Authors: Selma Dabbagh
‘“You
”
being who?’
‘The Palestinians. That was the best you could do, was it? Forget the suffering, the bombing, the arrests, the targeted assassinations, the whole damn Occupation and its economic devastation. Not to mention the destitution or the enforced malnutrition. No, no. You just sit there drunk in front of a senior government official telling him about some party where they served joints in cocktail glasses.’
‘That was not the point I was making, I was just saying it was bad timing for that party.’ Ali had not moved and Rashid could feel his attention on them. Someone else was watching too, a man in the Internet café, smirking through the window.
‘Yeah, well, maybe you would have been better off keeping your mouth shut and just letting him carry on thinking that there were people out there he can believe in.’ Lisa’s finger was pointed, as though she wanted to squash Rashid into the ground with it.
‘Of course there are people there that he can believe in.’
‘Well, you should have said so. Listed them. Like who, anyway? I thought you were
way
too
cynical
to believe in anyone?’
‘Well, like Khalil.’
‘Oh great. Yeah, your best friend. And that gets us where exactly? That’s just typical, isn’t it? So tribal, just stick up for your own little group. You just don’t
get it
,
do you? You can’t just go around showing your dirty laundry in public – dope, corruption, hypocrisy, all that
crap
that you’re so good at. Keep it to yourself. You can’t afford the luxury of showing that off.’
‘We can’t just present ourselves as graciously suffering all the time either. The stress of that place: people feel suicidal. When they get just a whiff of what freedom feels like they do strange things. That’s understandable, isn’t it? It’s not like anywhere else.’ He tried to hold her arm but she moved away from him. ‘Come on, Lisa, I was out for the evening having a meal, I thought, with you and your friends. I didn’t know that I was expected to sound like some zealot standing outside a mosque shouting propaganda.’
‘OK, Rashid. Listen, enough, all right. Look, I need to help Ali out with something and so I am going to go. I am just going to leave it here.’
‘Lisa, come on, don’t just go off in a mood. It’s all right. No harm is done. I think the guy liked me in the end. He gave me his card, see?’ Rashid pulled it out of his pocket, but it slipped out of his fingers on to the pavement. When he stood up again, Lisa was standing with her arms folded in front of her. ‘Look, I really appreciate you introducing us, OK? We’re going to meet again. Don’t start trying to make some excuse about Ali. What can you help him out with now? It’s nearly eleven o’clock. Come on, come back to my place.’
‘No, Rashid. I agreed this with Ali earlier. It’s got nothing to do with you asking Anna or what you said to Charles. I just need to go with him right now, OK?’ Her hand touched his jacket. ‘Let’s try to get together later in the week,’ she said.
He tried to kiss her but only caught her forehead before she found Ali, who was scuffing around the postbox. He watched her purposeful bottom move off. Attractive as it was, it was quite a bit heavier than her sister’s.
‘We’re closing in five minutes,’ the man in the Internet café blocked Rashid at the door, ‘and you’ve got to pay for fifteen. It’s the minimum charge.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I only need two.’ Rashid pushed the door. ‘You’re still open, aren’t you?’
Outside, with Lisa going off like that, the road looked hostile and sad. There were police cars moaning in front of one of the bars and he’d nearly tripped over a homeless person (
Watch it, wog!
) when he had turned the corner. It was cold and there was too much rain and petrol in the air. The trees were black shapes and the clouds were scudding fat and fast behind them. It had all become very rocky. The expelled pub crowds were angry too, angry at the road and with each other. They wanted to eek out more from the evening, to stop their sense of being ripped off by it. Rashid was fretted at by absence; the people that he thought of weren’t there, the place he thought of was not there. He craved email. To each of the questions that ricocheted in his head about his family, about Khalil, there was an open window of an answer somewhere. He was sure they were waiting to be downloaded on to any computer he could find.
Force had got him in. He had made the guy feel it against his toes.
There was only one message, but it was long and it was from Khalil. He printed it off. He didn’t feel like going back to his room yet. He was not in the mood for Ian, hanging around trying to cadge a bit of black, lecturing him on Palestine. The employee, a bit watery-eyed now from the cold, was pulling down the metal shutters and, with thoughts of Ian, Rashid decided he liked this sad, lost stranger with his dead-end job. He even tipped the grumpy bastard, for now with his jacket bulked out and warm with Khalil’s message, London had become a bit of an adventure again.
All the pubs and bars on that street were closed or closing. He walked through the side streets, smoking with a song in his head, a song with
fat chords
by the man himself. The term
fat chords
and the tickets in his pocket lightened his pace into something casual and
London
. The globes of streetlights expanded diagonally and then shrank as he passed them. Above, the sky was still churning itself up, but holding itself back for the time being. He headed east with his bag hung between his shoulders to spread the weight, through rows of squat Georgian terraces with slanted roofs, weaving in and out of parked cars, slapping his feet into puddles.
Some boys hung around in front of graffitied walls and garages and the canal shone black between the buildings. Rashid walked through warehouses and buildings squeezed into awkward triangular plots. Still quiet. A brightly lit bar, like a glass cube dropped on to a square, shone out at him and he moved towards it, but everything inside it was stiff, noisy, self-aware. He walked past posters of bad-tempered-looking people, brick walls babbling with spray paint, underground bridges, an empty library building guarded by a woman with muscular breasts and a spear, Ethiopian restaurants, boxing clubs, rows of estate agents, kebab vans. There was nowhere for him to go at all. He was about to go back to the glass cube bar with its high-heeled women, when ahead of him the door to a pub opened and a man in a suit ushered him in.
It was filled wall to wall with men holding pints, clustered into groups of three or four. The barmaid wore thick-rimmed black glasses. She was barely tall enough to reach over the bar and moved fast, alone, ringed in by the thick wooden pen, her feet restless, her face immobile. Perched on stools by the bar two old men in tweed caps explained their indignation about something to a woman whose nipples under a thin white T-shirt pointed to the ground like fairy lights.
The dancer came on as Rashid was buying his drink. She threw her open mouth out at the audience, her sweaty-looking hair swinging around her, then removed her dress and thrust forward her other orifices. Her body was smooth and alien in its hairlessness, rubbery in texture, and she bent and wound it around a vertical pole, hopping with a masculine strength on to the higher poles so that she could suspend herself upside down. Her breasts remained focussed, static, liquid-filled mounds. The men talked quietly among themselves, watching respectfully, diligent in their role as spectators. The barmaid’s head stayed down.
Rashid found a deserted table by the entrance to the bathroom, covered with peeled lager mats and crisp packets. Relieved of his bag, he sat with his back to the bar, to the dancers, and took out the message from Khalil.
Rashid
ya zalame,
comrade, how are you? I hope London is treating you well. How are your family? How is Iman getting on in the Gulf? And Lisa? Have you been to any meetings with her? Were the statistics we provided what she was looking for?
Mishta’ habibi
, I am missing you here. I haven’t been down to Sindibad’s since you left. What the Mustafa Seif El Din’s killing has done for expanding the number of supporters of his party, I can’t tell you. They are signing up in droves. Even my father has picked up on the strength of the Islamic movements and has told me that if I don’t cut my hair I am going to get attacked for being a devil worshipper. It is the only subject he talks about. Also, do you remember the computer genius who used to come down to the Centre? Two weeks ago, his father pulled him out of all the programmes I was trying to line up for him and has sent him to a religious
madrasa
instead. When I tried to persuade him to leave the boy in the classes, the father replied, ‘What value is success in this life compared to eternity in the next?’ I was not sure whether I could even try to answer that one in the circumstances.
The good news is that we have managed to get the Centre up and running again with the newly donated computers working. It took a lot of scrubbing and painting. Our biggest cost was mending the doorway. Next time we should just leave it open to save the cost.
I am spending most of my time trying to get Jamal released. As Sabri anticipated, he’s in administrative detention on a ‘preventive’ basis. I found him in Shohar IV – in one of those centres where the detainees are in canvas tents, four of them per two-man tent. In the summer they bake in the sun with all the desert dust blowing in at them, in the winter the tents fill up with mud.
A song blared out in the background, a burst of an introduction from something very eighties, either Flashdance or Prince. The lights started rolling around. Rashid found a bright cotton-covered crotch pushed up near his face, a paper cup rattling in front of him.
‘All right, love?’
Familiar with the homeless, he plopped some coins into the cup.
‘You all right here, darling? Can’t see an effing thing down here. You’ll miss the show.’
‘It’s all right. I’m fine. Don’t worry,’ Rashid had to shout for the girl to hear him.
‘Suit yourself, love.’
Rashid caught the barmaid watching him as he twisted back around into his seat.
Jamal seems to be doing OK though from what I’ve heard from his family he’s sharing a tent with some Gazan fishermen so he has learnt one hundred different ways to bone and cook a fish. He seems to be very impressed by the leaders from the religious parties that he’s met in there. Why does this depress me so much?
To be honest, Rashid, I have no idea how I am going to be able to get him out. We are trying to get an appeal, but even if we manage, it just means that he comes up in front of a kangaroo court for ten minutes and the success rate is so low. His family are wretched because he was meant to be getting married in March and they’ve already paid for it with their life savings. Can you see if there is anything to be done from there? Could Lisa’s group help?
Anyway,
habibi
, missing you a lot. Go see a Bertolucci for me, will you? I may still come to that dodgy funder’s workshop in Leeds in April if I can get an exit visa. Regards to Lisa and wish Iman the very best.
Your friend,
Khalil
In the middle distance, somewhere close to where the heels of one of the old men in the flat caps were perched on to the rung of a bar stool, Rashid could see Jamal crouching in a prison camp. The heels moved. A stripper stood next to Rashid and waited. ‘Got a light I can borrow?’ She leant over him with her all of her excitable bulbousness. Her body’s desire for attention was exhausting. The pub had almost completely emptied. The barmaid put two large scooped glasses filled with a beige drink and ice on to the counter. The stripper took one and strutted back to Rashid, who was stuffing Khalil’s message back into his jacket pocket.
‘Mind if I . . . ?’ She indicated the chair. Rashid nodded, although he found her knickerlessness somewhat perturbing.
‘Not your kind of thing, then?’
‘No, not really. I just needed somewhere to go.’
‘Aww. All alone are we?’
‘I just had a letter I wanted to read. I didn’t feel like going home.’
‘Trouble with the wife?’
‘I’m not married.’
‘So, where are you from, anyway?’
‘Palestine.’ Was there even any point in saying that?
‘Oh, right. My mate. Her man’s from there. Always joking about how he needs to walk around with see-through plastic bags and a couple of cans of lager to stop himself getting arrested.’
‘Are you sure he’s not from Pakistan?’
‘Pakistan. Yeah, that’s it. Would not carry around a bag like yours anyway. What you got in there?’
‘Books.’
‘You a student then?’ Rashid nodded. ‘Like her behind the bar. She’s a student. Studies women’s issues. Not even a dyke or anything.’ Dyke? Some words still threw Rashid.
A second lurid-coloured-cotton-clad woman came over to them. She stroked down the other dancer’s hair and kissed her mouth. Dyke? OK, he got it. The other woman turned to face him, ‘Who’s this then?’
‘Show’s not his kind of thing. We were just having a chat.’ Rashid was holding the canvas straps of his bag. They were still watching him.