An Evil Cradling (20 page)

The guard who led us to this cell told us that we would be fed three times a day, that we would have some light and that they would try to make us comfortable. What comfort in a white stone cube, we

thought. The mattresses they gave us took up the whole floor space.

We could neither stand, walk nor exercise. Each day we had to lift the mattresses and lean them against the wall: the undersurfaces were always damp. As the days passed the smell of the mattresses and the odour of our body sweat became part of this new home of ours. We were shown a bell in the cell which we might ring when we needed to go to the toilet. I felt like a child in primary school raising my hand to say ‘Please Sir, I need to go.’

In those first few days I talked with John of how sometime in the future I thought perhaps to marry. I explained that I doubted my ability to live in intimate association with someone else. Confused about what I was saying, I said I felt that fate had somehow brought me here to come to terms with this inadequacy. I knew of John’s relationship with his friend Jill. Indeed we had often talked about past lovers, love’s failure or its half-success. John quickly answered my own interpretation of this new confinement: ‘What woman would want to live with a black Irish bastard like you anyway?’ The intensity and constancy of John’s joking rebuffs of my own analysis of our situation underlined his anxiety at our enforced intimacy. There was no room in this place for any distance between us. We lay or sat side by side all day, every day. Like lovers in bed. There was little that could be withheld for long. Some days after our arrival John drew his finger along the line where our mattresses met. ‘There’s a dividing line here, that’s your half and this is mine.’ Only then did I begin to understand how stressful it was for John to be so confined. What did he fear was hidden in himself and that he did not want discovered? What had I revealed of myself that made him anxious about being with me in this small cell? Was I secretly just as afraid of the closeness with which we were confined?

Each morning it was necessary to lift one of the mattresses to allow the cell door to open. Every day we asked for games and books.

Always the answer was ‘Bukkra.’ Which translates from the Arabic as ‘Tomorrow.’ With each tomorrow neither books nor games nor anything that might entertain or stimulate the mind was forthcoming.

John’s benediction as our day drew to a close and we lay down to sleep was the lines from Macbeth, ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day’. It was becoming increasingly difficult to entertain ourselves. There was no room for silence or retreat. The smallness and the heat of the place oppressed us.

The white walls and the constant repetition of square tiles seemed to hammer home its awful monotony. Like those tiles, our conversations became repetitive. Oddly this was our only escape. While each talked, the other, half listening, could think his own thoughts far removed from captivity. But it was not possible for us both to sit in meditative silence. I often thought of this place as the white emptiness that the lunatics of some old bedlam might find themselves subjected to. I dreaded to be alone in that emptiness.

We often talked of our schooldays. John’s life at a public boarding school still intrigued me, but more intriguing was his own dislike of that school. He felt himself an outsider and as a consequence of this in his later years was a kind of rebel. Here was something that I could appreciate. I too Was always something of an outsider, always distancing myself from people and situations. Whatever I was engaged in, I always wanted to go beyond it. I was impatient without understanding why. My impatience must have seemed like an arrogance to people. Maybe I was simply afraid of them. Such were the self-doubting musings that the mind wallowed in.

I remember telling John a story of how, when I was about eight or nine, I took pennies that my mother kept in a glass jar in the cupboard beside the gas meter. On occasion I’d sneak into the parlour to this jar and pinch one or two of them. I told him how I never spent the pennies and he was surprised. I simply took them and kept them. It must have been something to do with childish insecurity. Perhaps with these unspent pennies I would feel secure. It was some kind of childish fetish. ‘Why did I want those fucking pennies anyway?’ I would insist on asking him, knowing that he would not have the answer. The question was so persistent that I felt he should answer it. I had no answers in myself to the many niggling and irritating questions that began to flood into me.

John seemed to understand this. He told how he had felt like an outsider during his university career. ‘Hull was not the place to be with an accent like mine … The local students abused my la-de-da … There was always an air of aggression about them … I took refuge in alcohol for three years. I was the university’s upper-class piss-head … how in the name of Christ I ever got my degree is beyond me.’ I answered him ‘You’re still a piss-head from what you told me about your job.’ ‘An occupational hazard, old chap … we journalists are under great stress you know …” ‘Bollocks,’ I answered. Our childhoods and the memory of them fascinated us. There were so many things that we didn’t understand. We both felt a great need to talk deeply and affectionately about our parents and those puzzling incidents in our childhoods which returned to perplex us. With the realization of that need and the fact that there was no-one there with whom we could resolve these things, we were overwhelmed with fear that our parents might die before we got home. It held us frozen and every night we knew that each prayed for the comfort and survival of our families.

We spoke voraciously of international politics. John’s appetite for my fairy tales of the troubles at home seemed insatiable. I laid on my Irishness thick and creamy. John would listen for long periods, then suddenly attack with a barrage of questions. I had to struggle to answer them. Our imprisonment had given us a capacity to think deeply and comprehensively. In the nothingness and those excruciating hours of mind-wrecking isolation from which we had both to climb and fall back and climb again, we had each brought with us, unknowingly, an intellect honed and sharpened. These profound meditations often degenerated into an exchange of foul-mouthed banter. ‘That’s the problem with marley mouths like you. You write about news you have no understanding of.’ John giggled. ‘Marley mouth?’ he asked. ‘Yes, you talk like you were born with marleys in your mouth … I don’t know how you ever got the silver spoon in.’

‘Marleys?’ he asked again, his laughter rising; ‘What in the name of fuck are you talking about, you ridiculous Irish aborigine.’ ‘Marleys, you brain-dead piece of shit, are little coloured glass balls that children play with … I would have thought that a boarding school pimp like yourself would know all about playing with balls,’ I retorted. John’s laughter was feverish. ‘My dear fellow,’ he said in the most precise and mannered English, ‘you mean marbles. It always amazes me that the race of apes from which you descended should ever have acquired the basic rudiments of language. As for my manner of speech, your own diction is unfathomable. It is only matched by your audacity, you maggot-faced, pea-brained piece of pus.’

Both of us were now in hysterics. The rich elaborations that we slung at one another endlessly with childish competitiveness intoxicated us. It was heady, monstrous and foul. But it was gloriously imaginative and unfettered. We hurled this abuse with such pretended vehemence and at other times with such calm perverse eloquence that the force of it and the laughter pushed back the crushing agony of the

tiny space. ‘John-boy, if I get out of here before you I am going to go and see your mum. I’m going to tell her the truth.’ I paused. John looked, screwing up one eye as if to say; what are you at, Keenan? I continued ‘I’m going to tell her that your language is appalling. You swear like a trooper and your imagination belongs in a dung-heap of a camel overcome with diarrhoea.’ John answered ‘My dear fellow, if you do I’ll tell you what she will say.’ He paused.’ “You are a fucking lying Irish bastard, now buggah off,” that’s what she will say,’ he concluded. And again we were off laughing uncontrollably and the laughter of each affecting the other. The way the laughing sailor dolls in fair grounds and fun-houses have everyone who pays to hear them laughing uncontrollably along with them.

In a moment of quiet John would ask ‘Do you think God minds us swearing?’ The innocence of the question stunned me. ‘I don’t think so,’ I slowly answered. ‘Anyway if he does it’s too late for both of us, especially you. The stokers in hell will be working overtime awaiting your arrival.’ John would not be knocked down, he replied calmly ‘Well in that case they won’t find an oven big enough to get your fat arse through.’ His smiled widened with that remark. I came back at him. ‘I’m convinced that the noise and smell of your farts will ensure your own arse is permanently employed as hell’s own bellows.’ The train of humour and abuse was steaming along again and we rollercoasted recklessly with it.

When we were not butting one another with vicious humour we talked about pleasant moments in our lives. John seemed to be quite a charmer and to have had his fair share of female companionship. I was less fortunate or perhaps had chosen not to pursue commitment too enthusiastically, always having my eye fixed on another horizon or another country. Travel fascinated me and I had done much in the years prior to coming to Lebanon. Even in this talk of travel we would revert to descriptions of the women we had met or simply admired in the different countries we had visited.

Strangely enough there was never any discussion of intimate moments with female friends. We felt no need to talk about the physical side of relationships. We preferred to talk about the comical situations. I often wondered why our relationships had ended in the way they had. Perhaps we had both learned much about ourselves in that long period of isolation, delving back into our history and stopping abruptly to confront the full meaning of a specific incident. , In such confrontations we had seen and perceived and understood so

much more of what had been happening, what people were thinking and how they were feeling. It seemed as I thought back over the poignancy and vividness of these memories that I had been more blind then than I was now even in the darkness with this piece of cloth perpetually confining my eyes. I turned to John one evening before going to sleep and said ‘John-boy, I’m really glad you told me about all those girlfriends because I’ve been running out of women to think about and now I’ve got all yours to sleep with for the next week or two.’ Sardonically he answered ‘You’d be so lucky, they wouldn’t have you. These women like class and I’m it.’ We both laughed and lay back in the darkness understanding perhaps as we hadn’t before our need for love.

For many days we talked of how we’d like—one day, if fate reversed itself-to become fathers. I spoke again of my daydream of birth, during my time in solitary. John didn’t comment but only listened, intensely fascinated. We talked of our dreams, trying to understand the significance of what we remembered from them. There were nights that we both remembered, in the early hours, when one of us would hear the other moaning deeply and fearfully. A moaning that sometimes lasted for fifteen minutes. The listener lay wondering at the agony of it. I had my own share of these horrors and would sometimes even in my sleep hear myself moan. It seems that in nightmares we cannot cry nor scream. It’s smothered in the dream or in the nightmare itself and it will not come out. On those occasions as I lay shivering with a fear bred in my sleeping mind I would feel a hand gently on my shoulder, shaking me tenderly and whispering ‘Brian, Brian wake up, wake up.’ I would wake and know that I had been dreaming. John would simply say ‘Are you okay, you seemed to be having it rough there.’ I would answer, still half asleep, ‘Yeah, I’m okay. It was fucking rough I can tell you.’ We would both lie back in silence, and perhaps talk of the last remnants of the images and the horrors that had so disturbed us, and then fall back into sleep.

But this madness was not confined to the night or to the sleeping mind. We both lived at such an intensity of mind and of emotion that we knew an exhaustion beyond a physical one. The conscious mind needed rest from the way it was being driven and abused. It needed rest from our separate attempts to contain it with humour or amuse it with storytelling or with that kind of confessional sharing that was so much a part of our bonding together.

Many times we sat staring at the wall or tried to sleep during the

day. On one of these occasions while I was dozing after a lunch of rice and spinach, I felt John shake me, not in the gentle manner he would use if I were dreaming but this time urgently. ‘I’m not sleeping, John what is it?’ There was silence for a moment and then he answered ‘I’m going mad,’ and again ‘I’m going mad … I’m really, really going mad … what am I going to do?’ I knew that this was not a time for humorous rebuttal. I had known these moments, as I’m sure John had before, but in isolation you understand them differently and have to deal with them alone. I sat up and looked at him. He looked pale. I hadn’t noticed until now the black circles under his eyes. This thing had been coming at him for days.

He looked at me. ‘Talk to me, tell me something, tell me what to do?’ he pleaded in desperation, the words faltering from him. ‘You’re not going mad, John,’ I said. ‘It’s one of those bad patches that come at us.’ ‘But I can’t get rid of this, my mind is breaking up,’ he said. I felt in the air the desperation that he was experiencing, as I desperately sought to find an answer for him. ‘Listen to me, John,’ I said firmly.

‘Listen?’ He looked at me. ‘Try to imagine something.’ He stared at me intently. ‘I’ll tell you what I do,’ I said: ‘I get these moments as well, and I try to imagine a room, any kind of room anywhere. I think of two things in that room and then I try to build a story around why those things are there. What happened in that room?… Where did these things come from? … Who lived in there? You’ve got to build a story in your head.’ I saw him look at me now more intensely. ‘I’ll tell you what. Here’s a room. There’s a table in it, a few chairs, a fireplace filled with ashes. There’s the peelings of an orange. There’s a pair of shoes on the floor … There’re no laces in the shoes.’ I looked again at him, his intensity was driving into me. ‘Come on, John … see that room in your head. Now I’ve told you two things. I’ve put two things in that room … You put two more in … Put them in that room. Think of why those things are there? Why did they get there? Who put them there? What happened in that room? Build a story around it, John. Create a room that you can go into so that you understand why everything is as it is in that room. Search out in your mind all the reasons why that room is the way it is. But first just pick two things completely disassociated from one another and put them in this room. Tell them to me now. What are those things?’