Eight Months on Ghazzah Street. Hilary Mantel
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I was sick.
Now the prisoner is released. Frances could walk in the street; but to what purpose? You could not get anywhere. Only, after long hot miles, to Medina Road, where the traffic goes screaming by, out of town to the bypasses and motorways and on to the Holy City. Walking is pointless; but she can go out into the hall, where gritty dust blows continually under the big front door, and makes patterns on the mottled marble underfoot. She can go up to the flat roof, with her basket of washing, and hang it out, to bring it back an hour or two later, dry and stiff with heat, burnt-smelling, and covered in dust if the wind has veered round in the interim. There are washing lines for each of the flats, but she hasn’t seen her neighbours use them. Perhaps they have more sense, or tumble-dryers.
She likes to be on the roof, and to look down on to the street, and on to the big secluded balconies of the two upper flats, and into the branches of the brown tree with its brown leaves. It is a secret view, a private perspective, and she reminds herself of some lonely woman, her own mother perhaps, peeping at the doings of the neighbours through a lace curtain. Not that she has learned much. The Saudi woman does not come out to take the sun and air; the doors to her balcony—a solid affair, like an extra room – remain firmly closed.
And the fourth flat is empty. Curious, that, because on her very first morning she had heard footsteps above her head. She remembers it – she remembers every detail of her first day – as the incident which jerked her out of her maudlin state, and made her know that there were people around her, and a new life to be lived. But Andrew says she must be mistaken.
From the roof of the apartment block there are long views over the dusty street; over the big turquoise rubbish skips that stand at each street corner, the property of Arabian Cleaning Enterprises; over the rows of parked cars. Fierce cats spit and howl and limp in the purlieus of the building, their fur torn into holes or worn away by skin diseases. As the first week of comparative liberty passes, the view comes to seem less edifying, the reasons for the climb fewer, and she begins to resent the two closed doors she passes on the way up, before she negotiates the final turn in the stairs and the short flight to the roof: Abdul Nasr’s door, and the door of the fourth flat. And she begins to hate the stairs themselves, because they are made of that kind of marble patched with slabs of irregular rufus colour, flecked with black and a fatty cream, revoltingly edible, like some kind of Polish sausage. She avoids them. She phones up Eric Parsons and tells him that she is not happy and must have a tumble-dryer herself. A van arrives with one the following day. Nothing is too much trouble for Turadup.
So now she stays downstairs. From the living-room, a sliding door leads out on to the cracked pavement in the shadow of the wall. Beyond the wall, between the parked cars, boys play football in the street. Andrew is not happy about the sliding door. He no longer believes that the crime rate is low; he has heard some terrible stories. Someone he works with has advised him to block the track with a length of wood, so that it cannot be slid back from the outside, even if the handle is forced. He has done this.
If Frances is willing to prise out this piece of wood—not easy because he has made it fit so exactly – she can draw back the door and – careful to close it behind her, to keep the insects out and the cold air in – she can stand under the shabby tree, and the wall which is a foot higher than her head. She can hear car engines revving up, and the children’s shouts, and sometimes the soft thud of the football against the bricks. When she goes inside and shuts the door these sounds still come to her, muffled, very faint, as if they happened last year.
They have been out to dinner twice now, and to a party, and met a lot of people; they are becoming familiar with Jeddah cuisine, and with the strange but addictive taste of siddiqui and tonic. A telephone has been installed. The diary is kept less attentively, because her inner ear is attuned again to other people and the outside world. And yet, the first two weeks have changed her. Introspection has become her habit. There are things she was sure of, that she is not sure of now, and when her reverie is broken, and first unease and then fear become her habitual state of mind, she will have learned to distrust herself, to question her own perceptions, to be unsure – as she is unsure already – about the evidence of her own ears and the evidence of her own eyes.
Within a day or two the unblocking of the hallway brought Yasmin to the door, gesturing gracefully behind her; I am from Flat 2, I hope you will come and have a cup of tea with me. Frances followed her across the hall. She felt dull and badly dressed in her limp cotton skirt. Yasmin’s glossy hair hung to her waist, and a gauzy veil floated about her shoulders. One slender arm from wrist to elbow was sheathed in gold bangles.
She closed the door of Flat 2, swept off the veil and handed it to her maid, who stood inside the doorway. ‘Put on the kettle,’ she said to the woman. The maid scuttled away; a short, dark, low-browed woman, with a faintly pugilistic air.
‘She is from Sri Lanka,’ Yasmin said. ‘She is not much use, but thank goodness I have got her. Raji calls so many people for dinner every night that I have no time for the baby.’
‘People don’t seem to have much domestic help here. It surprises me.’
‘In the grander households, of course, you will find it. But the Saudis are discouraging it now. They don’t like the foreign influence. Of course, it is a good point, these young girls come to the Kingdom as housemaids, and then they cause trouble.’
‘Do they?’ Frances sat down, where she was bidden. ‘What sort of trouble?’
‘They get unhappy,’ Yasmin said. ‘Because they have left children behind them at home. Also the Saudi men, you know, they find that these girls are not very moral.’ The maid came in; put down the tea-tray. Yasmin dismissed her with a nod. ‘Then the poor things are trying to commit suicide. You would like some of this Crawford’s shortbread?’
‘Thank you,’ Frances said. She took a piece. Yasmin gave her another composed smile; poured tea. ‘How?’ Frances said. ‘How do they commit suicide?’
‘They throw themselves from the balconies. Silly girls. But this one, I have got a reference for her. She is all right, I think.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘It is Shams.’
Frances repeated it, tentatively. ‘I can’t quite get hold of it.’
‘Shams,’ Yasmin said. ‘As in Champs Elysees.’
‘Oh, I see.’
‘Means sunny.’ She tittered. ‘I do not find her a little ray of sunshine about my house. But Raji was six months waiting for the work permit for her. He doesn’t like to ask the Minister for favours. You are used to a servant, Frances?’
‘I’m used to help. But it doesn’t bother me, either way.’
Yasmin sighed. ‘It is a problem,’ she said.
In Yasmin’s apartment, there was flowered wallpaper and patterned rugs, and little gilt tables with glass tops, and an enormous sideboard, crowned by family photographs. Yasmin with her new-born baby; earlier, Yasmin beneath a wedding veil of gold lace, her mouth painted emphatically red, and her delicate hand on the dark-suited arm of her plump husband. He looks older by some years; a handsome man, though, with a full expressive face, liquid eyes. Yasmin’s own age is not easy to determine; she sits swinging one slippered foot, a long-nosed, spindly young woman, with a flawless ivory skin, a festinate way of speaking, and large eyes which are lustrous and intractable, like the eyes of a jibbing horse.
‘So your husband’s building is coming along?’ she asked.
‘I haven’t been to see it yet.’
‘Your husband is shy, I think. He runs away.’
‘Really?’
Yasmin smiled. ‘Samira would like to meet you.’
‘The lady up above?’
‘You will be surprised. She speaks good English.’
‘I should like to meet