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One morning the warders opened our door, yelling, accompanied by helmeted police. They were running in the corridor, banging the walls with their batons. At the howling of the other inmates, we got up. Aidan pressed himself against me, back to back, nape against nape. We chained ourselves together, arm of one clasped through the other’s, fists clenched against our chests. We were bellowing at life, at fear. We shook with our fury. We formed a single body, which they broke apart with savage blows.

I was knocked to the ground, my blankets snatched away from me, then dragged by the legs into the corridor. The line of clubs. Protected by their riot shields, they were taking their revenge on these fucking Irish, on their blankets, on their shit, on their insults, on their contempt. They were beating naked men. Heads, legs, backs, raised arms. They were marking us. They were leaving their traces.

I was pulled by my beard and hair to the shower room. I struggled and shouted. I no longer hurt, no longer felt anything. The shouts from the others were intoxicating. For a moment, I thought they were going to kill us. Terror. There were three screws. They were keeping me on the floor. Arm locks, hands gripping my neck. I repaid them by scratching, spitting. And then I was lifted up like a sack and thrown heavily into a bathtub of freezing water. They were going to drown me. I threw my arms and legs about. A blow to my jaw. I fell back, head hitting the wall. They were washing me. They were scouring a year of resistance away. A screw was scrubbing me with a hard brush. My back, my arms. He was rubbing down a bad horse. Scraping the shit off a toilet bowl. He was puffing, mouth open, threatening my father, my mother, and all the pigs of my kind.

He shouted.

—That’s for Agnes Wallace, you filthy bastard! Does that mean anything to you, Agnes Wallace?

My howls were drowning out his voice.

—And William Wright? That means nothing, either? You IRA scum!

He was scrubbing me violently, scraping me clean. He held my hands on the lip of the bath and forced the bristles under my nails. He was barking names in my ear.

—William McCully! John Cummings!

He was whacking rhythmically with the back of the brush.

—Robert Hamilton! John Milliken!

Milliken. I remembered. A head warder of the penitentiary administration, shot by the IRA on his way home.

Good Christ! He was avenging his dead.

—Thomas Fenton, you scumbag! Desmond Irvine, you murderer!

The second screw had taken over. He was tearing my hair out. He ploughed into my skull with blunt scissors. He cut, he slashed.

—Micky Cassidy! Gerald Melville!

Then I responded.

—James Connolly! Patrick Pearse! Eamonn Ceannt!

I bellowed with all my might. Blood for blood, rage for rage, their victims for mine.

The scissors took away part of my ear.

—Albert Miles!

—Tom Williams!

—Nazi! shouted the screw with the brush. Filthy fucking Nazi!

I had blood in my eyes. The third screw was choking me. He had wrapped his forearm around my neck. He was squeezing. I could barely breathe. My mouth was open, tongue hanging out, I clenched my jaw in vain. Before my eyes, on his tattooed arm, the pole of a Union Jack pierced through the Irish flag.

—You killed Danny Finley!

They pushed my head under the water and kept it there, one hand on my skull, the other on the nape of my neck, legs hobbled by two arms and a boot on my waist. Until I passed out.

On the way back, we met spacemen. A dozen guys with protective gloves, boots, overalls, transparent masks and waterproof hoods. They were carrying cleaning equipment, power hoses, vacuum cleaners.

—Go back to Mars, bastard! growled a wounded prisoner.

I was returned to my cell by my regular warder. An odd guy, almost bald and older than the others. He always had a word or a look for us.

We called him ‘Popeye’. Every single time he brought us our evening mess he’d glance around our cell with a sorry look on his face. He’d lift his paper mask, as though wanting to share our ordeal, shake his head and murmur:

—Jesus Mary!

He must have been a Catholic.

One day, he asked me to give up the dirty protest. To accept the blue uniform. I was alone in the cell. Aidan had been transferred to the prison service to learn that his sister had died, killed in a fire. Usually Popeye would remain in the doorway. This time, he came in. He stopped in the middle of the room, away from the soiled walls. He placed my mess on the mattress.

—Even animals don’t live like this.

I listed out our demands. I chanted our slogans. And I felt bad for doing it. He was speaking to me man to man and I was replying like a robot. Because his colleague was waiting in the corridor Popeye whispered cautious words. He told me that the public couldn’t care less about our shit, that the British would leave us like that for a thousand years if that was what it took. He told me that outside of our ghettos, with their isolated circle of Irish Republicans, the world wasn’t the slightest bit interested in us.

—It’s been four years now. Four years, do you get it? And look how far you’ve got. It’s you who’s living in the shit, Meehan, not Margaret Thatcher.

Often the other screws took the piss out of him, so the prisoners used to stand up for him. There were some amongst us who considered his compassion a manoeuvre – the good cop, bad cop tactic. But one evening, when Aidan was crying over his sister, Popeye proposed delivering a letter to his family for him. He made him promise that it wouldn’t be political. A letter of commiseration, words of comfort from a son to his grieving parents. And Aidan accepted. It was a crazy act for both men, criminal under prison law. For Popeye, it was treason.

Aidan shut himself off, facing the wall. First he spent a long time choosing a passage from the Bible, then he tore out the page. He read it to me.

—‘A prayer for help against the foe’, Psalm 60. David addresses God:

Thou hast showed thy people hard things:

Thou hast made us to drink the wine of astonishment …

He asked me what I thought of his choice. I made no reply. Yes, said Aidan, God has been making us see. And this ordeal was, for him, the proof of His presence. Then he spent a long time writing in the margins. Tiny script, cramped, the same used by prisoners before the blanket protest began, when we still had visitors. When we recounted our lives on sheets of cigarette paper folded over and over until they were no larger than a nail. Those stowaway secrets, enveloped in tinfoil and clingfilm. Those messages hidden in men’s cheeks in place of a missing filling. Those notes passed from one tongue to another in the visitors’ room at the moment of a kiss.

One evening after dinner the warder left with our two messes, and the message buried in some leftover white beans.

The astronauts were going into the cells. Popeye was carrying me, hugging me around the waist. I had my hand on his shoulder. I was whimpering, swallowing my saliva and my blood. Everything hurt. My knees were knocking with every step. My skin was burning, as though it had been burnt to a crisp by the sun and then rubbed with sand. Everything was spinning around me. I stumbled. I waited a moment for the ground to become still.

And it was at that instant that I saw Robert Sands. For the first and last time in my life. The prisoner who used to start shouting in Irish once night fell: that was him. People had told me about him on the outside, their voices full of respect. He was twenty-seven years old. Before the blanket protest he had been writing articles and poems for the Republican press, drawing, giving classes in Irish. Bobby Sands had been arrested in a car along with four
óglaigh
. There had been one gun between five of them in the vehicle. And he got fourteen years in prison.

—Your leader is in a bad way, Popeye murmured.

Bobby commanded the IRA within the prison compound. Two screws were taking him back to his cell. They held him under his armpits, one on either side, and they were dragging him carelessly along the floor.

—Don’t watch.

I closed my eyes. I just caught a glimpse of him, half-covered by his blanket. Behind my closed eyelids I could still see his white skin and the marks of the blows. His arms were dangling and his legs were jelly, bare feet sliding along the tiles. His head hung listlessly. A soul wrapped in a coarse shroud.

A shock awaited me in my cell. The floor was wet and everything smelled of Javel, ammonia, chlorine – a mixture of morgue, toilets and hospital. The walls had been cleaned. Nothing left of us but the dark shadow of our dirt. They had soaked our blankets and our mattresses. Aidan was in his usual spot, his wet blanket around his waist and over his shoulders. He had shorter hair on one side and a large white dent at the front of his skull. He was rubbing his knees. I joined him in his corner. From his side, you could see the whitish light from outside. It was raining. I was in pain. My skin, my head. My blood was pounding through my veins. At the back of my jaw, two teeth were broken. My tongue was a wound. One of Aidan’s eyes was closed, my mouth was hanging open. We didn’t fight the silence. We waited for the night, pressed up against one another wordlessly.

—Tiocfaidh ár lá!

—Our day will come!

A roar in the corridor. The last of us had got back to his cell. I had dozed off, back against the wall. I looked up. Aidan was questioning me silently. He was smiling in the dark. The warders still hadn’t turned on the lights. And then he got up. He went over and squatted next to the door, in his little corner, under the crucifix. So I got up. He shit on the ground, I shit in my hands. And we began to repaint our cell.

When I left the Kesh on 7 January 1981, I hugged Aidan. I squeezed him as I would Jack. Our beards, our hair tangled together, our soiled blankets, our pride. Bobby Sands was organizing a hunger strike in order to obtain political prisoner status. From cell to cell, we had reformulated our demands. We had five of them and they were pathetic. The right to wear civilian clothes, to associate freely with other prisoners and not to have to work for the prison. We wanted to receive one visit, one letter and one parcel per week. We also wanted full restoration of remission lost through our protest.

I asked Aidan not to add his name to the list of prisoners volunteering for martyrdom. He was nineteen and had a little girl aged two. Sentenced to barely five years, he would walk out one day. He’d take care of her.