Iris and Ruby: A gripping, exotic historical novel

I laid my head against the door frame, electric shocks of relief and delight chasing up my spine. I managed to answer, ‘Yes. Now?’

‘Right now.’

‘Yes,’ I said again. ‘Yes, please come.’

That was how it was.

I open my eyes on the dim, silent room. There is spilt tea on the cushions, some sticky drops dark on my front. I am overwhelmed with sleep now, too tired to sit up and tidy myself. It doesn’t matter. Who will see, except Mamdooh and Auntie?

Sleep. Dream. Always the dreams.

Shit. Double shit and fuck, Ruby said to herself as she caught a glimpse of what lay beyond the doors. Is this what it’s like?

It was dark outside. Beyond a barrier there was a heaving wall of heads and waving arms and shouting faces, harshly lit and shadowed by sickly overhead neon lights. The airport was clammily air-conditioned, but she could already feel the heat rolling towards her through the doors as they slid open and hissed shut again. The crowd of arriving passengers pushed her forward, catching her rucksack with the protruberances of their own baggage, jerking her from side to side. The doors opened once more and this time she was part of the gout of humanity they disgorged.

Hot, humid air rushed into her lungs. Sweat immediately prickled under her arms and in her hairline.

A chorus of yelling rose around her. Hands grabbed at her arms, tried to hoist the pack off her back.

‘Lady! Taxi, very good, cheap.’

‘Hotel, lady. Nice hotel.’

‘Stop it,’ Ruby shouted. ‘Leave me alone.’ She hadn’t bargained for this onslaught. Alarmed, she wrenched herself free of the clutching hands but another dozen pairs replaced them, tried to propel her in different directions.

‘Taxi here! Lady, I show you.’

She became aware of a stream of honking cars beyond the immediate crowd, a fringe of palm trees with ragged leaves outlined against a sky dimly peppered with stars, a snake of headlights along an elevated road. The noise and the heat were overwhelming. Ruby glared into the boiling sea of dark faces, moustaches, open mouths. At the back of the throng was a younger face, imploringly watching her.

She dragged an arm free, pointed at him.

‘You. Taxi?’

Instantly he dived through the scrum of bodies, grabbed her wrist with one hand and snatched her rucksack with the other. Ruby kept her smaller nylon sack tightly pressed to her side. They scuttled through the mass together and emerged into a clearer space beyond.

‘Come,’ the man shouted, pointing over the roofs of a hundred hooting black-and-white taxis. A packed bus roared in front of them, missing them by inches.

The driver’s taxi was parked under one of the palm trees. Two ragged children were sitting propped against it. The driver gave them a coin, threw her rucksack into the boot and opened the passenger door. With relief Ruby sank into the back seat. The springs had collapsed and stained foam padding bulged through a split in the brown plastic seat cover. The interior of the car smelled strongly of cigarettes and cheap air freshener.

The driver thrust the car into gear and they roared forward, then jerked to an almost immediate halt in a queue for the exit road. Even though it was dark, the heat was intense. Ruby had never encountered this phenomenon before. She closed her eyes, noticing that even her eyelids were sticky with sweat, then forced them open again. She mustn’t switch off, not yet. The driver flashed her a smile over his shoulder. His teeth were cartoon-white in his brown face. He did look young, not much older than herself.

‘Where you go?’

She unfolded the sheet of paper that she had kept in her jeans pocket all through the flight and read out the address.

‘Why you go there? I know nice hotel, very clean, cheap. I take you there instead.’

‘We’re going where I told you,’ Ruby insisted. ‘No arguing. Got that?’

This amused him. He laughed and slapped his hands on the steering wheel.

The traffic began to move. There were roads everywhere, the sodium-lit elevated sections crazily perched over complex intersections, all hemmed in by drab concrete tower blocks and hung about with giant advertisement hoardings. The faces of huge women with black eyebrows and cows’ eyelashes mooned at each other over the street lamps. Every foot of road was clogged with hooting cars and trucks and big blue buses. The road signs were written in a code of squiggles and dots.

Ruby lounged in the sagging seat and stared at it all. Her face was expressionless but inwardly she was fighting to maintain the defiance that had buoyed her up since leaving home. Now that she was actually here, she realised that she had hardly considered her destination. To get away and to stay away, that was what she had fixed on. But now all kinds of other problems reared up, competing with each other for her attention. She didn’t know how to handle this place, not at all. And nobody knew where she was; no one was looking out for her arrival. It was far from the first time in her life that she had been in the same situation, but never in quite such an alien setting.

She felt a long way from home, but she bundled up that thought and pushed it aside.

‘How much?’ she demanded. She had changed the rest of her money into Egyptian pounds at the airport exchange. It made a reassuringly thick wad, which was why she had decided to splash out on a taxi. The thought of trying to find a bus had been too much to contemplate.

The driver swung the wheel to overtake a donkey cart laden with saucepans and tin bowls that was plodding along the inner lane of the motorway. He shot the smile at her again.

‘Ah, money, no broblem. Where you from?’

‘London.’

‘Very nice place. David Beckham.’

‘Yeah. Or no. Whatever.’ At least they were moving now, presumably towards the city centre, wherever that might be. Airports were always miles away in the outer bloody suburbs, weren’t they?

‘My name Nafouz.’

‘Right.’

There was a pause. Nafouz reached under the dash and produced a pack of Marlboro, half turned to offer it to her. Ruby hesitated. She had run out and she was longing for one.

‘Thanks.’ She lit it with her own Bic, ignoring his.

‘You have boyfriend in Cairo?’

Ruby gave a snort of derisive laughter. ‘I’ve never been here in my life.’

‘I be your boyfriend.’

She had hardly looked at him, except to notice his teeth, but now she saw the creases in the collar of his white shirt, and the way the inside of his black leather jacket dirtied the fabric in crooked ribs. His black hair was long, combed back from his face. Quite nice, really.

She lifted her head. This, at least, was familiar territory. ‘In. Your. Dreams,’ she said clearly.

Nafouz’s delighted laughter filled the car. He drummed his hands on the wheel as if this was the funniest joke he had ever heard.

‘I dream always. Dreaming cheap. Cost nothing at all.’

‘Just watch the road, all right?’

She huddled in her corner, smoking and looking out at the wilderness. She had been abroad before, of course, with Lesley and Andrew to places like Tuscany and Kos and the Loire valley (how dull that one had been), but she had never seen anything like this steaming mess of concrete and metal. As they got nearer to what must be the middle of the city the traffic jam got even worse. There were long stationary intervals during which she peered down the side streets. There were tiny open-fronted shops with men sitting smoking at tin tables. Shafts of light came out of open doorways, shining on women with black shawls over their heads who sat on stone steps with children squirming around them. There were crates of globular shiny vegetables and crooked towers of coke cans, a thick litter of rubbish in the gutters, scrawny dogs nosing at it all. Men selling things from trays yelled on the street corners, other bent old men pushed hand barrows through the traffic. Neon lights blinked everywhere and there was the endless honking of horns.

‘Busy place,’ she said at last, wanting to make it smaller and less threatening with a casual phrase.

Nafouz shrugged. ‘Who your friends here?’