The Bride Box

ONE

Gareth Cadwallader Owen, The Mamur Zapt, Head of the Khedive’s Secret Police, was sitting in his office, the blinds drawn against the sun, grappling with the latest misdeeds of the Brotherhood, when Nikos, his official clerk, came in looking pale.

‘Effendi …’

‘Yes?’

‘Miss Skiff to see you.’

Miss Skiff was the elderly and eccentric English lady who ran the Cairo Dispensary for Sick Animals.

Owen’s responsibilities, although wide, did not in his view extend to sick animals. He turned back to the Brotherhood. ‘You sort it,’ he said.

After a while he became aware that Nikos was still standing there. ‘Well?’

‘She has a girl with her.’

‘So?’

‘A little girl,’ said Nikos with emphasis.

Owen thought he understood. Nikos was not a family man. Owen sometimes suspected that his most intimate relationships were with the steel filing cabinets that filled his office. People, he was not good at; children, he could not make out at all. They filled him with alarm. He sometimes saw them from his window. They milled about in an unruly and unpredictable way. How did you deal with them? How, so to speak, did you come at them?

‘Oh, very well,’ said Owen, and got up from his desk. He went through into Nikos’s office. Miss Skiff was sitting there with a little Egyptian girl, holding her by the hand.

‘Captain Owen …’

Fraser, an engineer on the Egyptian railways, had been going along the carriages of the train that had just come in from Luxor, checking the bearings for sand, when something had stirred in the darkness at the end of the carriage he was under. He crawled up to it and was surprised to find that it was a little girl squashed up in the space above the wheels. When he had hauled her out she had put up her hand to shield her eyes against the sudden brightness of the sun. And then the whole front of her face had fallen off.

‘It gave me quite a turn,’ he confessed afterwards at the bar.

Unnecessarily, it turned out, since what had come off was not in fact the front of her face but a dense layer of flies which had settled on a raw wound that they were concealing.

Still, that was bad enough and he felt that something ought to be done about it. But what?

‘I mean, I had the rest of the train to examine,’ he explained to his cronies at the bar.

‘So what did you do?’

‘Well, I thought at first of taking her to the hospital, but the Victoria is a long way from the Pont Limoun and, as I say, I had the rest of the train to do. But then I hit upon the answer. Miss Skiff’s outfit is just up the road.’

‘But that’s for animals!’

‘But she would know about wounds, wouldn’t she? Anyway, I took the little girl along. I’ll admit she was a bit surprised but she took her in. And I finished the train and went home for supper. Actually, I was a bit worried about it afterwards. I mean, you ought to report these things, oughtn’t you? But to whom?’

‘The police?’

‘I suggested that to Miss Skiff, but she wasn’t having any of it. Apparently, she had not got on too well with the police over some of her stray animals. And she had been talking to the girl, and said that was not the right thing to do. “This is a case for the Mamur Zapt,” she said.’

The Mamur Zapt was a traditional post in the Egyptian government. Indeed, some claimed that he was the Khedive’s right-hand man. Less traditionally, but like many of the other senior posts in the government, it was occupied today, in 1913, not by an Egyptian but by an Englishman. A few years before, the British had been invited to sort out Egypt’s chaotic finances and, well, they had stayed. The effective ruler of Egypt was not the Khedive, nor his unfortunate Prime Minister, but the British High Commissioner who, in the interests of better administration — so he said — had installed his own British men in most of the country’s senior posts. Including that of Mamur Zapt.

The present occupier of the post was not, actually, as he frequently but fruitlessly pointed out, an Englishman but a Welshman, which put him at a certain distance from both sides. He was loyal, or, as some claimed, disloyal to both sides. Anyway, in the High Commissioner’s view — but not the Khedive’s — this made for greater efficiency. In Owen’s view it merely meant that he could be stabbed in the back by both sides.

‘Hello!’ said Owen. ‘What’s your name?’

The little girl was tongue-tied.

‘Mine is Gareth,’ he said easily. ‘It’s a funny name, I know, but that’s because it’s foreign. I come from England …’ This was stretching a point, because he was Welsh and proud of it. ‘Where do you come from?’

As she remained silent, he said, ‘Let’s see if I can guess: is it Luxor?’

The little girl shook her head.

‘Assiut? No?’

He tried several other places.

‘You’ve got me beat,’ he said at last.

The little girl gave a triumphant smile. ‘Denderah,’ she whispered softly.

‘Really? Well, that’s a long way away! And you came all that way on the train? It can’t have been very comfortable, under the train like that.’ Nikos had showed him a briefing note as he came in. ‘Was it dusty?’

The little girl nodded.

At least this man spoke in a language she could understand. Fraser had been totally incomprehensible to her.

‘And the sand blew up, too, I expect. Did it get in your eyes?’

She nodded again.

‘And in your mouth, I’ll bet. Did you try to spit it out?’

He gave a mock spit. The little girl gazed at him, amazed.

Then, tentatively, she followed suit.

Owen gave a yet bigger spit.

The little girl’s face, so far as he could see it behind Miss Skiff’s bandaging, broke into a delighted smile and she gave a huge spit.

They rivalled each other for a moment or two before Nikos’s horrified eyes.

‘Captain Owen …’ Miss Skiff began.

‘I’ll bet you’re thirsty after all that! Would you like a drink?’

On Nikos’s desk, as in all offices in Cairo, was a pitcher of water. It was covered with a cloth, not just to keep out the sand, which came in through the shutters and lay in a thin film upon every surface, but to keep the water cool. A suffragi came in regularly and dipped the cloth in a bowl of ice and water and then wrapped it round the pitcher again.

Owen poured out a glass and gave it to the little girl.

‘What did you say your name was?’

‘Leila,’ she said softly.

Gradually he teased her story out of her. Her mother had died giving birth to a little brother, who also had not lasted long. Her father had taken another wife and this time the wife was not so nice. For a time a bigger sister had protected her but then the sister had gone away. Then one day a white man had come and she had been told to go away with him.

‘White man?’ said Owen.

‘Yes. But he wasn’t very nice.’ And there were other men, too, some with whips. And a lot of children like her. And they all started walking. And one of the men had said they were going to the sea and would get on a boat. But Leila had not wanted to go on a boat and had run away.

And now Owen understood why Miss Skiff had been so adamant that the little girl should be taken to the Mamur Zapt to tell her story.

‘I thought the slave trade had been stamped out,’ said Owen’s friend Paul at the Sporting Club that evening. Paul was an ADC to the High Commissioner and Owen often found it useful to run things past him before they got out into the open and too many people had a hand in them.

‘If it had been the Sudan, I would have understood it,’ said Owen.

‘Don’t let them hear you saying things like that,’ said Paul. ‘They think they’ve stamped it out, too.’

The Sudan, that vast country, larger than India, which lay to the south of Egypt, was jointly governed by Egypt and Britain. There, too, there was a difference between appearance and reality. While formally the Sudan was a condominium, jointly governed by Egypt and Britain, in practice the British ran the show. Once their troops had re-conquered the Sudan — in the name of Egypt — some years before, the British had stayed there, too. It was Englishmen not Egyptians who were the District Commissioners and the country was governed from Khartoum. There, too, the slave trade had been put down — supposedly. It was one of the pretexts for the British invasion.

The Sudan had been the great slave market of Africa. Here traders had brought their captives from the south to be traded and sold on to the markets of the Middle East. Egypt had been one of those markets. In Egypt now the slave trade had been largely stamped out, though rumour had it that it still persisted in parts of the south, along the border with the Sudan.

The Sudan government hotly denied it and were zealous in their efforts to quash it, but the rumour persisted.

‘I was thinking of having a word with their Slavery Bureau,’ said Owen.

‘It sounds as if you’d do better to have a word with our Slavery Bureau,’ said Paul. ‘If it still existed.’

The Egyptian Slavery Bureau had been abolished recently in the name of economy.

‘My people won’t want to hear about this,’ said Paul. ‘They think they’ve put slavery behind them, and won’t want to restart the machinery for suppression. It’s too costly.’

‘So who do I have a word with?’

‘A good question.’

‘I thought you might-’

‘Have a word with my boss? Yes. I will. But I’m not sure he’ll want to know. Doing anything will cost money and he hasn’t got any. Not until the next financial year.’

‘It will be too late by then. They’d be out of Egypt.’

‘It looks as if you’re on your own, then.’

‘Not me. It’s really nothing to do with me. It’s not political.’

The Mamur Zapt reckoned to concern himself only with political matters.

And meanwhile there was the question of what to do with Leila. Paul said that he thought they could find some institution which could look after her. Again, however, Miss Skiff was having none of it.

‘They’d steal her back,’ she said.

‘Steal her?’ The thought had not occurred to him.

‘It would be better if she went home with you,’ said Miss Skiff firmly.

Owen was not so sure about that. How would Zeinab react, for one thing?

He put it to her.

Zeinab was taken aback. She felt sorry for the child and wouldn’t mind helping; but broad sympathy was one thing and having a child about the house where you would always be tripping over her was quite another. The prospect was faintly alarming.

Like Nikos, she was not used to children. She was the next best thing to an only child. She had a half-brother but he was much older than she was and they had never been close. Never, in fact, had much contact at all. He had not been around for years, hurried out of Egypt a while ago following an abortive attempt on the Khedive’s life.

Zeinab was not, actually, Nuri Pasha’s legitimate daughter. Her mother had been a famous courtesan who had resisted Nuri’s repeated proposals of marriage, preferring to keep her independence. And her daughter had taken after her, insisting on cutting her own way through life. Nuri, modern-minded in some things, had gone along with this, seeing only that she received a proper (i.e. boy’s) education along French lines. (Like many rich Egyptians he had no time for Egypt but plenty of time for France. England was a necessary evil.) Having done this he got out of the way and gave Zeinab her head. He had not frowned upon her relationship with Owen. There were, after all, advantages for a wily and eternally hopeful politician in having the Mamur Zapt as a sort of son-in-law.

But Zeinab had not exactly had a normal family upbringing. Nuri had doted on her as on her mother but had not actually had much to do with her. Her closest relationships had been with servants — or, in truth, with slaves — of whom, of course, given that this was a Pasha’s household, there had been plenty. Not much difference, in fact, existed between slaves and servants. The result was that Zeinab, who thought of herself as a French liberal, was not too bothered about the slavery issue.

When she had moved in with Owen, she had not taken any slaves with her. Because of his special position, Owen, unusually among Europeans in Cairo, had no servants. Zeinab hadn’t minded this. To her it was rather exotic, one of the many exotic things that had drawn her to Owen.

She had never had anything to do with children. Lately, one of her friends, Aisha, had had a baby. Zeinab had held it in her arms and, once she had got used to it, quite liked the experience. She wouldn’t mind having a baby herself. In fact, at nearly thirty, perhaps she had better get on with it.

But having a grown child in the house was a bit different. She wasn’t sure about that.

Not only that, the child was … different. She was, for a start, darker than Zeinab, or, indeed most Egyptians.

‘She looks Sudani,’ she said to Owen.

‘She comes from Denderah,’ he said. But he knew what Zeinab meant. Leila’s features were not those of an Arab. But then, nor were those of many Egyptians. Still …

And then there was the question of colour. Again, this was not unusual among Egyptians, particularly those living in the south, where races had mixed over time. All the same, Leila’s face was a bit … different.

Not that it mattered. The girl was only going to be with them for a short time. It was just that it was difficult for Zeinab to feel close to her. Not like a mother but, say, like an aunt. She told Leila to call her ‘aunt’.

But there were practical things, too. What was the girl going to do all day? Zeinab hadn’t the faintest idea. She consulted Aisha.

‘Don’t be daft!’ said Aisha. ‘Give her some things to play with. I’ll let you have some of ours. And if you’re really bothered, get someone in — a maid or a nurse or something.’

But that would mean having a servant in the house and Zeinab was not sure how Owen would feel about that.

Owen, as a matter of fact, was already toying with the idea. But for a different reason. He had been left uneasy by Miss Skiff’s suggestion that the slavers might try to steal Leila back. What if they did that while he was out of the house?

He didn’t want to have a guard. He had never gone in for guards and wasn’t going to start now. But maybe, just while Leila was here …

An idea came to him. There was a man he knew, Musa, who had been in the police and whom Owen had borrowed on occasion and found reliable. He was now retired and working, so Owen had heard, as a part-time servant in several wealthy houses. People liked to employ ex-policemen in that capacity. There was some — well, better than none, anyway — guarantee of honesty and they were usually good at polishing things. Like ex-army people. Come to think of it, hadn’t Musa served in the army as well? That might come in handy.

He sent for Musa and explained the situation to him. Musa would be glad to come, not just for the money but also for the prestige of working for the Mamur Zapt.

‘Nights as well, Effendi? I can sleep on the floor.’

Owen thought. ‘That might be a good idea,’ he said.

Musa shuffled his feet. ‘Can I bring my wife?’ he asked. ‘She would sleep on the floor, too,’ he added quickly.

‘I don’t see why not. It would only be for a short time.’

There could even be other advantages to this. He knew that Zeinab felt uneasy at having a child around.

‘Have you any children?’ he asked.

‘Three,’ said Musa. ‘But they’re grown up now.’

‘Would your wife mind looking after the girl?’

‘She’d jump at the chance!’ said Musa.

Zeinab’s friend Aisha was married to a colleague of Owen’s. Not exactly a colleague, since Mahmoud worked for the Parquet, and the Parquet, staffed by lawyers anxious to keep their distance from the government, and especially from the Mamur Zapt, whose legitimacy they (along with a lot of other people in Cairo, not all of them Egyptians) denied, tried to steer clear of anything to do with the Secret Police.

The Parquet was the Department of Prosecutions of the Ministry of Justice. The Egyptian system followed the French and not the British. Investigating a crime was the responsibility not of the police but of the Parquet. When a crime was committed, the police reported it to the Ministry of Justice, who passed it on to the Parquet to handle. The Parquet officer assigned to the case, a lawyer, looked into the matter and decided if there was a case to answer. If he thought there was he would bring the evidence together and present it to the Court. It was then his responsibility to prosecute and carry the case through to sentencing.

Mahmoud, one of the Parquet’s bright young men, had just reached the stage in his career when things got difficult. That is, in Egypt, they got political. Egypt was a country of a multiplicity of nationalities, many religions, many diverse ethnic groups and several legal systems. There was the French-based national legal system, the Muslim law-based system, presided over by the Kadi, with its own independent laws and courts, and in addition a complicated financial and legal system known as the Capitulations, under which any citizen of another country could elect to be tried by a consular court set up by that country, answering to that country’s law and judgements.

Enterprising criminals soon learnt the skills of switching rapidly from one nationality to another, delaying the prosecution, the verdict and the consequences. The system made the Parquet lawyers tear their hair out, and Egypt was a great place for crooks.

What made the situation worse was for each consular court there was, naturally, a consulate and a country. The effect was to shift everything from the criminal to the political. You could get so far and then the politicians, and their lawyers, took over.

Mahmoud was just hitting these buffers. Owen, of course, had hit them long before. Shared frustration had brought Mahmoud and Owen together. At the most general level they shared the same aim: justice — although Egyptians defined that differently from the British. Mahmoud, a staunch Arab Nationalist, didn’t believe there should be such a thing as the Mamur Zapt. Nor did the Khedive and nor, officially, did the High Commissioner. It was just that, given the way things were in Egypt, it was handy to have one around.

Despite all this, Mahmoud and Owen got on very well.

This morning Mahmoud had been assigned a new case, one which reflected, he suspected, his declining value in the eyes of his superiors. A goods train had come in from Luxor and when the men went to unload it they had been put off by the nasty smell emanating from one of the boxes.

‘There’s something dead in that,’ Ali said to Hussein. ‘You mark my words!’

The box, which was about the size of a small trunk, was sewn into a coarse canvas bag of the sort often used to protect items in transit. You could almost have taken it, but for its rectangular shape, for one of the larger Post Office mail bags.

When they had lifted it out of the wagon and put it down on the dusty sand, the smell was even more apparent, and after it had been resting there for an hour or two — things did not move fast in Egypt, particularly loading and unloading — it became clear that the package was secreting fluid at one end.

‘Don’t like the look of that,’ Hussein said to Ali, giving the box a wide berth and moving on to another one.

They continued giving it a wide berth and moving on to another one until there were no other ones for them to move on to.

‘What about that one?’ said the overseer, going past the box.

‘Don’t like the look of it,’ said Ali.

‘Don’t like the smell of it,’ said Hussein.

‘What?’ said the overseer, taken aback because Hussein and Ali had never shown signs of aesthetic or olfactory discrimination before.

He went up to the package and sniffed and looked and then he went to fetch the yard supervisor.

‘There’s something dead in there,’ said the supervisor. ‘Who’s the package for?’

He instructed the overseer to read the label. The overseer would have instructed someone else to read the label, since the smell now was quite overpowering. However, neither Ali nor Hussein could read and he knew that the clerk would refuse to move out of his office, so, with the greatest reluctance, he approached the box himself.

‘Can’t read it,’ he announced. ‘It’s for a Pasha somebody or other.’

‘Look, just find out who it is and then we’ll get them to send someone to come and move it.’

The overseer reluctantly approached the package again. ‘It’s like I said: you can’t read it. It’s been soiled by … Well, it’s been soiled, anyway.’

‘Of course you can read it! Someone must be able to read it!’

Others were pressed into trying but without success.

‘Look, we can’t just leave the box there, not the way it is. I mean, people have to go past,’ said the supervisor.

‘And some of us have to go past a lot,’ said Ali and Hussein.

‘It’s what’s inside it,’ said the overseer.

‘We can’t just leave it there,’ the supervisor said again. ‘We’ll have to move it.’

But where to? Anywhere else in the yard would just move the problem rather than solve it; and if the package was just moved out of the yard and dumped, as they were tempted to do, this would almost certainly cause trouble too. And plenty of it, if the box did indeed belong to a Pasha.

‘We’re going to have to open it,’ said the supervisor with decision. ‘It’s probably a dead dog or something.’

‘Yes,’ said Ali, more cheerfully now there was a prospect of something happening. ‘Probably sent up from his estate or something.’

‘A prize dog!’ said Hussein enthusiastically. ‘A hunting dog. A Saluki maybe. He wanted it sent up to him!’

‘And the bastards put it in a box with no air and no water! Just sealed it up and sent it off!’

‘A prize dog, too! Now if it had been an ordinary dog-’

‘And not a Pasha’s dog. There’ll be trouble over this, you mark my words! He’ll kick their backsides for this!’

‘Well, they deserve kicking! Ignorant bastards! But that’s what they’re like down there in the south.’

‘Sudanis, I shouldn’t wonder,’ said Hussein.

‘Are you going to open that box or not?’ demanded the overseer.

Not, was the answer they would have preferred. But jobs were jobs and someone had to do it, and if it was a nasty job or a dirty job, it was usually them.

So … When the cloth covering was cut away and removed it revealed a cheap, gaudily decorated box, painted in all the colours of the rainbow.

‘Why!’ said Ali. ‘It’s a-’

‘Bride box,’ finished Hussein.

And when Mahmoud opened the box later, he saw that the bride was inside.

Bride boxes were perhaps less common than they had once been but no respectable girl, especially in Upper Egypt, would consider getting married without one. In it she accumulated her trousseau and when the great moment came would transfer with it to the bridegroom’s house. She would build it up over the years and as the wedding approached it would become more and more prominent. In the days immediately before the wedding the world would be invited round to gaze and wonder.

You could buy one in the souk, of course, or have one made especially for you. The painting was done by a separate skilled, or possibly not so skilled craftsman. The craftsman was probably also responsible for the gaudy paintings, usually of trees and reeds, which appeared on the front of houses and showed that the owner had performed a pilgrimage to Mecca.

The present box was empty except for the person lying there, a young woman. So much could be made out but little more. The corpse had been so distended by the heat and the gases that it was practically unrecognizable. It could not have been in the bride box for more than three days. Otherwise its presence would have become even more unpleasantly obvious. Nor, probably, would it have been there for less than two days. He would check the documentation and see when the box had been picked up.

Almost certainly it would have come from the south. Mahmoud sighed. That would mean he would have to go down there to make inquiries. Like most Cairenes, especially the educated ones, the proposal of travelling down to the south filled him with horror. It was so hot there, especially at this time of the year. And so uncomfortable, so lacking in normal creature comforts. Like showers, or so he had heard. Mahmoud, though highly intelligent and educated, was not above the prejudices common to the Cairo intelligentsia: that civilization began and ended in Cairo, with a possible branch line to Alexandria. Anywhere else, though, and especially anywhere in the south, was not just beyond the pale of civilization, it was positively primeval.

Perhaps he could start his inquiries at the other end: with the label and with the man, if only he could make it out, to whom it was addressed.

He had the body sent round to the morgue for a post-mortem. The box would just have to stay where it was for the time being. If it was taken to the Parquet offices, especially in its present state, he would be highly unpopular. He wasn’t going to send it round to a police station because it would disappear and most likely reappear in the souk, where it would be cleaned up and then used again. People were cheap in Cairo and it was cheaper to leave the bride box where it was and post a guard than try to find space for it somewhere else. But he would take the label and show it to the experts.

Musa had moved into Owen’s house with Latifa, his wife. She had arrived carrying a bed roll containing all the possessions they would need. They installed themselves in the kitchen, which wasn’t used much. Both Owen and Zeinab were usually out for lunch and in the evening they went round the corner to a restaurant they favoured. Owen could usually rustle up a very basic meal if it was required. Zeinab would usually send for one of her father’s cooks. Owen, however, thought that this was excessive and they usually reserved that for a special occasion, when for instance, they had guests. Zeinab had a Pasha’s daughter’s tastes but on an English official’s income. Reason, said Owen, ought to prevail in these things. So it did, said Zeinab; only her reason not his.

Latifa at once took over responsibility for Leila. This was a great relief to Zeinab, who couldn’t think what she was going to do with her otherwise. It was Latifa who had discovered that Leila really was a Sudani. That explains it, thought Zeinab, who shared the universal Cairene view that all bad things came from the south.

Not that there was much bad about Leila. For the first day or two she crouched in a corner of the kitchen sucking her thumb. After a few attempts to draw her out, Latifa stopped trying. Instead, she just got on with some cooking. That wasn’t strictly part of the contract but she did it anyway. She said she couldn’t just sit there idle, and anyway, her man needed his meals. Needed them, too, in a way that only she could perform. So she got to work at the centre table, and, over in the corner, Leila sat watching her, and gradually she was drawn in.

‘What sort of family is she from?’ Latifa said to Owen. ‘She don’t know nothing!’

So Latifa set about teaching her.

‘Her mother dead,’ she said to Owen the next day. ‘No time to teach. Sister not know much more than she. What sort of family? And now the new wife sit on her ass all day and try look pretty! But what her father doing? Musa like that and he out of the door! But with new wife, that all he think about. But what about children? Hah! Want get rid of them. They mean nothing to him. Hah!’ she finished, with disgust.

Fortunately, Musa wasn’t like that. He took his time with Leila, not forcing things, after the first attempts, but content, like Latifa, to wait. And gradually Leila got used to him and occasionally ventured a word when together they were cutting up the onions for Latifa. She even helped Musa to polish the brass and copperware that had never been polished before. Musa let her help him, although, really, he believed that this was a job for a man. It needed the strength and stamina of the ex-soldier — the way he did it.

‘Like buttons, like belt,’ he said. ‘Polished till you can see your face.’

Owen was glad to have him in the house. He didn’t think that the traders would really go to the trouble of snatching Leila back but all the same, the possibility worried him. He would be glad to hand the problem over to …

And that was the problem: to whom? Paul had come back to him asking him to stay with it until his boss had made up his mind. He was thinking about it. There were aspects beyond the ken of ordinary mortals. Chief amongst these was that His Majesty’s Government was anxious, as always, to cut costs — and among the costs they were thinking of cutting was that of the Slave Bureau in the Sudan. The slave trade was dead and buried, surely? The Bureau was no longer needed, surely? And still less any possible corresponding unit in Egypt, where the slave trade was even deader.

Or so it had seemed. Until this.

What his boss really wanted, said Paul, was for someone to quickly wrap the whole thing up. Then they could go away and forget about it. Just get on with what they had been doing. Carrying through the cuts.

‘He thinks you might be the man to do it,’ said Paul, ‘especially as it has, in a way, landed in your lap.’

‘That was just fortuitous,’ said Owen.

‘Things that land in your lap fortuitously,’ said Paul, ‘have a way of staying there.’

‘I have a lot of other things in my lap at the moment,’ said Owen. ‘Things with the potential to turn into hot potatoes. Political things. Which is my job.’

‘And you think that this is not political?’ said Paul neutrally, gazing away into the distance.

Owen went to the Central Station at Pont Limoun, taking Leila with him. He wanted to go over it again with her. He also wanted to talk to some of the people. In particular, he wanted to talk with Fraser.

On their way they passed the goods platform. The bride box was still standing there.

Leila pulled at his hand. ‘Why,’ she said, ‘that’s Soraya’s box!’