Yousef Al-Mohaimeed - Where Pigeons Don't Fly

Summer had begun, he supposed. Ice cream vans were scattered about, along with sellers of Wadi melons, pomegranates from Ta’if and dates and milk from Qaseem. People straggled down both sides of Thamama Road into the early hours, searching for a cool breeze in the Nejd nights whose like was to be found nowhere else in the world.

His mobile rang and it was Tarfah, promising to wait for him. He had assumed that she was at Granada Mall but she said she would wait for him at a clinic. ‘When you get to Abraj Street call me, and I’ll come to you.’

He was returning from a weekend place belonging to friends and had taken Abraj Street heading south in the direction of the Knowledge Clinic where Tarfah was waiting. He drove past it, then turned right down a side street as she had requested, so the people by the door and the receptionist wouldn’t notice that she had got out of one car (her brother Ayman’s) and left in another.

She got in and they set off for Quds then doubled back to the eastern extension of King Abdul Aziz Road. When he reached the traffic lights by Jarir, his face to the east, she signalled to him, her finger concealed from the eyes of other motorists, that he should turn back in the opposite direction. He turned, driving past Panda then Jarir, and they took the southbound Eastern Ring Road.

On their left, in Quds and Roda, they noticed a number of furnished flats on offer, and picking a complex, Fahd parked the sea-blue Hyundai outside the entrance as the street filled with people emerging from the sunset prayer.

From the glove compartment he took out a folded copy of a forged marriage certificate that Saeed had procured for him that day: ‘This is for you to use in emergencies!’ The Sudanese receptionist pretended to inspect it without moving his eyes from a card game on his computer screen. The price of an apartment was 250 riyals, he said. Fahd handed him the money and he began to enter their details, continuing to click on the mouse and move cards across the screen as though locked in a life or death struggle for victory.

‘Go and get your luggage,’ he said, desperate to carry on with his game.

‘I don’t have any,’ Fahd said. ‘We’ve only come for a wedding in Riyadh.’

The receptionist returned the certificate and handed him the key to the flat. Fahd went back to the car then they went together into the lift, embracing passionately as he said apologetically, ‘Sorry sweetheart, there are no lights in furnished flats!’

She laughed out loud as he opened the door and they crept into flat 101. Like any nosy woman she headed for the kitchen and opened the cupboards, then the fridge, and inspected the dark brown sofas in the living room.

They went to the bedroom. She removed her abaya , revealing her uncovered shoulders and gave her familiar smile, that delicious grin both coy and impudent. Her hair was soft and her breasts were alive with anticipation; part of her bra was visible, an elastic strap covered in striped red satin. As always she rushed to his mouth, devouring it hungrily as she pulled off his shimagh and whispered, ‘That’s better!’ then let out an unexpected laugh as she threw her body on to the bed.

He asked her why she had laughed and she turned her face away, ‘It’s nothing!’ and busied herself with stroking his chest. He stopped her. Taken aback, he asked her why she had laughed like that. He remembered Thuraya, who as he departed after their first meeting had told him that he looked funny naked, scampering into the bathroom like a rat making for a drain!

He felt unexpectedly irritated. His mood clouded as he insisted she tell him. She laughed and explained that she was too embarrassed to say. Summoning a strained smile he coaxed her to speak.

‘I’m worried you’ll be angry,’ she said.

He hugged her, kissing her neck and earlobe and whispering, ‘How could I be cross with my Taroufi?’

‘My friend Nada saw a picture of you on the forum standing next to one of your pictures at a group exhibition …’ She roared with laughter, her hand clamped over her mouth, and said, ‘I can’t … I can’t … Fahd, please don’t embarrass me …’

‘Come on!’ he said impatiently. ‘Tell the story!’

Still laughing, Tarfah told him that Nada had said that he had looked ridiculous standing next to the website’s owner; his pale skin, red hair and shimagh had made him look like one of the darfours in the Lipton Tea adverts: a whitey. He frowned slightly, and laughed to humour her. Why darfour ? How had the word first found its way to this racist society? If you came from the Eastern Mediterranean, that’s what they called you. They had said it to him at school when he was little, even though his father was Saudi, he had Saudi nationality and he had been born here. The teachers at Al-Ahnaf Bin Qais Primary referred to him as ‘son of the Jordanian woman’, as though he didn’t have a name. Even the website’s owner, whom he took to be a cultured man, had once referred to the fact that his mother wasn’t Saudi.

‘You know,’ he’d said offhandedly, ‘you can tell you’re half-grilled from your red hair.’

Fahd sat up all night thinking about the phrase ‘half-grilled’.

‘Damn it! Was he trying to say that I’m not fully Saudi? Why would he talk about me as if I were a lump of cooked meat? Or did he mean that the sun hadn’t tanned my face properly, that I hadn’t been seared brown by the heat of the Nejd or the desert and my hair turned black as night?’

He could still recall the decision he had taken in the summer holidays before starting secondary school to dye his hair, angering his mother who said, ‘Ever since you grew up your heart’s been dyed black!’

How he had hated her at that moment.

Tarfah threw herself at him, hugging him and whispering, ‘She’s an idiot, anyway; she’s never experienced the taste of that red-haired madman in her mouth, or had it flog her!’

Her brown hand had descended and started fondling him and it awoke, uncoiling like a snake. In a teasing tone she said that she loved lollipops and that a year ago she had been handing them out to some women and children who were guests at her house when a woman in her fifties asked her what they were.

‘They’re lollipops!’ she’d answered. ‘You suck them.’

The woman had laughed and said, ‘Well thank God I’ve got my own special lollipop at home. It’s black, true, but it’ll do.’

She was pointing over at her dark-skinned husband, and Tarfah murmured, ‘My lover’s lollipop is red. The imported kind.’

Whenever Tarfah mentioned her surname she would add that she didn’t come from the family of the same name who owned a huge shopping centre in Riyadh. ‘We’re not tribesmen!’

It was the distinction people drew between tribal types, nicknamed ‘110 volts’, and the brighter ‘220 volt’ bulbs from the cities: a bit like she was reassuring him that he wasn’t obliged to think of marrying her. Once, he said to her, ‘I don’t know why people here are always turned into numbers. When a guy’s a farmer or a tribesman you call him “110 volts” and sometimes no more than 60, not enough to power a light bulb! Southerners are Zero-Sevens after their dialling code, and loads of those of mixed birth from our parents’ generation and before had their birthdates recorded as 7/1, as if the whole lot were born on the day the welfare budget’s announced. You even retire from a government job on 7/1. The government would love it if we all dropped dead on 7/1. It would make their job easier!’

Tarfah moaned, his madman plunging in and out, a famished polar bear switching back and forth between two darkened caves, and her beautiful wide eyes rolled up in ecstasy as though she had fallen into a coma of everlasting pleasure. He cried out at her, cursing and clutching himself with his slippery hand and she embraced him with an intoxicated whisper: ‘I love you!’