A Dark Nativity

by George Pitcher

  Esther had gone back inside from time to time to collect small coffees and biscuits for the passing afternoon trade. She was from Haifa. Her brother owned the cafe, not a husband as it turned out, but she was deeply loved. I was right about that.

  His wife had been unwell and had to spend time in a clinic in Tiberias. She’d had a hysterectomy and had lost a lot of blood. Esther had come to help and had stayed. Her sister-in-law was getting better, but her brother practically lived in Galilee now. But the cafe was going bust. She didn’t know enough about running it and her brother had to look after his wife. The bank was calling in the debt on the property.

  But she moved about among tables like she owned the place. The afternoon sun was harsh now and she adjusted the awning to give us some shade.

  “Hide the sun till dark,” she said to herself with a smile. Her phone played the opening bar of Star Wars. She picked it up and rocked it between her thumb and finger at me.

  “For you? I think? Your boyfriend?” She laughed.

  The text said, “Hold tight. Coming. T.”

  Yeah, you and whose army, I thought. Still, maybe Esther would be my witness. I moved inside and sat at the window and watched the square. I watched it to see if its character changed, whether more police turned up, any heavies in shades. I couldn’t see anything that might indicate a security presence, but then I wouldn’t, would I?

  The fruiterers smoked. The tourists took photos. The women came and went, talking until it was time to go. The square continued its turnover.

  Esther was sitting opposite me, smoking but not drinking.

  “Some terrible things have happened to you,” she said.

  “I’ve done some terrible things,” I replied, looking down.

  “That’s what I said. Terrible things have happened.”

  Neither of us spoke. She poured me more wine.

  “Whatever it is, Maria, you can be made clean again. It’s OK.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been clean, Esther. But thanks.”

  She looked at me for a few moments.

  “You should be washed. We have tvilah. Jews wash away their sins. Makes us pure again.”

  “Show me where to find those waters,” I said. It was a scriptural reference and I couldn’t be sure if she knew it. She was silent and watched me.

  “There’s nothing that can’t be washed away,” she said at last. “You’ve been among the dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “We wash ourselves clean again when we’ve been among the dead. It gives us life, pure life, again.”

  I couldn’t go where she was taking me.

  “I’m so lonely,” I said suddenly. I remembered the doctor in Sudan. “And tired. I’m just so bloody tired.”

  “I know. Wash it away.”

  “Thanks, Esther,” I said and tried a brief smile. “I’ll try to remember that.”

  It was only with a languid curiosity that I watched Toby’s silver hatchback pull slowly into the square, over Esther’s shoulder, its red brake lights flickering querulously along the line of palms as if he was looking for his date. Or kerb-crawling.

  He put two tyres on the kerb and stopped. Was he phoning? But a moment later, he got out, hoiked up his trousers, looked around like a batsman at his crease. He’d had his hair cut, I noticed. He took off his cotton bomber and opened his back door, hanging it over the back of the driver’s seat.

  There was no point in waiting any longer. If there was a team covering the square, they’d find me soon anyway. If someone shot me from an upstairs window, it might as well be now as later. A blissful calm washed over me, as if I’d chosen my ending.

  He – they – may not know what I was wearing. And they may not take the risk of a shooting in a busy Nazareth square. I was in control again. And I can’t deny I was enjoying the feeling. Always have.

  I took a long drag on the last of Esther’s cigarettes and stubbed it out. She smiled that broad smile. She was leaning back on the bar now, arms crossed under her perfect cereal-bowl breasts.

  “I’ll see you later,” I said. “I’ll come back and pay.”

  She crossed and kissed me on both cheeks, holding my arms.

  “I don’t think so. But God go with you, Maria,” she said.

  I suddenly felt a sharp pang of shame that I’d lied to her.

  “Natalie. My name’s actually Natalie.”

  “Maria to me. If anyone ever asks, I’ll tell them Maria.”

  Her mobile chirruped its text signal again and she shrugged with a laugh.

  “You’d better go. He’s chasing you.”

  “Thank you, Esther.”

  I hugged her. I suddenly wanted to stay with her for ever, hide in her cafe, snuggle down in a tiny room upstairs, mop the floors at dawn. But life can never be like that.

  I wrapped the shawl over my head and across my face in the Arabic day-style and stepped on to the terrace. There were pedestrians passing Toby’s car continuously in both directions. Sufficient cover if I timed it right. I fell in behind two women with laden shopping baskets, a young man overtaking swiftly on our right. It was perhaps only seventy or seventy-five metres or so. I walked briskly behind the young man – we could look like we were together. He was going to walk around the offside of Toby’s car. That was cool. If Toby was watching his wing mirror, he’d see the white shirt and jeans of the young man, some Arab woman in his wake.

  A whole narrative can fit into a single thought, I know now. And, as I stepped off the kerb behind Toby’s car, I had several of them competing in my brain, complete and concurrent premonitions in a single synapse snap. The back door would be locked. Toby would have thrown the central locking, of course he would. He’d hear me try the handle, swing out of the driver’s door and stand before me, watching me dragged to the ground by the heavies he’d fixed.

  Esther would be watching and would see that and that would be sad.

  Or he’d stay put and loads of little, tight-suited men would run up and bundle me in the car, or pin me to its roof. Or they’d simply shoot me with silenced guns, the thuds of rounds entering my chest and abdomen. Or they would swing a hood over my head, like Burly did, my throat constricting again, unable to breathe. And I was breathing fast. I wouldn’t last long before suffocating, bowels opened.

  But the door handle came up on my fingers, it opened effortlessly and I swung in, one easy move. The car smelt of polish, newly valeted; well done, Toby.

  He was turning round, first left to cover the door opening, then right as I took the back seat. I swung a hand around his head and cupped his forehead as his hands came up and dropped the copper piping down my left sleeve.

  I had to keep it away from his mirrors, so pushed it firmly between the headrest and the palm of my hand, while pulling his head back hard with my right hand, my hand in his hair, like I’d learned in my hostage video.

  The pipe pushed into his neck just above the collar.

  “Shut up, Toby, just bloody shut it, Toby, or I swear to God I’m going to blow your head off. I can do it, Toby, I can kill, and I’ll just pull this trigger, do you hear, and you’ll be dead and I’ll be dead and it’ll all be over, Toby.”

  “Nat, for fuck’s sake, what the hell are you doing!” His hands were over my forearm but he wasn’t pulling, the cold copper on his neck had frozen him and I felt his whole body tense. I took his phone from his top pocket. I noticed my hand was steady.

  “Shut up, Toby.” Yank.

  “Nat, what . . . Jesus Christ—”

  “Just listen, Toby. Listen hard and we’ll both stay alive.”

  I looked around quickly. No one at the doors. Just people passing, middle-distance staring.

  “Just drive very slowly and calmly out of the square straight ahead. Don’t turn round, Toby. I’m serious. Or I’m pulling this frigging trigger. Just go.”

  He slowly lowered his hands, as if balancing, and leaned forward obediently, bringing a shaking arm under control to start the car. Good.
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br />   “Lock the doors.”

  We pulled away, behind a freezer van. I pushed the pipe harder into his flesh at an angle. I wanted him to feel the edge of the barrel. Toby was making little grunts.

  “Nat?”

  “Follow the main road. Down the hill.”

  “Nat, take it easy. Please just be calm. Let’s talk.”

  “Just keep driving.”

  We pulled up at lights. Cars beside us. Businessmen. Families. I began to feel rather less conspicuous, rather more stupid. Had I really just said “Drive”?

  “Shut up. I’ll tell you where to go.”

  I looked behind. What was I looking for? Maybe a car would pull across in front of us. The road widened to the edge of town as it became light-industrial, with warehouses and shuttered wholesale shops.

  “Now fork left,” I said, like I knew where we were going.

  The road rose again gently, some houses and a school on the left, a pile of tractor tyres to the right. I looked behind again. A soft-drinks float. Really?

  “Turn right.”

  A recreation field. The drinks float has gone straight on.

  “Pull in here. Turn the engine off.”

  My arms ached. I so wanted to let go now. But I pulled Toby’s head back again and pushed the piping.

  “You didn’t expect me, Toby, did you? You didn’t think you’d see me again.”

  I was hissing in his ear.

  “I’ve killed, Toby, I’ve just killed grown men, blood all over my hands, and I can kill you. It’ll be so bloody easy. I’ll just pull my trigger and your throat will be all over the windscreen. Is this where you’re going to die?”

  And all the time he was saying: “Nat, what are you doing, why are you doing this, Nat, what’s going on?”

  “You and your bastard little friends, Toby. How was it arranged? What was the plan? You fucking threw me away, Toby.”

  “I don’t understand, Nat. I don’t know what you’re saying. I don’t know what’s going on. I just don’t understand.”

  I could see in the rear-view mirror that he’d started to cry. Softly, resignedly. Like the boy Jon at school. I looked at myself in my own right eye, below and slightly behind his. I looked minx-like and he just looked blank, hopeless, staring unseeing over the bonnet of the car.

  Holding him, I watched us both in the mirror for a moment. We could have been a zany couple in a photo booth. I listened to our uneven breathing, arrhythmical, out of time.

  I could see it now, everything made sense. No need for charades. I fell back into the back seat, broke the spell.

  “Oh, sod you, Tobes. It’s only a bit of pipe.”

  And I threw it into the front passenger seat.

  15

  There was something of a tristesse in the air as Toby leaned on his forearms across the table from me. We were in his flat in West Jerusalem. Modern, a sort of designer version of the one I’d been slammed up in. Net curtains over floor-length windows leading to a tiny balcony. Utilitarian and very male.

  I remember wondering, for the first time, if he might be gay. A small hall, this sitting room, a low red sofa against the wall facing a flat-screen TV and this table against the window, a tiny kitchen behind Toby, a small bedroom, I guessed, behind me, which would have a neatly made bed smelling of washing powder, a half-read thick novel and a bottle of mineral water. A room his mother would recognise as his.

  We’d driven down from Nazareth without saying much. He was still feeling shaky and resentful, evidently, and was trying to regain some dignity. I played with his mobile phone. I wasn’t sure if he could use it to call his office without me knowing and I wanted to answer it if it rang.

  I’d told him I’d tell him everything when we got to Jerusalem and made sure he wasn’t planning to drive down through the West Bank.

  I’d said, “I’ll bring you up to date,” like a schoolteacher or a sales rep. It sounded administrative.

  It would go like this: As far as my time allocation has gone, Toby, I’ve spent the last month or so largely incarcerated in a room in a village that’s a bit like a settlement in northern Israel. I was led to understand that I was taken hostage by Hamas extremists who had taken me into Lebanon. They were going to kill me, I was sure of that, so I killed the two who guarded me overnight and escaped.

  Has anyone ever done that before, Toby?

  No, of course I didn’t tell him that. Anyway, he hadn’t taken my little drama with the copper piping well at all. I thought the sheer release of nervous energy would have made him laugh. But no. He just slumped against his car-door window, which he lowered slightly, breathing heavily and eyeing me like a punch-drunk boxer in the mirror.

  “Sorry,” I’d said. “I thought you might have come to kill me. Or turn me in.”

  I told him not to call the office and, when eventually he spoke, he said he’d only told them he was going out for a doctor’s appointment, because I’d told him not to grass me up. As we sat there, some Jewish kids playing football on the recreation ground beside us, he didn’t look like someone who was briefed to turn me in, or indeed turn me over.

  “Let’s go back,” I’d said, and climbed into the front seat, tossing the copper pipe into the footwell to make it look like a game.

  And so here we were, mid-evening, the remains of some chicken and rice that he had microwaved and I had wolfed down, while Toby rolled a cup of the leftover broth between the palms of his hands and stared at the table.

  I had thick black coffee now and was gnawing at a mango. I’d told him most of it, as if in bullet points. They bundled me in a car. They drugged me. They made a video, threatening to kill me.

  I paused at that bit. The video I had fondly imagined had run on a loop on the 24-hour news channels, from Al Jazeera to CNN?

  Toby just shook his head. “We’ve seen nothing. No such thing.”

  He even sounded a bit bored.

  I went on. They kept me in a room. Then they said they were transferring me, giving me over to a different crew. I said that sort of thing, anyway. At the end, I just said that I’d fought my way out and left it at that. I don’t know why. Killing now seemed strangely banal in this suburban, yuppie flat.

  “Here’s the thing, Toby, I was in Israel. I never left it. One of the new developments, somewhere up near Haifa. I wasn’t even in the West Bank.”

  Toby stared at me. Then: “Would you find it again?”

  “Well, of course. Probably. But there’d be nothing there now.”

  I looked at him hard as he studied his broth.

  “Where did you think I was, Toby?”

  “We thought you’d taken off with some aid friends. The conference was over. It happens.”

  He fetched a couple of cans of beer and a half-empty bottle of red wine, with a stopper. As soon as I drank, I started to fall asleep.

  “They were going to kill me, Toby.”

  I wanted him to ask who “they” were, but he didn’t. He just said: “We’ll tell the office in the morning.”

  “No!”

  “We’ll have to tell someone I’ve found you.”

  “No. I don’t know. I thought I was safe with you, Toby.”

  “You are. Safer than I am with you, as it happens.”

  “Have you told the office you’ve got me?” It must have been the twentieth time I’d asked him.

  “No. Why would I?”

  “Did they talk to you about me?”

  “They asked if I’d heard from you a couple of times. They thought you’d gone off with your friends.”

  “Why didn’t anyone want to know where I was?”

  “I told you,” he said wearily. There was a pause.

  “Will you promise not to tell anyone I’m here, Toby? At least until tomorrow?”

  “I promise.”

  Another pause for effect.

  “I believe you.”

  I threw my head back and looked at the intertwined bamboo lampshade hanging from the ceiling and I wanted to cry ag
ain. So I stood instead and fell on to the sofa.

  Some time later, Toby came with an unzipped sleeping bag and a quilt, which he spread over me and put a foam-filled pillow by my head. It did indeed smell of washing powder. He turned the lights out without a word – I think he thought I was asleep – and left the room softly.

  Then I heard him turn a key in his door and I tensed, eyes popping open wide in the dark. A gasp that I realised was mine. But street-light was falling across the room and the nets lifted lazily to a crack in the sliding door, and I knew this was a very different room to the last one that was locked on me.

  With a smile, I realised Toby was locking me out, not in.

  I was expecting night terrors, a sweaty and fevered half-sleep in which recently buried images of the Boy’s and the Troll’s torsos would erupt like cheap-movie zombies from a grave. But I slept as I did as a child.

  Yes, it disturbs me now, or at least when I think about it. I recognise I have the capacity to rip a boy’s throat out as I screwed him and gun down his dumb sidekick, in order to survive myself, and then sleep like I’ve just had a hard day at school and my mum has made everything all right.

  I barely moved before morning and had only pulled up the cool nylon of the sleeping bag into my cheek as a kind of comforter. When I woke, it was light and the sounds from the kitchen could have been a parent fussing.

  My body had that stillness in which you can feel every fibre of it but you’re not sure you can move anything. When I did stir, just to awaken my hips, Toby brought me Jasmine tea.

  I showered in his little en-suite – I must have stunk. He lent me some pants and we actually laughed, like students in digs. It was our first shared levity since my crazed stick-up. He had some colour back, I noticed.

  “Are you going to work?” I asked.

  “It’s Shabbat,” he said. It was quiet outside, I noticed now.

  We sat at the table again, as if it was the morning after a party.

  “I’ll drive you to your place,” said Toby. “I have a pass key.”

  “They won’t be there.”

  “Who won’t?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “We may as well check it out anyway.”