken glass with shreds of plastic flagging the thorn bushes. The wind that sliced down the gully made Ruby shiver as the sweat cooled on her skin, and the shelter of the wall was welcome. They sat down on the rock with their backs propped against it and Ruby cupped her hands over Ash’s as he flicked his lighter and lit a cigarette. She took it from him and he lit another for himself.

  ‘Funny,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘It’s like another place in there, a different city.’

  ‘Like London?’

  ‘Well, no. Not very.’

  She didn’t want it to be anything like London. The carpet of lights beneath them was Cairo, it was enticing and exotic, and the inside of a club banging with dance music was not. To cover the surprising, slight feeling of disillusionment she slid closer to Ash. She rested her mouth against his neck and her hand crept across his thigh, and after a second he shifted position and came closer, his mouth finding hers. There was whisky on his breath. Ruby closed her eyes and began to let go. It felt warm and consoling to be touched and stroked, Ash was beautiful and she liked him, and he had been kind to her. In a similar situation at home she would have expected to have had sex with him days ago. Of course she would.

  She undid the zip of his trousers. Everything was fine there. When he didn’t make the corresponding move she undid the buttons of her own jeans and lifted her hips, encouraging him.

  Ash tilted upwards on his elbows, looked down at her and sighed.

  ‘Ruby, I am not going to do this.’

  Surprise made her jerk backwards and the back of her head hit the wall.

  ‘Fuck,’ she murmured and rubbed it with her free hand. ‘Why not?’

  ‘I think it is not right.’

  ‘You don’t fancy me.’ This was startling. She was used to trading elements of herself as a powerful currency, the dollar standard, with everyone from boys she met in clubs to Will. She had been doing it since she was fifteen. Only Jas had been different.

  ‘Yes, I do. Do not be stupid.’

  ‘Well, come on then. I want to.’ She tried to smile saucily at him, but her lips seemed to get stuck.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  He seized her wrist, hard, then turned it over and with infinite gentleness kissed the thin skin where the pulse beat.

  ‘I like you too much.’

  ‘Right. Wasn’t doing it with me what you were after, you and Nafouz, when we first met?’

  Ash said angrily, ‘Nafouz is not me. And yes, at first, all
right. Everyone knows European girls, English girls, they will make love to Egyptian boys, it doesn’t matter to them. Egyptian girls are not like that.’

  Ruby stabbed a finger towards the concrete block. ‘What about all of them?’

  ‘They are not out here, are they? Most of them, their brothers are in there, their cousins, friends, people who know them all their lives. They come out, to dress up, dance, maybe have a drink or two, even, if they think their fathers will not know about it. But not to do this.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I think you do not.’ He took her face between his hands, forced her to look at him. ‘Before, you were just a tourist girl. Now I know you, you are Ruby to me. Better than rubies. Perhaps I love you.’

  Ruby let out a disbelieving hiss of laughter from between her clenched teeth. She felt rejected, but at the same time another thought dawned on her.

  Perhaps what he said was true.

  It was possible that they were now dealing in another currency altogether and she didn’t have to trade herself in the old one. Perhaps, like Jas, Ash was going to be different.

  ‘Why do you not believe me, Ruby?’

  ‘If you’re saying it, OK, then I do believe you. I don’t know why you would love me, that’s all. Anyway, boys usually say that to get you to shag them, not as a reason for not doing it.’

  ‘I took you to visit my family,’ Ash said, hurt. ‘Did you not understand? My mother said to me, “Who is this girl?” and I tell her the truth, “I am not sure, but she is important” and so you are. Why would I not love you?’

  She sat in the circle of Ash’s arms and stared at the ground beyond their feet. The shards of glass had begun to reflect a cold grey glow like polished steel. The eastern quarter of the sky was turning grey too. In another hour it would be dawn.

  ‘You can do what you want, I suppose,’ she muttered. And then, because the lack of grace in that was so audible, she turned her face against the warmth of his neck and inhaled the scent of skin and whisky. ‘I’m glad we went to your place, right? I’ve thought about it a lot. There’s no reason why your mum should take to me on first sight, but she’ll probably get used to it. If you want to go on seeing me, that is.’