The Catastrophe

by Ian Wedde

  He’d probably go back to cooking. Maybe he’d even go back to New Zealand. He’d be all right. Someone would always adore him.

  ‘Six Days on the Road’: Gonna make it home tonight ... Emmylou and Gram winding around each other like a couple of snakes.

  But love the fool or not, admit it: the world would be a drearier place without those mouth-watering columns.

  They’d woken her up again to sensation all those years ago when she also heard the little family living its life in the flat below. They were so in the moment. Ska music and the lovely young daddy trumpeting like an elephant. The little girl laughing and consenting to eat her dinner.

  The next glass of wine made her feel maudlin and rebellious.

  Emmylou and Gram had gone treacly. Also a bit smack-dreamy and drawly.

  Time for Miles and Coltrane, ‘Straight, No Chaser.’

  In Nice, the restaurant he’d been assigned to review was called Le Lapin Sauvage. Now that was original. She could just picture it, cheerful tablecloths. There was a phone number. She’d telephone them in the morning, and then Bob.

  Those Ligurian dishes he loved best, his grandmother’s. Each name a little song.

  Vellutata di porri.

  Zuppa di primavera.

  Christopher’s appalling Dean Martin routine. That’s amore!

  She should eat something.

  Food is love.

  That was then.

  But where was now? She wanted it to be where she was. She wanted to be where it was. Me, myself, here, now, the title of some artist’s show, unforgettable. But it wasn’t, she wasn’t. She was never completely just here, now. Nearly, when Danny pushed down the hypo plunger and a cocoon of the present ballooned around her. But that was vague and muffled.

  Other times, undeniably, with Christopher. Sensational. Unbearable, in the end. But sensational, here, now. Sometimes.

  These days here, now happened when she was taking photographs – but only sometimes.

  Miles and Coltrane, ‘Two Bass Hit.’ The two of them so utterly together in it.

  In the moment. At the present time. All those phrases, they were so full of longing. But when she looked at what she’d done in the moment, in the present moment, at the photograph of the moment, she wasn’t ever there.

  Only the ghost of her, a memory of the sensation of her.

  What she’d meant.

  What she’d meant by the photograph of the mansaf Bob had on the wall of his office. Which was also the reason she and Christopher fought over it.

  ‘What do you like about this one, Christopher?’ Picking their way through book illustration options on her big monitor. He was bored and fidgety. He kept making annoying clicky, whistly noises with his lips, smothering yawns.

  ‘I like it because ...’ Really, he just wanted to move on. To finish the job, to let her decide. ‘I like it because it looks like a whole lot of food, Pepper. Which it was – remember? A whole lot.’

  ‘What about the hands?’

  He heard her tone. ‘What about them, creampuff?’

  That was when she lost patience. ‘The whole lot of food was being eaten, Christopher. By people. That’s what was happening – see, the hands?’

  ‘That’s what food’s all about, treasure.’

  ‘Doesn’t it strike you as interesting that the hands aren’t attached to anyone?’

  ‘Mine was – it was attached to me.’

  Off they went. Boom.

  She gave up and left him staring moodily at the screen. Fiddling with his sticking-out bottom lip.

  ‘Fuck you, Christopher, you’re so wet. You decide. Why don’t you choose the whole lot all by your fucking self.’

  Because couldn’t he see, didn’t he even remember? That it wasn’t just a whole lot of food on the vast table-sized platter on the carpeted floor of the Bedouin tent? It was a whole lot of food being eaten by a whole lot of men. Who’d been invited to be there. It was about the men who were there more than the food.

  They were all men apart from the photographer.

  They were bigwig Jordanian politicians and businessmen. With bigwig smiles and wristwatches. They were bigwig tourism men.

  They were, apparently, local Bedouin sheikhs from Wadi Rum, their hosts that night, looking to improve their tourism revenues with a book by the famous food writer. An article in the prestigious food magazine. A feature in the in-flight magazine.

  A TV special on the mansaf. With spectacular, irresistible photographs.

  Eat! Eat more!

  This was a safe destination, they insisted. It was completely secure, the troubles were over. Safer than Israel! The heritage, the authenticity, the history, the hospitality. You will definitely want to come back! Everybody does!

  She’d been hearing it all day.

  And yes, the food was stupendous. Rich yoghurty lamb; rice, almonds, pine nuts, flat bread. The tender cheeks and lips of the sheep’s head were removed from the skull and spread across the dish. The skull, and what was left on it, taken away on a plate.

  She was offered some of the best bits and yes, they were indescribably delicious.

  She thought there were some jokes about testicles hidden in the dish, but the men were too polite to include her.

  A fleeting thought about kashrut and the non-kosher mixing of meat and dairy. But only fleeting.

  Christopher had learned an Arabic word, mabrouk. It meant something like ‘congratulations’. He kept saying it to loud applause. In return his appetite was being applauded.

  So when she excused herself and stood up to take some photographs, she did actually have a plan in mind. The huge, sumptuous dish of delicious food, yes, but also the disembodied hands and wrists. Men’s hands, with expensive gold wristwatches.

  And her husband’s hand among them, the food writer’s hand. Reaching in, with gusto, mabrouk!

  Not her hand, the woman’s hand, the photographer’s hand. That was only normal, under the circumstances. She was doing her job, they were eating, the spectacular dish of food had to be photographed. And, before that, of course, it had had to be cooked.

  But, leaving hers aside, there were no other women’s hands there, reaching in to the dish. The cook’s hands weren’t there. There were no children’s hands, either. She could hear them outside the tent, the women and children, laughing and scolding, and sometimes she could tell that children were peeping under the wall of the tent at the men and their big feast.

  Mabrouk, mabrouk!

  Outside, it was chilly, though the day had been blisteringly hot. The smell of the heat still rose up from the ground, dusty and aromatic, with tangs of animal shit and kerosene. The sky was dark and clear with a glittering scatter of stars. The daylight pinks and mauves of the sand and buttes were now thick, soft fields and looming piles of deep textured shadow. Even with no moon, the horizon was sharply defined, a black edge of high rock against dark, luminous blue. The stars there seemed to hang in space, not against it – the space went back, beyond them. There was a line of white SUVs parked nearby, and the drivers’ cigarettes glowed here and there in the dark. A car radio was on, playing a woman’s voice winding and winding around some repeated phrases. Some of the drivers were joining in.

  Ya habi ... ii ... bi!

  She’d never been anywhere as beautiful. She didn’t want to go back into the tent with the men and the huge mansaf.

  When she stepped away from it into the darkness she seemed to be stepping away from herself, the photographer.

  Out of the picture entirely.

  I didn’t have a hand in it.

  This was the quip she’d used for Christopher, the first time they looked at the photographs. Keeping it light. He’d looked at her uneasily, sensing something. But really, that was when she began to step away from him as well.

  He’d stopped cheesily singing ‘That’s amore!’ The kinds of things he used to do. Months and months ago.

  The Ligurian dishes that were like songs his grandmother might have
sung.

  Mandilli de saea al pesto.

  Where did you go, Christopher?

  Christopher Where?

  When she left the room, back in London, that time they had their seriously big row about the photograph of the mansaf – that was when he knew it. That she was leaving him. She could see that he felt her go.

  It was the way he sat there, pulling at his stuck-out bottom lip, his face pale and sad in the glow from the screen of tile-sized images of turmeric-coloured chickpeas, purple aubergine skins blackened by hot charcoal, little skewers of minced lamb, plates of sliced tomatoes, red onions and green peppers, a grilled half-chicken dusted with paprika, fried eggs on a bed of seared mint, pale couscous scattered with parsley, a plate of grilled sardines with vivid lemon wedges, a bowl of shining black olives, a shallow dish of hummus with oil, olives and paprika on the surface, hard-boiled eggs on blistered pita bread dusted with za’atar, a plate of falafel dribbled with yoghurt, a tajine of carrots with raisins and almonds, a plate of dates, a plate of prunes, glasses of mint tea, a plate of halva.

  An immense dish of mansaf with hands reaching into it, including his, Christopher’s.

  But not TG’s. Not Thé Glacé’s.

  She no longer had a hand in it.

  Now she was quite drunk, and the phone had rung again, more than once. Too late to eat anything and anyway she wasn’t hungry.

  Pesce al cartoccio.

  Seppie in zimino.

  Carciofi all’inferno.

  The memory of Christopher’s dejected hunched shape in front of the computer screen with its 1,001 Nights pictures was a sad one. But then so was her memory of their final showdown, spectacularly in public, at the opening of her exhibition.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  T.G.? Pepper? My paciugo? Sweet tooth? Why didn’t you?

  She had. He should have seen it coming.

  So why couldn’t he just have said something wonderful and meant it? ‘Brilliant! Brilliant!’ with that gorgeous smile of his.

  Instead, a look of utter horror.

  What did he expect?

  This was what she knew: that she could be free sometimes, but not often happy. Or happy sometimes, but not often free.

  And the man who’d made her happiest? Who’d most often had a hand in her happiness?

  Fagiolini all’aglio e acciughe.

  The ludicrous stripe of sunshine across his big funny body, and his blubbering mouth saying, ‘What am I supposed to do with this feeling!’ Beating his breast!

  When had he stopped singing?

  She got up and walked very carefully to the phone to ring Bob, knowing she had to. Of course she had to.

  She opened another wine instead.

  Put on Joy Division. Ian Curtis singing ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’.

  Turned it right up.

  CHAPTER 9

  ‘I can go?’

  This was what the food writer had said – Christopher. But she had heard in his voice no timbre of urgency, of desire, of impatience. I can go? There was even something strange in his articulation, which was at once a statement of his decision and also a question as to his freedom.

  Well, that was for him to decide. This was not a stupid man – indeed, inside his comedy, there was an intelligent instinct, a certain intellectual heat. She had watched him understand where he was, now, in the present, in the place from which he could go forward.

  She had seen the question attending in his hands and face – But where, how? And the speculation in how he looked at her. Clearly this was sad, but of course without doubt the decision had to be his. This was the moment at which she, the doctor, had learned to remove herself from the matter of life and death. Now, he could choose to decide, or choose to let fate decide, but in any case now the choice was his to make, not hers.

  In the room downstairs she took the laptop from its satchel and placed it on the table. On top of its closed lid, her long fingers counted and thus removed from her thoughts the tasks she had completed. There remained one.

  In thinking about it, she considered the procession of images whose truth had been the narrative of her life, its measure, her authenticity. There was the image of the white-stone house on a small rise in Lydda, with an old grape vine whose trunk was the circumference of an unmarried girl’s waist. There was an image like a faded photograph of a long line of people carrying possessions down a road glaring with pale heat, with the short shadows of noon at their feet and a tumbled wall of white stones fencing them in. There was her grandmother wearing a headscarf of Nazareth lace figured with birds and flowers, standing on the rooftop of the house on Jebel Ashrafieh and lifting her hands towards the bellicose sunset. There were the faces of the young fedayeen on Jebel Amman, bright with exultant power, parting before her as she ran with Habib through the hot mass of them. The image of children whose phosphorus burns could not be extinguished, who continued to burn in Barbir Hospital after they had died, who burst into flames in the mortuary. The image of Boutros on the roof of the apartment block in Beirut, with one leg bent under him in a way that told her he must be dead. Her husband Abdul Yassou’s wide silent grin of fear as she felt the revolver kick back against the heel of her right hand, the one with which she was accustomed to hold the instruments of her healing profession.

  Some of these images and many others were in her mind because she had put them there or because the stories she had been told had imprinted them there, and some were there because she had seen the events that the images remembered on her behalf. But they were all within her, and when she moved in time or to a different place they also moved; they would always be there, within her, her substance. She was not distinct from them, indeed they were who she had become during her life, Hawwa Habash, and they and she would now go forward free of that false present that had weighed her down for so long.

  Now there remained one task, a small one, which would separate her and the images that were the narrative of her life from this place and this moment, and from the imploring expression on Christopher’s face, and from his question that was not entirely a question, ‘I can go?’

  Yes, she, Hawwa Habash could go now, she could decide to do this, it was simple, and as for the food writer who would surely not be sleeping on the hard bed upstairs, he could likewise decide to go, he could tip his uncertainty across into whatever freedom he desired. That was for him to decide.

  As she lifted the top of her laptop and turned it on she heard the sound of Philippe upstairs, and a murmur of voices as he woke the driver Mahfouz. Perhaps Christopher would be hearing this also and wondering what was happening. She deleted the browser’s cache and checked that the website hadn’t left a cookie. She wiped out the singer Maya Yazbeck whose identity she had borrowed. Now she was no longer associated in any way with the message sent to the food writer’s wife, the one called ‘Thé Glacé’ on the blogs, the small woman with pale hair who was also an artist, a well-known one. There would be no trace, not even a false one.

  Now I can go was clear.

  And yet it was not without anxiety that she went up the stairs towards the top floor of the truck drivers’ house where Christopher was unlikely to be sleeping. She met Philippe and Mahfouz coming down from the floor below Christopher’s, and signaled to them to be quiet, though she saw with a small heat of embarrassment that this was unnecessary given their manner, and was only the result of her own nerves. Mahfouz was respectfully carrying Philippe’s small suitcase for him, and had his own backpack over one shoulder. They did not pause but went on down towards the truck garage at the back, where the freshly-painted red Mercedes saloon was parked. The doors of the rooms were all open except the one to the room she had used, where Christopher was no doubt waiting to find out what was happening.

  How would she finish it, this bizarre episode of the food writer? In France there were houses with signs on their doors or gates that said, Attention: chien bizarre! As a doctor she had sometimes stood in the open door of an apartment an
d encountered the ‘mad dog’ languid with caresses in the arms of its owner. But was there not supposed to be a savage beast somewhere inside? As was the case with Abdul Yassou, who had worn his domestication so convincingly in the kisses he had bestowed on the cheeks and neck of his beloved Boutros, and on his adored wife?

  But the food writer Christopher Hare she did not believe to be bizarre in this sense, though perhaps in others.

  She felt the weight of the gun in her jacket pocket, something she did not want to feel again after this day – but would, in some fashion, if she had understood Philippe’s kiss on her forehead. Her anxiety reached forward to turn the catch of the lock on the bedroom door. She would wait for Christopher to open it, and she would also wait to discover what she herself was going to say at that moment.

  Or she could leave the door for Antun to unlock when he arrived later in the morning.

  This was her anxiety. This choice.

  From downstairs came the quiet mutter of the Mercedes in the garage. Now, yes, she had of course already decided, she would do it as she had envisaged. She took the gun from her pocket and slipped the safety catch. Then she unlocked the door and stepped back. She did not believe she would have to shoot the food writer, but she would have to convince him to wait until it was light, until they had been gone for some time, before he could answer his own question, ‘I can go?’

  But there was no sound from the room and the door did not open from the inside. Indeed, when she went carefully forward and listened at the door she could hear the man snoring gently.

  Oh, he was a phenomenon, bizarre in some way even if not savage, this Christopher Hare. What had his life been like that he could be so content with his situation? With the consequences of his action and of what he now knew about its dangers?

  She reversed the safety catch of the revolver and went quickly down the stairs, turning out the lights as she went. Her anxiety drained away, a sensation that was joyful at first. But soon after, there was an ache of grief in the very pit of her stomach as she put on her fine dark overcoat and took her bags to the garage, including the plastic one with the grey wig and her surgical gloves in it. Her grief came from the innocent sound of Christopher snoring, as if oblivious to what fate might now decide for him if he did not take his I can go now into his own hands.