Throwing Sparks (31 page)

*  *  *

The young girl’s name was Mawdie.

I do not recall Issa taking up with any of the girls in our neighbourhood. The only woman from the Firepit he ever loved was his maternal aunt, Salwa, who was also his suckling sister. But he loved her as a sister, best friend and confidante. He could not bear to see her hurt in any way and it was the only thing that roused him to anger. Salwa was like his own soul in another body.

Issa had a number of interests. He played football with the local team and was one of the young ruffians who could not resist a brawl, whether with boys from our own neighbourhood or the ones nearby. He took part in musical evenings held at wedding halls, where he played the
simsimiyya
and sang plaintive sea shanties with a musical group. He raised pigeons and went out twice a week to fish or hunt rabbits in the wadis east of Jeddah and, at night, he looked for partners in the dark alleyways to play
balut
.

Nothing in his early life suggested he would achieve great things. In that respect, he was no different from all the other kids growing up in the Firepit: an uneventful life, with the expectation of a steady job on which to raise a family was the extent of their dream.

But Issa strayed early and began to keep company with older boys and men. Now when he looked for partners in the dark alleyways, it was no longer to play
balut.
He soon acquired two vices: chasing after boys and stealing.

His petty larceny included shoplifting from small neighbourhood groceries, pilfering from the carts of itinerant fruit and vegetable vendors, stealing the birds of other pigeon fanciers, and snatching motorbikes to go joyriding. But the theft that confirmed him as a crook in the eyes of his parents – and which became the talk of the neighbourhood – was the burglary of his grandmother’s savings. That theft changed the course of his life and led him down the road to the Palace, and to Mawdie.

The moment he vowed to enter the Palace, a change came over him. He began to feel he was different from us and he spurned our company. All of a sudden, it seemed to us, he was no longer interested in petty theft – lurking about the small corner shops in the alleyways, scheming to grab produce off a pedlar’s cart, or huddling together to plan the heist of a motorbike we would later resell to a bicycle shop.

His transformation was obvious the night he treated us all to a feast at a restaurant. He kept the tab open, letting us order whatever we wanted. That did not stop us from our cruel taunts as we voiced our suspicions that he must have robbed someone to be able to treat us all. He just laughed off our jabs.

Back then, none of us could figure out how he had come by so much money that he could spend it so liberally. Some of us gave him the benefit of the doubt and attributed his newfound means to the sale of the pigeons he had been raising for years.

His generosity extended to the local football club, whose expenses he basically underwrote: he paid for jerseys and balls, goalposts and nets, the clean-up of a vacant lot and all the planning work. Issa even bought the water and other refreshments that were distributed to the players at half-time. In recognition, the team nominated him to head the club, but he declined the honour. He was content to sit in his customary place at the nearby crossroad and stay out of the club’s contests.

And at some stage during those matches, a luxury car would glide to a stop and Issa would hop in, spirited away to some unknown destination. Different cars would come and collect him at different times of day. Their models and designs varied but the cars were always gleaming. He swapped his garish outfits for fine and elegant attire. His sharp appearance and the succession of luxury cars lent credence to the rumour that he had given up petty crime and become a drug dealer.

He gave up all his hobbies. He no longer cared about rabbit-hunting in the wadis and stopped singing the old shanties and playing his
simsimiyya
with the band. His generous gifts and donations to community endeavours like the football club ensured that all the talk never got back to him.

Speculation that he was a drug dealer only grew after Crazy Jamal was run over by the Rolls-Royce. Issa asked me to accompany him to Crazy Jamal’s house. Knocking loudly at the door, he had called out for Jamal’s father and, once the old man appeared at the door, Issa handed him a wad of bills.

‘A benefactor wants Jamal to have this,’ Issa told him.

Crazy Jamal’s father took the bundle of one-hundred-riyal notes, stared at it for a while and then flung it in Issa’s face. ‘I will not accept ill-gotten riches,’ he shouted. ‘Nor will I have them given to my children.’

News of the substantial recompense spread throughout the neighbourhood and soon everyone became convinced that Issa was selling drugs. This was when his father, Abu Issa, notified the counter-narcotics agency, which then came and ransacked their house. They went through all of Issa’s personal effects and found nothing suspicious. Issa left home that night and only returned fleetingly, a week later, to take his mother away.

Salwa was the only person who knew where he had gone and she told no one.

*  *  *

Issa started working at the Palace before the death of
Sayyid al-kabeer
. That is how he was able to provide a detailed description of him when neighbourhood locals went and stood at the street corner to catch a glimpse of the first Master driving by.

That is also how money came to flow through Issa’s hands.

For
Sayyid al-kabeer
, the incident with Crazy Jamal was a blemish on his conscience. Issa’s arrival at the Palace alleviated his burden since he was able to entrust him with 50,000 riyals to give to Jamal’s father.

When the Palace lights went out for three whole days and the usual car did not come and collect him, Issa was bereft. I saw him on the second day of the blackout making his way to the Palace on foot. He walked all the way around the wall until he reached the main gates and entered. He was gone a long time.

It was he who bore the news of the death of the first Master. The news was relayed from mouth to mouth without anyone ever knowing how it reached the neighbourhood.

We all thought that Issa came to leave the neighbourhood because of the dispute with his father. In actual fact, he had accepted the new Master’s offer to move into the Palace in order to be closer to Mawdie. All he wanted was to be in her vicinity – ever since the day he had saved her brother from drowning. There was no other place on earth for him but in her bewitching eyes.

An innocent love had blossomed between them and nothing could keep them apart. He was to her as nourishment to a plant, nudging it forth through the soil and towards the sunlight. They were enamoured of each other from the first glance. It was as if the drowning that he had spared the young Master became his own beguiling fate: she lured him into the depths of her being with eyes he could die for and, like a diver, he plumbed her depths. Issa was spellbound, but did not dare to reveal what he felt. She had eyes only for him and he remained unrivalled in her estimation.

19

Maram finally came through on her promise.

Lying on the hotel bed and looking in the mirror directly across from her, she could see the curve of her hips outlined through the light bedcovers. She lifted the telephone receiver and ordered breakfast for two.

Her languor suggested she had just emerged from a deep slumber. Her hair had danced about her collarbones and neck until late in the night, until she had finally fallen asleep, exhausted.

She was mesmerisingly beautiful.

Like the other girls at the Palace, Maram had not expected to become the object of a derby for thoroughbreds. She had won the ultimate prize when the Master had placed her in his sights. When she finally came to me, she was like a parched field thirsting for rain.

‘Slow down,’ she had teased the night before, slipping into the bathroom. She was changing and her words were muffled. ‘Wouldn’t it be better if we spent the next two days at the bungalow?’

I did not want to respond to her question so that she would not know how much the Master had me on edge: he was always around and the further I tried to get away, the closer he seemed to move. I tried going places where I thought he would not find me and spent time at different hotels along the seafront. But he always caught up with me with a phone call. ‘Where are you, scum?’ he would say.

I emerged from every escapade thinking it would be my last, feeling my neck gingerly to make sure I was still breathing. It is true that I risked death but I was watching my step. After a quarter century of confinement, I was calling the shots.

My reactions betrayed my anxiety. I was nervous when the receptionist asked with a knowing smile, ‘Just a room, or a suite as usual, sir?’

He emphasised ‘as usual’ with that superciliousness that petty officials favour – it was their way of getting back at overbearing bosses who held them in their places.

I had seen far too many receptionists looking over the women who accompanied me, barely concealing their brazen thoughts.

‘Are you going to spend the night in the bathroom?’ I asked her.

She appeared in the doorway, striking a provocative pose, hands on her hips and torso thrown back. ‘Now let’s see how well you measure up to your passionate wooing,’ she said with a laugh. ‘But don’t give up that charm offensive.’

She had me flustered. I checked that I had enough Viagra in my wallet, after I had not found any rifling through my pockets.

It had been a rough night, which I spent trying to meet her urgent needs.

Now morning, I watched Maram sleeping peacefully for a while and then moved to the bathroom. I really needed a warm bath to loosen my joints, which felt stiff and creaky. I stayed in the water, chewing gum to dissipate the smell of stale alcohol on my breath.

How I wished that some medicine had been discovered that could erase one’s memory.

Like a slideshow, all the faces from the past clicked through my mind’s eye. I saw Tahani, screaming for mercy as she squeezed her thighs together, holding her hand up to my face to show me the rosy blood that was evidence of her defilement. Aunt Khayriyyah appeared next, with her wild bush of white hair and rattling bones, shrieking hysterically despite her dwindling strength and stuttering gibberish in the torment of a never-ending life. Mustafa Qannas raised his head and roared like the grinding gears of a powerful truck engine, vowing to pound me to a pulp, dragging me stark naked through the neighbourhood’s alleyways and squeezing the last breath out of me as he sodomised me in public. That image was replaced by Osama, who trapped me in a funeral shroud and exclaimed, ‘At last, I’ve caught you, thief!’ The Master’s flushed and jowly face seeped into the picture and spread outwards like an oil slick on the surface of the sea, obliterating everything around, with his devious and cunning malice reflected in his features.

Those who did not know the Master were charmed by his smile and convinced that he would not hurt a fly. But those whose lives were bound to him knew that meekness and humility were only a veneer – and a very thin veneer at that. No matter how hard I tried to keep him at a distance, he would surprise me, worming his way into my very soul and boring into my skull. In my mind, I could always hear him say, ‘I’ll carve out a tight space for you in Jeddah’s most pathetic cemetery.’

It had been a long journey.

It had taken more than a quarter of a century but I was proud of my financial success and willing to overlook the pact with the devil that it had taken to get there. With a pill to erase my memory, I could have forgotten all the unmentionable things I had been compelled to do throughout my life.

I was brought up in a humble home with a father who came back in the evenings half dead from work. His only reaction to hearing about my childish misbehaviour was to threaten me – but his threats were empty. With every vain warning, I gained more wiggle room to disregard the next one and to do whatever I wished with the full knowledge that the threats would never be carried out.

My ability to be a step ahead of him nurtured my recklessness. It never occurred to me that the strategies and escape routes that I used to get around my misconduct might one day bring on my downfall, or that I could lose my soul in the process.

Aunt Khayriyyah was like an affliction that had wormed its way into me and contaminated me with chronic hatred. She fed me an endless diet of animosity and thanks to her relentless and hostile scrutiny, I became a master in the art of deception and evasion from a very young age.

Once when the Master had phoned to see where I was, he had shouted, ‘I’ll send you back to the streets where you came from!’ As long as he said such things, I felt I was safe. For if he had known that I was having a relationship with Maram, no street would have been punishment enough – I would have been chopped up into mincemeat then and there.

My love of the hunt, which I had acquired in the winding alleyways of the neighbourhood and on the reef islands strewn across our shore, had spurred me to go after his woman, even if it had not been easy to prise her from his grasp. I was able to get the better of him on one of those wild nights at the Palace, like so many others except that this playful young kitten had made that particular evening extraordinary.