As we stood around the graveside, I felt like our family was metaphorically speaking, leaning in, supporting each other like sticks on a tee pee, and all I could think was we could have been anywhere doing this. Every culture on earth has this kind of a ritual for someone who has died, and you wonder how we can find so much to disagree about, when fundamentally, we all have such similar needs. Everywhere I looked, there were little green shoots peeking through the frosty earth. This is what it's all about, I thought. Shoots, and roots. And on Granny's coffin, the roundest, proudest numbers glistened. 88. My favourite number in the bingo, and two infinite wheels sitting alongside each other.
But tearing myself away from family and home again after only 3 weeks in Jordan was a wrench, even with the thought of the Lozenge's expression on unzipping the suitcase loaded with sausages, bacon and hot cross buns. After being around so many people I know so well, all united by the legacy Granny left behind, each of us, cog-like, independently turning yet linked, similar to the ones on Connect 4, to be returning to a place where I know no-one well, seemed perverse. Looking down on the midnight lights of Amman on Wednesday, as though some huge hand had thrown a handful of yellow fairy lights onto black velvet, I looked down and thought of my three boys sleeping down below. I was coming home to a place which isn't yet home. And in some ways I think I feel it more strongly than any of them.
I'm reading a book called 8 months on Ghazzah Street by Hilary Mantel at the moment (thank you, Malika!). It's one of those novels that sucks you in so much, that you live it in your head even when your nose is out of it. It's set in Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia, and is so sinister about the regime there, that it makes living in Jordan seems like Islam lite. Yet the two countries were all the same land before the Arab Revolt and World War 1, after which time the Middle East was carved up, and the Al Saud tribe took charge of Saudi and the Hashemite tribe took Jordan. As well as a chilling account of what can happen to humans if they have their freedom taken away, it gives a horrible impression of expats in this situation too. In some ways I think you can probably only be truly honest as a writer of fiction. The main protagonist says: "Travel ends and routine begins and old habits which you thought you had left behind in one country catch up with you in the next, and old problems resurface, but if you are lucky you carry as part of your baggage the means of solving those problems and accommodating those habits, and you take with you an open mind, and discretion, and common sense; if you have those with you, you can manage anywhere." I bit my lip as I read it, hoping I was one of those. I will be judging my actions from now.
I woke up on Thursday after sleeping for about 2 hours to a tangle of boy flesh, bees nest hair and squeaking as the cubs came scampering in. Rashimi smelled like the John Lewis perfume department, presumably after four days of being in the bosom of the Glammy and her cousins and friends. The Lozenge less perfumed, but more verbose.
Rashimi and I went to collect the Lozenge from nursery from the first time on our own, as to solve the car issue, we've hired the cheapest one we could find for a month. It's a vermillion Chevrolet automatic, which hiccuped and wheezed its way along the familiar roads we'd got to know with Abu Mohammad, pumping Lebanese pop from the radio, which I couldn't work out how to turn off completely. The first thing L said was: 'I like the car and I like the miuthic Mummy!' Then he told me I was very naughty for putting Great Granny in the earth. 'It'th not nithe,' he reiterated.
We ditched the car at home and went on foot to the bird park which was crammed with women and children and the occasional man. I looked around and realised I was almost the only one without a headscarf, and definitely the only Westerner. Hilary Mantel is not helping with her interpretation, albeit in novel form, of certain interpretations of Islam, and I couldn't help feeling a bit cross I had to think before I dressed in the mornings, and cross that these ladies may or may not have had the choice to do the same. I tried a bit of idle Arabic chit chat with a few, but it never seems to get anywhere. L said he wanted to go to Regents Park in London, and then got some huge black ants in his pants after raking a nest with his new purple plastic rake which he'd spent the last hour wrenching off a few other boys who liked the look of it. Probably due to the 2 hours sleep the night before, and after the whistle-stop trip home, my soul was filled with the most intense feeling of loneliness. We hobbled back to our flat, L picking ants out of his pants, Rashimi kicking his legs idly in the pushchair, and I asked myself the same question that pops into my head most days. Why did we decide to do it this way? It was such a stupid idea.
J, being my only real friend in this city so far, was understanding and practical when he got back to find his wife had become a jelly. We agreed it wasn't a bad start to have each other in this new city, and perhaps we were even being a bit more productive with our time than normal.
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