Shake Off

by Mischa Hiller

  I rang Rachel at her office from King’s Cross. She was still there, according to the receptionist, and for a moment I panicked when she asked who she should say was calling, because I’d forgotten what name I’d used—but then it came to me: Roberto Levi. Rachel sounded truly pleased to hear from me. No, I didn’t need to come to the office for the keys, she would gladly meet me at the station and drive me to the house. When I hung up I finally came face to face with the black thought swimming in my head, holding onto it and seeing it for what it was: the dark awareness that I was absolutely and irretrievably on my own.

  Thirty-Six

  Rachel’s BMW was waiting at the curb when I came out of Cambridge railway station. She wasn’t wearing the suit that revealed her legs but instead wore a pristine tracksuit that suggested some physical activity was planned. Her hair was tied back less severely than before, and dark roots had started to grow through. She asked me to excuse her outfit, she was off to the gym, but was more than happy to drop me off at the house. I sank gratefully into the leather and closed my eyes on the short trip to the house, as she chatted about boring things, happy to carry on with me throwing in the odd grunt. I opened my eyes as she pulled into the drive and it was still light. She handed me the house keys.

  “When are the rest of your party arriving?” she asked.

  “I’ll be on my own for several days,” I said. “Is there somewhere nearby I can get food?” I hadn’t eaten since my greasy breakfast this morning.

  She shook her head. “Not at this time of the day. I could come by and pick you up after the gym,” she said. “We could go out and eat. If you want to, of course?” She puckered her lips.

  “I’m too tired.” And it was true, I was too exhausted to spend an evening of pretence with her.

  “Of course, I can see that. I’m sorry.” She smiled. “Listen, why don’t I bring you something back later, a takeaway or something?” She was eager to please, and I was very hungry and in need of company, so I agreed with her suggestion of Chinese.

  The house was bigger than I remembered. I made sure all the doors were locked and, after drawing the curtains, lay on the thick carpet in the front room. I wanted to take some codeine, but Rachel would be back in a couple of hours with food and I needed my wits about me when I was with her. I closed my eyes. A vision of Mama came to me, her hands, soft and prematurely wrinkled from continual washing, tucking me in. Then she disappeared, but I heard her screams, screams of dismay and horror at what she had just witnessed. I had only seen the beginning of it when we were lined up, before being knocked down by my father as the shots rang out. I’d heard one of the men, the man in charge, order someone to shut her up, and her voice was muffled as she was dragged into the house. But I had just lain there then as I was lying here now, as I had yesterday when Abu Leila was shot. I had done nothing.

  I was woken by the unfamiliar doorbell. I went upstairs and looked out of the window of the dark bedroom. Rachel’s BMW was in the drive. I scanned the street but couldn’t see much of it from the window because of the trees. I went down and opened the door.

  “You look like you’ve just woken up.” She pushed past me in a green dress, carrying a paper bag of food and her gym bag. I could hear her in the kitchen as I bolted the door. “You haven’t warmed any plates. Why are men so useless?” she said with a laugh. She was still flushed from her workout and shiny from the shower. She had little make-up on; it was a nice contrast to her professional get-up. In her summer dress and flat sandals she reminded me of Helen, and where she lacked Helen’s grace and litheness, she made up for it in cleavage. We ate at the breakfast bar, and Rachel opened a bottle of wine. I told her the bad news.

  “Teetotal, eh?” She poured herself a large glass, leaving me to wonder how she would drive home. “I wish I could be teetotal.”

  It soon became clear that Rachel had no intention of going home. After dinner she poured herself another drink and took the bottle to the living room, kicking off her sandals along the way.

  “Isn’t the carpet great? I think there’s a decent hi-fi in here, Roberto.” Roberto went to look for it and found, hidden behind a sliding panel, a collection of records, mostly jazz, and a sophisticated sound system. Helen would love this, I thought, but Rachel hated jazz and so Roberto found something else to put on, some mindless popular music he found on the radio, and sat down opposite Rachel, who was sprawled on the big sofa—except she couldn’t sprawl like Helen could because she didn’t have the legs for it.

  She started to tell me how she had spent last summer on a kibbutz in Tiberius and asked whether I had been to one. I shook my head; I wouldn’t be allowed near one, I thought. Had I been to Israel then, or thought about making aliya, she asked. I shook my head, although Mama’s village Lubya used to be in what Rachel called Tiberius, near what was called the Sea of Galilee. She spoke at length of her positive experiences, and not once did she mention the Palestinians or Arabs, or make reference to any problems there. Maybe, in her mind, there weren’t any. Maybe she felt it rude to mention them, since I was, after all, a client, and one must not mix politics with business. The more she drank, the more she spoke and giggled. The more she drank, the more blurred she looked. She asked me a few questions, but I let Roberto lie with practiced ease. Roberto, despite my exhaustion, was on form, a master of sleight of speech and verbal mirrors, bouncing back her questions with feigned interest in her. I wanted to tell her about my grandparents’ home in Lubya, as had been told to me, but instead Roberto spoke of an imaginary family of Italian Jews from Turin, culled from my reading of Primo Levi’s potted biography; for Roberto had started to believe that he was related to Primo. Rachel made no such connection because she did not, by her own admission, read books, preferring, she said, popular magazines and sentimental films.

  “And the newspapers, Roberto, so full of doom and gloom—I never read them,” she slurred. Both Roberto and I agreed with her. I, because newspapers were full of omissions and lies; Roberto, because he was as shallow as Rachel and would say anything to ingratiate himself. Roberto and Rachel wanted to be liked; they didn’t like confrontation or the unpleasantness real feelings could arouse. I wanted Rachel to leave, because she wasn’t Helen, and I felt comfortable with Helen. Rachel was nebulous and lacking to me, but Roberto found her fascinating. Roberto, to his credit, knew that we both needed her; she was our link to the outside world. He was right, we did need her, but he wanted to take it further, he wanted more; he wanted to get to know her between her short legs.

  Soon, Roberto had been invited onto the sofa and was nuzzling at Rachel’s neck. I, however, pawed at her breasts, because she knew nothing about anything. Roberto pulled off her hairband and admired her dyed, brittle hair. I laughed inwardly at her dark roots and impatiently pulled down the straps of her dress because she thought a kibbutz was a fun place to spend the summer. Roberto kissed her bare shoulders while I pulled up her dress and put my hand between her sweaty thighs. I was rough because she had not visited Lubya, where Mama’s family came from, even though there would be nothing to see because it had been razed to the ground after everyone had been driven out in 1948. She made a groaning noise, and silky-spoken Roberto persuaded her to remove her bra.

  “Gently, Roberto, gently,” she said, to the wrong person, and Roberto apologized on my behalf, but I pulled and snatched at her underwear until it was around her ankles. Roberto wanted to get on his knees and kiss her between her thighs, but I said she didn’t need it or deserve it and wanted to get straight to it. We argued about it until Rachel took things into her own hands and all I could see was the top of her head, and so studied her darkening roots. Roberto and I both enjoyed what she was doing—she did it with some enthusiasm—until her mouth was unexpectedly and efficiently replaced with a condom, conjured from I don’t know where. Then she was on her back on the thick carpet, and both Roberto and I had our way, although Roberto wanted to take it nice and easy but I saw it as an opportunity to teach her a lesson. I thoug
ht I’d got my way over Roberto but she kept urging me on, faster and harder.

  Afterwards, I went to the bathroom and flushed the sagging condom down the toilet, followed quickly by my Chinese meal, most of it undigested. I heard Rachel flush the toilet upstairs and followed the noise. When I got up there she was in the big bed in the master bedroom with its en-suite bathroom. I brushed my teeth, took some codeine and slipped in beside her, resting on her welcome bosom.

  “You were like an animal, Roberto,” she whispered, twiddling with my hair. She was right, I was an animal: a dog maybe, or a pig.

  “I’m tired,” I said. She turned out the lights and I moved to my pillow. She leaned over me in the dark, smelling of wine, her breasts resting heavily on my back.

  “If you want to do it again, just wake me,” she whispered. But I’d just taken four codeine and so it wasn’t going to happen.

  Thirty-Seven

  Mama hadn’t spoken often of her parents’ house in Lubya, west of Tiberius, and even less of her parents. From what Uncle Elias had said—my only uncle on her side of the family—they felt that she’d married beneath her. Uncle Elias intimated, out of earshot of Mama, that my father’s family had not done well, even before the 1948 exodus, and that Mama’s parents had despaired when their only daughter had left the relative comfort of an apartment in Jordan and gone to live in a refugee camp in Beirut. So Mama, out of respect for my father, never talked about them. She did describe the house though, and whenever I admired the big houses and apartments she went to clean, she always said they were nothing compared to her parents’ house: the lemon trees in the back garden, the fig tree at the front, the wooden shutters closed against the heat in the afternoon, the view over the olive grove they owned. These were all descriptions from when Mama was a girl, of course, and were whimsical and nostalgic and set against the dirty reality of the camp. She would laugh and say, “Imagine it, Michel, we used to have people come to clean for us!” But it was a laugh tinged with bitterness. I discovered from later research that the house had been razed to the ground along with the whole village. Afterwards, the rubble was planted over with pine; so there had been no going back for my grandparents. They died in Jordan. I never met them, as they never came to Lebanon to see us.

  Rachel came back to the house for three nights. She wanted to go out to eat but I said I was too tired in the evenings and had a lot of work to do during the day. I told her I was preparing the ground for the negotiations and meetings with various technology companies, putting together portfolios and the like. She believed all of this, and believed that I was out during the day, when in fact I never left the house. After that first night we talked little. I gave her money to bring food back each evening and we watched tennis on television or listened to silly pop records and she drank lots of wine and we had sex, and afterwards she read women’s magazines while I stared at the ceiling and avoided thinking about what to do next because I hadn’t a clue. Before she slept, Rachel applied a greasy lotion to her face that she said would stop her getting wrinkles when she was older. She stayed until I could bear her cheery little face and eager-to-please manner no longer.

  On the fourth night, after we had finished eating, I was about to tell her that she couldn’t stay anymore (with the excuse that the rest of my party were arriving), when she said she wanted to talk. She made it sound serious. We were sitting at the breakfast bar over our half-empty foil containers of Indian takeaway. She’d hardly touched her wine. I prayed she wasn’t going to make some declaration of love.

  “I can’t stay the night, Roberto,” she said, worry on her face. “In fact, I can’t stay here anymore.”

  I was filled with a relief which I did my best to hide. “Why not?” I asked, supposing that I ought to show some interest in her reasons in case my ambivalence became apparent. “Is something wrong?”

  She put a manicured hand on mine. “No, you’re a sweet man and everything, but my boyfriend is coming up to Cambridge for a few days tomorrow, before we go on holiday to Spain.” The shock she could see on my face was genuine. “I’m sorry, Roberto, if I’ve hurt your feelings. This was nice while it lasted but it was never going to be a long-term thing. You must have known that.” But of course: her absence of curiosity in me was an indication of her lack of real interest. She had used me just as well as I had used her.

  “Do you have to go tonight?” I asked, and meant it—the sudden realization that I was being rejected was unpleasant, especially when it meant having to spend the night on my own.

  “Don’t make things awkward, Roberto,” she said, in an excessively concerned voice. She took her hand off mine and gave me a sad look. “It was fun—let’s just leave it at that.” She said she would still be available professionally, regarding the house, and added, “You mustn’t feel awkward about calling, Roberto.” And she insisted on giving me a hug, which I had to stoop for.

  When she was gone I cleared up and had a bath, but then the bath reminded me of Helen and I became heavy-hearted so I got out. I did sleep well on my own though, and could at least put Roberto Levi to sleep as well, which was a relief. But I couldn’t stay holed up in that house forever, sitting all day in front of the TV watching tennis and soap operas, however comforting this arrangement felt for Roberto.

  The next morning I left the house first thing, wandering down the tree-lined road until I found a phone box. It was my first time out of the house, and I carried all my belongings with me in my bag, just in case.

  After getting the number from directory enquiries, I rang Helen’s department at University College and, after some to-ing and fro-ing, got through to someone who knew who she was. By my calculations she should be back from Turkey, although I had no idea whether she would be at the college. But I didn’t know where else to ring her; there was no telephone at the Tufnell Park house. I asked the male voice whether Helen had returned from her site visit to Turkey. He thought she was due back today but wasn’t coming into the department until tomorrow. I persuaded the voice to write down a message for her, saying that Michel had called and would call back tomorrow. Before the voice hung up something made me ask whether Professor Niki had returned from his holiday in Greece.

  “Er, I don’t think he went to Greece,” the male voice said. “I think he was at the same site in Turkey as Helen and the others.”

  I had no room for anger or jealousy (after all, wasn’t it what I’d expected?) but I still felt a pang of disappointment, despite not being in a position to be righteous. I hung up and dialed the speaking clock.

  I walked further on, past houses as big as the one I was staying in, but the more I walked, the smaller they got, until they were all conjoined in one terrace like the streets in Tufnell Park. I happened upon a main road with a row of shops, one of which was a post office. I picked out a postcard, a picture of one of the Cambridge colleges, and addressed it to Helen at our Tufnell Park address. I wrote: “I miss you and would like to see you as soon as possible. I’ll ring you at your office.” I signed it “Ton belle” and posted it first class. In the Italian delicatessen next to the post office I bought olives and bread and cheese and pasta and Italian sausage. I walked back to the big house—no fig or lemon tree here—thinking that I would go into Cambridge proper tomorrow. I spent the rest of the day eating and watching television, happy to have the place to myself, but not so happy at having so much time to think. I toyed again with the idea of opening the envelope, but I took codeine instead, as it seemed the easier thing to do. I spent the night in fitful worry, despite the codeine, which didn’t seem to take. At one point I went and stood in the front garden, watching the street for an hour, standing perfectly still in the dark shadow of a tree. Nothing came of this foolishness so I went back inside, falling asleep towards dawn.

  Thirty-Eight

  I passed some kids on roller skates doing figures of eight in the road on my way to the phone box to ring Helen at the college again. It was midday. I stood with my bag between my feet and fed a lot of
money into the phone while I was passed from extension to extension. At last Helen’s voice came on the line. I was so relieved I couldn’t speak.

  “Michel, is that you?” Her voice was hushed; people were talking in the background.

  “You’re back,” I said.

  “Yes, well done, I’m back. Came back last night, got your postcard this morning. Are you in Cambridge? What are you doing up there, are you all right?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “What does that mean? Do you know your room’s been trashed? The landlord is pissed off, whoever did it stripped everything. Hang on a minute…” Her voice became muffled; it sounded like she’d put her hand over the mouthpiece to speak with someone else in the room. The people who’d searched my room while I was there hadn’t made enough noise to trash it. Had they come back or was it different people? I fed another ten pence into the phone box. She came back on the line and I didn’t know what to say.

  “Are you still there?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you coming to London?”

  I watched the kids on roller skates. So little traffic came through that they could play without much interruption. “No, I can’t. You come to Cambridge. Please.”

  “What’s wrong, Michel, why all the mystery?”

  “Come to Cambridge. Come today.”

  “I have to write up the site visit, that’s why I’m in the department.” But she was thinking about it, I could tell.