What Will Survive (3 page)

‘But where are we?' Aisha demanded. ‘How long have I been asleep?' Fabio brushed away her questions, blaming Mahmoud: the driver had taken the wrong road, he said, and the Lebanese captain had just shown him where they were on the map.

‘I'm starving,' Aisha said plaintively, reaching for a bottle of warm mineral water. ‘When will we get to Beirut?' Fabio moved his head from side to side, as though he found the question difficult to answer, and finally admitted they were near a town called Nabatiyeh, which meant nothing to her.

To Aisha's astonishment, he went on to say they had ended up, completely by chance, about ten minutes' drive from a village where an old friend of his lived. And, as if he were doing her a favour, Fabio suggested they look up this friend, who was called Marwan Hadidi, and see if his family could offer them something to eat before they continued north to Beirut. Now fully awake, Aisha began asking for more details about this mysterious friend and received a disarming reply: Marwan had been Fabio's fixer in Beirut during the war and had actually saved his life on more than one occasion.

‘If you knew him in Beirut, how do you know he's even going to be in this village?' she objected, realising she had lost another argument. Fabio said confidently that Marwan had always intended to return home when
he finished his degree. He had been a law student when the war started, Fabio added, but had started working for foreign correspondents in the city when conditions became too difficult. Irritated and hungry, Aisha sat back and only half-listened as Fabio spoke with Mahmoud in Arabic, tapping the map a couple of times to make a point. A few miles along the road, they passed a deserted-looking UN compound, and shattered buildings began to appear on exposed hillsides. It was almost a relief when the sun set in a blaze of rosy light, cloaking these relics of the civil war in shadow.

In Marwan's village, Mahmoud stopped an elderly man to ask the way and was directed — after some suspicious glances, Aisha thought — to a house halfway up a hill. Mahmoud parked opposite a high wall, on the right-hand side of the rutted street, and Fabio threw open the front passenger door, suddenly full of energy. Aisha got out of the car more slowly, stretching her arms and legs, and followed him to the gate.

Inside the dark courtyard, a young woman in jeans and a faded sweatshirt emerged from a door to the left, light from the room behind her framing her wavy hair. Fabio spoke to her in Arabic, gesturing towards himself and Aisha, and the girl listened impassively until he mentioned Marwan's name. Then her body became rigid and she backed away, disappearing inside the house and leaving Aisha and Fabio to exchange perplexed looks. ‘Are we in the right place?' she asked, but before he could answer the door opened again and the girl returned, this time with a baby in her arms. With her was a much older woman, wearing a headscarf, who took over the conversation as the girl stood to one side, rocking the infant.

The older woman poured out a torrent of words, seeming fearful at first but rapidly becoming angry. Fabio interrupted from time to time, asking questions, and the woman replied as best she could while feeling for a handkerchief and wiping tears from her eyes. Aisha gripped Fabio's arm.

‘What's wrong?' she demanded. ‘Isn't he here?' Thinking about the almost perpetual bad news from Lebanon, her stomach contracted and she began to worry that Fabio's friend might be dead. He seemed barely to hear her. Soon all three of them were speaking at once, making so much noise that they woke the baby, whose thin wails added to the hubbub in
the enclosed space.

Her head beginning to ache, Aisha retreated to the gate and glanced towards the car, where Mahmoud appeared to be asleep in the driver's seat. She crossed the road and climbed into the back, where she fished a strip of paracetamol from her bag and swallowed two with the last few drops of warm mineral water. Her mobile rang, prompting a series of grunts from Mahmoud, and Aisha answered it to find a reporter from an English broadsheet looking for a comment for the next day's paper on a speech by the Foreign Secretary. After a slightly surreal conversation about the dangers of linking trade and aid, Aisha felt steadier and made up her mind to find out what was going on. Returning to the courtyard, she discovered Fabio in conversation with a middle-aged man, each of them holding the edge of a map, while a curly-haired child of nine or ten clung to the older woman's arm.

‘Fabio,' she began, and he turned to her with what she realised later was a guilty look. Folding the map, he handed it to the stranger and drew Aisha to one side, speaking in a low voice.

‘Listen,
cara,
these people — Marwan's family, they have a problem. I will explain everything later, trust me.' Startled, Aisha looked up at him. ‘What kind of problem? What's going on?'

Once again it occurred to her that Marwan was dead but, if that were the case, surely Fabio would come out and tell her instead of behaving in this mysterious way? He made an impatient sound. ‘Aisha, this is Lebanon, you would not understand.' She tried to interrupt and he talked over her. ‘Sorry, sorry, of course you would understand but there is too much history.' He squeezed her arm and repeated what he'd already said: ‘Please, Aisha, trust me and I will tell you everything later.' Turning towards the little group, all presumably Marwan's relatives, he beckoned to the young woman with the baby. ‘Go with Amal,' he told Aisha. ‘She will bring you something to eat — you said you were starving,
cara
.' He spoke in Arabic to the girl, then to the middle-aged man, who pointed impatiently at his watch. Fabio nodded and moved towards the gate, his face set in a grim line.

Aisha heard her own name, spoken softly, and turned to see Amal
gesturing towards a door opposite the gate. ‘What? You want me to come?' she asked.
‘Aywa,
' the girl confirmed, handing the baby to the older woman — her mother? mother-in-law? — and ushering Aisha towards what was clearly the family's best room. It was brightly lit, with a low seat running round the walls, piled with colourful kelim cushions. In the centre of the room was a circular wooden table, inset with ivory, and in one corner a modern wall unit, draped with the Lebanese flag. Aisha saw row upon row of photographs, flanked by vases stuffed with artificial flowers, and was still taking in her surroundings when Mahmoud appeared with her overnight bag, and dumped it at her feet. ‘Why do I need this?' she asked. ‘We're not staying.' The driver muttered something about Fabio and turned his back on her, almost colliding with Amal on his way out. The young woman spoke sharply and followed him out of the room, leaving Aisha alone. She perched on the edge of the seat, stabbed Fabio's number into her mobile phone and exclaimed in annoyance when it went straight to voicemail. She lifted a hand to her head and pushed her hair back, closing her eyes for a few seconds, before trying another number which also went straight to voicemail.

When Amal returned she was carrying a tray, which she set down on the table. It contained flat bread, meatballs in a sauce on one plate, aubergine purée on another, a deep bowl of creamy sheep's yoghurt and a jug of water, which Aisha was at first reluctant to drink. But hunger and thirst got the better of her and she soon cleared the plates, even though the meatballs were lukewarm and she hated to think what might be incubating in them. Piling the empty dishes on the tray, she got up and paced the room, stopping after a while to examine the photographs. They stretched back across several generations, the oldest portraits in sepia or black and white, showing men, women and children with a strong family resemblance — heavy eyebrows, long faces which tended to look solemn — in formal poses. The later ones were in colour, including several wedding photographs, and the most recent featured a strikingly handsome man who looked to be in his late twenties. In most of the shots he was facing the camera, instinctively seeking it out, looking, in contrast to the rest of the family, as though he might break into laughter at any moment. His graduation
photograph, in which he wore a suit, seemed to confirm Aisha's idea that this was the absent or dead Marwan, and she bit her lip at this troubling thought. Someone had tucked a smaller picture in the corner of the frame, in which the same young man grinned widely, his arm slung across another boys shoulders.

Aisha heard footsteps approaching and looked up, ready to speak as soon as Amal appeared in the doorway. ‘Is this Marwan?' she asked, lifting the picture in its frame.
‘Aywa,
' the girl said, averting her eyes. ‘Is he –' Aisha stopped, frustrated by her inability to converse. She tried asking in French but Amal looked at her blankly, no more familiar with the language than she was with English. There was no reason why she should be, Aisha reminded herself as the girl cleared away the remains of her meal, returning shortly afterwards with a torch, which she used to guide Aisha to the washroom. Later, when a couple of hours had passed and Fabio still hadn't returned, Amal showed Aisha to this bare room where she had tossed and turned all night.

After she had read for a while, Aisha put down her novel, sensing that the air was growing warmer. Looking at her watch, she saw it was still very early in England but decided to risk sending a text to Ricky. ‘Message sent' flashed up and she speed-dialled an international number, holding her breath until she was connected to an answering machine. ‘It's me,' she said, ‘I hoped your voicemail was on. I still don't know where the hell I am — hang on.' She listened for a few seconds. ‘Sorry, I thought the helicopter was coming back, I can't imagine what it's doing in the middle of nowhere ... Listen, my battery's low so I'll call again when I get to Beirut. I can't wait to have a hot shower.' She laughed. ‘Love you, darling.'

She heard a noise at the door. ‘Come in,' she called, once again forgetting she was not fully dressed. ‘Oh, thank you. I mean,
choucran.'

Amal, who blushed when she caught sight of Aisha's underwear, was carrying another tray, this time loaded with coffee, and yoghurt sprinkled with dried herbs. Aisha took it from her: ‘Is Fabio here? Fabio,' she repeated, and although the girl replied in Arabic, Aisha thought from her tone that Amal was confirming his return. The young woman smiled and retreated, pointing across the courtyard to a closed door. Aisha was not sure
whether she was pointing out the washroom or where Fabio had spent the night. She nodded to show she'd more or less understood, her spirits lifting at the thought that the mysterious events of the previous evening would soon be explained; her intuition, which she could not explain, told her that even if something had happened to Amal's brother, it was unlikely that he was dead.
‘Choucran,
' she repeated cheerfully, and Amal left her to get on with her breakfast.

The coffee was too hot to drink but smelled of cardamom, and Aisha inhaled the fragrant steam with a feeling of genuine pleasure. As she moved round the bed to the table, she felt something cool and fleshy underfoot, and glanced down to see the bruised petals of the red flower she had worn in her hair the previous day. Brushing them to one side, she put down the tray and looked for a band to tie up her hair. She twisted it into a loose knot and picked up the dark blue trousers she had worn the day before, deciding that they would do for the journey to Beirut. A moment later, carrying a threadbare towel and her toilet bag, she stepped out of the room into what was already beginning to feel like another swelteringly hot day.

It was stuffy in Committee Room 18, even with the windows open on to the Thames, and the woman from Fair World Now! was still speaking. Her evidence to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee had started almost an hour ago and she was producing lists of figures with lots of decimal points, having memorised, apparently, the shortfall between UN targets and the aid budgets of every EU nation. As for the US, which she seemed to mention in every third sentence, it was axiomatic that the President was public enemy number one, even if he happened, in this instance, to be a Democrat. ‘He's on your side,' Stephen felt like hissing, and wondered if she was so single-minded and humourless in private. Aisha knew a lot of that stuff too, but she had more sense than to go on about it, especially in front of people who might be able to help her if she handled them in the right way.

Thinking about Aisha reminded him that he had not heard from her since he switched on his mobile and found a message the previous morning; she had not called again and her phone was turned off each time he tried the number. It was unlike her and Stephen hoped nothing was wrong, telling himself that the most likely explanation was a weak signal or perhaps her battery was flat... He fixed his gaze on a point in the dark green Pugin wallpaper above the other committee members' heads — balding heads mostly, for this particular committee attracted more than its share of grandees; Stephen's own hair was dark and curly, and he had been in the House long enough to see men not much older than himself develop beer guts, a warning which kept him going to the Westminster gym a couple of times each week. He deliberately moved his thoughts away from the committee and his underlying anxiety about Aisha, forcing himself to concentrate on his performance in the House that afternoon, when he was due to put a question to the Prime Minister.

A nursing home in Stephen's constituency had just been sold to a developer, throwing half a dozen nonagenarians on to the street, and Stephen — well, actually, his diligent new researcher — had discovered that the partner of a junior health minister was on the board of the company
responsible for the closure. It was a pity it wasn't the minister himself, of course, but the man was unpopular with his own backbenchers and that made him vulnerable. Stephen hoped it would raise the morale of his own side, most of whom were behaving as though they were just as mesmerised by the PM's thumping majority as the man himself. The honeymoon can't last, Stephen kept telling his colleagues in the bars and tea rooms, on the rather slender basis that the PM reminded him of the head boy of his old school: charm itself when things were going well, but displaying a petulance that slid into spluttering inarticulacy when anyone challenged him. Every time the PM leaned forward at the despatch box or in a TV studio, putting on his most sincere expression, Stephen thought of Burrell, whose father was an earl and from whom he had inherited the family bank soon after leaving Sandhurst. Burrell acknowledged Stephen whenever their paths crossed, but he clearly did not consider him important enough to cultivate. That was another parallel with the PM, who seemed barely to know who Stephen was, even though he was popular with the parliamentary sketch writers and often featured in their round-ups.