by John Sweeney
At the core of the Troubles were two nationalisms entwined with two religions, fighting each other. After his father was shot dead in Belfast when he was seven, his mother had taken him and his older brother south, to the relative calm of the Republic. They’d ended up in Cork. On Joe’s first day at his new school, he’d written in his new diary: We had a god but then we put it in the attic. The teacher, a Christian Brother – though not much of either – read his blasphemy out loud and gave him the strap, a short strip of leather that, correctly applied, left a stinging pain on the palm of your hand. Worse than that was the class’s mockery of the new boy, with his weird Belfast accent. Their new parish priest had come round to the house that very evening to enquire what devilry these new people from the north, the Tipladys, were up to. When Joe’s mother heard his question, she laughed out loud, the first time he’d seen that happen since his father’s murder.
‘We had a crucifix, Father,’ she’d said. ‘And I decided I didn’t want it on the wall of the living room in our new home so I put it in the attic.’
The priest was on the doorstep, his mother at the front door, Joe was eavesdropping from behind the living room door, his brother Seamus was out playing football.
‘Go easy on us, Father,’ his mother continued. ‘The Rah shot my man. Now Seamus and Little Joe have got no da. Your God may be able to explain that to two little boys but mine can’t. So we’re not going to have a crucifix on the wall and we’re not going to Mass anymore. We’ll go to hell our own sweet way.’
The priest swore. His mother swore back and slammed the door and braced her back against it and laughed so much that tears of joy trickled down her cheeks.
But Joe had been to the world’s purely atheist state, too, and that wasn’t so wonderful. Though, of course, you could say that North Korea has a religion, that the ruler is some kind of god.
And now this man, Joe’s cellmate, he took solace in God, his God, in this place. Well then, who was Joe to hold that against him? He stopped praying and Joe sighed, more to himself than the other man, and said, ‘I’d love to hear some English, just a phrase in English. Anything . . .’
Silence, then a light cough, then from out of the gloom:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury . . .
‘Signifying nothing.’ Joe completed the verse from Macbeth. To him, to hear those words in that darkness, it was unbearably moving. Tears ran down his face, tears he could not stop.
‘Thank you, that was beautiful,’ Joe whispered.
‘It was nothing.’
‘The screaming just now?’ Joe asked. ‘That was you?’
‘I’m embarrassed to say it was. They amplify it, you know, to accentuate the effect.’
‘I noticed. But the loudspeakers distort it, kind of makes it worse.’
‘Of course. It’s their version of’ – the man hesitated – ‘Justin Bieber.’
‘That’s a bit harsh,’ Joe said, and together they colluded in the quietest of chuckles. But in that place of hate and fear, even the softest laughter was an act of sedition.
‘Perhaps. Perhaps not.’ His English had a strong accent, but the grammar was good, his voice suggesting someone younger than Joe but cracked, if not yet broken, beyond exhaustion, on the edge of life. Yet there was a quality that shone through his words, something that placed him, if not out of reach of his torturers, then at least aside from them – a sardonic intelligence that glittered in the dark, that was irrepressible.
‘The strange thing is I was telling our . . .’ He paused to search for the right word. ‘Our hosts the truth, the absolute truth, and they knew it. But for them, the truth is dangerous. Better hear what they want to hear. This request, I found it difficult to oblige. Hence my misfortune.’
‘I’m so sorry I vomited. It was the smell of burnt skin.’
‘Shh. It’s over now. Let’s not talk of these dull things.’
Joe paused, wanting to know more but afraid to press him. Only then did he remember his manners.
‘Is there anything I can do for you?’
‘My wounds, perhaps they need a wash.’
‘There’s a jug of water somewhere here,’ Joe said. ‘And one of my bandages is not too dirty.’
‘Your accent is not quite British?’
‘I’m Irish.’
‘Oh . . .’ He said it long, as if he’d worked out who Joe was, or who Joe might be.
‘Oh means what?’
‘Nothing.’
Joe shuffled on his bottom to the back of the cell, away from the door, and put his fingers out tentatively so that he grasped the water jug – not to be confused with the foul-smelling pisspot that was in danger of becoming full. He brought the jug back to his usual place and asked his cellmate to move as close as possible to the knife-slash of light. What Joe saw made his hands shake so much, he almost dropped the jug.
‘Holy Mother of God,’ he cried out. Joe could swear like a trooper when he stubbed his toe. For something like this, he had to go back to when he was six years old, when he’d been an altar boy, when blasphemy meant something. The man before him had been blinded in both eyes, his nose broken, his chest peppered with cigarette burns, but worst of all was the stench of burnt flesh from his groin.
‘How did they do this to you?’ he asked in a whisper.
‘Blowtorch.’
Joe gagged again, but this time, thank heaven, he didn’t vomit. He dabbed his used bandage on his cellmate’s useless eyes, his nose, then handed it to him to clean up his groin, as far as that was possible. The other man inhaled sharply; when Joe was done, the bandage was black with blood.
As Joe moved, his moon necklace rattled slightly. His cellmate’s fingers moved to Joe’s chest and scrabbled around before locating the necklace, running his fingers around it in a way Joe found overly intimate.
‘This moon, a gift?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Joe said, ‘from a friend.’
He shuffled out of the light and Joe returned to his usual place, with his back to the wall, his arms on his knees.
‘My name is Joe Tiplady. And you?’
The darkness ensured Joe couldn’t see him but Joe sensed, though it sounded strange, that he was smiling.
‘I have so many names that I forget them all. Forgive me, Mr Tiplady—’
‘Call me Joe . . .’
‘In this place, Joe, the less you know about me, the better. Suffice to say, you can call me Aladdin. My hosts here think of me as a thing of darkness. So call me Aladdin. It amuses me.’
‘Aladdin, like in the movie?’
‘Aladdin, like in the pantomime. I had an aunt who lived in London for a time. Auntie Natasha went to see Aladdin at the Drury Lane theatre. Her description of this pantomime was glorious. Aladdin wasn’t a man at all but a woman dressed up as a man. The wicked uncle was played by a man in a fez called . . .’ He hesitated, dredging his memory and failing. ‘Alas, my memory is going. A magician, but so bad at magic. I was a boy when the Russians were bombing Grozny and I had already lost most of my family. I used to tremble with fear, and to get my mind off the bombs, my aunt would describe this man in a fez trying to turn a handkerchief into a white rabbit and failing, and failing, and failing . . .’ He started to laugh softly, almost on the edge of hearing, a sweet, infectious giggle that reminded Joe of someone in his past.
‘The worst magician in the world? I saw him in a show in Cork when I was but a boy. His name was Tommy Cooper.’
‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘Tommy Cooper – how wonderful to rediscover that in thi
s place.’ Joe joined Aladdin in laughter, just a gentle giggle at first. Tommy Cooper had been a big working-class man with a drinker’s nose – something silly, not quite right about him in fez and tuxedo. Something melancholy, too, about his doomed attempts to bring off magic tricks, a puncturing of magic’s pretension; about all human endeavour, perhaps. In this dark place, which had been echoing with screams only minutes before, laughter was a weapon. Joe’s mind’s eye pictured the clown-magician trying and failing to procure a white rabbit, and it got funnier and funnier until his ribs started to hurt.
‘Shh,’ the stranger warned. ‘They must not hear us laugh because they might think we are laughing not at the magician, but at them. And that would not do.’
Joe bit his lip and the cell returned to quiet.
For a while Aladdin said nothing, then he sniffed. ‘Forgive me, Joe, I smell antiseptic cream. It’s quite unusual for our hosts to treat you here for the injuries they themselves have created. Are you injured?’
‘Before I arrived here.’
‘How?’
‘I fell off a roof.’
‘Forgive me, Joe, but that was clumsy of you, and I do not think you are a clumsy man.’
The hairs on the back of Joe’s neck stood up. There was something alarming about this man’s intelligence, the power of his insight.
‘I found myself in Ghouta during the sandstorm.’
‘Ghouta is not at all safe for a European.’
‘It was a big mistake. We were almost captured by ISIS. Running from them, we got to the roof, and then I climbed onto a satellite-dish frame which buckled, and then a helicopter came and barrel-bombed ISIS. I was protected from the full force of the blast by being shielded by the building. The army must have picked me up. First they brought me to an ordinary prison, then I ended up here. By rights I should be dead.’
‘Thanks be to God that you are not. And how nice of them to treat you. No torture?’
‘The guard has hit me with a cosh a fair few times, once on my spine. But no, nothing like what you’ve been through.’
‘So you are here but not being tortured, a most unusual paradox, Joe. You must be an honoured guest of the government.’
‘I hadn’t quite thought of it like that.’
‘We are guests of air force intelligence, if I am not mistaken. Seven floors below ground. Here, they keep the most interesting guests in all of Syria.’
‘Is this the worst place in Syria?’
‘If you’re assuming that only Zarif tortures, then I’m afraid I cannot say yes. This is the worst place the regime has that is, er, mapped. There are other places – villas in Damascus, villas in the countryside, towards the sea – where the Alawites are strong, where people can be forgotten about. They may be worse. I have no personal knowledge of this. There are places under the control of ISIS that are differently appointed but no better. But this place is not at all good. I know of many people who have been through here, and more who have left here dead, and you are the very first to be treated in this most special way. That changes things.’
‘How so?’ Joe asked.
The man paused to gather his thoughts. ‘If they have made a decision not to torture you, and I think that best fits the facts, then I can tell you some things I would like to be communicated. I do not, I think, have so long to live. At the moment, what I have to say has been falling on deaf ears. But I think you are a good listener, Joe, and I trust you.’
‘Why would you trust me?’
‘Because my sister did.’
In the distance, a cell door closed with a soft thud.
THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA
The inflatable lost all forward motion and began to slop around crazily in the sea, which was getting wilder by the second. Without power, the inflatable’s lack of a proper V-shaped hull reduced it to a part-deflated grey balloon, not just bouncing around in the dark but wallowing within its own length, generating its own caterpillar motion. In the bow, the old lady who had already thrown up in the bilges vomited profusely over a fat man who, outraged for his dignity and fearful for his life, slapped her hard across the face; the old lady’s son punched the fat man on the jaw, knocking him overboard. The fat man’s wife let out a piercing scream. His son, a twelve-year-old boy, reached out his hand to rescue his father; the fat man, heavier than his boy, dragged him into the sea with him. The screaming woman followed her son, her cry extinguished by a throat full of brine.
Three young men in the starboard middle stood up to remonstrate with the hapless Iraqi who had been piloting the inflatable, yelling at him to restart the outboard – but the truth, unknown to the people on the boat, was that the smugglers had not bothered to recharge the electric motor properly, giving it only enough juice to get the refugees a mile or two away from the beach and out of their hands. The Iraqi shouted back, gesturing by dumbshow that the outboard would not start, but as he did so the boat tipped heavily down the biggest trough yet and two of the young men standing, gesticulating with fury, fell backwards into the sea. For so many of the people on the boat who were suffering the delusion that their life jackets might save them, the screams from the men in the water, turning to gurgling as they sank, proved them wrong. Their friends leant over to bring them back but, as they did so, the middle of the starboard side of the rib deflated some more, allowing in yet more gallons of seawater. The rescuers abandoned their attempt, and the men at sea gibbered in terror. The water level inside rose remorselessly, and more and more people started to scream, to stand up, making the boat more unstable, allowing more water in. There was no true captain, no legitimate authority; in its absence, in the predawn murk, there was chaos and frenzy and inhumanity.
The wind strengthened, the waves reaching two metres, and the inflatable started to sink, bow first. The smooth plastic offered no handholds, no traction, so that people who, with immense self-discipline, had spent the crossing sitting down, now were awash and floated off into the sea helplessly. Soon thirty, forty people were bobbing about in the waves, some trying to cling on to the grey plastic, others splashing around desperately in the choppy water, half in and half out. As luck would have it, by being amongst the last to board, Jameela and Ham at the stern of the inflatable were in the safest, or least risky, place. She clung on to the wooden transom to which the outboard was fixed with one hand, and to Ham with the other. But soon, they both knew, the stern would become so waterlogged that it would lose buoyancy and they would go under.
‘Mom,’ said Ham, ‘I love you.’
Jameela kissed him, hating every fibre of her being. She had fought for so long for them to be free from fear – and now, by her own actions, by her own reckless stupidity, they were both going to die.
Some already had. As the sun came up, Jameela saw seven, eight, nine corpses float past them, face up and face down, men, women, children. In the slop at her feet, inside the three-quarters-sunk inflatable, was an infant, barely two, bobbing up and down in the water, its face white with death.
DAMASCUS, SYRIA
Wolf Eyes – Joe’s dead love – had been Chechen. Katya had told him about her little brother, Timur: how he had been radicalised after the Russians had tortured him, how he had joined ISIS and had been, for a time, lost to the world, and her.
‘You’re Timur, aren’t you? Katya’s little brother?’
‘Call me Aladdin, Joe.’
‘That wasn’t a negative.’
‘And you’re the Irishman Katya fell in love with, after she ran away from the Russian. We were able to communicate, a little, in that time, and she told me about this man called Tiplady. I suspected it might be you, but it was only when my fingers were able to touch the moon necklace that I knew for sure. I gave it to her. So, here we are.’
‘I miss her, every day of my life,’ Joe said.
‘Before you die, you cannot get enough of breathing.’
‘What’s that?’
‘A saying that Auntie Natasha liked.’ He said nothing for a time, the
n: ‘May I ask, how did Katya die?’
For a time Joe was lost, the memory of that dusk in Utah; his love, lifeless in his arms.
‘A killer, a CIA man turned traitor, working for the Russians, held an old woman hostage. Katya challenged him to shoot her instead. She was extraordinarily brave.’
‘The killer?’
‘I shot him.’
‘She was buried according to our tradition?’
‘No, I am sorry, according to mine.’
‘And what is your religion?’
‘I’m a lapsed Catholic.’
‘What does a lapsed Catholic believe in?’
‘That God is a drunk, I suppose. I had Katya cremated and then I took her ashes to an island off Donegal in my country. The Atlantic rolls in, big surf, seabirds, seals, no humans in sight, a small chapel, abandoned. It’s a place . . . It’s a wilderness of savage beauty. You could call it holy. It is . . . it was for us. Before, we had a few days together there, in hiding. It was, for Katya and for me, the best of times.’
‘Perhaps I can go there someday,’ Timur said.
‘Perhaps,’ Joe agreed, but the uncertainty in his voice gave the game away.
‘Perhaps, but not so likely.’ There was something wry about the way Timur spoke, acknowledging the reality that they were both locked in a tomb, deep below the ground.
‘This . . .’ said Joe. ‘Our meeting in this place is too much of a coincidence.’
‘In here, there is no such thing as a coincidence.’
‘So this is part of a game? They’ve deliberately put the two of us here together?’
‘Tyranny is cruel, but it is not stupid. If it were stupid, too often it would fail. They may have a reason. Or they know that you don’t speak Arabic but they don’t know that I can speak some English. I haven’t told them. The logic may well be to frighten you, to get you to talk. It’s a smart idea to put you in a cell with a man who has been badly treated. You did vomit when I first came into the cell, so their logic has some force.’
