Some Here Among Us (28 page)

‘Toby!’ said Jojo.

‘It takes a lot,’ Toby said.

‘What?’ said Jojo.

‘It takes a lot to laugh and . . .’

‘
What
?
’ said Jojo.

‘It takes a train to cry,’ said Toby.

‘Toby!’ said Jojo.

‘That’s Dylan, Jojo,’ said Toby, slightly peevish. ‘It’s a song by Dylan.’

6

The next morning Jojo and Toby met on the terrace of the Palmyra hotel. They met early and by arrangement. None of the other wedding guests was up. They had croissants and coffee for breakfast, and ripe figs that had come from Egypt. It was a cool spring morning. The grape clusters in the vine above their heads were still tiny and green. They had made the arrangement to meet drily, formally, and as though there was nothing special to it. This was intended to put everyone off the scent – not only Joachim, for instance, but if necessary Jojo and Toby themselves. They both knew that something had happened, but neither knew whether the other thought the same.

‘Do you want more coffee?’ said Jojo.

‘Thanks.’

‘My shower was cold this morning.’

‘You can have hot water in the morning at the Palmyra, or the evening, but not both.’

‘Look, that woman’s baking bread on the hearth.’

‘They do that here, but they’re aware of the rustic charm and charge even more.’

‘It’s expensive for a hotel with no hot water in the morning.’

‘The Kaiser stayed here. And de Gaulle. You have to pay for that.’

‘Oh, God,’ said Jojo. ‘I forgot to see the ruins.’

‘We can go see them now,’ said Toby.

‘They’ll be shut.’

‘We can try.’

They finished their coffee and left the hotel and went across the road. Behind a long concrete wall, great pillars of marble, the smokeless stacks of Roman power, stood against a blue sky. Jojo and Toby walked the perimeter of the site through a wasteland of goat-nibbled furze and broken stones.

‘How’s Joachim?’

‘Asleep.’

‘Do you like him?’

‘I like him. He’s nice. He’s good.’

‘He’s a whale.’

‘He’s a lovable whale.’

‘You
love
him?’

‘I don’t love him, Toby,’ said Jojo.

There was a silence.

‘You know that,’ she said.

‘I do.’

There was another silence. They had nearly done the full perimeter of the site and were back on the smooth road again. They stopped at the entrance.

‘What about you?’ he said.

‘What about me?’

‘You know that I knew.’

‘What?’

‘That you didn’t love him.’

‘I did. I mean I do.’

‘Have we . . . changed the subject?’

‘I think so.’

‘We both just said “I do.” ’

‘I know.’

‘Come in, come in,’ said a man beaming by the gate to the ruins.

‘You’re not open,’ said Toby.

‘For you – it is now open,’ he said.

He was a middle-aged Lebanese man in a brown and green knitted cardigan, smoking a cigarette. Without quite knowing it they recognised in his disguise the one who verifies the presence of love.

‘We only have half an hour,’ said Jojo, further on inside the enclosure. The mini-buses would soon be gathering at the hotel to take everyone away. Jojo and Toby were holding hands again for the first time for two years. Ahead of them, as a result of that touch, waited Beirut, London, the world together. They went around the stone platforms and megaliths. The place was, strangely enough, not deserted. They caught a glimpse of another couple ahead of them in the distance, and they saw a pretty Lebanese girl, on her own, looking down from a high stone balcony into a field of long grass where two youths seemed to be loitering. The wind was blowing mildly through the trees.

‘Fifteen minutes,’ said Jojo.

‘This,’ said Toby, ‘is the temple of Bacchus. Possibly. I don’t think they really know. And there’s the soffit.’

‘The soffit?’ said Jojo. ‘What on earth’s a soffit?’

‘That’s a soffit,’ said Toby, pointing high above them. ‘It’s a well-known architectural term. It’s the underside of an arch, I think. Look! There’s an eagle up there, and a palm. And a god. It’s supposed to be Bacchus. But I think it might be Cupid. It looks like Cupid to me. Do you think it’s Cupid?’

‘Maybe it is Cupid,’ said Jojo.

They stood under the soffit, gazing up at the winged god and the eagle and palm carved high above them. Then they remembered the time, and went back down the stairs, where they stopped in their tracks.

Just round the corner from the bottom of the stairs someone was sitting in the dirt, leaning against the temple wall. But who was it? The figure was hooded, and was covered from head to toe in a sort of striped robe. Only the hands of the person were bare; they were dirty, and half clasped, but were they the hands of a man, a woman, a youth? You couldn’t tell. There were some roses, very dark red, growing nearby in the dry earth. The figure was silent and quite motionless. There were no eye-slits in the hood. All the same, Toby and Jojo felt they couldn’t stand and stare. They moved away.

‘How strange,’ said Jojo. She felt a little frightened. It was so very odd, the motionless figure in the eyeless hood. Who was it? Why were they there? What were they
thinking
?

Back in Beirut by noon, the wedding party immediately began to disperse, swirl away to the ends of the earth never to form again. Some people went straight to the airport. Others took tours, to Byblos, or up into the wild gorges. Gilly disappeared into a grand Beirut world which was now hers, preparatory to flying to Brussels where she and Maro were to live. The rest of her own family and the Chadwicks went to their hotels, having arranged to meet for a late lunch at Le Sporting.

At one o’clock Jojo arrived at Toby’s hotel with her luggage. She had left Joachim.

‘Where’s Joachim now?’ said Toby.

‘He’s seeing the minister of culture,’ Jojo said. ‘Joachim adores ministers.’

Toby came out of the shower and dressed and they went out and walked along the Corniche. It was not even May yet, but the air was hot and dim and somewhat salty.

‘Look, there’s Tawfik,’ said Toby. ‘He’s a friend of mine.’

‘Where?’ said Jojo.

‘Just here,’ said Toby.

Jojo could see no one immediately ahead, only a beggar without legs, on a little tray.

Toby bent down and said hello to Tawfik. If truth be told he was rather proud of his acquaintanceship with Tawfik. It seemed to him a mark of distinction – that he and this beggar, a man in another world, so to speak, should recognise their brotherhood. Jojo, he thought, would just have to be impressed.

But Tawfik looked Toby straight in the eye and did not return his greeting.

Toby fished some money from his pocket and proffered it.

‘No,’ said Tawfik. He looked away into the distance. Toby flushed, then he straightened up and walked on with Jojo.

‘Search me,’ he said, foreclosing any discussion. A little further on, he shook his head. They reached the entrance of Le Sporting and went in past black-suited security. The others were sitting at tables in the sandy plaza. The outdoor furniture, wooden and concrete, had been repainted in hornet hues of red and yellow. Toby had the impression there was some heavy weight hanging over the group.

Candy was the first to see Toby and Jojo. She had been watching out for them and she caught his eye and waved her hand.

‘Toby!’ she called.

‘My mother,’ he thought. ‘Whether we like it or not.’

‘Hi, Ma,’ he said.

‘Oh, Jojo, Toby,’ said Candy. ‘Sit down.’

She looked delighted, and yet she was distracted as well. They sat among the hornet furniture. Again Toby had the sense of something odd in the mood – something uneasy and burdened and slighted.

The waiter came with a tray of drinks and olives and put them down on the table expressionlessly and went away without a word. Everyone watched him go.

‘It’s not good,’ said Candy to Toby.

‘What isn’t?’

Chadwick was sitting there like a sphinx.

‘This,’ said Candy. She held out a newspaper. At first Toby could make no sense of the story on the front page.

‘A Few Bad Apples?’ said one headline. There were pictures of naked people in a pile, with grinning white faces floating above them. ‘Detainee Abuse Rocks US’ said another headline above the fold. He looked more closely at the pictures: a naked man on a dog-lead; a weeping man with a dog’s fangs at his face.

‘Those
fools
,’ said Chadwick.

‘What fools?’ Toby said.

‘In the Pentagon,’ said Chadwick.

‘Oh, Toby,’ said Jojo.

She was looking at one of the photographs which showed a man standing on a box. He was cloaked and wearing an eyeless hood. There were wires attached to his fingers. His hands were stretched out, as if to the whole world.

‘Those
damnable
fools,’ said Chadwick.

‘But we saw him this morning!’ said Jojo.

‘Who?’ said Candy.

‘That man,’ said Jojo.

Toby looked uneasy at this leap of the imagination.

‘Where, darling?’ said Candy, looking puzzled.

‘At Baalbek,’ said Jojo. ‘In the ruins. By the roses.’

But she saw no one was listening.

‘It will take us a hundred years to get over this,’ said Chadwick. ‘Maybe five hundred.’

‘Under the soffit,’ said Jojo.

7

Outside the supermarket in Camden Town the heat struck down. It was mid-July, the first hot day of the English summer. Instantly, the required temperature having been reached, bare London limbs – calves, thighs, arms, navels – navels especially that year – appeared in the streets. Far and wide into the gritty distance, up to Hampstead Heath, down to Euston Road, the semi-naked, navel-baring English flowed.

‘Hello, darlin’,’ said a young black man to an old white woman coming out of the estate beside the supermarket. ‘Everyone’s tearing off half their clothes. Terrible innit? But what can you do?’

Toby raced into the supermarket. He had a lecture at two. It was now twelve-thirty. He had to pick up something in Sainsbury’s then take the 91 down to Aldwych, and then he had to meet his father. Race was in town for the first time since Toby had come to live in London. He was coming to the flat at four that afternoon. Thinking through this schedule, Toby found he had forgotten what he had come to the supermarket for. What was it? Food, drink? Edible, vegetable, medical? There was enough food for them at home that night. Jojo was away on a film-set in Spain. When she came back tomorrow they would all go out for dinner. He roamed up one aisle and down the next, hoping for insight.

At Jams and Spreads two young women were clashing shopping trolleys.

‘Cow!’

‘Cow!’

‘She hit me with her
thing
,’ cried one. ‘She is cow. Her mother is cow.’

Her little face in a brown veil looked like a flower in a pot.

‘Get away from me,’ said the other young woman. Her navel was bared and pierced. ‘Go back to your own country.’

‘Leave her, darlin’,’ said her boyfriend. ‘Do yourself a favour.’

‘You permit me in your country,’ said the first. ‘Now permit me to exist.’

‘She hit me with her trolley.
Wiff
her kid in it! Shows how much she cares about her kid. She’s a cow.’

‘Cow!’

‘Cow!’

‘That’s enough,’ said Toby.

They stared at him.

‘What’s it got to do with you?’ said the English girl.

‘I can’t get past,’ said Toby.

There was a silence.

‘Cunt,’ said the boyfriend in a small voice.

‘Optrex,’ thought Toby.

‘Optrex!’ he said. ‘That’s what I came for.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ said the boyfriend. ‘That’s good stuff, that is.’

The woman in the brown veil went one way, the English pair another. Toby found the Optrex, paid at the self-service till. ‘
Thank you for using Sainsbury’s self-service
,’ all the machines were singing. ‘
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you
.’

He put the Optrex in his bag. Then he saw Jojo’s books there.

‘Damn,’ he said aloud. He had meant to drop them at the library when he left home. Now he would have to go back up the hill. Outside the heat of the sun hit him. The sky had a bronze cast to it. The crowd at the bus stop was huge. The sun had not only brought English limbs out of hiding, it had brought forth the English themselves from a thousand rooms, basement squats in Camden Town, mansions on Primrose Hill. And the convertibles! Where had they been hiding? They came cruising down Parkway as elegant, as evolutionarily inevitable, as dragonflies above a pond. A flock of cyclists went scudding past. People were avoiding the Underground. There were rumours of more terrorist attacks. Jittery, bellicose, magpies clattered their beaks in the oaks above the traffic. A bus came up from the West End; the driver slowed, peered at the throngs on the pavement and drove on.