Sliding open my bedroom window, the morning call to prayer from the nearby minaret resonated through the fly-mesh, its ululations amplified by loudspeakers. The smell of fresh stone-baked flatbread wafted from the downstairs bakery’s stove pipes. Both were silhouetted against the scintillating blue of the Gulf’s coastal waters. Orange-brown dust lay in the tracks of the thick double-glazed window, its two panes meant to keep stifling heat outside and artificially cooled air inside. A peeling surround of masking tape forever immobilised one pane, a failed barrier between a summer sandstorm’s eroding blast and a vacuum cleaner’s domestic suction.
My bedroom, like the rest of my family’s first-floor apartment, had a mottled marble floor that was cool underfoot and disproportionately amplified the sounds of any furniture being moved. The polished surface also allowed dust bunnies to slowly self-assemble in the quiet draughts created by opening doors and moving feet. Delicate, entangled balls of detritus that slid under my bed, along with the occasional mosquito trying to hide from deadly chemical sprays.
Large floor-to-ceiling fitted wardrobes with doors of dark panelled wood spanned the wall opposite the room’s doorway. They contained relatively little, as I only inhabited my bedroom for a few weeks each year. Clothes of course, but also the trailing creations from a younger self – Airfix models and Lego – took up most of the shelf space. A few other prized possessions also occupied the room, signifying increasing maturity and trusted safekeeping: A pair of binoculars for studying docked oil tankers and drilling rigs sat temporarily offshore; my first stacked hi-fi immodestly positioned on a table, its graphic equaliser often resonating with excessively low frequencies and protested high volumes; a new-fangled Walkman cassette player and its orange foam headphones entangled in its cable on a bedside table.
The bookcase near the door held a mixture of fact and fiction, novels and textbooks, comics – 2000AD a favourite – and half-read copies of Omni, New Scientist and Scientific American, all piled up as book-ends. On the dresser were untidy stacks of cheap, pirated cassette tapes from South-East Asia, the Live Aid concert recording already in circulation. Alongside them were bundles of revision notes. Exam time beckoned once more and it was supposed to be another revision day today.
In a few years all this would soon be gone, my room ransacked by an invading force heralded by tanks rolling over a border to the north. I still occasionally wonder if my binoculars are sitting in another boy’s bedroom, the same prayers echoing through his window. But I know my room, and probably all of my belongings, are no more, inconsequential memories of a pointless war.
This is a great piece of evocative writing. Thanks for sharing.