‘I am not leaving the House,’ said the Prime Minister from the floor. He was curled up and looked like he was in pain. I could see he was still the great man I knew and respected, all curled up there, and yet I could also see, like everyone else, he’d made it for one whole day on his own reserves of spirit. His health was now declining rapidly and this could affect his valour, maybe even his ability to speak clearly for himself.
‘No,’ the Prime Minister repeated firmly, ‘I’m not leaving.’ He said this with eyes now almost sealed shut, his face swollen with the beating. The gunmen all stood round him in a circle. One kicked him in the ribs just for the hell of it.
The Prime Minister groaned.
‘Leave him alone,’ said Mervyn for the first time in a gruff voice. ‘He is very sick.’
They moved away. It was as if the gunmen had lost their way a little, or they were no longer so sure of who they were. They hadn’t just lost their purpose but their identity in this mad room; they’d gone a little astray. The atmosphere they had created affected everyone, including them. It was just as difficult for them being here where the air was mad, where the room was heavy with the smell of a bloated dead woman down the hall. Those ministers they were holding hostage had showed bravery and also kindness to them; the doctor had patched them up. The ministers, they now saw, were not such villains after all. It was easy to see that whatever was going on for me, the beginning of a failure to cope, was also happening to everyone, including the gunmen.
‘The Prime Minister needs his medication,’ Mervyn said to Hal. ‘And he needs those pills by tomorrow morning latest, or he will comatose.’
*
The PM was very attached to the House and I thought about this. Of all the buildings on the island, the House had seen the most civil unrest over the years before and after Independence. There’d been ruination and violence in the House of Power before, every minister knew that; it was a historical fact. The House had been burnt to a shell of itself already. There’d been riots over the cost of water, decades ago. And for more or less the same reasons, the House had been violated. The government of the time had tried to tax the poor. Except the last time it was the colonials who were in power.
Back then, the British had passed an ordinance to increase the cost of water. They wanted to install water meters as they felt water was being wasted by the general public. Taps were allowed to run free. The British didn’t like the sight of people bathing at standpipes by the road for too long. In response, there had been demonstrations and these had gone unheeded. Finally, the people had rioted and pelted stones and rocks through the windows of the House. They smashed up a stained glass window which celebrated Christopher Columbus arriving in the south of the island. They dragged the governor’s carriage to the port and dumped it in the sea. Then they set fire to the ground floor of the House. The people were vexed, crazy like fire ants. When the police arrived they opened fire, openly shooting and bayoneting the crowd. Sixteen people were killed, including five women and a girl of twelve. Dozens of others were badly wounded. The House of Power was gutted.
Slowly, it was rebuilt. It was painted red at first, the colour of blood, in celebration of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. And then, in even gayer times, it had been through a range of colours: lime green, ochre, blue morpho turquoise, adapting to moods and eras. From working in the House I knew that parts of it were dilapidated and in need of repair. In the southeast chamber, there was a crater-sized hole in the ceiling where rain had soaked through and plaster had come down and pigeons had nested for decades. When the colonials departed in the early 1960s, they left behind this stately Victorian monument. And yet I had never understood why the new wave of independence leaders claimed it as their own; it didn’t seem a good way to start a new era. The proud and hard-to-rule people of Sans Amen had already burnt the place down once. Now, they were attacking it again.
FRIDAY MORNING,
THE HOUSE OF POWER,
THE CITY OF SILK
In my dream there was a young woman lying dead on the ground. Her stomach was all shot up and slick with blood. The woman was called Bathsheba, and she was a fighter for freedom. She had a baby in her stomach. She lay face down, one arm clutching herself, the other flung forward as though she’d been swimming across the hot tarmac. Her body was riddled with bullets. There’d been a gunfight which had lasted for hours, men firing from houses, rooftops, the police were encamped. Now her body lay inert in the middle of the road; no one would touch it for fear of being shot too. Bathsheba was a woman who’d taken up arms to fight for a New Society. In my dream Bathsheba came awake. She stopped her slow crawl across the road, struggled to her feet and dusted herself off. The bloody patch on her stomach began to shrink and she walked through the houses of that village in the hills and back to a more ordinary existence.
Then my dream started to blur and turn to chaos: people in the streets outside the House of Power were rioting. A young girl of about twelve years old, her eyes weeping tears of disbelief, a sharp bayonet rammed through her ribcage, in and up through her stomach. A long pointed blade glistened from her back. She lay dead from the wound in the street outside the House of Power. In my dream the City of Silk was now called the City of Riots.
My body was hot from the dream and I writhed with discomfort. It wasn’t really sleep; for a couple of hours I’d drifted off. 5 a.m., or around there, I’d floated away from the chamber. My dreams were trampled up and full of dead women. The skin on my back, on my stomach was damp from the horror of these images. My eyes felt bruised and I touched around them, pressing gently to see if my skull was still there, under my face.
I opened my eyes. The young boy Breeze was standing above me and I had the feeling he’d been watching me for several minutes. His presence must have brought me round. His face was full of moodiness. It was a small, sullen African face; it carried questions and proud reserve. My city, the City of Riots, bred these difficult young men by the dozen; they were born of the mothers who were proud and dirt-poor and abandoned by their men, who, in turn, had been abandoned by other men. The City of Riots made boys who were resilient and who had patience and who could fight. This Breeze was a young poor man, full of insolence and posture, even grandeur.
‘I see you before,’ he said, looking down at me. He was only fourteen but possessed a manliness which came with everything else he was born to. It was everywhere, this male charisma. It came from Africa; it was on the street and it was in the House. Sans Amenians were a charismatic people, men and women equally; it was our birthright and our strength and also our foolishness, for it was commonly said that God came from Sans Amen.
I tried to focus on the young man. My neck was stiff and I felt the skittishness of panic dart through me. He was standing above me in a way which threatened a sexual act. I had reason to be scared of this young man. He was a little too trigger-happy for my liking. He looked like his head was full of ideas, like he had more intelligence than the other boys, and yet he was also one of the most confused. I tugged downwards at my skirt. I didn’t know what to say; my voice had turned to cotton in my throat. My dreams had left me weak and spacious.
‘Where have you seen me before?’ I said quietly. It was just before dawn; everyone was quiet on the floor of the wrecked House.
‘On TV, the Parliament Channel. I does watch the Saturday Night Review,’ he said.
I nodded. Recently parliament had agreed to being filmed in session and now debates and such like were shown on the news every Friday, and also once a week in a Review show.
‘I see you making speeches and talking and having things to say.’
I nodded, hoping this wasn’t going to go the wrong way.
‘Allyuh chupid,’ he said.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘I see you all eating nuts. Reading the newspaper. Sometimes I see half the men inside the House of Power asleep! Right here in the chamber.’
I felt ashamed. I’d often wondered if it had been a mist
ake to allow the chamber to be televised. This was Sans Amen. The ex-colonial citizens must have found the behaviour of some of the ministers in parliament a far cry from their fantasies. The House was Victorian; they must have thought we behaved like Queen Victoria inside here, all formal and serious, wearing wigs and drinking tea. But that was not the case and I had also found it shocking to watch the footage of the debates. I’d seen the slumped ministers, the men I considered colleagues; some of them were quite good men, but they let themselves down by their casual habits.
‘Yes,’ I said to Breeze. ‘Men in power are no different to any other men.’ I wanted to say something general, placatory, but Breeze had a closed-up face and I felt his power and I felt judged and castigated.
‘Huh,’ he said. ‘That is what you think. We is not like allyuh. We doh fall asleep when we meet to talk. We are men with discipline. Our Leader train us good. Not like this fool all roughed up so on the ground, none of you know how to behave.’
‘You think your Leader is a good man?’
He nodded with a solemn certainty.
‘You think your Leader could do any better than us?’ The young boy continued to stare down at me as if I were less than him; he nodded again. I could see he belonged to a bunch of righteous men, vigilantes and crusaders. He’d been shown respect by the Leader and that acknowledgement gave him a sense of status, a place in the world. I could see they were a disciplined bunch, not like those men in the House. He had a point. Breeze was sure of his Leader. Not everyone in the House was sure of the PM.
‘What do you do every day, then?’ said Breeze. ‘What is your job?’
‘Me?’
‘Yeah, when you not on TV, what do you do?’
‘Well . . . I make decisions. I have a small team and we . . . make decisions for the country.’
‘Tell me one decision you make.’
I tried to think straight. ‘Well . . . I am Minister for the Environment. It is a new post, progressive thinking. We decide what is the best way to preserve our natural assets and that is both the hills and forests and the wildlife and also the sea life. We try to monitor the pollution in the sea, like mercury in the fish, like keeping the oilrigs from leaking. We work closely with the Ministry of Energy too.’
His eyes looked glazed and contemptuous. I hadn’t answered his question. One decision.
‘I made the decision to protect the leatherback turtles.’
The young boy’s face creased.
‘Turtles?’
‘Yes. The northeast coast of Sans Amen is one of the largest migration grounds for leatherback turtles in the world. Our people haven’t respected this. Often they kill them, or eat them, sell the meat. I have imposed a fine for selling turtle meat.’
The young boy laughed out loud.
‘Didn’t you know about the turtles?’
‘I know nothing about no turtles. Turtles have nothing to do with politics.’
‘Of course they do. Politicians are given the responsibility of caring for the whole country, that includes land and sea, not just people.’
The young boy looked incredulous.
I was vaguely embarrassed.
‘Nah, boy. Allyuh chupid. You saving turtles? When people starving?’
I wondered about the size of this young boy’s world. Had he ever swum in the sea along the north coast of his own island? Had an adult ever taken him over the mountains to get to the sea? If he was from the slums in the east of the City of Silk, there was no reason why he should know about, let alone care about sea creatures.
‘Where did you live,’ I pressed, ‘before you went to live in the commune with the Leader?’
‘I live in mih mother house.’
‘And where is that?’
‘Up so,’ and he pointed eastwards to the hills, to the slopes of shacks and old wooden houses; and then he looked at the slim metal barrel of his gun and he rubbed a spot clean.
‘Do you have brothers and sisters?’ I pushed.
Again, he gave me a look to say this was stupid. ‘Mih mother have ten children.’
‘Oh.’
‘I number seven. She have three others younger than me.’
‘Ten?’
He nodded. And then he looked distant . . . and then he looked alert, like a question had come to him. ‘You ever speak to your children?’
I nodded. ‘Of course.’
‘Well . . . my mother. She busy, busy, busy. She have no time to talk to me. She busy, busy minding children. When she comes from work she only have time to clean the kitchen, go to sleep and then back to work. She ent tell me nothing about no turtles . . . I never have her to tell me about these things.’
I felt a shadow of guilt crawl across my back. I knew it would be very unwise to ask him about his real father. No wonder it was so easy for the Leader to make such an impression. People were like plants; they craved the sun and, just like plants, they grew anyhow they could. Unlike plants, people also craved love and knowledge; both gave them nourishment. Love, to humans, was like a food group. Babies denied love failed to thrive; children who’d grown up without love were forever damaged. The Leader had been giving Breeze knowledge and respect, he had been growing this young man. But I doubted the Leader had been giving him the love of a real parent. That true parental unconditional love, I could see, had been denied to Breeze.
The man they called Ashes appeared behind him.
‘Come,’ said Ashes, pulling the young boy away.
But the young Breeze didn’t move and for a few moments both boy and man looked down on me and I felt their mistrust and condescension. They were from another life and set of ideas and they looked at me like I was a foreign type of human, and maybe I was very separate and hadn’t been aware of just how apart it is to work in the House.
These two looked like brothers, Ashes and Breeze, two generations. I watched them back away and I saw that there was a familiarity between them, a gracious body language which I knew was unique for men in this town, a kind of modesty or self-respect.
Their Leader had given them this, too. They walked down the corridor together, past the tearoom, and I saw them kneel together and some of the other gunmen joined them. Six or eight of the men who were holding us hostage laid down their guns in the dawn light and prayed to their God.
One or two prostrated themselves fully, their stomachs flat to the floor; another knelt and bent his head to the ground. Ashes knelt and gazed upwards and held his hands to his heart. The young Breeze knelt and spread his hands flat on the carpet. It made me feel confused. It made this mad act of theirs look like it had meaning and substance behind it. And I could hear them chanting and it sounded beautiful, like a kind of music.
I curled up on my side and watched my captors pray and I felt desolate and lonely and this loneliness was nothing to do with missing my husband or children. I had a loneliness which was all of its own, a longing in my heart which I’d been born with; it accompanied my life. It was a thirst, and a sadness, to be loved . . . and when I watched these men I understood them and they made me feel less alone. I wondered if they were the only souls praying like this for miles around. Maybe the Leader had led them back to something good, to an ancient faith of some sort, to an original tradition of wisdom.
*
When Father Jeremiah Sapno returned to the chamber he caused a stir. He’d disappeared in the early hours of Thursday morning with a list of demands in his hand, scribbled on a piece of notebook paper. Now it was Friday, late morning, twenty-four hours later. There’d been big energy in those demands. But by the time the priest returned, the demands seemed lost, even forgotten. Howl was winning this siege already, hands down. The army had bombed the place, shown their massive potential, frightened everyone inside, including Hal. They had purposely kept Father Sapno back; they were forcing the gunmen to wait. The priest returned to the House on their terms. They were showing that they would decide when and if and how negotiations took place. They weren’t hungry, weak, liv
ing cooped up in appalling conditions.
When Father Sapno appeared again in the chamber, it was clear he was very frightened by what he saw. I registered this with a mixture of understanding and alarm. I was no longer so frightened of the gunmen, or the situation. Me and my fellow captors had somehow, incredibly, acclimatised. We’d learned how to survive. The feeling of immediate danger had worn off, even though the actual danger hadn’t. The guns, the bullets in them, no longer seemed so murderous. Again, my mind played tricks. They were like magic bullets that couldn’t hurt or kill. Bullets made of silk. That, or perhaps I’d been so scared for my life, for minutes, hours, early on, that there was no emotion left in me I could associate with terror. All my terror had been used up. The only loose cannon of a gunman, the one with the Santa hat, had been apprehended and tied up. There was a well-known madhouse in Sans Amen; I wondered if he’d once been an inmate. At that point the House was a madhouse too. I was an inmate.
*
My main concern was the split. In fact the split was at the heart of this whole outrage. A year earlier, our party had split into two. There was the PM, a good man, if a little stiff, and his faithful ministers, and then a small group who’d split away. It had caused the PM a lot of pain and made the party look chaotic. Those who’d divided from the PM were more extreme socialists. They didn’t like the way the PM ran things, his personal style. But the PM had seen them as dangerous and unstable with mad ideas; he’d viewed them as communists. These ministers had got involved with the labour movement and I was sure they’d even mixed with the Leader at times. Some of them had progressive ideas, like a new type of money, a bartering system, and buying land for social housing and setting up a type of co-operative system.
I suspected these ministers with progressive ideas knew the Leader and Father Sapno. I suspected they all had a lot in common. Those who’d split from our government were more like the gunmen in terms of their ideas. There were four or five ministers involved in this split and these were the ministers who were being detained separately during all this madness. They were kept apart and were being treated better in general, as if the gunmen hadn’t meant to capture or hurt them. It was those ministers, who were out and out socialists, who Hal was prepared to negotiate with. The PM was entirely left out. He was still tied up on the ground, by then seriously ill; I was worried he might lose consciousness.
House of Ashes Page 9
