Iris and Ruby (7 page)

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.

CHAPTER THREE

When I replace the receiver I see that my hands are shaking.

I return to the other room where the child is waiting for me.

‘What did she say?’ she asks.

The anxiety in her round face tells me how much she does not want to be packed off back to England. I sit down to collect my thoughts and she fidgets with impatience, twisting her legs and picking at the stud in her nose.

I can give her the gist of my conversation with Lesley, but there is so much else that I would find harder to put into words.

‘Leave your nose alone or you will set up an infection. Your mother has been worried about you. I told her that I thought you would be safe enough here.’

At once, the anxious expression breaks up into a smile that contains glee and satisfaction and a measure of triumph.

I am beginning to understand that Ruby’s innocence is shot through with calculation. Maybe the innocence itself is calculated. And I realise that the notion interests me more than anything has done for quite a long time.

‘So I
can
stay for a bit?’

Our separate conversations with Lesley have had a further curious effect, of course. That she is in opposition to both of us makes partial allies out of Ruby and me.

‘I would like a drink. A proper drink, I mean. Will you call Mamdooh?’ I say.

I am stalling for time because with part of myself I fear the loss of privacy that having her here will inevitably mean. I want to be alone to concentrate on the past, in order to hold on to it for as long as I can. Yet maybe the offer of help that Ruby made is less naïve than it sounded; maybe there is something in her idea.

Wearing his disapproval like an extra robe, Mamdooh brings in a tray with two glasses, a jug of water and a decanter with a couple of fingers of whisky in the bottom. I have no idea when I last drank Scotch.

‘Mum-reese, you will have plenty water with this?’

‘No, thank you, I’ll take it neat. And a decent measure, please. That’s better.’

Ruby accepts her glass with small enthusiasm. ‘I don’t really like whisky.’

‘What do you drink?’

‘Depends. Vodka and Red Bull?’

‘What’s that? I’m sure it’s disgusting. I don’t have anything of the kind anyway, so you’ll have to make do with Scotch.’

We both laugh and Mamdooh peers at us in surprise.

When we are alone again she draws up a stool and sits close to my chair. The sun has set, the street outside is noisy once again with shouts and music as people prepare the
iftar
. It is already twenty-four hours since Ruby arrived.