The Network - Jason Elliot [99]
I wake in the night with a shock, as if roused by a gunshot. The shots I fired on the beach have been carried into my dream. Somewhere a dog is barking. Jameela is asleep next to me like a baby, half-wrapped in a sheet. I go to the bathroom to drink from the tap and notice the pattern made by all the sand washed off our bodies in the shower. Then I retrieve the satellite phone and step onto the balcony, where the air smells of dust and jasmine. I prepare a coded sitrep for Seethrough and thank him for his part in the arrangements of the previous day. I’m not really expecting an immediate reply and I’m just sitting in the silence thinking of Jameela when I see the blinking light in the phone display that signals his reply: your reference ‘pirates’ not understood please confirm.
And it’s only after about a minute of thinking this over that it really hits me.
I see Jameela every day, and return to her home with her after she’s finished work. The hours of daylight are spent in anticipation of the hours of darkness, when we can travel ever deeper into the territory of intimacy that has opened itself to us. I planned nothing of this when we first met. But now it has us in its grasp and we are powerless against it, and care nothing about where it will take us.
The elements themselves seem to be conspiring in our favour. One afternoon Jameela calls to say she’s returning home early. I drive to her apartment to meet her, and we sit on her balcony, where the air smells so strongly of jasmine, and drink cold white wine. I notice that the sky seems darker than it usually is and wonder if a storm is coming in.
‘Not a storm,’ says Jameela, as if she knows something I don’t. ‘Come.’
We climb to the roof by some narrow brick stairs and she points over the rooftops. Beyond the river to the west, rising out of the desert beyond Omdurman, is a sight I’ve never even imagined. A billowing wall of sand, a thousand feet high I’m guessing, is rolling towards the city. It stretches for what must be miles, an opaque, boiling, blood-orange wave, creeping visibly towards us. The scale of it is stupendous, like a biblical plague. The outline of the city seems puny against the advancing bulk of sand, and the sky grows darker as it nears as if under the command of an irritated god. I have no idea what will happen when it reaches us.
‘Have you seen this before?’
‘It’s a haboob.’ She smiles. ‘The desert’s way to clean itself. It’s beautiful.’
It’s a magnificent reminder of the scale on which nature prefers to do things. We watch its course for a few minutes. Its beauty is inescapable. But as I look at it I feel more than anything a sense of foreboding, as if a kind of reckoning is about to unfold. It signifies only danger to me. Then I turn to Jameela and see her beauty and am reminded how often beauty and danger can be found close together, and the symmetry of the moment seems complete.
‘It will pass,’ she says. ‘We should go inside.’
We leave the roof and return inside, and close the doors and windows of the apartment in turn. The sky darkens even more. We can smell the sand as the haboob advances into everything, suffocating even the daylight and robbing the world outside the windows of colour like an eclipse of the sun. We retreat to the bedroom and make love once more as if to take shelter in one another, celebrating our intimacy in defiance of the affliction visited on the city beyond us.
Later, lying against each other in the muted light, feeling as though we’ve survived a natural disaster, Jameela speaks, prompting me to wonder whether she can read my thoughts. She faces away from me and asks quietly if I am awake.
‘I know you are a spy,’ she says. ‘I don’t care.’
‘I’m not a spy,’ I tell her.
There’s a long silence. She’s not happy with my answer.
‘But I do know people who are.’
‘They sent you here?’
‘Yes.’
‘To spy on me?’
‘No.’ Lie. ‘My meeting you has nothing to do with that.’
‘What do they want?’
‘To find out about bin Laden and his people.’
‘From