The Meeting Point

by Lucy Caldwell

  She waited, smoking her stolen cigarettes, until the new people appeared on their veranda. They were not what she had expected. She did not know quite what she had expected: but whatever it was, it was not this couple. They were much younger than she had imagined, for a start, and good-looking: they could have come out of a magazine, Noor thought. Sampaguita had said they were Irish. They looked it: they looked romantic. The man was tall with curly red hair and the woman was slim and willowy with light brown hair cut straight across her shoulders and a pretty, heart-shaped face. They had a baby girl, too, with masses of golden curls and fat little legs. They walked the length of the compound, each holding one of the baby’s hands and jumping it in the air, and it shrieked with laughter. Noor had a strange, churning feeling in her stomach as she watched them. She tried to imagine her mother and father doing that to her, and she could not. She watched the couple and the baby until they disappeared out of sight behind the furthest villa – where the bad joke of a tennis court was, and the disused swimming pool – and then she waited for them to walk past her again, on their way back in. In the morning light, with the sun behind them, they were haloed, golden. The sudden, irrational idea that they were angels, come to save her, flashed through her mind, and she had a vision of running to them, falling at their feet and telling them what she had done.

  They went back inside their villa and shut the door. There were no outer windows to any of the villas, so you could not see what was going on inside. Noor waited a while, but they did not come out again. Her heart was beating inexplicably fast. She went inside, seized with the notion that something had happened which needed to be written down, recorded, made sense of. Sampaguita was in the kitchen, preparing that evening’s meal, but for once Noor went straight down to the basement without heeding her own precautions.

  She did her best to put into words the strange feeling – how it had been to watch the golden couple, in the light and the heat – but it was no use, and every attempt just made her crosser and more frustrated. Eventually, she gave up, and crept back upstairs.

  There was nothing to do. She poured herself a beaker of grape juice and took a box of koloocheh, her father’s favourite walnut-stuffed cookies, and sat down in front of the television to channel-surf. There was nothing on: only the rolling news on CNN, covering a four-day walk-out of musicians on Broadway who feared they were to be replaced with a synthesised orchestra, and the daily instalments of interminably melodramatic Arabic soap operas. She flicked between the music channels for a while, then watched cartoons on Nickelodeon. This was how most of her days so far had been spent. She was allowed to use the computer in her father’s room, but she had not logged in to her email account since leaving school, six weeks before, and she had no intention of doing so now. She had signed in to MSN Messenger once, just to see who was there and what they were saying, but as soon as people saw she was online they started bombarding her with hate mail. She signed off almost immediately and was too shaken to try it again, even invisibly or under a pseudonym.

  She ate through the biscuits one after another until the box was finished, and immediately loathed herself for it. She had not even been particularly hungry. She slid the carton under the settee, for Sampaguita to find later, and skulked into the kitchen. Sampaguita was frying spices for kare-kare stew. The kitchen smelt earthy and pungent. The bony, gelatinous oxtails sat in a heap on the counter, oozing thick dark blood into their paper packaging.

  ‘I hate kare-kare,’ she said. Sampaguita did not reply, just carried on stirring, tossing, shaking the frying pan. Noor poked the spongy meat with her forefinger. ‘I said I hate kare-kare.’

  Sampaguita turned and fired a sudden burst of staccato Tagalog at her. ‘Umalis ka!’ she finished up. ‘Umalis ka!’

  Noor knew what that meant. ‘OK, OK,’ she muttered, ‘I’m umaliska-ing,’ and she slunk from the kitchen and out onto the veranda: just in time, it turned out, to see the blonde American from number four walking across the compound to the Irish couple’s house, carrying something wrapped in a cloth. The pretty woman opened the door, admired whatever was under the cloth, and welcomed her in. Noor squatted in the shade of the stunted date palm beside the villa and smoked a cigarette. Then she sat on the steps of the veranda and drew patterns in the dirt with a dead twig, trying to look as if she was just sitting there, not watching the house. The American left and a few minutes later Anjali from number five, Dr Maarlen’s wife, came out of their villa and walked to number two, also carrying a tray of food. The Irishwoman came out again, with the baby this time, and talked with Anjali for a few minutes. The baby was tangling its hands in its mother’s hair and babbling to itself, and when Anjali turned to go it waved at her and beamed a dimpled smile.

  Noor got up abruptly and went inside.

  ‘Sampaguita,’ she said, ‘is the kare-kare ready?’

  ‘Ay, is it ready!’ Sampaguita laughed a brown, gap-toothed smile at her. ‘Is ready tonight, for Doctor. Now shoo!’

  ‘I need some food, Sampaguita.’

  ‘What a fat girl like you need food for?’

  ‘Sampaguita,’ Noor said, feeling her cheeks grow hot but standing her ground, drawing herself up to her full height, ‘I need some food, and I need a dish to put it in.’

  Sampaguita just laughed this time and turned back to her pot of stew. Noor stood for a moment, then yanked open the door of the refrigerator and took stock of what was inside. The only things she knew how to make were marmalade sandwiches and baked beans with chopped ham and cheese. There was a half-open packet of crabsticks on the top shelf and she suddenly remembered a salad she had eaten once at the American Club, of soft shredded crab on a bed of lemony lettuce. She took out the crabsticks, and the remains of a sliced tomato. There was most of an iceberg lettuce and a bottle of mayonnaise, and she lined them up, too. She could not remember what else went in the salad. Cucumber – but there was no cucumber. Avocado? There were no avocados, either. She found a tin of sweetcorn in the cupboard: that would do. Ignoring Sampaguita’s muttering, she carefully cut the crabsticks into cubes, sliced the lettuce into strips, drained the can of corn and mixed it all together, squirting mayonnaise liberally on top. It did not look very pretty. Then she thought of a trick of Sampaguita’s, sprinkling red pepper on top of prawn cocktails to brighten them up. She found the tub and shook it over the salad. She eased the mixture into a plastic container and tapped some more red pepper on top, wiping away the smears around the edges. And then, before she could change her mind, she slipped her feet into her outdoor flip-flops and ran across the street.

  When the woman and baby answered the door, she suddenly found that she did not know what to say, and all she could manage to do was to proffer the lunchbox. The woman took it, her grey eyes widening and her cupid’s bow of a mouth forming an ‘o’, but before she could speak Noor turned and ran back home. Her heart was pounding and her palms were greased with sweat. She wanted a cigarette, but did not dare go out in case the Irishwoman was still standing there. The thought occurred to her that the woman might come over to the house, to say thank you: she had seen where Noor lived.

  For the rest of the afternoon, Noor sat restlessly in front of the television, half-watching sitcom reruns on the Comedy Channel; waiting, but not quite knowing what it was that she was waiting for.

  5

  When she looks back over it, the day seems to have happened without her: or rather, regardless of her. She has never before had such a sense of not existing, not mattering. She is heavy and slow, and yet light with tiredness: her limbs too cumbersome to do her bidding, and yet the slightest puff of wind, it seems, could blow her away. He would sacrifice her, she knows that; he would sacrifice both her and Anna. Just like Abraham and Isaac: she has never thought of the story in that way before, as anything more than a story. Father? Yes, my son? Abraham replied. The fire and wood are here, Isaac said, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering? Abraham answered, God Himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offe
ring, my son. And the two of them went on together. Never before has it been more than an allegory: about what God asks of us, about how hard it can be to do and understand his bidding. But now she hears the creak of the rope and the screams of the bound boy, his pleas and tears. Did Abraham stuff his mouth with rags to stop the cries? Turn him face-down to avoid looking him in the eye? Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. He was right to do it, of course. In the eyes of God, he was right, and he was blessed. She has heard the story explained before, in sermons, countless times. And God, too, gave up His only son.

  But yet. Something in her has cracked. A hairline fissure, invisible to the eye. But cracked, nonetheless.

  *

  She dozed off at the breakfast bar and woke with a shock to Anna’s chatter: Euan had got her up and was bringing her in for breakfast. It was just after seven. The kitchen felt dingy: the narrow windows let in only a suggestion of light. Euan looked haggard, his skin greasy with the sweat of a restless night, his eyes puffy with blooming mauve bruises. From the way he looked at her, she knew she looked just as bad. She went to get up, and stumbled, her legs thick and torpid. She knocked the mug, which went spinning to the floor and shattered, shards of cheap china quivering. She stood looking at it, dumbly. Her vision was tight and grainy, as if her eyes had been sandpapered. She watched – felt herself watching – as Euan put Anna into the high chair and bent to pick up the pieces, daubed at the slick of coffee dregs. She thought of how he had kneeled before her last night, begging her to listen, to understand, and she felt weary with a strange, distant sort of sorrow; like remembering something from long ago. Euan straightened up with an involuntary groan, placed the pieces of cup on the counter. They looked at each other, and something, some movement he made, some tremor of his jaw or pulsing of his temple, sparked the habit of love and her hand reached out to pick a crumb of sleep from the corner of his eye. His eyes closed, eyelids fluttering, and he took her wrist and held it there, her hand against his face. His grip was strong and warm.

  ‘I love you, Ruthie,’ he said into the base of her palm. ‘I love you.’ She felt a slow, tight ache start to spread through her chest. Her tongue was swollen and dry in her mouth. She swallowed, started to speak. But Euan went on: ‘We must remember, Ruth. God does not allow us to be tested beyond what we can bear. And when we are tested, He always provides a way out, so that we can withstand it.’

  She closed her eyes. They smarted so badly when she shut them it was almost less painful to keep them open. She felt wetness start to seep through her eyelashes and she knew Euan would think she was crying: but she was not, not quite, not exactly.

  Anna was banging her fists on the tray of her high chair.

  ‘OK, Anna,’ Euan said. ‘OK, hang on.’

  ‘You can’t just tell her to “hang on”,’ Ruth said. ‘She’s a baby, she doesn’t understand “hang on”.’

  Euan looked at her. And then, out of nowhere, she heard herself saying: ‘And what would have happened to her if we’d been arrested at Bahrain airport, then? Did you think of that?’

  Euan turned away, bowed his head, and she suddenly wanted to hit him, hurt him.

  ‘I said, did you think of that?’ Her voice came out distorted, harsh. Her chest was so tight, now, it hurt to breathe.

  ‘Christopher’s not coming till ten,’ Euan said. ‘If you want to get an hour’s sleep, you can. I’ll deal with Anna.’

  Before she could speak, before she could formulate a reply, there was a noise in the hallway. The maids had arrived. They rapped perfunctorily at the door, but from the inside: they had their own keys and they had let themselves in, were already exchanging outside shoes for flip-flops, putting down their bags. They introduced themselves in their stop-start, fluting language, then set about their work, completely at ease. Ruth felt horribly awkward, standing there bare-legged in the faded old T-shirt she slept in. Euan was embarrassed, too: he ran his hand several times through his hair until it was sticking up in all directions, messier than ever, and he tried to joke with the maids. After a minute or so, they retreated to the bedroom. Sleeping, now, was out of the question. They took turns to shower and dress, then had breakfast on the veranda. It was thick with dust: Ruth felt the dust settling on her damp hair and skin, and each mouthful of yogurt tasted of grit. They barely spoke, just took it in turns to steady Anna’s hand and spoon more yogurt into her bowl. Outside the villa directly opposite, a teenage Arab girl slouched, smoking. She stared at them. She was sullen-looking, and fat, wearing tight blue jeans and a pink T-shirt a size too small for her. Ruth met her hostile stare for a moment then looked away. The day felt wrong, somehow. The maids, the dust, the Arab girl – it should not have happened like this; this should not have been their first day in Bahrain.

  They killed the time waiting for Christopher by walking around the compound. They each held one of Anna’s hands, playing one-two-three-jump whenever they came to a pothole: the dusty road was riddled with them. The compound was small, each squat bungalow the same as its neighbour, with its covered veranda and little garden. Two of the villas looked empty and run-down, paint flaking in saucer-sized scales from the walls, heaps of dust and dead leaves on their terraces, their gardens little more than scorched squares of grey scrub. But a few of their neighbours had made a real effort with their garden: little flower beds and pebbled pathways and plants arranged in pots. One even had roses: huge, crimson, overblown blossoms twined up in an immaculately whitewashed terrace. It would be hard, Ruth thought, to cultivate things here, in a city wrested from the desert. Things must very quickly disintegrate, in the dust and the heat. A few days without water, and the plants would shrivel and die; a few days without cleaning, and the sands would start to reassert their rightful claim. It must take constant vigilance, constant attention, to stay ahead of the desert.

  At the bottom of the compound was a small swimming pool. The water level was low and there was a dirty brown tidemark around the sides. Several of the tiles were cracked, or dropping away from the sides. A strip of fake grass, bleached yellow by the sun, ran around the edge of the pool, and a couple of plastic sunloungers were stacked along the wall beside a concrete changing hut and a rudimentary metal shower. Euan picked up a hollow metal pole and stirred at the water.

  ‘Nobody must use it,’ he said. ‘Pity. I wonder why.’

  She did not reply.

  They walked around the swimming pool and through the metal fence onto the compound’s tennis court. Its surface was cracked and faded, its net ripped and sagging in the middle. They sat for a few minutes on the bench. Its green paint was coated with a layer of grey sand. Ruth picked with a fingernail at the edges where the paint had bubbled and chipped, and Anna squatted down and scratched at the tarmac.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, hauling her daughter onto her lap. ‘You’ll get your dress all dirty.’ Anna squirmed and started to cry.

  ‘Well,’ said Euan, ‘neither of us even plays tennis. And it’s not as if we’ll have much time to be idling around swimming, anyhow.’

  ‘No,’ she said, keeping her voice calm. ‘You certainly won’t.’

  ‘Ruth …’ he said. But he did not say anything more.

  The sky above them was white and hazy. From somewhere nearby came the dull, clattering noise of piledrivers and the whine of stone-cutting.

  It wasn’t meant to be like this, Ruth wanted to say.

  They walked back in silence.

  *

  When Christopher arrived, they seemed to slip into their roles: the Reverend, and the Reverend’s Wife. Christopher couldn’t know, Euan had said, that she knew about the Bible-smuggling. It gave her a mean, savage pleasure greeting him, asking about his T-shirt (it was another Grateful Dead one; his private joke, he explained, because a ‘Jesus Saves’ one would be out of the question), and answering his questions about the villa, were they comfortable, had the maids arrived, all the while knowing that he didn’t know she knew. It surprised her, how easy it w
as to prevaricate, dissemble. She felt Euan watching her, and wondered if she was overdoing it. But even this gave her a bitter satisfaction.

  They drove around Manama, Christopher keeping up a stream of commentary. The highways, even at this time of the morning, were chock-a-block: a mass of oversized cars jammed nose-to-tail, blasting their horns at the slightest provocation, real or imagined. They moved in fits and starts. Downtown Manama, so far as Ruth seemed to see, was a sprawl of low-rise buildings, most of them white but many of them discoloured with exhaust fumes and dust. New blocks stood side by side with others in various states of dereliction or decrepitude, and yet others in varying stages of construction. There seemed no rhyme or reason to it. Stray cats slunk in towers of tyres on patches of wasteland. Indian migrant workers, thin men with deeply lined faces and dirt-streaked cloths wound around their heads and mouths, wheeled breezeblocks balanced on rusty barrows. There were few other pedestrians on the pavements. As they drove round, she and Euan took turns to answer Christopher’s questions, and to ask further questions of their own. They were all equivocating, she realised. Pretending an interest where there was none, paying lip-service to sculptures or feats of engineering, puffed up with airy lies – like the Pharisees’ bread. That was what they were: the yeast of the Pharisees, hypocrisy itself.

  *

  It was like that at church, too. The Cathedral of St Thomas was smaller than she had imagined; no bigger or grander than a modern parish church. She expressed her surprise at this, and Euan pointed out that ‘cathedra’ simply meant ‘the seat of the bishop’, and bore no relation to the size or style of the church. That he knew this, and the way he told her – civil, jocular – made her furious with him. He was the Reverend, he was saying. He knew what was right. This was a foolish thought, she knew, petty: but yet she could not shake it. It was the way he had been behaving all morning, like a martyr; not rising to her gibes, turning the other cheek. He knew he was in the right – even if he was wrong, he knew he was right – he knew he was doing the right thing. He would be praying for her to come round, to understand; this, somehow, made things worse.