Throwing Sparks (24 page)

Tahani lurked on the periphery of my mind, but I managed to keep thoughts of her at bay until Osama joined us in Paradise. With him around, I could not help being reminded of her and of our rivalry.

The wild nights at the Palace were of no interest to Osama. Once his job setting the parties up was done, he would disappear and return only at the end of the evening. He would slip off to his room and keep his cell phone close by in case he was needed.

One evening we began reminiscing about events both recent and long-gone.

‘Would you feel sorry if I told you that you ruined my life?' he asked with a deep sigh, as if some heavy burden was being lifted off his chest.

‘We all ruin each other's lives without meaning to,' I answered, patting him on the shoulder. ‘Should I blame Issa for ruining my life? If I hadn't gone along with him, I wouldn't be stuck here now. Nor would you, had you not chosen to follow suit.'

‘I wasn't talking about being here,' he said.

‘I know we made a dirty choice, but it's too late to clean up our act now,' I cut him off.

‘I'm not talking about the Palace, Tariq,' he said, adding with resentment, ‘I'm talking about Tahani. Tell me what's become of her.'

I said nothing. Her face loomed before me, tender and sad as if from behind a veil of dust. I had covered her tear-streaked face with layers of dust in the years I had spent putting her out of my mind.

Osama stood up and faced me. ‘I came to the Palace to kill you,' he confessed. He buried his face in his hands as he added, ‘And to kill Issa – and to kill myself.'

There was a long, strained silence.

Eventually, Osama asked me bluntly, ‘What did you do to Tahani?'

Just then, a servant approached to let us know that the Master was asking for us. We were both worked up, but we set aside our animosity, jumped to our feet and hastened to the Master's side.

‘Get ready,' the Master said, addressing us both. ‘There's an arse that needs whipping into shape.' He rose and headed to the private quarters where his family resided, adding gleefully as he reached the door, ‘I'll be watching you. Don't let me down.'

We took care of business, the Master watching us closely, and when we were done we went back to our seats as if nothing had happened.

Tahani was right there where we had left her, waiting to torment us both.

13

Before coming to the Palace, I would sneak off in the dead of night to the Kuft to enjoy the tenderness of young flesh and unburden myself of my infamous sex drive. Like well-worn steps, those alleyways were beaten smooth with stories and allegations of transgression. Every boy in the neighbourhood had left some trace of himself smeared against the ramshackle houses wedged together there.

I would walk the familiar twists and turns all night. The paths were as intertwined as the spilled guts of the run-over cats I would stumble upon, their bulging eyes a stark testimony to the fatal impact.

Early on, life in the neighbourhood had been a stagnant and putrid morass from which no one thought to raise his head or venture away. Residents were content and accepted their lot. The first person to disrupt the placidity was Issa, who set off in search of excitement and planted the idea of the easy life among us boys hankering for a little more glamour.

Issa lured us to the Palace one after the other, slipping golden spoons into our mouths and tickling our palates. Unfamiliar with the sight of gold and the other bounties on offer, we responded eagerly and did whatever was necessary to feel those delicacies were meant for us. We were brought into the Palace to decorate it with our shabbiness like so many antiques or bric-a-brac acquired at a flea-market.

The Master scattered us about the Palace like a novice collector who regards tattered old things as priceless gifts. In each of us, he found some distinctive feature to play up which allowed him to demonstrate to his entourage that even the poorest districts harboured hidden treasure – in our case, untold riches of deviancy to fulfil every imagin­able desire.

It was Issa’s job to hunt down such treasure. I was the first to be drawn in. After me was Sheikh Omar al-Qirsh, formerly the head fisherman, who piloted the Palace yacht on sea excursions and fishing trips. After him, blind Ali Madini was hired to tell dirty stories and gossip about the women he followed with his nose thanks to the over­powering perfumes they favoured. Jameel Badri was hired to plant trees and Bakr Adam to cook popular dishes. Ibrahim Dana instructed guests in the performance of the stick dance, or
mizmar
. Hamdan Bagheeni, who still struggled with the alphabet, was hired as a guard and Hassan Darbeel trained the dogs. This long line of people made its way into the Palace at Issa’s behest: they were selected for a particular attribute or because Issa nursed some old grudge he needed to settle.

Of them all, I was the most dishonourable. Only I was truly despicable.

I was the second one to enter service at the Palace after Issa. Osama joined us three years later. He was hired to assist me in punishing the Master’s rivals. After him, all kinds of characters streamed into the gilded cage.

Osama distinguished himself from the very first day he worked at the Palace and the Master was so pleased with him that he appointed him to the Punisher Squad immediately. I had noticed him enjoying it whenever we had shared the spoils of our hunt through the dark alleyways, and only later did I realise that he had been faking it.

At the end of his first day at the Palace, Osama frowned when our eyes met.

‘You still nursing that grudge of yours?’ I asked him.

He left the room without saying a word. He was gone long enough to splash his body with water and came back, hair dripping wet and carrying a copy of the Qur’an.

‘Place your hand here,’ he said, facing me, with the holy book open.

Though I was ritually unclean, I stretched my hand out to place it on the open pages, but then a shudder rippled through me and I was covered in goosebumps. I could not go through with it and drew back my hand.

‘If you want to end the ill will between us, just place your hand on this page and take an oath,’ he urged.

‘What kind of oath?’

‘First, place your hand on the page.’

‘I’m unclean.’

‘Then go and wash,’ he said. ‘I’ll be waiting here.’

I was gone for two hours and hoped that if I dawdled long enough he would get bored and leave. But he remained rooted to the spot like an old tree. He jumped to his feet as soon as I came into view and opened the holy book to the
sura
entitled ‘Repentance’.

‘Place your right hand here,’ he insisted.

I did as he asked. He closed the covers over my hand and told me to repeat after him: ‘Say, “I swear by Almighty God, Lord of the Heavens and Earth, that I do not have and have never had a relationship with Tahani.”’

I could not bring myself to take the oath and tried to think of some way to wriggle out of it. Then it struck me, of course, the word ‘say’ was just the subterfuge I needed. If I uttered ‘say’ silently and kept it to myself, I could complete the oath.

Osama snapped the holy book shut after kissing it, brought it to his forehead and looked at me warily. ‘I don’t know why,’ he said, ‘but I feel that you’ve just made a false oath.’

He was determined to get to the bottom of the matter and kept making veiled threats. ‘I could swear that you are the culprit,’ he said. ‘I could kill you, although killing you wouldn’t satisfy my thirst for vengeance.’

I did not respond.

‘But I’ll find a way to make you sorry for what you did as long as you live,’ he warned.

When the Punisher Squad was disbanded and Osama went to work for the Master’s brother, Nadir, there were fewer altercations and we stopped stoking the embers of hatred between us.

*  *  *

When we graduated from school, Osama said he wanted to start working right away so as to improve his chances with Tahani. He felt he was old enough and his desire to marry her became so intense he could no longer contain it.

The day results were announced he went to his maternal aunt, Tahani’s mother, and asked for her daughter’s hand in marriage. His proposal was apparently accepted because when he returned he was ecstatic, and set to hugging all the young boys in the neighbourhood. His joy was plain to see; when he told Issa and me about his marriage proposal, it was obvious he had no idea of my relationship with Tahani.

That was the day Tahani appeared at her window and waved at me. Thinking the gesture was meant for him, Osama vowed to make a break from his wayward past. Osama was going to make a fresh start and lay the foundations for a lifetime of happiness with Tahani.

He was very practical about it: when he realised his marks were not good enough for a place at university, he applied for a job with Saudi Telecommunications. He was hired and immediately began to prepare for his betrothal to Tahani.

He bubbled with joy as he planned for the wedding. He looked into all the costs, calculated expenses and left no stone unturned in his efforts to obtain the necessary funds for that dream. He considered selling the family home but decided against it. He even thought about claiming compensation from the government for his father’s death in the hostage incident in Mecca, but he soon dropped that idea for fear of running foul of the authorities, going to jail and never again seeing the light of day.

He settled on taking out a loan. Although he did not have all the wedding expenses quite covered, he remained buoyant with joy.

In a matter of days, however, his face went from utter exuberance to abject misery. Tahani had told him frankly that she was not interested in him and that she was in a relationship with another boy. Osama’s hopes were dashed and he repeated, bewildered, to anyone within earshot, ‘Who is this boy?’ He had no idea that the one he was looking for was among his closest friends.

Issa tried to comfort him but was not around for very long as his own relationship with his father was heading for a crisis. Abu Issa had noticed that his son had become flush with money and he began to suspect that Issa was selling drugs. He enlisted the help of the counter-narcotics agency to spy on his son.

The agents watched Issa for a time but could not find anything to charge him with. At Abu Issa’s insistence, they raided the house one night and went through all of his son’s possessions. They found nothing and left after mumbling a half-hearted apology. For Issa, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. He left home and returned just once, a week later, and only in order to get his mother out of the house.

That left
me
all alone with Osama. I tried to summon the courage to tell him about my relationship with Tahani but could not bring myself to do it – the boy was lovesick and inconsolable. Osama met his match in misery with Kamal who was also grieving because his sweetheart, Samira, had just been married off to the old wretch, Abu Musharrat. They were like a pair of mourners with their lamentations, and while I dispensed vacuous words of comfort, all I wanted was to knock the infatuation out of them, especially when Osama went on about the boy Tahani was involved with.

After the terrible night Samira died, Kamal became obsessed with visiting Samira’s grave, turning what had been nightly trysts into a passion play for the dead. Kamal would set out in the afternoon and remain at her graveside talking to himself until sunset; when he was finished, he would slip out of the graveyard furtively, like someone trying to cover up an illicit relationship.

For his part, the broken-hearted Osama started to drink. He stumbled around the alleyways at night swigging straight from a bottle of cheap wine with the other drunks and lamenting his unrequited love and back-stabbing friends. Tahani, he predicted, would bitterly regret having driven him to perdition.

*  *  *

Osama followed me into the Palace and it was there that our hatred blossomed.

I had decided to break with my past when I moved to the Palace. I wanted to put everything behind me, first and foremost, Tahani’s blood on my conscience. I had managed to forget about her until Osama showed up at the Palace three years after that fateful night. He had apparently spent the entire time searching for Tahani and the young man she loved.

His aunt, Tahani’s mother, had promised her daughter in marriage but her promise had been nullified by Tahani’s banishment to the village following the fateful night of the intruder. Osama looked for her everywhere and even accepted the idea of her marriage to another man; he just wanted a glimpse of her to regain some peace of mind.

He eventually made his way to me.

Initially, I thought he knew what I had done to Tahani and was guarded. But his reproaches centred on my having kept our relationship a secret. After Osama told me that her father had whisked her off to his ancestral village, I denied having any feelings for her. I convinced Osama that I had never carried on with her and that rumours of a relationship between us were unfounded. She might have said so, I told him, though I doubted it, but as far as I was concerned, Tahani and I had never been together.

At that stage, he still believed me.

This disavowal gave him a new lease on life. He started his search all over again. He returned to the village and even stayed with some of her father’s relatives but found no trace of her.