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
