Iris and Ruby (12 page)

‘Nile river,’ Ash said at her side. She gazed at the ripples and reflections. Tall buildings on the opposite bank and humid grey clouds swam on the moving surface.

‘That way’ – he gestured – ‘Alexandria. Then Europe. And that way’ – he swept his left arm in a stately arc along the river – ‘Egypt.’ For Ash, it seemed, the name was enough to convey the magnificence of his country. He took her hand to emphasise the importance of what he was showing her.

‘Yeah.’

Her unwillingness to be impressed annoyed him. He began jabbing his finger towards nearby landmarks. ‘See, Cairo Tower. El Tahrir Bridge, up there 26 July Bridge. Gezira island.
Sheraton Hotel.
’ The last was a hideous cylinder on the tip of a tongue of land opposite.

‘No, really? Amazing.’

He jerked her wrist sharply and she stood upright, startled and defensive.

‘Watch it,’ Ruby snapped.

They faced each other, glaring. The breeze off the unfamiliar river was humid, and the sprawl of an unknown and hostile city stretched away on every side. Suddenly Ruby missed the clatter and roll of skateboarders under the concrete spans of the South Bank, and the smell of hot dogs, and all the damp, foggy chill of London. She heard Lesley’s voice and shut that off inside her head.

It was important not to piss Ash off because he was the only friend she had here.

But it was Ash who began laughing first.

‘You make a frown like a monkey,’ he told her.

She corrugated her face even more elaborately and crossed her eyes until they were both laughing. Then she nodded at the river. ‘It’s beautiful. I like the boats.’

‘One evening I take you sailing in a felucca. At sunset. Very romantic.’

‘Great. I’d rather that than the fucking museum.’

‘Ruby,’ he sighed.

‘Sorry. Gimme another brown?’

‘What?’

‘A ciggie. A cigarette, for God’s sake. I’ll buy some if you show me where, if that’s the problem.’

‘No problem,’ he said politely.

They began walking, their hands occasionally brushing together. Ruby noticed the top of a grand pillared building behind a high wall guarded by a couple of armed and uniformed men. She was surprised to see the Union flag hanging limply from a central flagpole.

‘What’s that place?’

He shrugged. ‘British embassy.’

‘Oh.’ Ruby wasn’t very interested.

They passed beneath a huge, ancient-looking tree, its trunk a mass of writhing tendrils for all the world like dun-coloured snakes. In its thick shade the air was almost cool.

‘Banyan tree.’

They stopped and looked up into the canopy of coarse leaves. Taxis cruised and honked a few feet away, a couple of passers-by glanced incuriously at them. Ash’s throat was smooth, his skin pale brown. Ruby stepped up close, put her hands behind his head and pulled his mouth down to hers. She kissed him hard, flicking her tongue between his lips.

She saw the flash of dismay and disbelief in his eyes before he stepped sharply backwards.

‘Why you do that?’ he demanded.

She had done it without thinking, just because she felt like it.

‘Didn’t you like it?’

He had liked it, of course, but it was not what he had planned.

Ash had intended to make a play for the English girl, that went without saying, but he had expected to chase her until she was cornered and when she finally gave way the triumph would all have been his. Now she had taken the initiative and he felt diminished. He had no idea what to expect next.

They were now both aware of the breadth of experience and expectation that separated them, and they were uncomfortable.

‘You have boyfriends,’ Ash said flatly.

Ruby tried to give a careless laugh, but it came out sounding harsh.

‘Yeah. What do you expect? Yes, I do. Have had.’

He nodded. ‘I see.’

She didn’t like his disapproval and tried to startle him back into sympathy with her. ‘No, you don’t. My boyfriend died. In an accident.’

Ash’s eyes were very dark brown and the whites were so white they looked blue.

‘What? Accident in a car?’

‘No. He fell. He fell off the balcony of someone’s flat. It was late at night, a party. He had been drinking and taking stuff. I didn’t see how he fell. Maybe he jumped, I don’t know. He was a bit fucked up. His name was Jas.’

Ash shook his head. This information was almost too much for him, but he took her hand gently and led her a few steps to a bench facing the river wall. They sat down with their backs to the traffic and stared at the ugly cylinder hotel across the water.

‘Did you love him, this Jas? Did he love you?’

He asked this so simply and tenderly, and his directness seemed to flick a switch in Ruby. She almost heard the click. Without any warning tears welled up in her eyes and poured down her face, scalding her cheeks as they ran.

‘Maybe. Yes. It wasn’t like you think.’

‘I think nothing,’ Ash said.

Ruby knuckled her eyes and sniffed hard. She tried not to cry, as a general rule. Not about Jas, or anything else. She usually tried not to think about Jas being dead either, except as a bare fact, but now she couldn’t stop the thoughts – or the images that came with them.

The flat had been on the ninth floor of a stumpy tower block on the edge of a no man’s land of railway sidings and warehouses with broken windows that looked like cartoon eyes in the darkness. It was a rain-smeared late night that had begun in a pub with Jas and some of his friends, and ended in a boxy room with a couple of mattresses on the floor. There were quite a lot of people in the flat. Not the ones who had been there at the beginning, they had melted away and different faces had bobbed up. Two girls had been arguing about the music that was raggedly playing, and one of them had snatched a CD and flung it at the wall. Her boyfriend had given her a shaking and her head wobbled disconcertingly. When he pushed her away from him she fell sideways on one of the mattresses.

Ruby was sitting on the other, with her knees drawn up to her chest like a shield. She had been wanting to go home for a while, or at least somewhere that wasn’t this place, and wondering how to negotiate an exit. She was dimly aware that Jas had moved away but she felt too out of it herself to pay any attention to what he might be doing. The next thing was a shout, and a ripple of movement in the room that pushed the girl on the next mattress into a sitting
position and sent several others stumbling towards the door onto a balcony.

Ruby found herself walking towards the door. Cold air blew towards her, and the few steps seemed to take a long time. There were one or two voices, high-pitched with alarm, but most of all she could hear a huge silence. She knew at once that something very bad had happened.

The balcony was small. There was a flowerpot in a corner with the brown stalks of a dead plant sticking up, and a scatter of cigarette butts and roaches. The walls were brick, topped with gritty stone. A white-faced bloke was holding on to the stone as if he was on a ship in a bad storm, and a girl was half turned away with her hand over her mouth. Ruby walked very slowly to the wall and looked over.

A long way down, Jas was lying on his side with his head and his arms and his legs all at weird angles. There was a dark pool spreading round his head. He was dead. Just in one glance you could tell that much.

The girl took her hand from her mouth and started to babble.

‘I just saw his feet and legs going. His shoe caught on the edge. I wasn’t looking, I just sort of turned. I saw his legs and his feet, falling.’

The sick-looking man put his arms round her. ‘OK,’ he said. Ruby wondered why, when it wasn’t OK at all.

‘Who is he?’ someone else muttered. She realised now that she hadn’t set eyes on any of these people before tonight. Jas had been her connection. He made friends easily, but never tried to keep them. They had drifted along together, Ruby and he, without asking themselves or each other any questions.

When the police arrived, there wasn’t much she could tell them. It was that that shocked her, really. She knew his name, and the address of the house where he squatted. He came
from Sunderland, and he liked curry and Massive Attack. He had made her a CD compilation and decorated the insert with red biro swirls.

It wasn’t very much. It wasn’t very much for a life that was now over.

The police drove her back from the police station to Will and Fiona’s house in Camden. It was already light and people were going to work in their neat clothes. A policewoman offered to come in with her and explain what had happened but Ruby shook her head. She scrambled out of the car as quickly as she could and bolted inside. She hoped that no one would be awake yet so she could slide into her bedroom without being seen.

But Will was up. He was coming down the stairs, wearing a suit and a blue shirt and a dark-red tie, his cheeks and jaw shiny from his morning shave. In the kitchen there were kids’ drawings on the pinboard and a bunch of flowers in a milkjug on the table, the same as yesterday.

‘Fi’s still asleep. Where have you been all night?’

He was in a position to ask the question because he was her stepfather’s brother, so she was part family as well as part lodger. But they were also conspirators because when they were alone Will didn’t always treat her like family. Or at least, the way families were supposed to treat each other. Ruby thought he was rather pathetic, but she had taken advantage of the situation in the past. Being in a conspiracy with Will meant she could get away with things that he and Fiona, as a fully united front, would never have allowed.

But not any longer. Not after this night.

She blinked, and her eyes burned with the image of Jas lying at the foot of the stumpy high-rise.

‘Um. I went to a party.’

Will looked angry, in his plump way.

‘What are you like? What sort of behaviour do you call
this? It’s five to six in the morning and you’re supposed to go to college today.’

Ruby glanced away, down at the floor. She was thinking if she could just get away quickly, upstairs to her bedroom, she could keep all the spinning and churning bits of misery inside and not let Will see them.

‘I know,’ she mumbled. ‘Sorry.’

He sighed. Then he came round the table and took hold of her. He put his hand under her chin and tilted her face so he could examine it. She felt too numb to break away from him, or to do anything but stand there. Will sighed again and then his hand slid over her bottom but he gently pushed her away at the same time, as if it were she who had come on to him. He was very good at making things appear the opposite of what they really were. A long time ago – yesterday – she used to think it must be one of the number of things he had a first-class degree in.

But there was no place this morning for any of those old notions. They seemed to belong to a different person.

‘Go on, then. Go upstairs and get into bed, before Fi catches you. I’ve got to get to the airport.’

He was fussing with his briefcase, snapping the locks.

Ruby went up the stairs, very slowly. Her feet felt as if they had rocks tied to them.

In her bedroom she took off her clothes and then stood holding them in a bundle against her chest, very tightly, as if she were hugging a baby. She even made a little crooning noise, out loud, and the disembodied sound made her jump. When she buried her face in the clothes she realised that they stank of sweat and smoke and sick. She had thrown up in a green-painted toilet cubicle at the police station.

She put the bundle down on the velvet-upholstered button-backed chair and covered it with a cushion. Then she crawled under the bedcovers and pulled them over her.

As soon as she closed her eyes he was lying there with the black puddle spreading round his head.

She told Ash briefly about Jas. It wasn’t right, she realised as soon as she had begun, to use it as a way of getting his sympathy. Then she gave him a flat smile. Her tears were drying up, leaving her eyes feeling sticky in the heat.

‘Anyway,’ she said, and shrugged. She stood up quickly, pulling at her clothes where they were glued to her skin. After a second he got up too, still looking at her with gentle concern.

‘That is very sad. I am sorry,’ he said. ‘What would you like to do now? Do you want to go back to your grandmother’s house?’

She didn’t want to cry again, for one thing, didn’t even want to think about crying. It was all too dangerous.

‘Can we just go on with what we were doing before?’

They walked on, under the dusty leaves, in and out of patches of shade. Ash waited for what she would do or say next.

‘Don’t you have a girlfriend?’

He considered carefully. ‘Of course, there are some girls I like. But it is not quite the same thing, I think.’

His solemnity made Ruby laugh. She still wanted to make him like her and the wish surprised her.

‘It was only a quick kiss, back there, you know? I just did it, I thought it would be nice. Sorry if it was totally the wrong thing. I get things wrong all the time, it’s the way I am. You’ll have to get used to it if we’re going to be friends. That was one of the good things about Jas. He kind of didn’t mind anything. He’d say things like, we are each the person we are and we should try to be that person to the full, not someone else. I liked that a lot.’

Ash stopped again. He looked over his shoulder at the
traffic and at the passers-by, then he steered Ruby into an angled niche in the river wall where an ornate street lamp sprouted.

‘I would like to kiss
you
, now, please.’

She leaned back. The stone was hot against her ribs and spine.

‘Go on, then.’

‘Wait. To me, these things have importance. They are not just a quick this, or for nothing that. Perhaps you think to be this way is funny?’

‘No,’ Ruby said humbly. ‘I think it’s lovely.’

‘All right.’ He came nearer. Close up, there were all kinds of different textures and colours visible in the dark-brown irises.

He kissed her, an experimental meeting of mouths that seemed, to Ruby, very tentative. Then he pulled back again.