Palestine

1. God is dead

Myron comes home and takes off his, ‘God is Dead’, sandwich board.

“What I don’t understand,” he says, “is how the Jews can go through the whole Auschwitz thing and then do that to the Palestinians.”

Yesterday it had been the atrocities of Hizballah, Hamas and Algeria’s FIS so at least, I think, he can’t be accused of taking sides.

“Are you coming to football training tonight?” I ask.

“After lugging that thing around all day.” He points to his sandwich board. “No thanks.”

By the time I get home Myron is flat out on the sofa. On his stomach is the book he is reading, ‘The Great War for Civilisation. The Conquest of the Middle East’. It is going up and down with his stomach, neither a particular barometer for anything.

When we met two years ago Myron was more of a Nutz kind of guy but that was before the whole Lorna thing and everything that happened after. I’ve tried talking to him but he denies he’s any different, just says he’s getting older. ‘Like Yasser Arafat’ he said last week and that confirmed it for me, because a) what had Yasser Arafat got to do with it? And b) even I knew Yasser Arafat was dead.

I throw a duvet over Myron and head up to the bathroom. As I am soaping off the mud I remember the times Myron used to burst in and have a pee while I was in the shower cubicle, burbling over his shoulder about Victoria Beckham’s lack of tits or Rafa Benitez’s rotation system. I miss those times, but how can you tell a guy that you miss him having a pee?

I am half asleep when I hear first the crash, then the wailing. Downstairs, the coffee table is turned over and Myron is stumbling around in a circle, his eyes closed, arms out like a zombie.

One of the doctors told me you shouldn’t wake a sleepwalker, while a specialist we saw later took off his glasses and said, “‘like a zombie’? A strange turn of phrase. I think perhaps you have been watching too many movies.”

“What a jerk.” Myron said after. “If I do that again, whack me in the balls. That’ll give me something else to think about.”

I put an arm around Myron and lead him back to the sofa. We half fall on it together, Myron trapped between me and the back cushions and I pull the duvet over both of us. After about an hour Myron stops his moaning and an hour after that I fall asleep.

When I wake up, Myron’s gone. Remembering everything, I shout out, scared for a moment that Myron’s finally completely lost it and done something terminal but he appears from the kitchen, a plate in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other.

“Ah, the baby awakes,” he says. “I’ve made us breakfast.” Then, as he puts the plate down on the coffee table, which is now the right way around, he says, “I’ve been busy this morning. I’ve booked us both tickets to Tel Aviv.”

The previous year I wouldn’t have even known where Tel Aviv was. Now thanks to Myron, I do. That’s how things have changed.

2 Lorna

One of the very first things Myron ever said to me was that we should live together as we were both so ugly. While other people skirted around the issue, Myron’s directness took away my usual need for self-depreciation.

“Let’s face it,” he said, “we’re never going to get married, and who can afford a mortgage on their own these days?”

Myron had turned up at our football practice one day with his boots hanging around his neck by their laces. The rest of his kit was in a heart-shaped pink trolley case. Somehow Myron carried this off, although later it turned out it had been a dare.

“I’m usually a striker,” he announced, having got changed on the touchline, and in that first game he scored four times, the last one a diving header. The next week he was there again and this time he said he would play defence, ‘to give someone else a chance’ and I liked that about him, because it meant that he didn’t always want to be in the limelight.

The first time we got drunk properly together he did a moonie and pulled apart his cheeks.

“I’ve got two arseholes,” he said. I can still remember the way his face was peering at me, upside down through his open legs. His gaze was like that of a child, searching for affirmation, although the landlord of the pub we were in didn’t see it the same way. He said there was a phrase for what we were up to although he didn’t like to use it in polite company. Then he threw us out.

Apparently it was a medical condition, this bum thing. The technical word was ‘anal fissure’. The doctors could do something about it, he said, but it meant splitting him apart from his anus to the second hole and then stitching him back together.

“As there’s a chance it wouldn’t heal properly, I’d rather just live with it.”

I liked this about him too, like calling me ugly, it displayed a certain honesty. Besides, no one had ever shown me that much intimacy before, even if it was kind of gross. It was right there and then that I decided Myron could have the spare room.

Those first two months we lived together were the best of my life. While friends had to be home to their wives by a certain time or were rushing off to do things with the kids me and Myron could do pretty much as we pleased. Not that we lived like animals, not at all. Like Myron said, ‘if you’re gunna fart, then open the goddamned window’. That was his philosophy on life. Well, that is until he met Lorna.

She turned up one day at football practice. It wasn’t just that she didn’t stand with the other supporters, there were other reasons she stood out. It was the middle of summer but she wore this black coat that went all the way down to her ankles. When she walked you couldn’t see her legs move so she looked like a duck in a shooting gallery, backwards and forwards. It was not only strange, it was sinister.

It wasn’t until the end of the game when Myron ran up to her and put an arm around her that we even knew she was with him.

“She’s Jewish,” he told me later. “I’ve never met anyone Jewish before. I like her. She’s different.”

When the other lads found out they kept making jokes to Myron that he would have to get circumcised and someone bought him a cigar clipper and a bottle of antiseptic. He didn’t respond to any of this, only smiled in that way he was doing all the time now, like he was happy or something.

As Myron’s bedroom was right next to mine I could hear them fucking every night, the headboard banging against my wall and Myron making these groans. She was completely silent, something I thought about later. But back then the noises turned me on and I was confused, wondering if it was to do with her, or Myron, or her and Myron together. I remembered how Myron used to come into the bathroom and pee. She put a stop to that; she got a lock put on the door and said that we all had to use it.

That Myron was in love was obvious and I couldn’t begrudge him that. Still, when he told me his news he caught me off guard. It was right after one of those fucking sessions when he knocked on my door. He was dressed only in his boxers and his body was covered in a sheen of sweat. He looked like a seal just come up out of the water, but more attractive than that. He told me to budge up and slid under the duvet next to me.

“She’s done it,” he said. “She’s only gone and bloody done it.”

Right off I thought it was about his two arseholes, that Lorna had convinced him to go for the operation. She was going to have him split in two and then stitched back up again so he had one single arsehole just like any other guy. She looked like the kind of woman who would be into that kind of thing.

“We’re going to do it in Tel Aviv,” he said. “That’s in Israel.” This sounded logical to me. I wasn’t sure if it was something they would do on the National Health and going private was probably cheaper over there.

“I had wanted you to be best man,” he said. “But apparently Lorna’s already promised her brother. He’s a rabbi or something else big in the church.”

And that’s when I realised it wasn’t about his arse. Myron was getting married.

3 Tel Aviv

Myron is a bugger to get on the plane. I should have expected it after what happened last time. As a last ditch attempt I find these chairs that give you a massage if you put a pound in the arm and I sit him in one and insert a coin.

I try and think of an inspirational story but the only one I can think of is that time when Jesus walked on the water and I know this isn’t the time or the place.

Myron asks if I will massage his feet as this calms him down so I kneel in front of him and take off his shoes and socks. A security guard comes up and says naked flesh is not supposed to touch the ‘machinery’ not that Myron’s feet are anyway and an argument develops between us. By the time it’s over the pound has run out but Myron is at least distracted enough to get on the plane.

He doesn’t say a single word throughout the whole flight, except to order gin and tonics from the air hostesses. He jokes that they should perhaps bring him a bigger bottle except I know, perhaps, this is not a joke.

It is only after we have gone through customs, walked past the Israeli soldiers, looking relaxed yet kitted out with all kinds of weaponry, and are standing in the heat of the airport taxi rank that Myron holds out his passport.

“You see, that’s how easy it was. I got through on that.”

I flick through the pages, not knowing what he means.

“It’s not mine, is it? It’s my brother’s. They were never going to let me in, were they?”

Right after we have checked in at the hotel Myron wants us to go to the beach. He unpacks these loud Hawaiian shirts and shorts, a set for both of us and tells me to put them on. All the while he is drinking the tiny bottles of spirits from the mini-bar, unscrewing the lids and emptying them straight into his mouth.

Apart from the Hawaiian clothes he is acting like Martin Sheen from that scene in the hotel room in Apocalypse Now where he goes mad and I guess that’s what the clothes are for, to at least add a dimension of normality, although the clothes are pretty weird too.

We get in a taxi but only go a hundred metres or so to the end of the road. The driver turns to us and points. There is the sea and golden sands, like something from a postcard.

“You boys enjoy yourselves,” he says and then tells us how much the fare is. “Hey, a man’s gotta live,” he replies when Myron mumbles something.

There are bars on the beach front. I order food, a fish with all its eyes intact. Myron says he is not hungry and orders himself a beer. As my fish arrives he starts talking about God.

“If God is so good,” he says, “wouldn’t he sort all this out?”

We are sitting on a bar terrace under a brightly coloured canopy. There is a warm breeze off the sea. On the beach a group of young tanned Israelis throw a Frisbee back and forwards between them like its on a lead. I know that Myron isn’t referring to this itself but to Lorna. Still, I can’t argue with him.

I don’t know a great deal about God. They talked about him sometimes at school but I wasn’t that interested. All I can remember is turn the other cheek, Saul becoming Paul or the other way around and the stuff about Jesus and Christmas that everybody knows. It was never a big deal.

After we have finished eating Myron drags me up and we go marching along the front. He stops every now and again, puts his hands on his hips and look around. He has the rest of those bottles from the mini bar in his pockets and for every two or three he drinks he will pass me one.

Eventually he comes to a full stop.

“This is the place. June 2001, a suicide bomber mingled with a crowd of teenagers waiting to go into the night-club and blew himself up. He took twenty-one other people with him.”

He looks like he is about to burst into tears and it hits me for the first time what we are doing here. It’s a mission of expiation.

Later, as it gets dark we find ourselves outside a casino. The bouncers on the door look us up and down and you can see in their eyes they’re not going to let us in. Myron is both pissed and still dressed in his Hawaiian beach outfit. I am a bit pissed and dressed the same.

Myron, eloquent, ‘in vino bullshit’ as my dad used to say, tells them how we’ve come all the way from England and our bags were lost and these are the only clothes we’ve got. It doesn’t seem a likely story, because who would travel in Hawaiian shorts and shirts? However, they let us in. They probably figure we look harmless and if we are drunk enough will probably blow all our money.

I think that too, especially when Myron changes our stash of traveller’s cheques for chips and starts playing two tables at once. I work out I’ve got a three choices. I could try and get Myron to quit, I could stay and try and effect some kind of damage limitation. The third thing I could do is just let Myron get on with it.

This last one is the option I chose. Not because it’s the easiest, although it is, but because I figure Myron is working through something.

That same doctor who made the comment about me watching too many movies, said post-trauma can reveal itself in many ways. Myron had been through something that, I hope to God (and those were the doctor’s words) no one else will have to deal with and who can say what is the right way for him to deal with it?

So when Myron tells me to sit at the third table, to always quit at seventeen, never have more than four cards, and never bet an uneven number of chips I just go for it.

By two o’clock in the morning we are twenty thousand shekels up and that’s when one of the bouncers taps me on the shoulder and tells me we’ve got to leave. At first I think it’s because we’ve won too much money, or someone has complained about the way we are dressed, but then he points to Myron and I see that he has been sick right across his table, the vomit almost obscene across the pure green baize.

I think we will now, finally, go back to the hotel but Myron tells the cab driver to take us somewhere where there are women. The driver scowls, as if perhaps, Israel is not the kind of place that has women but we speed through neon lit almost deserted streets until we stop outside a bar.

Inside, a woman in a tall black wig asks us how many our party consists of and I hold up two fingers like I am testing her to see how drunk she is.

We are shown to a table way off in a corner somewhere. On a low stage is a band, or part of a band, and a female singer has her leg entwined around a microphone stand like she’s scared at any moment someone is going to drag her off and she’s clinging on for dear life. I excuse myself to go to the toilet and when I come back there are two cocktails in balloon-shaped glasses on our table.

“Mazel tov,” says Myron and lifts one of the glasses to his lips. I hope he won’t be sick again and wonder how long I’ll have to wait before I feel it’s ok to suggest to Myron we get out of this place.

As my eyes adjust to the gloom I make out a row of women sitting along the bar on high stools. They have either short skirts or long legs or a mixture of the two.

Occasionally a couple of the women will pair off and come to the space in front of the band. It is not a dance floor and what they do is not dancing. As one particular pair comes past our table Myron reaches out a hand and grabs one them by the arm.

“Sitdown,” he says, all one word, and then to me, “I’m going to take this girl home and fuck her.”

I start to apologise but the woman says as long as we pay up front we can do what we want. She has a soft face and hard eyes. Her accent is mid-Atlantic and it sounds like a place she’d rather be. I try and tell myself we are taking her out of here, but in reality, we are probably not taking her anywhere better.

Myron falls asleep in the cab leaving me and Miriam, the woman, to make small talk. Neither of us has any so I ask the cab driver a series of inane questions about Israel, the weather, the beaches, its famous sites and so on. I realise I sound like a jerk.

When we get back to the hotel Myron momentarily comes back to life. He tells Miriam he is going to fuck her again and even manages to get his shorts and pants down but then he trips and falls face down on the bed and starts to snore.

“So it looks like it’s me and you then,” says Miriam, not unkindly.

“Ah,” I say, “I’m not into all that. And besides I’m in love with Myron.”

Sometimes things are easier to tell strangers than they are to tell yourself. Miriam gives me this look which says ‘rather you than me’ and asks if we can get a drink. I call down to room service and order a bottle of champagne. I still have a wad of shekels in my pocket and feel we should celebrate something, if only my confession.

When the champagne arrives we take it out onto the balcony. I didn’t know we had one, nor that we could see the sea from it. The sun is coming up and already there are people walking their dogs along the beach, also some joggers, making big moon-walking strides.

Miriam tells me she is a Palestinian, working in Israel illegally, forced here after her family were killed by Israeli reservists on the occupied territories.

“These people were not even real soldiers. By day they are doctors, dentists, bakers. That’s who’s doing the killing. Doesn’t that surprise you?”

I’m sorry but not surprised. It might be the whole Myron thing, or the alcohol, or even just jet-lag. It might be to do with what Myron asked me about God earlier in the day. If you don’t believe in some supreme being, then there isn’t any pattern to anything, things just happen and you either have to accept them or not. This seems a little deep so I reach for the champagne bottle and pour us both another drink.

4 Lorna

As the wedding day approaches the fucking becomes more intense and Lorna more distant. Sometimes I find her in the kitchen, perched on a stool, smoking cigarettes down to the butt, one after another, like she is in a race.

One morning I am making bacon sandwiches and I offer her one. She just scowls and storms out. Later Myron tells me she is Jewish and so doesn’t eat pork. I knew that but had wanted to test her. I didn’t think her a very forgiving person and she’d proved me right. She could have just said, ‘no thanks’.

Myron says he wants it to be only me and him for the stag night. At one a.m, drunk, we take a taxi out to Heathrow. We had intended to lie on the grass and watch the planes fly over our heads. Apparently Myron had seen this in a film once. But when we get there there isn’t any grass and the taxi driver, an Algerian, starts to get nervous. He says if we keep stopping and starting they will mistake us for terrorists and arrest us, or worse, although he doesn’t go on to explain what ‘worse’ might be. We tell him to drop us off at arrivals and we go into the all-night Burger King.

“About what I said before,” says Myron, as if this is what we have been building up to all night. “You’re not ugly. Not really. You’ll meet someone.”
I like these words, except the ‘not really’ part. I wonder if I will look back on these comment about my looks as the the book ends that mark the beginning and end of our friendship.

I am too drunk to face a taxi and suggest we book into one of the airport hotels and watch porn on the tv. This seems decadent in itself and I try to win Myron over by telling him it’s not the sort of thing he’ll be able to do when he’s married.

“I will so,” says Myron. “Lorna is very open-minded.”

The hotel receptionist pushes a card reader towards us and says it’s a hundred and fifty pounds for the night and we have to vacate the room by ten. What with all the alcohol and the taxi and the burgers it’s more money than we have between us so we go to the hotel bar.

I list all the things I should do to Myron as it’s his stag night; tie him naked to a lamppost, shave off all his pubic hair, make him walk around the streets of Prague wearing only a thong. I tell him of this video I saw. One end of a rag is put up the stag’s bum. The other end is lit. He has to stand it as long as he can.

“Where did you see this?” asks Myron.

I shrug. “On YouTube, I think.”

Myron shakes his head. “Do you know I’ve never been to an airport before? They are a place of infinite possibilities. I mean right now we could go anywhere in the world and anything could happen.”

If these were his last words, they would be famous.

The actual wedding is a week later although Myron and Lorna are flying out three days earlier to finalise the preparations.

On the morning of his flight I don’t see Myron. I walk around the house opening cupboards, check under beds, looking for something but I don’t know what. Then at midday I get a call on my mobile. It’s from one of the lads in the football team. He tells me I should turn on the news. The tremor in his voice is unmistakable, even across the miles between us. I ask what’s going on but he just tells me to turn it on, now.

There on the screen is Myron, his face pale, his normally dishevelled hair neat, as if ordered by some other agency. This makes me realise more than anything that something is seriously wrong.

The words at first are difficult to take in and I have to flick between channels to make sure I am not the victim of some elaborate spoof. The facts, in the end, are simple.

Myron was arrested trying to board Flight AF1781 from London Heathrow to Tel Aviv with a bomb in his hand luggage. If the bomb had gone off it would have killed every passenger on board. No major terrorist group has yet claimed responsibility.

I spend all day glued to the television news channel and on Monday I call in sick at work. It isn’t until day four that there is any word of Lorna, although her real name is not Lorna and she wasn’t ever Jewish. The way she stares into the camera reminds me of that time I offered her pork.

It is a month before they let Myron out, his part as an innocent mule established. The first I know about it is when he knocks on the door one afternoon. He asks if he can have his old room back. I tell him it’s not his old room, it’s his current room; I haven’t touched anything in there since the day that he left.

“You know what,” he says, later and drunk that evening, and also the only thing he ever told me about what happened, “I really do think she loved me. She just loved her country more.”

It’s then that he starts reading all these books about the Middle East, and then that he has that sandwich board made up, the one that says ‘God is dead’. I don’t know that he means it, because I don’t think he ever believed in God anyway, but if it helps him then who am I to argue?

5 Operation

Shortly after we get back from Tel Aviv Myron decides to have that operation on his arse after all.

“It’s not through choice,” he says, “but the secondary hole has become infected. That can happen. Apparently the shit doesn’t know which way to go.”

He asks me if I will accompany him to the specialist’s and during the first session the professor draws a diagram of what he was going to do on a whiteboard.

“Didn’t you think,” said Myron after, as we were having a coffee in the hospital cafe, “that his drawing looked like a map of Palestine?”

I think of sitting with that prostitute on the hotel balcony and her story of her family killed by the Israelis.

“My proper arsehole,” says Myron, “was like Gaza, the secondary one right where Jerusalem would be. Where he’s going to cut is the occupied lands.”

Actually, since we have got back Myron has been a lot better, he has taken the lock of the bathroom door and started coming to football practice again.

“Sometimes you have to cut something apart before it can heal,” he says, enunciating the words carefully as if it is something he has been thinking about, superficial yet deep at the same time.

The day after the operation I turn up at the hospital with flowers and grapes and chocolates. I’ve gone the whole hog. But on getting there some kind of commotion is going on. There are security guards outside the main doors and all these people on the steps.

I ask someone at the back what is going on and he says, haven’t I heard, ‘Lorna’ (this is what the papers are still calling her) has just been given more life sentences than any other person in history and her former boyfriend is in this hospital. I realise all these people are journalists and they want to speak to Myron.

It takes me some time to get through. The nurses are suspicious even though they’ve seen me before and it is only after the matron, a kindly woman with whom I had had a conversation previously about Myron’s post-op care, intervenes that I am allowed in.

Myron’s in a room on his own, with a tv and a view over the car park. There’s kind of a cage over his middle and his legs are suspended in the air.

“If this is what anal sex feels like then I might give it a miss,” he says, grinning as I put down my booty next to him.

“I don’t think that during anal sex they actually cut you,” I say.

“‘They,” says Myron, “who the fuck are ‘they’?”

I laugh and know that Myron is back to his old self. So what if I love him and he might never love me back. My mum used to tell me that one day I would meet someone who it was my duty to look after and when I met them I would know who it was.

She said that if every human being just made it their job to look after one other human then that would put an end to all wars and badness, because if you loved someone you would never let them buy a gun, would you?

When I was older she said ‘buy a gun’ was just an example, but I think I knew what she meant.