Authors: Gerald Seymour
There were no curtains covering the window and the moon threw sufficient light into the room for Famy to make out its bareness. Rough, uncovered boards, indented with nails, peeling floral wallpaper. A length of flex hanging twisted from the low ceiling; a bulb, but no shade.
In a corner a bulging plastic bag, and around it a scattering of orange peel, newspapers and cigarette butts. Apart from the sun-beds, and their clothes and their bags, there was nothing else. His shoulders felt the cold of the great unheated house.
When he'd arrived, they'd offered him food, talked of beans and stewed meat and bread. He'd declined, and watched the Irishman help himself from a scarcely-washed plate. Later he'd relented sufficiently to take a cup of milk poured from a half-empty bottle. That was all he had allowed himself.
He had waited out in the hall when they had first come to the house while McCoy had entered a downstairs room, and over the music made himself heard. Famy had not been able to distinguish the words. A group, a foraging party, had come to look at him, to survey the visitor.
Without meaning to he had smiled at them as they stood by the door. They did not come closer, just watched and evaluated. Long, dank hair, falling straight to their shoulders, boys distinguished from girls by their beards and moustaches, but both in the uniform of tight jeans, sweat-shirts and jerseys. Some had worn sandals, others had been barefoot. There were beads and badges embroidered on the clothes. Famy had been able to look over their shoulders into the rest of the room and in the candlelight had made out others, either sitting on the floor or draped on chairs, all intent on him. McCoy had not led him in, but up the stairs to the room.
There was no life like this in Nablus. Some might live unwashed and in clothes that were little more than rags, but not from choice. No one sought such degradation, or made it a purposeful way of life. In the camp up the hill on the Jerusalem Road, where existence was married to the open drains, where a roof was corrugated iron, where walls were fashioned from wooden or cardboard packing-cases, there was no satisfaction at the awfulness. There was simply no option. Those who lived there had come in 1948, bred their children there, built their shanties, and when the Israeli advance had rushed further forward nineteen years later the movement had been too fast for them to walk on again and seek a new refuge in new filth on the far side of the dividing Jordan river. The tanks had outstripped them.
But the Irishman had said it was safe to stay here. That was sufficient, while the operation went ahead.
There was movement below the floor. Doors opened and closed; he heard shouts on the landings. And then the undulating and controlled heaving of a bed, starting softly, rising minutes later to a frenzy. He had listened, almost ashamed, his mind conjuring the faces and the forms of the olive-skinned girls he had known in Beirut, whose arms he had touched, their gentle skin sensitive to his fingers. He strained to listen, drawn by the steady, driving persistence of the sound. The half-sleep left him. Imagination delving into fantasy; coiled bodies, searching and passion and closeness, enacted in a near room. It was almost nauseating for him to imagine anything so precious, in that stench, in that dirt. In the camp there had been girls
- not many, and they had slept in their own tents. They joined in the laughter and the gaiety, shared the training sessions, but at night they left the men to sleep alone on their close-packed trestle beds. In his student days there had been girls too, beautiful, supreme but with mothers awaiting them as the city darkened. He had never slept with a girl, had never known the reality of his imagination, and now close to him two of these creatures, with their smears and the hair, coupled. And then the sound died, and the house was at rest.
It was nearly dawn, when the thin grey light had begun to penetrate the room, that he was alerted by the turning of the door handle. If he had been able to drift back to sleep he would not have noticed the action, as it was done quietly and with care.
He lay very still, tense, eyes like slits, watching the entrance to the room. He saw his coat and trousers, suspended from a metal hanger, move towards him as the door opened. The door was heavy, and the hinges made the sparse, scraping sound. Famy controlled his breathing, reducing it to the same pitch as McCoy's, and watched a darkened shape glide without sound into the room and across the boards. For a moment there was a silhouette against the window and he could make out long hair, and the shape of a coat thrown shawl-like over shoulders, then the figure merged into the blackness of the far side of the room and went beyond his power of vision. A small shaft of light - a hand torch? - at the edge of his sight field, and he was aware of hands pulling open and probing inside his grip-bag. Then the light was doused, and the sound of the feet on the floor boards became muted, as if uncertain where next they should travel. The figure went across the room, back toward the door, hesitating there, at his clothes, those that were not beside him. There was a chink as his belt clasp was shifted, and a smooth rifling of a hand inside his trousers. And then there was the sound of the catch being fastened again, the door closed. Yet there came no movement of footsteps away from the door immediately. He stayed motionless in his sleeping bag. Waiting to see if I am aroused, he told himself. Like a rat that comes for the cheese and lingers by its hole to see if the dogs are out and have the scent. Fifteen seconds passed, perhaps more. Then the noise on the landing, the shuffling of bare feet, finally lost, emptied into the hugeness of the house.
Famy found he was sweating, cold moisture on the folds of his stomach, dampness in the hair at the back of his neck. He would have given anything for the company of Dani and Bouchi, for the presence of his friends from the camp, someone in whom he could confide, someone other than the stranger in the other sleeping bag across the boards.
The fool had said it was a safe place, a place where he could relax, where there would be no requirement to remain vigilant twenty-four hours in the day. Half a night, and both his possessions and clothes had been precisely and systematically searched. Should he have intervened?
Thrust himself at the intruder? But how would he have done it? The bag was a strait-jacket, so how to create the element of surprise ? It could not have been accomplished, he told himself. He lay in his bag, waiting for McCoy to wake and the morning to come.
It was past seven on his watch when the Irishman began to struggle his way out of the sleep. Famy leaned over to him and shook his shoulder, firmly, communicating his impatience. McCoy awoke, eyes focused instantly.
'What is it? What's the bloody matter?' he said.
'There has been someone in here, someone has been in the room.' Famy said it with urgency, seeking to impress with his information.
'So what? People come and go in these places. Looking for somewhere to doss down, kip for a bit.'
'Not like that. Someone has been to search - the bags and clothes. To examine.'
McCoy stared hard across at him. 'Been in here, giving us a look-over?'
'I was awake,' said Famy. 'I could not sleep, and someone came in, went through the pockets. I didn't move, pretended sleep. Nothing was found. It was about two hours ago, just before the light began to come.'
McCoy forced his lids further open, bruising them with the motion of his arm, and sat up. His white skin seemed curiously weak and without sinew till the body swivelled, and Famy saw the reddened, puckered mess of a bullet wound, on McCoy's left side, just below the rib cage.
'Probably just some bugger on the scrounge looking for a few pence . . . '
Famy cut across him, excited, talking fast, 'Nothing was taken. I couldn't see all that was searched, but no sound of money being taken. My trouser pockets, they were looked at, the money remains. It's the wrong place for us here, not the place I was expecting, not
familiar.'
'Well, it's here you're bloody well staying.' McCoy was close to shouting. 'You'll stay where I bloody well say, and that's here. It's an out-of-the-way, quiet, no-questions place. If some sod comes wandering about in the middle of the night frightening you I can't help it. Shouldn't believe in bloody fairies.'
'And if you're wrong?' Famy asked.
if I'm wrong? What the hell does that mean? What I say is we're better off here than with the usual crowd, the ones who might want to know about us - our bloody lot.'
He quietened suddenly, recognized the anxiety as genuine, and became anxious to allay and calm. 'I'll ask around downstairs, put a bit of heat on, but gently. There's all sorts of buggers just drifting round these places, looking for a bed, or for something to pinch. Nothing extraordinary about the night. Remember it's London you're at now, and it's Saturday, and the man you want is here on Monday, whatever it is you call him . . .'
'Al Kima.'
'Whatever that means.'
it is the man who grows mushrooms. The Mushroom Man. My friends would like me to meet him. They would believe that I would avenge them.'
Crisis over, calmed the little bugger down, chance of more sleep. McCoy turned away from Famy to face the wall.
'There's nothing much to do today. Lie up. Tomorrow we start working. For now it's sleep we want, there's nothing today but a walk round the university. Tomorrow it gets interesting.'
The Irishman could not see the gleam in the other's eyes, the brightness that comes from an erotic and compulsive anticipation; the dream of the shudder of gunfire, blood smears on the concrete, the international headlines, and the adulation in the tents far away in Fatahland.
When Famy looked again across the floor of the room he saw McCoy was asleep, with his left arm high round his head to shut out the light, so that the bullet wound below was exposed. The thought of it bruised the Arab.
He who had come so far, and who now assumed leadership, was virgin and unconsummated, had never known the reality of conflict. He could not know how it would affect him, the moment when it came. Famy lay on his back staring at the ceiling, while deep in the sleeping bag his legs trembled.
Jones was padding down a ground-floor corridor at the back of Leconfield House on his way to the canteen kitchens. They'd be empty, but he could heat a kettle there and make himself a cup of tea with the tea bags he kept in his desk drawer. He was without either shoes or socks, having washed his socks last thing before getting into bed.
They were still damp, and he would leave putting them on till the last minute, before the walk up the stairs to the early morning meeting. After the tea he would shave, make himself presentable. The way it was supposed to be in the department.
As he stood facing the window, running the water from the taps into the opened top of the kettle, he saw the Director General's Humber turn into the narrow entry to the underground car park, wire portcullis raised as the vehicle was expertly manoeuvred by the young man in the front. In the back there was nothing much to see, an opened newspaper masking the figure, well down in his seat.
The alarm bell, furious, demanding attention, woke Helen.
She reached forward, pressing herself up with one hand, the other straining across Jimmy toward the bedside table and the offending clock, till she found the button and the silence. He hadn't moved all night, the bastard. Sprawled on his back with his eyes tight and hermetically sealed, mouth open, his pyjamas buttoned protectively up to his neck. Bloody good weekend entertainment you make, Jimmy. A great porpoise up a beach, with no prospect of another high tide. She made one more concerted effort to work some life into the marooned carcase next to her, slipping her hands beneath the material and working with her nails at his chest, slowly and with consideration sketching out small patterns of the skin. Jimmy slept on.
'You're bloody hopeless,' she told him, mouth close to his ear. 'Understand,
hopeless,
a great dump of garbage.
Come on, wake up! Stir yourself!'
No response. She moved her hands lower, indenting a line where the beginnings of his paunch slunk down to his hips. Then there was movement. Convulsive, total, as his arms came up and around her, gripping the shoulder blades, pulling her down on to him. His eyes opened for a brief flicker, then closed again, and his arms went slack.
'Better, Jimmy, fractionally better. One out of ten for trying, zero for everything else.'
He hadn't seen a razor the day before, nor the day before that, and his chin was close-set with a tight brush of hair. It bit into her skin, a myriad of needles.
'Not so fast, lover-boy, or we'll have the bloody department wanting a blow-by-blow account if I turn up with half my face scraped off by your beard.'
He spoke for the first time, but as if the effort were all but beyond him, the ultimate struggle, it's Saturday, you're not going in today, and what bloody time did you get here last night? I'm sitting here half the bloody evening waiting for you.'
'I'm going in today, and I'm going in now. Jones's special request. There's a big flap, all hands to action-stations.' She slid out of his grasp and swung her legs over the side of the bed. She wore no clothes. Wishful thinking, you silly bitch, she told herself. Leave him past midnight and you're always the loser.
Jimmy had began to take an interest. Not in me, she thought, wave him the boobs and the backside, but it'll take second place to the department. He was half up, almost sitting.
'What's going on, what's the flap?'
'Don't worry, lover-boy, you're included in the cast.
Some hit-and-runners reached inside base with a nice plum. Yiddisher target all to themselves, and second, third and fourth floor are running round like it's Declaration of War day. Big enough for the DG to be arriving before breakfast, then a full scale bit of summitry at zero-eight-thirty hours on the precise stroke.'
He was still trying to focus on her: rounded, pink, but not clear lines yet. Striving for concentration. 'What way is it for me?'
Helen moved off the bed toward the chair draped with her clothes, and began to pull them on. 'Don't know yet.