Ibrahim had gone into hiding, but I knew where to find him. I waited on the red carpet in front of the RAC club’s reception desk as Mohamed made a call on the internal telephone system before leading me upstairs.
The private suite was smoky and Ibrahim looked old and frail, his hair awry. Only when he had locked the door behind me was I aware of the shadowy figure to one side of the room. The Mukhabarat man relaxed as I sat down.
Ibrahim sat opposite me, easing himself into the club chair. ‘So. Mariam is dead.’
‘I was with Nour when she got the news.’
Ibrahim grimaced. ‘She would have been upset. It is the way my brother died. These helicopters are their favourite toy.’
‘What about Hamad?’
‘In prison. The farm has been completely destroyed. The action is being justified as an anti-terrorist sweep. They used phosphorous on the fields. The olives all were burnt. This I had from Hamad before they came for him.’
‘The Israelis?’
‘Yes, them.’ Ibrahim lit another cigarette. ‘You want a drink?’
‘No, no thanks. I’m good.’
He grunted and lifted his glass to drink. His hand shook, making the ice tinkle, so he steadied it with his other hand.
I rubbed my sandy eyes. ‘What will you do?’
‘I will wait. They cannot continue. They have already made arrests, caused much damage. We have lost our offices in Eilat and Haifa and we have lost our farm. But we still have a business in the Arab World. We will survive this.’
Sitting in the ludicrously rich, gilded room, I realised the Dajanis had lost all their young men. Hamad the bomber and Daoud the visionary were dead and Ibrahim and Nancy didn’t have kids. Only Aisha could give the family an heir now.
‘What about the water consortium?’
‘I do not know, Paul. Our government has lost its appetite for this solution, I think. There have been accusations from the Israelis that we Jordanians had a secret agreement with Syria and Lebanon that we would all take more water together. There have been “accidents” in Damascus and Beirut. I think everyone has lost their appetite for water.’ He lifted his glass. ‘Take my advice, Paul. Take your whisky neat.’
His eyes were closing and I understood how he had managed to retain such composure in the face of his grief. Ibrahim was blind drunk.
I stood. ‘Give Aisha a message for me, Ibrahim. Will you remember?’
His eyes opened. ‘I don’t forget when I drink. Do you have anything left unsaid to her, Paul?’
I winced at that. ‘Yes, I do. Tell her I was misled by the British. They gave me good reason to suspect Daoud was a terrorist. I was wrong to believe them. Tell her I am sorry and I love her. Can you tell her that?’
He nodded and I left him, his head down. The Mukhabarat man closed the door behind me.
The rain started at about four in the afternoon. I had spent the day wandering disconsolately around the house, sitting down every now and then, getting up to gaze out of the window or flick through the TV channels. For about an hour I watched cartoons. It was unnaturally dark outside, the garden stark and the trees stripped of their leaves. The rain came, light at first, flicks and diagonal streaks of refracted light across the windows. I sat in the bedroom looking out across the patio as the rain came harder and harder until it was smashing down, splashing on the flagstones, relentless, driving rain obscuring the houses beyond.
I stood on the patio, sheltered by the overhanging first floor balcony and smoked a cigarette, the air wet and cold. I stepped out into the rain and let it fall on me, soaking me. I held my face up to it and felt it hitting my skin, making my eyes twitch with its force on my closed lids. I forced my eyes open and it hurt me, the water and the pain cleansing me. I walked down to the road and wandered the empty streets. I remembered Aisha dancing in the downpour and tears joined the rain streaking my cheeks. The streetlights flickered on and I realised I was walking in darkness. I dragged myself back to the house, noticing lights were on upstairs but too tired and too bruised to care about any new tenant. I dried myself and made another drink.
There was a knock on the kitchen door.
More beautiful than ever, her hair plastered down over her face and her clothes soaked, Aisha was framed by the light from the kitchen. I didn’t believe it at first. I stood in the doorway and stared at her.
‘I didn’t know where else to go.’
I stepped aside to let her in. She waited, dripping on the kitchen floor. I motioned at her sodden coat.
‘Take those off.’
I went to the bathroom and got a bathrobe I’d stolen from some hotel and brought it back to her. She was naked and shivering, her clothes over a chair. I rolled up newspaper and laid it under blocks of wood in the stove, then lit it. The warmth was instantaneous and I pulled up a chair by the fire for her.
‘Have you eaten?’
‘No.’
I pulled some bread from the fridge, made sandwiches and coffee for us both. I spread out her clothes on two chairs by the fire. She gazed silently into the flames.
I brought her coffee and sandwiches and she cradled the cup in her hands, rocking slightly as she ate.
I sat by her. ‘Where have you been?’
‘Around. Friends. They’re watching Mum’s house.’
‘I know. Have you spoken to Ibrahim?’
‘Yes.’
I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands.
‘I didn’t mean…’
‘Yes. You did. You meant everything you said. But I know why you said it, Paul. I’ve thought about it a lot.’
I was at a loss. I didn’t know where we could possibly go from here. But I knew I desperately wanted to be with her again. We were silent together, looking at the fire.
‘What about us, Aish? What are we going to do?’
‘There is no us. You need to go home. To leave Jordan. I don’t know what I will do.’
‘There can be an us.’
And wrote my will across the sky in stars
‘No. No there can’t. We can’t undo this. We have been through too much.’
I wanted to plead, to beg her. But she was cold, distant. I took refuge in domesticity, cleared the plates and turned her clothes on the chairs. Her underwear was almost dry.
‘Aisha, I love you. I don’t want to be away from you.’
She pulled the bathrobe around. Her damp hair formed tendrils on the towelling. ‘They have arrested my mother.’ I looked up at her. ‘They will arrest me,’ she added, simply.
‘I don’t care. I’ll wait for you. I’ll work with Ibrahim. You’ve done nothing. Either of you.’
She smiled but there was no warmth in her expression. ‘My sister, too. Maybe Ibrahim.’
I had never known myself to possess such resolution, not in a life of wandering and letting the tides of fate carry me, free of ambition or the desire to stamp my will on other people. But now I knew resolution.
‘I will be here, Aisha.’
She nodded and reached out, touched my face. I looked into her eyes, put my hand up to her cheek as she asked me, ‘Who is Gerald Lynch to you?’
I tried to conceal my surprise at the question, but I failed. ‘He works for British intelligence.’
‘And so do you.’
The truth, nothing but the truth. So help me God.
‘I have done things for Lynch, yes.’
‘He pays you.’
‘No. Not money.’
‘Not money.’
‘I got caught up with him. He drew me in. Once I had given him one thing, he asked for another. I couldn’t go back.’
She turned away from me. ‘The water contracts. The request for proposals. The evaluation. Daoud’s bid.’
‘Yes,’ I said to her back. She had lifted a decorative plate from the kitchen surface and was turning it in the light.
To earn you freedom, the seven pillared worthy house, that your eyes might be shining for me when we came.
‘Yes.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me about Lynch?’
‘I didn’t want it between us. I tried desperately to get away from him. I wanted to be free so I could be with you.’
She nodded, picking up her clothes and walking out of the kitchen into the bedroom. I sat looking into the fire for a couple of minutes but she didn’t come back. I followed her. She had dressed and was standing in the darkened room, looking out into the rain through the patio window. I spoke her name and she turned. She came to me and collapsed in my arms. I felt the warmth of her, smelled her soft woman-smell.
‘I love you, Paul.’
Death seemed my servant on the road, till we were near and saw you waiting, when you smiled
I don’t know what stilled us as we stood there in each other’s arms, but something made us both animal, alert. The sound of glass breaking and a terrible concussion sucked the breath out of us, making us both scream soundlessly, a high pitched whine in our ears, too loud to bear. The force and sound dropped us both to our knees on the instant before the smoke billowed up around us in choking yellow-white clouds. We reached for each other, coughing, our eyes streaming and bodies shaking.
Shapes in the smoke, tall, dark, bulky alien forms with piercing bright lights for eyes, masks and guns. We clung to each other, touch the only sensation for a second before another concussion forced us apart and I fell. Sound came back, men shouting and things breaking. I retched, vomiting on the floor as I crouched on all fours like a dog, choking and drooling saliva in a silvery band to the puke on the ground. Aisha was dragged away, two of them holding her as she screamed to me, reaching out for me. I could do nothing, disoriented and sick, my eyes, nose and mouth burning and streaming. I choked out her name, ‘Aisha,’ but she had been swallowed by the fog. A bulky shape materialised in front of me, twin pillars of light shining down and a terrible, crunching kick to my stomach and another to my head as I started to go down, falling into my own puke, my lips drawn back from my teeth in pain. My back arched and he kicked me again.
I heard a gunshot. A single gunshot. Aisha’s screaming stopped. I forced my eyes open. The smoke billowed and parted. For a second, her marble face stared sightlessly back at me. Then the curtain of smoke fell and she was gone.
And in sorrowful envy he outran me and took you apart into his quietness
Fin
THANKS
I originally wrote this book in four weeks, inspired by a dream of a girl dancing in the rain after listening to George Winston’s Winter Into Spring. It took a further seven years to become the book you’re holding today. It’s been a long road.
Travelling along much of it with me has been a merry band of online companions, the ‘Grey Havens Gang’, so here’s to Simon Forward, Heather Jacobs, Peter Morin, Amethyst Greye, Dan Holloway, Sabina England, Robb Grindstaff, Gail Egan, Bren MacDibble, Kate Kasserman, Michelle Witte and Phillipa Fioretti.
Phillipa in particular gave much of her time and considerable talent to working with me on editing the original MS of Olives and Robb was its final editor. Any faults in this work are obviously theirs and nothing to do with me.
I have been lucky to enjoy the friendship and support of many remarkable people around the Middle East over the years. The exceptionally talented Lebanese artist Naeema Zarif created the cover of this book. I owe a deep debt of gratitude in particular for the contributions, suggestions and patience shown by my friend Eman Hussein and to the encouragement, friendship and support of Micheline Hazou, Sara Refai, Roba Al Assi and Taline Tutunjian as Olives took shape. They have all, in one way or another, influenced the relationship I have with my books and writing. Matthew Teller made some critical corrections to the MS as did Katie Stine.
My wife, Sarah, has been encouraging me in this for something like ten years now. I’ve long ago lost count of how many times she’s said ‘Don’t give up’. It’s terribly conventional to thank your wife for her support, but Sarah has been a rock of remarkable constancy as I have pursued my ten year long career of collecting a quite wondrous number of rejection slips.
Finally, I’d just like to thank you for reading Olives and hope you’ve enjoyed it.
If you’d like to know more about Olives:
www.olivesthebook.com
Michel Freij is a powerful man. But he wants more. Two hundred kilotons more.
Ruthlessly ambitious Lebanese businessman and politician Michel Freij is slated to become the country’s next president.
The son of a bloody Christian warlord, Freij’s calls for a new, strong Lebanon take on a sinister note when European intelligence reveals he’s bought two ageing Soviet nuclear warheads from a German arms dealer. Cynical SIS man Gerald Lynch battles to find the warheads before they reach Lebanon – and to discover what Freij plans for the deadly weapons.
www.beirutthebook.com
www.alexandermcnabb.com
@alexandermcnabb
Olives Page 24