Quality Time
It was Tom’s idea to come here. Hayley had favoured a long weekend in Rome. But Tom had argued with unusual vehemence that on the eve of their fifteenth wedding anniversary, they should revisit the country where they fell in love. The children, now in their early teens, could spend half term with friends. It was the right moment, he insisted, to rediscover the spirit of adventure that had brought them together in the first place.
“Let’s live a little,” he’d said, reaching out to touch her forearm, “get out of our comfort zone. And no cheap hotels this time, I promise.”
Besides, they already had the guidebook. He had duly presented her with their tatty old copy of The Rough Guide To Tunisia, published in the early 90s. As he pressed it into her hands Hayley had instinctively lifted the book to her nose. It smelt hot and sweet, and fell open on a chapter headed “Tozeur And The Jerid”. Something fell from the page: a dried oleander bloom that Tom had picked for her during their trip almost two decades earlier. The children groaned as they always did when they sensed a rare moment of sentimentality between their parents. And Hayley capitulated, unable to resist the nostalgia of his notion.
“Great,” she said swiftly, aware that if she thought about it too long, she might find reasons not to go.
“Really?” he had responded.
“Really,” she had reiterated, gratified she could still surprise him.
And so, instead of resting a cheek against a cool marble pillar in the Sistine Chapel to stare up at Eve emerging from Adam’s side, Hayley now found herself squinting at the biscuit-coloured minaret of a mosque just outside Tozeur, trying to remember how she felt when she saw it for the first time all those years ago.
“We used to be so free,” she said wistfully, craning her neck towards the top of the tower, admiring the exotic geometric patterns and wondering who came to worship in this apparently deserted village on the road towards Algeria. She felt Tom touch her neck and leant towards him. He kissed her quickly on the lips.
Hayley wiped her forehead again. Hotter. She definitely felt hotter than she could ever remember. Her eyes were half closed against the sun and the sky, which had turned from blue to orange in the time they had been standing here. As she licked beads of sweat from her upper lip, she could feel that already, less than half an hour after leaving the air-conditioned sanctuary of their boutique hotel, she was already baked inside a shroud of dust. They had come at the same time of year as their last visit. So was the impossible heat due to global warming or peri-menopause, she wondered?
“Water?” She took a long swig from her bottle and passed it to Tom. It was already warm. He shook his head.
“Go easy on the liquid,” he said, “it just makes you sweat more.”
“We’ve got two gallons in the back of the car,” she said, but her words were carried away by the wind, which seemed stronger away from the oasis of Tozeur.
Tom ignored her and continued reading from the guidebook. She tried to concentrate on what he was saying but was distracted by the sight of an elderly Bedouin man loping towards them on a mule. He stopped almost beside them and stared, his hand resting protectively on a large sack.
“We don’t want any carpets,” said Tom abruptly, without looking up from the book, as the man opened up the bag.
“As-salam alaykum,” said Hayley, pleased her memory hadn’t betrayed her. She pulled a scarf around her head, less out of any sense of propriety than the urge to keep the dust out of her hair and the heat off her head. When they arrived yesterday she had laughed at the tourists trying to pass themselves off as nomads by wearing blue scarves wrapped around their face and neck. Now she was one of them.
“They don’t say that in Tunisia,” Tom murmured. Hayley noticed that the small bald patch on the top of his head was looking red even though the rest of his face was already turning steadily browner.
“Haboob,” the man smiled, pointing at the sky, “Haboob.”
“Don’t engage or he’ll try to sell you something,” Tom reminded her. “We don’t have much time.”
Hayley winced. Last time they were here, Tom and she spent hours sharing tea and shisha with villagers. At the time she thought it was an appealing part of her new boyfriend’s personality. Now she realised it probably had more to do with the fact that he was working on a documentary series on nomads of the Maghreb.
She recalled the sense of hope and optimism of that first trip. She had known Tom less than three months when he suggested she fly to meet him at the end of his work trip. She was 23 and had just finished an MA in English Literature. He was already working in the documentaries department at the BBC. Her elder brother had introduced them with a warning that Tom wasn’t “good relationship material”. She had ignored him and bought a ticket to Tunis. Within three years they were married and a couple of years later Gus was born, hastily followed by Felix.
Hayley wanted to tell him that he needed to slow down. That it didn’t matter if they didn’t make it to the desert today, that the Dar Charait museum could wait until tomorrow. They could go back to Tozeur, spend the afternoon in bed and then walk round the welcome cool of the oasis in the evening if they wanted. They could even spend the whole day in bed. When was the last time they had done that?
Hayley still travelled with hope. Now aged 43, her aspirations were less epic and more specific than they were two decades ago and mostly involved her children because she was no longer sure what she wanted. She closed her eyes again and breathed in the rich smell of aniseed as the man opened up his sack.
“It’s fennel,” she exclaimed triumphantly. The man pressed a bulb into her hand looking pleased with her reaction. He pointed at the sky.
“Haboob,” he repeated several times before climbing back on his mule.
“Thank you,” shouted Hayley after him.
“It was built in the ninth century and the raised brickwork laid in contrary directions is unique to this region of Tunisia,” said Tom, reading from the guidebook.
“Mmm,” said Hayley. The wind blew a new wave of sand and dust across the road and Hayley. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, she thought to herself. The desert could consume a body as fast as any hyena.
“What do you think?” Tom asked, in the way he might once have questioned the children when reading a bedtime story to check they were concentrating.
“I think it looks like a piece of giant shortbread,” replied Hayley with satisfaction, assuming he was asking her opinion about the mosque.
“You’re not listening to me,” said Tom, heading back towards the car. “I was saying that I think it would be a good idea to hit the dunes before the masses arrive.” He headed for the car so fast that she found herself caught in a slipstream of dust. As they climbed into the front, Hayley noticed that behind them the sky was turning grey.
“Rain?” Hayley shouted over the noise of the wind.
“According to the guidebook it hasn’t rained here for half a century,” said Tom, as he switched on the engine.
They left the village behind them and turned up the radio to listen to gravelly songs in Arabic on a local radio station as they headed west towards the Algerian border, where the rough, flat edges of the Sahara turned into huge imposing sand dunes.
“Why were you rude to that man?” Hayley suddenly asked, as she stared out of the window wondering if this really was the same route they had followed 20 years earlier. All the roads in this region looked the same. Tom apologised and tried to explain that perhaps it wasn’t such a great idea to come back to a place that you had been before because it increased the possibilities of nostalgia and regret. His comment stung Hayley.
“What I mean is that the era of mass tourism has reached the Sahara and I don’t like the way everything has become so commercialised. Last time we were here there were four land cruisers in Tozeur to take tourists to the dunes and now there are hundreds,” Tom hastily added.“It’s all those Star Wars aficionados. God, did you see that American guy in the lobby this morning dressed up as Luke Skywalker? And the women with their Princess Leia plaits?”
Hayley remained silent. She would have liked to visit the old Star Wars sets in Matmâta and knew that Tom would probably indulge her if she suggested going there now.
“If you go somewhere you’ve never been before then you don’t have points of comparison,” Tom continued, anxiously glancing over at her. “I guess I had too many expectations.”
She stuffed a couple of dates into her mouth in case she was tempted to give in and chewed them in silence.
“I wasn’t talking about us, Hayley,” Tom said finally. The long silence was filled with the sound of a commentator gabbling in Arabic on the radio. Then a familiar song came on.
“Oasis playing in the oasis,” joked Tom.
“So each time you slept with her did you regret it a little bit more?” Hayley blurted out. Her words hung in the air.
“It was over before it even began, Hayley,” Tom said gently, “And yes, actually, I did.” There was another gaping silence. “Can’t we put it behind us? Please. It was meaningless.” He switched on the wipers to try and clean the dust from the windscreen and Hayley was grateful for the noise as they squeaked back and forth.
“You’re the one who always wants to be somewhere else,” Hayley responded. “And when I’m with you and you’re in that kind of mood, it makes me feel like you’d rather be with someone else, and that makes me feel that maybe you should be with someone else.”
The words tumbled out of Hayley’s mouth before she had any time for self-censorship. It was an ancient argument. So familiar that it had come to feel like the script of someone else’s life. Why had he done it? Why? When they had got through the grind of the early years, when Gus and Felix were almost independent and they were beginning to rediscover life together? Why had he chosen that moment to embark on a casual affair with a researcher at work? It had happened on location, he explained, as though that accounted for what he described as “his serious lapse of judgement”.
They had unexpectedly come to a fork in the road. Hayley turned the map several times in her lap. Tom switched off the engine. She turned round to look at a sign beside them. “Attention Passage Dromadaires” it read. Nothing to indicate the road to Nefta.
“Do you know where we are?” Tom asked. He tentatively wound down the window to look back down the desolate road. Sand blew in and wind roared as loud as the sea as it rocked the stationary car.
“God, what’s going on?” asked Hayley, through the grit between her teeth.
They both turned round to stare out the back windscreen and saw a thick soupy brown cloud behind them.
“Sandstorm,” they both said simultaneously. Tom swiftly shut the window again. The key strategy in a sandstorm was to stay in exactly the same place because within minutes the road would be covered, he commented, pulling out his BlackBerry from the glove compartment.
He had once been in a sandstorm when he was filming in Morocco, he reassured Hayley.
“There’s no reception.”
He took the map from her lap and tried to identify where they might be.
“It’s inaccurate,” said Hayley, opening a couple of guidebooks to compare different versions of the same area. “They’re all different.”
“We should get the food and water from the boot,” suggested Hayley. Her teeth were chattering from the sudden drop in temperature.
“And our clothes,” said Tom, “in case we end up spending the night here.”
“You were right. We shouldn’t have come,” said Hayley.
“It was my idea,” shrugged Tom.
“But you expected me to say no,” said Hayley. They smiled tentatively at each other.
The car was enveloped by the cloud of sand and grit. Hayley could no longer see the sign warning about camels on the road, but at least the dust muffled the noise of the wind.
“I wonder whether sandstorms have an eye, like a hurricane, and if they do whether we are almost at its apex?” Tom asked.
“Do you think we could get buried?” Hayley responded. “Is there such a thing as an avalanche of sand? Could we suffocate?”
“We have to fight the urge to get out of the car,” insisted Tom. He held her hand and they stared out the windscreen as sand fell on the glass like tiny drops of rain. “In a situation like this, it is critical not to lose your nerve.”
“What would Ray Mears do?” Hayley wondered.
“He would tell us to pee in a container in case we run out of water,” said Tom, picking up an empty plastic bottle from the floor in front of Hayley. Despite herself, she laughed.
“We’re not going to die,” said Tom.
“We’re not going to die,” Hayley reiterated.
She shivered again and Tom suggested they lie across the back seat to maximise their body heat and cover themselves with spare clothes. Tom offered to go on the edge and they lay there staring out the window as the sandstorm enveloped them. Hayley glanced at her watch and told Tom that they shouldn’t look again because it would make the time pass more slowly. Tom pulled an iPod from the bag and they each chose songs for each other. Tom put his arm around her.
“We’re good together, Hayley,” he said.
“We are,” she admitted.
“I’m really sorry,” he said.
Then as quickly as it had descended, the cloud of sand began to disappear. They got out of the car, scarves wrapped around their nose and mouth. It had blown itself out in less than half an hour, but the road was totally obscured.
“What do we do now?” asked Hayley, warily eyeing the desolate, empty landscape.
“We wait,” said Tom. “The desert is full of tourists.”
They leant against the car, enjoying the heat of the sun against their skin. Tom read from his guidebook.
“We must be very close to where those Austrian tourists were kidnapped by Al-Qaeda,” Tom suddenly said. “It says they came across the border from Algeria.”
He put up a hand to shield his eyes. In the distance they could both see the glint of a car windscreen approaching.
“What happened to them?” Hayley asked.
“One was killed, the other released,” said Tom.
The car was travelling fast, its driver utterly assured of his whereabouts, despite the disappearance of the asphalt road. They stood waving their arms in a spot that might have been the middle of the road. As it drew closer the driver slowed down and they could see a group of people in the back wearing scarves around their faces and carrying what looked like guns.
“Shit,” said Hayley.
“Could be Berber tribesmen,” said Tom sounding nervous for the first time. “It would be really bad luck, after everything that’s happened, to end up bumping into a bunch of jihadists in the desert.”
The car pulled up and the door opened. Out got the man they had seen in the hotel that morning. He was carrying a lightsaber.
“God, am I pleased to see you,” said Tom.
“May the force be with you,” joked the man.
Read our interview with Fiona Neill
Read our review of Fiona's book Friends, Lovers and Other Indiscretion
