The soft rustle of the lift took me to my room. 119. A recovery cubicle for the commercially sick, with a window that locked open at four inches, a little acknowledgement that at least some of its occupants would want to throw themselves out of it into a defiant oblivion, write themselves off the balance sheet, form that crazy shape in the car park.
I’d taken an apple, a supple red like all the rest, from a display in the mezzanine cafe, put it on a small plate, taken a knife from the grey plastic container with four pods for knives, forks, big spoons, teaspoons, which made the same crunch when you disturbed the cutlery, like beach stones on a tide, as the ones we had at school did. Now I sliced my apple, coring the segments with my knife into a little white towel from the bathroom that reminded me of the linens that the silent boy brought me over my buckets in that Israeli room.
It was too blunt to skin the apple and the serrated inch on its curve too clumsy, so I lay the four little segments side by side on the glass-topped table by the London tourist magazine, like boats in a harbour.
Yes, and with an electric-cold shiver I ran the blade gently up the soft underside of my forearm, from the wrist to the pit of the elbow and my body buckled in welcome.
Come pierce me, make me pay. A little more pressure on the next stroke and I had the dry line of a scratch. Then with a grunt of welcome the slight serration went in, in, in, a furrow ploughed between sinews, dimpled blue veins giving way like sapling roots, or weeds in a pond, with the great unreachable prize, the great lazy pikes of arteries somewhere much lower and safer, in crimson depths. Life blood bubbled up and eagerly ran the little circumference of my arm and dripped into the white towel that I would leave in the little sanitary bin for tampons.
The pain was distant, not mine, and I cut again, across this time. A cross. It was some kind of justice. Some recognition of both my worth and worthlessness. And, oh, you can’t believe, that’s so good to confess. I had to clench my thighs to stop myself wetting at my own confession. I dripped blood. I was both mortal and alive. I could slice my vile body and it would shed, you see? For you, for me. I was flesh and blood.
18
I was being watched. I was convinced of that now. I couldn’t stay in my room; there was a tiny red bulb in the ceiling corner, a little light on the air-conditioning unit above the bathroom door that looked fibre-optic and a television on a short metal arm that I turned to face the window. All the time I rocked, with my own voice telling me that they weren’t watching me through anything glass and electric. It was like trying to locate my own cry, a call that would haul me back from stupid, mistaken presumptions. I struggled to be rational.
I still had Masha’s debit card. Sarah had said it was better to stick with Masha for money, even on Huda’s passport. But maybe they all knew about Masha in London? I knew I had trusted Sarah because I wanted to. That’s the only reason anyone ever invests trust. Trust in God. I’d checked into the hotel she’d told me to, hadn’t I? But the receptionist had paused at her screen, maybe to check me into this room specially? So I could be watched? And around my head the doubts went again.
It was me that was ahead of the game, I kept telling myself, not them. But how-could-they-know kept seguing into how-did-they-know. Fear of surveillance gives you a physical reaction. I was telling myself that I was on my own; I’d breathe deeply, but I still turned my back to the little blinking lights and the TV. I sat on the edge of the bed, facing the en-suite wall, and shook a bit. Until I thought there was an audio monitor of some sort in the bedside lamp, tracking my breathing.
So I left the room again, banging against the walls of the long corridor. Probably drunk, I saw a room-maid think, as I tracked the wall past her trolley. Now I was watching myself as through CCTV, the grey figure in staccato little freeze-frames, like those shots of murdered teenagers or robbed newsagents.
I made it to the lifts, but then couldn’t get in a lift that was occupied. A man and a woman, dressed as tourists, probably Scandinavian. They looked concerned, but I was thinking it was strange that such people would come for me. I dashed for the stairs and back down to the Business Centre. The pumping of blood made my forearms tingle along the weals the fruit knife had made, now coagulated.
I had less fear of the PC there, for some reason. Perhaps because it took my password, obeyed my command, you see? I was looking outwards through it, you understand, and no one could look back at me. I felt clammy sweat cool on the backs of my hands.
One received mail. I sat and stared, without opening it. Another delicious anticipation. Also cherishing imminent relief and delaying disappointment – suppose it was just a welcoming message from the provider? But it was real. Yusef was there for me. I was connected, across the multitudes of Europe, across the Balkans, across the eastern Med, connected to the place that had nearly killed me, with someone – even there – who loved me, who had sent this gift of grace, who had reached out in my loneliness and touched me and made me real.
The title box just said “Message” beside the paperclip of an attachment. From an
