Strangers. Danuta Reah
and feel the soft warmth of the bread in her mouth, but there was nothing she could do about it. Women didn’t eat in public here.
She collided with Joe who had stopped abruptly in front of her. ‘Which way are we going?’ His voice, as he spoke to O’Neill, was sharp.
O’Neill looked surprised. ‘To the al-Masmak fort,’ he said.
‘We need to get back. Roisin’s tired.’
Roisin opened her mouth to object, then shut it again. She had no idea what had upset Joe, but his face had that bleak, distant look. ‘It’s a bit hot,’ she said diplomatically.
O’Neill raised an eyebrow but didn’t make any further comment. ‘OK.’ His shrug was in his tone. ‘We can cut through this way to the car.’
She glanced quickly at Joe as O’Neill turned away. ‘I’m fine,’ she said, but he didn’t seem to hear. He was pushing ahead through the crowd and she couldn’t see his face.
Just then, the crowd parted to let a man through. He was tall and his robes were dazzling in the light. Her eyes followed him instinctively. In the next instant a sudden surge caught her unawares, turning her around in a wave of bodies and almost knocking her off her feet. When she tried to turn back, O’Neill and Joe had vanished and she had no idea which way they’d gone.
They couldn’t be far away, but she wasn’t tall enough to see over the heads of the people and she was getting pushed back, further away from where she had been. The next surge carried her to the edge of the street, and then she was against the wall, trying to make herself inconspicuous as she oriented herself. The streets, narrow and shadowed, ran away from her in all directions. She had the sudden feeling–something she had never felt before–of hostile eyes searching for her, eyes that wouldn’t be fooled for long by her disguise. She could feel the start of panic constricting her chest, and made herself breathe slowly and steadily. There was nothing to worry about. She’d got separated in the crowd. The worst that could happen was that the Mutawa’ah would shout at her.
Then she recognized the corner of a building. That was where they had left the souk. In that case, they had been heading towards…or was it this way? There was a straight lane ahead of her, free from the confusion of the market-place throng.
She followed it, and suddenly, to her relief, the crowd was gone. A square opened up in front of her, paved in patterned stone, surrounded by palm trees. At the far end was a low, flat building raised on pillars, and to her right a minaret reached up towards the sky. The shadows were solid and hard-edged. A white-robed figure stood in the shadow of the pillars, but otherwise the square was empty. It was shocking in its unexpected silence.
She stood still, frozen in a moment of déjà vu. She thought she knew this place. Then Joe was beside her, his face tense with anxiety. ‘Christ, Roisin…’
‘Joe!’ She put her hand out to touch him, then drew it back, remembering where she was. ‘I’m sorry. I got caught in the crowd.’ She had been separated from them by a few yards.
Damien O’Neill was looking at her assessingly. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes. I’m fine. It was my fault. The crowd took me by surprise.’
‘I’m sorry. I should have warned you about that.’ He turned to Joe, who had fallen silent and was staring at the square in front of him. ‘Come on. We can get back this way.’
Moving quickly, he led them away from the market and suddenly the old town and the crowds were behind them. Roisin’s head was spinning in confusion. She was an adult woman in one of the major capitals of the world. She’d taken care of herself alone in a hundred cities and yet this place had rendered her helpless, had changed her status, just like that, to that of a child.
The sun was almost directly overhead. The Arab city had vanished. They were walking through a street that could be in Anycity, Anyplace, past high glass blocks of anonymous business space where the noise and smells of modern urban life surrounded her. By the time they reached the car park, she was glad to get back into the air-conditioned interior of the car.
She was starting to flag. She’d tried to push herself straight into local time, the only cure for jet lag that worked for her, but all she’d been able to do when the taxi driver had dropped them at the hotel shortly after five the evening before was fall on the bed and sleep.
She’d woken in the small hours. The green light of the clock said 3.10. She knew that she wasn’t going to be able to sleep again and sat up carefully. The blinds weren’t closed and the moonlight illuminated the room with a cold radiance.
Slipping out of bed, careful not to disturb Joe, she’d pulled on her robe and got herself some fruit juice from the mini bar. Then she went and sat by the window, looking out across Riyadh, her home for the next year.
The cityscape had blazed out in millions of lights. Skyscrapers, impossibly slender and fragile, thrust up towards the sky, and the highways bound them together with loops of light. It was as if someone had asked the designers and architects to build a stage set for a city of the future and they had created this edifice, a city that rested uncomfortably on the desert and on the customs of the people who inhabited it. She remembered what Joe had said when they first met. It’s like one of those optical illusions. If she sat here watching for long enough, would the illusion fade? And if it did, what would she see?
Now, in the centre of the city, the broken night was catching up with her. The furnace blast of the air was sapping the vitality out of her, and she sank back into the car seat, enjoying the cool of the air-con. Her annoyance at Joe faded. He’d been right. She was tired. She could feel the sweat between her shoulder blades, and her hair felt damp. ‘What was that place?’ she asked, adjusting her scarf to stop it slipping off her head.
O’Neill steered the car into the stream of fast-moving traffic. He still looked cool and untouched by the heat. ‘It’s as-Sa’ah Square,’ he said, his voice expressionless as he gave her the careful non-information. She wondered what he wasn’t telling her. A car cut in from their right and he switched lanes smoothly to avoid a collision. ‘You were based in one of the villages before?’ he said to Joe. Joe didn’t seem to hear. A truck careered towards them and swerved away at the last moment.
‘Someone should tell them that they drive on the right here,’ Roisin observed.
O’Neill glanced at her in the mirror. His mouth twitched in a sudden smile. ‘It’s optional,’ he said.
Encouraged by the first sign of warmth, she tried again. ‘Tell me about that square. It was so…’ She searched for words. The cathedral-like silence had caught her imagination. Despite the hard glare of the light, she could imagine banks of candles lit for the souls of…who? She tried to catch Joe’s eye, but he was staring out of the window, lost in his own thoughts.
O’Neill glanced at her again before he answered. ‘It’s known colloquially as Chop-Chop Square,’ he said.
‘Chop-Chop Square?’ For a moment, she didn’t understand what he was talking about, then she realized. The bright square with the blue patterned stones and the palm trees was the place where malefactors against the rigid laws of the Kingdom were dealt with. The place of punishment. The place of execution. All the impulse to laugh drained out of her. People had died on those sun-dazed stones, close to the place where she had been standing.
O’Neill had observed her reaction. ‘It’s part of what this place is,’ he said. ‘I give it a wide berth. Some Westerners go. For them it’s the nearest thing we’ve got to a tourist attraction.’
Joe’s voice cut into the exchange before she could respond. ‘Have you seen that, Roisin?’
She leaned across the car to look out at the building they were passing. A tower of reflective glass rose hundreds of feet above them, ending in a parabolic curve beneath a fragile arch where the structure had been cut away forming a needle reaching up into the sky. She twisted round in amazement as the road swooped away.
‘It’s called