Olives (7 page)

*

Aisha took me
home. I sat in her car, a little dark bottle with a gold label
clutched between my legs.

She broke the
silence first, ‘Was it okay with Daoud?’

‘
Laugh a
minute. I’ve always enjoyed the heavy-handed approach, you know?
Toucha my sister I breaka your neck. Loved every
second.’

I saw her
wince.

‘
I didn’t
know he was going to do that,’ she said.

‘
Yeah, well
he did. Sorry, Aisha, but I’m a nice little English boy with a nice
little English girlfriend and I really didn’t need that kind of
heavy shit.’

We pulled up
outside the house and sat in the car together. Aisha switched the
engine off and the windows started to fog.

‘
You have to
give him a little time, Paul. He’s been through a lot.’

I nodded.
‘I’m sure he has.’

‘
He took my
father’s death badly. He runs the businesses now, but he’s very,’
she paused, searching for her word, ‘passionate.’

I shifted to
face Aisha, the leather creaking underneath me. ‘It’s not just
that, is it? Daoud got into trouble last year, didn’t he? How did
he take your brother’s death?’

Aisha gripped
the wheel, her knuckles pale, before stretching her fingers out. I
had never noticed before, but the little fingernail of her right
hand was bitten. Her red nails were perfectly manicured, which made
the bitten one even odder.

She talked to
the windscreen. ‘How did you hear about it?’

‘
I just
heard. Which is a shame, because I’d rather you had told
me.’

Aisha stared
silently out of the windscreen, her face eerily illuminated by the
splashes of blue and orange light from the dashboard LEDs. I waited
for her to say something, to explain, but she just looked out into
the night. I pulled the door handle, the noise making her
flinch.

‘
Goodnight.’

Aisha didn’t
move. I got out of the car, closing the door with more force than I
intended and striding up the steps to the house. I turned as I
heard her start the engine. I waited by the front door for her to
pull away, but she just stayed with the engine running.

I went inside
and devoted a little quality time, with the help of a bottle of
crappy dry red wine from Bethlehem, to thoroughly disliking
myself.

SIX

Way past
midnight, I heard Lars staggering past the French windows. His
insistent knocking on the front door forced me to drag on a pair of
shorts and T-shirt and fumble through the kitchen to answer him. He
stood framed by the light, grinning and speaking with slow,
painstaking precision.

‘
I am
drunked.’ He was unsteady on his feet. His eyes were bloodshot and
he was focusing on staying upright and stable. ‘And I thought to
myself, “Lars, what would be an perfect Englishman’s nightmare if
not to see a drunkeded Swede at midnight?” So here,’ he tottered a
little, hiccupped and grinned broadly, ‘I is.’

He fell
over.

I eventually
managed to sit him safely at the kitchen table. I made him a strong
coffee and got a scotch on the rocks for myself. He took a little
milk, pouring it from the plastic bottle with the wobbly
concentration of a three-year-old stacking building
bricks.

‘
Did I wake
you up?’

‘
Nope, still
watching the news,’ I lied.

‘
Good.’ He
sat back heavily. ‘How’s your girl?’

‘
She’s fine.’
I realised he meant Aisha and so did I. I had forgotten to call
Anne. I frowned at him. ‘She’s not my girl.’

Lars sipped
his coffee and pulled a face. ‘Any sugar?’ I got up and rooted
around in the cupboard, finding a packet. Lars stirred two
spoonfuls into his coffee and asked, ‘How did dinner
go?’

‘
Fine.
They’re good people. Her brother took me in the garden and gave me
the heavy chat about his sister, which I could have done
without.’

Lars shook
his head and wiggled a roguish drunk’s forefinger. ‘I told you
about Arab men, didn’t I?’ He sat back. ‘I asked friends about that
side of the Dajanis. Stay away, Paul. They’re the bad news. I was
right about this brother, he was a suicide bomber. He exploded
himself with a busload of kids in Haifa. People say he did it in
revenge for his father. The father was killed by the Israelis, you
know?’

No, thanks
Lars, but I didn’t know. And was becoming more and more certain I
didn’t want to know. But he was unstoppable.

‘
They killed
him with a missile. A helicopter attack in Gaza against a Hamas
guy.’ Lars wagged his finger at me again. ‘Now what would any
decent man in the rightness of his mind be doing in Gaza talking to
Hamas people, Paul?’

I sipped my
drink, grateful for the coldness. ‘I don’t know, Lars.’

‘
So they kill
the father and then the brother falls off the rails, starts keeping
the wrong company. He’s all the time at the mosque and then he
disappears. Everyone’s out looking for him when the news comes back
there’s been a big bomb in a school bus in Israel. And then he’s on
the news, they’ve made a video of him.’

I hoped I
could stop Lars somehow, stem the flow of unwelcome information
when I noticed my wish being granted, his head dropping.

‘
Come on,
let’s get you to bed,’ I said, standing up. ‘You’re
fucked.’

I helped him
up the stone steps. I found the light and switched it on, while
Lars slumped back against the wall by the door as I looked out over
the large room, so different to my place downstairs. It had been
opened out, the internal walls removed to leave a space more like
an art gallery than a house, with beech flooring, white walls and
halogen lamps dropped from the ceiling. There were pictures hung at
intervals on the wall, each lit by a lamp. At the far end was a
desk with a pair of screens on it, surrounded by racks of
electronics and keyboards. The chairs were steel and black leather.
An impressive display of expensive minimalism.

‘
You’ll be
okay now?’ I asked him.

Lars teetered
on the edge of consciousness. ‘Thanks.’

I left him to
it and went downstairs to bed. I was tired and perhaps a little
confused, but lay awake for hours thinking about helicopter
gunships in Gaza. About grubby-faced children playing in the dust
between crumbling buildings pock-marked with bullet holes, lines of
threadbare washing flapping a slow dance to the thump and crack of
gunfire and the sky-sweep of black smoke from burning tyres. The
whump of rotor blades high in the air. The hiss of rockets. The
white-out.

I didn’t see
Aisha at the Ministry at all the next day. I wrote up my interview
with the Minister and Googled some background research on potash.
Journalism means picking up an intimate knowledge of all sorts of
strange things, although sometimes it can come in handy. You never
know when you’ll be stuck in the kitchen at a Chelsea party with a
potash magnate, able to wow him with your subtle knowledge of the
intricacies of his business.

Having
learned all about Jordanian potash and the British-led consortium
holding the extraction license, Petra-Jordanian Industries, I
called Robin and found out that, yes, Petra-Jordanian was an
advertiser with a ratecard double page spread booked across all
twelve issues. That meant kid gloves and an interview laced with
platitudes. Great.

I could hear
talking and the chink of cutlery on porcelain in the background.
Robin must be ‘doing lunch.’ He was, as usual, all bluff bonhomie.
‘How’s the rest of the editorial shaping up, young man?’

‘
Good. You
didn’t come back to me about Zahlan and the online stuff. I’m
taking a lot of heat about it. What are we going to do?’

Robin tutted.
‘We signed up to do a damn magazine, Paul, not develop their
website for them. Tell him we’ll help them to repurpose the
editorial and stuff for online, but we’re not going to start
developing websites unless we can negotiate an addendum to the
contract.’

I emailed a
meeting request to Abdullah Zahlan.

I called Anne
when I got back home, flopping onto the bed.

‘
Hi.’

‘
Paul. Where
have you been? You haven’t called all week.’

It was Monday
and we’d last talked Thursday. A miserable, guilty chill ran
through me.

‘
I’m sorry,
Annie. I moved into the house over the weekend and it’s been pretty
hectic. I ran out of credits on the phone yesterday too. I’m
sorry.’

‘
You promised
me you’d call or text every day.’

‘
I know. Like
I said, I’m sorry. But things got on top of me here. It’s been
really busy, babe. Look, how’re things with you?’

‘
I’m fine,
thanks. It’s busy at the office, too. Rory and Chloe are going to
get married.’

‘
Really?
Great. When?’

‘
Next year,
January. In Scotland.’

‘
It’ll
rain.’

‘
They’ve
planned for it. They’re calling it a wet wedding.’ Ha ha. I hated
Chloe, although Rory was alright. She was a snob in window dressing
or something in Knightsbridge. Chloe, ‘dahling,’
drawled.

Anne’s
well-to-do City friends enjoyed having a slob around. It gave them
someone to patronise. I was thinking about her in the past tense,
which shocked me a little.

There was a
silence as if Anne were debating something. For some reason I
didn’t have the small talk to fill it, but waited for her. There
was a faint hissing noise on the line.

‘
Paul?’

‘
Here, Annie.
Sorry, wandered a bit.’

‘
Paul, I’ve
got some time off. Brian’s cancelled his leave next month and I can
take four days, maybe even a week.’

‘
Great. What
are you going to get up to?’

The awful
realisation hit me an instant too late for me to recover. Her voice
was small, breaking the little silence.

‘
I thought
I’d maybe come and see you, Paul.’

Fuck. Fuck.
Fuck.
I overcompensated, my
voice too eager, too bright, silly words tumbling over each other
to fill the gaping void. ‘Wow. Fantastic news, Annie, that’s great.
I’ll put flowers in vases and stuff and fatten up some cows or
something. We can play and go around and just see the sights and
everything. Hey. Cool. Oh, brilliant.’

But the
damage had been done and we were quickly reduced to small talk and
big silences as we tried to want to be on the line together.
Finally, the merciful click ended the call.

I spent a
couple of minutes sitting in the kitchen, torturing myself by
replaying the conversation in my mind with an embarrassed squirm
over how totally dumb I could be.

I poured a
beer and sat on the cold stone patio steps looking out onto the
garden and listening to the busy crickets. The city glowed, a faint
halo of purplish light framing the houses and trees uphill. For the
first time in my life, the urge to smoke a cigarette came over me.
I remembered Aisha had left a pack in my car and so went into the
house, got my keys and wandered down to the street to get it.
Everyone in Jordan smoked, it seemed. Everyone except me. I walked
down the walled steps onto the street and saw a dim light by my
car, parked up over the road. My reaction came automatically,
London boy to the fore: I shouted out.

A dark figure
detached itself from the shadows around the car and ran down the
street. I dropped my beer glass and it shattered on the pavement,
the beats of my running steps slapping wet echoes from the houses
around me. He dived to the left, down one of the many stairways
dropping steeply between the houses on the hillside, and I smashed
painfully into the far wall as I made the top of the stairway too
fast to turn. Winded, I tracked the figure skittering down the
steps. He darted to the right a hundred metres or so below me and
danced madly down into the warren of buildings. I leapt down the
steep flight of steps past a blue-lit coffee shop, a blur of
curious faces looking out at me. I made the right turn and caught a
flash of movement ahead to my left. I stopped at the next turn,
confronted by a steep, empty stairway plunging down into
darkness.

I took a
couple of uncertain steps down, gripping the cold metal handrail
running down the centre of the stairway. Standing still for a
moment, the smell of coffee and the faint sweet-sour tang of
tobacco smoke from
argileh
pipes in my
nostrils, I listened to the faint sounds of the sleepy city, the
low chatter of voices, the clink of china from the coffee shop and,
from nearby, the ragged breathing of an unfit man.

I advanced
another step but stopped when a hand thrust out of the darkness to
my right, the cold-looking blade flashing with his upwards
gesture.

‘
Yalla.’

I didn’t
move. It wasn’t bravery, I simply didn’t know what to do. His voice
sounded coarse. ‘
Yalla, ya
hmar.
’