Читать книгу Eight Months on Ghazzah Street - Hilary Mantel - Страница 11

The first thing I did was to go around the flat drawing back the curtains. This does not seem to me to be a particularly good way to start a diary, but it seems necessary to put down everything I did the first morning, so that I can be sure that I really did as little as I thought, and yet time did pass and I got through it. It reminded me of a particular day in Africa, when I was in our house alone, at home because I had been ill, and I was lying in bed. I’d had tick-bite fever but I was over it, still weak and full of aches and pains, and with no energy to do anything. The house was very quiet, because the maid was having her holidays and the dogs were asleep, and outside rain was falling steadily, that grey carpet of rain that used to come down sometimes for days on end. I remember that morning creeping by, in self-pity and looking at my watch every few minutes, and I couldn’t imagine how time could move so slowly. Our bedroom was in semi-darkness, because I had wanted it that way when my head hurt so badly, and now although the pain had gone I didn’t have the strength or initiative to get out of bed and let in what little light there was from outside. I felt utterly unreal on that day, and utterly alone, as if I were drifting on some tideless grey sea.

Feeling this on my first morning in Jeddah, I blamed fatigue, and the upset of flying, and self-pity again, because I wasn’t entirely sure that I wanted to be here. But although flying does sap the energy it isn’t as bad as tick-bite fever, and besides, years have passed since then, and I have taken myself more in hand. So this time I did go and open the curtains.

The curtains are the kind that look as if they are made out of knitted porridge. The carpet is beige and the wallpaper is beige and so is most of the furniture.

When I drew back the curtains I couldn’t see out. There are blinds on the outside made of wooden slats, and hidden behind the curtains is a mechanism for raising them. In the living-room the blinds were not down, and when I drew back the curtains I realized that this was the view I had treated myself to on what Andrew called my pre-dawn tour. It was a wall.

I felt that I was getting frustrated now – first blinds, then wall. I walked around the flat and looked out of each window in turn: bedroom one, wall, bedroom two, wall, bedroom three, wall. And into the kitchen, but the kitchen doesn’t have a window, though it does have the side door with a frosted glass panel. But that door was locked and I hadn’t found any keys. I went into the bathroom, which has a small frosted window which slides. So I slid it. And there was the wall.

I suppose I hadn’t realized last night that it ran right round the apartment block. But I don’t think I’d expected a garden. There is one tree, the tree that I saw at dawn. It has a brown trunk and brown leaves.

I am keeping this diary so that I can write letters home. People expect you to have something exciting to tell them, though the truth is that once you have been in a place for a few weeks it is not exciting, or if it is, then it is not exciting in a way that the people at home understand or care for. By and large people at home are not interested in hearing about your experiences. They feel bound to put you in your place, as if by going away at all you were offering some sort of criticism of their own lives.

When I was back in England waiting for my visa, I went over to Scarborough to see my cousin, Clare. We used to get on pretty well before I went abroad. I took some photographs with me, of our house and garden in Botswana, which was probably a mistake and a boring thing to do, but it wasn’t a bad enough thing to account for those whiffs of hostility I kept getting from Clare. She said, I can’t think what induces you to live in such places, I never would. And then she said, I suppose Andrew can’t get a job at home? So I said, not at his new salary. I told her what it was, and that shut her up.

It doesn’t matter, though, how uninterested people are, you still have to write them letters. And I have a feeling that very little will happen here. I couldn’t, for instance, write much on The View From Our Front Window. Andrew says that your first impression of the Kingdom is that it is a stable and orderly place where the telephones work (when you can get one) and the household rubbish is collected every morning from your front gate. I know Clare will not want to read that. But I thought that if I write my diary every few days – I know I can’t manage every day – then if anything happens at all, I can make more of it in my letters home.

This is a new departure for me. In Africa there was no need to keep a diary to convince yourself you had an interesting life. Things were always happening. The garden boy would get syphilis, for instance. Perhaps it is a relief not to have household help.

I found myself looking around the flat that first morning, thinking rather desperately, I wish this would get dirty, then I could clean it. Which is not at all my usual sort of wish.

I went into the kitchen and moved the food around in the fridge. I looked in the cupboards to see if I could make a list of what we needed, but we didn’t seem to need anything. I went into an empty bedroom and moved a packing-case into it, so that it looked more occupied. But I did not feel at all in possession of the ground.

Then I unpacked my cases. The customs men had churned everything into a knot, and I found that one of my shoes was missing. Only one, and there I was with the other shoe in my hand, new and unworn, and although I knew that my feelings were out of proportion I felt overwhelmed by a terrible sense of waste, and I thought damn them, damn those customs men, who do they think they are, and I said out loud, damn, damn, damn. Then I put most of my clothes in the washing-machine and ironed the rest, and hung them in the wardrobes, and it was still only half-past eleven.

I walked around the flat, thinking dire kinds of thoughts, such as, here I am, here I stay. I went into the bathroom and there, sitting in the washbasin, was the biggest cockroach I have ever seen. I looked at it for some time in a kind of admiring revulsion. Then the thought came to me that there were other people in the building, other lives going on around mine. I heard the distant ring of a telephone, and footsteps in the flat above. It seemed to wake me out of a dream. I can’t go on like this, I thought, just wandering round aimlessly.

I went into the living-room. There aren’t, as I’d thought earlier, a dozen armchairs, but there are eight, scattered here and there, and two long overstuffed oatmeal-coloured sofas. When there are so many choices there doesn’t seem to be any reason for sitting in one chair and not another, so I stood there for a while thinking about it. Eventually I took the chair nearest the window, and sat in it rather stiffly, as though someone were watching me, and read the paperback I’d been reading on the flight. This made me feel as if in fact I hadn’t arrived at all, as if I were still in transit, with my passport in my handbag, waiting for it all to begin.

After a few minutes I got up and put on the overhead light, and I thought, that will always be necessary, how depressing, because I hate the lights on during the day. It was very quiet. I heard the prayer call at noon. It seemed strange not to speak to another person all morning, and yet to know that people were there, in the flat next door, and up above my head, and in the street beyond the wall, and that there was a whole country out there which I had not yet seen.

At about two o’clock the cockroach entered the room. It strolled across the huge expanse of carpet and began to climb up one of the curtains. Somehow I was quite glad to see it.

On that first day, Andrew came home at half-past three. She followed him around the flat. ‘Will it always be like this?’ she asked.

Preoccupied, he dumped his briefcase on the table. ‘I’m sorry I locked you in.’

‘What about going out? How do I get around?’

‘I’ll have to talk to Jeff Pollard to see if the office can let you have a car to go shopping sometimes.’

‘I’m not that fond of shopping, you know?’ she said mildly. Andrew flipped the briefcase open and took a sheaf of papers out. He began to flick through them. ‘Well, I don’t know that besides shopping there’s much else to do.’

‘How do people get to see their friends?’

‘I suppose they must come to some arrangement. Some of the women hire their own drivers. I don’t think we can afford that.’

‘Are there buses? Can I go on the bus?’

‘There are buses.’ He had found the piece of paper he wanted and was reading it. ‘But I don’t think it’s advisable to take them.’

‘What’s wrong?’ she said. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Oh, nothing. Just a bad day.’

‘Can’t you tell me?’

‘No, I don’t think I could begin to explain.’ He tossed the papers back into his briefcase and snapped it shut. Need we sound so much like a husband and wife? she wondered. We have never had this conversation before. It is as if it came from some central scripting unit.

Andrew crossed the room and threw himself into an armchair. She followed him. This big decision again; none of the chairs was so placed that they suited two people who wished to sit companionably, and talk to each other. It would seem unreasonably portentous to start moving the furniture now; although it was true that he had been in the house for ten minutes, and had not looked at her once, and this in itself seemed unreasonable. She chose a chair, rather at an angle from his own, and leaned back in it, trying consciously to relax; or at least to capture the appearance of it.

‘I was tidying up,’ she said, ‘filing papers away. I couldn’t find your passport.’

‘It’s in the safe at the office. Turadup keep it. I’ve got this identity document, it’s called an iqama.’ He produced it from his pocket and tossed it to her. ‘I have to carry my driving licence too. If the police stop you and you haven’t got your documents they take you off to gaol till it’s sorted out. They’re very keen on establishing who people are, you see, because of illegal immigrants. People come in at the end of the summer to do their pilgrimage to Mecca and then they try to get a job. I think there’s some kind of black market in servants. They try to make a few bucks and get back to Kerala or wherever before the police catch up with them.’

‘I can’t think that the police would mistake you for somebody’s illegal houseboy.’

‘Well, what are you saying? That they should only stop people with certain colours of skin?’

‘That would be the practical recommendation.’

‘Oh, there’s no colour prejudice in Saudi Arabia. At least, that’s the theory. Somebody told me that when marriage settlements are negotiated the girl’s skin is a major consideration. If the bloke’s never seen her without her veil, I suppose he has to weigh up her brothers’ pigmentation and take it on trust…What were we talking about?’

‘Your passport. Can’t you bring it home? You never know…suppose something went wrong and we had to leave suddenly?’

‘Having a passport wouldn’t be any use. You can’t go out of the country just like that. You have to apply for an exit visa. You need signatures. An official stamp.’ Andrew pushed his iqama back into his pocket. He didn’t mean to be parted from it. ‘If you want to leave you need permission from your sponsor. My sponsor’s His Royal Highness the Minister. Your sponsor is me. If you wanted to go to another city even, I’d have to give you a letter.’

‘Would you? And that would be true if I were a Saudi woman?’

‘Oh yes. You can’t just move around as you like.’

‘It reminds me of something,’ she said. ‘The pass laws.’

‘It’s not that bad. A lot of countries have these rules. It’s just that we’ve spent most of our lives subject to a different set. This isn’t a free society. They haven’t had any practice at being free.’

‘Freedom isn’t a thing that needs practice,’ she said. ‘If you have it, you know how to use it.’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps.’ He sounded very tired. ‘We’re not quarrelling, are we? I can’t do anything about the system, we’ll have to make the best of it, and most of it needn’t bother us and is no concern of ours.’ They sat in silence for a moment. ‘The first thing is to find out,’ he said at last, ‘how to make daily life tolerable for you. I shall go and see Pollard and insist that he gets on to the telephone company. And we’ll have to have that doorway unblocked, so you can talk to the neighbours.’

‘Do we need to have those blinds down?’

‘We do at night. They’re a security precaution. Against burglars.’

‘I didn’t think there’d be burglars. I thought they cut people’s hands off.’

‘They do. You get reports of it in the papers.’

‘And isn’t it a sufficient deterrent?’

‘It can’t be, can it? I have noticed that the papers don’t carry reports of crimes, just reports of punishments. But if there are punishments, there must be crimes.’

He had been upset by something today, she saw, made angry, or very surprised. ‘I’ll make some tea, shall I?’ she said. Because all I can do is be a good practical housewife, and offer a housewife’s cliches. The fact is that he has come here and he knew it wouldn’t be easy, he said that; and now he thinks that he has contracted for his problems, and deserves what he gets, and that he shouldn’t be shocked, or baffled, or put into a rage.

‘The truth is that you can’t know if there are burglaries or not,’ Andrew said. ‘Except you hear that there are. You hear rumours.’ He looked up. ‘Everything is rumours. You can’t ever, ever, find out what’s going on in this bloody place.’

She got up. He followed her out to the kitchen. ‘Frances,’ he said, ‘you must give it a chance. You’ll make friends. People will start to call on you…people’s wives. If there is anywhere you want to go I’ll always take you.’ She took a packet of milk out of the fridge. She waited. ‘There’s this man at the office,’ he said, ‘a kind of clerk, his name’s Hasan. I thought he was mainly there for making the tea, and driving Daphne about, but it turns out that his speciality is bribing people. No wonder you can never find him when you want somebody to put the kettle on, he’s out slipping baksheesh to some prince’s factotum. He only bribes the lower officials, though, not the high-ups.’

‘Who bribes the high-ups?’

‘I don’t know yet. Eric, maybe? They paid to get you your visa, and they paid to get me my driving licence, and you just go on paying out at every turn, you have to bribe people’s clerks to get them even to pick up the telephone and speak to you. But it’s a funny thing, because officially there is no bribery in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. And that again is a damn funny thing, because bribery in Saudi Arabia is a very serious crime, and people are charged with it and put in gaol and deported for it. Though of course it never happens, because it just doesn’t exist.’

She took cups out of the cupboard. She was locating everything; this was home. ‘Well, what did you expect?’

‘I didn’t know it would be quite like this. I didn’t know there would be so many layers to the situation.’ He paused. ‘Do you think I’m naive?’

‘You are, a bit, if you need to ask the question. I expect you’ll get used to it.’

‘You’d think it would be a sort of abstract problem,’ Andrew said, ‘a matter of conscience. But then about once a day I realize what’s happening in some particular situation, and I realize what I’ve let myself in for…’ He put a hand to his ribs. ‘It’s like being kicked.’

Turadup, William and Schaper first came to Saudi Arabia in late 1974, a few months before King Faisal was shot by his nephew, when oil revenues were riding high, property prices in Riyadh had doubled in a month, and so urgent was the need to build that the Jeddah sky was black with helicopters ferrying bags of cement from the ships that packed the harbour. Since then they had expanded to Kuwait and the Emirates, been chucked out of Iran when the Shah fell, and accommodated themselves to Saudi labour law and the rise of Islamic architecture. They had a contract for a shopping mall in Riyadh, several schools in the Eastern Province, a military hospital, warehousing in Yanbu; there was the military project they did not talk about much, and there was the marble and gold-leaf ministerial HQ…Turadup and William are dead and forgotten now, but the son of Schaper is still around, and the company’s recent success is due in no small part to his ready and willing adaptation to Middle Eastern business practices: tardiness, doublespeak, and graft.

Throughout the seventies, Schaper flew in and out, disbursing great wads of used notes. His briefcase became a legend, for what came out of it. Conscious of his role, he took to clenching Havanas between his rubbery lips, and to wearing eccentric hats, as if he were a Texan. ‘Buccaneering’ was a word he liked to hear applied to himself.

Turadup flew in teams of construction workers from Britain, and housed them in temporary camps outside the cities, giving them a makeshift supermarket selling fizzy drinks, a mess serving American frozen beefburgers, a lecture on sunstroke, an anti-tetanus shot, a dartboard, and three leave tickets a year to see the families they had left behind. The physical stress was crushing, their hours were ruinous, their pay packets enormous. Off-duty hours they spent lying on their beds, watching mosquitoes circling the cubicle rooms; unused to letter-writing, they became like long-term prisoners, subject to paranoia; to fears that were sometimes not paranoid, but perfectly well-grounded, that their wives were preparing to leave them for other men. When letters reached them they were full of news about burst pipes and minor car accidents, and vandalism on the housing estates where they lived; and seemed to conceal much else, lying between the blue-biro lines on the Basildon Bond Airmail.

They began to occupy themselves in brewing up liquor. They wandered off towards the desert looking for a bit of privacy, and caused search-parties. Their skins, after every precaution, turned scarlet and blistered in the sun. Strange rashes and chest complaints broke out. When they were released for leave they sat at the back of the plane and got sodden drunk within an hour of take-off; they squirted each other with duty-free Nina Ricci, and laid hands on the stewardesses, and threw their dinners about, and vomited on the saris of dignified Indian ladies who were seated on their path to the lavatories. At Heathrow they vanished, sucked into the rain, an allowed-for percentage never to be seen again; this was part of the company’s calculations, for they were cannon-fodder, quick and easy to recruit and cheap to replace. Cheap, that is, by the standards of what Turadup was making in those years; and cheap compared to what skilled men of other nationalities might have taken as their due.

Then again, a certain number would be deported for misbehaviour, for offending against the tenets of Islam; run out of the country, sometimes flogged beforehand and sometimes not, or beaten on the streets by the ‘religious police’ for lighting up a cigarette during the Ramadhan fast. They were all informed of the risks upon arrival, and Turadup took no responsibility in such cases; they were adults after all, and they knew the rules. There came a point when these men became more trouble than they were worth, and so now only a few foremen and site managers were British. The labour was recruited from Korea, yellow, tractable men, reeling through a desert landscape: indentured coolies, expecting nothing.

On the other hand, Turadup had always prided itself on how it had treated its professional staff. Plush if prefabricated villas were erected, with fitted carpets and icy air-conditioning, and instant gardens of potted shrubs. School fees would be paid for the older children left behind, and there would be Yemeni drivers to run the wives about, and a swimming-pool for each compound (carefully fenced from local eyes) and perhaps a squash court. And perhaps a weekly film show, as TV in the Kingdom is in its infancy, and mainly confined to Tom and Jerry cartoons, and Prayer Call from Mecca, and expositions of the Holy Koran; and certainly, soft furnishings coordinated in person, down to the last fringed lampshade, by Daphne Parsons herself. Turadup picked up the medical bills, and gave its professionals and their families a splendid yearly bonus and ten weeks off every summer; so that they would say, ‘We only have to last out till Ramadhan, and we don’t come back till after Haj.’ It was important that their lives should be made as smooth as possible, that they should not be ground down by the deprivations and the falsity of life in the Kingdom. They must be comforted and cossetted, because Turadup’s professionals were responsible, discreet men, who could Deal With The Saudis; and they do not come ten-a-penny.

But by the time the Shores arrived in Jeddah the great days of Turadup were over. They had sold off their big housing compound and let some of their staff go. The price of oil was falling and the construction boom was finished. It was true that buildings were still going up all over the city, but every stage of a project needed an infusion of money, and often it was delayed, or doubtful, or didn’t come at all. Eric Parsons got used to waiting on the Minister of Finance. He spent a lot of time in other people’s offices, sipping cardamom coffee, waiting for people to get around to him. He had a sense, at times, of things eluding his grasp; of the good years slipping away.

Daphne Parsons would tell you, if asked, that the Jeddah social scene was not what it had been. The Saudis, of course, had never really mixed with the expatriates. That was as it should be; it avoided mutual embarrassment, and the thorny question of illicit liquor. The odd groveller would ask a Saudi to dinner, a colleague or a boss; but the man would turn up two hours late and without his wife (one should have known) and a place-setting would hastily be removed, and a man you had thought was a liberal, a modern Saudi, would sit glowering at the tense, sober company, as if expecting something.

What was it he expected? Was it a drink? Normally there would be home-made wine on the table. Tonight you’ve left it out, in deference to Islam – and because of the risk if your Saudi friend should later turn against you. He may drop a hint that he would like a little something; you produce it, but you’re still afraid. Or he might not drop the hint, and let you suffer, on Perrier water, the drying up of the conversation and the covert glances at watches. And if you should so suffer, you will not know why; whether it is because he is really religious, or whether it is because he is as frightened as you; or whether it is simply that he has plenty of Glenfiddich at home.

Khawwadjihs, the Saudis call the white expatriates: light-haired ones. And nowadays the turnover in light-haired ones is so quick. Eighteen months is the average stay. There are people in Jeddah today, Mrs Parsons reflects, who didn’t even know the Arnotts, who weren’t here when Helen Smith died. People are scarcely around long enough to get involved in serious entertaining, or in the Hejaz Choral Society, or in running a Girl Guide troop. There are never enough helpers for the British Wives’ annual bazaar at the Embassy, and the British Community Library staggers on with too few volunteers for weekend evenings. There is almost no one around, nowadays, who remembers what it was like before the giant shopping malls were built, when people had to shop for groceries in the souk. And Mrs Parsons does not know anyone who attended that fabled party in 1951, when young Prince Mishari, eighteenth surviving son of the great King Abdul Aziz, turned up in a drunken rage, sprayed all the guests with bullets, and murdered the British Consul.

Those were the days.

That evening Andrew drove her downtown. Her sense of unreality was intensified by the slow-moving traffic, bumper to bumper, by the blaring of horns in the semi-darkness; by the prayer call, broadcast through megaphones to the hot still air. Neon signs rotated and flashed against the sunset; on Medina Road the skyscrapers were hung with coloured lights, trembling against the encroaching night.

They executed a U-turn, inched through the traffic, and swerved into a great sweep of white buildings. They edged forward, jostling for a parking space; with no anger in his face, but with a kind of violent intent, Andrew put his fist on his horn. Cadillacs disgorged men in their thobes and ghutras and hand-made Italian sandals; women, veiled in black from head to foot, flitted between the cars.

Andrew took her hand briefly and squeezed it, standing close to her, as if shielding her with his solid body from view. ‘I mustn’t hold your hand,’ he said, ‘we mustn’t touch in public. It causes offence.’ They moved apart, and into the crowds.

Inside the supermarket, on the wall where the wire trolleys were parked, there was a notice which said

THIS SHOP CLOSES FOR PRAYER. BY ORDER OF THE COMMITTEE FOR THE PROMULGATION OF VIRTUE, AND THE ELIMINATION OF VICE.

‘The religious police,’ Andrew said. ‘Vigilantes. You’ll see them around. They carry sticks.’

‘What do the secular police carry?’

‘Guns.’

Frances took a trolley. She manoeuvred it to a gigantic freezer cabinet. Pale chilled veal from France and black-frozen American steaks swept before her for fifty feet. ‘Do we need any of this?’

‘Not really. I brought you to show you that you can get everything. Come and look at the fruit.’

There were things she had never seen before in her life; things grown for novelty, not for eating, bred for their jewellike colours. ‘They don’t have seasons,’ Andrew said. ‘They fly this stuff in every morning.’ She bought mangoes. She put them in a plastic bag and handed them to a Filipino man who stood behind a scale. He weighed them, and twisted the bag closed and handed it back to her, but he did not look her in the face. Andrew took the trolley from her. ‘Don’t think about the prices,’ he advised. ‘Or you’d never eat.’

In Botswana, in the last town where they had lived, the vegetable truck came twice a week. Carrots were a rarity, mushrooms were exotic. In the garden, baboons stripped the fig trees. Fallen oranges rolled through the grass; the gardener collected them up in baskets. There were tiny peaches, hard as wood, and the cloying scent of guavas in the crisp early mornings. Around her, women plucked tins from shelves; women trussed up in their modesty like funereal laundry, women with layers of thick black cloth where their faces should be. Only their hands reached out, sallow hands heavy with gold.

She caught up with Andrew, laying her hand on the handle of the trolley beside his, carefully not touching. ‘Let me drive,’ he said.

‘I didn’t know the veil was like this,’ she whispered. ‘I thought you would see their eyes. How do they breathe? Don’t they feel stifled? Can they see where they’re going?’

Andrew said, ‘These are the liberated ones. They get to go shopping.’

They took their groceries to the car. ‘We’ll eat soon,’ Andrew said. They wove themselves into the crowds; each brilliant window collected its admirers. The buildings here looked new, perhaps a month old, perhaps a week; perhaps they had sprung from the desert that morning, gleaming and stainless, and some old-style genie, almost redundant now, had caused to appear in them by an instant’s magic all the luxury goods of the Western world. Cameras, television sets, Swiss watches, so crammed that they seemed to spill out on to the pavement; ancient silk carpets, and microwave ovens, and electric guitars. There was a furrier: fox, wild mink, sable. She wiped the sweat from her forehead. The smell of fried chicken mingled with the scent of Chanel and Armani. Between the Porsches, a fountain played in a marble basin. She stopped before a shoe shop; a window of tiny high-heeled sandals, green, lilac, red, gold. ‘Why these?’ she said. ‘Westerners have more sober shoes.’

‘I suppose that if you have to go out draped in black to your ankles, you want some way to express yourself.’

She followed Andrew. ‘Can’t they buy furs when they go abroad? They can’t need them in this climate.’

‘Money is a burden all the year round.’

They bought cassette tapes; cheap copies, pirated in Asia and imported by the shopful. All the latest stuff was on the shelves; rock music, and Vivaldi’s Greatest Hits. She didn’t buy the Vivaldi. She planned to fill the flat with noise. I am thirty years old, she thought, and I still buy this, whatever is current, whatever is loud. When they came out of the tape shop it was time for night prayers, and men were unrolling prayer carpets on the ground.

‘There is no God but Allah, and Muhammed is his Prophet,’ Andrew muttered. Grilles clashed down over the shop windows, doors were barred. In a space by the fountain – which now, unaccountably, had run dry – the worshippers jostled together in lines behind the imam, and then in time fell to their knees, and touched their foreheads to the ground, elevating their backsides. It was just as she had seen it in pictures; she was always surprised if anything was the same.

They stood watching, in the heat. Andrew looked as if he wished to speak; but perhaps he had no right to an opinion? She glanced at him sideways. ‘Oh go on,’ she muttered. ‘Spit it out. I know you hate religion.’

‘Oh, they must do as they like,’ he said. ‘It’s not my business, is it? It’s just the ablutions I mind. They have to wash before they pray, all sorts of inconvenient bits of themselves. When you go into the lavatories at the Ministry all the floor is flooded, and people are standing on one leg with their other foot in the handbasin. You can’t…you want to laugh.’ He took out his handkerchief from the pocket of his jeans and mopped his brow. ‘We timed this trip badly. But people are always getting caught like this. There’s only a couple of hours between sunset and night prayers.’

And then, she thought, eight hours till dawn. Her feet ached, still swollen perhaps from the flight. When prayers were over they went into a fast-food shop. Small Korean men in a uniform of check shirts and cowboy hats grilled hamburgers behind the counter, and stacked trays, and busily cleaned the tables. There was an all-male party of young Filipinos in one corner; and Saudi youths sprawled across the plastic benches, nourishing their puppy-fat and their incipient facial hair.

A sign said ‘FAMILY ROOM’, and an arrow pointed to a corner of the cafe marked off by a wooden lattice screen. Andrew steered her behind it. There were three tables, empty. They ate pizza and drank milk-shakes. Conversation between them died; but for a moment, over the comforting junk-food, she did feel real again, and uncalculating, whole, as though she were a child. But it is not really myself, she thought, as she pushed an olive around her plate, it is just an image I have been sold, in a film somewhere. A wide-eyed child of America; the innocent abroad.

The feeling did not last. They drove uptown, the roads packed and dangerous now that night prayers were over. ‘At this hour,’ Andrew said, ‘Saudi men go out to visit their friends.’

‘They drive like maniacs,’ she said.

‘Just think if they had alcohol.’ His face was grim and set. He was almost used to it now, the six near-misses a day.

Each highway was straight; the same neon signs flashing between the streetlamps, Nissan, Sanyo, Mitsubishi. On the central reservation saplings wilted in the exhaust fumes. ‘I don’t know where we are,’ she said.

‘It takes weeks to learn your way around. It comes in time.’ They turned off the main road. Now they were close to home, driving between apartment blocks. Subdued lights burned behind closed curtains. At just one first-floor window, at the corner of Ahmed Lari Street, the curtains were drawn back; on a balcony, brilliantly lit from the room behind, a small dark man in a singlet stooped over an ironing-board. Andrew slowed at the intersection; Frances looked up. The man swept a garment from the ironing-board, and held it aloft; it was a thobe, narrow, shirt-like, startling white against the shadows of the walls and the night sky. She imagined she could see the laundryman’s face, creased with the weariness of long standing; as they turned the corner he laid the garment down again, and began to arrange its limbs.

They were back at Ghazzah Street. She got out of the car. The laundryman seemed to her as clear and sharp and meaningless as a figure in a dream; she knew she would never forget him. As the metal gate clanged shut, and Andrew turned to lock it, the dream closed in on her; they walked around the side of the building and he let them in through the kitchen door, into the dark cold silence of the apartment.