Every night we’d scout the town for a hotel after consulting my guidebook. We’d inspect the room before taking it, the two of us sharing to save money. Always a twin. We’d check there was running water, that the sheets were clean, and that the room wasn’t too close to the communal toilettes. Looking for certainty and receiving assurances from the hotel-keeper about the reliability of the electricity. Futile assurances, but ones we’d seek anyway, hopefully. We’d fill in the register as a married couple. Once a hotel-keeper queried our different names and our different passports. Sophe answered in Arabic, feigned offence, and put her arm around my waist as she led me away from the reception desk with the room key. Dropped her arm and laughed when we were out of sight.
Then the task of getting a lift each morning. Someone at the hotel desk the evening before would always know someone heading our way early. We took up the offer the first time, and lingered around the foyer for hours in the morning before realising the promised lift was never more than mere hope, or desire to please, or just to prolong a conversation with a white woman. Instead, after sunrise we’d make our way to the petrol station on the route out of town and strike up conversations with drivers heading south. Or we’d walk to the town’s fringe, find some shade, lay down our packs, and wait.
And so we plunged deeper into the desert. At first it was across hamada, the endless flatness, the inexhaustible supply of small stones that lay strewn on the ground either side of the road. The landscape offered nothing to orient ourselves by. It seemed the asphalt road had been laid across that plain of stones according to a compass – south – and that no natural contour shaped its direction.
On the road I still didn’t think much about Jack, and Sophe didn’t ask about him, not directly. Instead, as we travelled and Sophe asked about our family and life at The Springs, it began to seem it was me Sophe wanted to understand.
*
‘Two years at art college,’ I answered, ‘sucking in what I could about light and shade and texture and perspective. Technique. Memorising the names of those who’d gone before me, those whose work I admired.’
‘Why didn’t you finish?’
‘Because I needed to start.’
Sophe looked at me, a raised eyebrow beneath a line of cloth.
‘OK,’ I said, ‘and because I hated being away. Hated it. I didn’t belong there. I belonged at The Springs. I knew what I wanted to do. And I needed to start.’
Sometimes it is an advantage we second sons have, to walk untroubled below our fathers’ eyeline. It gives us time to think, time to hone our own visions. How much I wanted to tell Sophe, then, about my vision, its breadth. How much, if I’m honest, I wanted to impress her.
‘No one has mastered sandstone,’ I said. ‘Not like Michelangelo did marble.’
But I would. I would. The Master of Sandstone. I would carve. I would sculpt. I would find beauty. And I would elevate my town and its sandstone.
‘But your Pop?’ she asked.
‘At first he wanted me to join him in the quarry.’
‘So he was disappointed?’
‘In the end he had no illusions about me. And he had Jack, so he let me go. I begged him for stone. And I set up a space in the backyard looking out over the anthills, and began to carve. I told him my carving would do the town proud, that The Springs would celebrate them . . . that . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘He had no idea what I meant.’
‘What about Emma?’
‘Her name’s not Emma.’
Sophe was confused.
‘It’s Em, isn’t it?’
Em was born of resistance, childish and spiteful. It was a year or two after she’d replaced our mother. While I struggled with it, Jack simply consigned her to irrelevance. He had his life to lead. He’d concluded he wasn’t the first child to lose his mother, or the first to have a stepmother forced upon him. Nor did it seem to trouble him that our stepmother was our aunt, our mother’s sister. I knew she was a parasite and a predator, but Jack didn’t seem care about any of that.
‘She may as well live with us,’ Jack said. ‘Forget her. Don’t let it bother you.’
I took my lead from him in so many things, but ignoring her was not something I could sustain. I was not Jack.
I can’t remember the first note to Jack that started it, some child’s intrigue. But I do remember that instead of writing her full name – Miriam – I wrote the initial, ‘M’. Perhaps I thought it would protect me if she – or worse, my father – found it. And I thought it was clever, a code.
Jack loved it. He didn’t just pick it up in his return note. He raised it to another level – that’s how he began to address her. To her face! Good morning, M, he’d say. Is dinner ready yet, M? I watched in silence and wonder, week turning into month. His campaign didn’t seem to take anything out of him. This was simply how it would be, the new reality. Our father didn’t intervene, his debt to Jack, I guess. And so Jack’s will came to pass and the woman who had assumed the place of our mother became known as M. Answered to M. Accepted that she was, in that house, M.
As for ‘Em’, well ‘Em’ was a softening, years later. A softening born of guilt, replaced in time by a fondness of sorts. One she also accepted.
‘And now?’ Sophe asked.
‘Now what?’
‘How do you get on with her now, with . . . Miriam?’
‘Take her or leave her.’
‘Jack told me . . .’
‘What did Jack tell you?’
‘That he . . . that he was reconciled with her,’ Sophe said.
Easier for him to say. I was the one who’d discovered the truth, had learnt about it by chance. She’d wanted me to do something for her, some domestic chore I’d refused, yet another. And this time, rather than give up, she persisted, despite having no maternal authority – only that we ceded, and I was giving none.
‘You took Dad even before Mum died,’ I said, snarling it at her, not believing it myself, not even really knowing what it meant, any of its shades. Wanting only to wound her. And expecting, if anything, anger from her. Ready enough for that, ready to make a stand.
Instead she looked at me. I must have been all fury, all hiss and spit. But Em looked at me, cool, slow-blinking, stringing her gaze out so long that I grew uncertain. This was not the woman I’d come to know.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You’re right. I did.’
Because she’d had enough of my little war against her. She wanted to hurt me too.
Jack didn’t seem to care when I told him. It’s not that he disbelieved me – he listened, and nodded. But when I was done, all he said was ‘Is that right?’ It wasn’t a question, was just a mildly surprised acceptance, that the world is a strange place. It confounded me that Jack wasn’t moved. Even in defence of our mother. It unsettled me, because it couldn’t be right.
*
Late one afternoon I walked the streets of the town we’d reached after our last lift of the day, looking for an atelier, a mechanic’s workshop. Unlike our own towns, where they’re hidden away, in the desert mechanics are prominent, their main street shop-signs large and colourful. Being a mechanic is a noble profession in the Sahara. They bring desert-crossing machines back to life. If they don’t have a part, or can’t source it, they fashion makeshift solutions from the collections in their workshops. They are preservers and creators.
A mechanic lifted his head from the bonnet of a Peugeot 404 to show me an instrument I’d never seen before: a long-necked flat-head screwdriver with rough parallel grooves spiralling up its shaft. Half screwdriver, half rasp. It was perfect. I didn’t bother bargaining.
On my way back to the hotel I collected hand-sized rocks which had come away from a building wall, fallen out of the dried mud. I sat on the hotel roof that evening – modified into a t
errace so travellers could sit and drink tea under the stars – and worked the pieces of stone, prying small chunks off with the point of the screwdriver, rasping off grains of sand and quartz.
Sophe joined me, followed by a boy from a nearby restaurant carrying a tray with glasses of mint tea. Washed and refreshed, she sat while we drank the tea and gazed up at the stars. I looked at her, the light of the new moon on her face, the softness of her cheekbones. She must have felt my stare and turned.
‘May I?’ she said, reaching for the carving – a crescent moon cut into the face of the rock.
‘I like it.’
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘And when you’re finished with it?’
‘I’ll leave it here.’
‘Why?’
‘They’re too heavy to carry. And anyway, I’m happy to leave them. You never know what people might do with them.’
‘Or is it for you?’
‘Huh?’
‘Like Hansel?’
‘Sorry?’
‘From the fairytale. Isn’t that what you’re doing? Dropping stones like Hansel did as he travelled deeper and deeper into the forest?’
It was gentle enough, but I tensed, and withdrew. I didn’t want to have to think – just there, just yet – about the end of the journey, different for each of us. I didn’t want to consider what would happen when we reached Assekrem.
‘These aren’t just stones. They’ve been transformed.’
And another thing. If Sophe was comparing me to Hansel, I didn’t want her just to be my Gretel.
SEVEN
The next morning I’d only just sat down on a large rock at the outskirts of town, when a camionette pulled over with its little cabin and its low tray, the first ride of the day. Sophe was adjusting her headcloth in the shade of a nearby palm, so I walked across to the driver’s side window. The driver and his companion could have been twins behind their long beards, white hats and flowing white robes.
‘Salaam alaykum,’ I said.
‘Alaykum as-salaam.’
But the driver wasn’t interested in me. His eyes were on Sophe as she gathered up her bag from the ground and turned. How could he not look? Her straight back, her strong shoulders, her confident stride. Green headscarf covering her hair, a fold across her mouth concealing chin and neck. The long street dress she’d slipped over her clothes, the bottoms of her jeans just visible below the hem. What man would not gaze upon her if he had the chance?
Yet he did not speak. Rather he motioned with his head for us to get in the back. We climbed into the tray, its thin raised ridges pressing against our buttocks, our backs to the cabin. We had one arm each on the tray, the other on our bags. After we’d been sitting for a while, and still the vehicle hadn’t pulled onto the highway, I bent to look into the cabin. The two men were talking, watching us, the driver with his black-marble eyes in the rear-vision mirror, the second man having swivelled his body around to our window. I gave the thumbs up and a smile that fell dumb before it reached them. In unison, they turned their double gaze ahead, and the truck was soon drawing away from the palm trees, and was out on the asphalt, scything its way through the desert.
Around noon we veered off the road. It was only a matter of degrees, the change in course. But soon the camionette was rumbling across the floor of the oued, speed unchanged, a cloud of dust billowing behind us and an indistinct purple ridge on the horizon. I peered through the cabin window at the driver. He was intent, hands gripping the wheel. As I watched, the vibrations shook loose a postcard of Mecca that had been wedged into a groove in the dashboard. The man in the passenger seat bent to pick it up, and as he tilted his head back we exchanged glances.
I touched Sophe’s leg.
‘What’s happening?’ I mouthed.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
Before we reached the ridge the vehicle stopped. The men waited for nearly a minute until the dust settled and then got out. They neither acknowledged us nor spoke with each other. They merely moved away from the vehicle and spread out a mat each on a sandy patch of ground, one beside the other, before falling to their knees, cupping sand into their hands and rubbing it over their forearms like water. They even poured sand over their brows and the backs of their ears, then began the synchronised prostration before Allah in the east.
Sophe and I were dry from the dust and drank from our water-bottles, small discreet sips. I wanted to climb down from the camionette and stretch my legs but decided this might disturb them. Not so much distract them from their prayer – they seemed too purposeful to be easily diverted – but rather that it might have been disrespectful. I thought of Jack and me at mass in The Springs as children. Prayer’s stern demand for silence and stillness, control over even one’s breathing.
So I watched. The simple choreography of it, the repetition, the pressing of foreheads against the earth, and their murmuring as if God dwelt there in the ground. There was power in it, Jack was right. The way they wove their devotion into the day, and the sense that without this thread of prayer, the days might unravel and lose their shape, lose their substance. Except perhaps it wasn’t the devotion but the discipline that was impressive, its touch of ferocity.
*
After the deviation to pray we returned to the highway. Sand drifted across the bitumen at intervals, the tyres of the camionette leaving golden eddies in our wake. We stopped at a roadside teahouse around midday, and the men disappeared – we guessed to perform their rituals once again.
‘Tired?’ Sophe asked.
‘It’s the wind as much as the sun,’ I replied.
‘And the vibrations,’ Sophe added, smiling.
‘And the noise.’
‘And the exhaust fumes.’
‘And the dust.’
We were both laughing, giggling like children.
‘Come on, let’s get something to drink,’ I said.
At a small table we drank milky tea. The statuette I’d been working on rested in the centre of the table, a protean female figure Sophie had watched take shape in the back of the jolting camionette over the last hour.
‘So who is it?’ she asked.
‘I’m not sure yet.’
‘Is it like Michelangelo said, that there’s an angel in there, just waiting to be set free?’
I looked at her, trying to read what she meant, whether Jack had said something to her.
*
‘Did you hear,’ Mum exclaimed when we were seated at the dinner table one evening, ‘about the Pieta?’
I was seven. I thought immediately of the plaster figurine mounted on the sideboard – crucified Jesus taken down from the cross and draped across his mother’s lap.
‘Someone’s tried to destroy her,’ she gasped.
The shock of it, that someone – and I knew Mum didn’t mean Jack or me – had come into the house to destroy our statue. But then I got confused. Hadn’t I seen the statue when I came in after school that day, after I’d dropped my bag and gone into the kitchen for a biscuit?
‘But . . .’ I began.
‘The original,’ Mum said, realising.
Which was a revelation in itself, though not one I fully grasped that afternoon: that the world was divided into originals and copies. I began to understand that later, when a photo of the damaged Pieta appeared in the newspaper.
But our father and Jack seemed to know what she meant.
‘Inside St Peter’s,’ she continued, shaking her head as if not quite believing herself what she was telling us. ‘Inside the basilica itself.’
‘So what happened?’
Our father was growing irritated. He didn’t share her reverence, wanted to know the hard detail.
‘It happened after mass, as everyone was leaving. A man jumped up with a hammer
and . . . and . . .’
She was overcome, shaking her head. It was too much for her.
‘It’s alright, Mum,’ Jack said.
‘The Pieta’s been injured,’ she said at last. ‘Damaged. And the man who did it is Australian.’
This is one of the only conversations with my mother I remember with absolute clarity.
We followed the story as it unfolded in the news, charged with the emotion of mothers and their sons and the desecration of one of the holiest sites in all Christendom. And through it I discovered Michelangelo Buonarroti, the greatest of all artists. The assailant had cried out as he struck the statue with his hammer, that he was, himself, Jesus Christ risen from the dead. God had commanded him to destroy it because, being eternal, Jesus could have no mother. Then, at his trial, he accused the judges of pride, because they wanted to declare him – Christ incarnate – insane. When he was convicted, he was deported back home to Australia.
So many revelations. Among them, that a statue could have such power.
*
‘Michelangelo was a master,’ I said carefully.
‘Your hero? Your Mother Teresa?’
‘He was no saint.’
‘He wasn’t perfect?’
I laughed.
‘His work then?’ Sophe asked.
‘Almost. Some of it.’
‘David?’
‘David is close, but no, not perfect.’
‘The ankles?’
‘Everyone says the ankles, that they’re too thin, too weak. That he erred. That his ankles can’t hold the block. But David stands. The ankles are fine. So no, not the ankles, but the back. He missed a muscle. Look closely next time. On his right side there’s a hollow where there should have been a ridge of muscle.’
‘His back is beautiful,’ she said.
‘But not perfect. His rock would have fallen short, would have landed at Goliath’s feet.’
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