We sat in frozen silence. There was nothing to say. Nothing could change what had happened. We knew that now beating had begun, it would continue. The silence was broken only by our commiserations. ‘Poor old bastard, hope he is all right,’ and then the sympathy was joined by foul-mouthed abuse.
‘Those stinking pieces of dogshit. Why did they have to pick on Tom?’
We allowed a half-hour to pass then rattled the fan to try and communicate with our friend. No face appeared. We rattled again and looked. Still no face. ‘Perhaps it’s better to leave him alone for the evening.’ Neither of us wanted to signal a conversation.
But both of us felt the need to reach out and touch this man in the only way we could. It struck home to me then that when we participate in another person’s suffering, we in part heal ourselves. We needed some way to dispel the alarm and fear that was beginning to take hold of us.
We had been suddenly wrenched out of our laughter and security. We needed the reassurance that talking to Tom might provide.
The next day, after the washing patrol was completed and the guards returned for their daily dose of TV, we signalled again and stood up to see our friend. Even had he wanted to return our call, he could not. They had placed a metal flap over the grille through which we could see each other. Tom was now in complete darkness, without means of communication with anyone. He was to remain in that dark hole for seven days.
The face that emerged after the week had passed was one which I found it painful to look at. It was waxen and withdrawn, as if some cold fingers had moulded this dreadful face in wet clay and left it fixed.
All animation had gone from it. Looking into Tom’s dull eyes was like looking into emptiness itself. It seemed all life had been extinguished in him during those long black hours. It was hard to draw him into conversation. I can still see, even now, his fingers signalling out the words ‘I can’t take any more of this.’ Slowly, falteringly, he told us in silent finger-talk that the guards had seen him looking over towards our cell and thought that he had been spying on them. They had taken him to the guards’ room and there four of them tied him up and beat him with what he thought was some kind of rubber hose. For a week he had to eat in the dark, not seeing the food before him and only knowing what dish it was by the taste of it in his mouth. The punishment of that black week was greater than the physical beating he had undergone. In those empty eyes and in that fixed coldness of his features I read anew a kind of pain that is beyond any physical hurt.
Tom was again hopelessly talking of suicide and we tried to talk him out of such thoughts. We told him how, though we had not been able to see him, our thoughts were always with him and we had prayed continually for him. We talked to him of his family, his wife, his three daughters. We tried to talk to him of what he would do when he was released to make him believe that this ordeal would not be permanent and that it would come to an end. My conversation as I silently fingered the words across to him was made half garbled by the terrible despair that was etched into every feature of that empty face. Slowly as the days passed some small spark oflife began to come back into his vacant eyes.
The week of blackness and isolation behind the closed grille that Tom had gone through was to be endured by all of us.
But not as punishment for looking out of our cells. Whatever power was piped into this prison, whatever light we had to eat and wash by was suddenly taken from us. The prison generator either broke down or was switched off for some nine days. It was not an unusual occurrence for us to be in darkness for a day or two. The first few days of this black-out we tolerated, having had to cope on several occasions already. As time dragged on into the fifth day the strain on each of us was beginning to tell. We persuaded our guards to give us small pieces of candle to eat by. But such was the size of these candles that we could not afford to light them for any purpose other than eating. Long hours of constant darkness seemed, even with the companionship of John, to be a kind of action replay of our first captivity. John found this period particularly distressing. In the darkness we each knew the other was there but we could only hear whispering disembodied voices as we tried to talk away the darkness.
When we tried to sit close to one another we could not see but only feel each other. The nights were like the days, and only the regime of meal-times told us that it was morning or evening. The evening cup of tea told us that it was time to sleep.
But for John there was no sleep to be had. This darkness brought with it the night creatures that he found so hard to deal with. Often as I lay trying to sleep I would hear John’s excited voice whisper ‘Brian, Brian, wake up, wake up, there’s something in the cell, there’s something in the cell,’ and I would hear it. Those huge cockroaches were scratching and crawling their way about the cell and we could not see them. Mice often came in. With the electricity off, the fan that turned in our door to circulate the air had stopped. This provided an opening for these night creatures to enter our cell and crawl unseen over our beds and the floor beside us. At John’s insistence I would get up, light the tiny stub of candle and begin to search our prison cell to find some offending creature which, though tiny, to us had become a tormenting monster. For hours we would lie there, trying to sleep, having found the creature and killed it. But there was no sleep for we were tense with listening for another scratching sound, the scuttling of mice or what we most dreaded, rats. The noises in that black silence were magnified in our imagination. Always in the darkness the mind finds free passage to the most awful places. Even though we knew that small mice were harmless their constant presence and the noise of them running about seemed to worsen the sense of terror and absolute subjection in this long night. With what light we had, we tore up pieces of blanket or of tissue paper to block the holes through which these creatures streamed, but it was never enough. Within hours of building these barricades we would hear the scratching and crawling animals in our private blackness.
On one occasion after we had been trying to sleep for some hours, John anxiously woke me. ‘Quick, get up, there’s something in the cell, quick, get up, get up,’ and again we lit the candle stub and began our hunt. These hours we called the ‘Great White Safaris’, as we hunted in every corner lifting mattresses and blankets, searching out the beast. Finding nothing, John looked over at me and I at him. I saw for a moment his face beginning to break up. He was on the edge of nervous tears. His face spasming as he spat out at me, filled with vehemence, ‘They’re probably breeding under your bed, you filthy Irish bastard,’ and I looked at him and realized how stressful this darkness had become for him. Quietly and calmly I spoke the words that his mother had spoken to his father when his father got angry about something. ‘Now, now, we are getting very paddy today, aren’t we John?’ His eyes caught mine and all the fear and stress seemed to wash out of him, and he smiled, remembering his mother saying it so lovingly to his father.
The first mouse we caught was a pathetic creature. We stumbled in the darkness chasing it with our tiny candle, sometimes leaping in the air with fright as it dashed towards our feet, laughing nervously until finally we trapped it in a corner. It sat and looked up at us. In that moment both of us felt a kind of pity, knowing we were about to kill it. We tried to shoo the mouse out of the cell but it would not go. We watched it flash up the wall and we hoped we could push it out the grille but as it tried to scale that six-foot door it fell back. We knew we could not bear this living creature scuttling in the dark about us and yet we both felt that we could not kill it. It somehow mirrored our own fear and our own pathetic condition. It dashed in under John’s mattress and slowly we lifted it. It sat almost on its hind legs as if to beg. What we were about to do was an offence against everything we had come to believe in. How could we take this life? John excitedly said ‘Kill it, kill it,’ grabbing at the bottle with which we hoped at least to knock it senseless. In that moment some animal savagery in him welled up and was suddenly gone again. I leaned forward as the mouse squatted, looking up at me.
Before the blow descended I heard it scream in fear and I almost held back.
It was dead. Picking it up delicately by the tail I deposited it in our bag of rubbish and lay back sweating with tension. I felt a huge guilt and compassion and ugliness in myself. I wondered if that tiny pathetic creature had known what was about to happen? Do all creatures know the moment of death before it claims them?
Having set out so often on these Great White Safaris we became immune to the slaughter and as we chased these creatures in the dark we found ourselves laughing again. It was a diversion from the pressure of so constant a darkness. As we tried to fill that darkness with stories, songs or sometimes with jokes the strain and effort of trying to block it out with words exhausted us. On these hunts we giggled and we killed our prey with sometimes brutal savagery.
We recalled our time in the place we called Abed’s Hotel. The guards had woken in the middle of the night and we heard them rummage around their room. They were laughing, they were shouting, chairs were being lifted, tables overturned and we wondered what was happening. For hours those two men seemed to be wrecking the building. Then we heard gunfire and more laughter but could not fathom what was happening until the morning, when the guard Abed brought us breakfast. He explained that there had been a mouse in their room and they had been trying to find it. Was their terror so great that they needed a Kalashnikov to shoot this little rodent? We asked ‘Did you shoot it?’ to which Abed replied that they had tried but that it moved too fast. ‘Did you kill it?’ we continued to press him. ‘Yes,’ he said, and began laughing loudly as he explained how they had eventually destroyed the mouse. They took a syringe and filled it with pure alcohol. Having cornered the creature they had soaked it, squirting the alcohol from the syringe. Then with much glee they had thrust lighted matches into the area and watched it burst I into flames, incinerating the mouse in an instant. We laughed at these ‘terrorists’ who fearlessly hunted mice with Kalashnikovs. We thought how malicious was the mind that would destroy a creature in such a way. Abed’s delight as he told his story had the sadistic feel of a m cartoon about it. I suppose we felt ourselves quite brave hunting around in the darkness destroying these animals with blows from a plastic bottle.
On another occasion, in another of our prisons one of the guards brought us a mouse which he had trapped, and held it under my nose. I looked and watched it feebly trying to struggle out of the thick layer of stickiness that had trapped it. It could not move its feet. I watched the muscle and bone in the body struggling, trying to extricate itself. The guard was laughing delightedly and I just felt pity for it. I choked back the rising emotion and shook my head, to the guard’s surprise. ‘Why … why you shake?’ he demanded. I sat in silence, my pity becoming anger. By this time that glue had became the chains on my own feet and I wanted so much to spit out into his face that his savagery was an obscenity. I wanted to explain to him how that trapped, struggling, crying creature was myself. I knew he would never understand and knew that he could feel no empathy for it or me. Any such response was not a part of what that man knew or felt for us. To him, we were his night creatures to be abused or beaten as fancy took him. My thoughts on that occasion would become literal truth before too long.
As the days of absolute darkness continued we thought that we could not endure much more. Yet something in the human spirit seeks a way to overcome such oppression. There is always something in us that will not submit. In the after-dinner candlelight I reached under my mattress and took out a sheet of the silver cigarette paper that we had been keeping for messages. From inside the mattress I pulled out a stem of candle that we had been trying to save and began slowly and carefully to roll the silver cigarette paper round the length of the candle. John watched me, curious and silent. I looked at him and winked in the candlelight, continuing my delicate operation. Having rolled the silver paper round the candle I melted some wax and dropped it into the seam of the silver tube, sealing it. I pulled this silver sheath off the candle and lifted it up to my eye, peering through it at John sitting opposite. I then tore off a piece of cigarette-packet cardboard and took some threads from my bedcover. I sat in the candlelight and began plaiting them into a single string. With the three pieces of string plaited together I made a tiny hole in the small square of the cardboard and passed the string through, tying a knot in the end preventing it from passing through the hole. John was watching me closely.
I sat in silence, refusing to explain to him what I was doing, teasing his curiosity. ‘I thought you were making a skipping rope for a moment,’ he said. I smiled back. ‘No, John-boy, something far more complicated and far more necessary.’ He looked at the piece of card and string in my hands and the silver tube. ‘Interesting old fellow,’ he said simply. I reached my hand back again inside the torn pillow and extracted chunks of melted candle wax that I had been accumulating over the days of darkness. John’s fascination deepened. ‘You’re a great horder of rubbish, Brian.’ Quickly I broke the pieces of melted wax into tiny fragments, and collected them together on my stone shelf. I lifted the plaited pieces of thread and ran them along the pool of wax gathering on our lighted candle. The molten wax seeped into the plaited thread. I held it at each end, blowing on it until the wax had congealed and the piece of string became rigid. This piece of string was passed through the tube of silver paper, blocked off now at one end by the piece of cardboard that was attached to the rigid string.
Slowly and carefully I began dropping the pieces of candle wax down the tube of silver paper.
‘I’m just beginning to understand how your devious mind is working, Keenan,‘John said slowly and I laughed, beaming widely.
With the tube packed tight with these crumbs of candle wax and the end of the plaited thread sticking out through them, my task was complete. ‘Abracadabra, the ignorant Irishman does it again; magic, just simple magic,’ I said holding up my improvised but complete candle. John crawled over to me. ‘Mmm … very smart, much smarter than I thought you were, Keenan, but will it work?’ and I laughed again. ‘Of course, you apathetic Englishman, anything I do works.’ ‘Go on then,’ he said. ‘Light the fucker.’ Delicately I lifted our lighted candle and touched the flame of it against the plaited thread which was now serving as a wick. It rose in flame and as it burned down began melting the broken and crumbled pieces of candle wax packed tight in the silver tube. It burned brightly. We sat and stared at it, hypnotized by the flame and glinting silver. At last we had our light. Quietly, calmly a sense of victory welled up in me and I thought to myself without saying it ‘Fuck them, they haven’t beat us yet. We can blot out even their darkness.’
The days that followed were spent plaiting threads and making wicks for our improvised candles. Furiously we grubbed about the cell scraping off the pieces of candle wax that had accrued over the time we spent eating in the dark. We began crumbling them and storing them. It was wise not to have a store of such improvised candles but to have the materials at hand. John had astutely begged for and been given a small battered tin ashtray. We now used this same ashtray for melting the crumbled wax and pouring it into the silver tubes. The hours we spent making these candles diminished the terror and monotony of this black timelessness.
Now we could exercise again and slowly we walked around this candle planted in the centre of the floor in a kind of ritual trance of silence. The candle flame seemed to still and calm the mind on those long silent walks. In that soft half-light we would imagine ourselves walking in some favourite place. Occasionally, taking it in turns, we would describe it to each other. Perhaps along a riverside, sometimes walking along a windswept beach or occasionally climbing up some hill that had been a childhood place of adventure.
On one of these walks pacing slowly around the single candle, John calmly asked me ‘Do you know I am a Count of the Holy Roman Empire?’ I walked along behind him and thought about this. I knew by the manner in which he had addressed me that this was not a piece of John’s lunacy. ‘You’re what?’ ‘I??
?m a Count of the Holy Roman Empire,‘John said, with some pride swelling his words. Still calmly and slowly pacing along behind him, I said ‘You’re off your half-empty head, my son. ‘John stopped, turned around and with the same pride and comic arrogance said ‘No, really it’s true, I am a Count of the Holy Roman Empire, and furthermore,’ he continued, ‘you pathetic little piece of nothingness, I think you should begin addressing me as befits my station.’ ‘I’ll station my foot up your backside McCarthy, if you don’t start talking some sense.’ We both began laughing, feeling that tide of comic and foul abuse welling up. We loved this game. It was like fencing with wooden sticks. But it was competitive and fierce and we found phrases and words and long sentences of the most elaborate invective thrusting out from us, driving us deeper into laughter. ‘My dear dog-eared and dopey-dick,’
John spat out at me, ‘that is not the way in which you should be addressing me in light of what I have just told you.’ ‘I’ll address you with a urine shower if you don’t cut this out.’
We were laughing again and this time we stopped and sat down.
John explained how his brother, who worked as a Queen’s Herald, had examined the history of the family. With a great show of enthusiasm and pride John claimed his descent from the McCarthys of County Kerry and how one of them had at some point in their history been dubbed a Count of what was then the Holy Roman Empire. I listened and was as fascinated as John had been at my stories of Belfast.
As he finished this long saga I admitted that I did believe him. I turned to him, looking him straight in the face and with a cheeky grin affirmed to him ‘I’ll tell you one more thing you are, John.’ He raised his eyes. ‘You’re a shilling-taking shithead.’ .,,