I had no particular desire for west, I suppose, but west would eventually mean sea and ports, east meant mountains and trouble.
The alley opened behind the houses on to a small, railed viewing bay, the backyards of the houses on either side. I’d been kept in a room that faced out to open country. Of course.
Away below, I could pick out the lights of vehicles on the road, but not many. I swung over the rail and on to the ground and picked my way carefully into the dark, aware that a torch would have easily picked me out in my white clothing. An easy shot.
The ground started to fall away fast, shale, or a slate outcrop. I started to glissade down, like a cartoon cat on marbles, then sitting to take the tide of the small stone avalanche I’d started.
Occasionally there was a large rock that I had to pick around. The ground levelled, a small brook, some barbed-wire fencing. The road was close now and I began to follow its line, staying in the dark on mushy and mossy grass; south, I reckoned.
But the soggy ground and the rocks slowed progress, and I had to make for the roadside, lying flat down its bankside when headlights appeared. It was an open, hedgeless highway and I could spot the lights of vehicles when they were still far off, long before they illuminated me.
Maybe a couple of kilometres of this and the road rose on an escarpment, some larger rocks lower down to my side. I glided down and between them and rested my head, while lorries thundered by above.
It was only then that I started to shake, my whole body trembling, great swings of my forearms with no autonomic nervous control, as if in the trauma of a hospital admission after a road crash.
I gibbered in the cold, salivating down my chin, muttering like a drunk, speaking in tongues of men and angels. I knew I was in some kind of withdrawal, a detox from the intensity of a short window of absolute trauma, maybe no more than half an hour, in which I had changed the world. So I squatted there, dribbling and shaking, unable to address the enormity of what was happening. The rocks offered a kind of sanctuary; the headlights were like passing comets in the sky and from time to time a trance-like sleep wrapped me.
14
First light revealed mists on the meadows under the crags, between which I’d fallen from the scene of my crime. I could see from my rock sanctuary that the length of the road I’d walked formed a gradually falling left sweep around the little mountain I’d descended and it grew craggier as the road fell away – I’d been lucky to come down where I had.
I forced myself to concentrate, to put mental distance between the house way up beyond the crags and my rock of ages. I calculated I had about three or four hours of daylight, from dawn to around nine, before the shift changed at the house and the bodies were found, assuming that the gunshots hadn’t been investigated.
So I needed transport early, before anyone came looking for me. I heard dogs barking as soon as I could see across the sheep meadows and I imagined my trail being followed and shivered the great jaw-rattling shake of the dangerously exposed.
There was something else: I wasn’t just fully awake as soon as the sky turned mellow, but I felt real again, not the imagined creature of the night hours. I had woken from my dream.
One, two, three, four, five. . . Think, girl, get a grip.
I checked my legs and arms; there were scratches and one deeper gash on the back of one calf, caked now with dried blood. My arms were pinked with my own as well as the Boy’s blood. The overtrousers were torn and the back of the smock was wholly scuffed with slate dust, but I’d just have to explain that away somehow. I washed in the brook and, clocking that the sheep that had started their dawn bleating were downstream, I drank a little as it looked cool and clear, living water that soothed my sickened stomach.
That dawn, I guessed, I was in the foothills of the Chouf mountains, but I’d need a road sign or a talkative driver to get some bearings. So I straightened up and patted down my incongruous clothing and scrambled up the bank to the roadside. There was a utility bin, grit or sand perhaps, away down the road and I strode down purposefully to sit on it.
Only one vehicle, a coach of sorts, passed in the opposite direction. Sitting on the bin, I let a lorry pass, then another, while pretending to examine an imaginary smartphone in the palm of my hand. A lorry has connections, professional curiosities.
Then a suave executive car. I didn’t stand, but offered an inquisitive palm, such as a professional stuck in a wilderness might offer if their car had broken down and they were wondering what to do next. It too passed.
I became keenly aware of the risk I was taking. Mr Silent might take this route to his work as my janitor, or Burly, or any of his mates might already be out on the road looking for me. I’d be picked up, driven up a track somewhere and despatched. If I was lucky. Women who behaved like men could be particularly brutally treated. Raped and stoned, maybe; there were enough rocks around.
I thought of taking off across country again, but the crags rose sharply on the other side of the road and this was wild country. I had to take the chance
