Trigger Warning

Morrison hesitated. Then he said, in a rush, ‘We went through a youth hostel, down to an underground, um . . .’ He lost the word. ‘Water storage place. From Herod’s time. They stored the rainwater underground, so it wouldn’t evaporate. A hundred years ago someone rowed a boat all the way through underground Jerusalem.’

The lost word hovered at the edge of his consciousness like a hole in a dictionary. Two syllables, begins with a C, means deep echoing underground place where they store water.

‘Well, then,’ said his neighbour.

‘Right,’ said Morrison.

The Heath was green and it rolled in gentle slopes, interrupted by oak and beech, by chestnut and poplar. He imagined a world in which London was divided, in which London was a city crusaded against, lost and won and lost again, over and over.

Perhaps, he thought, it isn’t madness. Perhaps the cracks are just deeper there, or the sky is thin enough that you can hear, when God talks to His prophets. But nobody stops to listen any longer.

‘Cistern,’ he said, aloud.

The green of the Heath became dry and golden, and the heat burned his skin like the opening of an oven door. It was as if he had never left.

‘My feet hurt,’ Delores was saying. And then she said, ‘I’m going back to the hotel.’

Their guide looked concerned.

‘I just want to put my feet up for a bit,’ said Delores. ‘It’s just all so much to take in.’

They were passing the Christ prison shop. It sold souvenirs and carpets. ‘I’ll bathe my feet. You two carry on without me. Pick me up after lunch.’

Morrison would have argued, but they had hired the guide for the whole day. Her skin was dark and weathered. She had an extraordinarily white smile, when she smiled. She led him to a café.

‘So,’ said Morrison. ‘Business good?’

‘We do not see as many tourists,’ she said. ‘Not since the intifada began.’

‘Delores. My wife. She’s always wanted to come here. See the holy sights.’

‘We have so many of them here. Whatever you believe. Christian or Muslim or Jew. It’s still the Holy City. I’ve lived here all my life.’

‘I suppose you must be looking forward to them sorting all this out,’ he said. ‘Er. The Palestinian situation. The politics.’

She shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter to Jerusalem,’ she said. ‘The people come. The people believe. Then they kill each other, to prove that God loves them.’

‘Well,’ he said. ‘How would you fix it?’

She smiled her whitest smile. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I think it would be best if it was bombed. If it was bombed back to a radioactive desert. Then who would want it? But then I think, they would come here and collect the radioactive dust that might contain atoms of the Dome of the Rock, or of the Temple, or a wall that Christ leaned against on his way to the Cross. People would fight over who owns a poisonous desert, if that desert was Jerusalem.’

‘You don’t like it here?’

‘You should be glad there is no Jerusalem where you come from. Nobody wants to partition London. Nobody goes on pilgrimages to the holy city of Liverpool. No prophets walked in Birmingham. Your country is too young. It is still green.’

‘England’s not young.’

‘Here, they still struggle over decisions made two thousand years ago. They have been fighting about who owns this city for over three thousand years, when King David took it in battle from the Jebusites.’

He was drowning in the Time, could feel it crushing him, like an ancient forest being crushed into oil.

She said, ‘Do you have any children?’

The question took Morrison by surprise. ‘We wanted kids. It didn’t work out that way.’

‘Is she looking for a miracle, your wife? They do, sometimes.’

‘She has . . . faith,’ he said. ‘I’ve never believed. But no, I don’t think so.’ He sipped his coffee. ‘So. Um. Are you married?’

‘I lost my husband.’

‘Was it a bomb?’

‘What?’

‘How you lost your husband?’

‘An American tourist. From Seattle.’

‘Oh.’

They finished their coffee. ‘Shall we see how your wife’s feet are doing?’

As they walked up the narrow street, towards the hotel, Morrison said, ‘I’m really lonely. I work at a job I don’t enjoy and come home to a wife who loves me but doesn’t much like me, and some days it feels like I can’t move and that all I want is for the whole world to go away.’

She nodded. ‘Yes, but you don’t live in Jerusalem.’

The guide waited in the lobby of the hotel while Morrison went up to his room. He was, somehow, not surprised in the least to see that Delores was not in the bedroom, or in the tiny bathroom, and that the sheets that had been on the bed that morning were now gone.

His dog could have walked the Heath forever, but Morrison was getting tired and a fine rain was drizzling. He walked back through a green world. A green and pleasant world, he thought, knowing that wasn’t quite it. His head was like a filing cabinet that had fallen downstairs, and all the information in it was jumbled and disordered.

They caught up with his wife on the Via Dolorosa. She wore a sheet, yes, but she seemed intent, not mad. She was calm, frighteningly so.