An Evil Cradling (38 page)

Swatting flies, talking to them as they lay crippled and crawling about the floor. In that moment I witnessed all the obsession, fixation, and infantilism that commands the mind of a man as disturbed as Said.

I felt again a kind of pity for him, but I would not let it overwhelm me. I kept it in check. Angrily I wrenched at the chain. Said looked at me. ‘Break it, break it … you want to break it.’ His malignant comments mocked me and I withdrew in silence, and grinned broadly. I felt him sit and watch me. This was another kind of battle.

For some reason Blake’s aphorism swam into my head: ‘The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction’ and with that thought I silently hummed to myself’Bring me my bow of burning gold, bring me my arrows of desire’, and at the same time pulsating in the back of my head came the words ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil’. The tension between us was fiercely charged. Something broke. I heard Said strut off barking orders to the guards in the other room. I never saw or heard him again.

The next few months were a blur of routine. Morning, toilet, return, lock up, read a book if you haven’t read it before and if you have, read it again. Talk if you can find something to talk about. The sunlight coming in had lost its magic. We were, after all, constantly blindfolded.

It had been this way now for many, many months. We both began to feel a kind of unresolved irritation. We both knew it was caused by the tininess of the space we were in. The brightness of the light reinforced our confinement. Now we thought that those long months in the dark had been less exasperating. In the darkness you can’t see the walls. In the darkness the mind can dream, but in light, you see the absolute limitation of your condition and can measure it in inches. After months and months it hammers into the back of your mind and causes pain and distress at the most unlikely moments. We each began to sink back into periods of manic depression. We would recognize them in each other and attempt to pull one another up from their horrid depths. But they would come back again, for longer periods. In these states the mind would fly ofFleaving us dizzy, trying to find our balance.

Abed had begun his old tricks again, walking us to the toilet with our hands tightly twisted, high up our backs, and a pistol jammed in the side. Our response was always the same: laughter. His reaction was always to inflict more pain. He had become more frightened. My playful wrestle with Saafi and my confrontation with Said must have made him even more wary than he had been before. Daily he abused us and on occasions came into the room to wave his gun and give unnecessary orders. We smiled and complied.

The stress we were undergoing in such a tiny space was making it more difficult for us to contain ourselves. My loathing of Abed would not let me rest. His antagonism fuelled mine and on occasions I would turn to John and say ‘I can’t take much more of this … If that little bastard keeps this up I am going to push him through that fucking window.’ John laughed ‘Don’t do that Brian,’ he would continue.

‘That’s what he’s waiting for; don’t give him the pleasure; that’s what he wants you to do … start something, say something, he is looking for an excuse.’ ‘I know,’ I would answer, ‘I’m just finding it harder to contain myself.’ John, reassuring and comradely, placed his arm around my shoulder ‘Don’t give in to him Brian, don’t give him what he wants.’ And I answered ‘I know, you blue-blooded bastard, you’re always right.’

For a long time now, John and I had played a game. ‘The double voice’ we called it. When things were going badly or there was something to be angry about I would be the one to be angry and John would come echoing in behind with sweet reason. The guards would be confused, they would understand that we were angry, but also that we weren’t angry. They would either leave us in peace or do something about whatever it was that we were complaining about. It worked for a long time. It allowed us to give in to our anger without creating a situation which would rebound badly on us. But this confinement was wearing us down. The anger was now more real.

There was less sweet reason to temper our anger. Controlling the game became more and more difficult.

Waking early one morning, always looking to catch that first sunlight come streaming through the glass panel, I lay waiting. John had been dreaming. His dream had made him moan, those fearful moans none of us can control. His feet lashed out and kicked me. I wondered what he was dreaming and let the dream die in him, rather than wake him in the middle of it. He was sleeping peacefully now. I lay and watched the sun begin to stream through the glass. An old Arab saying flooded into my head with that first sunlight, ‘Rise early, for the hours before sunrise are taken from paradise.’ In the silence of that slow, soft first light, I heard feet approaching me. I lay still and untroubled. It was Abed, I could tell from the footsteps. He stood looking in at me. I was passive, unmoved. I heard him rattle some n chains just outside the door. He went off; I sat up now to think and Tl tried to find in my mind a beginning for this day. His feet slowly returned. Abed stood staring at me. I sat soaking in the silence of the light.

He barked an order ‘Open the window!’ Quietly I said ‘You open the window. I do not want it opened.’ ‘Open the window!’ ‘Fine,’ I said, and got up slowly, walked my four paces to the end of the room, stretched up on my toes, opened the window, walked back, and pulled the covers over me. The morning air even with that first light was always chilly. ‘Close the window,’ came Abed’s voice again.

Calmly I said ‘You want it open, I have just opened it.’ ‘Close the window,’ he ordered. I got up slowly, walked to the window, closed it and went back to bed thinking that that would be the end of his abuse for the next few hours. But no. ‘Open the window!’ I answered again passively ‘I have just opened the window and I have just closed the window, what do you want? When you make up your mind, do it yourself!’ Something was going to happen. Someone would have to give in, but I had done my share of it. I had opened and I had closed this window for no purpose other than to satisfy this man’s ego. ‘Open the window.’ I got up, flinging back the blankets, walked to the window, opened it and went back to bed, pulling the blankets back around me to find some sleep, hoping that he would go away. ‘Close the window.’ I lay still. ‘Close the window.’ Abed’s voice was urgent.

My urgency met his, I thrust back the blankets again, walked slowly to the window, reached my hand up and with every ounce of muscle, power and strength in it flung the window closed. It slammed with a loud bang.

Abed charged into the cell, punching me viciously in the stomach, kicking at my feet. This was it, I had waited, it had come and I could not resist. I reached out. In that tiny cell the closeness of his body allowed me to put him where I wanted him, I thrust him against the wall, my hands about his throat, my eyes blinded more by fury than the towel around them. I began not to squeeze, but to hold him against the wall, so that he might know what it was like to be trapped.

He screamed. In ran Bilal, the big butcher’s son, and pulled me from Abed, thrusting me into a corner. I heard Abed run out of the cell, shouting, yelling. Bilal held me down. I was serenely calm. I felt nothing. Abed came charging back and ran into the room as Bilal quickly squeezed past him. He began then to do what he had wanted to do for so long. He had a brush pole and began beating and beating and poking the brush pole into my chest, into my genitals, beating my thighs, my back, my shoulders, my neck, but careful, so careful of my face. Every part of me sang with this dull thud that slapped against my skin. He continued and I could only squat in the corner. John, anxious now, shouted to him to stop, not seeing but knowing what was happening. He shouted out ‘Stop it, Abed.’ Abed turned and began flailing him about the body and then, turning back on me squatting in the corner, began again, filled with an uncontrollable fury, beating everything in the room. The man was no longer a man but a crazed animal. And so the blows rained down, more hurtful because they were so uncontrolled, more frightening because you never saw them and felt them only after the blows had landed. After several minutes, how many I don’t know, time seemed so long, he stopped, exhausted, and ran off shouting.

John and I sat silent, shocked by the assault and desperately worried about one another, but not being able to see the extent to which we had been hurt. Before we could collect our thoughts, Abed returned with Bilal. I was grabbed by the hair, thrown down on my face. A heavy foot stood on my neck. Abed’s hands grabbed my wrists, jerked them high up behind my back, laced chains and padlocks round them. Still shouting, he wrenched up my feet and chained my wrists to them. My feet were in the air, the soles pointing upward.

I felt my whole body strain and scream at being held and chained in this position, every muscle of my shoulders, chest and thighs pulling against one another. Then he began; down hard and solid came the brush pole across the soles of my feet, again and again the blows rained down. John cried out ‘Stop it, Abed, stop it,’ but he could not stop. He squealed something in Arabic and still he flogged me. At first I felt nothing, the shock of what was happening numbed me. This was the ritual Arabic punishment. The blows kept coming down and coming down, my swelling feet only felt the sting of them. That slow soreness began, and again he kept hammering the blows, like a crazed axeman at a log that would not split. He chopped and chopped and beat and flailed against my feet. The pain was excruciating and I believed somehow that he must stop, that he could not continue this, it must end. Still he beat me. For a full fifteen minutes, screaming and beating down. I was consumed by pain. I moaned with each blow. I prayed desperately for it to end but I knew it would not. His excitement was beyond control. At times I thought he was almost singing. His rage was spitting out of him like fireworks as the shaft nailed down.

Somewhere in my head as I prayed and ached and moaned, I heard these words ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ It was so with this man. Nothing in him could control himself. He was not even beating me, he was beating something bigger than me. Maybe he was beating himself. And then I heard it.

A noise that I have never heard before, nor since, nor do I ever want to hear it again. I know only that it came from me, yet it did not come from me. It was a cry so awful and so excruciating, which came from some part of me, but was not willed by me. It was a primordial sound, fusing every moment of anguish in me. Where it came from I don’t know, only that I was the vehicle through which it passed. That one awful anguished scream. Suddenly it was over. He stopped. It was as if that cry that came through me had silenced him.

Abed knelt down beside me. Taking a fistful of my hair, he jerked my head back off the mattress and spitting into my ear said ‘You want to fight, you want to fight, you want to fight.’ I could only spit back at him half choking with fear, with rage, ‘Kill me, kill me.’ Abed stood up, his feet upon my neck. He muttered something in Arabic. I heard Bilal, the boy who wanted to learn to dance, say to him ‘Enough … enough … enough.’ Abed kicked me and left.

A long silence. John was choked with pain and with his own horror of what had happened. He couldn’t speak. I lay trying to remember every moment of that beating to take hold of it before it took hold of me. ‘Jesus, are you okay? Brian, are you okay?’ I could feel John’s voice trembling with concern. ‘Yeah,’ was all I could answer. Across the hall Abed was screaming at the Americans. There was silence.

Twenty minutes later, while John and I fumbled to find reassuring, supporting and comforting words, Abed returned. He had with him a television. He set it down in the far corner of the cell, and switched it on; as he walked past John he touched his shoulder. He left. I lay chained with my feet in the air, my arms tearing at the shoulders.

‘Brian, they’re not going to leave you like this all night?’ ‘Maybe,’ I said, dreading it, dreading it more than anything. I wondered what would happen if they did. It would be impossible to lie like this all night. John tried to watch the film, confused, there were no words.

I lay in silence, wondering how long I could bear this. So many things come out of pain. They become in their own way a fascinating kind of balm. But I knew the mind alone could not overcome the pain of lying stretched like this. I turned to John: ‘You’re going to have to bring the bottle over and hold me while I have a piss.’ ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how you’re going to do it chained up like that.’ ‘I need to do it, John, nervous reaction … It’s either that or flood this mattress and sleep in it all night. I don’t want to give that little bastard another excuse. Can you lift me up and point percy at the bottle for me,’ I said, searching out a joke. This was a most embarrassing favour that I was asking and John with great tenderness was fully compliant. As he struggled to try to turn and lift me, Abed came back. ‘What are you doing?‘John, now fiercely defiant, said ‘Abed,’ his voice was calm but there was a steel in it, ‘I need to help him.’ John tried to lift me and arrange me. Abed saw that John was not afraid of him and he knew he could not do this again. He came back with a plastic bottle, and removed the chains.

I sat back against the wall, relieved, waiting for the slow pain of the bruises to begin and waiting for that bone soreness to numb me.

Abed’s voice spoke slowly but urgently to John behind me. ‘He made me do it, he made me do it, he bad man, he bad bad man, he made me do it.’ He was pleading.

Abed was on the very edge of emotional collapse and exhaustion, just as I was. I felt his tears in the hot sting welling up in my own eyes, but I would not cry. I knew that in that moment he was very close to me in everything he felt and thought. John’s voice was now completely calm and authoritative: ‘No, Abed, you wanted to do it … You planned to do this thing … You wanted to do it… This man has done nothing, you have done this thing because you wanted to do it.’ Abed was silent. John had him, his words held Abed hypnotically and then with concern for me, born out of huge anger and compassion, he administered the coup degrace: ‘There was another man in the prison who beat us many times… He wanted to do it, just like you, Abed.’