An Evil Cradling (39 page)

That night for me, there was no supper. I was glad of it. I would not have eaten it. Abed said calmly ‘How are you?’ I answered ‘Fine, I needed the exercise. ‘John laughed out loud, rejoicing. That night was the longest of my life. I lay awake trying to patch together all the split and splintered pieces of my mind, and get back some semblance of myself. I wondered would I or could I be the same again. This thing was not over because it had ended.

The next morning was full of surprises. Not least John’s first remark to me as he raised his blindfold. ‘Oh holy good fuck, your body looks like blackberry and custard pudding … How’re your feet?’ he continued. I answered drily, admiring his remark, ‘Well, I’ll not be skipping the light fantastic for a while! How are you?’ I asked him.

‘I’m fine,’ he answered, ‘I didn’t get it as bad as you.’ ‘Bollocks, you’re always trying to be better than everybody else, John.’ Our humour was not heroism, quite the reverse. It was a way of putting the previous night at a distance from us, screened behind humour and affection, so we could take control of it before it took control of us.

The last thing we wanted to think about was a repetition of this incident.

Abed came with breakfast. ‘How are you?’ he asked. ‘I’m fine… I just won’t be running in this year’s marathon,’ I answered, keeping up the quips and keeping him and the night before away from me. The humour was lost on him. John’s laughter at my remark was perhaps enough to silence him. After a few moments he asked ‘Can I do anything for you?’ I said ‘Yes, I want a bath… I need to prevent these bruises from getting worse.’ He agreed. I could not believe he was so compliant: if I had asked him to take me for a ride on a motorbike he would have done so. I don’t know to what extent he felt guilt or if he had been ordered by his chiefs to accommodate me, to get me medicines, to calm me. I had heard long conversations on the two-way radio in the night.

I walked slowly to the toilet. My feet like huge, heavy sponges.

There was little pain, for I tried to walk on the sides of my feet. The swelling shielded me from the real pain. I took a long luxurious bath and felt I had merited it. The hot water lapping my body made me want to vomit; I couldn’t, though I felt I needed to. I felt nervous and emotional confusion rather than any real illness. I hobbled back from the bathroom and sat down on the bed. Abed wanted to show John the bruises on his neck. He wanted to prove to John he had an excuse. John did not care to look. ‘What can I do for these marks?’ he asked. ‘Bathe them as Brian has done,‘John said.

I ate little for the next few days, not because I was not hungry, but my mind was preoccupied with other things and hunger didn’t bother me. I thought of Abed’s words ‘He made me do it’, and thought Illi perhaps that I had. Maybe my aggression was arrogance. I felt no pride. I felt a huge unspeakable guilt for my friend John. He had been beaten for my arrogance, for my cocky stubbornness, for my insistence on not being humiliated, for all my absurd antics; he had suffered, and suffered more perhaps than I had. Sitting only inches away listening to my screams and being so powerless, unable to do anything. He endured every blow that I received. What right had I to cause such pain to the person who after all was my life support? I also felt another layer of guilt that I had failed to do more than grab Abed and throw him against a wall, holding him around the neck. My sense of myself was withering rapidly; I found it hard to hold it in check.

These thoughts tossed and tumbled through my head for days.

They were long days for John as I spoke little. He read, knowing what I was going through, and knowing that he would be powerless to help. Then after a few days he tenderly put his hand around my shoulder and said quietly ‘Well, you did it anyway, didn’t you? It’s over and you did it.’ This comfort was more than I could bear. I didn’t know if he knew what I was thinking, but I am sure he sensed it. I turned to him and in the only way I could, wanting desperately to apologize to him for what he had had to suffer, I said ‘It’s pretty bad when you have to suffer for my Irishness, being the shilling-taker you are.’ He did not laugh, but he understood. He smiled, and knew that I was trying to reach out to him, to be forgiven for what I had done in seeking only to satisfy myself.

The nexfweeks were uneventful. The old routine established itself again. My bruises disappeared, the pain went away, only the self-reflective anguish remained. We all have to deal with these things on our own.

Some weeks after the beating, one of the chiefs came to visit. He said nothing for some minutes and merely looked at me. Then he quietly said ‘If you do bad things, you will be treated badly.’

Anger roared up in me and I caught it by the throat, choked it and held it back. I said nothing, I merely turned and stared at him with my blind eyes as I had at Said, then turned away. He waited for me to speak. I would not. He squatted down beside me. ‘How are you, my friend?’ A few more moments of silence, then he called something to the guards. Three of them came. A piece of paper was put into my hands. ‘It is a letter from your family,’ he said. I felt the newsprint and knew it to be a cutting from a newspaper. I lifted my blindfold. I held the letter addressed to ‘the Irish Hostage’, choking back this time not anger but the hurt that was welling up. I read the letter in silence, then passed it to John. John read it quickly, then passed it back to me to read again. Saafi, my wrestling partner, was behind me. The letter was written in English and beside it was the Arabic translation. He read the Arabic pronouncing the names of my sisters and mother.

The letter repeated many phrases and paragraphs that I had put in that first and only letter I had written some six months before when we were interrogated. It was obvious to me that the letter I had given to my captors had gone somewhere, perhaps not to my family, but certainly the repetition of key words and phrases was a sign to me that someone had received it and a signal that something might be happening. I talked with John about this after the guards and their chief had gone, repeating to him the phrases in the letter that I had used in my own. There were names of friends and acquaintances in this letter that only friends or family or someone who had been meeting with my family would know about. To this day both the British and the Irish governments deny they were given any letter and that the repetition of those phrases in the letter I received on that 29th of August was a pure coincidence. This repetition hinted very strongly that either the British or the Irish government had made contact with our captors. This both governments strongly deny.

The letter, whoever it came from, was mannah from heaven.

Whatever bruises or pain I felt were extinguished instantly.

For many days we both lived off that letter. The guards had taken it with them but I remembered every word and every phrase and still to this day remember most of it. We talked for hours of what it could mean; who could have received it, who could have published it in the newspaper, and what might this mean in terms of negotiation?

The guards were very relaxed with us now. They would often come into our tiny room and sit behind us and watch TV. I remember laughing heartily at my wrestling companion who sat behind me and cracked jokes at the American movies. On other occasions he would sit behind me crunching and crunching on an apple. The noise of it and the smack and the crunch as he devoured it drove me almost to distraction and I could only calm myself by laughing. On other occasions, though they loved to watch these movies, whenever music played, particularly Western rock music, Saafi would rock back and forward as I myself had done long ago when I was locked up alone, and sing Muslim hymns or war-songs to drown out the noise of the pop music. I remembered that mystical music I heard in my cell and saw a shadow of myself behind me, as Saafi tried to block out the soundtrack to the movie. It was genuinely painful for him.

Saafi had little English, yet he had a quality the others lacked: he had a sense of humour. He cracked jokes in Arabic we couldn’t understand but the sense of them was obvious. These were Saafi’s gifts. Both John and I liked him. Saafi had changed since the days when we knew him as one of the Brothers Kalashnikov, when he had shot into the shower room. Ever since, and perhaps because of our wrestling bout, there was a bond between us, a mutual liking, though one would hardly call it respect. Saafi also exhibited guilt when we complained of our chains. He would say ‘It is same for us… We can go nowhere, we can do nothing … Prisoners here.’ It was a feeble excuse, but the tenderness and the honesty behind it touched us.

We remained in this place near the Israeli-occupied zone for approximately nine months and experienced extreme conditions, which we somehow managed to survive.

Both John and I had suffered bouts of illness throughout our period of captivity. We simply called it ‘Beirut Belly’ and it was usually a dose of bad stomach pain followed by long bouts of diarrhoea. We had become habituated to it and knew that it would pass in about a week.

On many occasions it was simply that the plates on which we were served our meals were not washed. One day’s food was piled on top of another’s. In the heat this was sure to cause severe stomach problems.

One afternoon, I sat talking with John about a book we had both just read and how it could be improved and what parts of it we thought were of some merit. We had both become quite the literary scholars. In the middle of the conversation I felt everything drain from me instantaneously. I thought it just a spasm that would pass, but I did not recognize the symptom from any previous attack. This sudden onslaught of weakness was new. For the rest of the day I could not eat and night brought the full evidence of what the next two weeks were to be like.

As I settled down for sleep, the cramps knotting in my stomach, my body sweating, I could feel the sweat running into my eyes. There was no reason why, it was not hot, yet my body was on fire and my stomach felt as if it was being twisted and then wrung through a mangle. I lay down hoping to find the sleep of oblivion which we often sought when the situation exceeded our ability to control it, but sleep would not come. Instead I felt as if my bowels, my intestines and all my organs were screaming to get out of me. Suddenly I needed to shit. There was no time to call a guard, the urge was desperate and I could not hold it in. I dived up, fumbled in the darkness to find a plastic bag, ripped down the shorts from my loins and held the bag at my backside. I felt the whole of me pour out, hot and streaming. It seemed to go on for ages and finally in exhaustion I lay down, tying the neck of the bag, which now reeked, and hoped John would not awake with the odour of it. That night I shat in a plastic bag nine times.

I sweated like a horse after a race.

When John awoke I was urgently apologetic, the smell in this tiny room was beyond endurance. ‘John, I was very sick last night, I’m sorry about the smell.’ ‘I know … I heard you and I smelt you.’ We both tried to laugh. No sooner had we begun laughing than I desperately needed the bag again. I leapt up from the bed and unashamedly bared myself and shat into the bag no more than three feet from his face. ‘God, you are in a bad way,’ he said. When the guards came to bring us breakfast, I could not eat. John told them I was very ill in the night and had to go to the toilet many times, they must bring medicine. They only said, as usual, ‘Bukkra,’ and left.

For several days I could not eat and all day and all through the night I filled my plastic bag. They would not take me to the toilet and I would not try asking after the first day. I needed to go so often. The pain was continuous and the sweating relentless. There was nothing to excrete, yet my bowels screamed to be relieved. In all that heaving and pushing and forcing and wrenching of my stomach nothing but small squirts of white mucusy substance left me. Even when the guards I came to make their daily prayers to Allah with their heads bowed I eastwards towards Mecca, I would be jumping up, swiftly pulling my shorts down about my ankles and heaving this sickness from me. At first they were not pleased, even angry. And later they realized that I had fasted for seven days, and had slept very little, lying awake in the night praying for relief from this agony. Jumping up every ten minutes and heaving excruciatingly. Nothing would come. They took me off my chains and made me walk for the chief. With the lack of food and the exhaustion from not sleeping and the sheer physical effort of constantly trying to relieve myself, I was unable to walk. My head was dizzy and I swayed and rocked unsteadily. I was exhausted after a few paces. They quickly brought me back and locked me to my wall again. I explained my symptoms slowly, wearily. He nodded. He told me he would speak with a doctor. He would return with medication. I didn’t believe him. I had come to know that one would have to be almost dead before any medication would be brought and I also knew that others had been left to die.

For almost two weeks I could not eat and suffered the pain and indignity of the plastic bag and living through the stink of it until the morning, when I would take it to the toilet, wash it and return with it.

John suffered too, knowing my pain and my total exhaustion. I raged at God for not ending this suffering. I could not endure this constant emptying of myself into a bag, followed by vomiting. I drank, and it came through my bowels. I thought my urine had redirected itself. I had neither the energy nor the will to make that quick dive to the corner and get my shorts around my ankles and place that bag strategically.

On many occasions it came out of me before I could reach the bag.

When I did try to eat, the solid food ran from me like hot chocolate. I could not reach the bag in time. The mess ran from me and over me and onto my mattress. Lying exhausted, with an agonized embarrassment I watched my friend clean the mess off me without complaint.

He was a very proper nurse, diligent in his work and tender in his passion, never once complaining of the filth he had to dip his hands into and never once complaining of being constantly wakened in the night by my wretching and by my bowels exploding.