London encompasses a vast space, covering well over fifteen hundred square kilometres. Into that space the best part of eight million people are jammed: in Victorian and Edwardian terraces, in seventies council blocks, in modern steel-and-glass towers, sprawling out into endless suburbs. In the past twenty years I had bought and sold flats all over London, forever on the move, forever moving west. I never stayed in one place for long, loving each new property for a year or two, then feeling restless, unsettled. Once I had finished renovating and redecorating and moved my focus outward to the world again, I felt uncomfortable. No matter where I was, no matter how attractive the area or how pleasant the neighbours, I never felt as if I fitted in. Each time I had itchy feet, I would find myself looking in estate agent windows and know that the time had come again to up sticks and move on. I was lucky: the property market moved with me, onward and upward. In the process I managed to trade up from a bedsitter in Nunhead with mushrooms growing between its bathroom tiles, to a one-bedroomed apartment in Brockley, to smarter two- and three-bedroomed Victorian conversion flats in Battersea and Wandsworth, to a mews house tucked away in the backstreets of Chelsea; and had finally ended up in a substantial property in the far south-west of the city, about as far away from my parents’ house as you could be while still remaining in London.
Less than forty minutes after we had speeded away from Hampstead we were back in Barnes, having gone from one overpriced middle-class village to another. Both areas reeked of money, old money and new; and for a few sickening seconds, as I drew the Mercedes into the drive, I hated my own version of my parents’ house almost as much as I had the original.
I said nothing of this to Eve: she wouldn’t have understood even if I could have put it into words. Eve loved things, loved them in a visceral, sensual way, as if they filled the void in her life that should have been filled by a husband and kids. She’d had two husbands, but had never been able to have children. I wondered sometimes if I filled part of that void as well, for she could be bossy with me when I was being slower off the mark than she liked, as if she was playing the mother she had never been and I her child.
I cleared the table and set the box on top of it. It looked ridiculously out of place amongst the shining stainless steel and polished granite of the kitchen: a piece of old rubbish salvaged from the street. I ran a sharp knife down the top seam and watched the paper and packing tape part. Isa, it said on one side of the cut, and belle on the other.
Eve and I craned our necks over it. Inside, at first glance there appeared to be just a load of dusty old papers. I took them out carefully: they looked fragile enough to disintegrate in my hands. The first sheet was small and a pale green in colour – my mother would have called it ‘eau de nil’. It had been folded and refolded many times. On one side there were odd-looking squiggles, impossible to make out since the ink was so old. I turned it over and found an indistinct heading. Something Maroc … Whatever came next was lost in the fold. It looked as if it might once have been an official document of some kind, for I found a couple of words that appeared to have been printed. I picked out provi … and a word that began hegir … But whatever else had been written or printed on it had vanished over time, evaporating inside the box. For a moment it occurred to me that by opening it I had allowed this information to escape, that somehow it was in the air around us, invisible but full of meaning. Fanciful nonsense! I passed the thin green note to Eve. ‘Not much help.’
She turned it over; held it up to the light, squinting hard. ‘Maroc: that’s Morocco in French, isn’t it?’ she said after a while. ‘And is that a stamp?’
In the bottom corner there was a small, embossed-looking rectangle. It bore a faint image, but even under the brightest of the halogen bulbs we couldn’t tell what it was. I put it aside. Next was a sheaf of typed papers, brown at the edges, the printing obviously that of a manual typewriter, since missing serifs and filled spaces appeared in the same letters each time, and occasionally a full stop had punched a hole right through the paper. My father had always had a heavy hand when typing.
Notes regarding the gravesite near Abalessa, read the heading across the top of the page. I scanned it, frowning, taking in the phrases confused jumble of stones, otherwise known as a redjem and commonly found in the Sahara. At the bottom of the first page the word skeleton leapt out at me. Gingerly, I picked up the article, turned the page and quoted aloud to Eve: According to witnesses, the skeleton of the desert queen had been wrapped in red leather embellished with gold leaf. She lay with her knees bent towards her chest upon the decayed fragments of a wooden bier secured with braided cords of coloured leather and cloth. Her head had been covered by a white veil and three ostrich feathers; two emeralds hung from her earlobes, nine gold bracelets were upon one arm and eight silver bracelets on the other. Around her ankles, neck and waist were scattered beads of carnelian, agate and amazonite … I skipped a bit and then continued: Professors Maurice Reygasse and Gautiers of the Ethnographical Museum believe this site to have contained the remains of the legendary queen Tin Hinan.
‘Wow,’ said Eve. ‘What fabulous stuff.’ She closed her eyes. ‘You can almost smell the desert, can’t you? Treasure and a legendary Saharan queen. It’s like something out of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom! But what’s it got to do with you?’
I shrugged, feeling a bit sick. ‘I haven’t the least idea. From the tone of the notes it doesn’t even sound as if Dad was the one who excavated the site.’ I put the papers aside: it was like going back in time, seeing their punched-out o’s and feeling the impression made by the typewriter keys on the reverse side. It was some sort of message to me, a message from beyond the grave – both the Saharan queen’s and my father’s. The skin on the back of my neck tingled as if hairs were rising one by one.
The last item in the box was obviously the thing that had shifted when I picked it up in the attic. It was a cotton pouch with a cord wrapped many times around it. It weighed heavily in my hand, more heavily than I’d expected. A sudden electrical current ran up my arm, as if it had given me some sort of shock.
‘Do you think it’s something from the gravesite?’ Eve asked eagerly.
I was shaking now; but whether from excitement or from terror, I did not know. ‘I don’t think this is a good idea,’ I said, dropping the pouch back into the box, then shovelling the papers in after it. I closed the ruptured flap and put the knife down on top to hold it down. ‘This is all too weird and cryptic. And so typical of my father. I remember something he once said on TV: “Curiosity in children is to be encouraged. Give a child knowledge on a plate and it will leave it there to dry up, craving something more forbidden. Let it ferret out a treat for itself with the aid of a judicious clue or two and it will learn something for life.” Well, I hate being fed sodding clues like this. It’s designed to draw me in and prey on me, and I just don’t intend to let it. “Let sleeping beasts lie,” he said in his letter; perhaps that’s what I should do.’
‘It’ll only prey on you more if you don’t open it.’
I knew she was right. I wrestled with my irrational fears, then took a deep breath, removed the knife from the top of the box, delved inside and drew out the pouch. Swiftly, before I could change my mind, I unwound the drawstring and shook the contents into my palm, and we both stared at the thing that lay in my hand.
It was a solid chunk of silver, around five millimetres thick at its top edge, flaring to almost a centimetre or more at its base, the whole being the best part of four centimetres square. Circles of red glass or some semi-transparent stone embellished the central boss, and diagonal bands of complex, arcane patterns were engraved across the corners. A twisted leather thong was attached to the top. I picked it up by this and it swung from my fingers, twirling this way and that like a divining pendant, the red discs capturing the light like rubies. Against the backdrop of my modern kitchen it looked impossibly foreign and out of place.
‘Oh, Izzy,’ Eve breathed, her eyes round with wonder. ‘It’s … unreal.’
Its weight and massiveness made it feel very real to me; but what on earth was it?
Eve took it from my fingers and examined it closely. For some reason without it in my hand I felt strangely insubstantial.
‘I think it’s a necklace,’ she said after a while. ‘But what a barbaric-looking thing!’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Not my style; not yours, either, my love.’
It was true: you couldn’t get any further from what she called ‘my style’ than this curious object. I picked up the pouch. A slip of paper protruded from the bag. I eased it out and read there in my father’s neat print: ‘Amulet, date and provenance unknown, possibly Tuareg; silver, carnelian, leather.’ A chill ran down my spine. Was this thing part of the grave-goods of the skeletal queen mentioned in my father’s archaeological paper? I pushed it back into the pouch and stared at the lump it made under the cotton. Convulsively, I shovelled it back into the box, feeling quite illogically as if it might bite me. What had I brought into my home? I felt like running outside, digging a hole beneath the patio and reinterring it, along with the papers my father had left me.
That night, for the first time in years, I dreamt.
Through the narrow eye-slit in my veil I see palm trees and my heart rises. I have crossed the desert and survived. Alhamdulillah.
Before me, the other caravanners lope easily, their blue robes dun with sand and dust, their veils wound tight against winds that have stripped the fine patina of colour from my grandfather’s saddle and torn the bundles from our animals’ backs.
I blink and a herd of gazelles flashes past, their brilliant white scuts dancing in and out of the red granite boulders. I blink again and we are in a wide valley at the foot of a deep gorge and there is something watching me. A lion, vaster than any lion can be, gazing down from the cliff! I cry out in alarm.
When I look again I realize it is a natural feature, many camels in height, incised into the rose-red rock by God’s own hand, and given perspective by the scatter of adobe houses on the slopes below it and the tiny figures of black-robed women tending to the cultivated terraces. One bold soul accosts Soleymane, asks what we have brought. When he tells her salt and millet, her face falls. She is as old as my grandmother, her eyes outlined with kohl. ‘No jewellery?’ she asks. ‘No gold?’
The days of gold and slaves are past. Times are harder now.
As we enter the oasis town, the muezzin calls out the adhan. We lead the camels to the caravanserai and some of the men go to the mosque, but I want to see the market.
In the souq, artisans are working iron over open fires. I give them a wide berth: the inadan channel spirits. Old men sit on blankets selling pyramids of spices, vegetables and, wonder of wonders, leather babouches, bright yellow, as yellow as the sun. Suddenly I imagine them on my feet, resplendent. Such slippers are sure to impress pretty Manta. The next thing I know my hand is reaching for my silver amulet to make a bargain.
Azelouane appears, as if by magic. ‘What are you thinking of? That amulet is worth a hundred pairs of babouches; a thousand! What else will protect you from the evil influences of the Kel Asuf?’
But when I look down there are yellow babouches on my feet. They pinch: too new, too tight, but in them I look like an emperor.
Now it is night and we are sitting around our fire wrapped in our blankets and Ibrahim is telling me, ‘God created the desert so that there might be a place where he could take his ease. But he soon changed his mind. So he summoned the South Wind, the North Wind and all the other winds and ordered them to become as one and they obeyed. He took a handful of the airy mixture and there came into being – to the glory of Allah, to the confounding of his enemies, and to the benefit of man – the camel. To its legs he bound compassion, on its back he laid saddles, and to its flanks he tied riches, and finally he fastened good fortune to its tail. The desert and the camel are God’s gifts to the People.’
‘Allahu akbar,’ I say, because I know it will please him.
‘God is great.’ He pauses, then leans in. ‘Those who are born to the Great Desert can never be free: no matter how far they travel, no matter where they go. The spirits are always with them, those beings that have inhabited this world before there was time, or rock, or sand. Beware the Kel Asuf: wear your veil high; keep your nose and mouth covered. They love the body’s orifices, the spirits: they are always looking for a way in. When you make water, use your robe like a tent. When you shit, make sure you do it where the sand is undisturbed.
‘You will see their marks if you look closely. Amongst the dunes you will sometimes see a spiral of sand rise in the air for no reason. Where the sif dunes ripple like serpents, you may see where their claws have raked the ground. Watch for the changing angles of sun-shadows and moon-shadows, for eddies and ripples, for the perfect tiny circles formed in the surface by blades of grass bent flat by the wind: they leave their traces everywhere. Keep your amulet close at all times: it will keep you safe from harm, and remember, always, that the desert is your home.’
I woke before dawn and my mouth felt strangely dry and gritty and there was a strong, musky scent in my nostrils. I lay there for a while, luxuriating in the smooth coolness of my London bed; but it was hard to shift the sensation that instead of a quilted silk comforter and luxury Egyptian cotton sheets upon me, there lurked a smelly camel-hair blanket somewhere in the room.