The mother in the back

I'd been in the souk for two hours and had bought nothing and was beginning to feel like a failure at commerce. It wasn't that I didn't want anything. I wanted everything. Lamps, rugs, a particular blue ceramic bowl I'd seen four times in four different shops at four different prices. It was that I'd read too much before coming. Every blog said haggle, every blog said the first price is a joke, every blog said walk away and they'll follow you, and I'd absorbed all of it and turned into a person who couldn't say yes to anything in case I was being had. I'm thirty-eight. I run a team of eleven people. I've negotiated a mortgage. I could not buy a bowl. The shop I ended up in was small and down a side alley I'd taken to get away from a man with a monkey. Ceramics, floor to ceiling. The owner was a young guy, maybe twenty-five, on his phone, who barely looked up. And in the back, on a low stool, was his mother. I knew she was his mother because when I picked up a bowl, the blue one, my blue one, she said something sharp to him in Arabic and he sighed and put the phone down. "Two hundred," he said. Here we go, I thought. I put on my walking-away face. "That's too much." "OK. One eighty." "I've seen it for one twenty." "Then buy it for one twenty," he said, reasonably, and picked the phone back up. I stood there. I had, I realised, no move. Every blog had told me what to do if they chased me. None had told me what to do if they didn't. The mother said something else. Longer this time. The son answered without looking up. She said something that was clearly the last word on the matter, got up off the stool with some effort, and came over to me. She took the bowl out of my hands. Turned it over. Showed me the base, where there was a mark I hadn't noticed, a little stamp. Then she went to the shelf and got a different blue bowl, one I'd have said was identical, and turned that one over. No mark.

She held them side by side. Tapped the marked one with a fingernail. It rang. Tapped the other. It didn't, quite. "Hundred sixty," she said. It was the only English she used the whole time. Then she put the marked bowl in my hands, folded my fingers over it, and went back to her stool. I paid a hundred and sixty. I have no idea if that was a good price. I have no idea what the mark means. I've since looked at a lot of bowls in a lot of shops and I've never found one that rang like that one, though I'll admit I might be hearing what I want to. What I do know is that she'd watched me for ten minutes, seen exactly what I was, a woman so scared of being cheated she couldn't buy the thing she wanted, and decided the fastest way to get me out of her son's shop was to tell me the truth. The son wrapped it in newspaper. He said "she does this," in the tone of someone whose mother has been doing this his entire life. On the way out, the mother, not looking up, raised one hand about an inch off her knee. The bowl's on my kitchen table. I keep keys in it. It rings when they land.