“Are you going to work?” I asked.
“It’s Shabbat,” he said. It was quiet outside, I noticed now.
We sat at the table again, as if it was the morning after a party.
“I’ll drive you to your place,” said Toby. “I have a pass key.”
“They won’t be there.”
“Who won’t?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“We may as well check it out anyway.”
“I don’t want to be found, Toby. I don’t want them to find me.”
“It’ll be fine. Really.”
He was handling me, managing me. I was a high-maintenance guest and he wanted rid of me. But he was probably scared that I might repeat some version of the Nazareth performance.
So we drove across Jerusalem, quiet and Saturday-still. Up the Bekaa Valley road that skirts the old wall, the Temple of the Rock high on one side, Gethsemane and the Mount of Olives on the other, the terraces of white-marbled graves, the lucky first who will be raised when the Messiah comes.
I made Toby stop at the end of the road of the low-rise apartments where I’d stayed weeks before, but an age ago. It looked as it always had. Like I’d come out of an illness and was being returned home. I had changed since I was last here, but this looked the same. How could it? Or it was like visiting a childhood home and finding it unchanged.
It felt like déjà vu, but I had to remind myself that I really had been here before. I could have been visiting a set for a short film of my life. There was no one sitting in cars, nobody patrolling the pavements, though I imagined that any surveillance would be conducted from a flat opposite, or next door.
“You OK?” said Toby, after we’d parked up.
“Yeah. You go first, there may be somebody inside.”
I watched him as he climbed the steps and, intriguingly, he did ring the bell and pause, before using his pass key. I wondered what would have happened if Burly, or anyone else for that matter, had answered the door. I’d drive the car off, I supposed.
But I glanced across and Toby had taken the ignition key. Of course he had. My copper piping was still in the footwell. Toby was back only a minute later.
“Do you want to come in then?” he said through the open car window.
I turned the lights on in the apartment, because Toby hadn’t and I wanted to see if the electricity had been cut off. The first thing I noticed was that there were a pair of tights on the floor where I’d stepped out of them.
The conference programme was open on the round table, an empty glass tumbler securing it against draughts from the window I’d closed before heading for East Jerusalem on my errand of weeks before. A mug had blotches of mould on the remains of some coffee in the kitchen.
It was all a shrine to my former life and I could picture my ghost moving in the room, busying myself with those matters from another time, another world, like they were important.
It was a time I’d mysteriously abandoned. The bathroom was musty, dust gathering at the waterline in the bath. There was an abandoned stillness everywhere. This place had just gone on, impervious to events, like a church. This little flat was my Marie Celeste, floating emptily on into a future that no longer contained me.
Ridiculously, I opened a wardrobe first. No one had stolen my clothes. Then the drawer in the fitted cabinet by the bed. My passport and UN Blue Card. I held them, flicked through the pages in case – I don’t know – my face had been changed in the photos or something, like my identity had been airbrushed away, while Toby stood watching me from the door.
Something fell from the passport and I bent to pick it up. I inspected the little plastic rectangle, turning it in my fingers.
“What is it?”
“It’s my debit card.” I turned to show Toby.
“No burglars then.”
“No. But I didn’t leave it here. I wouldn’t have done. It was with me in my bag.”
“Evidently not.”
“I wouldn’t have left it here, Toby.”
He didn’t answer. Just walked away towards the front door, signalling that it was time to go.
“Wait,” I said, and pushed past him again into the living room. There was a little teak table by the television, near the power plugs. I stood, staring at what was on it, as though cherishing the sight of something precious that has been lost and found.
Toby joined me and followed my line of sight.
“What is it?” he said.
“It’s my mobile.” I picked it up, pulling the charger from its base. The screen lit.
“Probably some texts from me,” said Toby. I was turning it round in my hands. It had the cracked cover of The Fed that I’d always kept on it. Contacts. There was Hugh. There was Adrian. There was “Home”.
“I didn’t leave it here, Toby. It was with me. It was the first thing they took.”
“Well, you’ve got it now,” he said. “Come on. We can clean up later.”
“I want to change,” I said, returning to the wardrobe.
Toby said he’d wait outside. When I came out – trousers, shirt, light cardigan, another change of clothes in a plastic supermarket bag – Toby had started the car and I jumped in lightly next to him.
“Did anyone come looking for me here when I was away?” I asked as we swung round in the turning circle at the dead end.
“I don’t think so, no. Not on my watch.”
Yes, they did. Of course they bloody did. But there was no point in arguing.
Toby kept insisting that we went to his office. Why?
It all had to be reported, he said, but he didn’t sound convincing.
I wondered if he’d been phoned about the two bloodied corpses up-country, my grotesque abattoir. “How could she have done this?” Perhaps he had.
He was strangely calm in my company if he knew about that. Perhaps it was time to
