House of Ashes (11 page)

‘Go away! Get out of my
sight
,’ I rasped. The young man-boy with the gun looked at the body of the woman on the ground and he winced as if she was a small mistake. He moved
backwards a little but hovered, still, with his big gun . . . watching me.

I found the washroom and I turned the handle and let myself in. I gagged and vomited into the sink. I ran the taps and splashed water on to my face and tried to see, really see, who I was
looking at in the mirror. Aspasia Garland, where was she? But I could barely see my face; it was as if I’d no head, as if it had been removed. I saw a blank space in the mirror. That
woman’s bloody and bloated body could have been mine. That body
was
mine. That woman
was
me. We were the same woman. Her body had been so casually discarded, a life thrown
away; it could have been any woman, all women. The boys too, the gunmen. They were every boy. Tears ran and I saw that I looked very young, and also a hundred years old. I splashed water again so
the water dissolved my tears. In the washroom there was a small window, but it was much too high up to escape from. I looked out into the night sky and prayed to God to be delivered from all of
this.
Deliver us, Lord
. If I lived I would do better in this game of politics, which was mostly a game for men. I vowed to be there and stay there for the sake of the dead woman on the
floor.

When I returned to the chamber I sat back down next to Mervyn.

‘You didn’t tell me how bad things were in there.’

‘No. It’s bad . . . isn’t it?’

‘Terrible. There’s a woman lying dead. Under the table.’

He nodded, gravely.

‘I think she was a clerk from downstairs. She must have come up here on Wednesday afternoon to deliver papers or something. A young woman, she has kids. I know her.’

I could see Mervyn was upset.

‘They are crazy, these people, Mervyn. Their Leader, he gave a bunch of men some guns, he had some half-cooked plans, and now things . . . really, really bad. I wanted to be in politics
since I was young, since I was about
twelve
.’

Mervyn looked impressed.

‘I was one of the first people in Sans Amen to be a member of Greenpeace in the early 1980s . . .’ I laughed at this. It felt like a long time back; Greenpeace was then considered a
kind of terrorist cell. ‘I was an activist from an early age. Saving animals, you know . . . a conservationist. That was me. All I wanted to do was save the earth. It has been a passion of
mine, since childhood . . . since I saw a turtle on its back on the beach, with its fins hacked off. It took hours to die in the sun. It devastated me to know humans could be so barbaric, to see
the creature cry as it died. I went to school and university here on the island and studied politics. I was proud to be elected.’

Mervyn nodded. ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘I fell into it.’

‘Well I didn’t.’

‘I’ve never been an activist. I’m an observer. And a doctor.’

‘That sounds pretty active to me.’

‘No. I feel different, Aspasia. Quiet. I am a quiet man. I like to keep out of things. Really.’

The gunmen had been using Mervyn to help the injured and he’d been generous with his skills. Some more of the gunmen had been shot; one in the arm, another had had his ear badly grazed.
Another had fallen on broken glass. None of the hostages, luckily, had been hurt by the incoming gunfire. Mervyn was asked to do what he could with the medicine kit and he freely obliged. One of
the phone lines had been reconnected and I suspected this was how Hal and the Leader were communicating between the House and the television station. But Mervyn had also started to look a little
shaky. He was less steady on his feet. Like me, he must be hungry and scared. The gunman Ashes was helping him tend the injured men. The pair of them made a rather well-matched team. In different
circumstances, it was easy to see them as colleagues.

When he was done, Mervyn wrote a list of what was needed and gave it to Hal saying he should ring for supplies to be delivered as soon as possible. The gunman with the bullet in his arm faced
gangrene within hours in the heat if he wasn’t treated. Others needed stitches where he’d picked out large shreds of glass. But it was the Prime Minister he was most worried about.

‘The Prime Minister is now losing his sight from his diabetes. If he isn’t treated with his medication, he could slip into a coma. Then you will have lost your most valuable hostage.
Then you will have a body to throw over the balcony. His. Then the army will come in here and kill everyone. Get him his pills or release him.’

‘I am not leaving the House,’ said the Prime Minister from the floor. He was curled up and looked like he was in pain. I could see he was still the great man I knew and respected,
all curled up there, and yet I could also see, like everyone else, he’d made it for one whole day on his own reserves of spirit. His health was now declining rapidly and this could affect his
valour, maybe even his ability to speak clearly for himself.

‘No,’ the Prime Minister repeated firmly, ‘I’m not leaving.’ He said this with eyes now almost sealed shut, his face swollen with the beating. The gunmen all stood
round him in a circle. One kicked him in the ribs just for the hell of it.

The Prime Minister groaned.

‘Leave him alone,’ said Mervyn for the first time in a gruff voice. ‘He is very sick.’

They moved away. It was as if the gunmen had lost their way a little, or they were no longer so sure of who they were. They hadn’t just lost their purpose but their identity in this mad
room; they’d gone a little astray. The atmosphere they had created affected
everyone,
including them. It was just as difficult for them being here where the air was mad, where the
room was heavy with the smell of a bloated dead woman down the hall. Those ministers they were holding hostage had showed bravery and also kindness to them; the doctor had patched them up. The
ministers, they now saw, were not such villains after all. It was easy to see that whatever was going on for me, the beginning of a failure to cope, was also happening to everyone, including the
gunmen.

‘The Prime Minister needs his medication,’ Mervyn said to Hal. ‘And he needs those pills by tomorrow morning latest, or he will comatose.’

*

The PM was very attached to the House and I thought about this. Of all the buildings on the island, the House had seen the most civil unrest over the years before and after
Independence. There’d been ruination and violence in the House of Power before, every minister knew that; it was a historical fact. The House had been burnt to a shell of itself already.
There’d been riots over the cost of water, decades ago. And for more or less the same reasons, the House had been violated. The government of the time had tried to tax the poor. Except the
last time it was the colonials who were in power.

Back then, the British had passed an ordinance to increase the cost of water. They wanted to install water meters as they felt water was being wasted by the general public. Taps were allowed to
run free. The British didn’t like the sight of people bathing at standpipes by the road for too long. In response, there had been demonstrations and these had gone unheeded. Finally, the
people had rioted and pelted stones and rocks through the windows of the House. They smashed up a stained glass window which celebrated Christopher Columbus arriving in the south of the island.
They dragged the governor’s carriage to the port and dumped it in the sea. Then they set fire to the ground floor of the House. The people were vexed, crazy like fire ants. When the police
arrived they opened fire, openly shooting and bayoneting the crowd. Sixteen people were killed, including five women and a girl of twelve. Dozens of others were badly wounded. The House of Power
was gutted.

Slowly, it was rebuilt. It was painted red at first, the colour of blood, in celebration of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. And then, in even gayer times, it had been through a range of colours:
lime green, ochre, blue morpho turquoise, adapting to moods and eras. From working in the House I knew that parts of it were dilapidated and in need of repair. In the southeast chamber, there was a
crater-sized hole in the ceiling where rain had soaked through and plaster had come down and pigeons had nested for decades. When the colonials departed in the early 1960s, they left behind this
stately Victorian monument. And yet I had never understood why the new wave of independence leaders claimed it as their own; it didn’t seem a good way to start a new era. The proud and
hard-to-rule people of Sans Amen had already burnt the place down once. Now, they were attacking it again.

In my dream there was a young woman lying dead on the ground. Her stomach was all shot up and slick with blood. The woman was called Bathsheba, and she was a fighter for
freedom. She had a baby in her stomach. She lay face down, one arm clutching herself, the other flung forward as though she’d been swimming across the hot tarmac. Her body was riddled with
bullets. There’d been a gunfight which had lasted for hours, men firing from houses, rooftops, the police were encamped. Now her body lay inert in the middle of the road; no one would touch
it for fear of being shot too. Bathsheba was a woman who’d taken up arms to fight for a New Society. In my dream Bathsheba came awake. She stopped her slow crawl across the road, struggled to
her feet and dusted herself off. The bloody patch on her stomach began to shrink and she walked through the houses of that village in the hills and back to a more ordinary existence.

Then my dream started to blur and turn to chaos: people in the streets outside the House of Power were rioting. A young girl of about twelve years old, her eyes weeping tears of disbelief, a
sharp bayonet rammed through her ribcage, in and up through her stomach. A long pointed blade glistened from her back. She lay dead from the wound in the street outside the House of Power. In my
dream the City of Silk was now called the City of Riots.

My body was hot from the dream and I writhed with discomfort. It wasn’t really sleep; for a couple of hours I’d drifted off. 5 a.m., or around there, I’d floated away from the
chamber. My dreams were trampled up and full of dead women. The skin on my back, on my stomach was damp from the horror of these images. My eyes felt bruised and I touched around them, pressing
gently to see if my skull was still there, under my face.

I opened my eyes. The young boy Breeze was standing above me and I had the feeling he’d been watching me for several minutes. His presence must have brought me round. His face was full of
moodiness. It was a small, sullen African face; it carried questions and proud reserve. My city, the City of Riots, bred these difficult young men by the dozen; they were born of the mothers who
were proud and dirt-poor and abandoned by their men, who, in turn, had been abandoned by other men. The City of Riots made boys who were resilient and who had patience and who could fight. This
Breeze was a young poor man, full of insolence and posture, even grandeur.

‘I see you before,’ he said, looking down at me. He was only fourteen but possessed a manliness which came with everything else he was born to. It was everywhere, this male charisma.
It came from Africa; it was on the street and it was in the House. Sans Amenians were a charismatic people, men and women equally; it was our birthright and our strength and also our foolishness,
for it was commonly said that God came from Sans Amen.

I tried to focus on the young man. My neck was stiff and I felt the skittishness of panic dart through me. He was standing above me in a way which threatened a sexual act. I had reason to be
scared of this young man. He was a little too trigger-happy for my liking. He looked like his head was full of ideas, like he had more intelligence than the other boys, and yet he was also one of
the most confused. I tugged downwards at my skirt. I didn’t know what to say; my voice had turned to cotton in my throat. My dreams had left me weak and spacious.

‘Where have you seen me before?’ I said quietly. It was just before dawn; everyone was quiet on the floor of the wrecked House.

‘On TV, the Parliament Channel. I does watch the
Saturday Night Review
,’ he said.

I nodded. Recently parliament had agreed to being filmed in session and now debates and such like were shown on the news every Friday, and also once a week in a
Review
show.

‘I see you making speeches and talking and having things to say.’

I nodded, hoping this wasn’t going to go the wrong way.

‘Allyuh chupid,’ he said.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘I see you all eating nuts. Reading the newspaper. Sometimes I see half the men inside the House of Power asleep! Right here in the chamber.’

I felt ashamed. I’d often wondered if it had been a mistake to allow the chamber to be televised. This was Sans Amen. The ex-colonial citizens must have found the behaviour of some of the
ministers in parliament a far cry from their fantasies. The House was Victorian; they must have thought we behaved like Queen Victoria inside here, all formal and serious, wearing wigs and drinking
tea. But that was not the case and I had also found it shocking to watch the footage of the debates. I’d seen the slumped ministers, the men I considered colleagues; some of them were quite
good men, but they let themselves down by their casual habits.

‘Yes,’ I said to Breeze. ‘Men in power are no different to any other men.’ I wanted to say something general, placatory, but Breeze had a closed-up face and I felt his
power and I felt judged and castigated.

‘Huh,’ he said. ‘That is what
you
think. We is not like allyuh. We doh fall asleep when we meet to talk. We are men with discipline. Our Leader train us good. Not like
this fool all roughed up so on the ground, none of you know how to behave.’

‘You think your Leader is a good man?’

He nodded with a solemn certainty.

‘You think your Leader could do any better than us?’ The young boy continued to stare down at me as if I were less than him; he nodded again. I could see he belonged to a bunch of
righteous men, vigilantes and crusaders. He’d been shown respect by the Leader and that acknowledgement gave him a sense of status, a place in the world. I could see they were a disciplined
bunch, not like those men in the House. He had a point. Breeze was sure of his Leader. Not everyone in the House was sure of the PM.