Iris and Ruby (48 page)

There was nothing further they could do, the doctor said. The next twenty-four hours would tell. Nicolas had gone home, but he had left them a message to say that he would see them in the morning.

‘We all need some sleep,’ Andrew said.

Ruby squashed into the back of a taxi between her mother and stepfather. The enclosed space filled up with Lesley’s perfume. She wondered briefly about Ash and what he would have made of her disappearance. Then she asked herself why she had leapt to the conclusion that it would be Sebastian who had come all the way out to Cairo with Lesley. Because that was what she wanted, Mummy and Daddy together, just as if she were a kid?

But it was Andrew who really had come and was sitting solidly beside her in his seersucker summer jacket that she remembered from dull holidays.

She put her hand awkwardly on his sleeve, realising that at the hospital she had hardly acknowledged his presence. ‘Thank you,’ she said humbly. ‘I’m really sorry.’ She had parroted that often enough. But this time she meant it. Lesley stirred on her other side, making Ruby aware that she was grateful for this offering. It was such a very small offering, too, Ruby realised.

‘You’re in one piece. That’s what matters.’ Then he leaned forward. ‘Do you think this driver is taking us all round the houses?’

‘No. This is the right way. Where’s Ed?’ she asked Lesley.

‘Staying with his friend Ollie. It was the best we could do at short notice.’

‘Are we ever going to get there? Where on earth are we?’ Andrew muttered.

‘It’s just down here.’ The sight of the three minarets touching the sky made Ruby’s stomach turn over with renewed anxiety for Iris. ‘You don’t think she’s going to die, do you?’

‘No, I don’t,’ Andrew said.

In that moment she loved him for always having to know best and for always having an opinion to express, right or wrong. It was weird, that, because it was one of the things about him that had always annoyed her most. Lesley didn’t say anything. She had been very quiet since they had left the hospital.

Mamdooh opened the door almost as soon as Ruby knocked. His moon-face was heavy with gloom. ‘Miss, you are safe. And Mum-reese?’

‘They’re looking after her,’ Ruby said.

Auntie appeared and swept Ruby into a flutter of hugging
and patting. She was rapidly murmuring in Arabic and Ruby couldn’t understand her any better than she ever had done but she whispered back just the same, telling her that she was sorry and it was all her mistake and Mum’reese was in the hospital and being cared for and they would all have to hope and pray that tomorrow she would begin to get better.

‘
Hasal kheir,
’ Auntie said. Ruby did understand that, it was one of the phrases Ash had taught her. It meant something like, it could have been worse and we should be thankful that it was not.

‘
Inshallah,
’ Ruby added. That it might not yet turn out to be worse.

Turning back to Andrew and Lesley she noticed how lost and incongruous they appeared in the dim, bare, stone heart of Iris’s house, flanked by Mamdooh in his
galabiyeh
and Auntie with her white-shawled head. Andrew was wearing his summer blue chinos with the seersucker jacket, and Lesley had low-heeled sandals and fine tights and a good handbag. They must have hurried to find lightweight clothes that would have been stored away for the winter. Knowing how long and how careful the preparations were for an ordinary holiday, Ruby could only begin to imagine what it must have been like for them to pack for Cairo at a few hours’ notice. Yet here they were. She felt a weight dropping off her as she looked at them. They were only people, as kind and as blinkered and as likely to be correct or mistaken as any others. Maybe the weight was resentment.

‘It’s late. You should go to bed now,’ Ruby said, as if they were the children.

Lesley nodded her head obediently, and then collected herself. ‘But you need some food, darling, and you remember what they said about fluid intake.’

At the hospital, Ruby had been examined. She was dehydrated and hungry and sunburned, that was all. She had
felt quite proud of her resilience, and then bitterly ashamed of her thoughtlessness in taking Iris with her, who was neither young nor strong.

Ruby was still wearing the wrap that one of the trekking party had given to her and now Auntie was insistently tugging at the folds of it. She was murmuring about food.

‘Auntie will fix me something in the kitchen. Have you got a bedroom?’

‘If we can find it, in this place.’ Andrew peered up into the shadows of the gallery.

‘Good night, then.’ Ruby hugged them both and thanked them, as best she could. The words were just words but she meant them. Lesley held on to her for a second and then turned away in Andrew’s wake.

‘It’s this way,’ he told her, heading for the wrong staircase.

In the kitchen it was warm and quiet. Mamdooh sat in his chair next to the stove with his hands laced together over his belly, as he always did, and Auntie laid out an earthenware bowl and a dish of flat bread. Ruby tore off papery chunks and soaked them in bean soup, and crammed the rich hot mush into her mouth so the overflow dribbled down her chin and she rubbed it away with the heel of her hand. With her head on one side, Auntie watched her and nodded encouragement.

There was no need for any of them to speak. Their thoughts were with Iris and the collective wish for her pooled between them in the silence.

When she could eat no more – and she was surprised by how little she had managed, believing that she was ravenous – Ruby washed up her own plate and spoon even though Auntie tried to stop her. She touched each of the old people on the shoulder, reaching up to Mamdooh and down to Auntie, and told them that they should try to sleep. Then
she went upstairs, passing along the gallery where the faint light from below shone through the crescents and stars in the pierced screen. She was dirty, her skin and hair were caked with dust, but she was too tired to do more than strip off the borrowed shawl and her stiff clothes, and drop them in a heap on the floor. She crawled under the covers and closed her eyes.

The desert rose up, with Iris lying in what looked too much like a shallow grave scraped beside the car.

‘It’s not time for you to die,’ Ruby told her. She listened in the dark room, but she couldn’t hear Iris’s response.

The metal clash and footstep squeaks of hospital. Familiar from layers of memory and experience, but I can’t place myself in any of them.

Pain at the periphery, or rather within a separate place that I don’t want to re-enter. So I am the patient, not the doctor.

Either way I would prefer oblivion and I am trying to retreat into it, but awareness scratches and then batters at me. There are voices, talking across me, and as soon as I can decipher the words pain sweeps in. It is no longer on the margins but everywhere, behind my eyeballs and within my ribcage and in my mouth like a hot stone that I can’t spit out.

I open my eyes and pain shoots through my frontal lobes.

In my immediate field of vision there is a doctor’s face; he has thick eyebrows and nasal hair and a deep cleft in his chin in which a line of bristles is embedded. Beyond him, standing against a window so that it is haloed in light, is another figure. A woman in a flowered dress, not a nurse. The woman steps forward, away from the sunlight, and the troubling familiarity surrounding it like another light halo suddenly crystallises.

It is Lesley.

‘She’s awake,’ the doctor says, in English.

There are painful – agonising – prods and shifts of examination. My wrist is lifted and turned, then my head. I close my eyes against the intrusion.

When I look again, Lesley is close at hand. Her face leans down over me, her forearms are resting on the bedsheet. The doctor has gone. Lesley lifts a hand and touches her fingers to my forehead. She is smiling, rather tremulously, her characteristic smile that might at any moment melt into tears.

‘It’s all right,’ she whispers. ‘You’re going to be all right.’

I look past her, to where an IV pack hangs on its stand. The tube is taped to my arm. They’re putting in fluids, that’s all. We were in the desert, I remember, without water. The pain is mostly in my head, I realise; the after-effects of severe dehydration. Lesley is correct, then. I am not going to die today, or even tomorrow.

A shadow falls for a moment, a compound of weariness and exasperation.

But then I look back at my daughter’s face. I don’t know why she is here and the effort of working it out is too much. But I have the sense that Lesley has been in my mind. It was her absence that was like a butcher’s hook, holding me up and stopping me from slipping down and away. Now the negative is reversed to positive, absence has become presence, and I realise that I am profoundly glad.

I make an effort of concentration and lift the fingers of my left hand. The plastic IV tubing faintly chafes my skin and Lesley sees the movement. She takes my hand and laces her fingers with mine.

I say her name. The smile flowers all over her face.

‘Yes. I’m here, Mummy. Everything is going to be all right. I love you.’

Love. The wide sea that one word conjures up, all the
currents and tides and storms and oily swells of it. But I manage to nod my head.

As soon as she woke up Ruby knew that she had been asleep for a long time. The light was bright behind her half-closed shutters and Auntie was at the door of her bedroom. She was bringing morning tea; at least, a glass of hot water with a Lipton’s tea bag laid in its yellow envelope in the saucer. A cup of tea English-style, a special treat.

Mamdooh eased into the doorway and decently hovered there. Ruby instantly hoisted herself upright, keeping the sheet pulled up to her chin.

‘Mum-reese?’

‘Today better. She is weak, but now awake. Your mother with her.’

The cup and saucer rattled. ‘God. Oh, what a relief. That’s so good. She’s going to be all right, isn’t she?’

‘God is merciful,’ Mamdooh agreed. ‘Your friend has called to the house. He waits for you outside.’

‘Ash?’ Ruby wanted to see him, very much. She began to get out of bed and Mamdooh hastily withdrew. Auntie dipped the tea bag into the hot water and pressed the glass of cloudy brownish fluid into Ruby’s hand. She was very thirsty, sticky-mouthed with the taste of sand and the residue of bean soup, so she drank it in a single draught. She shook her head like a horse and Auntie tittered.

Ruby pulled on the nearest clothes that were not actually in the reeking desert heap, raked her fingers through her hair and leaned to open the shutters. Ash was standing against the opposite wall, one knee bent and the foot propped under him. He was wearing his leather jacket and a red Coca-Cola T-shirt. She rapped on the window to attract his attention but he was smoking, frowning and looking away down the alley.

She ran down the stairs and out of the front door.

Ash straightened up and threw his cigarette aside. ‘You look very terrible,’ he said.

She stopped short. ‘Well, thanks very much.’

He caught her by the wrist. ‘It is not being rude, it is the truth.’

Her hair was flat to the back of her head and stood up in matted spikes from the crown. Her lips were swollen and cracked, and her cheeks and eyelids were reddened and puffy from sun and windburn.

‘I am sorry,’ he added.

Ruby pulled angrily back but then she realised he was only shocked at the sight of her. She hadn’t bothered to consult a mirror and wondered briefly just how bad things were.

‘I’ve been in the desert. Three days. It was … it was …’ She stopped there and shrugged. She supposed that in time she would develop a routine for describing the experience, it would become her desert story, but she was nowhere near that yet. How it had been was too unwieldy to put into words. ‘Can we go somewhere? Not in the house.’

‘I will never put foot in there again,’ Ash almost spat.

‘Why? Why not? What happened?’

‘Let us go somewhere, yes.’

‘I want something to eat.’

‘Come, then.’

He took her hand. They went down the alley and into the street that led to the busy road. Ruby looked all around her, at the crowds of people in which each person had his own precious history, and at the garish colours of the overbearing advertisement hoardings, and the peeling walls and telephone wires and glinting traffic and exuberant density of ordinary Cairo, and she was almost overcome with gratitude for it. Her legs felt unsteady and even though she was hungry her
stomach contracted and rose as if she was about to be sick.

‘Are you all right?’ Ash wanted to know.

‘Yes.’ She was shocked, Ruby thought, with another faint frisson of surprise that she should be knowledgeable enough, somehow old enough, to recognise this so precisely. But that was what it was. She swallowed the sharp taste of delayed terror and followed Ash’s leather jacket as he shouldered through the crowds. At a café on the edge of Khan al-Khalili Ash pulled out a chair for her and Ruby quickly sat down. Immediately the usual crowd of newspaper vendors and shoeshine boys and children trying to sell lighters and bottles of water swarmed around them. Ash waved them away, and from the waiter in a stained white jacket he ordered yoghurt and coffee and fried eggs with flat bread for Ruby, the same as he had ordered for her first breakfast in the bazaar.

Ruby helped herself to one of his Marlboros. Inhaling the smoke brought a wave of giddiness.

‘The
suffragi
, and your mother and father, they think
I
have taken you and Madam Iris and done harm to you,’ Ash blurted out.

‘Did they? Why?’

‘How should I know this? The
suffragi
came to Nafouz and my mother, and talks about the police. And then of course, to help in any way I come to the house as soon as I can and your mother and father …’

‘My stepfather,’ Ruby interrupted, but Ash only stared at her.

Angrily he said, ‘… They look at me as if I am guilty for something. Why do they think that when I am your friend and you are mine? I tell you why. It is because I am Egyptian boy and you are English girl.’