The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (39 page)

All.
Darkness swept in against the edge of his thoughts every time Raf glanced down. And the alley floor sucked in his concentration like a singularity swallowing light. Until looking away became nearly impossible, climbing ditto.

Crying with frustration, Raf made himself stare up at the window, its shutter swinging slowly in the evening breeze. Everything he needed to become was on the other side of that. Zara, Hani, the ballerina… And whatever the ballerina was doing, that was something he needed to know about.

Hey, dead boy,
the voice in his head was mocking.
Recognize where you are?

Raf did. He’d been there before.

CHAPTER 48

Switzerland

Outside was silver rain.

Inside a fox cub coughed, thin shoulders heaving and skull flat to the floor. The door stood ready to be opened, buckled by the noise and anger of what waited on the other side.

He touched the handle.

Skin seared and the boy’s fingertips vaporized, fragments of skin left sticking to the red-hot door knob as he yanked back his hand. He wanted to cry but he was doing that already.

It was nothing, he’d been telling himself… Nothing seeping under the door, nothing pushing past the sodden towels he’d used to close out the gap; but he could no longer pretend. Tears dripped unnoticed onto his red wool dressing gown.

He could smell burning and the smell came from him.

All the boy had to do if he wanted to live was turn the handle and yank back the door. It was that simple. The alternative was to die in peace, letting go any last shred of hope that stuck to his soul the way his burnt skin was glued to the door handle. Die, or walk out into the silver rain. Into the Hell pastors talked about in chapel.

Water still trickled from the cold faucet but it was boiling now, steam rising from the basin as he turned on the tap. A gravity-feed cistern in the roof behind him supplied water and the noise had not yet reached his stretch of attic.

Stripping off, the boy screwed up his dressing gown and held it under the water, burning his already burnt fingers. When the cloth was completely sodden, he wrapped it around his body. The dressing gown wasn’t long enough to protect his ankles or calves but it would cover the rest of him, for what that was worth.

He opened the door by gripping its handle through cloth from his gown and twisting. And when steam hissed from beneath his fingers, the boy knew he should have dealt with the door first, when the dressing gown was still dry, rather than this way round. Logical rather than lateral, he wasn’t as good at that as his mother’s friends expected.

But this wasn’t a test.

Taking a deep breath, he threw back the door and stepped out. There was no ground, no walls, no roof above him. Only a red glow. A darkness of night sky held back by flame. The silver rain had almost finished, thick drops of lead trickling down from gutters to evaporate into dark smudges on fire-scarred walls. Surrounding him was what was left of one attic and between him and the next surviving attic lay nothing but a smouldering pit of fire bisected by a black steel girder that stretched over empty space.

The noise of the flames had grown softer. Burnt out, along with the west wing of the school. There was fire behind him, scavenging its way like cancer along the building, shattering walls, melting lead and eating through wooden beams to drop the blazing remains noisily into orange cinders below.

Firemen had seen him now. That became obvious when a spotlight almost bowled him backwards with shock. Someone swore, their words made puny by distance and flame, and the light snapped out. So the boy shut his eyes and let them adjust, calling up darkness in his head. Waiting until the extraneous noise died and the orange glow behind his eyelids slid away.

When he looked again, the pit was back, framed round with darkness and night, while tiny grey bats of ash spiralled high into the air.

“Stay there.” Words loud enough to come from God bellowed from a hand-held loudspeaker somewhere below. “You’re safe there.”

The boy shook his head. The man lied, probably not intentionally. But only because the man wasn’t where he was, so didn’t know any better.

He was going to die or he was going to live: the choice was his. Not their choice, his choice. He and the fox were the ones who had to walk the abyss.

On the far side of the attic, a tall ladder was sliding upwards in a fluid sweep of hydraulics, a man balanced at its top. The man wore dark blue overalls and a yellow helmet with a bump across the top like a ridge of bone. A night visor covered his eyes and nose, and on his back was an oval oxygen tank. One of the new models, doughnut-shaped with a hole in the middle. He was mouthing words the boy didn’t wait to hear.

“Time to go,” said the boy.

Claws needled into the flesh of his shoulder as he tightened his grip on the scrabbling animal. Of course the cub wanted out of there, so did he, and that meant crossing the iron beam. He didn’t blame the fox for not being happy, but it wasn’t helping.

The iron beam was recent: put there within the last seventy years to brace internal walls of a Swiss arms dealer’s mansion originally built for show rather than quality. The beam and its bracing were the only thing stopping the wing of the Swiss boarding school falling in on itself.

Flames flickered below him, held in check by fire hoses but waiting, gathering themselves to explode upwards and sweep away the last fragments of his attic. This was life.

He shook his head crossly, flipping blond hair into already stinging eyes. He didn’t like the school and didn’t want to be there. He couldn’t see the point of useless tests or running through brambles in the rain. It wasn’t even the exercise he minded. It was the other pupils. The ones who never saw what he saw.

There were tears in his eyes again, but he couldn’t work out why. Maybe he was just scared. That was allowed, wasn’t it?

Except it wasn’t.

Boys like him weren’t scared. They did the stupid, the splendid and the impossible without making a fuss. They walked out along red-hot
—

“Enough already,”
said the fox.
“Move it.”
The beam was sticky underfoot. But that was the soles of his slippers melting, each step leaving a black footprint on the beam behind him.

Heat rose as if from a furnace, billowing his dressing gown until it blew out like a limp balloon. It was hotter than the wall of heat he’d hit that time stepping off a Boeing onto the tarmac in Singapore.

His mother had been photographing tigers then. Not the original
singha
after which the island had been named, but the new ones, the re-introduced ones that kept dying because there was nothing in the wild for them to eat. The director had offered to pay for her to bring her kid along: it added human interest to the other sort.

Bubbling step followed bubbling step. The next one would take him to the middle of the scorching beam, then he would
have
to do what the fox said. Not that he could turn round; any more than he could stop the soles of his slippers bubbling, molten rubber blistering the bottom of his feet.

Going on was his only option. The burning pit wasn’t there. The beam was just a line he’d scrawled on a floor to amuse himself, a crack along the edge of some floorboard. Reality was what he wanted it to be, what he made it.

Staring straight ahead, the boy wrapped the struggling fox tight in his arms, buried his cheek into hot fur and walked across the remaining stretch of beam onto the front page of next morning’s papers.

Fox Saves Boy—only the
Enquirer
got it right.

Fear, shadow and tears gave his childish face the tortured beauty of an El Greco saint. No one mentioned that he owed the anguish which twisted his mouth to a terrified fox cub chewing chunks out of his shoulder.

By the time a tee-shirt was being faked in sweatshops in Karachi and sold on street stalls in London and Paris, he was gone. No longer aware of the fuss, no longer watching the screens. He had more important things to talk about—his mother was coming herself to collect him.

She flew into Zurich first-class on Lufthansa and the ticket was free, like the cars and hotels. Reporters met her at Kloten and photographs of him being hugged by a thin woman in a long black coat with shades, were syndicated worldwide. There were some long-lens pap shots from a brief stay-over at the George V in Paris—all flat surfaces and squashed depth of field—but no one got real access until London.

A man Raf didn’t recognize—who called his mother Sally a lot and looked at her ankles—sat on a chair in a BBC studio on the outskirts. Hot lights blazed above the boy, raising beads of sweat under his newly cut hair. The fox cub sat on his lap, pinned by his hand to the grey flannel of his school trousers.

The trousers and tweed coat were a compromise. He wore school uniform for the interview and the school in Zurich didn’t charge a term’s notice for removing him as a pupil.

Everyone won except Raf.

On the studio wall was a bare blue screen. On it the people at home would see whatever the producer wanted them to see. Mostly this was a long shot of the boy balanced high on the iron beam, his face raised to heaven.

When the man had finished asking his mother how she felt about having a child who was a hero…

She was glad he’d rescued the fox.

What was she photographing now…

An endangered seal colony on the Falklands.

What would she and Raf be doing next…

Spending some quality time together at a friend’s apartment in New York.

When all that was over, the man who called his mother Sally turned to the boy and, pasting on a sympathetic smile, asked how he’d felt up there on the beam.

The man wasn’t happy with the boy because the producer had already halted the interview once, after a sound man complained he kept unclipping the button mike fixed to his school collar.

“Well?”

What had he felt? He wasn’t too sure he’d felt anything at all. Mostly he’d been busy keeping his head empty.

“Were you scared?”

Only of having nearly killed the fox. Despite himself, despite not allowing himself feelings, the boy’s eyes misted and for the first time since he’d reached the top of the fire truck’s ladder, his mouth trembled.

It was like punching a button. Repressed irritation segued into instant sympathy as the interviewer’s face softened. The man rephrased the question, glancing only once at the camera.

The boy thought about it. He still didn’t know how he felt but now everyone was waiting, his mother’s pale eyes fixed on him, her face tense.

“I can’t sleep,” said the boy finally. That at least was true. Always had been. Darkness unravelled in front of his eyes in minutes that ticked by so slowly it was like living inside freeze-frame.

“Dreams,” said the interviewer. “I can understand that.” He glanced at Raf’s mother, his look conveying just the right amount of compassion mixed with an unspoken question.

“He’ll be seeing the best child therapist in New York.”

The interviewer nodded. Debated the propriety of asking his next question and asked it anyway. “When you do sleep,” he said, “what exactly do you see?”

Nothing, that was the real answer. A brief darkness that swallowed emotion, fear and guilt. But, glancing round the studio, Raf knew that wasn’t the right answer and he was learning fast that “real” and “right” were different things.

“Flames,” he said simply. “I see flames.”

The producer brought the interview to a quick halt after that. Time was needed in the cutting suite and they had an actor from the National standing by to voice-over the links needed to tie the interview into existing footage of the fire.

In the hospitality room afterwards, hardbitten hacks wrapped heavy arms round the boy’s tense shoulders and told him how brave he was. And all the while, the boy stood clutching a glass of orange juice and wondering why none of them had thought to ask him how the blaze got started in the first place.

CHAPTER 49

1st August

Some sense of meaning was there, just about. Hidden
beneath animal howls that ended in choking silence.
Stb pzzz.
But the German ballerina had no interest in stopping, not yet. Not until Madame Sosostris told the ballerina why she’d been hired. Only Madame Sosostris wasn’t saying, because refusal was the only thing keeping her alive—although that definition was becoming increasingly loose.

Sighing, the ballerina lit another Cleopatra and inhaled deeply, letting the smoke dribble from her mouth. Then she inhaled again, and stubbed the cigarette out in the screaming woman’s navel.

Zara put her hands over her ears.

Ashraf was dead. Someone she knew and liked had been murdered. Maybe more than liked, if she was honest. Now she’d walked Hani straight into a trap. Zara had brains, she had courage, she should have been planning their escape but somehow…

All she wanted to do was cry. Zara was disgusted at her own cowardice. The kid, on the other hand seemed almost oblivious, only glancing up from where she squatted beside Ali-Din whenever another cigarette went out.

Outside, late evening leeched daylight from the sky. Lights would be coming on along the Corniche, the fish restaurants shuffling tables as tourists finished their supper and locals arrived to eat, children in tow. And, sitting alone in his study, nursing an illegal whisky, her father would be checking his messages and trying not to worry. She could look after herself, that was what he would tell himself because that was what she’d spent the last five years telling him, every opportunity she got.