The Meeting Point

by Lucy Caldwell

  For a moment, Noor felt lighter than she had done in weeks. Perhaps there was another way, after all, she thought; and when the guilt and hopelessness came crashing back down, it was slightly less heavy than before.

  And in just over an hour’s time, she was to spend a whole morning with the missionaries. She did not know what their pull was, but she had felt it, from the moment she first saw them. She stepped into the shower and turned on the tap, and with the first shock of the icy water she allowed herself to pretend that everything – guilt, sin, memories – could somehow be washed away.

  9

  He came for her the next morning. She answered the door and there he was, dressed not in the jeans and polo shirt of the previous evening but in a crisp white thobe and a white gutra bound with black cord, tall and straight and proud.

  He bowed slightly. ‘As-salaam alaykum.’

  ‘Wa-alaykum-as-salaam,’ she managed. She had mentioned last night that she was learning Arabic. Sayyid al-Harun had clapped his hands and said, Excellent, and she must practise.

  ‘Kayf haalik?’ Farid said, and she wondered if he was laughing at her.

  ‘Al-hum-doo-lillah,’ she mumbled, feeling ridiculous.

  ‘Ruth?’ Euan had come to the door. She felt her cheeks redden, as if she had been caught out in something. She had not had a chance to tell him about yesterday, about meeting the al-Husayns, or about the idea of a trip to the Tree of Life. He looked at Farid, and looked at her.

  ‘Can we help you?’

  ‘Euan, this is Farid,’ she said. ‘He is the son of one of our new neighbours. Farid, my husband, Euan.’

  ‘As-salaam alaykum.’

  ‘How d’you do?’

  ‘You have not learned Arabic?’

  ‘Pardon?’ Euan frowned slightly, then smoothed it away. ‘Ah. My wife puts me to shame.’

  There was a moment, then, when none of them spoke. Ruth swallowed. The air already tasted of the white heat of the day to come. ‘I had coffee with the al-Husayns last night,’ she began, feeling like a child caught out in a lie. ‘They offered to take us to see the Tree of Life today. I—’ She broke off, awkward. ‘I didn’t realise the offer was in earnest.’

  ‘Well,’ said Euan. ‘Well, that’s exceedingly kind of them. But—’

  ‘You are busy, we know,’ Farid interjected. ‘Your wife told us about your charity work. Perhaps we could arrange some other time, or perhaps’ – he paused – ‘perhaps your wife would like to go, anyway.’

  Euan looked at her.

  ‘This was arranged?’ His voice was level; too level. She could see a muscle pulsing in the corner of his jaw. He was trying to control his temper, to be reasonable.

  ‘Well, yes,’ she said. ‘I mean—’ She felt tongue-tied, flustered. ‘I’ve been wanting to see the Tree of Life since we first decided to come here, you know that, and I just happened to mention it, that’s all.’

  ‘I see,’ Euan said, and she knew he was preparing to make excuses on her behalf. He was not happy, she could see that, at the thought of her meeting people without him. But before he could begin to talk, Noor appeared, hurrying across the road towards them.

  ‘Good morning!’ she said, ‘Good morning, Mrs Armstrong, and you must be Mr Armstrong, I mean Reverend, it’s such a pleasure to meet you, it really is – will you be coming on the excursion with us, too?’ She rushed on, without waiting for an answer. ‘It was so kind of you to invite me along with you, I’m so excited about it. Baba says we should get going early, before the roads clog up. So I’m all ready, whenever you are.’

  Euan hesitated.

  Ruth could see him, fazed. Euan was rarely fazed. ‘Well, then,’ she said, ‘in that case we really should get going, shouldn’t we?’

  ‘And you’re bringing Anna?’ Euan said.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘I borrowed a child seat from my sister,’ Farid said, gesturing towards his car. It was a sleek silver Chevrolet Camaro that purred softly, its engine still running. ‘So it will be perfectly safe.’

  ‘Well, then,’ Euan said. ‘Ruth, a word?’

  ‘I’ll wait in the car,’ Noor said, ‘unless you need a hand with anything?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ Euan said, ‘thanks all the same.’

  They stepped back into the house.

  ‘You’re going?’ he said. ‘You’re going on a trip, with these strangers?’

  ‘They’re not strangers,’ she said. ‘I told you, I met them, last night. They’re our neighbours. It’s a trip to see the Tree of Life, Euan. What harm can there be in that? Of course I won’t’ – lowering her voice – ‘give anything away—’

  ‘Ruth—’

  ‘And besides, if I don’t go, I’ll just be stuck in here all day, while you’re out. And I can’t relax with the maids here, I can’t do anything, and there’s nowhere to go with Anna. And it’s not as if you were particularly keen on seeing the Tree of Life, in fact I seem to remember you laughing at me and calling me naive when I said I wanted to go there.’ She felt her voice rising. She had not known she was so angry, so worked up. She took a breath. ‘I want to go, Euan.’

  Euan looked at her, exhaled. ‘Fine,’ he said.

  ‘Fine?’ She had been steeling herself for an argument.

  ‘Fine,’ he repeated. ‘Go. Take some pictures for me. Now I have to get going. I’m late.’

  He turned and went into the bedroom. Ruth felt suddenly limp. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘OK. Then I will go.’

  *

  Two of the main highways out of Manama were shut due to accidents, so they took a circuitous route, driving east towards the Marina Corniche. Farid drove smoothly and carefully. Noor even teased him, at one point, for letting too many cars cut in front of him. He was being careful, Ruth realised, to show her that she and Anna were safe with him. They had talked last night of the dangers of driving in Bahrain. As they drew parallel to the Corniche, Farid slowed down even more, gestured with pride towards the vast expanse of the Gulf, glittering for miles in all directions. Ruth wound down her window to look: and after a minute or so, she found that she could no longer tell what was sea and what was sky, all was so white, so dazzling. The light in Bahrain was not crisp and bright and clear, as she had imagined. It was hazy and oblique, shifting and impenetrable. You could hardly see the sun for the dust clouds; just feel it pressing down on you.

  Farid was quiet as he drove. Noor played games with Anna in the back. Anna seemed happy, squealing with laughter. Ruth wound up the window, pressed her cheek against the cool glass, gazed out. Now they had left the Corniche and were heading south. Palm trees lined the road, short and squat, with ragged, bulbous trunks. The ground to the sides of the road was covered with dirty, whitish sand, scattered with dense, grey, tough-looking clumps of grass. The desert here looked morose and insipid, a wasteland between settlements. They drove. Ruth gazed at the sentinel palm trees, marking their rhythm like telegraph poles seen from a train. Then suddenly the road beneath them changed: it felt smoother and newer and the palm trees were little more than baby stumps, some still encased in hessian sacking, with shy green shoots where the fronds should be.

  ‘We are on the new road, now,’ he said, ‘the road to the Bahraini International Circuit. Formula One, you know? It will be finished by the end of this year. I would take you there, but there is not much to see, yet. It is better we go on to the Shajarat al-Hiya. It is not far, now.’

  ‘Not far?’ Ruth said, surprised. She had imagined it would take them hours to get there, right out into the middle of the desert.

  ‘No,’ Farid said. ‘Half an hour, maybe less.’

  They drove on. The new road ended, and they were back on the old. There were few other cars on the road. The landscape was becoming shabbier and dirtier by the minute. There were no more palm trees, just greying shrubs, most of which looked dead or dying. All along the roadside were piles of rubbish, old tyres and broken crates and bits of twisted, blackened metal; rusting tin cans and tatt
ers of bin-bags and faded plastic drums. Big brown pipes criss-crossed the wasteland: oil pipes that ran the length of Bahrain, all the way from the refineries in the south and under the sea to Saudi Arabia.

  ‘Can I ask you,’ Farid said suddenly, ‘why do you want to go to the Tree of Life?’

  Ruth looked at him; looked away, back out of the window. ‘I read about it in my guidebook,’ she said.

  That wasn’t entirely a lie, but it wasn’t true. Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the East, in Eden, the verses in Genesis went, and He put there the men that He had formed. And the Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground, trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters.

  She had studied the verses before they left for Bahrain. The first river was the Pishon, winding through the land of Havilah, where there is gold. The second was the Gihon, in the land of Cush. The third was the Tigris, running along the east of Asshur, and the fourth was the Euphrates. It was possible – just about possible – that all of those rivers had originated in Bahrain; that Bahrain was once Eden. The guidebook said this, and if you looked at a map (she had taken down her parents’ old Reader’s Digest atlas once more) you could trace the Tigris and the Euphrates (scholarship was divided, the guide said, on the Pishon and the Gihon) and see how they started in the Persian Gulf.

  Ruth was not a Bible literalist, and she was certainly not a Creationist – and you got plenty of those back home, tub-thumpers who gave Christianity a bad name, Euan said – but still, she knew, she just knew, that the Garden of Eden must have existed, once. Euan had laughed at her for this – that was when he called her naive; you’re so naive, Ruth, honestly – but for two days running she had left Anna with her mother and taken the bus into Belfast to go to the Central Library and study the books written by people who had tried to track down Eden. Some were archaeologists, some theologians; some, it seemed, just plain cranks. But all set out their theories with meticulous care, and evidence: maps, dates, forgotten scrolls, carved tablets. Some said Eden was in Iraq, others in Damascus, a few in Jerusalem. A book by a Latter-day Saint had even argued that Eden was located in modern-day Jackson, Missouri. But a substantial number maintained that Bahrain was the most likely setting for Eden. And the ancient acacia in the desert, the only tree for miles around, nourished by a secret underground spring too deep for the roots of other trees, was all that remained; a reminder of paradise.

  She had imagined the journey to the Tree of Life as a sort of pilgrimage: a long, bumpy drive through the desert, a beautiful desert, with mile upon mile of sand dunes like ripples of silk and a spice-scented sky. She had imagined arriving at dusk, and walking the last few hundred metres to the massive, gnarled old acacia – which even modern carbon-testing methods admitted to be thousands of years old. A living thing older than Christianity: it was almost inconceivable, a vital relic from another, mythical time. She had imagined the Tree would radiate a sense of this, an air of dignified benevolence – an acknowledgement of the memories of all the people, through the centuries – through the millennia – who had sought solace in its shade. Of Adam and Eve themselves, even, resting from the heat of the day. She had imagined lying against its rough, hoary trunk and feeling life flow into her, mysteriously, like the flow of water from the hidden spring so deep beneath the earth.

  She had imagined going with Euan, even when he laughed at the idea, of together feeling their Confirmation vows renewed. She had not imagined this journey, a short drive with two teenagers she barely knew – because Farid was a teenager, it had transpired; he looked older, in his thobe and gutra, but he was still nineteen, his twentieth birthday in a few weeks’ time – and she had not imagined arriving like this. The road to the Tree of Life ran so close that you could drive right up to it. Rusting pipes snaked across the scrubby earth, which was littered with tufts of spiky grass and clumps of gorse bush. To the left of the Tree, only a short distance away, was a massive used-car scrapyard with heaps of scorched metal and tyres piled forty or fifty high. About half a kilometre to the right was a big oil refinery eructing clouds of tarry black smoke. When Farid pulled up and they climbed from the car, Ruth saw that the grey ground was covered with bottle caps and crisp packets, Coke cans and beer bottles, the charred remains of makeshift campfires and shreds of plastic sheeting. The great Tree itself tilted to one side, apologetic, or ashamed, its heavy boughs drooping towards the earth, the branches on its right-hand side crawling almost abjectly along for several metres before making a half-hearted attempt at rising up and breaking into leaves. The low metal fence that surrounded the trunk offered scant protection from the gangs of teenagers who liked to come out here, Farid told her, to build fires and drink and smoke weed. The tree trunk and larger branches were covered with their graffiti: Roops, Moh & Paresh, 2000, Reem, 2001, 01/01/01 Yasmin, , Shami 4 Isa. Names, dates, banal obscenities, written in spray-paint or marker pen, scraped in biro, or hacked roughly with a penknife. The lower branches were mutilated, stripped bare where people had snapped off twigs as souvenirs.

  She walked around the Tree two or three times, slowly. Noor had unbuckled Anna and was squatting down with her and drawing patterns with a stick in the dirt. Farid was leaning against the car, smoking. It was almost midday, now, and the sun was at its highest. The light had a glassy sound, as if it shrieked faintly as it shimmered. She felt hollowed out, as if someone had taken a blunt instrument and gouged out her insides. A gourd, the goodness gone, left to dry in the sun.

  It was meaningless. She knew that, now. All she had, all she was, it was meaningless, chasing after the wind. Man’s fate truly was like that of the animals, the same fate awaited them both. As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; man has no advantage over the animal. All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return.

  Her vision was blurring; dizzy, she bent forwards.

  ‘Ruth?’ Farid was behind her, beside her. She tried to speak; she could not speak. She felt tears prickle her eyes, and before she could do anything, stop them, blink them back, they were spilling out and down her cheeks, more and more of them, rivers of tears.

  ‘Ruth …’ Farid’s voice was coming from very far away. His hand was on her back, stroking, moving in firm circles, as she might do to Anna. ‘Ruth, humdillah, what is it, what is it?’

  She straightened up, lacunae still pulsing at the edges of her vision. ‘I thought I’d find something,’ she found herself saying, ‘I know it’s ridiculous because the Bible isn’t literally true, I mean not even Euan’ – another sob – ‘and it’s not that, it’s just, it’s just’ – her voice began to break down on her again – ‘I thought if I could see where things started, if I could—’ and she stopped, dissolved into tears.

  Farid had hold of her shoulders, was using the sleeves of his robe to wipe her cheeks. Then all of a sudden she was embracing him, falling against him, into him, clinging, as if once she let go she would plummet.

  And Noor was there, too, she could hear her, but she couldn’t stop crying, she couldn’t stop crying.

  10

  When Farid left her back home that afternoon, Noor rushed straight down to her cellar, not even bothering with her usual precautions. Sampaguita called out a welcome, but Noor did not bother to reply, or to go into the kitchen to see what was cooking. That morning, Sampaguita had arrived with a package of cold, glistening rockfish, fresh from the early market, with which to make lapu-lapu. Lapu-lapu was practically a Filipino national dish and there were as many varieties as there were Philippine islands. Sampaguita sometimes fried the fish whole and served them escabeche with a sticky pineapple sauce – that was Noor’s favourite – but other times she would steam them with slivered carrots and noodles or wrap them in banana leaves and bake them. She had also promised to make crema de fruta for pudding and
that was a favourite of Noor’s, too: the sponge fingers soaked in tins of Del Monte fruit cocktail and layered with sweet, chilled eggy custard, dolloped on top with glossy, gelatinous beaten cream. Noor could eat bowl after bowl of that.

  But even though it was long gone lunchtime, Noor was not hungry: she did not care if the lapu-lapu was cooked escabeche or if there was a whole basin of crema de fruta waiting for her. She galloped downstairs, almost yanking the light cord from the ceiling in her haste, and pulled her diary from its hiding place to start describing the day.

  She wrote pages and pages. She wrote until her hand was seized with splintering cramps, and still she was impatient to write more. She wrote, again, of how kind Ruth Armstrong had been inviting her on the trip, and she wrote of how adorable little Anna was, burbling and chattering away for most of the journey, happy to play endless games of peekaboo and This Little Piggy, shouting with joyful laughter every time Noor popped out from between her hands or got to ‘all the way … home!’ and tickled her soft, squashy little tummy, as if it was the best game in the world. ‘You’re good with her,’ Ruth had turned and said at one point, and Noor copied this down, reverently. I’m good with her. She wrote of how disappointed Ruth had been when they reached the Tree of Life – and how she, Noor, could have saved her disappointment. The Tree of Life, although Noor had never actually been there herself, was where all the young Bahrainis went to drink and smoke spliffs and make out. The running joke was that it was called ‘the tree of life’ because so much sperm was spilt at its roots. She wrote of how Ruth had started crying – crying – at the Tree. She, Noor, had wandered off with Anna, and had been completely shocked to turn back and see Ruth doubled over against Farid. She had run back then, for a brief, horrible moment thinking they were kissing or embracing, but when she got close, she could see that Ruth was sobbing and Farid was trying to calm her down. She, too, had tried to help, touching an awkward hand to Ruth’s back. And then they got back in the car, and came home. She had been disappointed at that: had imagined that they might go for lunch somewhere – Hardee’s or Applebee’s or one of the food courts at the malls – but Ruth had just said to Farid, Please take me home.