Arabesk (123 page)

Huge black eyes looked up at Micki Vanhoffer from beneath a rather dirty scarf. Eyes that swam so deep with tears they appeared larger than was humanly possible. Below those eyes jutted a nose too prominent to fit any Western idea of beauty and under this a mouth that positively quivered with anguish.

“You speak English…” Micki meant it as a statement rather than a question, but her words were inflected, rising towards the end so Hani found herself answering.

“Yes,” Hani said. “I learnt it from tourists. When I was working in a café with my mother.”

Micki looked puzzled. “I thought you said you lived in an orphanage?”

“This was before my mother died,” Hani said firmly. “When I was little.”

“When you were…” The large woman looked at the small girl and sighed. “Things like this never happen on cruises,” she said. “I’ll get Carl Senior down from the bubble. You wait here.”

“You say he’s your brother…”

Hani looked at Murad, then nodded. “My brother,” she agreed. “Unfortunately he’s not very bright.”

The man asking Hani questions was big in a different way. His shoulders so broad that they seemed to stretch against his very skin. On his T-shirt was a simple fish made from a single line that curled back over itself at the tail; Hani had a feeling she’d seen the sign before.

“You have the fish.”

The man nodded. “You know what it means?”

Hani nodded. “Of course I know,” she said. “Everyone knows.”

“Carl…”
The word was a warning. “I know you want to do good in this heathen place but remember what our brochure said about preaching.”

“I’m not preaching,” said the man. “She mentioned it first.” He dropped to a crouch in front of Hani. “What’s this about an orphanage?” The words were soft, unlike his eyes, which were pale, watchful and just a touch angry. Mentioning his shirt had obviously been a bad move.

“We’re running away,” said Hani.

“I can see that.”

“From an orphanage.”

“What’s its name? Come on,” he said when Hani hesitated. “Spit it out.”

Hani looked puzzled. “Spit what out?” she said.

“Carl!”

“It’s a fair question,” Carl Vanhoffer said to his wife. “If she can’t instantly name the orphanage, then it probably doesn’t exist. And that boy isn’t her brother. Not full brother anyway. The skin colours are way different.”

“You’ll have to excuse Carl Senior,” said the woman with a tight smile. “He used to be a police officer. He gets like this sometimes. You should have seen him with Carl Junior when he was growing up…”

“That’s okay,” said Hani. “My uncle used to be a policeman. He gets like that too and your husband’s right. We’re not really running away from an orphanage.”

“Told you,” Carl Vanhoffer said. “What are you running away from?”

“Marriage,” said Hani and slowly pulled the shawl tight round her face, shrinking inside it. With her hunched shoulders and narrow back she looked frighteningly young. “And you’re right about the other thing too, Muri’s not my brother, he’s my cousin.”

“How old are you?” That was the woman.

Hani thought about it.

“Well?” The man’s eyes were less hard than they had been. Slightly mistrustful to be true enough but not out-and-out disbelieving.

“Twelve,” said Hani, adding a year to her age. Assuming Khartoum was right and she really had just turned eleven.

“You don’t look it.”

“Carl!”
Again that outrage, almost maternal. Like there were things men couldn’t be relied on to understand. Hani glanced at the both of them, the American man and woman. Most husbands and wives she’d met had harder edges to their lives and stricter boundaries. However, Hani had to admit to not having met many.

Hamzah Effendi and Madame Rahina were not a good model. Aunt Jalila and Uncle Mushin even worse. One now dead, the other apparently in a sanatorium. Uncle Ashraf and Zara? They weren’t even a couple, not properly.

“It’s all to do with food,” Hani told the woman. “The less you get to eat the smaller you look… A doctor told me,” she added, before Carl Senior had a chance to ask her how she knew.

“And the poor get married younger,” said the woman.

Hani wasn’t convinced this was true because, the way Zara told it, the really poor people in Iskandryia couldn’t afford to get married until their twenties, which might be why they got so cross. And that fact probably applied to Ifriqiya as well.

But Hani kept her silence.

Despite what Uncle Ashraf, Zara and everyone else thought, she always had known when to keep her opinions to herself.

“Have you met the boy you’re meant to marry?”

“Oh yes.” Hani nodded.

“What’s he like?” The woman sounded interested. Appalled, but still interested.

“Okay, I guess,” said Hani, jerking her narrow chin towards Murad. “As boys go…”

“This is him?”

Hani nodded again.

“And he’s running away with you?” Carl Senior sounded doubtful.

“Of course,” said Hani, “Muri doesn’t mind getting married but he doesn’t want to leave school.”

“Why would he leave school?” It was Micki’s turn to look muddled.

“Because he’ll need a job for when I have a baby…”

“When you…”
Their voices were so loud that Hani was afraid the Russian in the next cabin might start to wonder what was wrong.

“What exactly are you telling them?” Murad hissed, his Arabic so flawless he could have been reciting poetry at the court of a long-dead caliph. Needless to say Micki and Carl Senior understood not a word.

“That we’re running away,” said Hani. “Because our parents want us to get married.”

“Married?”
Murad stood openmouthed in outrage. “You’re eleven,” he said. “I’m twelve. Fourteen is the earliest a girl can get married in Ifriqiya. Sixteen for boys.”

“But they don’t know that, do they?” said Hani.

“What are you telling him?” Carl Senior demanded.

“That Muri shouldn’t be afraid of you,” said Hani. “That you won’t hand us over.” She was glancing at the man but she was talking to Micki.

Friday 11th—Sunday 13th March

He stank and there was little doubt that he’d just pissed
himself again. Liquid his body could ill afford to lose. Raf had also started to think of himself as
he
and that was never a good sign.

Maybe it was this that allowed the fox to return. Alternatively, Raf had just got bored with trying to hold himself together.

“Now dislocate your other shoulder,”
ordered the fox.

Raf shook his head. His teeth gritted not from bravery or pain but because he was trying to stop his upper left canine from falling out and keeping his mouth closed was all he could come up with, given both his hands were shackled behind his back and fixed to a wall.

Impossible.

“Not impossible,”
said the fox,
“just painful. Work on the difference.”
And then Raf stopped letting the different bits of himself talk to each other and started to listen to the sound of a sea that had vanished millions of years before, after the Chott el Jerid finally separated from the Mediterranean to become first an inland sea, then a lake and ultimately the flood-prone salt flats it finally became.

Except that the waves like the voices, came from within him and there was nothing supernatural about them.

What Raf could hear was the sound of his own blood echoing off the stone walls of an azib, a domed shelter built for goats and now his prison. At first the noise had been slight as meltwater over pebbles, growing louder, until now it splashed like a fosse falling into a cool meltwater pool far below. He was listening to what was left of his own life.

“Do it,” Raf told himself. “Dislocate.”

His first idea after Major Jalal had bolted the heavy azib door was to somersault out of his predicament by rolling forward to hang upside down from his shackled wrists, then twist sideways to land on his feet, facing the wall, with the shackles now in front of him. All he needed to do then was free his wrists and dig himself out.

Two failed attempts had convinced Raf this was impossible. So now he was going with the fox’s suggestion, that Raf begin by convincing himself he was really merely testing the strength of the chains shackling him to the wall.

As ever, when facing something unpleasant, the trick was to remove oneself from the pain. A trick he’d previously spent many months unlearning. Although back then he’d been somebody else. Or rather, Bayer-Rochelle had made him somebody else and done a good job of it too; much better than any of his schools had managed.

Removing oneself from pain wasn’t a trick everybody could master. For a start, it required a certain working knowledge of the subject, preferably one built up over many years. Unless, of course, it was possible to go for a single cataclysmic thunderburst that shocked the flesh into learning something it never forgot.

Raf didn’t know, that wasn’t the route he’d taken.

The secret was to be somewhere else. Answering questions other than those asked. While hunting for the fracture behind reality.

Breathe through nose or mouth…

Saturday or Sunday…

Live or die…

“Just one collection of questions after the next, isn’t it?”
said the fox.
“Life I mean. Or what passes for it…”

How long he’d been in the azib Raf wasn’t sure. Being knocked unconscious did that to you. At least it always did to him. And his back history was punctuated, at significant points, by such bouts of darkness, although often differently induced.

Actually, it was probably more accurate to say his life, back history, call it what one would, was a string of cold darkness punctuated by sharp, occasionally contradictory memories of being awake. What Raf had taken to calling the
sickroom conundrum
and what the fox insisted on calling Schrödinger’s paint pot.

If he went to sleep in a ward that was green and woke in the same room but it was grey, what had changed? Reality, the room or Raf? There was something very primitive about that question. Almost classic. A puzzle replete with a dozen resonances Raf undoubtedly failed to appreciate.

There was, of course, an even more primitive conundrum slumped against the wall opposite, quietly decomposing in note after note of sweet decay. At what point did Hassan cease to be human? And what exactly did death remove from that original mix of 65 percent oxygen, 18 percent carbon, 9.5 percent hydrogen and all those other elements neither Raf nor the fox could be bothered to remember?

Dying seemed simple, decomposing less so, if Hassan was representative. A veritable matrix of influences constraining or facilitating the metamorphosis: beginning with attack by insects, originally flies, then beetles, finally millipedes; amount of clothing intact, in this case none; level of physical trauma, considerable; ambient heat, sweltering…

The fox and Raf also agreed on the probability that soil type made some impact.

Felix would have known. Having wiped his finger on the floor of the azib he’d have announced a high saline content was hindering decomposition or saltpetre was causing mummification. Of course, the fat man was quite capable of wiping his finger straight on the body.

When Raf first woke, Hassan had been coming out of rigor, locked muscles slowly relaxing, starting with his eyelids, lower jaw and the soft jowls of his neck. And Raf didn’t need voices in his head to tell him this was decomposition of muscle fibre.

By evening the boy’s face had turned a weird greenish red, with a veritable tie-dye of corruption brightening his flabby chest and blotching his naked thighs. It was around this time that Hassan began to smell. At least that was what Raf thought then. Now, reassessing, he understood that corruption had barely started.

After the face began to melt, millipedes arrived to eat mites busy feeding on flesh, the blowflies having already gone. And gas-filled blisters began to appear under the skin as liquid leached from anus, nostrils, mouth and ears. In all probability, Raf realized, he was taking more interest than was wise in the intricacies of what was happening. But it was hard to avoid when shackled in a stone azib, five paces from one’s very own
memento mori
.

“Enough with the thinking,”
said the fox, its voice completely present for the first time in weeks.
“You can dislocate your way out of this or stay here and die. Make a choice.”

It looked out through Raf’s eyes. The bit of him that had never been entirely human.

“You want this to end,”
it said,
“then end it. But ask yourself this… How many more times can you afford to die?”

Saturday 12th March

Sometime after the lights went down in the main part of
the coach, and those who had couchettes let back their seats, and the loos and showers occupied by tourists preparing for sleep finally emptied, Micki took Hani to the loo, using the width of her hips to shield the child from anyone who might glance round.

Micki was pretty sure everyone was safely dozing. She’d already made three visits, earning herself pitying glances from a middle-aged, pudding-faced Soviet woman in the back row who’d finally fallen asleep with a crumpled copy of the previous day’s
Pravda
on her lap.

“I’ll keep guard,” Micki told the child, ushering Hani through a door. “Don’t worry,” she added, when Hani looked anxious, “I’ll be here when you come out.”

“Micki,” Hani’s voice was little more than a whisper.

“What now?”

“Um…”

The child had the face of an angel. A foreign angel obviously but an angel all the same. Men were going to fall into those dark eyes and never find their way back. Not for years though, Micki told herself hastily. When the girl was properly grown-up.

“What is it?” asked Micki and when Hani still didn’t answer, she dropped to her knees the way she used to do when something was worrying Carl Junior. Carl Senior never got the importance of this, although she’d tried to explain it more than once. He always towered over the boy, then wondered why he got frightened.