Eight Months on Ghazzah Street. Hilary Mantel
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bloody day. The Turadup people who are working at the missile base won’t talk to me. They enjoy being secretive. You ask them a perfectly straightforward question about the best way to get something done, and they start tapping the side of their noses, you know what I mean? Americans run that base. They’re even in uniform. It’s no secret, but it is a secret. It’s supposed to be missiles for local defence, but that’s not what people say. They say it’s a base for intercontinental missiles. And yet the Saudis loathe the Americans. Because they support Zionism. They’ve banned Ford cars. They’ve banned Coca-Cola. They’ll just have weaponry, thank you.’
‘And hamburgers and Cadillacs.’ She reached for the newspaper. ‘Have you seen the cartoon?’ The President of the United States, a wizened mannikin in a Stars and Stripes waistcoat, balanced on the tip of a huge, hooked, disembodied nose. ‘That’s meant to be a Jew’s nose, not an Arab’s. You’re supposed to understand that. It says in the letters column that you should study the customs of a country before you get in it, but I think there’s nothing like studying them when you’re there. Much more enlightening.’
‘Perhaps we shouldn’t have come. If we are going to dislike all these things so much.’
‘It’s hard to take umbrage on a salary like yours.’
‘I expect we’ll survive it,’ Andrew said. ‘We’ll have leave in the summer. We can start planning it.’ He broke off. ‘Oh, look at that cockroach. There were five in the shower when I got up this morning. There were three in there just now. Where the hell do they come from? Where’s the spray?’
Swearing to himself, he padded out in his bare feet. Frances slid off the bed, rubbed her eyes, straightened the cover. She looked at Andrew’s discarded shirt on the floor, picked it up, and dropped it in the basket.
Ten o’clock. Like someone testing the water, Frances stepped out through the glass sliding doors, and stood on the paving stones in the shadow of the wall. I’m going to come to grips with this place, she thought. The heat of the sun struck her lifted face. Satisfied, she turned, stepped inside again, and drew the door behind her.
Five minutes later she went out of the front door. She wore her baggiest smock, flat sandals. She held up a bunch of keys, peered at them in the light of the hallway. First the door of Flat I. Then the main door. Then the iron gate. Perhaps I shall never get back in, she thought.
She was alone, out in the street. The stray cats fled away. A dark-faced boy in a car blew his horn at her. He cruised along the street. He put down his window. ‘Madam, I love you,’ he called. ‘I want to fuck you.’
She walked on to the corner of the block. Every few yards it was necessary to step down from the eighteen-inch kerb and into the gutter; the municipality had planted saplings, etiolated and ill-doing plants inside concrete rectangles, and it did not seem to have occurred to anyone that the saplings would block the pavements, and that pavements are for walking on. But clearly they are not for walking on, she thought. Men drive cars; women stay at home. Pavements are a buffer zone, to prevent the cars from running into the buildings.
By the time she reached the street corner she realized that it was far hotter than she had thought. The air felt wet, full of the clinging unsavoury fragrance of the sea. A trickle of sweat ran between her shoulder blades and down the backs of her legs. On her right stood a row of half-built shops, wires snaking from the brickwork. She stuck close to the wall; she had reached a main road. The dark fronds of shrubs spiked the air over the central reservation. A hot-dog van trundled past. A skip full of builder’s rubble forced her into the road again. From out of the dazzling sunlight, moving slowly towards her, came two fellow pedestrians, two women in long zigzagged gowns, in African headcloths of vivid stripes; their blue-black flesh rolled towards her, and she saw their large spread feet, pale grey with dust, planted on the hot concrete. Smiling dazedly, hardly seeming to know that she was there, they parted to let her slip between them. Yasmin had told her of the West African hajjis, the pilgrims on their way to Mecca, who dropped their garments on to the shingle of the Corniche and ran naked into the waves. These women had stayed on, washed up in the city. They left behind them the scent of their passage; onions, the hot pepper smell of their skin and hair.
Frances turned back into the smaller streets, between apartment blocks, to cut back on herself. Over to her right, cranes and derricks split the sky. On her left a wall had been built, enclosing nothing; a gate gave access to nothing but a tract of muddy churned-up ground and some stagnant pools.
She stopped for a moment, unsure of where she was. Her sense of direction had almost never failed her. She steadied herself, her hand against a burning wall. Her own block of flats was ahead of her, seeming to shimmer a little in the heat; in the two first-floor apartments the wooden blinds were drawn down securely over the balcony windows, and the building had a desolate, uninhabited air.
A man in a Mercedes truck slowed to a crawl beside her. ‘I give you lift, madam?’ She ignored him. Quickened her step. ‘Tell me where you want to go, madam. Just jump right in.’ He leaned across, as if to open the near door. Frances turned and stared into his face; her own face bony, white, suffused with a narrow European rage. The man laughed. He waved a hand, dismissively, as if he were knocking off a fly, and drove away.
Inside the hallway, Yasmin stood by her front door. Her face was agitated. ‘Frances, Frances, Shams was looking out and saw you just now in the street. Where have you been?’
‘I went for a walk.’
‘Come in, come in.’ With a flapping motion of her arm, Yasmin drew her inside. Her bracelets clanked together. ‘Sit, please sit. I will fetch you a cold drink.’
Frances perched on the edge of one of the heavy brocade armchairs. She felt dirty. She took a tissue from a box and wiped her hands. Yasmin hurried back with a little silver tray: a glass of Pepsi-Cola, a dish of ice, a saucer of sliced limes. She produced a spindle-legged table from its nest, placed the tray at Frances’s elbow. She hovered above her, speaking not out of curiosity, but in proprietorial wrath. ‘What made you do it?’
‘I just wanted to see how I would get on.’
‘But it is so hot, Frances. And men will shout at you from cars.’
‘Yes. I know that now.’
‘I could have told you and saved you the trouble. Frances, could not your husband’s company give you a driver?’
‘I think Mrs Parsons, the boss’s wife, has got a monopoly on them.’
‘I can get drivers. Raji’s office will send a car, if I call up, but I don’t like to ask too often.’ She pressed her hands together. ‘Just tell me where you want to go. I will arrange it. But don’t be walking the streets.’
‘It was only round the block,’ Frances murmured.
‘We can go to Al Mokhtar if you want anything for sewing. We can go to Happy Family Bakery. We can make an evening tour to the souk, Raji would be so happy. Just tell me where.’
‘The trouble is, I don’t know where. How can I find out about the city? How can I meet people? Can I learn Arabic?’
‘I can teach you a few phrases. It is enough.’
‘But what if I want to study it?’
‘You can get a teacher. I have a private teacher, but it is for classical Arabic, it wouldn’t interest you. Or perhaps, I don’t know, maybe there is a class somewhere. Don’t think about this now, Frances. You have to get your household in order. You will be meeting your husband’s colleagues and entertaining them. You will be busy, I think.’
Yasmin leaned forward, and brushed the back of her sticky hand with a long, opalescent fingernail. ‘Listen, Frances, I remember when I first got in Jeddah. I had come from Karachi, you see, where my family were all around me. I have been to Britain, fifteen months in St John’s Wood, you know, when Raji was working over that side. I am a modern woman, Frances. I have the British passport. I have not lived my life behind the veil. It is hard,