Guantanamo Boy (23 page)

A deep well of fear and worry adds to the feeling he’s been a dimwit most of his life. Then suddenly he’s aware of himself sweating and panicking. Standing stock still in the middle of the cell for no reason.

Listening.

Knowing whenever a sound stops out there, like when a soldier clunks to the end of the row and the name-calling finishes. Finishes. A hum starts up where the echo of the boots was before. A hum that rings and rings even though there’s no proper noise behind it. Not even the voice calling his name. Then, when it goes quiet, Khalid can see a white space filling out in front of him, even though he knows he’s imagining it.

He falls on the bed. Head in his hands. But the worse thing is, when the white space comes, it spreads everywhere. He can’t stop himself sinking into it. That’s why he wets himself from fear.

The warmth a pleasant feeling for a second until the smell hits him.

No point getting up now.
Khalid shakes his head at himself. Shocked and half pleased at the same time. Shocked he’s lost control of his bladder. Half pleased because the sensation brings him round and, the second he knows where he is, the white noise goes away.

Feeling better for a while. But not better enough to do anything, like pray or think. Especially not think about his family and what he’s supposed to be doing for Ramadan.

This morning, when they brought the plastic tray for breakfast, he was still staring at it when they brought the next tray for lunch.

“What’s up, man? This place stinks. Why you ain’t touched your oats?” The smiling black guard stares at the tray. His voice soon changes to a gentle whisper. “Now come on, you gotta have something!” In the end, it’s the dark, syrupy color of his eyes that brings Khalid back.

“I, um, I, yeah,” the only thing Khalid manages to spit out. Part of him believing he’s skipped breakfast because of Ramadan, while another part wonders how he completely missed hearing the soldier. Maybe he didn’t shout his number this morning. Maybe he didn’t fall on the bed when he went sweaty. Maybe he stood in the middle of the room for hours. He got up from the bed just now—didn’t he?

The thought troubles him.

“Now, you eat this up, you hear me? I’ll be back in ten and I wanna see this grub gone.”

Khalid nods, pretending not to be a bumbling idiot. Then he takes a deep breath, thinking,
He’ll be back in ten and I have to eat this up, otherwise they’ll . . .
He doesn’t know what will happen if he doesn’t eat the cold canned potatoes, one after the other. Then the peas, one after the other. Then the . . . it looks like fish, but it smells like stinking cabbage. He’ll be back in ten and then—what?

The rancid smell of urine overpowers Khalid as he stands with the tray in his hand in front of the hole, waiting. Waiting for the guard to come back.

Only he doesn’t come back in ten. He doesn’t come back in fifteen or twenty. The man only said that to get Khalid to eat up.

So Khalid stands there, tray in hand. Waiting for the man to come back. Refusing to sink into the white space or listen to the voices until after—yes, after the sound of footsteps disappears down the corridor. Refusing to believe in the white space that he’s already in. Seeing it over there. Not here, next to his shadow.

When the prayers begin from every corner of the camp, Khalid’s mind starts up for a second with the thought that maybe they’ve given him the wrong number.

Rubbing his forehead with his free hand, he bursts into tears.

His number is 256 and he knows now they’ve given it to someone else, because no one’s called his number for a long time. So something must have happened. They used to call his number for showers. A soldier would shout, “256! 256!” Khalid would know then they were coming for him. Then it all stopped. Or did it?

“256!” Khalid yells to remind them, just as the beany hole slams open and another man, not the one with the kind eyes, grabs the tray.

“You’re stinking the place out!” he barks at him. The beany hole snaps shut. Khalid listens to black boots march on. Holes banging open and shut, on and on down the corridor. The sound of plastic trays clattering on the trolley. Then it all stops and the smell of urine takes over.

Suddenly the air conditioner starts up, blowing out freezing-cold air. Khalid moves back to the small bed, covering his shoulders with the blue blankets. Placing a white towel on his head, he sinks into the white space that opens up after the last of the prayers die away. Unable to resist anymore.

His empty brown eyes rest on the empty gray floor. There are only a few gravy stains and dead flies and his bare feet, but a less earthly realm takes over the moment he closes his eyes and makes space for the jinn, the genie man with the purple hat and big wide grin who slides him into his playground. Others come too, trailing behind Khalid, yes, behind him, if he meets their gaze. Shivering. Shivering. There’s no need to run when the jinn come calling, because they live in a world where all Khalid’s thoughts are acted out right in front of him. Some have wings, others have swords. Some have unfathomable powers. One has a wife by his side. Another has an army dressed in black.

You never know with the jinn.

Anything can happen with them.

Only when he hears the air conditioner click off does Khalid blink himself back to sitting on the bed. The blue blankets are on his shoulders. White towel on his head. Watching the jinn fall down.

“Go on, take everything with you,” Khalid says. Leaving him with only the ash-colored walls, plus the sound of someone being dragged past the door, shackles scraping the floor. And then the unbroken noise of a man screaming, which has been going on for hours and is beginning to make Khalid feel he should join in.

There’s something strangely soothing about the thought of screaming his head off. Anyway, it’s better than listening to the yelling. That gets on his nerves. His mind becomes a flickering video camera, recording the screamer’s pain, hunger, desperation. He can see him pacing the room, banging his head on the wall, biting his arm. Waiting for something to happen to break the monotony of wondering how everything went wrong. Of wondering how anyone can spend their time making other people unhappy. Kicking their heads in for saying the wrong thing. Smiling at the wrong time. Being other, not like, separate—them—they—demons—Muslims—insurgents—enemy combatants—extremists—terrorists—whatever. It’s one big scam. And then go home and have a chicken dinner in front of the TV.

“Watch it, or we’ll hang you up by the wrists to a wall. Be careful, dude, or we’ll pour water down your face until you drown. No mistake, we’re the good guys. We don’t hit our kids but we’re happy to kick you about. Next one, please.”

More crap. How can you fight for peace? Peace doesn’t understand war. Khalid shakes his head angrily. Why don’t they get it?

“War doesn’t work, you jackasses!” Khalid screams. Screaming high and wide until his throat rattles and throbs. The word “they” comes back to him in a flash of inspiration. The word “you” cracks his spine like a mugger’s fist, making him jump out of his skin. Then Khalid sees—there is no “they”—there is no “you.” Bin Laden and al-Qaeda are just as bad. Look at the killing they’ve done and the hatred they’ve spread, because in the end there’s just “us”—just “us.” He stops yelling. Stops banging the door and falls back on the bed to wonder at the powers of the jinn.

The blue blankets are in a heap on the floor. The white towel is on the bed. The gray walls, though, are in the right place in front of his eyes.

Any minute now it will be dinnertime. Khalid can always tell when it’s dinnertime. By now he knows the noises that come before the sound of the trolley wheels hitching up on the concrete to begin the round.

First there’s the guards marching up and down twice in two minutes instead of once every three minutes. Sixty seconds—more than just a number—Khalid’s counted them out a billion times. The slamming begins, getting nearer as the holes open and shut, and this time Khalid’s ready for them. He’s hungry now and he’s hoping it might be sweetcorn and chicken lumps in a half-cold tomato sauce, because that’s the only meal he can eat without wanting to gag. And the bananas are always nice. Even the ones with the black skins are much tastier than any of the food on the tray.

Khalid’s mouth begins to water as the metal flap of the hole next to him slams shut. Arms ready to grab the tray. A whiff of putrid sardines lands on him but, hey, there’s a sprig of parsley on top. No banana today, though. Chewing the parsley, he lines his mouth with the sharp taste before bracing himself for the slices of gray-sided fish in yellow gloop. Swallowing it anyway and saving the wrinkled peas for after, he pushes the four canned potatoes to one side.

At least the screaming guy has shut up for a bit. All he can hear is the sound of lots of plastic spoons scraping the last peas from the plastic trays, echoing down the row.

That’s it for another day, until the volunteer prisoners come to slop out the rooms. One of them, Shafi, sometimes whispers to him from the Qur’an. Yesterday he said, “They claim that He has kinship with the jinn, yet the jinn know they will also be brought before him.”

Khalid likes it when Shafi comes. With big, mad eyes, he looks something like 50 Cent but he doesn’t rap. Khalid wishes he would rap, but no, his head is somewhere else entirely. Quoting from the Qur’an is his thing.

Soon it’s slop-out time again and the door’s unlocked. Two men point their guns at Khalid in case he goes crazy, like the man last week who rammed himself in the stomach with the mop handle. Keeping it there in a frenzied grip, sniveling and yelling until the soldiers dragged him away. Shafi had calmly carried on, going about his business without the mop, and washed the floor by hand with the man’s white towel, he said.

“Two men they keeeksh.” Shafi draws his fingers across his neck like a knife.

Khalid gasps, nodding, “They killed themselves?”

“Yes. Also five they going starving death. Nearly killed,” Shafi says. “Don’t do this.”

“No, I won’t.” Khalid feels sorry for Shafi, because he’s not quite right in the head. Not quite here. A good reminder you have to keep your feet on the ground in this place or the jinn will take over.

Shafi stares at the bucket. Looks at Khalid. Rolls his eyes a bit. Then whispers, “Signs are in the power of God alone!”

“What signs?” Khalid says, watching Shafi dunk the dirty mop in the dirty water.

“Signs.” Shafi runs off with dripping mop and filthy bucket, leaving Khalid thinking about signs, wondering if rainbows are signs, because he used to like rainbows whenever they appeared in Rochdale—which wasn’t often.

The expressions on the faces of the watching soldiers are ones of utter boredom until Shafi comes back with a bucket of clean soapy water, when they nod to him, then chat to each other in low voices.

“Eight more days and I get to go home,” the first soldier says, scraping around for something to talk about.

“Twelve for me if you don’t count today,” his mate answers.

A foul smell of disinfectant drifts suddenly from the corner of the cell. Shafi pads off. The beany hole slams shut, leaving Khalid alone again, always at the mercy of these small interludes to provide a few minutes’ company, entertainment and food for thought.

And sometimes his thoughts settle down. Settle down to ordinary things.

This time it’s rainbows occupying his mind, plus the science of the color spectrum they learned in primary school, remembering the colors from the rhyme they were taught: “Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain.” Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Rainbows are signs of the power of good, he decides. Bored enough to try and see good in whatever’s left in his brain, he battles hard to come up with something else. But nothing wraps itself around him like the vision of the last rainbow he saw over the oak trees in the park.

He’d just spotted the perfect semicircle of radiant color over the high branches and when he turns round, there—tipping backwards on the bench—is Niamh, with her hair in a twist on top of her head. She smiles up at him. Did she smile up at him? Now she does. The biggest smile in the world. Her perfect face, beautiful mouth, made him feel like a million dollars for the rest of the week. A million dollars until the smell of disinfectant evaporates and the smell of urine returns.

Her face fades suddenly with the fatal realization she’s not here. Curling up on the bed like a baby, Khalid reaches for the blue blankets to cover himself. Pulling the white towel over his face to stop the jinn from bothering him.

After six days of yelling and screaming, shouting at himself, listening to the silences and the pauses between them, things improve slightly when the library man, Will, comes with a cardboard box of old Reader’s Digest condensed books.

“Any books, man?”

“Books?” Khalid can’t see them at first. Where are they?

“Yep, books.” Will smirks. “You want them?”

Khalid nods in the belief they’re not actually being poked through the hole at him. “Yes.” He carefully squeezes the word out and three small books tumble to the floor. Will’s soft footsteps stroll away. Khalid listens to him saying the same thing to each man as he saunters from cell to cell.