House of Ashes (26 page)

‘Breeze!’ shouts a voice through a megaphone outside a shop called Rattans, ‘Breeze come up and check us out, everything must go today.’

‘Breeze!’ as he runs past the Golden Windows plaza, past a woman on the street with two buckets of pickled green mango.

‘Breeze!’ as he runs past KFC, past the car park, the fruit vendors, the man selling handcrafted leather shoes. And then he cannot see, he is running too fast, up and up, past the
spaceship and its silver domes and then across three lanes of traffic. He runs and stops cars and then he is in the middle of the brown savannah, the trees everywhere, like strawberry ice creams,
erupting and clapping as he passes, petals like wedding confetti, like he is running through a party. Then he is running fast as he can across the savannah. There are children with brightly
coloured kites and he keeps running across towards the centre. There are hills all around, gentle slopes, and he remembers now, running through the tunnel of bamboo, yes, he ran away, fast fast,
like an athlete sprinter. He ran for days, ran for nights, ran to the centre of Sans Amen, away from his old self.

No one knows what happens to leatherback turtles between the day they hatch and the day they return to the beach where they were born to give birth. It’s a mystery only known to God. No
one knows where they go for twenty years, where and how they live and how they survive. They simply disappear into the great oceans of the planet. Humankind hasn’t been able to find them in
their adolescence or early adulthood. They survive, somehow, and have done for millennia. They outdive killer whales who hunt their prey in packs for days, and great white sharks who can snap them
in half. Over time, they can grow enormous.

Like the turtles, no one knows what happened to him either. Those first fifteen years of his life – what were the facts of his existence as a son of the City of Silk? The young boys who
were gunned down, who cared? Now Joseph wants to remember. What happened to him? He wants to retrieve his life, all of it, before and after what happened in the House. He must find the only other
man who escaped the execution, the strange quiet one with the spectacles, Ashes. The one who took him to pray and who said that intelligence lived in the heart.

For a while he’s had some inkling of where this man Ashes lives. He’s heard some talk, over the years. On the way back home from town towards L’Anse Verte he will again cross
central Sans Amen, pass through towns and villages. He can get dropped off, ask around. He heard something once, from those who left the compound, those who were never involved. After the Leader
was shot, his followers quickly left the compound and separated. News drifted his way that the army quickly realised two gunmen had escaped; they searched for them that night and for weeks
afterwards. Years later, a rumour had come to him, via some of his ex-brothers, that one of the escaped gunmen, the older one, had become a librarian in a small village . . . a village called
Liberty.

It would be easy to sneak in, just take a look. Then sneak out. The library is a modest affair, just three large rooms, a reception desk and some filing cabinets; there is an area with some
desks and a corridor with some doors, one marked AV, one marked washroom. It is late afternoon and it is empty, near closing time.

He is a lot thinner now, and his hair is grey and his beard is long and frizzy, and he is wearing exactly the same round spectacles, has the same slow way of moving around. It occurs to Joseph
that this man Ashes won’t recognise him. Joseph pretends to browse the shelves, taking books out, using the slots left as a spy hole from which to watch. The man Ashes is moving along with
his trolley, absorbed in re-shelving books. Joseph can feel his breathing slow in his lungs; the old librarian floats past like a ghost. The man is putting books back on to shelves, taking pleasure
in doing so, reading the spine of each. Joseph feels himself go in to some kind of trance. The air seems gluey. His tongue is thick in his mouth. His kidneys are suddenly active, he is itching to
piss. He fights the urge. Again, his heart, it begins to race and then slow. All of him feels weak and faint and he realises he needs to sit down.

He gets to a chair by the wall and sits. He feels like an old man too, like his heart is slowly quaking and rolling around. He remembers the line of men falling, the sound of machine gun fire,
the way some were already on their knees. Running blindly along the road, through the bamboo.

‘Hello.’

He hears a voice. He looks up to see the man Ashes standing there with his trolley.

‘Sir, are you okay?’

Joseph presses his hand to his groin and blurts, ‘It’s me, remember me? In the House . . . it’s me.’

The man bends closer to hear him.

‘It’s me. Breeze.’

A small seizure of shock spreads in his face, ‘Oh!’ And then . . . a furtive glance backwards.

‘Wait,’ he says and hurries to the door. He turns the open sign to closed and locks the door with a key. He pulls down the blind.

The man comes forward towards him, his arms outstretched, tears flowing and Joseph stands. Then he is in a crush of arms and beard.

‘Thank the Lord, give thanks, give thanks,’ the man Ashes repeats again and again into his ear, like he is whispering these words to a long-lost child or relative.

‘I’m so glad to see you, thank you, thank you for coming. I have been hoping. Hoping and waiting and praying for you, my friend. Oh, my friend, my young friend,
oh,
oh
,’ and Joseph is overcome with relief. Feelings slide through him of wonderment and pent-up longing; tears flow and the two men stand and hug each other for several long minutes.

Then Ashes takes him by the shoulders and holds him at arm’s length and examines him, as if concerned for his health, as if checking his teeth. Behind his spectacles his eyes are alert and
piercing, like they’ve been taken out of his head and polished. It is then, gazing back at him, that Joseph can see something has changed with this man called Ashes. Now he has a different
face, alive and animated.

‘Is
you
,’ Ashes says. ‘I can see you become a man. Oh, look at you! You got so
big
. Eh, eh, gorsh, nuh, very tall and big. Are you married? What happened to
you, eh, come, come and sit down with me, here in the back. Come.’ He keeps glancing backwards and pressing his hands to his lips and smiling at him and saying, ‘Oh, thank the Lord. He
lived. He lived.’

Over cups of sweet mint tea they sit and talk freely, both of them needing to, both full, everything and anything falling out. It is a joy for Joseph to see this man; he is so different now.
Energetic and somehow younger, not older. Their conversation is in fits and spurts and long monologues and each listens to the other with intense curiosity.

‘I have felt alone all these years,’ says Joseph, ‘all this time. I have a good wife, a daughter, but . . . there is a part of me that is on fire, that is restless since those
six days in the House. I care for turtles now. I found my way to a small village on the north coast. I ran that way, getting there three years later. One of the female ministers gave me the idea
and so I went to look for where leatherback turtles go to nest. I was lucky, I got work picking cocoa at first. The men of the village didn’t run me out. I was still young, about seventeen by
then. I found the men on the beach guarding the turtles, and so I joined them.

‘But . . . is like the House, what happened there, killed part of me. I find it hard . . . to sleep. My side aches. I have a wound no one says exists. I fill my life and I enjoy my work. I
have love in my life. And also is like I suffer an absence. I am a loner, still.’ Joseph looks away. He thinks of Mercy Green, his mother, who died alone, eventually. She possessed this kind
of singularity too, despite all her children; like she was always distracted or somewhere else. His mother’s bones were laid to rest in the large cemetery on the outskirts of the City of
Silk.

‘I went back to the House, today – first time ever – just to look – to see if it could give me back . . . you know . . . I figure I lost myself in there.’

Ashes sips his tea and nods and says, ‘When my brother River died, I felt the same way for many years, most of my adult life. Like something get lost. Is why I get mixed up in that mess.
To prove something or get part of myself back. I get devastated when I was a boy, something left me then. The House? For me, something else happened.’

‘What?’

‘I get
saved
there, I find my way out. Back to home, to roots. To self and service. I ask the right question then.’

‘Oh yeah? What is the right question?’

The man called Ashes looks into a middle spot between them.

‘I cannot give you that answer, my friend, every man need to come up with the right question when he gets to a certain age.’ And then Ashes goes quiet. ‘Go an see the
King,’ he says.

‘King? What King?’

‘The King of the castle.’

‘Who you mean?’

‘The Prime Minister.’

‘Eh? You crazy?’

‘I serious.’

‘Which Prime Minister, that woman in charge now?’

‘No.’

‘Then, who?’

‘The man we meet all those years ago. The PM, the man Hal shot in the legs.’

‘Him? You mad or what?’

‘No.’

‘How?’

‘Never mind that. Go see him and ask him the question you must ask.’

‘I have no idea where his house is, where is it?’

‘Go left,’ says Ashes.

‘Left?’

Ashes smiles. ‘That’s all I can say for now. Left and over the bridge. Keep walking. Then ask.’

‘You speaking some kind of code?’

‘I speaking simple. Go left and cross the bridge and you will find the PM. He an ol man now, a recluse. He no longer go out in public affairs. He get his confidence shaken. But he is the
founding King of a big court now, court of human rights and international justice. He an ol King. Wounded. Go and see him. He walks with a limp. Go – and then ask the right
question.’

‘Shit, man.’

Ashes laughs. ‘He’s not difficult to find, my friend. His address is in the phone book. He lives in a quiet suburb of the City of Silk.’

Ashes is so different somehow. Peaceful and manlike. His advice sounds crazy, though. It is most unexpected advice for his loneliness, and it is extraordinary to see this man again, strange at
how he is transformed. He was a man depleted of power, who had a famous brother, that was the talk. Now he seems strong.

‘You been reading in the papers about those bones?’ Joseph says.

‘What bones?’

‘Amerindians. Under the House.’

‘Oh. Yes.’

‘That place haunted, no arse.’

‘Yes. I had a dream when I was there. About bones.’

‘Well, seems like they going and dig up a whole other parliament under that House.’

‘What . . . the elders of the past?’

‘Or maybe just regular people. That place haunted. Like I is haunted.’

‘Yes. I can see that.’

‘I murder two people. I am a double murderer.’

‘Go to see the King,’ says Ashes.

‘Yeah, an ask him the right question, right?’

Ashes nods and his eyes are inquisitive and alight.

*

When Joseph gets home Pearl gives him the silent treatment. His disappearance was too secretive, too puzzling, and she is repaying him with silence and he doesn’t blame
her for this. She will refuse to be generous with him, in bed, in conversation. She will be cool, cool, and he knows she will stay so for a while even though she has never won any of these
standoffs; she has never been so silent with him that he has spilled the beans. Part of him clamps shut – and when she goes silent in response he clamps up even more. He goes insomniac too.
The rocks in their marriage are all about this: his past. He is evasive; she demands more – and he cannot give her more. It is a stale old rigmarole. They are both tired of it.

Soleil is in bed, fast asleep. His wife, he knows, is faking sleep. It is 1 a.m. and he decides to go out on to the beach. Sometimes he talks to the turtles, they remind him of Aspasia Garland.
Her ban on hunting and eating them has been effective. The beach has become a safe haven, as have others on the coast. In the moonlight he can see the beach is now empty of other humans. All the
guides have gone home. It is just him on a beach which is long and narrow, a river at each end. The waves are choppy and roll in from the Atlantic. And there are hundreds of turtles on the beach,
massive, like trucks, like armoured tanks, coming up on to the sand, like they are bringing parts of another continent with them on their backs.

He stoops by one and shines his infrared light on to her face. It’s all spotted and mottled pink and she looks all greasy-eyed and tearful and he thinks of the dove on the House of Power.
He remembers how confused he was to find out who the Prime Minister was, the elected head of state. He felt elated with his gun, the chaos and the shooting; and then it was a shock to find out that
the Leader wasn’t so important. It was the PM the army came to save. It was the PM who ordered all the men to be shot, including the Leader. He remembers coming down out of the House, his
hands in the air, the feeling of contempt for his father-Leader. He’d been used. When he ran out the tunnel of the green bamboo he ran and ran, into the future and the hell of knowing
he’d been so let down – again. The Leader was a madman and the PM had had them shot. His own father he never knew; he’d abandoned him before he was even born.

‘Go left,’ said the man called Ashes; what de ass did he mean by that? ‘Go over the bridge. Go and see the King.’ How does he go and see such a man, a man who made the
order to have him shot?

He wrote a letter in the end. Short, mentioning the Monroe Doctrine and his nickname Breeze, saying he was one of the two that escaped the execution. Saying he shot the woman and would like to
turn himself in. He was part of a treasonous and vile act that hurt others and the country. He is a murderer and cannot live. He asked to be granted a meeting. He expected nothing would come of it;
he found the old PM’s name and address in the phone book, plain so.