Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (9 page)

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Authors: Hilary Mantel

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“Yasmin sent it with the curry. She sent Shams to do the dirty work. She thinks I need it for the souk. She’s propagandizing me. Trying to make me into a good Eastern wife.”
“Take it off. I don’t like it.”
She spoke from beneath the layers. “This morning she told me that the Saudis didn’t mind seeing women’s legs, it’s their arms they mind. She said, since she is a Muslim, but she’s not a Saudi, she doesn’t feel she need cover her face, just her head, and her arms, and her legs. I can’t work it out, can you?”
“Please take it off. It’s sinister.”
She swept the veil off, and stood smiling at him. “You’ve got something on your forehead,” he said, “something red, what is it?”
It was very quiet in the flat; just the hum and rattle of the air-conditioners. She went back into the bathroom to wash away the red sauce. Perhaps Jeddah life is making me slightly deranged, she thought. It was strange how sound carried down the well at the center of the building, echoing around the plumbing and the sanitary fittings of Dunroamin. Quite distinctly, she could hear, from the floor above, the sound of a woman sobbing.
 
 
Tuesday. Mrs. Parsons’s driver parked in Ghazzah Street and blew his horn for Frances to come down. She picked up her bag from a chair in the hall, took the house keys in her hand. Andrew had locked her in again. You’re always asleep when I leave, he said, or half asleep, what else can I do? She turned the key to let herself out of the apartment—it was stiff, a poor fit—and found she had turned it the wrong way, and double-locked the door. She fumbled, felt her face flush, dropped the keys. How incompetent I am becoming, she thought, about even quite ordinary things.
She found the front-door key again, and again fitted it into the lock; she felt an irrational urge to hammer on the door, shout to whomever was listening, in the outside world, to come and spring her, get her out. The door opened. She stepped into the hall, closed
the door, locked it behind her; double-locked it again, without meaning to. A long blast of the horn came from the street: Daphne and her driver, wondering where she was.
She looked over her shoulder, up the stairs. So far she had not even had a glimpse of Samira; though she had heard her, perhaps, last night. She glanced across at the closed front door of Flat 2. Was Yasmin standing behind it, her luminous long-tailed eye applied to the spyhole? I shall get you one of those spyholes, Andrew had said, and she had snapped at him, I’m not a child; if someone comes to the door I shall answer it, what do you think this is, Manhattan?
Now her sandals slapped against the hard marble floor. She wrenched open the heavy front door. It swung behind her on its stiff hinge, firmly ushering her out. Then the paving-stones, two paces, rank air, the gate in the wall; she drew back the metal bolts, swung it open, clattered it shut behind her. She chose another key. Wrong one. Another. Wrong one. She could feel the driver’s eyes on her back, and a blush spreading upward from her throat. When would she learn these keys? Locking in Yasmin, and Samira, and their children and maids; Parsons had told her to do it, told her she must remember, or her neighbors would be annoyed. Finally she dropped the bunch of keys into her handbag. Mrs. Parsons was waiting in the backseat of her car, and she smiled as she leaned over and flicked the door handle for Frances to get in beside her.
“Always in the back when you’re with a driver,” she said. “Give the door a good slam, dear. I was just going to come after you. Weren’t you ready?”
“Yes,” Frances said, “I’ve been ready for an hour. But there are a lot of doors to lock and unlock.”
“Funny old block,” Mrs. Parsons said. “Very Saudi.” She leaned forward and said distinctly, “Hasan, we want Queen’s Building, you understand me, Queen’s Building.”
“Yes, madam,” Hasan said.
“Because we don’t want some other souk,” Mrs. Parsons said, “we want the main souk.” Her pale eyes slid to Frances. “So how are you finding it?” she inquired.
Frances hesitated. Already she felt uncomfortable, her dress
sticking to her under the arms. It would cool down toward Christmas, people said. She reached into her bag, checking that the keys were still there, not dropped in the gutter or down the car seat. She considered Mrs. Parsons’s question. “It’s … stultifying,” she said at last.
Mrs. Parsons made no answer to this; or no immediate answer. Frances felt she knew her already, from a former phase of life: a sagging, soft-fleshed woman, with flushed weathered skin, a Home Counties voice. She wore a flowing kaftan with a batik pattern, and her freckled arms were encircled by heavy antique bracelets of traditional design; around her neck on a long chain she wore another beaten silver ornament, which bore an unfortunate resemblance to a gym-mistress’s whistle. Her manner was benignly poisonous.
“I hope I’m properly dressed,” Frances said.
“You ought to get some kaftans really. Especially for the souk, you know, and for when you’re out without your husband. The shop people won’t serve you, if they don’t think you’re properly covered up.” Mrs. Parsons looked her over. “You don’t want to be pestered, do you? You’ve got that fairish hair, you see, fair hair’s always an attraction to them.”
“I thought I’d be all right if I covered my arms.”
“Well, of course, there aren’t any hard and fast rules.” Mrs. Parsons passed a hand over her own bare forearm. “It isn’t arms they mind, I understand, it’s legs. Or if you want to just go out in your ordinary clothes, what you should do is get an
abaya,
you know, those black cloak things the Saudi ladies wear, and then you can just fling it on over everything.”
“Yes, but I’m not going to do that,” Frances said. She was silent for a moment. She had seen European women with the black wraps shrugged on for half-concealment; they trailed and flapped, and slid off the shoulders, like a student’s or a barrister’s gown; as they stood at the supermarket checkouts the women twitched at them whenever they had a hand free. These women looked absurd, she thought, as if they had stopped off for some groceries on their way to a degree ceremony. “They’re just dressing up,” she said. “It’s an affectation.”
“Oh, well,” Mrs. Parsons said. “They’re only trying to keep out of trouble.”
“It’s selling out.”
“You’ll have to talk it over with your neighbors. Have you met your neighbors yet?”
“We’ve met the Pakistani couple, on the ground floor.”
“Yes, I thought old Raji’s wife would be asking you over for a cup of tea.” She gave a little knowing laugh. “Raji knows all the expats. Doesn’t mix though. Oh no. Can’t, in his position.”
“What exactly is his position?”
“He’s very close to Amir, Eric tells me. That’s the Minister, Amir. Does all his wheeling and dealing on the stock market. He’s always jetting off to London or Tokyo. They have private fortunes, you know, these people, that they keep outside the Kingdom.” Again the laugh, without humor. “Knows a lot, does old Raji. Met the Arab girl?”
“No.”
“I don’t know her,” Mrs. Parsons said, as if that settled the matter. “I don’t know her at all.”
They had left behind the narrow streets around Dunroamin; the driver put his foot down. They shot through a red light. “Third one this morning,” Mrs. Parsons muttered. “Can’t you slow down, Hasan?”
Frances looked out of the window. The sheer face of a twenty-story bank building rose on their right. A National Guardsman in camouflage gear lounged in the gateway of a white-walled palace. He held a rifle; the wind, blowing in from the desert, whipped his red and white
ghutra
before his face. Mrs. Parsons half-turned in her seat. “Are you hoping to get a job?”
“I didn’t think one could.”
“Oh, there are ways around it. There are sometimes office jobs. Secretarial work.”
“I’m not a secretary.”
“No, well, you seem a smart enough little girl, you’d pick it up. You can answer the telephone, I suppose?”
They screeched to a halt. Hasan had stabbed his foot on the
brake; they were flung forward against the front seat. Mrs. Parsons’s bracelets clashed together loudly. “Damn these women,” she said.
Ahead of them, a collection of black-veiled shapes had drifted into the road. They hovered for a moment, in the middle of the great highway, looking with their blind muffled faces into the car; then slowly, they began to bob across to the opposite curb.
“There you are,” Mrs. Parsons said sourly, as she rearranged herself in her seat and readjusted her jewelry. “That’s one of the few advantages of being female in this part of the world. They know that drivers will pull up for them.”
“Where are they going? Where have they come from?”
Mrs. Parsons gestured around her. “There are these little poor communities all along this road. It’s surprising where people live, in the middle of everything. They’ll be Yemenis, or something, like Hasan there.”
Between the palaces of commerce, small lock-up shops flourished, little metal boxes, metal shacks, selling cheap clothing and flat bread. Even under the glacial slopes of the Hyatt Regency Hotel, men lounged in the greasy doorways of cheap cafés, their eyes on the moving traffic. Frances felt an impulse of frustration. She put her hand, momentarily, against the glass of the window. Mrs. Parsons looked out at Jeddah, moving past them. “It’s called the Bride of the Red Sea,” she said. “You’ll find.”
A broken-down butcher’s shop went by, the windows draped with gray intestines. A
thobe
maker displayed bale after bale of identical white cloth. Then Sleep-hi Mattresses, and Red Sea Video, and The Pearl of the Orient Cafeteria. “Would the drivers stop for me?” Frances asked.
“I don’t know. It might depend how you were dressed.”
These are such major preoccupations, Frances thought, nearly all-consuming preoccupations: the dress rules, the accident rate.
“Of course, they’re not safety-conscious,” said Mrs. Parsons. “You know the worst thing? When there’s an accident, no one wants to get involved, because of the police, and the blood-money system. If you stop you’re a witness, and you might be held in jail. And if you give somebody first aid, you might be accused of making
their injuries worse. Suppose you move someone, and they die? You might have to pay the blood-money yourself.”
“But that’s ridiculous.”
“So the injured just lie there. If something else comes along and hits them—oh, my dear girl, don’t look so alarmed. Everyone has accidents in Jeddah, but it’s mainly just a shunt and a scrape for us expats. It’s the Saudis that cause the havoc, all these twelve-year-olds in their sports cars, and all the Koreans and the Filipinos in those old wrecks they drive.”
“I wonder what the chances are, of getting out in one piece?”
“Oh, quite good, really. It’s on the freeways that you have to watch yourself. It’s not the roads in town that are dangerous. It’s the roads out.”
Frances thought, I do not like the tenor of her conversation, I do not like the tone of it, and yet I should listen to what she says, because it is probably true. When she had first gone to Africa, she had expressed discomfiture, to an old resident, at the state of the servants’ quarters of her bungalow. “Wait till you see how they live in the villages,” the woman had said. Her tone had implied, they want nothing better. Frances hadn’t liked her tone; but the woman had been right. Her houseboy had considered himself in luxurious circumstances, with his concrete-floored shower, and single whitewashed room. He put up pictures and curtains, and invited friends around. The burden of guilt had eased a little; had been easing, ever since.
“About this job,” she said. “I thought women weren’t allowed to have jobs that brought them into contact with men?”
“Not legally,” Daphne said. “It’s become more difficult now, but a little while ago you got a lot of British and American girls working in offices. The police would raid them every so often.”
“What, typist raids? Like drug raids?”
“The firm would just get a car to the back door and slip the girls out and they’d have to stay away for a few weeks. But then as I say, it’s not so easy now, several companies got heavy fines, and nobody nowadays feels their position in the Kingdom is too secure.”
“What do they do now for typists?”
“Oh, they get Pakistanis in.” Mrs. Parsons spoke as if she had said, they use robots, they’ve trained some apes. “I could probably put out feelers,” she said. “Eric knows a lot of people.”
Frances turned her face away, tilting up her chin a little. The shops crawled by: Prestige Autos, Modern Fashion, Elegant Man. Two elderly men in turbans sat on the sidewalk deep in conversation, crouched in the scant shade of a sapling, their flip-flops inches from the passing cars.
“There’s not much to office work,” Mrs. Parsons said. “Did you work before?”
“I’m a cartographer.”
“How unusual.” Mrs. Parsons thought for a moment. “Nursery teachers are always in demand,” she said. “You could have started a preschool playgroup. Pity you weren’t a nursery teacher.”
“I’m sure I would have been,” Frances said, “if I’d thought of the advantages.”

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