An Evil Cradling (29 page)

Slowly and carefully I began dropping the pieces of candle wax down the tube of silver paper.

‘I’m just beginning to understand how your devious mind is working, Keenan,‘John said slowly and I laughed, beaming widely.

With the tube packed tight with these crumbs of candle wax and the end of the plaited thread sticking out through them, my task was complete. ‘Abracadabra, the ignorant Irishman does it again; magic, just simple magic,’ I said holding up my improvised but complete candle. John crawled over to me. ‘Mmm … very smart, much smarter than I thought you were, Keenan, but will it work?’ and I laughed again. ‘Of course, you apathetic Englishman, anything I do works.’ ‘Go on then,’ he said. ‘Light the fucker.’ Delicately I lifted our lighted candle and touched the flame of it against the plaited thread which was now serving as a wick. It rose in flame and as it burned down began melting the broken and crumbled pieces of candle wax packed tight in the silver tube. It burned brightly. We sat and stared at it, hypnotized by the flame and glinting silver. At last we had our light. Quietly, calmly a sense of victory welled up in me and I thought to myself without saying it ‘Fuck them, they haven’t beat us yet. We can blot out even their darkness.’

The days that followed were spent plaiting threads and making wicks for our improvised candles. Furiously we grubbed about the cell scraping off the pieces of candle wax that had accrued over the time we spent eating in the dark. We began crumbling them and storing them. It was wise not to have a store of such improvised candles but to have the materials at hand. John had astutely begged for and been given a small battered tin ashtray. We now used this same ashtray for melting the crumbled wax and pouring it into the silver tubes. The hours we spent making these candles diminished the terror and monotony of this black timelessness.

Now we could exercise again and slowly we walked around this candle planted in the centre of the floor in a kind of ritual trance of silence. The candle flame seemed to still and calm the mind on those long silent walks. In that soft half-light we would imagine ourselves walking in some favourite place. Occasionally, taking it in turns, we would describe it to each other. Perhaps along a riverside, sometimes walking along a windswept beach or occasionally climbing up some hill that had been a childhood place of adventure.

On one of these walks pacing slowly around the single candle, John calmly asked me ‘Do you know I am a Count of the Holy Roman Empire?’ I walked along behind him and thought about this. I knew by the manner in which he had addressed me that this was not a piece of John’s lunacy. ‘You’re what?’ ‘I’m a Count of the Holy Roman Empire,‘John said, with some pride swelling his words. Still calmly and slowly pacing along behind him, I said ‘You’re off your half-empty head, my son. ‘John stopped, turned around and with the same pride and comic arrogance said ‘No, really it’s true, I am a Count of the Holy Roman Empire, and furthermore,’ he continued, ‘you pathetic little piece of nothingness, I think you should begin addressing me as befits my station.’ ‘I’ll station my foot up your backside McCarthy, if you don’t start talking some sense.’ We both began laughing, feeling that tide of comic and foul abuse welling up. We loved this game. It was like fencing with wooden sticks. But it was competitive and fierce and we found phrases and words and long sentences of the most elaborate invective thrusting out from us, driving us deeper into laughter. ‘My dear dog-eared and dopey-dick,’

John spat out at me, ‘that is not the way in which you should be addressing me in light of what I have just told you.’ ‘I’ll address you with a urine shower if you don’t cut this out.’

We were laughing again and this time we stopped and sat down.

John explained how his brother, who worked as a Queen’s Herald, had examined the history of the family. With a great show of enthusiasm and pride John claimed his descent from the McCarthys of County Kerry and how one of them had at some point in their history been dubbed a Count of what was then the Holy Roman Empire. I listened and was as fascinated as John had been at my stories of Belfast.

As he finished this long saga I admitted that I did believe him. I turned to him, looking him straight in the face and with a cheeky grin affirmed to him ‘I’ll tell you one more thing you are, John.’ He raised his eyes. ‘You’re a shilling-taking shithead.’ .,,

He began laughing again. ‘What do you mean, my old son?’ he asked. I explained to him how with his origins in the McCarthy clan in County Kerry, his now proudly held English Protestant citizenship made him a type of turncoat. ‘You’ve taken the Queen’s shilling … You went fleeing out of Ireland when times were tough, took the Queen’s shilling, changed your faith and now look where it’s got you.

That will teach you to sell your heritage for a mess of porridge.’ He was laughing and I saw him studiously take on board this new term, ‘shilling-taker’. ‘Shilling-taker,’ he said, trying to get my Belfast accent. ‘Shilling-taker.’ We were both pleased and delighted with this new term that had entered into our repertoire and would remain a constant source of abuse and of affection.

When we were not engaged in our marathon domino games or our candle-making or our discussion of John’s ancestry we found ourselves talking of how men could do such things as had been done to us. What was in a man that allowed him to lock up another human being for long periods of total darkness -a human being he did not know or understand, who had given him no offence, nor committed any crime against him. We could never answer the questions we asked ourselves. But as we talked and tried to understand how these men could ever justify their actions, I recall saying to John ‘I understand it, I accept it, even though I do not condone it… I think I understand it.’

John looked back at me, puzzled, and quick as a flash I said to him ‘Well in another sense now you know what it is like to be Irish.’ He knew what I was hinting at, for so many people in the history of Ireland had lost their lives or liberty and now here was this English man undergoing something of the agony that people were still suffering in English jails.

Another morning came. I lay in the dark silence waiting for my friend to wake, and thought back on the sleepless night I had undergone. Half asleep but with my mind working overtime I had jg suddenly opened my eyes, and stared into the blackness, listening to the silence made louder by the darkness around me. For a moment I thought how do I know I am alive? I felt my skin and felt my face and it gave me no assurance. I could have died in the night. I might be dead now. Do even the dead imagine living? I see nothing and hear nothing and feel only my flesh. What does it tell me? This kind of self? indulgent iny? trospection fascinated me, yet made me wary. Was my mind so empt Was I left only with this futile curiosity? For some minutes I lay and thought again about what happens when there is nothing more to think about. Do I reach the edge, and feeling the intoxication of its darkness, throw myself hungrily into it? Would a mind so completely empty feel any pain?

I struggled to convince myself that by thinking such thoughts my mind was not empty. Even if it was approaching a vacuum these questions denied that there ever was or ever could be a real emptiness of mind. I somehow convinced myself that, in some way that I could not explain, the mind could never become a void. I repeated these words lest that insidious panic should take hold again. The mind is endless. There is no vacuum in the mind.

I heard John wake and quickly seized the opportunity to move myself out from this obsessive introspection. ‘Good morning, your Eminence. What may I order you for breakfast today?’

It was later that day, as we sat huddled beside our homemade candle playing our usual dominoes, that the light suddenly, blindingly returned. We both started up, dazzled. We looked at one another and held one another’s stare and then both simultaneously jumped up raising our hands in the air, jumping around in circles. The light was back on! ‘How many days do you think it’s been, John?’ Looking at him now in the full light, wondering strangely had he changed any. ‘I don’t really know,’ he answered. ‘Seven, eight days, now that I think of it it’s hard to remember.’

But this surprise of light was to be topped by something which made this place we called the House of Fun funnier and more insane than we could ever have imagined. Days passed with their usual monotony. But then one day we heard the guards coming to unlock the cell. As usual we pulled the blindfolds down. We were both given new shorts and new T-shirts and told to dress. The cell closed and we looked at each other, puzzled. ‘I am sure we can’t be going anywhere, not in this get-up anyway. What can it mean?’ John asked. I simply shrugged. ‘It doesn’t really matter,’ I said: ‘At least it’s good to have them, the elastic has gone out of my shorts and I have to tie them in a knot to hold them up they’ve had so many washes, but they are more often around my ankles than around my ass.’ Without further conversation we changed and sat down thinking nothing more would happen that day.

We had guessed wrong and the key was turning in the padlock again. ‘Come, come’ a voice said to John and I heard him lift himself off his mattress and walk out into the passage. The door closed and I waited. After some minutes I was also walked to the guards’ room. It was our habit to tie the blindfold loosely so that we could look down underneath it at our feet as we walked. Now as we stood in the guards’

room I looked down and saw spread out on the floor the edge of a new bed cover. The creases were still in it and sitting on top were bowls of fruit and nuts, oranges and apples. I tried to turn my head slowly to take in the area several feet around me and caught sight of other bowls with similar fruit and nuts laid out around the perimeter of this bedspread stretched on the floor. Two hands gently pushed my shoulders. ‘Sit, sit’ a voice said quietly and I sat down. I could hear John’s voice across from me say something to one of the guards.

‘What is this?’ he was asking. We both feigned surprise for we knew what it was.

It was John’s birthday. These terrorists were giving him a birthday party. One of the guards switched on a cassette player playing some piece of classical music and a few other guards arrived and talked excitedly amongst themselves. Then we heard the voice of the officer Said. He seemed angry and switched off the cassette. For this zealot, music was absolutely forbidden. With much enthusiasm we passed the next ten minutes eating our nuts and some fruit and then great slabs of birthday cake were set before us. We ate and tried to speak with the guards who were sharing our birthday meal. I tried to visualize the situation: here were five or six men with guns in their waist bands and Kalashnikovs stashed against the wall, sitting here eating this food, trying to talk normally with us as we sat blindfolded, fumbling with the food that we could not see properly, trying to peel the fruit or to break the shell from the nuts. The House of Fun was restored to its lunacy and the black comedy was began again. John must have been reading my mind. From across the birthday feast I heard him politely ask ‘Excuse me, do you think I could have a photograph of this?’

Said, the officer, barked some order and into this bizarre scene there came a chorus of Arab voices singing a discordant harmony of’Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday John, Happy Birthday John.’ Our laughter was nervous and forced, though we felt unafraid.

This would take some time to come to terms with. When we had finished the meal and washed it down with a cup of Pepsi we were raised from the floor. A handful of nuts and some boiled sweets were placed in our hands and I began my walk back to the cell. The door closed behind me and I sat waiting in confusion for John. I expected him to be brought in immediately after me, but I was left to wait for fifteen or twenty minutes before I heard the door opening and John entering.

I lifted my blindfold and John standing above me raised his. ‘Okay, birthday boy,’ I said ‘what else did you get?‘John raised his eyes and his outstretched hands in a very typical Arab manner. He answered ‘You’re not going to believe this, you’rejust not going to believe what this bunch of fruitcakes have just tried to do.’ I waited for him to continue. ‘Well then come on, spit it out, what happened?’ I asked. John began to explain and as his story unfolded my laughter unfolded with it. ‘They took me a little way down the passage, then spread a blanket on the floor and told me to lie down. I tell you, Brian, I was a bit panicky … I lay down on my back and Said said to me “Don’t worry, nothing bad, nothing bad happen…” I wasn’t too sure about nothing bad going to happen… I’ll be honest, Brian, for a moment I thought these bastards were going to sexually abuse me.’ At that statement I stopped laughing for a moment and quickly said to him ‘You must be joking, who would want to sexually abuse a piece of rubbish like you!’ He smiled and continued his story.

‘I just lay there, I didn’t know what these cretins were going to do.

Next thing I heard all the guards come around me. Said was giving orders and I didn’t know what the hell was going on. Then I felt their hands reach under my legs, my backside, then hands on my back and at the back of my head as I lay there. I was beginning to panic I can tell you. Then they started humming something and then they started laughing and Said started shouting and they were quiet for a while with their hands under me and then they were all laughing again. I don’t know what I was feeling at that time but I just wanted to get away from those crazy creeps.’ ‘Well, what was it all about then?’ ‘You won’t believe it, you just will not believe this.’ ‘Come on, John, stop fucking around and tell me.’ ‘Well it’s simple,’ he answered. ‘They were trying to levitate me.’

I looked at him dumbfounded. ‘They were trying to what?’ ‘I told you you wouldn’t believe it. They were trying to levitate me.’ I rolled back on my mattress, the laughter choking me. ‘Did it work, John-boy?’

‘Did it hell,’ he answered. I was laughing again. ‘Well I suppose you can always tell your grandchildren that you were levitated on your birthday by a bunch of Arab gunmen.’ ‘No-one would believe it,’ he said dolefully. ‘You bet,’ I said. ‘The inmates of the asylum are the keepers of the sane.’