Jon Grimwood - Felaheen

"No reason," said Raf. And was shocked to discover he was crying.

"You miss your kid?" Isabeau demanded when the waiter had gone.

Raf put down his coffee, thought about it . . . "Yes," he admitted finally.

"Because he lives with his mother?"

"She," Raf corrected, "and I think her mother's dead."

"You think . . ." Isabeau tried hard not to be shocked. Divorce was more common in Ifriqiya than in other North African countries. But not in the way it was in the West. All the same, Isabeau obviously figured she'd know if a person she'd married was alive or not.

"You were married to her mother?"

"I've never been married," Raf said. "Although I was engaged once but that was to someone else." He caught Isabeau's expression and smiled. "It's a messy story," he said.

"They usually are." Glancing round the café terrace with its noisy children and couples relaxing after a stroll in Jardin Belvedere, she shrugged. "You don't have to tell me that." When Isabeau spoke again it was to ask a question that appeared to have been troubling her. Her voice was hesitant, as if Isabeau was uncertain of the wisdom of asking.

"You're not really who you say you are, are you? If you know what I mean . . ."

Inside Raf's head the other Raf grinned, all teeth and no smile. "Okay," it said smoothly, "answer that and stay human."

Raf couldn't. Which he guessed was Tiri's point.

The capuchin was milky, came in glass mugs and had a scum of thin froth across the top. Raf promptly embarrassed himself by mishearing the price and blithely handing the waiter a note roughly equivalent to U$5, a good portion of Raf's wages for that week.

"Does Your Excellency have anything smaller?" It was obvious the old man thought Raf was trying to impress Isabeau.

Raf shook his head. "Wednesday's payday," he said. "That's how I was given it."

"Must be a good job."

"Kitchen work, seven shifts in a row," Raf said wryly and saw rather than heard the old man suck his teeth.

"No so good . . . I'll get you change."

A dozen grubby notes and a fistful of change, some of it old enough to be real, arrived on a chipped saucer, while Raf and Isabeau sat at their table and watched two toddlers, an old man wearing a red felt chechia and a young woman cross the wooden bridge leading from the gates of Jardin Belvedere over a narrow strip of lake to where Isabeau and Raf sat nursing warm coffees.

At Raf's end stood a camera crew trying to film two laughing girls in red headscarves, arms tight around each other's waists as they strolled across the same bridge, but every time the girls got halfway some toddler would run into the shot or a passing family would halt and stare. Once, an old woman halted the two girls just as they reached the café end of the bridge. She wanted to ask them the time.

"Who are they?"

Isabeau snorted. "Now I know you don't come from around here," she said and named a famous Tunisian soap that had been running for eighteen years. "They've been friends since before kindergarten," Isabeau explained. "But their fathers have hated each other ever since Jasmine's father had Natasha's mother's kiosk at Gare de Tunis torn down because she hadn't applied for a tobacco-sellers' permit. So now they have to meet in secret."

"Are they lovers?"

Isabeau's eyes went wide. "Such things don't happen in Ifriqiya. Especially on television."

"Don't happen or aren't talked about?"

"Both," said Isabeau. And for a moment Raf was looking through a broken window into the darkened basement of her soul.

"So why the fear?" Raf asked.

Part of Isabeau obviously wanted to ask what fear? And for a second, Raf was afraid she might just get up and walk away. Instead she sipped at cold coffee and watched two twenty-three-year-old actresses pretend to be fifteen.

"In America," Raf said, "they'd close this café, hire extras to drink coloured water and have police tape off the road both sides of the gate. Everything would be done in one shot . . . The only people allowed near that bridge would be the actresses and the crew. And if the actresses decided to fuck each other it would be out of boredom."

"You've been to America?" Isabeau sounded disbelieving.

"Once," said Raf. "Years back. When I thought I was somebody else."

"Why tell me this?"

"Because I can?"

"And I can't tell anybody." Isabeau nodded, as if that was obvious. "Without you telling them about me . . ." Her voice was thoughtful.

"So Hassan doesn't know?"

"Hassan!" Raf could almost taste her irritation. "Oh, Hassan wants to marry me, all right. So he can get his hands on my quarter of the café." It took a second for Raf to work out that Isabeau meant the smoky tunnel in Souk El Katcherine where he'd first met Idries. "That won't be happening . . ."

"You already have a lover?"

The broken window was instantly back. The room inside darker than ever. As black as those places where the fox hid. In the days before Raf finally accepted that the fox was him.

"Okay," Raf said. "No lover."

"No," Isabeau agreed. On the far side of the bridge the camera crew began packing equipment into a white van, faces relieved; and both the actresses now sat in an old green Lincoln that waited to pull out into traffic, watched by a crowd of schoolchildren.

"What about you?" Isabeau asked, her eyes never leaving the car.

What indeed. Any answer Raf might be prepared to give was aborted by a sudden buzz from Isabeau's bag.

"It's me," she said, having reached for a cheap cell phone. "What?"

The answer froze Isabeau's expression. One second, she was watching a distant schoolgirl with bare legs and checked dress; the next blood drained from Isabeau's cheeks and her mouth went slack. Spiralling adrenergic hormones. Textbook shock.

She turned off the Nokia without saying another word.

"I have to go." Eyes unfocused.

"Go where?" said Raf. And when Isabeau didn't answer he reached forward to take the cell phone from unresisting fingers and put it back in her bag. Without thinking he also wiped a fingertip of sweat from her forehead and absentmindedly licked it. Shocked and scared , the Raf inside Raf decided, been there/done that/probably about to do it again.

"You in trouble?" Stupid question really.

"I have to go." Metal scraped on concrete as Isabeau pushed back her chair and three tables away people winced. "My brother, Pascal . . ."

"I'll come with you," said Raf.

She shook her head.

Raf sighed. "Whatever it is," he said. "I can help. And if you're really in trouble, then a couple is less easy to spot than a single girl in a city like this." His nod took in the café crowd and the busy sidewalk on the other side of the bridge.

"How can I trust you?" Isabeau demanded. "And how do I know you are who you say you are?"

"You don't," said Raf. "And I'm not." He tossed some change onto their table for the waiter and gripped Isabeau's hand, refusing to let her pull free. "Smile as you walk away," Raf ordered, and Isabeau's face twisted in misery.

Halfway across the little bridge he made her stop to watch a waterbird swim beneath their feet, take a last look round the lake and then stroll arm in arm with him towards the gates. On the way out, Raf bought a loose bag of cookies from a stall. They were sweet to the point of sickness and warm from being on display.

"I wonder if you could help . . ." Hani's voice was polite but firm. As if she regularly wandered alone as evening fell, trawling expensive Italian boutiques on Rue Faransa, a street once famous for its Victorian brothels and opium dens.

"A dress?" Returning Hani's demand with a question was all the sticklike owner could manage. Backed up inside Madame Fitmah's head were certainly a dozen other, infinitely more important questions, starting with how was this child planning to pay and ending with what should she, Madame Fitmah, call the small girl since madame was obviously out of the question?