I suggested – first in English and then in pidgin Arabic – that the cameraman should use the extra range afforded by the kitchenette. There followed a pastiche of the clifftop just-one-step-back routine, a silent-movie slapstick. At one point, Burly laughed, a grunted guffaw that acknowledged, I thought, that I was directing the shoot.
After a while, the camera stood at a slight angle in the cooking area. The boys now stood at my shoulders with legs braced and guns across their chests, in the internationally recognised pose for terrorist propaganda videos. The room was hushed and, with Burly standing aside, the Eurocrat began reading a script towards the laptop.
As I stared ahead, as instructed, it began to dawn on me that I might be about to die, that this pantomime was about my videoed execution. My response was neither cold terror nor warm resignation, but rather a sense of humiliation. I felt pathetically compliant, assisting in my own destruction because they were stronger than me and I needed to please them.
I’d seen it in the wretched footage of executions before, from the Nazis to the Chinese. The obedient kneeling, the facing patiently towards the self-dug grave. If I cooperate, if I just play this game your way, you might approve of me and I may thus be acknowledged momentarily as part of this world, rather than merely its waste product. It’s this instinct, this final hope, I think, that makes the condemned play their parts so dutifully in the drama of their own deaths, instead of raging against the darkness of their killers’ intent, spoiling the show, like a defiant Christ who spits in the eye of Pontius Pilate and takes one Roman centurion down with him.
For me, I was acknowledging my captors’ control, their total domination in the two-roomed universe that they had created to contain me. So naturally I would play their game by their rules, help them to the best camera angle so they could murder me most effectively for public consumption.
As I sat and tried to listen, almost politely – the Jews were this and that, the state of Israel was something else – like the guest speaker at speech day, the crippled girl at school swung her wheelchair briefly in front of me. I felt sorry for myself not because I was about to die, but because my instinct had been to make common cause with my executioners, because the desire to join in to avoid any further, unnecessary suffering overcomes any conviction of your own autonomy. I’d stepped in for Sarah. There was no one there for me now. It was lonely.
I wondered briefly who would see this video. The Ruperts in their riverside offices, freeze-framing my rag-doll moment, that final affirmation that I was commoditised meat. I have no family to speak of, but I hoped Adrian wouldn’t see it. I didn’t want to be his paschal lamb. And I didn’t want Hugh to see it either. He wouldn’t get the joke. Perhaps it would make YouTube. Perhaps they could play it on a loop at General Synod, and the new women bishops could lay garlands on the lino at my still-twitching feet.
I could pick out some of the hurried Lebanese, delivered in a monotone rap, like a languid recitation of someone else’s audition piece. The Western oppressors of Islam were as guilty as the killer Jews, apparently. Mr Euro turned slightly to address this passage to me, and the boy to my right laid the cool blade of his curved kukri, or agricultural machete – I’m no expert on weapons of dismemberment – across my breast.
I glanced down, as if a waiter had dropped something in my lap. Burly shouted and left the wall, into the light of our stage area. Talking colloquial Arabic too fast for me to follow, he grabbed the handle of the blade, then my hair, and yanked my head back so that I blinked into the white light of the ceiling bulb, like Joan’s final vision at the stake of St Margaret.
Burly was still babbling at the boy and I realised he was giving directions in how to slit my throat. Mad as it sounds now, a paralysing calm consumed me at this point, as I winced into the light. I dreaded the pain, for sure, and I could feel my blood pound, so I knew it would spurt under some pressure. And it hurt now as he gathered a firmer clump of hair and pulled on the roots, but imminently I was to be no longer part of this room, nor of this foul human charade, with its cock-strutting politics. It all began to fall away and that was soothing, in its way.
I started, before I even recognised the formation of the words, to whisper the Nunc Dimittis. It’s odd to think of now, because I’m not sure I’d know the words that well, in Cranmer’s version anyway, if I was asked for them in, say, a taxi.
But these words moved my lips then in what I assumed would be their last articulations.
“Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word.”
Burly stood aside, handing my hair to the boy, who held it more gently, and Mr Eurotrash was talking, the last other voice I would hear, I presumed. The words popped noiselessly on the breeze over my lips.
“For mine eyes have seen thy salvation.”
On which word, I wondered, would Simeon’s prayer end? I suppose every martyrdom leaves the fragment of an unfinished prayer, but I didn’t count as a martyr, I wasn’t dying for the Lord I now professed, I was dying for a Hamas promotional video. The sort of motivational tool that’s used in motels on Beirut’s périphérique and becomes the sordid currency of prurient schoolboys on social media. Decapitation. Would my brain know when it hit the floor?
“To be a light to lighten the Gentiles.”
The boy, it came to me, had dropped the hacking sword to his side and had let go of my hair, like a schoolchild who had completed his role in the nativity play. I rocked my head forward, away from the light, celebrating my intact neck, and looked the camcorder dead in the eye. Then Burly was in my face. There were minty toothpaste notes to the twist of tobacco on his breath.
“What are you saying?” he asked.
I switched my focus to his right ear, the blur of his sun-leathered skin becoming suddenly sharp.
“I was naming my children,” I said.
He straightened and said something about taking the camera out, then indicated that I was to be returned to my cell. The younger one to my left took me under the armpit and, more roughly this time, swung me to my feet and around in a cruel parody of a square dance, and through the door. Burly followed. As I stood on the rope carpet, he looked at me with a sort of palsied face and his shoulders dropped.
“We don’t kill you today,” he said without expression, then turned and left. I heard the bolts shift on the outer door to the street. The boy and the dark young man remained.
“You like it?” said the boy, his top lip parting from his upper teeth.
“Do I like what?” I said, as benignly as I could muster. I genuinely didn’t know what he meant. He swung up his arm and handed the other his automatic weapon, then rushed on me, pushing me hard up against the wall, a forearm across my throat, his other hand working the buckle of my trouser belt ineffectually. He was gurning at me and I hung limp against the wall, as I think you’re taught to if attacked by a bear. The fumbling hand slowed and he glanced at his friend in an appeal for assistance, but he stayed at the door.
“You won’t like it,” I said softly. He was still and I fixed his dark eyes. “I’m bleeding.”
I held the stare. It was a point of information, no more.
He whisked his arm away in a grand gesture of jettisoning me and staggered into the middle of the room as if drunk, snapping his head from me to his friend and back again.
“Huh,” he went and “Huh” again, then a chuck of the head and a grin. He took his weapon back and, rather spoiling the effect of his desperado exit, gestured an “after you” to his partner, before slamming and locking the door behind him without looking back at me.
I stayed against the wall, breathing in the solitude of the room. This was my space. After a few minutes like that, I took the steps to my bed and lay on my back, breathing evenly and deeply. My limbs felt heavy but didn’t shake. The palms of my hands spread over the sheets, which had stiffened from my night sweats.
I realised, curiously, that I had slept for a moment or two when my left knuckles slid into the n
arrow gap between the bed and the cool of the wall. There was a fissure in the wood, following the grain into the body of the bed and forming a point at the corner, on which I caught my palm. It was a splinter at its end, but it grew into a heavy shard down its fractured length. My fingers played against the spring of its pointed end, pushing it towards the wall, before it snapped back against the sprung pressure of its attached base.
That distant voice from another hill was calling to me again, but I couldn’t make out what it was saying. But it shouted every time I twanged the lumpen splinter on my bedstead. It was a comfort, a gift, a sign. When it had my attention, it whispered.
“We’re going to take action, you and me. We’re going to lead events, not be their victim. We’re going to try not to die here. This isn’t Golgotha. The wood of your cross is splintered, Natalie. Break it. Take it. It’s yours.”
I ran my hand down the length of the split wood, collecting tiny shards in my fingers. I played with it a while like this, also scratching and lightly puncturing my palm, like a stigmatum, until I slept properly.
13
I can occupy my space, what’s directly around me and about me. I can pull it into my head and live safely there. And so that’s what I did. They can’t touch you if you go inside, right inside, and mark your own time. They can watch but they can’t join in, you see? Because everything is inside my ball, and they can do what they want to Natalie out there, but they can’t get in here. In here, there’s only me, and while I rock and hum, there’s nothing, nothing in this world that can come close. I’m bored in here, but it’s a blissful boredom, full of grace and peace. They can do what they like with Nat, but they can’t get in here. Here, where no voices crowd in, where I can watch but no one can see me, where there are no secrets to be told because there’s no one to tell.
The wood broken from the bed began to form. But I didn’t know what it was for. Really. I watched myself make it, carve it, fashion it from its pointy pointless form into its new identity. It was now a thing and things have purpose, if only I could find out what it was.
I expect it was about a week after I broke it off, maybe more, but less than two, that about two-thirds of the length of that jagged splinter lay sharpened into a stiletto. In another world, it would have been just a good piece of kindling, spitting and spluttering, its thin tip aflame first. It lay between the bed and the wall, whence it came, but now that it was a thing, now that it was something that had a mysterious purpose, it had a marked place, because everything has its place and this one’s place was taped securely to the bed with the length of that duct tape they’d gagged me with when they first brought me here. It was a perfect artefact, modelled by the purest boredom, the kind of stasis that is entirely free of order and planning and ambition.
I suppose a therapist would say that it was also a small act of self-determination, a defiant little secret. They had given me a loose abaya to wear and watched as I stripped and put it on. My lavatory was a bucket and they took it away. There was nothing they didn’t know about Natalie here. But there was one tiny element that wasn’t known to those in the next room, and it was this sharpened thing with its bulbous butt that I’d shaped to my right palm. I was my own secret Lady Macbeth.
The days had fallen into a vacuous routine. The boy and the Troll took the night shifts. The film crew had not returned. The silent one was always there in the day, sluicing my buckets, bringing me fresh fruit for breakfast, flatbread and olives and tomatoes in the middle of the day, usually nothing at night but water, sometimes chicken or lentil soup. I presumed my diet was designed to avoid the least bucket cleaning in the night, calculating that my bowel movements would be confined to the early mornings, when waste was cleared. I wasn’t getting hungry in a room that took four paces to cover. I’d lie on my back on the floor in the morning and cycle my legs in the air to keep circulation going.
It was the fizzy drinks that led to my secret wooden spear. One day, early on, when the passage of the hours still sometimes bothered me, I’d mimed to the silent one with a hiss and a pop that a drink other than water would be agreeable. I’d trembled from lack of sugar and needed the rush or I feared I’d faint. Incredibly, the next day the plastic tray had a can of cola on it and thereafter various orangey carbonated drinks arrived. I said some wine would be nice too, but that was lost on Mr Silent.
With the edge of the first can, I scratched a small cross in the plaster of the wall under the window, conducting my own little ontological experiment under controlled clinical conditions. I knelt before it, sitting on my ankles, and emptied my head.
“Be still and know that I am God.”
“However deep the pit, God’s love is deeper still.”
During priestly training, I’d heard others talk of letting the Holy Spirit take vacant possession of your mind, like a squatter. But nothing came, of course, except a cramp in my ankle.
Then I toyed with mental images. I’d lay at the foot of the cross before me what I imagined to be my despair – though I had yet to experience anything that I could truly call that. And I prayed that the burden of this captivity would be borne for me. Good vocabulary, I thought.
I’d read years ago of a Beirut hostage who had fallen to the floor of his dungeon, never before or since a believer, begging for release from despair, even the release of death. The next moment he was dancing in a trance of ecstasy. He’d never sought to explain this radical mood swing in terms of deliverance, but as a professional Christian I calculated that I might be able to generate something similar.
But nothing. No still small voice nor answering host, no hope, least of all a sure and certain hope, as promised by scripture. Just my improvised cross, mugging at me from the wall. I was being stonewalled by God.
So by way of distraction, I’d wrapped the ring-pull from the drink can around my finger and, almost idly, like I’d cut myself in the old days to check that I was still there, I’d pushed the curled leaf of it into the finger next to it until it bled. The same blood that they would spill in their video sequel, I fully expected. I watched it closely, as a child might examine a caterpillar crawling between your fingers.
A while later, a plan to fill the empty hours had formed. I was a woman with a purpose again, a small narrative to fulfil. The radio was playing in the next room and I waited to hear the bathroom door shut next to my room. About an hour later, maybe more, it did so. I bent over my bed and took hold of the splinter. The flush sounded – a solid overhead cistern, and there was the noise of the flow and the plumbing that ran under my room as it rushed into an extended gurgling flood. I was braced across the bed now, holding the nose of the large splinter with both hands above the level of the sheet on the bed, taut to breaking point at its broad base.
A second flush from the bathroom and I pulled hard and sharply. It just sprang against itself and I fell forward with it, but with a progressive final pressure before the cistern filled it began to give, not with a crack, but rather a melee of rustling disintegration as it parted at the base in a bush of sharp fibres. I’d moaned in the effort, I realised, and as the cistern’s burble quietened so did I, holding my kindling log tightly in its place in case I’d been heard. But the radio played on.
I wish I could tell you that I began to whittle another cross, or a figurine of the Blessed Virgin. No, I’m afraid the merchant of death needs the tools of his trade. Half-wrapping the ring-pull in one of the linen cloths and wedging it between my fisted fingers, I could pull it along the narrowing length of the wood perhaps a dozen times before the ring-pull folded up and presented no cutting edge. In this way I gradually sharpened a plane that led to a slender but strong point.
So my time wasn’t entirely wasted in Cousin Derek’s shed. The shavings went in my pillowcase. Olive stones went in the empty cans to simulate the rattle of complete ring-pulls. And Lady Macbeth had her dagger.
The routine grew slightly easier. The Troll never left the front room, sitting with the expression of a surprised sea lion
who’d just been served an extra side-order of sardines.
The key to the lock on the front door, I noticed, hung on an identity card around his neck. I saw this because my door was now left open and though I was rarely allowed to leave my room I was now permitted to use their bathroom, with its half-decent lavatory with a noisy cistern that needed double-flushing, a shower with a Perspex wall and a basin unit. The plumbing was efficient; the flush on the loo turned out not to be an old chain-pull, but a big handled affair.
The window of this bathroom was on the same wall as my room, also high. The frame opened from the top and stopped within six inches at a locating bar. No prospect of an exit and the Boy and the Troll left me to my toilet.
I’d long dispensed with underwear, but was chafed by the trousers I still wore during the day to make the abaya last at night, and by the lack of hygiene, so I needed some soothing in the groin. There was soap. The place, I realised, was in a state of disrepair, but wasn’t old. A flat with one bedroom, which was mine. The caretaker’s accommodation above a block, maybe, or student digs. An anonymous remote little block that would attract no attention. But I knew if I was taken there again, I’d know it instantly.
Whenever I left the bathroom, the Troll stood to cover the street-facing windows in the kitchenette and the main living room, one arm extended like a portly usher, as if I didn’t know the way to go. Stupid slug. But, by doing so, he did confirm that there was a street or some other sort of thoroughfare out there.
And then my dream started. Don’t think that it will be easy to tell. Real dreams never are. They never make sense when you’re awake.
I made friends with the Boy, won his trust. That’s the truth. The only truth. It’s the kind of verity that lies like a bloodstain on a white marble floor. I cover it with the underlay and shagpile of all that’s happened before and since, but it’s always there, the sin that can’t be absolved, don’t even ask. No point in dwelling on him, for he’s well out of it, but I’m the living expiation of guilt, the devil’s work in progress.
A Dark Nativity Page 18