Читать книгу Rosie Thomas 2-Book Collection One: Iris and Ruby, Constance - Rosie Thomas - Страница 16

In the restaurant, waiting for Sebastian, Lesley ranged her cutlery so that the pieces lay perfectly parallel and with the tails exactly half an inch from the table edge. The napkin’s white cone stood in the centre of the rectangle created by the knife and fork, and the autumn sun striking through the plate-glass window was reflected in a starry prism from the blade of her knife.

‘Don’t play with your knife and fork.’

Lesley had been thinking of Iris and the voice in her head was hers. Her mother had been strict about table manners; suddenly Lesley felt her as close as if she were sitting in the opposite chair. Then she looked up and saw her ex-husband. He came across the restaurant, jacket flapping and a scarf trailing, arms out as if to catch the wind.

‘Lesley, hello, hello. Am I late? You’re looking fabulous.’

‘Am I? Thank you.’

Sebastian aimed a kiss at her cheek before taking his seat opposite her, allowing a waiter to retrieve his scarf and carry off his battered leather briefcase, which was the size of a small suitcase.

‘Have you been here long? It’s one, oh God, twenty past. The bloody phone rang just as I was walking out of the door. An author having a crise. I had to deal with it.’

‘It’s all right.’

He leaned forward and put his hands over hers. The table rocked slightly.

‘Good. That’s good. Here we are, then.’

She slid her hands away and replaced them in her lap. Sebastian glanced around the room, checking to see if he knew anyone.

‘Look at this old place. It’s changed a bit since our time, eh?’

When they had first met each other, a year or more before they were married, Sebastian Sawyer used to bring her here for dinner. The restaurant was round the corner from his flat and he had been a regular, with whoever the current girlfriend happened to be. In those days it had been a checked-tablecloth French bistro, with the menu chalked up on a blackboard, and she had hardly noticed anything because she was in love with him. Now it was all blond wood and brown suede. Off-the-shelf restaurant design, Lesley noted critically, professionally.

‘You’re frowning.’

‘What?’

‘Is something wrong?’ Sebastian asked.

‘No, nothing. Well, except that I’m worried about Ruby, of course. You know that. It’s why I wanted us to have this lunch together. You are her father, and …’

He held up his hand. ‘Don’t worry. We’re going to have a good long talk. Let’s order first, shall we?’

Lesley picked two things off the menu at random. Sebastian asked the waiter where the beef was from and peered for long moments at the wine list. At last he folded away his reading glasses, took a mouthful of wine when it arrived and appeared to be chewing on it, then leaned back with a rich sigh.

‘Now then,’ he said encouragingly. ‘Ruby.’

‘Have you talked to her?’

‘As a matter of fact I have. Since you and I were going to meet today, I gave our daughter a call last night.’ Sebastian twinkled at her. As a senior publisher with a large staff of young, attractive women, the twinkle was a well-used weapon in his armoury. ‘I couldn’t get her mobile, of course, so I tried the number you gave me and lo and behold, my ex-mother-in-law answered.’

‘What did she say?’

‘To be perfectly honest, I don’t think she had a clue who I was.’

Lesley made a quick reckoning. Sebastian and Iris had met only a handful of times. Iris had come home from Africa for the wedding, and during the eight years before Ruby was born there had been maybe four or five other encounters. Iris came to London again soon after Ruby arrived, she was sure of that; there was a photograph of her holding the new baby and gazing unsmilingly into the camera lens.

Family life hadn’t really suited Sebastian. When Ruby was three, he left home and moved in with a youngish novelist with a growing literary reputation. There had been a succession of other women since then, getting younger and younger. Ruby had resented this. ‘This one’s not much older than me. It’s pathetic, that’s what it is.’

So far, Ruby was his only child. ‘Doesn’t need to have kids, does he? He just goes out with them,’ she sneered.

‘Iris’s memory isn’t good,’ Lesley said now.

‘Anyway, I asked to speak to Ruby and she came on the line.’

Their starters were placed in front of them and Sebastian immediately broke off and dug a fork into his. Lesley looked out of the window at the crowds of shoppers and the buses trundling like giant logs in a slow current. It was odd to be sitting across the table from a plump, routinely genial stranger who had once been her husband. A man with whom she had had a child. But then she quite often looked up and saw Andrew and he seemed to be no less of a stranger, and they were also joint parents and she was still married to him. Much of her life, it seemed to Lesley, now had a flimsy, two-dimensional quality to it, as if you might walk round to take a look behind the painted flats and see another world altogether.

The only real, solid, unshakeable constant was her love for Ruby. She loved Ed too, of course, but Ed was entirely knowable. He did what he was supposed to do and took pleasure in that, like his father.

But Ruby …

Lesley ached with longing for her missing daughter. Her shoulders bowed, curving inwards on the dart of pain that pierced her ribcage.

She had to hold on to the leg of the table to stop herself flying out of her seat and rushing to Heathrow for the first plane to Cairo. The only thing that held her was the mental picture of herself arriving at Iris’s house, and the flat, baffled stares – one mirroring the other – that Ruby and Iris would give her.

She cleared her throat. ‘Er, how did she seem?’

Sebastian put down his fork, dabbed his mouth with his napkin. ‘She seemed perfectly fine.’

Lesley waited.

‘She shouldn’t have run off. She shouldn’t have worried you like that. But she did get herself all the way to Cairo. She’s going to museums, she said, seeing the sights. She’s made friends with some people of her own age, they’re showing her the city. What’s the real problem with that? She’s with her …’ Even unctuous Sebastian couldn’t quite bring himself to say Granny, where Iris was concerned. ‘… With your mother.’

And there you have it, Lesley thought.

My mother, my daughter.

I don’t think my mother ever loved me, otherwise she wouldn’t have left my father and me.

I love Ruby more than anything and she doesn’t want my love. It chafes her, just like when she was a little girl and I took her to have her hair cut. The tiny ends of her hair worked their way inside her vest and itched and itched. Even though I undressed her and gave her fresh clothes, the memory of the itching still made her scream. I am the cut hairs, for Ruby. Part of her but not part of her, and an irritation.

Iris and Ruby.

Motherhood, or actually the denial of it, is the thread that connects all three of us. I wanted to spin a better, finer filament for Ruby and me, a gossamer link that wouldn’t drag between us and trip us up the way that Iris’s and mine always has done. But all I seem to have created is a different kind of unwelcome tie.

Or look at it another way: perhaps we are like the same poles of a magnet, Ruby and me and Iris and me, always driven apart. And by the same analogy Ruby and Iris have leapt together, irresistibly attracted.

Lesley was familiar with all the images of repelling and chafing and restraining. She had no need to ask herself what an analyst would make of them, she already knew the answer. Over and over again, whichever way she entered the circle, everything led back to Iris.

Rejection has become my pattern, my expectation. Sebastian and Ruby have made their own flamboyant rejections. Andrew and even Ed, in their invisible and within-bounds way, make their own smaller gestures.

‘What is the problem?’ Sebastian asked. He was looking hard at her.

Despair rose in Lesley. The food she was trying to chew turned to a thick paste on her tongue.

What was to be done? Leave Andrew, dismember their son’s life, because her husband preferred his work and his boat and his yachting magazines to her company?

What was there to do, except go on living and working and being grateful for all the benefits in her life?

‘Lesley?’

She forced herself to swallow and then took a deep breath. She wanted to cry, but that was impossible.

‘I miss her,’ she said. It was only the thinnest, icy sliver of the vast glacier of truth, but she was offering it to Sebastian.

He leaned back in his chair and let out a laugh.

‘Les, poor old Les. Of course you miss her. It’s what happens, it’s perfectly natural. We have kids, we give them everything we can, just to enable them to grow up and not to need us anymore. It’s harsh, but it’s the way it goes. Isn’t it the same for all your friends? Would you rather Ruby was some dependent little creature who didn’t want to take a step away from us?’

Lesley lifted her eyes. What did he know? She saw Sebastian’s plump, well-fed face through a fog of rage. It was as if all the capillaries suddenly burst inside her skull, flooding her brain with black blood and madness.

She picked up the knife from her plate. With a single swoop of her arm she lunged across the table and with all the weight of her body behind it she stabbed the point of the blade deep into her ex-husband’s left eye.

Then she blinked and looked again. The knife still lay on her plate, Sebastian was still smiling broadly at her. Her hands shook.

When she finally spoke, her voice came out as a croak.

‘We? Us?’

Sebastian’s smile moderated, crimping inwards into a rueful, amused moue of roguish culpability.

‘I know. Of course. You’re quite right. I haven’t been much of a dad to her. I said so, you know, on the phone, and we promised each other that when she’s back in England we’ll spend some more time together. I’ve got to make a trip to New York before Christmas, seeing a couple of my opposite numbers over there. Maybe Ruby could come with me. She’ll have to amuse herself a bit during the day because I’ll have meetings, but she’s proved that she’s old enough to do that.’

Taken with this idea, Sebastian hooked his arm over the back of his chair and regarded his ex-wife.

She was broadening a little in the hips and her hair looked as if it was discreetly coloured to blot out the grey, but she was well-dressed and her jewellery was subtle but expensive. She looked exactly what she was, a prosperous wife and mother with her own business, who had driven up to London from the country to have lunch. With her ex-husband. She was a woman with a history.

‘What do you think?’

‘I think …’ Lesley began.

The blood still hammered in her head, and the knife lay on her plate. She jerked her eyes away from it and they settled on his glass of wine, just refilled by the waiter. She eased herself out of her seat and slid her thighs into the narrow space between their table and its neighbour. Then she bent down so her mouth was close to his ear.

‘I think you are a selfish, self-satisfied, pompous idiot. You are a pathetic father and you were a lousy husband. Fuck you.’

Then she snatched up the wineglass and tipped the contents into his lap.

Even as he exclaimed and rocked backwards with wine cascading between his legs, she was stalking away across the restaurant.

Waiters and napkins descended on Sebastian. He let them swab him down and as he was attended to he raised his eyes to the two men at the next table. They exchanged the briefest glances that said Women, and She always was a nightmare, before his neighbours discreetly resumed their conversation.

Lesley walked out into the street. She was disorientated; for a moment she couldn’t even remember where she was. She turned away, wanting to get as far from the restaurant and Sebastian as possible, and stumbled for several blocks before she realised that she was heading in the opposite direction from the car park. She stopped and made herself think, and slowly the familiar geography closed around her again. She retraced her steps, taking a parallel back street to avoid having to pass the plate-glass window of the restaurant. She was sure that Sebastian would still be sitting there, sluicing down the rest of the wine and enjoying his beef and the certainty of its provenance.

She reached the underground car park where she had left the car, and plunged into the reeking depths. Her heels clicked, pit-pat, on the gum-blotched floor.

When she was inside her car, and had made sure that the windows were closed and the central locking was activated, she lowered her head to rest on the steering wheel. She thought she would cry, here where there was no one to see her, but as she waited for the relief of tears she suddenly realised that she felt better.

The picture of Sebastian with the red arc of wine falling towards his lap came back to her. She could see his face quite clearly, transfigured with shock and disbelief. She hadn’t stayed around for long enough to catch the fury that would have followed, but that was quite easy to imagine.

Instead of crying she laughed. She lifted her head and stretched her arms as if she were just waking up from a long sleep.

She sat in the car park for a little while longer, reliving the scene in the restaurant. After that she repaired her makeup and drove home.

Ed was already back from school. He was sprawled in front of the television with a bowl of cereal balanced on his chest, milk dribbling from the spoon as he lifted it to his mouth. ‘Ed?’

‘Yeah, hi, Mum.’

‘Ed?’

‘Yeah?’

Lesley waited but his eyes didn’t move from the television screen.

‘How was your day?’ she asked.

‘OK,’ he answered at length. Another milky spoonful followed a sloppy trajectory towards his open mouth.

She crossed the room in two steps and snatched the bowl from his hand. An arc of white droplets sprayed through the air and spattered the cushions.

Ed sat upright and stared at her. ‘Mu-um,’ he complained.

‘Look at me when you talk to me.’

‘I am looking. What’s up?’

‘Don’t ignore me. I’m your mother. Don’t sit there gaping at the TV and dribbling food, just answer me. Maybe even ask me a question in return.’

‘What’s happened? Just calm down, Mum.’

Lesley had never struck either of her children. Now she was too angry to stop herself. She aimed a wild slap at the side of Edward’s head, the dish wobbling in her other hand and spilling more milk down her skirt and on the floor. The blow hardly connected but it made her fingertips tingle and burn. Ed gaped, his eyes and mouth forming three shocked circles. She turned off the television and silence seeped between them. Lesley’s throat felt as if it was full of sand.

‘Now. Pick up your things. Put them away where they belong. Then go upstairs and start your homework.’

He stood up and swept his coat and school bag off the table. Then he marched out of the room without looking at her.

She mopped up the puddles of milk, rinsed the bowl and put it in the dishwasher. In the household diary she read that Andrew would be out that evening at a dinner with clients, so that would mean a simple supper just for Ed and herself. She opened the freezer, took out a labelled plastic box of her own pasta sauce and left it on the draining board. Checking that there were bags of salad leaves in the chiller drawer of the refrigerator, she saw a bottle of Andrew’s good Sancerre. She lifted out the bottle, poured herself a full glass and took a long swig. Then, holding the chilled curve of the glass against her cheek, she walked out into the garden.

Late roses lingered on the bushes, the outer petals faintly bruised with the chill of autumn. It seemed to Lesley that everything she looked at, every leaf and twig, the stone bird bath and the diamonds of latticed trellis, had grown a bright, hard margin. There was an extra cold clarity to the world, each painfully intricate detail thrown into relief by her despair. A white butterfly settled on a furled spike of lavender, its powdery wings closing as the stalk shivered in the breeze.

A stronger gust of wind shook the bush and the butterfly was blown away.

Ruby and Iris sat in the garden, the trickle of the little fountain loud in the stillness. The late afternoons were now beginning to be touched with a chill as the sun faded. Iris’s feet were propped on a padded stool and Auntie had draped a thin blanket over her legs.

‘That was my dad on the phone,’ Ruby remarked.

They had fallen into one of the silences that Ruby now understood to be companionable, able to be broken if one or other of them had anything they wanted to say, or equally to be left to stretch into a long chain of minutes. At first she had felt uncomfortable and had tried to talk – about anything, any nonsense that came into her head – just to fill the vacuum. Then she had noticed that Iris didn’t hear anyway. Her eyes went absent.

Sometimes her head fell back and her mouth dropped open, and Ruby knew that she was asleep, but at other times she was awake and lost in herself.

Iris stirred. ‘Who?’

‘My dad. On the phone.’

‘When?’

Ruby was growing accustomed to this too. Now and again, Iris would forget something that had just happened. Mamdooh would carry in the tray of mint tea and Iris would drink hers and when he had taken the tray away she would say sharply, ‘Where’s Mamdooh with that tea?’

‘We’ve already had tea,’ Ruby would tell her. ‘Do you want some more?’

This time she said, ‘Just now. You spoke to him and then you called me to the phone.’

Iris’s mouth moved as if she was trying out the proper response, and the furrows radiating from her lips deepened as she found her place back in the present. ‘Oh yes.’

‘Mum must have been on to him. He never usually phones just for a chat. He’s more of a “not now, sweetheart” kind of a person, really.’

‘He’s not the one she’s married to now?’

‘No. That’s Andrew.’

Iris sighed. ‘I really cannot keep up with Lesley’s husbands. What’s the difference between them?’

Ruby started to laugh. The laughter took hold until she was coughing and shaking with it, and it infected Iris too. They wheezed and wiped their eyes and finally Iris sank back against her cushions. ‘Oh dear. Well, is there a difference?’

‘Yes. Totally. Sebastian, that’s my real dad, thinks he’s quite cool. He knows lots of well-known writers and people, and although he’s quite fat these days he wears sort of youthful clothing. Not quite bad enough to be embarrassing or anything, but always with a nod to what’s in, if you know what I mean?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Uh, wacky scarves. Logo T-shirts. Beanie in the winter. And in the week, designery suits and no tie.’

It was plain that Iris understood almost none of this, but she was enjoying the faces that Ruby made and the way her hands fluttered and nipped to describe the outlines of her father’s clothes. Ruby liked it when Iris was amused because it made her feel that she was welcome, and maybe even useful.

Their idea of Ruby capturing Iris’s memories had made little progress so far. Whenever Iris did start to talk, the stories seemed to be just that – stories, about ancient nightclubs and games of polo and the army. It was quite hard trying to memorise the details of such unfamiliar things. And then Iris’s voice would slow down and grow vague, and Ruby would look into her eyes and see that she had gone missing again. Now she talked to her as if she were the one who was telling a story.

‘Dad and Mum separated when I was three. He’d come to take me out at the weekends and we’d go to the park and things. I was little, so I can’t remember what it was like when he did live with us. Anyway, he had a girlfriend, quite young, and she didn’t like kids so I didn’t see that much of the two of them together. It was just Sebastian and me, and even I could tell that was pretty boring for him.

‘Then, after quite a long time – it seemed a long time – suddenly Mum started going out with Andrew. They got married, I was a bridesmaid. I had to wear pink stuff, a whole matching outfit, a dress with puffed sleeves and fake rosebuds in my hair. I hated it and at the reception I picked all the flowers off the headband and threw them at people. When I was eight and a half, my brother was born.’

Iris nodded. ‘Did you mind?’

Ruby shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I suppose so, but it was happening to plenty of other people as well. Most of my friends, you know.’

‘Was it? And this one, Andrew, what does he wear?’

Now Ruby’s hands chopped a series of straight lines and boxes.

‘Ah, I see.’

They were laughing again.

‘He’s a businessman. Management, accountancy. That sort of thing. And he likes sailing, he’s got a boat.’

‘Go on.’

Ruby looked at Iris. Her head was resting against the cushions but her eyes were bright. When she laughed she did look younger, as though she could have been any age at all.

‘It’s not boring? Really? Let me think. OK, when I was about … eleven, when Ed was getting to the age when he wasn’t a baby anymore and was always climbing into everything and being a pain, and I was supposed to be working for exams to get into a good school but I was doing really badly, Andrew started thinking that he and I should be doing some bonding. So he decided that he’d teach me to sail, right? There was one weekend, we went off down to the boat together, just the two of us.’

Now Ruby stretched her face, rolled her eyes and pressed her fingertips into the hollows of her cheeks.

‘Oh dear,’ Iris murmured again.

‘God, it was worse than oh dear. It was quite rough and windy, and the Solent seemed to me it was like the Pacific Ocean or something. Andrew could sail the fucking boat quite well on his own, OK, but he was doing this big pantomime number about how he needed a crew and we had to work as a team and rely on each other. So it was all this yelling and splashing, and me tripping over the ropes and him shouting Ready and Going about, and the boom banging above my head and the sails flapping and cracking. Wherever I put myself I was always in the wrong place. There’s this big sail like a parachute that goes at the front, and I really liked it because it was bright colours, but when we tried to put it up it got wrapped round the forestay and we had to sail round in circles in the opposite direction to try to unwrap it. Andrew was yelling No, no, no and I was completely certain we were going to capsize and drown.’

Ruby was taken up with the momentum of telling this story. She jumped to her feet and mimed the frantic winding of winches and stumbling from side to side of the cockpit under her stepfather’s command.

‘What happened?’

She undulated her hand sharply to indicate the height of the waves.

‘I got seasick and puked everywhere. Andrew turned the boat round and we sailed back to the marina, and as far as bonding goes the glue didn’t work. He never suggested doing it again, anyway. Not that I’d have gone, I hate sailing. Wouldn’t you? He and Lesley go quite a lot, but actually I don’t think Mum likes it much either.’

Iris nodded. There was still a smile in her eyes. ‘No, it doesn’t sound particularly enjoyable. I enjoyed hearing about it, though.’

Ruby sat down again and took her grandmother’s hand. ‘Now it’s your turn.’

Slowly Iris tapped her fingers against her mouth, as if memories were about to spill into words. Ruby waited patiently, saying nothing. She had already learned that trying to prompt her only interrupted the ghost train of her grandmother’s thoughts. A minute passed, then another, liquid with the small splash of the fountain. They both lost track of time.

‘Amethyst,’ Iris said softly at last.

Nothing followed and when Ruby looked up from watching the patterns of silvery drops she saw that she had fallen asleep. She unlaced their fingers and settled Iris’s hand back in her lap, then adjusted the rug over her knees and stood up. It was as if Iris were a child, she thought suddenly, and she were the mother.

This idea took root and grew, casting a shadow like a dark finger pointing right across the garden and up the turquoise tiles lining the opposite wall. Ruby felt afraid of what she couldn’t quite understand. She wished she knew where she was going or what would happen next month, or even next week.

She would have liked to talk to Jas about being disorientated and not knowing where you stood, but Jas was dead.

Ruby left Iris to sleep and wandered through the dim spaces of the house.

In the hall she trailed her fingertips over the table and raked faintly shining lines in the dust veil. Away from the sound of the water, the thick walls trapped silence and the smoky scent of incense that must live in the cracks of the stonework because she never saw Auntie or Mamdooh burning it.

Her aimless wandering brought her to the door of the kitchen. She put her hand to the heavy panelling and pushed.

Auntie looked up at once. ‘Mum-reese?’ she asked, pillowing her cheek against her folded hands.

‘Yes, she’s sleeping.’

‘Ah.’ The old woman put down the knife she had been using to slice vegetables and came round the table to Ruby. She reached up and pinched her cheek, gently, shaking her head and smiling at the same time so that her pale gums and isolated teeth were all on show. She murmured something in Arabic, the tone of her voice so soft with sympathy that Ruby’s eyes stung with sudden tears of self-pity. She sniffed furiously and pulled out of Auntie’s grasp.

Auntie pointed to the comfortable chair near the stove. It was padded with cushions made out of worn carpet strips in shades of faded garnet and copper, and it seemed to hold the substantial print of Mamdooh’s body.

‘Me?’ Ruby asked, and Auntie nodded so she sat down.

It was peaceful in the kitchen, with the click of the knife blade on scrubbed wood and the sharp scent of cut leaves. After a while, starting with a drawn-out note that still made Ruby jump, the chanting of the muezzin poured in through the screened windows. That was where Mamdooh had gone, to prayer.

Auntie took a pomegranate out of a woven rush basket and sliced it in half. With the sharp point of her knife she cut the jewelled beads of fruit away from the creamy pith and let them fall into a bowl. Next she took an earthenware pitcher, ladled a couple of spoonfuls of yoghurt onto the fruit and handed the bowl and a spoon to Ruby with a series of small encouraging nods.

Ruby dipped the spoon, and tasted. Tiny sharp globes burst against the roof of her mouth and her tongue was thick with velvety yoghurt. To be fed made her feel that she was back in a warm, familiar place again. For now; for the time being.

‘It’s nice.’ She smiled. ‘Thank you.’

When the call to prayer died away, Auntie began singing to herself as she worked. The sad chain of notes seemed to come from somewhere between her throat and the back of her nose, ululating in half and quarter-tones, with no beginning or end. Ruby listened and ate her pomegranate. Tomorrow was Ash’s day off. He had promised to come on the moby and take her out somewhere.

‘Where?’ Iris asked sharply. This morning she was wearing her silky striped gown and her hair was caught up at the sides of her head with turquoise and coral-headed combs. Ruby and Ash shuffled a little awkwardly under her gaze. ‘Where are you taking her?’

‘To al-Qalaa. To Citadel, Ma’am,’ Ash answered politely.

To where? Ruby was going to protest, but decided that she would save it until they were alone together.

‘I see. You will tell her some of the history?’

‘Of course. I am proud of this.’

‘Good.’ Iris approved of Ash, and even Mamdooh had opened the front door and shown him through into Iris’s garden without any noticeable signs of objection. ‘Go on. Off you go. Make sure you bring her back here by six o’clock on the dot.’

‘Of course.’ This time, Ash even bowed.

‘Creep,’ Ruby whispered under her breath.

The moby was outside. Ash pulled his sunglasses down over his eyes, flicked back his hair and gestured to the pillion. He was wearing his white shirt and dark-blue nylon Adidas tracksuit bottoms.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Didn’t you hear? To Citadel.’

‘Don’t I even get consulted? Maybe I don’t want to go there.’

He frowned at her. ‘Why not?’

Ash never backed down and Ruby liked that. He was also looking particularly fit today. She flicked a grin at him and bounced onto the pillion seat.

‘Oh, come on then. Let’s get going.’

He kicked the starter and they plunged out into the traffic. By now, Ruby was quite confident on the back of the bike. She pulled a scarf across her mouth and nose to filter out the dust and fumes, as she had seen other women passengers do, and wound her arm round Ash’s waist. Above them, monopolising the skyline, were the sand-coloured walls and turrets of the old Citadel. The way to it curved upwards along a series of wide, sun-baked avenues, past gaudy tents and littered fairgrounds on Midan Salah al-Din. When they reached the entrance at Bab al-Gabal they left the bike padlocked to the trunk of a struggling sapling and continued on foot, into a walled and crenellated maze of turrets and domes separated by glaring empty spaces that trapped the afternoon’s heat. Treading over hot stone and dust-lapped patches of lawn, Ruby began to lag behind Ash.

‘Why are we here?’ she demanded irritably.

‘History. First fort built here, nine hundred years old. By Salah al-Din.’

‘Yeah?’

‘You know who this is?’

‘Should I?’

He frowned at her again. ‘You are educated English woman and you know nothing, it seems. He is a great leader and warrior against your Christian Crusaders. You have heard of Saladin?’

She sighed. This did ring a faint bell. ‘Yeah. Look, I’m crap at history, always was. And geography and maths and biology, you name it. But I’m not at school anymore so it really doesn’t matter, does it?’

Ash looked dubious. ‘Learning is important. It is a way to make a life better for yourself and your family. You don’t believe this?’

Ruby squinted against the light. There was a weight inside these walls that made her feel uncomfortable and Ash’s crowding insistence made it worse.

‘Yes, I believe it, but that doesn’t mean I have to do it.’

He gave her his white crescent of a smile. ‘You are funny. And you are very pretty today.’

That was better. ‘Am I?’

Ruby had stopped making up her eyes with black lines and dark smudges, and she had also stopped gelling her hair into spikes because she had run out of gel with which to do it. It flopped over her forehead now in a shiny fringe that she clipped on one side to leave her pale forehead bare.

‘Yes,’ he said. He took her hand and turned it over to look at the veins on the inner side of her wrist. He glanced round to make sure that no one was watching them, then touched the tip of his tongue to the place where her pulse beat.

A second’s giddiness made Ruby close her eyes.

‘Come on,’ Ash whispered at last. ‘I show you something.’

The enormous mosque enclosed at the heart of the Citadel could be seen from almost every corner of the city, but from close at hand Ruby thought it was disappointing. The domes were covered in dull tin and the pale walls were stained, and a fat snake of tourist visitors lethargically coiled in front of the huge doors.

‘What are we looking at?’

‘This, the Mosque of Mohammed Ali.’

Ruby was going to make a rejoinder, but she thought better of it. ‘It’s pretty big. Who was he?’

‘Two hundred years ago, he ruled this country. He made Egypt modern, and he is also responsible for the great massacre of the Mamluks.’

‘OK. Tell me. I suppose you will anyway, whether I want you to or not.’

They passed into the parallelogram of purple shade in front of the mosque. Ash stood with one foot up on a broken block of stone.

‘The Mamluks were soldiers, born as slaves, with no families, made to gain power by the fight and scheming for the sultan. Mohammed Ali when he came to rule knew he must defeat them, or they will kill him instead. So he is giving a great banquet over there, in the Citadel Palace, and to be his guests five hundred of the most powerful Mamluks come, in their fine robes, up inside the walls here. There is feasting and dancing and everyone is happy. Then the day is ended, and the Mamluks mount their horses and make a procession back down the narrow road, between tall walls, to the al-Azab gate. But Mohammed Ali has ordered the gate to be locked and from the walls above his soldiers fire guns on the Mamluks, and when the men and horses and swords and fine clothes and coloured banners are all fallen in a mess of bodies, the soldiers come in and finish off each one so that a river of blood, from men and horses, runs down like a wave under the gate. Only one of all those fierce Mamluks escapes, by leaping his great horse over the wall and flying away.’

‘How horrible.’ Ruby could hear the terrified whinnying of horses and the screams of dying men, and the rattle of gunfire in the rocky defile. ‘I don’t like it here.’

Ash touched her wrist again. ‘I feel it too. We will go, but first I must go inside to pray.’

At the mosque doors there were guardians policing the tribes of tourists. Ash and Ruby exchanged their shoes for felt slippers and Ash lightly twitched the sleeves of her shirt to cover her arms. He lifted the folds of her scarf and draped her head, and then they passed inside.

The domes and half-domes soared above them, like the insides of a giant’s eggshells studded with thousands of precious stones. Chandeliers and huge glass globes hung from the dim heights, and there were screens of latticed metal and borders of scalloped gold. Ruby stood with her feet together and her hands pressed against her sides.

Ash stepped forward onto the intricate patchwork of rugs that scrolled away in front of them. He knelt and pressed his hands and then his forehead to the floor.

As she waited Ruby felt an absence inside herself, a strange whisper of sensation that was more a negative balance than a physical reality. Surreptitiously she rested the flat of one hand against her belly, but that made no difference. It wasn’t hunger. It was more like being thirsty, while knowing at the same time that a river of water wouldn’t quench the thirst. Her only belief, ever since she had been old enough to reach for one, and which had been later thoroughly agreed with Jas, was that she didn’t want to believe in anything. And yet now she found herself parched with the need for whatever Ash had, for whatever kept his head bowed to the dusty rug.

A pair of tourists passed close beside her, a man and a woman in their fifties, European or even British. The woman had her finger folded as a bookmark inside her guidebook. Something about her, maybe her clothes or a just-perceived hint of perfume, or even the unexpectant set of her features, made Ruby think of her mother. She felt another small pang, an indicator of absence, and she acknowledged that she missed her.

Ash’s narrow back arched like a cat’s and then he unfolded himself to the vertical once more. They walked out of the mosque and reversed the shoe procedure. In the few minutes that they had been inside, the sun had dropped behind a bank of pale lavender cloud on the western horizon.

‘I’m thirsty,’ Ruby said.

Across a square paved with uneven blocks of stone, polished by centuries of footsteps, a drinks vendor’s little metal cart stood against a low wall. From the child vendor Ash bought two cans of cold Coke, ripped the ring-pull from one and handed it to Ruby. He drank from his. Ramadan was over now.

Ruby cooled her cheek with the beads of condensation from the can and wandered towards the wall. She had been expecting a view, but what she saw made her eyes widen in surprise. Cairo lay spread out beneath them. From this height and distance the jungles of apartment blocks looked desolate and deserted, leaning inwards to each other, concrete towers with empty windows, threaded with twisted metal. The only colours were grey, sand, brown and khaki, with scoops of purple and indigo where the shadows lay. In the far, far distance three tiny triangles toothed the cloud horizon. It was another view of the Pyramids, separated by most of the city from the one Ash had shown her from the top of the hotel. She stared across at them, trying and failing to fit herself into the warp of distance and history. She felt Ash close behind her and turned. Their faces almost collided and she pressed awkwardly against him, finding his mouth with hers.

‘Go on, you can kiss me.’

Ash moved an inch away. ‘Perhaps not a good place.’

Groups of tourists were being marshalled by their guides. Smaller knots of young Egyptians took photographs of one another and the European couple drifted past, the wife two steps behind her husband. Ruby glanced at the needle minarets against the subsiding sky. In an hour it would begin to get dark.

‘Do you believe in God, then? Allah, whatever?’

‘It is what I must do.’

She was left in doubt whether the compulsion was from piety or social pressure or as an insurance policy.

‘Must?’

‘Yes, Ruby. This is simple for me, more easy than you think.’

Ash took her arm and they followed the angle of the perimeter wall. To the east of them were the brown ribs of the Muqqatam hills and ahead, stretching north, another landscape of brown diggings and ragged buildings, blistered with a few domes, a low-rise reflection in miniature of the other city.

‘What’s that?’

‘Shall we visit something else?’ His face was serious.

Ruby sighed. What she would have liked was to sit or lie down with Ash somewhere quiet and private and have him put his arms round her and press their foreheads together, not even needing to talk, as she and Jas used to do. Since that plainly wasn’t going to happen, they might as well pass the time in some other way. She felt out of sympathy with the brutal scale of the day, and no longer disposed to enjoy whatever it brought.

‘If you want.’

They went back and unchained the moby. It was a short ride to the sepia walls of the low-rise mirror city they had seen from the heights of the Citadel.

The bike threaded on a narrow dirt road between what looked like very small square-built houses, with arched open doorways and lattice-screened windows. A line of children skipped across in front of them and Ash called a warning, then they came into a paved yard where a flock of longhaired white and brown sheep bumped at a wooden feed trough. Between a pair of dusty acacia trees Ruby saw a high domed canopy sheltering a pair of stone tombs, and to the side of the pillars supporting the canopy there were more stone blocks, the same shape as the houses but smaller, just big enough for one person to lie within. A child’s ball and a pink plastic doll, legs askew, lay in the dirt in front of the bike wheel.

‘What is this place?’ she murmured.

Ash shrugged, carelessness only partly masking an evident anxiety.

‘Cities of the Dead.’ He grinned, flicking an eyebrow at her. Ruby looked at a broken wall of pink-tinged plaster that was printed all over with child-sized dark-blue hand prints, a charm to ward off the djinns.

All the little houses were tombs. But the whole place was busy with the living, too. There was an old man in a blue galabiyeh and a white headcloth, minding the sheep. A little boy sat on a step, stirring the dust with a stick, and his mother looked out of the doorway behind him and tipped a bowl of dirty water into the gutter. There was a tap on the wall beside her and she refilled the bowl and went inside again.

‘A place to live,’ Ash added.

Ruby kept quiet, waiting and half guessing why he had brought her here.

‘My family. You can meet them. Not Nafouz, of course, he is with the taxi.’

He wheeled the bike and they walked down an uneven street of tomb houses. The departing sun left an ash-grey light filtering through the feathery acacia leaves.

They reached an ochre-painted building with a single stone step, none of it very old-looking. Ash led the way and she followed, ducking her head beneath the lintel. Inside there was light from a single electric bulb, a table with an oilcloth, a very old woman sitting with a child in her lap. Ruby stared, trying to make sense of what seemed so unlikely. In the middle of the small space was a raised stone covered with incised inscriptions. It was unmistakably a tomb, and above and around it lived Ash’s family.

The old woman and the half-dressed child both held out their hands to Ash.

‘Misa’ al-khairat’ (evening of many good things). The woman beamed and the child scrambled off its grandmother’s lap and ran to him. Ash swung it up by the hands and kissed its brown cheeks.

‘Habib, habib.’

Then everyone’s eyes slid towards Ruby.

Ash said her name and added, my friend. Ruby carefully skirted the tomb, and went to stand in front of Ash’s grandmother. Her head was wrapped in a dark cloth, her skin was seamed with wrinkles and as brown as a walnut.

‘Ahlan w-sahlan,’ she said, with her bird-eyes on Ruby.

‘Ahlan biki,’ Ruby muttered, as Ash had taught her. She was rewarded with a string of Arabic exclamations and a wide smile. Ash’s grandmother folded Ruby’s hands between her own two. It was all right, Ruby thought. She couldn’t look quite as disconcerted as she felt. Holding the child in one arm, Ash was hunting among the jars and packets that stood on a shelf. Like Jas, she thought, or Ed – searching for something to eat as soon as he came home. This was a home, but the grave drew her eyes. She wanted to stare at it, but thought it would be better to pretend it wasn’t there.

A woman came in with a thin blue plastic carrier bag in either hand. There were shops too, then, in the Cities of the Dead.

‘Ummi,’ Ash said. He went to her and kissed her, and unwound the handles of the plastic bags from her fingers. He dumped the shopping on top of the grave.

Ash’s mother was small and thin, with the same dark eyes as her sons. Ash introduced Ruby and they went through the same greeting, but Umm Nafouz (Ruby knew she must call her by the name of her oldest child, Ash had told her that too) was busier and less cordial than the grandmother had been. She turned away quite quickly and began to take bags of flour and tinned food out of the shopping bags. Ash scolded her and moved her to one side, so that he could do it. The child ran between them, laughing and exclaiming.

No one was looking at her now, so Ruby gazed at the room’s centrepiece. It had plain stone walls and a slab on top with all the lettering. How many people were buried within, and how long ago? The dead were too close. She looked quickly away again.

Ash’s mother was laying out pans and food, preparing to make a meal. There was a gas bottle with two ring burners beside the table, a radio and cassette player on a shelf, and a curtained doorway at the back of the room that must lead to where the family slept.

There was warmth in this place that more logically should have felt cold and gloomy. The child wriggled between her legs and Ash’s, and put its hands over its eyes, then lowered them just far enough to be able to peep over the fingertips. She was inviting Ruby to play the game.

Ruby hid her own eyes briefly then exposed them again. ‘Boo,’ she said and the child laughed. Ruby was quite surprised by this. Usually little kids disliked her.

It was dark outside. She looked quickly at her watch.

‘It’s half past five. I told Iris six o’clock, remember?’

Ash said, ‘You are right. I will take you home.’

Ruby put her hands together and bowed to Ash’s mother and grandmother. ‘Masa’ il-kheer,’ she said. Ash nodded as if he were her schoolteacher.

‘Masa’ in-nur,’ the two women replied. The grandmother lifted her hand in a blessing.

The child wrapped its arms round Ash’s leg and shouted a protest at him. He bent down and whispered something, then took a sweet out of his pocket and popped it into its mouth.

‘Yalla. Let’s go.’

The shepherd and his sheep had gone. Ash wheeled the bike and Ruby walked beside him, unsure what to say. There were lights in many windows of the little houses, people walking by with bags of shopping like Umm Nafouz’s, and in a beam of light from a doorway a couple of children intently playing a game with a handful of stones. Other tombs had barred doors, windows protected by metal screens. They were dark, guarding their secrets. Crooked alleyways led away in all directions. Ruby remembered how vast the burial areas had looked from up at the Citadel. You could get lost in here, among the dead houses, and never be found again.

He said, ‘You are quiet.’

‘Yes.’

‘You think it is a strange thing.’

‘It’s only strange … to me. That doesn’t mean it is strange.’

‘It is my family tomb. When we were young we came here once every week to visit, to have picnic among our dead, to celebrate the moulid. It is not a place of fear for us, but of memory and respect. Then after my father died …’ Ash shrugged. ‘It is a home to live in. And the dead and not-yet dead, we are company all together. Why not? The dead do not harm us, only the alive.’

A much bigger structure loomed ahead of them, a dome and finial outlined against the navy-blue sky.

‘See in here,’ Ash breathed. He took her by the wrist and they glided through heavy doors into a cold, close atmosphere. It was quiet enough in here, Ruby thought, to hear the dust settle. A shiver began beneath her hairline and ran the length of her spine. Ash clicked his cigarette lighter and a fragile nimbus of light spread around them. There were more tombs here, but these were built in tier upon tier up to an invisible ceiling, carved and decorated over every inch with patterns and lettering and painted in red ochre and cerulean blue. Here and there, in the flicker of the lighter, was a glint of gold.

‘Mamluk tombs,’ Ash said. He traced the line of a stone wreath. ‘The stone carver, once he finished … kkkk.’ He mimed a chop at the wrist of the hand holding the lighter. ‘This work done, finish, no more carving for other masters.’

Their eyes travelled upwards, over the wealth of pattern. High above was a flattened arch picked out in flaking gold.

The flame died and left them standing hip to hip in the blackness. Ash’s hands cupped Ruby’s face and his lips brushed her cheek as he whispered to her, ‘You were polite to my family. Like a good Egyptian girl. My mother will not be so unhappy.’

They stood close together. Ash was warm and he tasted of cigarettes and spearmint chewing gum. Light spilled inside Ruby, a brightness so easy and careless that she wanted to laugh. It was partly to do with wanting Ash and his narrow, brown body, of course it was, and she was surprised by how much she did want him, but it was also the opposite of the negative balance that had troubled her in the mosque of Mohammed Ali. There was a positive here, glimpsed in the tomb house of Ash’s family and in the way that life continued among the remains of other lives. It was very strong in Ash himself.

‘Was this what you meant, when I asked you if you believed in God and you said it is what I must do?’

Ruby’s hand travelled through an unseen arc, to take in the Mamluk tombs and the Dead Cities and the people who had to live there.

To believe would be an explanation, a system, and a lifeline. Otherwise there was only dust.

‘God is good. He takes care of each of us.’

‘I wish I believed that.’

Ash laughed. ‘Infidel.’

Ruby pressed her head against his shoulder, ran her hands down the curve of his back to the hollow above his hip bones. He was beautiful.

‘Sit down here. We will smoke one cigarette and then I take you back to your grandmother’s house.’

He guided her to a ledge that ran around the base of the nearest tomb. The lighter clicked again.

‘But, you know, it is not a free ride. God does not do that. I work hard and go to school, English, and I hope I will learn computers. I told you this, learning is important. Nafouz and I, we must look after our mother and brothers and sisters and we will live in a better place. But for now …’ His shoulder twitched against hers. ‘ … For now, we can enjoy too sometimes. Why not?’

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.’