For a long time now, John and I had played a game. ‘The double voice’ we called it. When things were going badly or there was something to be angry about I would be the one to be angry and John would come echoing in behind with sweet reason. The guards would be confused, they would understand that we were angry, but also that we weren’t angry. They would either leave us in peace or do something about whatever it was that we were complaining about. It worked for a long time. It allowed us to give in to our anger without creating a situation which would rebound badly on us. But this confinement was wearing us down. The anger was now more real.
There was less sweet reason to temper our anger. Controlling the game became more and more difficult.
Waking early one morning, always looking to catch that first sunlight come streaming through the glass panel, I lay waiting. John had been dreaming. His dream had made him moan, those fearful moans none of us can control. His feet lashed out and kicked me. I wondered what he was dreaming and let the dream die in him, rather than wake him in the middle of it. He was sleeping peacefully now. I lay and watched the sun begin to stream through the glass. An old Arab saying flooded into my head with that first sunlight, ‘Rise early, for the hours before sunrise are taken from paradise.’ In the silence of that slow, soft first light, I heard feet approaching me. I lay still and untroubled. It was Abed, I could tell from the footsteps. He stood looking in at me. I was passive, unmoved. I heard him rattle some n chains just outside the door. He went off; I sat up now to think and Tl tried to find in my mind a beginning for this day. His feet slowly returned. Abed stood staring at me. I sat soaking in the silence of the light.
He barked an order ‘Open the window!’ Quietly I said ‘You open the window. I do not want it opened.’ ‘Open the window!’ ‘Fine,’ I said, and got up slowly, walked my four paces to the end of the room, stretched up on my toes, opened the window, walked back, and pulled the covers over me. The morning air even with that first light was always chilly. ‘Close the window,’ came Abed’s voice again.
Calmly I said ‘You want it open, I have just opened it.’ ‘Close the window,’ he ordered. I got up slowly, walked to the window, closed it and went back to bed thinking that that would be the end of his abuse for the next few hours. But no. ‘Open the window!’ I answered again passively ‘I have just opened the window and I have just closed the window, what do you want? When you make up your mind, do it yourself!’ Something was going to happen. Someone would have to give in, but I had done my share of it. I had opened and I had closed this window for no purpose other than to satisfy this man’s ego. ‘Open the window.’ I got up, flinging back the blankets, walked to the window, opened it and went back to bed, pulling the blankets back around me to find some sleep, hoping that he would go away. ‘Close the window.’ I lay still. ‘Close the window.’ Abed’s voice was urgent.
My urgency met his, I thrust back the blankets again, walked slowly to the window, reached my hand up and with every ounce of muscle, power and strength in it flung the window closed. It slammed with a loud bang.
Abed charged into the cell, punching me viciously in the stomach, kicking at my feet. This was it, I had waited, it had come and I could not resist. I reached out. In that tiny cell the closeness of his body allowed me to put him where I wanted him, I thrust him against the wall, my hands about his throat, my eyes blinded more by fury than the towel around them. I began not to squeeze, but to hold him against the wall, so that he might know what it was like to be trapped.
He screamed. In ran Bilal, the big butcher’s son, and pulled me from Abed, thrusting me into a corner. I heard Abed run out of the cell, shouting, yelling. Bilal held me down. I was serenely calm. I felt nothing. Abed came charging back and ran into the room as Bilal quickly squeezed past him. He began then to do what he had wanted to do for so long. He had a brush pole and began beating and beating and poking the brush pole into my chest, into my genitals, beating my thighs, my back, my shoulders, my neck, but careful, so careful of my face. Every part of me sang with this dull thud that slapped against my skin. He continued and I could only squat in the corner. John, anxious now, shouted to him to stop, not seeing but knowing what was happening. He shouted out ‘Stop it, Abed.’ Abed turned and began flailing him about the body and then, turning back on me squatting in the corner, began again, filled with an uncontrollable fury, beating everything in the room. The man was no longer a man but a crazed animal. And so the blows rained down, more hurtful because they were so uncontrolled, more frightening because you never saw them and felt them only after the blows had landed. After several minutes, how many I don’t know, time seemed so long, he stopped, exhausted, and ran off shouting.
John and I sat silent, shocked by the assault and desperately worried about one another, but not being able to see the extent to which we had been hurt. Before we could collect our thoughts, Abed returned with Bilal. I was grabbed by the hair, thrown down on my face. A heavy foot stood on my neck. Abed’s hands grabbed my wrists, jerked them high up behind my back, laced chains and padlocks round them. Still shouting, he wrenched up my feet and chained my wrists to them. My feet were in the air, the soles pointing upward.
I felt my whole body strain and scream at being held and chained in this position, every muscle of my shoulders, chest and thighs pulling against one another. Then he began; down hard and solid came the brush pole across the soles of my feet, again and again the blows rained down. John cried out ‘Stop it, Abed, stop it,’ but he could not stop. He squealed something in Arabic and still he flogged me. At first I felt nothing, the shock of what was happening numbed me. This was the ritual Arabic punishment. The blows kept coming down and coming down, my swelling feet only felt the sting of them. That slow soreness began, and again he kept hammering the blows, like a crazed axeman at a log that would not split. He chopped and chopped and beat and flailed against my feet. The pain was excruciating and I believed somehow that he must stop, that he could not continue this, it must end. Still he beat me. For a full fifteen minutes, screaming and beating down. I was consumed by pain. I moaned with each blow. I prayed desperately for it to end but I knew it would not. His excitement was beyond control. At times I thought he was almost singing. His rage was spitting out of him like fireworks as the shaft nailed down.
Somewhere in my head as I prayed and ached and moaned, I heard these words ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ It was so with this man. Nothing in him could control himself. He was not even beating me, he was beating something bigger than me. Maybe he was beating himself. And then I heard it.
A noise that I have never heard before, nor since, nor do I ever want to hear it again. I know only that it came from me, yet it did not come from me. It was a cry so awful and so excruciating, which came from some part of me, but was not willed by me. It was a primordial sound, fusing every moment of anguish in me. Where it came from I don’t know, only that I was the vehicle through which it passed. That one awful anguished scream. Suddenly it was over. He stopped. It was as if that cry that came through me had silenced him.
Abed knelt down beside me. Taking a fistful of my hair, he jerked my head back off the mattress and spitting into my ear said ‘You want to fight, you want to fight, you want to fight.’ I could only spit back at him half choking with fear, with rage, ‘Kill me, kill me.’ Abed stood up, his feet upon my neck. He muttered something in Arabic. I heard Bilal, the boy who wanted to learn to dance, say to him ‘Enough … enough … enough.’ Abed kicked me and left.
A long silence. John was choked with pain and with his own horror of what had happened. He couldn’t speak. I lay trying to remember every moment of that beating to take hold of it before it took hold of me. ‘Jesus, are you okay? Brian, are you okay?’ I could feel John’s voice trembling with concern. ‘Yeah,’ was all I could answer. Across the hall Abed was screaming at the Americans. There was silence.
Twenty minutes later, while John and I fumbled to find reassuring, supporting and comforting wo
rds, Abed returned. He had with him a television. He set it down in the far corner of the cell, and switched it on; as he walked past John he touched his shoulder. He left. I lay chained with my feet in the air, my arms tearing at the shoulders.
‘Brian, they’re not going to leave you like this all night?’ ‘Maybe,’ I said, dreading it, dreading it more than anything. I wondered what would happen if they did. It would be impossible to lie like this all night. John tried to watch the film, confused, there were no words.
I lay in silence, wondering how long I could bear this. So many things come out of pain. They become in their own way a fascinating kind of balm. But I knew the mind alone could not overcome the pain of lying stretched like this. I turned to John: ‘You’re going to have to bring the bottle over and hold me while I have a piss.’ ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how you’re going to do it chained up like that.’ ‘I need to do it, John, nervous reaction … It’s either that or flood this mattress and sleep in it all night. I don’t want to give that little bastard another excuse. Can you lift me up and point percy at the bottle for me,’ I said, searching out a joke. This was a most embarrassing favour that I was asking and John with great tenderness was fully compliant. As he struggled to try to turn and lift me, Abed came back. ‘What are you doing?‘John, now fiercely defiant, said ‘Abed,’ his voice was calm but there was a steel in it, ‘I need to help him.’ John tried to lift me and arrange me. Abed saw that John was not afraid of him and he knew he could not do this again. He came back with a plastic bottle, and removed the chains.
I sat back against the wall, relieved, waiting for the slow pain of the bruises to begin and waiting for that bone soreness to numb me.
Abed’s voice spoke slowly but urgently to John behind me. ‘He made me do it, he made me do it, he bad man, he bad bad man, he made me do it.’ He was pleading.
Abed was on the very edge of emotional collapse and exhaustion, just as I was. I felt his tears in the hot sting welling up in my own eyes, but I would not cry. I knew that in that moment he was very close to me in everything he felt and thought. John’s voice was now completely calm and authoritative: ‘No, Abed, you wanted to do it … You planned to do this thing … You wanted to do it… This man has done nothing, you have done this thing because you wanted to do it.’ Abed was silent. John had him, his words held Abed hypnotically and then with concern for me, born out of huge anger and compassion, he administered the coup degrace: ‘There was another man in the prison who beat us many times… He wanted to do it, just like you, Abed.’
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 n
ames 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.