Jon Grimwood - Effendi

Raf had selected the room because Hani had one next door. A small dark space that might once have been a dressing room to this, though the entrance between rooms had been bricked up long enough for the Persian wallpaper that covered it to have faded to faint horsemen who hunted in shadow.

“Blow out the candle.”

“I can see in the dark,” Raf warned Zara.

“Maybe,” she said, “but I can’t.” And so Raf blew out the single candle and the room’s cool air flooded with acrid smoke.

“How?” Zara demanded suddenly. “How do you see in the dark?”

“My eyes adjust . . .” Raf thought about it. “No,” he said, “I adjust my eyes. There’s a difference.”

“Then don’t.”

Raf looked at her.

“Stay blind.”

“If that’s what you want.” The last thing Raf saw before he tuned the room into darkness was Zara unbuttoning the front of her short dress. She wore no bra and her body was as perfect as his memory of it.

He met her clumsily in space that waited between them, neither one quite certain of where the other stood in the darkness. Zara felt his hands reach up to grip her naked shoulders and he felt her fingers brush against his face. And this time their kiss was slower, much less frenzied than that time when they were drunk and tired and on her father’s boat.

Zara’s breath tasted of wine and her throat of salt. He got colours and memories with each kiss, though they might have been imagined. Putting both hands around her, Raf followed her spine with his fingers, pausing only when he reached the silk of her thong.

He smiled.

“No.” The command was simple, far simpler than the mix of emotions encoded in her suddenly breaking voice. Sheer nervousness Raf could have understood. His own body was almost vibrating with tension. And fear of what might come next was possible. As was worry that she’d let things get this far . . .

But this was anger.

Raf just wasn’t sure it was directed at him.

He stepped back just enough to put a slight distance between them. “You okay?”

Zara leant her head against his neck and nodded, feeling his answering smile. There was a neat scar under his jaw, the one half the city assumed was RenSchmiss . And another on his shoulder, so ugly that no one in their right mind could have assumed it resulted from a formal duel.

“Seattle . . . ?” Zara asked, running her fingers across ridged skin. Something else he didn’t talk about, the bombing of the Consulate in Seattle.

“A fox cub,” said Raf lightly, “when I was a child.” He touched her face and let his hands rest there before dropping them to cup breasts that were full and high, with nipples that hardened beneath his touch. They both shivered, but he did so first.

“You like?” Zara’s voice was low, almost mocking.

In answer, Raf shifted one hand to the back of her head, feeling her lips silence and her mouth open wider.

“Of course I like.” His right hand found a pressure point between her third and fourth vertebrae and he pushed, so that her chin came up and her neck exposed itself. Her pulse beneath his lips was as loud as a bass loop.

Somewhere, in the hollow where the fox should have been, Raf knew this was merely an act of mutual empathy, the grown-up equivalent of the intimate attunement of infant to mother, mere parasympathetic arousal. Everything that wasn’t the fox-shaped void didn’t mind about that. It welcomed the night outside and the faint pricks of light glimpsed through a badly drawn curtain. And it bathed in the sound of gulls riding salt winds over a city struck into near darkness for the first time in centuries.

“Open the curtains and shutters,” demanded Zara suddenly.

“It’ll let in the stars.”

“That much I can cope with,” she said in a voice as bitter sweet as black chocolate. “Probably . . .”

When Raf turned round from pulling back the double shutters that usually closed off each of the room’s five floor-to-ceiling windows, Zara was in bed, safely tucked under a linen sheet.

The first thing she said when he joined her there was, “I won’t have sex with you . . .”

“So how old were you when it happened?”

“Seven, maybe eight . . . At an age you don’t really realize what’s being done. Maybe that helps.” Zara sounded doubtful, like she was trying to convince herself.

Raf’s answer was noncommittal.

“You know,” Zara added, “I forgot all about it for years. I just thought it was normal.”

“What changed?”

She was lying beside Raf in the darkness with a late-October wind rattling the sash windows and a quilt pulled up so tight around her it almost hid her face. One of Raf’s arms held her shoulder as she lay on her side, facing him, and when she spoke it was in a monotone so soft and so quiet that Raf doubted if anyone but he could have heard even half of what she said.

Sometimes she spoke and sometimes there was silence. When the silence grew too strong, Raf asked another question. Zara had been talking for hours, her voice never raised nor showing any emotion Raf could recognize. Except its very emptiness told Raf more than her answers to half a dozen of his questions.

Zara had, so far as he could tell, long since forgotten he was there. He didn’t know who she thought he was . . . Maybe some part of herself.

“What changed?” Raf asked again.

“Schools changed. My mother refused but I kept insisting. And eventually Dad agreed I could go to the American High. They did a medical.”

“With a male doctor?”

“Of course not! The nurse was French. Probably not much more than five or six years older than me. She did a blood test. Asked for a sample of urine. Cut a strand of my hair and took a swab from my mouth . . . Drugs and DNA profile,” Zara added, as if Raf couldn’t work that out for himself.

“She listened to my heart and lungs, took my blood pressure and did a quick CAT scan with a handheld. Then she asked about periods. Only I didn’t know what those were, so she explained and I said they hadn’t started. Which was when she asked me to get back on the couch.”

Zara sighed.

“I don’t think she’d ever seen a female circumcision before. When she came back she had Sister Angelica, our school doctor, in tow. She was maybe thirty-five, though she seemed much older to me.” Zara spoke as if this had all happened decades earlier, rather than just five years before. “It was the first time I heard a woman swear . . .

“Apparently, because there were now laws against female circumcision, Sister Angelica thought it didn’t happen.”

“What did she do?”

Zara’s laugh was a bitter bark. “After she’d slammed the phone down on my mother, she went to see my father at his office. It’s probably the only time he’s stood there, utterly speechless while a woman shouted at him.”

“And then?”

Silence was Zara’s answer. An absence that stretched so thin that Raf finally decided Zara must have fallen asleep, but he was wrong. She was busy remembering the bits she didn’t usually allow herself to remember.

“They cut the stitches,” she announced flatly. “Sister Angelica did it herself. There were five in total, each separate, transparent and beautifully neat, pulling together the sides of my . . .”

Zara stopped, starting up again, minutes later, as if she’d never paused.

“Sister Angelica cleaned the area where the inner labia should have been and removed an oval of surgical plastic designed to create enough space for urination . . . It had been done in a hospital, you see. A good hospital with qualified doctors and a resident anaesthetist. And that was the problem. Because if it had been done by a jobbing midwife with a piece of broken glass in a back room, then I’d have struggled, which would have made it hard to cut away as much as my mother wanted.