by Rosie Thomas
‘I am so sorry,’ Roddy said. ‘As soon as I heard I came straight here.’
Somehow I spoke. The words sounded as though they came from someone else. ‘Thank you. Colonel Boyce, how could the enemy have known that Xan’s patrol was in the Qattara?’
I must have been unbalanced with shock. Part of my brain seemed crystal clear, with a sequence of sharp, angry thoughts running through it. The other part was black, closed, disbelieving.
‘I am afraid I can’t answer that, Iris. I wish I could.’
Can’t or won’t, I thought. There was a security leak, exactly as Xan had suggested. Roddy’s eyes flicked towards the door of the supper room. He was under unusual pressure and there were heavy demands on his time; he had broken the news and he wanted to be gone.
‘I’ll go to the hospital,’ I said.
‘Are you sure you want to do that?’
I was already on my feet, walking unseeingly through the crowds of guests and past the sheaves of green wheat for fertility.
‘I’ve got a GHQ car,’ Roddy mumbled as he tried to keep up. ‘You could take it, I’ll walk.’
‘Thank you,’ I said again, not even looking back.
In the car, on the familiar route, I stared at the people in the streets who were walking and talking as if nothing had happened. I was still alive myself, I was breathing and sitting back against creased leather with my hands like wax in my lap. I stared down at them. It was impossible that Xan was dead. Xan, who had been more alive than any of them. My mouth moved and I found I was saying his name.
At the hospital, crowded with MTC drivers and medical staff and injured men, people stared and then fell back to let me pass. I was in wedding clothes and my face must have been a mask of shock. I went to the clerks’ office and with Christina Tsatsas’s gentle help I found out where Jessie had been taken.
He was lying behind screens in a ward full of men who had just been brought in from the battle. His face was paler than the dressings that covered his upper torso and his light hair was dark with dirt and blood. At first I thought he was unconscious but when I took his bloodstained hand and held it his eyes opened.
‘Iris.’
‘Yes.’
His lips moved but his voice was barely audible. ‘Xan. I’m sorry.’
‘Shh.’
There was a silence while he summoned up a reserve of strength.
‘Air attack. Out of nowhere.’
‘Roddy Boy told me.’
‘I saw … came straight at us.’
‘Jessie. I have to ask you this. Are you certain he is dead?’
Maybe there was the possibility of a mistake, maybe the smallest chink of doubt that would allow me to hope. At the same time I prayed that there could be no doubt at all, no chance that he might be lying alone and mortally wounded in the sand.
There was a carafe of water and a sponge on the table beside the screen and I moistened the sponge and dabbed it to Jessie’s mouth.
‘He was in the lead truck. The rest of us were spread out on a broad front behind. Xan’s vehicle took the brunt of the fire.’
This much seemed to cost him all the strength he had.
‘Shh,’ I said again. I held his hand and a nurse looked in through the screens, glanced at me and went away again.
Jessie collected himself once more. ‘The truck burst into flames. A ball of fire. None of them got out. I tried to run across to see but the planes came back to finish the job and …’
Jessie’s eyes closed. A breath sighed out of him. He didn’t say anything more and I sat there with my hand linked in his as the life seemed to recede, from his fingertips, from his arms and legs, until it was just concentrated in a flutter round his heart. I felt hard and heavy, like a piece of wood.
I thought it was the nurse again when the screens parted but someone put a hand on my shoulder and I looked up to see Daphne. She was wearing an apron and her horizontal hair was flattened under a white stocking cap. There were purple circles of exhaustion under her eyes. I watched her as she moved round to the other side of the bed and put her fingers on Jessie’s neck, then shone a small torch into each of his eyes. Her expression didn’t change.
‘Well?’ I demanded.
She shook her head.
‘Xan is dead,’ I said.
She came back to my side of the bed, unlaced my fingers from Jessie’s cold ones and put her hands on my shoulders. Then she pulled my head against her. She smelled of carbolic and disinfectant and also, I thought, of carnage.
‘Xan is dead,’ I repeated. I knew I hadn’t begun to register what the words meant.
‘Iris. Listen to me. Come with me to the mess. I’ll get you some tea.’
‘No. I’m staying here.’
She nodded wearily. ‘All right then. I’ve got to go now, but I’ll come back when I can.’
I turned back to Jessie and held his hand again. I put my mouth close to his ear and reminded him of the night we met at Lady Gibson Pasha’s, and the mule at Mrs Kimmig-Gertsch’s New Year’s party. I said that I would go and see his family back at home, and I told him that I loved Xan and I would always love him. What I really felt was angry, but I told him that I was proud of them both.
Jessie never regained consciousness and he died in the early hours of the morning.
Afterwards Daphne led me out of the ward.
‘You have to go home and rest now,’ she ordered. ‘Remember the baby.’
Since the moment when I saw Roddy Boy heading towards me, I had not given it a thought. I had forgotten that I was pregnant.
Another slope of dune and her gasps for breath keeping a rhythm with the words please, let me find her. Her outward tracks were barely discernible.
Ruby crested the dune and the Beetle lay in the hollow below. Her legs wobbled and she sat heavily down in the sand, slip-slithering to the bottom. Iris seemed not to have moved at all, but there were tears running down her face and glimmering in the sun.
Ruby knelt in front of her and gathered her up into her arms. She mumbled a rush of words. ‘It’s all right, here I am, you’re safe, we’re going to be all right, look, I won’t leave you again, Ash will find us, Ash and Mamdooh and Auntie, I promise, they have to find us, don’t they?’ She attempted the reassurance out of a complete absence of conviction, and she thought how frail and improbable the words sounded. But in any case Iris was staring at her, through her tears, as if she had never set eyes on her before. She wasn’t crying over their plight, or out of fear at being left alone. She was crying for something inside her own head and Ruby couldn’t reach that.
She let go of her and Iris sank back against the half-buried car.
It was for the best, probably, Ruby thought. Let her be, with her memories. Better that than be aware of this reality.
She unscrewed the bottle of water and gave it to Iris; then she took some herself. It was the hardest thing she had ever done, not gulping the last mouthfuls straight down. They had less than half a litre left now.
The day slid onwards. At noon, sitting shoulder to shoulder in the little ellipse of shade beside the car, they shared a pomegranate and each bead of sweetness burst a tantalising droplet of moisture on their parched tongues. Iris was silent, lost in a reverie, and Ruby’s thoughts went round and round in tighter and increasingly desperate circles.
The planes continued to glide overhead. Maybe if she could light a fire, they would see the smoke? The car tyres would burn with thick black smoke, but how could she set fire to them with no matches?
She rummaged in her memory for the vestiges of television survival programmes, the kind of thing her stepfather liked to watch. Focus the sun’s rays through a lens, or use a camera battery? They had neither.
The sun crept across the sky.
Lesley had been in the garden for most of the afternoon, sweeping fallen leaves off the herringbone brick paths, but now it was getting too dark to work. Through the drawing room french windows, she could see Andrew sitting in his ar
mchair reading. At least he wasn’t clicking at his laptop, or checking messages on his BlackBerry. She would take him a cup of tea and draw the curtains. She put her broom away in the garden shed, carefully padlocking the door behind her because the Macys’ shed had been broken into last week and their lawnmower and gas barbecue had been stolen. Colin Macy was burning leaves this afternoon; the damp air was thick with the smell of bonfire smoke.
In the kitchen she washed her hands and filled the kettle. She could hear Andrew talking on the phone. It must be Ed, calling to say what time he wanted to be collected from Saturday rugby practice.
Then Andrew appeared in the kitchen doorway.
‘There’s some French doctor on the phone from Cairo. It’s about Ruby.’
Lesley’s hand reached up to her mouth. ‘Is she hurt?’
‘He says your mother and she went out yesterday morning and they haven’t come back.’
Lesley took two steps to the kitchen phone. French, her mind obstinately retained that. She cleared her throat.
‘Bonsoir? Je suis la mère de Mademoiselle Ruby Sawyer …’
‘Good evening, Madame. I am afraid there is some anxiety concerning your daughter and your mother,’ the doctor began in accented but perfect English.
When Lesley replaced the phone her hands were shaking. Andrew was still standing in the doorway.
She said, ‘We’ll have to fly out. Tomorrow, as soon as we can.’
He didn’t try to contradict her, or tell her that she was overreacting and ought to calm down. He just nodded. ‘I’ll see what flights there are.’
* * *
Ruby stood up and walked a little way from the car to where the sand sloped upwards. Her body was twitching, small jerks of electricity ran through her limbs and made it difficult to keep still. The sky was unbroken blue, and along the line where the crest of the dune met the sky there was a multicoloured zigzag of dancing light, as if the sand were narrowly on fire. The sight made her thirst burn more fiercely and she turned her back and slumped down on her haunches. The sand around her feet was criss-crossed with tiny braided patterns, and after a while she worked out that these were the tracks of toktok beetles. Her fingers burrowed aimlessly in the sand and encountered some coarse strands, and when she disinterred them she saw that it was a few blades of rough, bleached grass that had been buried by the storm.
Grass, beetles, they could survive.
Can we?
Iris was lying on her side next to the car, her head shaded by her white scarf. Her quietness, her seeming acquiescence, frightened Ruby. But Ruby was frightened of everything now. Their water was gone, all they had left was a pomegranate. In an hour or so it would be dark again.
Ruby was thinking so this is how you die, is it?
Tears of pity for herself burned behind her eyes, but her whole body seemed too dry for the relief of falling tears. A voice quite unlike her own broke out of her instead.
‘I don’t want to die. I don’t want to fucking die.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Under a sky blown clear of cloud, the temperature dropped as soon as darkness came. Ruby helped Iris into the back seat of the car and held her with her head cradled in her lap. Iris folded her arms across her chest and drew up her knees to fit in the cramped space, and Ruby took off her own T-shirt and tucked it over her hips as if it were a blanket. They were both shivering but the cold was only a partial distraction from their thirst.
Ruby decided that they would share the remaining half of a pomegranate when the sun rose again, then she would plan what to do.
But what to do suggested a breadth of choice belonging to the precious world that had just slipped out of her reach.
Go out, stay in. Smoke a cigarette, or not. Tea or coffee, pizza or curry, cinema or telly – mundane choices that she had never bothered to savour, let alone acknowledging that it might also be luxurious to weigh company against solitude, the possibility of action against lingering inertia, the greasiness of indulgence as opposed to glowing self-denial.
Her mind racked up the pairs of alternatives, her imagination lending them a luminosity that reality had never bestowed.
She thought if I ever get out of here, if we get out, I’ll never not value every ordinary minute of every day, however drab or annoying the moments seem.
Life is exquisite. Why had she never known this before?
It is precious. Colours. Voices. Streets. Love, music, laughingsingingtouchingdancing. I wish I could even find the words for it. I wish I’d done something I was proud of.
I wish …
Thirst racked her throat and made her tongue raw and puffy. The recesses of her teeth and gums tasted foul, and she couldn’t draw down enough saliva to swallow properly.
I wish I could see Lesley and Ed, and my dad and Andrew.
She realised that her lips were moving, forming the words even though her throat was too sore to voice them. She stroked Iris’s hair, feeling the gritty sand coating her scalp. It was cold, and the rear window framed a patch of sky packed with aloof stars. A cold quarter of moon hung in a faint veil of silver. To see the jets drifting overhead towards the glamour of the airport made the desert even lonelier.
‘Iris?’ she croaked.
There was no answer; they had hardly spoken since they had taken their last mouthful of water. Ruby hoped that she was asleep, and at the same time she was afraid to realise how silent and still she had become. Iris was frail and every hour left her weaker.
Ruby lifted her head, wincing as a cramp tightened in her leg.
Choice. She had been considering the stark options that would be open to her when the sun rose again.
They could sit here and hope to be found. In the end, a search would be mounted and they would be discovered, sitting in their car that was slowly turning into a piece of the desert. But this was Egypt. Realistically, how long would it take for Mamdooh and Auntie to summon the rescuers? Most probably Iris would be dead before anyone came.
Or she could set out again, as she had done this morning, and this time instead of losing her nerve and turning back she would have to keep on and on walking until she found help or until she dropped.
Either or. The richness of the whole world reduced to a choice that was not a choice at all, but a sentence.
All right. Wait till the morning. Think.
Ruby now couldn’t think of anything but the few drops of moisture held in the pomegranate seeds. She had to clench her fists to stop herself reaching for the fruit and cramming it into her mouth. Then she relaxed her hands again and continued to stroke Iris’s hair, concentrating on the slow rhythm, trying to subdue all her love and longing for the world into the caress.
Mamdooh walked through Qarafa with the folds of his galabiyeh drawn up round his ankles, following the ragged boy who dashed ahead of him, and at the same time trying to avoid the heaps of rubbish and scattered animal dung. It was the point of the day at which the light faded and the sky turned indigo. In the City of the Dead the flat brown tombs and the colourless dust darkened, and their sharp edges were picked out with the silver-bright tracery of rising moonlight, so that the arid daytime scenery was transformed by exotic twilight.
Mamdooh did not linger even for a glance at the Mamluk tombs in the moonlight. He kept his eye on his skinny little guide instead, who was ducking between the low tomb houses of the ordinary dead. The alleys were apparently deserted but they contained a sense of watchfulness. A few more turns brought them to a closed door and the child wordlessly pointed to it. He held out a hand and pulled at Mamdooh’s sleeve until Mamdooh tipped a couple of coins into his palm. Then the child skipped over a broken pillar and vanished into the dusk.
Mamdooh banged hard on the door. It opened by a crack and Nafouz’s face was revealed. Mamdooh reached in and grasped him by the collar of his leather jacket. With unsuspected strength he hauled him out into the open and in the crack in the doorway the faces of Nafouz’s mother and his grandmother immediately appeared in
stead.
Mamdooh shook Nafouz and poured out a stream of questions, and Nafouz twisted his shoulders and tried to break out of his grasp.
He shrilly insisted that Ashraf was at his work at the Bab al-Futuh hospital, and had been at work the night before too, as usual, and he had not seen Ruby for two whole days.
The two women emerged from the protection of the tomb house and now they all stood in a little circle in the indigo dusk. Mamdooh turned on them and demanded to know if this was the truth.
It was, Ash’s mother protested. Several times Ashraf had brought the young girl to this place, but not in the last two days. And yesterday afternoon he had said that he would go to meet her but he had come back and told his family that the girl was not in the usual place at the agreed time. Today, the same thing.
What was Ashraf to do about that, she demanded? Was her son to blame if an English girl was not reliable?
Mamdooh retorted that what her son should now do was tell the truth to the police.
The two women pressed closer to Nafouz and murmured anxiously to each other, and Nafouz stepped in front of them and loudly insisted that his brother and the police had no business together.
‘That we shall see,’ Mamdooh warned.
He told them that the police were now looking for Miss and for Doctor Black, her grandmother, who was missing also. The young girl’s mother and father were coming from England to take charge of the search. They would all want to speak to Ashraf, and to the rest of his family too, and it would be advisable if they remembered every smallest thing and spoke nothing but the purest truth.
Ash’s grandmother covered her face with her headscarf and began to wail.
Mamdooh walked away, back in the direction he had come.
Ruth is stroking my hair.
