Ishmael's Oranges (24 page)

Her mouth was pressed to his, clumsily, and he spoke his promise to her lips. ‘Jude. My Jude. I'll make you happy, I swear, my love. Whatever else comes, I swear it. I've come home now to
you.'

Douay–Rheims Bible

Anwar Sadat, to the Israeli Knesset
after the Yom Kippur War

‘Can I have an ice-cream? You said I could, remember? Not a lolly, a big
dahab
one, with nuts.'

By the seashore, the birds wheeled and circled in the gasping heat. The Kuwaiti sun was approaching its zenith in a roaring blaze and not a ghost of a breeze lifted from the oily water.

Jude fished in her pocket for change.
Even the coins are hot
. Once, she'd told Marc that their car at midday was hot enough to fry eggs on. The next hour, she had come outside to find him standing by the car bonnet, eggshell in hand, watching the hardening white drip slowly onto the melting tarmac.

‘Wait a moment, pet,' she said. ‘Daddy will be here soon.'

‘Daddy doesn't like ice-cream,' said Sophie solemnly, leaning into the slim shade of her mother's skirt. Marc stood in front of her, feet planted apart. The light turned his hair an aching white and his skin transparent. Fierce blue eyes looked up at her and his lips pressed together in tight disapproval. ‘But I want one
now
,' he said firmly. ‘Before Daddy comes. He always says
no.'

Jude silently willed Salim to hurry. He'd left the house this morning in his best suit and tie, eyes full of anxiety. Jude's heart went out to him, even though she desperately hoped his mission would fail. If he failed, then they could all go
home.

She bent down and pinched Marc's chin. He was both old and young for his six years. Sophie, the elder twin, was her mother reprised in olive tones. Within her brown skin and almond eyes was a quiet, meticulous child, gentle and ready to
love.

But Marc
–
goodness knows where Marc came from, Salim used to say. Salim had taken Marc's stubborn paleness to heart
–
almost as if it were a deliberate affront. Jude understood his incredulous annoyance.
Your Arab friends here were already suspicious of your blonde wife. And now they look at your white son and wonder – whose is he?

Jude loved Marc's skin, but the feelings that bubbled inside it troubled her. Her little boy had a mind like a bird, full of fever and flight. He did not listen, he could not be still, soaring and plunging through feelings like the desperate gulls behind her skimming the Arabian
Gulf.

‘Be patient, pet,' she said. ‘We have to wait here until Daddy comes to tell us about his job, remember?' Marc dropped his eyes and kicked the ground with his feet. Behind her, Jude heard Sophie shout, ‘Daddy!' She pushed herself up, her heart leaping in her chest.

Salim was beaming, kneeling on the dusty ground, his arms open for Sophie as she ran into them. He pulled her up over one shoulder, where she giggled and kicked her
legs.

Jude took Marc's hand and hurried towards him. He turned to her and kissed her hard and long on her upturned palm
–
the most he could legally do in Kuwait's puritan public spaces. ‘It's okay, my love,' he said, his voice surging with new confidence. Over the past month, she'd been afraid his courage was leaving him. ‘They agreed to give me a trial. For six months at least, we're safe. And if it works out
–
you're looking at the new Managing Director of Expansion for the Gulf Region.' He stood taller and slapped Sophie on the backside, making her squeal with laughter. ‘What do you say to that, you pair of pickles?' he shouted to the children, ruffling Marc's
hair.

What do I say?
Jude squeezed his hand and smiled at him. ‘I'm so proud of you, my love. You deserve it. I hope they're really sorry about what they did to
you.'

Salim's face fell slightly, but then he shrugged.

‘I suppose they did what they had to. The company has to think of its bottom line, and that division wasn't making so much money.' It was almost word for word what his American mentor had said when they'd let him go the month before.

Three years ago Jude would never have dreamed they'd be living in this empty desert. Their road in England had just started to smooth, the birth of their perfect twins reconciling doubters on both sides. Marc and Sophie had been wondrous, glorious affirmation of their courage. Those first days in the hospital Jude and Salim had been transfixed by them, these two unlikely beings clutching each other, their twined limbs formed by
love.

Everything before had been so hard. Dora nearly had a heart attack when Jude told her of the engagement. It was Jack's actual heart attack that finally opened the door to tenuous acceptance. Dora stood grimacing at their tiny wedding at Chelsea Register Office as Tony gave her away, and Hassan loomed woodenly by Salim's side as best
man.

Two years later, Salim came home with a strange look on his face. He'd sat on their white and brown spiral carpet and played with the twins, tickling their bellies to make them wriggle with
joy.

Once the toddlers were in bed, he gave Jude the news that would set them all on an unknown course. A recruitment company had called to ask if he would consider relocating to Kuwait.

‘Where?' was the first thing that Jude could find to say. Salim explained. Kuwait was a small desert nation on the shores of the Arabian Gulf, sandwiched in between Iraq and Saudi Arabia. ‘Small but very rich,' he said, ‘and getting richer every day.' An American company was peddling new technologies to the sheiks in their rising business districts. And they wanted someone who knew the region. ‘Although that just goes to show how much Americans know about Arabs,' he'd laughed. A Palestinian doesn't even speak the same language as the Kuwaitis.'

‘So why go there?' Jude found herself holding on to the edge of the table, a lump in her throat. She'd been planning to return to her master's degree once the children turned three, taking all the old books out of the attic and putting them back on the shelf. ‘How could
I
go there?'

He'd looked at her thoughtfully, but she could already see the fires of excitement in his eyes burning away reason. ‘You don't look anything other than English,' he'd said. ‘There are twice as many foreigners in Kuwait than Arabs
–
they'd never notice you. We wouldn't need to say anything, my love.'

‘And what about you?' she'd countered
–
later, after his first interview had gone so well. On the sofa that evening, in his arms, she'd played her last card. ‘You said you never wanted to go back. You wanted to be free of it, to be your own
man.'

She remembered how he'd taken her hand and kissed it. There'd been tears in his eyes, but his voice was wild with happiness.

‘Don't you see?' he'd said. ‘That's the point of all of this. I have a British passport. I'm not a poor Palestinian any more, being pushed around. I'm British, a westerner. They'll
have
to respect me.' He was looking up at the white ceiling, smiling at the invisible future he saw gathering there. ‘Just a few years, and we'll be rich, my love. We will never have to struggle again.'

And a few days later, Douglas Friend, Managing Director of Odell Enterprises Gulf Division, was buying them dinner at Le Gavroche.

She remembered
–
it had been the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur in 'seventy-three. Bombs were once again falling around Israel; Arab forces were surging across the deserts and mountains towards Jerusalem. They were calling to take back their stolen lands and Jude despaired of knowing if they were right or wrong.

Salim had persuaded Jude to miss Uncle Alex's uptown breaking-of-the-fast to come with him instead. How could she refuse, when their peoples were killing each other half a world away? So she left the twins with a babysitter and ached for them throughout the meal. As they ate and Salim talked, she watched the pale orange candlelight stream through their empty champagne glasses, painting ghostly pictures on the mirrors behind their heads. Later that night, she took Salim's face in her hands and said, ‘One condition, Sal. If we go, we don't change who we are. We protect this family. Even in an Arab country… I want the children to grow up with nothing to hide.'

They'd arrived at the time of the oil embargo that looked set to make Kuwait even richer. Now three years later
–
three years of diplomatic dinners, weekends at the Equestrian Club, cheap maids and aching loneliness for Jude
–
the dreams of wealth were slipping
away.

That same Doug Friend, the one promising so much, took Salim into his office to tell him he was out of a job. The division he worked for would be shutting down, and Salim's contract would not be renewed. Salim had come home crushed, dazed
–
like the dockyardman Jude once saw knocked over by a swinging crane catching him from behind.

One thin branch of hope remained
–
a promise to put Salim forward for a trial position in another part of the company. The weight of Salim's anxiety had been crushing; he
had
to impress, or it was all
over.

Now, with Sophie in one hand and Jude in the other, her husband stepped lightly as he led them into the restaurant beside the waterfront. Behind them stood the triple pillars of the new Kuwait Towers. Their sea-blue globes were raised hundreds of feet into the sky, pierced by long white needles like rockets aimed at the heavens.

Marc was ordering his ice-cream, arguing with Sophie about whether the chocolate or the strawberry
dahab
cone was tastier.

Salim put his arm around Jude's waist. ‘I'm so relieved,' he said in a low voice. ‘But I know you must feel a little sad, my love. It's just for a while longer. A short while, to secure the rest of our lives.' She smiled up at him, loving him for his awkward attempt at reassurance.

Marc came up beside her and tugged on her arm. ‘Mummy, can we go and buy the plants now? I waited all week.' It took a moment before she remembered it: the garden and Marc's obsession. It had started as a notion of their paper-skinned English headmistress; dreaming of cool summer roses under the Arabian sun, she decided to challenge the children to make English gardens at home. They'd each worked for a month, finding plants and flowers that would grow in the gasping
air.

Marc's garden had been a fantastical and elaborate construction
–
flowers, stone towers and a spiral of wires taken from a hoard of trash outside the house.

But the very night before the class visited, Salim destroyed it by accident. Coming home late from the office, he'd stepped on it blindly in the near dark. She'd heard the thin sounds of Marc crying the next day, seen his small hands frantically repositioning his plot in the early morning glare.

The prize went to a girl whose mother had planted a circle of geraniums. Marc pushed all of his disappointment into a ball of belief that they could be persuaded to change their mind if only he could make his garden better.

‘Let's take the children to the Friday market,' she said to Salim. ‘We did promise Marc last week.'

Salim frowned, and looked at his son. ‘Is this about the garden again?' She sensed irritation seeping around the corners of his words.

‘It needs to be brighter,' Marc said, blue eyes staring fearlessly into brown. ‘Dina's had lots of colours, and that's why she
won.'

Salim shrugged. ‘Sure, let's go. But this is the last time, Marc. I've had enough of the fuss around this garden. It's not like a man to cry about flowers.' He chucked Marc under the chin as he spoke.

Marc jerked his head away.
This one knows how to carry a grudge
.
Jude suddenly thought back to Hassan's words to her, about Salim.
He can't let anything go. You'll see.

The Friday Market was Kuwait's largest. Jude could always hear it before she saw it
–
a vast river of sound springing from a thousand throats, animal and human, conjuring camels and bronze pots, the shriek of dealers and beggars wailing. The market itself sprawled under the noonday sun like a disrobed woman with her entrails open in the heat. Flies crowded them as they walked through row upon row of people lying in the dirt, a legion of the armless, eyeless and legless. Hundreds of palms reached out to them as they passed. Those fingers tore into Jude's conscience until she felt blooded with guilt; every time she came, she dreaded it more. Her husband, though, had never given the beggars a second glance. Marc and Sophie, she saw with sadness, did not notice them either.

Under a low tarpaulin sheet ahead of them, the stench from the animal market rose off chokingly small cages. Sophie grabbed her mother's hand and pulled it as they walked past a box full of baby chicks popping over each other with soft cheeping sounds. Each one was dyed a startling pink, green or blue. She heard the tinny rattle of little claws batting against cages and the desperate screech of birds calling for the
sky.

Sophie touched the bars as they passed. ‘Mummy, can we take another one?' Jude shook her head and said, ‘Sorry pet, you know what we said last time.' There was a limit to how many times a child could bring home an animal and wake up to find it dead the next morning.

Marc had raced ahead to a stall of trees and plant pots. He began pulling small tubs of bright, shrub-like flowers to one side. Then he pointed to a small, slender tree with sweet-smelling white blossoms. ‘That one can go in the middle,' he said, brimming with excitement. ‘The others can go round the edge.'