Lye

by James Keir, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The boy brought the soap in a Lidl bag, six bars of it, each wrapped in a page of the Express & Star, and laid them out on the bench in the garage in a row, like a hand of cards.

"My mum says you will need to cut one," he said. "She says it is all right to cut one."

Len Hackett unwrapped the nearest. It was a cube, a little smaller than a fist, and heavy for its size. The outside was the colour of weak tea and had a dull skin on it, and pressed into the top was a seal, a round stamp of Arabic letters with a border of leaves, crisp enough to read if he had been able to read it. He turned it over. The bottom was smooth where it had cooled against something flat.

"Where did she pour it?"

"On the floor of the unit. On plastic sheet. Then she cuts with a—" The boy made a movement with both hands, a long blade drawn down and towards himself. "She has a kind of rake, also, for making it flat. My uncle made it from a broom."

"How thick?"

"Like this." Two fingers and a thumb apart.

Len took the old knife from the drawer under the bench, the one he used for opening sacks of compost, and wiped it on his trousers and then, because of who was watching, on a clean rag, and cut the bar in half.

Inside it was green. Not the green of anything he could name at once: the green of olive oil held up to a window, but solid, and darker towards the middle, and the cut face was waxy and took the light. A smell came off it that he knew from somewhere and could not place. Cupboards. A church.

"Bay," he said.

"Laurel. Ghar." The boy looked pleased that it had been noticed. "Twenty per cent. It is written on the stamp."

The boy's name was Karim. He was fifteen, and tall for it in the way that was all leg, and he had on a school blazer on a Saturday, which Len took to mean that his mother had dressed him for an appointment. His mother had come too. She was standing at the open door of the garage, on the drive, with her coat buttoned and her handbag on her arm, and when Len had said, twice, that she should come in out of the wind, she had smiled at him and stayed where she was. He could not tell whether it was the smell of the garage or the fact of it being a man's garage, and it was not his place to ask. He had put a kitchen chair out on the drive for her. She had not sat on it either.

---

It had come to him the way things came to him. Somebody at the Methodist hall, where the community lunch was on Thursdays, had a neighbour, who knew a lady from Syria who made soap and wanted to sell it at the Christmas market in Stourbridge, and there were forms. Somebody said, Len was a chemist, wasn't he, at the works, and Len, who had spent thirty-eight years at the alkali works in Oldbury and had been secretary of the sports and social club for nineteen of them, and had stopped at least one strike and started a bowls team, and in his whole working life had never once been able to say no to a form, said he would have a look.

The forms were not difficult. Before you could sell a cosmetic in this country you needed a safety assessment, signed by somebody qualified, and the somebody qualified was a woman in Kidderminster who would do it for ninety pounds, and wanted the recipe in grams, with the name of every ingredient, and a description of the method in English. Karim had done the description. It was in a plastic wallet, on the bench beside the soap: two sides of A4, typed, with a heading in bold. Traditional Aleppo Soap — Method of Manufacture.

Len put his glasses on and read it standing up.

It was good. It was better than good; it was the kind of thing he would have been glad to get from a graduate trainee. The olive oil is heated in the cauldron with the solution of sodium hydroxide for three days, with stirring. When the mixture is ready the laurel oil is added. The soap is poured, levelled, and cut by hand when firm enough, then stamped and stacked in towers with spaces between the bars for the air to pass. The soap is aged for three years in the traditional way.

"Who wrote this?"

"Me. My mum tells me, I write."

"It's very clear."

"I use a dictionary for the chemicals." Karim pointed. "Sodium hydroxide. In Arabic we say qali, or sauda kawiya. Caustic soda."

"Qali," said Len. He took his glasses off again. "That's where we get it from. Alkali. Al-qali. It was what you got when you burnt the saltwort, the ash of it. It was the Arab chemists' word. We borrowed it and never gave it back."

Karim said something over his shoulder in Arabic, quickly. His mother, on the drive, answered with one word, and a sound in her throat that might have been a laugh.

"She says, of course."

---

He did the free alkali first, because it was the one that mattered, and because he wanted to see whether his hands still knew how.

The equipment was not what he had been used to. The burette had come from a school that was clearing out its prep room, by way of a man at the car boot at Wollaston, and the retort stand had been bought for a pound and cleaned with wire wool, and the balance was a jeweller's scale off the internet that read to a hundredth of a gram and had to be kept out of the draught. The ethanol was the real thing, though, because he had kept a contact or two, and so was the phenolphthalein, in a brown dropper bottle with his own handwriting on the label from 1994.

He grated a quarter of a bar on the fine side of a cheese grater onto a sheet of paper. The shavings came off pale green and curled. He weighed out five grams, tipped them into a conical flask, and set the flask in a pan of hot water on the camping stove, with the ethanol over them.

"Why is it the alcohol, not water?" Karim had pulled up the other stool. He was sitting on his hands, the way boys did in a room where they had been told not to touch anything.

"Because soap in water is a bit alkaline anyway. Always is, the soap itself. Water would make it pink whatever you'd done, and you'd learn nothing." Len swirled the flask. "In alcohol, only the loose stuff shows. The caustic that never found any oil to marry."

He had boiled the ethanol earlier, and put the indicator in it, and taken it with a whisker of alkali to the first blush of pink and back again with a whisker of acid, so that it stood exactly on the edge, and whatever colour came now came from the soap and not from the bottle. That was the bit people skipped. You could tell a works man from a college man by whether he neutralised his solvent.

When the shavings had gone into the alcohol he took the flask out of the pan, dried the bottom on the rag, and held it up.

No pink.

He held it against a sheet of white paper, the way he had held ten thousand flasks. Nothing. A faint yellow-green, from the oil, and a slight cloud. His hand had gone to the tap of the burette before he remembered there was nothing to titrate, and he laughed at himself.

"Is it bad?"

"It's very good. There's no free caustic in it that I can find. Whatever your mother does in that cauldron, she does it right. She'll have run it a little on the oily side, I should think. On purpose."

Karim turned and translated. This time the answer was longer, and the woman on the drive took one hand from her bag and made a small flat movement in the air, palm down, as if smoothing a cloth.

"She says, her father always said: a little oil left over is for the skin. The soap is for the dirt."

"Her father made soap?"

"In Aleppo. The factory was in the old city. Since my great-great-grandfather." Karim said it the way people say an address, without weight. "My mum worked in the office, and in the — where they make it. Both. She knows every part."

Len wrote Free caustic alkali: not detected (< 0.01% as NaOH) in his notebook, in the column he had ruled for it, and underlined it twice.

---

The moisture was the other number the woman in Kidderminster had asked for, and it took longer.

He weighed out two lots of shavings into foil trays he had shaped round the bottom of a jam jar, and wrote the weights on the foil with a biro, and took them indoors, and put them in the kitchen oven at a hundred and five, which was what the old method said, and which the new oven, thank God, could do. Then he put the kettle on, because there were going to be two hours to fill, and came back out to the garage with three mugs on a tray and a packet of shortbread.

Mrs Sabbagh accepted a mug at the door. She held it in both hands and still did not come in, but she did, after a while, sit down on the kitchen chair, side-on to the garage, so that she could see the street and the bench both.

"There is another one," Karim said.

He had a seventh bar in his blazer pocket. It was not wrapped in newspaper but in a square of cloth, white once, tied with a thread, and when he put it on the bench he did it with more care than he had given the six.

It was smaller than the others, and it was a different colour all through: a deep, dull gold, almost brown, the skin of it fine-grained and slightly glossy where hands had rubbed it. The stamp on the top was worn shallow, but it was the same stamp. Len could see that. The same ring of leaves.

"From Aleppo," Karim said. "From the factory. My mum brought it."

He did not say when, or by what road, and Len did not ask. He knew roughly what roads there had been. The bar had been carried a long way in a pocket or a bag, and kept in its cloth, and never used.

"She says, if you want to test this one also, to compare, you can take a little. From the bottom. Not the stamp."

Len looked at the woman on the chair. She nodded, once, and looked back at the street.

He took a shaving off the bottom with the knife, a single thin curl, no more than a gram, and it came away hard, almost brittle, like old cheese. Green inside, still, but a green gone deep and dark. He weighed it into a third foil tray and wrote on it, and did not write Aleppo on it, but a small letter A, and took it indoors to join the others.

---

While the oven did its work they sat in the garage and the boy talked. He was going to do chemistry at A level, and physics, and maths, and his teacher said further maths if he could stand it. He did not like the English names for elements; he thought the Latin ones were better, because natrium told you where the N-a came from and sodium told you nothing. He had a younger sister who was clever at drawing and had designed the label, which had not been printed yet because of the forms. The unit was on the trading estate off the Stourbridge road, past the scrapyard, and the rent was paid to the end of December, and the market was three Saturdays away, and they had made four hundred bars.

"Four hundred."

"From one cooking. My mum says in Aleppo that is nothing, that is a morning. In Aleppo the cauldron is—" He stood up and held his arms out as far as they went, and then a little further, and then gave up.

Len asked what they would sell them for, and Karim told him, and Len thought it was too little, and said so.

"It is aged three years," Karim said. "People will pay for this, I think, if they understand. In the shops in London it is more. I have looked."

From the drive, without turning her head, Mrs Sabbagh said something in Arabic. It was short. It had an edge on it.

Karim answered her, also short. Then he said to Len, "She says it is cold. Can she use your toilet?"

Len showed her where it was, through the back door and the kitchen, and when she came out she stood for a moment in the kitchen doorway looking at the oven with its light on, and the three foil trays on the shelf inside, side by side.

---

At ten past one he took them out.

You let them cool in a dry place before you weighed them, or the warm air rising off the foil made the scale read light. He had no desiccator; he put them in an old Quality Street tin with a sachet of silica gel he had saved out of a box of new shoes, and pressed the lid down, and they waited another twenty minutes, and nobody said much.

Then he weighed them, one at a time, with the garage door pulled to against the draught and Mrs Sabbagh, for the first time, standing just inside it, on the oily patch of concrete where the car used to go.

The two trays of the new soap had each lost a little under a fifth of their weight. Eighteen per cent, and eighteen point four. He did the sums twice in the notebook, the long way, because he did not trust the calculator on his phone with anything that mattered.

The trayful marked A had lost five per cent.

He sat and looked at the three numbers for some time. Then he turned the notebook round on the bench so that the boy could see it.

"Do you know what that is?"

Karim looked at it. He was quick; he was there almost at once, and Len watched him get there.

"It is water," Karim said. "The water that comes out."

"That's it. Soap like your mother's goes in wet. It comes out of the cauldron with a lot of water in it, and it dries out slowly, in the towers, with the air going round. That's what the towers are for. Year after year it gets harder and drier and better and it lasts longer in the dish. You can tell how long a bar's been curing, near enough, by how much water's left in it." He put his finger on the 5. "That's a bar that's been drying a long time. Ten years. More, perhaps." He moved the finger to the eighteens. "Those haven't."

The boy did not say anything.

"The woman in Kidderminster will want this number," Len said. "On her form. I'll have to give it her. I'll not give her a different one."

He had not raised his voice, and did not need to. In thirty-eight years he had told a great many people things they did not want to hear: that a batch was off-specification, that the new plant would not run at the rate in the brochure, that the man they were angry with had been right. He had found, early, that it went better if you said the true thing plainly and then waited, and did not fill the silence with apology, because apology made the other man defend himself, and then you had two problems.

He waited.

"Six weeks," said Mrs Sabbagh.

She said it in English. She had come right into the garage now, up to the bench, and was looking not at Len but at her son.

"Six weeks," she said again. "I tell you. I tell you every time." Then a good deal more in Arabic, low and fast, and Karim's face went dark red from the collar of his blazer up, and he looked at the bench.

When she had finished she turned to Len, and her English was slow and careful, the English of somebody who had understood far more than she had spoken all morning and was now going to speak exactly as much as was needed.

"In my father's factory," she said, "the soap waits. Two years, three years. Every bar has its year. The young soap, it is good soap. But it is young. It is cheaper." She pointed at the cloth-wrapped bar. "This one, from 2011. This is old soap. My father never say a young soap is old. Never. With his name on it." She touched the stamp on one of the new bars, the ring of leaves. "This is his name."

"He wanted to help," Len said. "He wrote it very well."

"He writes very well," she agreed, and looked at her son again, and something in her face changed, though not much. "He writes what the English like. Three years, the English like. I know."

---

It was Karim, in the end, who asked what they should do, and he asked Len, which Len had expected, and which he thought was the wrong way round. So he did not answer straight away. He turned to the boy's mother instead.

"In Aleppo," he said, "the young soap. You sold it?"

"Of course."

"For less."

"For less. And the shop, they buy young and they keep it, and they sell it old, for more. Everybody knows."

"Then that's your label." He took a clean page in the notebook and wrote, and turned it round to them, and read it out as he went, the way he used to read out a procedure to a new shift. "Made in Lye, October 2026. That's the truth and it's a good thing; they'll like that it's local. Twenty per cent laurel. Then: Ready to use now. Better by midsummer. Better again the year after. Keep it somewhere dry, with air round it. You sell them at the price the boy said, which is too little for what it is but right for six weeks, and you put fifty back in the unit, in a tower, and you don't touch them. Next Christmas you've a year-old soap to sell, and that's dearer, and it says so. And the year after that, dearer again. Then you'll have the three years. Honestly come by."

"The English will wait?" said Mrs Sabbagh. "For a soap?"

"Some will. The sort who'd pay for three years will like it better that they can watch it happen. People like being let in on how a thing's done." He tapped the page. "And the woman in Kidderminster gets her eighteen per cent and it's no trouble to anybody, because nobody's said otherwise."

Karim was reading the page upside down. "Lye," he said. "Like the caustic. Like qali. That is why my mum wanted the unit here, a little. She thought it was a good sign."

"It isn't, I'm afraid," said Len. "I'm sorry. It's an old English word for a clearing in a wood. Nothing to do with soap. It's just a coincidence."

The boy translated that, and Mrs Sabbagh laughed properly for the first time, a short delighted laugh with her hand up in front of her mouth, and said something to Karim that made him laugh too, unwillingly, and look at the floor.

"She says, even the town, you will not let it lie."

Len, who had spent a large part of his life being the person in the room who would not let things lie, and had been liked for it more often than he had any right to expect, said that was about the size of it.

---

They left at two, with the six bars rewrapped in their newspaper and the page from the notebook folded into the plastic wallet behind the method, and Karim said he would retype the method that night and send it to the woman in Kidderminster, and his mother said something to him in Arabic at the car, and he turned round on the pavement and came back up the drive.

"The last part," he said. "Aged for three years in the traditional way. How do I put it instead?"

Len thought.

"Put what she does," he said. "Not how long. Stacked in towers, with space between the bars for air, and left to cure. Each batch is dated." He watched the boy say it over to himself under his breath, so as to have it. "Then it's true on the day you write it, and it's still true in three years."

When they had gone he cleaned the burette and hung it upside down on the stand to drain, and put the phenolphthalein back in the cupboard, and emptied the foil trays into the bin. The cloth-wrapped bar had gone home in the boy's pocket. On the bench, where Mrs Sabbagh had stood, she had left the half of the new bar he had cut, the green face of it already beginning, very faintly at the edges, to go the colour of tea.

He found a saucer for it, and put it on the windowsill over the sink, where the sun came in in the afternoons and there was air all round.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (17 October 2026), ab Iacōbō Keir per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

James Keir, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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