Iris and Ruby (34 page)

‘It’s OK’, Ruby said. She strolled to the door and opened it, and Mamdooh loomed into the room.

‘This is not correct,’ he spluttered. Ash was already sidling past him in an attempt to get away but Mamdooh moved with surprising speed to cut him off, and Ash shot an imploring glance at Ruby.

‘What’s wrong?’ Ruby innocently asked Mamdooh.

His big face was puffed with rage. ‘You bring shame.’

Ash began a protestation but Ruby hushed him.

‘Shame? What right do you have to say that?’

Mamdooh wouldn’t look at her. ‘You are Muslim boy,’ he said to Ash.

Ruby darted round and stood next to Ash. ‘Yes, he is, and
he has never done one thing wrong or
shameful
as you call it ever since I have known him. I might have, but he hasn’t. You should apologise to him.’

‘Ruby,’ Ash miserably whispered.

Mamdooh frowned from one to the other. He pushed his lips out so they looked even more like dark fruit. ‘Is this truth?’

‘Yes.’

‘In this country, in this house, it is not for boys to visit the bedroom of a young girl.’

‘In England we figure that if people are going to do something they’ll find somewhere, bedroom or not.’

‘You are being rude,’ Ash told her.

Ruby whirled round, ready to take him on too, but he held her gaze. After a long moment her shoulders dropped. ‘All right. I’m sorry, Mamdooh, OK? I promise I won’t bring any boy up to my bedroom ever again. Will that do?’

Majestically, he inclined his head and stood aside to let them file out of the door.

‘Mum-reese waits for you.’

Iris and Nafouz were sitting in the garden, drinking mint tea and looking like the best of friends.

‘There you are,’ Iris called when she saw them. ‘Did you say you were going out?’

Patiently, Ruby said no, they had just gone off while she and Nafouz were settling up about the car. Iris’s face cleared. ‘The car. That’s right. Have some tea, both of you.’

Ash accepted the glass Ruby gave him but he would only sit on the edge of the bench.

‘It is time for Nafouz and me to go. I am glad car is fixed, Madam Iris.’

Iris smiled gaily at him. ‘You must come for a drive.’

As she saw them out, Ruby asked Ash when they were going to see each other again.

‘Soon. I have to work, Ruby, you know this.’

She watched the two brothers until they reached the end of the street and disappeared in the direction of Khan al-Khalili. They had the same walk, the same watchful way of turning their heads, and their closeness made her feel excluded. Nothing had been said about the night at the club; Nafouz’s charming smile was as wide and implacable as ever and when she asked Ash he shrugged and replied, ‘Sometimes it happens. It is not good but it is not the worst thing.’

They protected and looked out for each other, the two of them. If it came to a test of loyalty, Ruby thought, there was no question where Ash’s would lie.

The garden was deserted. Auntie had already cleared away the teapot and glasses.

Ruby found Iris in her room, wearing her outdoor coat.

‘There you are. Are you ready?’

‘Ready for what?’ Ruby asked.

‘For a ride in the car, of course. Come on, where do you want to go?’

‘I don’t know. Are you sure you want to do this right now? And don’t you need … insurance, things like that?’

‘My dear girl, this is Cairo not Tunbridge Wells. All that can be dealt with. I want to go. Look out there, you can see the sky.’

Through the window screens, you could. Ruby said, ‘All right, if you’re sure you’re not too tired and if you promise you’ll drive carefully.’ Then she grinned. ‘Ha ha, will you listen to me? I sound just like Lesley and Mamdooh, only not quite so much fun.’

She put her hand under her grandmother’s arm and they went downstairs together, Iris jingling the keys in her pocket.

They were not to have an easy exit. Mamdooh darted out from the back of the house and saw at a glance where they
were heading. He began by insisting that it was too late, the roads would be too busy, Mum-reese would be too tired.

Iris stepped round him.

Then he put his tarboosh on his head and made to follow them.

Iris held up her hand. ‘Thank you, Mamdooh. But this afternoon Ruby and I are going to make an excursion together. You may accompany us another time.’

He still came all the way out into the alleyway with them, and almost tussled with Ruby as she tried to heave open the old wooden doors and he lent his considerable weight to holding them closed. He wouldn’t look directly at Ruby, blaming her as always for bringing all this distraction and disruption into the peaceful household, but he kept up a stream of warnings and gloomy pronouncements to Iris.

She smiled briefly and batted him aside. ‘Thank you. I was driving around this city sixty years ago, you know, when you were just a boy coming to Garden City with your father. Get in, Ruby.’

They settled themselves in their seats and Mamdooh planted himself a foot from the rear bumper, legs apart and fists on his hips.

‘Are you going to run him over?’ Ruby murmured.

‘I shall try not to.’ The Beetle’s engine coughed and then roared, there was a scream from the gearbox as Iris attempted to find reverse gear without engaging the clutch, but then she seemed to remember something of what driving involved and began to back out of the garage. She rolled down her window and nodded to Mamdooh as he jumped aside. ‘Don’t worry about us,’ she said breezily.

They almost slammed into the opposite wall of the alley. Ruby’s head jerked as Iris stamped on the brakes just in time.

‘Mamdooh’s pissed off with me. He found me and Ash up in my room just now. We weren’t doing anything.’

Iris clicked her tongue as they drove off. ‘Really, Ruby. You have no idea how to behave. What you do is your business, but if you try not to offend people you will find life much simpler.’

Ruby shrank lower in her seat. ‘Sorry,’ she said humbly. ‘
Look
out!’

A headscarfed matron on a Vespa was crossing ahead of them as Iris shot straight out of a junction. The scooter wobbled as Iris braked and then accelerated, making a gesture of apology as she turned across a hooting stream of traffic.

‘These people always were crazy drivers,’ she said, heading downtown. She was looking at the crowds with curiosity and apparent enjoyment.

Ruby unclenched her fists and told herself that at least it was the end of the day and every street was jammed with vehicles. When the collision came, they wouldn’t be travelling at anything more than a walking pace.

But Iris’s embedded motor responses seemed to fire up again, erratically at first and then more reliably. Her hands loosened on the wheel and she accelerated and changed gear and braked in the right order, apparently without thinking about it. After a few more angry blasts from trucks and taxis she even began to use the indicators.

The traffic heaved and shuddered around them, carrying the Beetle forward like a pebble churning in a wave, then freezing again in a collective hiss of hydraulic brakes, bleating horns, tinny music from the open windows of mud-grey Fiats. Traffic lights suspended in a cat’s-cradle of wires changed from green to red. Ruby looked out at the tall advertisment hoardings wedged between peeling concrete buildings, bright-lit little shops, and the press of people dashing for home or into the mouth of the nearest metro station.

It was the twilight half-hour when the flat sky took on a sudden dark-blue depth. In another half an hour the stars
would begin to show. The women with mop buckets would be washing the day’s last eddy of visitors towards the doors of the museum and then the statues and carvings would lie in silence for the night.

After a few minutes she roused herself, aware that she had been daydreaming. Iris had been taking a series of left and right turns further and further away from the main stream of traffic and now they were in a quiet street lined with mimosas and oleander. The lights of apartments were beginning to blink on.

‘Where are we?’ Ruby asked unthinkingly.

Then she saw that Iris was staring ahead through the windscreen. She let the car drift to the side of the road and the tyres struck the kerb at an angle. The car behind them hooted and swept past.

‘Iris? Are you all right?’

There was no answer and Ruby put her hand over her grandmother’s where it rested on the wheel. Iris turned off the ignition and there was silence broken only by the little ticks of cooling metal.

‘It’s all different.’ She shook her head as if she was trying to clear it, and then turned towards Ruby. The street lamp five yards away had just come on and the pale acid glare shone into her face. ‘I don’t know where I’m going.’

‘I’m not surprised; of course it’s all different,’ Ruby began.

But Iris was staring through her. Her mouth trembled and her eyes had lost their focus. She looked shocked, as if she were seeing the faded streets of sixty years ago and was disorientated by the brutal superimposition of modern buildings and the unfamiliar breadth of teeming new roads.

They sat for a moment in silence. A pair of men walking by in smart suits with camelhair coats slung over their shoulders glanced into the car with brief curiosity. At least they weren’t in a dodgy area, Ruby thought. It even seemed
vaguely familiar, now she looked at it. The apartment blocks looked prosperous and there were guard houses at some of the tall gates.

She squeezed Iris’s hand in her own. ‘Let’s go home. Can you drive?’

But Iris was soundlessly weeping.

‘Don’t cry. It’s all right, look, here.’ From the pocket of her jeans Ruby produced a Kleenex and tried to dry her tears.

‘It has all gone.’ Iris’s voice was like an abandoned child’s, plangent with a terrible despair.

‘No, it’s still here, it’s still Cairo. It’s just time, doing what it does.’

‘Doing what it does,’ Iris forlornly echoed, the words themselves seeming to make no sense to her however much she longed to find comfort in them.

‘That’s right,’ Ruby confirmed. The obvious thing to do was take Iris back home, to the reassurance of familiar surroundings. She detached her hand from Iris’s although Iris tried to hang on to it, climbed out of the car and came round to the driver’s side. Then she gently helped her out and into the passenger seat, Iris doing as she was prompted with childlike trust. The tears had stopped and she just looked smaller and frailer.

Ruby took the wheel and started up the car. If she could drive the taxi back from Muqattam, she reasoned, she could equally well find their way home from here. Given time.

The streets were curved, seeming to loop around gardens crammed with leafy darkness. She drove slowly, ignoring impatient hooting, searching for a clue to where they might be. There was a tall brown block on the next corner, projecting metal balconies outlined against the glare of light from a busier street and Ruby slowed even further as they came to the junction, craning left and right.

Iris stirred. ‘What are you doing? Turn right,’ she said
suddenly, in a louder voice quite unlike the lost child’s.

Ruby did as she was told. The traffic was lighter now and they swept past gaudy shop windows. She darted a glance at Iris. ‘You know, you could direct me. I’m not very sure of the way.’

With a touch of irritation Iris pointed ahead. ‘Carry on until the end of Sharia Mawardi, then turn left.’

‘OK’.

They rattled over tramlines and then in the distance Ruby saw the outline of the Citadel, two solid shades darker than the opaque eastern sky. Now she had a reference point. After a minute or two, they were out in the blare and rush of Sharia Port Said and she could almost relax. They had been in Iris’s old neighbourhood, Garden City.

‘Soon be home,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ Iris agreed. ‘Are you all right, driving this car?’

‘I think so.’

Ten minutes later they nosed into the cobbled alleyway. Ruby left the engine running and got out to open the heavy wooden doors, then eased the Beetle into its space. She let her hands fall into her lap with a silent gasp of relief. Her hair was glued to her damp forehead.

‘I am sorry,’ Iris mumbled.

‘What for?’

‘For crying.’

‘Because we were lost?’

There was a pause. ‘I suppose that was the reason.’

Ruby had no idea how much of the past Iris actually remembered and could only guess at the terror that the periodic blankness must bring. She reached for the knob that controlled the headlights and darkness rushed around them as they blinked out.

She said firmly, ‘We’re not lost. We’re in Cairo and we’ve got each other, haven’t we?’

Iris gathered herself, pulling her coat round her and arranging her limbs ready for the effort of climbing out of the car. She was very tired. ‘We’ve got each other.’ The words were repeated in the same wondering way.

It struck Ruby afresh that her grandmother was lonely as well as confused. She said, ‘Come on, let’s go inside.’

‘I
wanted
to go for a drive.’ That it hadn’t been a comfortable excursion didn’t diminish the original longing.

‘I know. And we can go for plenty more, whenever you like.’ The memory project seemed to have come to nothing; she could do this much if that was what Iris wanted.

‘Don’t say anything,’ Iris begged.

‘‘Course not. What about, anyway?’

They entered the house through the back door, conspirators.

In the hall, there was a coat folded over the back of one of the gaunt chairs. Iris saw it and stopped, turning to Ruby with the silent question. Ruby only shrugged; evidently there was a visitor, but she had no idea who it might be.

He was waiting in Iris’s sitting room. He had been reading a paper, but he stood up when he heard them coming up the stairs.

‘
Bon soir. Excusez-moi
. Iris, how are you?’

The man was compact, dark-haired and olive-skinned, dressed conventionally enough but with a touch of flamboyance in the extra-bright blue of his shirt and the silky handkerchief trailing out of his side pocket.

‘Nicolas.’

‘I was making a visit to a patient nearby and I thought I would call in. Maybe it is not convenient?’ His dark eyes rested on Ruby. ‘We haven’t met.’