“Are you OK?” I asked.
“Yes. Sure.”
I paused just a beat. “And the boys who took him?”
He looked at the ground for a moment. “They may not be so well.” Now he looked at me properly, as if trying to think of something to say. “Thank you for staying here.”
I slapped his upper arm in a satire of manly acknowledgement and said, “Please be careful, Yuse.”
I hugged Uncle, hugged Asi like he was mine, kissed May and headed down the alley and towards town to find the guarded compound where I had left the 4x4, what felt much longer ago than just the day before.
I returned to England only about a month later, the local UN desk having absorbed much of the administration of the social and education projects we had set up. Through the good offices of the NGO that had sent me in the first place, I took a job administering a teaching-support charity in north London. It was only part-time, three days a week, but it was something to do. It wasn’t where I was going. I started at The Fed shortly after that.
The interview was perfunctory. I’d worked in Sudan and I’d worked in the Middle East. But they did ask me why I’d been ordained as a priest.
“Is that where your compassion comes from?” Jake had asked me.
“No,” I’d replied before I’d thought about it properly. “No, I don’t think it’s about compassion actually. It’s more about justice. I think it’s more about anger than pity.”
Jake had cocked his head in attention to this. “But I suppose it’s the Christian’s imperative to love our neighbour as ourselves, no?”
“Yes, but I think it’s ambitious to suppose that that brings peace, for other people or ourselves,” I’d said. I was a bit on a roll so I went for it. “He also said that he hadn’t come to bring peace, but a sword.”
Looking back, I see that by my mid-twenties I was carrying a sword, rather than a cross. I didn’t know how to use it then. Indeed, it was probably piercing my own heart. But I would learn.
12
The job Toby drove me to in Jerusalem was utterly banal, with no shadow of the horrors to follow. He parked a couple of streets away and I walked maybe a half-mile dogleg of streets. There were a couple of dusk drinkers sitting outside in the orange light. Inside, everything was dazzling white plastic.
Two young men in bomber jackets were sitting at the bar and turned towards me as if I was expected. I pulled the envelope from my pocket and ran it over my knuckles, raising my eyebrows to the young man who was now standing. He flicked his head as if to beckon me and put out his hand to his colleague, who produced an envelope from a black leather shoulder bag. It was an A4 envelope, folded double. The envelopes passed each other briskly and without fuss, no tugging, no ceremony of laying them down together.
“Thank you,” I said, and he flicked his head again and grinned.
I walked briskly back to Toby. He was parked in one of those herringbone Jerusalem bays, reading a paper. I went to his open window.
“There you go,” I said and passed the envelope through the window.
“Splendid,” he said. “Jump in.”
“Do you want to know anything about who I saw, what they looked like?”
“Nope. No offence, Nat, but they’re people like you. Or me. Just doing someone a favour.”
“Aren’t you going to open it?”
“Above my pay grade. Come on, get in.”
If I had, if I’d gone for a drink with Toby, maybe some supper, I wonder how things might have turned out. I doubt it would have altered anything; they’d have got me later, is all. As it was I made it easy for them.
“No, you go on. I’ll walk back to my digs. It’s a nice enough evening.”
That’s what I was doing. Swinging along between the low shrubs beside the main road, heading west, about a kilometre from my conference apartment, when I heard my name barked from behind me and turned instinctively. A dark vehicle with dark windows was pulling up next to me. Arms on my arms, a large heavy hand on the top of my head. I was in the back of the car before I’d seen who’d called me.
And there was no dwindling dusk, no gloaming to which the light of my day submitted. Light straight to dark. I was alive and then I might as well have been dead. Breath still inflated me, but imagination and consciousness were gone, like my own hard-drive had crashed.
I was plunged from the light of my day into the dark of a nylon hood, as I lay across the back seat of a saloon car, bucketing like plane baggage in turbulence. I can’t say what I was thinking about, if I was thinking at all. So I can’t claim I was violated. More like invalidated. Tough as it is to concede, all that surrounds us defines us. We have no other identity. I amounted to Natalie Cross, Anglican priest, inadequate wife, minor canon, sometime missionary. That’s me in London, or Africa, or the Middle East, floating but anchored to a deathless litany of functions. From this moment, I had no purpose other than those defined by other people. Perhaps this is the sense of objective calmness that enfolds some at moments close to death. I was being unwound, wiped clean – though emptied, not purified.
It wasn’t so much that I could do nothing; it was that I had become nothing.
And it’s as though I write of another person, someone spawned in that car journey. What happened didn’t happen to me, but to the person I became. I can’t view it now with anger or fear, far less with penitence, but only with a dispassionate clarity – she
