You could hear everything. The screams, the confessions. The blaming other people. The begging to do this to someone else, Not me, not me, no, no, no, please stop, anything, not me. Her in there, behind the wall, they know what you want, they’ll say what you need them to. Not me, not me.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, Oooh, now come the gory details. The juicy bits. What did they do to her? Was it rods or whips or sticks or cattle prods, or just boots? Fire? Electricity, perhaps? What devices? The thumb screws, the strappado? Did they hang her up by her elbows tied behind her back? Did they use spiky things inside?
Forget it. That kind of stuff is private. The tortured never forget. It lives in our minds every day, why would you want it in yours? It’s always there, waiting for you. It comes to you unexpectedly, in your sleep, when you walk down the road, while you eat, when you make love. Such memories know no mercy, just as it was when your torturer was working on you. Sounds or smells or sights can set you off – it comes at you out of the blue. It breaks your body and your mind and your feelings and your emotions all over again, every time. You lose everything. It’s intimate. I truly expect my torturer’s face to be the last face I remember at the end of my days. How could I forget him, and the betrayals he pulled out of me, one by one, like the nails from my fingers?
I hope, I truly hope never to see my comrades from the torture chamber again. And yet how can I ever forget the way we cared for each other when they flung us back to the other side? We touched each other very gently. We forgave every betrayal. Tried to wash the blood and dirt off each other and held hands while we cried.
Each of us was taken out for torture maybe three times a week, maybe twice, maybe four times. One of us was taken out every day for her first week. I think they only stopped because they thought she might die. She was never asked any questions because it wasn’t what she knew that offended them. It was what she was. They made her say filthy things about her mother, her father, her brother, her friends, all the things she loved.
Such memories become a part of you, a big part, perhaps the biggest part. Bigger than your friends, bigger than your lovers, bigger than your childhood, bigger than anything you can know.
So, hearing that, maybe you think you know me now. You’d be wrong. There’s nothing I don’t want you to know written down here, so don’t begin to imagine you know me. My name, perhaps? You think you know that? You think I’m called Marti, or Martina or Martin? You don’t know my name. I never lie – never – but most of who I am is simply untold. What I choose to tell you is the limit of your rights, and what happened to me in that container – guess, guess, guess away! I won’t say. Mostly, it’s a secret even from me.
But you do know this much: I got out.
26
Yes, I got out. And for your information not because someone gave me a gun, and not because I took one from the guards and blasted my way out. Little Rowan never found a way to sneak a gun or a knife into the Tank – do me a favour, he was only three! Maude didn’t turn out to be alive after all. It wasn’t Tariq, who was still in Huntingdon I suppose, or my dad.
But it was the cavalry. Far, far, far too late.
The first us prisoners knew of it was the shelling. Massive explosions all around us. The container was shaking from side to side, we were all quaking in terror that we’d get hit – why, I don’t know, all of us just wanted to die by then. Then gunfire. Strafing. Mortars. It went on for... I don’t know how long it went on for. You lose track of time in there. Half a day, I suppose. A day, maybe. Then things quietened down for a while, a good while. Then gunfire again. Then voices. People talking street. American voices. Pakistani voices, South London, Manc, Scouse. It was like the United Nations out there.
We waited quietly, still scared to speak out. Finally, one of us, I forget who, starting banging on the container. Our guards, who were next door in the torture chamber, started hissing at us to shut up, but it was already too late for them.
Then the sudden clatter as they opened the door, which was in the other compartment. Shouts.
The torturers... ‘Thank God you came,’ they said. Trying to make out they were the victims, the lying bastards. But we yelled and when our rescuers opened our door, the real door, they knew in an instant.
‘What’s going on here?’
‘Man, it’s minging!’
‘It stinks!’
And daylight, suddenly in our eyes. The breeze from outside.
It was a strange coalition who had rescued us: the New English Army, although they weren’t all English. It had been formed when British Black and Asian soldiers, sailors and aircrew took up arms against the Bloods. They helped train up other people of colour and teamed up with some Black US troops who were stranded over here when the dollar fell and had been having the same trouble with their own army. It was a separatist group – they wanted a land of their own for our people. It didn’t have to be big, but it had to be Black, Black, Black. I wasn’t sure about that myself. They kept telling me I was Black, but I had a white mum, didn’t I? I have white family over in Ireland, who treated me kindly years ago before things got to this. So where did that leave me?
And Rowan, who’s as pale as a plate of pasta?
‘Black,’ they said, without even having seen him. Just one drop of Black blood made you Black, according to the NEA. I figured they were going to need more land than they knew to house all those white Black people.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, Rowan? Yes, what happened to him? I was asking as soon as my mind began to tick – suddenly, in the middle of eating some rice. But Rowan wasn’t there.
Sebastian hadn’t kept him close at all. To be fair, as a slave, he didn’t have much option. He found someone else to care for him, though. A group of working girls had set up camp on the edge of the site – two caravans, one for living in, one for working in – and he’d given Rowan to them to look after. Which was fine, except that a few days before the shelling started, the girls struck camp and moved on, and they’d taken Rowan with them.
I was – not angry. I was too broken to be angry. But bitter and disappointed. I turned my head away and refused to look at him when he came to visit me.
‘Jesus, man! What was I supposed to do? Walk round with him on my hip all day while I’m pretending to be their houseboy?’ he hissed. But I wouldn’t answer. I just made up my mind that as soon as I could walk again, I was going after him – as soon as!
Sebastian came back the next day and told me there was a search going on, but I still wouldn’t speak to him. But he was back the next day, and the next.
I raised my eyebrows at him – like, You still here?
‘Yes, I’m still here. You the... person who shot Major Tom’s dick off. You’re my hero.’
There was that little pause before ‘person’. But I was willing to give that a miss for now. And that was it – we were friends. I was still angry but really, he’d done his best for me – and here he still was. He’d joined up with the NEA and he was doing his best to find those prossies and get my brother back. Which wasn’t going to be that easy. The NEA called themselves an army, but there weren’t that many of them – just this bunch and a few scouts out there, looking about for Blood-funded militias to take out. They were over the moon having taken out this lot, because they’d captured all those rocket launchers and other weaponry. Now they were sitting still for a while, learning how to use their new toys.
Me and Sebastian got on well together, as it happens. Really, I could forgive him anything after he’d said ‘Sister’ to me when he had to undress me.
And he would have done anything for me. That thing I said to him about what was his favourite food his mother cooked for him, that was what started him off finding himself hidden away behind all that Blood rewriting they’d done. Me asking that made his mouth water, see, but he had no memory at all what his mouth was watering at. So he was going around for a couple of days w
ondering about it, about why he couldn’t remember what food it was, and then, hey, why didn’t he remember his mother all that well, either, although he felt that he loved her? And then, Lo! Someone on the camp cooked the very self-same thing that his mother used to. Rice pudding. So he smelled that – like my dad said, you see? Smells! – and then the memories started to come back to him.
‘I started to dribble at the thought of that rice,’ he told me. ‘And I was ready to go and get some – it was mine, that’s how I felt. I was annoyed that someone had stolen my rice pudding. But when I knocked at the door and asked for some, I got chased away. So I went away and I wept, Marti, I just wept. And in the morning when I got up, I remembered my mother again.’
And he remembered a little more day by day, and finally he realised what was actually going on. So he ran away. And they chased him and caught him and whipped him, like they whip a slave. So he had to stay, and he had to pretend he still thought he was a white man, which was hard, because he kept switching from one personality to the other with no control, and he was terrified that Major Tom and the others would spot it and send him back to the ERAC to be reconditioned.
Yes, it’s a crazy world, brothers and sisters. Sebastian had resurrected his good old self, but the bad Blood self was still in there, too, with a crazy set of memories about how the white people had looked after him so well, and let him eat their leftovers, which was too good for him, really, because he was a savage with savage tastes that could never appreciate good food like a white person could. And how the white people had civilised the Black folk but the Black folk hadn’t learned how to be grateful etc, etc.
Sometimes, he’d start talking fondly about his days with ‘the guys’, and it’d turn out he was talking about his captors, and I’d have to say, ‘Ah, the good old days, when you got whipped for running away from home because they didn’t share their rice pudding with you.’ And he’d shake his head and scowl at me, and then he’d stalk away to try and get his head together again.
Also, he had a whole set of responses that weren’t his – like the time I started talking about Malcolm X and he went, ‘That no-good negro,’ just like that. And you should have seen the look on his face! Surprised isn’t the word.
‘I never said that,’ he said.
‘I think you just did,’ I said. I knew what was going on, even if he didn’t. Poor old Seb was programmed with one of the really early versions of the Blood rewriting software. My dad had been working on number three, but Seb was full of number one, which was read-only. So whenever he said anything that was good and strong and Black, he had some stupid response wired through.
It drove him crazy. ‘It’s like living with a racist in my head,’ he groaned.
But I told him he’d be OK once he got the microchip taken out. He had no idea it was there, even, but I found it for him, tucked in under a little roll of fat at the top of his neck. He couldn’t believe it. He must have been programmed never to touch it. It would have been nice to think he might get the chip blocked if my dad’s software worked, but like I say, version one was read-only. He had to have it taken out and nothing else would do. Which was easier said than done, because it could go off with a bang – they wired those things to explode if you messed with them. So poor old Seb had to wait.
And his real name, his real Black name was Sebastian! How about that? He was adopted by white parents, both doctors in Sussex. He was a nice, white, middle-class boy, and he’d always spoken with a nice, white middle-class accent too. But the odd thing was, after his rewriting and then coming back to himself, he always spoke in a Brixton, south London accent ever after – as long as I knew him, anyway.
I asked him what age he was adopted.
‘Age four,’ he said. So I guess that sorted out where he’d spent his first four years, anyhow.
The NEA had put us ex-prisoners in various huts and tents while we recovered. I was in the officer’s dorm with four other people from the Tank. All men. I guess my bits confused them, they often do, but I didn’t have the heart to complain.
It was strange. We’d lived together in that hell for so long. We’d all been broken, we’d betrayed everything we knew and loved, including each other. Suddenly here we were in a new life. Gradually we got to know one another better and...
Frankly, it was embarrassing. I suppose you want me to talk about the bond between us, how we’d been through so much and come out the other end closer. You might expect it. All we had in that place was each other and we looked after each other so well while we were in there. We really did. But outside, it wasn’t like that. One by one we got better, and people began to leave. Sometimes they came back to visit, but always as a duty rather than a need to be together again. Because – why would you? Torture is something you never get over. You don’t even ever get to learn to live with it. Why would anyone want to be reminded of it even more than they already are?
Funny thing is, I think about them every day, my container comrades. Sometimes I think I may even love them. But I was happy to see them go away and none of us have made any effort to get in touch. I wonder how they’re doing, if they’ve got on with their lives, how much it changed them, how many were just broken, how many have made lives worth living. I’m curious, I admit it. And yet, if there was ever a reunion, I wouldn’t go. None of the others would either, I bet. It would be the strangest reunion in the world – a room full of love, with no one in it. Once, I had dreams of being a pretty girl, but the container put paid to that. My nose was halfway across my face, my jaw was crooked, my shoulder had been dislocated so often I couldn’t lift it above my chest. My ribs were cracked. I limped. One eye was cloudy. I’d lost most of my teeth. Just about the only thing I had from my past was my handbag. Yes, that was the only constant companion I kept throughout the whole journey. Sebastian got his hands on it somehow and kept it for me while I was in the Tank. Somehow, he even kept my gun.
‘Why on Earth didn’t you use it?’ I asked him.
‘With one bullet in it? You crazy, girl!’
I was in the hospital dorm for a month and all I wanted to do was get on my feet and go find my brother. Easier said than done. I was weak – so, so weak. They’d broken my feet and toes, which healed like crabs, so I’ve never been able to do much more than hobble ever after. Still, at least I could walk. Slowly, slowly, I got better – road-ready, as Sebastian called it. Bit by little bit.
So the journey goes on, but before I take you out on the road with me again, I have a few things that happened to tell you.
First is this. That software I took down south? It worked! What do you think of that? Can you imagine? I told you my dad was a clever man. Maybe he was even a genius, because he worked out how to do it months ago, and everyone else had all that extra time to work on it but it was still his software that did the trick. Yeah, the NEA had the news – there’d been a breakout from the ERAC. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people got their lives back, their memories, themselves, and they broke out and went running for freedom.
How about that? All down to my dad. And me – and Maude. I cried when I heard that because it meant she hadn’t died for nothing.
‘You did it, Maude,’ I said. Because it was her, it was all her, really. If it had been left up to me, I’d have been sitting on that phone as my own personal tunes repository to this day, and never even worried about all those people.
And... what about my dad? According to the NEA, a lot of people got recaptured and put back in. Was he one of them? Or maybe he was sitting with Tariq in a bar somewhere, downing a bottle of wine. Or on the run, or...
Who knows? I had business in Amsterdam, I couldn’t go back down there without some sort of clue. But... there was hope. Last time I had hope about my dad, it nearly killed me. This time, after all I’d been through, I just let it sit. I’d find out about him one day. Or not.
Another thing I want to tell you about is Judgment Day for Major Tom. It was only a week or two after our
release. They took me out into the field behind the hospital. I was still so weak, they had to push me in a wheelchair. There was quite a crowd come to watch.
Major Tom was there. So were the torturers. My torturer. I won’t tell you his name, because as far as I’m concerned he has no name. Him and Major Tom and a few others, standing with their hands tied behind their backs. And behind them, a big deep hole.
Well, we knew what that hole was and so did they. Major Tom was in a mess, weeping under his gag. Some kind of begging, I suppose. My torturer was standing next to him, and it was like he couldn’t quite get his head around what was going on. He kept turning to stare at Major Tom, and then look at us as we all trooped in, and then back at the hole behind him. I have no idea what was going through his head. He must have expected something like this. I have this feeling he couldn’t get it into his head that it was going to be public, for some reason. All the pain he ever dealt with was done in private.
I don’t know what I think about it now. Some of the other people from the Tank wanted to do it themselves, to be the one who pulled the trigger.
‘I want to look into his eyes while I blow his f*****g brains out,’ someone said. The NEA didn’t allow it, they wanted it to be official. Me, I didn’t really even want to watch. I wasn’t going to, until Sebastian told me I needed to be a witness, which convinced me at the time. It seemed important somehow. These days, I’m not sure. If I had the time again, I doubt I’d go. It was a mistake. Whenever I remember it, watching that man standing there waiting to die, the bile rises up into my mouth and I’m so full of hatred and fear, I can feel my blood curdling in my veins.
When the time came, when the firing squad came out and the order to take aim was called, Major Tom shook his head violently. Bang!
Three Bullets Page 18
