Eight Months on Ghazzah Street. Hilary Mantel

He prepared to abandon her, move away. Sleeping executives stirred now, dribbling a little on to their airline blankets. There was a sound of subdued laughter; briefcases intruded into the aisles. The steward relented. He leaned over her seat. ‘Listen, if anything goes wrong, if by some mischance hubby’s not there, don’t hang about, don’t speak to anybody, get straight in our airline bus and come downtown with us to the Hyatt Regency. You check in, and I’ll look after you, and he can come and find you in the morning.’

      ‘Oh, I’m sure he’ll be there,’ she said. Or someone will. Jeff Pollard. At least he’d be a familiar face. ‘I’ve got numbers to ring, in case anything goes wrong. And I could take a taxi.’

      ‘You can’t take a taxi. They won’t carry you.’

      She thought of that cheese, that people say French taxi-drivers won’t let in their cabs. ‘What, really not?’

      ‘It’s bad news, a man picking up a strange woman in a car. They can gaol you for it.’

      ‘But he’s a taxi-driver,’ she said. ‘That’s his job, picking up strange people.’

      ‘But you’re a woman,’ the steward said. ‘You’re a woman, aren’t you? You’re not a person any more.’ Doggedly, courteously, as if their conversation had never occurred, he reached for a glass from his trolley: ‘Would you like champagne?’

      Soon, the crackle from the P/A system: Ladies and gentlemen, we are now beginning our descent to King Abdul Aziz International Airport. Those seated on the left-hand side of the aircraft will see below you the lights of Jeddah. Kindly fasten…kindly extinguish…(And to the right, blackness, tilting, and a glow of red, the slow fires that seem to ring cities at night.) We hope you have enjoyed, we hope to have the pleasure…we hope…we hope…and please to remain seated until the aircraft is stationary…

      Half an hour later she is inside the terminal building. The date is 2 Muharram, by the Hijra calendar, and the evening temperature is 88°F; the year is 1405.

       Muharram

      1

      Ghazzah Street is situated to the east of Medina Road, behind the King’s New Palace, and in the district of Al Aziziyya; it is a small street, which got its name quite recently when street names came into vogue, and a narrow street, made narrower by the big American cars, some of them falling to pieces, which its residents leave parked outside their apartment blocks. On one side is a stretch of waste ground, full of potholes; water collects in them when, three or four times a year, rain falls on the city. The residents complain about the mosquitoes which breed in the standing pools, but none of them can remember whether there was ever a building on the waste ground; no one has been in the area for more than a couple of years. Many of the tenants of Ghazzah Street still keep some of their possessions in cardboard boxes, or in shipper’s crates bearing the names of the removal and transport companies of the subcontinent and the Near East. They are from Pakistan or Egypt, salesmen and clerical workers, or engaged in a mysterious line of work called Import-Export; or they are Palestinians perhaps, or they are picking up a family business that has been bombed out of Beirut.

      The district is not opulent, not sleazy either; the small apartment blocks, two and three storeys high, are walled off from the street, so that you seldom catch sight of the residents, or know if there is anyone at home; women and babies are bundled from kerb to car, and sometimes schoolchildren, with grave dark faces, trail upstairs with their books in the late afternoon. No one ever stands and chats in Ghazzah Street. Neighbours know each other by sight, from glimpses on balconies and rooftops; the women speak by phone. There are a couple of offices, one of them a small forgotten offshoot of the Ministry of Pilgrimages, and one of them belonging to a firm which imports and distributes Scandinavian mineral water. Just around the corner on Al-Suror Street, there is a mosque, its dome illuminated at dusk with a green neon light; at the other end of the street, in the direction of the palace of Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, there is a small shop which sells computer supplies and spare parts.

      At the moment Ghazzah Street is about a mile and a half from the Red Sea, but in this place land and sea are in flux, they are negotiable. So much land has been reclaimed, that villas built a few years ago with sea views now look out on the usual cityscape of blank white walls, moving traffic, building sites. On every vacant lot in time appears the jumble of brownish brick, the metal spines of scaffolding, the sheets of plate glass; then last of all the marble, the most popular facing material, held on to the plain walls behind it with some sort of adhesive. From a distance it lends a spurious air of antiquity to the scene. When the Jeddah earthquake comes – and it will come – all-seeing Allah will observe that the buildings are held together with glue; and he will peel the city apart like an onion.

      The sea itself, sometimes cobalt in colour and sometimes turquoise, has a flat, domestic, well-used appearance. Small white-collared waves trip primly up to the precincts of the desalination plant, like a party of vicars on an industrial tour. The lights of the royal yacht wink in the dusty evenings; veiled ladies splash on the foreshore in the heat of the day. Benches, placed by the municipality, look out to sea. Around the bay sweeps an ambitious highway, designated The Corniche; now known as Al Kournaich, or the Cornish Road. Public monuments line the sea-front, and crown the intersections of the endless, straight and eight-lane public highways; bizarre forms in twisted alloys, their planes glistening in the salt and smog air.

      On Fridays, which are days for rest and prayer, families picnic around these monuments, black figures in a tundra of marble; stray cats breed on their slopes. The sun strikes from their metal spokes and fins; towering images of water-jugs, sea-horses, steel flowers; of a human hand, pointing to the sky. Vendors sell, from roadside vans, inflatable plastic camels in purple, orange and cerise.

      If you walk, suitably dressed, along the Corniche, you can hear the sea-wind howl and sigh through the sewers beneath the pavements. It is an unceasing wail, modulated like the human voice, but trapped and far-away, like the mutinous cries of the damned. ‘The people in hell remain alive,’ says a Muslim commentator. ‘They think, remember and quarrel; their skins are not burned, but cooked, and every time they are fully cooked, new skins are substituted for them to start the suffering afresh.’ And if you pick your way, with muttered apologies, through the families ensconced on the ground, on the carpets they have unloaded from their cars, you will see the men and women sitting separately, one hunched group garbed in black and one in white, and the children playing under a servant’s eye; the whole family turned to the sea, but the adults rapt, enthralled, by the American cartoons they are watching on their portable TV. A skin-diver, European, lobster-skinned, strikes out from an unfrequented part of the coastline for the coral reef.

      Back on the road the teenaged children of the Arab families catcall and cruise, wrecking their Ferraris. Hotrodding, the newspapers call it; the penalty is flogging. A single seabird hovers, etched sharp and white against the sky; and a solitary goat-faced Yemeni, his tartan skirts pulled up, putters on a clapped-out scooter in the direction of Obhur Creek. The horizon is a line of silver, and beyond it is the coast of the Sudan; enclosed within it is the smell of the city’s effluent, more indecipherable, more complicated than you would think. At the weekend the children are given balloons, heart-shaped and helium-filled, which bob over the rubble and shale. On the paving stones at your feet are scrawled crude chalk drawings of female genitalia. Inland, wrecked cars line the desert roads, like skeletons from some public and exemplary punishment.

      Whatever time you set out for Jeddah, you always seem to arrive in the small hours; so that the waste of pale marble which is the arrivals hall, the rude and silent customs men turning over your baggage, seem to be a kind of dream; so that from each side of the airport road dark and silent spaces stretch away, and then comes the town, the string of streetlights dazzling you, the white shapes of high buildings penning you in; you are delivered, to some villa or apartment block, you stumble into a bathroom and then into bed – and when you wake up, jerked out of a stuporous doze by the dawn prayer-call, the city has formed itself about you, highways, mosques, palaces and souks; grey-faced,