An Evil Cradling (8 page)

The guard came back within a few moments. He asked this time whether I had registered with the Irish Embassy. I told him that I had, and he replied ‘We do not think so.’ I gave him the address and the precise location of the Irish Embassy and the name of the first secretary to the Irish Ambassador, with whom I had had dinner and occasional drinks. It seemed to make little impact. I doubt if he understood much of what I was saying. He rose, said ‘Goodbye’ and left.

Again I was alone. I passed the rest of the day listening to the noises of the people in the street, aware of the smells of the men in the next cells, and also an obnoxious and throat-choking smell of some kind of paint percolating into our prison from outside. I remembered once ™

having driven through Beirut and noticing a number of small car repair shops. Beirut is a great place for having your car stolen and seeing it the next day, driven by someone you might know. It would definitely be your car, but it would be a different colour and there

would be no number plates on it. There was little you could do to prove it was yours, and it was dangerous to try and claim it back.

As yet the different emotions of resignation, rebellion, of religious abandon, fear, despair, anger, frustration had not fully taken hold of me. I was to know them in their fullest and most profound sense much later. At the moment I was still riding that high wave, convinced that my time would not be long. It would be a matter, I supposed, of them authenticating my Irish identity, realizing that there was little they could obtain from me and then setting up some mechanism for releasing me without endangering themselves.

Hill Sunday came and went. I buoyed myself up thinking of cracks and jokes that my friends in Belfast would make when I returned. I’

thought also with some degree of anger that I had come to Lebanon to work for a couple of years, had been kidnapped as a British subject,locked up as a British subject, and questioned as a British subject. I had run away to this country to escape the consequences of British policy , in Ireland and here I was about to be sent back for all the wrong reasons I after only four months. It angered me and the anger kept away those dark moments which were yet to possess me. I was not discontented with my imprisonment so much as with what my release would mean: the loss of ajob, a feeling that whatever was to be my future had been 1 chosen for me. On Monday, after the usual ablutions, my kidnapper and aspiring I confidant came back. A social visit this time, not to interrogate me but ll . to give me some news. He seemed excited, telling me that the Irish Government had placed a large advertisement in the local Arabic newspaper with my photograph and a copy of my passport, appealing Mi to my kidnappers for my release. He laughed. He found it funny. I J laughed too, but I laughed out of relief that finally something was confirming my own insistence that I was Irish, and that it was I pointless to keep me for it would surely only complicate matters for 1 themselves. However my increasingly acute discontent was not to be relieved by this good news.

One day during those first weeks of my captivity, I was brought a 1 towel and a toothbrush, having asked for them on several occasions.

My mind reeled on receiving them, trying to understand what this meant. Did they want to keep me in good shape for my imminent release, or had they resolved to hold me for some time and keep me in condition to endure my imprisonment? I was soon to learn the 1 significance of the towel. It was not only for cleaning myself but it was also to become my shroud. It was a drape which I had always to put on my head and face so that I might not see them nor see anything around me when they were present. So began the real monotony of my imprisonment.

Each day became another day, unmarked by any difference from the day that preceded it or the day that would come after. Always it began with a door banging and the guards crying out to one another in Arabic; the sounds of the preparation of food, boxes or tins being opened; and then the opening and closing of doors and the shuffling footsteps of the men who occupied the cells next to mine fumbling their way to the bathroom. It was always an old man in filthy ragged pyjamas and broken and torn bedroom slippers who came to my cell.

Henceforth I was forbidden to look at him but saw only the door opening, the broken shoes, the legs of the pyjamas and heard his soft, feeble voice saying something to me in Arabic. I came to call him the ‘Shuffling Acolyte’. There was only this old man and perhaps one or two other guards. One of them was in charge, and gave the orders, more shouting than ordering. I always recognized the sliding gait of my old man. As if to hold the shoes upon his feet, he would slide himself forward, his feet in constant contact with the ground.

Sometimes he would hurry me and at other times he was content to smoke as long as I was content to wash or do whatever else I could find to do in the toilet. But I always knew when he was coming for me, that telltale shuffling slide outside my door. The other, much younger guard who seemed to be in charge, I called ‘The Grim Reaper’. These were the only two human beings with whom I had the barest contact.

The Grim Reaper was given his name because of his occasional outbursts of violence and his frequent beatings of some of the younger Arab prisoners. It was not unusual to hear him shouting abuse at one of the passing prisoners and continuing the scolding until he had worked himself into enough of a frenzy to make his abuse more physical. Either outside my cell door or in the cell of one of the Arab prisoners he would kick and beat and scream at some unfortunate. It seemed as the days passed that he had one favourite, a pet he enjoyed tormenting. I would hear this pathetic creature trying to run past The Grim Reaper on his way to and from the toilet, and then there would be the familiar flurry of abuse followed by the beating and the screaming.

The toilet was no more than a hole in the ground, and beside it a water tap, where I could fill a plastic jar to flush away whatever needed to be flushed away. It was a filthy place. I doubt if anyone had bothered to wash it in years and indeed, as I came to learn, no-one would want to wash it. We were prisoners, unwanted, unworthy and according to our jailors’ convictions, unclean. They would not enter a place which we had used to wash or relieve ourselves. But it was what lived in there amongst the rubbish and the filth that made those minutes in the toilet so disgusting. The place was alive with cockroaches, large and shiny. Their hard body armour and their claw-like legs made loud scratching noises as they moved. They scurried rather than crawled. Their speed and the hardness of their shell made it impossible to crush or kill them. The toilet was their nesting place. It was necessary on each visit to poke through the filth and chase these monsters out of our privy. I remember once trying to drown them in the water of the toilet hole and to my horror watching them climb unscathed from this pit of excrement and dart glistening around my feet again. Using the toilet was, because of this insect menagerie, a painful experience. I sat half squatting above the receiving hole while nervously watching every dark corner.

The toilet was screened off from the cell block by a crude and tattered curtain. I would sit at times and watch the daily procession of bodies, their faces draped with filthy towels, move in slow silence to and from this place. It was like some unholy ritual at which I was a secret observer. One day during that first week, I can’t remember precisely when, they took me for my first shower. The shower space was like the toilet, a cubicle of filth. It was fitted with a brace of pipes and an ancient shower head. The walls were of crude block construction, about shoulder-high. I noted that some of the blocks had fallen away and revealed a dark space beyond; through it I could hear more clearly the noises from the street, voices of children and occasionally what I took to be their mothers calling to them. What was immediately beyond the shower room I could not clearly see, nor could I risk looking. But it was possibly a way out. I took my time showering, wanting to establish in the minds of my guards that when I was brought again I could be left there for some ten or fifteen minutes, enough I thought to climb the piping and slither like one of those cockroaches through the opening. But it would have to wait. I was also still trying to convince myself that I would soon be released.

There was no point in pre-empting that freedom by making a failed escape attempt.

Showered and refreshed, and my head filled with plots and hopes, I was returned to my cell. I think now how much like one of those hateful cockroaches I had become. Crawling every day, fearful and half-blind, to the toilet hole and back to my corner. My food awaited me. It was the same as before and would be the same for many days to come: a round of Arab bread, a piece of cheese, a spoonful of jam, a boiled egg. The bread was my plate, the floor my table and my fingers became my fork. This was my morning and my only meal. The guards came only to wash us and to feed us, much as one does with animals, the terminally ill or the deeply insane.

During those days as I sat complementing hopes for release with plans for escape, I had occasional visits from my kidnapping friend.

He was always amicable. He seemed intrigued that I was relaxed, that I seemed unafraid and that I was able to laugh. He told me of his time in London and how his English teacher, who was of Scots origin, had called him a ‘Sassenach’. He didn’t understand what this word meant.

I tried to explain it to him. He became even more confused while I thought quietly to myself, I have another name for you, my friend.

On one of his last visits I recall him telling me that if any of the guards should beat or punch me I was to tell him. Instead I told him, filled with cocky self-confidence, that if anyone punched me I would most assuredly punch them back. He heard this I am sure not knowing exactly what my words meant, but feeling the confident force of them. He only looked at me for a moment and perhaps then the thought crossed his mind that maybe he should beat and frighten me to avoid such happenings. The moment passed, and nothing happened.

He had taken to wearing my new sunglasses. I boiled with anger, but concealed it. He seemed oblivious to the fact and I wondered what had become of my ring and my watch. Insignificant and inexpensive things had now become so vitally important to me. Parts of me had become parts of someone else. I wondered, as they walked about and looked at my watch, did they ask where it had come from and what had happened to its owner? Was there one split second of thought about me, as they twisted my ring or wound my watch?

Sometimes my kidnapper would ask me to give him English lessons, which I agreed to do, more out of boredom than any desire. I remember looking through the textbooks that he had brought with him for an appropriate lesson, and somehow I found the right one.

On the day I had decided to execute my plan, which I jokingly called ‘Operation Clean Getaway’, I was duly delivered to the shower cubicle. I waited some minutes for the guard to take himself back to the main cell-block. Slowly I turned on the water and rapidly put on my shirt. I remember stupidly rubbing my shoes against the calves of my legs to polish them. I must have thought I was going to ‘Come Dancing’. First, I tested the pipes, and they seemed secure. I reached up and placed one hand into the hole through which I hoped to disappear. With the other I reached up and clasped one of the pipes. I next had to lift my foot onto the lower bend of the pipes, then heave and push myself hand over foot into the hole. Thus positioned I waited, steeling myself and trying to calm my nervous breathing by taking huge gulps of air. I chose the number eleven in my head and began to count slowly. On reaching eleven I was supposed to disappear, head first like a rabbit down a hole. ELEVEN!!! Up and Away!!!

With an arthritic creak and groan the pipes came away from the wall and the bend snapped under my foot. Water roared and poured everywhere. Whoever coined the phrase ‘drowned rat’ must have had a vision of my state of dripping idiocy. But the flying cold water did nothing for the sudden panic that came charging over me. I expected to be immediately hauled from the shower and beaten senseless. But by whatever stroke of luck or Grace of God, no-one came. I hurriedly removed my shirt and then, holding my hand over the jetting pipe, like the Dutch boy on the dyke, shouted for the guards. After some minutes they heard and shouted back to me to wait. They had been oblivious to my predicament. Anger at their stupidity overcame my panic. I cursed loudly at them.

Eventually the guards reacted. Whether because of my shouting or the rush of water into the passage I can’t say. Suddenly voices were raised and feet were running towards me. The Shuffling Acolyte pulled back the curtain and for a moment stood stunned at the sight of this naked man clinging to the broken pipe joints while water showered and sprayed him from every angle. He muttered something and threw himself into the cubicle.

In his striped pyjamas and broken slippers he grabbed at me and then the pipes. The water displaced itself to another point and from there jetted on to us more fiercely. Like two clownish ballet dancers in a comic pas-de-deux, our underwater jig was outrageous.

Defeated, drenched and in desperation my dancing partner thrust my shirt and towel into my arms and bundled me Out of the shower.

His pyjamas hung from him like thick coats of dripping paint. My towel was thrown over my face, and I was quickly marched back to my cell, a dripping twosome leaving a wet trail behind them.

I sat, soaking into my mattress. My senses were like those jets of water, coming at me from every angle. Confusion, fear, frustration, laughter and panic all showered over me. A thought flashed through my head, a line from a hymn I recalled from my childhood: ‘I have tried the broken cisterns, Lord.’

Surprisingly, nothing was said to me and nothing done to me. All those fearful expectations amounted to nothing. And I got more angry with them because my escape had failed and they were too stupid to punish me for it. I think back on those spasms of anger and how they were helpful in crushing back the panic that was always waiting to take possession of me.