Читать книгу Rosie Thomas 2-Book Collection One: Iris and Ruby, Constance - Rosie Thomas - Страница 10

‘No, no, don’t worry at all. I just wondered if she and Chloe might be together … Yes, of course. Is she? In Chile? How marvellous. Give her my best wishes, won’t you? Yes, that would be lovely. I’ll give you a call. ’Bye.’

Lesley replaced the receiver. ‘She’s not there either.’

Her neat leather address book lay open on the side table, but there were no more numbers left to try. She had been through them all and none of Ruby’s friends or their parents had seen her recently. None of Ruby’s friends who were also known to her mother, at least. There weren’t all that many of them.

Andrew was sitting in an armchair in a circle of lamplight, a pile of papers on his lap. A vee of wrinkles formed in the centre of his forehead as he stared at her over his reading glasses.

‘She’s nineteen. It’s really time she started taking responsibility for herself. You can’t stand in the firing line for her for ever.’

‘I don’t think I do,’ Lesley answered mildly. ‘Do I?’

Andrew exhaled sharply through his nose, pulling down the corners of his mouth to indicate disagreement without bothering to disagree, and resumed his reading.

Looking away from him, at the pleasant room that was arranged just how she wanted it, with the duck-egg blue shade of the walls that was restful without being cold and the cushion and curtain borders exactly matching it, Lesley felt anxiety fogging the atmosphere. Concern about Ruby distorted the room’s generous proportions and made it loom around her, sharp with threatening edges. The air itself tasted thin, as if she couldn’t draw enough of it into her lungs to make her heart beat steadily. Lesley knew this feeling of old, but familiarity never lessened the impact.

Where was Ruby? What was she doing this time, and who was she with?

One day, Lesley’s inner voice insisted, the unthinkable will happen. She shook her head to drive away the thought.

She never experienced the same anxiety about Edward, Ruby’s half-brother. Edward was always in the right place, doing the right thing. It was only for Ruby that she feared.

Justifiably, Andrew would snap.

Lesley closed her address book and secured it with a woven band. They had eaten dinner and she had cleared it away. The dishwasher was purring in her granite-and-maplewood kitchen, the central heating had come on, the telephone obstinately withheld its chirrup. Ruby had been gone since yesterday afternoon. She had slipped out of the house without a word to anyone.

Just to break the silence she asked, ‘Would you like a drink, darling? A whisky, or anything?’

‘No thanks.’ Andrew didn’t even look up.

‘I’ll go and … see if Ed’s all right with his homework.’

Lesley went slowly up the stairs. At the top she hesitated, then tapped on her son’s door: ‘Hello?’

Ed was sitting at his table. The television was on at the foot of his bed, but he had his back to it and she saw an exercise book and coloured pencils and an encyclopaedia open in front of him.

‘How’s it going?’

‘OK.’ His thick fair hair, the same colour as his father’s, stuck up in a tuft at the front and made him look like a placid bird. He was the opposite of Ruby in every single respect. He rolled a pencil between his thumb and forefinger now and Lesley was aware that he was politely waiting for her to go away and leave him in peace.

‘No word from Ruby,’ she said. ‘I really thought she’d ring this evening.’

Ed nodded, looking thoughtful. ‘You know, I don’t think we should worry. She’s probably staying in town with one of her mates. It’s not like it’s the first time she’s just forgotten to come home, is it?’

For an eleven-year-old, Edward was remarkably well thought-out.

‘No,’ Lesley agreed.

‘Have you tried her mobile again?’

Only a dozen times. ‘Still turned off.’

‘Well, I think we should just tell ourselves that no news is good news. She’ll probably ring you tomorrow.’

‘Yes. All right, darling. I’ll pop in later and say goodnight.’

‘OK.’ He had his nose in his book again before the door closed.

Lesley went along the landing to another door at the far end. The thick sisal matting, expensively rubber-backed, absorbed the sound of her footsteps. She leaned against the handle for a moment, then walked into the room.

It was dark and stuffy, and the room’s close smell had a distinctly brackish quality to it.

Lesley had already looked in here two or three times during the day but the otherness of Ruby’s bedroom, the way it seemed to rebuff her, never failed to take her by surprise. She felt cautiously along the wall for the light switch, then clicked it on.

The smell was from Ruby’s collection of shells. She had lost interest in adding to it at least eight years ago but the cowries and spindles never quite gave up the traces of fish and salt locked in their pearly whorls. The wall cabinets that Lesley had had put up to display them contained a jumbled, teetering mass of sandy jars and broken conches. The collection had never been properly organised or catalogued. Ruby had just wanted to get specimens and keep them, piling up her acquisitions greedily but carelessly, as if she were building a dam.

She moved on to shells after her enthusiasm for collecting autographs had waned, and after shells lost their fascination she became obsessed with beetles. There were boxes and cases of preserved specimens on every flat surface.

Lesley crouched down beside a row of mahogany display cases and peered through the dusty glass fronts. These had cost Ruby all her pocket money and every Christmas and birthday present for years, and the contents still made Lesley smile and suppress a faint shudder at the same time. Some of the beetles were two-inch monsters with stiff jointed legs, minutely articulated antennae and folded wings with an iridescent polish. Lesley had always recognised that they were exquisite as well as interesting, these skewered trophies of Victorian entomologists that had so fascinated her twelve-year-old daughter.

Other items in the collection were just matchboxes containing tiny shrivelled items that Ruby had pounced on in the garden, trapped and kept. Lesley smiled again at the memory of absorbed Ruby crouching beside a bush of artemisia, her latest discovery caught in her cupped hands.

‘What are they all? Do you know?’ Andrew used to ask.

‘Yes,’ Ruby would answer flatly, offering nothing more.

‘Why do you like them?’

‘They’re beautiful. Don’t you think?’ She would turn away then, not looking for an answer, as if she had already said too much.

‘At least it’s not spiders,’ Lesley had said appeasingly to her husband once she was out of earshot.

The beetle passion eventually faded like its precursors, but Ruby would never consider selling any of her acquisitions or even allowing them to be stored up in the loft. Almost everything, including the shoeboxes full of autographs, was in this room.

Lesley kept her eyes averted now from the case containing a single enormous conker-brown insect that looked like a giant cockroach. There was hardly room to place her feet among the boxes and cartons, the scribbled drawings and pages torn from magazines, discarded clothes and spilt tubes of make-up. It was impossible to tell what, if anything, Ruby had taken with her. She stepped gingerly across the floor and sat down on the rucked-up bed. She placed her hand in the hollow of the pillow, but no warmth lingered there.

Every corner of the room, every shelf and cupboard and drawer, spilled hoarded belongings. Nothing was in any order. The collecting seemed to have little to do with quality, only quantity. To having and holding, Lesley guessed, maybe as a way of shoring up a world that might otherwise crumble. But for all the random, chaotic and overwhelming material clutter, the impression that it now held was of emptiness.

Ruby had gone.

Lesley placed her feet together and rested her hands in her lap as if to offer up her own composure in response to the room’s disorder.

Ruby hadn’t gone like her contemporaries were going, on well-planned gap year travels to Asia and South America or amid clouds of A-level glory to good universities. Not mutinous, truanting, dyslexic and serially expelled Ruby. She hadn’t passed any exams, or spent a summer raising money to fund a year’s work with children in Nepal or wildlife in Namibia. Ruby had left the family house in Kent to lodge with Andrew’s brother and his family in central London, supposedly while she was attending sixth-form college. But college hadn’t lasted long and in Camden Town, Ruby had spent her days hanging out with new friends that none of the Ellises approved of. Then, just recently, she had abruptly moved back home again. She passed long hours closeted in her room and when she emerged she spoke only when spoken to. Andrew chivvied her for decisions about a career. Making a contribution to the world, as he called it.

Ruby had lifted her black-painted eyes and stared at him as if he belonged to a species she didn’t recognise.

Nothing could have enraged him more.

And now, she had simply removed herself altogether. The absence of Ruby swelled to fill her bedroom and bled outwards, hollowing the comfortable house.

‘I love you,’ her mother said to the motionless, smelly air.

Tenderness and longing sprang from the marrow in her bones. The feeling was turbulent, baffled, nothing like the calm, sturdy love she had for Edward, or her regularly thwarted affection for Andrew.

Her love for Ruby was the deepest passion in Lesley’s life.

The silence deepened. There was no ready explanation to be found, in this room or anywhere else, for what had gone wrong with her daughter. Or with me, Lesley added meticulously. It wasn’t that she blamed Ruby for being difficult. She took all the responsibility for that on herself, which further irritated Andrew. In their late-night conversations or in the car on the way to deal with another of Ruby’s situations she had asked the same questions over and over: what have I done wrong? Have I been a bad mother?

‘You have lacked a role model,’ Andrew tended to say.

One thing did strike her with peculiar certainty now: this time the departure was final. Wherever she had gone, by her own choice or – please, let it not be that – under compulsion, Ruby wouldn’t be coming back.

Lesley bent her head. She examined her knees in their second skin of smooth nylon mesh. She picked at a loose thread in the grosgrain hem of her skirt and, to her shame even though there was no one to see, tears suddenly ran out of her eyes and dripped on the fabric.

Ruby opened her eyes.

White light poured in through the arched window, filling the bare room until the air seemed almost solid with floating particles of dust. It wasn’t the sunshine that had woken her, however, but a burst of chanting. The words were incomprehensible, delivered in a rich sing-song voice distorted by heavy amplification. She pushed back the sheet and scrambled to look outside. Her eyes widened in amazement.

In the street below, rows of men were kneeling on mats laid over the cobbles, with their foreheads pressed to the ground. They made a patient sea of white- and grey-clad fish backs, the soles of their feet turned innocently upwards like so many pairs of fins.

The city was stilled. Ruby rested her own forehead against the thick greenish glass and tried to hear the prayers.

A few minutes later a wave broke across the sea as the men kneeled upright and then stood up. The mats were casually whisked away and movement flowed back into the street again. Two little boys chased each other up some steps and scuttled through a doorway. A handcart loaded with fruit trundled past, pushed by two men. Realising that she was hungry, Ruby reluctantly turned from the inviting view.

The house was so quiet. The stone walls must be very thick, she thought, as she wandered along the outside corridor. She couldn’t remember which way Auntie had brought her last night and the layout of interconnecting rooms was confusing. Here was a broader corridor with seats facing a carved screen with little hinged trapdoors in it. She peered casually through one of the propped-up hatches and was surprised by the grand double-height space it overlooked. This big hall was almost unfurnished except for a long table and some high-backed chairs pushed against the walls. At the far end was a low dais backed by a wall painting of entwined flowers and fruit and exotic foliage. Huge lamps of iron and glass were suspended on chains from the arched roof. It would be a pretty good space for a party, she reflected. If you half closed your eyes as you peered through the screen you could see the whirling dancers and hear the beat of the drums.

After another full circuit of the gallery Ruby opened a low door and found a staircase. She ran down the steps and peered into the big room from this lower level. From down here the gallery was completely concealed.

She suddenly sensed that there was someone behind her. Whirling round, she came face to top of head with Auntie.

‘Hello,’ Ruby said brightly.

Auntie peered up at her. ‘Sabah il-kheer,’ she murmured. Her face was like a walnut. She didn’t smile, but there were quite kindly-looking creases at the corners of her eyes and mouth.

‘I’m looking for my grandmother.’

‘Mum-reese,’ Auntie agreed, nodding. She indicated with a small hand movement that Ruby should follow her.

The house wasn’t really as big as it appeared. Just a few steps round a corner brought another surprise.

Ruby said, ‘Oh. It’s lovely.’

At the heart of the old house was a little open courtyard. It was enclosed by terracotta walls pierced by simple rounded arches faced with grass-green and turquoise glazed tiles. In the four corners were big square tubs of trailing greenery and to one side a waterspout splashed into a green glazed bowl. The trickle of water was loud in the small space. A lemon-sharp slice of sunlight obliquely bisected the courtyard and in the shady portion was a padded chair. Iris was sitting there watching her. Her thin grey hair was held up with a pair of combs and she was wearing an elegant silk robe with a faint pearly stripe. She appeared less tired than she had done the night before. But she also looked displeased.

Ruby considered. She wanted to find a way to stay, not just because to come here at all had been a last resort and she had no intention of being sent back home, but because it was so intriguing. Therefore she must say something appropriate, find a way to ingratiate herself. A shadow of a thought passed through her head – an acknowledgement that she was quite out of practice at making herself agreeable. She didn’t even know what to call this disconcerting old lady. She was way too unfamiliar and beady for ‘Granny’, which was how Lesley referred to her at home. Not that Ruby’s mother talked about her own mother very often.

‘Hi,’ she said in the end, shuffling her feet.

Mamdooh had to remind me when he brought my morning tea that we have a visitor. The night was a long one, and it was after dawn when I finally slept. And then, dreams.

Now here is the girl. She wears peculiar, ugly clothes. Are they the same ones as last night? A pair of dusty black trousers, safety-pinned in the front across her plump belly. The legs billow out from the knee like sails, and they are so long that they drag on the ground. The hems are all dusty and torn. When she takes a step I see that her huge shoes have soles four inches thick, so she isn’t quite as tall as she seems. On the top half, or third because the garment is so shrunken that it exposes six inches of white midriff, is a little grey thing with some black motif on the front. She has so many silvery rings on her fingers that they reach up to her knuckles, more rings in her ears, one in her nose, and a silver stud pierces her top lip. She hasn’t washed this morning, there is black stuff smudged round her eyes. Her face is round, pale as the moon, and innocent.

She slouches forward and utters some monosyllable I can’t hear.

Why is she here?

I search the layers, broken layers, of memory. Piecing together.

Lesley’s daughter.

‘Don’t you have any proper clothes?’

She sticks her chin out at me.

‘These are proper.’

‘They are not decent.’

Her eyes meet mine. She scowls, then thinks better of it. Her metal-cased fingers pluck at the bottom of the vest garment.

‘Too short?’

I am already tired of this exchange. There is a white shawl across the arm of my chair and I hold it out to her. She shakes out the folds and twirls it like a matador’s cape, and I am struck by the grace of the sudden movement and, yes, the happy exuberance of it. It’s pretty to see. Then she seems to remember herself. She knots my shawl awkwardly over her breasts so it veils her stomach.

‘Sit down.’

Obediently, she perches on a wooden stool and leans forward.

‘Y’know, I don’t know what to call you. You’re my grandmother and everything, but it doesn’t seem right to say Granny. D’you know what I mean?’

It hardly matters what she calls me. It’s a long time since I have been anything except Mum-reese or Doctor Black. ‘My name is Iris.’

‘Is that what you want me to say?’

I rest my head on the cushions and close my eyes.

After a minute, maybe more, she murmurs, ‘Iris?’

The line of sunlight is creeping towards us. I rouse myself again.

‘Have you told your mother where you are? You’ll have to go back home right away. You do realise that, don’t you? It’s very inconvenient, this … this appearance in my house. You must telephone her at once, tell her where you are, and say I told you, to …’

A shadow crosses the child’s face.

‘Yeah. I know, I know. Thing is …’ she half stands and rummages under the shawl in the tight pocket of her trousers. She produces a small silvery object. ‘My mobile doesn’t work out here.’

‘Is that a telephone? You can use the one here, I suppose. It’s through there. Mamdooh will show you.’

‘Right. OK. Um … I’m really hungry, though. Is there something to eat, maybe, before I call home and tell them everything’s cool?’

‘Auntie is bringing it.’

Auntie and Mamdooh arrive together. Auntie’s quite lively with curiosity now but Mamdooh is offended, I can see from the way he puts down the tray with exaggerated care and doesn’t look at the girl. It doesn’t matter. She’ll be going back where she came from, maybe not today but certainly tomorrow. What was her name?

It comes back to me surprisingly easily. Ruby.

Ruby’s eyes lit up at the sight of breakfast. She was very hungry indeed, and here was a bowl of fat purple figs and – lifting a little beaded cloth that covered a bowl – thick creamy yoghurt. There was a basket of coarse bread, a glass dish of honey and a plate of crumbly, sticky little cakes. There was also a battered silver pot, a tiny wisp of steam rising from the spout.

‘Thank you, Mamdooh. Thank you, Auntie,’ Iris said. ‘We’ll look after ourselves now.’

Ruby drew her stool closer.

‘Pour me some tea, please,’ Iris ordered. Ruby did as she was told and put the glass on the table beside her. The tea smelled of summertime.

‘Mm,’ Ruby said, after a long swallow. ‘That’s so good. What is it?’

‘Don’t you know? Mint tea.’

‘I like it. We don’t have it at home. Well, maybe Mum does. She drinks those herb tea things, but I shouldn’t think they’re like yours. Can I try some of this?’

Iris nodded. She watched as the girl spooned honey onto bread and ate, biting off thick chunks and chewing with strong white teeth. Honey dribbled down her chin and she wiped it off with her fingers before greedily licking them too. After the bread and honey she turned her attention to the figs.

‘How do you eat these?’

Iris showed her, slicing open the skin to reveal the velvet and seed-pearl interior. Ruby ate, her smudged eyes screwed up in a comical spasm of pleasure. She followed the figs with most of the bowl of yoghurt and then drank more tea.

‘Aren’t you going to eat anything?’ she asked.

‘I’ll have one of those.’ Iris pointed to the triangles of baklava. Ruby put the pastry on a plate, handling it as if it were burning hot so as to be seen to limit the contact from her own fingers, and set it next to Iris’s glass of tea. Then she stretched out her legs, sighing with satisfaction as she looked around the little courtyard.

‘It’s like another world. Well, it is another world, of course. Glorious Araby.’

‘What did you say?’

‘When? Oh, that. I dunno, it’s from a poem or something, isn’t it? Don’t ask me who wrote it or anything. I suppose I read it or heard it. Probably bloody Radio 4, it’s always on in our house. You know how some things you don’t try to remember, quite weird things like bits of poems or whatever, they just stay in your mind? And other things you’re supposed to remember, however hard you try it’s just like, phhhhht, and they’re gone? Stuff you’re supposed to learn for exams, mainly?’

‘If it matters, you will remember it. You have to hope for that.’

‘Depends on what you reckon matters.’ Ruby laughed, then caught sight of her grandmother’s face. It had fallen suddenly into lines of anguish and the powdery skin under her eyes looked damp with tears.

She bit her lip. ‘Did I say something wrong?’

Iris reached a hand inside the sleeve of her robe and brought out a handkerchief. She dried her eyes carefully and tucked the hanky away again.

‘I am becoming forgetful myself,’ she said. She made a little gesture with her hands, swimming them through the air and then closing them on nothing. It made Ruby think that memories were slippery, like fish.

‘That must be frightening, sometimes,’ she ventured.

‘It is.’

‘What can you do?’

Iris turned her head to look full at her. ‘Try to … try to capture what you can’t bear to be without.’

Ruby didn’t understand this but she nodded anyway. The sound of water splashing from the little spout filled the courtyard. The sun had crept closer and now the thin stream sparkled like a diamond necklace.

‘Well,’ Iris said in a different voice. ‘Have you had quite enough to eat?’

‘Maybe one more of these.’

She bit into another pastry. Sugary flakes stuck to her lips and she darted her tongue to retrieve them.

Mamdooh came through one of the arches and stooped beside Iris’s chair. It was time to move it further into the shade. As she watched him helping her grandmother and settling her again Ruby noticed he wore the same tender expression as last night, as if Iris were a little child.

While they were talking quietly together, Ruby stared up into the parallelogram of sapphire-blue sky. She could just see the tips of towers, topped with slim bulbs of stone and spikes bearing crescent moons. There was a whole city on the other side of these walls, the teeming place she had seen out of the taxi windows last night. Now that she had found her feet she was longing to explore it.

‘Mamdooh is going to the market now,’ Iris said.

Ruby leapt up so eagerly that her stool tipped over. ‘Can I go with him?’

Iris lifted her hand. ‘You will have to ask Mamdooh.’

‘Please may I come with you?’

He had round cheeks, rounded eyelids, full lips the colour of the breakfast figs, but his bald head was all speckled and his eyes were milky. His stomach made a sizeable mound under his long white robe. He didn’t look as old as Iris or Auntie, but he wasn’t young by any means. He looked Ruby up and down as she stood there with Iris’s shawl knotted round her midriff.

‘To the market, Miss?’ He sounded doubtful.

‘I’ll, um, put a cover-up shirt thing on? I’ve got one in my bag. I could help carry the shopping, couldn’t I?’

‘I do this for many years, thank you.’

‘I’d really like to come.’

Iris closed her eyes. ‘Show her the market, Mamdooh, please. She will be going home to England tomorrow.’

He bowed. ‘Of course.’

When she came downstairs again with a man’s shirt buttoned up over her vest, Mamdooh was waiting for her. He had a woven rush basket over his arm, and a faded red flowerpot hat set squarely on his head. A black tassel hung down towards his left eye. Ruby felt a giggle rising in her throat, but Mamdooh’s expression quelled it.

‘Is this OK?’ she meekly asked, indicating her cover-up.

His nod was barely perceptible.

‘If you are ready, Miss?’

They went out through the blue-painted door and the sun’s heat struck the top of Ruby’s head. She took the few steps to the corner and looked up at an ancient crenellated wall, a cluster of smaller domes surrounding the large one and the three slender towers.

‘What is this place?’ she called to Mamdooh who was making stately progress in the other direction.

‘It is the mosque of al-Azhar. We are going this way, please.’

‘It’s very old.’

‘Cairo is a place of history.’ The way he said it told Ruby that he was proud of his native city and his reverence made her want to know more of it. She quickened her pace to catch him up again, and they swung down a narrow street and out into a much broader, almost Western-looking one. Out here there was a roar of traffic and hooting and tinny amplified music, and they were caught in a slow tide of people before Mamdooh ducked down into a tiled modern subway not much different from the one beneath Oxford Circus. When they surfaced again Ruby blinked.

Mamdooh beckoned her. ‘Khan al-Khalili bazaar. Follow close to me, it is easy to be lost here.’

He was right. It would be the easiest thing in the world to lose yourself in this maze of tiny alleys leading away from the almost-familiarity of the main street. There were canvas awnings looped overhead, and in their welcome shade the brightness of the crammed-together shops and stalls was dazzling. The merchandise was piled up and hung in tiers so it seemed to drip stalactites of hectic colour. One shop was crammed with interesting-looking brass and ceramic hookahs, another niche was festooned with belly dancers’ costumes gaudy with nylon fringing and glass beads. Another little recess was shelved from top to bottom with hundreds of glass jars containing oils in all the shades of precious stones. Next door open-mouthed hessian sacks spilled ochre- and saffron- and pearl-coloured grains.

The footpaths between the stalls were choked with people and wooden carts and porters with boxes piled on their heads. There were men in Western clothes, and others in galabiyeh and tarboosh like Mamdooh. There were women robed in black from head to toe, others in trousers and sturdy blouses with just a scarf wound over their hair. Ruby was startled and slightly affronted to see that there were numbers of Western tourists, pink-faced and too tall, uncertain in response to the urgent demands of the stallholders. In Iris’s secluded house she had felt as if they were the only two of their kind in the whole of Cairo.

The shopkeepers competed for Ruby’s attention as she went by.

‘Lady, look-see. Just looking, no charge. Very good prices.’

Urchins plucked at her shirt, holding up novelty lighters and boxes of tissues and bottles of water. Even in the shade it was hot, and the air felt saturated with moisture. Her shirt was soon sticking to her back and thick hanks of hair plastered themselves to her forehead and the nape of her neck. There was a continuous ssss-ssss of warning at her back as porters and carters hauled and pushed their loads into the depths of the bazaar.

She followed Mamdooh’s bobbing tarboosh, realising that if she lost sight of him she had no idea which way to turn. A memory came back to her of being a small child, shopping with Lesley in a department store. She had lost herself in a forest of legs and bulging bags, and she fought her way between them, stumbling forward and then back again, a wail of panic and outrage forming in her throat. Big faces had bloomed over her head, and hands reached out to catch her as she screamed and screamed. It could only have been a minute or two before Lesley found her, but it had seemed like hours. She resisted the impulse now to catch and hold tight onto Mamdooh’s white skirts.

An even smaller capillary led away from the alley of shops, this one enclosed by rickety houses with overhanging upper storeys that reduced the visible sky to a thin strip. There were wooden benches lining the house walls, all heaped high with vegetables and fruit. One stall was a mound of figs with skin as smooth and matte as the softest kid leather, another was a tangle of bitter-looking green leaves. Mamdooh stopped, planting his legs apart and surveying the merchandise.

Stallholders surrounded him at once, thrusting up polished aubergines and bunches of white onions for his attention. Some of the offerings he waved away, others he condescended to pinch or to sniff at. Once an item had received his approval, there was a convoluted exchange obviously relating to the price. Finally, at length and with ceremony, a purchase was wrapped in a twist of paper in exchange for some coins and Mamdooh stowed it in his straw basket before moving a couple of paces onwards.

Ruby had never seen shopping taken as seriously as this. She found a space against a dusty wall and watched in fascination.

Mamdooh glanced back once or twice to check on her. When he realised that she wasn’t going to interrupt him, or wander off and cause trouble, he gave her a small nod of approval. And then, when his shopping was complete he tilted his head to indicate that she was to follow him. At the corner he spoke to an old man sitting on a stool beside a couple of rough sacks. Another coin changed hands and now Mamdooh passed the twist of paper straight to Ruby. She bit into a sweet, creamy white nut kernel.

Mamdooh treated her just as if she were a kid, she thought. It was quite annoying, but at the same time – well, it was restful, in a way.

They threaded their way back through the porters and tourists and stallholders and customers, a slow mass of hot humanity that made urgency impossible. Ruby tucked herself behind Mamdooh and watched the faces as they bobbed towards her and were borne past.

Slanting sunlight just ahead revealed an open square. There were walls of sepia-coloured stone, the dust-coated leaves of rubber trees casting patches of shade on broken pavements, and a pair of faded sun umbrellas rooted in pillars of concrete. At two tin tables, bare except for ashtrays and a folded newspaper, sat a handful of old men.

They raised their hands or mumbled greetings to Mamdooh, who responded with two or three brief words. Several pairs of eyes, red-rimmed or milky, turned towards Ruby.

She understood the situation at once. Mamdooh came out to do the household’s shopping, then retired to this café or whatever it was for an hour’s talk with his friends, and her presence was an impediment to this pleasant interval in his day. She lifted her hands and raised her shoulders in apology as Mamdooh prepared to move on.

She said hastily, ‘I can find my way back, you know, if you want to stay with your friends for a bit. I found my way last night, didn’t I?’ She remembered Nafouz and his taxi.

Mamdooh looked genuinely shocked at this suggestion.

‘That would not be at all right, Miss. We will be going home at once. Mum-reese will look for you, perhaps.’

The perhaps, and the pinch of the lips that went with it, betrayed more hope than conviction, but Ruby knew there was nothing more to be said about going back by herself. Farewells were exchanged with the old men and Mamdooh sailed across the square. But now, Ruby sensed, she was walking with him rather than in his wake. The impression was confirmed when he remarked in a conversational voice, ‘Market, very old also.’

‘How old?’

‘Seven hundred year.’

‘Ha. Just think of all the buying of things.’ Centuries, Ruby thought, of leather and herbs and perfume and figs. The notion made her shiver a little.

‘Selling,’ Mamdooh corrected her. He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. ‘Selling, very important.’

They both laughed at that. Mamdooh’s shoulders shook and his head tipped back, but his tarboosh didn’t fall off.

They came to the wide street from a completely unexpected direction and ducked through the stream of buses and cars. They were walking companionably towards Iris’s house when an extra-loud volley of hooting caught their attention. There was a black-and-white taxi parked where the alley finally became impassable to cars. The faded blue of the door was just behind it.

‘Lady, lady! We look for you!’ a voice shouted.

Nafouz was leaning out of the driver’s window and banging with his fist on the car door.

Mamdooh moved fast for a man of his bulk. He streaked across to the taxi and shouted at Nafouz, flapping his big hand towards the open end of the alley. From the passenger side of the car another young man climbed out and hung on the lintel. He looked like Nafouz, but a little younger. He was grinning and shouting back at Mamdooh, thumping on the car roof, clearly enjoying the scene. Two or three small children gathered to stare.

Nafouz slid out of the car. He appealed direct to Ruby. ‘We are friends, yes? I bring you, last night.’

‘No.’

‘Lady?’ Nafouz’s eyes were wide, hurt pools.

‘Yes, I mean, you drove me from the airport. That doesn’t make us friends, does it?’ She had kicked him, for one thing.

Nafouz turned away to burrow inside the car. Ruby looked at the other young man. He had the same slicked-back hair as Nafouz and a similar white shirt, but cleaner. He smiled at her.

‘I come all the way, bring this for you.’ Nafouz had re-emerged. He was holding out a CD case with a hand-coloured insert, a pattern of swirls and tendrils in red paint and black ink. Ruby looked at it. Her name was spelled out among the tendrils. Jas had painted the insert, and he had burned the CD inside it for her. It was one of his own mixes, just about the last thing he had made for her before … Before he …

She held out her hand. The CD must have fallen out of her bag as she scrambled into or out of the taxi. She would have been sad to lose it.

‘It’s only a thing, baby,’ Jas would have said. ‘Things don’t matter, people do.’

But she had so little of him.

‘Right. Well, thanks,’ she muttered.

She was about to take the case but Nafouz drew his hand back, teasing her. Her fingers closed on thin air, but Mamdooh was quicker. The case was tweaked out of Nafouz’s grasp and slipped into the deep pocket in the seam of Mamdooh’s galabiyeh.

There was a sharp exchange of words before Mamdooh turned back to Ruby. ‘If you like, Miss, you give him a little money. But it is not if you do not want.’

Ruby looked at the two young men and they stared back at her. An awkward flush of colour crept up her face as she felt the space of cobbled alleyway widen between them. She wished she hadn’t denied being Nafouz’s friend; she would have much preferred to be that now rather than the possessor or otherwise of a few Egyptian pounds.

‘How much?’ she muttered, in shame.

Nafouz was equal to the moment. ‘Twenty bounds,’ he said brightly.

Mamdooh clicked his tongue but Ruby rummaged under her shirt for her purse as the two young men watched with interest. She took out a note and Nafouz whisked it away. He winked at her.

‘You take a tour? I show you Cairo. Special Cairo, my brother and me. Not tourist places. Real city.’

Ruby hesitated. She would have loved to pile into the taxi and go cruising through the streets with them. She could smell cigarettes and the plastic seats of the car, and feel the hot diesel-scented air blowing in through the windows.

Mamdooh had already mounted the steps and produced a key for the blue door.

‘Another time, maybe,’ she said lamely. There were priorities, other matters she had to deal with first.

The younger brother came round to Nafouz’s side of the car.

‘I am Ashraf.’

‘Hi.’

The door was open, Mamdooh was waiting with the basket of vegetables at his side. The brothers were waiting too.

‘My name’s Ruby.’

Their faces split into identical white smiles. ‘Nice name.’

‘I’ve got to go now. But I’d like to take a tour, yeah. Have you got a …’ She made a scribble movement in the air for a pen, but Nafouz dismissed it.

‘We find you.’

‘Miss?’ Mamdooh said, holding the door open wide. His forehead was serrated with disapproval once more.

‘See you, then.’

Ruby marched up the steps. The taxi noisily reversed down the street in a cloud of acrid fumes.

In the cool hallway Mamdooh blocked her way. ‘It is important to have some care, Miss. You are young, in this city there are not always good people. Not all people are bad, you must understand, it is just important that you make no risks. Do you understand what it is I am saying to you?’

He was treating her like a child. In London, Ruby did what she wanted. Lesley and Andrew didn’t know what that involved, nor did Will and Fiona who were Andrew’s brother and his wife. She was supposed to be their lodger, but – well, after a while they had given up on telling her what to do and what not to do. That was because of Will. Even though Fiona didn’t know about him, the three of them had ended up in this kind of silent contract, where nobody saw anything or said anything in case it led to somebody seeing and saying everything. That was how Ruby summed it up for herself, at least.

And there had been some bad interludes. Ruby had seen and once or twice done things that she didn’t like to remember. The memories came back anyway, in the night, and they made her sweat and feel sick. The memories had a way of changing and speeding up so that they were like horror films of what might have happened to her. Her skin crawled, and she would twist and turn under the covers to try to make them stop and go away. She even wished for Lesley to come and tell her it was all right and she was safe.

But usually in the end she fell asleep somehow, or the daylight would come and she’d wonder what she had been so afraid of. The important thing to remember was that she had survived. Going back to people’s places when she shouldn’t have done. Doing too much stuff, or just drinking. Not knowing where she was or where she had been. Feeling like nothing, less than nothing. But that happened to plenty of people, didn’t it? Not just her.

Luck or cunning, Jas had said. That’s what you need to survive, in this day and age. It was important to have both. She could just hear his words, see him breathing out a snaky ring of blue smoke as he spoke.

So Ruby was sure she understood exactly what Mamdooh was saying and was certain that she could deal with whatever might happen to her here. She was impressed by her own cunning and her luck wouldn’t desert her.

‘Yes,’ she said stonily. She stood and faced him, giving no ground.

Mamdooh tucked the handles of the basket over his arm.

‘Mum-reese resting now. Later, she will speak to you.’

And order her home. Ruby knew what he meant her to hear, but she gave no sign of it.

Left to herself, she wandered through the house.

It was less opulent than it had looked in last night’s incense-scented darkness, and even more neglected. The great lamps that hung from the vaulted roofs were thickly furred with dust, and more dust lay on the stairs and on the broad sills of the windows. Cobwebs spanned the dim corners. The rooms were barely furnished with odd, unmatching chairs and tables that looked as if they had been brought in by an incoming tide and just left where they landed. There were no books, ornaments, or photographs – none of the cosy decorator’s clutter that Lesley arranged in her own house and those of her clients. There was nothing, Ruby realised, that told any stories of Iris’s past. Nothing accumulated, even after such a long life. She was quite curious to know why.

This morning, Iris had told her that she was becoming forgetful. She had made a swimming movement with her old hands, as if she were trying to catch fish. And there had been tears in her eyes.

Didn’t framed photographs and bits of china and books help you to recollect?

Ruby frowned, trailing her finger through the grey film on a wooden chest and recalling her grandmother’s words. She had said something about capturing what you can’t bear to be without. It was the word capture that resonated.

When she was small, Ruby distanced herself, she had felt all wrong. She couldn’t read and write as well as girls in her class, and she was endlessly in trouble. A way of making sense out of her confusion had been to collect and keep things. By piling them up in her room she could make herself bigger than they were, so even if what she collected represented only a strand, a tiny filament of the world’s appalling abundance, it had still seemed to offer a measure of control. But shells and beetles were inanimate. In that, in the end, collecting had disappointed her because the world was so swarming, inchoate and threateningly living, and it had bulged and gibbered and danced outside her bedroom window, making her boxes of beetles seem nothing more than childish detritus.

‘Growing up is so very hard to do.’ Jas had yawned when they talked about this.

But if you wanted to capture memories that threatened to swim away like fish? How would you do that?

An idea came to Ruby. It was a very neat, simple and pleasing idea that would solve her problem and at the same time be valuable to her grandmother. It was the perfect solution and she was so taken with its economy that she ran up the nearest of the house’s two flights of stairs towards the door that she had worked out must be Iris’s. She hovered outside for a moment, with her ear against one of the dark panels.

Then she tapped, very gently. When there was no answer she rapped more loudly.

‘Auntie? Mamdooh?’ Iris’s voice answered.

‘It’s me. Ruby.’

There was a long silence. Then the voice, sounding much smaller, said, ‘You had better come in.’

She was sitting in the same low chair as last night. There were pillows behind her head, a rug over her knees. Ruby read bewilderment in her face.

She stooped down beside the chair and put her hand over Iris’s thin, dry one.

‘Am I disturbing you?’

‘No.’

‘I went shopping with Mamdooh. I think I got in the way of his routine, but it was really interesting. He told me there’s been a market there for seven hundred years.’

‘Yes.’

The monosyllable came out on a long breath. Iris was obviously almost too tired to speak and her fragility gave Ruby a hot, unwieldy feeling that she could only just identify as protectiveness. She wanted to scoop up her grandmother and hold her in her arms. But even as she chased this thought to its logical conclusion – Iris would not appreciate being handled like a rag doll – the old woman seemed to summon up some surprising inner strength. She hoisted herself upright against the cushions and fixed Ruby with a glare.

‘Have you spoken on the telephone to my daughter?’

Ruby quailed at this sudden direct challenge. ‘Um, no.’

‘You are disobedient.’

‘I didn’t say I was definitely …’

‘Why have you not done so?’

There was now the opportunity to make up some excuse, or to try a version of the truth. Ruby understood already that it would be advisable to aim for the truth, at least where her grandmother was concerned. She withdrew her hand and took a breath. ‘It’s really because I don’t want to go home. I was hoping you wouldn’t make me.’

Iris studied her. Her gaze was very sharp now, all the weariness and confusion seemed to have evaporated. ‘Why is that?’

‘It’s quite a long story. If I could stay here with you for a while, I could maybe tell you …’

‘That is not possible.’

Ruby bent her head. The sonorous, amplified chanting that had woken her this morning suddenly filled the room again. ‘What is that?’

‘The call to prayer.’

‘Oh. All right, I’ll ring Mum and tell her where I am and there’ll be a mega fuss and outcry, and I’ll go home. But if I could stay here, just for a few days or so, not a lifetime or a year or anything, then maybe I could help you.’

There was again the steady gaze. ‘This morning, with my shawl. You did a little … almost a dance. I liked that.’ Iris smiled at the remembered image. ‘Did I?’

‘How do you think you can help me?’

Now it was Ruby who made a small unconscious gesture with her hands, as if trying to catch darting fish. ‘You told me you are sometimes forgetful.’

‘Yes. So?’ Sharply.

‘I walked round the house this afternoon, and you don’t seem to have any belongings, the kind that help you to remember the past.’

‘I have lived a long life, in different places. Most of them primitive. I have learned that so many material possessions are just that, material.’

She was saying almost the same as Jas; it’s just stuff, baby. There were connections here, twining around herself and Iris and the old house and even Mamdooh, and Nafouz and his brother, and the old men in the café. Ruby wanted to stay, more than she had wanted anything in a long time.

‘Go on.’

‘I thought, I wondered, if you told me what you want to … to capture, maybe I could be the keeper of it for you. I could be the collector of your memories. I could write them down, even. I could be your am … what’s the word?’

‘Amanuensis.’

Ruby’s pale face had been animated, but now a heavy mask descended. She turned her head and looked out of the corner of her eyes. Iris hadn’t seen her look sullen before.

‘Not that, maybe. I’m dyslexic, you know. Bit of a drawback.’

‘Are you?’

‘It’s not the same as being thick. But sometimes it might as well be. To all intents and purposes.’

‘Thank you for making that clear. You don’t seem thick to me.’

‘But maybe we could tape-record you? Like an oral history project. We did one at school, with the old ladies from the drop-in centre, about the Blitz.’

Iris laughed at that. Her hands loosened in her lap, her face lost its taut lines and her eyes shone. Ruby suddenly saw a young girl in her, and she beamed back, pleased with the effect her company was having.

‘How useful to have previous experience.’

‘I didn’t mean to compare you.’

‘Why not? I remember the Blitz. The beginning of it, anyway. Then I came out here, to Cairo, to work.’

‘Did you? How come?’

‘That’s the beginning of another long story.’

They looked at each other then, as the last notes of the muezzin crackled and died away.

It was Iris who finally broke the silence: ‘Go and talk to your mother. You may use my telephone, in the room through there. And when you have finished I will speak to her myself.’

Ruby stood up and went through the interconnecting door to Iris’s bedroom. It was very bare, containing nothing more than a bed swathed in white curtains and a couple of wooden chests. A telephone stood on the table on one side of the bed, and on the other there actually was a framed photograph of a man and a woman. Managing not to stare at it, she walked deliberately round to the opposite side and picked up the receiver. After two or three attempts, she was listening to her mother’s mobile ringing.

Lesley answered immediately, of course.

‘Ruby? Ruby, are you all right? Thank God you’ve called. Tell me, what’s happened? Where are you?’

Ruby spoke, briefly.

Her mother’s voice rose. ‘You are where?’

She closed her eyes.