Authors: Selma Dabbagh
He had tried to pull Lisa back on to the bed for a final fondle before she left but something sharp on her head scratched at the side of his eye, the under-wiring of her bra trapped the tips of his fingers and one of his toenails had snagged the leg of her tights. She had pushed him off, redone her hair (brushed it straight, down, down, down, as though it was part of a military drill, then pulled it through a hair band twice, her fingers straining pink and unsteady as they stretched it wide to pull the hair through, up high and bouncy into a girly ponytail) and she was off. Off in her puffy hip-length coat with the diamond shapes stitched over it. Gone. All strapped up and padded and off to do big things with her little laptop all packed up into its own miniature flak jacket.
Lisa’s family’s house had been cushioned and soft, with clocks that had tocked, clucked and whirred into buffered surfaces. Her parents’ movements were synchronised around the clocks’ understated commands and seemed to be conducted in complete isolation from the outside world. The heavy wooden front door automatically locked (
click!)
and was then manually latched after Rashid and Lisa had arrived and stayed that way until they left. The doorbell never rang, nor did the phone.
Close to her parents, Lisa had seemed drunk or at least very highly caffeinated. Her conversation was jittery and full of show-offy statements and brash confrontation, which was never followed through but caved into simpering cuddles (with her father) and a chummy snuggling up of shoulders (with her mother in the kitchen).
‘Will you be getting changed for lunch?’ her mother had asked, as they stood in the corridor seemingly unsure how, or whether, to greet each other. Lisa had chosen to wear one of Rashid’s oldest sweatshirts, climbing boots, jeans and a checked black-and-white
keffiyeh
that they had bought together in Gaza.
‘No, should I?’
‘Of course not, dear. Not if you don’t want to. I was just wondering.’
Lisa’s mother went back to the kitchen, leaving them with her father, who kept leaning his weight forwards on to his toes as though the pressure could cause him to emit something of importance each time.
‘Would you care for a little something? Say a G & T or a sherry, perhaps? Lisa didn’t say whether you are, you know . . . unless of course you would like something soft, if you’re
observant
, that is?’ And at this proposition Lisa’s father had braced his hands together at the knuckles and set his mouth in preparation for something truly horrible.
‘Oh, no. He drinks anything,’ Lisa put in, ‘anything.’
Rashid had not spoken and was silently wishing that he was wearing something else, but he only had one pair of smart trousers which were far too light and Lisa had laughed off a jumper Khalil’s mother had given him for London (‘You can’t wear patterns, Rashid,
really
! You look like a computer technician or something’) so he had ended up dressed identically to Lisa, but uncomfortable with it. Lisa, however, seemed to be very pleased with how he looked in her parents’ house. It was as though she had brought home a particularly gaudy piece of jewellery from a junk shop and could now, against a plain background, appreciate its particular panache. When her parents left the room she leant over him and kissed his mouth with hers in a pout, her eyes open, and with an air of hungry sexiness that he felt she must have copied from a celebrity.
The G & Ts and wine went to Rashid’s head. Lisa’s father had grunted with satisfaction each time Rashid accepted another glass but the food, which interested Rashid far more than the alcohol, was guarded jealously with a foot-long knife sharpened repeatedly at the table, and a fork shaped like a witch’s claw. These implements stood between Rashid and the meat and vegetables in the centre of the table. It was not that the meal had made any effort to entice him; it tasted to Rashid as though it had all been rinsed under the cold tap, but he was hungry and his allocated portion was insufficient. The drink had only stirred up his hunger; it came very far from sating it.
‘And what effect will the recent attacks have on your situation?’ Lisa’s father asked, as though the question had followed on from a detailed debate when it had actually come from nowhere. When Lisa’s father spoke, he focussed on a willow tree at the end of the garden and when he listened, he tipped his head to the side like a security guard receiving commands over an earpiece.
‘It’s a disaster,’ Rashid said. ‘We were gaining sympathy for what was happening to us. But now no one is interested. They are trying to make out we are the same as those extremists who have nothing to do with us. No one wants to know about what we are going through any more. It’s a disaster.’
Lisa’s father had carefully removed a line of fat that curled around the pale meat and moved it to the side of his plate with the tip of his knife to where a twin sliver curled around it causing Rashid to think of the word ‘spooning’ that Lisa had taught him.
‘Yes,’ her father said, focussing on the rain moving in the hanging branches of the willow outside the French windows. ‘I can see that. I can see how that would happen,’ and with that Rashid and Lisa’s father’s contribution to conversation was fulfilled. Talk turned to the regatta, Lisa’s sister’s habit of driving with the clutch down, the unreliability of the men repairing the central heating, the mouse in the garage and the office affair of the next-door neighbour but one.
‘Daddy’s changed.’ Lisa hugged at Rashid’s arm as they crossed the wet lawn after lunch. ‘Mummy thinks it’s losing the house. It belongs to the estate, you see. When he retires it goes on to the next doctor for the village. It’s tragic.’ She stopped at a damp bench that stood in front of a row of pruned laurels that had been cut into the shape of a giant sponge. ‘You can smoke now,’ she said, waiting next to Rashid as though he was a toddler needing to pee.
‘I didn’t bring cigarettes with me.’ Rashid looked back at the house, which seemed to be watching them with every glinting window.
Lisa frowned. ‘I was even born here, you know. Daddy delivered us.’
He looked with her across the lawn that was panelled with muted green and whitish shade as the sunlight pushed through the clouds and the trees to hit it in shafts. There was something of the cross-dresser about the house, the sloppy thatch flopped like a lady’s hat and the climbing roses were like rouge on its builder’s jaw of brick structure.
‘I want to show you something,’ Lisa said, leading him further down the garden past the weeping willow that trailed over the wet grass and dripped fingers down Rashid’s neck.
Behind the willow, propped up on bricks at the back, stood a painted gypsy caravan backed by a row of conifers. The caravan was more spacious inside than he expected, with the cosy feel of an underground bunker. The secrets of teenaged girls were tucked everywhere: under the cushions and in doll-sized drawers. The smell of damp wood took him back to a time when his family had been in Scandinavia and he had been happy. A stove sat rotund and blackened on the floor.
‘Are you sure it’s safe?’ Rashid asked more than once as Lisa leant forwards to light it, poking around with a skewer, her straight hair wrapped with the
keffiyeh
so that it bulged about her head into a round-bottomed ‘W’ shape. She passed him a packet of cigarettes, her sister’s, and they watched the crackles coming off the fire while he smoked. He tried to do better things with her, but found himself snuggled into the warmth of his own sweatshirt, now filled with Lisa and, once there, he was pushed into a deep sleep by the alcohol, a boot nudged him into a trench backwards and he was gone.
But even there, in the peeling wooden caravan in Lisa’s garden, it had found him. It had winged its way across land and sea, stretched wide, bat-like, its nose conical and tipped, its approach low and precise. It had found its way up into him, up the leg of his jeans, over the skin of his chest and had made its strike in the centre of his brain. After the thud, the windows had burst in first and had shattered into frisbees of glass that shot through the room. He could see Iman and his mother fall to the floor, Sabri trying to throw himself from his wheelchair as the glass crashed at the walls, and the room was overwhelmed by a raid of flames.
His body jolted, calling for his sister, ‘Iman!’ and his arm hit Lisa in the face. He woke streaming, coughing and crying on the edge of the seat, Lisa holding him tight, as though that would prevent him from falling off the bench too.
It had taken him a while to remember what the caravan was.
How dried-up English toast was. How calcified. It was like sliding a slab of compressed insect carcasses into his mouth. Rashid opened the window and dropped the crusts down to the ledge below.
Ian knocked lightly on Rashid’s door and ignoring the half-hearted nature of Rashid’s encouragement for him to enter, slid in anyway, his hoodie slopping around his collarbones, his jeans threatening to give up on his hips and make their descent to the floor alone.
‘Got a skin, Rash?’ Ian spread himself – a long jumble of elbows, knees, legs and trunk of dirtied fabrics – on to the tussle of Rashid’s sheets. The band of his greying underpants (always the same pair, the writing on the wide elastic around the top never changed) rested against the part of the bed where Lisa had lain the night before; Rashid could still see the white of Lisa’s inner thigh where he had held it, just
there
where Ian now sat.
Ian had first cornered Rashid after a development policy lecture and given him the full lowdown. The lowdown as to where it was at and how it was not going to matter, Palestine that was, because you had to get it into
context,
and the starting point was the dysfunctionality of British politics. Ian told Rashid about the erosion of national morality, the corruption of the West, the number of right-wing Labour MPs masquerading as left-wingers, the demise of the Communist Party, the integrity of the Revolutionary Workers Party, the short-sightedness of the environmental agenda, the limitations of the current select committees and the number of Labour ministers with children in private schools. Rashid had been given a whole load of it and there was a lot more where it came from.
‘She’s gone then, your Lisa? Yeah?’ Ian had already burnt the nail of his forefinger orange with his lighter in the process of trying to soften the miniscule amounts of hash he carried around with him. ‘Quite a job she’s got.’ Rashid peered down at a couple of sparrows wrangling over a crust on a lower ledge as Ian continued. ‘I mean, I am not sure that I would work for them. There are some real bureaucrat types in that organisation and they’re really never going to rock the boat on anything, but it’s still got great exposure, contacts, you know.’
Rashid wondered how Ian’s ankles (a corpse’s ankles, the pallor of them with their dark hairs was just unnatural) coped with the heftiness of his shoes that badly attached swung on them like weights. He also did not understand how it was that Ian’s tiny bits of hash did not disappear under one of his orangey fingernails and just get lost down there, with the rest of the decade’s debris, for ever.
In an adept one-handed movement Ian sprung up and covered the smoke detector with a piece of cling film and wrenched forward the aluminium frame of the window with the other so that it cut through the room on a horizontal plane. Only then did he light up.
‘Quite fit though.’ His grin was approving. ‘Your Lisa. She’s quite fit, isn’t she?’ Rashid did not understand what Lisa’s health had to do with Ian. ‘Want some?’ Ian squeaked at Rashid, keeping his lungs full and going slightly pink, as though he was being gassed. The more difficult the process was, the more Ian enjoyed it. He loved to show off his prowess at surmounting the legal, practical and physical obstacles standing between him and the art of dope smoking.
‘No, it’s all right, thanks. I need to check a couple of things before I go.’ Rashid nodded at his computer.
‘Go for it. No worries.’ Ian exhaled greyness into the bright air outside and the outside air buzzed traffic back into the room in return.
Sabri. Sabri.
Rashid clicked on the message and scrolled down. It was the longest message he had ever received from his brother.
Ian was still talking. ‘So what you were saying last night about Tripoli? During the war in Lebanon, you were saying that you think that, had the other faction won, that Palestinian leadership would have been different? Do you really believe that? Because I think you can’t just consider bad leadership in a vacuum,’ Ian said, fluent now he had been fuelled.
No time to read the message now. Rashid printed it out, folded it over and stuck it in his jacket pocket. He sifted through the papers on his desk, creating a small pile, the proposed thesis at the bottom, a couple of books on top.
‘No?’
‘Of course you can’t.’ Ian’s eyes glistened with bloodshot pleasure. He was exactly where he wanted to be, pontificating with a joint. ‘You can’t just say, “This micromanaging dictator came up and wrecked everything for us, destroyed our struggle.” You have to say, “Right, so how did this guy do it? How did we let him?” Take responsibility, brother. There must have been some kind of . . . of culture (in the non-static sense of the term, you understand), that promoted him. He didn’t come from Mars or Blackpool, say. He was one of yours, man.’
The stoned grin was something that Rashid greatly enjoyed having himself but hated intensely in others. He particularly disliked Ian’s version of it. When faced with political questions of the type Ian particularly liked to concoct, Rashid never knew where to start. Did he start with revolutionary movements in general or the assassination policy aimed at their moderate politicians, writers and thinkers more specifically? He could also, he supposed, defend the Outside Leadership’s successes and its democratic nature during its heyday. Victim or propagandist, take your pick; Ian always forced him into one role or the other.