Olives

by Alexander McNabb

  I let go the bunch of leaves and glanced across to Daoud, who was looking down at the glowing tip of his cigarette.

  ‘How?’

  I felt his eyes burning in the darkness. I shifted uncomfortably and so did the conversation.

  ‘You like Aisha?’

  I tried not to react to the abrupt question, taking my time and listening to the faint traffic noise carried on the cold night air. I replied cautiously. ‘She’s been great to me, Daoud. The Ministry’s lucky to have her. I couldn’t have settled in the way I have without her. She’s a smart girl.’

  A crowd cheered in my mind. Just right. My breath was coming out in misty puffs.

  ‘She was my father’s favourite.’

  The cheering died down. ‘She’s a very good artist. You must be proud of her.’

  ‘Yes. Yes I am. I would not like anything to happen to her. She took his death badly, as I suppose we all did. She is still perhaps,’ he searched for the word, ‘vulnerable.’

  Fucking hell. Enough already. I kept the smile going, but it was getting hard to maintain. My cheeks hurt from the effort. ‘Jordan is a beautiful country, Daoud. I’m glad I came here. I’m sure my girlfriend will like it here, too. She’s a lawyer. She practises international contract law, actually.’

  Not strictly true, the line about Anne liking it in Jordan. I hardly expected her to turn up. Workaholic Anne never took leave and we didn’t anticipate seeing each other until I went home for Christmas.

  Daoud seemed lost in thought, leaning against the trunk of an olive tree and drawing on his cigarette. Finally he spoke.

  ‘The Israelis have taken everything from us, Paul. Our land, our dignity. They took my father, too. My brother. Now they’re taking the water. We’ve lost too much.’

  He pushed the cigarette butt into the sandy soil with his heel, then put his hand on my shoulder, a quick squeeze and a pat, a very Arab gesture of finality and yet somehow accepting. ‘I won’t let the olives die. Come on, let’s get back inside. I’ll get you a bottle of our oil. At least when the olives weep, we are enriched.’

  *

  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 hi
m 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.’

  I stepped back and he slashed at the air with the knife, snarling, ‘Yalla.’ Walking slowly backwards, I turned the corner and waited for a second then turned and headed for home. I wasn’t going to get into a knife fight. I felt a coward.

  I couldn’t make out any damage to the car in the dim light. I poured a scotch and sat outside. My hands still trembled lighting up the cigarette, which I hated and put out after a couple of puffs. Going to bed, sleep evaded me for ages, the tobacco taste in my mouth. Thoughts of knife-toting thieves and what I’d have done to him if I were a braver man raced around in my mind.

  *

  The road from Amman to the Dead Sea drops down from the city, twisting through villages and farmhouses clinging in ones and twos to the steep hillsides as the road descends to the lowest point on earth. Driving, I found it hard to focus on the twisting road and the scenery at the same time. We saw the sparkling expanse of water slide into view below us, the misty blue shores of Palestine and Israel framing the far side of the immobile expanse of water. The road straightened out into the plains around the sea and we slowed as we reached an army warthog, a temporary checkpoint, the soldiers examining my passport and Aisha’s ID card. She chatted them up in Arabic, laughing with them, her eyes flashing and teasing.

  We drove along the coast of the Dead Sea.

  ‘What was all the checkpoint stuff about?’

  ‘Security. That’s Palestine over there across the water. And Israel.’

  ‘I thought you were at peace with the Israelis.’

  She looked askance at me, an eyebrow raised. �
��Jordan is. Apparently there’s a government event on at the Conference Centre. It’s up the road here. That’s why security is tighter than usual.’

  We passed a tall, square metal tower overlooking the flat expanse of lifeless water. I gestured toward it and asked, ‘Lifeguard?’

  ‘Gun position. They’re not usually manned these days, but when they are they turn the guns away to face inland. So does the other side. Peace, you see?’

  She flicked through my passport before handing it to me. ‘Cute picture. They’re usually very bad. You’d want to look after a face like that rather than being a hero and chasing robbers.’

  My account of the knifeman in the depths of the city’s stairways the night before had broken the ice between us. Aisha had been astonished I had been brave or mad enough to have given chase and had nagged me not to try and take the law into my own hands like that again.

  ‘You don’t get it, Paul. The Eastern City is dangerous and it starts at the bottom of the hill outside your house. Leave things be at night, please.’

  The whole episode seemed as if it had taken place in a dream, particularly as we drove along the coast in the sunshine, the Dead Sea shimmering beside us.

  I reached out my hand to grab at Aisha’s ID card. ‘Let’s see yours then.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Come on, give it over. You’ve seen mine, show me yours.’

  She laughed and pulled away from me, the light making her eyes sparkle. ‘Here, then. You’re not to laugh.’

  She handed over her civil ID card and of course I did laugh, because the picture was truly awful. ‘You look podgy.’

  ‘I am never talking to you again, ya Brit.’

  We reached the dusty moonscape around the potash complex, laughing and teasing each other, the angry silence of the night before a distant irrelevance. We tracked Clive Saunders, Mr Potash, down to his office.