Rock Me Gently (20 page)

The girls continued talking, huddled in little groups here and there in the boot-room.

Frances, who had been silent, said quietly, ‘You are all wrong.’

We all turned towards her eagerly.

‘Why?’

‘Do you know?’

‘Who told you?’

‘Tell us, Frances.’

Frances pointed out the window across the playground where Sister Mary was pacing to and fro by herself, her rosary beads swinging.

‘She knows,’ she said.

The girls looked out at her and one said, ‘Why, has she told you?’

‘Well, of course, she’s told her,’ said Ruth. ‘She’s her pet girl.’

Scowling at Ruth and lowering her voice, Frances said, ‘I’ll tell you why Thomas and Lucy have gone, but you mustn’t let on to any of the seniors.’

‘Tell us, Frances. Go on.’

She paused for a moment and, looking nervously out the window, she said mysteriously, ‘They were caught in Thomas’s cell together last night.’

The girls looked at her. ‘Caught? What doing?’

‘Snogging.’

All the girls were silent.

Frances said, ‘And that’s why.’

‘Vile!’ said Ruth. ‘Even Mary Magdalene wouldn’t have got away with that.’

The film reel snagged, ran out and the memory stopped. But what more was there? We never did find out why those two nuns were sent away.

‘Jude?’ Cydney’s soft voice.

My cigarette had gone out. I flicked it over the veranda railing and drew a hand across my eyes. ‘Hi, Cydney.’

She sat down beside me. ‘What’s wrong?’

I shrugged. On the night air, the faint scent of citrus washed over us from the groves. We sat in silence for a moment.

After a pause, I said, ‘Did I ever tell you I spent part of my childhood in an orphanage?’

I visited Miriam every day. And slowly, I found that on waking each morning there was no longer a terrible urgency to escape my thoughts. They were mostly harmless. They centred around learning my part in a play we were to perform in Hebrew to the other members of the kibbutz, a couple of letters I had to write and planning my imminent trip to Jerusalem with Cydney, Rick and Mark, small goals to purify my days. My plans became clear in my head, neat and tidy, like boxes all lined up in a row.

We stood on the side of the road and stretched out our thumbs; hoping, praying. Most of the traffic that passed was lorries with full loads of watermelons, oranges and chickens. Then miraculously, a battered red lorry with a layer of red dust obscuring the hood and the headlights, pulled over on to the hard shoulder of the road and rolled to a stop. It just stood there with its signal lights blinking. The four of us gaped back with uncertain hope, until Cydney’s face contorted in that funny awestruck look she got sometimes.

‘Holy shit! A ride! That didn’t take long. Let’s go!’ And we were pounding the road.

When we reached the cabin, Cydney and I grabbed the door handle and tugged ourselves up and took our seats of honour beside the driver. Rick and Mark climbed into the open back and settled themselves on the straw amongst crates, boxes and a bunch of hippies, grime-faced and crazy. Some of them were holding on to the bars on the sides and blabbing non-stop.

‘Jerusalem?’ Cydney asked the wiry, grizzled driver as we climbed in.

‘Jerusalem?’ she asked again more anxiously as we began to pick up speed, bumping and rattling through the dust. Bent over the wheel, the driver merely raised one eyebrow and thumped his foot hard on the accelerator. We sped off down the road like riding a killer whale, weaving and surging and churning, tail-slapping whole schools of smaller cars.

The driver kept shifting his myopic eyes from the road to the instrument panel, watching the speedometer, which jerked suspiciously as we overtook everything at high speed on nail-bitingly narrow bends. Even a single donkey warranted an ear-piercing blast of the horn to signal our approach. I kept my eyes glued to the road, listening to the rattling of the old jalopy with all my senses on alert for a change of tone, a variation in rattles. It felt good to be alive and I wanted to be sure that it wouldn’t all end in a splintering crash of metal at the hands of this suicidal driver.

‘I’m scared shitless,’ hissed Cydney in my ear. ‘Is he taking us to Jerusalem, or kidnapping us?’ We giggled as the sun rose slowly in the sky, heating the lorry into a burning grid. I peered through the rear window to look at Rick and Mark. They lay on their backs on a pile of straw. They saw me looking and Mark gave me an ambiguous wave, either of greeting or derision.

Despite the heat, I shivered when we passed two women dressed from head to foot in black flowing robes, leading their flock of black goats across the scorched fields. As we reached the pine country of Jerusalem’s surrounding hills, we passed an encampment of black tents with a camel or two lazing next to them. It seemed that somewhere along the way we had crossed over some great but unspoken divide.

Cydney loved it. ‘Far out. Out of this world. Totally cosmic,’ she kept repeating, bouncing on the seat and craning her neck to see everything at once.

Jerusalem was an emotion more than a city with its citadels, arches, domes, and minarets. It seemed to hover between earth and heaven. The fragility of the brilliant air and massive white clouds hanging over the Holy City made Cydney’s commonplace ‘out of this world’ true enough to give my soul a start.

We were unceremoniously dumped in the Old City near the Damascus Gate and went ambling down the arched alleyways. The sun swept through the endless lanes, an obstacle course of stalls and stands bearing helter-skelter displays of peanuts, dried salted chick-peas, lupin seeds, gaudy pastries, fritters dripping with oil and honey. A swarm of flies and children, both attracted by the same wares, buzzed and shouted as they chased each other around the stalls, The stallholders, who feared for the stability of their wares, brushed both flies and children away with a single cursing gesture. Donkeys backed out of bedroom-workshop-kitchens, or bakeries, or basket weavers’. In the alleys, tailors worked away on the foot-pedals of old Singer sewing machines. Ancient beaded necklaces dangled on strings in the doorways of shops. Souvenir shops displayed clay lamps, belts, fleece-lined slippers, antique brassware, carved cherry­wood pipes, rotten teeth, coins and battered pieces of everything, including crowns of thorns and genuine slivers of the cross, laid out on the ground - a scavenger’s heaven. Groups of jaded tourists piled out of their air-conditioned coaches ‘doing Jerusalem’ via their four- or five-star hotels, searching through the lenses of their automatic cameras for some reminder of the sensation they once had as children when they first gazed on the world. And Arabs sat in corners sipping coffee and sucking at their bubbling hookahs filled with apricot tobacco. Their hollow, saucer eyes, drooping brown, glanced briefly at us as wisps of olive-grey smoke escaped into golden shafts of sunlight. A traditional jewish woman in a wig and babushka shuffled up the street, displaced in time, like something that had stepped from a sepia-toned turn-of-the-century photograph.

A gang of impish boys shouted frantic advice at a driver backing his tipper-lorry into a narrow lane. Hawkers offered mint tea on little brass trays, freshly baked bagels topped with sesame seeds, boxes of Turkish delight, highly perfumed and coloured mauve.

We had paused at one of the stores to look at a set of carved camels, when a young Palestinian boy, no more than fourteen, grabbed Mark’s sleeve and shouted demands for shekels.

Mark shook him off. ‘No.’

The boy narrowed his eyes, looking at Mark speculatively. ‘Please, you give me money to buy food for my family?’ he offered hopefully.

The skin around his brown eyes was red and puffy. There was blood on his forehead - not much, but a cut. Clouds of tennis-shoed tourists walked around the boy, their eyes appraising him, hardening and turning away. Some raised their cameras to buildings, focusing shutters, firing away, as the boy tried to get their attention, his arms outflung. He turned suddenly to me, his eyes wide, his underlip pouting and, spreading out his hands in a gesture of entreaty, he said, ‘Lady, please help.’ His voice was pure need, pure despair.

I tried to smile at him, but I could only think: How did I ever learn to smile such a cheap smile? I stood stupefied, uncertain what to do. I looked over my shoulder to see if the others were watching.

‘Come on, Jude,’ yelled Rick. ‘Don’t let him rip you off. He’s only begging.’

What did he mean
only?
Wasn’t that bad enough? The boy’s young brown eyes and his outstretched arms seemed to me at that moment an image of guilelessness, and I halted until the image had vanished and I saw only his ragged clothes and damp coarse hair and large almond-shaped eyes pleading with me.

‘Here,’ I said. I fumbled in my duffle bag, found some paper money, crumpled it into his hand. I turned and walked away from him, feeling guilty but forgiving myself: nobody else had bothered with him. They got me every time; they could spot me coming, pick me out of the crowd no matter how hard I frowned. Buskers, vagrants, tramps, winos, the homeless. In the grip of the needy I was needy.

I found Rick, Mark and Cydney in a store examining some jewellery. I let myself be talked into buying some rather garish Eilat-stone necklace, which I thought Miriam might like, and, for myself, a silver filigree hand on a thin chain that the storekeeper assured me would keep away the Evil Eye. It seemed a good idea, and I laughed and slipped it on.

We continued our meandering, taking in the sights and smells that assailed us. Up until now, Rick and I had been flirting a little, making each other laugh about silly things. It was nice, it was easy, but what if I started to like him and then, boom, he disappeared?

Cydney winked at me, smiling as if she knew what was going on. I licked my lips, felling more nervous than I could remember.

‘Here, Jude, I’ll carry that.’ Rick lifted my duffle bag off my shoulders, slinging it over one of his own. I smiled uncertainly at him. When we got close, he smelled nice. A spicy, woody fragrance. As we climbed up some steps to the Jaffa Gate, I caught his eye again. He smiled, his blond stubble sparkling in the sunshine, and I wondered if he knew what I had just been thinking, wondered what he was thinking.

The four of us decided to splurge, and booked ourselves into the King David Hotel, the most expensive and certainly the most elegant hotel in Jerusalem. The contrast with the spartan accommodation on the kibbutz was breathtaking. I turned around in the lobby, feeling like a child eating ice cream for the first time.

The lobby was decorated in the intense colours of the Middle East - azure and brick red - as well as the creamy beige of Jerusalem, illuminated by a soft yellow glow from the Art Deco lamps. Marble floors and tapestries on the walls all combined harmoniously into the perfect backdrop for intrigue, the tough political negotiations and lively parties that were part of the King David Hotel’s mystique.

I luxuriated in a hot bath, my first in six months, and used all the toiletries the hotel had provided. Cydney and I were sharing a room and I tried to get some rest while she roamed around the hotel. A knock on the door awoke me. Rick. He was wearing a fresh new shirt with the collar turned up. We grinned stupidly at one another for a long minute. I wanted to stroke my fingers through his tousled blond hair. Bad, scary thought. I put my hands behind my back.

‘Want to take a walk around the hotel grounds with me?’

‘Urn, OK ... a walk, yes,’ I said.

I was nervous. The words came out of my mouth all mixed up. He’d think I was hopelessly stupid now. A flush crept up my cheeks as I locked the door behind me. But before I had time to worry properly about how inane I had sounded, he snaked his arm around my shoulders - no one had ever done that. There was something so familiar about it as he steered me down the corridor. I tried to walk naturally, relaxed. Yes, this happens to me all the time.

Why he was interested in me was a mystery. Of course, he didn’t know anything about me. I hadn’t told him my background. Too serious. Too sad. Too weird. Besides, where would I begin to tell a story like mine? I swallowed hard, and walked like it was totally normal to have this man’s hand flat on my back. I felt, as if I were a different person completely.

Cydney was passing through the lobby. ‘Hey, you two,’ she said in her singsong voice. I scrunched my whole face at her.

‘Hey,’ Rick called.

She gave me a little wave of her hand, her eyes all round and exaggerated behind her glasses, as if she couldn’t wait to hear all the gory details.

‘Let’s sit in the sunshine,’ said Rick as we wandered outside into the hotel garden. It was beautiful there in the gardens - the tall fir trees, the blue swimming pool with sunlight shimmering on its surface. Rick sat with his knees wide, face without any kind of expression. I pushed my hair off my face and sat on the ground, my back against a tree trunk, Rick’s knee next to me.

We became silent for a moment, a strange, distant silence. Rick turned to me, his shadow blocking out the sun.

‘So,’ he said, ‘Cydney tells me you were brought up in an orphanage.’

He said it so suddenly, I felt I had been stung. Perhaps it was the quiet of his voice, or the simplicity of statement. I put a hand up to my mouth. My lips were pressed together. To my horror, my eyes filled, as if indeed I had been stung. I couldn’t speak for a moment. I was afraid to blink, afraid to move. He reached up and took my hand away from my mouth and held it.

The water in the pool lapped, slow and lazy. A chlorine dream. I took a deep breath, ready to fall into the abyss ... but instead I found that the thought of telling him didn’t panic me now.

‘I wasn’t an orphan,’ I said to the water. I let out a long breath after I had said it. I could feel his questions in the silence. He pushed his hand through his blond hair. He was going to ask me, ‘Why were you there, then?’

He asked the questions, and I answered them. As I spoke, terrible sadness, dread, an agonising desire for happiness swelled in my heart. I watched his face and felt anxious. Would he still look at me the way he did? Would he think I was different, damaged? I searched his hazel eyes for some sign that he was being put off by my story, but he just nodded and listened, watching me closely, as if he could see something with every gesture and inflection. His hand hadn’t moved; it was firm on mine.