The Rainbow Sign

Beatrice Markland ambles home from school beneath a sky of polished blue enamel.  Her school uniform is blue, too — a harsh royal blue — with a white piqué collar and cuffs.  Although this is only the beginning of June, yet the temperature is nudging into the nineties and the humidity sucks the energy from her body so that she feels limp and drained.  She wears grey cotton socks and brown leather Clarks sandals whose weight glues her feet to the pavement.

It takes fifteen minutes to walk from her school to her home, an interval punctuated by the sounds of Arab music wailing from open doorways, the shouts of street traders, the blare of car horns.  She can smell donkey droppings on the dusty roadway, and cumin and garlic from nearby cooking.  She sniffs the clean, fruity smell from the water melons heaped up on the stall on the corner, then moves on and wrinkles her nose at the sweet, putrid stench of a dead dog that no one has bothered to clear from the pavement.  All the sounds, all the smells, seem to bounce off the dome of the sky and concentrate themselves on to the spot where Beatrice is standing.  She never grows used to them; they define both the foreignness of this place, and its familiarity.  Turquoise and peridot, lapis lazuli and crystal.  Raucous voices, gutteral language, the quarter-tones of a haunting contralto, dark masculine eyes that skim her blonde looks and gauche English gait and dismiss her as irrelevant.

There is sweat trickling down her back, forming an oval patch of dampness on her dress.  The waistband is chafing, and she wishes she were wearing the loose, lightweight cotton rags of the children playing in the gutter.  She wishes she could take off her sandals and feel the dust and grit between her toes.  She wishes, too, she could have her ears pierced and wear gold hoops like the women bargaining at the fish stall.  She knows that all these things are impossible.