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, staggering a little, you stumble into the rooms you are going to inhabit, draw back the curtain or blind and – with a faint smell of insecticide in your nostrils – confront the wall, the street, the tree with its roots in concrete and six months’ accumulation of dun-coloured dust on its leaves; wake up, wake up, you have arrived. The first night has passed now, the severance is complete; the journey is a phantom, the real world recedes.
Andrew brought coffee. To her surprise, she felt chilly. He had always been bothered by the heat, and so it was his habit now to sleep with the air conditioners on, rattling and banging away all night. No wonder she hadn’t slept properly. She had dreamt she was in a railway siding, with the endless shunting, and the scrape of metal wheels.
Andrew was already dressed, buttoning his white shirt, plucking a tie from inside the wardrobe door. His muddy overalls and his safety helmet would be elsewhere, she supposed, although he had said in his letters that he would spend more time shuffling papers than he would at the site; ‘Pity you couldn’t come at a weekend,’ he said. ‘I feel bad about going off and leaving you to it.’
‘What time is it?’ She shivered.
‘Six-thirty. Back at three. Sometimes I have a siesta and go into the office for the early evening, but I’ll not do that today. We can go shopping. I’ll show you round. Are you hungry?’
‘No. Yes, a bit.’
‘There’s stuff in the fridge, you’ll find it. Steak for dinner.’
So everything was ready for her, as he had said it would be. When she had blundered through the rooms, an hour ago, she saw pale airy spaces, a vast expanse of beige and freshly hoovered carpet. Pieces of furniture, new, smelling of plastic sheeting, stood grouped here and there; a dozen armchairs, a gleaming polished expanse of table-top, a white, antiseptic bathroom. Quite different from the old life: the donkey boiler at the back of the house, and the tin roof, and the sofas and beds which had gone from family to family.
‘I may have been dreaming,’ Andrew said, ‘but did you go on a pre-dawn tour?’
‘I’m sorry if I woke you.’
‘The prayer call wakes me anyway. What do you think of the flat? There was a house, it was on a compound with some of the Ministry of Petroleum people, but Jeff lives there – you said you didn’t want him for a neighbour. It’s taken now anyway. You don’t get a lot of choice, Turadup has to rent what it’s told. It’s a big source of income for Saudi families, letting houses to expats.’
‘Who owns these flats?’
‘I think it’s the Deputy Minister’s uncle.’
‘Who paid for all the stuff? The new furniture?’
‘The company. They’ve redecorated the whole place as well.’
‘They’re looking after us. It’s not like Africa.’
‘Well, in Africa nobody cared whether you came or went. If you found it too tough you just drifted off.’
‘But here
