Iris and Ruby: A gripping, exotic historical novel. Rosie Thomas

it was Ash who began laughing first.

      ‘You make a frown like a monkey,’ he told her.

      She corrugated her face even more elaborately and crossed her eyes until they were both laughing. Then she nodded at the river. ‘It’s beautiful. I like the boats.’

      ‘One evening I take you sailing in a felucca. At sunset. Very romantic.’

      ‘Great. I’d rather that than the fucking museum.’

      ‘Ruby,’ he sighed.

      ‘Sorry. Gimme another brown?’

      ‘What?’

      ‘A ciggie. A cigarette, for God’s sake. I’ll buy some if you show me where, if that’s the problem.’

      ‘No problem,’ he said politely.

      They began walking, their hands occasionally brushing together. Ruby noticed the top of a grand pillared building behind a high wall guarded by a couple of armed and uniformed men. She was surprised to see the Union flag hanging limply from a central flagpole.

      ‘What’s that place?’

      He shrugged. ‘British embassy.’

      ‘Oh.’ Ruby wasn’t very interested.

      They passed beneath a huge, ancient-looking tree, its trunk a mass of writhing tendrils for all the world like dun-coloured snakes. In its thick shade the air was almost cool.

      ‘Banyan tree.’

      They stopped and looked up into the canopy of coarse leaves. Taxis cruised and honked a few feet away, a couple of passers-by glanced incuriously at them. Ash’s throat was smooth, his skin pale brown. Ruby stepped up close, put her hands behind his head and pulled his mouth down to hers. She kissed him hard, flicking her tongue between his lips.

      She saw the flash of dismay and disbelief in his eyes before he stepped sharply backwards.

      ‘Why you do that?’ he demanded.

      She had done it without thinking, just because she felt like it.

      ‘Didn’t you like it?’

      He had liked it, of course, but it was not what he had planned.

      Ash had intended to make a play for the English girl, that went without saying, but he had expected to chase her until she was cornered and when she finally gave way the triumph would all have been his. Now she had taken the initiative and he felt diminished. He had no idea what to expect next.

      They were now both aware of the breadth of experience and expectation that separated them, and they were uncomfortable.

      ‘You have boyfriends,’ Ash said flatly.

      Ruby tried to give a careless laugh, but it came out sounding harsh.

      ‘Yeah. What do you expect? Yes, I do. Have had.’

      He nodded. ‘I see.’

      She didn’t like his disapproval and tried to startle him back into sympathy with her. ‘No, you don’t. My boyfriend died. In an accident.’

      Ash’s eyes were very dark brown and the whites were so white they looked blue.

      ‘What? Accident in a car?’

      ‘No. He fell. He fell off the balcony of someone’s flat. It was late at night, a party. He had been drinking and taking stuff. I didn’t see how he fell. Maybe he jumped, I don’t know. He was a bit fucked up. His name was Jas.’

      Ash shook his head. This information was almost too much for him, but he took her hand gently and led her a few steps to a bench facing the river wall. They sat down with their backs to the traffic and stared at the ugly cylinder hotel across the water.

      ‘Did you love him, this Jas? Did he love you?’

      He asked this so simply and tenderly, and his directness seemed to flick a switch in Ruby. She almost heard the click. Without any warning tears welled up in her eyes and poured down her face, scalding her cheeks as they ran.

      ‘Maybe. Yes. It wasn’t like you think.’

      ‘I think nothing,’ Ash said.

      Ruby knuckled her eyes and sniffed hard. She tried not to cry, as a general rule. Not about Jas, or anything else. She usually tried not to think about Jas being dead either, except as a bare fact, but now she couldn’t stop the thoughts – or the images that came with them.

      The flat had been on the ninth floor of a stumpy tower block on the edge of a no man’s land of railway sidings and warehouses with broken windows that looked like cartoon eyes in the darkness. It was a rain-smeared late night that had begun in a pub with Jas and some of his friends, and ended in a boxy room with a couple of mattresses on the floor. There were quite a lot of people in the flat. Not the ones who had been there at the beginning, they had melted away and different faces had bobbed up. Two girls had been arguing about the music that was raggedly playing, and one of them had snatched a CD and flung it at the wall. Her boyfriend had given her a shaking and her head wobbled disconcertingly. When he pushed her away from him she fell sideways on one of the mattresses.

      Ruby was sitting on the other, with her knees drawn up to her chest like a shield. She had been wanting to go home for a while, or at least somewhere that wasn’t this place, and wondering how to negotiate an exit. She was dimly aware that Jas had moved away but she felt too out of it herself to pay any attention to what he might be doing. The next thing was a shout, and a ripple of movement in the room that pushed the girl on the next mattress into a sitting position and sent several others stumbling towards the door onto a balcony.

      Ruby found herself walking towards the door. Cold air blew towards her, and the few steps seemed to take a long time. There were one or two voices, high-pitched with alarm, but most of all she could hear a huge silence. She knew at once that something very bad had happened.

      The balcony was small. There was a flowerpot in a corner with the brown stalks of a dead plant sticking up, and a scatter of cigarette butts and roaches. The walls were brick, topped with gritty stone. A white-faced bloke was holding on to the stone as if he was on a ship in a bad storm, and a girl was half turned away with her hand over her mouth. Ruby walked very slowly to the wall and looked over.

      A long way down, Jas was lying on his side with his head and his arms and his legs all at weird angles. There was a dark pool spreading round his head. He was dead. Just in one glance you could tell that much.

      The girl took her hand from her mouth and started to babble.

      ‘I just saw his feet and legs going. His shoe caught on the edge. I wasn’t looking, I just sort of turned. I saw his legs and his feet, falling.’

      The sick-looking man put his arms round her. ‘OK,’ he said. Ruby wondered why, when it wasn’t OK at all.

      ‘Who is he?’ someone else muttered. She realised now that she hadn’t set eyes on any of these people before tonight. Jas had been her connection. He made friends easily, but never tried to keep them. They had drifted along together, Ruby and he, without asking themselves or each other any questions.

      When the police arrived, there wasn’t much she could tell them. It was that that shocked her, really. She knew his name, and the address of the house where he squatted. He came from Sunderland, and he liked curry and Massive Attack. He had made her a CD compilation and decorated the insert with red biro swirls.

      It wasn’t very much. It wasn’t very much for a life that was now over.

      The police drove her back from the police station to Will and Fiona’s house in Camden. It was already light and people were going to work in their neat clothes. A policewoman offered to come in with her and explain what had happened but Ruby shook her head. She scrambled out of the car as quickly as she could and bolted inside. She hoped that no one would be awake yet so she could slide into her bedroom without being seen.

      But Will was up. He