Gerard stumbles down an alley, derisive cries still ringing in his ears, and ducks behind a pile of boxes to catch his breath. He listens to the footsteps pounding away down the streets as the pack of—he can only assume—schoolboys that decided to try taunting him runs past, laughing and shouting. His understanding of the local language is still rough around the edges, but he catches the cry of “’Azharnahu!”—We showed him!
Showed him what, he has no idea, unless it’s that people around the world are stupid and not worth his time. It isn’t like Gerard goes around trying to make friends with people anyway. The sorts of people his mother usually consorts with aren’t the sorts he wants to spend much time with if he can help it, and most mundane people are just so…ignorant. It’s more annoying than it should be. About the only people he wants to spend time with are Martin and Melanie, and they’re back in London.
Gerard idly traces patterns in the drifts of sand, then hastily wipes them out with his hand when he realizes he’s been drawing the sigils his mother has been teaching him. No need to call that sort of thing down on his head, not when he’s got an afternoon free for the first time in forever. Despite the frustration of having been chased for blocks by a pack of kids mocking him for being different, it does at least mean that he’s been neatly separated from his mother, and she doesn’t know where he is. He’ll make his way back to where they’re staying eventually, but for now…
For now he’s free. For now he’s got time to spend on his own. For now he doesn’t have to think about Smirke’s Fourteen, or Leitner’s books, or any of that. For now he can just…be.
He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the little packet of Turkish cigarettes he got from one of the merchants his mother dealt with in Rome last month, who’d wanted to give him something but deemed him too old for a sweet, and the box of matches he swiped from the hotel bar. It’s taken him a bit, but he’s finally got the technique of lighting and smoking the cigarettes down; he can’t do it often, mostly because he’s still technically too young to be smoking and he knows it’s not going to be easy to get another pack once he finishes this one, but it helps with the stress. Or so he tells himself.
Once the cigarette is lit and he’s taken a couple drags on it, he gets to his feet and heads down the alley, curious as to what might be on the other side of it. He can hear a babble of voices, some regular chatter and some the louder cries of a hawker trying to draw attention to something, and he wonders if it might be a circus or a carnival. He’s never been to either, but he’s always wondered what they’re like. The idea of exploring one with Martin and Melanie sometime appeals to him in ways he’s not sure he can articulate.
Venice, he thinks to himself. The Carnevale in Venice. He doesn’t know exactly what it entails, per se, but it sounds good, and someday he’s going to take Martin and Melanie to it. Without his mother or Aunt Lily. Uncle Roger can come…maybe…but Gerard really wants it to be just the three of them.
He stops, momentarily surprised by the direction his thoughts have gone, and turns them over for a moment. He’s come to care about Martin and Melanie a lot in the last couple of years. They’re his friends, the only ones he’s got really, and he really likes spending time with them. They make the boring lessons more interesting and those rare free afternoons a lot more pleasant, and they’re both quick to come up with plans and include him in them whenever they get the chance.
But except for the idea of sneaking out of London for day trips on Martin’s birthday, Gerard hasn’t been the one to come up with any of their plans. He’s happy to be included, but it never occurs to him to include them in things his mother hasn’t already included Aunt Lily in. Mostly, he has to admit, because most of what he does isn’t something they should want to be involved in, and considering the risks—to Martin in particular, although Melanie is already proving adept at drawing aggravation from things—he shouldn’t let them. He’s never really considered plans farther ahead than an afternoon.
Yet here he is, thinking about something that’s going to require at least a year’s worth of planning and preparation. Or if they’re going to do it spontaneously, they’ll all have to be grown-up to do it—well, grown-up for real, since Gerard already thinks of himself as mature and world-weary, but legally he’s still only thirteen and a half and there aren’t many places that would consider that a man. Either way, for the first time, Gerard is thinking about the future, and a future that doesn’t involve monsters and things that go bump in the night, but does have Martin and Melanie in it.
He kind of likes that.
Smiling to himself, he takes another drag on his cigarette and looks to see where he’s ended up. The alley opens up onto a street boasting, not a circus or carnival, but an open-air market. There’s the smell of good food cooking and spices he can’t identify, bright colors everywhere, and the salesmen cry out for people to come try their wares, in three or four different languages that all blend together. It’s crowded, but not overly so.
Gerard ambles onto the street proper, looking around him. It seems like the kind of place where he might find an artifact of power, at least at first, but the more he looks, the more he revises. It’s not like Portobello Road or a swap meet or anything like that, it’s just…well, a market. It’s bright, and open, and honest about what it is. He’s more likely to find something tied to the Fourteen in a Tesco.
He stops to admire the wares displayed at one particular booth, brightly-colored quilts and hangings that catch his attention. The man in the booth eyes him suspiciously at first, but when Gerard asks him a question in halting, stumbling Arabic, he relaxes and engages with him readily enough. These aren’t Gerard’s thing at all, but they look like the sort of thing Martin, who’s keenly interested in textiles and the like, would be fascinated by, so he gets as much information as he can and stores it away to tell Martin about later.
“Do you make these yourself?” the man asks, or at least Gerard thinks that’s what he’s asking.
“My brother,” Gerard says. “He—” He flounders for a moment, trying to come up with an explanation with the extremely limited knowledge of the language he has, and eventually settles on, “He makes shirts with sticks.”
“Ah.” The man grins and says a word Gerard presumes translates to knitting. Pointing down the street and speaking in an English about as good as Gerard’s Arabic, he says, “Down that way, around next corner, you can find a maker of yarn.”
Gerard thanks the man profusely—he hopes—and heads off in that direction. Suddenly, a thought occurs to him, and he ducks into another alley to reach back into his pockets.
He comes up with a battered leather wallet that once belonged to his father and opens it surreptitiously, then riffles through its contents. Someone bought a book off him right after they arrived, and because it was his book that he’d bought (for a song, really, in a charity shop because he thought it might…but Martin, who’s picked up ancient Greek better than Gerard has, assured him it’s just a book of poetry), he got to keep all the money he made from the sale. It’s a decent amount, would be more if the book had been in better condition, but it should be enough.
They’re going to be back in England next week, his mother says, and they’ll be there for at least a month, which means they’ll be home over Christmas. Gerard suddenly decides that he’s going to buy presents for Martin and Melanie, proper presents they’ll actually enjoy. And he has a lead on what to get Martin, thanks to the man at the textiles booth.
He keeps an eye out as he walks, ambles really, but he doesn’t see anything that screams Melanie before he gets to the corner. (Well, he does, but even he’s not stupid enough to buy her a bladed weapon. Yet. Maybe in a couple of years, when she’s proved she won’t fillet someone at school if they look at Martin crossways.) When he goes around the corner, it doesn’t take him long to find the booth the man told him about. Brightly colored skeins of yarn hang in long, loose loops from the sides and drape across the counters, and behind it sits a woman humming as she teases long strands out of a curious wooden device. At least, it’s curious to Gerard. He’s sure if he knew anything about this sort of thing, it would be commonplace.
But no less magical, he thinks. Watching her work, he feels the same sort of wonder as when he watches Martin’s plump, patient fingers twisting and wrapping in and out of sticks and wool until he has a dishcloth or a scarf—the awe of creation, the surprise of taking something so unexpected and turning it into something else. The act of making something that didn’t exist before from something as innocuous as a ball of wool or a pile of fibers. Magic.
The elderly woman speaks less English than the man who directed Gerard here, but her Arabic is somehow easier to understand and she’s patient enough with Gerard’s fumbling attempts. He’s surprised—although he’s not sure why—to learn that all of the yarn she offers for sale isn’t spun from sheep’s wool at all, but some kind of plant; he assumes it’s cotton, but the stuff she’s working from doesn’t look like cotton. Either way, he’s impressed. He’s not sure if Martin will be able to work with it, but it can’t be that different, can it?
The skeins of yarn are in all colors of the rainbow, bright and vibrant, solids and ombres and rainbows, but one in particular catches Gerard’s eye. It goes from blue to green to a kind of muddy greenish-brown, like the woman was trying for a yellow and it didn’t work quite right. It’s also kind of shoved in the back of the counter. He points at it and asks, “How much?”
The woman’s eyebrows shoot up, and she shakes her head, then indicates another skein closer to the front of the booth, one that proves Gerard’s initial thought—that she was trying for a blue-green-yellow shift and the colors bled together improperly. “No, no, this will look much better. This is the one you want.”
“No, no, the—” Every color word Gerard has ever learned, which isn’t many, goes out of his head. Finally, he touches the blue on the skein closest to him as lightly as possible, so as not to damage it. “This is my sister’s eye.” He touches the green and adds, “This is my brother’s eye.”
Meeting the woman’s gaze as understanding begins to dawn, he taps just below his own eye, then points at the skein in the back and asks again, “How much?”
She smiles, and sells it to him for well below what he’s pretty sure it’s worth.
Buying a present for Melanie continues to be trickier. It’s not that he doesn’t know her as well as he knows Martin at this point, it’s just that her interests, at least at the moment, are not ones that can be easily catered to by a street market in old Cairo. He’s determined to buy it here, though. It just seems…important somehow. The things being sold in these booths are things that exist because someone wants them to exist, not because someone wants to sell them or to push an agenda or anything like that. He wants Martin and Melanie to be able to hold their gifts and feel the love and care that was taken in their creation, because Martin and Melanie deserve to know that’s how he feels about them. Uncle Roger is kind, but vague, and however much he loves Aunt Lily he’s still not completely over losing Melanie’s mother—and Gerard’s seen enough pictures to know that Melanie, except for her eyes, is her mother in miniature. Uncle Roger’s even called her “Amy” once or twice. They both deserve to know that someone cares about them just because they’re them, not because of what they can do or who they remind someone of.
He loves them, and he wants them to have something that lets them feel the love, too.
It’s halfway down the street that he finds it—a stall with a collection of bags of all shapes and sizes. Melanie isn’t one for purses, and she’s not thrilled with backpacks, but she needs something to carry her books to school in and tote her treasures around, maybe to pack as a weekend bag if she goes up to visit those few of her relatives she still wants anything to do with. Gerard peruses the selection carefully until he finds the perfect bag—big enough to carry what she needs but not so big it’ll overwhelm, sturdy enough to last but pretty enough to be enjoyable. And unlike the others, the embroidery on it doesn’t make him think of the Spiral.
Negotiating—haggling really—for the bag takes a while, especially as the man doesn’t seem to understand English and pretends not to understand Gerard’s Arabic either. Eventually, though, he comes away triumphant, his wallet significantly lighter but the bag tucked into the basket with Martin’s yarn. He’ll have to find boxes to put them in, some pretty paper to cover the boxes with, but he’s done it, he’s actually bought presents, and they’re perfect. Or at least as perfect as he can do, since Gerard is about as far from perfect as it’s possible to get.
Still. He’s actually excited. For the first time in his life, he looks forward to Christmas, because he’s looking forward to seeing the looks on Martin and Melanie’s faces when they see their gifts, see that even when he was halfway around the world, he was thinking about them.
He slips down a side alley to leave the market, lights up another cigarette, and begins making his way back towards the hostel.