The Meeting Point

by Lucy Caldwell

  They had a tour of the building – the bright white nave with its rows of blue-cushioned stackable chairs; the modest chancel with its simple pine altar and lectern and an unadorned wooden cross suspended from the ceiling; the east-facing apse inset with three modest stained-glass windows; the little cupboard of a sacristy – and the satellite rooms used for Sunday school, Bible study, meetings and other church functions, then met the Archdeacon. He was a mild, bespectacled Englishman called Graham Day, who greeted them politely, and started talking about the help they could give him with study groups and community outreach. It was a sensitive subject, he explained, because although freedom of conscience was enshrined in the Bahraini constitution, Islam was the official state religion, and for Bahraini nationals, conversion to Christianity was a grave offence. Tales circulated, he said, of the confiscation of passports, the denial of medical treatment, the loss of employment: and not just for the convert. Friends and family of a convert were liable to be ostracised and treated as second-class citizens, too.

  ‘“I came to set a man against his father,”’ Christopher interjected, ‘“and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household.”’

  Ruth looked at Euan. She willed him, dared him to look at her. But he kept his gaze on the Reverend, and did not flinch. She wondered if the Reverend Day was in on the plot, too. If all of the polite talk was for her benefit, and if once she left, as soon as she left, they would start discussing the real matters. Or if the Reverend, like her, was meant to be innocent of what was going on. Christopher certainly looked on edge. His eyes kept flitting from Euan to the Reverend, and he was too eager to jump into the conversation, to agree with what the Reverend said or quote from an appropriate verse. He was behaving like a man who had something to hide. Euan, on the other hand, looked perfectly calm. He had slipped into his professional mode: easy, assured, with a ready, confident smile. Watching him, if she did not already know, she would not know that he was concealing something. She had not thought that possible. But when the conversation turned to her, and to Anna, she felt herself too slip into a familiar version of herself, one who could talk about the church at Kircubbin with a smile, even sketch an amusing picture of the grey stone walls huddled defensively against the squally winds blowing in from the Irish Sea and the creeping damp of the vestry beyond the reach of the fan heaters. She had not been conscious, before, of these capacities within herself.

  *

  And the afternoon, too. Christopher left her and Anna back at the compound, then drove off with Euan. ‘To discuss a new study group,’ Christopher lied, looking her straight in the eye and not even blinking.

  ‘A new study group?’ she said, making her voice bright. ‘Well, have fun. You’re right to drop us back here, Anna would only get in your way.’

  Euan leaned in to kiss her, but she turned her head so he only brushed her cheek.

  *

  She tried to sleep, but Anna would not sleep; and the hard floors were too dangerous to let her run about on, unobserved. In the end, they sat in front of the television, in the lightless central room, and watched a series of mindless children’s programmes. Visitors came by, her new neighbours, each bearing a dish of some sort. A doll-like American, with fluffy blonde hair and round blue eyes, who brought banana bread – golden, perfectly risen, still warm – and said things like ‘oh my’ and ‘golly’. Ruth invited her in, and they sat on the divan and made conversation. Trudy was only twenty-two, even younger than Ruth. Her husband was a construction worker; he had been posted out to the Middle East three years ago. They had got married, she said, the week before they came, in order that she could come with him. They had lived in Dubai for a while, and now Bahrain. They were trying to save enough money to build their own house back in Ohio, and start a family. They had only meant to come for a year, at first, and she missed home something shocking. She gazed at Anna greedily. If she got pregnant, she said, they would have to go home: they had agreed on it. She talked non-stop for at least twenty minutes. Then she asked Ruth what she was doing – she had heard Ruth’s husband was a minister? – what church they were based at, how long they were staying. And once more Ruth dissembled, answering the questions smoothly, inventing schemes they would be running at church and projects they would be involved in; answers that could have been true, that should have been true. After Trudy came Anjali, a plump, pretty Indian woman who brought a dish of samosas and a tub of yogurt sauce. They had the same conversation, a variation of it, and Ruth tried to stick to the same answers. As she left, Anjali pointed out her house – it was the one with the roses – and invited Ruth to come over some time, any time. After she had gone, Ruth felt suddenly lonely. She had imagined herself and Euan throwing themselves into the social life out here, into the church. She had wondered about the people she would meet, the friends she would make. But now, she was sure that they would have to keep a low profile, hold themselves somehow aloof from everyone else, in case they slipped, or gave something away. She had not enjoyed the conversations with either Trudy or Anjali. They had seemed too much like a test, as if she could be caught out; her voice to her ears sounded hollow, insincere.

  She imagined how different it would be if she didn’t know, and wondered if she would rather not know: if it would be better if Euan had never told her. Or if she would have worked it out for herself, anyway: There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known.

  She phoned home, and that too was a dissimulation: feigning excitement at the place and the people; telling her mother about the maids and the neighbours with as much enthusiasm as she could muster. When she put down the phone, she felt further from home, and more alone, than ever.

  Another knock came at the door.

  ‘Let’s not answer it,’ Ruth said to Anna. ‘Let’s pretend we’re sleeping, or dead.’ But of course she went to see who was there. It was the teenager from the villa opposite, the one Ruth had seen smoking that morning. She stood, mute, then thrust a Tupperware container out in front of her, muttered something, then turned and ran back to her house.

  ‘Thank you,’ Ruth called after her, but she did not reply. ‘Well,’ Ruth said, aloud, to Anna, to nobody. ‘What an odd girl.’ She took the Tupperware into the kitchen and prised it open. It was a sorry-looking salad made of limp lettuce, tinned sweetcorn, chunks of tomato and some sort of pink cubes, smothered in mayonnaise and paprika. Ruth poked at a lump with her finger: it was jellied crabstick. She shuddered and scraped the mess into the bin, and rinsed the container in the sink.

  There was nothing more to do. The maids had cleaned the house, unpacked the clothes and left food for the evening in a pot on the hob.

  She went back into the living room and wondered what she was going to do. This was not supposed to be what her first day in Bahrain was like, she thought, once more. This was not how it was supposed to be.

  6

  Saturday morning should have been Noor’s next appointment with Dr Badawi. She had been seeing the therapist twice a week since arriving in Bahrain. But after the last time, there had been a showdown with her father. Dr Badawi had instructed Noor to make a list of things she liked about herself and things other people liked about her. When Noor started to get into a downward spiral, she was to take a deep breath, count to twenty, and remember her list. Noor had tried to make the list that evening – she really had – but she had not been able to come up with a single thing to write down.

  ‘I hate Dr Badawi,’ she had announced to her father. ‘I hate her and I’m not going back. And if you try to make me go back—’

  ‘Aiwa,’ her father had interrupted her. ‘Mafi mushkila. You don’t want to go back, you don’t go back, tayib, problem over.’

  She was taken aback at that. Her mother would have argued, threatened, cajoled. But her father was losing his patience with her, she could see that: he was regretting having agreed that she cou
ld move to live with him, already, after less than a month. Noor had quite liked the clinic at Riffa: the cool blue walls and antique wooden ceiling fans, the manicured gardens and miniature fountains. Dr Badawi, an Egyptian doctor in her mid-fifties with a black hennaed bob and rimless glasses, a smooth, low voice and steady gaze, had not been so bad, either. But once Noor had declared so vehemently, so confrontationally, that she was never going there again, there was no way of backing down.

  She spent the morning slumped on her bed, staring at the ceiling, lacking the energy to go to the basement and work on her writing, or even to sit outside and watch for the missionaries. For a while, she tried to count the cracks on the plaster ceiling. But each crack branched out into so many smaller subsidiaries that it was impossible to tell for certain where one began and another ended.

  *

  Dr al-Husayn came back at lunchtime, and after eating the reheated leftovers of the kare-kare, they set off for an interview with the headmistress of Noor’s prospective new school. Noor’s mother had insisted that if Noor really did go to school in Bahrain she should attend an institution where the British curriculum was taught. Of the two possibilities, the British School and St Jude’s, the latter was the biggest and the best endowed, with the glossier prospectus. In our school we encourage the notion that personal improvement and development is always possible. We seek to promote an environment in which it is considered natural to help and support others within the school. We take a tough, zero-tolerance approach to bullying. The spine of the prospectus was broken at that page, and Noor imagined her father poring over it, grimly, meaningfully. She tossed the prospectus into the back of the car. Her father glanced at her, but said nothing. Dr al-Husayn did not quite know how he had ended up with custody of the problem child, rather than her mother. Noor saw the thought on his face as plainly as if he had spoken it.

  They skirted the traffic snarl of downtown Manama and joined the highway to Madinat’Isa, or Isa Town, the middle-class suburb where most of Bahrain’s private schools were situated. They drove in silence. Noor was wearing a long, shapeless brown skirt that made her feel like she was dressed in a hessian sack, and she had plaited her hair back neatly. Her father, for once, was not in thobe and gutra but one of his old suits, from his previous life. It was slightly too small for him, now; Noor could see the creases in the jacket and the buttons straining. He looked as ill at ease in it as he did in his Arab robes.

  They drove into the school complex past the playing fields, which in the heat of the afternoon were yellow and empty. On the edge of the school grounds was an impressive-looking building housing the sports hall and indoor tennis courts. Workmen were toiling on what was to be an eight-lane swimming pool, due for completion in time for the new school year. It was to be four metres at the deep end, so that students could dive and learn scuba techniques. Dr al-Husayn had been impressed by this. But Noor hated sports, especially swimming. The thought of group swimming lessons and galas, of struggling to change into a too-tight costume behind a towel, of having to parade practically naked in front of other girls, not to mention the shame of communal showers – didn’t her father see this, couldn’t he understand? She hunched lower in her seat and scowled when he pointed out the swimming pool, feeling more utterly miserable than she had known it was possible to feel. The only thing that made her able to get out of the car was the thought that by the time the swimming pool was finished, she wouldn’t be here any more, anyway.

  A smiling prefect was waiting for them in reception, to escort them to the headmistress’s study. She chatted about the school and her experiences there as they walked through the corridors and up the stairs, never once losing her smile. She addressed one or two questions to Noor, but did not ask anything directly about Noor’s last school, or why she had left in the middle of a school year – the middle of a school term – to come to Bahrain. Noor wondered if she had been warned, or how much she knew. She mumbled her answers, could not meet the older girl’s eye, felt her father’s silent disapproval. Then she tripped on the hem of her stupid sack-skirt and almost fell. Her father caught her arm in time, and there was not a trace of laughter in the prefect’s expression of concern, but even so Noor felt herself burning up with humiliation. It would be as bad here as it was in England, she suddenly knew that. You could never make a truly new start, ever. No matter how far you went, you could never leave your old self behind. She felt another wave of pure misery wash over her.

  She sat silent, eyes downcast, while the headmistress conversed with her father. The headmistress, a tall, broad-shouldered Englishwoman of about fifty, had a brisk, no-nonsense way of speaking. They talked about the school, about the curriculum; about how good Noor’s academic record had been until the divorce and the problems in school. Noor glanced at her father as he mentioned the problems in school, worried that he would say too much, give something away. But he simply emphasised his desire for a school with a strong pastoral care network and systems in place to identify and combat sources of bullying. We take a tough, zero-tolerance approach.

  Then it was Noor’s turn. She spoke haltingly about the books she liked in English, the subjects they had studied in history, a biology field trip she had enjoyed. Her mother had warned her to prepare something about extra-curricular activities, so she said she liked writing poetry, and would be interested in editing the school magazine. She stumbled as she said it. The school magazine had been her mother’s idea, not hers. But the headmistress nodded smoothly, did not bat an eyelid. She turned back to Noor’s father and they began discussing whether it would be better for Noor to start in the coming summer term, or, given the disruption to this academic year, to wait until the autumn and repeat the year.

  Relieved that her part was played, Noor sat back and gazed at the paintings behind the headmistress’s head: watercolour scenes of English country life through the seasons. They showed golden harvest fields and boys sleeping on haystacks, bare black trees on a starlit night and fields of bluebells in spring. They were all lies, Noor thought. Everything was lies. A haystack was prickly and full of insects; trees in winter were dead and slimy. Nothing was ever as good as it looked on the surface, as it was in pictures – or words. You read a book where children set off on a train journey and shared segments of an orange, and it sounded so romantic. But if you did it yourself it was just a smelly, juddering train and the orange was dry and sour-tasting and made your fingers sticky. Words were lies, pictures were lies, a pretence that the thing they showed was better than it actually was.

  The headmistress was standing up, extending her hand. Noor scrambled to her feet and took the outstretched hand. It was dry and firm. Her own hand, she was all too aware, was limp and clammy.

  ‘Congratulations,’ the headmistress was saying. ‘We would be happy to welcome you as a student. We just have to decide on the best time for you to start. Let’s have a think about this over the next week or so.’

  Noor’s father thanked the headmistress, profusely: so profusely she felt embarrassed for him. He whistled as they walked back to the car. His troublesome daughter would soon be back in school and life would settle down again. She watched him thinking it.

  *

  Dr al-Husayn had to go back into work after that. He left Noor back at the compound and said, ‘Don’t worry, when you start school you’ll soon make friends.’ Noor could not even summon the strength to scoff at him. She spoke to her mother, who was keen to hear about how the interview had gone. When her mother heard the news, she said she was thrilled: that Noor would be able to put everything behind her now, and make a fresh start. Noor did not bother to contradict her, either. It took less energy just to agree. She let her mother chat on about inconsequential things – Noor’s brother Jamal and his new girlfriend, how she was ever so pretty, how good she was at tennis. That would have been her mother’s dream, Noor knew: to have a daughter who was slim and pretty, like her, and fabulous at tennis, and the two of them could go arm in arm together and the shop assista
nts would say, My, you’d think the two of you were sisters! When her mother had heard what had happened, the first thing she had said was: What did I do to deserve you as a daughter? Tell me – what did I do wrong?

  When the phone call ended, Noor wandered out onto the veranda. The sun was setting and the evening breeze was picking up. It whirled the grey dust of the compound into a cloud, a miasma, so that you couldn’t see the bottoms of things: villas, cars, walls, everything looked as if it was floating, suspended. Noor sat for almost two hours, and in all of that time there was not a single indication that even one of the villas was inhabited. The lack of windows meant that even if someone was having a party, there was no sign from the outside. It meant, too, that you caught no more than glimpses of people: as they parked their cars and carried their paper sacks of groceries up their little pathways, or as they walked down to their cars, dressed up and heading out somewhere, to one of the big hotel bars or private clubs. Tonight, there was not even that. Noor had not known such loneliness was possible.

  When she had insisted, day in, day out until her parents caved in and agreed, that she did not want to go to another school in England, her visions had been of the Bahrain they visited when she and Jamal were little. The heat, the swimming pool at the American Club, the waiters bringing unlimited supplies of Coca-Cola and fruit cocktails, elaborate concoctions with paper umbrellas and straws. The Aladdin’s cave of the souk, packed with sweets and stuffed toys, the camel farm in the desert and the salty sea at Al-Jayazir, the waters so saline that you couldn’t stay under, even if you tried: that you could lie back and read a newspaper on. The picnic trips out to Dar Island with their hordes of cousins, cool boxes full of grape juice and khubz flatbreads, Tupperware cartons of sliced qoozi, legs of lamb stuffed with spices, onion, boiled eggs and rice. And the delicious Persian pancakes her aunt Azar used to make, thick and greasy and salty and sprinkled with chopped herbs. They had been some of the best days of her life, those weeks when she was part of a ready-made gang. Racing bicycles up and down the dusty avenue of the cousins’ compound or playing on the roof of a downtown apartment building, games of chase in the stairwells and dressing up in headscarves and lipstick like the aunts. Even Noor’s mother, much as she moaned about her husband’s family not liking her, had been happy then, escaping the cold and drizzle of England for the sun. But now the cousins had grown up and moved away: they were studying in America or working in Dubai; and those who remained were married with young children and wore the hijab for real. Noor felt as different from them as she did from the English girls at boarding school.