Guantanamo Boy (20 page)

The only good thing is that he’s slept most of the time since he arrived. And he’s getting used to his mind blanking, wandering off in odd directions after so much humiliation and pain. The sensation of drowning still catches him out when he becomes aware he’s swallowing for no reason, or sometimes just breathing hard, but he’s getting used to that now and it doesn’t scare him as much any more.

Just lately, though, he’s been picturing his face on the news. A mugshot of a convicted terrorist who’s hated by everyone. Even his mates. Seeing Niamh snarl at herself for once smiling and flirting with him, while her friend Gilly says, “I never liked that loser.”

The other thing is, unless Khalid’s busy hating himself, he doesn’t feel fully here. Making up scenes like this is the only thing that stops him from thinking about what they did. From going out of his mind blaming himself for being so stupid. It’s so much easier conjuring up horror movies with him in the leading role than it is watching himself staring at the empty walls, too wrecked to hold his head up straight. At least it seems that way until he begins confusing the dreams with reality and starts believing the dramas in his mind are actually happening.

More than a few times he’s woken up and been surprised to find David Beckham, Niamh or Nico standing in front of him. Shocked to see them there instead of the small bed, white towels, toilet bucket on the floor. The familiar sound of someone screaming nearby seems to make his visitors smile.

Khalid has a feeling of dread he might join in and smile with them, slowly believing the noise of approaching boots might be a fantasy too and he’s really somewhere else, somewhere he doesn’t know, and the wasted, patchy, not-here feeling only subsides when the soldier yells something ridiculous. “You Taliban guys don’t know how lucky you are! If you were in Afghanistan now you’d all be dead. Thank God for the US of A.” Making it clear to Khalid that the soldier has no idea how nice dying would be. The upbeat, insulting tone of his cheery voice tears him apart bit by bit.

No one cares. They don’t care about him. Nobody does. If only he hadn’t signed those papers. They said he could go home, the liars. If they’d let him sleep, things would have been different. Then he might not have signed his own prison sentence. Reminding himself he was pretty much mentally and physically dead the moment his hand picked up the pen doesn’t help. He can’t forgive himself. Neither will Nico and the rest of his mates. Niamh hates him now, he knows it. His mum and dad. Aadab and Gul. Everyone does all over the world.

He’ll never be sure of himself again. How will he know who he is after this?

On and on, the day before they tried to drown him, they held up those pictures of children killed in 9/11. Photos of women jumping from the towers. Flashing them up as if their deaths were Khalid’s fault. Wearing him down until his nerves were completely shattered. Until he started believing maybe it was all his fault. In the end, he signed the papers and what happened? They shut him up here.

Does anyone even know where he is? He doubts it. Arms folded, Khalid sits on the bed and stares at the wall. At the blank space with pockmarks and dead flies he knows so well. The smell of his own body in the warm room, the sound of his own breathing and the thudding of boots make him think his whole life has been a gigantic mistake.

Then one day . . .

“Get up, you,” the guard says. “You never get up!”

His bad breath adds to the whiff of cold battered meat from the plastic tray he’s passing through.

“Sorry to put a crimp in your day but Britain cooled out —whupped the United Nations. Blair’s with us. Europe’s a bunch of cry-babies.” He laughs, then pauses a moment to work out which inmate nearby is reciting a verse from the Qur’an. The melancholy voice calling to Mecca.

Ignoring him, the guard turns back to Khalid to gloat.

“We gonna kick your butts,” he adds. “You ain’t going nowhere now, man. Tony Blair—with his decision—he clean done y’all in.”

“What decision?” Khalid drops the tray on the bed and, glancing back at the sneering face pressed to his fence, he’s surprised to see the guard’s big popping nostrils are flaring with excitement.

“Britain’s with us—at war in Iraq!” Shouting so loud, someone in the camp responds by translating the news into various different languages. Soon it’s passed on, until eventually everyone knows what’s happening. People run to the doors, kicking and banging to show how they feel, yelling and screaming in their own languages. Fury travels along the rows of cells like a crashing, unstoppable flood. The nearest thing to a riot Khalid’s ever experienced.

Guards respond by racing up the lines and leveling automatic machine guns at the detainees. Ready to fire at the drop of a hat. Khalid’s overwhelmed by the news Britain along with America are at war in Iraq and not just Afghanistan. Why? No one’s more surprised than him. Suppose he never gets out now? The guard said so, didn’t he? What else has changed out there that he doesn’t know about?

Khalid loses his grip on the door, letting his hands fall to his side like lead weights. Emotionally frail, he wanders the few steps to the bed. Collapsing in a feeble heap. The constant banging and yelling have broken down the flimsy layer of protection he hoped would keep his mind together today.

The violence is so horribly real to Khalid, he can’t help brooding on the hatred he feels growing in the world and the problems the war will bring to his family—for Muslims everywhere. He knows Dad would go out of his way to complete the Muslim duty of
zakat
—acts of charity to help people in need during the war in Iraq. But where is he now?

Eventually the banging and kicking die down and a pitiful whine starts up somewhere beyond him. Out there. Outside this field of right and wrong. The familiar, high-pitched, grating cry of someone who Khalid knows is being harmed. Bringing it all back to him . . .

Day follows day. Weeks and months pass by and nothing changes. Time stretches for Khalid. Sometimes the hours between breakfast and lunch feel longer than a day at school. He remembers the school day going so slowly. Often, by the time the bell went, he couldn’t recall what happened that morning, it felt like so long ago. Then, at other times, the minutes shrink. He finishes the tasteless cereal and two seconds later the lunch tray clatters the flap and all he’s been thinking about is the TV program he once saw about an Olympic diver. The guy explained how he has two and a half seconds between jumping off the board, doing two perfect spins and hitting the water, and in that short time he must rectify any awkward position he finds himself in. Deciding instantly while he falls to straighten his back or lower his arms.

How is that possible in two and a half seconds? In the time it takes for Khalid to say his own name?

Khalid wakes covered in sweat, perspiration running down his neck. The two-and-a-half-second dive is still on his mind. How can anyone plan what they are going to do in that amount of time? Suffering a slight headache, dry mouth, he glances at the air-conditioning unit bolted high on the wall behind him, wondering why the green light is off.

Now there’s a spider on the grill. Tiny quivering legs climb slowly inside the unit. Perhaps that’s the reason it’s not working. Don’t they check them? What do they do all day, these soldiers?

He places a sticky hand on his chest and the orange uniform feels wet. Hot pools of sweat are forming on his damp skin.

With no chance of release from the dense heat, Khalid lies on his side. Keeping as still as possible, he breathes gently to bring his temperature down. Concentrating on each breath until he can bear to reach for the half-empty bottle of water on the floor at the end of the bed.

Then a peculiar faintness passes over Khalid as he tries to sit up. His head’s worse, hurting badly now. His fingers feel weaker than jelly when he tries to unscrew the tight blue lid from the bottle.

After a swig of warm water, he senses a metal clamp tightening around his forehead. Forcing him to make a superhuman effort to focus on putting the bottle down without knocking it over. But when Khalid lifts his chin, the gray room swivels round ominously. Rising, swerving, moving in hills across his eyes. Flashing round to nuzzle the back of his head. Then pulsing and pulsing before coming back in a sickly rush.

Eyes popping, a broken man jumps ogre-like from the gray walls. Reaching for his throat from the pit of a nightmare. Arms wide.

A booming sound shoots from Khalid’s mouth with a heart-rending roar. Hands tear at his screwed-up face and he bashes the back of his head on the wall. Numbing his brain. The pain is a welcome relief as he thumps and thumps his head, suffering the kind of torment only a prisoner knows. Locked out, not in. Not here, not there. Not human at all. The only reminder he’s real is the ache, the sharp pain, again and again. The moving walls hold whatever’s left—together—for as long as the pain throbs and throbs. But are they walls?

When the air-conditioning light suddenly twinkles green, the walls fall back to steady the room. Khalid widens his eyes, sweat dripping from every pore. Forehead throbbing. Has he been going mental for minutes and hours or days and weeks? What month is it? Did he hear someone saying “Happy Christmas”? Or did he imagine it? Without a clock or a calendar, he can’t tell. Plus, the ceiling lights—are they getting brighter? Or is he imagining the increasing glare?

Groaning with pain, he begins flicking through the pages for the passages in the Qur’an he’s come to know well, turning quickly to the blessing of Moses. Hoping to find clues about how to deal with the pain that’s eating away at his guts. The holy book is his only link to outside help of any kind. Praying he’ll learn to become a better person and not the bitter, angry guy he turns into whenever he thinks of his cousin. Tariq’s never far from his mind. All Tariq ever talked about was himself and where he’d been and that stupid game. By the time the dinner trolley comes squeaking down the corridor, Khalid has been driven almost crazy by the memory of how devoted he’d been to his cousin.

“Yes, cuz. No, cuz. Two bags full, you’re so clever, cuz.” Why didn’t he just tell him to get lost? All those times he’d crept downstairs when everyone was asleep. Nights that Khalid had wasted telling Tariq how brilliant
Bomber One
was going to be. And it wasn’t, no way, it was just OK. But why, oh why, did Khalid care if
Bomber One
was going to be great or not? Why did he care so much about how Tariq felt about himself?

Sickened by the idea of Tariq’s smiling face bearing down on him, to get the thought of Tariq out of his mind, he escapes in other ways too. By the time the trolley stops outside he’s shocked to see perfect tooth marks sharply outlined on his arm. He’s been biting himself. Why the trauma comes out this way, he doesn’t know, but lately it has.

Khalid doesn’t notice the twinges of pain on his arm because today his fractured mind can only locate the many pictures Tariq had e-mailed of himself. All of them were digital photos of Tariq with his friends pulling mad faces. One with his dad and three brothers, lucky him, grinning at the camera as if everything in their family is perfect.

For a second, Khalid thinks he hears a car door opening and closing, but it’s only a dinner tray snapping into place.

Khalid glances at the gristly meat, boiled tomatoes and ball of undercooked rice and goes for the small banana first, before rubbing hard and trying to make the red tooth marks on his arm disappear.

A sudden surge of energy comes over him now.

His stomach feels better—yes. His heartbeat’s slower—yes. But the passage in the Qur’an he wants to read is still swimming in front of his eyes. The unchanging words are spinning in groups of three or four. The shapes jump out to confuse him, linked as they are without meaning to his previous, less shadowy brain.

Spreading white rice with the plastic spoon on the lumps of gray meat to disguise the gristle, Khalid’s half tempted to tip the lot on the floor.

Fading away into something beyond sleep for an hour or two after he’s eaten, he joins up the dots on the wall to make a giraffe shape with a rabbity ear. Then he eyes the eight gravy marks on the floor to see if the distance between two is smaller or larger than another two. Sometimes he counts the footsteps going up and down the row. Over and over again. Now and then he loses track, often when his fingers settle on the weird ridges of skin between his smallest toes. Is it night-time? Or morning? Did he eat breakfast today? Or did they forget to bring it?

Waking up to trace the red scratches on his face, Khalid catches sight of the spider speeding to the door and breathes a sigh of relief.

Perhaps he’s slept too long. Weeks, for all he knows. Only learning it’s early morning when the call to prayer wakes him up. For a while, Khalid imagines daylight breaking outside.

An unexpected feeling of peace spreads over him at the memory of being outside in the sunshine. Hoping, by concentrating on this, the last of the wooziness in his head will fade away. When did he last go out? He can’t remember.

But he mustn’t lie here forever . . .