The Golden Scales (2 page)

‘This is not your first time in Egypt?'

Liz shook her head, feeling his eyes scrutinise her, lingering on her fingernails, bitten to the quick. The raw hunger in her stare, the desperation she was unable to hide. She was reaching the end of her meagre funds. Her patience was running out. She was climbing the walls. And then there was Alice, with her constant demands for attention, for reassurances that Liz couldn't give her. The only thing that would make sense of any of this was finding him. She didn't care who helped her find him, so long as somebody did. The dark, sunken eyes met hers.

‘Is he the father of this child?'

Liz hesitated, sensing that any information she gave this man would place her further in his power, but she had no choice. If she wanted to enlist his help, she had to trust him. She nodded.

‘Ah.' He sat back. ‘Then she is a valuable child indeed.'

‘Valuable?' Liz placed an arm protectively around Alice's shoulders. ‘I don't understand.'

‘You don't trust me,' he smiled. It wasn't a question, and she detected the steel underlying his voice.

‘I don't know you.' She didn't want to offend him, but by now Liz could hardly breathe. She was beginning to sense that this had been a big mistake.

‘What is there to know? I am a man of simple tastes. Ask anyone.' He reached for another tangerine and broke it into segments. She watched him, helpless to stop him feeding her child; wanting, more than anything, to leave, but finding herself unable to.

‘What is it you really came for?' The deep-set eyes flickered upward, catching her off balance. ‘If you need money, all you have to do is tell me.' Again the toothy grin. ‘People come to me all the time because they know I will help them.'

‘It's not money.'

‘No? Something else then?'

Without warning he seized her wrist and held it firmly, almost without effort. She struggled to pull back, but couldn't move. With ease he tugged up the long sleeve of her blouse, past the elbow. Relentless eyes searched for the telltale tracks. She wriggled helplessly. When he was satisfied, he let go. Liz pulled her arm back, massaging her painful wrist. A segment of tangerine fell from Alice's mouth as she watched in silence, eyes wide. She crawled on to her mother's lap.

‘You have no right . . .' Liz began, struggling to control her voice. It was futile, but he tilted his head understandingly.

‘This is Cairo. Everyone's business is common knowledge.' He gestured with a wide sweep of the hand that encompassed their entire surroundings. It was true. Life was lived on the streets here. Hadn't she once admired the carved wooden
mashrabiyya
screens over the old windows, and wondered at the veils covering the faces of some of the women on the street, feeling their eyes sear through her flimsy clothes like hot pokers? She understood now this obsession with secrecy, the value of preserving a private space.

‘She's my daughter,' Liz whispered hoarsely.

‘But of course.'

‘I want the best for her.'

‘That's only natural.' He inclined his head.

Then Liz had managed to make her excuses, pull Alice into her arms and flee. Later that evening there was a knock at the door of the hotel room. It was late; she had been dozing, and rose from the bed half asleep. She opened the door a crack to peer round it. In the hallway stood a young boy, no more than twelve years old. He had a keen intelligent gaze despite his grimy appearance and an ear that was swollen and misshapen. They stared at one another for what felt like hours but was really only a matter of seconds.

‘Yes? What do you want?' asked Liz.

Without a word he thrust forward an envelope. It was thick and heavy and she turned it over in her hands. There was nothing written on it. No name or address. Nothing. When she looked up the boy was gone.

Alice slept on blissfully, her damp hair stuck to her forehead with perspiration. Liz sat on the bed and opened the envelope. Inside was a bundle of banknotes. Dollars. A lot of them. So many she couldn't count. She rifled through quickly – fifties, hundreds, tens, twenties, no sense of order to them at all. And there was something else, something that shifted around at the bottom of the envelope. Throwing the money on to the bed, she tipped the rest of the contents out into her hand. A simple twist of paper. Liz stared at it. She knew what it was. She could feel her heart start to beat. It was fear, excitement, or both mixed up together, that coursed through her veins then. She knew what this was. It was what she had come here to get away from. Or had she really? Her first instinct was to throw it away. Don't even think about it, Liz. Just flush it down the toilet. And with that intention she got up and headed for the bathroom. She locked the door behind her and leaned against it, the wrap clenched between her fingers. All she had to do was take it one day at a time . . . But she was tired. Tired of the pain in her limbs, the dull ache behind her eyes. Tired of sleeplessness and weariness.

Lowering the toilet cover, she sat down and unfolded the wrap. She stared at the contents, feeling her pulse accelerate. She dipped in a finger and touched it to her tongue. Still there was a moment's hesitation, in which she saw the road to ruin laid out before her in that single brown thread tapering across her hand. Then the despair rolled back over her like a thick carpet of cloud blotting out the sun, and there was no alternative. Kneeling on the floor, she tipped the heroin on to the seat cover and used the edge of the paper to divide it into narrow lines. She rolled the wrap into a tight tube, pushed it into her left nostril and leaned over. It was like sinking into a warm bath. She felt weightless and free, sliding back to the floor and slumping against the wall. Time stopped. Someone cut the safety line and she watched the blue world floating off into the dark void.

When she opened her eyes she realised it was light outside. Her head felt fuzzy and unclear. She struggled to her feet, her eyes going to the empty wrap on the floor beside her. She threw it aside as she wrestled with the door latch. The first thing she noticed was the money lying on the bed where she had left it. The second thing was that Alice was nowhere to be seen.

She checked the windows, the wardrobe, under the bed. Each option offered a fleeting, absurd ray of hope before the inevitable realisation. Then she was running. Along hallways, down stairwells, through the narrow arteries of the bazaar. She ran in disbelief, in shock, numbed, crying the name of her child. Alice. She walked until she was ready to drop. She was lost herself by then, delirious, finding herself reflected back in pieces, divided into strips by shards of mirrored glass, slivers of shiny metal. The men hanging around, leaning in doorways, called out as she went by, again and again, like a game.

‘Hello, welcome!'

‘Where you from?'

A gust of cold air wafted from a dark passage, making the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. She spun round, seized by the strange sensation that somebody was watching her, and found herself staring into the fierce gaze of Anubis the jackal, guardian of the Underworld. Or rather, an ebony carving decorated in gold leaf, of exactly the same height as her.

Alice was hidden somewhere in this nightmare . . . but where? Turning a corner and then another, not stopping, Liz ran left, right, left again. She paused for breath, looking back, only now she was not sure which way she had come. It all looked the same; the stalls, the narrow streets, the vegetable peelings on the ground, the discarded newspapers. Another corner brought her to a shop filled with junk no one would ever want: old rusty copper trays, wooden tables, strange tablets covered with letters that looked like no language she had ever seen before. Clusters of oil lamps dangled from the rafters. Centuries old. The kind a genie might fly out of if you rubbed them. A man shuffled out of the shadows. Liz looked at his wizened face, the wrinkles inscribed like hieroglyphics. Eyes filled with a very old light, in which she seemed to see her fate written. He smiled, revealing a row of stained yellow teeth. She closed her eyes tightly, then opened her mouth and screamed, ‘Alice!'

Part 1

The Missing

1998

Chapter One

Being something of an optimist, it had always struck Makana that it made a good start to the day to wake up in the morning and find himself still afloat. One of the little pleasures of life on an
awama
. He thought of it as a boat, but of course it wasn’t, not really, just a flimsy plywood construction nailed haphazardly on to a rusty pontoon. Still, it was a nice thought. A comfort to think that if he wished to he could one day simply cut the moorings and sail off around the world. The truth was that the thing would probably sink like a stone. It was only a raft with walls, to keep the world out. A dream. A trick of the mind. But it is the little things in life that keep us going, as he often told himself.

There aren’t too many people capable of sleeping soundly on such an unreliable craft, night after night, not knowing if they will ever live to see another day, or might in fact wake up to find themselves swimming, or even (better or worse?) simply drown in their sleep. But then, Makana wasn’t most people. Such worries never bothered him. He had long since come to accept that if it did go down one night there was not really a great deal he could do about it; that it might even be a relief in some way. And besides, he had no real choice in the matter. The risks of living on an
awama
were a fact of life for a man in his precarious financial situation. And even then, he was already four months in arrears with the rent on his flimsy home and didn’t need a soothsayer to tell him there was little prospect of any more money coming into his pocket in the near future. On this particular morning, peace of mind was a luxury he couldn’t afford.

Makana was a solitary man. The few friends he had tended to be drawn from among the community of his exiled compatriots: writers, painters, musicians, men and women forced to leave their country or else face the consequences of a repressive regime. Although he saw them infrequently he valued their company and they in turn seemed to appreciate his peripheral presence.

Most days, all Makana had to contend with was the steady stream of traffic that swept without cease along the tarmac artery skirting the west bank of the Nile. He had learned to ignore the fact that if he chose to throw open the grimy shutters, he could look up and see the whirling constellation of flying metal and machinery orbiting his flimsy sanctuary.

The familiar rumble of heavy traffic was already in full swing when he looked down from the upper deck that morning to see his only real neighbours: his landlady Umm Ali and her family. They lived in a shack made of stencilled wooden crates and flattened jerrycans, that clung precariously to the crumbling embankment, rising up like a muddy wave from the water’s edge. The long, drooping branches of a huge eucalyptus tree curled down over them like a protective hand.

Makana had not yet unravelled how exactly the
awama
had come into the possession of Umm Ali. There was a long, complicated story involving her late husband, without mention of whom no conversation was ever complete, as well as the village in some obscure part of the
rif
where she hailed from, several brothers and sisters, a piece of land, and a wayward father who gambled. Makana had long since given up hope of fully understanding the process and as a general rule he steered well clear of the subject. Since it could not be moved and presumably could not be turned to any other kind of profit short of chopping it into firewood, Umm Ali chose to rent the houseboat out. She could have lived on it with her children, of course, but either they needed the money more than Makana did, or they had less faith in its ability to float. Still, so long as she was happy having him as her only tenant, despite the rather irregular manner of his payments, then he had nothing to complain about. There were times when Makana had the impression that they were all clinging to this pile of matchwood as if it actually was a raft adrift far out to sea.

Considering his options for the day, he set about reheating the coffee grounds left in the brass pot on the stove. He gazed out at the river as he waited for the trickle of water from the tap to fill the pot. The tiny cubicle that passed for a kitchen was so narrow that he had to back out of it the same way he went in. If he turned around too quickly his coffee would go flying out of the low window to the fish. The facilities were basic: one small gas cylinder and a rusty metal ring. Since gas was a major expense he used it sparingly, although even when lit it generated little more heat than a candle. As he waited for the murky liquid to boil, Makana wondered if it was worth the trouble, putting off the moment when he could allow himself his first cigarette.

When it had bubbled away for a while and showed no signs of growing any more palatable, Makana poured his coffee into a cup and took it back upstairs. The upper deck was one open space with a set of rusty metal stairs leading up to it from below. The rear wall was missing, having fallen off at some point in history and never been replaced, which meant that he had an unrestricted view of the river beyond where the wall used to be. This was the place he spent most of his time. He usually preferred to sleep up here in the open air, even when it was cold. Old habits die hard and he couldn’t stand being cooped up inside. The furniture was an unremarkable collection he had accumulated over the years. A trestle table, covered in thick pools of dried pigment, that had once belonged to a painter. A creaky old wicker armchair which was his favourite place to sit and where he often slept, his feet propped on the small plastic crate that doubled as a low table. Scattered around the deck lay a collection of cardboard boxes filled with case files and unruly heaps of newspaper – his archives. The boxes were weighted down with stones to stop their contents from flying away, but the fluttering of paper in the river breeze sounded like a forest full of dry leaves.