Death by Perfume Page 4

  A black silhouette pushed through the crowd and grabbed the back of Albert’s collar, landing a fist directly on his face, showing absolutely no mercy. Completely unprepared for this, Albert was defenceless, and crashed hard onto the floor.

  The screams of the crowd grew sharp, and I was shocked too. The scene threatened to disintegrate into confusion. Someone turned on the overhead light and we saw that the dark figure was Steven. He looked like a wounded beast, teeth and claws flashing as he launched himself again at the prone Albert. Several of the men grabbed hold of him, while others helped Albert to his feet. Although he’d only sustained one blow, it had been delivered with such force that his face was badly bruised, blood spurting from his nose. His lips trembled with shock, and his bleary eyes seemed unable to focus. Steven was gripped so tightly he might as well have been bound by thick ropes, and still he glared as if he wished he could shoot bullets from his eyes directly into Albert’s body. All I could hear was his voice, roaring, “Out, get out of my house, you son of a bitch!”

  Albert dabbed at his bleeding nose, afraid to even look in Steven’s direction. Like a beaten dog, he slunk out of the main door with his head lowered.

  Gloria remained slumped on the floor, covering her face with both hands. Without a word, the guests exited one by one, leaving only the Latin music playing into emptiness, its beat as vigorous as ever. It echoed in my ear and felt, at that moment, unspeakably sad.

  • • •

  After that party, neither of us dared to contact Steven or Gloria, afraid to say the wrong thing and make an awkward situation worse. Word of the incident quickly spread through the expat community, and although it was Steven who struck the first blow, the general attitude was sympathetic towards him. It was generally reckoned that Albert got exactly what he deserved, and when the conversation turned to Gloria, many could only shake their heads and sigh, “Ah, that woman!”

  Gloria left Jeddah two days after the party, returning to the States.

  Would they get a divorce after this? Steven wasn’t saying, and no one wanted to ask directly. It was noticeable that he was now even less talkative than before, throwing himself even more into his work. He never mentioned Gloria, as if he’d plucked her entirely from his memory.

  Could he really have forgotten her? In my experience, those whose affections ran in only one direction tended to have especially deep emotions.

  The blow he landed on Albert was actually a direct hit to his own heart. And while Albert’s flesh wounds would heal over time, Steven’s internal injuries might well continue to bleed for the duration of his life.

  Summer departed and winter arrived (there are only two seasons in the desert). One day, out buying cold-weather clothes for Danny, we bumped into Steven. His face lit up by a smile we saw too rarely these days, he announced, “Gloria’s coming to Jeddah next Tuesday for a short visit. We must have you round for dinner then.”

  I smiled blandly. His love did indeed run deep. He might not be able to forget what had happened, but he could certainly forgive it.

  A gust of wind assaulted us, and I shoved my hands into my coat pockets. Winter had arrived in Jeddah, but the cruel winter in Steven’s soul was just abating now.

  Would Gloria only display her peacock tail to her husband in the future? From Steven’s beaming face, I could tell this wasn’t the most pressing question on his mind at the moment. More important, from his point of view, was that he and she would soon be together for yet another short-lived reunion.

  Missing

  MARGARET AND I got to know each other in unusual circumstances.

  Later on in our friendship, we often found ourselves recalling those circumstances, and each time we’d laugh helplessly, although afterwards I’d find a chill running down my spine at the memory.

  Margaret was British, and like me was in Saudi Arabia because of her husband’s work, here in Jeddah by the Red Sea.

  We first met on a Thursday. James needed to be in the main office around eleven, and I took the opportunity to accompany him to the city centre, where I planned to visit Bab Makkah.

  Bab Makkah was a shopping street full of Arabic atmosphere. A long, broad thoroughfare branching off into numerous alleyways, all crammed with shops that sold countless varieties of traditional clothes, food, and other objects. The whole area seemed permanently packed with people day and night, who knows where they all came from. Every inch of space was filled with throngs of humanity, the reek of sweat, the cacophony of the crowd.

  While visiting local friends, I’d sampled date-palm paste—a dessert found in every household here. It was made by crushing thoroughly ripe date-palm fruit and baking it. I found it enjoyably sweet and fragrant, without being cloying. Apart from killing time, my goal in coming to Bab Makkah that day was also to buy a kilogramme of the stuff to slowly enjoy with the family.

  The day was astonishingly hot. After walking a short distance, I was already drenched in sweat.

  There were many stalls selling date-palm paste, but none of them looked particularly hygienic. Flies swarmed around them, while the stallholders shed perspiration like rain, drops of salty sweat landing on the chunks of dessert. The sight was enough to make me lose my appetite.

  Walking slowly through the crowd, I turned a corner to see a golden-haired lady buying date-palm paste from an older man, his red headscarf and white robes immaculate.

  “I’ll buy from him, then!” I said to myself.

  The brown squares of date-palm paste laid out on the stall probably added up to a few dozen kilogrammes. I grabbed a plastic bag and began filling it, tossing in pieces of the treat while sampling the odd bite, relishing the taste.

  From not far away, a mosque sounded its languid call to prayer, and the stall-owner turned to the two of us, mumbling something in Arabic. Not understanding him, I continued to make my selection, still popping pieces into my mouth. Then a jumble of footsteps came from outside, and I looked up to see a whip flashing past my line of vision, landing squarely on the old man’s body. The wrinkles on his lined face squashed together in pain, as if he were a piece of paper that had been crumpled. He moaned and tumbled to the floor. The incident took me by such surprise that I could only stare open-mouthed, rooted to the ground. The foreign lady next to me was terrified too. Her hands, full of plastic bags, were trembling. The policeman with the whip glared at us and said, coldly, “It’s prayer time. No trading allowed.”

  Barely were the words out of his mouth before his whip was flying towards another stall-owner who hadn’t managed to put away his wares in time. The victim howled as he fell to the ground, and the others around him, seeing what was happening, hastily prostrated themselves, facing towards Mecca and praying. The entire situation was sheer chaos.

  The other lady thrust her icy hand into mine and said, in English, “Go, let’s go!” Roused from my stupor, I followed her through the alleyways of Bab Makkah, heading for the main road. Even though piles of stinking rubbish lay everywhere, the Arabic people we passed were kneeling amongst them, reciting from the Koran, the sound reverberating into every corner.

  We walked on, urgently, finally reaching the main street with its endless stream of cars. The foreign lady looked at my pale face and asked, kindly, “You—are you all right?”

  “I’m okay,” I forced myself to answer, although my heart was still thumping wildly.

  “Let’s go get a cup of coffee. How about that?”

  I nodded.

  Not far from Bab Makkah was a famous coffee house, serving beans from all over the world. The combination of aromas lingered on my clothes each visit, so pungent that even washing couldn’t remove them. I’d been there with James several times, and enjoyed the sensation of drinking our brew surrounded by so many other fragrant scents. The only problem was there weren’t any seats—customers stood at long tables as they drank.

  I ordered a bitter Turkish coffee that contained a hint of sweetness, while the other woman got a richly aromatic Italian blend.

  Holding our steaming cups, we had the sensation of awakening from a nightmare.

  Introducing ourselves, I learnt that her name was Margaret, that she came from Birmingham, England. Her husband Dale, a mechanical engineer, was on a two-year contract at a refinery. They’d been here just six months.

  I’d always known that prayers in Saudi Arabia were required five times daily (these times were printed in a prominent position in the newspaper every day). What I hadn’t realised was that all activity was required to stop at these times, nor that local policemen would arrive with whips to deal with those who forgot or failed to prostrate themselves in time! The scene we’d just witnessed had left me thoroughly shaken.

  Margaret glanced at me and sighed gently. “It looks as if there are many things we still have to get used to.”

  I nodded in silence.

  • • •

  In the desert, where life was as monotonous as a sheet of blank paper, friendships were as welcome as rain after a long drought. Before long, Margaret’s family and ours had become close.

  Margaret was a carefree soul. Her face was smooth as a gleaming slick of water, belying her true age. Many Westerners’ eyes looked like marbles embedded in their sockets, but Margaret’s didn’t have even a hint of falseness, only a beguiling, lively blue colour, delicate and playful.

  Her husband Dale was the opposite—a quiet man, his silence so heavy he often seemed depressed. His moustache was a couple of diagonal strokes, droopingly lifeless, as if the Chinese character for eight (八) had crawled there and fallen asleep.

  Margaret and Dale had been married ten years. They had a five-year-old child, whom they’d left behind in Birmingham. Their apartment was located in one of Jeddah’s high-end residential districts, a peaceful, eleg
ant area.

  Now that we were friends, Margaret frequently invited me to her home for afternoon tea. During our conversations, she alluded frankly to the difficulty of living in such a conservative country.

  “In Birmingham, while Dale was at work, I could drive the car wherever I wanted—free as a bird. But now, I might as well be locked up in prison.”

  Although I too had my moments of torment, Saudi Arabia was a brand new world to me, and there were many things I wanted to explore. Quite honestly, I had no complaints about my temporary new home.

  Hearing my viewpoint, Margaret shook her head, uncomprehending. “I’m not like you. Being here is no fun at all. If it wasn’t for our mortgage, I definitely wouldn’t have come.”

  “Mortgage? What mortgage?” I asked.

  “We bought a bungalow in Birmingham. You know how heavy the levies are in Britain. We worked out that on Dale’s salary, it’d take us twenty years to pay off the debt.”

  “Twenty years!” I was startled. “You’d be retired by that time.”

  “Exactly! Dale and I didn’t want to be mortgage slaves our whole lives. So we’ll suffer here for two years, and if all goes well, by the time we go home we’ll be able to pay off most of our debt.”

  Ah, a mortgage. Bearing such a burden on one’s shoulders, coming to Saudi Arabia for work and finding the environment hostile—how bitter that must feel. No wonder Dale was perpetually downcast, no wonder he seldom spoke.

  I tried to take a philosophical view, and generally looked on the brighter side of life. When I ran into trouble, I consoled myself with the saying: “When approaching the harbour, the boat naturally straightens”. Life in the desert might be dull and arduous, but I refused to spend my days locked in a fortress of despair. What will be, will be. What’s the use of torturing yourself?

  Perhaps it was my adaptable personality that made Margaret treat me as her confidante.

  A week before Christmas, the holiday most important to Westerners, she reminded me over and over, “Remember, you’re coming to my house for Christmas dinner.”

  She was extremely busy during that time, dragging the Christmas spirit to the desert with colourful ornaments, baking cakes and puddings to delight us with. In this festive atmosphere, none of us imagined that just a couple of days after Christmas, a heart-shattering event would befall them, nor could Margaret have known her stay in the desert would soon be cut short!

  Margaret’s house was beautifully decorated for Christmas. Her twelve guests sat around a long table, on which a golden turkey rested on a white serving platter, silently gleaming with a greasy sheen. The plastic tree by the table, strung with baubles of all colours, blinked and twinkled as if refusing to be left out.

  We sang carol after melodious carol, and with the music, homesickness crept into our hearts. We’d all come to this faraway place to make a living. In the words of Tang Dynasty poet Wang Wei: “Alone, a stranger in a strange land / Every festival, thoughts of family increase.”

  This should have been a night of pure celebration, but Dale seemed even more silent than ever, even more depressed. To prevent him from dragging the mood down, Margaret spoke more and laughed louder than anyone else, but there was no joy in her laughter, and it sounded merely hollow.

  After the meal, I found an opportunity to ask Margaret, “What’s going on with Dale? He seems to have something on his mind.”

  “He’s just sulking.”

  “Did you—did the two of you have a fight?”

  “A fight? Not at all! We were supposed to spend this Christmas back in Birmingham, but a senior employee at Dale’s company chose this time to hand in his letter of resignation, and we were forced to stay behind. Dale’s like me, he hates it here and can’t wait to get back to England. There’s nothing wrong with him but homesickness.”

  Home, how sweet that sounded. Who wouldn’t wish they were home! I heaved a long sigh, and said nothing more.

  • • •

  Two days after Christmas, misfortune beset Dale.

  That morning, less than an hour after James had left for work, he rushed back to our little white house.

  I was resting in bed with a book, and before I could ask what had happened, he informed me with an anxiety-filled voice: “Dale’s gone missing!”

  “Missing?” I sat up in bed, flinging down my book, unwilling to believe this could be true. “Dale, gone missing?”

  “That’s right.” His voice was heavy with sorrow and sympathy. “Margaret phoned me this morning, saying he hadn’t come home all night. She phoned his office, and not one person knew his whereabouts!”

  Thinking of all the horror stories I’d heard, my voice shook as I asked clumsily, “He—could he have met with an accident and died?”

  “How should I know?” James’s brow creased. “Let’s not talk about that now. I came back to bring you over to Margaret’s. You’ll need to do your best to comfort her. She’s pretty unstable right now.”

  James rushed us over to their apartment, then returned home with Danny. Margaret’s friend Jenny, another Englishwoman, answered the door, saying to me in a low voice, “Margaret’s just had a sedative. She didn’t sleep a wink all last night!”

  Walking in, I saw Margaret lying on the sofa. Her appearance was a great shock—she seemed to have become a stranger in the course of a single night. Her glossy, golden hair, dulled by worry, had become pale and limp. Together with that bloodless face and eyes like a dead fish, her appearance was tragic enough to draw sobs of pity.

  I knelt by her side and clutched her cold hand, trying to soften my voice. “Margaret, nothing will happen to Dale. You need to have faith!” After hesitating a moment, I added, “If you want to cry, cry as much as you like. Don’t try to hold it in.”

  She withdrew her hand and buried her face in her palms, remaining silent.

  After a long, long time, she squeezed out a few words. “Give me a cigarette.”

  I hurriedly passed her one.

  She took several puffs before uttering, in a voice that expressed the exhaustion of someone who’d just walked thousands of miles, “How could this happen? I don’t understand! It’s like a bad dream. So terrifying, but so real!”

  “All nightmares must come to an end.”

  “As long as he comes back safe and sound, I won’t ask for anything else…” she mumbled.

  Just then, the phone rang, piercing the silence. Jenny picked up the receiver and spoke in a low voice for quite a while. When she finally hung up, her expression was heavy and she looked hesitantly at Margaret for some time before getting the words out. “That was the British embassy. They haven’t been able to uncover any information about his whereabouts. But they’ll keep trying.”

  The cigarette in Margaret’s hand began to tremble violently, scattering ash over her dress. I was no longer able to hold back my tears, and quickly turned away as they gushed down my face.

  Jenny walked over and plucked the cigarette from Margaret’s fingers, then put her arm around the other woman’s shoulders, comforting her with gentle words. After some time, Margaret stood up, her skin ashen, and walked towards her room, tumbling into bed with her face to the wall.

  I continued to sit in the living room with Jenny, completely silent. Neither of us was willing to open our mouths, afraid of inadvertently saying some inauspicious word.

  At noon, we made some sandwiches and brought them to Margaret with a glass of milk. She was in the depths of despair and, no matter how we urged her, refused to eat or drink a single mouthful. The milk got tepid and the sandwiches dried out, while Margaret continued to lie motionless, facing the wall.

  When James came to fetch me in the evening, she leapt out of bed at once and cried, her face full of torment, “What’s happened? Is there any news?”