Olives (28 page)

‘
You must be
Paul. Nice to meet you. You’re a lucky man.’ This from a tall,
thick-waisted young man, maybe in his late twenties. He had teased,
curly hair, a precisely cut goatee beard and wore a dark suit and
open-necked shirt. ‘I’m Ghaith.’

Daoud greeted
Ghaith like a lost brother. Mariam danced on the bar, Aisha
clapping her on with the rest of the crowd. I went to the toilet,
met Aisha in the corridor on the way back into the bar. For the
first time ever in public, we kissed, a kiss of sheer exuberance.
We walked back into the bar holding hands and I saw Daoud standing
nearby, talking to the barman as he bought another Cohiba, our
seats empty over at the back of the bar, just visible through the
excited throng.

The bomb
scythed through them, an awful parabola of concussing violence,
bodies flung against the screaming living, glass flying and tearing
cloth, biting flesh. The bar in pieces, bottles smashed and drink
streaming down the broken wood.

The force hit
me, shards flying in the air, tossed me back against the wall. I
saw Aisha’s hair thrown up in a surreal halo as she jerked
backwards and hit the bar with a sickening force that distorted her
fine features.

Faux beams
falling, a woman crawling towards me as I staggered to my feet,
deafened. An awful silence, mouths open, soundless screaming. A man
walking, his hands to his ears and blood running down his face like
rain, the falling drops spattering on the dusty floor in a steady
flow like a broken gutter. I felt wetness on my cheek, saw the
blood on my fingers. Aisha.
Aish.

A woman lay
on the floor, her head thrown back and her eyes impossibly wide,
her hair fanned out on the wooden boards, her hips jerking
obscenely, nostrils flared. The iron tang of blood.

Dust,
coughing, thick dust. Ring a ring of roses. I turned, alone. Small
fires as the drapes burned up, smoke and dust, choking me. Silence
as I turned, gaping, torn flesh around me, open wounds, tangled
limbs and open mouths, dresses torn and dead eyes blurring as I
turned around, brown flesh, white flesh, red flesh. Brown, white,
red. Children playing and mother calling us in from the sun for
tea. A pocket full of posies. Whirling madness. Choking smoke and
stillness, except for a single dark figure, spinning in the middle
of the deadly tableau.

Aisha. Aisha.
Aisha.

I’m somewhere
white and beautiful, the breeze caressing my skin and she calls
out, answering me as I come to a standstill, screaming her name as
I double up in pain.

The olive
trees are her courtiers, the olive princess.

TWENTY

Aisha sat
wrapped in the rough blanket, still shaking and barely able to
grasp the Styrofoam cup of sweet coffee I gave her.

The
ambulances were still arriving, green-covered forms on gurneys
being wheeled past us, but the pace had slowed a little, some four
hours after our lives had been transformed by the instant of
horrifying force. They were all around us, sitting in groups, lying
on the floor, standing by beds or just silently staring. A woman’s
wail broke into sobs, the nurses shushing her.

Aisha
sniffed, wiping at her puffy, bruised eye and wincing. ‘How’s
Mariam?’

‘
She’s fine,
just a couple of small cuts. She was really lucky. They’ve sent her
home.’

‘
Daoud?’

‘
Still no
news.’

‘
He’s here,
right?’

‘
I’m not
sure, Aish. The woman at reception says they can’t tell who is and
isn’t here yet. Many of the people they’re treating still can’t
even talk for themselves. And they won’t let me check the
cubicles.’

‘
Mum?
‘brahim?’

‘
I talked to
both. Ibrahim is coming down here. He’s been talking to a contact
in the police to try and track Daoud down as well.’

She gazed
into her drink, the neon light shimmering on its surface. ‘And
what... what about everyone else?’

I looked
around us. There was no way of knowing how many people had died,
how many were injured. The hospital was overflowing, relatives
arriving and mingling with the bloodied crowd in the packed
A&E. I watched a young man, pale-faced and exhausted, his head
against the wall and his hands in bandages, a group near him
whispering as they tried to comfort a wide-eyed, violently
shivering girl with crimson stains on the bandage around her
head.

A nurse
stopped in front of us. ‘Dajani? Aisha Dajani?’

Aisha nodded.
I took the cup from her hand and helped her up. I walked with her,
my other hand shut tight on the memory key miraculously still in my
jacket pocket along with my mobile.

By the time
Ibrahim arrived, Aisha was wearing a collection of dressings, the
glass cuts on her arm and thigh stitched and the powerful
painkillers making her woozy. I started shaking, too exhausted to
even flinch as the sutures entered the gash above my ear and the
pattern of tiny cuts down my left side were probed for glass before
being dabbed with antiseptic and closed. Aisha’s hand on my cheek
felt cool and soft, her thumb caressing my hot skin as I tensed
with the pain.

Ibrahim wore
a beige greatcoat, a scarf around his neck. Aisha caught the
desolate look on his face, standing to bury her head in his
shoulder. I tried to sit up, the movement creating a sharp tearing
pain in my side.

Ibrahim
motioned me back, his hand on Aisha’s head, stroking her hair. ‘Do
not try and get up, Paul. You look very ill. Rest now.’

‘
Have they
found Daoud?’

‘
No. I do not
know. We can find no trace of him. The hospital director has been
very kind in helping me look through the admittances from tonight.
Daoud is not here.’

‘
The
club?’

‘
No. Civil
defence have cleared it now. There are no more people left there.
The police have confirmed this.’

The pain
returned, sharper this time and making me cry out. The nurse
started to prepare a syringe.

I found it
increasingly hard to speak, my swollen lips were dry and the
stitches painful. ‘How many? How many dead?’

Ibrahim
grimaced. ‘Eight. It is a miracle it was not more, apparently.
There are too many injured, some seriously.’

The nurse
slipped the syringe into the canula in my wrist. I was still trying
to form my next question, my bloated lips refusing to move
properly, when the enveloping lassitude lapped over me and enfolded
me in darkness.

They let me
go home the next afternoon. Aisha had gone earlier, tears running
down her face, kissing a finger and touching it gently to my
lips.

The ambulance
man helped me to make my way up the steps to the house. I went to
bed and stayed there through the day until, driven by thirst, I got
up and hobbled painfully to the kitchen to get some water. There
were missed calls on my mobile from my mother and three from
Lynch.

Aisha’s
mobile went straight to voicemail, so I called the house and Nour
told me she was asleep in bed.

I called my
mum and told her I hadn’t been anywhere near the bombing, that I
sounded funny because I had the flu. She had been getting calls
from the newspapers. I told her not to worry and to ignore them.
Apparently my brother Charles was ill with flu too. I silently
hoped, git though he was, he didn’t have the same flu I did as I
listened to her happy chattering.

I took my
water into the living room and settled down painfully to scan the
news as it ran footage of the ruined nightclub and told me about
the ten dead and eighty-five wounded, twenty seriously. The numbers
rolled by on the news channel’s ticker and I found myself thinking
of how impersonal they were, these tallies of deaths and tragedies,
of grieving families and loved ones.

The mobile
rang. Lynch.

‘
Paul. Are
you okay?’

‘
Bit stuffed
up, but yes.’ It sounded like someone else’s voice, harsh and
croaky, muffled by my big lips.

‘
Thank God.
Look, Paul, have you seen Daoud Dajani?’

‘
No. No, I
haven’t.’

‘
Well if you
do, call me. It’s important, Paul. He’s a dangerous man. We’re now
certain he’s linked to the Jericho and Haifa bombings and we
believe he’s behind this one, too. He’s disappeared, there’s no
trace of him. We’re really concerned about what he’s up to. The
man’s a terrorist and a smart one at that. Do you understand, Paul?
He’s dangerous.’

‘
So find him.
Arrest him.’

‘
We don’t
have enough to go on yet, Paul. But we’re working on it with the
Jordanians. You’ll let me know if you hear of him, yes?’

‘
Yes.’

I got a good
whack of scotch and a handful of ice from the kitchen and Daoud’s
memory key from my torn jacket and settled down to read his vision
for Jordan’s water. Sometime past midnight I finished, stretching
painfully and taking my drink to bed with me.

In the
blackness, sleep eluding me, I lay wondering what was driving Daoud
Dajani. His scheme was breathtaking, his plans meticulously
detailed and backed by swathes of research by French experts and
Arab researchers who had cut their teeth working on geophysical
exploration in the Gulf’s oil fields. His proposal claimed to
ensure sufficient water for Jordan’s consumption to increase by
twenty-five percent without breaking into a sweat. It would scale
back on currently over-exploited resources and tap into new finds
of water deep underground, a system of seasonal aquifers and
subterranean reservoirs that had lain undiscovered until Daoud’s
people had come along with new research based on tracing old Roman
water systems. Those deep resources eventually rose up into the
depths of Lake Tiberias throughout the winter, drying up in the
summer. Daoud wanted to divert and trap the deep water before it
got to Tiberias, storing it for use through the dry summer
months.

I knew
nothing about water, but one thing about Daoud’s whole proposal was
quite obvious. Jordan’s gain would be at Israel’s expense and would
involve huge volumes of water.

I lay in the
dark and tried to reconcile all of the different facets of Daoud
Dajani, the brooding presence, the laughing family man, the
successful businessman, the visionary with a plan for a nation’s
water and the terrorist. I was increasingly certain Gerald Lynch
was lying to me but I couldn’t shake the memory of Aisha’s lost bag
in the guide’s hand down by the Jordan or of the group of men by my
car outside a farmhouse near Ramallah.

We’re certain
he’s linked,
Lynch had said.
I almost wished I could be as certain. I looked up at the ceiling,
faint shapes starting to appear as my eyes adjusted. Daoud’s plan
for Jordan’s water could be as divisive as the recent bombings had
been. The new peace was in tatters and recriminations were already
flying.

Israel’s
thirst for water had driven land grab after land grab, from 1948 to
the insidious alterations in the course of the security wall that
curled around springs and aquifers. When the Lebanese had tried to
divert the Hasbani River, one of the three that flowed into Lake
Tiberias, Israel had threatened war. Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and
Syria. These people fought wars for water.

Daoud Dajani
was a dangerous man, for sure. I lay in the silence reprising
recent events and the people around me. I knew for certain he was
no terrorist. He was a water thief, but no terrorist.

I haven’t set
the alarm. If I wake before ten he’s innocent.

Aisha’s call
woke me. The morning sun’s glow through the curtains filled the
room with a soft, peaceful light. I checked the clock. Half past
nine. She sounded as beaten up as I felt, her voice was dull and
she mumbled.

‘
Hey,
ya
Brit.’

‘
Aish. How
are you?’

‘
I hurt. I
can’t believe it. I still think of it as all happening to someone
else. I’ve been asleep since they let me go. What about
you?’

‘
I’m fine,
just hurt a bit. How’s Daoud?’

‘
We don’t
know, Paul. We still haven’t heard from him. Mum’s in a real state.
We’ve lost...’ Her voice broke and I listened helplessly to her as
she fought to compose herself. ‘We’ve lost so many
friends.’

‘
We have each
other. At least we still have each other.’

‘
Can you come
around, Paul? I... I need you.’

‘
Of course.
Give me a while to tidy up a bit. I’m not pretty right
now.’

The hint of a
laugh through her tears. ‘You never were,
habibi
.’

I cleaned
myself up as best I could, but there was a lot of plaster and some
fine bruises were spreading across my shoulder, my side and my leg
where I’d hit the wall. I had a splitting headache and my lips and
eye were still swollen. I drove slowly, turning the wheel was an
effort and my cut and bruised leg made braking painful.