For a moment it looked like she’d taken off her own head. Her scalp was shaved down to a grey fuzz. Underneath the wig she was like another woman, sleek, older. Hal looked down at his feet, shamed by her nakedness. Breeze stared at this other skull. One or two of the gunmen backed away. Someone uttered the words ‘obeah woman’.
My heart felt warm for the first time in days. Thank God for her, thank God for Mrs Gonzales. I was scared for her and also held mesmerised. They hadn’t frightened her yet, or at all. She was a woman from Sans Amen. Taking no crap from no man.
‘Listen, here. I am a grandmother,’ said Mrs Gonzales. ‘An old black woman.’
Hal looked like he was going to melt.
‘You show me some respect. You see this?’ she said, turning her head and pointing to a bump at the back. ‘Mih skull split open once. Now mih head have a shape like an egg. A man cuff me down once and I end up in hospital. An you talk about me being oppressed today? I oppressed only once in my life, by a man I make the mistake to marry. That man now long dead. No man go oppress me again. None of you speak for me, yuh hear. I doh need no crazy bunch of boys with guns to come inside here on my behalf. I not oppressed. I have job, home, good health, family. You mad or what?’
I was worried. Despite their claims to have no war with women, these men could shoot women by accident. She was pushing her luck.
‘Mrs Gonzales,’ I chipped in. ‘Mrs Gonzales, this situation is very serious. Please,’ I turned to Hal. It was the first time I had said anything directly to Hal, the first time I’d had any cause to communicate verbally with him. ‘Please, just let her go. She’s been inside a cupboard for two days. No food, no water. Just let her go.’
Hal nodded.
‘Eh, eh. I ent going nowhere,’ said Mrs Gonzales. Her face was set in a cold and implacable fury; all the men and boys had seen this face before on a woman and it was trouble. No one said anything and everyone looked towards Hal.
Hal stared. ‘Jesus,’ he said, shaking his head. But Mrs Gonzales was way ahead of him.
‘You see that man over there on the ground? The Prime Minister?’
Hal looked over at the PM who had become more alert, who was watching everything now with more interest.
‘He work here late too. Just like me. He often here all ten o’ clock in the night. Often we does talk. I does bring him a cup of coffee. He does talk to me and sometimes we talk about politics in Sans Amen. So I staying right here with him till he leave this godforsaken place. Till allyuh go home. I not leaving you men in here to ruin mih frikkin carpet more than this. Me? I ent going nowhere.’
She gave Hal a look which told him not to trouble her any more than he already had. She tugged her wig back on her head. Somehow she looked less dangerous with it on. We were all struck dumb by her. She gazed around her at the debris and the tired, deranged hostages and she steupsed and shook her head. She knew many of the ministers by sight.
She said, ‘Come, nuh, ah going over there,’ and with that Mrs Gonzales picked her way over towards the Prime Minister and she sat down near him. She looked at his injured face and she said to Breeze, who’d been guarding him, ‘Bring me a bowl of water and a sponge from the kitchen.’
Mrs Cynthia Gonzales seemed to have an effect on the young boys and even the men. Like the PM she was brave and it seemed that they didn’t like how she appeared just like that from the cupboard and they didn’t like her wig. They kept their distance and watched her with suspicion, and at the same time they didn’t want to get involved with her. Again, Hal’s authority had been usurped. He let this pass; he had no choice but to do so, and made a vague reference to ‘upping the hostage count’. Her presence also had an inspiring effect on the hostages, including myself. Mrs Gonzales had decided to stay where everybody in the House was held hostage against their will. Breeze did as he was asked and watched over her as she sponged the caked blood from the PM’s face. It was strange to witness her tenderness towards him. The PM looked at Mrs Gonzales with a kind of gladness and a small smile on his lips. It was clear they were friends.
*
Friday evening came about. A feeling of acute deadness had settled in the House. The situation was in the act of extinguishing itself. The revolution had no more incentive or motive. Hal had lost some of his power to the PM and then more to Mrs Gonzales. He looked different, thinner, tired. There was nothing for him to do but wait for the army to reply to their one last demand. Every now and then he retreated to the back room to speak on his walkie-talkie to the Leader. Sometimes they called each other on the one phone line available in the House. I guessed the situation at the television station was the same. Everyone cooped up, waiting.
At dusk half the gunmen disappeared to pray on a closed balcony wing of the House. They left the other half to stand guard. Their prayers were said on a rotation and their prayers were the only thing that made the situation feel endurable. The man called Ashes was leading the prayers, like the job had somehow landed with him.
That night, my third night under the gun, I felt like I’d become another person. I ached for my children, my husband. Gloria, James and Marc. They were my heart; they were everything. I cried for Sans Amen, the other mothers like me. The City of Mothers: devastated, calling for change that had never arrived. I tried to review my life: my childhood had been happy enough, an older sister and a younger brother; I was the middle child, always different, always the one making a face in family photographs. Often, I felt on the outside of things. From an early age I was aware that I was wise. But I kept my wisdom to myself. Or maybe I was just shy and my feelings of being different came from just the opposite; I had the job of being ordinary, in the middle.
At school I’d done well academically; I excelled at geography and biology. My father was a hiker and often took us up into the hills of the northern range, up into the forest, and we often camped overnight, making hammocks with bamboo poles. In the dark we could hear agouti and manicou pass beneath us and this felt thrilling and also safe. We swam in the cold river streams which ran through untouched primary rainforest. Once we hiked up to where a famous pilot had crashed his plane, the rusted fuselage still there, bits of broken wing, the nose all crumpled up. He’d been trying to fly over the mountains and got snagged in cloud; the villagers nearby took ten days to find the plane, the bodies still inside, two young men, our first aviators. The empty mangled plane still ached with loss. I’d grown to love the land of this island from young. My father had taught me to respect it and to fear no animal or reptile, even the pit viper called a fer de lance.
I grew up and my chubbiness fell off. The younger, slimmer woman I became in my twenties met a man called Marc Garland, a handsome lawyer, and we married quietly. My husband knew of my dream of wanting to make a difference. He’d married a woman who needed to work, be of service. We honeymooned in a village called L’Anse Verte on the north coast of Sans Amen, in a house lent by a friend. It was then, aged twenty-six, I saw a leatherback turtle lay her eggs.
Female turtles have a tranquil grace born from their singular journeying across the vast oceans of the world. I saw her lumber from the sea, too big for land, too reptile for the daytime sun, and yet intent on settling to nest; she hauled her elephantine legs, her massive leather carapace. She came at dusk, the earth’s wisdom in her eyes. They leaked a saline gel, and I wept and remembered the turtle I’d witnessed on the beach, as a child, its fins sawn off. Here was another, giving birth. As she dropped her blind, perfect eggs into the sand she slipped into a birth-trance and like that she was very vulnerable to attack. She let her treasure of future generations slide from her womb; a hundred eggs fell silently into the sandpit she’d dug with her hind fins. Only one or two of her offspring might survive. I remembered the turtle’s determined crawl back to the ink black sea and tears streamed down my face. I was a young woman then, inexperienced.
In the House, all shot up and reeking of death, I felt old, old as the City of Silk. I prayed that my husband and childre
n were safe and I remembered what Mervyn had said about change and thought about how much this situation gave me a new feeling about myself.
I sat on the floor of the House and listened to the sounds of tired, frightened men and boys as they prepared for another night. The chamber now looked and smelled like a battleground. The night-time brought all manner of intimate sounds. Many of the men snored in their sleep; there were loud farts, half-spoken threats; others whimpered into their dreams; some tossed and turned over in their nightmares. Everyone gave way as best they could for a few snatched hours of escape. I closed my eyes and I imagined myself slipping away from Sans Amen, heading north, into an ink black sea.
SATURDAY MORNING,
THE HOUSE OF POWER,
THE CITY OF SILK
The explosion sent me flying several feet into the air. I had been standing up when the army launched their rocket. I landed on top of Mrs Gonzales and the Prime Minister and we became a bundle of arms and legs. The air went white and the explosion was followed by another massive boom, and the building shook to its very bones. My bones shook too; the sound ripped through my body as it did through the walls. Plaster fell in a fine silt powder over us all. I looked at her watch. It was 9.15 a.m.
‘Hold your fire, hold your fire,’ shouted Hal to his men. Not one of them had run to the window to respond. All the young boys had hit the floor as had many of the men; many, like me, had been blown off their feet. The floor of the House of Power was now packed with men face down, covering their heads with their hands. Everyone inside was struggling to take cover. The army was attacking again.
‘Do not return fire,’ shouted Hal. This, I realised, was because it would be useless. Again, for the third time, they were up against the army’s full vengeance. There was another boom. The House shook. I clasped my head and prayed and every cell screamed. They were using rocket launchers and firing into the walls of the House, blasting it away. Again, they were attacking with full force. They were carrying out the PM’s orders. He was still the Head of State; he had ordered this from the outset. Now we were going to die once and for all. It was the end. Three days: enough was enough. The army were saying ‘no deal’ to their amnesty. No to letting these lunatics off. The modern world was watching what was happening on TV. Kate Adie of the BBC was here on the island. CNN was here too. The international media were watching. But many of the journalists of Sans Amen were at the TV station, held hostage too. The citizens of the island couldn’t see the horror in the streets because of the curfew. Even so, there could be no pardon with so many people looking on; no one was getting away with anything, like in 1970. Now the army of Sans Amen were going to blow them all away. I looked across and saw that the PM was barely conscious. He might be dead soon; he was their prize hostage and he was already half dead.
Boom, another explosion followed by another massive jolt; it was as if the House was resting in the palm of a capricious giant and he was squeezing the walls and shaking it about. The ceiling groaned and dust fell. Outside I could hear a voice on megaphone shouting: ‘Lay down your arms,’ but the voice seemed tinny and distant.
Another boom. I wondered how the House could withstand any more pounding. This assault was even more fierce than the last. I imagined this was the final and total destruction of the House of Power. I hoped that those who governed Sans Amen in future would finally get the hint. They would build another place to govern from. There would be big changes after this.
Boom. The army guns outside were roaring, the sound resembling a massive sewing machine running on and on. I saw that the young boy Breeze was covering his head; he was screwed up in a ball. Next to him the man called Ashes was also face down. Greg Mason was down too. These men now felt known to me; not friends, but definitely people I knew and had some kind of understanding of. I found it hard to admit, but I had come to care for them.
Boom, boom, boom, then several rockets were released in one go. A part of the House fell off in a clump to the ground and then it was as if the chamber felt lighter. I looked up and gasped. There was a gaping hole in one side of the chamber. Sky. I could see sky, the outside world, and it occurred to me that freedom was beyond. I could leap out. They were blasting their way into the House; they didn’t care. I looked at Hal and saw a wild and cold terror in his eyes. He was going to die after all. We were all about to die. Boom, a rocket flew like a comet in through a window close by and then there was the horrifying smell of burning wood.
‘Do not return fire,’ shouted Hal.
I was afraid for my life, but it was only then, at this ludicrous command, after three terrifying days, that I felt murderous. I could kill this bloody man Hal and his Leader with my own hands. I noticed that his soldiers were still with him, still loyal. Only one of them had cracked, even in all this, the one who was already cracked before he arrived. Not one other had mutinied or run away. Their prayers had held them together; their prayers would get them through all this. The pounding went on and on. From the way the House shook with every rocket, I was sure that parts of the building were falling off. The army were blowing off bits of the House. Soon they would be inside.
*
At 11.35 a.m., exactly, the army stopped. Everyone in the House was powdered white. Some of the walls were gone. Now there were only holes, which tempted the world beyond. There wasn’t much left of the chamber. From the room at the back came the urgent sound of the telephone ringing. I realised it was the first time I’d heard the telephone in days. A normal everyday sound, while all around me an avalanche had struck. People were like ghosts, dusted white, coughing up the silt in their lungs. The phone rang on, an insistent solitary cry, impossible to ignore. The Leader calling Hal, I suspected. Hal got up and walked swiftly towards it down the hall. The dividing wall which separated the tearoom from the chamber had been obliterated. The latrine had been blown away with it. Faeces and silt ash were all mixed up.
‘Lay down your weapons,’ came the stern voice from the megaphone outside in the street. ‘Come out with your hands in the air.’
Still the megaphone voice sounded far away.
No one moved in the House. Only Greg Mason got up and dared a peek outside. A shot rang out from a sniper in the street and he ducked back down.
‘Them boys serious now,’ he muttered.
I glanced across at Breeze. He was looking at the PM with a perplexed expression in his eyes; something was dawning on him. The Prime Minster was dawning on him, what and who he was, that all this firepower was about coming to save him, about obeying his orders. I registered this newness of awareness in the young boy and I thought, finally, the Leader’s spell has been broken. Finally, he can see the bigger picture.
Mrs Gonzales’ wig had been blown off in the attack. She was on her hands and knees searching for it, cussing now, cussing the men who’d come to liberate her from her oppression. ‘Mash up mih damn carpet,’ she kept muttering.
Hal came back from his phone call and there was a mild triumph in his manner, in his step.
‘We have an agreement,’ he announced. ‘The army will be sending a convoy of trucks to take you away this afternoon.’
III. Mercy
SATURDAY AFTERNOON,
THE HOUSE OF POWER,
THE CITY OF SILK
Ashes woke with a start. In his dream the Phantom had been digging under the House of Power. He’d tethered his horse Hero to a silk cotton tree and he held a spade in one hand like a staff. With the other hand he was pointing, saying, ‘Look, there is the beautiful.’ And there, in the red soil under the House, he had uncovered the bones of many bodies, the remains of Amerindians from centuries back. The bodies were all laid out in trenches, dozens of them. There was a small burial ground underneath the House. Men, women and children had been laid there to rest. Ashes woke up sweating, a heavy feeling of dread in his chest. Somehow he’d forgotten about them, the first people of Sans Amen, and how he was related to them. The Phantom then did something unthinkable. He removed his mask. Behind
the mask Ashes recognised a familiar face: that of his dead brother, River. River was smiling and there was a circle of light blazing around his head. His spade then turned to a long rifle, silver-grey and threatening. ‘I’m always here,’ he said. ‘We all are.’
Ashes rose from the small nest he’d made on the floor of the library and prepared himself for prayer. His watch said 6.00 a.m. and a dawn light was filtering in through the stained glass. He could feel the City of Silk all around him, jarred, frightened by what had happened. It was a city on edge. Their doing. He had followed in the footsteps of his brother and the Phantom, but they were somehow good and he was somehow wrong and stupid. He knelt on his haunches in front of the coloured glass and he looked up at the martyr nailed to a wooden cross. He closed his eyes and opened his chest and very soon he became aware of the feeling of lightness and peace. The beautiful; it came down into him, spreading a tender and glorious love and he bent forward, open and receptive, and he pressed his arms and face flat to the floor, beneath the holy prophet, the revolutionary on the cross. Somehow it was all connected. Somehow he hadn’t understood this. He uttered the words of holy remembrance, and when he said the words his spirits lifted and he felt drunk with love and connected to his heart.
*
Upstairs, the chamber was an open cavity. Brothers were tired and starving; the hostages were starving too and beyond their wits. Ashes remembered the first hours after they had rushed up from the street, how he’d been shocked at the smashed crockery, the cussing and the dead bodies. That felt like weeks ago. Now everything was pulverised, walls blown away. The younger brothers shifted from room to room. They were looking for things to do and he had a feeling that their sense of reality had been altered for good.
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