The Gulf Between Us Read online

  ‘I don’t know… Not if he’s got questions…’

  Actually, I couldn’t imagine my dad going to a meeting of any kind, least of all one about gay people.

  ‘I think he might be going senile.’

  ‘I don’t know, sounds the opposite of senile to me: making calls, going to meetings.’

  ‘Oh, I should have known you’d be like this!’ Karen sighed bitterly. ‘It’s all very well for you. You don’t have to deal with him. And Chris didn’t want gays in his family in the first place…’

  ‘He’d be much happier if he stopped being so bigoted.’

  Until Matt came out I’d hardly been aware of prejudice. I suppose I might have suffered, relatively, from being female: sometimes I suspected I’d been beguiled by romance as a means of corralling and containing my sexuality. But this was no one’s fault – no one had specifically said, ‘Let’s keep Annie Lewis’s sexuality under control by making her watch soppy films and read romantic novels.’ So I hadn’t noticed, because I’d grown up with it and hadn’t questioned it and anyway it was a really nice idea. But now Matt’s coming out had exposed me to rampant and barely‐disguised prejudice, to which, incredibly, I had previously been oblivious. I felt as though I had been sensitized, and would forever more have to examine people’s responses more carefully, for hidden thoughtlessness.

  ‘Yes, well, he’s how he is… Annie? Are you still there?’

  I explained that I’d had a disturbed night and promised that I’d talk to her properly about it when she’d found out exactly what kind of meeting was involved.

  James called in the middle of the afternoon, as he’d promised. He was affectionate, but clearly rushed, snatching a minute when he was off the set to speak to me. ‘Look, I’ve only got a sec,’ he apologized, ‘but there’s this trip to the desert being planned for Friday, on camels or something. Nezar’s organizing it. Would you like to come?’

  ‘With Nezar?’

  ‘And a few others. Not a big group, though.’

  ‘I’m not sure they’ll want me.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, of course they will. Anyway, I’ve asked you now… Look, I’m really sorry, but I’ve got to go.’

  ‘So,’ I told the boys over dinner that evening, ‘it’s obviously good that he’s asked me out again, but less good that it involves a load of other people.’

  ‘Maybe you’ll like them once you get to know them,’ Matt said unconvincingly.

  The main reason I didn’t like them was that they obviously didn’t like me, and I couldn’t see that changing.

  ‘I thought this James Hartley affair was supposed to be a big secret,’ Sam said. ‘So why’re you going out in, like, a big group?’

  ‘I suppose Al Maraj and Fiona Eckhart and those people don’t count.’

  ‘What, so his friends can be trusted and ours can’t?’

  ‘Not really … they’re part of the deal. The whole James Hartley thing.’

  ‘Oh well, I suppose even a crap date will be something to look back on afterwards.’

  ‘Sam, why are you being so hostile?’

  He shrugged. ‘I’m not. Go. But do you really think anything’s going to come of it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I thought teenage boys were supposed to like irresponsible shagging. ‘That’s not really the point.’

  Eight

  I was in the fruit and veg aisle of Al Jazira when it happened. We have big, brash supermarkets in Hawar – Saveway up near the compound, or the new Carrefour hypermarket in the Al Riqqa mall with their briskly air‐conditioned aisles, every imaginable pancake‐mix and sixty different types of salad dressing. But I tend to stick to Al Jazira, where I’d shopped since I arrived in the emirate, which is down a side road in central Qalhat. Parking is a nightmare and the shop looks a bit scruffy, but it sells organic vegetables and can be covered on foot in under half an hour.

  I was standing by the tomatoes when they moved in front of me. For a second they trembled in a bloody blur and then I realized the floor was trembling too and thought it must be me – that there was something wrong with me – and then the air seemed to rearrange itself, as something soundlessly frisked the room and everyone in it. And then I heard the noise: a rumble that started a long way off and rolled, over and over, penetrating right into us.

  For a moment, nobody spoke, absorbing the aftershock. It was as if an invisible hand had found its way in and fiddled with, disarranged us.

  ‘What d’you think that was?’ asked a European woman – I thought probably Greek – who was holding a cabbage in front of her like a shield.

  I wondered where Matt and Sam would be. I opened my mouth to answer the probably Greek woman but then it came again: the bounce and shudder, then the long reverberating boom unsettling the air, rattling the plate‐glass windows and jiggling the metal shutters, rocking the tins on their shelves and making the dry goods whisper.

  At first I thought the war must have started, or that Saddam had launched a pre‐emptive strike. A part of me was waiting for the nerve gas and thinking that it was undignified to die in the fruit and veg section of a supermarket, although somehow apt, and that if I could have chosen, I would have chosen a different end. More edifying. I considered for a moment picking up a tomato and taking a bite out of it because it would be better to be doing something than passively waiting to die – though, ideally, you’d want salt if a tomato was going to be your final meal. Still, at least eating would be living – but by the time these inane thoughts had flittered through my head, I’d realized I wasn’t going to fall in a blistered heap like the Kurds in Northern Iraq. The adrenalin was already seeping away, leaving a metallic‐tasting dread about what it could possibly mean.

  Someone who’d been by the door, or gone there after the explosions, came back with the news that there was no smoke or anything else to show where they’d occurred.

  ‘Must’ve been a long way off,’ someone said nervously. ‘The American embassy?’

  For a moment, we all looked each other defencelessly in the eye, and then we stiffened and turned away and fumbled for our mobile phones and called the people who mattered. I tried to reach Matt and Sam, but like everyone else in Al Jazira, I found it impossible to get through. The lines were all busy.

  I finished shopping sketchily – staring too long at the shelves or throwing things into my basket carelessly. I couldn’t remember any more what I’d come in for.

  Sitting in the traffic on the Al‐Liyah Highway, I tried to call the boys again and still couldn’t get a line. The road out to the port was closed. It took fifteen minutes to get round the Pearl roundabout and the traffic was at a standstill up the Jidda Road. Helicopters thudded overhead and sirens complained through the nearby streets, but it was impossible to get a sense of where they were heading until one rushed up behind you, blaring importantly, and even then you only knew that they were passing, going somewhere else.

  I switched on Radio Hawar, hoping for some kind of emergency bulletin, but they were playing The Eagles, so I switched it off again. Finally, half way up the Jidda Road, my phone rang and I snatched it up from the passenger seat, only to see that it wasn’t either of the boys. It was a number I didn’t recognize.

  My fingers were slippy with nerves. ‘Annie?’ James said. ‘Just checking you’re OK.’

  ‘Thank you. Yes, I’m fine. It’s good to hear you. But how did you get a line?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nezar knows someone.’

  That was typical. The film company could get a line because Al Maraj knew someone, even though they couldn’t possibly need one, otherwise why would James be calling me? Meanwhile there must be thousands of frantic parents trying to reach their children.

  ‘I haven’t been able to get hold of Matt or Sam, though. D’you know what happened?’

  ‘Suicide bombers. One tried to get on to the set, here at the port. Then there was a car bomb near our office.’

  ‘God, are you all right?’

  ‘I�
�m fine. A couple of our security guys are badly hurt. They may be dead: no one’s telling us much. A load of people have been taken to hospital… but they’re saying it was worse over at the office… Oh, hang on a minute, Nezar says d’you want us to try to get hold of Matt and Sam for you?’

  ‘Could you? Oh, please, James, if you could…’

  I gave him the numbers and laid the phone down on the passenger seat as carefully as if it were itself a bomb. It was good of him to have called me, and reassuring to hear his familiar, throaty voice.

  Gulf Films’ headquarters was more than a mile from the publishing company’s office on the edge of the souk, but Matt often went out on assignments. The diplomatic area, despite its name, was actually Qalhat’s upmarket business district, all banks and corporate headquarters, so Sam was unlikely to have been there but it wasn’t impossible… And half the people I knew worked in those tall buildings, sprouting like weeds on the thin soil of the reclaimed land.

  I’d crawled up the Jidda Road and taken most of the shopping indoors when James called again. ‘Spoken to them both,’ he reported cheerfully. ‘Matt’s at work, and Sam’s at someone called Faisal’s? In Jidda? Does that make sense?’

  ‘Oh, God, yes, thank you…’ I’d switched on the television as soon as I’d come in. Hawar TV was showing a documentary about Victoria Falls. There were no pictures yet on the satellite channels.

  ‘We told them you’re OK.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  (I found out later from Matt and Sam that Al Maraj had actually made the calls.)

  ‘I don’t understand,’ James was saying, ‘– Nezar promised it wasn’t like this. He said we’d be safer here than at home. He didn’t say there were going to be car bombs in the AmEx building.’

  I don’t know why I hadn’t realized, because I’d been to Gulf Films’ office to drop off the wedding invitation. But it was only now, when he said it, that I remembered which building they were in.

  His words sliced into the moment. There was before, when I hadn’t known, and after, when I did.

  ‘Millie!’

  ‘Someone you know?’

  ‘Maddi’s sister. She’s been working there.’

  ‘The one who looks like a model… ? Shit – but, look, I’m sure she’ll be OK.’

  ‘Yes.’ She would. Of course.

  He said they’d had to stop filming for the day and I asked if he wanted to come round.

  ‘Oh, I’d love to,’ he said with genuine regret, ‘but Rosie and I have got to run through a scene and I’m not even sure if I can get out of here…’

  ‘No, sure,’ I said feeling suddenly foolish.

  ‘I’ll see you on Friday. I can’t wait. I keep thinking about you. It’s very distracting.’

  I made tea, slowly and deliberately, as if I were making a point of being alive. As if just pouring the water into the teapot was an act of defiance and sitting down on the sofa was heroic. As if I’d been through something, even though I’d actually only been on the edge of something, mostly in the way of ambulances.

  I worried about Millie and whether I should call the Franklins, or Will – but this would have seemed like overreacting before there was any firm news – and what if they hadn’t heard yet where the bomb was? I flicked through the channels and found a report on Al Jazeera. I couldn’t make much sense of the Arabic, but the pictures were clear enough. The diplomatic area, our gleaming business district with its confident commercial architecture, its glass bubbles and metal shards, now looked like 1980s Beirut: smoky rubble, drifting dust, confusion. A litter of concrete lumps, bent metal, shattered glass.

  The phone rang and Will was on the line, his voice tight and struggling to stay steady. ‘We think Millie’s been hurt.’

  ‘Oh, Will…’

  ‘She’s alive. They’re taking her to the Hawari Defence Force Hospital. We don’t know how bad it is. Peter and Katherine are trying to get down there. They can’t get through the traffic. I thought…’ he trailed off, in disbelief, ‘I thought I’d better check you’re all OK.’

  ‘Yes. We are. I heard the explosions. Everything shook. The others are fine.’ I told him what James had told me, but I didn’t know what else to say. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Maddi’s on her way home from work. She may come out to Hawar.’

  ‘Can I do anything?’

  ‘Not yet. When we know, maybe.’

  ‘Are you going home?’

  ‘Yes. There’s a call coming in. It might be her. I’ll have to go. I’ll let you know.’

  Mainly because of the film stars, the Hawar bombs were a big news story all over the world. There were pictures of James Hartley and Rosie Rossiter on all the satellite channels and the front pages of newspapers and soon people who hadn’t previously heard of Hawar could have told you where it was. On the inside pages of the papers there were potted histories of the emirate, explaining the recent introduction of limited democracy and the rise of the Islamists, and asking whether the Hawar bombers were likely to be linked to Al Qaeda or to represent a new kind of home‐grown, autonomous Islamic militancy.

  What seemed to have been established was that a twenty‐one‐year‐old Hawari with home‐made explosives strapped around his waist had tried to walk through security on to the film set down at the old port, killing two Pakistani security guards and injuring three Hawaris, a French woman and a Filipino. A second man, aged twenty‐three, with the same kind of explosives packed into the boot of his ancient Toyota Corolla, had accelerated off the road over the rough, stony ground of the diplomatic area and into the reinforced plate‐glass front of the AmEx building, killing one Sri Lankan, one Egyptian and one Indian, and injuring twenty‐five other people, including Millie.

  Both bombers had come from Ghafir, the village closest to Al Janabiyya. Police cars had been screeching and bumping up and down the unmade track beyond the compound gate all day.

  The reporting had a hysterical air. Sam and I found ourselves watching some American politician on CNN insisting that the film stars should be brought home and attacking the producers for making them come to what he called a terrorist region.

  ‘Oh, great,’ Sam said, ‘a couple of losers from Ghafir work out how to make a bomb and the entire region is populated by terrorists.’

  ‘Oh, look, even better: it’s Mohammed Alireza.’ The internet and cassette tape cleric was standing outside the mosque by the Hafeet roundabout, slim and impeccably thobed, explaining to a BBC reporter the background to sunni–shi’a tension in Hawar. ‘Do they have to give him airtime? Why can’t they get someone normal on? I suppose that’s not what they want, sensible people. They want mad mullahs.’

  ‘He’s not mad.’

  ‘What, apart from the whole cosmic struggle thing?’

  ‘It’s just talk, all that. He’s the only serious opposition to the Al Majid.’

  It seemed to me like the Al Majid were quite capable of creating their own opposition from among themselves. ‘People outside the country will think everyone here talks like that. Like we’re all waiting for an apocalypse.’

  ‘Mum, you’re not listening to what he’s saying…’

  ‘They’re making him look like he matters, that’s the trouble.’

  A picture of Millie filled the screen. Someone had taken it at the wedding: her head was half‐turned and her eyes were wide and expectant, her mouth open in the beginning of a smile. She looked so beautiful you’d have thought she couldn’t be touched by trouble. She was in intensive care; her doctors were saying her condition was stable.

  It took a while for Maddi to sort things out with her new employers and by the time she could get away, the planes to Hawar were full of journalists. The only seat she could get was on an overnight flight; she arrived on Wednesday morning, a day and a half after the attacks.

  I offered to pick her up so her parents wouldn’t have to leave the hospital, but Peter wanted to collect her. He said he needed to prepare her.

  Maddi herself
called me on Wednesday evening, to report that Millie was doing OK but that she couldn’t talk much now because they were about to have a meeting with the doctors. She suggested I meet her the following afternoon, once school was finished, so, on Thursday, I drove south out of Qalhat for about forty minutes along a highway that sliced across the scrub, leading into the desert, going nowhere else. At the end of it, the shimmering white edifice of the hospital reared up, vast and lonely in a moonscape of salmon pink shale. It was typical, somehow, that this hospital was here with its world‐class facilities and highly qualified staff, part of the twenty‐first century, raring to go, while all around it camels grazed in a baking, wind‐scarred desert that was working to a different time scale. It was, like so many things here, at once dynamic and utterly precarious.

  There was a lot of security round the hospital – armed guards at the entrance to the car park, four wheel drives dotted round the perimeter fence – and I remembered that the emir was here too. I parked the car and went inside, shivering in the hospital’s attack‐mode air conditioning. Presently, Maddi came downstairs, emerging from one of the banks of lifts, her face both drawn and swollen, her eyes red. She hadn’t washed her hair.

  I steered her towards the coffee shop and collected a couple of cappuccinos. Then we sat down and I asked about Millie.

  ‘She’s got this thing – did I say last night? – blast lung injury. She’s still in ICU because of it, but they seem to be managing it… when you’re that close to an explosion, it can sort of collapse your lungs. You can’t breathe. Her lungs are torn, is how they put it. And there’s a lot of swelling…’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘They think they can deal with that. Her face is cut, though. She got hit by some of the flying glass.’

  Millie had been outside the building, coming back from lunch.

  ‘You know,’ Maddi raked her fingers through her limp hair, ‘I keep hoping that at the last minute the bombers realized it was all a horrible mistake: there was no heaven and no seventy virgins and they were just deluded and small and stupidly destructive.’