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PROLOGUE

¶ Meanwhile elsewhere – just as the light turns green and the cars along a coastline prepare to leave the city towards the half desert and the mountains – more slowly than ever a woman crosses the highway, which, along with the corniche, is all that holds the ocean ever rising at bay.
     The woman is alone, searching for her child.
     Nothing in her face recalls what once was, and if someone shouts her name, she doesn’t turn around and say no or stop it in the language no one here understands or wants anything to do with; if they stop, she doesn’t meet their gaze, and if they say, wait, she doesn’t come back with a why nor later I have just as much right to walk here as you do, why can’t you understand that?
     It’s Friday and soon the city almost dissolved by the heat will fill up with tourists dressed in bright clothes and on a ramble through the food markets with fried fish and oysters. From the large galleria, the tourists as if from out of a hole will make their way to the museum quarter and the souvenir shops and afterwards, once they’ve finished shopping, move on to the rose garden, the university and the bookshops, to the corn vendor on the corner by the drooping palm groves, alone in the sun, and the cats in repose, stretching out, waiting for the heat to break and for the sun to set.
     Further on – furthest on where a hill obscures the view and the road muddies in the tracks of digging machines waiting for work to begin – are also abandoned new builds made of pale concrete and steel girders and a small library where only students go.
     Yes, right across the road, invisible to those at the university looking out across the green space and the faculties, stand the new builds half-finished, missing most of the walls to what could have been a living room or bedroom, a bathroom, kitchen or storeroom, and that now gaping mostly keep the students shielded from wind and rain.
     At night the students roll out their bedding on the concrete and each pushes their one bag all they have left against the wall, dozes off beside it. Then they wake to the sun and the morning haze and lug their bags across the muddy earth up to their department, cast a look around. At this time of day no one but the cleaners walk the empty corridors and no cafés are open with discounted tea, coffee and yesterday’s sandwiches; none of the guards asks where you’re from or what you’re doing there and no one plants their backpack on the empty chair beside them, saying sorry this seat is taken. The students wash under their arms and between their legs in the large bathroom at one end of the corridor, then take a seat in the armchairs by the door to wait for their first seminar, falling asleep and sleeping long.
     Later they’ll meet up around the fire and go over how best to make this unfinished building a home – they’ll discuss which walls are essential and from where they’ll get the sheet metal and who among them is best at construction and where they can get a hold of screws and drills. The students will talk and laugh and before bedtime open their bag and repack it, take out dry socks and a sweater and walk with their torch and books in hand up to their spot by the wall.

It’s Friday a late summer afternoon and soon the beach now vacant will have litter spread across its sun chairs and parasol stands as the ocean draws back from the rocks and reeds; the ice-cream vendors will shove their broken carts up the hill past the palms and grill kiosks, and the taxi drivers will run a rag over the seats and the cracked windshields, will wait for men in suits to wave them down and with someone beside them ask to be driven away from the corniche. Soon, the tourists – just as they for safety’s sake place a hand over their handbags and keep an eye out for the children who while waiting for work on the beach have fallen asleep sack and rake in hand – will climb the wide pavement along the twilight bright corniche and the ocean view beyond words even for those who can afford dinner and a little wine at one of the restaurants there. The tourists will take a seat and ask for sparkling water and maybe a large bottle of house wine, marinated olives with capers and garlic and salted nuts to tide them over, reclining with the late summer sea in minor revolt and the sky pitch dark and dull above the soon over-encumbered corniche.

The woman searching for her child has been there, she knows what the corniche looks like, and tonight as every other Friday night since her child disappeared she will go back there and wait; she will watch the girls, who appear out of nowhere with a mop and rag in hand, and follow them as they approach fresh spills and polish the floor to a shine once again just as the Missing One did.
     She will search and look around the corniche.
     Slowly endlessly tired she will wander up there – determined and clutching her bag like it’s the most valuable thing she owns, she will sit on one of the benches outside the restaurant where her child was working soon before she went missing and keep the knife warm by passing it between her hands on the corniche.

It’s the corniche she thinks of as the traffic light turns green and the shadows deeper than the day before render her invisible; it’s the corniche and the girl and the children she sees as she steps out and slowly starts making her way across the road – it’s the waiters in their black trousers black shoes and the men with their glasses of beer who stop to shout as the children walk by.
     Like any other day she means to continue to the square – to the razed lot they call the alley, and on to the place where the greengrocer is already stacking melons, stone fruit and the coriander the Missing One always wanted to bring home – but she can no longer move, is stock-still in the middle of the road.
     Today the world feels different somehow new and if she squeezes her wounds round and open, it doesn’t matter if the pus seeps out yellow thick and if she loses her headscarf at the roadside where she in her tiredness has lain down to sleep, it doesn’t matter if she gets it back – the air is both replete and empty and just as the woman perceives this she also senses the Missing One’s presence and perhaps her smell across the road.

(...)