Eight Months on Ghazzah Street Read Free Page B

said exactly.”
    “Go on.”
    Andrew bit his lip. “He said, ‘I have witnessed the biggest transportation of ready-mixed concrete in the history of the human race.
    “I’d like to witness a large gin. Let’s celebrate.”
     
     
    “We’re late,” said the man across the aisle. She jerked out of her doze; she’d not realized, at first, that he was speaking to her.
    “Are we?” She consulted her watch.
    “It’s always late,” the man said tetchily. “Of course, if you fly Saudia, they’re always late as well.”
    “Do you go often to Jeddah?”
    “Too often. The Saudia flight’s supposed to take off at twelve-thirty, but it never does. Not in my experience. I suppose the staff are having prayers. Bowing to Mecca, and so forth.”
    “How long do prayers last?”
    “As long as it takes to inconvenience you totally,” the man said. “I can tell you’ve never been in the Kingdom. Noon is movable, you see. Noon can very well be at twelve-thirty. Nothing’s what it says it is.”
    Oh dear, a philosopher, she thought. She might as well put on her Walkman. She leaned down to inch out her bag from under the seat in front, and as she groped for it she felt his eyes on the back of her neck. “Nurse, are you?” he inquired.
    “No.”
    “What are you doing out there then?”
    “I’m going to join my husband.” She filled in the details again, aware that she was more polite in the air than she was on the ground: the six years in Africa, and now Turadup, and the new Ministry building; aware too that as soon as she had said “husband,” the slight interest he had taken in her had faded completely.
    “Pity,” he said. “We,” he indicated his cohorts, “are stopping at the Marriot. I thought if you’d been a nurse we could have had dinner. Of course, I’m not sure if they let them out nowadays. I think they’ve got rules now that they all have to be locked in their own quarters by nine at night. It’s after that Helen Smith business.”
    “Oh, that.”
    “It was a damn funny business, if you ask me. That Dr. Arnott, the chap that lived in the flat she fell out of … and that wife of his, Penny wasn’t it … and the British Embassy? You can’t tell me it wasn’t a cover-up.”
    “I wouldn’t try, I’m sure.”
    “It stinks.”
    “I’m sure you’re right.”
    “You find a young girl dead outside a high-rise block, after a wild party—you ask yourself, did she fall or was she pushed? Take it from me, it’s a funny place, Jeddah. Nobody knows the half of what goes on. You work?”
    “Yes,” she said. “I’m a cartographer.”
    “Oh well, you’re redundant. They don’t have maps.”
    “They must have.”
    “Too bloody secretive to have maps. Besides, the streets are never in the same place for more than a few weeks together.”
    “They move the streets?”
    “Certainly do. They’re always building, you see, money no object, but they don’t think ahead. They build a hospital and then decide to put a road through it. Fancy a new palace? Out with the bulldozer. A map would be out of date as soon as it was made. It would be wastepaper the day it was printed.”
    “But in a way it must be quite … exhilarating?”
    He gave her a withering look. “If you like that sort of thing.” He turned away, back to his companion. “Have you got those end-of-year projections?” he asked. “I really do wonder how Fairfax is doing in Kowloon, don’t you? I don’t believe they should ever have sent him. Trouble with Fairfax, he’s got no credibility. They treat him like some bit of a kid.”
    Frances closed her eyes again. Drifting, she caught bits of their conversation: jargon, catchphrases. At home, at her widowed mother’s house in York, she had been reading books about her destination. Despite her skepticism, her better knowledge, their contrived images lingered in her mind: black tents at sunset, the call of the muezzin in clear desert air, the tang of cardamom, the burnish of