Shake Off (18 page)

W
hen I woke I was on my own, and it took me a moment to remember where I was. Then I heard the sea sucking at the sand and shingle. The open window opposite the bed framed a uniformly blue sky. I could also hear swooping bird cries, and the distant shrieking and shouting of children. The other single bed was unmade but empty. Helen and I were sleeping in this room and her mother was in the double bedroom next door, although I hadn’t seen Helen last night, having left them talking when we’d got back from the beach. It was eleven o’clock.

I went to the source of all this light and sound and looked out over a crescent-shaped sandy beach. Judging from a map I’d looked at last night, I was looking at it from the southern tip of the crescent, and a rocky slope rose gradually at the other, some two kilometers away. I could see no other houses, but a dozen people were on the beach, far enough away that I could only make out their sex by their swimwear. A group of smaller figures huddled over the sand, the source of the shouts and laughter. I could roughly work out from the deck below me where Helen and I had ended up last night. I got dressed and went downstairs. Helen had left a note on the kitchen table: “Have taken Mum to Glasgow. She’s going to London. Back this afternoon. Love Helen.” I was surprised that Sarah was leaving so soon, particularly since she’d driven all the way into Glasgow the day before to pick us up. Did something happen between them last night?

After I had fried some eggs, wandered around the house (two rooms and a kitchen downstairs, two and a bathroom upstairs), lain on Helen’s mother’s bed, looked in all the drawers and cupboards, examined the books (mostly poetry) and found an attic hatch behind which to hide my documents and money (keeping the envelope on me), I stepped onto the deck with some old binoculars I found and sat in a faded deckchair.

I could watch the beach from here, the binoculars brought everyone into detailed focus. I looked for individual men or couples fully dressed, people with radios or headphones or binoculars of their own. I scoured the dunes, then went upstairs and scoured them from the window before going back outside. I could see two middle-aged men sitting at the north end of the beach in shorts and T-shirts and sunglasses. I didn’t know if it was the usual thing in Scotland for men of this age to go to the beach on their own. But then two women emerged from the dunes carrying baskets and a beach umbrella, joining the men and gesticulating, perhaps protesting at having to carry everything. The men laughed and one of them got up and put up the umbrella. Otherwise there were three families and a teenage couple, further down the beach, entwined around each other. It was the two couples together I decided to keep an eye on.

I would have expected more people to be on the beach in this weather but Sarah had mentioned that it was difficult to get to; you couldn’t park nearby, which put most people off.

I removed my shoes and socks, spread my toes. This end of the beach, where the house was built, was more rocky and shingly, unlike the widest middle part and northern tip, which were yellow with sand. Across the water was a large landmass that rose high into the clouds from the water. I alternately watched some boats and the foursome with the binoculars until my eyes grew tired and I put the binoculars down.

When I woke the sun was low and Helen was sitting in a chair beside me. She was holding a perspiring glass of white wine, half empty. On the small table between us was my codeine sulphate. Not a single packet, but all six packs that I had rescued from my safety deposit box. I glanced at her, but she was looking out at the beach, now empty apart from a family who were packing up. I must have taken the codeine out of my bag in the bathroom before I’d hidden the documents and money in the attic and forgotten to put it back. One pack I might have explained away, but not six.

“I see you’ve managed to take your shoes off—that’s progress, Michel, it really is.” I wasn’t sure what she meant.

“What happened to your mother?” I asked, to buy myself time.

“She went home, that’s what happened.” A follow-up question would be a waste of time.

“What happens now?” I asked. She took a long breath through flared nostrils and picked up a packet of the codeine, shaking it gently. I was just grateful that she hadn’t flushed it down the toilet. I was starting to sweat, and it wasn’t the Scottish summer.

“Codeine sulphate is a painkiller, I’ve looked it up,” she stated. I nodded. She looked at me and I looked at the beach. “You can only get it on prescription.” I nodded again. “You must be in a lot of pain to need so much,” she said, without irony. I was trying to tell whether the tide was going out. “Do you take it all the time?”

“Only when I can’t sleep,” I said.

“Can you get to sleep without it?”

“Yes of course. Sometimes I get headaches, that’s all.”

She tossed the codeine back onto the table but it slid onto the deck. She sipped her wine. I had to restrain myself from picking the packet up. “Sorry, I thought we’d moved on from lying,” she said.

I closed my eyes for a few seconds then turned to look at her. “OK then. I take it every night because I cannot sleep without it. I’ve been taking it for several years. It clears my head of…well, everything.”

“In that case maybe I should try it. I could really do with clearing my head,” she said. There was a time when I would have liked nothing better, but that was when the morphine was running through my brain, not when I was clear-headed.

“It’s not a good idea,” I said. “Especially not with alcohol…”

“No, not now, later, when you usually take it, before we go to bed. I want to know what it does for you.” She leaned forward and flung the rest of her wine out of the glass onto the sand. Then she stood up and stretched. “First, though, we must clean the beach.”

Cleaning the beach meant walking the length of it with a large plastic bag and a long-handled grabber that allowed Helen to pick things up without bending down. It was for the detritus of the day-trippers: empty Coke cans, dirty tissues, chocolate bar wrappers, plastic bags, even a used condom (no doubt from the teenage couple I’d seen earlier).

“They have no respect for this place,” said Helen. “They think they can just leave their shit everywhere.” I walked barefoot on the sand, picking up things weathered by the sea and left by the tide. Flotsam and jetsam, according to Helen, rubbish thrown overboard, sometimes floating all the way in from the Atlantic. My favorite things were bits of wood worn smooth and bleached by years of exposure. I collected an armful of these and carried them back to the house.

“Can I make a fire?” I asked.

She laughed, and it was good to hear the spontaneous, unaffected nature of it. “Yes, you can make a fire. I’ll make some supper.”

We ate in front of the small fireplace in the living room—you cannot be outside in Scotland at dusk because of the little insects that eat you alive. Helen didn’t drink any alcohol.

“Does the codeine make you horny?” she asked, when we were done eating.

“No, it just makes you feel warm and fuzzy.”

“Then let’s fuck before we go upstairs, I think there are some scarves somewhere.”

“No scarves,” I said. “Let’s just make love.” So we made love, with the curtains open to the night, in front of my small fire, without scarves or other aids, and it was like that first time in Tufnell Park, after the jazz club. We had overlap, and we finished in the same place at the same time.

Afterwards, we watched the fire until it died and it started to get cold; we were still naked. She went upstairs to get a blanket.

“Do you still need the tablets, even after what we have just done?”

I nodded, embarrassed, but tired of lying. She prepared a tray with two glasses of water, the packet of codeine and some incense, then put it on the bottom of the stairs. She came over and pulled me up. She pulled the blanket off me onto the floor and took my hands.

“If I do this with you, then it will be the last time we do it. We do it together, but from tomorrow you start to wean yourself off. I’ll do it with you, one tablet less each day until you don’t need them anymore.” She shook my hands violently as if to shake off my torpor. “Do we have a deal? We’ll get rid of the pain some other way.” I wasn’t sure I could do it. I felt exposed, not just naked. I fidgeted and looked around the room, anywhere but into her eyes or at her body. “You have to promise me, otherwise you can take the tray and go to bed on your own—tonight, tomorrow and every night.” I looked down at the space between our bare feet.

“Look at me,
ma belle
—we’ll get through this together.”

I followed her as she carried the tray up to her mother’s room, where she had changed the bedding. She lit some candles and the incense stick. We sat on the bed with the tray between us. She opened the packet.

“How many?” I hid my face in my hands.

“I’ve been taking three, sometimes four,” I said into my palms.

She said nothing, clicking out eight little white, perfectly formed capsules. We took one each and drank some water, then another, until they were all gone. I told her we should lie down.

We started off lying face to face, then lay on our backs, holding hands. Outside, the surf pushed in and pulled out. Each time, it pulled out a bit further and longer until I worried about it not coming back in again. It was pulling me with it but I held onto Helen and it was OK. Then the ebb and flow became synchronized with her breathing and it slowed right down, which meant that she was controlling the sea.

H
elen was subdued in the morning, waking up after some difficulty, and only when I had taken her breakfast in bed. She ate it with a distant look in her eyes that worried me; I shouldn’t have let her take four tablets at once, not the first time.

“You don’t have to take them again,” I said.

“I’ll take them as long as you’re still taking them,” she said, but then spent most of the morning in bed. I watched the beach with the binoculars and popped up to see her every now and then.

“You’re like a jack-in-the-box,” she said, on my fourth visit. “Run me a bath.” I sat by the bath as she soaked, washed her back, read some poetry to her, passed her the pumice stone, washed her front.

“What do they want with you?” she asked. “These Mossad people.”

“I’m not sure,” I said. I told her about the envelope coming from the West Bank, Abu Leila’s shooting, going back to Tufnell Park, entering her room, hearing people in mine, meeting Khalil and ending up in Cambridge. I expected her to fly off the handle, as Jack would have put it, but she was remarkably sanguine.

“Lucky for you that you were creeping around my room. Did you try on my underwear?”

“I wasn’t creeping. I missed you, that’s all. I couldn’t sleep.”

“I’m teasing you, silly. Why Cambridge, of all places?”

So I told her about the Cambridge meeting that Abu Leila had set up, the house I had rented. She nodded at my explanation and relaxed into the bath. I didn’t mention Rachel; I didn’t see the point. Rachel was no competition to Helen. I told myself that to balance this omission I wouldn’t mention my knowing that Zorba had been with her in Turkey. In time she would learn what I had done to him at the station, but for now I would live in the moment.

“Do you think he was killed because of this meeting?”

“I’m not sure, I think that’s how they found the house, but to be honest I don’t even know who killed him.” I could see her mulling it over; I’d already told her that the meeting hadn’t been sanctioned by Arafat.

“You mean it was Palestinians, not Israelis, that killed him?”

I shrugged noncommittally. I had admitted the possibility to myself, but couldn’t do so to someone else. I didn’t mention that the killers hadn’t been after the envelope. She squinted at me, as if trying to get me in focus.

“You’re very calm for someone who was shot at,” she said.

“It wasn’t me that was shot at,” I said. It seemed so long ago now, even though it was just seven days earlier.

“So what’s in the envelope?” she asked, after some moments’ silence.

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?” She looked incredulous. “You’re carrying this thing around that people have come several thousand miles to recover and you don’t even know what’s in it?” I said nothing. What would she say if I told her it had been smuggled out by a heavily pregnant woman? “Aren’t you even curious?”

I told her I wasn’t, that it wasn’t mine to open.

She shook her head in disbelief. “What are you going to do with it then?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and I honestly didn’t.

“But that’s ridiculous,” she said, sitting up and in the process sluicing water over the edge of the bath. “It might tell you why Abu Leila was killed, or even who killed him.”

How to explain to this English rose my growing fear of what I might find inside, even though I knew I would have to face it at some point? I couldn’t properly articulate it but my fears were tied up with the fact that opening it meant breaking Abu Leila’s trust, and not opening it was the only act of loyalty that still remained to me, a demonstration of allegiance to the dead man who was not my father. And breaking his trust could only mean a terrible punishment in the form of the truth, and the truth was something he had taught me should be avoided. Helen was staring at me in expectation.

“I can’t explain it,” I said. “I’d have to explain everything.”

She stood up and let the water drip away. “Then that is what you will have to do,” she said. “But now you must dry me.”

So every day of our detoxification I told Helen a new thing, a new bit of my story, a new truth, usually as we cleaned the beach in the evening or sat on the deck, or inside when it rained, as it did often here, even in August. I worked backwards: telling her the things I did for Abu Leila, the trips I had taken, the people I had met, the unknown messages I had passed, the money I had laundered. On the second or third night—I can’t remember—I brought down all my passports and identification documents from my bag and laid them neatly out on the kitchen table. My hands shook as I called her into the kitchen. She sat down and studied the neatly arranged patchwork of my life.

“Are any of these real?” she asked.

I picked up the Lebanese passport. “This is, in the sense that it isn’t a forgery—but it’s not me, I’m not Lebanese.”

She took it from me and opened it. “Michel Khoury,” she read, then flicked through it. “Your student visa runs out in a couple of weeks.” She put it down. She read through the other documents. “Tell me something—is Michel your real name?”

“Yes. Yes, it’s my real name.”

She picked up a UK driving license—a driving license for someone who couldn’t drive. She put it down and picked up another document, a French
carte de séjour,
then a British National Insurance card, a German
Personalausweis,
an Italian
carta d’identità
.

“You like the name Roberto, huh?” My face burned, but thankfully she wasn’t looking.

“It’s just a name,” I said. I gathered up the documents, bundled them together, and went to take them back upstairs. I got as far as the kitchen door.

“Michel.”

I looked back at her.

“Thank you.”

The day after showing her the documents we were walking the beach, picking up rubbish under a patchy sky. One minute the sun would emerge victorious, only to withdraw again after a new ambush by the dark clouds. I had my jacket on, with the envelope inside it.

I told Helen about Abu Leila, my time at university in Berlin, in Cyprus with Jack. All this stuff poured out of me.

At some point she interrupted me. “I don’t like the sound of this Abu Leila,” she said.

I thought I’d misheard.

“He was a good man,” I said.

She picked up a half-eaten sandwich covered in sand with her grabber and placed it in her plastic bag. “I didn’t say he wasn’t—I just think he took advantage of your situation really.” She stopped picking up rubbish and looked at me. “If you think about it, he used you for his own purposes.”

“Rubbish. He helped me,” I said. “He sent me to a good school and to university. He educated me. He was like a father to me.”

“He did it for a reason, Michel. Not because he was fond of you. He needed you to follow a certain path, his path.”

I dropped my gathered sticks and stomped on past her down the tide mark, blind with anger. I reached the tip of the crescent and strode up a path in the rise, climbing for a long while before sitting in the long grass. The wind came in gusts off the sea and knocked the grass flat. I could see Helen walking back along the line where the sand became dunes, a small figure, no bigger than my thumbnail. I remembered a conversation in Berlin where Abu Leila himself had told me that “my purpose was now being played out” in London. I remembered him telling me, in Cyprus, that I would be going to Berlin, telling me that I should study German at The English School in Nicosia, that I would go to Moscow, that I would do this, do that. I tried to think of a time when he had asked me whether I’d wanted to do any of these things, but I struggled to think of one. But then wasn’t I a soldier of sorts, even though I had no uniform? Wasn’t I part of a grander plan that called for sacrifice and putting your own interests last? Hadn’t we shaken hands in Beirut all those years ago? I’d known nothing else, no other life, after all. Where would I have been without Abu Leila? Nowhere, I would have answered, were he still alive. But I dared to allow myself to imagine an alternative path I might have taken. Perhaps I would have stayed with my foster family, perhaps I would have gone on to study to be a doctor like Ramzi, set up a practice in Beirut, maybe even in the camp, looking after my people. These thoughts felt like a betrayal of everything Abu Leila had done for me.

Down on the beach I saw a man step out of the dunes several meters in front of Helen; she would have to acknowledge his presence either by stopping or avoiding him. From this distance it looked like he was looking out to sea. She walked in front of him and stopped. He was talking to her. She nodded and pointed out over the grey water. His shape or posture didn’t ring any bells with me; it was not my slopey-shouldered friend, although I wished I had the binoculars with me. They talked for a minute, then Helen walked on and the man watched her walk away. He stood there until she reached the house, then turned and walked back into the dunes. I could see him for a while until the path disappeared into the trees.

Back at the house I found Helen in the kitchen peeling potatoes.

“Are you OK?” she asked.

I nodded.

“I’m sorry if I upset you.”

I told her it was nothing, that I’d overreacted.

“Who was that man on the beach?” I asked.

“What, are you spying on
me
now?” As if I spied on everyone else.

“No, of course not. My question is whether you know him.”

She shook her head. “Do I have to report to you every time I talk to a strange man?”

I kept my voice even; had she not listened to anything I’d told her? “Yes, you do—at the moment I think it would be a good idea,” I said.

She put the peeler down and looked up. “Oh my God, do you think they might have followed us up here?”

“Only if they’ve connected us in some way.” I thought of Zorba retching on his shoes outside Euston. If they had picked me up at Euston after following Helen there from Tufnell Park, or indeed followed me from Cambridge Station, they might have seen me attack him. No doubt he’d have been happy to direct them here. It was the only way they could have found me—I’d been detected as a result of my own jealous rage.

“Should we call the police?”

I repressed an urge to laugh. “And tell them what, exactly?” She made a small pyramid out of the potato peel.

I sat down opposite her. “Tell me about the man,” I said.