Another 4x4 waited and we drove down on to the plain, and there was an airstrip with a few light aircraft and a small executive jet with its engines idling. Two guards peered into the car, but seemed to be expecting us.
“I’ll see you there, hun,” said Sarah, and kissed me. “Two or three days at the most.”
And then we were airborne over the top of the Dead Sea, just me and one of the Russian staff, a big but nice man who just smiled reassuringly in my direction. We taxied into a kind of private jet enclosure at Amman, then through two lounges where my escort showed passports and visas and spoke Arabic with a dense accent.
He left me with my tickets on landside, pointing at the departures board and I waited less in anonymity than pseudonymity, trying to see the world as Maria would.
You have to fly through Jordan to reach Lebanon from Israel. Amman airport is plastic and inauthentic. All that Arabic vaulting that tries to look like palm trees, reflected in mirrored black flooring that was meant to look like marble but was some kind of veneer, no depth in its reflection. Just a transit point, somewhere to travel from, not to. As it would have been for the magi, it’s a point to the east that’s much less important than your destination to the west.
Waiting for my connection – a cute little earner for Jordan – the anxiety returned and I trembled slightly, but no sweats, nor shortening of breath. As I sat on a marble-style bench, I wondered again if I was being followed, whether someone even now was checking me out from the passing travellers or from the mezzanine balcony of cafes and bars.
I played around with the things I knew for sure to calm me down. I’d been a game-changer since I killed to escape. But they hadn’t wanted to bring me in, arrest me, shut me up. If they’d wanted to kill me, they could have done, easily. But they’d left me with Toby, poor sweet Toby, who I prayed wasn’t any part of this, even if he had spiked my coffee.
I wondered what had happened to him. But I was no longer disappointed or even surprised to recognise that I didn’t care. I was too tired emotionally to care about anything. If they were leaving me in the wild, it was because I could lead them somewhere. I’m afraid I didn’t care about that either. Where else had I to go?
All my explorings were leading me to where I began, to recognise the place for the first time. But that was only part of my internal poetry. I was recognising myself for the first time, watching my little token as I moved it in the game. Looking at the little hunched figures in the mock-marbled mass of the transfer hall at Amman, I realised I was formed now entirely by events. Taken at their flood, they were washing me back where I’d come from.
I once went back to my school not long after my dad died. I suppose, with him gone, I’d wanted to check how much of my childhood was real. I wanted to know if it looked any different without him around.
Sometimes you expect a place to wait for you, to keep its memories fresh for your return. But it hadn’t done that. It looked just the same, but it wasn’t part of my story any more.
The corridor where they’d laughed at Sarah had been repainted with a gloss magnolia over the two-tone institutional light-blue and brown of our schooldays. It seemed to shrug at me and didn’t care that I hadn’t been there. Many other girls had laughed and cried through it since. It had moved on without my memory’s permission. We don’t own places. They own us and then they throw us away.
It was a bit like that when I arrived in Beirut. When I reached the camp, I noticed it had a new parking area at the foot of the incline. The washing had been edged out of the way to make room for satellite dishes, like Arab figures huddling from soldiers.
The water channel still ran down the centre of the passageway, but it didn’t seem so steep now, like I’d been a child when I was here before, and the way was shorter than I remembered, meaning I had to walk up and down it twice to be sure I was in the right alley.
But then I found the house as if it was an old friend waiting patiently to be recognised. It was shuttered, but the car seat was still outside, though covered in a tarpaulin and bright orange blanket, which had made me hesitate in case I was standing before something similar but not the same.
A young neighbour, tall and scrawny – had I seen him as a boy? – told me that they couldn’t be far, and I walked up the hill a bit to where some lads were playing basketball on a cleared terrace. I sat on a bin, in the shade, idly watching them for about an hour I suppose. When I wandered back down, I was pleased, though not exultant, to see that the windows of the house were now unshuttered. There were new stringed beads hanging as a curtain across the door. I just walked in. I was home, after all, and I simply called, “Hello?”
Yusef emerged from the back rooms. He was wiping his hands on an old stretch of towelling. His hands were oily – I thought for an instant that he might be mending a bike for Asi. But, of course, he’d be all grown up now. He had been mending a washing machine, perhaps. The old lady’s chair was gone, I noticed, along with the painting of the Madonna. In its place was an old L-shaped leatherette sofa, cream-coloured and cracked, and
