When I was a grown-up

Rendez-vous

It was four o'clock before we managed to get ourselves organised, have
showers, find clean clothes and generally get ready to leave the flat.
It was the usual story - arsing about and smoking cigarettes and
talking about going outside to actually have a look round the city.
After all, we were supposed to be immersing ourselves in its language
and culture - learning things and growing as people and all kinds of
Oprah Winfrey shit like that.

Jake and I hadn't left the flat at all the day before. And only for
five minutes the day before that. To be honest, going outside was
starting to become something of an issue. I'm not talking about
agoraphobia or anything clinical like that. I mean, it wasn't exactly
that we weren't keen to get out there and start using the language -
we'd been studying it for over a year after all - but there were always
other things that got in the way.

Like not being able to understand a bloody word anyone said to us, for
a start. Then there was the heat at that time of year. And the
humidity. And the eight flights of stairs with no lift on the way back
that left you gasping for breath and sweating like a bastard. And we
didn't really know anyone outside - although perhaps that should have
been an argument for going out more, not less. But anyway, all these
things and more, when all lumped together, kind of made it much easier
to stay in the gloomy flat and order Very Expensive Pizza. Of course,
there were moments of opacity when we thought perhaps what we were
doing was just wasting time and not benefiting anyone, but those
moments soon passed. Or at least, we carried on what we were doing and
ignored them.

So, what with all these things having made it a habit to stay inside
and our basic inability to get ourselves together, the planned midday
appointment with the City and Real Life in General had come and gone
and it was pushing four o'clock. Jake and I decided to say bollocks to
the others and just go on ahead without them. Imran was still in the
shower and Sam had, for reasons best known to God alone, just started
cooking himself some pasta. So we half-heartedly arranged to meet them
in an hour outside the Cecil hotel but we all knew we were talking shit
and it wouldn't really happen.

I was wearing shorts and sandals, had a bag over my shoulder, which
held the Lonely Planet, my wallet, keys and a ridiculous tourist's
sunhat. I had my new sunglasses in one hand that I secretly thought
made me look like Tom Cruise. I was ready to go. I held the door open
for Jake and almost pushed him through it into the gloomy concrete
stairway. The landing outside the flat was always covered in shit for
some reason, no matter how often the doorman washed the steps down from
top to bottom, sending gushes of dirty water under our front door in
the process. We still hadn't worked out which days the rubbish was
collected, so we just left overstuffed carrier bags outside the door
whenever we thought about it. They usually sat there for a few days,
stinking like shit. I pulled the front door shut behind me, holding it
against the sudden gust of wind that always took hold of it when it was
half closed. I suppose it had something to do with the draft from the
two windows we kept open in the flat, but I don't quite understand the
mechanics of it. Patting my bag to make sure my wallet and keys were
still in there (it had been thirty seconds since I last checked, but
the door had shut since then and that makes a world of difference) I
followed Jake round and down the tight corner of the first flight of
stairs.

The stairway was a gloomy and smelly shit-hole of a place. It only got
sunlight for about 2 minutes a day when the sun was directly over the
open gap at the very top. There were strange scrawls on the bare
concrete and open boxes on the walls with tangles of wires sticking out
of them. The stairs ran down through the centre of the building with
doors to the flats leading off one side. On the other were windows
covered in thick dust that looked over the other half of the divided
central gap in the building, which (in a friendlier and fairer world)
might have been intended to house a lift. What it actually housed was
an enormous amount of crap and broken bits of furniture and plastic
bags. Luckily you couldn't see much of it because the windows were so
caked in dirt and grime. Strange cooking smells wafted up the shaft,
coming from all the open kitchen windows pumping out the fumes of fried
meat and vegetables.

When we got to the landing below us Jake stopped and turned
around.

"Shit. Forgot my fags." He sighed and started back up the steps,
fumbling for his key.

"Okay, I'll meet you at the bottom," I said and carried on down the
winding stairs, looking over the concrete banister to see who was
making the foot scuffing sounds coming up the stairs from below. It was
probably one of our neighbours we never spoke to.

A few floors down I came across our landlady, Rasha, who lived on the
third floor, coming up the stairs with a man and a woman behind her who
looked European. They were still two flights below me, so I stopped and
stood to one side, waiting to let them past. Not necessarily European,
I thought. American or Australian or anything really. White. I smiled
at my landlady as she got closer.

"Sabah alkheer," she said, by way of a greeting.

I sabah alkheer-ed her back and pressed myself into the wall to let
them push past me in the narrow corridor, but she stopped at the top of
the stairs, leaving the other two hovering awkwardly behind her.

"Yoseph, I come to see you," she said, speaking English and
mispronouncing my name as she always did.

"Yes?"

"I bring two foreigners. They have some-kind trouble."

Now that they had been referred to, I felt justified in looking at them
properly. The woman was in front, small with black curly hair and a
too-large knitted jumper on. She looked tired and ill, but that might
have been the light. The man stood at the bottom of the stairs but I
couldn't see him very well because he was standing in the shadows in
the corner. He was tall and wore a long coat, which was odd because it
was so hot. The sound of our front door slamming echoed down the
stairway, followed by scuffed footsteps.

The woman took a step forward so that she was just behind Rasha.

"Parlez-vous fran?ais?" She said.

"Err . . uh . . . non," I said, struggling to dredge up a few words.
"Mais, mon ami . . . er . . oui." I gestured up the stairs towards the
noise of Jake coming down.

"English?"

"Yes. I am English," I said, for some reason feeling stupid.

"Ok," she said, "We speak in English."

As she said this, Jake skipped down the last few steps and stood beside
me. The man came a few steps further up and into the dim light. He was
even bigger than he had seemed in the shadows and I thought he had a
definite French look about him. Then I thought that was stupid because
before the woman had spoken he could just as easily have been from
Darwin as Dieppe. Jake put his hands in his pockets and looked a
question at me.

"Um, this lady is French," I said, since that was all I knew about
her.

Jake raised his eyebrows at her and smiled.

"My name is Marie," she said. "And I am looking for my children."

I didn't know what to say to that at all, so I didn't say anything but
looked over her shoulder at the man. He didn't say anything either and
she made no move to introduce him. There was a moment of silence, which
Rasha filled by saying, "I bring them to see you. Maybe you see foreign
children."

The woman fumbled suddenly in her cracked leather handbag and brought
out two photos. "Josephine and Luc," she said, with a heavy accent that
surprised me and momentarily disguised the names. She handed me the
photos. "Josephine is eight and Luc is six." I looked at the photos and
then handed them to Jake. I looked hard, wondering for a moment if it
was possible that I might have seen them. But I knew I couldn't have
done. In a place like Alexandria you noticed foreigners when you saw
them in the street and I was certain I hadn't seen any foreign children
while I'd been there. As the reality of what this woman was saying
began to dawn on me I wished I had seen them. I wished I could help in
some way.

I looked at Jake, who was squinting at the photos intently in the dim
light. I began to wonder if what I really wanted was not to have seen
the children and be able to help, but rather to have never met this
woman in the first place. Perhaps I wished she had never walked up this
staircase and shown me her problem.

Jake shook his head and handed them back to the woman, saying something
in French that I couldn't follow.

"You are sure?" she asked in English. "I have the address of the
building next door. I think they were there."

"I'm sorry," I said. "We've only been here for a month and a half. I
haven't seen any children."

"You don't see foreign children at the University?" Asked Rasha,
putting a ringed hand up to her mouth.

"Not that young," I said, wondering exactly what our landlady thought
we did at University. "Are they here alone?" I asked the woman, not
knowing how else to ask her what had happened. The man put a hand on
her shoulder, still not saying anything, but she didn't react. She
seemed very business-like about the whole thing.

"My husband and I live in Paris," she said. "He worked at night. In the
day he was with the children. I come home one day and found that he is
gone and he taken his clothes and the children. Nothing else." She
paused for a second but I didn't know if it was emotion or if she was
arranging her careful English before speaking. "He didn't even take the
children's clothes."

It took me a second to attach a meaning, or a shadow of a meaning, to
that fact but the blank expression on her face hadn't changed at all.
She must have been through all the emotions already, I thought. Oprah
Winfrey flashed through my mind again, giving me the only vocabulary I
had for this kind of thing. I half shook my head, chiding myself for
not appreciating the gravity of the situation. Perhaps she hasn't even
allowed herself to think about the darkest reason her husband might not
take the children's clothes. But then, why would she mention it?

"That was six months ago."

Everyone was quiet for a second, then Jake said:

"Why do you think they are here?"

"His family are from Alexandrie," she said.

Rasha inhaled sharply. "From Alexandria? What is his family
name?"

"El-Masri."

Rasha tutted. "La. This is a common name. Where do they live in
Alexandria?"

"I don't know," said Marie, shrugging her shoulders.

"You don't know?" said Rasha, raising her eyebrows. "You marry a man
who you do not know his family? This is no good. No good. You must
know."

The silent man shuffled his feet. That seemed to be all he could do in
the way of communication. Rasha opened her mouth to say something else
but I managed to get there before her. "Have you checked the
schools?"

Marie looked at me. Of course she had checked the schools. "I check
every French language school in Le Caire and Alexandrie." Again, the
thick accent on the place names confused me for a second.

"Of course," I muttered, feeling totally lost. This woman was right in
front of me and had brought her terrible situation with her to the
fifth floor of my block of flats, carrying it in the folds of her
jumper and in the silence of the man behind her, but it seemed more
distant than any bad TV drama. I could barely imagine what it meant to
be her looking at me rather than me looking at her. I had nothing to
offer her - no hope or information, or even understanding. Suddenly, I
felt like the child I was.

"But maybe they use different names," she said with a tired voice. "I
just don't know."

"Um, yes. Maybe." I looked at the floor. Shit.

"Okay," said Rasha, very loudly. "You didn't see the children. I bring
them to see top floor."

Two Germans lived in the top floor flat but they had only arrived a
couple of weeks ago and almost certainly wouldn't have seen anything.
But I didn't say that. Rasha seemed intent on introducing them to every
foreigner she knew.

"Okay, right, well. Look, if there is anything we can do . . ." I said.
The woman tried a smile. "We'll . . . we'll ask around at the
university."

"Thank you," she said, and handed me a card with her name and hotel
phone number on it.

"Oh yes," I said. I hadn't thought about that.

"Come then," said Rasha cheerfully and led them up the next flight of
stairs. The silent man's coat brushed against my legs as he passed but
he didn't look at me or say anything. The skin of my shins tingled
uncomfortably at the brief contact.

Jake and I stood on the landing for a few seconds listening to their
echoing footsteps. We walked down the thirty or so steps to the
entrance lobby with our hands in our pockets and the sound of our feet
scraping against the rough concrete. An orange glow bled through the
cracked and dirty glass doors that led out onto the street and the wide
harbour. Neither of us spoke until we were outside on the pavement in
the brilliant sunshine. I held my hand up against the sun-flare and
waited for my eyes to adjust to the change from darkness to painful
light. The traffic seemed distant as I screwed up my face and sniffed
the sea air. It never occurred to me to put my sunglasses on. I looked
at Jake, who was squinting against the reflection of the sun off the
wide, sweet-wrapper sea. He said:

"Shit."