Strangers

by Carla Banks

  She’d looked at Joe. ‘Do we have to go there straight away? Do you have time to show us a bit of the city first? I’ve never been here before, and…’ And the restrictions on women’s freedom meant that it would be hard for her to explore Riyadh on her own.

  ‘I have a bit of time. We could go to ad-Dirah. It’s in the old city. The market’s worth a visit.’ He must get bored with acclimatizing new arrivals.

  And now as she watched Joe bargaining with one of the market traders in a rapid exchange with hand gestures and laughter as his Arabic let him down, she was glad she had asked. She’d been told that the Saudis could be stand-offish and unfriendly, but these people seemed welcoming enough. She didn’t try to join in. She wasn’t sure what women were or were not allowed to do here. She could see local women, accompanied by men, haggling briskly at the stalls. She gave up trying to follow the bartering that was going on in front of her, and stepped back to join O’Neill.

  ‘It’s hot,’ she said to him distractedly, fanning herself with a guidebook she’d picked up at the hotel. She gave herself the day’s award for stating the blindingly obvious. ‘Isn’t that too warm?’ She nodded at his scarf.

  ‘The best way to deal with this sun is to cover up against it. Like they do.’ He nodded towards the crowds who were thronging the market.

  ‘Whereabouts is the university?’ She would be working there, teaching English to the women students. She wondered if they would pass it today on their way to the house.

  ‘It’s on its own campus, to the west of the city in al-Nakhil.’ He took off his glasses and slipped them into the pocket of his jacket. She saw that his eyes were grey. ‘The ex-pats call it Camelot.’

  ‘Camelot?’ She would be living in the magic kingdom and working in Camelot. She wanted to say something about this, to try and make some contact with this man who was part of the community she was about to live and work among, but there was something about his face that discouraged any further comment. They stood in silence waiting for Joe.

  He was moving away from the stall now, putting his money back into his belt, his eyes surveying the crowd. For a moment he hesitated as if he didn’t know where he was, and she was about to wave and call when she remembered that women didn’t do that here. He’d seen them, anyway, and came across. He caught Roisin’s eye and smiled a quick query at her: You OK?

  She smiled back and nodded. ‘What did you buy?’

  ‘Something for you.’ He showed her a cluster of bangles made of delicate, thread-like silver. He liked to buy her small presents. She had a collection of scarves and earrings and beads that he had bought for her over the few months they had been together. O’Neill was glancing at his watch.

  Joe slipped the bangles discreetly on her wrist. Men and women touching in public were likely to attract angry comment from the Mutawa’ah, the religious police. She felt the cold of the metal against her skin. ‘They’re beautiful. Thank you.’ Their eyes met.

  O’Neill hadn’t been watching them. Roisin had noticed the way his eyes kept scanning the crowd, constantly checking their surroundings. ‘We need to move on,’ he said. He led them out into the narrow streets where the shops of the gold market lined the pavements, filled with necklaces, bracelets, pendants, earrings, coins, piled up in glittering brilliance. In London, these shops would have been protected by heavy glass, by metal grilles and shutters. Here, everything was out in the open.

  As they threaded their way through the crowd, away from the covered market and back on to the street, Roisin’s eyes were constantly drawn to new sights–a child watching her big-eyed from behind a stall, the glitter of gold in the thread of a fabric, ornamented shutters across an upper window, the hard lines of the shadows as the sun rose to its zenith.

  The fragrance of cooking wafted over to her and she looked round. A man at a stall behind her was grilling kebabs on a clay oven, tearing open flat bread and slapping the meat inside it for the thronging customers. She could see salads of grain and chopped herbs, and dishes of hummus. Back home, it would be five in the evening, the time that she would be leaving work and heading to the small bistro on New Oxford Street where she and Joe customarily ate. Suddenly she was ravenous. She could almost taste the spices and feel the soft warmth of the bread in her mouth, but there was nothing she could do about it. Women didn’t eat in public here.

  She collided with Joe who had stopped abruptly in front of her. ‘Which way are we going?’ His voice, as he spoke to O’Neill, was sharp.

  O’Neill looked surprised. ‘To the al-Masmak fort,’ he said.

  ‘We need to get back. Roisin’s tired.’

  Roisin opened her mouth to object, then shut it again. She had no idea what had upset Joe, but his face had that bleak, distant look. ‘It’s a bit hot,’ she said diplomatically.

  O’Neill raised an eyebrow but didn’t make any further comment. ‘OK.’ His shrug was in his tone. ‘We can cut through this way to the car.’

  She glanced quickly at Joe as O’Neill turned away. ‘I’m fine,’ she said, but he didn’t seem to hear. He was pushing ahead through the crowd and she couldn’t see his face.

  Just then, the crowd parted to let a man through. He was tall and his robes were dazzling in the light. Her eyes followed him instinctively. In the next instant a sudden surge caught her unawares, turning her around in a wave of bodies and almost knocking her off her feet. When she tried to turn back, O’Neill and Joe had vanished and she had no idea which way they’d gone.

  They couldn’t be far away, but she wasn’t tall enough to see over the heads of the people and she was getting pushed back, further away from where she had been. The next surge carried her to the edge of the street, and then she was against the wall, trying to make herself inconspicuous as she oriented herself. The streets, narrow and shadowed, ran away from her in all directions. She had the sudden feeling–something she had never felt before–of hostile eyes searching for her, eyes that wouldn’t be fooled for long by her disguise. She could feel the start of panic constricting her chest, and made herself breathe slowly and steadily. There was nothing to worry about. She’d got separated in the crowd. The worst that could happen was that the Mutawa’ah would shout at her.

  Then she recognized the corner of a building. That was where they had left the souk. In that case, they had been heading towards…or was it this way? There was a straight lane ahead of her, free from the confusion of the market-place throng.

  She followed it, and suddenly, to her relief, the crowd was gone. A square opened up in front of her, paved in patterned stone, surrounded by palm trees. At the far end was a low, flat building raised on pillars, and to her right a minaret reached up towards the sky. The shadows were solid and hard-edged. A white-robed figure stood in the shadow of the pillars, but otherwise the square was empty. It was shocking in its unexpected silence.

  She stood still, frozen in a moment of déjà vu. She thought she knew this place. Then Joe was beside her, his face tense with anxiety. ‘Christ, Roisin…’

  ‘Joe!’ She put her hand out to touch him, then drew it back, remembering where she was. ‘I’m sorry. I got caught in the crowd.’ She had been separated from them by a few yards.

  Damien O’Neill was looking at her assessingly. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes. I’m fine. It was my fault. The crowd took me by surprise.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I should have warned you about that.’ He turned to Joe, who had fallen silent and was staring at the square in front of him. ‘Come on. We can get back this way.’

  Moving quickly, he led them away from the market and suddenly the old town and the crowds were behind them. Roisin’s head was spinning in confusion. She was an adult woman in one of the major capitals of the world. She’d taken care of herself alone in a hundred cities and yet this place had rendered her helpless, had changed her status, just like that, to that of a child.

  The sun was almost directly overhead. The Arab city had vanished. They were walking through a street
that could be in Anycity, Anyplace, past high glass blocks of anonymous business space where the noise and smells of modern urban life surrounded her. By the time they reached the car park, she was glad to get back into the air-conditioned interior of the car.

  She was starting to flag. She’d tried to push herself straight into local time, the only cure for jet lag that worked for her, but all she’d been able to do when the taxi driver had dropped them at the hotel shortly after five the evening before was fall on the bed and sleep.

  She’d woken in the small hours. The green light of the clock said 3.10. She knew that she wasn’t going to be able to sleep again and sat up carefully. The blinds weren’t closed and the moonlight illuminated the room with a cold radiance.

  Slipping out of bed, careful not to disturb Joe, she’d pulled on her robe and got herself some fruit juice from the mini bar. Then she went and sat by the window, looking out across Riyadh, her home for the next year.

  The cityscape had blazed out in millions of lights. Skyscrapers, impossibly slender and fragile, thrust up towards the sky, and the highways bound them together with loops of light. It was as if someone had asked the designers and architects to build a stage set for a city of the future and they had created this edifice, a city that rested uncomfortably on the desert and on the customs of the people who inhabited it. She remembered what Joe had said when they first met. It’s like one of those optical illusions. If she sat here watching for long enough, would the illusion fade? And if it did, what would she see?

  Now, in the centre of the city, the broken night was catching up with her. The furnace blast of the air was sapping the vitality out of her, and she sank back into the car seat, enjoying the cool of the air-con. Her annoyance at Joe faded. He’d been right. She was tired. She could feel the sweat between her shoulder blades, and her hair felt damp. ‘What was that place?’ she asked, adjusting her scarf to stop it slipping off her head.

  O’Neill steered the car into the stream of fast-moving traffic. He still looked cool and untouched by the heat. ‘It’s as-Sa’ah Square,’ he said, his voice expressionless as he gave her the careful non-information. She wondered what he wasn’t telling her. A car cut in from their right and he switched lanes smoothly to avoid a collision. ‘You were based in one of the villages before?’ he said to Joe. Joe didn’t seem to hear. A truck careered towards them and swerved away at the last moment.

  ‘Someone should tell them that they drive on the right here,’ Roisin observed.

  O’Neill glanced at her in the mirror. His mouth twitched in a sudden smile. ‘It’s optional,’ he said.

  Encouraged by the first sign of warmth, she tried again. ‘Tell me about that square. It was so…’ She searched for words. The cathedral-like silence had caught her imagination. Despite the hard glare of the light, she could imagine banks of candles lit for the souls of…who? She tried to catch Joe’s eye, but he was staring out of the window, lost in his own thoughts.

  O’Neill glanced at her again before he answered. ‘It’s known colloquially as Chop-Chop Square,’ he said.

  ‘Chop-Chop Square?’ For a moment, she didn’t understand what he was talking about, then she realized. The bright square with the blue patterned stones and the palm trees was the place where malefactors against the rigid laws of the Kingdom were dealt with. The place of punishment. The place of execution. All the impulse to laugh drained out of her. People had died on those sun-dazed stones, close to the place where she had been standing.

  O’Neill had observed her reaction. ‘It’s part of what this place is,’ he said. ‘I give it a wide berth. Some Westerners go. For them it’s the nearest thing we’ve got to a tourist attraction.’

  Joe’s voice cut into the exchange before she could respond. ‘Have you seen that, Roisin?’

  She leaned across the car to look out at the building they were passing. A tower of reflective glass rose hundreds of feet above them, ending in a parabolic curve beneath a fragile arch where the structure had been cut away forming a needle reaching up into the sky. She twisted round in amazement as the road swooped away.

  ‘It’s called the Kingdom Centre,’ O’Neill said. ‘Office space, conference centres, hotel, stuff like that. After 9/11, a bad joke went round Riyadh that they used it to train the hijackers. There’s a mall.’ He switched lanes and pulled away as a car drew level with them, almost boxing them in. ‘With a floor for women. You don’t need to wear a veil. A lot of the wives go there.’

  No one spoke for a while. She watched the traffic as they sped along the six-lane highway. The cars were all moving at high speed, and the drivers wove recklessly from lane to lane with little apparent regard for the danger. She looked at O’Neill’s profile, watched the way his hidden eyes observed the traffic, watched the way he anticipated the actions of the other drivers with the coolness of a chess player studying the board. He was a man who would fit in here. He was someone who knew how to become part of the background, who knew how to camouflage himself from the edginess and the tension that she could feel in the air around her.

  He swung the car along the road that ran through the outskirts of the city, further away from the lights and the noise and the bustle. Roisin had seen maps of Saudi–a vast desert that would swallow up western Europe, with cities emerging from the wilderness almost at random, a country created in a brief space of time from disparate groups of nomadic people, a country where the beliefs and alliances were complex and alien to outsiders like her and Joe.

  The road vanished into a hazy distance. It was lined with apartment blocks, stark and ugly after the beauty of the old city and the futuristic spires of the modern. They were on the outskirts now, with car parks, shacks and industrial complexes. Then a fence appeared on the horizon, dancing slightly in the heat haze. Roisin watched it as it emerged from the urban wasteland through which they were driving. It looked high and formidable, like a prison camp or a high-security installation. She found herself looking for the watch towers.

  But she could see trees and buildings behind the fence, and O’Neill was turning the car towards a gate protected by chicanes, towards a kiosk where two uniformed men stood with their guns held ready. ‘Security’s heavy. Got your documents?’

  O’Neill spoke to the guards, his Arabic sounding fluent and easy. There was a quick, unsmiling exchange. Roisin reminded herself that the promiscuous smiles of the West were not universal, that the severe faces did not denote hostility. O’Neill showed a security pass to the first guard, while the other one came round to the passenger side of the car and held his hand out for Joe to pass him their documents. The man didn’t indicate by word or gesture that he was aware of Roisin’s silent presence. She felt suddenly that she had ceased to exist.

  Then the car was waved past. She read the notices that hung on the gates as O’Neill waited for the barrier to lift. They were written in Arabic and English: Checkpoint. Stop at the barrier. Have your documents ready.

  Keep out. Sheer drop. Danger of death.

  6

  Damien O’Neill leaned back in the reclining chair and watched the sky. His house was in the old part of the city, a part that had been largely abandoned by the Saudis, who had moved out to the wealthy suburbs. When Damien had first arrived, more years ago than he cared to count, foreign workers were housed here, and he had never joined the exodus to what was seen as more luxurious, more suitable accommodation.

  The house, old and shabby, was traditionally Arabic. There was little furniture. Cupboards were built into the walls, but otherwise the furniture was sparse and portable, designed to be moved to the shadier parts of the house as the seasons progressed. It was far too big for him, but he couldn’t bring himself to abandon the cool, high-ceilinged rooms.

  ‘You have no wife,’ his friend Majid said, by way of excusing Damien’s eccentricity. Majid chided him regularly about the lack of order in his life. He was concerned for his friend’s welfare. ‘You should marry,’ he added with the zeal of the convert. Majid had recently
married and he and his young wife were expecting their first child.

  Damien knew too much about marriage. His own, embarked on with the careless optimism of his youth, had come to a catastrophic conclusion. If he let himself, he could still see Catherine’s face twisted with misery and a love that had rotted into hatred. You don’t care about anyone! No one matters to you! But no one could have filled the void that was Catherine’s need, or that was what he told himself. ‘One day,’ he said to Majid, unwilling to explain the complexities of his past, complexities that Majid would not understand anyway.

  ‘When you go home, maybe,’ Majid had said.

  But this was Damien’s home. He had nowhere else he wanted to go.

  He was feeling hungry. He stretched and headed down the stairs. The hallway was dim and cool, and the stone flags felt cold under his feet. It was shadowy down here. At street level, the house had no windows, just air holes to channel the breezes from the narrow streets. The kitchen smelled of coffee and spices.

  There was a pot of stew simmering on the cooker, and bread under a net. His houseboy, Rai, must have been to market, because there was a dish full of fresh, sticky dates. Damien had planned to go to the market himself. He liked to spend time drinking coffee in the cafés, talking to the men, catching up on the local news and gossip. This was part of his work: integrate, blend in, become part of the community.

  He had come to the Kingdom as a civil servant, working for the British government, but realized soon enough that the rigid hierarchies, the red-tape and bureaucracy that tied up the diplomatic service were going to prevent him from doing anything he really wanted to do, and that, if the local people were to trust him, he would have to cut all visible ties with Western government organizations. As soon as he made it known he was available, an agency that recruited professionals to work in the Kingdom had snapped him up.