‘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!’
Returning from the bathroom he was surprised to see the light from a pair of candles wavering over the two tables beside the bed. His bewilderment showed, and she told him that she had brought them in her handbag, thinking of furnished flats with no lights! He embraced her and kissed her nose, which reminded him of the pliancy of cotton wool or young girls’ rosy cheeks. It was slightly broad and squashy, as though devoid of cartilage and bone.
Fahd opened the wardrobe, took his cigarettes from his pocket and before lighting one from the candle flame, asked her, ‘Do you mind?’
She shook her head coyly and he blew white clouds into the room’s murk, the smoke rings rising like dancing demons.
‘Have you ever smoked?’ he asked.
‘Twice, when I was working at the clinic. Nada, my friend in reception, she’s a smoker.’
He handed her his cigarette and she hesitated, then took it, saying that she would only try it ‘because it tastes of your mouth’.
As she exhaled he said, ‘I get the impression your relationship with Nada is a strong one. There’s nothing else going on between you, is there?’
‘Oi,’ she shouted. ‘Don’t come near me.’
She would talk about relationships between women, how in crowded bathrooms at wedding functions you would see each pair of friends enter a cubicle together for ten minutes or more, to emerge in disarray and make a hasty stop in front of the mirror, taking their lipsticks from their purses and restoring colour to their lips.
‘What about you, then? How do you know all this if you haven’t tried it?’