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
