a woman with neither father, husband, brother nor son to take care of her and protect her. That was not a good position to be in at the best of times, and these were the worst of times. Ehsan, whatever his failings, was a necessary evil. She would just have to put up with him, as with everything else that had befallen them. In thinking this, tears flooded her eyes and the grief clenched at her heart once more. Her anguish and misery were more than she could bear; she could not live without Fayed who had always led and guided and protected. She wanted to shout out at his ghost, release her fury that he had not, as he had suggested he would, gone to the office that afternoon but instead had stayed at home and been pulverised by the falling bombs. Why had he betrayed her like this?
But then the tears fell with renewed intensity, as if desperate for release, as she railed with herself for her disloyalty and evil thoughts. Fayed had not meant to die. He had not wanted to leave them. And now that he had, she must somehow and some way, find the inner resources to keep going.
A test of her resolve came from the rightful demands of Safa, the matriarch of the family with whom they had found shelter.
‘We need food – bread and rice, and lots of other things that are nearly finished,’ Safa declared bluntly to Fatima, a few days after they had arrived. She and Marwa were sitting in an armchair. Fatima was trying to read the little girl a story but she kept losing her place on the page, her thoughts drifting away, her voice falling silent. She swallowed hard and fiddled with Marwa’s hair to cover her embarrassment. She should have thought of the need to contribute without having to be asked. Of course the family couldn’t afford to keep them; everyone was struggling enough as it was.
The shock of losing everything had temporarily eclipsed all else from her mind and then the trauma of arranging a funeral for Fayed, once she had managed to get his body recovered, had also taken its toll. It had all been overwhelming and she hadn’t been thinking straight but now that must change. Money must be procured to give to Safa, Fatima understood, immediately the demand had been made. She had not left Safa’s house since they had arrived there so she had had no opportunity to get cash. She had told herself that she was not going out because there was no reason to and she was tired but she knew that really she was scared. Scared to leave the house and not know if it would still be there when she returned. So she and the girls had stayed at home, if you could call it that, but now she had to pull herself together and pull her weight.
‘I’m sorry,’ she apologised to Safa. ‘I’ll go to the bank and withdraw some money.’ As she spoke, it occurred to her what Safa probably really wanted. ‘And – I can do the shopping on my way back. Tell me what I should get.’
‘Bread, rice, as I already mentioned,’ replied Safa, disappearing into the kitchen to check the cupboards. ‘Salt, meat, flour–,’ she continued, reeling off a seemingly endless list of the household’s requirements. Fatima wrote it all down on a scrap of paper.
Armed with the list and a veneer of bravado, Fatima left the girls drawing pictures in Safa’s kitchen. The queue at the bank stretched all the way out of the door but Fatima only needed to use the cash machine so she didn’t join it. Putting her card into the slot, she marvelled at how ordinary life continued amidst the mayhem, or at least the approximation of ordinary life. She could still shop. She could still go to the cinema or to a restaurant if she wished. Not that she could imagine doing either of those two things, but it was somehow unbelievable that such diversions still existed.
The machine bleeped and rejected her card. ‘Transaction not possible’ flashed up on the screen. Fatima frowned at the message. She reinserted her card and tried again. A line was forming behind her, of people anxiously shifting from one foot to the other, looking around them and up at the sky. Air strikes had become more frequent recently.
Once more, Fatima’s card was spat back out at her, emphatically. Puzzled, and with a knot of anxiety forming in her belly, she joined the queue which was only fractionally shorter now than it had been when she arrived. She had never taken much notice of their financial position before; she hadn’t had to. Fayed, older than her by ten years, already had a well-established business when they had met, fallen in love and got married. Fatima had been happy to take care of the children whilst he made the money. They were well off and she was able to continue studying English in her spare time, with the goal of going to university to do a degree in English literature when the girls got a bit older. She had plenty of time – she was only twenty-three.
Reaching the front of the queue, she handed her card to the cashier.
‘I don’t know why the machine wouldn’t process my request,’ she said, feeling the need to explain herself. The man tapped numbers into his screen and then looked at her incredulously. He had small, narrow eyes and a mean mouth.
‘It’s nothing to do with the machine,’ he explained, speaking very slowly as if she were extremely stupid. ‘It won’t give you any money because you haven’t got any.’
The mop handle clanged angrily and water sloshed onto her bare feet as Edie lugged the bucket into the cabin and began to clean, making wide, bad-tempered arcs across the tiles. Three cabins in two-and-a-half hours was too much, especially when so many of the guests were absolute slobs, leaving dirty dishes in the sink that she had to wash up and making sure that they’d messed up all the beds so that she still had to make them again even if they hadn’t actually been slept in.
She snatched a clean sheet from the pile she had dumped on the sofa and snapped it out across the double bed in the main bedroom, tucking it in haphazardly. Really, if anyone thought they were paying for hospital corners, they had another think coming. Pillowcases next, then the same to the single beds in the twin room. She swept the floor, whisking the grains of sand swiftly across the tiles so that they flew and caught the light like mini crystals. Slowly, she backed towards the door, dragging the bucket with her and cleaning right to the threshold. She paused to flick the air-conditioning off and stepped outside into the broiling heat. Fumbling for the key in her pocket, she could feel sweat gathering on her forehead and trickling down her back and legs, running from the nape of her neck to her shoulder blades. The door slammed as she pulled it closed.
The next cabin on her list was number 15, which brought back a few fond memories. She’d spent an interesting night there with two Serbian lads whose willingness to muck in together and get themselves – and her – into some gravity-defying positions had been entertaining to say the least. Not so much fun in here now though, she mused wryly to herself, pulling pubes out of the shower trap and trying to rid the sink of a tide mark of grime. Eleven o’clock already and still one more cabin to go. It was simply too much.
It was after midday when she locked the door of her third cabin and emptied her bucket out, slinging the water towards the roots of one of the parched olive trees nearby. She turned around, pushing her hair behind her ears with the back of her free hand and jumped out of her skin. Standing motionless in front of her was a man. Edie shrieked and then, realising who it was, clapped her hand to her mouth to suppress it. Zayn. She glared at him.
‘Not funny, Zayn, not funny at all. You nearly killed me.’
‘Sorry, Eeedie.’
In contrast to Stefan the chef, Zayn stressed the first part of her name so that it rhymed with an elongated ‘seedy’. Seedy-Edie – she was surprised the boys at school had never come up with that as a nickname, but they were mostly too preoccupied with Laura to bother their heads with her.
