A motorbike revs outside. My heart leaps.

The rapid rising tremolo lifts like the opening notes of a siren. The choke kicks in. No, not this time. Just a dratted bike.

I turn over in bed, but it’s no use, I’m startled, primed to run.

It’s been a week since I left the war, fled to Egypt. The Wrong Way, everyone joked. Moses went up, you’re going down. I’m guessing Moses wasn’t a light sleeper.

After 30 days of war my mind narrowed to a thin central plank, the reptile brain that deals with sheer bloody survival and snaps at people for no reason.

My body bloated. Perhaps it’s the cortisol, they said. Cute excuse. The guilty truth is quick packets of potato chips – each crisp could be my last! – padding a thick ring of tummy blubber.

It’s been a week now of regular sleep. My mind gingerly expands to its outer rim. I can think again.

I was scribbling notes those 30-something days of Tel Aviv under fire, snatches of experience jotted raw. I planned to write it up, a compendium of upside-down underground life:

Girls in a bomb shelter comparing dates; the stiff-backed neighbour in a wheelchair who wouldn’t let me out the front door — ‘better lose a moment in your life, than your life in a moment’; the hyena laugh of Russian boys in backwards caps on an emergency stairwell, that fateful Passover eve when at sunset they fired six solid salvos; the morning in my dressing down, Shoshi the neighbours’ dog on my lap, and I was someone else.

Was a theme emerging? Will........

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