Has anyone ever done that before, Toby?
No, of course I didn’t tell him that. Anyway, he hadn’t taken my little drama with the copper piping well at all. I thought the sheer release of nervous energy would have made him laugh. But no. He just slumped against his car-door window, which he lowered slightly, breathing heavily and eyeing me like a punch-drunk boxer in the mirror.
“Sorry,” I’d said. “I thought you might have come to kill me. Or turn me in.”
I told him not to call the office and, when eventually he spoke, he said he’d only told them he was going out for a doctor’s appointment, because I’d told him not to grass me up. As we sat there, some Jewish kids playing football on the recreation ground beside us, he didn’t look like someone who was briefed to turn me in, or indeed turn me over.
“Let’s go back,” I’d said, and climbed into the front seat, tossing the copper pipe into the footwell to make it look like a game.
And so here we were, mid-evening, the remains of some chicken and rice that he had microwaved and I had wolfed down, while Toby rolled a cup of the leftover broth between the palms of his hands and stared at the table.
I had thick black coffee now and was gnawing at a mango. I’d told him most of it, as if in bullet points. They bundled me in a car. They drugged me. They made a video, threatening to kill me.
I paused at that bit. The video I had fondly imagined had run on a loop on the 24-hour news channels, from Al Jazeera to CNN?
Toby just shook his head. “We’ve seen nothing. No such thing.”
He even sounded a bit bored.
I went on. They kept me in a room. Then they said they were transferring me, giving me over to a different crew. I said that sort of thing, anyway. At the end, I just said that I’d fought my way out and left it at that. I don’t know why. Killing now seemed strangely banal in this suburban, yuppie flat.
“Here’s the thing, Toby, I was in Israel. I never left it. One of the new developments, somewhere up near Haifa. I wasn’t even in the West Bank.”
Toby stared at me. Then: “Would you find it again?”
“Well, of course. Probably. But there’d be nothing there now.”
I looked at him hard as he studied his broth.
“Where did you think I was, Toby?”
“We thought you’d taken off with some aid friends. The conference was over. It happens.”
He fetched a couple of cans of beer and a half-empty bottle of red wine, with a stopper. As soon as I drank, I started to fall asleep.
“They were going to kill me, Toby.”
I wanted him to ask who “they” were, but he didn’t. He just said: “We’ll tell the office in the morning.”
“No!”
“We’ll have to tell someone I’ve found you.”
“No. I don’t know. I thought I was safe with you, Toby.”
“You are. Safer than I am with you, as it happens.”
“Have you told the office you’ve got me?” It must have been the twentieth time I’d asked him.
“No. Why would I?”
“Did they talk to you about me?”
“They asked if I’d heard from you a couple of times. They thought you’d gone off with your friends.”
“Why didn’t anyone want to know where I was?”
“I told you,” he said wearily. There was a pause.
“Will you promise not to tell anyone I’m here, Toby? At least until tomorrow?”
“I promise.”
Another pause for effect.
“I believe you.”
I threw my head back and looked at the intertwined bamboo lampshade hanging from the ceiling and I wanted to cry again. So I stood instead and fell on to the sofa.
Some time later, Toby came with an unzipped sleeping bag and a quilt, which he spread over me and put a foam-filled pillow by my head. It did indeed smell of washing powder. He turned the lights out without a word – I think he thought I was asleep – and left the room softly.
Then I heard him turn a key in his door and I tensed, eyes popping open wide in the dark. A gasp that I realised was mine. But street-light was falling across the room and the nets lifted lazily to a crack in the sliding door, and I knew this was a very different room to the last one that was locked on me.
With a smile, I realised Toby was locking me out, not in.
I was expecting night terrors, a sweaty and fevered half-sleep in which recently buried images of the Boy’s and the Troll’s torsos would erupt like cheap-movie zombies from a grave. But I slept as I did as a child.
Yes, it disturbs me now, or at least when I think about it. I recognise I have the capacity to rip a boy’s throat out as I screwed him and gun down his dumb sidekick, in order to survive myself, and then sleep like I’ve just had a hard day at school and my mum has made everything all right.
I barely moved before morning and had only pulled up the cool nylon of the sleeping bag into my cheek as a kind of comforter. When I woke, it was light and the sounds from the kitchen could have been a parent fussing.
My body had that stillness in which you can feel every fibre of it but you’re not sure you can move anything. When I did stir, just to awaken my hips, Toby brought me Jasmine tea.
I showered in his little en-suite – I must have stunk. He lent me some pants and we actually laughed, like students in digs. It was our first shared levity since
