“I don’t want to be found, Toby. I don’t want them to find me.”
“It’ll be fine. Really.”
He was handling me, managing me. I was a high-maintenance guest and he wanted rid of me. But he was probably scared that I might repeat some version of the Nazareth performance.
So we drove across Jerusalem, quiet and Saturday-still. Up the Bekaa Valley road that skirts the old wall, the Temple of the Rock high on one side, Gethsemane and the Mount of Olives on the other, the terraces of white-marbled graves, the lucky first who will be raised when the Messiah comes.
I made Toby stop at the end of the road of the low-rise apartments where I’d stayed weeks before, but an age ago. It looked as it always had. Like I’d come out of an illness and was being returned home. I had changed since I was last here, but this looked the same. How could it? Or it was like visiting a childhood home and finding it unchanged.
It felt like déjà vu, but I had to remind myself that I really had been here before. I could have been visiting a set for a short film of my life. There was no one sitting in cars, nobody patrolling the pavements, though I imagined that any surveillance would be conducted from a flat opposite, or next door.
“You OK?” said Toby, after we’d parked up.
“Yeah. You go first, there may be somebody inside.”
I watched him as he climbed the steps and, intriguingly, he did ring the bell and pause, before using his pass key. I wondered what would have happened if Burly, or anyone else for that matter, had answered the door. I’d drive the car off, I supposed.
But I glanced across and Toby had taken the ignition key. Of course he had. My copper piping was still in the footwell. Toby was back only a minute later.
“Do you want to come in then?” he said through the open car window.
I turned the lights on in the apartment, because Toby hadn’t and I wanted to see if the electricity had been cut off. The first thing I noticed was that there were a pair of tights on the floor where I’d stepped out of them.
The conference programme was open on the round table, an empty glass tumbler securing it against draughts from the window I’d closed before heading for East Jerusalem on my errand of weeks before. A mug had blotches of mould on the remains of some coffee in the kitchen.
It was all a shrine to my former life and I could picture my ghost moving in the room, busying myself with those matters from another time, another world, like they were important.
It was a time I’d mysteriously abandoned. The bathroom was musty, dust gathering at the waterline in the bath. There was an abandoned stillness everywhere. This place had just gone on, impervious to events, like a church. This little flat was my Marie Celeste, floating emptily on into a future that no longer contained me.
Ridiculously, I opened a wardrobe first. No one had stolen my clothes. Then the drawer in the fitted cabinet by the bed. My passport and UN Blue Card. I held them, flicked through the pages in case – I don’t know – my face had been changed in the photos or something, like my identity had been airbrushed away, while Toby stood watching me from the door.
Something fell from the passport and I bent to pick it up. I inspected the little plastic rectangle, turning it in my fingers.
“What is it?”
“It’s my debit card.” I turned to show Toby.
“No burglars then.”
“No. But I didn’t leave it here. I wouldn’t have done. It was with me in my bag.”
“Evidently not.”
“I wouldn’t have left it here, Toby.”
He didn’t answer. Just walked away towards the front door, signalling that it was time to go.
“Wait,” I said, and pushed past him again into the living room. There was a little teak table by the television, near the power plugs. I stood, staring at what was on it, as though cherishing the sight of something precious that has been lost and found.
Toby joined me and followed my line of sight.
“What is it?” he said.
“It’s my mobile.” I picked it up, pulling the charger from its base. The screen lit.
“Probably some texts from me,” said Toby. I was turning it round in my hands. It had the cracked cover of The Fed that I’d always kept on it. Contacts. There was Hugh. There was Adrian. There was “Home”.
“I didn’t leave it here, Toby. It was with me. It was the first thing they took.”
“Well, you’ve got it now,” he said. “Come on. We can clean up later.”
“I want to change,” I said, returning to the wardrobe.
Toby said he’d wait outside. When I came out – trousers, shirt, light cardigan, another change of clothes in a plastic supermarket bag – Toby had started the car and I jumped in lightly next to him.
“Did anyone come looking for me here when I was away?” I asked as we swung round in the turning circle at the dead end.
“I don’t think so, no. Not on my watch.”
Yes, they did. Of course they bloody did. But there was no point in arguing.
Toby kept insisting that we went to his office. Why?
It all had to be reported, he said, but he didn’t sound convincing.
I wondered if he’d been phoned about the two bloodied corpses up-country, my grotesque abattoir. “How could she have done this?” Perhaps he had.
He was strangely calm in my company if he knew about that. Perhaps it was time to tell him. But I made him drive into Bethany, turning right at the entry roundabout, away from the tidy Jewish bit and into the Palestinian side, rougher but safer for my purposes. Toby bought kebabs from a cafe. I asked for fizzy water, but he came back with two paper cups of milky coffee as well and we sat on a bench.
“Am I getting you into trouble, Toby?”
“Why?”
“You can’t harbour me without telling your people, can you?”
There was a silence.
“Have you told your people?” I stopped eating. “Have you told your office, Toby?”
“Yes.”
A long pause, while we ate.
“I don’t mind. You had to. Why haven’t they come for me?”
“I don’t know. They’re busy.”
“Why haven’t they tried to kill me?”
He sighed. “Why would they want to do that?”
“Come on, Toby.” I stared at him. “Why haven’t they rounded me up?”
I’d hardened my tone and he looked agitated. Maybe it brought back memories of Nazareth. We’d gulped the coffees and now swigged on the bottles of water. I let the question hang.
“The Desk just says you disappeared,” he said eventually. “Went to East Jay and just vanished. They weren’t unduly worried. Your visa was fine and you know lots of people in the region.”
I snorted.
“So I run an errand and just disappear. Come on, Tobes. Didn’t anyone want to debrief me? Didn’t anyone come looking for me? Wasn’t anyone worried? About the document exchange, if not me. Weren’t you worried?”
“Let me take you to the office. You can ask them. They can help.”
“Isn’t it shut weekends?”
“There are always pastoral staff we can contact.”
Pastoral? Then he turned towards me.
“You need help, Nat. Let us help you.”
It was a tone I’d heard before, but I couldn’t place it for a moment. Then I had it. Dr Gray. Therapy. My neck began to prick with humidity and anger. I shook a little. I realised he didn’t believe any of it. You don’t believe me, Toby.
But I didn’t say it, just carried on drinking my water and staring across the road at a shop that appeared to sell second-hand electrical goods. Toby had now been assigned, or maybe assigned himself, to look after the nutcase who had disappeared after the conference.
He was still talking.
“There are people who can help you. You need a good rest after all you’ve been through. There’s a lot you need to get out of your system.”
“Horsesh
it,” I said and screwed up the box the kebab had come in. “It’s a free world, isn’t it, Toby?”
I was feeling sick and my breath was short and quickening. I stood and felt my thigh shake lightly. There was a bin attached to a telegraph pole and as soon as I reached it I was neatly sick into it, this little emetic episode suddenly lightening me.
I drew the back of my hand across my mouth. Toby handed me a large navy-blue handkerchief, but said nothing.
“Toby, what’s going on?”
He was flicking the nail of his thumb.
“You’re a danger to yourself,” he said. “You’re not well.”
“It’s not me who’s the danger. Who is telling you this? Your people?”
“Not my people. Not any people. You just need help. You’ve had some sort of breakdown.”
Yeah, that’s what they’ll have told him, I thought.
“And who are you and your people? Don’t bullshit me any more, Toby.”
“You know who we are. Don’t be silly.”
He could have been speaking to that sister he didn’t have.
“Yes, but what office are you working in? Who are you working for? Come on, I’m tired of this.”
I really was. Suddenly I was really tired.
“Toby, when I phoned you from Nazareth. . . it rings out then transfers.”
“It transfers to my mobile. It’s no big deal,” said Toby. “Or it shouldn’t be. We’re working out of the American embassy.”
“What do you do?”
He looked at me like he didn’t understand. Perhaps he didn’t.
“Come on, Toby. What’s been going on.”
“Nothing. Really. It’s all as you were briefed. The conference and everything. All legit. It’s just led by the Americans, not us. It wasn’t led out of London, that’s all. It’s Washington.”
“US money?”
“I guess.”
I didn’t care. It wasn’t the biggest lie in the world. But there must be something else. So I waited, but nothing more came. Toby lit a cigarette and offered me one. I refused. My mouth tasted of tin and I was breathing hard.
“Toby, I need help.”
“I know. I’ll take you in.” He was suddenly more kind. “You do need help. They say you need medical help.”
“What do they want to do with me, Toby? Am I a security risk?”
“No, they’re just worried about you. And London wants to know what’s been going on.”
“But, Toby, I’ve killed people, I really have.”
“Stop it, Nat. Relax. Tell them all about it in London.”
“Someone must know about the bodies.” I was shaking again.
“Natalie, we can get you home quickly. When you’ve seen a doctor. Back to London.”
“Did they tell you about the bodies, Toby? Did they tell you they’d found them?”
I was speaking calmly and rhythmically, I thought, staring across the road for certainty, but everything was rattling inside, like being pushed in a pram over cobblestones.
“There was a boy in the back room. I seduced him, stabbed him in the neck and he bled to death. Then there was a fat guy in the lounge I shot.”
He paused, not shocked or anything, just patient.
“We can get you back to London. There are people there who can look after you. Help you. Nat, we’re here to help. We’ll get you home safely.”
I sat down again next to him.
“Toby, do you think I’m dangerous?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Are you afraid of me?”
“No, I’m not.”
I sighed deeply and my voice broke. I peered up at the sky to stop the tears running out from the bottom of my eyes. “I could tell you such things.”
“It’s OK, Nat. We’re going to look after you.”
“Why don’t you just take me in? Have me arrested, locked up or whatever? I’ve done such terrible things, Toby.”
“There’s no need for that.”
I was feeling stronger again, calmer. Maybe the kebab had just been too much.
“OK, Tobes, I give up. Take me in. Let’s go.”
I sat in his car with my head against the window. Toby drove back towards the city in silence. I knew I was unwell. I was tired again, beyond measure. I wanted a bed and I wanted comfort. I wanted to be talked to and I wanted to be believed. My breathing was shallower again and I was calm. Little pinpricks in the backs of my hands told me that I was sweating, tackling a mild fever, maybe. My immune system must be really weak, I thought.
But as my breath clouded the window glass, I started to think more clearly again. I could see where I was. I thought back to the little room, up north, beyond Nazareth. It would still be there. How did it look now? How did it sound? What voices filled it? “You should never have come back to Palestine.” Why back? Think, girl. And now I was being taken back again. Toby’s little car taking me into the city of Jerusalem, the blood sacrifice to the Temple.
The obedient handmaid of Toby’s elders. Time to be given up, to give up, a time to rest. Let them take over. Let them look after me. That’s what Toby had said. But I still had strength if I conserved it properly. They needn’t rewrite my story. Think, girl. Time to take control again. One more roll of the dice.
Traffic had built up now as Jerusalem anticipated the second dusk of its Sabbath. Every few hundred yards, Toby was pulling up at lights, or stopping as the traffic thickened. I watched as he was penned into a middle lane, two cars behind the front one at the traffic lights as they turned red at a junction, not exactly grid-locked, but moving very slowly with frustrated drivers swinging between lanes.
Barely lifting my head from the window, I opened the door as if to be sick again and with a casual, “See you, Tobes,” I was out and among the cars.
There were some Nat-come-backs from Toby as I found the pavement, which were then drowned by a crescendo of blaring horns. I calculated that Toby would balance chasing me against causing a huge scene in traffic in a diplomatic car. As I found the depths of a crowd, I knew I was free and I felt strangely strong, despite my sickness.
I reflected on how easy it was to shake off an escort. You just get out of their car.
I kept looking behind me to check if I was being tailed – maybe Toby had been working with minders in a car behind us? I walked up beside the Western Wall and into the Jewish Quarter of the old city, climbing the wooden ramps. I’d stop suddenly and walk back into the faces of pedestrians behind me, but that made me feel foolish and any mild hysteria seemed to start the sweats again.
I stopped at a cashpoint in a little booth. What was my PIN number again? Come on, girl, get a grip. There was a risk the cash machine would just keep the card, but I figured it would be better to find out that way than by trying to use it in a hotel where I could be seized.
And I stared at my reflection in the steel and glass of the bank, searching anyone who dawdled behind me. They were either very good and imperceptible, or Toby was the sum total of my security and he’d just lost me.
In every sense, I checked my balance. My debit card hadn’t been blocked. The float was still there, minus a couple of debits from before the kidnapping, nothing since.
So I checked into the Damascus Gate Hotel on the north side of the old city. Standing in its reception, I texted Hugh on an impulse.
“Huge – what’s up? Tell me all, Natter x.”
It was suitably ambiguous; if they’d heard of my disappearance in London, I’d get the whole “where have you been” scene. If not, it was just an innocent, catch-up, gossipy text.
The hotel was all plastic crystal chandeliers and yellow bottle-eye glass in arched window frames, what Palestinians do when they want to channel the Arabian Nights.
I took a pot of hot chocolate from the seated lobby area up to the roof terrace, which was really just an asphalted flat roof with some awnings and garden furniture between television cables. And I sat in the lowering sun and tried to think about what
to do next.
It was the first time I’d thought beyond the next hour or so since I’d escaped. Killed and escaped. How easy it was to say that. So I murmured it to myself as I looked out over the parapet of the roof at the walls of old Jerusalem turning from olive to ochre in the early evening sun.
My illness – food poisoning? – was creeping up on me, only announcing its presence when it had arrived. I began to realise there were recurrent pauses between my episodes of sickness, each one incrementally worse than before. So there were phoney periods when my mind relaxed and assumed that my perception was normal. Then it started to tell me that something was very wrong and the nervous system kicked in, breath quickened, sweat pricked.
The edge of my vision began to blur, while the centre, what I actually looked at, grew the more intense. I watched my arm put my hand on the edge of the table, tried to touch the handle of the cup, to make it normal. I could feel the long draw of breath expanding my chest, apparently no longer an involuntary action. I stood to see what my legs could do and wandered in one short direction on the roof, then another.
I needed to stay away from the parapet wall, or was I drawn to it?
I thought I saw my frame falling from the roof, lying by the old paperback stall down there, burgundy blood, those staring glassy eyes, mouth open in the death-dribble of sleep. But joined in one chorus with Hamal and the Troll. Sleep-dribble of death. Words chanted in my head. Back in my bubble, everything on the outside, but crowding in on me, trying to get in.
I stumbled through the staircase door and down to my room, if I could find it. Yes, I remembered where it was, so I must be OK, mustn’t I. OK? I watched my hand shaking and I was amused, distracted, as it tried to get the card in the lock, as if it wasn’t mine. Red to green. In.
Sat for a moment on the bed, head between knees, thought I was going to be sick and went to the bathroom, paced about some more, gasping as if I’d forgotten to breathe, but careful not to hyperventilate or I might faint, hand grasping at an invisible chain of pearls. Splashed some water on my face. Opened the window and closed it again – the body on the pavement, cheek pushed to the ground like a baby asleep, raising a lip in a curl.
I sat on the edge of the bed again, glancing around the room, everything slowing down, retreating from me slightly, my fevered face cooling. The pressure off my face and chest. I wondered if this was what a heart attack was like. Picked up my phone and stared at it as if I hadn’t seen it before. It had received a text. I didn’t care and threw it aside. No time for that now.
A Dark Nativity Page 23