by Ian Black
The chef stands, pats his heart passionately and explains, “Deep down, beneath the beast… a heart beats here too.” He presses play on a portable CD player. “I admit… I am different,” and as opening bars of the classic song “Que Sera, Sera” begin to sound, he explains, “I’m different to most men…” then throws his arms out wide dramatically and announces spectacularly, “I’m a showman!”
Slumped in his chair, Hazma’s whole self feels numb. He’s not completely comatose, but close. His eyes are now closed, but on autopilot they blink open periodically for a few seconds at intervals, and through blurred vision his memory banks register the following short distinct fragments in time; mini little memories of what his sight sees next. These eleven visions flashback to him… for the rest of his life:
1. Pixie removes his dressing gown, swizzles it around his head like a stripper and casts it onto the bed.
Hazma blacks out.
2. Pixie prances around Hazma like a delighted dancing bear, wearing only black socks and a smile.
Hazma blacks out.
3. Pixie sings along with the warbling diva, “When I was just a baby boy, I always wondered… What will I be?”
Hazma blacks out.
4. Pixie reaches beneath his own belly and strokes his genitals.
Hazma blacks out.
5. Pixie tells him, “You won’t remember a thing. That first drink was spiked to fuck… splashed and dashed with Rohypnol and sprinkled with lashings of Viagra.”
Hazma blacks out.
6. Using a long leather belt Pixie straps Hazma sat up into the hard-backed chair.
Hazma blacks out.
7. Pixie pulls Hazma’s trousers off, tickles the Iraqi’s testicles, and exclaims excitedly, “Hurrah for Viagra!”
Hazma blacks out.
8. Pixie takes long licks of Hazma’s nose with his long fat tongue.
Hazma blacks out.
9. Close up, Pixie admits, “I’ve taken black, white, mixed, chink, straight, gay, lady-boy, dwarf… but never a…”
Hazma blacks out.
10. Whistling along to the tune, Pixie positions his rear-end towards Hazma. Squats, and reverses backwards, while looking expectantly into Hazma’s lap.
Hazma blacks out.
11. George holds the portable television in both hands high above Pixie’s head.
“YOU DIRTY BASTARD!” yells George.
Pixie’s euphoric expression transforms to despair. He attempts to stand, but the date-rapist is stopped, dead in his tracks by George slamming the television, screen first, onto Pixie’s skull.
The naked chef collapses onto the floor, with the TV completely engulfing his head.
“Come on, Haz!” shouts George, but Hazma can’t move, he’s slumped across the strap with a gormless grin on his face.
Realising his cellmate is not too compos mentis, George unfastens the Iraqi, hoists him up with a fireman’s lift and turns to escape, but then remembering the whole point of the visit, he turns back, pockets all three phones and then leaves, with Hazma dribbling down his back.
In the corridor “Que Sera, Sera” nears its crescendo, ringing out from Pixie’s open cell door. George steps over the unconscious crony, shoulders open their door and shrugs Hazma off onto bottom bunk, as the diva climaxes, “Que Sera, Seraaaaaaaaaa!”
•
Sun shines into the cell next morning, as brightly as George returns sprightly from breakfast, alone, and greets Hazma far too cheerily, “Morning, Haz.”
The Iraqi is a wreck, in a dreadfully weak sad state; slumped across the table, head in hands. He manages a weak mumbled reply, “I have the mother of all headaches.”
Three mobile phones lie next to each other on the table.
“What happened then?” George enquires, too enthusiastically.
Delicately, Hazma lifts his head from his hands, frowns and moans, “Too loud!”
George whispers loudly, “So what happened?”
“Alcohol!”
“You don’t drink!”
Hazma scowls, “He made me drink. I had to, to get the phones.”
After a pregnant pause, George asks, “What else did he make you do?” A coy expression forms across his face.
“Why?” the Iraqi is concerned by the question, and his expression.
“Can’t you remember what happened?”
“It was weird!” Hazma explains, “He needs locking up!”
“He’s in prison!”
Hazma shakes his head, “In an asylum!”
He prompts again, “What else happened?”
“Then I was drunk. I couldn’t move… I can’t remember after that.”
George stares at him, in silence, looking as if he has something to say, on the tip of his tongue.
Hazma senses it, “Why?” he asks. “What do you know?”
George puts his head down, “You don’t want to know.”
“Just tell me!”
He takes time considering his response, which annoys Hazma even more; the Iraqi bangs a fist on the table, yelling “TELL ME!”
George lifts his head, and though trying to disguise it, the faintest smile is detectable, as he nods towards Hazma’s groin.
Hazma’s jaw drops, “What?”
“Soz, Haz,” he explains, “you were in there ages, and Pixie’s bloke wouldn’t let me in, so I twatted him, barged in and Pixie was…” he whispers, “doing stuff.”
“What stuff?”
George takes a breath, really struggling to know how to explain, and how to stop his twitching lips from smirking.
Hazma’s incensed, “Doing what?” He needs to know.
George looks him straight in the eye and delivers, “Bummed.”
He pulls a disbelieving face, “Bummed?”
“He looked like he, was… you know!”
The horrified Iraqi looks down, and retorts, “I’m not sore!”
“No! Not like that, he looked like he was bumming, your…” nodding at his groin again, “Well, it looked like he was!”
“No!” Hazma experiences the first of many nightmarish flashbacks, “Oh no. Oh no!” He’s frantic, “Well, was he or wasn’t he?”
“Was he what?”
“DOING IT?”
George feels under pressure and shrugs, “Well, er, I dunno, he looked like he was either just getting on, or just getting off, I dunno!” He feels bad for Hazma now, “You were out of it, Haz, you couldn’t help it!”
The Iraqi’s outraged, “THAT’S SICK!” and questions, “What was I doing, while he did it?”
George looks embarrassed to admit, “Smiling.”
“I’LL KILL HIM!” Hazma struts towards the door ranting, “I’LL KILL HIM!”
George bolts upright raising a hand to stop him, “You can’t!”
“Why not?”
He’s proud to announce, “Coz I put him in hospital.”
These words sound sweet to Hazma, but he’s a tortured man; the flashbacks are flooding back already, an avalanche of memories from last night. He doesn’t know what to do or say, except seethe. He skulks across to the window muttering, “I’ve gotta get out of here.” Placing his hands on his head he clasps clumps of hair tightly as the torturous thoughts flicker in frames like a persecuting projector show of pained memory. Through gritted teeth he asks himself in angst, “What do I do now?”
Thinking the question is for him, with the very best of intention, George advises, “Well… you just wash your willy and move on!”
•
Chapter: 26
Molotov Smile
“It’s amazing how much red tape these Masons can cut through,” says Larry, sliding a piece of paper across his desk. “I spoke to my chief inspector pal. He liaised between Agent Williams and the governor… We’re cleared to film another interview with both convicts!”
Millie whoops with delight.
He informs, “MI5 want to know more about the Iraqi as well, plus they’re pleased that we’re rufflin
g Ruparela’s feathers.”
“That’s great, thanks, Larry!”
He smugly holds his arms out wide, “Who’s the…”
“You’re the daddy, Larry!” She humours him.
•
That afternoon, as both cellmates rake the garden, the atmosphere remains fractious, as it has been since George’s flippant advice.
Hazma stews behind a wall of silence. George attempts to break it, “You okay, Haz?”
He stops raking, looks at George, and with a deadly serious expression demands, “Never tell anyone what happened.”
“I won’t!” he won’t.
Hazma nods towards the oil tank and orders bossily, “Go rake there!” As George sidles over, Hazma checks the guard, who’s preoccupied, then ambles over himself and uses his cellmate as cover while he pours a bucketful of oil from the drip container into the fertilizer bags.
George whispers, “You still haven’t explained how it works.”
Hazma checks the guard again, who’s not watching, then in the nicely raked, fine, flattened soil, uses the toe of his boot to draw a rough overhead plan of the prison garden and buildings. He marks an X in both places where the tomato plants have been planted and explains, “You’ve seen me pouring oil into the bags…” George nods. “When this type of oil is mixed with this type of ammonium nitrate fertilizer… it creates a chemical reaction and becomes… a stable explosive.” George’s face looks confused, but intrigued. Hazma continues, “To make it unstable… we add a detonator.”
George hangs on every word, “And then?”
He moves in close to George’s ear and whispers, “Boom!”
His eyes widen, “Really?”
Hazma nods.
“What’s a detonator?”
“A catalyst… to create the explosion; I can make them from mobile phones.” Hazma nods towards their cell window, “We’ll blow our cell wall first, then the outside wall, which has a weak fracture point beneath the fill pipe… This old prison’s already crumbling; what I’m mixing, combined with exploding a full tank of oil, will blast right through this wall.”
“How do you know all this stuff?”
“College… all good bomb makers study chemistry.”
Another guard appears from the main building, Hazma wipes a boot across his soil schematic, and both men busy themselves as he approaches.
Holding a note, the guard informs, “Two visitors here to see you both; Millennium Jones and a cameraman.”
They don’t look too surprised; Millie’s already emailed them.
•
Inside the tiny visiting room Millie and Terry are set-up and ready. After what happened in the last interview, both wait with nervous expectancy as the steel door swings open.
Two guards enter and sit either side of Millie, as buffers to protect her, followed by George and Hazma.
A third guard follows in behind and says, “I’ll leave the door open to let some air in.” He stands next to Terry, squashed back in the corner, adjusting his wide-angled lens to panorama setting, to fit all five bodies into shot, who sit from left to right – George, guard, Millie, guard, Hazma.
The standing guard points at Hazma and puts him straight, “Any shit from you and it’s solitary!”
He stares back with disdain. With so many bodies crammed inside, the room is claustrophobic and stuffy. A pathetic wall-mounted fan’s whirring blades don’t help much, by merely pushing warm air around. Once everyone has settled, Millie looks to Terry, who gives her the thumbs-up. She clears her voice, preparing to speak, and opens her mouth, but is immediately interrupted by Hazma, who nonchalantly suggests, “I know what you want!”
All heads turn to face him. Terry zooms close up onto his face as the Iraqi addresses the camera saying, “I’ve heard it all before… You want to know why we keep attacking you… and why 9/11 happened.”
After a brief awkward silence, Millie replies, “Well, I—”
He cuts her short, “Try my perspective…” and explains, “In the 1990s the West branded Iraqi President Saddam Hussein a tyrant… A tyrant who ruled and apparently abused his own nation with a rod of iron… He then invaded Kuwait and threatened Israel. So the West, in their wisdom, opposed Saddam apparently to ensure peace in the Middle East… Your brave leaders assured the world that your forces would oppose him in such a way that innocent people would not be harmed.”
Millie interjects, “That conflict is one of my earliest memories. In 1991, I was six years old, and remember being shocked by the—”
“When I was six,” he speaks over her, “I was in Baghdad, in a fishing boat on the Tigris river, with my uncle, at the precise moment the Americans and their allies laid down a barrage of destruction on my people… I thought the world had ended; it was like we were stuck in the middle of a volcano erupting, all around us explosions exploding everything everywhere; murderous destruction en mass… My family and friends were murdered, along with many other good, innocent people slaughtered.”
Hazma pauses for breath. Prompted by his words, thoughts flash through the minds of those who remember that TV footage, especially Millie, who compares his description to what she vividly remembers witnessing, and then surprises everyone by announcing, “I agree!” All heads spin to face her. “I agree it was wrong to bombard Baghdad as we did, and to make matters worse we, the American people, were fed lies during those raids. We were assured constantly by commentators and swaggering military spokesmen that smart weaponry and surgical precision bombing was being used to minimise what they termed collateral damage; that is, death or injury to innocent civilians… And we believed them! Why wouldn’t we? We are supposed to be the good guys; so we believed, as we watched, but it was like watching Star Wars battle scenes live on TV, as guided missiles obliterated MILITARY TARGETS ONLY we were told… and we believed them!”
Millie’s stun-gun speech levels the room to silence. No one expected that. She also appears to have stolen Hazma’s thunder. He looks flabbergasted by her words, which haven’t finished yet, and become markedly angrier as she quotes, “Following the ceasefire, official figures confirmed, that of the 250,000 bombs that were dropped on Iraq, only 6% were actually surgical strikes… The other 94% were traditional bombs… B52 bombers carried out raiding missions during every night of the war. A B52’s only function in warfare… is carpet bombing, which apparently they did every night of the war.”
She goes on, “During the first hour of the first bombardment, an American F16 pilot described the view from his cockpit as ‘flames rising up from the city, neighbourhoods lit up like Christmas trees. The entire city was sparkling at us’.”
Hazma concurs, “An accurate description!”
Millie concurs, “I witnessed that too, on TV; it was blatantly obvious to me as a six-year-old that innocent people would be killed… And now we know surgical strikes were in fact miniscule, collateral damage was inevitable. It was estimated that over 100,000 CIVILIAN Iraqi deaths were attributed to the Gulf War, of which 3,500 fatalities of innocent Iraqi people were directly attributed to bombing… by the West!”
Following her flood of facts, a surreal atmosphere fills the room; Hazma certainly seems unsure what to say next. He had a punchy statement prepared, but incredibly this American woman stole the wind from his sails, and continues, “Several years later, in New York, came 9/11… which also resulted in carnage… More cold-blooded murder… Nearly 3,000 innocent people… slaughtered; another 3,000 innocent souls, executed, by Al Qaeda!”
Pausing deliberately, she faces Hazma head-on, and then addresses him firmly, “So in answer to your initial question… NO! I don’t need you to try and justify 9/11 to me, nor 7/7, or any other bloodbath that your people have committed… I already know why they happened.”
The electric fan whirs.
She offers, “I know why they all happen,” and lists, “the War of Independence, the Boer Wars, the Civil War, World Wars I and II, Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, the Falklands, Korea, the Cold Wa
r, Bosnia, Somalia, the Congo, Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, Syria… need I continue? I know why they all started!”
Hazma looks confused, like every other face in the room, except Millie’s, as she jabs her finger at the Iraqi and continues firing, “Those conflicts all started… because of people like you… People who prefer annihilation to negotiation; fanatical gung-ho politicians, warlords, terrorists and clerics, whose simple agenda is ‘get them before they get us’, to take what they want or to reap their revenge, without realising that their logic and actions are futile… Futile and self-perpetuating, as the conflicts keep coming, relentlessly rolling like the tides in a never-ending sentence of epic perpetual death… Only names and places change and will continue to do so until warmongers finally realise… that the pen, the spoken word, and handshakes… are far mightier than any bleeding sword!”
Millie feels herself shaking, with adrenaline-pumped passion detectable in her voice as she admits, “I really don’t want to hear any justification for killing innocents… Not from you, not from politicians…” she shakes her head, “not from anyone.”
The fan gyrates.
“But…” she hasn’t finished, “what I do want to know…” her face fumes as expressively as her words, “is how anyone can murder an innocent person… and think they’ve done a good job? Even in revenge! How can anyone do that, Hazma?”
The tense room is stifled by quiet, except for whirring blades pushing angry air around. Her question wafts through Hazma’s echoing mind, on a rotating cycle: How can anyone do that, Hazma?
Terry zooms in slowly onto the Iraqi’s frowning face. Hazma’s eyes are wild; his back teeth grind and both fists are clenched tightly with white knuckles ready for action. He fidgets uncomfortably, and then opens his mouth to speak… but nothing comes out; he bolts up barges past Terry and storms out.
