Ishmael's Oranges (27 page)

After an autumn and winter of laborious preparation, Salim took his proposal for the bid structure and the Baghdad project team into Meyer's office.

The big visit to the Iraqi capital was set for early spring. The team would make an initial presentation; if it went well, it would secure the Iraqi go-ahead to make a preferential bid for the contract of technical supplier to their construction projects. Within weeks, a fortune might change hands to see Odell lifts in every new Iraqi government-financed building for a decade to come. Or the prize
–
and Salim's new job
–
could go to someone
else.

He'd lain awake the previous night, hallucinations of failure dancing across the ceiling. In the dead pre-morning hours, Mazen's face had bloomed from the dark ceiling. His black hair had curled tightly around his plump head and his eyes were vicious and merry.
Salim, you donkey
, his voice said, before fading away into the
dawn.

In Meyer's air-conditioned office, the chill helped him focus. He outlined his choices one by one. He knew they were all smart. It was a balanced team, and it included nearly all of Meyer's personal recommendations. Nearly all. He had sweated about this too. Choose them all, and he might look like he had no mind of his own. Choose too few, and he would be a rebel, a cowboy. Leave out the wrong one, and he'd be the man who couldn't take a
hint.

Meyer sat down and listened courteously. When Salim's pitch ended, he picked the carefully prepared files and leafed through them slowly. Salim's palms moistened and he wiped them unconsciously on his trousers.

‘I think you have it here, Slim,' Meyer said at last. ‘It's a nice balance. These guys from tech look very impressive. I can't believe they weren't on my radar.'

‘They were on Doug's team and they were fantastic on the Qatar project,' Salim said quickly. ‘They lost their jobs in the closedown, but I guarantee they can deliver more on this team than anyone else. Not that the team here isn't great, but I thought why lose a skillset this strong to a competitor?'

Meyer smiled. ‘Smart,
and
a humanitarian! I love it when we can cover both bases. I'm excited about this.' Relief was flooding Salim.

Meyer turned over another page. ‘I see you passed on Eric for the project assistant position.'

‘It was very tight. Eric is an excellent planner and I know he's been on the team here for a while.'

‘So he has.' Meyer's hand was poised over the page. Salim prayed he would move on to the next section, but the hand hovered there, a platinum wedding ring glinting against a ridge of thick knuckles and a light brush of silver
hair.

‘I thought that Omar Al-Khadra was a more rounded choice,' Salim said at last, drawn to plunge into the gulf of silence. ‘He's an engineer by training. It would be an excellent way to improve liaison with the tech team. He is pretty familiar with Baghdad. You've always given him great performance reviews.' He paused.

Meyer turned the page. ‘It's your call of course,' he said. ‘But maybe there are a couple of things worth considering, if I might be so bold. This is a very delicate project. There are other Arab teams going in there, I'm sure. Everyone wants to look like a local
–
local knowledge, local relationships
–
and so on.' He sat back in his chair and regarded Salim, his heavy body surging up into the long neck and the grey, patrician
face.

‘See
–
the thing is, local doesn't really swing it. These guys want us because we're an international, an
American
firm bringing that kind of expertise. And glamour, sorry to say it. That's what they like, even if they don't know it themselves. You know what I mean?' Salim nodded. ‘It's pretty unusual for us to have a local man running the team, as I guess you know.'

‘I'm British.'

‘Sure, I know. But, the question is, does it work against us in the long run to have a local guy doing the liaison too? Does it undermine the subliminal messaging? Nothing against Omar, nothing at all. But do you see my point?'

It's a shitty, unfair point
. ‘I do, for sure,' Salim said carefully. ‘I'll think about it. Rethink, if necessary.'

‘That's all I ask.' Meyer leaned over and shook Salim's hand. ‘You did great on this. Look forward to the next update on the trip.'

When Salim walked through the door that night, he heard the children shouting in the bedroom. Unusually, the television was on in the family room. He saw Jude in there, pale in the gloom, sitting as the images flickered over her face. She stood up hastily as he came in and shut off the
set.

‘What's the matter?' he asked, as she walked over to kiss him. ‘Nothing,' she replied, but her eyes were guilty. ‘The twins are going crazy, I just needed a break. I'm making chicken for dinner.' He watched her slip past him, into the orange-tiled kitchen. Marc came tumbling down the hall shouting ‘Mummy!' at the top of his lungs, stopping dead when he saw Salim.

‘You came home early,' he said. ‘Are you cross?'

Salim shook his head. He did not have the energy for Marc tonight. ‘What kind of a question is that, Marc? Who told you I'm cross? I'm not cross.'

‘Mummy says you're cross sometimes, when you come home from the office.'

Sophie had joined him, and at that she elbowed him in the chest and whispered, ‘Marc, shush.' Salim felt a revitalizing rush of bitterness.
Even here in my own home, I'm misunderstood
.

He walked away from the children, into the family room with the television and the drawn blinds. He flicked the set back on and sat down to watch the news. In the kitchen, Jude was clattering the pans with unnecessary energy, just like her mother the one time they'd met for dinner before their awkward London marriage.

The set came on in a blaze of crackling gunfire and screams. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust, but then he recognized the place
–
a town in the Galilee, not far from Nadia's flat. The camera panned over a restless, surging mass of people, young men with dark faces. They had sticks in their hands, and they were shouting
Ardna! Damna!
Salim felt their voices go right through him. Our land! Our blood! Tanks were jerking along the rough roads to the villages in lower Galilee, as men in jeans and
keffiyaat
charged rows of young Israeli soldiers.

The commentator's voice rolled over the scenes
–
an English voice filled with Arab emotions striking Salim strangely. The Israelis were seizing new holdings of Arab land around Nazareth. They cut to the Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, talking about Israel's need for security and new settlement. And then there was a fuzzy video of a man
–
some poet, called Ziad
–
calling on Palestinians to stand up and revolt.
Ziad – like the man in Shatila
. They'd declared a national strike and called it Land Day.
Yom Al-Ard
.

The commentary moved onto tensions in Iran, and Salim flicked it off. He had to face Omar in the morning, to give him the bad news. Now he felt dirty, as dirty as a traitor, sick of the whole thing.

In the kitchen, Jude, Sophie and Marc were already at the table. Sophie was attacking a chicken leg with both hands and Marc was peeling the flesh off the bone and arranging it on his plate in a neat circle. In the corner Sophie's birdcage rattled as its wounded inhabitants, rescued from cats and car windscreens, clambered nervously along the
bars.

Jude looked up as he came in. He recognized the expression of unhappy defiance. Salim's senses were still surging on the bitter flood of memory; she looked more than ever like Lili Yashuv, standing behind her husband at the gates of their house. Jude and Lili
–
their two images overlaid like two transparencies, coming together in striking clarity in the lines of their long noses, their high foreheads and blue
eyes.

He pulled up a chair and took a plate of rice from her hands. Shovelling it into his mouth despite his closed stomach, he tried to push the anger away.
I'm British
, he had pathetically pleaded to Meyer that afternoon. Pleaded like a boy, while more of his true home was being leached away by men like Meyer, women like
Jude.

‘Was it okay at work today?' Jude was asking. ‘Was Meyer pleased?'

‘Mostly.' He looked over at Marc, who was steadily looking back at him from over a large, flayed chicken leg. ‘What about you, Marc? Did you have your Arabic lesson today?'

‘It was yesterday,' Sophie said cheerfully. ‘Mr Shakir came to the house.'

Salim kept looking at Marc. How could he have such blue eyes? The child who would take his name forward had nothing of his nature. It was so unfair, as if Jude's genes and his mother's had conspired to remind him that he had no real power, nothing left worth passing
on.

‘What did you learn in your lesson then?' he asked the boy. Marc's eyes flickered back down to his plate.

‘We learned how to name all the animals.'

‘Really? So you can tell me what you're eating for dinner.' Marc's brow furrowed as he examined his deconstructed chicken. Looking back up at his father, the blue eyes were ruffled with a hint of worry. ‘I forgot,' he
said.

‘
I
know!' Sophie squealed, but Salim put his hand up to silence
her.

‘I asked Marc. Come on, Marc. Try to remember.'

‘I forgot, I told
you.'

‘That's not good enough. It was only yesterday you learned it. You can't really have forgotten, can you? Weren't you listening in the first place?'

Marc looked at his mother for reassurance, but that sidelong glance infuriated Salim. He hit the table with his hand, and Marc's eyes snapped back to him, his body jerking in shock. Jude said, ‘Sal, please, don't.'

‘Stay out of this,' he said heatedly. ‘They're supposed to be learning and
you're
supposed to be helping them. So Marc, tell me something in Arabic. Tell me anything, so I can see that you're taking this seriously, like a little man. Come on.' He leaned over and pulled Marc's plate from his hands, to leave nothing between the boy and
him.

Marc started to cry in that painful way he had, his lip wobbling like a girl's and tears trickling down his nose. Salim saw Jude's face
–
it was white. ‘Sal, for God's sake, enough,' she said, her voice low. Something inside him reached out of the blaze of anger and self-pity to comfort her, to apologize. But the image of those Israeli tanks rolled over it, slamming it
down.

‘If you had done your job, he wouldn't be so fragile,' he heard himself saying. ‘But I guess you don't want him to be like one of these crazy Arabs, right?'

He could see Sophie starting to cry now, her dark almond eyes swimming.
Where do these terrible words come from? What kind of man are you?
Angry with them all, horrified at himself, he got up from the table and went into the bedroom. As he shut the door, he felt the comfort of silence slide over him, blanketing the maelstrom within.

Meyer's wife invited them to the beach that weekend. Jude arrived with a warm smile and all the essential facts ready for new friendships: Mrs Meyer's name was Anne; she was secretary of the International Women's Club and had three grown children all doing something in New
York.

Out on the blazing sands of the Creek, Anne Meyer gave her a fainting handshake from under a drooping sunhat, a butterfly exhausted in the shimmering air. She complimented Jude's ‘sweet kids', and complained about the ‘god-awful heat'. Then she turned away to her other guests.

Sophie ran off to join the mêlée of sandy little bodies at the edge of the water. ‘Be careful, pet,' Jude called out, but her daughter just waved her arm, a brown glimmer of delight. Marc lay down under the umbrella, tracing stick figures in the sand. Out in the haze a tiny sandbank lay white against the blue.
Not more than a hundred yards away
, she thought.
Once I would have swum there without thinking
.

The rush of the water and the children brought back distant echoes of memory, the clamour of Wearside, the Junior Team Tryouts, the brightness of those friendships.
Another life, another road not taken
. She hugged her knees to her chest against the sudden ache, and turned to Salim.

He stood tall above her with the Super 8 camera in his hand, trained on Sophie's leaping form. As their eyes met he knelt down, his body brown as the darkening sand, and slid a hand onto her shoulder. Since that inexplicable fight he'd been contrite and defiant by turn. The pressure of the bid
–
that's all it was, she told herself. So much pressure on him to prove everyone wrong, to succeed in their hare-brained venture.

‘Okay, my love?' She saw the concern in his eyes, and it moved her
–
these precious reminders that they were still uniquely attuned to each other, that each soul could still resonate with the other's needs.

‘Perfect.' She smiled up at him and pointed to the shoreline. ‘Look at our Sophie.' Their daughter was skipping with another nameless girl, splashing joyously across the warm sand. ‘She's never afraid, is
she?'

‘Just like her mother,' Salim said, squeezing Jude's shoulder. Inexplicable tears rose to her eyes. Beside her, the sound of Marc's humming mixed with the rush of the waves. It washed old memories over her
–
rain soaking her forehead when Salim had first kissed her, the flood of her waters breaking and the perfect emptiness of her being when Marc was finally dragged out of her body, hours after Sophie slipped into the doctor's hands. Salim had rejoiced in his son and daughter, taking them from the bassinet and holding them up to the light, his face shining in pure happiness.