He had been embarrassed as he handed the folded sheet of paper to her, and she had not known what to say, either. She had read the parables – for that is what they surely were – twice, three times, then folded the page up and hidden it in her phrase book. When she thinks through the parables now, what she decides they are saying is: there are no gods but the gods we create, the gods formed out of the stuff of need, or fear, or wonder. Or: there is nothing more than what we do, here, in this life, on this earth. There is no heaven, no paradise, only this, here, now.
She cannot decide if this is a liberating or a terrifying thought. All she feels is an engulfing sense of loss, the meaninglessness of all things, now that the meaning has been stripped from them.
*
He called for her again on Sunday afternoon. She was ready this time. She had changed out of her church clothes, plaited her hair back, rubbed some cream blusher into her cheeks. Noor was there, too – she had come back with Ruth after church, wanting to talk about the sermon, and what it meant. Euan had given the sermon this week, and Ruth had found it contradictory and overzealous. It was one of his set pieces about the life of Jesus, the baby born to a peasant girl; she had heard it tens of times before and found it disingenuous. It was not even Euan’s sermon, really: he had taken and elaborated it from someone else; she remembered hearing it with him at a Mannafest when she was a teenager. But beside her, Noor had listened avidly, hanging on Euan’s every word. She had watched Noor for a while. The girl’s lips were parted and her tongue was slightly out of her mouth, as if it was not enough to hear, she had to inhale, to suck in Euan’s words. Noor’s skin was scattered with a fresh burst of pimples and she had dark, sunken circles under her eyes, badly disguised with concealer. Ruth felt a fresh wave of pity for her, so obviously lonely, and she had taken care to be patient with her, to invite her back to the house to continue their conversation.
It was the charitable thing to do, she told herself.
But perhaps this was not quite, or not entirely true. She was nervous of seeing Farid, equally nervous as she longed to see him. With Noor there – for she would invite Noor along too, on the pretext of needing help with Anna – she would be safe. She could indulge, whilst being protected from, her strange sudden feelings and longings. She was safe, she told herself. With Noor and Anna there, she would be safe.
They drove south, away from Manama, along the eastern coastal road towards Dar Island and the resort of Al Bander. They stopped to look at a flock of upraised dhows, the salted, stippled bows being planed and sanded by dark-faced boys in white headdresses and loose brown kaftans, oiled and repainted by other, older men, who took turns to squat in the shade of the curved prows, or under makeshift canopies of canvas and sackcloth draped from ladders and scaffolding. They stopped a second time when they crossed the causeway bridge from the mainland to Dar Island. Now the view to the east was clear and unimpeded: miles of glittering white sea and whitened sky, past the tip of Qatar and right across the Gulf, hundreds of miles, past uninhabited scattered islets to where the tip of the emirate states reached towards the curve of Iran. As Farid pointed it all out, Ruth laughed and compared it to the Irish Sea – seen from Portavogie, say, or Ballywalter, equivalent little towns and fishing ports – the oily black waters and slapping waves, the roiling, scudding clouds that could in a matter of minutes obscure the view, so you could see no more than a hundred metres out to sea and could only guess where the westerly parts of Scotland were, or the Isle of Man.
‘I would like to see Ireland, one day,’ Farid said. ‘I would like to see your world. It is so much part of you.’
She thought, involuntarily, how dark his eyes were, how steady, how his gaze held hers—
And then Noor jumped in: ‘Me too!’ she said, ‘I’d love to see Ireland, too,’ and she started babbling about Vikings and monks and cats, and the moment was gone – just as Ruth had intended, just as she had hoped.
And yet.
They got back in the car, and drove on.
*
Al Bander, when they reached it, was cool and airy, the illusion of a breeze conjured by tiers of fans. The main restaurant opened into a terrace, scattered with round glass tables under striped awnings, and beyond were deckchairs and sunloungers arranged in rows by a split-level pool. Only a handful of the tables and loungers were occupied. They chose a table at the very edge of the terrace, facing the sea, and ordered drinks from the waiter: a tiny Indian man in an immaculate white suit. Farid ordered a bottle of beer and Ruth, in a burst of extravagance, asked for an ‘Egyptian Champagne’: white wine and soda water. When it came, it was a crystal chalice the size of her cupped hands, adorned with papery pink blossoms – muhammadi, Farid said they were called.
‘Muhammadi,’ she repeated, and he smiled at her accent, and she blushed, and knew he saw her blushing.
Noor had taken seriously her charge of looking after Anna. The two of them had run down to the edge of the shallow pool, and taken their shoes off to splash their feet in the water. Their laughter rippled through the air on the currents of the fans. She and Farid sat in silence, watching them, watching the waterfalls – designed to look like large terracotta pitchers – spilling their contents from the upper to the lower-level pools. She felt a slow warmth in her stomach from the wine, and her head felt light in the heat.
They talked of this and that; of Ireland, of Bahrain. He did not mention her husband, and neither did she. They talked of the parables he had given her, and what she thought they meant. He talked a little of his mother, of when he lost his faith in Allah.
*
She says, for the first time aloud, When I lost my faith in God. She says it, and nothing happens: nothing. The air shimmers, the fountains plash, the children laugh. The waiter comes by to offer more drinks. She says the words again: nothing. No shaking of the earth, no sudden cloud of darkness, no splitting of the rocks. Yet it is done. How can it be done? But it is done: she has lost her faith.
*
He leans forward, asks her if she is going to cry. His eyes are dark and liquid; you could lose yourself in those eyes, she thinks, forget yourself. She should have looked away from him by now, broken the gaze: but she has not. Again, softer, Is she going to cry? No, she is not – she knows she is not, it is all right. She is past that, now.
*
The sun begins to set. Beyond the palm fronds, the sea is green, shot through with rippling veins of orange light. The sun sets so rapidly here; you can watch it falling through the sky like a dropped coin.
It is too romantic, she knows. Being here, with him, in the sunset, drinking wine. It is wrong, she knows this, too. She knew it before she came; she should not have come. She pretended to herself that having Noor there, having Anna, would make a difference, or at least be camouflage, or ballast. But she was deceiving herself, or letting herself be deceived. And at the same time, even as she knows she should not be there – here – she is strangely, helplessly excited, as if not being here, not coming here, was not a choice, was never an option.
Time slows. She is acutely conscious of the fuzz of sweat on her empty glass quietly beading into droplets; the quivering cyan blue of the pool; far off, seagulls skimming over the glistering sea. Against the last blaze of light, they are become silhouettes. Noor and Anna are laughing again, she hears them run past, playing chase, the slap of their bare feet on limestone paving. She does not move. Her hands are palm-down on the table, stilled, where they had been picking at the edges of a place mat, worrying the beginnings of a fray. Farid reaches forward, turns her right hand over, then her left, holds them cupped open, wrists up. It is the first time they have touched. She has never felt so exposed. With his thumb, he traces a vein down her wrist and into her palm. She can feel his breath, warm and more ragged than hers. She does not look at him.
Time is away and somewhere else. Each moment is an entirety; pearls on a string. There is nothing else beyond them, here and now.
Stretched out into streaks
of red on the horizon, the day shimmers, settles; night-time stirs and rises. The first flickerings and flitterings of an evening breeze, the click and whisper of the sprinkler on the lawns behind, the husky scent of jasmine as pale, open petals bruise with water. Her hands are shadows, he is a shape of shifting shadows, somewhere a bird – is it a bulbul? – burbles its liquid, plaintive call.
What is she doing?
What has she done?
Noor and Anna run over. It is night-time, they are hungry, wasn’t the sunset pretty? Ruth stands: the scrape of the heavy chair against the tiled ground is discordant and ugly. Euan will be back soon. She is a wife, and a mother. He is a boy, not yet twenty, and a Muslim. Adultery is illegal, not just by the law of God, but the law of the land. What if the waiters have seen, what if Noor has seen?
Her whole body is tingling.
‘We have to go.’
‘Ruth,’ he says. It is the first time he has called her Ruth, has not called her Mrs Armstrong. Her name in his mouth is a ruby.
‘We have to go.’ She turns and picks up Anna, feels her voice and body slip into the familiar rhythms of motherhood. Did you have fun, are you thirsty, let me wipe that smudge from your face, oh my goodness your nappy needs changing. Noor is trotting beside her, relating in minute detail the tale of some game played, some elaborate imaginary escapade. Ruth strides ahead, back through the clubhouse, down the gravel pathway to the bougainvillea-laden canopy, leaving Farid to pay the bill and follow. The night is thrumming with the creak-chirp of crickets, already a moon is rising.
How has this happened? she thinks, and the night come so fast?
‘Lady moon, lady moon, sailing up so high, drop down to Baby from out yonder sky,’ she murmurs into Anna’s ear, Anna already beginning to grizzle, overtired, overexcited, not wanting to leave, to be strapped into the car seat. Anna wriggles, and kicks out at her. ‘Babykin, Babykin, far down below, I hear you calling, I hear you calling, but I cannot go,’ she croons, only half-conscious of what she is saying, feeling a bubble of laughter or tears rising in her throat and trying to swallow it down.
‘What’s that?’ says Noor. ‘Ruth, what is that?’
‘Oh, it’s silly, it’s nothing, it’s just a silly song, isn’t it, Annie?’ she says, jogging Anna in her arms.
‘My mother never sang songs to us,’ Noor says wistfully, her eyes round and glinting behind her glasses. ‘Never.’
‘Well, it’s meaningless, really, I don’t even remember how it goes. Here’s your cousin.’ She turns away, so that she does not have to see his expression as he walks towards them. She is going to tell him, she decides, when he leaves her back at the compound, that she cannot see him again.
‘It’s been a wonderful day,’ Noor bursts out, ‘oh, such a wonderful day.’
6
That was the first thing Noor wrote in her diary: Today has been a wonderful, wonderful day. She had been rapt by Euan Armstrong’s sermon: thrilled and terrified, in equal, exhilarating measure, by the urgency with which he talked of the wages of sin and the cost of forgiveness. He talked about the word wage, and where it came from. To wage war, to wager, to receive your wages. The wages of sin was death, but the gift of God was eternal life. ‘“I tell you the truth,”’ Euan quoted, his voice rising to rebound off the blond wood and whitewashed walls of the little church, ‘“whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life.”’
There is a way, Euan went on, punning on the almost-homonyms of wage and way. There is a way out of darkness and despair, of war and death and suffering, and that Way is Jesus.
His face shone, now, when he talked of Jesus: Jesus as our saviour, Jesus as the example by which we must live our lives. This was a man, Euan said, who was born in ignominious circumstances to a peasant girl, and spent the early years of his life as a refugee – an asylum seeker – in foreign lands, after his parents were forced to flee their homeland with little more than the clothes on their backs. He worked as a carpenter alongside his father until he was thirty, and then he became a wandering preacher, roaming the desert lands and small settlements. He never owned land, he never held political office. He was never rich, he was never powerful – as we on earth define wealth and power. He travelled, all in all, no more than a few hundred miles from where he was born. He was mocked, derided, deserted and denied by those he thought his closest friends – a motley collection of itinerants, lepers, prostitutes and tax collectors. He was executed alongside petty thieves at the age of just thirty-three – thirty-three, Euan said, beating his own breast, the age I am now – and when he died, he would have been thrown in disgrace into a pauper’s grave, but for the pity of an onlooker. And yet, Euan said, dramatically dropping his voice and swivelling to meet the gaze of every single person in the church, and yet: two thousand years later, he is the most important person who has ever lived: he is the centrepiece, the climax, the apotheosis, of the entire human race. All the kings who have ever reigned are nothing beside him. All the armies that ever marched, all the warships ever built, all the bitterest battles ever fought, they are nothing beside him. Earthly baubles turn to dust: heavenly treasures are incorruptible. The life Jesus lived shows us we are not insignificant, however small or ignorant or unimportant we are or believe ourselves to be. The first shall be last and the last shall be first: the meek shall inherit the earth.
Jesus, Euan finished triumphantly, came for the least, the last and the lost.
The least, the last and the lost. When he said those words, Noor felt that he was talking directly to her. She felt her whole body start to shiver, and her skin was tingling. She turned to look at Ruth Armstrong, but Ruth did not notice her: she was gazing at her husband as if she was in a dream. When they stood to sing, Noor sprung to her feet, light as air, feeling that she might float to the ceiling, feeling that part of her was on the ceiling, looking down on herself, borne upwards by the streams of laughter rushing up inside her. Her fingers were trembling. She tore a page of the hymn book in her haste to get to the psalm. She was not a good singer; her voice was croaky and tuneless, but she did her best to sing along as lustily as she could, matching the rhythms of her voice to Ruth’s, thin and sweet beside her. The words of the psalm were rousing, admonishing – fires blazing through the Israelites and consuming the wicked, who had strayed from God – and then abject, humbling. Noor felt every surge and scourge as if it was amplified a thousand times. They ended by repeating the first verse, Blessed are they who maintain justice, and when Euan led them in prayers of peace and reconciliation for themselves and their families, for the leaders of the world and the warmongering factions in the world, Noor squeezed her eyes and clenched her hands and tried to mean every word, to truly mean it. For the first time in her life, she had a glimpse of what it meant to matter.
*
After the service, she hovered by Euan and Ruth’s side as people flocked around to thank the Reverend for his service and pay their respects to his wife. They were the centre of attention. And she, too, basked in the reflection of their light. She had never received so many smiles and greetings, gentle enquiries: who was she, was she a family friend, was she from Ireland? (Oh to be a family friend! she thought, thinking her heart might burst with happiness. Oh to be from Ireland, with Ruth and Euan Armstrong!) In the whirl of it all, she quite forgot her worries that her father might find out she had come to Christian church. And when the thought did occur to her: so what? she thought, emboldened and buoyed by the service, by the solidarity of being among these people, being one of them, welcomed and accepted by them.
*
Euan Armstrong turned to her at one point – turned to her, out of all the people there clamouring for his attention – and said, ‘One of these days we must have a chat,’ and when she cried, ‘Oh really?’ (everything seemed to be a cry or an exclamation suddenly, as if life had been turned up to a higher volume) he said, ‘Yes, of course we must.’
> ‘I have such a lot of questions,’ Noor said. ‘Such a lot.’
‘Write them down. Write them all down, and we’ll go through them.’
‘Euan,’ Ruth said then, and for the first time ever Noor heard an edge to her voice, a hardness. ‘Perhaps it isn’t entirely appropriate. Noor’s father is a Muslim. It’s one thing to let her come along with us, but quite another—’
‘It’s only a chat,’ Euan interrupted smoothly, turning to smile at Noor. ‘It’s only a friendly chat, to help her answer the questions she has in her heart.’
There was a slight, taut silence then, even in the midst of the bustle. But Euan’s calm smile did not falter, and after a moment Ruth shrugged and turned slightly away.
‘It would be all right, wouldn’t it?’ Noor said to Ruth, anxious not to upset her. ‘After all I am part English, too’ – remembering the proselytising conversation – ‘and so it wouldn’t get you into any trouble, it really wouldn’t. And, Ruth, I do have questions, so many of them,’ she went on in a rush. ‘I’ve done some such bad things, Ruth, I really have, and—’
The Meeting Point Page 13