Cinnamon by Emily Danby Read Free Book Online Page A

the area too, making deals with the taxi drivers to bring in the night-time punters. The place was an oddity, even to itself. There wasn’t the slightest sense of closeness drawing the neighbours together, or linking the adjoining houses, even though the residents could hear their neighbours’ lustful cries at night. In the mornings, the women would joke about the noises they heard, imitating the animal cries as they crowded in the doorways, before most left for work.
    Al-Raml district was like a public square that was alien to its own times. Everything there seemed comical, like a cartoon or a black-and-white western. The place was arid, isolated and languishing in dust: the glass windows covered with cardboard; the rusty iron doors; the walls made of tin and iron sheeting; the little shops like bandits’ grottos; the houses on top of houses. This latter sort was rare, perhaps because of the innovative way in which they were constructed. The owners would fix four iron posts into the ground, cover the walls with pieces of durable sheet iron and then hold them together with a little cement. Were it not for the rattling winter gales, this would have provided protection against the wind and made the walls solid. The roof was fixed with the same sort of resistant iron sheeting, held in place with a few kilograms of cement. There wouldn’t necessarily be a window to the room; the gaps in the walls, which appeared in every building despite the precautions taken, provided ventilation. On a winter’s day those very same holes became streams of rainwater.
    The other innovative way to create a home with adjoining rooms was to construct a partitioning wall which acted as two, since it was attached to two rooms. Then, both rooms would be covered with tin sheeting and the inner sides of the stone walls masked with pieces of coloured fabric, stuck down with cement until they became a part of the wall. After that, all the residents had to do was spread a mat on the floor and gather a few covers, and the place would become a real paradise.
    It was striking how the men’s eyes in al-Raml drowned in fatigue, despite the women’s beautiful faces, made up with bright red lipstick as they strolled by, flirting restlessly. This strange neighbourhood – cloaked in dust and boredom – was capable of turning even the red shades of the women’s lips a sombre, ashen tone, since deep down the men realised that the girls’ flirting glances were put on for the first pleasure-seeker they came across.
    The alleyways which ran between these buildings acted as a sort of boundary, no more than half a metre wide, which kept the women inside as their bellies swelled year upon year. During the final months of their pregnancy, the women were prevented from leaving the house, since their inflated stomachs couldn’t possibly fit through the tight alleyways all at once. The fact that there was a mosque in the neighbourhood made al-Raml all the more peculiar. Its magnificence was an oddity amongst the startling gloom of the houses. The mosque was built from iron and cement and decorated with marble. It was constructed by a charity worker, to provide a space for the neighbourhood men to gather in the evenings and sort out their differences and to receive handouts from the charities. The mosque’s Imam came from al-Midan and was not a local, but over the previous few years he had become a guardian to the whole community. Even though he was over fifty and already had two wives, the Imam married a third time – a girl from al-Raml who could have been no older than fifteen. He had spotted her one day as he made his way back from the mosque and she was leaving the house with her head uncovered, he felt a shiver run straight through his body as he leered at her curvaceous backside.
    The people of al-Raml could still recollect how everything had changed after the man from the religious charity had built them a mosque, and