Strangers

by Carla Banks

  ‘It’s had its moments. But mostly, yes, it’s been…’

  ‘Fine?’

  She laughed. ‘Just about. I like the work. I’m getting to know my way around.’

  ‘And your husband?’

  ‘Yes, fi—He’s OK, thanks, except he has to work long hours. I don’t think he expected it to be quite so…’

  A faint line appeared between his eyebrows. ‘Was it so bad at the hospital? I know they’ve been short-staffed for a while.’

  ‘It’s getting better. Joe says he’ll be on top of it soon.’

  He nodded. She got the impression that he was still thinking about this as he started asking her about her impressions of the Kingdom, about how much of it she had seen. She told him about her trips into Riyadh–he nodded approvingly when she told him how much she liked the remains of the old architecture.

  ‘There won’t be anything left in a few years,’ he said. ‘Have you seen the al-Masmak fort?’

  ‘Not apart from a glimpse on that first day. I thought it was all a tourist reconstruction.’

  ‘They don’t get tourists here, not to speak of. So it’s the real thing. It’s built of dried mud, and inside–on the upper floor–there are some carvings. You should go and see it if you want to understand this place.’ He told her about the battle in 1902 when Abd al Aziz, with only fifteen warriors, scaled the walls of Riyadh, took the fort and was declared ruler by the populace. ‘The history of the Kingdom–of the whole Middle East

  —was shaped by that one event.’

  ‘I always thought it was shaped by the desert

  —the culture, the way the people live.’

  ‘Have you been to the desert?’

  ‘Yes, the first week we were here.’ Her rising spirits deflated as she remembered how happy she’d been–how happy they’d both been that first weekend. She made an effort and smiled at O’Neill again.

  She got the impression she hadn’t fooled him, but all he said was, ‘Well, the desert and Wahhabbism will tell you everything you need to know about the Kingdom.’

  The desert and Wahhabbism–this was what Yasmin and Najia had to contend with. ‘Is there a women’s movement in Riyadh?’ The question slipped out without thought. Until she spoke, she hadn’t realized she was going to ask it.

  He looked at her. The silence stretched out uncomfortably. ‘Why do you want to know?’ he said after a while.

  ‘It was something one of my students said, that’s all.’

  ‘It depends what you mean by “women’s movement”. There are various radical Islamic groups. Women are members as well as men. If you want my advice, you’ll stay well away from anything like that.’

  ‘I meant a feminist movement.’

  ‘It’s illegal to set up political organizations.’ He was choosing his words carefully. ‘So the straight answer is no. There are various salon-type things–businesswomen, and women who want to be politically active, meet in their own homes sometimes. There was a well-orchestrated protest when they wouldn’t let the women vote in the election–it was all done legally, but it got a lot of publicity. Someone knows what they’re doing–and they’re moving very carefully. It’s a sensitive issue. I don’t think it would help if a Westerner was to take up the cause–they’d lose a lot of credibility.’

  That was more or less what Yasmin had indicated. ‘I realize that. I was just interested in what the students were saying.’

  ‘It’s a touchy issue at the moment. I’m surprised they talked about it at all.’

  He was studying her face closely, and he looked worried, so she said, ‘There was something posted on the university web site.’

  ‘That won’t have gone down well. But things are starting to change for women here. More of them work, these days. Some of them are very successful. A Saudi woman has just been appointed to lead the UN population fund. And there are women like Professor Souad al-Munajjed who are very successful in their own field. You know her, of course?’

  ‘Yes, but I wonder how representative she is.’

  He looked into the distance, considering. ‘She stays where she is because she doesn’t challenge the establishment. The traditionalists don’t like her, but she’s careful not to give them any ammunition. Her colleagues, the ones that did start challenging things, they’re more marginalized now.’ He told her about the time in 1990 when fifty women drove cars in protest against the ban. She remembered Souad talking about it. ‘I worked for the consulate then,’ he said.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘The women lost their jobs and their families were threatened,’ he said. ‘I thought a bit of solidarity from our government wouldn’t go amiss, but…’ He shrugged. ‘We’re selective about whose rights we support, and when.’

  ‘Is that why you left the consulate?’

  ‘Among other things.’ He changed the subject. ‘How are you getting on with the students?’

  ‘Fi—Quite well. They’re careful what they say to me.’

  ‘Well, that’s…’ A man came across to O’Neill and spoke quickly to him. ‘Would you excuse us?’ he said to Roisin.

  ‘Of course.’ She found herself engaged in conversation by another man who told her he was an engineer on contract, then she talked to an Australian dentist, and then to a couple who could only talk about how much they despised the Saudis and how much they wanted to go home.

  She shivered. The air-con was set too high and she could feel the deep chill of fatigue. She’d been up since six. She looked around the room, searching for Joe. She saw him, talking with someone she couldn’t quite see–or rather listening to someone, she could recognize the slight tilt of his head that indicated he was paying close attention to the conversation. The crowd shifted, and she saw with some surprise that the person he was talking to was Damien O’Neill. Joe looked across at her. His mouth was set in a thin line. As soon as he caught her eye, his face relaxed. He said something to O’Neill then came across to her and put his arm round her. ‘Are you OK?’ His earlier coldness had vanished.

  ‘I’m a bit tired. You?’

  ‘I’m ready to go if you are. Roisin–I’m sorry about earlier. I behaved like a shit. It’s been a bit tense at work–I shouldn’t take it out on you.’

  She felt the knot that had been in her stomach all evening start to unwind. ‘You could talk to me about it.’

  ‘I know. It’s…when I get away from it, I just want to forget about it.’

  ‘What kind of thing? I was talking to Damien O’Neill–he seemed a bit surprised you were still…’

  ‘Oh, just–organization things. People being inefficient. Stuff like that. I saw you with O’Neill. What did he have to say?’ There was a slight edge to his voice and she looked at him quickly.

  ‘Not much. We talked about this place. I told him about our trip to the desert. Why?’

  ‘Nothing. I don’t like him. He’s an officious bastard. It doesn’t matter. Come on, let’s go.’

  ‘I’d better go and say our goodbyes.’

  As she crossed the room, she became aware of someone watching her. A woman was standing by the French windows, a tall, slender woman with red hair. Roisin stopped, and the woman moved, the light catching her face. For a moment, they looked at each other blankly, then Roisin felt the jolt of recognition. She had a sudden vision of a figure leaning dangerously out of the window of a train, waving, calling something that was drowned by the noise of the engine and the echoes from the cavernous station, again and again as Roisin frantically shook her head and cupped her hand to her ear. I can’t hear you!

  Amy.

  She saw the look of recognition on the woman’s face. For a moment they stared at each other across a gap of almost sixteen years, then the woman moved away and was lost in the crowd.

  17

  ‘I think I just saw a ghost.’ Roisin sank down into the reclining chair and kicked off her shoes. ‘That’s better.’

  Joe stood at the other side of the room watching her. ‘A ghost
?’ His face was in shadow.

  ‘Just now, at the party. There was a woman there. I thought–at the time I could have sworn–that she was someone I used to know.’

  ‘Why a ghost?’

  ‘It must have been–what, sixteen years ago? Something like that. The woman at the party, did you see her? She was tall with red hair and she was wearing a black dress. For a moment, it was Amy to the life. But now…I don’t know.’

  His voice was quiet. ‘Amy.’

  ‘You know her?’

  ‘Amy Seymour. Yes. She works at the hospital.’

  ‘She was Amy Fenwick when I knew her.’ So it was Amy. Amy, after all these years. She had been working with Joe. He knew her. ‘That’s so…How is she? What’s she doing?’

  ‘I don’t know her well. She seems…OK, I suppose. She’s in charge of the unit for premature babies, and she works for a women’s health clinic. Roisin, why is she a ghost?’

  ‘We were friends, years ago,’ Roisin said slowly. ‘I was seventeen. I was in the middle of the adolescent rebellion thing, you know? You aren’t my parents. You’re keeping secrets–all that sort of stuff.’

  He was frowning as he looked at her. ‘Were they?’

  They’d never talked much about this before. She wasn’t sure why, but she had always steered away from the topic of her adoption. ‘They never talked to me about it. It was as if that part of my life, those first years, were some kind of mistake, a false start. They didn’t want to acknowledge them. I told you my birth parents were dead, right? They died in a car crash.’ She pushed the hair back from her face and showed him the small scar on her hairline. ‘That’s how I got that.

  ‘I don’t remember them, nothing about them at all. I have flashes sometimes–I can remember someone giving me a ride in a wheelbarrow. People are laughing, but I can’t see their faces. It wasn’t my family–my adoptive family. And I can remember another child. I can remember holding hands with another child for a photograph, and being frightened when the flash went off.’ And a voice singing to her, a few remembered lines:…between the salt water and the sea sand…

  ‘But that’s about it. It’s like I woke up when I was four, and I was living with my mum and dad in Newcastle. My parents wouldn’t talk about it, but I knew I could remember another child. All the time I was growing up, what I wanted most was a sister. And then Amy…’

  She looked away, trying to collect her thoughts. ‘We met at college. We were both doing A-Levels. I was straight out of school and as dumb as they come. Amy was different. She was a year older–that’s a lot, then–she was smart and she was cool. A lot of the students were a bit intimidated by her. But we really hit it off. We both had backgrounds that were…different, I suppose. She’d been in care, I was adopted. It was like I suddenly had the sister I’d always wanted, only without all the fights and the jealousy and the rest of it.’

  She could picture Amy in her mind as clearly as if it had been yesterday; not the woman she had glimpsed at the party, but the adolescent Amy. Then, Amy had been a bit too tall, a bit too thin, not quite comfortable with her body. She was ebullient and extrovert, street-wise in a way Roisin couldn’t then aspire to, giving the college lecturers a hard time, helping Roisin to plan the ways she could outwit her parents’ strict curfew. She took pride in her lack of family–much the best way to live, she had insisted. She had no one trying to control her life, unlike Roisin.

  She and Amy, sitting in Amy’s flat smoking–Roisin’s first experience of hash. She could remember looking out of the window to the estate laid out below her, the deep amphitheatre with its tiered blocks, the bright colours of the paintwork, the gardens and the hanging vines. Amy had been standing at the window, drawing the smoke into her lungs and watching the distant river. ‘One day,’ she’d said, ‘one day…’ And her gesture had encompassed the world that lay beyond the mouth of the river. That was when they’d started their plan to travel once they got their exams. Neither of them had left Britain’s shores before. Roisin had never even left Northumberland. She’d lost Amy, but the desire to travel had remained.

  ‘My parents didn’t like her,’ she remembered now. She could still see the way her mother’s lips thinned every time Amy’s name was mentioned. At the time, it had made Amy seem even more desirable.

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Well, I did a lot of things that would have horrified my parents if they’d known about it.’ She smiled at the recollection of their Goth clothes and their determined cool. Some of their exploits came back to her, not all as harmless as climbing through the girders of the iron bridge to get the correct angle for a photograph of the Tyne. Whatever else had happened, she and Amy had had fun. ‘But after a while, she told me a bit more of her story. She’d been taken into care after her parents had been killed. She said no one wanted to adopt her because she was too old and she was difficult. And she said she’d had a sister who she always used to look out for, but her sister was taken away from her and adopted.’

  She looked across at Joe, who was listening quietly, a faint line appearing between his eyes.

  ‘It got me thinking. There’d always been a gap, like I knew something should have been in my life and wasn’t. I started telling myself that I was Amy’s sister, I was the child who had been taken away and adopted, that my parents, my adoptive parents, had deliberately kept us apart because they wanted me all to themselves.’ And there had been just enough of that kind of possessiveness in her mother’s anxiety to make her fantasies possible. ‘I knew deep down it couldn’t be true, but I believed it anyway.’

  And that was why she still thought about Amy, even after all these years. Their friendship hadn’t been just the companionship of shared fun and risk as they spread their wings together. There had been no one she could talk to the way she could talk to Amy, and Amy had told her things she wouldn’t tell other people.

  Joe was watching her in silence. ‘I wasn’t happy at home then,’ she said. ‘I wanted to go to college and do an art qualification. I wanted to be a photographer.’ She made a rueful face. ‘I still think I could have made a go of it. But my parents wanted me to do teacher training. It was all rows and bad feeling. Amy and I decided we would go away together, take a gap year in Europe. We had it planned. And then when we got back we were going to share a flat in London while we were students–she wanted to be a designer and I was going to work at my photography.’ She could so easily recapture those times with their excitement and their closeness. ‘I don’t think you ever make friends again the way you do when you’re young.’

  ‘Did Amy know that you thought you were her sister?’

  ‘Not in so many words, but it was a kind of unspoken thing. She stopped talking about the family that she’d lost. And I felt as though there had been this gap in my life that I hadn’t known about, and suddenly it wasn’t there any more. Then something happened. I don’t know what it was. Amy had been a bit edgy–she could be like that–and then she said out of the blue that she had to go to London for a while. She said she’d found something out she wanted to check. She didn’t want to tell me then, but she said she’d tell me when she got back. It was like…she had this secret. She was really excited. She was…I can see her now. She was just glowing.

  ‘I went to the station with her, and I waved her off. I can remember she was hanging out of the window calling something to me, and I couldn’t hear what she was saying. I was running along the platform shouting, “I can’t hear you!” and she was calling, trying to make me understand.’ The picture was as vivid in her mind now as it had been then. ‘I never saw her again.’

  Joe had drawn up a chair and was sitting in front of her, leaning forward, listening intently. ‘She didn’t come back? Didn’t get in touch?’

  ‘She never did. I had a big row with my parents–I blamed them. I told them they’d driven her away, that Amy was my sister, and they’d done something to keep us apart. My mum was devastated. She’d had no idea…They had a kind of album they
’d never shown me, something they’d been given when they adopted me. I can still see my mother holding it out to me like some kind of offering, something dangerous. I spent hours that day just looking at the photographs.’

  There had been photos of her birth parents, photos of her home, photos of her when she was small.

  And photos of another child.

  ‘That’s the irony of it. I did have a sister. Nell. She was called Nell. She was a year younger than me. And she died in the crash.’…between the salt water and the sea sand…

  There was silence once she’d finished, then Joe said, ‘And it was her, it was your Amy, at the party tonight?’

  Your Amy. Roisin nodded. She hadn’t been hallucinating. She had seen Amy.

  ‘Did she recognize you?’

  ‘Yes. But she backed off at once. She was probably as shocked as I was.’

  When Amy had gone–once she was able to admit to herself that her mother was right, that Amy was not coming back–she’d been devastated. She’d imagined terrible things: Amy lost, Amy sick, Amy dead. She’d gone to the police, but they hadn’t been interested. A young girl, an adult, with a rootless past, choosing to disappear into the restless chaos of London, was hardly an emergency.

  And now here was Amy–happy and prosperous, judging from the brief glance Roisin had had. ‘I’ll have to contact her. Can you get her number?’

  Joe was looking at her, still concerned, but there was something in his expression that she couldn’t quite read. ‘You haven’t had any contact with her for years,’ he said. ‘Why stir things up?’

  It was as if she hadn’t heard him properly. ‘What?’

  ‘With Amy. Why stir it up? If I were you, I’d leave it.’

  A breeze blew across the room and Damien lay for a moment with his eyes closed, savouring its freshness. He had surfaced from a dream of veils that obscured his vision as he tried to find his way through a maze of stone and marble. The atonal piping that filled the air became the early-morning call to prayer, then he woke further and realized that what he was hearing was his phone. He swore and reached for it, his hand finding it instinctively before his eyes were open. The illuminated clock face said 04.09, and he felt dread in the pit of his stomach. Phone calls in the dawn hours usually meant bad news.