The Meeting Point

by Lucy Caldwell

  The plane lurched suddenly and she was jolted out of her thoughts. It had been a turbulent flight from Doha; the plane, buffeted by high winds, lurched and fell often. More than once she had reached for her sick bag, felt the bile rushing to her throat. She swallowed, steadied herself. Anna had woken and started crying again, and Euan was staring out of the window, distant, lost in thought. He had been quiet all day. Gazing blankly out of the window or at the unturned pages of his book, unwilling to be drawn into conversation. She wondered if he was nervous: if both of them were more nervous than they cared to admit.

  A voice came over the PA system, first in the strange, guttural sounds of Arabic and then in English. They were beginning their descent.

  ‘Love,’ she said, reaching out to squeeze Euan’s hand, ‘this is it, it’s beginning.’

  He turned and looked at her; blinked.

  ‘Everything OK?’ she said, softly.

  ‘Sorry, Ruth,’ he said. ‘I was—’ He stopped; took her hand in his; circled the palm with the pad of his thumb.

  The plane juddered again, and she was forced to snatch her hand back, soothe Anna.

  God would protect them, she reassured herself. This she knew. They were doing God’s work: He would not fail them.

  *

  Euan’s strange mood persisted. As they stood on the concourse waiting for Christopher, the man from the church who was coming to meet them, she clutched Anna to her and marvelled, taking in everything. The sweat and grime and cacophony of the night, the shoving, jostling, clamouring people, the muggy air thick with sand and cement dust, the curdled sounds of Arabic and shrilled sounds of Urdu. The men in long white thobes and red-and-white-checked gutra headdresses, the women gliding past in long black robes and veils – it really did look as if they were gliding. A chattering flock of Indian girls, like birds of paradise in their brightly coloured saris and jangling bangles and fluttering chiffon headscarves. She pointed things out: Look, look at that! but Euan was mute, impervious to her exclamations. When Christopher eventually arrived – he had been horribly delayed by the traffic, he said, pushing back a damp forelock with his wrist – Euan greeted him unsmilingly, and Ruth felt embarrassed. Christopher shook her hand – his was warm and limp – and made a joke about fresh blood and lambs to the slaughter. It was in poor taste, Ruth thought, but she laughed back, out of politeness. She felt Euan glance at her and frown. For goodness’ sake, she wanted to say to him. Help me out, here! Usually he had the right smile and banter for everyone, and she stayed demure in the background. But now it fell to her to make conversation. In the Jeep, Christopher explained that it would take them longer than it should to drive back to the compound because Thursday was the start of the Arabic weekend, when the highways jammed with Saudi boys who drove over the causeway to come to the nightclubs and hotel cabarets in Manama. As he spoke, she nodded eagerly, soaking in every detail, and encouraged him to tell them more about life in the Gulf. So he pointed out the monuments, and the notable buildings. There, lit up and proud in the centre of the big roundabout, was the great pearl clasped in the multi-pronged tower, a symbol of the island’s past, of course, and the pearl-divers – but to him a reminder of the parable in Matthew, about the merchant-man seeking goodly pearls, and selling all he had for the one pearl of great price. That, in the distance, was the dome of the Al-Fatih Mosque, the largest building in Bahrain, gleaming green in the floodlights. They’d get used to the muezzins’ calls to prayer, he said. Five times a day, through loudspeakers, from the Al-Fatih and all of the other mosques. The city didn’t exactly grind to a standstill, as it did in other Muslim countries, and you could pretty much go about your normal business, but you couldn’t ignore it. What he did was to lift up the name of Jesus each time he heard a muezzin; use it as a prompt to offer up his own, Christian prayer.

  He caught her eye and winked, and laughed.

  In that direction, he went on, was the King Faisal Causeway, stretching all the way to Saudi Arabia, and that highway took you into the desert, out to where they were building the new Formula One racetrack. It was a pity it was dark, that they arrived so late; tomorrow, he promised, he would drive them around Manama and show them the sights.

  Even to this, Euan did not respond with more than a vague smile, and once more Ruth felt embarrassed for him, and for Christopher.

  Finally, they arrived at the house. It was not what she had expected. It was in a compound of eight or so villas, single-storey, surrounded by a high concrete wall rimmed with barbed wire and stuck with broken glass. There was a sentry box, too, with a guard day and night, whose job was to keep watch of who went in or out, to raise or lower the barrier. Christopher saw her surprise at the security measures and told her not to be alarmed. It was not a dangerous area, he said, and Bahrain was not at all a dangerous country – the crime rate was, in fact, incredibly low. People just tended to live like this; the well-off or the expats, at any rate. Life out here in the Gulf, he added, was jolly good, all things considered.

  They pulled up in front of the second villa on the left, and started to unload the bags from the boot. Ruth tried to catch Euan’s eye, to ask, wordlessly, What’s wrong? but he didn’t meet hers. They walked up the little pathway to the veranda, where there was a small swinging bench and a stack of yellowing plastic chairs, a line of terracotta pots holding a sorry-looking jasmine and a few other wilting plants. Christopher knocked and a woman came out to greet them, grinning broadly. She was Indian, with very dark skin and masses of wavy hair, speckled with grey, plaited loosely back. She wore a bright red sari, and her nose was pierced with a gold ring. Christopher introduced her: she was his wife, Rosa. They made a funny-looking couple, Ruth thought, Christopher so lanky and English-looking, dressed in scruffy chinos and a Grateful Dead T-shirt, and his wife so tiny and exotic, and evidently older than him. Christopher must be in his early thirties, she guessed, around Euan’s age, and Rosa would be late forties, at least. Oh well, she thought: she would meet other people her own age, make other friends.

  She let Rosa kiss her, and bend to kiss Anna’s cheek. ‘We are honoured that you have come all this way to be with us,’ Rosa said. ‘By the grace of God your time here will be gainful for ourselves and for you.’ Her voice was lilting, sing-song.

  ‘Thank you,’ Ruth said. ‘Let us hope “his grace to us is not without effect”.’ It was Euan’s line; she had heard him use it before. Rosa smiled broadly, added an Amen! and Ruth smiled back. But when Rosa greeted Euan, she noticed, it was altogether more gravely, meaningfully, with no trace of laughter.

  ‘Reverend Deacon Armstrong,’ she said, ‘thank you,’ and Euan kept hold of her hands a moment too long, and nodded, as if he understood.

  Euan? she thought. Her exasperation at him was starting to tip into something else entirely: worry, almost fear. The bud twitched in her stomach.

  But Rosa was leading them inside, now, keen to show them their house. The lights were switched on, so it was bright, but Ruth noted that there were very few windows, and they were little more than narrow slits set high in thick walls. The floors were laid with marble tiles, white, with thick veins of blue and grey running through them; the walls too were smooth and white. At the heart of the house was a large, square room with no windows at all: which kept it, Rosa explained, the coolest room in the house. Its glossy floor was strewn with Persian rugs, midnight blue and gold, scarlet and orange, green and peach and violet, and it was furnished with an odd array of pieces, including a settee and matching divan upholstered in a maroon fabric embroidered with vines and satyrs and leaping goats. They were the ugliest pieces of furniture Ruth had ever seen. Rosa saw her staring at them and laughed.

  ‘A lady from church donated them,’ she said. ‘I say “donated” but if you ask me, she was glad to get rid of them. If you want to replace them, please do, please feel free to do anything you want. I can show you around the souk, if you like? You can buy anything you could possibly want in the souk.’

  ‘Oh yes,
’ Ruth said, her anxieties momentarily forgotten, ‘yes, please!’ She had read about the souk, and she could just picture it: the narrow streets and billowing silken roofs, blazing with colour and quick with people: hawkers and vendors, street musicians and snake-charmers, the cluster and the clamour of it! There would be music, and the scents of mingled spices, piled high in wicker baskets alongside mountains of fruit, gold, oil lamps. A thrumming, bustling scene straight from the Arabian Nights. She could not wait to experience the souk. She felt the rush of excitement at being here all over again.

  Rosa wanted to show them the rest of the villa. Their bedroom, and directly opposite a boxroom for Anna to sleep in, just big enough for a cot and a changing table. A second bedroom, which they could use as a storage room, or a study for Euan, empty but for a folded-up campbed. A bathroom (no bath, but of course they wanted to conserve water, in the desert), the kitchen, pantry, and a little back room where the maid would do the washing and ironing.

  ‘The maid?’ Ruth said, surprised, and Rosa explained that everyone had a maid in Bahrain. The church had engaged two for her and Euan. Liweiwei would do the cooking, and Maria was to come three or four mornings a week to wash and clean. Rosa held up a palm to silence Ruth’s objections. ‘You are providing employment,’ she said. ‘You are doing them a favour. They come here, from the Philippines or the subcontinent, and they have nothing – no social security, no medical insurance, no education, nothing. It is a form of charity to give them work.’

  Ruth shook her head, smiled, gave in. She could just hear her mother: Two maids, her mother would say. Two! Life of Riley you’ll be leading.

  When Rosa and Christopher were satisfied they were settled, and had everything they needed for the night – water in the dispenser, cartons of milk and orange juice and even a bottle of wine in the fridge, Tupperware boxes of food ready to be heated in the microwave – they took their leave. Ruth laid Anna in the cot and managed to undress and change her nappy without waking her – the child had fallen asleep in the Jeep, and it was a blessing she had not woken since – then went to find Euan. He was standing on the veranda, gazing at the sky. The air was hot and thick, even at that time of the night. If you breathed too deeply, the particles of dust caught in the back of your throat. She coughed; wondered if they would learn to breathe the air without noticing the taste and the feel of the sand. Euan did not acknowledge her.

  ‘Sweetheart?’ she said.

  He did not move. ‘Look, Euan—’ she began again, angry now, but this time he turned and cut her off.

  ‘We have to talk,’ he said. His face was grey.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘But not here; inside.’

  So they went back inside, and in the windowless central room, where he could be sure they would not be overheard, he told her the real reason he had come to Bahrain.

  2

  ‘I hate you,’ Noor screamed at her father’s back. ‘I hate you so much.’

  He walked calmly down the path, pretending he had not heard her. The hem of his fresh white thobe skimmed the dusty ground: already it was soiling at the edges, and his agal, the black cord wound round his head to hold the gutra in place, was lopsided, for all his careful twisting of it and his craning to check the back in the bathroom mirror. In all the time he had been married to her mother, she had never seen him in Arab dress, not once. It had been a shock to see him at the airport, wearing – as her mother would put it – a tea towel and a sheet.

  She had known then that it was the wrong decision to come to Bahrain. But what else could she have done? There was nowhere else for her, anywhere.

  It gave her a strange, bitter satisfaction to see the trailing hem and the clumsy agal.

  ‘You look stupid, you know,’ she shouted. Still her father ignored her. He was opening the car door now, gathering up his robes as he climbed in.

  ‘Really stupid!’

  He looked like he was dressing up. He was dressing up. He was reinventing himself here, after all the years of apostasy and almost-estrangement from his Bahraini family.

  ‘It’s so pathetic, you know’ – her voice was cracking now, and she had to make an effort to get the words out – ‘pretending you can’t hear me. You’ll be sorry. One of these days, you’ll be sorry.’

  But he had started up the engine and her words were lost. She watched as the sleek black car swept around the compound and out of the gate. Her legs were shaking and she felt sick. An Indian woman, carrying Tupperware containers into No. 2, turned to look at her and quickly looked away. Noor was suddenly conscious of what a sight she must be: barefoot and red-faced, screeching at a car. She turned and slunk back inside, trembling and ashamed.

  *

  She did not know how the fight had started. It had seemed to erupt out of nowhere, and before she knew it she was howling at her father and trying to hit him, so enraged she was hardly in control of her limbs, let alone her words, which came out in incoherent gulps. Dr Badawi had told her to picture her anger and despair as two black dogs, with red eyes and snarling, dripping mouths. When they started rearing up within her, she was to be stern with them, and send them back to their kennels. Noor thought Dr Badawi was stupid. It was the sort of thing you might say to a child. Anger wasn’t a dog, and you didn’t tame it down to a manageable, chihuahua size.

  She leaned against the marble wall to steady herself. It was cool under her hand. She pressed one cheek to it, and then the other. She could feel the thrumming of her blood, and the unsteady skittering of her heart. Her legs were wobbling so much now she thought they might collapse under her. She slid down to the floor. Her thighs strained against the hem of her shorts, and her stomach bulged over the waistband. That was how the fight had started: her shorts. Her father had ordered her to wear something more modest, and she had let rip at him. It wasn’t really about modesty, she knew that. It was that she disgusted him. The way he had looked at her in the airport, the first moment he saw her: he had tried to hide it, but beneath the polite veneer she knew he was utterly disgusted with her, with what she had done. And over the past three weeks there had been nothing to do but lounge about the villa and eat. Seconds, and thirds, of the meals that Sampaguita cooked; boxes of cookies; whole cartons of grape juice. Sometimes at night she would creep out and eat whatever was in the fridge: chunks of cheese, slices of bread, just cramming them into her mouth, hating herself, able briefly to forget that she hated herself in the physical, mechanical, desperate act of chewing, swallowing. She had been plump before she came, but now she was grotesque: she knew that she was, without even needing to look in a mirror. A monster on the outside, to match the monster within.

  *

  When her legs had steadied, she went down to the basement. It was a low-ceilinged room with walls of raw concrete breezeblocks; sunless and airless. Large brown cockroaches stalked boldly across the damp floor, and you could sometimes hear the skiffling and squeaking of rats behind the shipping crates. But it was the only place that Noor could be alone: the only place in the villa that was safe from the prying eyes and hands of the maids or the various al-Husayns who had taken to dropping by, sometimes with dishes of food, sometimes not even bothering with a pretext, curious to see the prodigal daughter.

  No: ‘prodigal’ was wrong. She was not a stray sheep, welcome back into the fold. She was a pig, an abhorrence, an embarrassment. They came to see her not out of kindness or compassion, for her or her father, but as you might go to see a freak in a travelling sideshow. She belonged down here, with the scuttling cockroaches and the rats.

  She felt for the cord to turn on the light. It was a single, naked bulb, hanging from a flex taped to the ceiling. It cast a dim, watery pool of light over one end of the room, where Noor had tugged the dust sheets back from their old mahogany dining table and one of the Louis XV-style chairs – her father used the basement to store his share of the furniture from the old Surrey house – and here she sat, undisturbed. It was possible to wedge a plank of wood wrenched
from one of the crates under the handle of the trapdoor leading down from the hallway, so that if anyone did try to come in, or came in search of her, she would have time to hide whatever she was doing. What she was doing was mainly writing. She had started to attempt a few poems – another Dr Badawi suggestion – but mainly she was writing a truthful account of what had really happened, so that one day everyone – her parents, teachers, all of them – would know what really happened. Only by then it would be too late, and they would be sorry.

  She took out her exercise book, unwound the string and the elastic bands that sealed it, and flipped to find her place. From the hallway above, she heard the shrill, distorted sound of the telephone ringing. She waited. It stopped. It would be her mother. Her mother was the only person who ever called – apart from once, excruciatingly, her English teacher. Noor had liked her English teacher, a lot, and had been so surprised to hear her voice on the other end of the phone that she had mumbled, been rude, unable to think of anything to say. She had nothing to say to her mother, either. In a sudden fit she seized her pen and scrawled a list of the things her mother would say:

  How are you darling?

  Are you all right?

  And how is Hisham?

  Her mother never said anything else, was careful to keep the conversation light. She had probably been advised to do that. Anything that mattered, she emailed or talked about with Noor’s father: who she never even called your father any more, simply ‘Hisham’. Noor would see him take the phone from the maid and get up with a sigh, go into his bedroom and close the door. Sometimes she listened outside, but mostly she did not bother. It was usually her mother who did all of the talking, anyhow. Her father was a morose, taciturn man. He was happiest at work: the strict hierarchy that put him on top of the pyramid, above the polite, respectful doctors and deferential nurses who would never dream of questioning or talking back to him.