Free Cinnamon by Emily Danby Page B

reach. At night, there, she was no longer haunted by her sister’s wide-eyed ghost, and the smell of the skips had vanished.
    When she was still eleven years old, Aliyah would tremble a little when Hanan al-Hashimi would place her in her lap and make her rub her body with strange oils, her fingers squeezing her quivering skin.
    Pliant like dough, Aliyah would give in to the mistress, letting her do as she pleased. In the beginning she had feared her gentle caresses – the source of nightmares that stole her sleep – but day by day, as she grew older in the villa, the mistress’s touch became the subject of daydreams; she began to wait for it in anticipation. Aliyah knew now of the precious treasure concealed within her own body, which she could grant her mistress when she felt like it and withhold from her when she was in a bad mood. Yet this was only at night. In the daytime, Aliyah avoided the mistress, keeping a distance as though the woman were poisonous.
    Night and day were two quite separate worlds.
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    Aliyah’s fingers froze around the handle of her bag. Sharp twinges ran through them as she struggled to hold her grip on the bag and keep her balance as she walked. As her fingers entwined over the leather skin she teetered on the point of falling. Then, her hand let go and the bag fell. Aliyah felt a chill run through her warm fingers, whose games had made her the queen of a magic realm. She watched the digits tremble, concealing them close to her belly as she wondered to herself what was causing them to shiver like that in summer. Perhaps it was the dawn chill, which arose there as in all desert-like places.
    But the cold wasn’t so intense as to make her fingers freeze like that; it was fear, she realised. Fear alone had turned her to a lump of ice. Aliyah remembered how her fingers would become completely rigid, refusing to bend or dance as sharp twinges of pain shot through them. It was happening again right then, as she tried to put her hands in her pockets to protect them from the biting chill of the morning. Aliyah studied her fingers. They seemed unfamiliar to her now. Those fingers that had once transformed Hanan al-Hashimi’s nights into eternal pleasure, before she had turned her out into this new unknown.
    That moment was etched upon her mind: the mistress charging at her like a woman possessed and throwing her out. Every time the memory arose, she shivered and began to falter, like a tattered yellow leaf on a wizened tree branch. Aliyah searched for a single convincing reason to explain why that woman – who was clearly deranged – wore so many different faces, some so frightening that she trembled when Hanan appeared in her dreams and turned into a savage. In bed, Hanan’s features were quite different, as if the djinn had taken possession of her. She became like an infant, her eyes shimmering as her body began to relax. In Aliyah’s embrace, Hanan was an obedient child. On other occasions, when she had guests, Hanan displayed a third face: her features would drain of colour and their contours turn to broken lines over a face devoid of laughter.
    The prickling sensations intensified. Aliyah brought her palms close to her mouth and breathed some warmth into them. Looking behind her once more, she saw nothing of her own world – that world which, until so recently, had been everything she owned. Once more, she picked up her bag and started to run, stumbling in her high-heel shoes. Why she had been so insistent on that particular pair, she did not know. From the clothes she was wearing, Aliyah momentarily imagined she looked like Hanan al-Hashimi, dressed up for one of her soirées from which she wouldn’t return until dawn.
    She took off the shoes and carried them, running and crying at the top of her voice, just like when she was a little girl. Aliyah dried her tears as she ran. Stumbling, she came to a halt, then charged on once more, without a