Chapter Four

      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 be tailing her, then hurried into the nearest alley where coffee was one of the stronger elements in the thick tangle of smells. But the narrow shops and piled barrows here were all crammed with plastic toys and knick-knacks. Dolls’ pink faces leered at her and dented boxes containing teasets and miniature cars were piled in teetering pyramids. Two men had a tray of toy dogs that yapped and turned somersaults and emitted tinny barking noises. As Ruby tried to squeeze past, two of the toys fell off the tray and landed on their backs with their plastic feet still pawing the air. A trio of small boys bobbed in front of her, shouting hello and holding up fistfuls of biros. ‘Very good, nice pens,’ they insisted, jumping in front of her when she tried to dodge them. The crowd was dense, choking the alley in both directions. The stallholders began calling out and holding up their goods for her attention.

      A man blocked