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 Boy 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
