Rosie Thomas 2-Book Collection One: Iris and Ruby, Constance. Rosie Thomas

everyone together.

      Why was Iris cut off from her own daughter, and Lesley from her mother?

      She would ask, Ruby decided. She would find out.

      She scrambled off the bike and kissed Ash goodnight.

      ‘Ma’ as salama,’ she said. Go in safety.

      ‘Good,’ he crowed. ‘Soon you speak Arabic as well as me.’

       Chapter Nine

      The child has been to the cemeteries. As we are drinking our tea together she tells me about it and I can see that the experience has shocked her.

      ‘People live right on top of the graves. In the little tomb houses. There are sinks and electric lights and kids’ toys, just like anywhere else.’

      Ruby’s appearance is changing. This morning her face is bare of the black paint and most of the studs and metal-work, and without this angry disguise she is becoming more familiar, as if history is seeping under her skin and bringing family contours to the surface. I can see something of my mother in the set of her mouth, and I notice for the first time that she has Lesley’s hazel eyes. She still tries to be hard-boiled, but I am beginning to see more of the underlying innocence. She is even swearing less than she did when she first came.

      I tell her, ‘The cemeteries are poor areas, but they are quite respectable. There are schools, sewerage, clinics. Further on towards Muqqatam are real slums. Don’t go there, please.’

      ‘Ash said the one they live in is his family tomb.’

      ‘That’s right, it would be.’

      ‘But …’ She shivers a little. ‘All the dead people.’

      ‘Are you afraid of the dead? Of death?’

      Of course she is; she is young.

      ‘No. Well, not of ghosts or … djinns. But I wouldn’t like to sleep the night in a cemetery.’ Her face changes, a shiver passing over it like wind across still water. ‘I don’t want to die.’

      ‘Someone close to you has, haven’t they?’

      I was expecting to hear about a family dog, or perhaps even a school friend in a car accident. Her answer surprises me.

      Ruby tells the story quickly, without embellishment, but her mechanical delivery hardly disguises the depths of horror. The last image of the crumpled boy with his head in a pool of dark blood will stay with me, too. I am filled with concern for her.

      ‘Ruby, who knows about this?’

      ‘I told Ash. But then I felt bad, like I was using Jas’s death to get sympathy or attention or something.’

      ‘No one else? Not your mother or father?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Why not?’

      ‘Why didn’t I tell them that Jas was on one then fell off a balcony and died?’

      ‘That would be the normal expectation, I suppose. You witness a tragedy, the violent death of a young man who is a close friend. Your mother would comfort you, wouldn’t she? She would want to do that.’

      Ruby looks me straight in the eye.

      ‘You didn’t.’

      She is very sharp, and I deserve that stinging observation.

      ‘No.’

      ‘The thing is, Lesley and Andrew didn’t really know about Jas. He wasn’t the kind of person they would go for. Don’t get me wrong, there wasn’t anything bad about him. He was kind, never wanted to do anything to hurt people, and he was funny, but he wasn’t plugged in to things most people care about, like money and jobs. I suppose some people might have thought he was a bit messed up. Lesley would have done.’

      Ruby sighs. ‘She’s my mother and all that, and you know how that works.’

      Her expressive hands sketch in the air, miming a smooth ball and then suddenly turning into claws, raking the layer of space trapped between them.

      ‘Lesley likes everything to be in order. She’s really controlling. I suppose it’s partly her way of keeping us safe, looking after us. But it can be a real pain. For example we’ve got some glass shelves in the kitchen at home, and all the mugs and milk jugs and stuff are kept there. But they have to be in a straight line and they have to be plain white. You know? They’re just mugs for drinking tea out of, but if there’s a patterned or coloured one it has to be kept out of sight in a cupboard. You can’t really drop someone like Jas in the middle of a world like that.

      ‘So I kept him separate. I liked having him all to myself, anyway. I’d just go off from Will and Fiona’s place and stay with him. He had a room in a squatted house, but he’d made it nice. He’d decorated it with postcards and pictures of flowers and leaves and trees, cut out of magazines, stuck all over the walls, on top of each other, so the whole room looked like a garden that had exploded. We’d just lie and look at it. He used to say, “It’s just the two of us, babe. Just you and me. This is our Garden of Eden.” I loved that. But then, after he … died, it was like he’d never been there. That was really hard. I didn’t want to think that he was so close to nothing.’ Her voice sinks to a whisper. ‘As if I was the only memorial he had.’

      Now I can see the shape of ideas crossing her mind. I am sad to think that Ruby might have been allowed to believe that she is stupid, because she is anything but.

      ‘Are you afraid of death?’ she asks.

      ‘No. Nor will you be, I hope, when you get to my age. But I am afraid of what might intervene between now and then.’

      Her hands move, trying to catch a slippery shape in the air.

      ‘I know. Of forgetting.’ Her eyes flick briefly towards the open door of my bedroom where Xan’s photograph stands on the table next to the bed. ‘Has anyone close to you died?’

      ‘Almost everyone,’ I say drily.

      She laughs and then guiltily catches herself, reckoning that amusement is inappropriate in this context. What she is trying to do, as gently as she knows how, is to give me the opportunity to talk about Xan. She’s curious about him on her own behalf, but it’s also part of our odd bargain. I am supposed to reminisce and she will remember for me.

      But it is hard.

      Ruby put it well. I wanted to be the memorial, not to Xan himself because his family and his friends and his regiment remembered him too, but to our love. I had nothing else of him, and for a long time looked for nothing else.

      For sixty years, the best part of a lifetime, I have jealously guarded these memories. I never spoke of them to my husband, or to my daughter, and I am aware that that was an act of selfishness. Lesley always knew, with the inarticulate, visceral intuition of a child, that I withheld myself from her. Even by the time she had learned to speak, the distance between us was almost palpable.

      And if I believed that I might be punished for what I have failed to do, or believed in anything except the random cruelty of life, I would agree that the slow burial of my memories under the desert sand of forgetful old age is an exquisitely appropriate form of punishment.

      Ruby is watching me, trying to work out where I am, waiting for me to say something. I have forgotten what we were talking about a minute ago.

      In the end she prompts me, ‘I met Ash’s mother and his grandmother.’

      Yes. The cemeteries.

      ‘Ash’s grandfather must be buried there,’ she adds.

      ‘Perhaps.’

      Silence falls again while we separately speculate.

      The