Actually, it’s a commonplace to say that there’s a bloody stain on a marble floor. It’s the easy way out to go for a curse, to say that there’s a bloody stain on a marble floor, like in a fairy tale where a thousand maids can’t scrub it clean and the queen orders it covered with the finest damasks, but still its dull, accusing shape comes through.
It’s not like that at all. In truth, the Boy is a cheeky pixie of a memory and I can be thinking of something workaday, thinking of what to eat or what to say, and he’ll pop up, just surface in my memory pool, and swish the water from his hair and smile in that way of his and laugh, teeth clean and set, and strike out for a certain shore like any young man finding his way.
This is what happened in my dream.
He began bringing me tea, a clear brew in a glass mug with a red plastic handle and frame. I remember such detail. It may have been some kind of atonement for the violation of our first encounter, but I doubt it. He was just curious and bored and he spoke some English. So I asked his name.
“Hamal,” he said.
“Where are you from, Hamal?”
He just grinned that grin that was the raising of his top lip.
“I need something to pass the time, Hamal. Something to read, something to look at, or I’ll go out of my mind.”
I pointed at my temple. He seemed to misunderstand, I don’t know whether deliberately, and made a pistol-kick gesture with his fingers and left to watch the television that I could hear had now replaced the radio, with the Troll.
But he brought a trashy magazine the next night, a compilation of sickly romances in Arabic, with repainted photos of princesses and brigands, and a deck of playing cards. They had no suits that I recognised and the numbers only rose to seven, but there seemed to be a repeating pattern of spirits and animals, so Hamal fetched a low stool and we sat on the floor and we played a crude form of Top Trumps, then a game I knew from the Sudan camps called Spit, a cross between Patience and Snap and quite aggressive, and I watched to see if it flipped Hamal’s nasty switch in his head. So I set the cards out and showed him the order, numbers up or down, which needed to be expended on the two piles we built between us. The winner of each round took the smaller pile and the aim was to rid ourselves of all our cards on the opponent. And like a good girl, I lost. And drew him slowly in.
As the distraction of the cards wore on, his English expanded.
“How long will we be here, Hamal?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Will I die here?”
He looked at me and the top lip raised.
“Maybe,” he said.
He always brought his gun with the tea, a stocky little semiautomatic, or so he told me, propping it as insouciantly against the wall as if it was an umbrella. He’d stay maybe an hour, before quiz shows in the Troll’s company beckoned. He was not to be an emasculated Arab boy.
The tea turned to coffee, because he preferred it, and he brought a backgammon board which he tried to teach me, but he didn’t really know the rules himself, so we turned it over and played the checkerboard on the other side, or draughts as I called it, which inexplicably made him laugh. Checkers was the American word he knew.
He offered me a cigarette for the first time and I took it, and we flicked ash into a bowl from which I’d eaten tomato and cheese.
“Where are you from, Hamal?”
“From Dayr al Balah.”
“Gaza?”
He nodded. We were sitting on the floor, coffee cups as makeshift ashtrays between us.
“Is that where we are? Gaza?”
Hamal laughed and flicked ash.
“Is that where we are?” I repeated and leaned in a bit, joining in his fun, not interrogating.
“No,” he said with a little, sad shake of the head. And I believed him.
“Then are we in Lebanon?” This I knew was far more likely, not just from the patois of the video cameraman but for purposes of their own security. Hamal just laughed some more, as if he was being teased, and looked at the ceiling, the back of his head against the wall, blowing smoke.
“Good dates in al Balah, I hear.”
“Not any more,” he said.
“What do you do when you’re there?”
“There’s nothing to do. I fight.”
Early on in the hours I’d spent staring at the ceiling, I’d concluded with some certainty that I was the hostage of a Hamas cell in Lebanon. I’d stated the logic of that in hours of isolation and simply accepted the proposition I’d given myself.
“Who do you fight, Hamal?”
He laughed more uneasily now.
“Your people,” he said, looking at the floor.
As time passed I started to be able to make Hamal laugh with almost anything I said. I amused him with talk of Americans, trying to put some distance between the US and me, mocking their ridiculous baseball caps – though he seemed to like those – and their burgers and debit cards.
But there remained something simply carnal about him and the top-lip grin was less a characteristic than an affectation of disdain, because he continued to look at me from under lowered lids, like a boxer would intimidate an opponent. Though perhaps I seek to dehumanise him now, because of what I did to him.
One night, when he brought cigarettes and coffee, I asked archly if I could touch his gun. After the barest of pauses, he said, “Sure,” and leaned over and picked it off the wall. But he moved round so that he sat next to me and we pointed it away towards the wall. So I can’t turn it on him, I thought, even if I know how.
It felt lighter than I expected. I played the girlie.
“Is it loaded?” I cooed, though I knew the answer from his acquiescence and his body language.
“No,” he said. That top lip. He put finger and thumb into his top pocket and pulled out two rounds on a clip, sleek and polished, the smooth silver of the cartridge casing offsetting the deeper bronze of the head.
“Show me,” I said, thrusting the rifle back at him.
He swaggered a bit as he revealed the loading chamber just above the rear handle. He thumbed one round through the lid, against a spring, then the second. I puckered up and blew air in a silent whistle. Whoa. I hoped I looked impressed.
“Is it ready?”
“No.”
He slid an oblong wedge just above the chamber forwards with the same thumb.
“Safety catch.”
He exhibited no shame, no sense of irony, that he might be demonstrating the tool of my eventual execution. He swung the muzzle towards me and I palmed it away with an exaggerated cringe, though in truth I really did feel my stomach knot.
He pointed it at the wall and made two “pee-ow” noises with faux kickbacks. I took a step forward so we were both holding it and gave a little childish give-me tug on its stock.
“Nah,” he top-lipped at me and pulled the short magazine from the bottom of the weapon, returning the two rounds to his breast pocket. Replacing the magazine with a snap, he made to pull the gun from my hands, but I held on.
“How old are you, Hamal?”
“Twenty-two,” he replied, with a toss of his head.
I’d guess he was adding a year or two. I pulled him in close with the gun and leaned over it and kissed him hard, locating that errant top lip. He was surprised but didn’t recoil and I took my hands off the gun and cupped his face to keep it there, while separating momentarily to look at him, as if admiringly, I hoped.
He swung the gun away against the wall and pushed me backwards towards the bed, but without the aggression of his useless attempted rape of some weeks before. I put my palms against his chest, feeling the little cylinders of bullets in his top-left pocket between my fingers.
“No, Hamal. Not yet.”
He did what he did, just smiled with his lip in free flight, ran his hand down my backside, then picked up his gun, the cigarettes and, with an uncharacteristic house pride, the coffee cups, and left the room, as ever without looking back.<
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I had no plan. I’d obviously decided to work on Hamal, but I really didn’t know what I was going to do. If I had known, if I’d formulated it as some kind of strategy, then I’d never have been able to do what eventually I did. At least, I like to think I wouldn’t be able to.
My seduction of the boy just seemed some form of progress, or the instigation of a change that might generate some progress. Perhaps he’d tell me something. Perhaps he’d help me. Perhaps he’d persuade someone to let me go. But, no, I had considered none of these outcomes and they certainly formed no part of a conscious plan. If I had thought about it, it seems highly unlikely that I could have thought that establishing some human intimacy with my captors would improve the situation.
If I’d really been considering consequences, I might have acknowledged the possibility of being raped by the Troll, so I really can’t have been planning at all. Maybe I was just whoring some new living privileges. But I hadn’t even thought about that either. Sometimes, I have to confess, Hamal was just something to do.
But the following morning began to shape a purpose for my folly. Hamal and the Troll stayed longer than usual, their telly coming on a little earlier to replace the radio, an indication that they were expecting to wait. My door remained locked, but I was by now familiar enough with the ambient sounds to know when Mr Silent arrived with Burly. The television went off ahead of a short and earnest exchange, before the cast moved into my room, Burly unlocking and leading, the other three following, appropriately armed to show off their diligence to their boss.
“Get up,” said Burly and I did.
He was carrying a flat little pile of white cotton, which he dropped at the foot of my bed as I moved away from it. It was a gown and shawl, I discovered later, along with the white undertrousers that unmarried Muslim women often wear, the gown high-necked, tied and buttoned at the front. It was not unlike being admitted to hospital.
“It seems your people don’t want you,” he said, standing in front of me with his hands on his hips. I said nothing. What was there to say? But I felt intensely lonely.
“So it’s time to be rid of you, missionary. Put some Arab clothes on.”
He indicated the pile. I was to move from black abaya to white – quite a transformation, night to day.
“You like? Tomorrow you meet some different Arabs, yes – different Arabs. Maybe they make their own video, yes? You understand?”
He chuckled and turned to share the joke with his staff, but it turned out this was just a manoeuvre to give his shoulder and right arm enough swing. He brought that arm up in one complete motion, swiping the back of his hand across my head with such deft force that only my head snapped to my left and hit the wall, my body still erect and the stagger only coming a moment later.
I felt nothing at all, no pain, but there was a buzzing and I couldn’t see from my right eye, as if a large cushion had been pushed against that side of my head. A moment or two went missing and my head grew heavy and pendulous as I turned back to the room. Only the left eye was processing images and I was looking at the crocodile motif on Burly’s shirt, a line of vision that was lower than I expected. I was crouched, I realised, but not kneeling, much as high-Anglican priests pray over the Eucharistic elements. There was some chatter in the room, but my buzzing ear was covering it.
As snow flies from a windscreen, my vision was gradually restored and I looked past Burly’s chest to Hamal. He was leaning to his left to get a better view. As I made eye contact and held it, the top lip lifted into the leer and for some reason I was disappointed, I think, as I’d hoped that I wouldn’t have to hate him, because that would be a waste of energy. The Troll was animated, joshing and jabbing Hamal at his side. Burly held me up by the shoulder of my shirt.
“We will send you and your kind to play with your fool in Hell,” he hissed and momentarily I thought he was deliberately playing a pantomime villain.
“Get dressed in your Arabic clothes, priestess, because you stink, you hear? Your pussy stinks.”
He let go, I fell back across the bed and they bundled from the room. My room. And here’s the weird bit: I smelt myself. I ran my palm across my crotch and smelt it.
And so I reflected, flat out, in my own clothes. It was true, they smelt, but the shower had kept me reasonably hygienic inside them. I realised that I had hardly worn the abaya, only when the room had grown oppressively stuffy. The underwear had long gone – I’d left it in the bathroom, I think, and I suppose the Troll had binned it – but I wore my jeans as a defiant identity. I was like Joan of Arc, putting on my heretical male clothing and inviting the contempt of my captors.
The evening was darkening now, the television was chattering, like an irritating neighbour. My mind was clear and I deconstructed my situation with a clarity that must have originated from the potent combination of an austere nun-like diet, solitude and physical violence. It was this last component, as the flesh around my temple swelled into a numb tumulus, that I imagined had had a catalytic effect on hitherto undiscovered powers of analysis.
It had been between two and three weeks, I calculated – I should have scratched the wall every dusk, I cursed myself now – since the video was shot. I imagined that it had been sent to news outlets, first to Al Jazeera in Cairo. From their scoop, it would have been on the European and possibly American networks, through CNN and the BBC. The pompous British newspapers would have been sorting it out to their own satisfaction, mostly online but also in hard copy, putting a picture of me and the boys on the front page initially and a leader comment inside; the right-wing press would have been saying that I should never have been put in harm’s way and blaming the liberal-left’s indulgence of Palestine, while, for their part, the papers on the left would claim that I was the consequence of everyone dragging their heels on the peace process, an implication that Israel’s very existence made the Middle East insoluble. Then they’d all turn to sport.
The foreign secretary, possibly the PM too, would have been saying that all that could be done was being done, the new news makeover of “we will never negotiate with terrorists”. Special forces may have been briefed, I speculated, if they had a clearer idea of where I was than I did – “We presume she’s in Lebanon, sir” – but I could only anticipate emergency rescue if the politicos calculated that they would come out of it smelling of roses, the peace process intact or enhanced, whether I was alive or dead. And from where I was lying, that was the point: a bungled early rescue would doubtless mean the Troll or Hamal putting a bullet through my head or chest.
The alternative was months in this or another room, or the sordid little execution-by-video from which I had previously been acquitted. All three options led me to the same course of action: early intervention on my part to change the narrative, radically.
If I left my fate to negotiation, I could still be dead at the end of it. Or dead at any stage during it, come to that. If I disrupted the process of my own demise now, it was also likely that I would be killed, but it would at least be a consequence of my own initiative, rather than of my inaction. And there was a slim possibility that, if I changed the course of events drastically enough, something entirely unpredictable might occur. If that was to unfold, then I needed to bring forward my end to an unexpected place, endeavour to make my end a new beginning. That was it, really. I was going to die to this life and see what happened: ignominious oblivion, or an exit of my own choosing. I developed an intense sense of my own mortality and simply invested it in the lives of those who held me captive.
My room had darkened, but I didn’t turn on the light.
With clarity, I saw that it hardly mattered that it was my head or torso that was discovered by a roadside and made the early evening news, affirming those newspaper leader lines. It had to be someone’s body, after all. It might as well be mine. “Cowardly and barbaric,” I could hear the foreign secretary saying.
No, I’d kill my way out this night. It was worth a try and better to be killed by the Bo
y or the Troll than in some piece of jihadist death-porn posted on the web. And, either way, in my attempt I’d die to this life.
They might come in the night for me but, like Joan, I wouldn’t change my clothes. They’d have to strip me and put me in them to spill my Christian blood. Splash themselves. And seeing me naked would hurt them. I would not go as a lamb to the slaughter. This room wasn’t my Gethsemane. It was my Temple and it was here, on this altar, that I would make my blood sacrifice. I would wipe my slate dirty.
I allowed one little warm patch of nobility to soak into the fabric tapestry of my story. This way, no one would really be clear how or why I’d died. A mysteriously dead former aid worker was less likely to screw up the prospects of a peaceful settlement than a public execution. That was a prospect that comforted me. Death is always better as a mystery.
And so it started. I cleared my head. And I found a song there.
I met my boyfriend at the sweetie shop . . .
I left the bed only to put the Arabic day clothes in the corner of the room. When I heard Hamal’s key in the door, I glided to the facing wall and leaned against it, breathing hard to keep still.
The light was off. Hamal needed to know from the top that tonight was different. The door opened a little and stopped. For an instant, I thought the dark might act as a block, startle him away. That might offer me a way out, this cup would pass from me, I’d be left there in the dark wondering if my dream was just the first manifestation of a madness born of incarceration.
“Hamal?”
The door opened. I had called him by name. I’d started it and there was no way back.
“Where are you?” he said.
“Here.”
He reached for the light switch and turned it on. He was carrying the Thermos of coffee and two cups, his fingers wrapped into their handles.
But no gun, I noticed. Did he always leave it outside? I suddenly couldn’t remember. Like a dizzy girlfriend afraid of alerting her father, I waved an arm forward at him mockingly.
A Dark Nativity Page 19