Her Iraqi experience would be recorded in jottings and tangibles—she would flatten its petals, note its peculiarities, allow its dust to get between her pages. There would be no considered essays, well-crafted letters or articles, such as her father had suggested. No. She would be no good at that. But memory, keeping it and controlling it, that was a job worth doing. Thea liked to be reminded, and she intended to capture this country, and hold it, in its minutiae.
The morning’s celebrations had set her on edge. She wondered, possibly for the first time, why she had not attended university. At eighteen it had been a straightforward choice, to her, even though it didn’t quite make sense. She was a reader, inquisitive, open-minded. Her parents’ expectations had been disguised as suggestions: a degree in history or literature? French, perhaps? Their thoughtful, considered child—her occasional outbursts of inanity notwithstanding—was surely bound for study? And they held this opinion even though her father had told her frequently that she spent too much time thinking. “Tell me how to stop,” she had teased him one day, “and I’ll tell you how to stop dreaming.”
There was, though, some truth in what he said—back then she spent a good deal of time inside her own head—but she wasn’t pondering Jungian psychology or planning a rewrite of The Great Gatsby. She was scheming, dreaming, fashioning plans to give her restless, reckless thoughts something to do. So when a summer job in an office had yielded cash into her hand, she was immediately persuaded that there were more exciting places to be than the dreary corridors in UCD’s campus at Belfield or the cobblestoned quads at Trinity College. A resistance to containment had always pulled on her—an impatient yank on her arm—and while working in an office was a containment of sorts, she did not feel constrained therein, because her bank balance had an air of conceit about it, and come the holidays, her spirit, her impulses, were her own to spill, be it on the shores of Lake Titicaca or sleeping with some pigs in a hut in the Pyrenees. Now, instead of a degree, instead of looking for a secure teaching job and a house on a cul-de-sac, she was living in Iraq.
No regrets. None.
And yet something niggled. Her laundry had been left on the end of the bed in a plastic bag. As she put away her pressed and folded clothes, she pinpointed what was bugging her: the women with whom she had celebrated International Women’s Day were architects and engineers and project managers. They had skills, real skills (though some weren’t much older than Thea), while her professional abilities amounted to typing. And Pitman’s Shorthand. A little bookkeeping. According to her last boss, her attention to detail was her real forte.
Attention to detail. Thea shook her head, folded the laundry bag, and went back to the window. How far, in truth, could secretarial work take her? Alia and Najma could design bus shelters that would survive a nuclear attack, but Thea had swapped education for a typewriter: 90 w.p.m. Her great skill: ninety words per minute.
A pink gloom was curling across the town. Perhaps it was in this part of the world, where the evening light was filled with desert dust, that the expression “dusty pink” had been born. The traffic was building now, the bridge lined with buses and pickup trucks, but scattered among the houses, palm trees lifted the city from the touch of time. From this perspective Thea could see, more clearly than had ever been possible from her breakfast café in Dublin, that horizons meant only that you had still farther to go. Her unease about her lack of professional qualifications began to fall away. She must, simply, make good her choices. If she was to live like a cricket, she should learn to fly.
Her contract, carefully managed, would give her the means to emulate Amelia Earhart (leaving out the forever-lost-in-the-ocean bit), and live up to her friends’ expectations, perhaps more literally than they had intended. Amelia, no doubt, had carried a stuffed journal or scrapbook as she hopped across the continents. “Yes,” Thea said out loud. Yes. That would be a certificate worth having. She would be a flyer and—it came to her as she stood there—she would fly across Australia’s red desert. Why not?
A week passed during which her nights, though restless, were undisturbed and her breakfasts were delivered by a parade of waiters, none of whom she suspected. Sachiv, nonetheless, called every evening: he was on night duty and had one eye on the kitchen
