Out of It

by Selma Dabbagh

  ‘My sister’s coming,’ she said, the rim of her plastic tube pass still in her bite. Rashid resolved not to say anything. Whatever he said on the subject of Lisa’s family was invariably wrong. When in doubt, Sabri had taught him, one should gather information. Sabri had been referring to guerrilla warfare at the time, but Rashid chose to adopt this tactic now.

  ‘Why’s she coming? I thought you didn’t get along that well?’ He couldn’t help it, it come out despite his promise to himself.

  ‘We don’t. She’s only coming because Charlie’s coming, and Charlie and Anna were at university together. I asked her to introduce me to him. But she won’t fit in with everyone else. At all. She just won’t fit and I told her that and she got all arsey.’

  ‘Who’s Charlie?’

  ‘Rashid, for God’s sake. I told you: Charles Denham, the contact at the Foreign Office. That’s what this whole thing’s for. He’s just been moved to the Middle East desk. I told you all about him. It’s really important that you get through to him about what’s going on. He needs to know about Gaza. About the Centre.’

  ‘Sure, sure, Charlie, fine.’ Rashid did remember discussing the man. He had a clear image of him already – Charles Denham wore a bowler hat and had a pipe that he tapped on with his little finger. Rashid had not made the connection with a university-going Charlie.

  The concert tickets in Rashid’s pocket were tickling him. He shuffled around. A couple in suits stopped to examine the menu in the brass box close to Lisa’s head. The woman rubbed her hand against the man’s hip, as though she was trying to ignite it. They were black (Afro-Caribbean, Rashid, he could hearing Lisa stressing, not black). Lisa smiled at them consolingly. Rashid stubbed his cigarette out in a pot holding a tree modelled on a lollypop. The couple walked on. Rashid, deciding that an appropriate length of silence had passed, pulled the concert tickets out and flashed them in front of Lisa.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Saturday, the Albert Hall, the man himself: Eric Clapton. Two tickets.’

  ‘Rashid! They must have been so expensive. How can you afford them? You should have told me. Or asked. I can’t even do Saturday. I’ve got this charity dinner I might have to go to.’

  He had not thought that she wouldn’t be able to make it. He had anticipated the scene of handing over the tickets as being one of delight (there would be a hug, a long kiss), that she would only question him about how he had managed to get them as that was a tale in itself. It hadn’t been easy and now she didn’t even seem sure as to why she couldn’t make it.

  ‘No, I’m certain that I can’t,’ she said, handing the tickets back. ‘You should’ve asked before you bought them. All that money, Rashid. You probably can’t even get a refund.’ Her voice was cross but when she looked up at him she made herself look sweet, her brows frowning up above her nose. ‘Sorry,’ she said, moving a bit closer.

  A significant presence was approaching from around the corner, clattering towards them in high heels. Lisa stepped back from Rashid and dropped his hand at the appearance of her sister’s tightly suited body.

  ‘It’s Anna. Look, I think it’s best if no one knows about us, that we’re, you know, together. OK, just for this dinner?’

  He was not going to take Ian to the concert; he would rather go on his own and waste the money. Khalil would have loved it, but he was not coming over for ages. There was no one else.

  ‘Anna, Rashid,’ Rashid shook hands with a neater, slimmer version of Lisa: plucked brows, tiny static pearl earrings, a cleanly cut fringe. She had the kind of look that would be used to advertise a telephone company or a law firm.

  ‘Ya, hi! Rashid? Rasheed? Is that right? Great. You’re umm… a friend of Lisa’s, right? You went down to see the parents, didn’t you? I heard all about that. All about it. I can’t remember, where is it that you’re from?’

  That question again; a box requiring a simple tick when he really needed to write an essay.

  ‘Gaza?’ Rashid raised his eyebrows at the anticipated incomprehensibility of his answer.

  ‘Sure, sure. God! The places Lisa gets to! Hey, sis, you all right?’ The two women bobbed their heads a bit at each other, but did not in any way touch.

  ‘You like it over here then, Rashid? I got it right, didn’t I? Rasheed, ya? Who else is coming, Lisa? Apart from Charlie, that is?’

  ‘Just us and Charlie. Then Ali. He’s Kurdish. And Steffi who’s just started an internship with us,’ Lisa said.

  ‘Steffi?’

  ‘Short for Stefanie, Anna.’

  ‘O-K. Well, why don’t we go in, sit down, get a drink? I’ve had such a day. The tube! I just… the City sometimes – it’s just too much and my boss… you know, Lisa, I told you about my old boss?’

  They were moving towards the door. Rashid heard bits and pieces of the conversation: ‘…boob job that got infected, anyway so she’s gone, so now I have this complete neat freak anal guy. Gay, I’m sure of it. Won’t get off my back. It’s just a nightmare. Nightmare.’

  ‘He’s anal because he’s gay?’

  Lisa was pointing at the chairs, Rashid next to Anna, Lisa down at the other end.

  ‘Of course not. Oh, Lisa give it a break, will you? Yuhooo! Charlie, we’re over here.’

  A man in a casual shirt moved towards them. Rashid found himself looking beyond this youngish orangey-faced man for the man in the bowler hat he had anticipated. Expensive schooling seemed to have set the man’s face in a way that had prepared for any eventuality. Breeding had also genetically disposed him to being able to rise above his freckles. He gave Rashid a solid handshake and awaited Lisa’s directions before taking the seat opposite Rashid, placing the napkin to the side of his plate and moving the cutlery slightly to make a space for his hands.

  ‘Did you find the place OK?’ Lisa asked with such concern and politeness, with such propriety, that Rashid’s mind steamed up with images of her pink nipples and her pubic hair spread out before him.

  Ali was the kind who looked to Rashid like a common pickpocket. When he arrived he went straight to Lisa and rested his hand on her waist when he kissed her cheeks. Three times.

  Kurdish or not, at the end of the day the man was a Turk and everyone knew those Turks would sleep with the devil to get a bit of international acceptability. You just had to look at the way he held Charles’ hand between two of his, as though he had just been reunited with his long lost exiled leader, to know that. And the way he had nodded at Rashid, as though Rashid had just made an adequate job of cleaning his car. Ali moved towards the chair next to Lisa.

  ‘I can sit somewhere else if you two would like to sit next to each other,’ Anna offered to Ali and Rashid. ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘No!’ Ali, Lisa and Rashid all spoke at the same time. ‘It’s fine as it is,’ Lisa added.

  ‘Of course, boy-girl-boy-girl and all that,’ Anna said smiling over at Charles with the complicity of parents at a children’s birthday party.

  Rashid had finished off his second beer by the time Steffi arrived. She had run to the restaurant and as a result smelt neglected. Sweat formed small blisters on her nose and moistened the hair of her upper lip.

  Hardly anyone spoke. It was as though they all stood on a muddy field in their best clothes with a ball before them. No one was willing to take the first kick. Then Ali started describing his escape from Turkey. ‘All my documents were in a plastic bag in my mouth, like this,’ his lips straightened out, his nostrils flared, ‘and I swim and I swim.’

  ‘Swam,’ said Lisa.

  ‘I swim, swam. I nearly died. I cannot swam so well. Then this ship found me and take me to Italy.’

  He had Lisa’s attention and she kept looking over at Charles to make sure that he had some of his too, but Anna remained restless next to Rashid and seemed keen to knock some self-interest into the gathering.

  ‘Ghastly,’ Anna offered to Ali when he ended his account (which included several appearances before the Immigration Appeals Board
, the last of which, held the day before, had been successful). ‘Ghastly,’ she said in the same tone as she pronounced, ‘Fabulous,’ to the waiter when he read back the order to them.

  Charles took the opportunity to examine Rashid. He was not how Charles had expected him to be, he was more like a type he was familiar with from school that Charles was wary of, those bike-shed-smoker types. The more they had, the more disdain they possessed for everything and they always took the effect they had on women for granted. He could see now the flutter this man was having on Anna and obviously on Lisa, too. It was not just the man’s height; it was also the straight nose, perfectly Greek, thick eyebrows, and that air of boredom. Charles never had and never would have anything like it. He had known that since prep school. It had become easier since university when women became a bit more discerning. They seemed to want to be treated better for one thing. But men like Rashid could still make him feel as though there was a stage of life that he had completely missed out on, a stage Charles, for some reason, always associated with the idea of Moon Parties in Goa.

  Charles decided however that Rashid’s manner of dealing with food was not really to type. Rashid had arranged hummus, taramasalata and all the various other bits and pieces in neat blobs around the edge of his plate. He had then diced a raw chilli (he had sent the red pepper back to the kitchen and offered to speak to the chef before they managed to bring out the right chilli, one of those scrawny little red ones) into very, very fine cubes before squeezing lemon (also requested from the kitchen to be cut into quarters) onto the meat. Each piece of meat had been wrapped in bread and dipped into the chilli and the pastes. He had also, and Charles was not sure whether he had meant well by doing so or not, mixed diced chilli and lemon juice in a saucer that he had placed in the centre of the table for everyone else to use. Charles had tried some but the stuff had been inhaled into his windpipe; his eyes had stung, and he had had to blow his nose several times before he was able to speak again.

  ‘So how is the situation in Gaza nowadays?’ Charles had, what Rashid thought was a doctor’s tone, a sort of How many cigarettes are you smoking a day then? concern. Lisa flashed Rashid a look that made him straighten himself up and push his beer away. It didn’t really agree with him. The table seemed to be waiting now as though the question was a whistle blowing on the field. Rashid responded, drawing on Khalil and Sabri’s most recent emails, some blogs he had been following from the south, and the latest news broadcast that he had seen. Charles nodded gravely, as though it was all as he thought it should be.

  Charles dropped in the name of a person in Gaza that he wanted Rashid’s opinion on, someone that the Foreign Office had identified as a possible partner in a new peace-building initiative. Rashid laughed. He could not help it.

  ‘Him? Well yes, I mean, he speaks good English but I guess you could say that he’s not very highly regarded.’

  ‘And why would that be?’

  ‘Well, as an example, I went to one of his parties. It was right in the middle of this phase when they were pounding the hell out of the south. There were tens of thousands of people living in makeshift tents because of the number of houses that had been bulldozed. And he holds this party. And it was not just any party. People were calling us and telling us we just had to go and see to believe it. I went with my friend, Khalil.’

  ‘Khalil Helou?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. You know Khalil?’ Rashid’s eyes became bright at the prospect that Charles might through some far-fetched possibility know his friend.

  ‘No, just the name,’ Charles said.

  ‘So, the party… there was even a belly dancer, and there were quite a lot of muhajabat, you know, veiled women?’ Rashid drew his fingers around his face. Charles and Steffi nodded, Steffi with particular vigour.

  ‘A lot of people were drunk and there were these cups on the table, with err… well, with joints in them.’

  ‘Marijuana?’ The doctor tone again. Rashid could feel Lisa looking agitated. Somewhere in his thoughts he recognised that he was probably going off script, but he was enjoying holding the table’s attention. It was fun to remember the party, too. It had been nuts.

  ‘No, nice guy and all that, but it was a seriously bad move to have that party then. I don’t mean that you can’t have parties; you have to do something. You can go crazy in that place. But the timing, and considering his position? No, I mean, that’s just not on. But sure, he says some really good things sometimes. He’s all right, but I can’t say he’s got much, shall I say, credibility right now. It’s not a one-off that party, there were other things—’

  ‘Khalil Helou and Rashid work together at the Human Rights Documentation Centre in Gaza,’ Lisa interjected, also cutting off Ali, who had started an account of his years in prison.

  ‘Now tell me about that.’ Charles folded his napkin across his lap and leant back slightly in his chair. Rashid obeyed. He gave the full rundown of the Centre’s activities, the summary pages of every project proposal he and Khalil had ever drafted. Talking about Khalil made Rashid miss him a lot, made him even miss the Centre, although he never thought he would. They had put so much work into it, particularly Khalil.

  ‘Well, that’s what it was, but you know, we are not able to do much at the moment.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It was trashed. Destroyed. During the August incursion, the one where they bombed the hospital. Do you remember that one?’

  ‘Yes, yes I do, just after the municipal elections?’

  ‘That’s the one. Well, their soldiers blew open the door, broke in. They took all of our disks and smashed the computers, burnt the books and, to top it all, they shat on the floor. Well, they put some children’s paintings on the floor then shat on them.’

  A circle of blank faces gasped at Rashid as he kicked the muddy ball of social interchange into Charles’ stomach, into all his finery.

  ‘Right,’ said Charles, refusing to be winded.

  ‘Euch,’ said Anna.

  Lisa was looking more than a little disconcerted. Ali’s monologue was on hold. The waiter started clearing up. Rashid squashed what was left of his bread into the small mush of hummus debris. He placed his hands wide apart, open on either side of his place mat, What else? What more do you want? Beer did not agree with him. He took against the room with its burnt pots and old brooms hanging on the wall, against the tinniness of its echo, against the blank white faces fed on stodge. Anger had built up in Rashid, talking about the situation, trying to give these people Gaza like it was chilli on a saucer. Goddamn it. He wanted to forget it. His anger was at the top of his skin running down his arms. By the time it got to his fingers he could barely control it.

  Charles adjusted himself in his seat. Anna took one of Rashid’s cigarettes without asking and pushed her chair back to go out. Rashid held the pack and was about to get up as well although the mood around the table stopped him from moving. Lisa’s chest rose and fell stroppily, but it was Steffi who broke the silence.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said, her hands crossed at the fingers, her thumbs stroking each other with approval, ‘do you then have female genital mutilation in Palestine?’

  Chapter 21

  ‘What the hell do you mean, you’re taking my sister?’ Lisa was more furious than Rashid had ever seen her. It lifted his mood completely.

  ‘Well, why not? You can’t make it. Who else am I going to go with? Ian? Steffi? Who do I know here? She really wanted to see him. She bought the ticket from me, insisted that she paid for it. I don’t see what the big deal is.’

  Lisa had left Ali at the corner of the road, his stooped form bent against a wall. His physique had not changed, he seemed acclimatised to rejection, bad treatment and hanging around on street corners.

  ‘Well, you just wouldn’t understand, would you,’ Lisa started.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. It’s just – what the hell have you got in common with my sister?’

 
‘Eric Clapton?’ He was moved by her fury, her apparent jealousy. ‘You?’ He slid his hand behind her hair and moved it along her shoulder.

  ‘She knows nothing about me, and I am not sure that you do either.’ Lisa looked like she was about to slap him. It was great. She cared. The straps of Rashid’s bag were cutting into his shoulders. He placed it on the pavement.

  ‘Look, Lisa…’ he started, about to say that he would not go.

  ‘And what the hell do you think you were doing in there? Going on about druggy parties in Gaza? I take you out to meet someone very important and you act like some drunken clown, bitching about his… his future partner in some valued initiative…’

  ‘Partner for Peace?’

  ‘Yes, Partner for Peace and you make it sound like you are all just a bunch of jokers, sell-outs, hypocrites, potheads,’ she spat out at him.

  ‘“You” being who?’

  ‘The Palestinians. That was the best you could do, was it? Forget the suffering, the bombing, the arrests, the targeted assassinations, the whole damn Occupation and its economic devastation. Not to mention the destitution or the enforced malnutrition. No, no. You just sit there drunk in front of a senior government official telling him about some party where they served joints in cocktail glasses.’

  ‘That was not the point I was making, I was just saying it was bad timing for that party.’ Ali had not moved and Rashid could feel his attention on them. Someone else was watching too, a man in the Internet café, smirking through the window.

  ‘Yeah, well, maybe you would have been better off keeping your mouth shut and just letting him carry on thinking that there were people out there he can believe in.’ Lisa’s finger was pointed, as though she wanted to squash Rashid into the ground with it.