“OK, Tobes, I give up. Take me in. Let’s go.”
I sat in his car with my head against the window. Toby drove back towards the city in silence. I knew I was unwell. I was tired again, beyond measure. I wanted a bed and I wanted comfort. I wanted to be talked to and I wanted to be believed. My breathing was shallower again and I was calm. Little pinpricks in the backs of my hands told me that I was sweating, tackling a mild fever, maybe. My immune system must be really weak, I thought.
But as my breath clouded the window glass, I started to think more clearly again. I could see where I was. I thought back to the little room, up north, beyond Nazareth. It would still be there. How did it look now? How did it sound? What voices filled it? “You should never have come back to Palestine.” Why back? Think, girl. And now I was being taken back again. Toby’s little car taking me into the city of Jerusalem, the blood sacrifice to the Temple.
The obedient handmaid of Toby’s elders. Time to be given up, to give up, a time to rest. Let them take over. Let them look after me. That’s what Toby had said. But I still had strength if I conserved it properly. They needn’t rewrite my story. Think, girl. Time to take control again. One more roll of the dice.
Traffic had built up now as Jerusalem anticipated the second dusk of its Sabbath. Every few hundred yards, Toby was pulling up at lights, or stopping as the traffic thickened. I watched as he was penned into a middle lane, two cars behind the front one at the traffic lights as they turned red at a junction, not exactly grid-locked, but moving very slowly with frustrated drivers swinging between lanes.
Barely lifting my head from the window, I opened the door as if to be sick again and with a casual, “See you, Tobes,” I was out and among the cars.
There were some Nat-come-backs from Toby as I found the pavement, which were then drowned by a crescendo of blaring horns. I calculated that Toby would balance chasing me against causing a huge scene in traffic in a diplomatic car. As I found the depths of a crowd, I knew I was free and I felt strangely strong, despite my sickness.
I reflected on how easy it was to shake off an escort. You just get out of their car.
I kept looking behind me to check if I was being tailed – maybe Toby had been working with minders in a car behind us? I walked up beside the Western Wall and into the Jewish Quarter of the old city, climbing the wooden ramps. I’d stop suddenly and walk back into the faces of pedestrians behind me, but that made me feel foolish and any mild hysteria seemed to start the sweats again.
I stopped at a cashpoint in a little booth. What was my PIN number again? Come on, girl, get a grip. There was a risk the cash machine would just keep the card, but I figured it would be better to find out that way than by trying to use it in a hotel where I could be seized.
And I stared at my reflection in the steel and glass of the bank, searching anyone who dawdled behind me. They were either very good and imperceptible, or Toby was the sum total of my security and he’d just lost me.
In every sense, I checked my balance. My debit card hadn’t been blocked. The float was still there, minus a couple of debits from before the kidnapping, nothing since.
So I checked into the Damascus Gate Hotel on the north side of the old city. Standing in its reception, I texted Hugh on an impulse.
“Huge – what’s up? Tell me all, Natter x.”
It was suitably ambiguous; if they’d heard of my disappearance in London, I’d get the whole “where have you been” scene. If not, it was just an innocent, catch-up, gossipy text.
The hotel was all plastic crystal chandeliers and yellow bottle-eye glass in arched window frames, what Palestinians do when they want to channel the Arabian Nights.
I took a pot of hot chocolate from the seated lobby area up to the roof terrace, which was really just an asphalted flat roof with some awnings and garden furniture between television cables. And I sat in the lowering sun and tried to think about what to do next.
It was the first time I’d thought beyond the next hour or so since I’d escaped. Killed and escaped. How easy it was to say that. So I murmured it to myself as I looked out over the parapet of the roof at the walls of old Jerusalem turning from olive to ochre in the early evening sun.
My illness – food poisoning? – was creeping up on me, only announcing its presence when it had arrived. I began to realise there were recurrent pauses between my episodes of sickness, each one incrementally worse than before. So there were phoney periods when my mind relaxed and assumed that my perception was normal. Then it started to tell me that something was very wrong and the nervous system kicked in, breath quickened, sweat pricked.
The edge of my vision began to blur, while the centre, what I actually looked at, grew the more intense. I watched my arm put my hand on the edge of the table, tried to touch the handle of the cup, to make it normal. I could feel the long draw of breath expanding my chest, apparently no longer an involuntary action. I stood to see what my legs could do and wandered in one short direction on the roof, then another.
I needed to stay away from the parapet wall, or was I drawn to it?
I thought I saw my frame falling from the roof, lying by the old paperback stall down there,
