and I have to leave again very early in the morning. I’ll take you home now.’
I smiled at him, pushing the meaning of tomorrow out of my thoughts, then leaned forward and gave him a lingering kiss. It took a serious effort of will to pull back again.
‘That was the very best evening of my life,’ I said.
‘Was it? Do you mean that?’
Once again, his eagerness touched my heart.
‘I do.’
‘There will be more,’ he promised. ‘Hundreds, no, thousands more. A lifetime of evenings, and mornings and nights.’
I touched my fingers to his lips, stalling him for now. I couldn’t ask where he was going, or when he would be back. All I could do was to send him off with the certainty that I would wait for him.
We blew out the candles together and untied the tent flap. We stood side by side and looked across to the Pyramids. And then we turned away from the tent and the view, and walked back hand in hand to the tiny oasis. The men who had been sitting around the fire were gone and the fire itself had burned down to a heap of ash with a heart of dull red embers. Hassan was waiting for us, sitting with his back against the trunk of a palm tree.
We drove back into the City. At the door to the apartment Xan touched my face. ‘I will be back soon,’ he promised.
‘I will be here,’ I said.
My eyes hurt from staring into the darkness.
My body aches, deep in the bones, and I am shivering as if with a fever. A little while ago I heard the child wandering about, but the street outside and the house are silent now. She must have fallen asleep. I long for the same but instead there is the patchy, piebald mockery of recall, and fear of losing even that much.
Always fear. Not of death, but of the other, a living death.
I think of Ruby’s offer to help me, innocent and calculating, and instead of finding her interesting I am suddenly overwhelmed with irritation, discomfort at the invasion of my solitude, longing for peace and silence.
The shivering makes my teeth rattle.
When Ruby woke, her low mood of the previous night had lifted.
She swung her legs out of bed at once and went to the window. The view of the street was already becoming familiar.
Humming as she turned back again, she picked up a T-shirt and a pair of trousers from yesterday’s heap that she had tipped out of her rucksack. She pulled on the clothes, then opened a drawer and scooped the remaining garments into it. The absolute bareness of the room was beginning to appeal to her; it looked much better without a bird’s nest of belongings occupying the floor. She even straightened the covers on the bed before hurrying down the passageway to her grandmother’s room. Her head was full of how she would start helping Iris to record her memories. Maybe after all she could try to write them down for her. The way they were written wouldn’t matter, surely? No one would be marking them or anything like that, not like school or college.
They could start talking this morning, while they were eating their breakfast.
Ruby was looking forward to figs and yoghurt and honey.
The door to Iris’s room stood open. She skipped up to it, ready to call out a greeting, then stopped in her tracks. The window was shuttered and the only light came from a lamp beside the bed. Iris was lying on her back and Auntie was reaching over her to mop her forehead with a cloth. The air smelled sour, with a strong tang of disinfectant. When Auntie moved aside Ruby saw that Iris’s face was wax-pale, and the cheeks were sunken. Her nose looked too big for the rest of her face and her eyes were closed. It was as if she had died in the night.
Ruby’s cheerful words dried up. She hovered in the doorway until Auntie half turned and saw her. At once she came at Ruby, making a shooing movement with her hands. Iris lay motionless.
‘What’s the matter? What’s happened? Is she ill?’
The answer was a few mumbled words in Arabic and a push away from the door. Ruby could only retreat and head downstairs in search of Mamdooh. She found him in the kitchen at the back of the house.
‘Is my grandmother very ill?’
Mamdooh pressed his fig-coloured lips together. ‘Mum-reese has fever.’
‘What does that mean?’
They glared at each other.
‘Fever,’ he repeated. And then, making a concession by way of further information, ‘Doctor is coming. Now she must sleep.’ He didn’t actually push her, but he made it as clear as Auntie had done that Ruby was in the way.
‘Will she be all right?’
‘Inshallah,’ Mamdooh murmured, flicking his eyes towards the ceiling.
‘Is there anything I can do to help?’
‘Nothing, Miss.’
Ruby glanced around the kitchen. The walls were painted a shiny, old-fashioned cream colour and the cupboards had perforated metal doors. There was a table covered with an oilcloth, an old-fashioned metal draining board at the side of the chipped enamel sink. There was a smell of paraffin and boiled laundry.
‘All right.’ She sighed. She knew something about sudden death but she had no idea about illness; it had never played any part in her life.
Iris wasn’t going to die right now, was she? What would happen to her, Ruby, if she did?
There was no answer to this. She would just have to wait for the doctor to come.
She wandered out into the courtyard and sat for a few minutes on the stool next to Iris’s empty chair, watching the way that sunlight turned the trickling water into a rivulet of diamonds. Soon she realised that she was very hungry indeed, and decided that it would be simpler to go out and buy herself something to eat rather than trying to negotiate Mamdooh and the kitchen. She checked that she had money in her trouser pocket and let herself out of the front door.
As soon as she started walking the heat enveloped her, and sweat prickled at the nape of her neck and in the hollow of her back. She kept to the shady side of the alleyway. There was an exhausted dog panting in a patch of deeper shade beside a flight of stone steps. He lifted his head as she passed and showed his pink tongue, and Ruby unthinkingly stooped to pet him. The dog cringed, lifting his legs at the same time to reveal a mass of sores on his belly. Flies rose in a buzzing black squadron.
Ruby shuddered and snatched her hand away.
She marched onwards, following the route to the busy street that Mamdooh had taken the day before. She had noticed plenty of little bakery and coffee shops in the bazaar, she would buy some breakfast there.
The underpass led her to the edge of the maze. She hesitated, looking back over her shoulder as if someone might
