Blue Lorries

Начало книги

Cairo Station. I lengthen my stride, all but running to catch up with my mother. I’m afraid to let her get even one step ahead of me. ‘Why are you holding on to my hand so tightly?’ she hisses. ‘It hurts!’ She tries to extricate her hand from my grasp, but I hold on even tighter.

My mother is busy talking to the fat woman holding a baby, who is making the trip with us. There on the railway platform, where we wait for our train to pull in, an enormous man with thick moustaches and white hair smiles at me and asks my name. I turn my face away. When our eyes meet again he smiles and says, ‘You’re a very pretty girl!’

‘Say “thank you” to Monsieur,’ my mother tells me in French. I pretend to busy myself with tightening my shoelaces, and my mother goes back to her conversation with the fat woman. I turn to the man and stick my tongue out at him.

It wasn’t just the crowds, or the noise, or the hubbub, but the persistent, ruthless destruction of everything I had built up in my imagination during the past few days. The trip had obsessed me. I thought about it, talked about it, prepared for it, and, in my imagination, assembled the details of it. I hovered over the great basket in which my mother was packing food, pointing out items she had left out, adjusting, suggesting, adding things. In secret I got my own special things ready — the ones I would share with him — stashing them in my small satchel: my portrait in my school uniform; the notebook, three of whose pages were adorned with gold stars; two chocolate bars.

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