Eight Months on Ghazzah Street. Hilary Mantel
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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