Bird Summons Read online

  Every morsel she put in her mouth, every piece of clothing, was provided for her by Ibrahim. The rent, the gas, the internet. She did not have to beg, borrow or steal. She did not need to get up at the crack of dawn, take orders from a line manager or clean up other people’s homes. Instead, she was as pampered as a racehorse and as busy as a geisha.

  To what extent is marriage religiously sanctioned prostitution? Iman sometimes pondered this question. She had even discussed it with Salma on more than one occasion – as much as she was capable of discussion. Salma of course had been adamant that the two were completely different. Iman wasn’t sure, and the arguments Salma used didn’t fully convince her. Prostitution and marriage. Man pays and woman serves. He houses, clothes and feeds her to get something in return. So what was the difference between the two?

  Iman’s phone rang. It was Ibrahim, insistent that they turn around so that he could speak to her. ‘Give me Salma,’ he said.

  ‘She’s driving. She can’t speak to you.’

  Salma turned to look at Iman. ‘What does he want?’

  Iman moved the phone away from her face. ‘He wants you to stop somewhere so he can catch up with us. He says he needs to give me something and it’s urgent.’

  ‘I’ve already left Dundee,’ Ibrahim was now shouting through the phone. ‘I’m making my way towards you. Stay at Finavon. Just stay there and wait for me.’

  Iman brought the phone back to her face. ‘We’ve already left.’

  ‘Let me speak to Salma.’

  ‘I told you she’s driving.’

  ‘Put me on speaker mode.’

  His voice was now in the car with them. ‘Salma, turn back,’ he shouted. ‘I’ll meet you at the service coffee shop.’

  Salma made a face.

  ‘Just ignore him,’ Iman whispered.

  Salma shook her head. ‘Ibrahim, not Finavon. I’ll turn into Stonehaven and we’ll wait for you at the castle.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ The relief was obvious in Iman’s voice.

  ‘Yes.’ Salma was made generous by the sense of holiday. They had time, so why not dawdle a little. ‘It’s beautiful there. We’ll enjoy it especially now that it’s stopped raining.’ Getting away from it all. Away from responsibility, away from authority, bodies set free from routines, perspectives altered, distances distracting. Every holiday was a test. Every holiday was a risk.

  Chapter Three

  The visitors’ car park was separated from the castle by a narrow winding footpath. The three had to walk in single file. Salma and Iman walked faster than Moni. Moni dragged her heels. She was not interested in seeing any castles. But Salma had refused to let her wait in the car.

  The path sloped downward, which made the walk pleasant for Salma and Iman but only made Moni worry about the upward return. She began to perspire. She took off her coat, draped it across her arm and walked on with the belt dragging on the ground. There were now steps and a railing she could hold on to, but still she struggled. The distance between her and the other two grew until it became too large for any meaningful conversation. She would have to shout if she wanted them to hear her. It was as if they were trying to shrug her off. Moni stopped making an effort to catch up and slowed down further. She could make out Iman’s figure ahead and, beneath her on the slope, Salma’s wide bouncy strides. Then the track flattened again, and she lost sight of them.

  Moni was now out of breath, sighing noisily and feeling faint. Her thighs rubbed against each other. She prayed for a bench and then, like a miracle, spotted one on the side of the path where the steps twisted into a right angle. She sat down, but sitting made her feel worse. She began to sweat and black blotches floated in front of her face. She needed to take in big gulps of air.

  Iman forgot about Moni and felt that Salma was chatting too much. The sea was calling her and she speeded effortlessly towards it. She wanted to laugh out loud as she skipped down the grassy slope. It was as if she were a child again, before her body became a responsibility, before she understood how her beauty could be of value and of interest. She was carefree in those days, snotty and bare-footed, wild in the fields and the alleys of her Euphrates village. She had played and skipped and run, feeling the wind against her face, the animal smell of the grass and her voice humming in her ear. A song that no one else could hear.

  Salma, who had been looking back expecting Moni to catch up with them, stopped. She grabbed Iman’s arm. Now that she was standing still, Iman heard her phone ring. Ibrahim’s voice sounded faint but persistent. She hardly paid attention; what she wanted was the sea. There it was, spectacular beneath her, and all she had to do was sing in order to reach it. Yes, she said to him, they had stopped at Dunnottar and she would wait for him down at the beach.

  Next to her, Salma raised her eyebrows at the mention of the beach. She wanted to go inside the castle. ‘I’ll go back and see what’s wrong with Moni. Wait for me.’

  ‘You sort out Moni, I’ll catch up with you later.’ She ducked past her surprised friend and ran down straight for the cove. Seagulls circled above her.

  Salma climbed back up the slope. Since when did Iman do her own thing? ‘Yalla, Moni, get up. You’re still not upset about leaving Adam, are you?’

  Moni shook her head.

  ‘You know, don’t you, that to visit Lady Evelyn’s grave we need to walk four miles up a hill? Only a four-by-four can reach there, or a coach, which was my original idea when the entire group was going. Now how are you ever going to manage that!’

  ‘I guess I won’t then.’ Moni held her arms against her chest as if she was protecting her body.

  Salma softened her tone, ‘If you practise walking now, then that would be good training for you. You can build up some stamina.’

  ‘You are forever planning ahead! I need to get myself back up to the car before worrying about anything else!’

  Salma sighed. ‘Don’t you want to come in and see inside the castle?’

  ‘It’s a ruin, Salma. There’s nothing to see. You go ahead. Personally, I think seven pounds is a swindle.’

  Salma paid for her ticket and entered the grounds of the castle. Lawns and clusters of ruined buildings. A map marked out the area: first on the right was the tower, strategically placed to survey all access to the castle by land, behind it were the smithy and the stables. Further inwards towards the sea and beyond the bowling green were the living quarters, the suites, dining and drawing rooms. Salma wandered around, the grass a bright green beneath her, the derelict buildings humble in their simplicity, solemn in their inner darkness. From the tourists around her, she caught the tones of foreign languages, a softness surrounded the place and the wind blew gently. From a porthole of stone, she looked down over the water. It was more purple than the sky, the waves uneven frills. To the left were high fields where bales of rolled hay looked like barrels laid down on their sides. This was the same view the inhabitants of the castle had gazed at long ago. The workers and ladies; the gardeners and stable boys. It struck her that Lady Evelyn must have come here as a girl in the late nineteenth century, as an adult in the twentieth. The woman who travelled in the Sahara and in Kenya would not have failed to visit the east coast of her own country. Once again Salma felt a closeness to her, an awareness that was more than curiosity.

  In the chapel, she stood on consecrated ground, the sky above her withholding rain. In 1276, people knelt here and worshipped. They were not her ancestors and she did not share their religion, but she understood them because she herself believed and she herself lived each day knowing she would, after she died, be held to account. It suddenly dawned on her that this chapel perched on the edge of the sea was facing south-east, the direction of Mecca. It was parallel to every purpose-built mosque in the country! Lady Evelyn, who left instructions to be buried facing Mecca, would have delighted in this coincidence. Salma smiled, imagining bringing it to Lady Evelyn’s notic
e. The one to hear back, ‘Really?’ in a posh Scottish accent.

  In the nearby kitchen, indicated by the wide arch of the fireplace, she heard the word ‘Really?’ in Arabic. Clear and intimate, a snap into her consciousness, coming after a lag in the conversation she had been imagining, a delay in reply like on a poor long-distance line. There was no one near Salma and she was sure, as she could ever be sure, that it was Lady Evelyn’s voice speaking to her in the Arabic she learnt from her nannies when she was a child growing up in Cairo and Algiers. Hearing the dead? Imagining, more likely. She knew what Lady Evelyn looked like from the photos – like Gertrude Bell, someone had described her, slim, active, snobbish and chatty with scrunched-up hair under a desert hat – and now Salma had her voice too. She looked up and saw a formation of grey clouds surrounding a sky-blue body of water. The loch was in her mind, where they were heading. How odd it had been to organise and reorganise this trip. The way it evolved from a day trip for the whole of the women’s group, to only the three of them but with the addition of the stay at the loch. She could not give up the visit to Lady Evelyn just because the majority were against it. Many of these women lulled themselves into believing they were in Britain temporarily; that somehow, someday, they would return ‘home’. Moni and Iman were different; they wanted to be here for the long haul. And Salma was the one with the Scottish husband, she was the one who must always be making the effort to belong. Digging deeper all the time, craving connections, self-conscious that her roots, despite the children, might not be strong enough.

  Sometimes she would walk into a room to find them with David and she would have no clue what they were saying even though she could understand every single word. She would then feel that they were his children and not hers. She was the outsider, the foreign wife, and they were one unit. She had believed foolishly that they would be born with a hard drive of her memories. That they would know Egypt as she had known it, the crowded bus to Saint Catherine on the trip she had organised for the student club – Egypt, the Beloved – and how they stopped on the way for breakfast. Foul and tamiyah and tea with mint, Amir shouting at the waiters, in truth abusing them to make everyone laugh. And she had laughed too though she wouldn’t now, but still she noted with bitterness that her children lived in a world where it was okay to be rude to their parents but to a waiter they must be very polite.

  She used to love a good argument but not with them. Despite all their bravado and independence, children growing up here needed to be handled delicately. One thwack with the hairbrush, only one, but the teacher saw the bruise and she and David were called in. The child was sticking a pencil in her ear and refusing to listen to warnings that she could puncture her eardrum. But no matter. Salma felt that she was embarrassing David in front of his own people, though he never reproached her except to say that when he was growing up plenty of children were given a good hiding, but no one did that any more. She didn’t want him to be ashamed of her, to feel that he had picked her up from the back of beyond, and so she became more careful, often not at ease. No matter how many clients she massaged and no matter that she had given birth to children with Scottish blood, deep down his people would think that she was not really one of them, that she was not British enough.

  A message flashed on her phone. It was from Amir: I am listening. If he was listening, what should she be saying? Complaints and the luxury of regrets. She did not reply and instead wandered back to the tower and climbed to the top. This space still had a ceiling and the light was dim. Looking out through a cavity that must have been at some point a window, she saw miles of uneven land spread before her, green grass inland and, on the left, the steep edge of the cliffs into the sea. She looked out for the bench where she had left Moni sitting, but it was hidden from view. She could see a cove, but it was on the other side of the castle, it was not the one where Iman was now.

  The castle was above Iman, its walls casting a shadow over the rocks and the sand. She wandered about the cove aimlessly, humming and singing, bending down to pick up rocks and examine them in her palms. At this close range, the sea was a moving world; the water cold and grand. Iman felt small in front of it. Not weak but limited. What did she know? She knew that every creature came from water, she knew that rivers poured into seas but never, in turn, became salty. She knew that fishes spoke. In their own language, they praised and glorified their Creator, they gave thanks and their hummed prayers were a blessing to the world.

  Pearls, corals, rubies, emeralds. She picked up small stones, balanced them on the back of her hand and they became jewels. Traces of moss and glints of red caught the sun. Some of the rocks were as large as ostrich eggs, the discarded jewellery of a giantess, strewn in delicate colours. The lightest amethyst, cloudy grey, duck-egg blue. Above her, tourists and visitors walked up the steps to enter the castle. Their voices drifted down to her, as did the shuffle of their shoes. She felt a surge of goodwill towards them.

  There was a cave beneath the castle and she had to scramble over a pile of rocks to reach it. The outer walls were covered in grass, but the interior was barren. She stared into the secret darkness, the moist, bulbous walls, growth ridged and uneven. A path worn by erosion where the seawater flowed up into the cave and down out again. It was like being inside a body’s cavity. But how would she know? The air was cool in the cave, the smell marine-dank. She hummed the same song that she had sung in the car. Yearning, the lyrics of the song said. Yearning to live alone on an island and give up on the world, let it go, let it drop. But that would be lonely. A waste of her beauty. She felt the walls closing in around her, turned and made her way down the rocks to the flat part of the cove.

  She put her hand in her pocket and found a date that had dried up and shrivelled. She popped it into her mouth and chewed for a long time, savouring what remained of its sweetness, before she swallowed. She bent down and buried the date stone in the sand. ‘I am planting a date tree,’ she said out loud. Maybe it will grow, maybe by Allah’s will it can grow in this cold climate and be a little miracle. She smiled at her foolishness, her childlike arrogance. But it gave her great satisfaction to plant that palm tree. A palm tree that would hang forlornly in the snow, buffeted by gales and waves, clinging to the weakest form of life and yet, against the odds, still bearing fruit.

  It was not difficult for Iman to imagine new life emerging from what was fragile and doomed. The way a grandmother could give birth to her grandson’s aunt. Iman’s mother had one child after the other every eighteen months. Sometimes every two years. All in all there were twelve of them – boys and girls. Scattered now all over the place by the war and the ambition to live. Iman felt sorry for her mother, but her pity was tempered with anger. Anger at her and anger for her. If having all these children was an investment for old age, then it was an investment that had backfired. Iman was unable to bring her mother to live in Britain. She was often unable to send her money. One mother could look after twelve children and decades later these twelve adults would fidget and struggle to look after that one mother.

  Moni continued to sit on the bench even though she was feeling much better. Her breathing steadied and she no longer perspired. Her vision, too, was free of the black floating jellyfish that had troubled her before. The path dipped down ahead and then rose again between two massive cliffs. Almost hidden behind the rocks was the castle and she could only see the highest point of the ruins, grey and white. The castle seemed protected and out of reach to her, but she acknowledged its beauty, accepted that this was as much of a glimpse as she was entitled to. She took out her phone and clicked open her Qur’an app. Every day she read a section of the Qur’an, or at least tried to. Sometimes, subject to Adam’s needs, she could only read one or two pages. On bad days, she could read none. Now when she finished one page and started the next, it occurred to her that she was free to read as many pages as she wanted. His voice would not call her. His needs would not interrupt. The more she read, the more she zoned out.
Her ability to concentrate had deteriorated of late. Her mind flitted from here to there. Images of Adam, his eyes, his hands; she could hear his grunts and unformed words, smell him, but he did not interrupt the flow of her reading. Silly thoughts wound their way through her head even though her tongue was reciting sacred words. She knew that this wasn’t good enough. She knew that she should be reading with her heart and mind clear; she knew that she needed to transcend her circumstances, her daily anxieties and her issues with Murtada. She knew all this – that she was worshipping inadequately – and yet she did not stop. She kept reciting, absorbed in the process. She kept trying with neither hope of success, nor despair. This was because she was drawing support, gaining nourishment and she could do that precisely because she did not rate herself highly as a worshipper. She was inadequate, she fell short. But she was enjoying herself, especially now that her breathing had returned to normal. She gave in to the rhythm and the sounds.

  In the back of her mind, she wondered if she was making history. Perhaps for the first time ever, the words of the Qur’an were reaching this particular part of the earth. Perhaps one day, to her credit, coastline, machair and sandstone would bear witness to what they had heard her recite. Long after Moni, with her faults and story, was gone and forgotten.

  Submerged in the text, it was only when he came quite close to her and directly passed her that she looked up and saw him. Iman’s husband. Ridiculously young, scurrying down the path towards the castle. He kept his head down and didn’t greet Moni. He knew who she was and yet he did not stop and greet her. He did not greet women he was unrelated to. He did not speak to them unless he had no choice. With a mobile phone in his pocket, he did not need to ask Moni about the whereabouts of his wife. Therefore, he did not need to speak to her.