Keys of Babylon (5 page)

When Tariq gave her the chocolate her eyes grew even wider. Like a schoolgirl's. The sanctions meant the people were starving. There were beggars on the street and malnutrition in Baghdad. One of the world's great cities. It was unheard of.

Tariq, I thought. She will pull you back. She will hang chains on your soul when you need to be free. Those eyes will work a spell.

What happened to Tariq? I ask.

Oh, another irony, says Mohammed. Irony followed him until the end. He became a tank commander, in charge of a T-72, the Arad Babil. You know what that is in English? The Lion of Babylon.

I gaze at the gods on the glass shelves. I'm still unsure how Mohammed reached the UK, but he senses the unspoken question.

Yes, this is home now, he says. Maybe Amman was a little fraught. Eventually I hired other drivers and took my belongings to Beirut where I have a friend. Then, when the money started to come in, I decided to travel. See the world. This is a pleasant apartment, no?

Canford Cliffs means money's no problem today, I say. But it was in Baghdad.

Mohammed looks hard at me. He is a man of sixty now, his moustache grey.

I apologise, he says. For crying that is. How crass it must have seemed.

Those were strange times.

No, my friend. Those were good times. Well, better times, despite the embargo. These are the strange times. The dangerous times. He whose name we could never speak, he whose photograph was in every room, he was maybe not so mad after all.

You miss those times?

The certainties? Yes. Being able to sit in a restaurant or walk down the street without some imbecile blowing his useless carcass up beside you? Yes I miss those times.

There are no terrorists in Poole, I laugh.

Not on the London Underground either, he says.

We're silent for a while. Mohammed has served almond biscuits. They're too hard for my teeth.

You know, he laughs, they bombed our national archive. Most of the old documents went up in flames. What was left was put into freezers but the electricity was always off. On, off. Then, a little later, the Americans arrived in Babylon. They built a helipad there. Bulldozers flattened a site in the immemorial earth. America, the stupid country, the new Mongols, brought history to an end.

We're quiet again and I'm still looking around. The leather, the tiny gods. On the plasma widescreen a dancer in a yellow bodystocking is silently circling on a black stage. She looks like an ash key falling to earth. Round and round in the darkness she goes.

Mohammed has made the best of things, I think, glancing up. He understood what was valuable. The time to stay, the time to leave. But when have I ever done that? That Lottery job would have sorted me out. Given me a chance to show my strengths. And the bloody film. All those hours we recorded were reduced to a fragment. At night in Baghdad I would lie awake and look at the green light on the battery charger. If it winked I would panic. But the film we cut doesn't tell the story. How could it? Ten hours of tape wait unseen in an attic and nobody gives a damn. It might have been a masterpiece. Maybe it still could.

There was a doctor I filmed. He took us to view the terrible twins. These had just been born and lay together in an incubator. Something was wrong with them and they weren't going to live. They looked like two halves of a walnut.

In my experience, the doctor said, they are unique.

I remember their wizened faces. Ugly as cicadas. Whatever their illnesses, we thought uranium was responsible. When we arrived home we offered the footage to all the news channels but nobody wanted to know. The parents lived north of Basra. That was where Prettyboy and his mates had been chucking DU around.

There is an intercom buzz. Mohammed's lunch is arriving. Steak and salad from a local restaurant. A quiver of frites.

I hold out my hand.

Extraordinary to meet you again, I say, but his attention is on the food. The silent screen shows cricket now. Sachin Tendulkar in blue and orange is batting for the Mumbai Indians.

Yes, goodbye, says Mohammed.

In the lift I look at myself. I've forgotten to shave again. I decide to have a drink. Yes, I'll go to The Nightjar. I need to think about things. And there's an article I have to write.

Her Honda makes the turning and she drops down slowly into Black Canyon City. But what she remembers today, for no reason she can understand, is something that happened further up the highway.

Somebody had told her there was work in Flagstaff. Boomtown. So what was there to lose? She shared a room with a deaf woman. There was no air con. The office where she cleaned held a thousand desks and every time she clocked on she wondered what the desk people did all day in their miles of metal and glass. Crunch paper? Spill coffee? There were famished flies in the double glazing.

Years of night shifts had brought her down. Daylight sleep meant lethargy. And the TV was on all the time.
Bonanza
in the mornings,
I Love Lucy
any time. You'll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent. Maybe that was why people went to work, fleeing to their desk islands and the Aqua Chill cooler. The deaf girl would sit and goggle, eating peanuts and drinking milk, a yellow mash in her mouth. With the money she'd saved, Maria decided to try north of Phoenix.

The bus had dropped her at the railway station. She had stood outside and waited for the line to clear, for that Santa Fe with its mile of iron carriages to go wherever it was going. She had looked at each freight car as it passed. Each a casket. A coffin. Sealed tight as an airplane hold. No riding that. No way.

There was a man looking at her from the platform. Blue and white bandanna, dark glasses. She could see his body through the singlet. He was old but he was fit. Or so he might think.

The next day she was sweeping the pine needles off his floor while he made the Impala roar through a cloud of sawdust. They had slept on a mattress in the back and in the morning he had cooked onions and eggs together in a skillet. She used Pillsbury sweet bread to soak up the grease.

Be back round five, he had said. Adios.

And she had kept sweeping because there was nothing else she knew how to do in that place. When he came home she was still there. Her choice.

The house was a shack above a new lot being cut into the trees. Juniper, pinot pines. Early on, when he wasn't there, she would walk out as far as she dared, climbing a hill in the forest where there were slabs of moss-covered rock with seams of crystal in it. She watched the lizards there, walked higher and stared out at the tops of the hills. All green. All smoking. Each hill with its rocks, its lizards.

Don't get lost, he had told her once. There's fifty miles of it outside. Lion territory.

From the rock she watched the jays, blue and black. Their voices reminded her of the travellers who had raised their puppet theatre one weekend in her home village. Mad voices. Whiny, stupid voices. She and Juan and the other children pointed at the shapes of the ventriloquists through the curtain. But how people had laughed at the puppets' cruelties.

She had thought the jays couldn't see her but maybe they could. How dazzling they seemed. Jays in their jewels. Such crowns they wore. But they were thieves, weren't they, the jays? The greatest of thieves. And out there in the forest were fifty miles of thieves and robbers. Of silent lions. On her fingers the pine needles had smelled of orange peel.

Thirty years ago? Close enough. Thirty years ago, she'd been standing on the station. A man regarding her. She had felt his eyes. Yes, thirty years of feeling eyes upon her. Thirty years waiting for the knock. The man was still staring. What did the bandanna mean? The leather vest? The Santa Fe passed and there were the empty rails.

He was dark as adobe, this staring man. But still an American. And she had sighed. Flagstaff was higher than six thousand feet, the signs said. It would be cold. There would be snow. Deep snow covering the red pine dust. Star-shaped lion footprints coming out of the rocks. Over the crossing she could see a sign for the Lumberjack Café.

Looks like you could do with a drink, the man had said. Poco aqua?

Yes, she had replied. I'm thirsty. Because by then if she knew anything at all she knew there was no turning back. And beyond Flagstaff there was nowhere. Or nowhere big enough to get lost and still survive.

What she's driving is a powder-blue Civic with red primer patches. Up in Flagstaff it would have rusted through by now, but, as she always said, Phoenix was bone dry. Not as dry as where she came from, but getting there.

A woman she knows in the nursing home had told her she should fly. ‘Not to go nowhere. Just to see the swimming pools.'

Apparently landing and taking off in Phoenix was some experience. A thousand, ten thousand swimming pools were strung out like Zuni turquoise. Like jays' feathers in the dust.

She'd never asked Frank what he was doing at the rail station. Old man had he been? Sort of. If the Luckies hadn't killed him, he'd be seventy now. Lean and red with a little pot belly.

And now it was her turn to be fifty. Only a little younger than the man who had picked her up on the platform. She could remember him pouring iced water in the Lumberjack and buying hotcakes, the syrup in a little jug. That night he left a spot of bloody drool on their shared pillow, his rifle standing in the corner.

Of course, she hadn't loved him. But there were times when she thought she might. Down in Cottonwood once they had danced to a bar band and some boy at the counter made a remark. Wetback, was it? She knew the word but had never heard it said. Not like that. And never about her. Maybe it was went back? Yes, that was it.

With dignity, Frank had told her they were leaving. Going home to the house in the trees. That there was no point. Let this one go, he said. They had other troubles to meet.

Yes, she had loved him then. His silver hair and a different bandanna. Kate, the bar owner, stayed silent and watched them go. The familiar betrayal. Yet what was Frank but a man looking around that bar and noticing, maybe for the first time, how the world had changed. And making the best of it. Facing it with the courage he could muster. Because when a man's time has gone that's all a man can do.

The young drinker had smiled at the room with both elbows on the bar. The stance that meant he owned it now. Owned the time. And Frank, humiliated in his heart but not in hers, coughed as they drove north. How their shadows had swung when at last the oil lantern was lit, the darknesses full of coyotes yapping and some kids driving pickups down the loggers' road.

She had all those years in that cabin and each day the black and white TV flickered in the kitchen. The Osmonds. Richard Nixon. And the Cardinals, the Cardinals who played all the time, and one day were miraculously red.

Hey Maria?

Hey, she said.

Buenos dias.

Hey, she said again.

No rest for the wicked.

I'm not that wicked.

You on afternoons all week?

Yes.

It's not so bad.

No.

They say it'll hit 100 today.

Oh boy.

See you inside.

Okay.

The Sunset was one of the smaller nursing homes in that part of the state. It had been bulldozed out of the hillside south of Black Canyon City, and yes, the evenings could be spectacular, black shapes of the saguaros against the orange sky, and then the town lights pricking the rapid nightfall.

Maria had worked there ten years, starting one year after the Sunset opened. Long enough for the home to get comfortable with itself, the rules to relax.

Finding the job had been easy. She was on time for the interview and said yes to every question. Welcome to the Sunset, the man had said. We'd like you to start soon. And remember. No chilli in the chilli con carne. Our clients don't go for the spicy. So the Sunset doesn't do the spicy. Set menu always.

And he'd laughed. Then she laughed too.

For the first six months she worked in the kitchen and learned to do everything. How to keep the mashed potatoes and meatloaf warm. How to ensure the rice pudding wasn't wasted. Yoghurts were the problem. The staff waited till the tops started to bulge. Then waited one more day. Then disposed. It was her job to see all the wasted food ended up in the aluminium wheelie that was collected every other day.

But it wasn't her job, she considered, to stop staff pilfering. So she always turned a blind eye. To fit in, she took a little herself. But only apple sauce. Only salad leaves. Maybe some of those
tomatillos
that no one ate. Little green strangers.

Yeah, no chilli, the head chef had said when she started. No cinnamon. No nutmeg. And he'd smiled a bitter little smile. No cilantro. No garlic.

That first day he had told her to stand on a chair. Then he ran his hands up her skirt. Up and down the cool insides of her thighs. While he did this she regarded the bald patch on his head. The greasy comb-over.