Where Pigeons Don't Fly (25 page)

He felt unexpectedly irritated. His mood clouded as he insisted she tell him. She laughed and explained that she was too embarrassed to say. Summoning a strained smile he coaxed her to speak.

‘I'm worried you'll be angry,' she said.

He hugged her, kissing her neck and earlobe and whispering, ‘How could I be cross with my Taroufi?'

‘My friend Nada saw a picture of you on the forum standing next to one of your pictures at a group exhibition …' She roared with laughter, her hand clamped over her mouth, and said, ‘I can't … I can't … Fahd, please don't embarrass me …'

‘Come on!' he said impatiently. ‘Tell the story!'

Still laughing, Tarfah told him that Nada had said that he had looked ridiculous standing next to the website's owner; his pale skin, red hair and
shimagh
had made him look like one of the
darfours
in the Lipton Tea adverts: a whitey. He frowned slightly, and laughed to humour her. Why
darfour
? How had the word first found its way to this racist society? If you came from the Eastern Mediterranean, that's what they called you. They had said it to him at school when he was little, even though his father was Saudi, he had Saudi nationality and he had been born here. The teachers at Al-Ahnaf Bin Qais Primary referred to him as ‘son of the Jordanian woman', as though he didn't have a name. Even the website's owner, whom he took to be a cultured man, had once referred to the fact that his mother wasn't Saudi.

‘You know,' he'd said offhandedly, ‘you can tell you're half-grilled from your red hair.'

Fahd sat up all night thinking about the phrase ‘half-grilled'.

‘Damn it! Was he trying to say that I'm not fully Saudi? Why would he talk about me as if I were a lump of cooked
meat? Or did he mean that the sun hadn't tanned my face properly, that I hadn't been seared brown by the heat of the Nejd or the desert and my hair turned black as night?'

He could still recall the decision he had taken in the summer holidays before starting secondary school to dye his hair, angering his mother who said, ‘Ever since you grew up your heart's been dyed black!'

How he had hated her at that moment.

Tarfah threw herself at him, hugging him and whispering, ‘She's an idiot, anyway; she's never experienced the taste of that red-haired madman in her mouth, or had it flog her!'

Her brown hand had descended and started fondling him and it awoke, uncoiling like a snake. In a teasing tone she said that she loved lollipops and that a year ago she had been handing them out to some women and children who were guests at her house when a woman in her fifties asked her what they were.

‘They're lollipops!' she'd answered. ‘You suck them.'

The woman had laughed and said, ‘Well thank God I've got my own special lollipop at home. It's black, true, but it'll do.'

She was pointing over at her dark-skinned husband, and Tarfah murmured, ‘My lover's lollipop is red. The imported kind.'

Whenever Tarfah mentioned her surname she would add that she didn't come from the family of the same name who owned a huge shopping centre in Riyadh. ‘We're not tribesmen!'

It was the distinction people drew between tribal types, nicknamed ‘110 volts', and the brighter ‘220 volt' bulbs from the cities: a bit like she was reassuring him that he wasn't obliged to think of marrying her. Once, he said to her, ‘I don't
know why people here are always turned into numbers. When a guy's a farmer or a tribesman you call him “110 volts” and sometimes no more than 60, not enough to power a light bulb! Southerners are Zero-Sevens after their dialling code, and loads of those of mixed birth from our parents' generation and before had their birthdates recorded as 7/1, as if the whole lot were born on the day the welfare budget's announced. You even retire from a government job on 7/1. The government would love it if we all dropped dead on 7/1. It would make their job easier!'

Tarfah moaned, his madman plunging in and out, a famished polar bear switching back and forth between two darkened caves, and her beautiful wide eyes rolled up in ecstasy as though she had fallen into a coma of everlasting pleasure. He cried out at her, cursing and clutching himself with his slippery hand and she embraced him with an intoxicated whisper: ‘I love you!'

Returning from the bathroom he was surprised to see the light from a pair of candles wavering over the two tables beside the bed. His bewilderment showed, and she told him that she had brought them in her handbag, thinking of furnished flats with no lights! He embraced her and kissed her nose, which reminded him of the pliancy of cotton wool or young girls' rosy cheeks. It was slightly broad and squashy, as though devoid of cartilage and bone.

Fahd opened the wardrobe, took his cigarettes from his pocket and before lighting one from the candle flame, asked her, ‘Do you mind?'

She shook her head coyly and he blew white clouds into the room's murk, the smoke rings rising like dancing demons.

‘Have you ever smoked?' he asked.

‘Twice, when I was working at the clinic. Nada, my friend in reception, she's a smoker.'

He handed her his cigarette and she hesitated, then took it, saying that she would only try it ‘because it tastes of your mouth'.

As she exhaled he said, ‘I get the impression your relationship with Nada is a strong one. There's nothing else going on between you, is there?'

‘Oi,' she shouted. ‘Don't come near me.'

She would talk about relationships between women, how in crowded bathrooms at wedding functions you would see each pair of friends enter a cubicle together for ten minutes or more, to emerge in disarray and make a hasty stop in front of the mirror, taking their lipsticks from their purses and restoring colour to their lips.

‘What about you, then? How do you know all this if you haven't tried it?'

‘Want to know the truth?' Tarfah added. ‘Lots of people are convinced that Nada and I must have some history together, because we've been friends for eight years and because Nada is really fair and soft and has a small body, while I'm dark and taller than her. They always assume I must be her man and she's my sweetheart. I just can't imagine myself ever being in a relationship like that.'

She wrapped her leg around him and began kissing him slowly, savouring it, as the hot breath from her mouth whispered, ‘How can I think of woman when I've got a lover like you? Huh? Tell me. How?'

When they were as hot as two coals she assumed the position like a cat awaiting her tom, her voice growing gradually louder
and louder until he ordered her to put the pillow in her mouth. She was grateful and giddy, her long lashes shading her wide eyes, and every so often she would press her fingers against her lower eyelids, feeling a faint pain run through them.

From time to time she would talk about the old boyfriend who had left her after five years together. In their final year, she said, he had tried persuading her to marry, on the grounds that he was married and settled and that she, too, had the right to expect marriage, security and children. He was plotting to get rid of her politely, ostensibly looking out for her interests but really looking to end it.

She said that Nada had told her she dreamt of marrying a Saudi man who wouldn't betray her. They were in Sahara Mall together and she noticed a handsome man sitting on a bench in the main plaza, playing catch with a little girl and waiting for his wife to emerge from a shoe shop.

‘That's the one!' Nada had cried in delight and Tarfah had pulled her away by the hand, saying, ‘You moron. If you show you're keen what's a guy like that to do? They're all acting, sweetheart!'

‘And what about you lot?' said Fahd. ‘A man only cheats with a woman who gives him the chance. Don't you think wives cheat on their husbands?'

She smiled, thinking of Leila.

With a little sigh of annoyance, Tarfah pulled the bed's white blanket over her exposed buttocks and told him about Leila, who claimed to be religious, ruled her
majlis
like the head of a sect of dervishes and interfered with what other girls wore, and how she had discovered her betrayal. Tarfah and her sister had stalked her as she wandered around the hotel looking for an unlit spot to continue her secret telephone conversation.

‘My sister pointed at her. “She's asking her sheikh for guidance!”' she said cattily, and let out a loud laugh.'

Fahd laughed, drawing her soft, moonlike face toward him and kissing her nose and mouth. Her lips formed a cocoon around him as she gathered in his face with unhurried pleasure. She wanted to sweep the sheet off but he prevented her and abruptly got out of bed, picking up one of the candles and placing it beside the other. He looked at her breasts and the shadow on the side of her face that leant against her palm was extraordinary. The folds of the bedsheet, rising and falling from light to dark, lent a compelling beauty to the composition. She laughed and let her face fall from her palm.

‘You look like you're drawing me.'

She would make an amazing subject for a new painting, he said. He could see it in his mind, along with all those paintings of nude reclining women, and he thought of
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
and another of Picasso's paintings,
Femme Nue au Collier
.

‘Should we go?' he asked.

She screwed up her face as she laughed and told him, ‘You're an idiot. You've got it all wrong. It's the woman who says she's late. For example, you should ask me, “Aren't you late?” so I get the hint in an indirect way.'

He apologised with a kiss and she started to get dressed while he went into the bathroom to wash his mouth. He heard the imam reciting the second
rakaa
—‘Does he not know, when that which is in the graves is scattered abroad and that which is in human breasts is made manifest…'—and for a moment considered going out to pray to mislead the receptionist, but he didn't.

Emerging from the bathroom he asked her the name of the old wedding hall opposite Uwaida Palace on King Abdul Aziz Highway.

‘You mean the Malakiya?'

He nodded and talked her through a credible way of leaving the key with the receptionist so he didn't have to return the next day just to hand it in.

Before she went out she covered her head. In the living room she stopped him and kissed his head. He laughed.

‘You're the first person to fall in love with my head.'

Lifting her
niqab
she pulled his face to hers and kissed him, then let it fall as she giggled and said, ‘You've had your final kiss from me.'

He had left the key in the door after locking it in case anyone tried opening it from outside with a spare set.

Before opening the door he replayed a scene in his mind, based on a dream she had recounted to him earlier, which had left him terrified though he hadn't revealed his fear lest he ruin her mood. Before they had met that afternoon, she had told him, she had been asleep and dreamed of him lying on a bed in a room that resembled her own while she sat beside him, stroking his face with her fingers and gazing at him lovingly. Every so often out of the corner of her eye she would catch a glimpse of lizards' tails, with their thorny scales, poking out of the space beneath the wardrobe. As she toyed with his face she grew afraid and thought of how she could suggest they go somewhere else without alerting him to the presence of the hideous reptiles and frightening him. At that very moment she heard the sound of her brother coming out of his room and she woke in a panic, staring over at the wardrobe but seeing nothing.

Turning the key he remembered the door of flat 102 across the hall and the shoe rack outside it, crammed with six or more pairs of shoes. Was this the explanation of the dream, that the shoes were the fat lizard tails seen by Tarfah? Or were they the bearded men of the Committee, lurking behind the door in their hair
mashlahs
and waiting to pounce as soon he opened up? They would lead him away to the GMC, pulling his lover behind him as she wept and pleaded. ‘Silence, whore!' they would say, and enter a case of illegally consorting with a female against him at the Committee's headquarters in Roda and turn him over to the police.

Quietly, apprehensively, he opened the door. The shoe rack was completely empty: the flat's occupants had left.

They took the lift down in silence and he led her out to the car before returning to the Sudanese receptionist and asking him, ‘Do you know the Malakiya wedding hall?'

The man shook his head apologetically.

‘They told me it was on King Abdul Aziz Road. Do you know how to get there?'

‘Leave here and take a right on to the service road leading to the ring road. Then at the lights at Exit Ten take a left and you'll be on King Abdul Aziz Road.'

Fahd handed him his secret treasure—the key—and brought his carefully planned conversation to its conclusion. ‘Great. Look, we're going to a wedding and so long as the hall's near Qaseem Road and we manage to get out early we'll drive directly to Majmaa. Keep the key and if we're not back by two then you can free up the flat.'

The receptionist took it gratefully and said that if Fahd wanted he would hold the flat for him until tomorrow.

Tarfah said she wouldn't go back to the clinic because it had locked its doors half an hour before. Instead of Le Mall or Granada Mall, she chose Sahara Mall at the intersection of King Abdul Aziz and King Abdullah.

He drove west along King Abdul Aziz Road, the tape player drawling out the song she loved—
My sweetheart, so far away from me, I long for your eyes
—nodding her head in quiet rapture. After the lights he turned right into the King Fahd quarter, swung behind the mall and stopped at the main entrance.

Tarfah said her goodbyes, got down and he went on his way, rolling down the windows and breathing in the warm breeze that blended with the cold air from the air-conditioner.