Out of It (27 page)

The flat smelt old and felt unused. If it were not for the contemporary mess on the surfaces, it would have been possible to believe that it had been sealed up for decades and preserved against the century’s turmoil. Charles strode ahead, trying to scoop up odd pieces of paper, a pair of trousers thrown over a chair, a cold mug that slopped something greyish on to the floor. He bumped into the lampshade causing a yellowy light to swing over the faded surfaces. It was furniture built for tight spaces and limited heat, for rooms where visitors stayed for a purpose and did not expect to be indulged. Books lined the walls around the fire and were stacked up on the floor. Several lay open on a polished wood and leather desk that seemed too small for a grown person. Swirls of flowers adorned the low sofa, the short curtains, the tapestry cushions.

‘It’s like my brother Sabri’s room,’ Iman said.

‘Really?’ Charles found it difficult to reconcile old-world chintz with new-world Gaza.

‘The books,’ she added. ‘He has books everywhere. They even prop up his mattress.’

Charles thought fleetingly of a cartoon character, a worm or something, that had all its furniture made out of books. Bookworm. He was going to try to joke about it, but didn’t think it would work. Her profile really was quite something. Great smile. He had always found gaps between women’s front teeth rather thrilling. Stemmed back to reading Chaucer at school. Lascivious. She had that pre-Raphaelite thing going on, too. Charles flicked through some images in his head to try to find one that matched, but found none of them entirely satisfactory. There were also those rather lovely paintings of the bare ladies by the pool, fabulous detail of the blue painted tiles, Delacroix possibly? A bit out of fashion now. Should not be mentioned. Orientalist probably.

‘A drink? Or tea? Do . . . do sit down, make yourself at home.’ Charles took some papers off the sofa and patted it so vigorously that dust rose from the fabric.

‘What are you having?’

‘Scotch, I think, but I also have some liqueurs, if you are not partial to strong tastes. Or I could pop some ice in it?’

‘That would do.’ Iman looked over to the kitchen, where Charles was noisily washing two glasses. The cabinet doors had been removed and two chrome replacements leant against them. An orange cloth hung over a pipe under the sink. Charles walked into one of the spare doors.

‘Trying to fix the kitchen up,’ he said. ‘Just never get the time to finish it. This girl I was seeing was very keen that I revamped this place.’ He wished he had not mentioned another girl. He did not want to have that conversation: the one about exes and where it had gone wrong. She was bound to ask now. But Iman did not ask and Charles surprised himself by feeling a little put out by her failure to do so.

Iman could see some of the titles of the books: spy books, war books, books about dogs and the countryside. A whole shelf of books about a place called Blandings. There was a book about etiquette and several about the lives of Hollywood actresses who had grown fat or died. The walls had a lot of detailed etchings and lithographs, hunting scenes, Captain Cook landing among the natives, an Indian war scene entitled ‘The Battle of Krishnapur 1845’ with a jolly italicised caption underneath it about bivouacking.

‘Bit of a collector, my great-uncle, liked the old military stuff. Arms dealer himself, you see.’ Charles handed Iman a glass that was wet on the outside and sticky on the inside. He spoke to the crossed swords over the mantelpiece, because they knew him better than Iman did. ‘Not really my cup of tea, but just don’t know what to do with the stuff. No other relatives. Can’t really just sell it all off.’

There was an extra ‘r’ in the last word that Iman had not heard others use before.
Orff.

‘Why not?’

‘Well . . . well, I suppose I could. It’s just not really done. It’s not that it
can’t
be done, I guess you could say, but it just
isn’t
.’

Charles felt an anxiety with Iman in the room that he was not sure how to resolve, he did not want to be obvious about it but felt that really one should not be too indiscreet. He had left some confidential documents out which he didn’t want to be too careless about. He placed his Scotch on the coffee table and got up to move his work papers back inside the desk and close up the flap. He sat back down.

‘There, looks a bit neater like that. Bit of a mess really. Cleaning lady only comes on Mondays.’

Iman was quiet now, but at the party she had got heated about some erroneous supposition he had made. She had become fiercely aggressive and tremendously beautiful.

Charles tried to find something else that was as easy to fix as his desk, but could not see anything else that was as easy to remedy. He drank his Scotch in one go instead.
Ha. Done
.

Iman had come into the flat with a purpose, but then with a stunning suddenness, like a floodlight coming on to a stage she realised that she did not know what it was that she was supposed to do. She had no lines to utter, no directions as to which moves to make. She was a woman alone in a flat with a man. But still nothing had been resolved. Her message was not being picked up on. Normally just to
talk
for this long to a man would be enough to make her intentions clear. The drink stuck all over her mouth and her hands. It seemed to glue them all up. She felt a bit sick. She had not been drunk since school when the girls in her dorm had smuggled in some sweet wine. She had spent most of that night vomiting into the shower tray. Sometimes she had sipped
arak
with Sabri but that was not the same.

‘Another?’ Charles took the glasses and came back with them full and tinkling. ‘Not quite the right shape, I daresay, but it will do, no? Better for brandy that one.’ Charles moved across the sofa so he could see Iman. ‘See, we are searching at the moment, at the FO, for a so-called Partner for Peace. It would be a cross-departmental collaboration; we’d be working with the development people, just at the non-governmental level, you understand. Now, I suggested Abu . . . someone. Well, whoever, but I have had some discouraging reports.’

Iman guessed a name and got it right. She smiled at it. She felt more comfortable now in this safe little hole underneath the centre of London’s government, this flowery little bunker, unchanged for over a century or two, filled with the regalia of the past. There was comfort in victory, in the silence that it brought. The knowledge that the bed you slept in would always be yours in the morning. She could see Charles’ confidence coming back with his subject matter. He furrowed his brow and small freckles found each other and merged into a tanned splat on his forehead. He had a habit of pushing his glasses up his nose as a sign of concentration. He did this now although he had already taken them off.

‘So, what I would like to put to you is, what would you do? Hmph? I have been, you may have noticed, skirting around, flirting with this issue all night, but tell me, what would you do in that role?’ He spelt out to her the mandate, the proposal, the limitations, the freedom, and the possibilities.

Iman found the muscle in her tongue and spoke of ideas that had knocked against her head in her room, had been interrupted for ‘points of organisation’ at her women’s meetings, would be taken as givens by Khalil and Sabri. Things that they all thought, that everyone knew.

‘I see. I see. Excellent. Excellent. Well, let’s see what we can do.’

Had she had one glass or two sitting there? Whatever it had been, even if it had been more, they had both gone into her brain and seemed to have both fouled it up and bedazzled it at the same time. The desire to giggle at her host and the pictures which surrounded him flooded through her. She fought an urge to stick her toe up his trouser leg to test for a reaction. A rush of opportunities all presented themselves to Iman at the same time. She thought of the things that had made her laugh, the bawdy Jahalia poem found by the Israeli border guards about the man’s key wilting in its lock (how could she even try to translate that?), the men that Suzi had tried to set her up with and even (in a really warped way, that she had not thought possible), the sheer weirdness of that day when Seif El Din was murdered and Abu Omar arrested, that man Ziyyad Ayyoubi outside the house. It was quite a story to be told. She was about to start recounting it all, in all its hilarity and horror, when she was overwhelmed by a feeling of fatigue and loneliness. She could not see the point of any of it. He would not, he
could not
understand. She didn’t know what she was doing. She had forgotten what the point was any more. She didn’t even know where she was.

‘You look a bit bushed.’ He leant over enough so that he could stroke her cheek. He could not help it. Her hair against the sofa’s pink roses and curling leaves made such a contrast. He would not get the sofas upholstered like his ex had gone on about; he didn’t need solid colours. They were beautiful sofas. Exquisite. ‘Shall I get you a taxi? Or I could make a bed up for you, I have this old camp bed that I can pull out and sleep on. You could have mine?’

‘No, no, I’m OK, really.’

Iman stood up clumsily as though heavily pregnant and walked over to the bookshelves. He followed her and took her hand as he gave a commentary on the titles. ‘A lot of it was here when I moved in.’ He pulled out a red leather-bound copy of the
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
and she flicked through its pages, marvelling at how there was much much more curiosity back then than now. He moved behind her and kissed her near her ear. She stayed still and waited for kisses until they compelled her to respond and it was all so much easier than she had thought.

The bed had been narrow and soft, a child’s bed, pushed next to a wall and sunken in the middle. He had been courteous and she had refused to be shy. It had not hurt as she had been told that it would, nor had she bled, but his skin was foreign and on it his sweat had the smell of wet potato peel.

Chapter 35

As the march entered the square, Khalil was standing, as agreed, by the fourth lion in front of the burger place. He blended in better here, Iman thought, seeing him up there in his black jacket, than he did back home. Behind him, banners waved and in front of him a row of speakers sat on fold-up chairs on a platform. Lisa was to their side, writing on a clipboard, a phone squeezed between her shoulder and her ear. An elderly politician, his legs crossed, smoked a pipe.

Ziyyad Ayyoubi had been on the stage when they came into the square. There had been some applause when he had finished a point and then he had started another one before he looked down, and she knew it was ridiculous to think this, as it was hardly possible, but she thought that he had seen her. He had stopped mid-sentence. The audience waited, but instead of continuing he had stepped off the stage. The audience held on, murmuring and speculating loudly until a poet in an anorak stepped forwards, silver hair lifted around his head in a static cloud.

Iman could not see Ayyoubi once he had left the stage and she found herself looking for him until she realised that Rashid, who had been at her side when they entered the square, had also disappeared. She pushed through the crowd towards Khalil thinking it was the route that Rashid would have taken.

‘I thought he went ahead to find you,’ Iman said to Khalil when she found him.

‘Is he avoiding me or something? I told him I would be here today.’

‘I expect he just went to get something to eat. He’s like that when he gets urges, he just shoots off; whatever it is, food, sleep, needing a smoke, he doesn’t tell you or ask you, you just turn round and he’s gone. You know Rashid. We went to the Public—’

‘I know. You were out. I went to your flat.’

A choir in red T-shirts were now on the stage.

‘What happened to your hair?’ Iman asked.

‘My father insisted on me cutting it. No, in fact he bribed me into it, true to form. I needed a pass to get to see Jamal in detention and he wouldn’t help me out with getting one unless I cut my hair off. I know, it’s outrageous, but you know my father.’

The red choir threw their shoulders back and formed a line of ‘O’s with their mouths on stage.

‘You came with my flatmate?’ Iman raised the tone of her voice to something a bit jokey, a bit mocking, which Khalil declined to pick up on. He answered her question seriously.

‘Eva? Yes, I sent her off to talk to one of the speakers from the Medical Union of Healthworkers and one of the other medical charities.’

‘Oh, good, good. Great idea.’

The crowd, muddy coloured and anonymous from afar, appeared diverse and Technicolor up close. People spread around the fountain and along the stairs. They stood in the roads; tourists photographed them from the top of buses; faces leant against windows to watch them pass. Some of the groups around her carried placards:
Socialist Jews Against War and Occupation, Muslims for Palestine, Welsh Singers for Peace
. Khalil acted as though he was entranced by the round-mouthed singers with their low-slung breasts (
Aaah! Peace! Aaah!
).

‘Did you see Ayyoubi?’ Khalil asked.

‘We arrived just as he left the stage.’ Iman checked Khalil’s face to see if somewhere behind the diplomatic manner of his father he was mentioning Ayyoubi specifically to test her. She could not see anything like that.

‘Strange. He stood up there staring at the sky giving a very impressive talk and then in mid-stream he just stops and goes. Gone . . .’ Khalil continued to look around him. ‘Where is Rashid? I was really looking forward . . . Is there any point in waiting for him?’