Free The Last Cut by Michael Pearce Page B

again.’
    ‘Of course, there will always be ill-informed people who talk—’
    ‘Not entirely ill-informed; the girl’s father.’
    He asked Mahmoud if he could go with him. It was Mahmoud’s case; but if there was any possibility of those stupid—and potentially troublesome—rumours about the Maiden reviving he meant to get in there and kill it off quick.
    The man lived out beyond the bazaars, on the very edge of the old Arab city, just where it gave on to the Muslim graveyard and the desert. The streets in this part of the city were full of crumbling and decaying houses, many of them still beautiful. Beyond them, though, were houses which were not beautiful, little squat blocks, single-storey and single-room, made of cheap sun-baked bricks which the rain, sometimes hard in Cairo in winter, was already dissolving. The walls had shrunk and the roofs sagged, so that some of the buildings were now only half the height they had been, and you had to crouch to go in and crouch while you were inside. Many of them were shared, as in the countryside, with animals. But these were the richer houses.
    Out here on the very rim of the city, all semblance of street plan had been lost. There were gaps everywhere and great stretches of rubble, which the sand, drifting in from the desert, was slowly covering. They stopped uncertainly.
    Some men were digging in the graveyard. Mahmoud asked them if they knew the house of Ali Khedri. One of the men nodded and then, glad of the excuse, put down his spade and came out to accompany them.
    ‘The house of the water-carrier,’ he said, pointing.
    It was one of the poorer houses. The walls had caved in so badly that the doorway had almost disappeared. You had to drop on to hands and knees to go in.
    Inside, everything was filthy. There were some rags in a corner, some water-skins thrown down carelessly, and over by the rear door some pots and pans. They did the cooking outside, presumably.
    ‘It needs a womans hand,’ said the water-carrier defensively. He was a short stocky man dressed not in the usual galabeeyah but just in woollen drawers. His skin had been burnt black by years of working in the fields and then walking in the streets. His eyes were reddish and inflamed, the usual ophthalmia of the fellah in the Delta.
    ‘We lived better than this once,’ he said. ‘I wanted to give it her again.’
    ‘Through marriage to Omar Fayoum?’
    ‘Well, why not? I know they said he was too old for her. That’s not the point, I said. It’s not how old you are, it’s how rich you are. And you don’t usually get rich until you get old. It takes time. That’s my experience, anyway. There are advantages, too. All you’ve got to do is hang on and one day he’ll be gone. And then you’ll have it all. That’s what I said. That’s what I said to her, too. Oh, I know he’s not young and handsome. I know he’s a hard old bastard. But that’s not it. The point is, he’s got a piastre or two. He’s got one cart, he’s talking of getting another. That’s real, that is. It’s not just a pair of nice brown eyes.’
    He spat on the floor.
    ‘Brown eyes!’ he said contemptuously. ‘They’re not real.’ Ants were already gathering around the spit. There must be something in it, thought Owen. Sugar? Tobacco? Hashish?
    There was another stain just beside it. From it a moving column stretched across the floor and up the wall. Not ants, not cockroaches, either; some other sort of bug.
    ‘It needs a woman’s hand. I’ve never said she wasn’t good about the house.’
    ‘And yet you were going to marry her off?’
    ‘She was getting on. It would soon have been too late. I hung on as long as I could. And then old Omar comes along. “It’s now or never,” he said. “In another year she’ll be over the hill.” Mind you, I think he’d had his eye on her for some time. He was just waiting for the price to drop. “You don’t want them young and skittish,” I said. “Not in a wife,