The Meeting Point

by Lucy Caldwell

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ruth said. The prospect of the day suddenly stretched in front of her, endless, trapped inside with the maids and Noor’s chatter and a fractious Anna. She looked at Farid. He was so young, after all, and she was married. They were safely divided. There could not be any harm in it.

  ‘I think I would like to go,’ she decided aloud.

  ‘You want to go?’ Noor said. ‘But you can’t take Anna, not to the museum. She’ll cry, and be bored. There’s nothing for babies to do there.’

  ‘Perhaps you could stay with Anna,’ Farid said. ‘Perhaps you could look after her, for the two, three hours it will take.’

  Noor turned to Ruth, startled. Her eyes were round behind her glasses. ‘Me look after her? Alone?’

  ‘It would be better,’ Farid said. ‘She is right, Mrs Armstrong, about the museum being no place for babies. We can take her another afternoon, if you like, all of us, to a play-park or the gardens at Al-Areen. That will be better for her than coming with us, this morning.’

  Ruth looked from him to Noor.

  ‘Would you be all right?’ she said to Noor. ‘She’ll have a nap, mid-morning, so there won’t be much for you to do. If she’s hungry, there’s plenty of fruit in the kitchen, and rice cakes in the cupboard.’

  She realised as she was saying it that she wanted to go.

  ‘You’d trust me?’ Noor said. ‘You’d trust me to look after Anna?’ Her voice wavered with surprise, the hard edge gone from it.

  ‘Of course,’ Ruth said. ‘Sure you’ve been great with her, these past few days. She likes you. You’ll be grand.’

  ‘She likes me,’ Noor repeated. ‘You know, I think she does. I really think she does.’

  ‘Of course she does. And you’ll be grand. I’ll give you my number, and you’ve got your cousin’s. And the maids are here—’

  ‘And Sampaguita’s there, too,’ Noor burst in. ‘She used to look after Baba, when he was a boy. And I know first aid, we did it in school.’

  ‘Well then,’ Farid said in his velvet-accented English. ‘It seems, inshallah, we are settled.’

  ‘I’ll pay you, of course,’ Ruth said to Noor. ‘I’ll get some money out and—’

  ‘Oh, no!’ Noor interrupted. ‘You don’t need to pay me, Ruth! It would be a pleasure to look after Anna, honestly it would. You really don’t need to pay me.’

  And that was it: it was done. Ruth changed her shirt and trousers and buckled her stiff new sandals, washed her face and combed her hair, kissed Anna – who miraculously did not cry, or cling – and climbed into the car with Farid.

  *

  They turned out of the compound, and joined the slip road to the highway. She thanked him for the scarf – is it a scarf, or a wall hanging? she asked, and he just shrugged and said it was whatever she wanted it to be – and realised she had little else to say to him. He seemed equally nervous: his eyes were hidden behind his reflective sunglasses, but his Adam’s apple kept bobbing, as if he was swallowing, or silently clearing his throat. She was relieved when he turned on the radio. She was more self-conscious than she could remember being, ever: of her feet prim and flat on the floor, her hands sweating in her lap, the slight bulge of her stomach over the waistband of her jeans, how loud the noise was when she swallowed. The radio was playing the new Christina Aguilera hit, ‘Dirrty’. It made her hot with embarrassment. She knew the song. Sometimes, when Euan was out, she turned on the radio for company; tuned it in to pop stations and danced along with Anna. He could not bear music of any kind as he worked, not even classical. If he turned the radio on in the evenings, it was to classical or current affairs stations. He had spent a whole sermon, once, talking about how debasing modern pop videos were, with their spray-on clothes and sexual moves and stripping. After that she was ashamed to tell him that she watched the music videos, sometimes, and could sing along to those songs. She felt a ripple of giggles rising in her throat and tried to keep it down, disguising it with a cough. She felt Farid looking at her and she tried to think of something to say, but her mind was a racing blank and her tongue had thickened to take up the whole of her mouth. Her legs were tight in her jeans. They were a stiff, new pair, bought specially – for camping in the desert, she’d thought, Jeep rides into the sunset. She could feel every seam, every stitch, against the inside of her thighs. The central seam pressed into her crotch; she was pulsing, almost itching. She shifted in her seat to try to release the pressure as the song came to its tacky, glistening, provocative end, and tried to banish such thoughts – such physical thoughts – from her mind.

  *

  The Bahrain National Museum was on the Al-Fatih highway west of Manama, overlooking the Gulf. It was an impressive complex: sprawling, monumental exhibition halls and wide, open plazas; glossy marble floors and inscribed marble walls, everything hewn from the same sumptuous pale stone. Farid bought their tickets from a desk in the cavernous foyer and they joined a group of jostling schoolchildren filing through to the main display: a history of Bahrain from 6,000 BC to the present. It was a relief to have something to do, something to concentrate on. They followed the school party up and down the aisles. They saw cases of skulls and reconstructions of ancient burial chambers, the skeletons buried on their right-hand sides, curled in the foetal position, with pots of water and jars of spices at their heads to help them on their journey through the afterlife. They saw large urns holding children’s bones and archaeologists’ representations of graves from later civilisations, built together like the cells of a beehive. They saw ancient clay tablets from Mesopotamia, inscribed with blessings and curses, verses from the Sumerian epics of Gilgamesh and Lugulbanda in a pre-cuneiform script. Ruth dutifully read the translations: Tears, lament, anguish, and depression are within me. Heart-sickness overwhelms me. Evil fate overcomes me. Malignant sickness overburdens me.

  ‘Not exactly happy-chappies, are they, these Sumerians?’ she tried. It was a poor attempt at a joke: the first time either of them had spoken. Her voice echoed against the cold, blank walls.

  ‘Pardon?’ Farid looked startled.

  ‘I just said—’ She felt foolish now. ‘It’s all so – melancholy.’

  ‘The Sumerians were not an optimistic people. They believed that once your life is over, you wander as a ghost, a gidim, in a damp, unlit underworld, for ever.’

  Ruth looked at him, his face sharp and shadowed in the thin artificial light of the windowless hall, and swallowed the urge to laugh, or weep. What on earth – she said the words aloud in her brain, almost like a prayer – what on earth was she doing here? She imagined telling Anna, one day. You won’t remember, pet, but one time when you were little, we spent a few months in Bahrain, in the Middle East, and I left you to go around a museum with an awkward Arab teenager, and it was the most daring thing I had ever done.

  She stared at the bones in the pot in front of her, bubbled like honeycomb. Her head hummed with emptiness. She blinked, caught her own reflection in the glass. She shivered. The conditioned air was dry and chilly and gooseflesh was rising rough on her forearms. The schoolchildren had left the hall now: save for an attendant or two lurking in the shadows, she and Farid were the only people there. She suddenly remembered a story she had read, or been read, a long time ago: a young boy left behind in a museum after dark and the exhibits coming to life. The half-shattered Sumerian skulls in the backlit case gaped at her. She rubbed her arms briskly and followed Farid on to the final aisle.

  ‘This one,’ he was calling, ‘this one is happier. This is what I wanted to show you.’

  These plaques showed artists’ impressions of a land called Dilmun, place of eternal youth and happiness. There were more clay tablets, elaborately inscribed: Utnapishtim, whom they call the Faraway, has entered the assembly of the gods, ran the translation, and What is this sleep which holds you now? You are lost in the dark and cannot hear me. Gilgamesh, Farid read aloud, mourning his comrade Enkidu, journeyed through the desert and the grasslands to beseech Utnapishti
m-the-Faraway in the land of Dilmun, eastward of the mountains, garden of the sun, the place of everlasting life. But although he passed through the trials of fire and water and won the rose that restores eternal life, he was tricked by a serpent bathing deep in a pool, who sensed the sweetness of the flower and snatched it from his hands. Was it for this that I toiled with my hands, Farid recited, Is it for this I have wrung out my heart? And Gilgamesh went back to his people and the land of the dead and dying, grown frail with the knowledge of mortality.

  ‘Look,’ Farid said, pointing to the final tablet in the display. Ruth stooped and read, shielding her eyes against the glare of the spotlights.

  Though he was strong of arm, he will not rise again;

  He had wisdom and a comely face, he will not come again;

  He is gone into the mountain, he will not come again.

  The words sent a rush of something uncomfortable, a tremor, intimations of mortality, through the whole of her body.

  ‘You said this one’s happier?’ she said – a stupid, clumsy, meaningless thing to say, for the sake of saying something.

  Farid was staring at her eagerly, as if she should understand. ‘It’s Bahrain,’ he said. ‘Dilmun is Bahrain. Dilmun is our ancient name, you see. The land of paradise and eternal life. Look.’ He turned to the display cabinet, and read aloud the translation of one of the stone tablets.

  ‘The land of Dilmun is holy, the land of Dilmun is pure.

  ‘In Dilmun the raven does not croak, the lion does not kill.

  ‘No one says, “My eyes are sick, my head is sick”.

  ‘No one says, “I am an old man, I am an old woman”.

  ‘You see? Dilmun is paradise. Your Eden. It did exist, once. It existed here – this was it. You are in it right now. The most sacred place in all Arabia – in all the mythologies. That’s why there are so many graves – I will show you, later, some of the graves. People rowed here from the bigger islands and from the mainland to bury their dead, to send them on their way to the afterlife. And the Shajarat is there to guide them, to mark the place of entry.’

  He was close enough that she could smell his breath: warm, and slightly sharp, unfamiliar. She felt the breath stop in her lungs, and her heart was thumping.

  ‘It existed once,’ he said. ‘You weren’t wrong, you weren’t mistaken. Once, it existed, and this is the proof.’

  That day, when they returned to the compound from the Tree of Life, Noor had rushed inside; but the two of them (and Anna sleeping in the back) had stayed in the car for half, three-quarters, almost an hour: until Anna woke up and began to cry and Ruth had to go in. She had been seized with a peculiar dread of the airless, sunless house, of being inside there, shut away, a body buried before it has grown old. It was irrational, she knew, hysterical, but she could not bear to go back in, not yet. And so Farid (how odd he must have thought her, she thought only later) had sat with her.

  She stared at him. Neither of them moved.

  A new party of schoolchildren came clattering into the hall and Farid smiled, not the curved, superior smile he had smiled the first time they met, but a soft, tentative smile with his eyes.

  And then he turned away, the moment was over, and they walked quickly through the rest of the exhibits. The upper hall was devoted to modern Bahrain, waxworks of women in traditional dress grinding herbs, weighing spices, crouched cooking over pits of fire. Photographs of thobed men and camels, of pearl-divers, a reconstruction of the inside of a basket-weaver’s house. They flitted around, overtaking the first group of children, who were sketching baskets and copying down inscriptions. And Ruth felt giddy, unreal, her feet light and her head ringing.

  *

  Out of the museum and into the bright light: the marble of the plaza reflecting the sky, reflecting the sea, the world whited out. Sharp edges and sheering façades, knife-edged sculptures of sails and sharks’ fins dazzling in the sunlight, the sealight. They walk to the edge of the waters, right up to where the Gulf begins, a zinc sheet sliding against the marble slabs, and the slippery, dizzy feeling grows: shimmering possibility, insubstantiality. They are standing side by side, looking out across the waters, out into the sun. She feels laughter rising, and this time she lets it out. Farid looks at her for a moment, and then he starts laughing too, and she thinks that neither of them knows what they are laughing about and she doesn’t care and it doesn’t matter. She has not brought sunglasses, and she cannot see his eyes behind his, so she reaches out and tugs them down, off. She does it without thinking, and as she does so a jolt runs through her. It is the closest either of them has come to touching the other and it suddenly seems too much, too intimate, to have pulled his sunglasses from his face. She holds them out to him, sober now, and he takes them back, carefully, his fingers on the opposite arm, not meeting hers. He folds them and places them in a pocket, and they stand for a moment, facing each other.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, ‘I—’

  ‘No,’ he says, ‘don’t be sorry.’ But she is awkward now, and it is almost lunchtime, and Anna – and so they go back to the car.

  *

  On the way back, he stops by a dusty roadside stall and buys a pomegranate. Its skin is glossy and unblemished, perfect, a Christmas bauble. He gives it to her to hold. It is surprisingly heavy, dense, its skin taut as a drum. When she taps it, she can feel it quiver. Back at the compound, the maids have gone and Anna is sleepy, lying placid in Noor’s lap. It is a relief to see them again, to see that nothing has happened to them. She has been gone only a couple of hours, she reminds herself, although it feels as if she is arriving back from years away. In the kitchen, over a bowl of cold water, Farid shows her how to score the skin of the pomegranate with a knife, then twist and split it into two halves. The scarlet juice, brighter than blood, beads across the worktop and flecks Ruth’s face where she is leaning in to see. Farid laughs and wipes his own face, spattered too. She touches her tongue tip to the back of her hand; the sourness of it glisters. Farid submerges the fruit in water for a few minutes, then lifts it out and begins peeling back skins of white membrane, twisting and pushing out clusters of seeds – the arils, he calls them – onto a plate. The seeds are like jewels, heaped rubies on the plate. They eat them standing, with teaspoons. The taste of them is glassy, astringent. They are like nothing Ruth has ever tasted before. Pomegranates are used a lot in Persian food, Farid tells her. His mother was from Iran – was, he says; she died when he was young. She fled her homeland with the Revolution, and could never go back. She taught them Persian stories, and cooked them Persian food. Pomegranates featured heavily: stewed with dried plums and lamb, or boiled to a syrup and drizzled in sauces. And in the Qur’an, too, he says, the sixty-eighth verse of the fifty-fifth sura speaks of paradise: In it are fruit, the date palm and pomegranates.

  Later that evening, when Euan sees the remaining seeds in the fridge, he tosses her a fact. Did you know, he says, that there’s a mistranslation in the Bible: it was a pomegranate Eve gave Adam, not an apple? The word comes from the same root, the Latin pomum, for apple, but they are completely different things.

  She feels her blood slow when he says that. He picks at a seed with his finger and thumb; presses it until it bursts then licks the pulp up. He does not ask her where the fruit came from, and now that he has talked of Adam and Eve, of knowledge and betrayal, she does not tell him.

  4

  Noor woke late on Saturday. She had gone to bed jittery with hunger, unable to sleep, her stomach gnarled and her mind racing. When she did sleep, her dreams twisted and swirled, like winds whipping round the centre of a hurricane. When morning finally came – the sharp slice of light through the slitted window – she felt sluggish and heavy. Her mouth tasted foul and she had a pounding headache. She lay in the tangled, damp sheets until she summoned the energy to haul herself out of bed and into the bathroom, where she peeled off her nightdress and stared at herself in the mirror with loathing. It was time to confront herself full-on: it was time fo
r a change. She pinched rolls from her stomach, slapped the wobble of her arms, clambered up on the toilet seat in order to scrutinise her thighs from behind. Close up, her skin looked ashy and her teeth and tongue were coated in some sort of dry fur. She stood in the shower tray and scourged her skin from toes to fingertips with a bristled kitchen scourer – she did not have a loofah or a body brush, as beauty magazines advised – and then had a cold shower to try to wake herself up. It worked, to an extent: the freezing water felt like needles driving into her skin and she whimpered aloud, but she left the bathroom feeling clearer-headed, with her skin tingling. One or two of the recent practice cuts on her inner arm had reopened with the brushing, and they smarted. She tried to ignore them. In the kitchen, she boiled the kettle and made herself a cup of strong black tea, mashing the colour and the caffeine out of the tea bag with the back of a spoon. No milk, because the only carton in the fridge was full-fat, so she hacked off a wedge of lemon to combat the tongue-curling tannins. Sampaguita was in the utility room, sorting out the washing. She heard Noor and came clucking into the kitchen, flapping her hands and muttering hissing bursts of Tagalog. She took Noor’s chin in her hand, tilted it upwards, clicked and fluted some more. She filled a cereal bowl with honey-nut cornflakes, glugged milk over, stuck a spoon in and shoved it pointedly towards Noor, then stood there, beady-eyed, hands on her hips. Noor started to protest. But that only prompted another shrill string of invective, and she was too tired to resist. She took up the spoon and dipped it into the flakes, lifted it up and dribbled the milk back out. Another barrage.

  ‘All right, all right,’ she muttered. ‘Keep your hair on.’

  Sampaguita frowned, and took a step closer, not catching the words, but understanding.

  ‘Noor!’ she said. Noh. ‘Noor-miss!’