“YOU can go to Hell!” Saira stormed out of the doorway, her parting words echoing in the corridor. “Both you and your stupid friend had best be gone before I’m back.”
It was always going to be a hard sell, Jack thought grimly. It wasn’t as if he had much practise in proposing to anyone before now, not least someone who had been married six times before. Perhaps he shouldn’t have dismissed Zarius’s suggestion of buying flowers after all.
Was it his imagination or had Saira had paused slightly, laughed almost, when he posed the question? There had bee a fleeting second, or so Jack had thought, where the words rattled in her brain; but when she could see he meant it, her features instantly hardened.
However unpopular the idea, Jack had hoped there would have been time to explain the thinking behind the proposition. But how could he explain what he barely understood himself? Zarius’s explanation about the misfortune which had followed Saira and her family was hopelessly vague. He had not worked hard at school. In rebellion, he had gone to extreme lengths to deliberately ignore and misremember any tuition in science. Yet despite his self-inflicted ignorance, the explanation he was offered did not ring true.
Surely it was not scientifically possible that the same illness had caused the deaths of all Saira’s husbands? Even if they had contracted it, why had it caused them to die on their wedding nights? And if it was fatal, why had Saira not died from it and why wasn’t she showing any symptoms? Why hadn’t others who were close to her, Khalid, Asif, and other family members, not ill too?
“I fear you too have contracted this… illness, dear boy.” Zarius had told him as they sat in the seclusion of their room, with the evening sun painting blood across the adobe wall.
“Your sudden turn during your visit to the desert was the first stage. You will not be fully cured unless you embrace this illness head on. You will not die – for, unlike those who have gone before, you understand the scale of the challenge. The sickness that you must fight is like none you have ever known, like none other on earth in fact. For it is an illness of the heart. Saira has lived with it for all her adult life and like a parasite feeds on her grief. With her father’s permission, I have interviewed Saira about the circumstances of her husbands’ deaths. Your fate will be no different from theirs unless you take action.”
“What sort of action?”
“Remember?” Zarius held up a glass jar in his palm. The contents were a cloudy red and a spongy shape could just about be seen. It was the spleen of the shark which they had carried from Alexandria. “If you eat this before your wedding night – you will be able to overcome the illness.“
“What do you mean?”
“Very high in protein, it stimulates the brain. The illness will take on a very real form… The best way to describe it; you will feel as if someone else is trying to take over your mind. But you must fight it. I won’t underplay things – you will be in great danger, mortal danger in fact.”
It sounded to like exactly the effects of a Nectar tab. But looking at the tuberous ventricles suspended in decaying blood, Jack thought that he’d take the tablet any day.
“But this isn’t making any sense,” he said. “If people only die when they marry Saira, the safest thing is for no-one to marry her at all.”
“Listen Jack, we didn’t come here by accident. You though we were just going to come over to acquire new bracelets, evade your father’s debtor’s trap, hide from the law, and overcome unassailable odds by returning to your homeland triumphantly. No my dear boy, it was never going to be that simple. You must marry Saira or you will not see your father and all we have worked for will be lost. By doing this you will cure both her and yourself. It is the only way.”
“But if I do overcome the illness and cure us both. What then?”
“I’d be honoured if you name your first child after me.”
“I don’t want a wife!”
“Why not? I think you’ll be very good for each other. She is a little bit older than you but very beautiful, don’t you think? But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Firstly we need to get her agreement. It will be your job to think of a nice way to propose.”
“What exactly do you suggest?” Jack said sarcastically.
“Oh candles, music, the usual thing.” His companion said chirpily, oblivious to the irony.
It was in this regard that their plan remained weak.
Jack had run through the doorway where Saira had fled. He was just in time to see her fading into the street, the crowd parting to avoid touching the outcast woman. Ignoring their bemused stares, he launched himself into the street calling her name. Her dark, shiny hair was easy to pick out in the crowd, among the covered heads and dust-covered faces and goats ready for slaughter. Whether she had heard his voice, there was no acknowledgement. A gang of blue overalls covered in work dust stormed through the makeshift street and Saira disappeared in a nimbus of plexiglass helmets.
But by now Jack knew where she was heading.
He raced across the meandering backstreets, stinking of human waste, making his way to the heat-soaked outskirts, where the sun pounded the flattened sand. A speck on the horizon, on a far away dune, was Saira. He drew closer, every step an agony in the searing light.
She was facing him but did not turn. His feet slid with every step as he ascended the hill, eventually having to plunge his fists into the slopes to keep going. Thus he climbed up the mountain, heaving for breath and soaked with perspiration as he arrived.
Saira looked blankly as he collapsed at her feet.
“Will you marry me?” he panted. She shook her head.
“I will not die. I promise. I’ve found a way to lift your curse – your illness, I mean- but you must trust me. You need to trust me.”
“It is not your life that concerns me. It is mine. I don’t know who you are. From the company you keep, you don’t seem very reputable.”
He followed her gaze to the tiny cloaked figure, standing at an outskirt wall, his robe hitched up to his knees as he gingerly picked his way through the sewage-strewn landscape. Somehow he had managed to find them.
“But my friend has the means to destroy the sickness that has killed your husbands. He’s got a sort of medicine which will cure you.”
“Tell me, what makes your friend so sure that I am sick.”
“I thought you told him what you told me.”
“I have no sickness and your friend is certainly no doctor. I know every plant there is in this godforsaken place, it’s every property. There is no illness in the world which could take the lives of six men in such a way as my husbands.”
Jack was confused.
“But didn’t he tell you that you abou-”
“He asked me lots of questions, when you were ill in bed, exactly like the police did before. Perhaps I should never have told you about my marriages. You obviously think t I am now willing to accept any man – any child - who comes along.”
“Look Saira, I know it sounds crazy but so much has happened that I can’t explain. Your husbands, our coming here, I think it is connected. I don’t know what has caused it all but I think we can help you. Please let us.”
“But I don’t want to marry you.”
“Me neither,” he stood in front of her now, hopelessly trying to find the right thing to say. “You married the last man, the policeman, out of anger. You didn’t love him. Marry me instead because you have a chance to rid yourself of this thing.”
She sighed and wiped a solitary drop of water from her eye.
“I suppose it’s worth a try. I don’t like you that much.”
Both of them stood in silence. From the bottom of the dune, the hooded figure was kicking dust into the channels of effluent streaming out of Sanaam.