He had pulled up short, just looking at me. I suddenly felt relieved. His tummy was only slightly looser, I noticed, and a few white hairs flecked his stubble.
“Yuse, I’m in trouble,” I said. He just took the three steps forward and, still holding the rag to protect me from the oil, hugged me in the way that I’d forgotten he’d hugged me when I left years before.
He cooked lamb and I told him my story. Part of my story. I didn’t tell him about the Boy and the Troll. Not what I’d done to them anyway. I was neither ashamed nor afraid of Yusef’s reaction, but – and here’s the weird thing – I didn’t think it was relevant. I’m aware now that I’ve put that episode – no, that event – in its own compartment. I have killed two people. I stabbed one in the throat and shot the other. Twice. There. But why tell Yusef? That’s not why I was here. But later he extracted part of the truth from me.
“How did you get out?” he asked as we sat on the car seat again, like the old days, even if we sat there as different people.
“They were men. They wanted to do things to me that men do. The young one did.”
“He raped you?”
“I raped him.”
Yusef said nothing more and I was grateful for that. And that was it.
After a while, watching his cigarette smoke spiral into the dark like incense, Yusef turned to me. “Who knows you’re here?”
“Only Sarah, I think,” I said. “I’m sorry, Yuse. I had to come. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s OK, it doesn’t matter.”
“I don’t think I was followed. But they may have the flight trail. I don’t know.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said again. “Everyone knows where I live anyway.”
“Sarah Curse does. How does she know you, Yuse?”
He just smiled and resumed his smoking, blowing rings now.
“You’ll sleep here. You’ll be safe.”
And I did. In what I guessed had been his boy’s room.
“He’s just finished college now,” is all Yusef said. “Army next.”
“I don’t want to get you into trouble, Yuse,” I said pathetically. I don’t know what I was imagining. Some American drone taking out his house and half the neighbourhood, maybe.
The next morning he brought me coffee and fruit and crispbread, and he was energised, like he had a plan. I wondered if he’d been awake all night, whether he’d spoken to Sarah.
He stood out in front of the house, on a mobile, smoking hard, then just stood for a long time looking at the ground, hand on hip. He had to go away, he said, when he came back in, he’d be about a day, back tomorrow anyway, probably later in the day, maybe thirty-six hours. It was important, he said, and he thought he could help.
“Trust me,” he said needlessly. I was to go nowhere. Someone – it sounded like Aysha – would bring me food. But I had to promise that I would stay in the house.
“You’ll be safe here,” he said. “But you’ll only be safe here.”
I wanted to stay in Yusef’s house anyway. Just try to get me out, I thought. When he’d gone, only a little while later, I began to melt into a tranquillity I hadn’t known for what seemed a lifetime, one I couldn’t remember ever having felt. One I haven’t known since either, if I’m honest.
Yusef’s concrete house in its maze of little alleyways enfolded me. I lay on that nasty Seventies sofa, smoking his cigarettes and staring sightlessly at the ceiling as if my bones had sunk to the bottom of a sack-like body. In the distance, a radio played Western pop. The sun in the alley shifted listlessly. Occasionally children shouted. I felt remote, untouched, lost in Lebanon. How could I have thought I was in Lebanon when I was a prisoner? This was Lebanon. And I was out of the game at last.
It turned out Aysha was a young girl, maybe fourteen. She brought meatballs and salad and water on a tray, and just smiled innocently and scampered away, her bright pink headscarf fluttering.
My reverie wasn’t even really broken by Uncle, more hollow-eyed now, a little gaunt, when he looked in to roll a ciggie and pat my knee, just to see if I was true, I think.
When he left, I wandered outside with him and two men straightened up against the wall opposite. They were very much like the young men who had departed into the night with Yusef when Asi had disappeared as a boy. They grinned and raised a hand, whether to Uncle or me I wasn’t sure.
I dreamed lazily back on the sofa, halfway between waking fantasy and sleep. I dreamed that Yusef drove me again, down through Israel somehow, my thonged feet on his dashboard, my elbow out of the window. I don’t know how he’d managed the border, he’s clever like that, and on we drove, the pop station in the house melding with his car radio, down the coast road, with bougainvillea in the central reservation and the sea washing up in endless white strips beside us, down through the posh suburbs of Caesarea, down past the verdant fig orchards of Gaza, where Hamal waved as we passed, and we pulled in only for diesel and a wash in the salty sea, Yuse smiling under his mirrored aviators as he put me back in his truck and drove on, taking me away, down south, to the desert lands, across into Egypt, where we would never be found, between palm fronds and pyramids.
I hardly knew night from that day, or light from dark. Later, I should have been turning restlessly under the single clean sheet Aysha had put on the bed. I should, it occurred to me in wakeful moments, have been sinking just under consciousness where ghosts awaited, then jerking awake with an ecstatic gasp, my blank eyes staring
