I remember them all. A station wagon, a van, a woman with children. The children looked at me, heads turning as the car passed. It must have been past seven, or even later, a school run. I’d soon have to think of hiding again.
I became more demanding. I stood, stuck out my thumb. Would that be recognised as British? No, thumb in Lebanon, flat palm in Syria, I recalled. Several more cars between the lorries. The working world was waking.
Then a red flatbed arrived, the sort with the maker’s name written large across the back, the kind we used in the desert. I saw sun-wrinkled skin, a white singlet, grey stubble. I felt his gaze focus on me from within the cab, like I was a sign. So my head followed its passing and the brake lights came on, its nose dipping slightly, dust rising from the kerb.
I should have a bag to pick up, I thought, as I ran to catch up, surprised that my legs were working so well. The passenger window was down and a wiry, bronzed little man, probably late forties, but dried up by the sun, like a prune, was leaning across, his bright blue eyes the only colour in the cab.
“Hi,” he said, leaning his fist on the rug of the passenger seat. Popeye’s Mediterranean uncle.
Dust and earth and cigarette packets on the dash, a long-extinguished air freshener swinging from the rear-view mirror. Placed there optimistically by a wife, maybe? It was shabbier and it smelt of bricks, but it reminded me of Yusef’s truck, the same sense of enclosed safety, nothing to do but wait and watch, the sun winking from behind the windscreen struts.
“Thanks,” I’d said girlishly as I fell in, like a cowgirl.
Then a bit too quickly, “I’m a relief worker with the UN. Been doing a tour of camps on a sanitation inspect. Just broke down. My truck was just taken away.”
“Yeah?” he said, grinning and wincing forward.
He wasn’t engaging with that narrative and I concluded that he wasn’t with my captors. I was motoring away and I wanted to go with that presumption, away from glassy eyes and sticky blood and the condemning silence.
“Where you going?”
“Just down to the border,” I said.
I hadn’t thought that far yet. I was still concentrating on departing, getting away, not on arriving anywhere. I started to build an assumption that border guards would be sufficiently bureaucratic to turn me in to the authorities, where I could contact the UN Mission and maybe the British consulate. Just a dippy relief worker who had got separated from her team. Even if they recognised me from the TV bulletins, they’d pass me up the line. They’d not want to get involved.
“Border?”
He chuckled softly to himself and rested just one hand on the top of the steering wheel. He looked out through his open window and shook his head a bit.
“I know,” I said, trying to enjoy whatever the joke was. “I need to check some supplies coming in.”
As casual as I could be. Keep it vague. I guessed he was a Lebanese builder, busy over the years with the rebuilding of the Beirut suburbs and the bombed south.
“Border,” he said again. “Is that what you call it now?”
I didn’t understand. The road was black and new. I stayed silent and he drove quite slowly, that one brown arm holding the top of the wheel, the other hand cupped in the slipstream outside his window.
“I’m going down to Jericho. Which side will I drop you?”
Still I said nothing. The Lebanon/Israel border was long closed, a militarised zone. Very few passed that way and only with the highest authority. He couldn’t possibly be passing in a builder’s truck. I didn’t want to direct the conversation towards my lack of papers or passport.
I felt the swing in my stomach as I started to lose control again. It was like one of those fantasy games where you can’t escape your dystopia, always ending up back in the same place. A truck passed. Something about its licence plates? I was finding it hard to concentrate.
Then a road sign, growing larger, like a dawning idea. It was coming to me gently to tell me something. A direction on to a slip-road, two lines, two languages. One Arabic. One Hebrew.
I pretended to be lost in thought. The road was straightening out from the hills and we were looking out across a plain.
“Remind me of the name of that village, that town, where you picked me up? Where I broke down. I’ll need to tell them to pick up my truck.”
He shrugged and stuck out his bottom lip. “I don’t know. One of the developments. A new one, I think.”
Some more traffic, passing too quickly for me to catch details. What did Lebanese plates look like anyway? How did it look when Yusef was driving me? Come on, girl, get a grip.
“Where are we, I mean, how far to the border . . . to the . . . barrier?” I couldn’t think of the words. “To the wall. Roughly, from here.”
“We’re only twenty minutes, maybe half an hour from the checkpoint now,” he said calmly. He hadn’t baulked when I said “wall”. Why had I said wall?
“You have papers, yes?” He looked at me only for the second time. I was carrying nothing. This could get him arrested.
“Bumbag,” I said uselessly.
A larger sign, blue across the road, which now widened into traffic lanes. Hebrew again. Oh God. I felt sick with madness, everything rocking, not just the car. I wanted to say to let me out now, here, deal with this panic attack on my own, hyperventilate beside the road with my head between my knees. Is that prayer?
The traffic filter was to another trunk road, a big town from the size of the sign, just eight kilometres away. Hebrew again. Oh, Jesus Christ. It says Nazareth.
“Drop me here,” I said. Then, pathetically, “We have an office. I just remembered.
