She sat next to him and told him a joke, but Fahd was still dwelling on his failure. At last he got up, got dressed and gave her a sad smile.
‘Shall we go?’
Going over to the dressing table she took a pack of slender Davidoff cigarettes from her handbag and lit one, blowing the smoke into the room. She handed it to him and he took a single drag then returned it to her, saying, ‘Sometimes I think about what’s changed in our relationship: how I start to feel afraid before we even touch, how even as we’re fooling around and kissing I’m worrying I won’t get it up … and then I end up failing for real.’
Tarfah didn’t fully understand what lay behind this but she worried that their love really had begun to wither, that one day, not long off now, she would lose him. Who would fill his absence? She laughed to herself, remembering that she had the same thoughts about Khaled, who had devoured her body for fully three years, and now here came Fahd al-Safeelawi invading her life and making her forget her former lover.
The life she led with her four-year-old, Sara, was so much lovelier than time wasted with these wretches, she thought to herself, But what can I do when my instincts take over? How can I quench the flames? I’m tired of taking care of myself and I don’t want another woman in place of a man. How I hate that! Whenever Nada comes close to whisper in my ear, or puts her arm about my neck and pulls me towards her to say something, or presses herself against me it disgusts me more than I can say. ‘I don’t like girls rubbing up against me!’ I shout at her and she and cousin Samia laugh and Samia, that idiot, says, ‘So you like boys doing it, then?’
Sometimes Samia’s stories astonished her, like the time she told Tarfah about those everything-for-two-riyal stores crammed with junk where the only floor space left were narrow passageways just wide enough for a single person. In the crowds that came during festivals and at the start of the school term young men would squeeze past her and bump against her on purpose. She paid no attention and did nothing.
‘Let them have their fun, poor things!’ she would say, shaking with laughter.
Tarfah embraced Fahd by the door and he pulled her slim hips violently towards him then lifted her plump hand and gave it a chaste kiss. In the lift there was only enough time to raise her veil and snatch a quick kiss between the second and ground floors. Handing her the car keys he issued rapid intructions. ‘Walk straight out to the car and wait till I’ve finished with him.’
Handing over the flat after just two or three hours was tricky, and he launched into his oft-repeated lie, this time asking about the Nuwara wedding hall. When the Egyptian receptionist professed his ignorance, Fahd told him that it was on Qaseem Road; did he know it? Shamefaced, the Egyptian shook his head and said that he was new in town, all he knew was this building, to which Fahd, bringing the conversation to its natural conclusion, said, ‘We’re off to a wedding. If we’re not back by one, consider the flat free and the deposit’s yours.’
The Egyptian grinned gratefully and thanked him.
On Tahliya Street the luxury vehicles coasted slowly by, blaring music as they went, and young men sat chatting in cafés. When he reached Coffee Day he asked her if she wanted an Americano or a cappuccino. She declined. He took out a rose and sniffed gaily at it, but it only made him feel intensely sad. He nearly wept as he thought of his life.
After he left her at the mall, she didn’t call him for an hour. He showered and switched on the television and then phoned her and asked, ‘Where are you?’
She was yet to leave the mall. Her brother hadn’t come. This time he felt her reproach more strongly. He hadn’t given his lover what she needed; his soul wasn’t what it was, his heart was just a witless blood pump. After switching off the light he wept and told himself it was a good thing Saeed wasn’t there because this was a golden chance to make fun of him.
Tarfah rang. She was doing her best to sound cheerful but her voice was sad. She was practically certain that there was another woman in his life and that he, so sensitive, didn’t have it in himself to break her heart. He tried convincing her that he was going through a tough time with his sick mother, but gave none of the details about his personal life that she was looking for. Their conversations were about love and longing, or about the scandalous friends she described with sweet sarcasm, or about his problems with painting, his ambitions and his negative views of Saudi artists.
— 48 —
FAHD HAD HAD NOTHING all day except a dried-up donut taken from the fridge and a cup of filter coffee. He had been wholly absorbed by his painting, Mecca. He was wired. In his mind sat Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, and facing it, an image of an uncovered marketplace in the small Basque town with warplanes overhead pouring down fire and obliterating the strolling citizens.
He painted a rooftop, broad as a desert and surrounded by minarets, and corpses sprawled all over the canvas, heads riddled with sniper rounds and trucks transporting the dead like crates of aubergines and tomatoes.
Fahd sometimes wondered what had caused him to love art so, to become addicted to the heady reek of oils. Was it a true passion, a hidden need to express what lay within him? Was it a response to the prophecy of Mustafa, the Sudanese artist he had met as a boy with his father in Thalatheen Street? Was it merely a stubborn, perverse desire to crush his uncle, always bellowing that on the Day of Judgement Fahd would be asked to breathe life into his creations?
He started to make a preliminary sketch for the painting, laying down pencil lines angrily and sadly. Then he threw the sketch away and began another until, with the tragedy and drama of Guernica in his thoughts, he made the decision to paint in only two colours, black and white. He drew widely scattered circles, heads like fat melons in a big field with small holes from which black liquid ran out to the earth.
He was working away, sighing from time to time with suppressed exasperation, when it suddenly occurred to him that a painting finished in anger would turn out excessively sentimental and he had better calm down a little. Taking a cup of coffee he went over to his father’s bag.
He opened it and rummaged through the books and papers, taking out the olive stone prayer beads and turning them one by one between his thumb and index finger, before returning to his chair beside the canvas.
He picked up a brush and painted one stone white then another grey. This pleased him: a fresh distraction that lifted his burden of worry. Squeezing a tube of red he deposited a quantity the size of a small bird’s talon on a stone and with his thumb smeared the paint over its surface until it was bright red all over. He did the same with another stone in yellow, then another in green, and so on until the dull loop had been transformed into an African song, warm and pulsing with life. It was as though he had restored the prayer beads to life.
His phone’s message tone trilled. He made no move to get up and ten minutes later it sounded again. Laying the prayer beads on the palette he slowly made his way over to the pocket of his thaub and read the two messages, one from Tarfah and one from Lulua: Fahd, Mum’s been asking for you since yesterday.
He went back to the canvas hanging on the easel and contemplated the corpses, sprawled chaotically and absurdly. He heard the door of the flat slowly open then close, and measured footsteps proceed to the kitchen that opened out on to the small living room. Water poured into a cup and glugged into a thirsty body. There was the light tap of the glass on the kitchen table, then Saeed’s voice a few paces away: ‘Superb, Fahd! You really are a great artist!’