Mike Allen - Clockwork Phoenix

On top of the teahouse was a small crescent moon which Mohammed Muneer polished each morning after the Fajr. Humming Nahna Wil Kamar Jeeraan in three different octaves, he burnished it vigorously until his fingers shred skin and sweat hung like a necklace across the brow of his forehead. The manager at Munch often watched on bemused. Eating jam doughnuts, belching black coffee, shouting between mouthfuls: “You should go neon, mate. More glow for less grind.”

Mohammed Muneer’s tea house rarely saw visitors even though he served tea in gold-lipped tulip glasses and offered ruby-inlaid nargiles from which to smoke tumbak. Even though he made sweets as fragrant as spring: churros glazed with rosewater, pistachio baghlava, rice-flour cookies sprinkled with crushed poppy seeds.

Road weary travellers, it seemed, simply weren’t interested.

Their tastes were much simpler, their guts far too staid. Cheese-and-bacon fingers. Fat plastic tubs filled with mousse. A Munch burger special with extra egg and thick beetroot. Who needed tumbak when you could smoke Bensons? Three puffs in the parking lot beside the dry spinifex grass. Butts flicked in the air like butterflies with torched wings.

Alas, for Mohammed Muneer, the townsfolk were no better.

Narrow in mind, if not in their girths, the very idea of something edible even being called a pashmak had them crossing the road promptly without checking for traffic. They crossed even faster when Mohammed Muneer was about. Waving them over with his wide, beckoning arms, apron to armpits, smiling so hard the tips of his moustache tickled the lobes of his ears. They’d rather risk their lives on the fast metal of the highway then engage with a man who didn’t serve milk in his tea.

It hurt Mohammed Muneer to be so scorned but in some small ways he was actually quite fortunate. The townsfolk were slobbish. They ate with their mouths open. They also had a rather perverse inclination for walking through dog poo instead of around it, so though he felt sad he was actually quite blessed.

There was only one local who ever visited his tea shop and that was Reggie Macklewaite, the town’s sort-of handyman. A softheaded fellow who wore lime velour tracksuit pants; he liked to help Mohammed Muneer wherever he could. Fix cracking pipes, empty clogged cisterns, sweep earwigs from gutters and the treads of the stairs. He used to come round every morning with his tools in a supermarket trolley until Mohammed Muneer told him he could sleep out the back, in a shack he had furnished with a bed and a basin.

Now it was true that poor Reggie Macklewaite hadn’t always wanted to be a handyman.

Indeed, he’d dreamed of being a pilot until cruelly advised to aim lower. “Stick to what you’re good at,” his teacher had said grimly. “And if you’re not good at anything then just be damn good at that.”

It wasn’t, however, that Mohammed Muneer’s tea shop never had visitors. (Reggie aside; but he was more of a fixture than a bona fide guest.) It was just that his visitors weren’t the usual types. Arriving at dawn from far-flung lands, they’d stagger through his bead curtain, eyes stung from no sleep, and collapse at his tea counter, feet shredded and sore. They would speak in strange tongues. Use their hands to make gestures. Tell tales that made no sense except to each other. Like the Argentinean fisherman who had lost his way at sea. Thought he was tracking a Patagonian Toothfish across the Southern Ocean, chasing the whites of its terrified eyes until one night he discovered he was tailing the moon instead. Or the pretty young girl from the Mekong Delta who carried a stash of hairy cherries in the cone of her hat. Said she’d wandered for months with a grain of rice in her eye that wouldn’t wash away no matter how much she tried.

Usually when such visitors arrived it was Reggie who would welcome them.

First offering them a seat, as he had been taught, and pouring them a tea: ginger root, lemon rind and honey from hived bees, specially blended by Mohammed Muneer to rejuvenate weary souls. Then he would listen as each of them asked him the very same question that had haunted every one of them separately since their journeys had begun.

Did Mohammed Muneer realise he had the moon on his roof?

Reggie always found the question to be quite absurd.

Of course he did.

Everyone did.

No one, not even Reggie, could miss the sickle-shaped ornament that spun on his roof. Shimmering rose-gold in the dawn rinse of the sky.

But Reggie was a gentle fellow not out to fool others.

So instead of calling them ridiculous or laughing in their face, he would simply lean over the counter (being very careful to tuck in his own personal moon which tended to appear rather regularly on account of his low-slung pants) and say with a wink: “The moon on his roof, eh? Well y’ don’t say. I’ve heard that the sun shines out of his arse too.”

It was a lonely life for Mohammed Muneer, despite these strange visitors (and Reggie, of course.) A life most men would have despaired at. Grown hairs on their palms. But Mohammed Muneer accepted it without gripe or growl. For Mohammed Muneer believed he was more than a simple tea shop owner and if anyone (other than his stray, passing travellers) had cared to look closely they would have noticed that his spinning rooftop crescent was no ordinary ornament. That what lay cradled in its gold-plated curve was no strange adornment, no waxed pearl or satin button or lost tooth from a baby. It was the very moon itself, come down from the sky to rest on Mohammed Muneer’s rooftop during the light hours of each day. Weary from the night spent travelling the skies, casting a light one million times greater than its own actual size. For the moon was, in truth, no larger than a juniper berry and as delicate to touch as a silkworm’s cocoon. Easily worn out by its nightly travail it would sleep through the day until evening came once more. Then it would rise to the sky to shine once again, as a whole or a part or sometimes not at all, depending on how tired it was, how well it had slept.

The fact that the moon rested on his rooftop was known by no one else but Mohammed Muneer himself. A secret so small it could fit in the palm of a man’s hand as it had in the past and would do so in the future.

Insha’Allah .

He told no one of its existence, not even his strange visitors, for he feared were it to fall into the wrong human hands, it would be its undoing. It would be its very end.

It never bothered him though, the idle banter of his guests; swearing they’d seen the moon sitting on top of his roof. For he knew they might talk until their teeth ground to gum but there was nobody about who would pay them any regard. Apart from Reggie, of course, but Reggie was much better with his hands than his head, so though he always listened he seldom understood.

Now it wasn’t as if the moon had always lived on Mohammed Muneer’s rooftop.

Since the beginning of time it had worn many guises:

the jewel in a queen’s crown;

a polished fountain stone;

the centre piece of a mosaic in an ancient Persian garden.

Every time it changed guises it had changed for one reason; because its keeper had been lost or had moved on in some way.

The queen with the crown, dethroned in a battle.

The gardener from ancient Persia dead amongst the pomegranates.

Whenever such an event happened, which inevitably it did, the moon would be forced to seek out a new keeper; for the moon knew very well that it could only ever have one—a person whose sole responsibility was to shield it from harm.