Chapter 27

Fareeha cupped her palm over her eyes and looked out from the battlements. The water was dull green, soupy, and she had to lift her head and look out a long way out before it regained its blue colour and glinted again under the sun. She found the horizon, squeezed her eyes, and pretended that she could see right across the Gulf to the free ports on the other side. Her stomach jumped and she dropped her hand; She turned and fell back into the shade of the battlements.

Now facing the opposite direction, with a thumping heart, she looked back across the harbour, inland, and the view was even worse: not only did she have the dirty water in her eyes, but also the horrors on the semicircle of land that trapped it—the heaps of refuse and the dilapidated buildings that pushed up to the water’s edge. In the distance, over the pier, the wharf was empty, the derricks stationary—Sa’ An’s economic progress on hold. She could just make out the floating trash and spilt oil which could only have been left by the last vessel to dock there: The Maharaja. She quickly looked away as the odorous Captain Rashid wafted into her mind.

Her side of the pier should have been better: charming, picturesque even—as the brochures of the long-defunct tourist office had once described it. But war, neglect, and time had conspired to suck away its quaintness, and all that remained was an ugly mess. She thought of Phipps. ‘Nobody comes to see these things anymore?’ he’d asked her a few days before, amongst the salvaged relics of the museum? Her answer, in the negative, could have been widened to include Sa’ An’s historic harbour. Nobody, she thought to herself, is ever again going to pay money to come here to see this!

*

She checked the Harbourmaster’s building again, but it still showed no signs of life, and in her dreamy state, she half expected to see Hassan jumping through the door and casting his dark eyes up here for her. Before they were married, she would often conceal herself high up among the red stones of the fortification, at the end of a long, hot afternoon, waiting for her new lover to finish his work. He would never wave or give any sign that he had seen her; he would simply look up before trotting over the flagstones and running up the cool spiral staircase of the tower. She relived those minutes between the meeting of eyes across the glistening water and the first touch, the aching in every part of her body, as if a fever had taken its grip and would not release her until it had been cast out by the healing hand of love.

She shuddered, remembering the abrupt ending of those feelings on her wedding night. Hassan wasn’t the beast that Farooq was, but she soon found out that he was just another man, after all—and by then it was too late . . .

Running her eyes back towards the octagonal tower, behind whose battlements she stood, she saw the boarded-up fronts of the once-thriving cafés and restaurants, behind which hid the all-night bars and bordellos . . . She brought her eyes directly back to her feet, refusing to dwell on the whereabouts of her husband on those nights when he was late home. She suddenly winced, bent forwards, and put both hands to her stomach. She staggered to the side and sat back on a ledge, pushing down on the fire.

Moments later, a light flashed across the heavy lids of Fareeha’s eyes that swam deeply in pain. She looked up. Somebody had opened the door of the Harbourmaster’s office.

*

At the top of the outside steps, Fareeha checked her headscarf and found a chewed-up lock of hair poking under its edge, just above her right eye: she dealt with it then shuffled along the verandah. Her knuckle rattled one of the dirty panes of glass in the door and she gave a gentle push.

‘Oh, Fareeha, it’s you, it’s you,’ the harbourmaster said, as if she could have been one of any number of people he was expecting to meet. ‘Come in, come in.’

From across the choppy room it was difficult for Fareeha to see if his greeting carried a smile; his voice told her it didn’t. She tried to step forward but some very dirty weather seemed to have recently hit the inhospitable waters of the office, from which an old packing crate had mysteriously washed up on the threshold; it blocked her entrance.

‘Just a moment,’ Muzaffer puffed, ‘I’ll get that out of the way for you.’ He had already pushed off from his desk and was steaming his way towards her for the salvage operation.

*

‘Well,’ Muzaffer began with a heavy sigh. He leaned back in his squeaky chair and the tails of his silk shirt rode partway up the bilge of his immense stomach, revealing a mass of black hairs. The fingers of his two hands met and intertwined where his navel ought to have been.

Fareeha looked away.

‘My dear,’ he said, falling forward and focussing his moist eyes on his guest. ‘Are you sure you want to go through with this?’ A hand left his belly and came up to cup his jaw. He winced.

‘What?’

Muzaffer tongued several of his back teeth, winced again, then leaned forward into the desk, still holding her with a stare.

Fareeha’s bit at her bottom lip; she shifted her weight in the chair and rubbed her sticky palms along the rough fabric of her dress. This was the time to say no. Muzaffer was offering her a way out; she could put a stop to these foolish ideas right here and now and run back to her house, her garden . . . Strangely, the foreboding Bashar Khan was not the first person to flash before her eyes—his threatening countenance arrived second. Phipps and his stern, white face beat him to it, briefly, his cold blue eyes entreating her to bring him back the soil tester. ‘Yes,’ she stammered ‘. . . of course.’

Muzaffer’s stare held. His right hand left his jaw and went to pull a handkerchief from a pocket of his slacks. He used it to dab at his glistening brow.

Fareeha tried to pull herself together, clearing her throat and arching her back. ‘It’s just business,’ she began, ‘I . . . I want to make a few dirhams, just like the next man . . . food, new clothes . . .’ She pinched at the tatty threads of her dress. ‘It’s not easy living alone.’

Muzaffer raised both of his hand, as if in surrender. He turned his head and squeaked back in his chair. ‘Good,’ he said at last, ‘good.’ The chair then moved a yard away from the desk and Muzaffer tried to find his feet; the handkerchief fell to the tabletop. ‘Now, how about a spot of coffee?’

Fareeha couldn’t speak; she simply nodded.

‘Rashid brought me a jar of cardamoms and a bag of the best Tamil beans.’ His eyes sparkled. ‘Not much of a coffee drinker myself, but it would be a shame to waste it.’ He walked to the alcove, where he busied himself for a while with jars and pans. ‘He’ll be in again tomorrow.’

Fareeha squirmed.

‘He never likes to stop the night, though; so you’d better be ready to embark by four, four thirty at the very latest.’ He turned around, leaving the ibrik over the flame of his small stove. ‘I couldn’t tell you much yesterday, in the bathhouse.’ He paused to screw up one side of his face, his tongue working away at his molars. ‘Words echo a long way in there, you know; and the men pay twice the attention to a woman.’ He waved a hand in front of him. ‘Anyway, a lot has happened. McBride passed by.’ He pointed the same hand towards the window. ‘He’ll be up in the Black Sea by now and on his way back in a day or two.’

‘You got through to him then?’

‘Oh yes, this time loud and clear.’

‘And?’

‘Well, of course he’s interested, my dear. Extra money! My god he’s a Scot isn’t he? But just wait a moment.’ He turned back to the ibrik and snatched up its long handle. ‘Damn,’ he said, ‘how long has that been boiling?’ He waited for a moment before returning the ceramic pot to the flame. ‘Ten times I usually bring it to the boil,’ he explained, ‘but for no longer than a second each time—more than that will ruin the taste.’ He pulled it away again. ‘That’s two.’

A few minutes later he walked over to the desk with two steaming cups of thick, frothy black coffee balanced upon two saucers. He left one on Fareeha’s side and took the other towards his chair, in which he sat with a heavy sigh of exhaustion. He then reached behind to a shelf in the middle of a tall bookcase that was laden with bulging folders and bursting envelopes. He touched an obese packet, which seemed to drop down of its own accord, as if pushed out by the other heavy pieces of stationery which were thankful for the extra breathing space.

The packet had already partly spilled its contents onto the desk when Muzaffer next spoke. ‘He may be greedy, my dear, but McBride is not stupid. He’s already hit me with the where, when, and how of it all. Security, he kept saying.’ He picked up his coffee and blew at its dark surface. ‘Shouldn’t put so much sugar in it, really, the state my teeth are in; ah well.’ He pouted his lips and sipped, sucking in a lot of air with the hot liquid. ‘Mmm,’ he mumbled, ‘not such a bad fellow that Rashid.’

Fareeha went for her own cup.

‘Anyway . . . where was I . . . oh yes, McBride. I didn’t want to get into too many details over the radio, so I told him that you would explain everything to him.’ He looked up. ‘He’s eager to see you, my dear, and you’ll have to do your best to allay his fears.’

Fareeha’s eyes hadn’t left the slippery flotsam of papers, documents, and notebooks that were swimming across the desktop towards her. She swallowed. ‘I need all of that?’

With his right hand, Muzaffer tried to rake in the spillage. ‘Mmm.’ His tongue was back in his teeth but his watery eyes fixed her with a stare. ‘What does your friend Khalil say about a drop-off point?’

‘Drop off . . .’

‘You’ll have to come up with a good place for the rendezvous—for your safety as much as anything. The Gulf can be a treacherous place, my dear. Currents, winds, rip-tides, unexpected squalls, undercurrents. Whirlpools even. You do not want to be just anywhere in a small boat trying to get alongside a container ship—it could be deadly.’

Fareeha looked away. ‘Khalil . . . well . . . he hasn’t mentioned anything about it.’

‘Mmm, thought not. Anyway, I found a place.’ He turned and swept his arm behind him towards a big blue nautical chart of the Gulf that hung askew on the wall. ‘I’ve put it in here.’ He touched a slim, kelp-green notebook. ‘Pirates used to tranship out there when the colonialists were in here running the place. McBride has probably heard of it—he’ll like it.’ He abruptly picked up the notebook and waved it at her. ‘Other things I’ve also put in here; all a bit technical, I’m afraid; and we don’t have enough time to go into half of it now; but McBride will know what it means—you just translate the bits that I haven’t already put in English and write down what he says.’

Fareeha watched as the old man’s hairy fingers slipped around the covers and dove between the pages. Her pulse thumped and she at once felt helpless. Her mind swam with arcane nautical terms she’d often heard but never really understood. Even the simpler things that she should have known, like latitudes, longitudes, bearings, radio frequencies, and knots, she didn’t really understand. ‘What kind of things? she ventured.

‘Oh, don’t you worry too much. It’ll all be very clear to a man of the sea.’ He tossed over the notebook and it landed next to her half full coffee cup

She stared at it and gave a submissive nod of her head, said nothing.

‘You’ll be over there to see family. Eh . . . an uncle I should imagine!’ He pushed over an identification paper, travel documents, and a pass. ‘Not for the harbour or immigration—you won’t have any trouble there—these are for the police, in case you are stopped anywhere.’ Next, he tossed across several small sheets of paper, folded, and held together by a rusty paperclip. ‘You’ll stay with a good friend of mine—from the port authority—I will send with you gifts that should satisfy him. He’ll help you find McBride when he sails in, but whatever you do, don’t tell him what you are really up to.’ Muzaffer leaned back in his chair and filled his lungs with air. ‘And that, my dear, is it. After your meeting, all you need to do is wait for Rashid to bring you back. I’ll tell him not to leave you there too long . . . we’ll just have to hope that his engines don’t break down again.’ He winced and put his right hand up to his jaw. ‘Still, I suppose we are lucky it’s him and not one of those incorruptible Danes or Swedes they used to send. Heaven knows what we would have done then.’ His hand at once dropped, and the grin that followed stretched out his grizzled moustache.

‘Lucky?’ Fareeha said, as she began to gather together the black and white omens of her uncertain future. ‘Yes, I suppose we are.’