The Abrupt Physics of Dying (5 page)

Moments passed. A minute? Maybe more.

Finally Clay said: ‘This is a European company, operating to the best international standards.’ Again, what the script demanded.

The
mashayikh
narrowed his eyes. ‘You insult us, Mister Straker. We know this is a lie.’ He looked down at the weapon lying across his knee, caressed the smooth walnut handguard with sinewed fingers, and then locked his gaze onto Clay’s eyes. ‘We can make things very difficult, Mister Straker, if we choose.’ Then he leaned close and
whispered in Clay’s ear. ‘Also, we can cooperate. It is your choice.’ His breath reeked of
qat
and alcohol.

Then the
mashayikh
stood and swung the Kalashnikov over his shoulder. The audience was over. Clay got to his feet and clasped the man’s right hand in his own, making sure to keep his left hand, the unclean one, behind his back. He felt the grit in the
mashayikh
’s skin, saw the stains of years cracked and stretched over the bones, and looked into the murky tannin eyes. ‘
Shukran
, Excellency. I will take the message back to my superiors in Aden.’

‘I will expect you soon, then,’ said the
mashayikh
with a flourish of his hand as he turned towards the door, the room emptying around him.

Soon Clay was alone. He slumped onto the stool and drained the last of the sweet dark tea. Was that what this was all about? Money? Al Urush was less than an hour away. He would see for himself.

A Melody of Spokes

Fifteen minutes out on the deserted main road, Abdulkader’s Land Cruiser continued its rebellion. Clay pulled over onto the rough gravel shoulder, and for the second time in less than a day set about changing a tyre. He had just mounted the last spare and was tightening the lug nuts when a vehicle appeared in the distance. It was travelling at high speed, heading towards him, floating on the heat. A hundred metres away, the car slowed, a Land Rover, white, new. As it approached, Clay could make out a single occupant, thick black hair streaming from the driver’s side window. Clay stood, tyre iron in one hand, and was about to wave when the driver gunned the engine. As the Land Rover flashed past in a hurl of dust and flying pebbles, the driver turned for an instant and looked at Clay through a tornado of whirling hair. For a fraction of a second their eyes met. Then she was gone. Clay stood gaping as the vehicle’s wake disappeared in the shimmering heat haze. A woman driving alone out here was unusual enough. Even more startling was that she had been unveiled, and uncommonly beautiful.

Clay arrived in the village at the height of day, when the sun had reached its zenith and the ground baked in the heat. At a distance, Al Urush looked like any other hamlet on the coastal plain, a cluster of earthen-brick huts nestled within a shock of green palms at the base of the cliffs. The mouth of a steep canyon yawned above the settlement as if ready to swallow it complete.

He stared up at the escarpment, a massive wall of Palaeocene limestone that ran parallel to the coast for hundreds of kilometres in
both directions and rose up to the barren tablelands of the Masila. The rock here was riven with long deep faults, veins carrying life to the ancient spring that wept from the base of the canyon walls.
Aflaj
, ancient hand-laid stone canals the width and depth of a man’s hand, carried the water to the fields, houses and palm groves of the village below. And somewhere up there, high on the plateau, five kilometres up-wadi, the Petro-Tex central processing facility, the CPF, gathered in the oil produced from two major fields and dozens of wells.

The dirt track ended in a small clearing at the base of a massive dolomite boulder calved from the cliff face. Clay stopped the vehicle at the edge of the clearing. Nearby, two veiled women in black
burqas
and conical reed hats toiled in a stone field. Bent double at the waist, they worked the ground with medieval hands, pulling up sheaves of a meagre crop.

He sniffed the hot dry air – burnished stone and ripening dates, a trace of wood smoke. Nothing unusual or even vaguely industrial. At the far side of the clearing a small boy sat in the shade of a trio of date palms, cradling an old bicycle wheel between his knees as if it were a harp. Head bent to the instrument, the boy flicked a short stick down across the spokes, one after the other,
click, click, click
, with slow deliberation until the lower clunk of the rim sent him back to the hub to begin again. The boy looked up as Clay approached but did not stop playing, only watched and clicked out the one-note melody in time with Clay’s footsteps through the dust.

Clay greeted the boy in Arabic. He could not have been more than five or six, the same age as Abdulkader’s youngest son. The boy’s face was sullen and grey, but his eyes were bright. There were open sores on his neck and arms. His name was Mohamed. Clay asked the boy to show him the
ghayl
, the spring.

The boy looked at him for a moment and then frowned. ‘Why you are angry?’ he asked in high-pitched Arabic.

Clay stood for a moment looking out across the plain, this part of the country so different from the veldt of his childhood and yet so reminiscent in its heat and unforgiving dry. He crouched down
to the boy’s level and tried to smile. ‘I am not angry with you.’ It was always easier speaking with children. His Arabic was almost at a six-year-old’s level.

The boy’s eyes widened and he smiled. His gums were red and inflamed. The boy pushed himself to his feet and stood clutching the bicycle wheel in both hands, turning it right and left, leaning into the turns, chattering in a shrill cracked boy voice.

Clay could not make out all the words.

‘Toyota,’ the boy said, pointing at Abdulkader’s dust-covered vehicle.

‘You want a ride?’ he replied in English. The boy was making engine noises now from deep in his throat, changing gears, accelerating. Clay reached into his pocket and offered the boy a sweet. The boy took it and smiled again.

‘
Ya’llah
,’ said Clay, reaching down and swinging the boy up onto his shoulders. The boy squealed in delight, still holding his wheel. ‘Let’s take a look at the
ghayl
,’ said Clay. ‘Maybe we’ll find something further up.’

Clay buckled Mohamed into the passenger’s seat and jumped behind the wheel. The boy was chattering excitedly, pulling at his sleeve.

‘
Aysh
?’ asked Clay. What?

The boy put aside his bicycle wheel and pointed at the steering column.

Clay ruffled the boy’s thin black hair. ‘Cheeky monkey,’ he said, something his father used to say.

Soon they were trundling down the narrow track away from the hamlet, Mohamed perched on Clay’s lap, bony hands clutching the Land Cruiser’s steering wheel. The boy steered with him, matching his movements. After a while, the boy directed him onto a rough stone track. The vehicle creaked and lurched past terraced flats of stubble wedged between rocky outcrops towards the cleft in the cliffs. The pitch of the track steepened. After a while Clay stopped, jumped out to lock the hubs, kept going. He thought again about
the woman in the Land Rover, the surprise he’d felt seeing her, the perfect symmetry of her features, her big dark eyes.

Soon they had penetrated the opening in the cliffs where the wadi met the line of the escarpment. So blinding was the light reflected from the sheer wall of limestone that he had to look away, over to the darkness of the facing formations sheltered from the full fury of the sun. They descended into the bleached cauldron of the wadi bed and then climbed again towards the afternoon shade of the far cliffs. The track became rougher and less distinct. Clay felt his way up the hill, the tyres slipping on the loose stone.

‘Stop,’ said the boy. ‘Now walk.’

They started up the slope towards the patch of green that marked the spring. After a few moments Clay stopped and looked back. Mohamed was already far behind. The boy struggled and stumbled on the loose scree, breathing heavily, his face covered in sweat. He stopped and looked up at Clay, swaying on bony legs. He opened his mouth as if he were about to call out, but then his face twisted in pain and he doubled over, his back and shoulders shaking as he spewed vomit to the ground in a series of wrenching contractions.

Clay ran down the slope, skidding along the loose scree to where the boy stood. He put his hand on Mohamed’s back, feeling the last spasm shudder through his thin frame. The boy looked up and smiled. Vomit covered his chin and the front of his shirt. Clay crouched down and unwrapped his
keffiyeh
and wiped the boy’s face and his shirt and ran his hand through the boy’s dark hair.

‘
Tammam
?’ Clay asked, giving the thumbs up. ‘OK?’

The boy nodded, managing a weak smile.

Then Clay hoisted him onto his shoulders and carried him up the hill, skin and bones, of no weight at all. At the top of the scree slope they came to a sharp vertical bluff as high as a camel’s back. The bluff’s frayed, fractured lip ran some hundred metres or more across the wadi to meet the cliff face, as if it had been tossed carelessly from the plateau to fall draped over the edge. A footpath ran along its base in both directions. Clay turned away from the cliff and started down
the path towards the wadi bed, the bluff on his right, Mohamed’s wet hands clasped across his forehead. He could feel the boy’s pulse against his own skull, rapid, tripping, excited.

After a few steps the boy shook his legs and tugged at Clay’s ears. ‘
La
,’ said the little voice from above.

‘What is it?’

The boy pointed back to the cliffs. ‘I show you,’ he said in English. ‘
Faddar
.’ Please.

‘OK, little brother.’ Clay spun on his feet and started back along the bluff footpath towards the cliff, the little hamlet spread below them on the right. Soon he was threading his way through a maze of boulders, the path narrowing so that in places he had to turn side on – Mohamed still on his shoulders, urging him forward with little kicks, as though Clay was some mountain donkey and he a travelling Mullah. The rock dwarfed them on all sides, and it was as if they had been swallowed up by the lifeless, uncaring age of the place.

Mohammed squeezed Clay’s head. ‘Stop,’ he said in English, pointing to the bluff. At first Clay did not see what the boy was showing him, such was its unity with the surrounding rock. It seemed impossible, but there it was – a scale of steps hewn into the limestone, a passageway disappearing into the rock. ‘
Aiwa, aiwa,
’ said Mohamed. Yes.

The stairway, ancient surely, twisted up into the core of the bluff, the sides handtool-etched so that he could almost hear the men chipping away at the rock through the centuries. He climbed steadily, heart working harder now, cooler here in the bowels of the earth, his shoulders scraping the sides in places, until they emerged into sunlight so bright he had to shut his eyes.

The oasis was a series of five spring-fed rock pools set in the barren footings of the canyon’s towering rock face, shaded by palms and acacia. The spring pulsed from the ground as if pumped from a heart, the clear water cascading over the grooved limestone from one pool to the next and the one after that. The place teemed with life: small green fish with silver bellies darted in the deep cool water,
frogs croaked in the fringing reed banks, insects buzzed in dense shifting clouds of colour. It was one of the most beautiful places he had ever seen.

A group of children splashed in the deepest of the pools. They smiled as he approached. Their gums, too, were red and inflamed, their skin dappled with sores. At the water’s edge, two women, clearly blessed by Allah, heavy with child, laid out their washing on the smooth rocks to dry in the sun. They whispered to each other as he approached. Clay looked towards them. One of the women raised her hands to her face and looked away. But the other met his gaze, and for a short moment she stared at him with dark, brazen eyes. Then she smiled and her teenage face vanished behind a drawn veil.

Clay swung the boy down to the ground and crouched before him. He took the boy’s face in his hands and turned it to one side and the other. ‘
Tammam
? OK?’

‘I am tired,’ the boy replied in a thin, high-pitched voice.

Clay pulled a sweet from his pocket, offered it to the boy.

Mohamed held out his hand. It was covered in blood from Clay’s head. ‘You are hurt,’ he said.

Clay reached for the boy’s other hand, dropped the sweet into his palm, patted him on the head. ‘I am fine,
al hamdillulah
.’

The boy muttered the same words, thanks be to God, closed his fingers around the candy, held it a moment, pulled off the wrapper, then popped it in his mouth.

Clay knelt and put his lips to the water. The first touch was cool, the water sweet. The boy crouched beside him and did the same.

Clay stood and sniffed the air. Iodine, salt, empty miles of hazy blue. The wind was from the sea. He reached into his pack and fished out an empty plastic water bottle, opened the cap. He was not prepared, but this would have to do. He crouched by the edge and dipped the bottle in the pool until the mouth was half submerged and held it there as it filled. Clay stood, stashed the bottle in his pack, and looked up at the women busy with their laundry. ‘Stay here, Mohamed,’ he said.

‘I want to come.’

‘I will come back. I have work.’

The boy bent the twig of an arm around Clay’s leg. ‘You are my friend,’ he said.

Clay smiled. He crouched and put his hands on the boy’s shoulders. ‘You are my friend, too,’ he said in Arabic. He reached into his pocket and poured a handful of sweets into the boy’s outstretched hands.

He left Mohamed at the pools and set off along the gradually constricting wadi bed. After half an hour of hard walking he came to a place where the canyon narrowed into a steep defile. Vertical dolomite cliffs embraced a sheer fault line that blocked the way. He stopped and looked up. There was not a whisper of air, nor any angle in the sun to throw shadows. He turned and wiped the back of his hand across his brow and down his temple and looked back towards the green of the oasis no more than a kilometre below, little Mohamed just a speck now, still waiting by the water. Whatever Al Shams thought was happening here, there was no sign of it. Was the truth being spoken?

Is a woman beautiful or ugly? A glance is not enough. To know, you must marry her. That’s what Abdulkader would have said.