“She’s no one. And everyone. She is you now.”
I wore a blue scarf around my head, as I had in the photograph. I was a Muslim convert, making some of the travel arrangements for the delegation, which she’d flown in with two weeks previously.
“Who was she when she came in, Yuse? Where is she now?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said from behind those mirrored sunglasses.
He took his hand from the gear lever and held the inside of my elbow briefly, but didn’t say anything else. The subject was being closed down.
“There is a guide in the group who will check you all through.”
At the airport, he parked as he must have done a thousand times before. In the departures hall we were joined by a large Arab in a light grey suit and pale skin, a dark and hairy mole on his left cheek.
“Mr Serrano,” said Yusef and Hairy Mole’s fat lips parted in a smile as Yusef handed over the passport. We joined the small group, a mixture of Lebanese and Europeans, bags on trolleys, small pieces of cabin luggage, one of which Hairy Mole passed to me.
Suddenly the scene started to slip away from me. My self-protective bubble was taking me, but I wasn’t going to let it yet and I fought to stay outside it, so I turned towards Yusef. He just blanked me and shook his head imperceptibly. I felt a twang of resentment.
We’d lain in bed the second night I’d spent in his house, coiled together, but he hadn’t even kissed me, just the breeze of his breath on my forehead. I understood now. He looked at Hairy Mole and shook his hand firmly, then flicked a salute at me with the palm of his hand and turned and walked briskly away. The back of his neck needed a shave, I noticed. He didn’t walk away slowly. He wasn’t giving me a chance to catch him up.
The little group busied itself, but none of them looked at me. Only Hairy Mole did, whose name was Mo. He was pleasant enough, it turned out, and moved with a reassuring ease as my consort, showing me to my seat on the plane – a rather bigger jet this time, but unmistakably the cramped and rarefied chariot of the elite – and then sitting in his, some six rows in front.
He had alleviated some fear, placing a hand firmly in the small of my back as we were waved through immigration. No, the fear I had came from elsewhere.
As we approached Heathrow, I couldn’t displace the thought that the man sitting behind me and across the aisle in a brown blazer was my tail from Beirut. Rationalising didn’t help, the idea that it was absurd that my erstwhile captors could have infiltrated a flight chartered by Sarah’s Centre. But I clenched the balls of my fists between my thighs and held a rage inside that wanted to spit in his face and claw at his eyes.
But there was a panic I felt of another kind as we pitched in to Heathrow, and I realised it was a kind of response to bereavement. This was a country that I’d lost, had died for me, and now it was resurrected, unrecognisable but the same, the life outside my tomb, a zombie town.
It was summertime in London, but it was still cold and bleak by comparison and darkness encroached even the brightest of streets. You could see the denial of this truth on implacable faces. So here was home again, with its permanent hum, its pointless arrogance, its business of self-entitlement. I watched it as a ghost might watch its former world go by, trapped by despair in the places of its former life, following death. The only evidence that I was really there were the little interactions with the show’s set pieces – the Polish émigré at the coffee counter, the boy lawyer’s sharp shoulder, the concierge at the hotel, a tourist asking the way.
I’d felt this way once with an extreme hangover. It had been the morning after arriving back from the feeding stations of Sudan and sixteen weeks of watching babies die, so my consciousness may have been attenuated then too.
I stopped once to give a penny-whistler a five-pound note. I don’t know why and I don’t care. I lied that I already had the magazine he was selling from a pile behind him. God bless you and have a very good day, he’d said. He was groomed and scruffy at the same time, the way you are when you’re clean but in scavenged clothes. Maybe I just needed to make human contact with someone around me, to prove I was there and not some spectre at London’s eternal feast.
I checked into a Babylon of a hotel in Shepherd’s Bush to which Sarah had directed me, one of the transit camps for Heathrow airport. I was glad – I didn’t want to be central, too cramped, enclosed and expensive. And, anyway, it felt like being outside the city walls. Masha’s debit card worked when the cashier swiped it and I wondered wistfully whether my balance was not only being watched but managed, topped up by an indulgent uncle subsidising a wayward, orphan niece. Well, Tiffany’s next, and I smiled.
It had a “Business Centre”, so a code for an hour of internet took me to a mezzanine with a row of PCs where young women with hair extensions and power tights were convincing themselves by booking venues that they had careers in marketing. I opened the fresh email account I’d been assigned.
The name looked strange now I saw it on screen. I stared at it for maybe quarter of an hour. Incoming messages: 0. Sent Mail: 0. Outbox 0. Drafts 0.
I opened a browser, ludicrously ran a search on Israeli settlements. And there
