House of Ashes (7 page)

But now, despite Breeze’s newfound respect amongst the ministers and top gunmen, Ashes noticed something else was happening to him, something Ashes found troubling: Breeze was drawn to the
female ministers.

The female ministers were called Mrs Lucretia Salvatore, Minister for Cultural Affairs, and Mrs Aspasia Garland, Minister for the Environment, both African women in their early forties. Breeze
had more or less appointed himself their personal bodyguard. Something else was strange too. The female ministers weren’t scared of him; in fact they didn’t show that they were afraid
of any of the men. There was a softness in the way they spoke to Breeze and the other younger brothers; it was as if they were trying to befriend the young boys, as if they were trying to engage in
a personal way. They were both sitting on the floor.

Breeze was standing tall above the female ministers, but if they stood up, the women would be taller than him. He was staring in a way which looked purposeful, as if he’d been given a rare
and senior authority. He looked like he wanted to talk, and yet Ashes sensed that Breeze didn’t know what to say.

The women regarded him in a half-bemused kind of way.

‘So,’ began the one called Mrs Garland, ‘how on
earth
did you get into all this?’ Her dark hair was straightened to curl in a swish. She had a thoughtful look in
her eyes. She was conservative-looking in a way which said she meant business in the House, and yet her voice was husky-soft. She didn’t look like a politician at all; she seemed too real and
woman-like. Ashes moved a little closer so he could hear this conversation.

‘We come for justice,’ said Breeze. ‘Alluyou is stealing money from the poor. I am a poor young man. You is stealing we money.’

‘Who told you that?’ said Mrs Garland.

Breeze steupsed. ‘Is in the papers, nuh. And the Leader tell us is true.’

‘What does the Leader tell you?’

‘You is spending all the money in the treasury. Now you want to go to the IMF, because the money done. Is the people money and you spend it. Now Sans Amen go be colonised by the IMF. Is
the same thing. Colonisation. First we get rid of the white man colonial in politics. Now you people go ask for the white man back in the country in the form of the big robber banks. We done with
that. Economic colonisation. That cannot be. You spend all the people money; you cut the Cost of Living Allowance for poor people. You cut wages by ten percent; everyone know that. We must stop
you. You ask why I get involved with all this. I is a fighter for freedom of the poor. You are the badjohns. You people in here with your fancy ideas. You is
thief
, you should be
ashamed.’

By now a group of young brothers had gathered around the female ministers and they all murmured a
yesss
to what Breeze had said. Breeze looked pleased with his rhetoric; he had
remembered it all and now glowed with pride. He looked defiant. Hal had heard this outburst too and looked on with approval. In fact everyone had heard what Breeze said; all the ministers were now
interested. Along with three meals a day, Breeze had been fed doctrine.

‘But listen here, young boy,’ said Mrs Garland. ‘You think is our government who spend all the treasury money? Eh? Think again, my young friend. The treasury was
empty
when we arrived two years ago. What we doing with cuts is for the general good of everyone. If we didn’t cut back, then the country would bankrupt. That would be a big thing. Catastrophe. We
had to make short-term cuts. Austerity measures.’

Breeze stared. He had nothing more than his speech. He looked like he needed more time to think.

‘The Leader has come in and shot up the
wrong
government in my opinion,’ said Mrs Garland.

One of the ministers laughed out loud.

Hal looked annoyed.

‘Only yesterday afternoon we were debating this very point,’ said Mrs Garland. ‘It was an important debate in the House, about corruption under the last government, just how
much money was stolen by them, when you boys came in and shot up everything.’

Breeze looked lost.

Hal began to look uncomfortable.

‘Young boy,’ said another minister. ‘My name is Mister Cordell Jayson. I am the Minister of Finance. I am the man who your Leader hates so much. I am the IMF man you were all
calling for yesterday afternoon. Does your Leader have a substitute financial plan for how Sans Amen will recover its debt, how it will regenerate after the decades of corruption we have
had?’

Breeze looked angry now. ‘Your stupid government was going to spend fourteen million dollars on a statue of some dead woman. It was the last straw. We had to take action.’

‘Actually,’ said Mr Jayson, ‘we had planned to spend one million on a statue of a woman who was a whistleblower and had uncovered corruption in the past. She was a national
hero. She fought for justice and was then ostracised by the men in power at the time. This new government stands for justice. We were elected to fight corruption. We have been in power only two
years. Things take time.’

Breeze steupsed, not listening and not really understanding. ‘So. Why you ent tell the people what you doing? All we get is bad news. Secrecy. Cut this and that. No explanation. The IMF is
a bad thing. Meanwhile poor people cannot eat.’

‘Well, maybe we could have explained things better . . . yes . . . and yes the IMF is a last resort. It is not something we take lightly . . .’

Hal had had enough.

‘Everybody SHUT UP,’ he barked. ‘Look, this is not Prime Minister’s question time, okay. You boys, go stand guard by the windows. Breeze, get away from those women. We
don’t want the Special Forces coming up those steps while we discussing the price of bread. You,’ he said to the female ministers, ‘hush up. Stop speaking to my
soldiers.’

Mrs Garland nodded.

Dr Mahibir had given out all the puffs by now; he was collecting the empty teacups. He was limping a little.

‘What wrong with your foot?’ said Hal. ‘You got shot too?’

‘No,’ said Dr Mahibir. He lifted his pants up by the knees to expose his leather shoes which were attached to calipers and braces. ‘I had polio as a child. I need help
walking.’

Ashes felt like he needed to pray again. He needed a quiet private space. No noise, no others, no chaos. He started to collect up the teacups from those who were finished and he went back to the
tearoom with Dr Mahibir and together they began to wash up the cups. He felt humbled being around Dr Mahibir; he sensed the goodness of this man who had been calm and helping everyone; he felt sick
in his stomach at the injured and the dead. He felt hungry too and yet he could not eat. He was dizzy and hungry and now another feeling was creeping in, a type of feeling he associated with being
in the wrong. He had that feeling with his wife sometimes, when she had to explain to him why he’d offended her or another person. The Buddha was big on teaching people how to refine their
judgement; his wife and the Buddha had this fine judging quality. It was an important human quality to cultivate. Many a time he had praised God for the gift of his good wife. She was teaching him
how to behave better than he generally could.

*

By midday the army were still encamped, and there was no news of the response to the demands they had put forward. Hal and the Leader had been communicating every hour.
Colonel Benedict Howl was still outside in the streets around the House of Power, pointing a lot and issuing commands. He had a loud voice and didn’t need a megaphone. Soldiers were scurrying
around.

The attempted revolution had now become international news. Journalists were flying in from America and England, CNN, the BBC. A woman called Kate Adie had arrived; apparently she was already at
the Holiday Inn. Hal was getting all this news from the Leader. The journalists wanted to speak to the Prime Minister on the phone, only all the phones had been ripped out of the walls. One of the
brothers was now trying to reconnect a line. Mr Bartholomew Sheldon was very bad indeed, slipping in and out of consciousness. At 2 p.m. Hal allowed him to leave in a wheelchair in return for eight
buckets of KFC chicken. Mr Sheldon went out, but no KFC arrived. Hal was furious. Furthermore, Colonel Howl refused to speak directly to either the Leader or Hal. Father Sapno was supposed to be
the go between, only he had disappeared.

‘You see that,’ said Hal. ‘They starving us out. They doing the textbook thing, nuh. Howl has been to hostage crisis school or something.’

Ashes cleaned his spectacles on his shirt and then put them back on his nose. It was like the freedom fighters were now hostages, Ashes realised. They held the ministers and the army was holding
them. A double bind. The liberators were now being held captive and in turn were holding captive those who oppressed others. The army was loyal to the oppressors. The liberators were now being seen
as oppressive. Some of the liberators were ex-army, Ashes knew that. The Leader himself was ex-police. The oppressed people outside, whose arses they had come to liberate, were all out looting; the
brothers had seen them from the windows of the House.

Ashes tried to picture a bomb in the House of Power, with Hal pushing a red button to make the thing detonate, all of them blown sky high, the roof of the House of Power blown off, all of them
dead, mutilated. Forty or so brothers and about twenty-five hostages. Sixty souls ripped to shreds in order to prove a point. Now it was hard to hold on to the point of it all. Perhaps Mrs Garland
had been right. They had somehow arrived too late. They had captured the wrong government. When the colonisers left, a popular people’s government were voted in and for almost thirty years
they had simply replicated the mistakes and greed of the British. It was as if they had
caught
something, like a flu or a cold, except the thing they caught was corruption. Corruption had
been caught and then continued to spread; the no-longer colonial government had carried on the same practices and the masses had remained more or less oppressed. Of course, as a result, there had
been a popular uprising too, in 1970, but this was soon snuffed out. His brother River, twenty years old then, had marched and followed the young black leaders of the time.

At night, as they had laid in their separate beds, River had recounted his adventures of black power marches and the ideas behind them.
Sans Amen was part of a world struggle
, his
brother had assured him. Revolution was everywhere in the world in 1970, especially in America; earlier they’d had something called a Civil Rights Movement and it had led to change for the
oppressed. Even women had marched; they had called themselves Feminists. Musicians, artists, even white people had joined in. In other parts of the world, the big patches of pink or yellow on his
small globe, revolution had made all the difference. River had called himself a fighter for freedom.

But 1970 all came to nothing in the end in Sans Amen. The then leaders of that black power movement were all tracked down, rounded up and locked away on a rock off the coast. Some wrote poetry;
others broke down. Some never broke. But during their incarceration, the spirit of rebellion cooled in the City of Silk. Their ideas were ridiculed by the government and then forgotten by the
people.

River had joined a small band of men who had fought on; they were called the Brotherhood of Freedom Fighters. It was as if the island of Sans Amen had been forever blighted with this flu called
corruption; it had arrived with Christopher Columbus. Half the Amerindians were killed off instantly and then it had spread through the Caribbean; it had arrived in waves, with the Old World
planters and the pirates.

Now it was 1990, fifteen years after River had been shot, and a new Leader had emerged on the streets of Sans Amen; a spiritual man who cared enough about boys like Breeze to rescue and educate
them, give them a sense of self-worth. The Leader had also attended marches, he had self-organised and talked like River had talked, about a New Society. ‘We
still
don’t have
enough men in society to respond to political oppression,’ the Leader often said. ‘We need to kill the very
idea
of oppression.’ And Ashes had consulted his heart and
knew that these words were true and just. Not enough common men stood up for what was right, or understood that they needed to fight for social reform. The people of Sans Amen were asleep; they had
accepted too much corruption, they did not expect let alone demand fair governance.

*

Four o’ clock on Thursday afternoon, and still no word of an amnesty or any of their demands. No one had eaten much, if anything at all. The hostages had been allowed
water and if they needed to relieve themselves they did so in a teacup or a glass in the corner of the chamber behind the speaker’s chair. Some of the brothers were openly relieving
themselves against the wall. Some had defecated and Ashes was ashamed of this. Small heaps of human faeces had started to fester in the heat. That part of the chamber had become a latrine of
smashed crockery and human excrement and piss. The two female ministers could not go there. Instead they used their own glass or cup. The chamber stank and what with the smell of the dead in the
rooms behind and those lying dead on the steps leading to the gallery, there was a new concern: disease, an outbreak of cholera or typhoid. Most of the hostages held a cloth or handkerchief to
their noses. They didn’t want to inhale the bacteria now airborne. The chamber was a hell. The fetid air was making Ashes’ asthma worse. He had already used half the salbutamol spray in
his inhaler; when the rest was gone he would be in trouble.

That was when he decided to go downstairs. He didn’t need to ask anyone for permission or say anything about where he was going. He felt invisible again and quietly moved towards the back
rooms of the House, the rooms with dead bodies, the rooms that were all shot up. Some of them contained gunmen sitting or lying on the floor; he walked past these and no one stopped him or called
out. In the commune he was always the odd one out, quiet, aloof; he didn’t live there, he came and went for prayers or to volunteer in the medical clinic occasionally. No one seemed to notice
him as he passed. There was a staircase leading to the lower ground floor and he followed it, his feet slipping down the steps, his heart crying out for peace and solitude. But he knew downstairs
there were barred gates, that he would still be surrounded and trapped. It was only just dawning on him what they’d done – what
he
’d done. He’d taken part in an
armed insurrection. A coup d’état. Or at least a good attempt at one.