Jon Grimwood - Felaheen

But today that didn't matter because Isabeau was doing a morning shift at Maison Hafsid, the Australian waitress refused to wash at all, something about natural oils and the Bosnian dishwasher and the one who wore tights but no knickers had resigned yesterday, shortly after Raf was promoted to work the broiler instead of her.

"Call for you," said a pearl diver, soap suds still gloved down both wrists. He held the dripping phone in one hand, a plate in the other and was looking at Idries.

"Tell them to fuck off," Antonio ordered. "We're going drinking."

"I think you should take it," the boy said to Idries, very carefully not looking at the chef.

"It won't take a minute," Idries promised as Antonio scowled.

Afternoon sessions were banned unless the chef suggested them. In the three days he'd been working double shifts Raf had discovered a dozen such rules. Spoken and unspoken. Along with a web of loyalties, pragmatic friendships and alliances, feuds that simmered below the surface and a few that didn't. All institutions were the same and few places came more institutional than a restaurant kitchen.

Small wonder Raf felt at home.

Over at the vidphone Idries was talking intently. His body hunched around the phone in his hand.

"Time's up," said Antonio. His voice hard. A tumbler of cooking brandy away from developing a dangerous edge.

"It's Isabeau," Idries said over his shoulder. "She needs to talk to Raf."

"You like snakes?" Isabeau's voice was neutral. All the same Raf knew it was a loaded question because he'd sensed her distance grow as he went from one dirty window to the next, matching labels to the reptiles inside. By the time they'd reached the third row she barely bothered to glance into the cases at all.

She was lost somewhere inside herself. Arms folded across her front. Shoulders hunched as she walked beside him. Dressed in what looked like new jeans and a pink T-shirt with three-quarter-length sleeves. A blue scarf hid her face.

If Raf hadn't known better he'd have said she was afraid.

Maybe he was meant to have reacted more to her news. That strange men were searching for him. At least, they were searching for someone. A soldier on the run. Only, Raf knew there was no soldier, was there . . .

Or if there was it wasn't him.

"Put it this way," said Raf. "Snakes remind me of my childhood." Absentmindedly sliding his hand into the pocket of his own jeans to touch the memento Eugenie had given him, Raf added, "You could call it a family interest."

His mother had once shot a series in the Amazon with the working title Good Snakes Gone Bad , probably for the Discovery Channel. It became Renegade Reptiles and paid less than zilch and took eight months out of her life. She came back with dysentery, ringworm, different colour hair and a brooding Brazilian boy who lasted two months in New York before demanding a ticket home.

Before this was footage for Channel5 involving a python and a naked baby, taken using a table-mounted Sanyo with remote control, so she could also be in shot. A thin woman in her early twenties, bare-breasted and with hennaed toes on a Berber rug beside the snake and child. Because she showed no fear of the reptile, the infant showed no fear and because the infant lacked fear it yanked happily at the sleepy python, digging small fingers into snake flesh and pushing the python around like a toy.

When this didn't elicit a response, the child dragged a heavy coil to its mouth and tried to chew its leatherlike skin. Finally the infant got bored and crawled out of shot, leaving the woman smiling into the camera.

A fifteen-second snip later got used for a campaign selling life insurance.

It was years before Raf realized the child was he.

"But do you like them?" Isabeau insisted.

Raf shook his head.

"Then why suggest we meet here?"

"You wanted to talk . . ."

She would age, Raf realized as he watched her frown. Her compact body would fill out and her face acquire lines. That residual puppy fat on her arms would become less puppyish, more obvious, her looks would go and breasts lose their battle with gravity. She would put on weight and grow old, something the fox once promised would never happen to him.

"Sometimes," said Raf. "I get voices that tell me what to do . . ."

Or maybe that was invent ? Raf was uncertain. For as long as he could remember there had been a fracture between mind and body, observed and observer. A rupture of identity that kept him distanced from himself, often thinking of himself as he. What if the fox was right and it didn't exist . . . If his memory wasn't as perfect as he pretended?

What if he was just running away?

Isabeau stared back. Worried but not frightened, not yet.

"And these voices told you to look at snakes?"

"Actually," Raf's smile was rueful, "I think that was my idea."

"Your . . ." And after a second Isabeau almost smiled back. It was a nervous smile but it lifted her face and bled some of the anxiety from her eyes.

"These voices?"

"Once there was a fox," said Raf, staring into a darkened case. "A dangerous and deadly ghost. Always waiting, always there." On the other side of the filthy glass a bootlace tasted the air with a sullen tongue. Around its nostrils splashed colours that no human eye could see. Knowledge Raf could tell Isabeau or keep to himself. "And then it wasn't."

"What happened?"

Raf looked at her. There were no colours hidden in her face. Nothing Isabeau couldn't see in her own reflection.

"To the fox?"

She nodded.

"Someone repaired the bloody thing . . ."

Hammered into a grassy bank between the ring road and the main fence surrounding the zoo were enamel signs every hundred paces or so, to warn visitors not to climb over. A crude silhouette of a wolf reinforced that message.

At the bottom of the track stood metal gates and on the far side of those, just before a main road, was a neat ornamental lake crowded with wading birds and waterfowl. Around the edge strolled what looked like smart Tunis. Girls walking hand in hand and young men with their arms around each other's shoulders in expressions of friendship that could only have been political back in Seattle.

A small wading bird with clockwork legs and a blue bottom raced across damp concrete and plopped into the lake, bobbing beneath the spray of a fountain on its way towards a tiny island in the middle. The concrete was damp because the fountain plumed straight out of the water and every gust of wind carried fine droplets towards the shore.

The scene was sickeningly normal.

"Let me buy you a coffee." Raf nodded to a low café across the lake, its tables almost as crowded as the paths. "Then you can tell me about Maison Hafsid and who these men were who came looking for me . . ."

In reply, Isabeau glanced at her wrist.

"You need to be somewhere else?"

Isabeau looked suddenly embarrassed, even slightly panicked; a blush suffusing her face. "No," she said hastily, "being here is good." They finished the stroll in silence. Only this time it was a quieter, less strained silence and could almost pass for friendship if not for the anxious glances she kept throwing in Raf's direction.

All that changed when Raf saw a child feeding bread to a duck. No one he'd ever seen before. Just a girl of about nine wearing a headscarf and feeding crusts to a duck so full it could barely waddle. She had long hair, tied back, white sneakers and cheap dark glasses that kept sliding down her nose. So wrapped up was she in watching the duck that the rest of the world might as well have not existed . . .

"Raf," said Isabeau. She was pulling at his arm.

"What?"

"What are the voices saying?" Worried eyes watched him. "And why are you staring at that child?"