Olives Page 8

  ‘I’m really sorry about your cousin.’

  She relaxed. ‘It’s okay, Paul. The funeral’s over, life’s back to normal for everyone. You have to move on, you know.’ She laughed, a bitter little laugh, flicked her hair back. ‘You even start to get used to it after a while.’

  ‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.’

  She tensed again.

  I looked at my glass. ‘About your father and your brother.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. I watched her shoulders hunch and her hands come together on the table, a barrier. ‘Why does that matter?’

  I ploughed on. ‘Because other people are telling me about it and I wanted you to tell me first.’

  ‘It doesn’t concern you, Paul. It’s...’

  Go on, I thought. Tell me it’s none of my business. She looked down at her own wine glass. I saw her eyes were moist, the warm light from the stove sparkling in them.

  ‘It’s not something I like to talk about very much.’

  I tried to be gentle but heard myself whining instead. ‘I wanted it to be open between us.’

  Paul Stokes, bumbling prat. The man who takes his conversational gambits from third rate soap opera scripts. If I had a low opinion of the human race in general, at least I had the grace to put myself at the bottom of the heap.

  Aisha looked away from me, reached into her bag for her cigarettes and lit one. I got the ashtray I kept for visitors, grateful for the excuse of movement to break the tension.

  She talked to the table, her voice low. ‘My father was born on a farm in Palestine in 1946, outside a village called Qaffin. It’s the farm we have today. My grandparents left during the troubles in 1948, what we call the Naqba, the disaster. You know this, right? The Naqba?’ I nodded. ‘When the Zionists threw my people from their land and declared Israel a state. They had a saying, you know, “A land without a people for a people without a land.” But it’s a lie.’

  Aisha slowly twisted her lighter between her thumb and forefinger. ‘My father met my mother in the camps. He was just another urchin in the streets there, but he was smart and started selling fruit on a street corner, grew it into a business by employing other kids so that eventually he could open a shop of sorts in the camp, made of cinder blocks. He was a good businessman and soon opened a proper store in Amman. He opened more of them. He started to trade with the Syrians and the Iraqis before he left the Amman business in Ibrahim’s hands and went to the Gulf in the seventies, to Kuwait, with my mother. The Gulf had oil and needed food, steel, concrete, cars. He did deals with family traders, earned a name for being able to get things nobody else could get, ship things nobody else could ship. Ibrahim found the supplies, my father sold them. My parents moved back here after I was born.’

  ‘And he met Arafat in Kuwait.’

  Aisha’s eyes widened and she took a pull on her cigarette, staring at me, the lighter twisting in her hand, the shaking tip of the cigarette glowing momentarily as she inhaled. ‘Yes, he met Arafat in Kuwait. Through Kaddoumi. And he supplied Arafat. My father believed in Arafat. His family had lost everything, including my grandfather. My father believed that we had to try and fight to return to our country, to our land.’

  ‘But Arafat was a terrorist.’

  She was trembling. ‘No. Abu Ammar was a unifier. There was no Palestine, no Palestinian people, no Palestinian identity. We lost everything, you see? Arafat brought us the dream that one day we could go back to things we had lost, that one day we could become a nation again. What could my father believe in other than this? We are lucky, at least we still have some of our family land, but only because we are on the border, only because we had an Arab Israeli lawyer on our side. Back then, there was no hope for any Palestinian other than Arafat offered.’

  I was watchfully silent. Aisha gestured with a wide sweep of her hand. ‘My people lost everything they had, living in camps with rusty keys and English title deeds that meant nothing. The world stood by and let it happen. Who else offered any hope to the Palestinians except Arafat and the people around him? Who else was helping us?’

  Aisha ground her cigarette viciously into the ashtray. ‘My father supported Arafat in the early days, but he turned away from them after the problems in Jordan. He stopped believing in Arafat’s way. Both he and Ibrahim became closer to King Hussein, then the King threw the PLO out of Jordan. We stayed here.’

  ‘Why did they leave Kuwait?’

  Exasperated, she spat out her answer. ‘Because I was born.’ She recovered herself with a long silence, her voice shaky when she spoke again. ‘I was my father’s favourite. He was always very close to me. We used to go on little adventures together, especially after I learned to ride. He was an accomplished horseman. I remember once we went riding with His Majesty. It was such a special day, the horses groomed until they were shining and HM chatting with us while we hacked along the wadis. He asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I told him I wanted to be a princess. Can you believe it? My father told the king I was already a princess and they both laughed at me. My father was a very gentle man.’

  ‘But he was with a Hamas man when he died,’ I blurted.

  She recoiled as my words shattered her reminiscence, catching my gaze for an instant, her eyes flickering around the kitchen, casting around for something from inside. I waited for her to calm and speak. She took a deep, shuddering breath and spoke to the tabletop in a small voice.

  ‘Yes, Paul. My father was in a house in Gaza that belonged to one of his old business contacts from the Gulf days. Another man was visiting, an important man in Hamas. The Israelis attacked the house with missiles. They killed my baba and took him away from me forever.’

  ‘Was he involved with Hamas?’

  I had spoken as gently as I could but then I saw, to my horror, the splashes on the tabletop. The tears brimming in Aisha’s eyes ran down her cheeks as she looked up. Her chin was puckered, her words halting as she fought for control of her breathing. ‘My father... was not a terrorist. He was... not an evil man.’

  She held onto her lighter so tightly the blood drained from her fingers and her hands shook. She dropped it, sniffed and wiped at her cheeks with her fingertips.

  ‘He was not accused, tried or found guilty of a crime. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, just like the young mother in the shopping mall when the bomb comes. He was killed by a state formed by bombing and violence, founded by terrorists who threw my people off their land by murdering them and driving them away with fear. By the people that killed the villagers of Deir Yassin and hundreds of Palestinian villages like it, the people that killed thousands when they smashed into Gaza and poured phosphorous on it from the sky like rain. There was no judge, there was no jury. He was murdered in cold blood.’

  Aisha delved into her bag for a tissue and wiped her eyes, shaking her head as she looked out of the kitchen window, away from me.

  ‘I don’t want to think about this, Paul. I prefer not to live with it in my mind every day. I have a life to live. As Palestinians we have to put this behind us and live, because we can’t afford to spend every single moment focusing on the tragedy and death that is around us, inside us.’

  She drank from her wine, her reddened eyes on mine over the fine rim of the glass. Her mascara was smudged.

  I broke the long silence. ‘So is that why Hamad did what he did? To revenge your father?’

  Aisha glared at me, placing the wineglass on the table with agonising slowness, her eyes on me as she pushed her chair back. She turned to hook up her coat. My chair rattled as I leaped to my feet. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I don’t need this. You don’t need Daoud lecturing you, but I don’t need you questioning me, either. You just go ahead and believe what you want to, listen to what you want to. I will not be interviewed by you. I’m going home. Goodbye, Paul.’

  I was incapable of movement, shocked by the realisation of my own immense stupidity and crassness. I saw her chin pucker again as the
light caught the side of her face, but she didn’t look back as she closed the door gently behind her. The kitchen was quiet, apart from the soft background grumble of the wood burning in the stove and the electronic tick of the wall clock. It ticked four times before resolution rescued me from stasis and I ran out after her. I caught her opening her car door, about to get in. I called across the road to her as I stood at the bottom of the steps that led up from the road to the garden: ‘Aisha.’

  The tears were streaming down her cheeks as she turned to me, shouting, her face contorted and her voice echoing down the dark street.

  ‘Fuck off, Paul. Fuck off and creep about in the garbage of someone else’s life. Leave mine alone.’

  I was still standing there ten minutes later when a truck full of red-painted gas bottles drove past, blaring an ice-cream van jingle out of the speakers mounted on the cab. The gasmen waved at me, but I didn’t wave back. I shivered in the cool of the evening. I blundered back into the house. For the first time in years, I felt utterly alone. I sat in the kitchen and drank my wine, listening to the tick of the clock and replaying the conversation, twisting the knife in the wound just so I could feel the pain of it.

  A little later, I drank hers too, matching my lips to the lipstick mark on the glass. It tasted waxy.

  TEN

  I didn’t see Aisha for the next three days. She sent messengers down from the Secretary General’s office with arrangements for interviews or with information I’d requested. The magazine was coming together and we were preparing to send it to press by the end of the week – I just had to get the final pages signed off by the Ministry. I took the printouts up to Abdullah Zahlan, who liked them but suggested I show them to Aisha for the Secretary General’s approval.

  There was a heavy crystal paperweight in the shape of the Al Aqsa Mosque on Aisha’s desk and a furry toy monkey with big, dopey eyes sitting on the top of the cabinet by the wall. She had a visitor, a veiled woman with whom she was chatting animatedly. She barely looked up at me, her voice cool.

  ‘Thank you, Paul. Just put them down on the side table there and I’ll return them to you this afternoon.’

  I bit my tongue and went back downstairs, stopping halfway down the dingy staircase to smack the gloss-painted wall with my fist. I sat at my desk, calming down and gazing into my screen for a couple of hours. I’d been spending my time drinking with Lars, missing Aisha’s company but keeping myself busy socially rather than having to sit down and think about what a total idiot I’d been. I felt guilty about prying into her life and about hurting her with my stupidity and selfishness. She had been kind to me, amused but tolerant of my ignorance and patient with my constant questions and demands. I had repaid her by digging into her pain, gouging away at the wounds until I’d forced her away from me. Stokes the lonely journalist who can’t switch off the desire to interrogate people, to indulge the driving curiosity that wrecks trust and renders everything down to the cold, hard facts that lie at the centre of all weakness. Pity poor Paul.

  Aisha strode up to my desk, the page proofs in her hand. She wasn’t smiling.

  ‘This stuff is approved. You’re going to buy me a drink at the Blue Fig tonight at eight o’clock.’

  I looked up at her. Her face was serious, but her eyes were flickering between mine uncertainly.

  I nodded, fighting to keep the astonishment from my face. ‘I am.’

  She left without another word but when the phone rang a few seconds later, I answered it giddily, ‘Stokes Precision Engineering and Victorian Toy Repair Service.’

  ‘Paul?’

  ‘Oh, hi, Robin. What gives?’

  His plummy drawl sounded relieved. ‘Sorry, thought I’d got a wrong number there for a second.’ His braying laughter jangled down the line. ‘Look, just called to make sure you got those proofs signed off okay.’

  ‘Signed off, Robin. The whole thing’s ready to print.’

  ‘Good work. We’ve broken target by 10k and forward bookings are looking great. We’ve hit bonus.’

  Ah, Robin, Robin. ‘We’ve hit bonus’ was code for Robin Goodyear has hit bonus. Paul Stokes would remain scrabbling around in near-poverty in a foreign country while the CEO, Michael Klein, joined Robin for drinks in his converted Kentish barn or maybe down the road at the BMW-lover’s pub, the Morgan Arms. They’d stand there at the bar in their Aran sweaters, telling each other just how well the whole Jordan thing was going and how clever they’d been to think it all up, then drink their beers and go back to Robin’s for an impeccably cooked Sunday roast prepared by Claire who would have drunk too much because she’d been entertaining Mousey Hilary, Klein’s plain little wife. Claire, a secretary at TMG before Robin ‘rescued’ her, knew full well Klein spent most of his time in the office pushing as much of himself as he could into the various openings offered by Lynda, his bumptious and yet decidedly pneumatic personal assistant.

  I imagined Robin naked and crucified upside down and managed a smile. ‘Good. I’m glad you’re pleased, Robin.’

  ‘Keep it up, Stokesy. Hear Anne’s coming out to visit you. Do you good to get your end away. Oh, wait a minute – haven’t you been servicing that Dajani bird?’

  Anne and Robin had always got on, often chatted. They moved in the same circles.

  ‘Just been waiting for Anne, Robin.’

  How I hated myself for not slamming the phone down on the bastard.

  ‘Good show. Well, must get on. Toodle pip.’

  Toodle pip my arse. I wrapped up and went home, too appalled at Robin to be mad with him. How on earth people like him survive, let alone climb to the top of their little dung heaps, constantly amazes me. I was angry when I got to the house and stomped up the steps to Lars’ place.

  Lars answered the door in a sarong, gesturing me towards the fridge as he fiddled with the mouse and closed whatever strange online session he’d been absorbed in before he turned to me.

  ‘What’s new?’

  ‘I’m meeting Aisha for drinks tonight.’

  ‘Okay. So it’s back on.’

  ‘What’s back on? It’s not as if we’re anything more than friends.’

  ‘Like friends sulk when they don’t see each other for a couple of days? Huh? You sulk if I’m not in when you get home, English? Hmm? I think not. Surely you’re friends. Look, just go to her. You’re crazy, but go anyway. Stop being a puppy sick. You say puppy sick?’

  I laughed despite myself. ‘Sick puppy, you silly sod.’

  Lars sat back, contentment on his handsome Scandinavian features as he raised his can in a toast. ‘Yes, like this. Go with her, Paul. Be happy. Be careful. Here, I have a present for you. Watch it if you like, don’t watch it if you like.’

  Puzzled, I took the memory stick he offered me. ‘What is it, Lars?’

  He smiled grimly. ‘It’s Hamad Dajani’s goodbye video. A friend of mine in Jordan TV got it for me. Like I say, watch it if you like.’

  When I had finished my beer with Lars, I went downstairs and stood in front of the TV for a very long time before putting the memory stick down by the screen and going to the bathroom to wash.

  The Blue Fig is a funky art-house café bar in the wealthy Abdoun district owned by a couple of Jordanian bigshots, all wooden flooring and antiqued steel trimmings. It’s a popular meeting place – in the summer it heaves with rich, pretty young things come back from the Gulf. Even now, early in the cool autumn evening, it was becoming noisy. I spotted Aisha in a quiet corner away from the bar. She wore the brown woollen outfit again and I couldn’t help my grin.

  ‘I thought we’d try starting again,’ she said, standing to meet me as I walked up to the table.

  There was a second’s hesitation – her hand wasn’t held out. I leaned forward and kissed her cheek, my hand resting lightly on her hip. It felt like the most natural gesture in the world. She smelled of warm spice.

  She handed me a little blue plastic bag. ‘Here. I brought you a little something.’

  I opened t
he bag. It was a delicate pen and ink sketch of a bunch of olives on a branch. I wanted to cry.

  ‘Listen, Paul, I owe you an apology. I’m sorry. I guess it was too soon after my cousin to start talking about all that family stuff and I just flipped out. I’m really sorry. I thought an olive branch was appropriate.’

  An uncomfortable, burning sensation seared my throat. I managed to swallow and keep the tears out of my eyes.

  ‘Thank you. It’s beautiful.’

  She smiled. ‘The salsa girls won’t forgive me. I stood them up.’

  ‘Aisha, I’m sorry.’

  She leaned forwards, put her finger to her lips. ‘Shush. Enough.’ She put her hand on mine and squeezed it, an electric moment of soft warmth. I felt myself falling into those gold-flecked eyes, our long gaze driving a thrill through me, a feeling close to fear and yet ecstatic. Aisha broke the moment first, taking her hand away to reach for her handbag and fuss for her cigarettes.

  I looked down at the table rather than meet her eyes. I tried to force a light tone, but just sounded manic. ‘I’ve got my own troubles anyway. Anne, my girlfriend, is coming out from England to visit me at the end of next week.’

  She froze for a second, her hand still in her bag. I had told her about Anne long before, but my girlfriend hadn’t been a topic of conversation between us precisely because I had avoided bringing it up.

  Aisha looked up at me and I cursed myself as I saw her strained face, her smile as bright and brittle as her voice.

  ‘You must be pleased. How long is she staying?’

  ‘For the week. She’ll go back just before the court case comes up.’

  ‘This will be her first time here?’

  ‘Yes. I honestly didn’t think she’d come at all. She’s very busy with her work.’

  Aisha lit her cigarette and puffed the smoke high into the air.