‘It’s wrong because I say—’ but she didn’t even let him finish that nonsense.
‘Your opinion is greater than the Prophet’s, peace be upon him?’ she wanted to know.
To even think such a thing was a sacrilege, and for a moment he couldn’t reply.
His mother hammered the advantage: ‘It was God’s will you took your father’s place – now start acting like him. You think he would want his daughters living like this? You think he’d want his wife?!’
The boy knew the answers. He looked across the vast expanse of gender that separated them, and into a tiny window. It was the narrow slit in her veil – for over a thousand years the only way by which men and women in the Arab world have observed each other.
She held his gaze with her beautiful, shadowed eyes. ‘I asked if you thought your father would want us living in these circumstances – now answer me,’ she demanded.
He tried to stare her down, but she wouldn’t have it and his eyes slid away. She was still his mother and he loved her dearly. ‘How much would a job pay?’ he asked at last.
Chapter Five
THE FAMILY’S INDIAN summer might have continued for ever except for a group of Bangladeshi construction workers.
Within a month of her son agreeing that she could work, they had moved to a house in a good neighbourhood and, five days a week, she got on the bus with her daughters and went to her job. Never before had she felt so much purpose in her life, or such quiet enjoyment of her two girls. It came to an end two days after the construction workers started building a small office block next to the boy’s school.
Unfamiliar with the finer points of site preparation, the Bangladeshis drove a mechanical backhoe through the underground water and power lines, killing off the air-conditioning in the school. While the hapless driver looked at his barbecued machine, the kids cheered him from their windows, fully aware they would be given the rest of the day off.
The Saracen decided to surprise his mother and take her for lunch, but the Manama bus service was about as reliable as Jeddah’s and he arrived a few minutes after the Batelco building had closed for the break. Assuming she was inside in the staff cafeteria, he went to the mall to get a drink and to consider how he might spend his free afternoon.
He stepped off an escalator, saw her from thirty yards away and, in that moment, whatever small life he had constructed for himself in Bahrain fell to pieces. Unveiled and wearing lipstick, her Gucci sunglasses pushed up on to her head, she was having lunch at a café with a group of co-workers.
He stared at her unveiled face and make-up, shattered. She might as well have been naked in his eyes. Even worse than her immodesty, though, were the four men who were sitting at the large table. One look at them, and he knew they were not the fathers or brothers of any of the other women.
A wave of sudden retching, of betrayal, almost choked him and, just as he beat that back, he was swamped by the rolling desolation of failure: he realized that he had let his father down in the worst imaginable way.
He considered confronting his mother in front of them, covering her face and dragging her home – but somehow he managed to force his legs to walk away. Angry, wounded virtually beyond repair, he went to the only refuge he knew – the mosque – desperate for comfort and advice from the imam and the other soldiers of the Muslim Brotherhood.
He returned home so late that night and was deliberately so tardy in getting up the next morning that he didn’t see his mother and sisters until dinner time. Strangely, he made no reference to what he’d seen at the mall but, all through the meal, his mother was aware something was wrong.
When the girls had gone to bed she asked him what it was but, withdrawn and surly, he wouldn’t be corralled into talking about it. The only thing she could think of was that it had something to do with a girl, so she decided not to pressure him; she’d had brothers herself and she knew how hard the teenage years were for boys.
It took several days, but he finally sat down and spoke with her. With downcast eyes, he said that, after months of introspection, he had decided to follow a religious life and would one day – God willing – become an imam.
She looked at him, taken aback, but made no attempt to interrupt. Whatever dreams she’d had for her son, they had never included that.
He told her quietly that he knew a spiritual life was a hard road but, since the death of his father, religion had brought him greater consolation than anything else and, as the imam had told him on several occasions, it was a decision of which his father would have been immensely proud.
His mother knew that was true and, while it explained his recent silence, she couldn’t help but think there was something else about the decision she didn’t understand.