Where Pigeons Don't Fly

by Yousef Al-Mohaimeed

  Fahd felt remorse that he had been ignoring her, claiming that he was busy, that his studies took up all his time and that his friends wouldn’t leave him alone.

  Haha, she would chortle in her text messages. Your friends, or your little girlfriends? I admit it, see? I know you’ve got girlfriends. Just give me a little of your time!

  When she sensed that he wasn’t interested in her, she turned her conversation to art, and asked him about the sketches. Had he liked them? Very politely and extremely embarrassed he answered that she had conveyed her ideas very directly, and most of them were highly romantic and sentimental.

  –22 –

  FOR THEIR NEXT MEETING Thuraya asked if they might sit together a while longer, in other words that she come out in his car and the two of them take a little drive. It would be easy, she said. ‘I’ll get in at the hospital entrance at evening prayers and we’ll go anywhere we like or just drive around in the car.’

  He was hesitant and unsettled. Saeed hooted when he heard him prevaricating, and when he hung up, gave a wild laugh. ‘The classic case of the village boy who falls for an older woman. My friend, she’s the same age as your mother.’

  Fahd smiled and blushed. He took the bottle of Givenchy cologne, tipped a few drops into his palm and rubbed his hands together.

  He borrowed Saeed’s car and as he got in his phone was hit by a message. He headed out for the Eastern Ring Road. He had no idea where Iman Hospital was and was embarrassed to ask, so he called telephone inquiries and got the number. A Sudanese employee answered who gave an awful description of the route.

  ‘I know it’s in the South, not the East,’ he said, then handed the receiver to a young colleague who gave Fahd precise directions.

  Ten minutes before the appointed time, Fahd was there. He passed through the Medical Institute’s gates with its domes like wind-filled sails, assuming it belonged to the hospital.

  I’ll take a look around and get to know the neighbourhood in the few minutes that are left, he said to himself.

  Worshippers were pouring into the mosque next to the hospital. Fahd felt that his bladder would burst. He looked around for another mosque. There was a large one facing the hospital, with Pakistani, Indonesian and Sudanese workmen clustered around the entrance to its toilets. He passed a Sudanese worker who had raised the hem of his thaub to avoid getting it wet as he sipped water from a palm cupped beneath a large cold-water tap. The droplets flowed in a long line along the bottom of his arm and dripped from his black elbow.

  He pulled up at the domed gateway.

  ‘Where are you?’ she asked. ‘I’m at the gate.’

  ‘Look to your right!’

  But the woman in the embroidered abaya did not turn round.

  ‘The gate’s the one with the domes like tents, right?’

  ‘No, you’re at the Medical Institute. Keep going.’

  He started the engine and found her looking out through her niqab. She got in next to him.

  ‘At last. Those kids were hassling me.’

  She took a large bottle of scent from her bag and sprayed away at her chest and hands for a few seconds, then put it away and held his hand between her palms. Her hands were soft and finely lined, her long nails untended and untouched by red or silver nail polish. His fingers were curled to form a ring that she mischievously poked her thumb in and out of until he heard her moan.

  He grew bolder and reached for her chest. Her bra was the rigid kind and he couldn’t tell if what it concealed was sagging or firm. Not firm, he guessed, or else why wear this horrible contraption?

  She said that she had had her children young.

  ‘Married at sixteen and here I am with six kids. The oldest’s at university; he might be your age or older.’

  She laughed. ‘But as you see, I’m not old.’

  She had an adorable, seductive roll to her ‘r’ when she spoke.

  ‘Want to see me?’ she asked. ‘Just go down any dark alley.’

  She raised the niqab and turning her head to the window on her right she shook out her short hair and ran her fingers through it. She looked like a lustful young boy. Then she turned to Fahd and fixed him with a lascivious gaze. Her eyes were Javanese, eloquent and eager, while her red-painted lips were large and full, as if bruised by lust. The streets were slightly darker now but what few cars there were still passed them at every turning inside the alley.

  ‘Forget it, I’m covering up.’

  She put the niqab over her face.

  ‘Khanshlaila neighbourhood scares me. They might know me,’ she said, then added, ‘I want to see your face!’

  Fahd turned towards her. Their eyes met for an instant and he realised that she was mewing like a cat on heat. She extended her leg into the small space between them. Its smoothness shocked Fahd. Braver now he went a little further and then forced himself to stop.

  ‘It doesn’t bother you that your mother’s Jordanian?’

  ‘Not at all! Does it bother you?’ he said, laughing.

  ‘On the contrary! Here you are, white and sweet and the way you speak drives me crazy!’

  They passed the end of Batha Road and stopped beneath the flyover at the lights for Southern Ring Road. Thuraya spotted a pink neon sign and pointed: ‘Furnished flats! What do you think?’

  ‘No. It’s not safe.’

  ‘To hell with you, you beast. It’s me that should be scared, not you.’

  Thuraya ordered him back to the dark alley. He went in and saw her fiddling with something in her lap. Then she guided his hand down. Her moans were loud and startling and he was scared some passer-by or passing car would notice, especially since his upper body was leaning conspicuously over towards her.

  She loved this, she said.

  ‘All I’ve got at home is an animal that can’t get it up.’

  ‘Have you thought about how I’ll drop you off and where?’ he asked anxiously.

  ‘No. I’m just thinking about being with you.’

  Though nearly forty, she was terrifyingly irrational. She never thought with her brain, but rather with her emotions or even her lust, which she described as her ‘mood’. Speaking like a sensible adult he told her: ‘You have to think hard about this so you don’t get discovered and destroy your family.’

  She stroked the back of his hand and answered like a reckless teenage girl. ‘Great! Let it be destroyed. Then I can be yours and yours only.’

  ‘So I can take you all the way home?’

  ‘No, maybe I’ll take a limousine even though my perfume stinks to high heaven. Maybe the driver will think I’m a lady of the night!’

  Fahd stopped at an entrance to a ladies’ hairdresser and spotted an ambulance some way off, its lights doused and a man sitting inside, waiting, as though on the lookout for something.

  ‘Get out by the hairdresser’s. Go inside for a bit and when I’m gone come out and take a limousine.’

  She got out and he drove his friend’s car away with a sigh of relief. Half an hour later he called her. She said that she had taken a limousine driven by a young Saudi, alarming him with the quantity of perfume wafting off her body. He had given her his mobile number and told her that he was at her service. Fahd laughed as he said, ‘So why did you take his number?’

  She answered that it was just a business card. ‘The man makes his living from the passengers. Why, are you jealous?’

  ‘Never,’ said Fahd, cheerfully.

  After two days, when Fahd had failed to answer her repeated calls, Thuraya sent him a text threatening to talk to the limousine driver and give him a chance to woo her. When he answered her call on the third day she said that the driver had told her she was lovelier than all those young girls and that he was ready to drop by, take her off in a Mercedes ‘Viagra’ and install her in her own flat.

  ‘So that’s your level, is it?’ Fahd asked.

  ‘No. I just want you to be jealous.’

  ‘Jealous of what? That you want to be a whore?’
r />   She cried and hung up.

  When Fahd lost his temper, he spoke with his mother’s accent. His mother had done the same. Whenever she had been irritated with him as a child, her speech would transform into a Palestinian-Jordanian dialect like that spoken by the inhabitants of the West Bank.

  –23 –

  FAHD MESSAGED THURAYA TO say he wasn’t prepared to meet. It was Wednesday and the week’s end sent the Committee’s cars roaming the streets of Riyadh like venomous snakes.

  ‘I can’t shake this fear,’ he told her, and she replied that he hadn’t made his mind up about having a relationship with her. She kept insisting that he, a young man in his twenties, wasn’t interested in her because she was nearly forty, even though she had taught him so much and he had certainly enjoyed their last meeting.

  He ignored his mobile for a while then found three unanswered calls and a couple of texts that he hadn’t noticed. He explained that he had spent an hour trying to call her but her phone was off. She had been in the bathroom taking a shower, she replied, and hadn’t wanted any of her sons and daughters to open her message inbox and ‘see the scandals’.

  ‘So … what do you say? Shall I make a move?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘You’re such an idiot, Fahd,’ she said. ‘Didn’t I tell you last week that I was invited to a wedding in Suwaidi? Will you come and pick me up there?’

  ‘OK. I’ll need half an hour at least.’

  ‘Oh, that’s so long! Where are you at the moment?’

  ‘Maseef. Up north.’

  He started his friend’s car and sped off. He took out the little bottle of cologne from the side pocket and poured a little into his palm, dabbing his neck and behind his ears. He took King Fahd Road. It was eight o’clock exactly, which meant he had taken the wrong road for rush hour. The cars flowed slowly along like a river. His phone rang.

  ‘Shall I get going, Fahd?’

  ‘No, just bit longer. Wait until I’m at least halfway there.’

  Five minutes later she called again. Then a third time. ‘Where are you?’

  He looked out at the skyscraper alongside him. ‘Past Faisaliya.’

  Then he told her to come out of the same hairdresser’s as before. After waiting with the Bangladeshi limousine driver for seven minutes she called and said, with an air of issuing instructions, ‘Look. I’ll wait for you at Haram Mall on the ring road.’

  When the southbound King Fahd Road came to an end, Fahd took the Southern Ring Road heading east and, passing the first exit, he turned right off the slip road for Ha’ir and Batha. At the lights beneath the flyover she told him that she had left the mall on the ring road and taken the Iman Hospital road heading north. Before he reached the end of the road, she told him, ‘look left and you’ll see a hairdresser’s. I’ll wait for you in there.’

  He jolted over the speed bumps without noticing and saw a police patrol car, lights flashing, race past in the opposite direction. Turning at the end of the street he pulled over at the World of Dreams hair salon, then called her. She only answered after it had rung five times.

  ‘Hold on a moment and I’ll be out,’ she said quickly.

  He looked to the right, where a Bangladeshi workman sat on the kerb outside the newsagent’s that was next to the salon. Pulling himself together he turned left and noticed the patrol car pulled over in front of a van.

  Thuraya emerged and hurriedly climbed in. Her eyes were rimmed with kohl and he was unable to make out what eyeshadow she was wearing because her niqab was tilted slightly forwards.

  ‘How come you were so late?’

  Tenderly, she took his hand. Her palm was hot and its surface so fine that the yielding, silken skin almost sloughed off when he rubbed it with his thumb.

  He set out for the Southern Ring Road, but the street didn’t continue on ahead and only two directions were available: right towards Batha Road and the jaw-dropping traffic by the lights beneath the flyover, or left, past the beauty salons, spare parts suppliers and the new district with its stench of overflowing drains.

  He went right and looking over at the other side of the street she said, ‘Don’t go back! Just look at the traffic!’

  The tunnel took him by surprise and he turned right, then turned again and re-entered the neighbourhood they had just left. Passing World of Dreams he decided to take the left-hand road this time in the direction of the new district where he could do a U-turn under the bridge and take the Southern Ring Road heading west towards Shamaat al-Amakin event hall.

  In the new district there were open plots of land and whole floors of translucent darkness despite the putrid stench that crept through the air conditioning vents.

  ‘Fahd? Shall I uncover?’ she drawled.

  He nodded, and she struggled to unfasten her head covering from behind, then looked over at him, a wanton catamite. She moved closer in the darkness and the car swayed slightly. She brushed his lips with a kiss that was fleeting and timid, as the darkened road had now come to an end and other cars suddenly appeared. Fahd decided to return to the ring road, turn beneath the bridge and head west.

  ‘Well, I don’t know where I am!’ she said. ‘The most important thing is to get me away from Khanshlaila!’

  She took his hand and laid it on her chest.

  ‘See how hot it is?’

  The small potholes in the road were filled with filthy water that gave off an acrid smell. Fahd tried to avoid them in the soft gloom.

  On the ring road the cars raced crazily. He tried keeping to the middle lane, avoiding hassle from the lunatics to his left and the influx of new cars on the right. He was not that skilful a driver yet, and cars in Riyadh moved as chaotically as blind ants fighting over crumbs.

  ‘Do you love me?’ she asked.

  He nodded. ‘Of course, and I desire you.’

  ‘Ahhhh!’ she sang with the madness of a forty-year-old child.

  Her middle finger was toying with his fingers and every time he looked at her he saw her staring hungrily back.

  ‘Will you marry a Jordanian or a Syrian?’ she asked and he laughed out loud, then suggested she marry him to her daughter in middle school.

  She remembered her husband and her mood suddenly clouded. He was a dog, she said: He beat her!

  ‘No one does that without a reason …’

  ‘OK then, I’ll give you an example and you be the judge: the last time I caught a slap from that bastard. For twenty years I’ve been trying to get him to buy us a house. Not for my sake, it’s for his kids, not that he ever cared about them! He always refused and asked me whether I lacked anything? This one time I decided to call his best friend and ask him to persuade my husband and help him buy a place, but on the condition that he mustn’t say it was me who called. More than once I told him: “Please don’t say that I called to ask you!” He gave me his word, but unfortunately he lied and told my husband about the call. My husband returned home like a raging bull. He came into my room, chucked the kids out and closed the door, then he flogged me with his aqqal until I wept.’

  ‘You’re in the wrong because you got his friend involved,’ said Fahd, boldly. ‘If you can’t persuade him yourself then that’s the end of the matter.’

  ‘Well of course, that’s not all that happened.’

  ‘Sorry for interrupting … This is Exit 25. Shall I get off here?’

  She was silent and he turned towards her to find her devouring him with her gaze.

  ‘So, you’re going to leave me so soon, are you, Fahoudi?’

  She glanced at her imitation Charroil watch. ‘Tell you what, let’s make a plan about where we’re going first, then we’ll drive. I want to see it and try it out, too!’

  As she spoke she put her hand in his lap and he shrank back like a cat.

  He took the exit and turned left at the lights. The area was all brightly lit hotels and cars. Children clustered at shop entrances and the women sold toys, nuts and fizzy drinks stored in blue and orange ice-filled ref
rigerators.

  Thuraya resumed her story. ‘Later, I called my husband’s mobile when he was at work and his dirty little pal picked up. When I heard his voice I told him, “You’ll come to a bad end, mark my words,” and I hung up on him. When my husband got home he beat me again. I ask you, does anyone beat his wife for a friend?’

  This time round, Fahd tried to avoid angering her. ‘I don’t know, I’ve never been married.’

  She punched him in the chest and in her beautifully flawed accent said, ‘My little idiot. So silly and soft. You’re just like the smooth men from the Hejaz: they love women and appreciate them.’

  Fahd was heading south, and before the side road gave out he turned right and saw a rose-red neon sign proclaiming Shamaat al-Amakin. He pointed.

  ‘There’s the spot, see?’

  She said he had to get out of the hotel district so they could drive around one of the new neighbourhoods until her friend turned up, because she didn’t know anyone else at the wedding.

  –24 –

  FAHD NAVIGATED A NARROW path through the rows of cars, worried that he might hit one. A Honda stopped in front of him. The boot opened, then the doors, and two women got out of the back as a fat youth emerged from the driver’s seat and began pulling out white tubs of food. The tubs looked heavy and the youth hunched forward as he walked over to deposit them by the women’s entrance to the hotel. He closed the boot and moved off, and Fahd followed him to the ring road.

  Fahd was forced to mount the pavement and come back down on to the road. Then he swerved across to the far left-hand side of the street and without stopping at the lights, kept to the left and turned into a newly built neighbourhood. Its buildings were of average height but its streets were fairly broad. In the darkness Thuraya’s hand reached out for his lap. Fahd’s breathing became uneven and rapid. Excusing herself she turned to look behind her then raised the armrest and leant towards him, snapping open the safety belt and entering the virgin forest.