Eight Months on Ghazzah Street Read Online Free

sharp-snouted coffeepots, the heat of the sand. “We’re building up the infrastructure,” said the man who despised Fairfax. “Infrastructure” was a word she had heard on Andrew’s lips; he had grown fond of it. It seemed that when oil was discovered in the Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia had no infrastructure, but that it had one now: roads, schools, hospitals, factories, mines, market gardens and chicken farms, airports and squash courts, telephones and filling stations, cold stores and police stations, take-away food shops, and the ten-pin bowling facilities at the Albilad Hotel. All this she knew from her reading, because after the romantic travelers’ tales came Jeddah: A Businessman’s Guide. The black tents of the Bedu have been replaced by aluminium shacks. Air-conditioning is universal. Gazelles are hunted from the backs of pickup trucks.
    I must like it, she thought. I shall try to like it. When everyone is so negative about a place you begin to suspect it must have some virtues after all. “No alcohol!” people say, as if you’d die without it. “And women aren’t allowed to drive? That’s terrible.” There are lots of things more terrible, she thought, and even I have seen some of them. She dozed.
    A touch on her arm woke her. It was the steward. “We’ll be beginning our descent in half an hour. I’m just doing a final drinks round. Another brandy?”
    “Keep the young lady sober,” the businessman advised. “She’s got the customs to face, and it’s her first time. They go through
everything,” he told her. “I hope you haven’t got anything in your suitcase that you shouldn’t have?”
    “I haven’t got a bottle of whiskey or a shoulder of pork. What else will they be looking for?”
    “Where do you buy your underwear?”
    “What?”
    “Marks & Spencer, you see, they call them Zionists. You have to cut the labels out. Didn’t anybody tell you that? And they look at your books. This colleague of mine, when he was last in the Kingdom, he had his book of limericks confiscated. It had this drawing on the cover, a woman, you know.” He gestured in the air, describing half circles. “Naked, just a line drawing. Chap said he hadn’t noticed.”
    “That seems unlikely,” she said. She added, to herself, “a friend of yours.”
    “It’s all unlikely. Even when you’ve been coming in and out for years, you never know what they’re going to be looking for. Our rep in Riyadh, he lives there, he should know. But then last year when he was coming back after his summer holidays they took away his Test Match videos. All his recorded highlights. Oh, they said he could have them back, when the customs had had a careful look. But he never went for them. He couldn’t take the hassle.”
    “Poor man.”
    “You’ve not got any art books, have you? Rubens or anything? Because they can be very funny about art.”
    “It’s un-Islamic,” Frances said, “to worship the human form. It’s idolatry.” The man stared at her.
    “So I can’t tempt you?” the steward asked. He peered into his empty ice bucket. “Gentlemen, don’t leave any miniatures down the seat pockets, please, we don’t want our ground staff flogged.” He looked down at Frances. “We’re relinquishing this route next year,” he said. “Give it to British Caledonian and welcome, that’s what I say. No more to drink then?” He prepared to abandon her, move away. Sleeping executives stirred now, dribbling a little onto 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