Touch (21 page)

You must travel light when you wear another’s skin.

Everything you own belongs to someone else.

Everything you value you must leave behind.

It is not I who made a family.

It is not I who have a home.

It is someone else, whose face I borrowed for a little while, whose life I lived and who now may live the life I lived as I move on.

Time to go.

I went to the post office and sent my USB stick first class to a PO box in Edinburgh, where some time I had worn a skin whose name was

something-son

and had opened an account and been careful never to close it. Because even a ghost needs something to call their own.

I headed to the airport.

This is how I run.

I am Alice.

I stand in the departures lounge of Brandenburg airport, and as the crowds bustle around me on their way to the luggage check-in, I spread my fingers wide and brush

a child holding her mother’s hand who walks towards the check-in desk for flights to Athens, and as I look up into my mother’s face I decide that actually this body is a little too young and a little too puffy-eyed from an early-morning start, so I switch into

Mum, straight back and wearing a belt a little too tight across the belly, I support my child as she staggers, only to reach out and politely tap the guard who stands by the oversize luggage counter to say, “Excuse me?” and as he turns, brush my fingers against his neck to become

oversize luggage porter, my arms folded, my breath stinking of cigarette smoke, I smile at mum and resolve either to get out of this body or get some mint into it as soon as possible. I march towards the security gate, calling out to the bored guard who confiscates all liquids and bottles over a hundred millilitres (verily, though they be empty, they shall be confiscated), “You got a cigarette?”

She turns, rolling her eyes at my approach, and as she does I catch her hand and

pull my hand free from the sticky grasp of the confused oversize baggage porter, tut and say, “Cigarettes will kill you, you know?” and turn, pushing my way through the winding queues for the security gate. The crowds are thick and unwilling to part, even for a woman in uniform, so I am

teenager slouching with drum and bass roaring through my headphones. I pull the cord free in disgust and, eardrums still ringing, reach out for

businessman, standing crooked, hip down, shoulders twisted, impatient for the flight, who reaches for

father, no longer listening to his wife,

who touches the arm of

student carrying too much stuff and none of it what she needs who stands at the head of the queue, and her heart is racing even though mine is not and I wonder precisely what else she’s carrying to induce such terror of the X-ray machine, but perhaps now is not the time to find out, so as the security guard passes me the tray for my personal belongings I brush his fingers and

straighten up, smiling my most reassuring smile at the shaking student and turn to my colleague, bored staring at the X-ray screen, and say, “Hey, you got the time?”

My colleague barely glances up from her monotonous study to grunt her reply, by which time I’m on the other side of the counter and into

baggage checker, who’s just been through a woman’s underwear, and the woman is bright red, ashamed of all her pink lace, though I,

as I move into her and pack up my bag again, think it’s really rather charming and not nearly so sexual as perhaps she intends it, and as I sweep through customs and towards duty free, I feel in my pocket for my ticket, and see it is to San Francisco and sigh, and go looking for someone who might be heading for Paris instead.

My name is Salome.

This is what my passport says and I have nothing better to go on. I had been aiming for first class, but the queue was varied and my fingers were warm, so Salome I remained, knees pressed against the seat in front of me, window view, a vista of wing, engine and a scrap of sky.

Somewhere a USB stick containing the records of a company called Aquarius is heading towards Edinburgh.

In Zehlendorf police have received a tip-off that a man is handcuffed to a radiator, confused and afraid.

And I, who don’t feel comfortable with a name like Salome and fancy myself more an Amelia, close my eyes as take-off pushes me into my seat and, with nothing in the world to call my own, think of Paris.

I heard a story once, in the basement of a Paris café where artists gathered to whisper of rebellion, and the music was soft, and the smell was strong coffee and cheap gin.

The story was told by a woman called Nour Sayegh, who studied not much at the Nouvelle Sorbonne and spoke French with an Algerian accent. There was a quality to her face that fascinated me, enthralled me, and as I sat among her fellow students – how I
love
freshers’ week! – I wondered if I had not met her before, or worn the skin of her sister, and yet I could not place her features until at last she began to speak.

“My name is Nour Sayegh,” she said, “and I carry the fire of the jinn.”

A slow drumbeat, for this was a space for people who liked to perform, for students with dreams of the limelight and contempt for those who already had it, and as Nour told her tale – of her journeys in Africa, of her coming to France – she swayed to the music that ran beneath her words, plumping them up.

“My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother married a jinn,” she said. “Her husband was a rich man in Cairo but he did not love my grandmother. She was an ornament in the house, not a woman at all. So my grandmother would weep, alone beneath the moonlight, and look towards the sacred waters of the Nile and pray to the ancient gods, to falcon Horus and gentle Isis, mother of all things, for some magic to change her husband’s eye. She wept so softly, for she feared being seen to be sad, that only the little crickets clustered beneath her feet knew of her distress, and the breeze that blew from the sea. Until the jinn came. Fire of the desert, the knife-wind, he comes, he comes riding the sands, and his name is a thousand eyes without expression,
elf’ayyoun we’ain douna ta’beer, youharrik elqazb doun arreeh
, and his voice is stirs-the-reeds-without-wind, and his sword is starlight, and his eyes are the hot embers of a fallen sun.

“We do not know the true name of the jinn, nor why the crying of my grandmother lured him to her house, but when he saw her weeping in the garden he grew sad and took the form of a little boy, silver-skinned and ebon-haired, who asked, ‘Why do you weep, mistress? Why do you weep?’

“‘My husband does not love me,’ she replied. ‘I am his wife so must be with him, yet I cannot but lament this fate that has befallen me, for I see other wives, and see that they are in love, and feel the sting of my sorrow, crueller by compare.’

“Hearing these words, the jinn was greatly moved. ‘Come away with me,’ he said, ‘and I shall love you as your husband.’

“‘Allah forgive me that I should even consider the thought!’ she replied. ‘For I am wed to my husband and cannot permit another to violate my flesh! Get gone with you, jinn, for though I know you spoke in kindness, yet your words are still obscene!’

“The jinn, confused, departed. ‘What strange ways these mortals have,’ he mused, ‘to be so trapped by prisons of their own creation. Why then, if I am to have her, I must be as her husband is!’ So saying, the jinn made himself a vapour, and slithered into her husband’s room, where he lay, great and panting from a night of loving some other wife. And the jinn wriggled up the husband’s nose and wrapped himself around his heart, so that when dawn came it was the jinn, not the husband, who roused himself from sleep, turned to the hussy by his side and barked, ‘Get gone, whore!’

“This woman fled, weeping, from the bed, while the jinn, now become the husband, went straight to the room of my grandmother and said, ‘Forgive me my past cruelties; I am your husband and will honour you with all the duty and care that is within my power to give.’

“My grandmother, being a shrewd woman, at once marvelled at this change and expressed only cautious duty towards her husband, not believing his speech. Yet as the weeks went by, and the jinn showed his dedication to her, she softened and began to hope, to pray, that this sudden change in her husband might be true.

“‘My lord,’ she said to him one night, ‘there is such alteration in your nature that, if you permit me to say it, you barely seem to be the man I married.’

“At this the jinn puffed up with pride. ‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘It is you that has altered me, fulfilled me and made me the better man.’

“With these words, they were happy together, but my grandmother could not help but remember the jinn in the garden, promising forbidden adventures to her, and as she looked at her husband she wondered. Was this man her husband, or was she ensorcelled by a fiery creature of the desert, a jinn of the sands? But if she was, what could be done? For the jinn are a great mixed race, who delight, it is true, in playing tricks on men, but are also gentle and kind to their favourites and beloved of Allah. For recall the jinn who carried the starving prince to Baghdad on a wind of fire, or helped the wounded merchant reach the gates of Damascus. Remember that there are jinn who have loved, and served faithfully those they have loved, and guarded the wombs of the mothers as they brought forth their children on stormy nights. We too eagerly blame the jinn, accuse them of all our woes, forgetting their good deeds, which we often claim for our own.

“‘You are much changed,’ she murmured again to her husband, as they lay, naked lovers, beneath the leaves of the trees. ‘You are much changed.’

“At this the jinn made to speak, but at once she interrupted him. ‘It is said that the innocents will find their path to paradise. I know of no crimes of which I am guilty, but if I am to stay shriven, surely my best safety lies in innocence. Were a spirit of the deep to abuse me, why then I am abused. But were I to revel in that debasement, why I am a harlot and a witch, and should be branded for the same. Is it not so?’

“Hearing this, the jinn wisely did not speak, for he knew my grandmother’s meaning. Instead, silent a long time they lay beneath the breath of the river’s breeze, until at last he said, ‘To love whom one loves, to be whom one would be, this does not seem against the will of the Creator. For he made you to love, and made you to life, and to deny this is to deny the will of Allah.’

“My grandmother shot the jinn a look of ivory arrows, piercing straight through his soul to the truth of his heart, so much that he almost leaped from the skin he was inhabiting; then she smiled and said, ‘And if Allah made others to mischief?’

‘“Then clearly,’ he replied, ‘there is a purpose.’

“For ten years the jinn remained by my grandmother’s side, loving her as she loved him, and never did they speak of the alteration in her husband or question how it had come to pass but, as innocents do, accepted everything of each other, and were truly the loveliest couple in creation.

“Then war came to the land, and the soldiers came for the husband, who had in his former time committed some deep indiscretion against the rulers of Cairo. And as the soldiers took hold of the husband’s arms, the jinn, incensed with anger and confused with terror, fled the body he had worn for ten years and vanished spinning into the night. Seeing this, the soldiers cried out against all sorcery and at once beheaded the husband where he stood, throwing his corpse to the crocodiles. My grandmother fell weeping by the crimson waters, but the soldiers called her a witch and took her to the jail, where first a judge, then a sacred wise man called her blasphemer. They threw her into the deepest dungeon in Cairo, where foul men practised against her evil acts, and every night she cried out for her jinn, for her husband, for her lost lover and protector, but he did not come, for jinn are as changeable as the moon, as fearful as the sea, and her cries were lost far beneath the stones.

“Her torment only ceased when the men who were her tormentors saw that she was with child. At this, many wanted her cast to the bottom of a pit, but one took pity on her and smuggled her out into the foggy night. Desperate and bleeding, she staggered through the streets, collapsing at last at the doors of a madrasa, where the kind imam took pity and nurtured her back to health.

“Yet the dungeon had wounded my grandmother deeper than flesh, and when the childbirth came, it was tormented, foul and bloody, for the child she was giving birth to was that of the jinn, and a creature as much fire as it was mortal. As it was born it burned my mother from the inside, its magical essence too much for her womb to bear, and seeing this infant as it fell mewling into the world, the imam was taken with a great confusion as to what he was to do. He turned to give the babe to his mother, but his mother was dead.

“Alone with the screaming child and the woman’s corpse, the imam prayed to Allah for guidance, and as he did, it came to him that he became as a jinn himself, for his mind seemed to slip into that of the child’s own, and within that little body he felt the terror, the pain, the grief, but above all the love that the child’s father had felt for my dead grandmother, brighter than the flames that had destroyed her. Returning to his senses, he knew then that he could not kill the child, created though it was in a union of obscenity, for it was also a child of the purest love. So he raised the child, and in time that child became a man, and the man lay with women, and the women became my grandmothers, each gifted with a little of the jinn’s blood, the desert’s fire and the love of an immortal soul.”

Nour Sayegh finished speaking, and as the half-attentive café beneath the Paris streets applauded her tale, I sat dumb in my corner and stared into the eyes of this child, who had come from the flesh of Ayesha bint Kamal and Abdul al-Mu’allim al-Ninowy; but also from my soul.