Arabesk (105 page)

A small wading bird with clockwork legs and a blue bottom raced across damp concrete and plopped into the lake, bobbing beneath the spray of a fountain on its way towards a tiny island in the middle. The concrete was damp because the fountain plumed straight out of the water and every gust of wind carried fine droplets towards the shore.

The scene was sickeningly normal.

“Let me buy you a coffee.” Raf nodded to a low café across the lake, its tables almost as crowded as the paths. “Then you can tell me about Maison Hafsid and who these men were who came looking for me…”

In reply, Isabeau glanced at her wrist.

“You need to be somewhere else?”

Isabeau looked suddenly embarrassed, even slightly panicked; a blush suffusing her face. “No,” she said hastily, “being here is good.” They finished the stroll in silence. Only this time it was a quieter, less strained silence and could almost pass for friendship if not for the anxious glances she kept throwing in Raf’s direction.

All that changed when Raf saw a child feeding bread to a duck. No one he’d ever seen before. Just a girl of about nine wearing a headscarf and feeding crusts to a duck so full it could barely waddle. She had long hair, tied back, white sneakers and cheap dark glasses that kept sliding down her nose. So wrapped up was she in watching the duck that the rest of the world might as well have not existed…

“Raf,” said Isabeau. She was pulling at his arm.

“What?”

“What are the voices saying?” Worried eyes watched him. “And why are you staring at that child?”

“No reason,” said Raf. And was shocked to discover he was crying.

“You miss your kid?” Isabeau demanded when the waiter had gone.

Raf put down his coffee, thought about it…“Yes,” he admitted finally.

“Because he lives with his mother?”

“She,” Raf corrected, “and I think her mother’s dead.”

“You think…” Isabeau tried hard not to be shocked. Divorce was more common in Ifriqiya than in other North African countries. But not in the way it was in the West. All the same, Isabeau obviously figured she’d know if a person she’d married was alive or not.

“You
were
married to her mother?”

“I’ve never been married,” Raf said. “Although I was engaged once but that was to someone else.” He caught Isabeau’s expression and smiled. “It’s a messy story,” he said.

“They usually are.” Glancing round the café terrace with its noisy children and couples relaxing after a stroll in Jardin Belvedere, she shrugged. “You don’t have to tell me that.” When Isabeau spoke again it was to ask a question that appeared to have been troubling her. Her voice was hesitant, as if Isabeau was uncertain of the wisdom of asking.

“You’re not really who you say you are, are you? If you know what I mean…”

Inside Raf’s head the other Raf grinned, all teeth and no smile.
“Okay,”
it said smoothly,
“answer that and stay human.”

Raf couldn’t. Which he guessed was Tiri’s point.

The
capuchin
was milky, came in glass mugs and had a scum of thin froth across the top. Raf promptly embarrassed himself by mishearing the price and blithely handing the waiter a note roughly equivalent to U$5, a good portion of Raf’s wages for that week.

“Does Your Excellency have anything smaller?” It was obvious the old man thought Raf was trying to impress Isabeau.

Raf shook his head. “Wednesday’s payday,” he said. “That’s how I was given it.”

“Must be a good job.”

“Kitchen work, seven shifts in a row,” Raf said wryly and saw rather than heard the old man suck his teeth.

“No so good… I’ll get you change.”

A dozen grubby notes and a fistful of change, some of it old enough to be real, arrived on a chipped saucer, while Raf and Isabeau sat at their table and watched two toddlers, an old man wearing a red felt
chechia
and a young woman cross the wooden bridge leading from the gates of Jardin Belvedere over a narrow strip of lake to where Isabeau and Raf sat nursing warm coffees.

At Raf’s end stood a camera crew trying to film two laughing girls in red headscarves, arms tight around each other’s waists as they strolled across the same bridge, but every time the girls got halfway some toddler would run into the shot or a passing family would halt and stare. Once, an old woman halted the two girls just as they reached the café end of the bridge. She wanted to ask them the time.

“Who are they?”

Isabeau snorted. “Now I
know
you don’t come from around here,” she said and named a famous Tunisian soap that had been running for eighteen years. “They’ve been friends since before kindergarten,” Isabeau explained. “But their fathers have hated each other ever since Jasmine’s father had Natasha’s mother’s kiosk at Gare de Tunis torn down because she hadn’t applied for a tobacco-sellers’ permit. So now they have to meet in secret.”

“Are they lovers?”

Isabeau’s eyes went wide. “Such things don’t happen in Ifriqiya. Especially on television.”

“Don’t happen or aren’t talked about?”

“Both,” said Isabeau. And for a moment Raf was looking through a broken window into the darkened basement of her soul.

“So why the fear?” Raf asked.

Part of Isabeau obviously wanted to ask
what fear?
And for a second, Raf was afraid she might just get up and walk away. Instead she sipped at cold coffee and watched two twenty-three-year-old actresses pretend to be fifteen.

“In America,” Raf said, “they’d close this café, hire extras to drink coloured water and have police tape off the road both sides of the gate. Everything would be done in one shot… The only people allowed near that bridge would be the actresses and the crew. And if the actresses decided to fuck each other it would be out of boredom.”

“You’ve been to America?” Isabeau sounded disbelieving.

“Once,” said Raf. “Years back. When I thought I was somebody else.”

“Why tell me this?”

“Because I can?”

“And I can’t tell anybody.” Isabeau nodded, as if that was obvious. “Without you telling them about me…” Her voice was thoughtful.

“So Hassan doesn’t know?”

“Hassan!” Raf could almost taste her irritation. “Oh, Hassan wants to marry me, all right. So he can get his hands on my quarter of the café.” It took a second for Raf to work out that Isabeau meant the smoky tunnel in Souk El Katcherine where he’d first met Idries. “That won’t be happening…”

“You already have a lover?”

The broken window was instantly back. The room inside darker than ever. As black as those places where the fox hid. In the days before Raf finally accepted that the fox was him.

“Okay,” Raf said. “No lover.”

“No,” Isabeau agreed. On the far side of the bridge the camera crew began packing equipment into a white van, faces relieved; and both the actresses now sat in an old green Lincoln that waited to pull out into traffic, watched by a crowd of schoolchildren.

“What about you?” Isabeau asked, her eyes never leaving the car.

What indeed. Any answer Raf might be prepared to give was aborted by a sudden buzz from Isabeau’s bag.

“It’s me,” she said, having reached for a cheap cell phone. “What?”

The answer froze Isabeau’s expression. One second, she was watching a distant schoolgirl with bare legs and checked dress; the next blood drained from Isabeau’s cheeks and her mouth went slack. Spiralling adrenergic hormones. Textbook shock.

She turned off the Nokia without saying another word.

“I have to go.” Eyes unfocused.

“Go where?” said Raf. And when Isabeau didn’t answer he reached forward to take the cell phone from unresisting fingers and put it back in her bag. Without thinking he also wiped a fingertip of sweat from her forehead and absentmindedly licked it.
Shocked and scared
, the Raf inside Raf decided,
been there/done that/probably about to do it again.

“You in trouble?” Stupid question really.

“I have to go.” Metal scraped on concrete as Isabeau pushed back her chair and three tables away people winced. “My brother, Pascal…”

“I’ll come with you,” said Raf.

She shook her head.

Raf sighed. “Whatever it is,” he said. “I can help. And if you’re really in trouble, then a couple is less easy to spot than a single girl in a city like this.” His nod took in the café crowd and the busy sidewalk on the other side of the bridge.

“How can I trust you?” Isabeau demanded. “And how do I know you are who you say you are?”

“You don’t,” said Raf. “And I’m not.” He tossed some change onto their table for the waiter and gripped Isabeau’s hand, refusing to let her pull free. “Smile as you walk away,” Raf ordered, and Isabeau’s face twisted in misery.

Halfway across the little bridge he made her stop to watch a waterbird swim beneath their feet, take a last look round the lake and then stroll arm in arm with him towards the gates. On the way out, Raf bought a loose bag of cookies from a stall. They were sweet to the point of sickness and warm from being on display.

Wednesday 23rd February

“I wonder if you could help…” Hani’s voice was polite
but firm. As if she regularly wandered alone as evening fell, trawling expensive Italian boutiques on Rue Faransa, a street once famous for its Victorian brothels and opium dens.

“A dress?” Returning Hani’s demand with a question was all the sticklike owner could manage. Backed up inside Madame Fitmah’s head were certainly a dozen other, infinitely more important questions, starting with how was this child planning to pay and ending with what should she, Madame Fitmah, call the small girl since
madame
was obviously out of the question?

“I’ve got cash,” said Hani, yanking a roll of dollars from her fleece pocket. “And you can call me
mademoiselle
.” She grinned at Madame Fitmah’s blossoming shock and nodded towards an antique brass till inlaid with silver and bronze, although the mechanism was strictly electronic. “You glanced at that,” Hani explained, “then you looked at me and seemed puzzled.”

“Mademoiselle?”

Hani nodded. “And I’ve got cash,” she stressed, holding out the roll of US dollars, but still the woman looked doubtful.

El Isk was, by the standards of North Africa, surprisingly liberal in its approach to life. In part this was due to its status as a freeport and, in part, to the fact that liberalism had been General Koenig Pasha’s only defence against creeping fundamentalism. True, a woman still couldn’t inherit property, hold a job without the consent of her father or husband, drive alone on Fridays or initiate a divorce; but she could own a credit card and was liable for any debt she incurred. Unlike, say, Riyadh or Algiers, where all a man had to do was repudiate his wife’s right to incur debt and no court would enforce an order.

Children were different, obviously enough. In Iskandryia, boys were considered responsible from the age of fourteen; for girls the age was twenty-one. Although where marriage was concerned the differential reversed. Then the legal age was fourteen for the girl and sixteen for a boy.

Even if Hani had possessed a credit card, Madame Fitmah would have been unwilling to sell her anything without an adult present to countersign the slip. Cash on the other hand…

“What kind of dress?”

“Gold,” said Hani. “Thin as the wings of a Great Admiral butterfly, with pearls around the neck and sleeves seeded with emeralds.”

“I’m not sure we’ve…” The Italian woman looked round at steel shelves lining her
haut minimaliste
boutique. A shop space taller than it was wide. And when she shrugged apologetically her scarlet Versace dress creased at the shoulders. “I doubt if anyone’s ever…”

Hani sighed and the gown that Scheherazade wore on the last of her one thousand and one nights crumbled in her imagination and was gone.

“Show me what you’ve got,” said Hani and sounded so like Zara that she tagged on a hurried
please
, before climbing onto a chrome-and-glass chair to position herself so that she stared at a red flower painted on the far wall, her spine rigid and legs bent at the knee. A move that would do more than cash could to convince Madame Fitmah the child belonged in her boutique.

“You’ve been measured before.”

“Oh,” Hani smiled sweetly. “I’m always being measured.” And so she was, against the edge of a door in the kitchen by Donna, who took a fresh measurement every month and wrote the date against it. Although obviously this wasn’t what the woman meant.

“But you don’t have your card…?”

“I’ve grown,” Hani told the woman. She sounded ridiculously smug about this, as if the growth spurt had been down to her and not to nature. That wasn’t the real reason Hani had left her card behind, of course. The one she’d had done with Zara featured Hani’s name and address encoded on the chip.

The scanner was silent as it passed through the small girl’s fleece, T-shirt and jeans to map the skin beneath, then looked through skin to the bones and measured those as well. Any clothes cut to measure would fit perfectly but Hani was too impatient to wait so Madame Fitmah matched her measurements to an inventory of stock.

“I’m sorry,” the owner began to say and stopped as the face of the child in front of her immediately dissolved into tears. Half a second later and the grief was gone, pulled back into glistening eyes and a trembling mouth. A second after that and Hani’s face was neatly composed.

“I’m sorry to have troubled you,” Hani said as she slipped from the chair. Pushing her bundle of dollars back into a fleece pocket, she headed for the door.

“Wait.” Madame Fitmah stood beside a screen, scrolling down the list. “I’m sure we can adapt something. Is this for a special occasion?”

“Oh yes,” said Hani. “One of my cousins is having a party for his parents.”

Wednesday 23rd February

“Next time,” Chef Antonio’s voice was flat, “I sell your
ass to my nephew Hassan, who likes that kind of thing.” He took back his high-carbon Wusthof and threw the recipient of his scorn a cheap Sabatier kept for casual labour.