Olives (34 page)

There were
ambulances outside the convention centre, three covered stretchers
by the front door. I stood in front of them, the tick tick tick of
the ambulance lights marking the sweeps of light across the
shapeless forms under the blankets. I saw blonde hair poking out
from underneath the rightmost blanket and in an instant I knew. I
stepped forwards but a paramedic had been watching me and stopped
me with his arm outstretched. I was numb.

‘
I can
identify her.’

He dropped
his arm and I leaned down to pull back the blanket. Anne’s blue
eyes stared back at me, blood streaked across her pale features. I
let the blanket drop. The urge to be sick welled up inside me, the
acid in my throat burning.

‘
You know
this woman?’ A police officer, important braid uniform.

‘
Yes, yes I
do. Her name is Anne Boardman. She is a lawyer. Was. Was a lawyer.
Part of the British delegation to the conference.’

‘
You have
personal relationship with her?’

‘
No. No I
don’t.’

I turned
away. They eventually found me wandering down the road towards
Bethany, apparently, and someone took me back to my hotel
room.

TWENTY-FIVE

I waited for
a long time by the car before I finally found the courage to push
my legs up to the house. I paused again before ringing the
doorbell. Nour answered, blinking in the morning light. She wore a
black
kandoura
, the wide
sleeves loose at her side. Her face was puffy and pale. She let her
hand fall from the door and walked into the house. I followed her
into the kitchen where she stood with her back to me, looking out
of the window.

I waited
behind her until she turned, her face crumpling as I stepped
forward. She lifted her arms to me and I held her, as she cried,
beating my back and sobbing ‘Why?’ until she couldn’t cry anymore
and stood, quiet in my arms. She finally pulled away, holding my
shoulders and looking into my wet eyes, her own blurred with the
tears that streaked her face.

‘
He was my
boy. First my husband, now my boys.’

‘
You have
Aisha.’

‘
For how
long, Paul? She is hiding from them. How much more can they take
from me?’

I didn’t have
an answer for her as she looked into my face, scanning me for a
reaction. She nodded, a little fierce smile lighting up her face
for a moment.

‘
Sit down.
I’ll make us coffee.’

I sat on a
stool at the breakfast bar in the kitchen as she bustled with the
brass long-handled jug boiling on the gas burner before she poured
the thick, black liquid into two tiny cups.

She lit a
cigarette from the butt of her last, drawing the smoke deep down
into her lungs. I finally broke the silence.

‘
Is Aisha
here?’

‘
No.’

‘
Do
you—’

‘
No, Paul.
Ask Ibrahim maybe. I do not know.’

‘
Have you
talked to her?’

Nour looked
at me for a long time before she answered, her eyes dropping to her
coffee cup. ‘Yes.’

The fridge
motor kicked in, its faint hum breaking the silence. I took one of
Nour’s cigarettes and lit it. ‘I pushed her away, Nour. I didn’t
mean to. There have been a lot of lies and half-truths around me. I
let them get to me.’

‘
You had an
argument.’ Again, she was making a statement. I wondered how much
Aisha had told her.

‘
Yes, we did.
It was my fault.’

There was a
silence between us. I could feel the accusation, the pressure to
unburden myself, to tell her what a shit I had been to her daughter
when Aisha had needed me most.

Nour took a
gulping breath. H
er mobile
rang and she snatched it from the kitchen counter, fumbling to find
the green key, her voice shaky as she talked, ‘
Allo, Na’m.
’

I
watched Nour as she listened. Her
eyes were on me, unseeing, as she nodded dumbly. They widened
momentarily as she nodded again, ‘
Shukran,’
before
letting the mobile drop, clattering to the marble surface. I
watched her face crumple.

‘
Nour?’

She looked up
at me, battling for control.

‘
A
helicopter. The farm. Mariam.’

I was swept
by an awful hollowness. The olive trees, their leaves bouncing in
the rain, the water trickling along the baked red soil around their
roots and the smiling old lady in her
kandoura
who
tended them. Please, Christ, the girl who used to play in them,
imagining they were a royal court packed with courtiers. Just like
I would imagine the crows circling above were delta-wing
fighters.

I went around
the breakfast bar to her, letting her cry into me, rubbing her back
in automatic, repetitive sweeps of my hand as she grieved. We
stayed together in our frozen pose for long minutes until, finally,
she lifted her head, brushing her tangled hair back in the gesture
I had come to associate so strongly with Aisha. She smiled at me, a
terrible, shaky, devastated smile.

‘
You have
better leave now, Paul,’ she entreated me. ‘Leave me alone with
Mariam, yes?’

I knew better
than to argue with her. ‘Nour, if you see Aisha, tell her I am
sorry. That I love her.’

She nodded.
‘I know this, Paul. Go. Please.’

Ibrahim had
gone into hiding, but I knew where to find him. I waited on the red
carpet in front of the RAC club’s reception desk as Mohamed made a
call on the internal telephone system before leading me
upstairs.

The private
suite was smoky and Ibrahim looked old and frail, his hair awry.
Only when he had locked the door behind me was I aware of the
shadowy figure to one side of the room. The
Mukhabarat
man relaxed as I sat down.

Ibrahim sat
opposite me, easing himself into the club chair. ‘So. Mariam is
dead.’

‘
I was with
Nour when she got the news.’

Ibrahim
grimaced. ‘She would have been upset. It is the way my brother
died. These helicopters are their favourite toy.’

‘
What about
Hamad?’

‘
In prison.
The farm has been completely destroyed. The action is being
justified as an anti-terrorist sweep. They used phosphorous on the
fields. The olives all were burnt. This I had from Hamad before
they came for him.’

‘
The
Israelis?’

‘
Yes, them.’
Ibrahim lit another cigarette. ‘You want a drink?’

‘
No, no
thanks. I’m good.’

He grunted
and lifted his glass to drink. His hand shook, making the ice
tinkle, so he steadied it with his other hand.

I rubbed my
sandy eyes. ‘What will you do?’

‘
I will wait.
They cannot continue. They have already made arrests, caused much
damage. We have lost our offices in Eilat and Haifa and we have
lost our farm. But we still have a business in the Arab World. We
will survive this.’

Sitting in
the ludicrously rich, gilded room, I realised the Dajanis had lost
all their young men. Hamad the bomber and Daoud the visionary were
dead and Ibrahim and Nancy didn’t have kids. Only Aisha could give
the family an heir now.

‘
What about
the water consortium?’

‘
I do not
know, Paul. Our government has lost its appetite for this solution,
I think. There have been accusations from the Israelis that we
Jordanians had a secret agreement with Syria and Lebanon that we
would all take more water together. There have been “accidents” in
Damascus and Beirut. I think everyone has lost their appetite for
water.’ He lifted his glass. ‘Take my advice, Paul. Take your
whisky neat.’

His eyes were
closing and I understood how he had managed to retain such
composure in the face of his grief. Ibrahim was blind
drunk.

I stood.
‘Give Aisha a message for me, Ibrahim. Will you
remember?’

His eyes
opened. ‘I don’t forget when I drink. Do you have anything left
unsaid to her, Paul?’

I winced at
that. ‘Yes, I do. Tell her I was misled by the British. They gave
me good reason to suspect Daoud was a terrorist. I was wrong to
believe them. Tell her I am sorry and I love her. Can you tell her
that?’

He nodded and
I left him, his head down. The
Mukhabarat
man closed
the door behind me.

The rain
started at about
four in the
afternoon. I had spent the day wandering disconsolately around the
house, sitting down every now and then, getting up to gaze out of
the window or flick through the TV channels. For about an hour I
watched cartoons. It was unnaturally dark outside, the garden stark
and the trees stripped of their leaves. The rain came, light at
first, flicks and diagonal streaks of refracted light across the
windows. I sat in the bedroom looking out across the patio as the
rain came harder and harder until it was smashing down, splashing
on the flagstones, relentless, driving rain obscuring the houses
beyond.

I stood on
the patio, sheltered by the overhanging first floor balcony and
smoked a cigarette, the air wet and cold. I stepped out into the
rain and let it fall on me, soaking me. I held my face up to it and
felt it hitting my skin, making my eyes twitch with its force on my
closed lids. I forced my eyes open and it hurt me, the water and
the pain cleansing me. I walked down to the road and wandered the
empty streets. I remembered Aisha dancing in the downpour and tears
joined the rain streaking my cheeks. The streetlights flickered on
and I realised I was walking in darkness. I dragged myself back to
the house, noticing lights were on upstairs but too tired and too
bruised to care about any new tenant. I dried myself and made
another drink.

There was a
knock on the kitchen door.

More
beautiful than ever, her hair plastered down over her face and her
clothes soaked, Aisha was framed by the light from the kitchen. I
didn’t believe it at first
. I
stood in the doorway and stared at her.

‘
I didn’t
know where else to go.’

I stepped
aside to let her in. She waited, dripping on the kitchen floor. I
motioned at her sodden coat.

‘
Take those
off.’

I went to the
bathroom and got a bathrobe I’d stolen from some hotel and brought
it back to her. She was naked and shivering, her clothes over a
chair. I rolled up newspaper and laid it under blocks of wood in
the stove, then lit it. The warmth was instantaneous and I pulled
up a chair by the fire for her.

‘
Have you
eaten?’

‘
No.’

I pulled some
bread from the fridge, made sandwiches and coffee for us both. I
spread out her clothes on two chairs by the fire. She gazed
silently into the flames.

I brought her
coffee and sandwiches and she cradled the cup in her hands, rocking
slightly as she ate.

I sat by her.
‘Where have you been?’

‘
Around.
Friends. They’re watching Mum’s house.’

‘
I know. Have
you spoken to Ibrahim?’

‘
Yes.’

I loved you,
so I drew these tides of men into my hands.

‘
I didn’t
mean…’

‘
Yes. You
did. You meant everything you said. But I know why you said it,
Paul. I’ve thought about it a lot.’

I was at a
loss. I didn’t know where we could possibly go from here. But I
knew I desperately wanted to be with her again. We were silent
together, looking at the fire.

‘
What about
us, Aish? What are we going to do?’

‘
There is no us
. You
need to go home. To leave Jordan. I don’t know what I will
do.’

‘
There can be
an us.’

And wrote my
will across the sky in stars

‘
No. No there
can’t. We can’t undo this. We have been through too
much.’

I wanted to
plead, to beg her. But she was cold, distant. I took refuge in
domesticity, cleared the plates and turned her clothes on the
chairs. Her underwear was almost dry.

‘
Aisha, I
love you. I don’t want to be away from you.’

She pulled
the bathrobe around. Her damp hair formed tendrils on the
towelling. ‘They have arrested my mother.’ I looked up at her.
‘They will arrest me,’ she added, simply.

‘
I don’t
care. I’ll wait for you. I’ll work with Ibrahim. You’ve done
nothing. Either of you.’

She smiled
but there was no warmth in her expression. ‘My sister, too. Maybe
Ibrahim.’

I had never
known myself to possess such resolution, not in a life of wandering
and letting the tides of fate carry me, free of ambition or the
desire to stamp my will on other people. But now I knew
resolution.