House of Ashes

by Monique Roffey

  Joseph stops directly in front of the House. It is like standing in front of a monument to his childhood. He tries to remember who he was then. He has limped a little ever since those six days in the House, especially when it rains; he gets a stitch in his groin, a small stabbing feeling. Like he was stabbed then, not by Greg Mason, not by anyone. It’s a phantom wound, he’s been told: ‘psychosomatic’. He has seen the doctor many times about it, and no one can find the reason for this pain. But sometimes he feels so bad and ill with it, this quiet hurt, that he has to lie down for days. Bones, he thinks. Four humans buried under the House, at least, from centuries back. An innocent woman, a clerk, shot dead, others gunned down too in the corridors. He remembers the bodies on the steps, rotting in the heat. Waving the white flag for peace. The House of Power is really some kind of ongoing and active grave. It is the House of Many Dead. Archaeologists have found bones now. And, finally, it looks like they are repairing the panes of glass where bullets flew.

  It’s all he can do to stand still. The House of Power reminds him of a dignified old woman. Its outer walls are cracked and flaking and it looks like it hasn’t cared for itself, like it hasn’t washed its face for a dozen years at least. It is peeling. It is cordoned off by a high fence and clad with scaffolding. Ideas come to him: he could make a mad dash into the street, across the two lanes of traffic and announce himself, proclaim who he is and what he has done.

  ‘Here I am! It is me, I am one of the gunmen. I’m one of those that was never punished. I survived. I’m here. I escaped.’

  Or he could clamber over the corrugated wall and get himself arrested. Or he could wait till dark and sneak over the wall and explore the place, graffiti his cell number in the chamber. Or he could urinate against the cordon in an act of provocation. He feels sad and sick. The spaceship at the other end of town has no feeling to it and no presence, not like this. This building spreads itself out, it owns the City; it has a dome and a spike at the top. Then he notices that there is no dragon there on top. He stares hard. Instead, there’s a bird. A dove. Made of bronze with an olive branch in its mouth. They must have swapped it for the dragon the man Ashes had told him about.

  He remembers Aspasia Garland talking about saving leatherback turtles, about politics being about everything, about taking care of the earth, not just people. ‘Breeze’, that was his nickname. His big gun. He shot a lady dead inside that House; he was so excited and overwhelmed by all the action. He had wanted to kill her too, his mother, kill her dead for all the time she never gave him.

  His groin begins to throb. He feels a jab in his side and also a dull ache in his heart which he will never erase and neither can Sans Amen. So, after all these years, they will ‘reconstruct’ the place, rebuild and renovate the House to its former so-called glory. They will reinstate its grandeur, its righteousness. This place of ruling in this City is built on the bones of others. Who were these others? Does anybody care? They will polish up the peace dove. He has a sense that this reconstruction is the opposite of progress; that the House of Power was not built for them; it was built for Victoria. Politicians inside the House are nothing like conservationists; they are not putting hatchlings back into the sea. They are not concerned with future generations.

  Joseph walks towards what used to be the old fire station. It is painted gentle pastel colours now. It was all crooked and dusty and abandoned the last time he saw it; now it looks like an attractive spot. Behind it is a dazzling building, an apparition of white, like a holy place. Tentatively, he draws closer and sees that in fact it is a library. It is the National Library of Sans Amen. It is magnificent, like a big white butterfly or a collection of sails. There is a small amphitheatre to one side which makes it look as though it could be in Rome. It is a place for books, for studying. When he was fourteen he couldn’t read properly.

  In the time of the attempted coup there was no library here; it was an old building on the other side of the square. He remembers Ashes telling him that books liberated people, the common citizen, from poverty of spirit. A man who read books was a man who was freer than most.

  Joseph walks left, behind the library, towards the sea. He should never have hidden at all, not for all these years. Hiding is cowardice. Hiding is not going to help him or the country heal. And yet he saw little alternative than to keep his head down. Has his real father been hiding too, from him, from all his other sons and daughters? Who is he the son of? His mother told him so little. His father was one of ten men who never stayed long. Maybe he could start to ask around; there must be public records, a register of some sort. Who, who, was his father? There must be relatives or half-siblings around he could track down and ask. What does his father look like, fat or thin, short or tall? Does he have good teeth?

  It is then that he sees the new promenade, a long stretch of sculpted public space – trees and a walkway – and he realises that now he’s in another place, a city he doesn’t recognise. This part of town was rough. Now it looks like a vibrant bustling square. It has been recreated, renewed. It used to be full of vagrants and beggars and men drinking rum in parlours. It was a violent place, edgy and unsafe. It was where the men used to send him to drop money and drugs. He came here for the men in the pizzeria on the east side of town. He came to do their deals before he got bailed from prison by the Leader. This is where he got caught, picked up by police and locked up. On a night run. Right here, where there are now trees and umbrellas and a wide open feel. He was entrapped here – and now it feels spacious. The sea is still there, though. It is like gun grey satin on the other side of the square. The small white lighthouse on the foreshore stands like a man he once knew. He is still standing there, alone, and he says now, ‘So there you are again. What took you so long? Hello, Breeze.’

  Joseph puts his hands over his ears. He walks through this busy square he doesn’t know anymore and he starts to walk faster. It is now coming to him, who he was. Breeze. He was worthless once, lost, abandoned, hard, a criminal, a fighter, rude and sour and difficult and proud and ugly and bad – and he starts to run, run up Chanders Street, run and run, fast fast fast.

  ‘Breeze,’ he hears the name everywhere now, everyone noticing him as he runs.

  ‘Breeze!’ shouts a voice through a megaphone outside a shop called Rattans, ‘Breeze come up and check us out, everything must go today.’

  ‘Breeze!’ as he runs past the Golden Windows plaza, past a woman on the street with two buckets of pickled green mango.

  ‘Breeze!’ as he runs past KFC, past the car park, the fruit vendors, the man selling handcrafted leather shoes. And then he cannot see, he is running too fast, up and up, past the spaceship and its silver domes and then across three lanes of traffic. He runs and stops cars and then he is in the middle of the brown savannah, the trees everywhere, like strawberry ice creams, erupting and clapping as he passes, petals like wedding confetti, like he is running through a party. Then he is running fast as he can across the savannah. There are children with brightly coloured kites and he keeps running across towards the centre. There are hills all around, gentle slopes, and he remembers now, running through the tunnel of bamboo, yes, he ran away, fast fast, like an athlete sprinter. He ran for days, ran for nights, ran to the centre of Sans Amen, away from his old self.

  LATER THAT AFTERNOON

  No one knows what happens to leatherback turtles between the day they hatch and the day they return to the beach where they were born to give birth. It’s a mystery only known to God. No one knows where they go for twenty years, where and how they live and how they survive. They simply disappear into the great oceans of the planet. Humankind hasn’t been able to find them in their adolescence or early adulthood. They survive, somehow, and have done for millennia. They outdive killer whales who hunt their prey in packs for days, and great white sharks who can snap them in half. Over time, they can grow enormous.

  Like the turtles, no one knows what happened to him either. Those first fifteen years of his life – what w
ere the facts of his existence as a son of the City of Silk? The young boys who were gunned down, who cared? Now Joseph wants to remember. What happened to him? He wants to retrieve his life, all of it, before and after what happened in the House. He must find the only other man who escaped the execution, the strange quiet one with the spectacles, Ashes. The one who took him to pray and who said that intelligence lived in the heart.

  For a while he’s had some inkling of where this man Ashes lives. He’s heard some talk, over the years. On the way back home from town towards L’Anse Verte he will again cross central Sans Amen, pass through towns and villages. He can get dropped off, ask around. He heard something once, from those who left the compound, those who were never involved. After the Leader was shot, his followers quickly left the compound and separated. News drifted his way that the army quickly realised two gunmen had escaped; they searched for them that night and for weeks afterwards. Years later, a rumour had come to him, via some of his ex-brothers, that one of the escaped gunmen, the older one, had become a librarian in a small village . . . a village called Liberty.

  5 P.M., THE LIBRARY,

  LIBERTY VILLAGE,

  CENTRAL SANS AMEN

  It would be easy to sneak in, just take a look. Then sneak out. The library is a modest affair, just three large rooms, a reception desk and some filing cabinets; there is an area with some desks and a corridor with some doors, one marked AV, one marked washroom. It is late afternoon and it is empty, near closing time.

  He is a lot thinner now, and his hair is grey and his beard is long and frizzy, and he is wearing exactly the same round spectacles, has the same slow way of moving around. It occurs to Joseph that this man Ashes won’t recognise him. Joseph pretends to browse the shelves, taking books out, using the slots left as a spy hole from which to watch. The man Ashes is moving along with his trolley, absorbed in re-shelving books. Joseph can feel his breathing slow in his lungs; the old librarian floats past like a ghost. The man is putting books back on to shelves, taking pleasure in doing so, reading the spine of each. Joseph feels himself go in to some kind of trance. The air seems gluey. His tongue is thick in his mouth. His kidneys are suddenly active, he is itching to piss. He fights the urge. Again, his heart, it begins to race and then slow. All of him feels weak and faint and he realises he needs to sit down.

  He gets to a chair by the wall and sits. He feels like an old man too, like his heart is slowly quaking and rolling around. He remembers the line of men falling, the sound of machine gun fire, the way some were already on their knees. Running blindly along the road, through the bamboo.

  ‘Hello.’

  He hears a voice. He looks up to see the man Ashes standing there with his trolley.

  ‘Sir, are you okay?’

  Joseph presses his hand to his groin and blurts, ‘It’s me, remember me? In the House . . . it’s me.’

  The man bends closer to hear him.

  ‘It’s me. Breeze.’

  A small seizure of shock spreads in his face, ‘Oh!’ And then . . . a furtive glance backwards.

  ‘Wait,’ he says and hurries to the door. He turns the open sign to closed and locks the door with a key. He pulls down the blind.

  The man comes forward towards him, his arms outstretched, tears flowing and Joseph stands. Then he is in a crush of arms and beard.

  ‘Thank the Lord, give thanks, give thanks,’ the man Ashes repeats again and again into his ear, like he is whispering these words to a long-lost child or relative.

  ‘I’m so glad to see you, thank you, thank you for coming. I have been hoping. Hoping and waiting and praying for you, my friend. Oh, my friend, my young friend, oh, oh,’ and Joseph is overcome with relief. Feelings slide through him of wonderment and pent-up longing; tears flow and the two men stand and hug each other for several long minutes.

  Then Ashes takes him by the shoulders and holds him at arm’s length and examines him, as if concerned for his health, as if checking his teeth. Behind his spectacles his eyes are alert and piercing, like they’ve been taken out of his head and polished. It is then, gazing back at him, that Joseph can see something has changed with this man called Ashes. Now he has a different face, alive and animated.

  ‘Is you,’ Ashes says. ‘I can see you become a man. Oh, look at you! You got so big. Eh, eh, gorsh, nuh, very tall and big. Are you married? What happened to you, eh, come, come and sit down with me, here in the back. Come.’ He keeps glancing backwards and pressing his hands to his lips and smiling at him and saying, ‘Oh, thank the Lord. He lived. He lived.’

  Over cups of sweet mint tea they sit and talk freely, both of them needing to, both full, everything and anything falling out. It is a joy for Joseph to see this man; he is so different now. Energetic and somehow younger, not older. Their conversation is in fits and spurts and long monologues and each listens to the other with intense curiosity.

  ‘I have felt alone all these years,’ says Joseph, ‘all this time. I have a good wife, a daughter, but . . . there is a part of me that is on fire, that is restless since those six days in the House. I care for turtles now. I found my way to a small village on the north coast. I ran that way, getting there three years later. One of the female ministers gave me the idea and so I went to look for where leatherback turtles go to nest. I was lucky, I got work picking cocoa at first. The men of the village didn’t run me out. I was still young, about seventeen by then. I found the men on the beach guarding the turtles, and so I joined them.

  ‘But . . . is like the House, what happened there, killed part of me. I find it hard . . . to sleep. My side aches. I have a wound no one says exists. I fill my life and I enjoy my work. I have love in my life. And also is like I suffer an absence. I am a loner, still.’ Joseph looks away. He thinks of Mercy Green, his mother, who died alone, eventually. She possessed this kind of singularity too, despite all her children; like she was always distracted or somewhere else. His mother’s bones were laid to rest in the large cemetery on the outskirts of the City of Silk.

  ‘I went back to the House, today – first time ever – just to look – to see if it could give me back . . . you know . . . I figure I lost myself in there.’

  Ashes sips his tea and nods and says, ‘When my brother River died, I felt the same way for many years, most of my adult life. Like something get lost. Is why I get mixed up in that mess. To prove something or get part of myself back. I get devastated when I was a boy, something left me then. The House? For me, something else happened.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I get saved there, I find my way out. Back to home, to roots. To self and service. I ask the right question then.’

  ‘Oh yeah? What is the right question?’

  The man called Ashes looks into a middle spot between them.

  ‘I cannot give you that answer, my friend, every man need to come up with the right question when he gets to a certain age.’ And then Ashes goes quiet. ‘Go an see the King,’ he says.

  ‘King? What King?’

  ‘The King of the castle.’

  ‘Who you mean?’

  ‘The Prime Minister.’

  ‘Eh? You crazy?’

  ‘I serious.’

  ‘Which Prime Minister, that woman in charge now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then, who?’

  ‘The man we meet all those years ago. The PM, the man Hal shot in the legs.’

  ‘Him? You mad or what?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Never mind that. Go see him and ask him the question you must ask.’

  ‘I have no idea where his house is, where is it?’

  ‘Go left,’ says Ashes.

  ‘Left?’

  Ashes smiles. ‘That’s all I can say for now. Left and over the bridge. Keep walking. Then ask.’

  ‘You speaking some kind of code?’

  ‘I speaking simple. Go left and cross the bridge and you will find the PM. He an ol man now, a recluse. He no longer go out in public aff
airs. He get his confidence shaken. But he is the founding King of a big court now, court of human rights and international justice. He an ol King. Wounded. Go and see him. He walks with a limp. Go – and then ask the right question.’

  ‘Shit, man.’

  Ashes laughs. ‘He’s not difficult to find, my friend. His address is in the phone book. He lives in a quiet suburb of the City of Silk.’

  Ashes is so different somehow. Peaceful and manlike. His advice sounds crazy, though. It is most unexpected advice for his loneliness, and it is extraordinary to see this man again, strange at how he is transformed. He was a man depleted of power, who had a famous brother, that was the talk. Now he seems strong.

  ‘You been reading in the papers about those bones?’ Joseph says.

  ‘What bones?’

  ‘Amerindians. Under the House.’

  ‘Oh. Yes.’

  ‘That place haunted, no arse.’

  ‘Yes. I had a dream when I was there. About bones.’

  ‘Well, seems like they going and dig up a whole other parliament under that House.’

  ‘What . . . the elders of the past?’

  ‘Or maybe just regular people. That place haunted. Like I is haunted.’

  ‘Yes. I can see that.’

  ‘I murder two people. I am a double murderer.’

  ‘Go to see the King,’ says Ashes.

  ‘Yeah, an ask him the right question, right?’

  Ashes nods and his eyes are inquisitive and alight.

  *

  When Joseph gets home Pearl gives him the silent treatment. His disappearance was too secretive, too puzzling, and she is repaying him with silence and he doesn’t blame her for this. She will refuse to be generous with him, in bed, in conversation. She will be cool, cool, and he knows she will stay so for a while even though she has never won any of these standoffs; she has never been so silent with him that he has spilled the beans. Part of him clamps shut – and when she goes silent in response he clamps up even more. He goes insomniac too. The rocks in their marriage are all about this: his past. He is evasive; she demands more – and he cannot give her more. It is a stale old rigmarole. They are both tired of it.