Eight Months on Ghazzah Street by Hilary Mantel Read Free Book Online

that. But I thought that if I write my diary every few days—I know I can’t manage every day—then if anything happens at all, I can make more of it in my letters home.
    This is a new departure for me. In Africa there was no need to keep a diary to convince yourself you had an interesting life. Things were always happening. The garden boy would get syphilis, for instance. Perhaps it is a relief not to have household help.
    I found myself looking around the flat that first morning, thinking rather desperately, I wish this would get dirty, then I could clean it. Which is not at all my usual sort of wish.
    I went into the kitchen and moved the food around in the fridge. I looked in the cupboards to see if I could make a list of what we needed, but we didn’t seem to need anything. I went into an empty bedroom and moved a packing case into it, so that it
looked more occupied. But I did not feel at all in possession of the ground.
    Then I unpacked my cases. The customs men had churned everything into a knot, and I found that one of my shoes was missing. Only one, and there I was with the other shoe in my hand, new and unworn, and although I knew that my feelings were out of proportion I felt overwhelmed by a terrible sense of waste, and I thought damn them, damn those customs men, who do they think they are, and I said out loud, damn, damn, damn. Then I put most of my clothes in the washing machine and ironed the rest, and hung them in the wardrobes, and it was still only half past eleven.
    I walked around the flat, thinking dire kinds of thoughts, such as, here I am, here I stay. I went into the bathroom and there, sitting in the washbasin, was the biggest cockroach I have ever seen. I looked at it for some time in a kind of admiring revulsion. Then the thought came to me that there were other people in the building, other lives going on around mine. I heard the distant ring of a telephone, and footsteps in the flat above. It seemed to wake me out of a dream. I can’t go on like this, I thought, just wandering round aimlessly.
    I went into the living room. There aren’t, as I’d thought earlier, a dozen armchairs, but there are eight, scattered here and there, and two long overstuffed oatmeal-colored sofas. When there are so many choices there doesn’t seem to be any reason for sitting in one chair and not another, so I stood there for a while thinking about it. Eventually I took the chair nearest the window, and sat in it rather stiffly, as though someone were watching me, and read the paperback I’d been reading on the flight. This made me feel as if in fact I hadn’t arrived at all, as if I were still in transit, with my passport in my handbag, waiting for it all to begin.
    After a few minutes I got up and put on the overhead light, and I thought, that will always be necessary, how depressing, because I hate the lights on during the day. It was very quiet. I heard the prayer call at noon. It seemed strange not to speak to
another person all morning, and yet to know that people were there, in the flat next door, and up above my head, and in the street beyond the wall, and that there was a whole country out there which I had not yet seen.
    At about two o’clock the cockroach entered the room. It strolled across the huge expanse of carpet and began to climb up one of the curtains. Somehow I was quite glad to see it.

    On that first day, Andrew came home at half past three. She followed him around the flat. “Will it always be like this?” she asked.
    Preoccupied, he dumped his briefcase on the table. “I’m sorry I locked you in.”
    “What about going out? How do I get around?”
    “I’ll have to talk to Jeff Pollard to see if the office can let you have a car to go shopping sometimes.”
    “I’m not that fond of shopping, you know?” she said mildly. Andrew flipped the briefcase open and took a sheaf of papers out. He began to flick through them. “Well, I don’t know that besides shopping there’s