The engine kicks on. The car revs. Higher and higher, louder and louder, the motor thudding and screeching, the whole machine trying to escape from her. Noor is laughing as she does it. The noise becomes louder, the sound of an engine in agony, and then a vast, explosive percussion, a great white light out of the engine block, and the whole thing melts, warps down into the tarmac, dripping with oil and hot steel. She grimaces, grabs Tunde’s hand and shouts, ‘Run!’ in his ear, and they do, they run across the parking lot, while she’s saying, ‘Look, film it, film it,’ and he turns back towards the jeep just at the moment that the hot metal hits the fuel line and the whole thing explodes.
It is so loud and hot that for a moment his camera screen goes white, and then black. And when the picture comes back there are young women advancing across the centre of the screen, each of them backed by the fire, each of them walking with the lightning. They are going from car to car, setting the motors revving and the engine blocks burning into a molten heat. Some of them can do it without touching the cars; they send their lines of power out from their bodies and they are all laughing.
Tunde pans up to look at the people watching from the windows, to see what they are doing. There are men trying to drag their women from the glass. And there are women shrugging off their hands. Not bothering to say a word. Watching and watching. Palms pressed against the glass. He knows then that this thing is going to take the world and everything will be different and he is so glad he shouts for joy, whooping with the others among the flames.
In Manfouha, to the west of the city, an elderly Ethiopian woman walks out of a half-built, scaffold-supported building into the street to greet them, her hands held high, calling out something that none of them can understand. Her back is bent, her shoulders hunched forward, her spine humped between her shoulder blades. Noor takes her palm between her two hands, and the older woman watches her like a patient observing a doctor’s treatment. Noor puts two fingers to her palm and shows her how to use the thing that must always have been in her, must have been waiting all the years of her life to emerge. This is how it works. The younger women can wake it up in the older ones; but from now on all women will have it.
The older woman starts to cry when the gentle force of it wakes up the lines of her nerves and ligaments. You can see it in her face on the footage when she feels it inside her. She does not have much to give. A tiny spark jumps between her fingertips and Noor’s arm. She must be eighty years old, and the tears run down her face as she does it again and again. She holds up her two palms and starts to ululate. The other women take it up and the street is filled with the sound, the city is filled with it; the country – Tunde thinks – must be full of this joyful warning. He is the only man here, the only one filming. This revolution feels like his personal miracle, a thing to overturn the world.
He travels with them through the night and records the things he sees. In the north of the city they see a woman in an upstairs room behind a barred window. She drops a note down through the bars – Tunde cannot get close enough to read it, but there is a ripple through the crowd as the message is passed from person to person. They break down the door and he follows them as they find the man who has been holding her prisoner cowering in a kitchen cupboard. They do not even bother to hurt him; they take the woman with them as they gather and grow. In the campus of the Health Sciences department a man runs towards them, firing an army rifle and shouting in Arabic and English about their offence against their betters. He wounds three of the women in the leg or arm and the others are on him like a tide. There is a sound like eggs frying. When Tunde gets close enough to show what has been done, he is perfectly still, the twisted-vine marks across his face and neck so thick that his features are barely discernible.
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.’