have an excursion. I know, we’ll go to Giza.’ The idea develops its own momentum. I am overtaken by a longing to leave the house and walk a different route, away from the repetitive circuit of my thoughts. ‘We’ll drive out there, visit the Pyramids and then watch the sun set over the desert. What do you think?’
‘Drive out there? Nafouz and Ash aren’t here today. That was last week, when we went to Groppi’s, remember?’
I stand up. Ruby picks up the blanket as it falls from my knees and folds it over the back of my chair.
‘Will you call Mamdooh? Tell him I will need the car.’
She follows me into my bedroom. In the cupboard hangs my warm deerskin coat.
‘You have a car?’
I am thinking of the sky fading to the colour of amethysts and the way that you have to steer a car when the wheels turn wayward in loose sand.
‘Of course I do. Hurry up, or we will miss the sunset.’
Mamdooh’s face was dark.
‘Mum’reese, it is not a good idea. For Miss, I can arrange to make a visit with a guide who will speak English. Tomorrow, or even better the next day.’
Ruby followed Mamdooh through the kitchen, both of them in Iris’s wake. He had given her one furious glare, indicating that all this must be her fault, and Ruby had done her best to signal back that it was nothing to do with her.
‘Where is the key? Mamdooh?’
‘It is here.’ Auntie stood aside and Mamdooh took a set of keys out of a drawer in one of the old cream-painted cupboards.
‘Very good. Come on.’
Auntie picked up a duster and polishing rag. In a small procession, with Ruby at the back, they passed through a door she had never seen opened before. It led from the kitchen into a small scullery, very small but high, with a tiny window let into the thick wall far above their heads. Mamdooh slid several bolts and opened another door. Ruby saw that it led into a cobbled alley at the back of the house. The blank walls out here were scabbed and blistered, and a thin trickle of grey water ran down the central gutter. The smell of sewage was powerful.
Iris stepped over the gutter and stood expectantly beside a pair of wooden doors secured with a chain and padlocks. Mamdooh very slowly went about the business of unlocking and withdrawing the chain. Finally he folded back the doors.
There was faint scurry in the dim interior, unmistakably a rat making for safety in the darker recesses of what must once have been a barn. There were wooden feed troughs along one wall, and a cobwebbed harness hanging from a peg.
And there was a car.
Auntie moved first. With her bunched-up duster she made a little swipe over the bonnet. Under the thick coat of Cairo dust and gritty sand, it was just possible to tell that the car had once upon a time been black.
Iris looked mystified. She opened the driver’s door and leaned into the interior, dust rising in little puffs under her fingers as she twisted the steering wheel.
‘Not any insurance, not any service, oil, benzene,’ Mamdooh muttered. ‘Look, tyres all flat.’
Ruby wandered round to the back and rubbed the rear insignia plate clean. Even though it was ancient, the car seemed quite familiar. It was a Volkswagen Beetle, not so very different from the new one owned by Lesley in which Ruby had learned to drive.
‘Mum had one of these.’ She smiled as she came round to the front again.
‘What?’
‘A Beetle. Until last year, then she got an Audi.’
Now Mamdooh stood back with his fists clenched on his hips. ‘It is not possible to drive this car.’
Iris gently closed the door again. ‘I bought it in the seventies, when I was living in Swakopmund, from a German dentist called Werner Esch. He was going back to live in Europe but he didn’t want to ship the car home, and he gave me a good price. When I moved up here to Cairo I drove all the way, and everything I wanted to bring with me fitted into here.’ Absently she patted the hood, her fingertips leaving little marks like the blurred footprints of birds.
Auntie had been rubbing the chrome door handle but her eyes were watering from the dust and she coughed into a fold of her white headscarf. Reluctantly Iris stepped away from the car although her hand still stretched out as if she didn’t want to relinquish the memory and promise of adventure that went with it.
‘We’ll get a taxi instead.’
‘Mum-reese, it is too late today. When you get to Giza it is dark.’
‘I have been out after dark in my life, you know.’
‘Miss will not see anything.’
Iris’s eyes glittered. He had outflanked her, but she wouldn’t be deflected. ‘We’ll go somewhere else, then. Ruby, tell me, where would you like to go?’
Without waiting for an answer she clicked her fingers. ‘The museum. We’ll go to the museum and that will give you some history before we go out to Giza. I don’t suppose you know any, do you? We’d better be quick about it.’
Within half an hour a black-and-white taxi, much newer than Nafouz’s, circled the vast traffic roundabout of Midan Tahrir and drew up outside the dark-pink block of the museum. Iris sat up in the front next to the driver and Mamdooh, who had insisted on coming with them, was squeezed in the back next to Ruby.
In the mornings the front of the building was choked with tourists and their guides and buses, but at the end of the day there was only a handful of stragglers and postcard sellers loitering in the dusk. As they swept through the gates they made an unusual threesome, but it was Iris with her stiff back and profile like a face on a coin who drew the attention. Ruby slouched with her hands in her trouser pockets. She didn’t care for the wholesome, family-day-out aspect of most of the museums she had been dragged to at home, but at least this outing was a diversion. As they reached the doors she was even experiencing a flutter of mild interest.
Mamdooh negotiated for tickets, then they walked inside.
Ruby tilted her head to look upwards. Dim galleries rose round a central well crowned with a span of murky glass. Radiating away from where she stood were tall wooden cases filled, heaped, overflowing with a wild profusion of exhibits. She drifted down the wood-and-glass avenues, gazing at the displays. There were tiny carved wooden figures from tombs and huge imperious pharaonic statues. There were primitive boats and earthenware pots, broken shards and scratched hieroglyphs and curled papyrus, massive jewellery in gold and cornelian and glass, amulets and bracelets, and humble leather sandals that looked as if they had been discarded only a day ago. The artefacts were all dusty and most of the labels were written in scratchy, faded Arabic, but for Ruby this only added to the appeal. This was a museum, not a museum experience. It was rich and darkly disordered and abundant, and tantalising because she didn’t know enough to begin to comprehend it. It was a vast collection of innumerable collections, a multi-magnification of her own one-time passion that made her hungry and awestruck at the same time.
Her breath fogged the glass as she stared at a swarm of bizarre brooches in the shape of golden flies.
