With an arthritic creak and groan the pipes came away from the wall and the bend snapped under my foot. Water roared and poured everywhere. Whoever coined the phrase ‘drowned rat’ must have had a vision of my state of dripping idiocy. But the flying cold water did nothing for the sudden panic that came charging over me. I expected to be immediately hauled from the shower and beaten senseless. But by whatever stroke of luck or Grace of God, no-one came. I hurriedly removed my shirt and then, holding my hand over the jetting pipe, like the Dutch boy on the dyke, shouted for the guards. After some minutes they heard and shouted back to me to wait. They had been oblivious to my predicament. Anger at their stupidity overcame my panic. I cursed loudly at them.
Eventually the guards reacted. Whether because of my shouting or the rush of water into the passage I can’t say. Suddenly voices were raised and feet were running towards me. The Shuffling Acolyte pulled back the curtain and for a moment stood stunned at the sight of this naked man clinging to the broken pipe joints while water showered and sprayed him from every angle. He muttered something and threw himself into the cubicle.
In his striped pyjamas and broken slippers he grabbed at me and then the pipes. The water displaced itself to another point and from there jetted on to us more fiercely. Like two clownish ballet dancers in a comic pas-de-deux, our underwater jig was outrageous.
Defeated, drenched and in desperation my dancing partner thrust my shirt and towel into my arms and bundled me Out of the shower.
His pyjamas hung from him like thick coats of dripping paint. My towel was thrown over my face, and I was quickly marched back to my cell, a dripping twosome leaving a wet trail behind them.
I sat, soaking into my mattress. My senses were like those jets of water, coming at me from every angle. Confusion, fear, frustration, laughter and panic all showered over me. A thought flashed through my head, a line from a hymn I recalled from my childhood: ‘I have tried the broken cisterns, Lord.’
Surprisingly, nothing was said to me and nothing done to me. All those fearful expectations amounted to nothing. And I got more angry with them because my escape had failed and they were too stupid to punish me for it. I think back on those spasms of anger and how they were helpful in crushing back the panic that was always waiting to take possession of me.
My next attempt was made a few days later. I had become increasingly anxious about those pliers stashed in my briefcase.
Sooner or later I was convinced they would find them. I thought I had better attempt to use them before this happened. My cell door was sheet metal welded on to a frame of angle iron. Above the door there was a small grille, some two and a half feet wide and perhaps a foot or fifteen inches high. To look out through this grille it was necessary to pull oneself up. It was above head height and it looked out on to the long corridor. I had on several occasions in the evening climbed up so that I could look out, but it was too narrow to see much. The cells were all on one side, so I could not communicate with anyone. A large section of this grille had been cut away to accommodate a piece of piping which occasionally blew air into the cell. It only worked infrequently and it also blew in the heat and dust of the streets; layers of dust had gathered in the piping over the years. When the pipe did blow, I quickly grabbed one of the bed sheets, which was an old curtain, and stuffed it into the pipe to avoid suffocating in the dust-laden heat. I had noticed that this piece of piping was held into the ceiling immediately outside the grille by one nail. My idea was to pull myself up as high as I could, lock my arm around the bars of the grille, and with the other hand reach out with the pliers, grasp the nail and wrench it from its anchor point. I would then be able to push this ventilation piping out and create a space large enough to climb through.
I was reasonably confident about this. It could be done at night, when there were never any guards. I was unsure where I would go once I got into the cell corridor, but there was always the large hole in the shower wall which I had previously failed to get into, or there was the possibility that there was a window or a door that would give me access to the street. At least, I thought, if I couldn’t get out of the building I could climb back into the cell, reposition the piping and the guards would know nothing of what had occurred.
I had lost any idea of time, beyond knowing it was the morning when food arrived, at (I assumed) around nine o’clock. Now, since it had been quiet in the cell block for many hours, I reasoned that it was very late. It was a particularly hot and sweltering evening and I had been sitting through those quiet silent hours naked on the mattress.
The cell was too warm to wear clothes. My body dripped with sweat and it was better to sit naked and use the towel to wipe off the rivulets of perspiration. In this condition I began to heave myself up the door jambs, locking my arm through the grille and around the bars and reaching out with my pliers to prise and pull out the single nail that was imprisoning me. Just one nail from freedom. ‘Here is a nail for your coffin, boyo,’ I kept saying to myself as I pulled myself up.
Once I had secured my arm-lock on the bars and reached out clawing with my pliers onto the nail, I was suddenly thrown back, falling on the gritty floor. I was perplexed. One minute I was hanging bare-arsed pulling out a nail and the next minute I was on that same backside on the floor of my cell. I stood up shaking, but this time not with nerves. I looked up, studying the surround of the grille where it met the wall. Finally I saw what had happened. There were two exposed wires, one obviously live, attached to the outer face of the grille, whether deliberately or by accident I was not sure. But I knew that every time I wrapped myself around those bars I would be instantaneously repelled from them by the current. Such was my rude awakening to the fact that this shoe-box of a cell was not going to yield easily to my efforts to get out of it.
My two attempts at escape had ended in abject failure, and were even comic and ludicrous; but as failure bore down on me and removed my hopes from me, I began to feel the seriousness of my plight.
Days now passed in an excruciating boredom in which the mind ran hither and thither looking for a place, an idea, a memory of the past in which to hide and absent itself from this tiny cell. The anger that I had found so beneficial in overcoming despair at my helplessness was slowly becoming a mindless rage; a kind of madness which was more punishing, more hurtful than any beatings would have been, beatings which I had expected and continued always to expect.
Occasionally this grey monotony would be broken by an apple being thrown through the bars above my head, or perhaps half a banana. The way a zoo-keeper throws food to the animals. I would never eat this food. I felt the humiliation of it and the humiliation made me angry. This precise anger I held onto, rather than let it slide into that unfocused rage.
Another memory comes to me now as I write, and I think of it as a kind of metaphor for the madness of that place. One afternoon, sitting in the corner, twiddling with an old piece of elastic, not knowing where my mind was at the time, I heard the door open and I quickly covered my eyes with the flat of my hand, for the towel was out of reach. It was not wise to grab for it in case the guard thought that I was lunging at him. The door opened slowly. I squinted through my fingers, expecting to see the usual pair of bare feet in plastic sandals.
Instead a figure was squatting and a hand was outstretched to me. I pretended not to see the hand for I could not reach out to take what was there or surely the guard would know that I was looking through my fingers. The outstretched hand touched me on my forearm and a voice said ‘Take.’ I reached out as a blind man would, pretending to search for the outstretched hand and at the same time raising my head a little to see the face. To my amazement, what squatted in front of me with its hand outstretched was the film creature ET. I was frozen between laughter and confusion. The guard was wearing a false face, a replica of the gentle alien. After so many days and hours of silence, rage, despair and hope climbing out of despair, and falling back again from the tension of my escape attempts, now here suddenly, with an ou
tstretched hand filled with peanuts, was ET quietly staring at me. I fumblingly took the nuts, and thanked ET, wishing to Christ he would please go home and leave me alone.
On another day in the late afternoon I heard the sound of the outside door opening, the one that led into the corridor of the prison. There were many voices, each of them subdued but excitedly exchanging words which I did not understand. The voices and the noise drew nearer to my cell. Then, as they were passing the door I heard one voice say in that broken English of theirs ‘You English?’ In the quick precise diction that one associates with an English aristocrat or perhaps a well-bred newscaster, a voice said ‘Yes, I’m English’, then the question, again, ‘Your name?’ to which the precise and impeccable voice answered ‘My name is John.’ I crawled quickly to the door, sticking my ear against it to hear more, for this was the first English I had heard for many days and it most certainly did not come from the mouth of an uneducated Arab terrorist. But I heard no more. The person who had arrived and who was clearly another captive was quickly rushed out of hearing into another cell.
I sat down again on my filthy greasy mattress to think of all the Johns that I had known who were teaching at the University and which of them it could possibly be. It was the accent, the manner of speech that confused me. No one that I had come to know while teaching there spoke with such polite and refined diction. The next day’s visit to the toilet and shower told me something. I could see as I left the cell a large black case just outside my door. It was obviously a TV camera, or large portable camera of some other description. On the ledge opposite my cell door, on which the food for the inmates was normally laid out before being delivered, there was a luggage bag which had not previously been there. It gave me only a hint at what this John might do, but nothing as to his identity.
I tried as usual to watch the procession of prisoners being taken to the toilet as I squatted behind the curtain. It was no good, for everyone as usual had their faces covered by filthy towels. Then a new person. I hesitate to use the word person, because these faceless men by virtue of their facelessness ceased to be individuals. But here was a new and different form, slowly walking his way to the toilet. He did not have a towel covering him, but he was wearing a T-shirt, and the front of it was pulled up and over his head. I had not seen him before, but his white skin told me clearly that he was not an Arab.
The next few days I spent thinking, working out who it might be. I did not know anyone in Beirut who was a cameraman or who worked for the press. After a couple of days I decided to try and communicate with the new prisoner. Since I had been made shockingly aware of the wires attached to the grille, I was careful in climbing up the two side jambs of the door. Ludicrously I put on my shoes, those same shoes which I had bought a few days before they took me. I had, since I arrived, kept these shoes carefully hidden from the guards’ sight when they brought food and I wore them always when going to the toilet or to exercise, which I had not been permitted to do for the last few days.
I carefully squeezed myself up between the door jambs and held
myself hand and foot on each wall like a coiled spring squeezed tight into the door but careful not to touch the grille. I shouted out in the long quiet of the evening at the top of my voice ‘Is there anybody here speaks fucking English?’; and waited. I held myself in that coiled-spring position, out of breath with tension, all my muscles aching for release, but no-one answered. Minutes later I shouted again as loud as the energy in me would allow ‘Is there anybody here speaks fucking English?’; again the silence. I fell back onto the bed exhausted, and after catching my breath called out ‘Well good fucking night then…
sleep fucking tight and mind out, the buggers will most certainly bite!’
Two further incidents that occurred in this prison may give a clearer picture of what each of us who was held there had to deal with. I have mentioned before how the guard in charge of the prison, The Grim Reaper, would frequently pick on one of the prisoners and beat him on his way to the toilet and in his cell when he had returned. On one occasion while squatting in the toilet, careful of those monstrous cockroaches but also watching through the tattered and worn curtain, I saw one of the cell doors being opened. On it had been chalk-marked a very poor representation of a skull and cross-bones. Whoever was occupying it awaited something that the mind didn’t want to imagine.
I forced myself to believe it was not the English man.
A few days after my discovery of this peculiarly marked cell the entrance door to the prison opened in the late afternoon and many men came in. They moved with swift deliberation along the corridor to a cell below mine. I thought perhaps they had brought a new prisoner.
The cell where these men gathered was unlocked. I could hear shouted questions in Arabic. I could not hear the answers, only the loud questions, then occasional blows accompanied by groans. I thought at first it was the young Arab boy again, but the quality of the grdaning and the depth of the voice suggested that it might be someone older.
The questioning continued and the blows became more frequent. I had the impression that the prisoner was being beaten by more than one of the guards. There was much noise. Then silence. The babbling voices quit, an order was barked and I heard feet shuffling quietly past my door, and subdued voices whispering. Then, suddenly, the silence was broken deafeningly by a pistol shot. The close confinement of the prison and the cells seemed to prolong the noise of the gun’s explosion. Feet walked past my cell door.
I sat quiet in my corner, calmly as I think back on it now. There was silence again. I thought the guards had left the building but some time later, I can’t recall how long, the feet returned. Again there was no voice, but I thought I heard fumbling. Something was happening there in that silence.
The next morning’s routine was a little different from usual. I returned from washing and back at my cell found my usual breakfast. I entered and sat down and awaited the closing of the door. The door was duly closed, but not padlocked. 1 lifted the food, putting it in a corner, covering it with a plastic bag to keep it fresh. I always ate after the guards left. But to my surprise another fresh portion of food, the same as the first, was brought in and set down on the floor by my old friend who had danced with me in the shower. He looked at me and left, locking the door.
I thought to myself, how strange; was this an act of kindness? Had he just forgotten? I lifted the food and quickly put it in the corner, hidden from sight with the first portion. I was not hungry and simply thought for a moment that I had won a small victory by stealing this extra portion. Later, as all the inmates were fed and washed and returned and locked in the small cells 1 again heard something that I had not heard before. Instead of leaving the prison, the guards lingered about at the kitchen and near the washing area. Then I heard what confirmed my worst fear. Someone went down to that cell and began scrubbing and washing it out. I could hear the splash of water, the brush scraping on the rough concrete floor and walls. Never before and never after that time were our cells washed out by the guards. If you wanted to clean your cell, you had to ask for the equipment to do it. Never would a guard clean the cell of someone who, deep in his unconscious, he considered unclean. The cell was simply being washed of the bloody debris of the shooting, and being made ready for its next occupant.
The prison was, after the first few weeks, a place where there were no incidents to stimulate the mind or the imagination; there was no colour, no character, nothing on which the mind and the personality might feed and nurture itself into meaning.
I was becoming increasingly distraught. The two weeks that I had allowed myself for this thing to be resolved were nearing their conclusion. I could not believe that it would take longer than this for someone, presumably from the Irish Embassy, to effect my release. I suppose my clownish attempts at escape ceased to be humorous after
they had closed off and sealed up permanently two doors of possibility as effectively as the real door that held me. I decided that I must a
gain be forceful in my demands; that I must obtain some information as to why I was being held. My strategy was one which I had turned over in my mind as a third possibility or a third door: a door which was always to remain with each hostage, and which we alone could open and go through.
Hunger-strike is a powerful weapon in the Irish psyche. It overcomes fear in its deepest sense. It removes and makes negligible the threat of punishment. It powerfully commits back into the hunger striker’s own hands the full sanction of his own life and of his own will. I was desperate for information. I needed to know something, anything, even a lie, something on which the mind could fix and, like a life belt, cling to for survival. I simply stopped eating. I recall now that in those first few weeks I had eaten very little and felt little need to.
Hunger never seemed to affect me. Perhaps the mind, constantly shifting and readjusting and falling back, grew so preoccupied that it never turned its attention to the needs of the body. But because of this I felt supremely confident about what I would do. So each morning as breakfast arrived, I would simply consign it to a corner and forget fly about it. It was not an effort. The food accumulated in my plastic bag.