Strangers (4 page)

And the moment when they threw petals, so that she and Joe were caught in a shower of brilliant colours.

And she remembered Joe, his face bright with laughter as he scooped her mother off the ground and kissed her. ‘Hi, Mum,’ he said. Her mother laughed with genuine delight, and the anxiety faded from her face for a moment.

Then, two days later, they flew to Riyadh.

Riyadh, October 2004

The ad-Dirah market was in the heart of the old city, a covered souk with labyrinthine walkways, cool and shadowed after the relentless sun. The air smelled of sandalwood and spices and the stalls were piled high with goods that ranged from the
commonplace to the exotic: translucent chunks of frankincense and reddish brown myrrh, brass coffee pots as tall as a child or small enough to fit in the palm of the hand, camel-hair shawls and scarves. Old men reclined on Persian carpets, smoking hookahs and drinking tea, enticing their customers in with gentle persuasion.

Roisin, dizzy with jet lag, wondered if she was dreaming a Hollywood incarnation of an Arabian street market. She felt as if she had closed her eyes in London on a grey October morning, and opened them again to the opulence and glitter of the souk.

She pulled her headscarf forward over the telltale blonde of her hair. She had never been in a country where she had to veil before. The abaya had felt odd and theatrical when she had put it on an hour ago, but here in the bustling market, she was glad of the anonymity. All the women she saw had covered their faces, and were dark shapes in abayas and veils. She could see nothing of them but their eyes, which gleamed in the shadows as they flickered in Roisin’s direction. They looked oddly, exotically beautiful.

In the cool dimness of the walkways, the light reflected off the brilliant fabrics, the silver of the jewellery, and the white of the men’s robes.

A man from the agency had met them in the hotel lobby at nine. ‘Dr and Mrs Massey? I’m Damien O’Neill.’ The name was familiar from the flurry of correspondence that Joe’s sudden decision
—and their precipitate marriage–had engendered. Roisin had studied him as they shook hands. His appearance gave very little away. He was wearing a lightweight suit, and draped round his shoulders was one of the chequered scarves the local men wore. His hair was fair and he had a thin, long-jawed face. His eyes were concealed behind dark glasses. His manner was pleasant enough, but he seemed a bit distant and distracted. ‘I’ll take you to the house and get you settled in.’

She’d looked at Joe. ‘Do we have to go there straight away? Do you have time to show us a bit of the city first? I’ve never been here before, and…’ And the restrictions on women’s freedom meant that it would be hard for her to explore Riyadh on her own.

‘I have a bit of time. We could go to ad-Dirah. It’s in the old city. The market’s worth a visit.’ He must get bored with acclimatizing new arrivals.

And now as she watched Joe bargaining with one of the market traders in a rapid exchange with hand gestures and laughter as his Arabic let him down, she was glad she had asked. She’d been told that the Saudis could be stand-offish and unfriendly, but these people seemed welcoming enough. She didn’t try to join in. She wasn’t sure what women were or were not allowed to do here. She could see local women, accompanied by men, haggling briskly at the stalls. She gave up trying to follow the bartering that was going on in front of her, and stepped back to join O’Neill.

‘It’s hot,’ she said to him distractedly, fanning herself with a guidebook she’d picked up at the hotel. She gave herself the day’s award for stating the blindingly obvious. ‘Isn’t that too warm?’ She nodded at his scarf.

‘The best way to deal with this sun is to cover up against it. Like they do.’ He nodded towards the crowds who were thronging the market.

‘Whereabouts is the university?’ She would be working there, teaching English to the women students. She wondered if they would pass it today on their way to the house.

‘It’s on its own campus, to the west of the city in al-Nakhil.’ He took off his glasses and slipped them into the pocket of his jacket. She saw that his eyes were grey. ‘The ex-pats call it Camelot.’

‘Camelot?’ She would be living in the magic kingdom and working in Camelot. She wanted to say something about this, to try and make some contact with this man who was part of the community she was about to live and work among, but there was something about his face that discouraged any further comment. They stood in silence waiting for Joe.

He was moving away from the stall now, putting his money back into his belt, his eyes surveying the crowd. For a moment he hesitated as if he didn’t know where he was, and she was about to wave and call when she remembered that women didn’t do that here. He’d seen them, anyway, and
came across. He caught Roisin’s eye and smiled a quick query at her:
You OK?

She smiled back and nodded. ‘What did you buy?’

‘Something for you.’ He showed her a cluster of bangles made of delicate, thread-like silver. He liked to buy her small presents. She had a collection of scarves and earrings and beads that he had bought for her over the few months they had been together. O’Neill was glancing at his watch.

Joe slipped the bangles discreetly on her wrist. Men and women touching in public were likely to attract angry comment from the Mutawa’ah, the religious police. She felt the cold of the metal against her skin. ‘They’re beautiful. Thank you.’ Their eyes met.

O’Neill hadn’t been watching them. Roisin had noticed the way his eyes kept scanning the crowd, constantly checking their surroundings. ‘We need to move on,’ he said. He led them out into the narrow streets where the shops of the gold market lined the pavements, filled with necklaces, bracelets, pendants, earrings, coins, piled up in glittering brilliance. In London, these shops would have been protected by heavy glass, by metal grilles and shutters. Here, everything was out in the open.

As they threaded their way through the crowd, away from the covered market and back on to the street, Roisin’s eyes were constantly drawn to new sights–a child watching her big-eyed from behind a stall, the glitter of gold in the thread of a fabric,
ornamented shutters across an upper window, the hard lines of the shadows as the sun rose to its zenith.

The fragrance of cooking wafted over to her and she looked round. A man at a stall behind her was grilling kebabs on a clay oven, tearing open flat bread and slapping the meat inside it for the thronging customers. She could see salads of grain and chopped herbs, and dishes of hummus. Back home, it would be five in the evening, the time that she would be leaving work and heading to the small bistro on New Oxford Street where she and Joe customarily ate. Suddenly she was ravenous. She could almost taste the spices and feel the soft warmth of the bread in her mouth, but there was nothing she could do about it. Women didn’t eat in public here.

She collided with Joe who had stopped abruptly in front of her. ‘Which way are we going?’ His voice, as he spoke to O’Neill, was sharp.

O’Neill looked surprised. ‘To the al-Masmak fort,’ he said.

‘We need to get back. Roisin’s tired.’

Roisin opened her mouth to object, then shut it again. She had no idea what had upset Joe, but his face had that bleak, distant look. ‘It’s a bit hot,’ she said diplomatically.

O’Neill raised an eyebrow but didn’t make any further comment. ‘OK.’ His shrug was in his tone. ‘We can cut through this way to the car.’

She glanced quickly at Joe as O’Neill turned
away. ‘I’m fine,’ she said, but he didn’t seem to hear. He was pushing ahead through the crowd and she couldn’t see his face.

Just then, the crowd parted to let a man through. He was tall and his robes were dazzling in the light. Her eyes followed him instinctively. In the next instant a sudden surge caught her unawares, turning her around in a wave of bodies and almost knocking her off her feet. When she tried to turn back, O’Neill and Joe had vanished and she had no idea which way they’d gone.

They couldn’t be far away, but she wasn’t tall enough to see over the heads of the people and she was getting pushed back, further away from where she had been. The next surge carried her to the edge of the street, and then she was against the wall, trying to make herself inconspicuous as she oriented herself. The streets, narrow and shadowed, ran away from her in all directions. She had the sudden feeling–something she had never felt before–of hostile eyes searching for her, eyes that wouldn’t be fooled for long by her disguise. She could feel the start of panic constricting her chest, and made herself breathe slowly and steadily. There was nothing to worry about. She’d got separated in the crowd. The worst that could happen was that the Mutawa’ah would shout at her.

Then she recognized the corner of a building. That was where they had left the souk. In that case, they had been heading towards…or was
it this way? There was a straight lane ahead of her, free from the confusion of the market-place throng.

She followed it, and suddenly, to her relief, the crowd was gone. A square opened up in front of her, paved in patterned stone, surrounded by palm trees. At the far end was a low, flat building raised on pillars, and to her right a minaret reached up towards the sky. The shadows were solid and hard-edged. A white-robed figure stood in the shadow of the pillars, but otherwise the square was empty. It was shocking in its unexpected silence.

She stood still, frozen in a moment of déjà vu. She thought she knew this place. Then Joe was beside her, his face tense with anxiety. ‘Christ, Roisin…’

‘Joe!’ She put her hand out to touch him, then drew it back, remembering where she was. ‘I’m sorry. I got caught in the crowd.’ She had been separated from them by a few yards.

Damien O’Neill was looking at her assessingly. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes. I’m fine. It was my fault. The crowd took me by surprise.’

‘I’m sorry. I should have warned you about that.’ He turned to Joe, who had fallen silent and was staring at the square in front of him. ‘Come on. We can get back this way.’

Moving quickly, he led them away from the market and suddenly the old town and the crowds were behind them. Roisin’s head was spinning in
confusion. She was an adult woman in one of the major capitals of the world. She’d taken care of herself alone in a hundred cities and yet this place had rendered her helpless, had changed her status, just like that, to that of a child.

The sun was almost directly overhead. The Arab city had vanished. They were walking through a street that could be in Anycity, Anyplace, past high glass blocks of anonymous business space where the noise and smells of modern urban life surrounded her. By the time they reached the car park, she was glad to get back into the air-conditioned interior of the car.

She was starting to flag. She’d tried to push herself straight into local time, the only cure for jet lag that worked for her, but all she’d been able to do when the taxi driver had dropped them at the hotel shortly after five the evening before was fall on the bed and sleep.

She’d woken in the small hours. The green light of the clock said 3.10. She knew that she wasn’t going to be able to sleep again and sat up carefully. The blinds weren’t closed and the moonlight illuminated the room with a cold radiance.

Slipping out of bed, careful not to disturb Joe, she’d pulled on her robe and got herself some fruit juice from the mini bar. Then she went and sat by the window, looking out across Riyadh, her home for the next year.

The cityscape had blazed out in millions of lights. Skyscrapers, impossibly slender and fragile, thrust
up towards the sky, and the highways bound them together with loops of light. It was as if someone had asked the designers and architects to build a stage set for a city of the future and they had created this edifice, a city that rested uncomfortably on the desert and on the customs of the people who inhabited it. She remembered what Joe had said when they first met.
It’s like one of those optical illusions
. If she sat here watching for long enough, would the illusion fade? And if it did, what would she see?

Now, in the centre of the city, the broken night was catching up with her. The furnace blast of the air was sapping the vitality out of her, and she sank back into the car seat, enjoying the cool of the air-con. Her annoyance at Joe faded. He’d been right. She was tired. She could feel the sweat between her shoulder blades, and her hair felt damp. ‘What was that place?’ she asked, adjusting her scarf to stop it slipping off her head.

O’Neill steered the car into the stream of fast-moving traffic. He still looked cool and untouched by the heat. ‘It’s as-Sa’ah Square,’ he said, his voice expressionless as he gave her the careful non-information. She wondered what he wasn’t telling her. A car cut in from their right and he switched lanes smoothly to avoid a collision. ‘You were based in one of the villages before?’ he said to Joe. Joe didn’t seem to hear. A truck careered towards them and swerved away at the last moment.

‘Someone should tell them that they drive on the right here,’ Roisin observed.

O’Neill glanced at her in the mirror. His mouth twitched in a sudden smile. ‘It’s optional,’ he said.

Encouraged by the first sign of warmth, she tried again. ‘Tell me about that square. It was so…’ She searched for words. The cathedral-like silence had caught her imagination. Despite the hard glare of the light, she could imagine banks of candles lit for the souls of…who? She tried to catch Joe’s eye, but he was staring out of the window, lost in his own thoughts.

O’Neill glanced at her again before he answered. ‘It’s known colloquially as Chop-Chop Square,’ he said.

‘Chop-Chop Square?’ For a moment, she didn’t understand what he was talking about, then she realized. The bright square with the blue patterned stones and the palm trees was the place where malefactors against the rigid laws of the Kingdom were dealt with. The place of punishment. The place of execution. All the impulse to laugh drained out of her. People had died on those sun-dazed stones, close to the place where she had been standing.