Ruth

It was one of those meetings- about meetings -that we had all too much recently, since the cut backs, in one of those faux- modern, wood panelled rooms, with stout chairs that were placed like thrones, around an Arthurian table piled high with three different kinds of coffee, tea, and biscuits, and energy bars, and chilled water with slices of lemon in it

Cameron, the cameraman was sitting, slightly apart, the only person not to have another knee pressed close to his, with someone in the seat next to him. He looked dog eyed hung over. That day he was unshaven, with his head in his hands; his hair falling over his face, shielding him; so that you couldn’t tell if he was asleep or awake; until he coughed, or changed hands to lean on; or more rarely, said something in his tired Glaswegian voice, that nobody could really understand, but everybody thought was just brilliant; brilliant, that he could speak that way. Like David Hayman.

The first item up was a short, about a cow that had escaped, after the lorry that it was taking it to the slaughter ran off the road. The cow crashed through gardens, careered through fences, stumbled onto the A96 Inverness Road, and got hit by a Landrover. Local chased it from the scene, and police marksman were called out, but they couldn’t find it. They blamed the weather conditions. The snow and heavy winds.

‘What do you think happened to the cow?’ said James Fleming, shown, with a snow-blanketed backdrop of the cow carnage, spliced with him interviewing Inspector Burns.

‘Well,’ said Inspector Burns, ‘with the high winds and the snow it could be anywhere. Our priority is to make sure…’

Close up James Fleming’s face: ‘where do you think it is?’

Close up Inspector Burns: ‘Maybe somebodies ate it,’ he said, chuckling, ‘you get a lot of funny folk about here.’

Donald Post sighed. He always liked to say that he was just part of the production team. Just one of the boys. He’d a picture of his wife and kids on the desk. Blonde hair, blue eyes, lips glued together, Barbie figure and face, a hand on the shoulder of each boy, standing beside her like two well-groomed spaniels. They’d be older now, of course, sent away to Gordounstoun or Eton, where they could be trained up to bray in the proper voice, and always have an opinion, like their dad. That was the smaller of the two pictures. One that could be safely tucked away in a drawer, if his desk ever had too much on it, not that he’d ever allow that to happen. He liked to think himself more of an ideas man. Paper clutter was for bureaucrats.

The bigger picture, pushed to the front of his desk, was of himself, grey hair slicked back and tied tightly into a little trendy ponytail, when that was the considered kinda cool, receiving an award from Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowden, but Post didn’t mind, he didn’t look down his nose at her too much. Then again, at 6ft 5 he looked down on most people. But he didn’t have that bent posture that taller folk adopt in the land of the common little people. His belt may have been tied in a few notches, to cover a belly that coveted the rich things in life. But there was an art to even that. I could imagine an endless line of aunts, embalmed as portraits on his staircase, and tutors, in sotto voice, telling him not to slouch, not to fidget, and to speak up, properly, in the way he should. He never had any problems with that.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t think we can use it. See if… any of the regionals can…’ He shook his trendily tousled mane and waved his hand. We knew that meant: next.

‘It’s that Bethlehem thing,’ said Ben Johnstone nervously. We’d spent a lot of money on it. And there were problems right from the off. The production team had made a detour and went through the Calandria checkpoint because there were rumours of an Israeli offensive on Palestine. But, unfortunately for us, the peace held. All we got were shots of flat roofs and rubble and Arabs, with their hands out, pulling at us, asking us to film them, to show the world how miserable they were.

We were glad to get back to the squat grey buildings of the checkpoint. There was something of the football stadium feel to the checkpoint, with the sick smell of urine in booths and the clicking of the cold metal turnstiles, and the endless queues that snaked towards tomorrow, or the next day, for the bedraggled supporters of Palestine. As Westerns we had our own turnstiles. One for us. Another for our equipment. But it was easier going out than coming in.

Going out into Hebron we could have carried a bazooka. Coming in we couldn’t carry a pair of nail clippers. They didn’t let half of our equipment back through, and worse, only three of us were allowed directly back into Israeli territory. A pretty girl, younger than my daughter, in a military jacket that was too big for her, said that she was sorry, but there had been a security alert.

‘This is an outrage, phone the British Embassy,’ said Ben Johnstone, on his mobile phone, speaking to us from the wrong side of Israel-Palestine. We could have hit him with a paper cup, and it would have been better if he’d just spoken to us through the barrier.

‘No phones,’ said a man in a uniform, pulling it away from Pat Kane’s ear.

‘Fuck you!’ said Cameron.

I don’t know what rank the man was, but he was big enough to be a battalion. He looked disappointed that Cameron was our side of the barrier, and there was something in his eyes, and gait, that suggested that he was thinking about changing that.

‘No phones,’ he said, with finality, walking away.

‘Now you know how it feels,’ hissed an emaciated old woman, clucking in broken English, through the turnstile.

I was glad to get back to the hotel. I don’t know how it was done, but Pat Kane organised things. We followed him when we went to interview the old woman at her home. He’d also arranged for the woman’s granddaughter to translate.

Donald Post nodded. ‘Good juxtaposition, he said.

There was tenderness in the way in which Cameron had framed the face of the old woman, a tendril of her grey hair, escaping from the black hair scarf she wore, as if in mourning, over her head, her eyes bright with knowledge and tears, as she blindly searched for the words of her youth. And the delayed tap, tap, of her dry eyed granddaughter, sitting next to her, with her hands folded neatly into her lap, smoothing out the same words, in a different language, adjusting them and fitting them together; a Jewish Sabra, with the moist eyes of a lion. Some of the words, Sorbibor and Auschwitz, needed no repetition, but were all the better for it.

‘So what we’ve got,’ said Ben Johnstone, ‘the anniversary of Auschwitz, and the the anniversary of the State of Israel, and we’ve got this woman’s who has been involved in both, and it’s her birthday, blah, d blah, d blah…’.

It was almost painful to listen to a grown man, add ‘blah d blah’ onto speech and fling his balding head back, wave his thin hands and arms about, as if that was perfectly normal. As if it meant anything. But he always seemed to get away with it.

‘But how do we sell it to the younger generations?’ said Donald, ‘they’ve heard it all before, seen it all before. It just bores them. News bores them. Documentaries bore them. All they want to do is play interactive games in which they blow everybody up’.

‘You need to take it into the schools, said Cameron.

The red haired PR woman, whose name I could never remember, crossed and uncrossed her legs and flicked her pad onto a fresh page.

‘You’ve got ask the kids who their best pal is. And when they point to wee Jenny or Tommy tell them not to trust them. And especially not to trust their pal’s mum or dad’s smiling faces, because that is what Sarajevo and Rwanda showed us.’

The PR woman stopped taking notes. Ben sneaked a look at Donald to see what he would say. Cameron didn’t look at anybody. I wanted to tell him to stop, before one of his rants went too far.

‘Then you could ask them to play hide and seek. Only difference is you’d need to tell them it was for real. And if anybody caught you, they’d kill you. Chop you up. Fling your wee brother out of the window headfirst. Rape your sister. And it would be all your good neighbours cheering them on. Hoping to get a wee shot. No pun intended,’ Cameron said, adding a wan smile.

‘Enough,’ Donald’s voice, was a low rumble.

‘And you could take them on a bus run, or on a train, or to a football match. And just say to them, look out the window kids, everybody you see is dead. It doesn’t matter how fast we go, or where we go, they’re all dead. Those two woman chatting. That baby in the pram. Those kids kicking a ball about. They are all dead. Six million dead. That’s the population of Scotland. Everybody you see is dead. Dead.

‘Enough,’ said Donald, banging the table.

‘Yes, I think we’ve had enough or your childish histrionics,’ said Ben.

Cameron looked through his hair, to one, then the other. He sniffed picked up his packet of fags from the table and left the room.

‘He can get a bit temperamental,’ said Donald. When the door shushed silently behind him, it erased his presence, as if he’d never been there.

We watched the film again and again, until I was nodding off and had to chew on some sliced lemon. My neck was sore and my arms were sore, as if I’d been on a long haul flight. I thought about saying something outrageous like Cameron, and also being asked to leave. But I couldn’t think of anything. And I knew that even if I could I would never say it.

Just when I knew, with the humming and the hawing of my colleague’s muted voices, that we were nearly finished; ready for a wrap, one of the bright college kids Petru Dumiriu, said something, and I knew that he’d taken us right back to the beginning again, as if we were in a giant maze, and had to re-run the whole shot again.

He was a smart kid. There was no denying it, spoke more languages than there were letters in the alphabet, seemed to be born middle aged, and even had serious looking hair. But for once I’d wished him unborn, or less smart, or maybe both.

‘What was that?’ he said, chewing on one of his nails. ‘Play it back… something about blood.’

‘I think we’ve had a full and frank discussion about blood,’ said Ben. I knew what he was thinking: everybody had flipped and even Petru was going to go off on a tangent like Cameron.

Donald let out a deep sigh, and looked up into the air, his fingers pushed together in prayer, as if he was consulting with the god of the rich people. ‘Let him continue,’ he said.

Stephen took the tape back, and Petru used his two hands, as if he was holding something slippery, as he tried to explain what the old woman was saying, and what her granddaughter was saying. The old woman said that she had been raped many times. The granddaughter said that she had been assaulted many times. Every night they raped her. Yes. Now we understood what Petru was getting at. The old woman was made to work as a prostitute. It was an interesting distinction, but hardly new. There was even a band called Joy Division. And there was nothing, in that, we could use.

But that was not what was getting Petru excited. Others were made to work as prostitutes. As Ben would have said, blah d blah. One girl Ruth, who was only thirteen bled, when she was raped.

‘The old woman said this girl Ruth bled every night. If you see here, her granddaughter tells her not to be so foolish. But look…’ said Petru, holding up his finger, ‘the old woman says, very clearly, “no, she bleeds. Every night God makes her a virgin again, and the Germans were scared.” '