by Ian McDonald
‘Kethba.’
‘That. Yeah. So they sent him to Coventry. He didn’t mind. He didn’t need them. He read a lot. He was never out of the library. Everyone else would be down the gym, he was reading. All hours. All the classics. I suppose he was trying to find out what it was about humans that they had to have a place like the Maze. He used to go to classes.’
‘This is a place where humans have their rights removed by the law, and they can read books and receive education?’ Ounserrat asks.
‘And better food than outside, and exercise, and free medical care, and watch television and listen to the radio. Costs more to keep a man in the Maze for a week than to keep him at the Europa Hotel.’
Ounserrat blinks that blink. I’m blinking that blink too, Andy Gillespie thinks.
‘Anyway, he went to these classes — the teachers asked him more questions than he asked them. That’s where I met him. I’d been thinking for a long long time about myself — it’s good for that I suppose, the Maze — and how letting things move me along, just going along with other people with no ideas of my own, had ended me up. You see, I’d never had a real idea of what I wanted to do, everything I did was just, well, OK. I was doing it because it was something to do and I couldn’t think of anything better. Same with my mates; I didn’t really like them, I wasn’t really interested in what they were interested in, but they were better than nothing. Never really fitted. Same with the job; I got into cars because it was there and it was easy and the money was OK. I didn’t really like it. Cars wasn’t really what I wanted to do. I just drifted into things. Ended up drifted into five years. Right, Andrew Gillespie. No more drifting. Do what you want. What do you like? Well, at school all the other kids thought I was weird because I liked reading. Most of them lived in houses where the television went on first thing in the morning and off last thing at night, the most they ever read was the Sun. No kid wants to be weird, especially in Euston Street Primary School, so I gave up reading and went and kicked a ball against a wall, but it wasn’t what I really wanted. It was boring as hell, kicking a ball against a wall. So, I’m banged up and I’m thinking, what do I really want to do? And I remember, well, I liked reading. And I’m sure as shit coming out of this place different from when I went in — and I don’t just mean older — so I stick my name down for a university degree in English. English literature. And off I go to classes. There was me, another guy called Eamon Donnan, a wee skinny lad who was in for drugs, for fuck’s sake, and Mehishhan Harridi.’
Ounserrat is closer to him now. They’re sitting in the right-angle configuration that psychologists say is best for threat-free, intimate communication. She has taken his hand and is examining it, worrying out the dirt under his nails, smoothing down roughs of cuticle, tracing the grooves of his knuckles and the lie of the hairs on the backs of his knuckles. And it’s all right. He doesn’t flinch from it the way he would flinch when Karen tried to stroke him, because there it meant something and here it’s just touching.
‘After a couple of weeks Eamon and I both realized that what we were interested in wasn’t Thomas Hardy and your woman who did all those books about marrying ministers for money. It was them, you, him. The Outsiders. The Shian. Why? Maybe because he was what I’d always felt. An outsider. Not part. Different. Weird. The ultimate weird kid… For Eamon, I don’t know. I’ve seen him, since. He’s living over in the Harridi Hold on Queen’s Quay. I think with him it’s the opposite of how it was with me. With Eamon, he needs to be part. He wanted something to belong to. He didn’t want to be an outsider.’ But now he is. Both ways.
‘There are humans like this at home in Docklands,’ Ounserrat says. Her fingers are very delicate. Their tips are soft and warm. So long Andy Gillespie’s been working with the Shian, and he’s never noticed that their fingernails are narrow and pointed. Hunting claws. They’re tracing the lines in the palm of his hand. Those are my past and future. Another part of the human need to connect everything with webs of meaning. Are your hands empty? Just hands?
‘We were real cautious to begin with. Worse than asking a girl out, we didn’t know what to say, or how he would react, or if he’d want to have anything to do with us. I’m still not sure what he thought of us, if we were friends, if he liked us, if he trusted us even. But he was willing to talk, and we were more than willing to listen. Eamon wanted to know about what it was like to be a Shian; their — sorry, your — history, your Hearthworld, the World Ten Migration, what kind of people you are, how you live, all that. For me, it was the law interested me. Everyone in jail’s always interested in the law. I suppose they want to know how it got them in there. I was interested in a legal system that could put the lawyer in jail while his client walks. What I couldn’t get was how he was so cool about the whole thing. Talk to twenty cons, fifteen’ll tell you they shouldn’t be in there, they’re innocent, the police stitched them up, it’s a fucking miscarriage of justice. Mehishhan, he didn’t seem to mind. It was like he was almost happy to be there.’
‘It is the gehenshuthra, the personal contract between genro and client.’
‘I know that now. But then, Jesus. It didn’t make sense. He made it make sense. He told me about how the Shian law is based on individual rights, and how one set of rights can violate another, and that the job of the law is to reconcile those sets of rights and I thought, what a fucking sensible system, not like our law, where you owe it everything and it owes you nothing and just when you think you get something the government changes the law and moves the goalposts and takes it away again. An unwritten constitution isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. He explained about how the law was always between people, even the lawyers, and that they could get burned by it same as anyone else — maybe more. I’m telling you, my brief back when I was up in court would’ve put a hell of a lot more work into it if it’d been his ass in the Maze. Mehishhan told me about the stones, the white ones for guilt and the black ones for innocence; and the staff and that it was a thing from thousands of years back when the path finder would lead the Hold to new hunting grounds and mark the way with scent from the staff.’
‘It has evolved in sophistication since then,’ Ounserrat says. Her fingers are finding fascinations in his wrist, the swell of the blood tubes. When Karen had played there he had always snatched his hand away. The juice of him was too close to the surface. But this Outsider does it and it’s OK. More: good.
‘It saved my fucking life, my friend.’
‘Mr Gillespie, do you have difficulty speaking my given name to my face?’
‘Do you have difficulty speaking mine?’
‘I have only known you four days, Mr Gillespie.’
But you’ve slept beside me in your skin, we’re sitting side by side in sort-of candlelight and drinking our drinks and your fingers are doing tricks that, if we were people, would be an invitation to sex. Except that it isn’t. It’s a kind of loving, but not a kind of sexing. That’s why I can bear you doing it.
‘Mehishhan taught me the Shian law, and I thought, yeah, this makes sense, it’s simple, it’s good, it’s responsible, this is what I want to do when I get out, this is the thing I’ve been looking for, because it’s me, on my own, using my own abilities. When I was a kid I’d always wanted to be a knight. But how the hell does a human become a Shian lawyer? Well, you start with what you see around you every day. Donnan and I took on our own sort of gehenshuthra with Mehishhan. We would be his knight-advocates, though I think Donnan loved him. He didn’t need minding, but we minded him anyway. Thanks for what he’d given us; maybe to show him men weren’t complete animals. Weren’t knights supposed to be noble and good; chivalry, all that shit?
‘I don’t know what it’s like for you folk to travel through space in those big ships of yours, but I imagine that being in the Maze is sort of like it. All crammed together, shit-scared, nothing outside. Inside, everything you get from outside seems fake. We’re all supposed to really value visitors and contact with the outside, but wh
at it’s really like is a television programme you switch on once a week and switch off and it disappears. No outside. No world, no change, no seasons. You look out your window one morning, there’s snow on the ground, Jesus, it’s winter. Another morning, you hear birds singing, it’s spring. Doesn’t matter. There’s nothing you can do with it. But it mattered to Mehishhan. He knew about it. He smelled it coming.
‘We didn’t know, you see. We thought it was us. He’d be talking about something or other, and I’d find I wasn’t concentrating, I couldn’t follow what he was saying, and I was pissed off with him about this, like it was his fault I’d lost his attention. Or you’d just want him to shut up for once, or someone in the library had taken out the book you wanted and that was the end of the fucking world, or the guy in the upstairs bunk would have his Walkman on but you could hear his music coming out of the headphones dish-di-di-dish-dish and you wanted to strangle him with the wire. The number of times I would look at Eamon Donnan and find I was thinking, you fucking fool, look at you sitting there thinking you’re an alien, like you’re really special and there’s never been anything quite like you before on the face of the earth and in fact you’re just a little wanker from Andystown. Jesus, I want to smash your face into that table. I know now he was thinking the same things about me.’
‘Mr Gillespie,’ Ounserrat Soulereya says, ‘you have made your hands into fists.’ She touches them. They open.
‘Within a week we’d all caught it. Jesus, the place was like a landmine, waiting for one wrong step to set it off. Eat each other’s faces off the least wee thing. Fights every night; folk making knives and things. The governor thought it was the warlords, stirring it up, trying for a takeover. He’d break a room up, move prisoners. Of course they stopped the moment they moved to another block and the new boys moved right into it. He didn’t have a clue. Neither did we.’
‘Humans are susceptible to Shian kesh pheromones.’
‘Yeah. Both female and male. The male pheromones make us men aggressive. Some kind of competitive reaction, so the Littlejohns say. I know what it is now, but it’s hard to fight the chemicals. I even get it a bit off Ananturievo. I’m kind of irritable when he’s around.’
‘And what do the female pheromones do?’ Ounserrat asks. Her thin hands have moved to his neck, hunting out the memories of old anger in the muscles.
‘Turn us on,’ Andy Gillespie says. Third thing he remarked about Ounserrat Soulereya, after the pizza and the leather: that turn-head, sad-lost-woman smell. Left his flat full of her musk. And in the Welcome Centre it had been so strong he couldn’t concentrate. But now he realizes he doesn’t smell it any more. He doesn’t smell it because it’s inside him. He swallows something that’s appeared in his throat that’s not a clot of perfume. ‘The air conditioning was blowing Mehishhan’s pheromones all over the block,’ he says. ‘Everyone was running at about eight million degrees. One word, one look, and they’d fight. Every day someone ended up in hospital, but the fighting was because we couldn’t get what it was really about. What it was really about was cunt. Fuck, or die trying.
‘It was in the library, at half twelve. I remember, I won’t ever forget it. We were in our corner by the window, at our table. Mehishhan was telling us about his birth Hold returning to the Hearth from World Four, and then the door burst open and in they came. Twelve of them, carrying bits of wood they’d knocked off from the joinery shop. That man I was talking to at the frook club, Gavin Peterson, he was there. Jesus, I can still see the bastard. The screw was up and out of there like shit off a shovel — he must have been thinking, Christ, the whole place’s going to blow. They came right over to our table. Didn’t say a word, not one word. I wanted to fight them. Twelve of them, big bits of wood, and I’d’ve taken them all on. They’d have fucking killed me, and I think maybe there was one wee bit of sense left in my head that the pheromones hadn’t fucked up that made me stand back. I shouldn’t have. I should have let them kill me. They came in, the twelve of them, and they lifted Mehishhan. He didn’t make a move to stop them. They picked him right up and the weird thing is — I can remember this exactly — when they came in, there was total silence, not a word, not a sound, nothing, and when they got their hands on Mehishhan suddenly they all start cheering and singing and they’re running off down the corridor with him and cheering and howling.
‘They took him to the gym. They made a big pile of crashmats, and bent him over it, and then made another big pile on top of him and piled a couple of the lads on top of that, just in case he got some idea about doing that kethba trick, and then they all took turns to fuck him up the ass. They were clapping and cheering and shouting ‘In, in, in, in,’ and going ‘Yo!’ when someone came and I stood in the door and watched. I stood in the door and watched them stick it up him and I didn’t do a fucking thing. Didn’t lift a fucking finger. They were singing. They were singing Loyalist songs: “The Sash” and “Derry’s Walls” and “Give Me Bullets In My Gun, Keep Me Shooting” and “The Twelfth of July in the Morning” and the fucking National Anthem. God save our gracious King, Long live our noble King, God save the King. Send him victorious, happy and glorious, long to reign over us, God save our King. Everyone got to have a go before the screws came with the riot gear. There was come dribbling out his asshole; there was a pool of the stuff on the floor, they were slipping and sliding on it and they were laughing their heads off, and I just stood there and I watched.
‘They had an inquiry, made a report. The bastards who did it lost remission, Mehishhan got a separate room over in the governor’s block with its own closed airconditioning system, even though the season had ended and he wasn’t giving off any funny fumes. Took me days to get the courage to go and see him. You see, I was his protector, his genro, me and Eamon Donnan, and we let them get him. We let them do that to him. We — I failed him. But you can’t see that, can you? How can I explain it to you? It would be like — yes, it’s exactly like this — it would be like you let someone hurt that kid there. How would you feel about that?’
Her fingers have been working their way like little creatures, coming, going, over his head. They freeze among the short stubble. Her low voice is shockingly intimate in his ear.
‘Mr Gillespie, I would kill whoever hurt my child.’
Pour petrol on them, set them on fire. That’s your way.
‘But how would you feel? Would you feel you had failed? Would you feel you’d done something wrong?’
She sits back, looks into his eyes. Her cat’s eyes are wide open in the dim light.
‘Is this guilt, Mr Gillespie?’
‘It’s part of guilt.’
She cocks her head to one side. It’s a strange, animal gesture. Andy Gillespie can’t read it, doesn’t like it.
‘I went to see him. He looked like shit. He’d lost weight — you folk are skinny, but you could see the bones. His hair had gone yellow, like he’d bleached it with toilet cleaner or something. He smelled really weird. He wouldn’t talk to me. Sat a whole hour, close as you and me, not one fucking word. The governor called me in. Me and Donnan were the nearest things the Maze had to Shian experts. He wasn’t eating. He hadn’t eaten a thing since. He wasn’t drinking neither. Or sleeping, or anything. He hadn’t moved or pissed or shat in a week, just sat in this nest of blankets on the floor. And he hadn’t spoken a word to anyone. They were shit scared of another hunger-strike, only this time with an Outsider.’
‘This was not a hunger-strike,’ Ounserrat says. Her fingers are doing things with the backs of his ears.
‘I know that now. And I know that he didn’t blame us for anything, because he broke the rules for us. He spoke to us at the end. You’re not supposed to do that. You’re supposed to go silently. With great dignity. It’s an ancient and honoured tradition. You even have a name for it: deheensheth. Jesus, you people. But I think he broke the rules about silence also because everything else was broken. We sat with him for hours, Donnan and me; we watched him go down, hour by hou
r. It was like he was eating himself, from the inside. Willing himself to death. We tried to talk him out of it, make him see sense, human things like that. It was Eamon got it first: he was just bringing his body into line with his soul. He couldn’t understand what they’d done to him, those bastards. They’d killed what he was, his Shianness, his spirit. He was dead, the meat was just running down to join him.’
‘Rape was a strange lesson for us,’ Ounserrat says. Graceland is dreaming in her lap, twitching and muttering. ‘The violence of one sex against another is most alien to us; at first, we thought men and women were different species. You do not even look alike, how can you be attracted to anything so different? And for one sex to be larger and stronger than the other, and be able to force intercourse on the smaller, less strong sex; this is quite horrifying.’
‘It’s all chemicals with you. Nothing goes up or comes down without the right chemical signal. So everything’s always good and right and when you want it and how you want it. Vanilla sex.’
‘Are you using ironic/satirical mode, Mr Gillespie?’
‘I’m using fucking disgusted with my own sex mode, genro Soulereya. There are women say all men are potential rapists. I used to laugh at them; fucking Malone Road tight-arse Queen’s University bitches; half of you probably dream about it. Then I watched them rape something that isn’t even human, something the same sex as themselves, another male, and I saw that it isn’t sex at all, it’s nothing to do with sex. It’s power. It’s being bigger and stronger and saying, I can do this to you and you can’t do a fucking thing about it. It’s nothing to do with your dick. It’s the size of your fist. And if it made me feel this, what the hell must it have made Mehishhan Harridi feel?’
