*
Noor stopped then, and frowned, rereading her narrative, wondering what was missing. She had put in everything that had happened, as detailed and accurately as she could, but still it did not feel right – did not feel complete.
*
She sighed. Then she took up her pen again and scribbled one last postscript to the day’s entry.
The Diary of Noor Hussain
If it was me she’d come to convert I’d convert immediately. Or maybe I’d wait a while and act puzzled like my soul was in tumult and turmoil so that she’d kneel down and pray with me and maybe if I had a fever she’d (like they do in books) touch her cool fingers to my forehead.
Noor stopped, suddenly hot. She quickly closed and hid her diary and went upstairs.
III
1
These are the dust days. It is the time of change and instability known as the sarrayat, when the cooler days turn hot again. A simmering wind – a suahili, perhaps, coming from the deserts of Arabia, or perhaps the tail of an early simoom, that hot, dry, suffocating wind that scoops whole sand dunes from the desert floor and whirls them along for miles, reshaping the entire landscape through which it passes – whips the sand into four-foot demons that swirl along the streets like miniature, malevolent dervishes. This year the sarrayat has come earlier than usual. People say it is caused by the world’s climate changing. People say it is a symptom of the political restlessness in the air, of nations blustering and waging war. People stay indoors, wear stones to ward off the Evil Eye. When they have to go out, they cover their eyes and mouths and noses, in case the demons get in.
The villa is constantly dusty, never mind that the maids sweep and mop it every day they are there, and Ruth the days between. It blows in even though the doors are kept closed, and their gaps stopped with damp, rolled-up sheets. It blows in even though there are no windows. Through the vents of the air-conditioning unit, through the cracks in the walls, she does not know how it gets in, but it gets in, and will not be cleaned away.
The days are long and the nights are longer; warped, elastic hours thick with the crackling pressure in the air. Ruth has strange, fitful dreams; dreams which, upon waking, she cannot put into sentences. The dreams do not have narratives; they are wordless dreams of pure distress and fear. She wakes shaking, sweating, gripped by nameless, nebulous dreads. Euan reassures her, time and again, it is simply the change of year. They must get the air-conditioning unit seen to, so it does not rattle so much. Its wheeze and clatter is probably what is waking her up, is seeping into her dreams. He spoons his body against hers and says the weather will settle and sleep will come again. She shakes him off: her legs are twitchy and her skin is tight and she cannot bear to be touched. Daybreak, when it comes, is a watery grey light that hurts her eyes.
She has not told him the real reasons for her restiveness. She has heard him talk before to people whose faith is shaken, many times; she knows what he will say. He will start by reassuring: even the apostles doubted, and begged Jesus to increase their faith, time and time again: they who had seen the miracles, who had seen the healing of the sick and raising of the dead, the walking on water and the armful of loaves that fed the five thousand. Even they doubted. Even Peter, walking on the water, lost heart and began to sink, afraid of the winds, afraid of the impossibility of what he was doing. And Thomas, at the Resurrection: Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, he says to the others, I will not believe. And Jesus says to him, Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed. Faith, like the parable of the talents, can be increased; like the parable of the seeds sown on rocky ground, it needs care and cultivation, nurturing and protection. And faith without deeds is dead. She must pray, he will say; she must spend extra time reading the Bible. She must take a Sunday school, or lead a Bible study group; apply her faith, enact it, live it. He will end with Paul’s words to Timothy: Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called when you made your good confession in the presence of many witnesses. And he will pray with her, using the words of the young boy’s father in Mark: I do believe: help me overcome my disbelief! She knows this. She has seen him do it before. She has seen those who have wavered, strengthened. But she fears, deep down, that it is no use. And yet she lacks the words, or the ways, to explain this to Euan.
*
She has failed him. She knows this. And he is disappointed in her. He is disappointed with her reaction, which he considers an overreaction. He is disappointed that she is not the strength and support, the help-meet, that he had thought she’d be.
She met him when she was fourteen; he, at twenty-one, was seven years her senior. He was newly graduated in law, and had turned down numerous career opportunities, including one offer of a pupillage, in order to come back to Kircubbin to volunteer for the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, work on an anti-drugs programme for teenagers and take an outreach group at church. Ruth’s mother reported over dinner one night that the Armstrongs were bitterly disappointed. She did not know the family; the Armstrongs were not churchgoers. But Armstrong Senior was head of the Rotary Club and drove a BMW with tinted windows; everyone knew who he was. He had high hopes for his son, she said; when the son came back to Kircubbin there had been a big confrontation; the father had demanded back the money spent on the university education and the son had walked out of the house and not come home for two days and nights. There was a picture in the local paper, a grainy, grinning curly-haired young man leaning awkwardly over a stile with the waters of the lough behind him, the headline ‘No Place Like Home’. Ruth had kept an eye out for him after that, every Sunday scanning the heads in the rows in front and glancing round when they were required to stand until she found him: a glimpse of red hair, a flash of bright blue shirt. But it was idle curiosity, no more. She was a fourteen-year-old who had not even taken her GCSEs; law graduates who had been featured in the Herald belonged to another orbit.
That summer she joined the youth group, which met every Sunday evening for Bible study and quite often on Saturday nights, too, for barbecues or trips to the Ice Bowl or the bowling alley. Once they went to a rally to hear a famous American evangelist speak; another time to an open-air Christian rock concert where it bucketed down with rain and there was a very unchristian scrambling for the last remaining cagoules. Euan Armstrong was friends with Andy and Sarah, the group leaders, and he often joined them on Saturday night excursions. He had a girlfriend from Dublin that summer, who had an unpronounceable name and glossy, expensive-looking dark hair. The four of them were the celebrities of the youth group, the idols, and they knew it. The younger teenagers would cluster round, competing to be the one to make a funny remark or to be chosen to lead prayers, to give the best interpretation of a Bible passage or to have adjacent seats in the minibus. Like any of the rest of them, Ruth mumbled and turned scarlet when Euan called on her to give her opinion; could not believe he knew her name, let alone was soliciting her ideas.
At the end of the summer, Andy left for England, and Euan took over as group leader. Now that the holidays were over, there were fewer excursions and parties: Saturday nights became trips to the cinema or table-tennis tournaments in the church hall, and fewer people attended. The Dublin girlfriend came less frequently; finally, she was not seen for four Sundays in a row and the rumour went around that they had broken up because she would not have sex with him – or was it the other way round? There were red faces and poorly suppressed giggles during the subsequent session’s discussion of 1 Corinthians 7 and Paul’s teachings on chastity. Ruth turned fifteen, joined the Young Farmers’ Association, which met on a Saturday afternoon, and twice in a row she went away on outdoor pursuits weekends. A third weekend she had a bad cold, and a fourth one of the cows broke a leg and she waited with her father while the vet was called. The following Saturday afternoon she was helping her father fix a broke
n fence on the far boundary of the farm when her mother came through on the CB radio saying she had a visitor at the house. She ran back through the frosted fields, the crusted earth black and bare underfoot, the sun a low red lozenge in the sky, and arrived at the farmhouse flushed and breathless, Rosie barking beside her, delighted at the sudden chase. Euan Armstrong was sitting at the big wooden table with her mother, laughing, drinking a chipped mug of tea. He stood up when she came in, and waited while she prised off each of her wellies with the heel of the other, tossing them into the hallway. Then he took her hand and greeted her formally – because apart from the odd group discussion, they had never had a proper conversation before, just the two of them. Ruth’s mother freshened the tea and brought out the leftovers of a Victoria sponge and said she’d leave them to it, bustled off to another part of the house on some pretext or other. Ruth felt acutely self-conscious. Her fork scraped against the plate and the wet noise of her swallow was claggy, too loud. But Euan Armstrong chatted away, seemingly oblivious, about how beautiful the farm looked, about how he liked the November weather, bleak as it could be, about what a lovely dog Rosie was. Rosie, lolling at Ruth’s feet, twitched her ears and barked at the mention of her name: they both laughed, Ruth relaxed a bit. The conversation turned to youth group and Sunday Bible study, about what Ruth had missed over the past month. And then Euan asked, gently, if there was a particular reason Ruth had stopped coming. I haven’t stopped coming, she tried to say, it’s not like that, but the words were thick and dry as cake crumbs in her mouth. It was hard, Euan said, to stay true to a Christian lifestyle and the demands it made of you, especially at the age Ruth now was, when other things – parties, alcohol, even drugs – suddenly became temptations. He reminded her about the Sermon on the Mount, and especially Matthew 13–14, the small road and narrow gate that leads to heaven and the broad road and wide gate that leads to hell. His eyes were wide and blue and utterly sincere, urgently fixed on hers. She felt a shiver of dizziness, a flutter in her stomach; she felt her mouth grow dry. When he had finished talking, Euan sat back and looked at her, his eyes grave, and she knew she would not miss another youth group session, no matter what else she had to sacrifice for it. He had brought her a small, leatherette-bound Gospel of Matthew. She took it and stroked the cover, her fingers clammy, and that night she slept with it under her pillow.
She was disappointed, the following week, to discover that she was not the only one Euan Armstrong had visited. He had been to the houses of five youth group members whose attendance had been shaky lately: and all but one of them returned the following Saturday and Sunday, and Saturdays and Sundays after that. Sometimes, Euan would give Ruth and a couple of others a lift to and from town. Her father’s farm was furthest out, so he would drop her off last, and come in for tea and toast. He loved the farm kitchen, the old-fashioned larder, the rows of boots and Barbours, the cats curled up beside the Aga, the massive oak dresser and the milk jugs of bluebells, or tulips, or sweet peas, or whatever wild flowers Ruth had gathered from the fallow fields. To Ruth, the farmhouse was chaotic and shabby. But Euan loved to sit with her mother, and sometimes her father, eating slices of toasted barmbrack and last year’s gooseberry jam, talking about the farm, the town, the world. That was always one of his strengths: he could talk to anyone about anything, and it was never forced or sycophantic because he genuinely liked people and was interested in what they had to say.
Ruth turned sixteen, seventeen. She started to help out with Sunday school, and sometimes they went for hot chocolate afterwards, or a walk down the high street and along the harbour. But it was nothing more than friendship. He had girlfriends from time to time, she knew that, though he rarely talked about them. Ruth dated a couple of boys from school, nothing serious, trips to the cinema or to pubs that turned a blind eye to under-age drinkers, drives up to Scrabo Tower or down the coast to Portaferry, or maybe to Belfast and back. None of the boys lasted more than a few dates. She turned eighteen, and Euan gave her a pretty necklace – an enamel flower on a silver chain. She had a birthday party in one of the old barns, hired a DJ and set up trestle tables with barrels of beer and soft drinks. She invited people from church, Young Farmers, friends from school. Euan came, brought a bottle of champagne. She wondered if he might kiss her. But he did not.
She scraped through her A levels, getting grades just good enough to secure her place at Greenmount Agricultural College. That summer, she was the female leader at the church’s summer camp: she and Euan took the teenagers abseiling and bouldering, rock-climbing and orienteering, sang songs and led praise groups in the evenings. Euan told her, one evening, that he thought he might have a calling. They talked about it, long into the night. People think God comes in a flash of light or a bush bursting into flames, Euan said, but it is not like that at all. He is the quiet, almost inaudible voice that you cannot quite ignore, the growing conviction that this, and only this, is the right and only way. She could not breathe when he said that; felt her skin tingling. She was the first, the only, person he had told.
On the drive back home, they detoured, down the length of the peninsula and across on the Strangford ferry to Castleward, all the way up the coast on the other side, past Killyleagh and Ringdufferin, the Sketrick Isles and the old monastery at Greyabbey. They drove mostly in silence. And then they pulled in to a little secluded bay and kissed for the first time, and Euan said he loved her, and she said she would always support him, help him; trust with him, hope with him, persevere.
*
Anjali and Trudy drop by, sometimes two or three times a day, but Ruth is cagey with them; they ask too many questions about her husband and their church, her faith. Anjali perches on the ugly divan, smooths invisible (or imaginary) creases from her immaculate sari and tells Ruth about the Evil Eye, about portents and omens. She explains that in India, the Evil Eye is called drishti or nazar. In order to reverse it, you must burn a holy flame on a plate in front of the afflicted person’s face; that flame will absorb the effects of drishti and when it is extinguished, so too will the power of evil be extinguished. In Arabic, you say mash’Allah to ward off evil. She makes Ruth practise it: Mash’Allah. She catches a wriggling Anna in her plump arms and tells Ruth to draw a spot of kohl pencil on Anna’s cheeks or forehead, an imperfection that will keep her safe, as the Evil Eye is attracted to whatever is good or new or perfect. Because the winds of the sarrayat, Anjali stresses, are inauspicious. Also inauspicious are a sparkle without smoke, bones, a snake, broken utensils, buttermilk, raw sugar. When Ruth asks her how she cooks, if raw sugar is unlucky, she laughs and says that until the sarrayat is passed, she uses honey and molasses.
Trudy makes fun of Anjali, and her superstitions. Trudy and her husband attend the NEC, the American evangelical church in Bahrain – and they believe, she brags to Ruth, in Intelligent Design; that the world was created six thousand years ago and the Devil plants fossils to throw us off course and test our faith.
Our faith: she speaks as if they share a kindred spirit.
Trudy talks a lot about the NEC, presuming it is what Ruth wants to talk about, too. It is the source of the most recent scandal in the expat world. The pastor – a hale, vigorous man in his late sixties, tough leathery skin and piercing blue eyes, a shock of white hair like an Old Testament prophet, a staunch Baptist and Vietnam veteran – is preaching the righteousness of holy crusades. He talks in parables, of course. He tells the Old Testament stories of Moses and the Egyptians, of how Moses’s triumph gave the Israelites faith in God for evermore. When I defeat them, the Egyptians will know that I am the Lord. But everyone knows what he really means. Saddam Hussein has been given a deadline by which to comply with the UN weapons inspectors, just a few days away, now, and if he fails, war will be declared. What the pastor is doing is tantamount to warmongering: it is enough to have him thrown into prison, or expelled from the Kingdom, if the Bahraini authorities get wind of it. A few kilometres across the water, in Saudi Arabia or in Qatar, it would be eno
ugh to have him executed. Trudy clutches her knees to her chest as she tells Ruth this, her eyes wide and delighted with the danger of it all. Ruth feels sick. She is uncomfortable with Trudy, as uncomfortable as she is with Anjali. She takes to pretending that she is not in when either of them calls round: she sits in the central room and does not answer the knocks at the door.
The edges of her world contract. Where once she felt wonder at the thought of existence – of the fact that we, that anything, exists – now she feels a sort of vertigo.
Noor comes over, and Ruth is relieved to have her: she seems happy to sit in the living room all afternoon and sing nursery rhymes or read story books to Anna, things that Ruth has lost the energy for. One day she comes over flapping a piece of paper and gabbling breathlessly: she has remembered that when she was little, an au pair once baked her play-dough; she has found a recipe online, all it needs is flour, salt, boiling water or vegetable oil, and colouring. They mix up play-dough for Anna, colouring it with the dyes Noor has brought from home: red, yellow, blue, green. Anna is delighted with the new game. They mould it into building bricks and stack towers for her to knock down, they make a green snake with red eyes, they make bananas and tomatoes and apples and pretend to have a fruit stall. Ruth feels sorry for Noor, so plump and awkward, so easy to please.
*
She sees nothing of Farid. She waits for Noor to mention him, to mention the life tree, but Noor does not. Ruth does not bring it, or him, up herself. She is embarrassed of how she broke down crying – and in his arms, a teenager, a stranger. She half hopes never to see him again, but yet the moment plays and replays in her head; the way he held her; what it felt to let herself go, completely.
The Meeting Point Page 9