Free Eight Months on Ghazzah Street by Hilary Mantel

go of your casual friendships so that even if you get bored you don’t get lonely. But it’s difficult to make conversation, difficult to keep each other entertained. The risk seems extraordinary—jail, flogging, deportation (and who knows if this theory is true about how the police are supposed to behave) but I needed a drink really to get through the evening with Jeff—his silly, sniggering jokes, and the way he seems to hate the Saudis and resent them because they have all the money and he (comparatively) hasn’t. Andrew got quite angry when he had gone, and said, what’s he complaining about, he’s coining it, he’s on the take; what’s he got to complain about, he’s working the system to suit himself. Then Andrew said more thoughtfully, he probably hates himself for doing that, for what he has become. And we were very quiet, thinking, perhaps we shall become it?
    We felt rather miserable, sitting in that impossible room with all the unused chairs, so we drank the bottle of Jeff’s own wine that he had left behind for us, and next morning I was sick.

    Now the prisoner is released. Frances could walk in the street; but to what purpose? You could not get anywhere. Only, after long hot miles, to Medina Road, where the traffic goes screaming by, out of
town to the bypasses and motorways and onto the Holy City. Walking is pointless; but she can go out into the hall, where gritty dust blows continually under the big front door, and makes patterns on the mottled marble underfoot. She can go up to the flat roof, with her basket of washing, and hang it out, to bring it back an hour or two later, dry and stiff with heat, burnt-smelling, and covered in dust if the wind has veered round in the interim. There are washing lines for each of the flats, but she hasn’t seen her neighbors use them. Perhaps they have more sense, or clothes dryers.
    She likes to be on the roof, and to look down onto the street, and onto the big secluded balconies of the two upper flats, and into the branches of the brown tree with its brown leaves. It is a secret view, a private perspective, and she reminds herself of some lonely woman, her own mother perhaps, peeping at the doings of the neighbors through a lace curtain. Not that she has learned much. The Saudi woman does not come out to take the sun and air; the doors to her balcony—a solid affair, like an extra room—remain firmly closed.
    And the fourth flat is empty. Curious, that, because on her very first morning she had heard footsteps above her head. She remembers it—she remembers every detail of her first day—as the incident which jerked her out of her maudlin state, and made her know that there were people around her, and a new life to be lived. But Andrew says she must be mistaken.
    From the roof of the apartment block there are long views over the dusty street; over the big turquoise rubbish skips that stand at each street corner, the property of Arabian Cleaning Enterprises; over the rows of parked cars. Fierce cats spit and howl and limp in the purlieus of the building, their fur torn into holes or worn away by skin diseases. As the first week of comparative liberty passes, the view comes to seem less edifying, the reasons for the climb fewer, and she begins to resent the two closed doors she passes on the way up, before she negotiates the final turn in the stairs and the short flight to the roof Abdul Nasr’s door, and the door of the fourth flat. And she begins to hate the stairs themselves, because they are
made of that kind of marble patched with slabs of irregular rufus color, flecked with black and a fatty cream, revoltingly edible, like some kind of Polish sausage. She avoids them. She phones up Eric Parsons and tells him that she is not happy and must have a clothes dryer herself. A van arrives with one the following day. Nothing is too much trouble for Turadup.
    So now she stays downstairs. From the living room, a sliding door leads out onto the cracked pavement