by John Sweeney
‘There’s something I didn’t tell you,’ said Joe. ‘The job I had, it wasn’t just to trace Jameela, find out that she was safe and well. It was to get her son back to the father, name of Dr Dominic Franklyn. I did that, I kidnapped her son while she wasn’t looking. I can still hear her screaming her boy’s name, in the fog, on a hillside in the middle of nowhere in northern Hungary.’ Joe’s voice went softer. ‘Thing is, Humfrey, I stole a child from his mother, stole him because I was told that it was the right thing to do by two people in the CIA, one of whom I trust with my life, and all of it – well, your part in it, anyway – turns out to be a lie.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to make my confession.’
‘You mean, in church?’
Joe shook his head. ‘No. I’m going to make my confession. But not in church. Then I’m going to kill someone I trusted, someone who lied to me. Confessing in church then killing would not be right.’
Humfrey nodded in agreement: killings and church confessions didn’t go well together.
Joe looked at him. ‘You lied to me, too,’ he said. ‘You put on quite a show. Stay away from me. If I ever see you again, I will break your back. Understood?’
Once again, Humfrey nodded.
NORTHERN HUNGARY
Autumn sunlight washed through high windows, making the bleak scene somehow less grim. The room in the old convent was bare, white-washed, cool, spacious, floored with red tiles. In its centre sat a stout wooden chair fixed to the floor by steel battens, in the chair the patient, trussed up in a grey straitjacket, her feet tied loosely to the chair legs, her black eyes scowling directly at the steel door.
Joe eased back from the eyehole and said in English, ‘She looks pretty harmless to me.’
The nurse, Zsofia, had hair dyed blue and was becoming too fat for her uniform. She spoke good English and translated Joe’s remark for Viktor, her male counterpart, a massive man, his skin the colour of a carrot. Viktor sniggered unpleasantly and Zsofia took up the laughter. Joe smiled thinly at them, signalling that he could enjoy a joke at his expense, but inwardly he felt unease, that he would not like to be trussed up in this place.
‘Every time we let her out of the straitjacket, she bite,’ said Zsofia. Joe was heftier than both of them, knew how to handle himself.
Viktor unlocked the door with a massive iron key and the patient hissed at them. The quiet intensity of the hiss unnerved Joe. This was not what he had been expecting. Nevertheless, he held his nerve and said, ‘Get her out of that thing.’
‘She bite, she bite,’ said Zsofia.
Joe palmed her thirty thousand forints, worth about one hundred dollars, and the two of them gingerly undid the straps of the straitjacket and the leather ties securing her ankles to the legs of the chair. The patient made no move; her eyes were closed. Zsofia backed out first, then Viktor. Then Joe heard the door closing and the key turning in the lock.
The moment the lock clicked, Joe spoke: ‘Jameela, I kidnapped your son. I am sorry . . .’ But that was all he managed to get out before she came at him, a snarling, biting, scratching whirlwind of hate. He grabbed hold of one arm but she sank her teeth into his hand and bit him hard, drawing blood. He roared in pain, but now she was clawing at his eyes. To defend himself, he had to hurt her, badly. He used his heft, locked both hands onto her right arm and spun her viciously hard against the wall; the air was knocked out of her for a few seconds, so he grabbed hold of the other arm and held both behind her and lifted them high, towards her neck. Her legs were still thrashing so he sat on her with a thunk. Now she was banging her jaw against the tile floor, a terrifying act of self-harm. Joe wrestled with her so that she was locked in some kind of stasis, her arms high behind her back, her stomach fixed to the floor by Joe’s weight. Even so, it was with relief that he heard the door unlock and Viktor come in, holding a syringe high and jabbing the needle into her buttocks. After half a minute, she stopped writhing and went limp under Joe, and the two nurses strapped an unconscious Jameela back in the straitjacket and retied her ankles to the chair.
Once Jameela was secure, Viktor winked at Joe and said something not very nice in Hungarian. Joe didn’t understand a word, but Viktor’s contempt for the patient needed little translation.
‘Tell Jameela I’ll come tomorrow,’ said Joe and he left, nursing the puncture wounds on the back of his right hand.
The second day, the two nurses left the straitjacket on. Joe brought in a chair, sat opposite her and tried to talk to her, tried to explain what had gone so terribly wrong. After the second or third sentence, she spat at him, accurately, hitting his skin just below his left eye. Disgusted, he got up and grimaced, but thought better of saying something and walked out.
On the third day, she remained trussed up in the straitjacket again; her two black eyes stared out at him, full of hate. He brought in the chair, a copy of Vogue, a half-bottle of Bushmills and two glasses. He parked his chair beyond spitting distance, flicked through the magazine for a time, got bored by the glossy adverts of fancy men and fancier women banging the stick against the bucket of pigswill, as they didn’t call it in the chic advertising houses, poured a good measure of the spirit of life into each glass, and raised one and said: ‘Sláinte.’
He downed his drink in one. ‘It means good health in Gaelic,’ he said conversationally.
She hissed at him, a long, sibilant eruption of sound.
‘Well-brought-up young ladies don’t hiss. Didn’t anyone tell you?’
She hissed again.
‘Listen, what I did was wrong, very wrong. If it’s any consolation, and I’m sure it isn’t, I was lied to. Not just lied to, but the victim of an elaborate play in which a man who I thought was my friend was shot dead. Only it turns out he wasn’t shot dead. It was just a game. They told me that you had kidnapped your son, that you had joined ISIS, that you had signed up your boy for the suicide bomb class at school. And then you went on the run to Europe and Little Miss ISIS doesn’t look after her boy properly and he breaks his jaw and – guess what? – she takes him out of hospital. So I kidnap your son and everything ends happily ever after. But the reason I’m here, Little Miss Hissy, is that none of this adds up. I think I’ve been played, conned, part of some horrible little intelligence game by the CIA, by some creepy doctor you once shacked up with, by . . . I don’t know who. So I’ve come here to try to find something, and all you do is fucking bite me and hiss at me.’
The black eyes stayed on him, but she didn’t hiss.
‘So I’m a thick Irishman that everyone plays like a patsy,’ Joe said. ‘I spend a bit of time in a hole in the ground, a tomb so deep your ears popped, a guest of your President Zarif. Fun times were had by all, so long as you forget about the blowtorch.’
He picked up the other drink and gulped that down in one, too. Something in her black eyes changed; the ferocity in them dimmed, a fraction, at Joe’s mention of him being detained in Zarif’s underground prison.
‘But you know what? That shit comes with the territory, it’s part of being who I am and what, God help me, I do. But kidnapping a child from his mother on a lie – that’s something I can’t live with. I can’t sleep at night. All I can hear is your voice in the fog, screaming “Ham, Ham, Ham!” I’ve come here to say sorry but not just that. I’ve come here to help you. I can get you out of here. All you have to do is stop hissing at me.’
Joe looked down at his empty glass and poured himself a third slug. ‘You know, you’re an excellent drinking partner. You don’t fuss, you don’t complain.’
The black eyes studied him, silently.
‘Sláinte,’ said Joe.
He downed the whiskey, smacked his lips and continued: ‘My father was shot dead by the Rah – the Irish Republican Army – when I was seven years old. And then I was so brainwashed by hate, by the hate of some of my own people, that I joined the very organisation that had murdered him so I could kill yet more people, so that yet more so
ns could weep at the loss of a father, so that mothers and fathers could weep at the loss of a child. You don’t have to tell me anything about terrorism. I did it. I was a terrorist. I used to kill people, or try to kill people. And then I became aware of the evidence of my own eyes. You want to know where I was? North Korea, in a terrorist training camp north of Pyongyang. And it was only there, in that godforsaken prison, that I realised that the people there were brainwashed and – guess what? – so was I. So you were in ISIS and I was in the IRA. They’ll tell you that the two things are quite different and so they are. But if your child is a kid in a pub in Birmingham and gets blown up, well, what’s the difference between that and your child being a sweet nineteen-year-old in Paris shot at a rock concert? “My child died but that’s OK because at least the terrorist organisation responsible was slightly more enlightened and phoned through a warning . . .” It’s all the same shit. It’s driven by hate and it’s wrong, just wrong.’
‘I was never in ISIS,’ Jameela said flatly. ‘I hate ISIS. They tried to kill me, my son, the man I love. They’re killing my country, my religion. I hate ISIS with every sinew of my being.’
Joe unbuttoned his top pocket and took out a photocopy he’d secretly made of Franklyn’s photograph of Jameela and Ham wearing their suicide vests in front of seven black-clad fighters, the ISIS flag at the centre.
‘This picture says you’re lying. Or have I got it wrong? Who are your pals? The Sea Scouts?’
Jameela smiled, a little, to herself. ‘The picture is fake news. The men in the picture were a unit of the Free Syrian Army, funded by your CIA, who pretended to be in ISIS. The head of the unit allowed Ham and I to be photographed with them because . . . because he was, is, my lover. It was a convenient lie because I wanted to break, totally, with my past.’
‘Prove it,’ said Joe.
‘Well, look at the photograph for a start. In it, I am only wearing a headscarf. For ISIS, that’s forbidden, haram. A woman who shows her face, who doesn’t wear two veils, who doesn’t wear gloves, will be stoned to death. Anyone who knows the merest thing about ISIS would know this picture is a fake.’
Joe studied the photocopy for a long time in silence and then said, ‘You’re right. Dear God, please forgive me.’
She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t hiss.
The light shimmered off the lake, turning the still waters a burnt ochre, then a deepening scarlet. From the little wooden house, the woman sat in a rocking chair watching the lone swimmer go far out, so distant that she lost sight of his head, a dot breaking against the reddening waters, fading to black. The stars came out, the plough forging its furrow, Mars twinkling red. A moorhen hooted, the reeds on the edge of the lake rustling in the lightest of breezes. Jameela lit a candle and sat waiting until a lesser darkness emerged from the night.
‘So, Irishman, why swim so far?’ Her voice was quite different from before, soft.
He dried his back with a towel and smiled. ‘Out there, I turn on my back and watch the stars and float and think about infinity and then, somehow, all the terrible things we humans do to each other in the name of our gods seem, somehow, less terrible.’
The candlelight was feeble and he had to squint to make sure that he was seeing right. ‘Are you wearing my clothes?’
‘I am.’
‘Has fashion changed since I started my swim?’
‘La. I hated everything they gave me in that place.’
Jameela had borrowed his oldest black jumper, a dark-blue cotton shirt and a pair of his shorts, cinched at the waist with a belt. He was more than a foot taller than her and twice her bulk. A less beautiful woman would have looked absurd. She still did, a little.
‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘how did you get me out of that place?’
‘Ah, you don’t want to know all my secrets.’
‘No, tell me. I want to know.’
He disappeared to his room, came back wearing a pink cotton shirt and black jeans, and sat down at the bare wooden table opposite her. Outside, the light had gone.
‘I told them that I was Sigmund Freud, professor of psychiatry at Ian Paisley University, Belfast. I emailed them a link to the aforesaid university’s website and a contact telephone number. They called the number and were assured that I was indeed exactly who I said I was by the dean of the university.’
‘And who was the dean?’
‘My brother Seamus.’
‘Is he the dean of the Ian Paisley University?’
‘He would be the first-ever Catholic to hold that position.’
‘Can you answer my question?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Not exactly? Is he the dean of the Ian Paisley University?’
‘No.’
‘What does he do, if he’s not a dean?’
‘He runs a pub in Donegal. I owe him a pint of Guinness.’
‘Tell me about your brother.’
‘He’s a good citizen, these days. His pub is in the wild north-west of Ireland, where the Atlantic crashes onto the rocks and you can’t sleep for the roar of the sea. He’s much-loved by his regulars and he looks after them, sorts out their problems. He did the same for my mother and me, after our father was killed. He’s always done his best to look after me. Little Joe, he still calls me, some of the time. And . . .’
Joe paused, lost in his thoughts.
‘And?’
‘He’s in a wheelchair because someone wanted to kill me and I’d vanished so they shot him instead.’
They ate fish soup and bread, washed down by a rough red wine.
‘So, your turn, Jameela. To fake a connection with ISIS, that’s . . .’
‘Crazy?’ She completed the thought. ‘Yes. Dominic drove me mad, literally so, so I ended up in a straitjacket.’
‘Why? Why do that? You were playing . . . you were playing with evil.’
‘To fight another evil which, to me, at that time, was the greater evil. It still is. Thanks to you, he has Ham, he has my son.’
Joe froze. Outside, the wind, freshening, soughed in the reeds. He stared into his soup, consumed with melancholy, and then with a tangible physical effort he raised his gaze and met her cold black eyes. ‘Jameela, I made a terrible mistake. I was lied to. It wasn’t a simple lie. It was an orchestrated deceit. To understand the nature of that lie, I need to fathom why you did what you did. If I can work that out, then it’s a start.’
‘A start to what?’
‘To getting Ham back to you, to reunite mother and son, to reverse what I’ve done.’
‘I miss him every second of every minute of every day. I miss him so much. He’s a brave, funny, weird boy.’
‘Like mother, like son?’
‘Did it hurt when I bit you?’
‘Yes, very much.’
‘Good.’ Jameela smiled to herself, then shook her head, banishing the thought. ‘I was so angry with you, so beyond ordinary emotion. It is an animal thing when a child is taken from a mother.’
She paused, and then said with a formality he didn’t quite believe, ‘I am sorry I bit you.’
‘Really?’
‘No, not really.’ She smiled to herself and refilled their glasses, and as she poured wine into her own glass he gave her a mocking look.
‘I drink wine, I show my hair, I don’t eat pork, I pray to God sometimes, not often but enough for me. I’m not a good Muslim but I’m Muslim enough to know that ISIS is an abomination unto God. There are many worse things in life than having a drink or showing your hair. Taking life, for one. That is forbidden by a verse in the Quran.’
‘Tell me what happened. Tell me what he did to you, why you ended up in the photograph wearing suicide vests, pretending to be in ISIS.’
Jameela closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them and started: ‘In the beginning, Dominic and I, it was wonderful, magical. I’d had fun in LA, too much fun. I was a wild child, away from my home in Aleppo – alone, enraptured by everything Hollywood had to offer. T
hen I woke up one morning feeling wretched, and there were horrible stories about me and another man.’
Joe said nothing about knowing Humfrey, not wanting to stop her flow.
‘It wasn’t just the shame. It was also a feeling that I was part of LA, part of Hollywood, part of the emptiness of the American Dream. I felt hollow inside, empty. What is the line from Browning?’
‘Browning, the guy who made the good automatic?’ Joe asked.
‘No, fool, the poet Browning. “What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?” I thought I needed to see someone – a shrink, someone like that. That’s how I met Dominic. I started to work with him, became his nurse. He was, then, inspiring, a man with a mission. With him, I felt I could change the world. To begin with, Fort Hargood out in the desert, it felt pure, ascetic. Dominic’s goal was to conquer addiction: drugs, alcohol, sex. I was doing all three. For Dominic, I was the perfect person to test out his technologies. He would experiment on me. In the beginning it was fascinating, truly absorbing. And then it became darker – much, much darker.’
‘This is all hippy-dippy talk to me,’ said Joe. ‘TMI, they called it, or plugging-in. I don’t get it. It’s bullshit, isn’t it?’
‘There isn’t a mousetrap in the world that doesn’t have good cheese. And it isn’t all bullshit. It kind of works, or at least there are some people who are willing to pay Dominic a lot of money for his magic box of tricks.’
‘I don’t understand what TMI is or how it’s done.’
‘It starts with control over what you do. It ends with control over what you think. You get habituated to knowing he knows what you’re thinking. Fort Hargood is full of tiny pinhole cameras, picking up sound and vision.’
‘I still don’t get it. Help me understand.’
‘Dominic read a lot of books by the Scientology founder, L. Ron Hubbard. He thought Hubbard was onto something. He keeps a naval hat in the long room at Fort Hargood as a tribute to Hubbard. But Dominic reckoned that he and Scientology had somehow lost their way. Strip away the space-alien stuff, and what you do if you’re a Scientologist is hold cans wired to a meter and confess your sins. You’re a Catholic, aren’t you?’
