The Pact We Made

by Layla AlAmmar

  I’d seen the chain-link fence up ahead and knew what it was. I’d driven down that road countless times, and the sign always caught my eye: Salmi Fishermen’s Association. There was something absurd about it; how big could the Salmi area be that their fishermen warranted their own association? There were only, maybe, a million Kuwaitis in the whole country; how many of them were fishermen and lived in Salmi? It made no sense.

  I decided we should hop the fence.

  Yousef had put up a token protest, but hadn’t made us turn around. We peered into the dark lot, empty but for dead boats. Yousef mentioned that a guard might be on duty, and I made a crack about only the best for the SFA, but there was no one around. No lights in the lot, no voices on the other side of the fence, nothing but the traffic rolling steadily to our right and the water murmuring on our left. The latter made Yousef wonder if the beach area was open, if people could just keep walking down the beach until they were on the association’s property, and I huffed that he was ruining it for me.

  And so, up and over, and down in a tangle of limbs and dust and loose gravel.

  We walked down the jumbled aisles, pausing to read the names of speedboats or spin the propeller on an engine. There was a mosque, no bigger than a shed, whitewashed with blue trim.

  He hopped up into one of the bigger boats, snooping around, kicking up dust as he lifted tarps and coverings while I stayed on the ground wondering how much I could tell him about what was actually happening. I decided that it was nice, in a way, to have one person who didn’t know the worst things about you.

  He jumped back down, muttering that it was all crap, and we kept moving. There was a little room up by the gate, the size of two payphones stuck together. It was lit and the tinny sound of a radio spilled from its open windows. Yousef steered me away, back into the darker aisles at the far end of the shipyard.

  ‘I need to get out of here,’ I said.

  He shushed me and whispered, ‘Back over the fence, or should we try the beach?’

  I shook my head. ‘I meant I need to get out of the country.’ He shushed me again, turning back to the guard’s station. ‘He can’t hear us over the radio, Yousef.’

  Nevertheless he pulled me deeper into the yard until the traffic faded away and all we heard was the water. ‘And go where?’ he asked.

  I shrugged in the darkness. ‘I don’t know. London, maybe, or the States.’

  ‘Go back to school, you mean?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘And leave me all alone with the boss?’

  I let out a laugh. He looked so horrified by the prospect that I wrapped my arms around his tiny torso and buried my face in his chest. He didn’t hesitate, hugging me close, his chin resting at my temple.

  ‘Is it to get your mother off your back?’ he whispered.

  ‘That’s part of it.’

  ‘We could still get married.’

  I shook my head. ‘No, we can’t.’

  He gave me a squeeze. ‘No, I guess we can’t.’

  ‘You could leave too,’ I murmured into his chest.

  He sighed and it ruffled my hair. ‘No, I need to have a son to give my father’s name to.’

  At first, I thought the flashing white light was from cars on the street. Only when the gruff voice barked out did I realize we weren’t alone. The guard, flashlight in hand, yelled at us in a rapid-fire Egyptian dialect about police and indecency, and Yousef and I were already running.

  We separated. I went one way while he disappeared parallel to where the guard was approaching from.

  The flashlight kept tracking back and forth, but I didn’t turn to look. I heard the yelling, more threats and demands to come back, but I yanked off my heels and just ran. Deeper into the darkness, veering between boats and jet skis, trailing the fence in the direction of the water. I hoped he was right about the beach. I couldn’t hear anything behind me anymore, but I didn’t slow down. The soles of my feet were screaming, but I just kept aiming for the beach.

  When I got there, when I crossed over from pavement and dirt to soft, cool sand, the fence came to an end. There was nothing but open beach and a succession of man-made cement ramps used to lower boats into the water. I clambered up the loose stones and cement blocks, slipping across wet ramps. One ramp, two, three – how many ramps did these fishermen need? Finally, I was up and over the last one, but I kept going. My heart was pounding, sweat pouring, feet probably bleeding, but I still didn’t stop.

  I hopscotched over wet seaweed and sharp shells, zig-zagging upward to smooth sand. I finally risked a glance behind me. There was no one there. He must have chosen to chase Yousef. I slowed to a jog down the stretch of beach, sighing as the cool sand relieved the pain in my soles, and up towards the restaurant that jutted out into the water. I paused in the half-empty parking lot, hands on knees to catch my breath, and wondered whether I should keep going or wait. Hands on knees wasn’t working. I felt like I was going to pass out, so I put my shoes on my aching feet and kept walking, meandering over to the opposite end of the parking lot, eyes peeled for any sign of Yousef. The restaurant wasn’t busy, only one group left while I was loitering and no cars entered the lot. Traffic was backed up on the road, horns honking, music blaring from windows.

  A hand gripped my shoulder and I screamed.

  ‘Shh,’ Yousef hissed, clamping a hand over my mouth, but he couldn’t control his laughter.

  I pulled away and hit him. ‘You piece of shit! You scared the crap out of me.’

  He only laughed harder, guarding against my blows, doubling up and gripping his stomach – whether to try and stop laughing or to catch his breath, I didn’t know. I kept hitting him all the same.

  Even as he carried on laughing he pulled me along, setting a brisk pace as we started the long walk back to the car. He looked behind him every few minutes, but seemed satisfied that we weren’t being followed. The guard had chased him, he said, but there was no way the fat dude would catch him. He said he’d run back to the fence, describing some parkour-like move as he clambered up and over.

  ‘All he saw was the tailfeather,’ he said with a smirk when I asked if the guy might be able to describe him. ‘Anyway, he’s not going to call anyone.’

  His confidence eased my mind, and we dropped to a slower pace. I could no longer feel my feet, but it was a small price to pay. I could only imagine what Mama’s reaction would have been, or Baba’s even, if they’d had to come down to a police station because I’d broken into the Salmi fucking Fishermen’s Association.

  ‘Oh, hey,’ Yousef said, pointing to a tall white building on our left. ‘Remember how you said you wanted a tattoo.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I replied, glancing at the nondescript apartment complex.

  ‘Well, there’s a place in there apparently that does it. It’s like a proper parlor or something.’

  ‘Not licensed though.’

  He looked at me like I was a moron. ‘Of course it isn’t licensed. But this guy I know got one there and said they were good. You know, clean and trained and everything.’

  I stopped and tilted my head, staring at the building with its plain windows and boring exterior. ‘Call your friend. See if they’ll take me.’

  Yousef turned back, coming to a stop before me. ‘Dahlia, you’re not serious.’

  ‘I’m very serious.’

  He was gaping at me, like he was seeing me for the first time. ‘A tattoo is permanent.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Meaning it won’t go away. It’s forever.’

  ‘I know what permanent means, Yousef. Call him.’

  He stared at me for a long moment, a frown contorting his features. ‘Why are you doing this?’

  I pushed my hands through my hair, getting dirt and sand in the wind-knotted curls. ‘Because it’s my body. It’s my body, and I want to.’

  His eyes met mine and stayed there. I didn’t know what he was looking for, but he seemed to find it because he took out his phone and made a call.
>
  Several calls were made in the end. Yousef was on the phone the whole way back to the car, as we drove to the building, and as we waited out front. The tattoo place only took referrals from people they knew, so we had to park outside the building and wait for his friend to walk us in. While Yousef talked, I sketched designs on scraps of paper and the margins of newspapers I found in his car.

  It had to be a dahlia – a Bishop of Llandaff, maybe. I drew rapidly, one after the other, in different mutations. A single dahlia, lonely and suspended. A cluster on a stem, crowded and confused. A trio in succession: horizontal, then vertical, then a trefoil. I returned to a single one on a little bough, added little shoots sprouting above and below it, but I hesitated to place flowers on them. I doodled around it – the same phrase over and over like a chant. I wrote it out in bold print, in cursive script, in swirls and sharp lines. Over and over, over and over.

  The flimsy wooden door closed behind me. The apartment was dimly lit apart from the work area by the window with its strong spotlights. The entryway and the front of the living room were dark, illuminated only by lamps and weak candles. Framed designs lined the walls: blossoms and flowers, dragons with forked tongues, sharp-clawed tigers and orange koi fish, cobras and pythons, scrolls of calligraphy, in both Arabic and English. The living room seemed to function as reception area, lounge, and studio simultaneously. A man sat at a small table near the door, hunched over a sketchbook; guys and girls were sprawled across the L-shaped sofa, smoking and laughing and watching one of those adult cartoons that I’ve never gotten the appeal of. One workstation by the window was empty, but a muscled man sat at the second one while the artist shaded his bicep in shimmering blues and whites.

  Yousef turned to me with a half-smile, trying not to look nervous, while his friend walked up to the table with a swagger that clashed with his preppy look. Nevertheless, he had a pow-wow with Sketch Boy while Yousef and I stood and waited.

  It was warm. I pulled at my shirt, feeling that awful small-of-the-back dampness; my trousers clung to my legs, and I wished I’d worn a dress. My feet were screaming in agony.

  ‘This is Tariq,’ Yousef’s friend said to me.

  Sketch Boy looked me up and down. ‘My friends call me TQ.’

  Sketch Boy did not fill me with confidence. He looked no older than eighteen, spotty chin, Heisenberg T-shirt, hair flopping across his forehead.

  ‘So you want to get inked?’

  The preppy friend gave me an encouraging nod forward. He didn’t want me embarrassing him. ‘Uh, yeah,’ I said.

  He put his pen down; the pad was filled with loopy designs, arrowheads, and sigils. He looked at me expectantly, spreading his ink-stained hands. ‘Well?’

  ‘Oh, right.’ I moved forward to his table, pulling out a scrap of paper and smoothing it on the surface. ‘I wanted this with this phrase somewhere around it.’

  He scrutinized the blossom on the bough, turning it this way and that, asking if those little upside-down teardrops were meant to be buds that hadn’t bloomed yet, and I said yes, somewhat offended that he had to ask. He turned to the words then, studying my small, cramped script – I’d tried to fit the phrase onto that specific drawing rather than make a new one. ‘On the bat’s back I do fly?’ he read out with a frown.

  ‘It’s Shakespeare.’

  He seemed unimpressed, scowling at me as he read the words again. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I want it inked on my body, so, yeah, I’m pretty sure.’ I looked over to Yousef and his friend. The preppy boy was eyeing a girl on the sofa.

  My-Friends-Call-Me-TQ scratched at his cheek and frowned some more. ‘I don’t know, dude.’

  ‘Are you offering an opinion or a disclaimer about your abilities?’

  ‘What?’

  I looked over at the artist tattooing the blue sea creature. ‘Can I speak to someone else?’

  Sketch Boy followed my gaze, then turned back to me. ‘Hey, I’ve been doing this as long as he has, all right? And I’m just as good.’

  ‘Then I don’t understand what the problem is,’ I replied with a huff.

  ‘Right,’ he said, picking up the scrap of paper. ‘Any particular font?’

  I shrugged. ‘Something elegant, classy. Something I won’t get bored of.’

  ‘Fine.’ He nodded. ‘Give me a few minutes to sketch something out.’

  I wandered over to the calligraphy scrolls, my eyes scanning the letters and words, but not taking any in. There were interesting fonts with sharp brushstrokes and precise angles, and there were patently ridiculous fonts, all bubbly and cartoonish. There was a poster of symbols and zodiac signs and runes that looked like semaphore.

  I had a moment of clarity, a crystal-clear vision of what this act would say to my parents. A tattoo is a statement, an expression. It would say, for me, all the things I couldn’t say. And if actions speak louder than words, they also speak harder, and this act would perhaps ring harshest of all.

  ‘Where did you want it?’

  I turned to Sketch Boy and bared my right shoulder. He nodded and got back to work. Yousef and his friend had been accepted onto the sofa, separated by two girls and a sleeping guy. Turning back to the calligraphy on the wall, I picked out the letters of Baba’s name and wondered if I was going too far.

  When I was twenty-five I felt like I was losing my best friends forever.

  It was two weeks since Mona had fulfilled her end of the marriage pact, announcing her and Rashid’s engagement to us in a three-way call. Not much of a shock as they’d been together for a couple of years. I had taken it well, not so much as an intake of breath at the news. Zaina was very upset though, talking some nonsense about it being too fast – in a world where marrying someone you’ve known less than six months is normal.

  What she meant was it was too early in the year. Twenty-five. The year we were supposed to marry as per a later iteration of the pact. Mona didn’t take it seriously either, laughing out loud when I’d mentioned it as a reason for Zaina’s lack of enthusiasm. All the same, I wasn’t surprised when, three weeks later, she announced her own engagement to Mish’al – a prospect arranged through friends of her mother.

  Mona was furious, charging Zaina with stealing her thunder and instigating a passionate, if short-lived feud, which I stayed out of.

  A part of me wasn’t sure she’d go through with it. I recoiled from the thought of an arranged marriage – though I knew most, if not all, of us were destined for one. But I couldn’t imagine her marrying him just for the pact. Not even Zaina, with her bizarre devotion to destiny, could do that. ‘Kismet wa naseeb’, that’s what we were told. Our lives, all the gains and losses, were apportioned ahead of time, written in some cosmic book by a guiding hand.

  I never thought about God much. I observed the pillars of the faith like anyone else, praying and fasting out of habit, but I never thought about God, about a plan, about the idea of faith that Zaina was always on about. There was the problem of pain, of gains without merit and unjust worlds, of sins unpunished and the blood of the innocent. I wasn’t smart enough to ponder such things, so I left the question alone, nodding along and echoing Zaina’s ‘Allah kareem.’

  As the day of Zaina’s milcha approached, the day for men to gather and sign her over to the care of her husband, I panicked. She’d known him less than three months, and even though it happens all the time, I panicked. There was an immediacy to it, a concreteness that made it more real than when it was a second cousin or friend of the family. It wasn’t abstract; they would share a bathroom and a bed. She would be living with him, waking with him, expected to sleep with him.

  I felt a desperate need to warn her about something I couldn’t find words for.

  I accosted her at the end of a last-minute dress fitting. She was in a good mood driving me home, not even moaning about Mona missing this fitting (along with all the others). She was bubbly, excited, going on about the dress and jewels and hair and makeup, and I felt bad for bringing her down
, I did, but I couldn’t contain my worries anymore.

  I started slow, agreeing that yes, it was all terribly exciting, yes, it was a whole new life, and no, things would never be quite the same. But it wasn’t long before my anxieties bubbled over.

  ‘But can you imagine spending your life with him?’

  She turned to me. ‘You don’t think I’ve imagined that? I’m getting married in a week.’

  I nodded and looked out the window on my side. ‘And you’re sure he’s the one?’

  She shrugged, sighed, then shrugged again, and in that moment she seemed incredibly wise. ‘Love comes later; all you need at first is respect and affection, maybe even attraction. Later, when you nurse him through an illness for the first time or the first time he holds you when you’re crying, that’s when love comes.’

  She was reciting someone else’s words. How many times had she repeated them to herself? How many times before she started to believe it? Or was she still working on belief?

  ‘And if it doesn’t come? If it doesn’t work?’

  She frowned at me like that was an impossibility, and perhaps, to her, it was. Fiddling with the radio, she said, ‘That’s not an option. We’ll make it work.’

  ‘You’re still young, Zaina. You don’t have to do this now.’ She stopped the radio at a station spitting something fast and heavy. She didn’t look at me, but I continued regardless, ‘If it’s to do with Mona—’

  ‘Mona!’

  I picked at imaginary lint on my pants. ‘Yeah, I mean none of us is taking the pact seriously.’ She snorted and shook her head. ‘We don’t have to get married this year.’

  ‘I want to,’ she said, turning to me. She repeated it. ‘Do you honestly think I’d go through with this if it were just about the pact? If I didn’t really want to marry him?’

  That was exactly what I thought, but I only mumbled, ‘You don’t even know him.’

  ‘So?’ There were sparks of defensiveness now, bursting from her skin, from the gold flecks in her eyes, pushing against me. ‘Your parents, my parents, Mona’s, none of them knew each other, and they’re still together, still happy.’