Free Olives by Alexander McNabb Page A

of
Aisha’s voice changing from chatty light to what seemed to be
confusion and shock. She ended the call and I waited for her to
explain, but she kept her eyes fixed on the road.
    ‘ What is it,
Aish?’
    I watched the
tension in her neck, her lips pressed tight. She didn’t look at me.
‘Ibrahim has heard from the colonel in the police he has been
talking to. The policeman is insisting you injured him. They’re not
going to drop the charges against you. There’s nothing more Ibrahim
can do with the police. It will go to court.’
    I slumped
back against my seat. An overwhelming sense of my impotence quickly
turned to intense sadness. The game was up. I had no choice but to
start the process of confession that would end my life in
Jordan.
    I found my
voice, but it felt like someone else’s mouth shaped the words.
‘Well, if you could thank him for me anyway, that’d be great. I’m
sure he’s done everything he can.’
    ‘ They have
set the court date, Paul. You will appear before the judge in
October. Ibrahim is still trying to fix this. He has powerful
friends in the Ministry of Justice.’ Aisha reached across and
squeezed my hand. ‘It’s a setback. But don’t worry. ‘brahim hasn’t
given up and neither should you.’
    ‘ And what do
I say to people now?’
    ‘ Say nothing.
There’s still hope he can get you out of this.’
    To my horror,
my eyes started to prickle. Turning away from Aisha so she wouldn’t
see, the dusty hillsides stretching out beyond the roadside planted
with olives and cypresses blurred with the tears I tried to blink
away.
    ‘ I didn’t hit
him.’
    ‘ I know,
Paul.
    We passed a
faded green water lorry jangling with battered metal decorations
and I wiped my eyes. I now had little choice but to meet Gerald
Lynch of the British Embassy, a meeting I had sworn to myself
wouldn’t take place. Being beholden to the Dajanis is one thing;
being in Lynch’s debt was quite another. Something about the man
told me his help would come at a high price, but I already knew I
would have to pay it.

SEVEN
     
     
     
    I arrived
home from a long, lonely day at the Ministry spent brooding over my
impending court case. Aisha hadn’t returned my calls. The warm day
was cooling fast and I stood looking out over the uniform pale
stone of the city below me, watching it darken from umber to
aubergine and wondering how I’d get through a trial in an Arab
court.
    I went
inside, switched on the TV and undressed to take a shower. I came
out of the steamy bathroom wearing two white towels, like a pilgrim
to Mecca. I caught the image on the TV screen, frozen for a moment
before it played out in real time before me, water dripping on the
stone floor.
    Glass, blood,
sirens. A man’s hand poking out from the debris, its fingers
curled, the forefinger pointing, an oddly Raphaelesque gesture.
Women crying, dust and desperate screams of loss. Palestinians. The
skeleton of a bombed out jeep, the torn wreckage of a checkpoint
behind it. Men in uniforms, guns and a distorted commentary over a
videophone, the journalist’s voice breathless and over-excited. It
wasn’t the news of a bombing that stilled me, or the fact four
Israeli soldiers had been killed in the attack on a military
checkpoint.
    It was the
name flashing across the bottom of the screen, white on
red.
    Jericho.
    I remembered
the whitewashed buildings nestling across the Jordan when I had
stood next to Aisha looking at the city over the muddy green river.
Joshua marching around the walls with his army tooting away on
their trumpets. Joseph and his Technicolour Dreamcoat.
    I went to the
kitchen and poured a whisky then sat down in my towels to watch the
news again, hopping between channels to catch each brief mention of
the Jericho bombing, snippets sandwiched between the smaller
concerns of the world at large.
     
     
    Aisha wasn’t
there when I turned up at the Ministry the next morning and her
mobile remained switched off. I sat at my desk