The Meeting Point

by Lucy Caldwell

  ‘Farid,’ she said. ‘After Al Bander, when I said I didn’t want to see you again.’

  He looked at her, suddenly and completely still.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, softly.

  And then she took a breath, gripping the table to stop her hands trembling, and said, ‘I was wrong, Farid. I’ve been wrong, and I hope – if you do – if you can understand – how lonely I’ve been – how miserable—’

  Her heart was racing and the words were lurching incomprehensibly from her tongue. But he understood. She could see by his face that he understood. And he reached over, and once more took her hand.

  10

  The Diary of Noor Hussain

  Sunday, 23rd March 2003

  Well, here we are, back home, and finally! After three days and nights at Amm al-Harun’s I was practically begging for a stray American bomb to flatten the place. There are just so many people there, constantly people, talking, shouting, laughing, eating (eating), kids running from room to room, babies squealing and shitting their nappies. You do not get one second to yourself. If it’s not the grown-ups hassling you to do this or that or asking you about school or all the rest of it (correcting your Arabic, refusing to answer you in English) it’s a trail of giggling younger cousins following you wherever you go and shouting things they think are so funny. Their latest game: firing paper aeroplanes at your head and making noises like they’ve bombed you. I thought Farid might be my ally, but he was never around. He has his car, which of course is the perfect escape route. I asked him one day where he was going, and he looked vague, and just said, Nowhere. He was going to drive around in it, listen to music, that’s all. He made it clear he didn’t want me with him. Screw you, Farid!

  Another thing: it is IMPOSSIBLE not to eat because they all eat together every day, it’s the centre of the day, the main event: and someone’s always watching you like a hawk. You’ve only had one koloocheh Noor come on azizam have another I baked them fresh, these ones have dates and these walnuts, take one of each. The first thing I did when we got back here, before even writing this, was weigh myself. And I have put on two pounds again. Imagine if we lived there full time?! Which it turns out is the plan: one of the extensions they’re building is for Baba and me, and we’ll be in by the summer, he says.

  Yeah right, Baba!

  Because (drum roll please)

  THIS IS THE PLAN.

  I’m going to go back to Ireland with Ruth and Euan and Anna and live with them there. Mummy won’t mind, in fact she probably won’t even care. Her phoning to say she’s worried about me in Bahrain isn’t about me, it’s just a way to get at Baba. Because I’ll never be the daughter she wishes she had. And Baba will be relieved, too, because he never knows what to do with me here. I’m in his way most of the time, and he just stomps about and shouts at me, and it can only get worse. I thought Bahrain was going to be a fresh start, but it’s as bad as England ever was.

  When I first had the idea at Al-Bander I thought it was ludicrous, that it was just me being fanciful (Dr Badawi: you have to control your fantasies, Noor). But I’ve been thinking and thinking it over the past few days, and I think it’ll work!

  I have enough money in my savings account to pay for my flight back, and if I need more I can get Mummy to sell off my Premium Bonds. And so my flying back won’t cost Ruth and Euan a penny. And once I’m there, well Ruth is always talking about the farm she grew up on and they’re currently living in ‘one of the cottages on it’ so I’m sure they’ll be able to find a room (if not a whole cottage) for me. And if there isn’t a room I can always sleep on the sofa and make sure my bedding is all rolled up neatly by the time anyone comes down in the morning.

  It’s so simple, really, it’s all so simple!

  And I’ll clean and I’ll learn to cook and that so Ruth is free to do whatever she wants. And I’ll look after Anna, of course, that’s the main thing. I’ll be just like an au pair. If money’s tight I can get a part-time job, and I won’t need much in the way of ‘things’ anyway. And we’ll manage, because unlike Mummy and Baba and their constant squabbling over money, we’ll know that it isn’t money that matters in the end.

  And I know I have to go to school, but only for another two and a half years because you can leave when you’re sixteen. Even if I do have to be at school all day for the first couple of years I’ll still be there to clean and cook in the mornings and evenings and at the weekends and during all holidays, and I’ll come home (home!!) at lunchtime to see little Anna.

  My heart is racing so fast as I write this! I think I need to go outside and have a cigarette to calm down. (N.B. I mustn’t let Ruth or Euan see me smoking in front of Anna. In fact after I’ve finished this pack I’m going to give up for good. See what a good influence they are on me!)

  How easy it is! How easy it all is!!

  From the moment I first saw Ruth and Euan and Anna Armstrong it was special. I remember it exactly, seeing them go walking down the compound, each holding one of little Anna’s hands and jumping her up and down, and it was so perfect, the most perfect thing I’d ever seen, and I so wanted to be part of it. Euan said the other night (how long ago that seems!) that with God there is a reason for everything. And now I start to see it! Why they’re here, why I’m here, why everything.

  There is one dark cloud on the horizon. I will have to confess to them – tell them everything – because I don’t want them to find out later on by chance or gossip and think that I wasn’t truthful from the beginning. And I’ve never been more scared in my entire life. But Euan said God forgives everything and who is anyone to cast stones when we’ve all got whole planks in our own eyes.

  And in the meantime, I’m going to have to make myself indispensable. Looking after little Anna, being there, doing whatever Ruth wants or needs, so that when the time comes for her to leave she knows that she can’t do without me.

  Look how messy my writing’s got! I’m shaking so much I can hardly hold the pen!

  Now for that cigarette – the final cigarette.

  I’m going to be a new Noor.

  ‘Noor Armstrong’!!!!!

  IV

  1

  The next two weeks are the happiest of her life.

  Two weeks: a fortnight – such a short time, and yet an eternity, an entirety. The life of man, seen from the heavens; a handbreadth of days.

  *

  Farid picks her up each morning and takes her out, sometimes with Anna, but most often not, for Noor is happy to babysit all day. They wander the streets of downtown Manama – something that she could not do alone, a woman and a foreigner. In Ireland, she tells him, she used to go for long, long walks, across the fallow fields and down the rutted lanes to the waters, and she would walk all around the headland before looping back cross-country to the farmhouse. Sometimes she would walk across the cut-over bog, north-east of Kircubbin. You needed permission to access the bog, but she knew the rangers, and they let her walk through, so long as she kept to the tracks. There were Exmoor ponies there, three of them, and sometimes you could feed them handfuls of wild grass or Polo mints. And if you were lucky you might see otters, or a flash of a stoat, the white at its throat catching the corner of your vision. Once, sitting downwind, she had watched a family of foxes play, the mother nosing at her cubs, encouraging them to prance and fight. She exaggerates her stories, romanticises them: Farid loves to hear her talk of Ireland. Even when Anna was born, she tells him, she would strap her in a sling and go walking, until the baby grew too big to be carried far. It is what she finds hardest about Bahrain, she says: her world so circumscribed. The compound is small – you can walk from one end to the other in less than five minutes – and the few times she has tried to go for a walk, the sentries have stopped her, or someone (Anjali, Trudy, Maarlen) has seen her and insisted she come back inside. There is nowhere to go, they tell her. And they are right: after two blocks of compounds and one apartment building, there is the cold store, and then the highway. If she wants, they w
ill drive her to a mall, and she can stroll about there. Bahrain is not designed for walking. People go from air-conditioned houses in air-conditioned cars to air-conditioned malls: it is a lifestyle that turns its back on the outside world, which for so many months of the year is inhospitable, almost impossible to bear.

  But this is still March, and although the days are already hot and getting rapidly hotter, you can still stand to be outside. The heat prickles into sweat beads on the back of the neck as soon as you climb out of a car, and within a few minutes of walking you are sweating and streaked with grime. But Ruth can bear this. She likes the strangeness of the air, the unfamiliar smells. The city is hot and pungent: exhaust fumes and dust and drains. You can feel the air as you breathe it in, drying the roof of your mouth, gritty at the back of your throat. And the noise: it is almost exhilarating, like another form of heat, bearing down on you. The blare of car horns and squeal of brakes, the rattle and hum of air-con units, the wail of Arabic music and shrill of Indian from open-fronted shops, the clatter and whine of building sites and screeching of turning cranes, men shouting, gesticulating, scabby, sunken-eyed dogs snarling at each other.

  She has never felt so alive as when she is exploring these streets with Farid, streets where few foreigners could – or would – choose to go. They walk through seedy, run-down textiles districts, where racks of faded saris and shalwar kameez trousers clutter the pavements, and ragged stretches of gauzy chiffon hang from washing lines stretched corner to corner. Alleyways where makeshift poles slung with T-shirts and bathtowels sag and bleach in the sun, and chipped mannequins draped with swathes of gold-and silver-sequinned cloth are suspended from upper-floor windows. Farid keeps up a stream of imshee, imshee! at the boys who run after them with open packets of cigarettes, stuffed toy camels, bobbins of thread, and at the shopkeepers who step out in front of them to push squares of fabric or handfuls of cheap, logoed T-shirts in their faces. The streets are a maze, and she cannot make sense of them: some seemed at first to be arranged in a grid, but just as she thought she had her bearings, or caught a glimpse of one of the iconic skyscrapers in the financial centre towards the north, the roads would twist and cluster together and seem to loop back on themselves. Alone, she would have been horribly lost, horribly panicked. But Farid knows his way. He shows her the Arab quarters, rows of coffee shops, flat-roofed concrete rooms open to the road, where men sit on yellowing plastic chairs drinking cans of Pepsi or tiny espressos, smoking hookah pipes or playing dominoes. Some are dressed in trousers and polo shirts, others in full white thobe and gutra; some are old, some are young – but there are never any women. The air here is sharp and sweet with the smoke of the hookah pipes, appley, perfumed. It smells of sizzling meat, too; hot oil and spices from the rickety shawarma vendors shearing off meat into flatbreads or pitta breads, or frying strips of herbed lamb on hot plates. They stop, sometimes, to try the food, or to buy a juice or an ice cone from a street seller, and it is always the most delicious food Ruth has ever tasted: something to do with the heat, and the foreignness, and the daringness of it, the juices running down her wrists and the spices making her lips tingle and her eyes water.

  He shows her the commercial district, too, where the streets are wider, smoother, and the buildings are glossy-fronted estate agents or travel agents or telecom companies. And they drive the length of the King Faisal Highway, past the ministries and the five-star hotels, the Sheratons and Hiltons and Ritz-Carltons, with their palatial driveways and lush, desert-defying landscaped gardens.

  Once they have exhausted Manama, they go on excursions further afield. To the wildlife park at Al Areen to see the oryx and the zebras, the herds of adax and reem gazelle, protected Arabian species with delicate, long-lashed eyes and shy hoofs, like creatures from a story book. To the Qala-at Fort, where archaeologists are looking for Dilmun. To see the basket-weavers at Karbabad, where Farid buys her a sunhat and a shopping basket made by a blind man, who sits in front of his cottage all day twisting and knotting straw from a pile beside him, his callused, gnarled fingers moving with impossible ease. They visit villages where old men still use donkeys, and water comes from wells. They go to the camel farm at Janabiya to see the sour-smelling, greasy animals being led out into the desert. They go to the beach at Al Jayazir, on the western side of the island, where the sea is so salty you can float in it without moving: you just spread your legs and close your eyes and the water holds you up. They go back to the Persian restaurant, and to others like it, and to Al Bander. They smoke hookah pipes in cafés where loud pop music plays and young people lounge drinking cans of soft drink or bright pink milkshakes, and rather than feeling too old, as she would if she came there with Euan, she feels young again, free.

  She pities the limited world of the expats and Westerners, where weekends are spent in the malls or with day passes at the hotel spas, evenings drinking cocktails at the American Club, and eating steak frites or soft-shell crab. Their Manama is limited to the souk; they know nothing of the streets beyond. They drive, or have drivers to take them everywhere, they pass their time with coffee mornings and cocktail parties, the men playing golf and the women sunbathing at their husband’s club. She has learned this from Trudy, and from several of the wives at church. She is grateful, now, that Euan has always declined their invitations to join in, because if she had had the distraction, the artificial whirl of that world, she might not have found this realer Bahrain.

  *

  At first, their relationship is innocent, chaste. They cannot hold hands in public, and there are very few places that are private. The Persian restaurant, where they can kiss; discreet corners of Al Areen or the Corniche at dusk; the villages to the south where you can park the car under a banyan tree and, by paying a few fils to the young boys, ensure that nobody comes near.

  Sometimes, Farid comes to the villa. But neither of them is at ease there: even if the maids are gone, and Anna is at Noor’s, they feel at the mercy of visitors, and cannot fully relax. Nevertheless, it is here that they make love for the first time, on the floor, up against the divan. Farid pins her wrists behind her, covers her mouth with a cushion when she cries out. It is unplanned, or at least not wholly planned: they are not even fully undressed. But afterwards, Ruth feels a deep sense of relief, or release. That night, she presses the tender places on her arms, wondering if they will bruise, and thinks: I have been with another man.

  *

  After that, they make love more often: in the car, in the villa. Farid has no home of his own to take her to, and they cannot check into a hotel for an afternoon: even the hotels that offer hourly rates need passport details, identity, and this is something she is too frightened to risk. So they start to take precautions: Farid parks his Camaro in the cold-store car park, and comes in down the back passageway, through the utility room. There is a way, they discover, of getting in without alerting the sentries, a blind spot, where if you’re quick in vaulting the low wall, you can be over and hidden from view before you’re seen. She is grateful for the lack of windows: nobody can see what’s going on, even outside their own front door, unless they’re actually standing there. She gets used, too, to the banalities: if they eat in the villa, she makes sure the plates and forks and cups are washed and dried before Euan returns – not in the draining rack or dishwasher, but back in the cupboard or drawer, in their rightful places, so that he does not ask if Trudy or Anjali came over today and catch her out in a fumbling lie. She makes sure that the toilet seat, too, is put back down. When Farid leaves, she walks out of and then quickly into each room several times over, trying to see it with fresh eyes, with Euan’s eyes: is anything displaced, awry, has anything been overlooked, that would give the game away? She tries to memorise the maids’ rotas, but they are unpredictable, so she takes to locking the front door with the chain, so that at least they cannot get in without her knowing, without Farid having enough time to go.

  It should feel sordid. But somehow it doesn’t: only practical, necessary. And the
curious thing is that she does not feel remorse: not at all, even when she is lying in bed with Euan. In fact, when she is lying in bed with Euan (who gets home late these days, and exhausted, too tired to make love or to want to) it is Farid she feels she is betraying. During the marriage preparation course she and Euan attended, she imagined that she would be wracked with guilt and regret if she so much as thought of kissing someone else. But it is not so. Here she is having an affair (an affair, she tells herself, several times a day, testing herself, marvelling; she, Ruth Armstrong, is having an affair), and it should be wrong: it should be better to gouge out your eyes and cut off your limbs than even contemplate adultery. But being with Farid feels right – more than right: she feels alive. When he touches her, her body responds, and she feels a desire for him she has never known before, not for Euan, not for anyone, anything. And it is easy, so easy. Anna’s mother, Euan’s wife – they come out as needed, as if they are people within her who surface to play their role, and protect the secret, hidden her within. Because this, Ruth knows, is the real her. The other ‘hers’ just glide through the motions, distant, practised, capable. While inside, the real Ruth – the Ruth who is learning how to feel, how to live, how to be – is blossoming. That is what it feels like, blossoming: as if cramped, damp petals are unfurling in her chest, rising and swelling to fill the hollow places.