The Tour Bus to Petra

The itinerary was laminated, and Mara was very proud of it.

Six days. Amman to Petra and back. Every stop, every meal, every toilet break, typed in a clean font on two sides of a sheet of card and sealed in plastic so that nothing, not spilled coffee or desert dust or a sudden shower, could ever change it. Day One: Arrivals, Queen Alia Airport, 14:20. Transfer to hotel. Welcome dinner, 19:30. Mara had laminated seven copies, one for each passenger, plus three spares, plus one for the driver, plus one for herself, which was now slightly damp from being held so tightly.

It was a quarter to seven in the morning, in the ground-floor office of Basalt and Rose Travel, in a side street off Rainbow Street in Amman, and Mara's first tour as a tour leader began in seven and a half hours.

"Laminated," said Samer, holding one up to the light. "Very nice. Very professional." He was the ground-agent manager, forties, in a pressed shirt and a lanyard, with a phone in one hand and a cup of cardamom coffee in the other, and the slightly haunted look of a man who has worked in tourism for twenty years and has seen everything at least twice. "You know nothing will go like this."

"I know," said Mara.

"No, you don't," said Samer kindly. "But you will." He set the itinerary down on his desk, next to a computer showing a spreadsheet so large and so colourful that it looked like a stained-glass window. "Your group. Seven passengers. One family. Grandmother's seventieth birthday. Booked through Wayfarer Lane in England." He scrolled. "They booked the Classic King's Highway, six days, private coach. Very good. Simple." He scrolled further, and paused, and frowned at something. Then he scrolled back up again quickly, as if he had not seen it.

"What?" said Mara.

"Nothing," said Samer. "A note. From the other office. I'll check." He put the phone to his ear. "Go and meet your driver. She's outside. Rania." He paused. "Be polite."

"I'm always polite."

"Be very polite," said Samer, and turned away to shout cheerfully at somebody on the phone.

Mara stood for a moment in the doorway of the office, looking out at the street. Amman was waking up. A man was hosing down the pavement in front of a juice shop, the water running in a bright stream down the steep hill. A bakery on the corner had its doors open, and the smell of fresh bread and za'atar drifted up the street, and a queue of people in work clothes were buying bags of warm round loaves. A boy on a scooter went past with a tower of flat boxes on the back. Somewhere a radio was playing the news. And over all of it, the hills of the city, pale gold in the early light, rising one behind another, covered in houses like sugar cubes.

It had been years since Mara had lived here, as a student, in a rented room with a landlady who corrected her Arabic at breakfast. Mara had forgotten how the light looked at this hour. Had forgotten the smell. Had not, it turned out, forgotten anything at all.

The coach was parked half on the pavement outside, white with a stripe of turquoise down the side, twenty-two seats, spotless, gleaming in the early sun as if it had been polished by hand, which, Mara would later learn, it had. A small string of blue beads hung from the mirror. A box of tissues sat on the dashboard, and a thermos, and a tin of dates, and a pair of sunglasses, and a notebook with a pencil tucked into its spiral.

Leaning against the front wheel, drinking tea from a small glass, was a woman of about fifty-five, in a navy jacket and a patterned headscarf, with reading glasses pushed up on top of it, watching Mara come down the steps with an expression of polite, total assessment.

"Marhaba," said Mara. "Good morning. I'm the tour leader."

"Ahlan," said Rania. She did not move from the wheel. She looked at Mara's face, and Mara's shoes, and Mara's bag, and lastly at the laminated itinerary in Mara's hand. "First tour?"

Up close, the coach was even cleaner than it had looked from the steps. The windows had been washed that morning; there were still drops of water drying in the corners. The seats had covers in a pattern of small turquoise diamonds, and every one of them was straight. Somebody had hoovered the aisle, recently and with feeling.

"Is it that obvious?"

"You laminated," said Rania. She held out her free hand. "Give."

Mara gave her one. Rania read it, slowly, both sides, sipping her tea. Then she took the pencil out of her notebook's spiral and made a small mark in the margin. Then another. Then she turned it over and made three more.

"You can't write on it," said Mara. "It's laminated."

"Pencil," said Rania, as if explaining something to a child. "It wipes." She handed it back. Beside Day Two, 13:00, lunch, Madaba, restaurant TBC, she had written Nour. Beside Day Three, Wadi Mujib viewpoint, 15 min, she had written no, 40. Beside Day Three, 13:30, lunch on the road, she had written, in small careful capitals, MY MOTHER.

"Who's Nour?" said Mara.

"My niece," said Rania. "In Madaba. Mosaics. Best lunch in Madaba, upstairs from the workshop. Her husband's mother cooks." She finished her tea. "Restaurant TBC is no good. Restaurant TBC means a big place with forty coaches and soup from a packet."

"And your mother?"

"Lives on the King's Highway," said Rania. "We go past her door. Thirty years, I never go past her door." She looked at Mara over the tea glass. "She makes maqluba on Wednesdays."

"Day Three is a Wednesday," said Mara slowly.

"Yes," said Rania. "It is."

"I'm sorry," said Mara. "I have to stick to the itinerary. It's what the company sold."

Rania looked at Mara for a long moment. Then she shrugged, an expansive, unbothered shrug.

"Of course," she said. "The itinerary." She tucked the pencil back into her notebook without rubbing anything out. "We'll see on Wednesday." She opened the coach door. "Come. I show you the bus. You sit there." She pointed to the seat beside the driver. "Not behind. That one squeaks."

Samer came out of the office at a run, with both hands full of paper and his phone wedged against his shoulder.

"Small thing," he said. "Very small. Don't worry."

Mara began to worry.

"The other office," said Samer, "the partner agency, in Aqaba. They also had a booking. For this coach. Same six days." He gave a short laugh with no humour in it at all. "Four people. From the Netherlands. A bird club." He looked at the paper. "De Kleine Zilverreiger." He tried it again, worse. "They booked the coach too. Our coach. Same dates. Somebody clicked the wrong thing." He looked up at Mara, with the face of a man who had already been on the phone about this for an hour. "Two companies. One bus. Eleven people."

"There are twenty-two seats," said Rania, from the doorway.

"Yes," said Samer. "That's the good news." He shuffled the papers. "The bad news is, the family booked a private coach. For their mother's birthday. They paid extra. Private." He swallowed. "And they land at two-twenty. And the bird club lands at two-forty."

Mara looked down at the laminated itinerary, at Day One: Arrivals, Queen Alia Airport, 14:20, in its clean font, sealed in plastic, untouchable.

Rania leaned over and, with the pencil, very gently, wrote beside it: +4.