The road to Damascus

Kay puzzled over the cryptic footnotes. Jebel Howah, Jazirah, Rubrah… She looked at Mr Woods in the bed beside her and struggled to square the mystical content of the battered old journal with the shrivelled figure before her. Hadn’t he mentioned something about a Damascene moment in the bathroom that time? Lowering him naked beneath the harsh strip lights, he’d wept at the pathos of it all and she’d felt compelled to match his vulnerability by telling him her husband was having an affair. It was the first time she’d said it aloud and the tears fell without warning, mingling with his own in the tepid bath water. ‘Better than Epsom salts,’ he’d said with a wry smile and they’d both laughed. Then he reached up and held her smudged face in his shaky hands and said something about a journey to Damascus. She’d assumed he was speaking figuratively, only now she realised he’d actually been there – inhaled the same dusty air as St Paul himself.

Kay had only left the country once and that was to go to a funeral in Ireland. It hardly counted. But, no, this wasn’t where she dreamed her own road would lead. Lonely and washed up, working in a care home; her spirit as broken as her fingernails. The work was OK, mostly making cups of tea and wiping arses; and the old dears were delightful. But there was something about seeing them sitting out their days on threadbare armchairs in a sea of greige that pressed down heavily upon her; the gloomy old grandfather clock in the communal area chiming for them all. She had come to dread the nights when she’d lie awake panicked at the empty years ahead, or lack of them. 

Minarets, mosques and souks rose up from the yellowing pages and the air became infused with jasmine. Hard to believe the frail creature before her had ever been anywhere but this care home where bored young girls spoke to him like he was deaf and retarded and they knew best. The truth was he had lived more lives than they ever would. She flicked through the journal and a pressed Iris fell to the floor, accompanied by a letter in Arabic in what she guessed was a woman’s hand. The rigid lines of the single kiss at the end seemed at odds with the sensuous curves and undulations of the rest of the script, but it was the words ‘Your Sariehah, for always’ that made her catch her breath. Even all these years later, the ink faded, the paper bloated, the language indecipherable, she could feel the urgency of the love, the passion bursting forth from the foreign font. And he had cherished it all this time. She thought of her own husband, and felt… nothing. All this time he’d been pretending to be a dull middle-aged man who had given up on his dreams; too tired to talk, let alone get naked. And the truth was he loved another woman, or at the very least was infatuated with her, needed her, wanted her, made her feel alive.

A calm flushed through Kay’s veins like valium as she took in the reality of her situation. Her husband was a spineless, cheating bastard, but it was her impotence and denial that had allowed this to happen. She thought of the journey she hadn’t taken. Years ago now, but it still stung. The post was only for six months, but he’d made it clear he wouldn’t be there when she got back. So she’d never left – spiritually she had never been present since. Now here was Mr Woods’ life, laid out in this treasured journal, bulging with adventure; the red and purple sunsets every bit as vivid even now.  

When the night porter arrived that evening, he found Mr Woods cold as Syrian stone, a single pressed flower between his fingers. Weeks later a postcard arrived from Istanbul. The orderly, a foreign chap, pinned it up in the dining area. Kay liked to imagine it displayed among the polite thank you notes and sympathy cards, a window onto another more exotic life. Hers.   

BG