The Power(20)

At last, near dawn, crowded around by women who show no signs of tiring, Noor takes his hand and leads him to an apartment, a room, a bed. It belongs to a friend of hers, she says, a student. Six people live here. But half the city has fled now and the place is empty. The electricity isn’t working. She makes a spark in her hand to find their way, and there, in the flash of her, she takes off his jacket, pulls his shirt over his head. She looks at his body as she did before: open and hungry. She kisses him.

‘I have never done this before,’ she says, and he tells her the same is true for him and he does not feel ashamed.

She puts her palm to his chest. ‘I am a free woman,’ she says.

He feels it. It is exhilarating. In the streets there are still shouts and crackles and sporadic sounds of gunfire. Here in a bedroom covered with posters of pop singers and movie stars, their bodies are warm together. She unbuttons his jeans and he steps out of them; she goes carefully; he can feel her skein starting to hum. He is afraid, he is turned on; it is all bundled up together, as it is in his fantasies.

‘You are a good man,’ she says. ‘You are beautiful.’

She runs the back of her hand over the sparse fur of his chest. She lets a tiny crackle go, a prickle at his hair’s ends, glowing faintly. It feels good. Every line of his body is coming into focus as she touches him, as if he hadn’t really been there at all, before.

He wants to be inside her; his body is already telling him what to do, how to move this thing forward, how to take her arms, how to bring her down on to the bed, how to consummate. But the body has contradictory impulses: fear is as significant as lust, physical pain as strong as desire. He holds himself there, wanting and not-wanting. He lets her set the pace.

It takes a long while, and it is good. She shows him what to do, with his mouth and with his fingers. By the time she is riding him, sweating and calling out, the sun has risen on a new day in Riyadh. And when she loses control as she finishes she sends a jolt through his buttocks and across his pelvis and he barely feels the pain at all, so great is the delight.

Later that afternoon, they send out the men in helicopters and soldiers on the streets, armed with guns and live ammunition. Tunde is there to film it when the women hit back. There are so many of them; they are so numerous and so angry. Several women are killed but this just sharpens the rest, and can any soldier keep on firing for ever, mowing down row after row of women? The women fuse the firing pins inside the barrels, they cook the electronics of the vehicles. They do it happily. ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,’ says Tunde in his voiceover report, because he’s been reading about revolution, ‘but to be young was very heaven’.

Twelve days later the government has fallen. There are rumours, never substantiated, about who killed the King; some say it was a member of the family, and some say it was an Israeli assassin, and some whisper that it was one of the maids who had served in the palace loyally for years feeling the power between her fingertips and no longer able to hold it back.

By that time, anyway, Tunde is on a plane again. What has happened in Saudi Arabia has been seen across the world, and the thing is happening everywhere all at once now.





Margot



‘It’s a problem.’

‘We all know it’s a problem.’

‘Think about it, Margot. I mean, really think about it.’

‘I am thinking about it.’

‘We’ve got no way to know whether anyone in this room can do it.’

‘We know you couldn’t do it, Daniel.’

That gets a laugh. In a room of anxious people, a laugh is a release. It wells up to more than its proper size. It takes a few moments for the twenty-three people gathered around the conference table to settle again. Daniel is upset. He thinks it’s a joke about him. He’s always wanted just a little bit more than his due.

‘Obviously,’ he says. ‘Obviously. But we have no way to know. The girls, fine, we’re doing what we can with them – God, have you seen the numbers on runaways?’

They’ve all seen the numbers on runaways.

Daniel presses on. ‘I’m not talking about the girls. We’ve got that under control, for the most part. I’m talking about grown women. Teenage girls can wake this thing up in older women. And they can give it to each other. Grown women can do it now, Margot, you’ve seen that stuff.’

‘It’s very rare.’

‘We think it’s very rare. What I’m saying is, we just don’t know. It could be you, Stacey. Or you, Marisha. For all we know, Margot, you might be able to do it yourself.’ He laughs, and that also gets a nervous little ripple.

Margot says, ‘Sure, Daniel, I could zap you right now. The Governor’s office treads on a news cycle you agreed to give to the Mayoralty?’ She makes a gesture, splaying her fingers wide. ‘Pfffzzzt.’

‘I don’t think that’s funny, Margot.’

But the other people around the table are already laughing.

Daniel says, ‘We’re going to get this test. Bring it in state-wide, all government employees. That includes the Mayor’s office, Margot. No arguments. We need to know for sure. You can’t have someone employed in government buildings who can do that. It’s like walking around with a loaded gun.’

It’s been a year. There’s been footage on the TV of riots in faraway and unstable parts of the world, of women taking whole cities. Daniel’s right. The critical thing isn’t that fifteen-year-old girls can do it: you could contain that. The thing is that they can wake up this power in some of the older women. It raises questions. How long has this been possible? How did no one know until now?