best.’ Bending forward, he kissed her on the lips, hard and purposefully.
Edie felt herself relax. Only the best. Of course that’s what he wanted for her. And Laura, too, she was sure.
She kissed him back.
The pudgy fingers of the man in the gold shop repulsed Fatima as he picked at her bracelets, her necklace, her wedding and engagement rings.
‘They’re not much, are they?’ he stated disparagingly, his grubby glasses fallen to the end of his nose and dandruff from his greasy hair coating his shoulders.
You disgust me, Fatima wanted to say. You are a horrible little man who feeds on the plight of others.
She kept her mouth tightly closed. The odium she felt was not really for him; it was for the perpetrators of this conflict that allowed some to profit whilst most were reduced to utter ignominy. Watching the dealer distastefully poke her earrings she wondered how her happy, settled, ordered life had come to this. And then gave a contemptuous inner laugh at the idea that she had it worse than anyone else, at the audacity of even thinking that she didn’t deserve what had been meted out to her. Millions of lives had been slashed to pieces, tens of thousands slain, a multitude left with scars that would never heal. And she was sad about selling her trinkets. She despised herself for the pettiness of her thoughts.
And yet her heart lurched in her chest when the dealer held a magnifying glass against the stones in the necklace that she always wore. The chain was pure gold and the pendant an interlocking figure of eight shape with two emeralds surrounded by tiny diamonds and seed pearls. Fayed had given it to her when the twins were born, an emerald for each of them to match their mother’s green eyes, he had said. It had been in his family for years and Fatima had always admired it but never thought to own it herself, assuming that Noor, who possessed the status conferred by seniority, would get the pick of the most valuable pieces.
‘This one – this is nice,’ the man said, laying it carefully back onto the table.
Fatima gave an almost imperceptible nod of agreement. Remain implacable. Give nothing away. This had been her advice to herself as she set off for the shop.
‘Take whatever you can get,’ Ehsan had urged her, his brow growing taut and his eyes wide, obviously fearing that she would bungle it somehow and get ripped off, end up selling everything for a song.
Fatima had nodded whilst secretly concocting her own game plan. She was not going to panic and give the jewellery away. She was nobody’s pushover. She’d been telling herself that since the day at the bank and she was beginning to believe it – or at least to make a good enough pretence. There had been bad decisions in the past, though. If only they’d sold the house and left at the beginning, when it all started, Fatima railed at herself now. Then she’d have cash in her pocket and could keep the jewellery for later, for the rainy day that would undoubtedly come all too soon. But no one had known, then, how bad it was going to get, how long it would all go on for. No one could possibly have predicted such a complete breakdown of society, such carnage, such an exodus. Now Fatima had only her few pieces of jewellery to fall back on and thank goodness Fayed’s accountancy business had been lucrative, once, and that he had been generous and rich enough to bestow gold and silver and precious stones upon her, and that she’d been wearing so many of them on the day the bombs fell. She was going to need every single pound she could glean from them today. There was nothing that mattered now except getting Marwa and Maryam out of here.
The gold dealer offered a price. It was derisory.
‘I don’t have time for this.’ Fatima scooped up all the jewels, delicate chains dripping between her fingers, the stones of her engagement ring digging into the palm of her hand, and left. She said nothing more, just turned her back and walked away.
The man called her bluff, shrugging and busying himself with some paperwork. She almost lost her nerve and returned to the counter but just managed to hold on long enough for him to have to summon her.
‘Wait,’ he called out, ‘let me take another look.’
She was at the door already and she paused, hovering on the threshold, making him wait for her to turn back.
His second offer was better, but still nowhere near enough. Fatima scowled scornfully and refused, but this time remained where she was standing. The dealer did some more poking and prodding and examining and scrutinising. Fatima put forward an amount that she would find acceptable. He laughed in her face. She almost capitulated, anything to get away from the humiliation he was joyously meting out to her.
Inside her head, a voice was crying out to her, this is all you have! Nothing else, just this. Don’t mess it up, you foolish woman. She stood firm.
Pursing her lips tightly together, squaring her shoulders, Fatima steadfastly gave the dealer another sum, her absolute minimum. It was not much less than the previous number. Negotiations like these could take hours or minutes. It all depended on how much the seller wanted to sell and the buyer wanted to buy. However much she affected nonchalance, the dealer knew that a woman only sold her jewellery, her wedding ring, if she had to. She only had so much power to influence the outcome.
Eventually, they agreed on a price. It was far lower than the value of the items, but considerably higher than Fatima had expected to get.
‘Thank you,’ said Fatima, and actually meant it.
‘No, thank you, madam,’ said the gold dealer, suddenly jovial now the deal was done. ‘It was a pleasure doing business with you.’
‘Likewise,’ nodded Fatima, and did not mean it.
She stashed the money in the waistband pocket, nodded a perfunctory farewell and left. It was small, but it was a victory. It was proof that she could cope, that she would continue to cope. She would do it for her children because not doing so was not an option, and for Fayed, for his memory. As she walked back to Safa’s house, her thoughts strayed to how life used to be when they were all so happy together and had everything to look forward to. The twins were healthy and bright, they were comfortably off and, most importantly of all, she and Fayed were in love.
Fatima remembered how he had brought the emerald necklace to her one evening as she sat in the girls’ nursery in the courtyard house, singing them to sleep with the songs she had learnt from her mother that had been passed down through the generations. He had hung it around her neck, gently fastening the clasp and then leading her to the mirror to show her how it complemented her dark skin and sparkling eyes. In that moment, Fatima’s world had been complete. The rumbling protests and skirmishes in the big cities far away had been expected to pass over quickly; order would quickly be restored and life would go on as before.
How naive that complacency seemed now. Fayed was dead and the country dying. Life itself could no longer be taken for granted. Fatima quickened her pace as the sky darkened. She had a feeling there would be a raid that night. She must get back to the twins before the bombs began to fall.
‘So
