Chapter 28

Fareeha’s sharp knock echoed along the dusty hall, into its dark recesses. Nobody answered. She clutched the tight knot beneath her chin and cast her head from side to side and behind her, checking to see if she was at the right room. The doors that came under her eyes were blotched and scabby, like the skin of a malnourished child from a cold climate; the one before her had been wiped clean of its neglect and shone back at her. She knocked again.

The handle creaked as she squeezed it down, releasing a catch, but the door resisted her gentle push. She dropped her eyes to tidy a piece of carpentry around the handle and realised that the room’s current occupant had recently installed a new lock. ‘What have you got to hide?’ she said, comparing the secure access ahead with her own flapping piece of linoleum and seeing a barricade.

A sudden clatter ran up the stairs chased quickly by a voluble curse. The voice was of an indeterminate sex and used a language that could have been one of many.

Fareeha stepped back to the spiral staircase and grabbed the damaged banister. ‘Mister Phipps? Is that you?’ she called down.

Another crack jarred up towards her and she called again. ‘Mister Phipps?’

‘It ain’t the doctor,’ came the voice again, sharp but lacking power. ‘just me.’

Fareeha heard a heavy thump of wood on wood, then another, and then the tap-tapping of what sounded like a stick rattling against the boards. Whoever it was down there was on his way up. She released her grip on the banister. ‘Who are you?’ she called down.

Clump. ‘I might . . . ask you . . . the same question,’ clump, ‘seeing as it’s you . . . who’s in my building.’ Clump. The sentence came in sparse, drawn out words interspersed with heavy wheezing.

Fareeha stepped back. ‘I’m Fareeha Azziz. I’ve come to see the foreigner, Mister Phipps.’

‘Right you are then . . . Just doin’ me job.’ Clump. ‘Can’t be too careful these days . . . can I?’ Clump.

‘Oh . . . you are . . .’

Clump. ‘The custodian . . . and it’s me business . . . to take care of the place,’ clump, ‘and the things in it.’

Fareeha returned to the shaky banister just in time to see a hairless scalp loom up through the shafting light that illuminated the head of the spiral staircase. She gasped.

Clump. The pale scalp fell backwards and a smooth-skinned, young face crept out from beneath it. He wheezed before speaking. ‘Fahid’s me name,’ he finally said, leering up at her, and then another heavy footfall took the face back to the steps. Clump.

Fareeha stepped away to give him some room and watched as he manoeuvred his damaged body out of the stairwell and onto the landing, pulling a crutch behind him. The stick tapped against the top step, before he heaved it up and rammed it into his armpit; he collapsed onto it and pushed more dry air out of his wheezy chest; his free hand reached out for the shaky banister. The crutch was little more than a tree branch, knotted and bent; at its top, someone had nailed on what looked like an old arm-rest of an easy chair.

‘War,’ he said, using just one short word to explain the tangled mess of his body.

‘Oh . . . I . . . I’m so sorry,’ Fareeha said. She had already taken in his crossed eyes, broken jaw, and crippled leg; and what else lay beneath the rags he wore was beyond her imagination. He was just a teenager.

‘Nobody pays me, mind,’ he said, ‘not yet anyway. Just do it ‘cause . . . I love the old things.’ He tried to point down to the ground floor but lost his balance and had to put his hand back on the railing.

‘Oh yes; the artefacts,’ Fareeha said. ‘Wonderful . . . I saw some of them the last time I was here.’

‘Oh yeah?’ he said, trying to fit a grin to his broken face. ‘Went there every day when I was a kid—the museum.’ His face dropped back into its original cast: one of unsentimental sadness. ‘Cried when I heard about the bomb. Wasn’t here, though, at the time. Had to wait till I got me leg blown off and lost me breath before I could get back here to look after the things.’ His hand left the banister again and brushed the brow above his mismatched eyes, as if he felt the needed to point out something that might not be too obvious to her. ‘They gave me a big bunch of keys, a title, and a contract; but no money—not yet anyway.’

‘Do you know where the doctor is?’ Fareeha asked him.

‘Usually out in the daytime. Never see him till well after dark. He goes over the headland, to the flats. Tryin’ to get the water back, he says; make the crops grow again; but he’s wasting his time if you ask me.’

Fareeha pictured the ungainly figure of Phipps striding out over the steppe in his shorts and floppy hat under a fierce sun. ‘Why do you think that?’ she asked.

‘Soil’s gone. Me uncle used to farm over there . . . but had to quit it. "Can’t grow beans in sand," he told us. Another thing is, there are hardly any farmers left over there—nobody to grow the stuff, even if he fixes things up. No soil, no farmers. What does he expect to do?’

Fareeha couldn’t answer and simply sucked air in through her pursed lips. Since her last meeting with Phipps she had kept only the image of sparkling, fresh water in her mind and that term, the water table. She really had no idea what he was trying to do. She and everybody else knew about the state of agriculture in Sa’ An, but she had always put that down to the war and revolution. You can’t grow beans if someone is shooting at you, she had presumed. ‘But . . . at least he’s trying to help.’

The boy twisted his face again, into a frown this time.

Fareeha looked away and said ‘I have to see him; ‘I’ll wait.’

‘Please yourself; but like I said . . . he don’t usually get back . . . till after dark.’

‘Well . . .’ Nobody stayed out after dark in Sa’ An, especially a woman by herself. It was already five, and to be home safely before nightfall, she would have to leave pretty soon. ‘. . . It’s important,’ she said.

‘Suit yourself then.’

‘How does he get around?’ Fareeha asked.

‘He fixed up an old oxcart and bought a donkey,’ the boy said, ‘Never seen nothin’ so funny in me life.’ He tried to laugh but quickly broke off in a raw, dry cough, his hand left the banister for his chest. ‘Me . . . lungs . . . not so good this week,’ he managed to wheeze out.

Fareeha remembered talk of gassings by the government’s forces, but she didn’t ask.

The boy stopped coughing, but his face continued to flame from the effort, and the whites of his eyes bulged.

Fareeha walked over to him and put her hand on his bony shoulder. ‘Why don’t you sit down,’ she said. The boy shrugged off her fingers but agreed to the suggestion and she helped lower him onto the top step. She lay the crutch on the floor and sat herself by his side. ‘Where does he stay,’ she asked when the boy’s breathing had returned to a steady wheeze.

‘Here, now,’ he answered, jerking his thumb back over his shoulder towards the locked door. ‘Was in the hotel for a few nights, but the electricity is usually off over there. No power, no water. And it’s still expensive. Better off here: there’s a well in the yard, electric in the mornings, sometimes.’ He stopped and looked at Fareeha, ‘And me to keep an eye on him.’

She tried to smile back at the boy.

‘I can speak a bit of English, you know.’

Fareeha hid her surprise. ‘Oh?’

‘Learned some to find out about the things in the museum. And a bit o French. Remember old Gamin, the curator?’

Fareeha nodded.

‘He taught me. We used to go through the books in the museum’s library. Know quite a bit, I do.’

‘But your guest doesn’t seem to like talking to people.’ Fareeha said.

‘Right.’ The boy looked at Fareeha with a degree of trust, as if he were about to take her into his confidence. ‘Strange ain’t it?’

Fareeha nodded. ‘A little, yes.’

‘Spends most of his time in there.’ He thumbed again towards the locked room. ‘If he does come out, he creeps around like a ghost. I’m sure he does it so as I won’t hear him and won’t speak to him. I’ve caught him running away along the halls a few times, I have.’

Fareeha creased her forehead.

‘Funny ain’t it? He even knows a bit of our language, he does; but he don’t like to use it. Smart though. I’ve seen all his books in there. Stuff I never saw at the museum. Water, soil, deserts, and a lot more I don’t know nothin about.’

They didn’t speak for a while, during which time Fareeha ran images through her mind of the strange Englishman, leaping along the dark and dusty corridors of the disused building of the Department of Water Resources, fleeing form a harmless, crippled war-victim who could hardly find the breath to keep himself alive.

‘Can you?’ the boy suddenly said, handing Fareeha a lighter.

She came back to the present with a start.

‘Gettin’ a bit dark in here.’ He nodded up to a large candle that sat on a ledge at the head of the stairs.

‘Oh, of course.’ Fareeha obliged him and at once shadows began to flicker and jump on the walls around them.

‘He should be back soon,’ the boy said. ‘He’ll have to lock up the cart round the back and feed the donkey, but that don’t take no time at all.’

‘I don’t suppose the Professor showed up? Or the students?’

Fahid shook his head

I offered to help find them but when I went over to the university they had never heard of him.’

‘Another strange thing isn’t it? Not sure that he minds though—he seems to prefer doin’ things on his own—if you know what I mean.’

The boy’s last words seemed to carry darkness which made Fareeha suddenly look behind her at the Englishman’s office door. She saw black shadows dancing on its surface. She turned back and grabbed a post of the banister and tried to pull herself up. At the exact same moment a long metallic creak reverberated up the stairs from below. Instinctively, as she gained her feet, she threw her head over the top of the stairs and peered down into the darkness. She saw nothing.

‘Don’t worry Misses,’ the boy said, ‘that’ll be him.’

‘Mister Phipps? Is that you?’ she called down, with her head still immersed in the column of darkness.

There was a very long silence, during which she imagined Phipps running away down a long and dark corridor. She looked at the boy’s face flickering in the candlelight and frowned.