The Meeting Point

by Lucy Caldwell

  She ripped the page of platitudes from her jotter – just looking at them was making her angry – and crumpled it into a ball, threw it into a corner to be shredded and used as bedding by the roaches. Then she turned to the back of the book, where she was keeping a diary of her time in Bahrain.

  The Diary of Noor Hussain

  Thursday, 6th March 2003

  1. Sleeping tablets

  2. Razor

  3. Hanging

  4a. Drowning

  4b. Being run over

  1. Sleeping tablets

  Advantages: Painless?? Like drifting off to a gentle sleep??

  Disadvantages: Vomiting them up or someone (Baba, Samp.) finding you too soon. Getting hold of them. a) the pharmacist won’t sell you any b) Baba locks spare drugs in cupboard (could get hold of key??)

  N.B. Tylenol won’t do because you have to take hundreds and hundreds of it and might just end up with liver failure like in Biology video.

  2. Razor

  Advantages: Quick?? (is it?) so long as you cut the right way (find out which is right way) and get artery not vein

  Painful. Messy. No bath. Blood makes you faint.

  Don’t have a razor and Baba won’t buy one because girls shaving legs is sluttish. And Baba uses electric shaver.

  N.B. Maybe you could use scissors? Ugh ugh ugh. Not razor.

  3. Hanging

  Advantages:

  Disadvantages:

  4a. Drowning and 4b. Being run over

  Advantages: They both look like accidents (or is this disadvantage??)

  Disadvantages: OK at swimming and sea too salty to sink well in. Swimming pool drained. Car might stop in time or might just end up paralysed not dead.

  THINK NOOR THINK!

  As soon as her Account was finished, she had decided, she was going to do it. That much was certain. Even if she did go to hell – and she wasn’t sure if she even believed in such a thing, anyway – it couldn’t be worse than this, here, now.

  Maybe, she wrote, gouging blank despair through the previous pages, this is hell and I’m in it already.

  She put her head down on the scratched, dusty table and wept.

  3

  He has come to Bahrain to smuggle Bibles into Saudi Arabia.

  ‘Not “smuggle”,’ Euan objects, ‘that makes it sound like drug-running.’

  What, then?

  ‘Introduce. Bring in. Please, Ruth’ – he is close to tears – ‘don’t get hung up on the word. It’s not alcohol or drugs or illicit substances or what have you. It’s bringing the Word of God to those who are dying of thirst for it.’

  He shows her the gospel – it is the Gospel of Matthew, with the Sermon on the Mount – printed in a tiny font on rice paper, fragile and flimsy as the veined skeleton of a fallen leaf. The paper is rolled up into a tight tube, thinner than a pencil, and inserted into the body of a cheap biro, branded with the logo of a construction company or engineering firm. He has a whole box of the pens, one hundred of them. He carried them over in his suitcase, along with a carton of cheap pamphlets about the fictional Northern Irish business.

  ‘You what?’ She can barely form the words. ‘Euan, you—’ she tries again. Words fail her. She gapes at him. The whole way – in their luggage – alongside their books and clothes and Anna’s toys – the whole time?

  He tries to take her arm and she pushes him away, so violently she almost topples over.

  ‘Please, Ruth,’ he says, ‘I’m begging you. Please hear me out.’ He kneels on the floor in front of her – he actually kneels – and she feels too sick and stunned to stop him.

  He will make the trip across the causeway to Saudi Arabia, he says, along with another man, or men, ostensibly for the purpose of meeting with Saudi-based companies. There are networks in place to distribute the gospels. It must be done before Easter.

  ‘“He led you through the vast and dreadful desert,”’ Euan recites, ‘“that thirsty and waterless land, with its venomous snakes and scorpions.”’

  ‘Euan—’ she interrupts, but he continues. His voice is thin. ‘“He brought you water out of hard rock. He gave you manna to eat in the desert, something your fathers had never known, to humble and to test you so that in the end it might go well with you.” We must pour water on the thirsty land, Ruth.’

  ‘But—’ Her mind is starting to whirl with questions. ‘You need a visa to get into Saudi Arabia. You can’t just cross the border. It’s the strictest place in the Middle East, you need a company to sponsor you, and a visa from the state, even I know that. And what about the fake company you’re supposed to be representing, surely all it takes is a couple of phone calls or a Google search to see that they don’t exist?’

  He tells her that he cannot go into the details: that even he does not know all the details. They keep them secret until the last minute, even from him, until the last possible moment, in case the plan is discovered.

  ‘They?’ she says. She is almost shouting now. ‘They? Who are “they”, Euan?’

  He does not know their names; not all of them. ‘But trust me, Ruth, these people, they’re not amateurs.’

  ‘But you are!’

  That’s different, he tells her. They always need new people, new faces. You cannot make more than one or two crossings, your face becomes known. And it cannot be people who have lived out in the Gulf long; they become known, too.

  ‘One or two crossings?’ she yells at him. ‘Are you out of your mind? It’s illegal, Euan! It’s worse than illegal – it’s against Islam, it’s blasphemy, it’s the worst crime possible! They still cut off people’s hands in Saudi for stealing a loaf of bread from a market stall, they stone people to death, they cut off people’s heads! What if they catch you? What if it goes wrong? And what if it had gone wrong on the way over here, and they’d found the, the’ – she casts about for a word – ‘the material on us? Us, Euan. Your wife and baby daughter. Us.’

  ‘Please, Ruth,’ he begs again. ‘Please.’ But she moves away from him, puts the divan between them.

  ‘You brought us,’ she says, struggling to keep her voice level, ‘you brought your wife and your daughter into this country knowing that’s what you were going to do?’

  With all the talk of war, he counters, and hostilities to the Western world and Christianity running high, it is more important than ever that they support the struggle of their underground brethren in places suddenly more unsafe and unstable than ever.

  ‘“Support”?’ she says. ‘It’s not just “support”, Euan, it’s not the same as coming to Bahrain to help with the church – it’s an illegal act that could get us all thrown in jail, that could get you killed. All this time,’ she says, feeling her voice start to crack, ‘you’ve been – been – playing fast and loose not just with your own life, but with ours, too?’

  But it’s not just our lives, he says. That’s the thing. It’s far, far bigger than that. It’s the eternal lives of tens of people, hundreds of people, who will otherwise burn in hell. It is far more than a matter of life and death.

  She does not know what to say when he says this. She stares at him. His face is pale and set, like a death mask of itself, and his eyes are gleaming.

  ‘Ruth,’ he says.

  ‘Get away from me.’

  Anna is crying. Ruth slowly registers the sound of the child’s voice, and realises that she has been sobbing for some time.

  ‘“For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may be revealed in his mortal body”,’ Euan quotes. ‘Second Corinthians, chapter 4, verse 11. Romans chapter 8, verse 39: “Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”’ It is these verses, he says, that he kept being drawn to, after Richard Caffrey’s phone call, when he did not know if he could, or should, accept the calling.
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  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she wants to know now. ‘Why didn’t you tell me, at the start?’

  He couldn’t, he says. How could he? People’s lives were at risk, he was sworn to secrecy. He shouldn’t have told her now, even. He wasn’t meant to tell her. The fewer people who knew, the better, even her, even his wife. He had been planning on not telling her. Until he realised tonight that he couldn’t not tell her, it was too big a secret, and they had never had secrets before. It was too much of a betrayal.

  A betrayal. She almost laughs. Not telling her was the betrayal?

  He begins to plead with her. Does she not see how torn he has been? How torn between himself, his family, and the Word? He waves the cheap biro at her, right in her face.

  ‘This is what we believe,’ he says. ‘This is what makes us who we are. I understand you are shocked, and scared. I understand that. But I know you, Ruth, and I know you’ll agree, once you’ve had time to think about it. I know—’

  She marches into Anna’s boxroom and slams the corkboard door behind her.

  *

  She does not sleep that night. Of course she does not sleep. She feels Euan not sleeping beside her, too. Once, he reaches for her. But she keeps her back to him and makes her body rigid. They have never fought before, never, not in two years of marriage, nor all the years before that. Petty arguments, sure, or angry words, but nothing that has not been settled and forgotten before they go to bed.

  She knows there is nothing more to say. She knows that Euan will do it. He will: she knows him, knows his determination, once he has set his mind on something. There is nothing she can do: she can be as furious as she likes; she can beg and plead; it will not change anything. His course is set; hers with it.

  But now that the initial shock is subsiding, she cannot stop going over things in her mind, piecing together what was really happening, what was really going on, when all the while she was ignorant of it. The airy assertions to her mother that everything would be fine; the way she jabbered at Christopher in the car. The way she had thanked Euan, thought him so considerate, when he insisted he finish packing the cases so she could walk over to the farmhouse to be with her mother. The way she misunderstood his doubts, and set about convincing him that they should go. She feels a fool.

  She does not sleep at all. Euan falls asleep. She feels his breathing soften and lengthen behind her. Finally, an hour or so before dawn, she gets up, goes into the kitchen. The dark, and the noises in the dark – the rattle of the air-conditioning unit, the gurgle of the electric water dispenser – are unfamiliar, foreboding. When she flips on the fluorescent light, even the shadows seem to have a different texture, a different quality. She feels a long way from home. She sits at the breakfast bar with a mug of instant coffee and flicks uselessly through her Arabic phrase book. She had been so excited about coming here, so excited. She had learned to say Murhuba, and Kayf haalak? – Kayf haalik to a woman – and the reply, Al-humdoolillah bikhair, thanks be to God. She has practised As-salaam alaykum and Wa alaykum as-salaam, twisting her mouth around the unfamiliar patterns. She has learned the etiquette – how Arabs may keep hold of your hands when they talk to you, after they have greeted you; how you must never ask directly about a man’s wife, or sit so the soles of your feet point at someone. Your right hand only is used for eating, and you must never admire something, or your host will be obliged to give it to you. And all the while Euan listened to her, let her test her phrases on him, let her believe that they really were coming to strengthen Christian ties in a Muslim country. It had seemed a game to her; an adventure.

  At the back of the phrase book, amid the dense explanations of grammar that she has not yet read, her eye falls on a short paragraph, separated from the rest of the text. In Arabic, it says, there is no future tense. The present tense is also used to cover the future. The verb ‘to be’ does not exist in the present tense. She rereads the paragraph a couple of times, trying to get her head around it. There is no future, only the present. When she rests her aching head in her arms, pressing her forehead against the cool black granite of the breakfast bar, the words purl and reverberate around and around in her mind.

  4

  On Fridays, the second day of the Arab weekend, Noor’s father went to jum’ah prayers at the central mosque. He met his brother, sisters and their families there; afterwards, they all went back to the al-Husayn compound for a big, communal lunch: up to thirty people sitting on cushions around the edges of the central living room and eating from dishes that the older women had spent the past two days preparing. Noor was shy of these family gatherings. The cousins were too numerous and too clamorous; she felt they all looked at her askance, and giggled or gossiped behind her back. Her Arabic was not good enough to follow when they talked fast; and sometimes they lapsed into Farsi, which she did not speak at all. Each Friday morning for the past two weeks her father had asked her if she wished to accompany him to jum’ah, and both times she had declined. Her mother, she thought, would be shocked if she knew how changed Hisham was since the divorce. Only a year ago, he had worn designer jeans and expensive loafers, belonged to the Wine Society and joked about his pious family. These days, he woke before dawn to perform fajr, the first of the salah prayers. From her bedroom, Noor would hear the shrill beeping of his alarm, the splashing of water in the bathroom, and the scrapes and bumps as he heaved furniture out of the way in the living room and arranged his prayer rug and turbah in the right direction. He was new to this. His own parents had not been zealous, and he had grown up mostly in Europe, and England. His spoken Arabic was fluent, but his voice when he recited the prayers wavered: the intonations and the gestures were a new language for him. She had found leaflets in his bedroom detailing the prayers step by step and explaining the etiquette surrounding them. To Noor, it seemed rigid, incomprehensible, impenetrable. The way to wash your face was using the right hand to wipe the face from top to bottom, in such a way that the water reached all parts vertically from the hairline to the chin, the section on wudu said. It scared, and fascinated Noor, these strange, inexplicable rituals; this strange, unpredictable new father.

  After her outburst the night before, Noor was not expecting her father to make his usual offer. When he did, politely and distantly as ever, she wondered if it was a test, or a trap.

  ‘No, thank you, Baba,’ she said, and he looked at her for a moment, then nodded curtly and set off.

  *

  So she was left alone. Sampaguita was mopping the floors, which meant that she could not get to her basement. Sampaguita was Filipino, and the weekends meant nothing to her: she worked her own hours. She had worked in Noor’s father’s household when he was a boy, and when he moved back to Bahrain, she came to work for him. She was a wily old woman, Noor thought; bony, with a hollow, inscrutable face and beady, darting eyes. Neither her English nor her Arabic were any good. At least, she pretended they weren’t. Noor had started to suspect that it quite often suited her to feign ignorance or incomprehension. For the first few bewildering days, alone in the villa while her father was at work, Noor had tried to befriend her. She had asked what part of the Philippines Sampaguita came from, and if she had any family, and why she had never gone home. Most of the Filipinos and Indians came over to labour as maids or on building sites for a few years in the hope of earning enough money to get married, or send children to school, or buy a refrigerator or build a new house back home. They worked long hours, slept in outhouses or shanty towns on the outskirts of Manama or Isa Town, paid off their tickets and agent fees in monthly instalments and wired the rest of their wages back to Malolos or Dhaka or Cochin or wherever else they had relatives. But Sampaguita had brushed away or chosen not to understand Noor’s questions. Noor had persisted for a while, out of exasperation as much as interest, following the old woman around the kitchen. But she had not been able to wear the maid down. It was as if, she decided, Sampaguita was showing that even though Noor was the master’s daughter, she, Sampaguita, held the
power. She liked to tease you with information, Noor was beginning to realise, dispensing it in short, sharp bursts and stopping suddenly, watching you with glittering eyes, waiting for you to ask more, enjoying the hold she had over you. Noor wondered if she knew about the basement hideout, and was taking pleasure out of mopping the floor so thoroughly, knowing that Noor wanted to go down there but could not.

  The radio was on, tuned to a station that alternated Arab songs with American hits. Sampaguita was wailing along, singing vowels rather than words, and the noise was getting on Noor’s nerves. She went outside, and slumped listlessly on the veranda. The compound was dead, as usual. But she remembered the Indian woman, and the Tupperware containers of food, and wondered if the new people had arrived. A week ago, someone had come to paint the walls, and for the last few days the Indian woman and white man had been coming and going, carrying pieces of furniture in and out, washing down the terrace, putting plants by the door. Sampaguita had been dropping hints, too, in her usual, cryptic way. The new people were God Squad, she had said – laughing to herself at the term – come to save wicked souls. Noor had not known whether to believe her. Now, with nothing else to do with her day, she decided to watch the villa until the new people came out. She hunkered down and took a cigarette from her secret tin stashed under the veranda. They were mostly Marlboro Reds, sneaked from her father’s packet, with a handful of Camels that one of her cousins had given her. She could not inhale properly yet – the smoke made her cough and feel dizzy – but she was practising. Why, she did not really know. She had never been one of the girls who smoked at school, making a big deal of sneaking off behind the sports hall, or up to the common-room fire escape, so they could be sure that everyone nearby knew what they were doing. But since coming to Bahrain it had given her a stab of pleasure each time she stole a cigarette from her father, and smoked it when he was out: as if it was a victory over him.