Flatly I announced to John ‘I will not wear these clothes.‘John was anxious at my refusal, appreciating the problems it might cause. He was also anxious because my own decision committed him to making some decision about this matter. He said ‘At least these are clean clothes, we can’t be sure that just because they give us clean clothes we are going to spend an unknown number of years in here.’ I welcomed his easing of my own anxiety and admired his attempt at rising above the bleakness of what to me was inherent in these garments. But I still flushed with suppressed anger. ‘John, you’re not facing reality.’ My anger built itself into a kind of white-hot Irishness. I said to him ‘To put on these clothes is an act of submission … it is a capitulation and an acceptance of something that we are not and of which we are not guilty … I will not wear these because I cannot.’ I remember almost spitting the last words out of me, less with anger than with an upwelling of frustration.
To calm myself, maybe to strengthen my resolve, I talked with John at some length about the ‘dirty protest’ in the prisons of the North of Ireland. They were an act of defiance and resistance, a means J
of holding yourself together against an absolute condemnation. It was a way of insisting more to oneself than to the world that one was innocent. I wanted to affirm that I was myself and would not allow my integrity to be taken from me by a surrender to what another believed or would make me be. Perhaps, as I think back on it, these fiery words were not helpful for John. This was not a choice he had ever thought about making. Would my decision force him to follow suit, and if he chose not to would the relationship between us deteriorate?
Something in me -Irish stubbornness, the refusal to surrender no matter what the consequences -meant I could not take and wear these clothes. I walked around the room in slow silence trying to fix my resolve and John lay quietly on the bed trying to prepare himself for what he must do. After perhaps twenty minutes of this sombre but steely silence he spoke. ‘Let’s worry about this thing when it happens, Brian, okay.’ I quietly answered ‘Okay.’
Some time later the door opened and Abed and Jeeves entered, cheerfully throwing down our new clothes on the bed beside us. A pale blue T-shirt, clean white shorts. I pushed them from me saying nothing, only taking a deep breath. I could not capitulate now. Abed, unaware of my decision, said as he lifted me from the bed ‘You take shower.’ Quietly I nodded and moved towards the door. He stopped me gently, handing me the clothes, saying ‘You put on after shower.’ I handed them back to him and said ‘There is a problem, I will explain when I return.’ A silence followed after in which he simply answered ‘Okay,’ half puzzled and half unconcerned.
I showered quickly and returned, seating myself on the bed while John was taken for his shower. The door was locked and I was alone. I sat and stared at the clothes, trying to allow enough of the anger to possess me so that I could follow through what I said I would do and be strong enough to face the consequences. Hearing the door open I shielded my eyes again with the blindfold and prepared myself with another deep rasping breath. I heard John move to a position behind me and Abed the master chef approach and say gently ‘New clothes, put on, put on.’ He sat them gently on my lap and I with equal calmness placed them back on the bed and said ‘No, I will not wear these clothes.’ I waited for the burst of anger I was expecting, but nothing happened. I wanted to fill the silence with more words. To wait on a blow and not know whether it is coming is more terrifying than the blow itself. ‘Why don’t you wear?’ came the question from Abed. And then I began to stand on my defiance and with my
stubbornness crush out any fear that might be lurking there. I said ‘I have done nothing … I am innocent … but you keep me as a prisoner … I will not wear the clothes of a prisoner … I will not become what you want to make me … I am Irish … many men in my country are sent to prison and they are innocent men… they will not wear the clothes of a prisoner… they will not become that thing that they are not… I will not wear these because I cannot wear these … this is my tradition … you can do with me what you like but I will not wear these clothes.’
Abed was silent and then whispered something to Jeeves. It was too late now for fear and I stood up. Abed answered, nervous, confused, ‘This is very bad, you very bad man.’ I turned and felt my way back to the bed, and sitting down said ‘I am not a bad man.’ Another silence and then the door was closed and locked. A kind of exhilaration slowly crept over me. Maybe it was just a relief of the tension that my words had smothered, or maybe it was the feeling of victory. I turned slowly to look at John behind me and saw him dressed in the new clothes. I said nothing. John simply said ‘You’re a very brave man,’ at which I smiled and replied ‘No, John, I’m just fucking stubborn, it’s nothing to do with courage, it’s got something to do with keeping hold of what I am and believing that I am something worthy.’ John, while I had been in the shower, had explained to Abed that I would not wear these things and if he tried to make me or if he beat me for it then he, John, would not wear them either. I thanked him quietly and he knew that I meant it.
For the remainder of our time in that place I sat with only a ragged towel around my loins. I suppose the arrogance of it really gave me strength. Each day when Abed brought us food he would say ‘You bad man,’ but never pushed the matter beyond that and my answer was always ‘I am not a bad man.’ This act of stubbornness rather than strength became, as the days passed, emotional reinforcement for both of us. We had learnt that if we stood by what we believed and were unafraid, then the guards became hesitant and unsure.
Being exposed to my own articulation of what it was to be Irish, John in his own way felt a new kind of strength in himself. I always like to think it was the Irish in him that began to come out when he found himself being treated in the way that the Irish throughout history have often been treated.
In the days that followed we talked animatedly about Irish history and culture: the politics and the people, and the places that were
important in that history. Sometimes seriously, and sometimes with black comedy, we laughed at the outrageous characters that peopled the streets of Belfast. I talked about situations that were not described in the newspapers but that spoke a great deal about the cultural differences between Ireland and England. John listened carefully and with real interest.
My own background, so different from John’s, now became an object of fascination for him and no longer a simple item of news.
Unconsciously he had entered into it. The incident with the clothes had strengthened us and given us a new kind of confidence against the mundane repetitiveness of each day as it settled on us. We felt we had restored choice to ourselves by this refusal.
We would talk long into the night about long-forgotten things in our past that emerged now, when the mind had little else to occupy it.
John’s fascination with my tales of Ireland was mirrored in me as I hungrily swallowed his stories of his own home life: the beautiful Elizabethan farmhouse, its herb garden and orchard, the massive timber-beamed building which had once been his family home and which was in such contrast to my parents’ backstreet terraced house.
So many times, as he talked, I could imagine myself being there. I saw myself walking past the little herb garden which might have filled the skirts of Elizabethan ladies with its aroma.
John’s stories of his days at an English boarding school were very different from my own in my Belfast secondary school. I was very grateful that this man was so different from me; without knowing it, he was an enrichment to me. But even in these long nights of quiet conversation and quiet fascination there was something that held us apart. Had my own cocky stubbornness allowed John to see me as some kind of hero figure which he himself was unsure of being? The path connecting us was as yet incomplete. We both still felt an insecurity about each other. But we held onto the value in each other’s life experiences.
There was another occasion in Abed’s Hotel that for me was a turning point in that
relationship and in the process of coming together.
Another morning, and we awoke. I told John how I had awoken in the early hours of the morning and turned around to face him in that half-sleeping, half-awake state, and looking over saw a huge headless chicken devoid of feathers squatting on the floor in front of me. I remember freezing for a moment in fear and looking at this grotesque
hallucination and then closing my eyes to confirm if I was dreaming or sleeping and opening them again slowly, to focus on this monstrous thing in the shadow of the room. As I looked and my vision cleared with my sleepy state sliding from me, I saw not a huge headless chicken, but John lying on his back with his legs and backside raised high in the air so that his legs almost hung forward into his face. With fear gone I became curious to know what he was doing.
As I related my vision of the night to him, he burst out laughing and explained to me that he had trouble sleeping. He would often raise himself high in the air, lying on his back and thrusting his legs forward until his backside was pointing at the ceiling, and prop himself up with his elbows on the floor, his hands in the middle of his back. ‘It’s simply a way of stretching my damn back. I get so cramped at nights, I often have to twist and turn and exercise this back to rest it.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you still look like a fucking headless chicken to me.’ We both laughed that lunatic laugh that was so often to be ours.
That same day as the laughter diminished we waited for breakfast. It did not come. Nor did any other meal. No guards came either. We were not taken to the toilet and as evening came our eyes were heavy from our long conversation and sleepless night. The hunger began to gnaw. We slept again to await the morning, unfed, unwashed and untoileted.
The next morning we were ravenous but the hunger was not yet deep enough to anger us. We expected that today someone would come with food. That day was as the last. No-one came. There was no toilet, there was no food. We were now seriously hungry and anxious that our supply of water was running low. How many days would we wait here? So again into the long night. This time angry not because we were hungry, but angry that we were forgotten. And as the third day slowly arrived the need to excrete was coming with it. For hours I had lain trying to hold in the urgency of my bowels and to sleep and forget the demands of my body.
The sunlight shone into the passageway outside our door and filtered in a crack of light. A thin sheet of dim light seemed to divide the room and told us that the full morning was approaching and we were not going to eat. I could no longer hold or forget my need. We were talking now in this haze of light and even with the conversation I could not dispel the cramp and pain. I wondered how I could shit in front of John. But there could not be any embarrassment here.
In the middle of something that John was saying I rose from the bed, saying ‘WellJohn-boy, I’m sorry about this, but I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do.’ I walked to the corner of the room, lifting one of the old magazines that had been lying there for weeks and tore from it the two centre pages. I walked naked into the thin sheet of light, thinking how unbearable it was that I had to sit in the light and relieve myself in front of a man a few feet from me. I squatted as filaments of dust held my attention, placed carefully the double pages between my legs and slowly enjoyed the release from the pain in my bowels. Defecating in full view, my need and agony greater than any embarrassment, without saying anything I cleaned myself as best I could and as I had done in the previous prison, which seemed such a long time ago, quietly folded up the excrement and threw it away in a corner. I walked back to my bed saying without guilt or shame ‘I’m sorry about that, John, but I needed, needed to go. ‘John did not reply for a moment. Perhaps his own embarrassment for me silenced him and then I heard him say ‘Well, perhaps the smell ofit might stop me thinking about food, I’m fucking starving.’
The day continued. The guards did not come. We complained half humorously, half-bitterly to each other as if this treatment was worse than anything we had previously experienced. ‘I think we should write a letter of complaint to the management of Abed’s Hotel about this,’ I said to John. ‘Never mind writing letters of complaint to the management, I think we should burn some fucking buses,’ he said, taking up one of the Belfast colloquialisms that I had been feeding him recently. I laughed at his eloquent English voice catching almost to perfection my plebeian Belfast accent. So the hours passed. We tried to sleep, and to talk between our dozing fits. There was a feeling in this friendly exchange which was not the usual banter but in which the humour was more tender than it had been before. I felt a kind of warmth, almost a pleasure that I had done what I had done and had been seen doing it and had felt unashamed.
After some hours John rose and saying nothing walked into the light where I had recently been and with the same action squatted over a piece of paper and relieved himself as I had done. As I sat looking at the silhouette squatting there I felt something that even yet is hard to explain. Maybe it was the way a father might feel when his son executes a piece of work that he has taught him to do. Maybe it was the kind of feeling that two friends might have after having gone through some ritual initiation into adulthood: a sense of deep joy, companionship, brotherhood. Simply in that moment to know it is there, and that it is a complete thing and that it requires no words.
John duly delivered his parcel near where mine sat and perhaps because I was anxious that he might feel awkward I said ‘I bet your parcel’s bigger than mine, Johnny-boy.’ John, sitting down on his mattress on the floor, replied ‘You must be joking, your Irish arse is much bigger than mine.’ We both laughed but this time the hysteria had gone. It was a knowing smile. We were now and would always be somehow without shame or guilt before each other.
That evening food arrived with Joker. He told us it had been very hot and he had run a cold bath and fallen asleep in it. We laughed at the idea of a man sleeping in a cold bath for two days. The laughter pricked at Joker’s guilt. We got double rations of food. Joker complained that his friend, the teacher, should have come to feed us.
We said nothing but ate the food feverishly. Joker again complained about his friend not feeding us, his complaints betraying his own guilt. He quoted from the Koran the prophet’s words ‘You must feed the people,’ and he gestured proudly: ‘You too are the people, you too must have food.’ His excuse had its own kind of appeal and it was exactly in tune with his own innocence. That evening, perhaps seeking to atone even further, Joker arrived in our room. He sat on the bed beside me and said ‘Look, look what is this? What is this?’ I pulled the blindfold out from my face, peering beneath the fold and gazed on a whole barbequed chicken. I immediately exploded ‘It’s a fucking chicken, it’s a fucking chicken.’ Joker joined the laughter, he understood my swear-word but perhaps understood even better my utter amazement. For so long our food had been bread, cheese and jam. John’s disbelief was apparent in his words ‘You’rejoking, you’re joking.’ I could only answer ‘Smell it, can you not smell it from there, John?’ Joker was delighted with our amazement at this single small chicken, and delighted with himself.
We enjoyed a rare delicacy. A time of enjoying the rich first fruits of each other. Our companionship had put up a barrier between ourselves and the awful pressures of our captivity. With a new confidence we began to plan our next escape. This time we had no alternative. It would necessitate physical confrontation and Joker was the target.
There was one bed and a mattress on the floor. Every two days we took turns on the bed. Always when Joker came to talk he sat on the bed beside whoever had been sleeping on it. We made a point of always shaking hands with him when he entered. Our plan was that when Joker turned to shake with the person sitting across from him, his hand would be grasped and thenjerked forward. The other person, sitting beside him on the bed, would immediately thrust himself over him bodily, containing him. We agreed it would be necessary to physically frighten him, to beat and punch him and to threaten him.
Silence was the ultimate necessity. Sil
ent violence we knew about, and we knew its power.
For days we exercised furiously, preparing ourselves for this physical abuse which we both secretly feared. We practised the handshake which would contain Joker over and over again. We changed positions, each playing Joker and testing the plan on one another. We agreed that whoever was positioned to take Joker would do so. The other would complete the immobilization. We had enough handmade pieces of string and wire and finally our blindfolds to tie, and gag him. -.
‘If you keep grabbing me like that you’re going to pull my arm out of my shoulder, then we’re both fucked,‘John said. Both he and I knew that there could be no limitation to the violence once this thing had begun. We were going to have to beat this man into silence. To beat someone physically appalled us both. Finally we were convinced that the overpowering of the guard would take a maximum of three minutes. We could train no further.
It was time for action. I loved this man who was now so determined partly because of my own stubborn antics. I knew he drew strength from me and his belief in me in turn gave me strength and determination. The day was agreed: whoever was in the best position to begin this ‘capture’ would be decided by chance. We had built up a regime of each sitting in a fixed position. A change would make the guards wary. We had everything stuffed into the mattress or under the raffia carpet. This was to be the day.
We were both confident and frightened -that mix that raises the adrenalin and which we had to hold in check to let the energizing effect of it empower us. We each acknowledged that if this escape failed we were most certainly finished. But we dismissed the fear and told ourselves recklessly that such a daring escape was worth the consequences of failure. We placed everything out of sight but close enough to be able to grab it swiftly and tie Joker up when he arrived. As I think over this episode now and how we sat there waiting for the key to turn and the guard to come in, I think that the desire to escape was secondary to an unspoken need to prove ourselves to each other. Here