The Salt Road Read Free Page B

friends’ cats were called simple descriptive things such as Blackie or Spot or Socks. ‘That’s not even his real name,’ he told me solemnly, as if imparting one of the world’s long-hidden secrets. ‘Nor is he even just a cat. He’s the reincarnation of an ancient scholar and his real name is Abu abd-Allah Muhammad ibn-Ali ibn Muhammad ibn al-Arabi al-Hatimi al-TTaa’i. And that’s why we call him Max.’ Which left me none the wiser. But every time that cat looked at me I sensed it regarded me through the veil of hundreds of years of acquired wisdom. Other children might have been unnerved by such a concept, but I was fascinated. I would lie nose to nose with Max out in the garden to see if that wisdom would leap the gap between us, inter-species. I had completely forgotten not just that cat, but the entire sensation of magic and promise and possibility it had represented to the child I had been.
    Remembering now, I felt like an entirely different person to that naive and trusting eight-year-old; but perhaps her shade was waiting to be reunited with me under the eaves of my childhood home. ‘All right,’ I said, making what felt like a momentous decision. ‘Let’s go.’

2
    We took my car. On those rare occasions when other people drove me, my right foot hovered constantly over a phantom brake pedal; I had to grit my teeth to prevent myself from yelling ‘Watch out!’ or ‘The light’s changing!’ I watched other road-users in the rear-view mirror, and out of the corner of my eye, anticipating their every move. My fingers itched to change the gears or take hold of the wheel. I was not what you would call a relaxed passenger.
    We crossed the river at Hammersmith, manoeuvred around its clogged-up roundabout and took the A40 into the West End, overtaking the slow weekenders in their family saloons. As we were cutting up through the backstreets around Regent’s Park we came upon two men loading a camel into what looked like a glorified horsebox. Or were they taking it out, delivering it to the zoo? It was hard to tell. The camel was single-humped and looked as if it had reached the end of its patience. It had planted its wide, padded front feet sturdily on the wooden ramp and wasn’t budging an inch one way or another. Just before we turned the corner into Gloucester Gate, I looked in the rear-view mirror and it was still there, as immobile as a statue.
    We reached the house twenty minutes later, having toiled through the clogged traffic of Hampstead Village. I hadn’t been back since I’d walked out of it at the age of eighteen, with any illusions I’d had about the benevolence of the world lying in tatters around me and with only the hundred quid I’d raided from my mother’s study to sustain me until my university grant came through. ‘Give me a couple of minutes, will you?’ I asked Eve, and left her sitting in the car on the driveway.
    The house regarded me furtively through its shuttered windows. If it recognized me it gave no sign. But I remembered everything about it: the pattern of the creeper as it wound up around the eaves and how it turned to crimson in the autumn, then became plague-spotted and finally a sickly yellow before littering the garden with its annual death. I remembered the rhododendrons whose contorted branches hid the dens of my youth, and the smooth patches on the slate path up to the front door that had been worn by the passage of thousands of feet. It was a Georgian house and its proportions pleased the eye of the adult who regarded it now. As a child, it had seemed vast to me; now it seemed substantial but hardly enormous, impressive but not ostentatious, as if it had somehow shrunk over the course of the intervening years. I looked at it steadily, and knew that I would sell it. I did not even want to go inside. Too many memories waited for me, and not just in the box in the attic.
    Instead, I took the path that led around the side of the house to the back garden and