Page 2 of Under the Arabian Sky

“Arthur, how old are you? Twenty-five?”

“Thirty-two.”

“Whatever. My point is, you’re young. Think of it as an adventure.”

I caught my breath. That word always reminded me of him.

My Andrew.

I felt my chest tighten. “Are you sure I’m the only one who can go?”

“Yes, I’m sure. Burgess is in the Kalahari, I’m here in the Sahara and poor Sutton is stuck in the Gobi in the middle of bloody Mongolia. I can ask him to trade with you if you like, but he’s just mastered the art of yak-herding.”

“Sounds like a real life-skill.”

“It is if you live in Mongolia. Now what’s your answer? Are you going to Oman or not?”

I looked at the waterfall on the outside of my window and the pigeons trying in vain to stay warm and dry. A drip developed in the ceiling and the deluge outside grew even heavier, so much so that Henderson could hear it loud and clear all the way from the Sahara. “Good heavens, that rain does sound biblical.”

“It’s certainly set in,” I said, grabbing the wastepaper basket beneath my desk to catch the drips.

“Then look on the bright side, Arthur… where you’re going you won’t be needing a raincoat anymore.”

I gave a defeated sigh and felt my frightened heart break a little. “I suppose so.”

CHAPTER2

The differencebetween sand and dust is simple. Sand is a particle with a size that ranges from seventy-five to a thousand micrometres, whereas dust is anything seventy-four micrometres or smaller. The fineness of dust gives it the capacity to do much more damage than sand. Its particles can carry viruses in the air. It can cause rot and decay in most materials if left unattended. And perhaps most damaging of all, it can serve as a reminder that time has passed without change, that the days are disappearing faster than we know.

Dust covered the only piece of luggage I owned: a battered old suitcase that I had bought from a second-hand store three years ago, not for travelling but for the sole purpose of keeping my bundles of archive notebooks and research documents in one place. As I pulled the suitcase down from atop the wardrobe in my tiny flat, a cloud of dust plumed and made me sneeze. I plonked it on the bed, unlocked the latches and began unpacking my notes.

I asked myself whether or not I was unnerved by the idea of being a gay man in the Middle East. The answer was, not really. I’d been single for so long now that I felt as though I was gay by definition only, and not by any practical sense of the word.

No, I was fooling myself if I thought my anxiety had to do with anything but Andrew.

In the days when I once travelled, I had a proper suitcase… a Samsonite number, sleek and black and made from lightweight, state-of-the-art polypropylene. But that left with Andrew one day and never came back.

I felt the fragile shards of my heart chime in the cold wind that blew through my chest from time to time. That wind seemed stronger and chillier than ever now. I suddenly became short of breath and had to sit on the bed. The irony that I was being plucked out of my comfort zone— out of the home that Andrew and I had built together, the only place I felt safe besides my leaking office— and forced to take a journey for the first time since his death was not lost on me.

It felt like the universe was having a laugh at my expense, an amused spectator of my ongoing struggle.

Or perhaps it was Andrew himself, telling me to finally get off my arse and do something.

Out of the two of us, he was always the doer.

The great over-achiever.

The reckless risk-taker.

Yes, I probably had him to blame for all this.

I stared into the old suitcase, empty now, with its dented-in corners and torn polyester and nylon lining. I wondered who it had belonged to in its previous life. I was somewhat comforted that, no matter who had owned it, it hadn’t been forever lost in an incident that newspapers would label ‘tragic’ and ‘untimely’. At least this battered little piece of luggage had always made it home, until the day it was given the chance to find a new owner— me— who saw it in a second-hand store one rainy day and decided it would make a safe place for his work.

“I wasn’t really expecting to take you away with me one day,” I murmured to my suitcase. “I hope you’ve got it in you for one last adventure.”

Outside my bedroom window, a flash of lightning lit up the night.

The rain drummed against my window harder.

---