Shake Off

by Mischa Hiller

  Helen put her hand on my arm.

  “You’re shaking,” she said. I gathered the newspaper cuttings and the reports and placed them in her hands.

  “This is when my parents were murdered,” I said. “This is when all of my family were murdered.”

  Then I went outside.

  Forty-Five

  The darkness enveloped me like a cold blanket. I walked on the sand, listening to the water reach up the beach then drain away. It washed at my thoughts and sucked the bad ones out. Washed and sucked, washed and sucked. Helen was reading the cuttings in the house. She had been for a while. I could see the light coming through the windows in the distance. Soon she would know everything, almost everything, the context of that day at least. She’d caught me off guard, asking about the name Roberto. I would have to explain all that to her, although I didn’t understand it myself. I walked up to the dunes through the soft sand and sat down in the long grass facing the sea. It was as if I could hear voices in the surf, whispering and talking. Then the voices seemed to get stronger.

  They weren’t imagined at all, they were real.

  I lay down in the grass; no one should be here at this time of night. I crawled in the direction of the voices, the noise I made covered by the surf. The voices grew distinct but I couldn’t make out the words. I crawled a bit closer, breathing in sand. I could hear Hebrew. I froze, sharp grass stabbing my face. Another voice answered and I cursed Abu Leila’s memory for not allowing me to learn the language. Without lifting my head I could make out three shadows in the dark, crouched down in a circle. They were looking at something on the ground between them, a sheet of paper or a map illuminated by a small torch. I couldn’t deal with three of them on my own, and no doubt at least one other was waiting in a car somewhere. I crawled slowly backwards through the grass until they were out of sight, then, hunched down, ran along the line where the beach met the dunes until I came to the house.

  I looked through the French windows and saw Helen blowing her nose. I went inside and closed all the curtains.

  “We have to go,” I said. She started to say something, but a length of snot came out of her nose. She laughed at this and I smiled, giving her my handkerchief. I threw the cuttings on the dwindling fire, giving it a final surge of flame that reached up the chimney. You could still see the pictures though; even the text was still readable on the burnt newspaper. The words existed in a delicate state of clarity that was only destroyed when I poked at the grey fragments and they disintegrated. “We have to leave, they’re here, they’ve found us.”

  “What do we do?” she said, calm as anything.

  We went upstairs. I told Helen to leave the lights off. We packed our things, taking our time because, as I reassured Helen, they would do nothing until they thought we were asleep, because they just wanted the envelope, although I had no reason to believe that. I was frightened because we were in the middle of nowhere and they could do anything. Why couldn’t I have just left Zorba alone?

  I asked Helen how she felt about driving us out.

  “What other way is there?” she asked.

  Then I realized what I was asking. “You don’t have to come,” I said. “They’re not here for you.”

  “If you think I’m staying here on my own you’re fucking mad. Besides, have you learned to drive overnight?”

  I carried the bags down to the car. I opened the car door, quickly disabling the courtesy light, and put the bags on the back seat, then went back into the house. Helen was in the front room, peering at the books on the shelves.

  “You can’t appeal to their good nature by reciting poetry,” I said. “I doubt they’re the kind of men who read it. We must go.”

  “But you are, Michel. You’re the kind of man who reads poetry.” She pulled a thin book from the shelf and put it in her handbag, looking around the room for any forgotten items.

  “Wait in the car and I’ll be there in a minute,” I said. “Don’t put the car lights on or start the engine or close the car door.” I went upstairs and took the holdall with the money from the attic hatch. I got down the stairs in three steps.

  Helen was in the driver’s seat, her door ajar. I got into the passenger seat, leaving the door open.

  “OK. Start the engine.” She turned the key but nothing happened, not even a starter motor. She tried again three times—it was dead.

  “It won’t start,” she said. Of course it wouldn’t start, these people were professionals and had been at the house already. Helen looked panicked, so I kept my voice level, although my stomach was churning. They had probably been inside as well, looking for the envelope. I could feel it next to my chest like a slab of iron, sitting there since Berlin. They would have disabled the car after we’d come back from town, probably when we were on the beach picking up rubbish. I was panicking now. Think like Vasily, I told myself. You can’t have a crisis if you have a plan.

  “Where do they park, the day-trippers that come down to the beach?” I asked.

  “About a mile and a half up the road; we pass it when we come to the house.” I remembered a wide bit of the road where I had seen several cars parked on the verge. That’s where the path started down to the beach, about twenty minutes’ walk. I retrieved the bags from the back seat and got out of the car. I spoke quietly, as I wasn’t sure how far away they were.

  “Is there another way up there, apart from the road and beach path?”

  “You would have to go through the wood, but there’s no path and in the dark…”

  “Through here?” I pointed to the trees by the drive. She nodded. We pushed through the brambles, glad of our jeans. Something hooted in the trees. I picked up a stick to push back the brambles, holding them aside to let Helen pass. After ten minutes we stopped to get our bearings and breath, down on our haunches.

  “Michel?” she whispered.

  “What is it?”

  “This is real, isn’t it?”

  “It doesn’t get more real,” I said. I listened to the unfamiliar noises of the wood, trying to discern anything manmade.

  “Michel?”

  “Yes.”

  “Whatever it was that happened to your family, did you see it?”

  I couldn’t see her face in the dark, which meant she couldn’t see mine. “Yes,” I said.

  She put her hand to my face and held it there for a few seconds. I kissed her palm. “We’d better keep moving.”

  A few minutes later we came onto the beach path some fifty meters from the road. The path rose up from the beach, now in the far distance, not visible from where we were. I told Helen to wait in the wood, told her that I would be back soon enough.

  “Where are you going?” she whispered.

  “To get a car.”

  You couldn’t see the road from the path. I walked in the shadow of the trees until it was visible, then stepped into the wood. The Renault 4 was there, facing away from the house, but no other car. This didn’t mean that the Golf wasn’t nearby. My Russian with the toy cars would tell me that it would be somewhere down the road beyond the house, facing the other way. They would have radios, communicating by clicks if nothing else. I moved closer through the trees. My heart jumped. In the driver’s seat I could see my slopey-shouldered friend who I had first spotted in the canteen at UCH. I needed to get him out of the car without him alerting his colleagues. On the other hand I didn’t have much time, they may well have visited the house and already be on their way back up the path. But no, they would have called the car back to the house. We might have enough of a headstart to get clear, provided Helen’s driving didn’t suffer under the pressure she must be under. She’d been remarkably calm so far, considering what I’d thrown at her. I worried that she was still in shock and that she would imminently crack in some way.

  I wasn’t sure whether I should kill the agent or just incapacitate him. If it took the former to do the latter then that is what I’d have to do. Method became my concern; he was possibly armed. He wouldn’
t be expecting me, so I had surprise on my side. Of course all this thinking was just a way of putting off the inevitable. I was at a point on the path where I had to step onto it and commit myself. I found a heavy stick that fitted my palm nicely and was about to move when the car door opened and he got out. I stepped back and froze behind a tree. He came around the back of the car and approached me, undoing his fly. He stood against a tall pine two trees away and the night air was filled with the sound of his urine splashing against dry leaves. I could smell it. I stepped out. He turned towards me, but was more concerned with doing up his fly than defending himself. I hit him square across the temple before he even managed to get his hands up.

  Forty-Six

  I had to hit him again, as he collapsed to one knee, because he tried to get up. This time he slumped onto his front, his hands trapped beneath him. I turned him over and dragged him by his arms into the trees so that Helen wouldn’t see him, then searched him for a radio. I found it in an inside pocket and turned it off, throwing it into the woods. He also had a Canadian passport on him, which I pocketed. I removed his belt and tied his hands behind him, just in case he regained consciousness soon. His undone trousers had been yanked down when I’d dragged him so I pulled them off and threw them into the woods. Then I went to get Helen.

  She took the wheel of the Renault and complained that the gear stick came out of the dashboard. I couldn’t help so I left her to it. We trundled off. I looked in the glove compartment. I saw no clue as to the identity of the driver, but I doubted whether he was Canadian. I checked the passport, which had an unmemorable name that I forgot as soon as I read it.

  “Where are we going?” Helen asked.

  “When does the first ferry to the mainland leave?” I asked. It was after midnight.

  “Five in the morning, I think.”

  “Then I don’t know,” I said. The Renault’s headlights lit up the hedges and stone walls as we made our way along the narrow road.

  “I know where we can go,” she said. She turned left and we climbed a winding road, then we dropped and climbed again and she drove slowly through a sleeping hamlet and down a dirt road for five minutes. The Renault did not have the suspension for it—it vibrated and rattled; I imagined nuts and bolts falling off it like in a cartoon. Then she pulled off onto a tarmac road that was blocked by a barrier. She told me to get out and open it, which I did, letting her through before closing it. A big sign warned trespassers of the dangers of entering. She drove past me and the headlights picked out some run-down buildings, not ruins in the ancient sense but relatively new buildings that had been abandoned and neglected. She drove the Renault between two of them and killed the engine. I caught up with her as she got out of the car.

  “What is this place?”

  She explained that we were in an abandoned village that was built in the fifties to house the expected population boom due to the growing oil industry.

  “Turned out it was all happening on the other side of Scotland,” she said. “I used to come up here with the butcher’s boy sometimes.” It was too dark to tell if she was teasing. “There’s a small ferry terminal in the village we’ve just been through, it goes west rather than east towards Glasgow, but I thought that would be a good thing.” She peered at me in the dark. “Have I done good?”

  “You’ve done good.” I hugged her. We stood like that for a moment. Then she broke free and told me to follow her.

  We moved between the houses and went through a doorway with no door. The front wall of the building was missing, revealing a wide view of a loch. We were high up, with an excellent panorama of the starlit water.

  “We can see when the ferry leaves the other side. We’ll have plenty of time to get down to the port,” she said. She told me that once over the water we could drive north and connect with the mainland, then head back east. “I’m assuming you’ll want to get back to civilization?”

  “I do feel more in control where there’s public transport,” I said. We dragged an old sofa over to face the view and sat down.

  “Let’s rest,” she said. “We can hear and see any cars for miles.” We put on extra clothes against the cold. She lay down with her head on my lap. “People come up here to neck,” she said.

  “Neck?”

  “Kiss and grope,” she said.

  “Ah yes, the irresistible butcher boy.”

  She laughed and squirmed on the sofa, trying to find a comfortable position on the semi-exposed springs. I laughed too, but felt jealous of this butcher boy.

  “What’s the plan, Michel?”

  “To get through the night, and to catch the ferry,” I said. I had no real plan beyond making sure Helen was safe. A car noise echoed off the hills and we saw lights several kilometers away light up the road below. They disappeared over the hill and it went quiet.

  “My family were shot,” I said, looking out at the black water. She started to raise her head but I gently held it down. “No, please stay there, don’t look at me. Don’t say anything.” She relaxed and I stroked her hair, traced the outline of her ear. “We were having dinner on the second night of the massacre you read about, and some men came into the house, smashed the door off its hinges. The funny thing is we would have opened it if they’d knocked, because we didn’t know what was going on at the time, the scale of it anyway.” I could envisage that last meal, a meal I hadn’t eaten since. I could taste the fried onions. “We were taken outside and lined up against the wall. All the men, that is, and me. Mama, my mother, was held back. They made her watch when they started to shoot us—she had to watch it.” I stopped to regain control of my voice; I could feel it slipping away from me. I traced Helen’s jawline with my finger, pushed her hair behind her ear. “My father knocked me down, when the shooting started, and fell on top of me, or maybe he threw himself on me, I don’t know, but it’s how I survived.” The clouds parted and the moon emerged, just a half-moon, but bright enough to light up the other side of the loch. “I could feel him breathing for a while, and I could hear Mama screaming. I should have moved, done something, I don’t know.” Helen shook her head on my lap. My thigh grew damp and I looked down to see tears dripping from her eyes straight onto my jeans. I stroked her forehead. “One man was in charge, who gave the orders. He told them to shut my mother up.” I took in some air because I’d forgotten to breathe, and Helen took my hand from her face and clutched it hard to her chest. “They took her inside the house,” I said.

  * * *

  That was it. I couldn’t tell Helen any more. I could remember the rest in vivid detail, because I’d heard it all going on. I knew exactly what had happened to Mama. After some time it had gone quiet, my father had grown heavier, then stopped breathing. I couldn’t tell Helen any more of it; I didn’t want to poison her ears. Instead I said, “This man, the officer who gave orders, they called him Roberto.”

  “Roberto. Yes of course,” she said. “Roberto,” she repeated, as if it was an unfamiliar or foreign word. She patted my hand. I think she understood something that I couldn’t articulate. Soon her grip relaxed and she fell asleep. It grew cold and my leg went to sleep but I didn’t want to wake her.

  The moon moved across the loch and I tracked its path when it was revealed by the clouds. Things became clearer. The sky turned grey and a mist layered the still water, like a thick but incredibly light blanket. A small boat went right to left, out to sea, plowing a v-shaped furrow. Helen stirred and turned onto her back, looking up at me. My legs had gone to sleep. Her eyes were bleary, and the corner of her mouth was crusty with dried spittle.

  “It’s not your fault, you know,” she said, in a voice croaky with sleep. “You did the right thing that day. It was what your mother would have wanted you to do. You do know that, don’t you?”

  I nodded. She was right, but I had needed someone to tell me. I wiped the corner of her mouth.

  She smiled. I could hear a thrumming coming off the hills on the other side of the loch. She touched my face.
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br />   “The ferry’s coming,” she said.

  Forty-Seven

  Helen drove north for a couple of hours after crossing the loch—we’d been the only ones on the ferry apart from a couple of locals and a post van. She grasped the wheel with white knuckles, leaning forward in the seat, peering through the rain-smeared windscreen. The rain droned on the roof, occasionally sending me to sleep until we braked or turned and I would wake up. Helen would apologize for these interruptions and I would drop off again.

  At lunchtime we stopped for breakfast at a roadside place used by truck drivers, filling ourselves with hot tea, fried eggs and sausages.

  “Did you miss the tablets last night?” she asked.

  “If I have the same distractions we had last night every night then I won’t need them at all,” I told her.

  She laughed and mopped her plate, then drained her tea. “Michel, where are we going?”