Dead I Well May Be (19 page)

Here they come, Scotchy said simply, and they rushed us. I took a swipe at some boy, but before I could do anything I’d been kicked in the back and I was on the ground. I got a kick in the head and the
legs. I felt my sandals getting pulled off. Someone was trying to get my T-shirt. I curled into the fetal position and waited. The guards would come. The kicks came in again and again. There was no pain at all. Nothing. I bundled myself tighter and moved my arms down to protect my ribs. Someone started pulling my hair. Dust was in my throat. A foot came onto my neck and I grabbed the ankle and bit into it until I got bone. A belt buckle thumped me in the ear, but still I bit into the ankle. I could taste the blood now. A bare foot kicked me on the forehead and I went backwards over my head and scrambled up and found that I was standing. I hit the guy next to me with my elbow and I felt his nose break. There was a whistle and through the dust I could see the men run back to their cells.

Now I started to hurt.

I’d been scraped all over my back, and despite the head kicks, that was the worst. I’d bitten my tongue and I spat blood. I felt an arm underneath mine and Scotchy yelling at me. I couldn’t understand a word. He yelled, and then he saw that I wasn’t getting it and he showed me. Andy and Fergal lay flat out on the ground and he wanted me to help get them up. The guards were yelling at us to get back in the cells. It was a fucking joke. I bent down and lifted Fergal under the arms, but it was impossible. I slipped, went on my arse. Before I could try again, the guards were there screaming at us and hitting us with billy clubs. They shoved us back towards our cell. I was shouting, but they cut me off with a dig in the mouth. They pushed us inside and beat us down and locked our ankles into the ring bolts.

A minute later, two guards dragged in first Fergal and then Andy and locked them in too. They were both unconscious. All of us had been robbed of our shoes. Andy had been in nice new high-tops that Scotchy and I had bought for him at the airport. He’d put up a real fight to keep them. He was covered in dust and blood. They seemed to have got his T-shirt, too, but I couldn’t tell, because my eyes were stinging. Fergal lay beside me, though, his polo shirt torn off him. Scotchy was bent over and hacking now.

Jesus, I said.

I closed my eyes, and when I opened them it was night. My sides were on fire and my back felt like I’d been flailed. There’d been a noise all this time, and I realized it had been Scotchy, as close as he could get
to the door, yelling for medical attention. The guards came in and beat him quiet, and it stayed that way until morning. I shivered through the night, and when I woke I dry-heaved for fifteen minutes.

Bruce, Bruce, Scotchy was whispering.

Name’s not Bruce, I managed.

Bruce, Scotchy said.

What?

Are you ok?

Aye, no. Aye, I suppose, I said.

Scotchy crawled over to me. He was right at the limit of his foot chain and his whole body was stretched out so he could talk to me.

Bruce, are you hurt bad?

Not bad, I said.

Fergal’s in and out of sleep, Scotchy said. He’s ok. But Andy’s in a bad way. I think his ribs are broken. Do you know anything about first aid?

I shook my head, but we both crawled over to Andy anyway. Fergal was moaning on his side. He was in terrible pain, but at least he knew he was in pain.

Andy had been stripped to his boxer shorts. He breathed erratically in shallow, desperate little breaths, blood in his spittle. His face gaunt, horribly pale. He wasn’t conscious, but he wasn’t out, either. His lips formed words, but there was no sound. I looked at his chest. His ribs didn’t seem right, and I could see blood beneath the skin, pooling there at his lungs.

Jesus Christ, Scotchy, I think he’s dying, I said.

Scotchy looked at me, one eye closed over, his face puffy and blue.

When they come in to give us dinner, you pull the guard down and I’ll wrap my chain around his neck. We’ll say we’ll kill him unless they get a doctor for Andy, Scotchy said, cold and deliberate.

I nodded. I really didn’t see how it could work, but what choice did we have?

I heard you yelling, I said.

Aye, they just come in and shut you up, Scotchy murmured.

We waited and girded our strength, and the light started to come in the little cell window. We heard the whistle blow and the prisoners get let out. The afternoon became very hot and the day dragged by.

Andy’s lips were parched, and he was paler than before. Each breath was a tremendous effort. We crawled over to him.

Andy, if you can hear me, it’s going to be ok. We’re going to get you some help, I said.

Aye, we are, big lad, we’re not going to let you down, Scotchy agreed.

The afternoon ended and finally the door opened. I rugby-tackled the guard, but he kicked me off easily and I sprawled against the back wall, my chain going taut and almost dislocating my ankle.

Doctor, doctor, doctor, doctor, Scotchy was pleading and pointing at Andy.

The guards ignored him, left the food and water, and went out. We tried to give Andy some water, but he choked when we brought it to his lips.

The guards came back for the wooden bowls, and we grabbed some handfuls of rice.

Dying, morto, morto, I yelled, hoping they would understand. The guards looked at Andy for a moment, then closed the door. They went away, talking, and we held out hope that they would send someone. We waited and waited, but no one came.

In the evening, Fergal was fully awake and doing a little better, and we took turns cradling Andy’s head in our laps. We didn’t know what to do. None of us had any medical experience. All I knew was the recovery position thing. I held Andy and told him it was going to be ok. His breathing was even shorter. Fergal relieved me after a while, and I lay down. Night came, and sometime after midnight Scotchy shook me awake. Fergal was beside him, his eyes vacant in the moonlight.

What is it? I asked.

Andy died, Scotchy said, simply.

I sat up. I looked at Fergal, who nodded.

Are you sure? I asked. It was a stupid question. Scotchy didn’t answer it.

I suppose he wasn’t fully recovered from that first hiding, Fergal said.

No, they murdered him, they murdered him, Scotchy whispered. They killed him.

I crawled over to Andy and touched his hand. It was cold. They’d closed his eyes.

Jesus, Andy, oh Christ, I am so sorry, I said. Fergal patted me on the back. Scotchy spat and then, turning to the pair of us, he said:

If I don’t get back I want youse to promise me you’ll see to Big Bob. You’ll see to him, promise it.

We both nodded.

Scotchy lay down on the floor. I wiped a mantis off my arm. I put both arms under my head and curled my knees almost up to my chin.

I closed my eyes, and, after a time, I slept.

6: THE LOST WORLD

Y

es. It’s true. We’re lost. We’re in a boat on the wild ocean. The seas are high, and there is no compass. We’re fucked. Blind. Ignorant. The night bewildering and there is no dawn. We are outside latitude or longitude or maps. No land, no dead reckoning, no horizon. Fucked in spades. In this cabin of stale air, with asthmatics, fellow fools before the mast, who know no shanties but who cough nocturnes for me. But they’re more doomed than me. I’m ok, really, for I’m not with them. I am not a boy or a man, rather I am a cow, or a black buffalo, or a bird, or a tiny caterpillar crawling under the door. I am, that is, until one of the others wheezes or says something and I’m back again, a haunted passenger, seasick, lost, fucked.

I close my eyes and lean back and open them.

Days go by.

And it’s not that bad, for I have, as contingency, made myself another world. I’ve been staring at the ceiling, lying on my back, head on the straw, arms on my chest. There are above me valleys, ridges, craters, lines. Funnel cobwebs in the corner. The color is a washed-out gray. Often I imagine they’re cities, rivers, an aerial map of a country. The topography is surprisingly uneven; it’s a mountain kingdom. We haven’t been talking much, so I’ve been building a story of an imaginary civilization. The big crack down the middle separates two continents that are at war. They’re always at war. There are canals, too, like the ones Percival Lowell used to see on Mars. The continent nearest the door is drying up, dying, so the inhabitants want to conquer their neighbors. The continent near the tiny barred window hole has plenty
of water; those people live an agricultural, tractable existence, though occasionally death comes to Arcadia, for there are damp and flood marks. The window continent also has the spiderwebs, and I imagine these are desperate, impenetrable morasses where only fools go, of which in a pastoral idyll there are many.

There are wars and negotiations and sometimes individual narratives within the grander themes. There are factions and religions, and perhaps down here we are gods.

My story gets interrupted in the morning for a feature. The window lets in the sunlight and every day there’s a black-and-white movie: shadows marching across the canyoned ceiling surface, slowly, for about three hours and then they disappear. It’s not much of a show, but the plotting is at least linear and unconflicted.

It’s been a fortnight, and we are lousy, scabrous, and covered in bites. Our wounds have not healed well. Fergal sits towards the corner nearest the light. He’s filing part of my belt buckle into a lock pick. He thinks the locks on the leg irons could be reasonably straightforward to pick since they’re all standard bolt jobs from the seventies. Fergal was a jemmy for a while, so maybe he would know, but Scotchy and I, unfortunately, know Fergal too well to hold out much hope. In any case, the lock on the door needs a big thick key and we don’t have the metal, so Scotchy doesn’t see the point of getting us out of the leg irons if we could never open the door. But he’s only saying that. He needs it as much as both of us.

It’s been ten days since they took out Andy. He’s buried by now, or cremated, or whatever it is they do around here. Eaten in some Mayan ceremony, for all I know. No one has said anything to us about him. No one’s said anything to us about anything, but I imagine now we’re pretty much screwed sideways. A dead gringo—that can’t be something you’d want the world outside to know about. They’ll bury the case, do nothing about us, let us rot. I mean, they couldn’t hush this up if we ever got out to tell the papers. I really don’t see how they can bail us now, of course. It’s the word of a drug smuggler, but the whole thing would still stink. I haven’t said anything about this to the others. Scotchy probably has his outside hopes still pinned to his friendship with Darkey, and Fergal’s energy is concentrated on his silly little pick.

We’ve been out to the yard several times and no one has bothered us. I think Andy got killed because they were after our clothes. It sounds stupid, but now that they have our shoes they’re leaving us alone. We got some straw for bedding, and for a while Scotchy had us making an attempt to clean the cell out a bit. He’s stopped in the last couple of days. It’s not the futility of the thing; rather, I think, he just doesn’t have the energy to boss us and keep himself together.

So there’s Scotchy sleeping, Fergal filing the belt buckle against the concrete. The flies, caterpillars, roaches, the sweat on my skin, and of course the ceiling.

The movie’s over, and it’s only four hours until dinner. The narrative kicks in without me. Agriculture, herds of animals. The dust rising from pilgrims coming to wash in the sacred river. Millions of them. The primary cult of the two kingdoms is shared by the majority of the population, but like the Endians, they hector one another over trivialities. One says you bathe only up to the waist, the other that the head must sink beneath the water. Scholars at universities debate it. Everyone wears turbans, incidentally, but some tie at the front and others at the back. They argue over that, too, it’s crazy. It’s like that Frank Gorshin episode of
Star Trek
.

There are hunting parties, dare raids over the divide, and occasionally kids are captured like Gary Powers, and there’s a whole ta-do. It’s tense, and everyone’s bored with their life and this is bringing on war fever. People grumble, and there’s hysteria mounting in the press. A prime minister of the left continent is debating with his cabinet the consequences of mobilization. They’re at a country house in an island group near the continental divide. The peace party thinks there will be universal slaughter if war breaks out; they’re right, of course. The peace party recalls to memory the events of the last border war. He’s talking and they’re listening, jaws agape. It’s not my story now, it’s Granpa Sam’s, the mudbath shambles of July 1916, shit and skulls. The Ulster Division slaughtered by companies and then by battalions and then by week’s end there is no one left at all. From the picture on the piano Granpa Sam loses forty-five friends, forty-five out of fifty, in the first twenty minutes. The piano and the brown photographs and a sword and a violin. How rigid everyone is, how formal. Were they like that, were they not profane like the rest of us?

And now where have these thoughts come from? Home. War. It’s a universe away. An ocean. But the
sheugh
is wide. Aren’t we still in the New World? Possibilities.

I leave them there in the mud, poison gas drifting back into their own trenches. I’m back with the farmers of the window continent. Mechanization has not yet hit. Neither has enclosure. There is proper crop rotation and the fields are left fallow in winter and every seventh year. The crops are hardy and adaptable and disease in this kingdom is rare. They have malaria in the swamps, but they have discovered quinine. There’s a light rain, a sun shower; people are tilling soft drumlins and in the background there’s a blue lough. They’re wearing woolen trousers and cotton shirts, flat tweed caps. They have butter and buttermilk and potato bread and veda. Yes, that’s better. For breakfast there is a toasted slice of soda with Dromona and Lyle’s Golden Syrup. And then, bejesus, you’re out in the crisp morning and into the fields. The sun’s out over the lough and it’s a wee bit like County Down. There’s a church and a tractor, and you’re baling hay. I don’t mind being back here. A big ganch with a blue face is driving the tractor and we’re on the ground with forks shoveling it up onto the back of the truck. Sweating and cursing and spinning yarns. It’s lunch and we’re only thirteen, but the oul boy’s wife has brewed us cider and we’re half tore from just the smell of it. Big jam pieces on batch bread with butter and homemade blackcurrant. Yeah, that’ll do. I close my eyes and drift.