hung huge and pallid in the sky, bisected by a lamppost; a fuzzy globe of electric light encircled it, like another satellite. Toward morning there was a little rain. When Frances got up, drew back the curtains, wound up the blinds, she saw the leaves of the tree washed clean, saw for the first time their true, green color.
Frances went up to the roof. It was nine A.M.; the heat was building up, and there was a shimmer in the air. Traffic moved in the distance; the highways were thin bleached lines, and beyond them was another line, another highway, which was the sea. You could sense it this morning, and those few drops of rain bred hope; flowers might bloom out of concrete, trees shoulder through the dereliction. She looked down into her neighbors’ courts and enclosures, at the broken line of roofs below her. Thirty feet down a striped cat lay, looking up; its eyes gazed into hers, offended. The cat should be above her, looking down; that was nature. Morning haze hung over the building sites, and gilded the scaffolding, like a veil over bones.
On the balcony of the empty flat there was a wooden crate. It was only by accident that she had spotted it; she had leaned over the branches of the parapet, to put her face into the tree, to catch the fugitive scent of leaves. She leaned farther, and there was the logo of the Hejaz Removals and Storage Company.
What she noticed, next, was the balcony floor, thinly veneered with mud. So when Sarsaparilla was cleaning, she didn’t get round to the balcony; cement dust and sand had lain there for months, blown in through the leaves of the tree, and had stood, and thickened, and now formed a wet sticky deposit on the tiles. The balcony was not visible from the street; you could only see it by leaning over, by twisting your neck at an angle. That crate, she thought, must be classed as an unsightly wooden structure; and under the landlord’s very nose. Even the most desperate hajji wouldn’t live in it, though it was just big enough for a man, if he didn’t mind doubling himself up, if he didn’t mind some pain.
“It is just for some things of Raji’s,” Yasmin had said. Someone has told me a lie, Frances thought. Or, what seems more likely now, someone has told me a series of lies.
Andrew came home. “There’s a crate on the roof,” she told him.
“What I mean is, there’s a crate on the balcony of the empty flat.”
“Oh yes?”
“I think I’ve seen it before, that crate.”
Andrew was not attending. He was pulling documents out of his briefcase. “Where’s my pocket calculator?” he said.
“Is there a panic?”
“Only the annual panic. Or so Eric calls it. The end of the financial year’s coming up.”
“Surely that was foreseeable.”
“Yes. Don’t make sarcastic remarks, please. We’re living on next year’s expectations. Turadup’s running out of everything. We’re running out of building materials. If something breaks down I can’t get it replaced. We’ve run out of photocopying paper, I’ll have to go out tonight and buy a ream. God damn it, we’ve even run out of lavatory paper. We don’t know what sort of money we’re going to get in the new budget. Eric’s gone to Riyadh. We might know something when he gets back.”
“What do you think this crate is?”
“Mm? I don’t know. Maybe it’s a chicken coop.”
When Frances finished her diary, Andrew was still muttering and frowning over his papers. She got up, and wandered about the flat; she sorted some dirty clothes, and loaded the washing machine and thought, go up to the roof. She measured the detergent out and thought, go up to the roof. She turned the knobs to set the cycle and thought, go up to the roof.
“I’m off now,” Andrew called. “Do you want anything from the stationery shop?”
“Yes, I want another exercise book for my diary.” She slid down the hall, away from his voice, and locked herself in the bathroom. She didn’t want him to see her plans written on her face.
“I’ll have to be quick,” he said, from behind the closed door. “I might just make it before they close for evening prayers.”
She heard the front door slam. She emerged. She waited; and when she had given him time to drive away, she let herself out of the apartment and began to climb the stairs.
There was someone on the top landing. She ran; two steps at a time, grabbing for the handrail at the top and swinging herself round on to the landing to confront, head-on, Samira’s maid. Sarsaparilla held in her hands a small covered dish, and a piece of flat Arab bread. She stepped back. Her face was stricken, and her hands closed like claws; and again Frances caught that strange thin smell from her skin, and as she caught it her mouth dried, and she also stepped back a pace, as if the air between them had become infected by consternation.
Then suddenly, the maid smiled. It was a terrible parody of a smile, a rictus, in which she might have been rehearsed; she held out toward Frances the bowl, the piece of flat bread. “For you from Madam,” she said. Her first words: high-pitched, quavering. Frances took the bread, took the bowl. Her hands shook. Sarsaparilla made a little gesture, gracious and rueful, to indicate that she had just that moment been on her way down. She kept her shoulder turned to the door of the empty flat; she kept her eyes averted from it.
Holding the food, Frances turned away. She could not bear the sight of the girl’s panic. She went downstairs,