Daniela’s lip curled up sharply in frustration. ‘Damn, I’m bored,’ she announced loudly.
Amanda placed an arm around her lover’s shoulders but Daniela shrugged it off. ‘Not here,’ she warned.
Amanda mouthed an obscenity and opened her book, a detective novel she had picked up in an English-language bookshop in Cairo. The story was lurid, the writing soporific and the mystery self-evident, but she and Daniela had exhausted their supply of books and it was the only one she hadn’t read. It was an awful book but a rapid read, and in all likelihood with the plane delayed she would finish it before they boarded. She read two paragraphs and then slapped it shut. It was terrible. She saw that Daniela was rereading The Edible Woman.
Amanda peered over her spectacles at a young broad-faced Egyptian man in thick grey overalls leaning on his mop. He was staring intently at both of them. She frowned, but that only made his face break out in an inane grin. He stared even more intently. She was sure that his right hand was jiggling in the pocket of his overalls. For God’s sake. She was so weary of that, but this time she didn’t groan out loud, not wanting to alert Daniela to the man’s attentions. Daniela would be both offended and confused, her feminist ire conflicting with her cultural sensitivities. Amanda’s Arabic was limited to Salaam Alaikum, Merhaba, Shkrun, Bekam and La. When they reached Amman she was determined to find someone who would translate for her the phrase ‘I am old enough to be your mother’. She was probably much older than his mother.
The tender-aged mothers and the boyish fathers: she had noticed them from their first day in Istanbul. It had been the same throughout southern Turkey and Egypt. She was sure it would be no different in Jordan. She had expected it of the women; all the usual prejudiced crap, of course, that the Arabs kept their women barefoot and pregnant, as if Arabic culture was some ludicrous mirror of backwoods Georgia or outback Western Australia. Nevertheless, all that bigotry had to be there in her head too, because she had not been thrown by the young women who looked like girls holding their babies or chasing after their children. The youth of the fathers had been more shocking. She had been taken aback to see baby-faced Turkish youths carrying their sons through the markets; and a working man in a small town south of Izmir arriving home for lunch, his son and two daughters rushing around him, his oil-streaked uniform almost slipping off his slight shoulders. He had seemed so young. Back home, boys his age were still locked in their rooms playing video games and delaying the responsibilities of adulthood for as long as possible.
Wherever she and Daniela had travelled, she could not help thinking about Eric. She wished she had fallen pregnant younger. Eric’s adolescence was exhausting. She loved him, but he could be such a snappy, moody little shit. It seemed fantastical to imagine him coping with a job and three young children, but surely he was only a few years younger than the boy she’d seen on the outskirts of Izmir? She kept telling herself that being away from Eric for six weeks was not a bad thing; in fact, it was positive: good for him to be spending more time with his father and stepmother. But wherever they went she was constantly reminded of her son.
In the end she didn’t manage to finish the book. The plane lifted, they flew across a stretch of golden desert and then seemed to follow the coastline of the dazzling sea. Every few minutes it seemed Daniela was exclaiming, I think that’s Beirut, no, maybe that’s Tyre, oh I think that’s Tel Aviv, is that Tel Aviv? Oh my God, is that Jerusalem? No, I think that’s Haifa. Then all of a sudden, first in Arabic, then in French and finally in English, a steward was announcing their descent into Amman.
The proximity of the world in the northern hemisphere was startling, astonishing. They had just passed over three countries, a desert, two seas and the juncture of three continents in less time than it took her to drive across Melbourne to visit her mother. Amanda gripped tight to her armrests, preparing herself for the stomach-churning moment when the plane’s wheels unfolded and it prepared to touch the earth. She refused to cross herself, thought touching wood superstitious. Her ritual was to count to seven, over and over.
They had landed. They were safe.
They had booked three nights in Amman, and that was one night too long. After the ferocious scale of Istanbul and then Cairo, the compactness of the Jordanian capital was pleasing. But after a visit to the Roman ruins, a half-day getting lost in the labyrinth of the ugly, congested downtown area, and another half-day wandering the national museum, there was nothing much left for them to do. It was not impossible to buy alcohol but the cafés and restaurants they found themselves in did not serve any, and the nightlife — at least that which was visible to tourists — was not the kind to attract two middle-aged women.
It did not help that on the second day Daniela developed a stomach bug. Amanda thought she should stay in the room and rest, but Daniela would not hear of it. She was determined to see the ancient amphitheatre of Philadelphia.
‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine,’ she said, but she wasn’t bloody fine. She followed Amanda around with a pained expression, putting on a stoical smile whenever her lover glanced back at her. It nearly drove Amanda mad. That smile oozed martyrdom.
The stone steps of the amphitheatre were steep, and the desert sun was already broiling by mid-morning. Daniela looked sullen when Amanda announced that she wanted to climb to the top.
‘It looks slippery.’
‘It looks perfectly manageable.’
‘Can’t we head back to the hotel? I don’t feel well.’
‘Then you should have stayed in the room.’ And with that, Amanda started to climb, not once looking back. When she reached the summit, sweat was running down her neck and back. There were only a few other tourists wandering the ruins below. She spotted Daniela sitting on a large slab of stone shaded by the eastern wall. Her frustration and annoyance vanished at once. A stomach bug was a miserable thing on a holiday; it was bad enough when it happened at home. She took one last look at the miniscule world below, the jumble of concrete and power lines, the narrow streets and laneways of the city.
She carefully walked back to earth and sat down beside Daniela. ‘Let’s go back to the hotel. I want to escape this bloody sun. I’ll write postcards and you can rest.’
‘Are you sure?’ Daniela’s tone was timid. Amanda nodded vigorously. Daniela’s answering smile was grateful and relieved.
•
‘Your driver is waiting for you, madam.’
The young clerk at the desk spoke English with a faint American accent. He was spindly thin, with a neatly trimmed black goatee, which he would stroke gently when faced with a request or a question. On their first afternoon there, the women had returned to the hotel to change for dinner and had found him praying on a small mat next to the desk. They had waited for him to finish before asking for the key and he had bowed to them and thanked them profusely. Amanda wondered what he thought of them, these two women sharing a room, no wedding rings on their fingers, no sign of husbands. But if he thought it at all unsavoury, his manner did not show it. He had been charming and polite from the beginning.
‘Shukrun, Ahmed,’ she said as she handed him back the key. ‘It was a wonderful stay.’
Their driver, Hassan, was a large stout man in an olive-coloured ironed shirt and white linen trousers. He picked up both their bags as though they weighed nothing at all, and grinned cheerfully as he opened the rear door of the car for them.
‘Would you mind if I sat in the front seat?’ Amanda asked.