Authors: Monique Roffey

House of Ashes (16 page)

Dr Mahibir came quickly and when he saw Ashes breathing like a crapaud fish on the sand, he sat down opposite him and said, ‘Look into my eyes.’ He picked up Ashes’ hands in
his and said, ‘Do not panic. You are having an asthma attack.’

Ashes nodded, knowing this. It rarely got this bad, but now it was happening and he had no secret air to save him. If he died here like this he wouldn’t face what the others had to face,
courts and treason. He wouldn’t have to face his wife, his sons. It would be a natural way to disappear.

‘Keep looking at me,’ said Dr Mahibir. ‘Look at me and breathe, keep breathing.’

Ashes looked into the doctor’s eyes. It helped a bit.

‘I know you,’ Dr Mahibir said. ‘They call you Books, don’t they?’

Ashes tried to keep his breathing even. He nodded.

‘You keep medicinal plants in your backyard. You read a lot.’

Ashes nodded and kept holding the doctor’s hands; the doctor was kneeling in front of him.

‘You work as a porter in the health clinic in the east side of town. I hear about you and about your plants from a neighbour of yours, a trainee doctor who works in my
department.’

Ashes kept his slow, shallow breaths going. In, out, in, out.

‘I heard you had a famous brother. River, right?’

Ashes wanted the doctor to stop talking. He wanted everyone to stop talking about his famous brother, the one who got shot up.

‘I was the one who wrote his medical report for the coroner. I was a very young doctor then. I had my first job with the government. They needed all those men looked at, proper
certificates. Everything above board even though they had shot them all dead. I was the one they called in. I removed twenty-eight bullets from his body.’

Ashes could feel the air in his lungs begin to surge. Air, the source of all life, was returning in small measured doses.

‘You?’

‘Yes, me. This is a small place, you know that. We are all related in some way. I am sorry about your brother. I was shocked at the time, deeply shocked. Now I meet you here. Your poor
mother. Two sons active in revolution. I guess having a strong political conscience must run in the family. I guess all this, guns and . . . everything must be exciting. Breathe,’ he
said.

Ashes breathed in slowly; he was feeling a little better, more air now.

‘You know . . . I think we don’t need guns to change anything. Change is upon us all the time. Change is natural and ever present. Nothing stays the same. Everything is always
moving. We are always growing. Our hair grows, our skin flakes, we grow each day. Every situation moves forward in its own way. Look, you see, even this situation has changed. When I arrived you
were breathing your last breath. You were dying. Now your breath is returning.’

Ashes nodded.

‘All it took was a bit of . . . regulation. You are breathing again. See?’

‘Yes.’

‘The biggest part of the self wants to live,’ said Dr Mahibir. ‘Not one part of the self wants to die. We desire to live. That’s a very basic rule of life. Being too
reactive is not the way of the natural world. The natural world is slow and often abundant, it can heal itself.’

Ashes nodded. He was breathing again. And yet he felt profoundly confused. Love. Just like air, it was an invisible force. A cohesive agent in the world. In the last three days this love force,
one he usually had access to, could find within himself, had vanished. Love had vanished into thin air. And then he had no access to air. Both air and love had cut him off. He put his hand to his
heart and breathed in deeply and it felt like a miracle to be breathing and to be alive. He breathed in and out, in and out; his lungs were working again, just. If he’d found his way back to
air, maybe, just maybe, he could find his way back to his own heart.
Go through the phases of life without losing yourself
, said the Sufi mystic Hazrat Inayat Khan. Yes, he had lost
himself; he had lost the heart of self. He breathed, in and out. In and out.

There was no place to go; everything was wrecked. The tearoom had been blown to smithereens. There was debris everywhere. The dead lay under the debris. Three days. Ashes felt
there was a sense that they, the men with guns inside, were hiding now; they had no power whatsoever. The army had not yet sent their convoy of trucks. Soon after Ashes had used the telephone, the
army had cut off this line so that Hal and the Leader couldn’t communicate. Hal’s walkie-talkie had more or less died. Hal was on his own now. But the agreement, generally, was to get
out of there alive.

Ashes tried to think it out: the elected Prime Minister of the country had shown from the outset that he was prepared to die. The head of the army, Colonel Benedict Howl, had shown that he was
loyal to the PM and the country; he had followed orders and attacked. The army had shown discipline and loyalty. They had backed up the PM and Howl. These two men, the PM and the head of the army,
had worked together in some mysterious way. They hadn’t been speaking to each other like the Leader and Hal had been talking every hour; none of that was going on. And yet they were somehow
working together, decisively, without needing to talk. It was becoming clear that this collusion was something Ashes didn’t know about, had overlooked; and so had the Leader and Hal.

Power. In some way these two men, the PM and Howl, knew what it was and what it meant. It had been allocated to them. And they had both been trained about power. They seemed to have some kind of
secret knowledge about events like this which both had put into action separately and together. It was as if this covert complicity was only needed once in a lifetime, perhaps – but it was
vital. They both knew how to act when power was under threat. The thought of all this made Ashes’ head spin.

Breeze had been behaving differently since the attack that morning. He looked like he had been doing some thinking too, and he’d been hanging around Ashes as if wanting to share his
thoughts. Now Breeze came up to him with his hands empty. Breeze had stopped carrying his gun, maybe because it was bigger than him.

Breeze cornered him.

‘What? What going on, my friend?’ Ashes tried to sound encouraging.

Breeze crossed his arms over his chest. He was trying to maintain the posture of an urban guerilla fighter still.

‘What is a Prime Minister?’ he said. The question was more like a command.

Ashes laughed. Where had he seen Breeze before?

‘The Prime Minister is the head of government, the head of the country.’

‘Oho.’ Breeze looked suspicious, as though this was a trick statement. He re-crossed his arms and struck the same pose from another angle. ‘I thought
the Leader
was
the head of the country.’

Ashes stared.

Breeze glared back, a small shyness now breaking out on his cheeks.

‘Howyuh come to think
that
?’

Breeze shrugged. ‘I ent know. Everyone think so. I does talk to alluh de men, everyone in the compound, they say he the real Leader of the country.’

Ashes steupsed. This was bad talk. ‘No,’ he said. ‘The Leader is
not
head of the country. You making no sense at all.’

‘Then
who
he is?’

‘The Leader is himself.’

The young boy’s eyes went hard and dark; suddenly he looked all boiled up and vexed. Like this was all the wrong information.

‘He lead his followers, like us.’

‘So how the Prime Minister get to be so important? I figure he an old man. I never figure he so important they go blow down this whole friggin place.’

‘Well, yes . . . he is important. He is the most important and powerful man alive in Sans Amen.’

‘Only now you telling me this.’

‘You didn’t know what a Prime Minister is?’

‘No. Is only now I figuring it out.’

‘Only now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who you figure the Leader is?’

‘I figure the Leader is the Prime Minister.’

‘
No
,’ Ashes sighed and wanted to weep. ‘You have to be
elected
to be Prime Minister. Votes and elections. Official things must take place. The Leader, you
know he doing his own thing. Freestyle. He is . . . well . . . he is spiritually inclined.’

‘Why you follow him?’

‘Same reason as you. He a good man. Spiritual.’

Breeze steupsed.

‘He just make a mistake is all.’

Ashes looked at the young boy and it was then he saw himself, his fifteen-year-old self, the young boy who followed his brother around, who followed River everywhere. River his hero-brother.
River who was cunning and smart, who ran off to the hills to take up arms. Breeze looked like River but he was as foolish as Ashes was at his age and even now. Breeze was like the two brothers
melted into one, a young innocent boy with a gun.

But Breeze wasn’t finished yet. Something else was stored inside. Now Breeze looked different, softer. Like a tear might fall and he was keeping it back.

‘I want to tell you something.’

‘Oh?’

Breeze looked down and said, ‘I shoot someone.’

Ashes felt bad. Hot and dead in his arms and legs. He had wondered if this might be the case. He nodded but he didn’t know what to say or do. Unlike the PM and the Colonel, he didn’t
know how to act in these circumstances. River had also shot people. He knew that, but River never talked about it.

‘I shot the woman in there,’ Breeze pointed to the room behind, now blasted to pieces, the room where Ashes had bent down and seen the woman’s body slick with blood; she had
still been alive then. Then he remembered what she’d said to him.

‘I sorry, yes,’ said Breeze. ‘I sorry.’

‘You shot the woman?’

‘It was an accident. It happen in the first ten minutes we get inside here. I was running and she appeared and I was shooting up the place. I shot her. She fell down. She was in the room
trying to get out of the window and I doh know how it happen. Everyone was shooting everything. I doh know what I was doing. I shot her. She was trying to escape. I sorry.’

Tears fell down his face.

‘I like the women inside here. Mrs Garland, she a good lady. She kind. I almost shoot she as well.’

Ashes felt his heart thunder around inside him.

‘I have a bad feeling,’ said Breeze. ‘Right here,’ and he relaxed one arm and let it hang free and with the other hand he patted the area around his groin.

‘Come,’ Ashes said.

‘What?’

‘I taking you to pray.’

‘Where?’

‘Somewhere quiet. Away from here.’

He put one hand on the young boy’s shoulder and squeezed. ‘Come with me.’

Ashes took Breeze down along the blasted, blown-up corridor, past all the smashed-up rooms where clerical support staff had been going about their business only Wednesday last, past the cases of
unused guns and ammo the brothers had brought with them, past the room with the last telephone line, now dead, past the broom cupboard where Mrs Gonzales had been hiding, past the room with Liquid
Paper graffiti about God, and then down some mahogany stairs in the middle of the building, down two flights to the cool terrazzo ground floor of the House of Power where there was a fountain in
the centre but the water had stopped its flourishing dance. Although down there was quieter, the signs of the mayhem above were evident: broken glass and planks of wood were strewn across the
floor. They had to go carefully so as not to be seen through the wrought iron gates by the army encamped on the streets. They were unarmed and couldn’t return fire. They both looked upwards
and gazed at the vaulted ceiling.

‘This place huge, man,’ Breeze gasped.

‘Yeah.’

‘It haunted, no arse.’

Ashes looked at him. ‘Maybe,’ he said. He thought of the burial ground under the House which had appeared to him in his dream. Could there be Amerindians buried beneath?

‘Why they build this place so big?’

‘So everyone can see it, nuh.’

‘Who build it?’

‘The Queen.’

‘What Queen?’

‘The Queen of England. Victoria. She dead long time. Is in her style.’

‘Well she had good style. Fancy.’

‘Yeah, but she have plenty power. And they stick one big dragon up there on top this place. To defend it. That dragon
serious
, no arse. Is why this all go wrong. Like this place
cursed.’

‘A dragon?’

Ashes said, ‘Yes. Come.’

They walked along one of the corridors and Ashes pushed open the wooden door to the library and behind him Breeze let out a low whistle. There was his nest on the floor made of some curtains
taken from the window and the cushions from the old leather armchairs. Ashes felt awkward; now the library had an intimate feel, like he’d made it his own bedroom.

They shut the door behind them and stood there on the deep blue velvet carpet and for a few moments it was like the world was normal again. None of the other brothers had been down here. No one
else had thought to snoop around this far away from the action.

‘What is this place?’ Breeze asked.

‘Is a library, nuh. For books.’

Breeze looked around, his jaw set in a held-in wonder. In the window Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross and was gazing up at the skies. Ashes had found himself talking a lot to Jesus on the
cross. Mostly he had gone over the rights and wrongs of fighting for freedom and its cost. Now he stood there with Breeze and he felt self-conscious. Breeze was inspecting Jesus.

‘That is Jesus Christ?’ Breeze asked.

‘Yes.’

‘The prophet?’

‘Yes.’

‘He not looking healthy.’

‘No.’

‘He get his arse killed in a bad way.’

‘He get executed.’

‘Howyuh mean?’

‘The Romans, they punish him by death.’

‘For what?’

‘For what he preach. It was treasonous.’