House of Ashes (21 page)

A voice came at me through a megaphone, ‘Mrs Garland, keep walking. Turn right.’

I was trembling. I did as I was told, turning right, and only then did I see the bus. My heart surged. Freedom! It would carry me away. My legs felt spongy, like I was walking on pillars of
foam.

‘Keep walking towards the bus,’ said the voice. The bus was parked just beyond the perimeter of the grounds of the house. I saw the bright magenta walls, how dwarfed I was next to
them, how astounding they were now. A wild colour, the colour of sex and carnival, it gave me a sudden surge of confidence. Slender green palms stood next to the House, their red berries showing
under their skirts. I could have kissed the ground. Sans Amen was still standing.

The skies were the brilliant clear blue that screams down and says
good morning
much too loudly. Everything was too much. I feared I might topple over before I reached the bus. Men were
everywhere, wielding rifles, in army combat uniform, their faces hidden by balaclavas.

‘Keep walking,’ I heard the voice, now at my back, through the megaphone. There were two men in army fatigues standing near the bus. One of them greeted me with a glass of water
which I took and drank from immediately. These men with guns weren’t my captors, they were my protectors; I smiled at them uncertainly. I still didn’t know quite what to do. One of them
saw I was disorientated and took my arm and helped me up into the vehicle. He escorted me to one of the rear seats. There were open windows but the heat was intense and dazzling. I felt amazed,
blinded by the sun and by my freedom.

*

Parts of the City of Silk were still smouldering in the morning heat. Some of the looted buildings were clouded in a grey smoke and this made everything in the blackened and
barren streets appear smudged. These buildings were in the act of being rubbed out. They’d been dismantled, raided, burnt down and now – six days later – what was left of them
looked indistinct and blurred. The looters had invaded most of the lower end of town. Shops, offices, arcades, everything was now charred; broken glass was everywhere in the streets, the innards of
these properties dragged out into the street: timber, sheets of metal, chunks of plaster, a power cable, like a giant skipping rope, hung limp across the road. Tears ran down my cheeks. No one
spoke in the white hostage bus. The City of Silk had been burnt like razor grass. It had been seared off. Now it was a wasteland.

As the bus moved slowly down Veronica Street I felt like I was on a fairground ride; this was a Tour of the Macabre. Everyone on the bus could now see what had been happening in the City of Silk
over the last six days. If the city could weep, it was weeping. It stood disrobed and humiliated and I felt its shame. I had been craving freedom, but now I witnessed another hell on the outside of
the House. I found it hard to look at the damage; it was like looking too closely at a woman who’d only recently been raped. The City was standing in its own violation and it hung its head,
raw and pitiful.
What had the people done to themselves?
What had the PM, myself, other ministers not seen? How could we have missed this? Here it was. Here was the people’s anger
and delinquency. An old anger. It was right here on the streets and now the streets were smouldering with contempt. The City of Riots. This city kept doing this to itself; its citizens had old
wounds to discuss.
Stupid woman
, I castigated myself. Everyone in the bus was equally silent. The City of Silk was in mourning and, as we glided past, every single one of the ministers
gazed out, unnerved, humbled.

‘Jesus Christ.’

‘Jesus, dear God.’

Low whistles.

Tears in my eyes. Shock in my nerves. Some of the ministers would survive; others would never come back. Mervyn could only click his throat and shake his head.

Where would Sans Amen begin again after this? There were helicopters in the sky, I could hear a not-so-distant
chop chop chop
. Like a big carrion bird hung overhead.

The bus stopped at the Square of Independence and I gasped. Soldiers everywhere now, more chaos. Only last week we were discussing plans to erect a statue here to a brave woman, a citizen
who’d fought corruption in the past. Now the square was corrupted. The people of Sans Amen had beaten us to it; they’d made their own sculptures, from mangled metal and broken breeze
blocks. Jab jabs had been here. They’d urinated, stolen, jeered and mashed up the place well and good. The bus turned the corner and sailed past an old woman standing in the street. She wore
a simple housedress and held a human head in her hands. She proffered it up to us hostages in the bus as it passed. I gasped. The bus moved on and, moments later, when I looked back, I saw no
woman. The streets were deserted.

I was beyond tired. I closed my eyes and pressed my fingers to my forehead and took several deep breaths and counted. The urge to retch came as it had so many times in the last few days.
Nothing. There was nothing inside me.

The bus was now being trailed by two army jeeps, each with armed outriders. We were heading north, towards the savannah, away from the House, and yet everywhere there was this sense of dismay.
No life on the streets; the City of Silk was being kept stable by the military. Something war-like had happened.

Then I saw the green rich field, the vast savannah playground gifted to the City by the white French Creole planters of another era. Nothing felt good or right or sane or safe or stable. Freedom
tasted like ashes in my throat. The bus swept around the park and everything was grotesque and familiar; the Poui trees were laughing, the world was enjoying a sinister joke. I felt older and I
felt ugly. I needed to urinate. I needed a hundred hours of solitude. I was in shock. And I needed a bath. I wanted to say something but my voice was lost. I craved my family. I was so grateful to
be alive; I’d lived for them. But this was another landscape, another island now. The bus was heading out of town, away from the savannah, and then it swept up the hill towards the old upside
down Hilton Hotel which clung to the hills above the City of Silk.

*

In my hotel room I threw open the curtains and went straight to the balcony and gazed out. From high up, the view was different. I could see the deep glittering purple sea;
ships and tankers in the gulf. I could see a horizon. The City of Silk was left and right of me, panoramic, low and jumbled, old and young, and all of a sudden there was perspective. This attempted
revolution, this disaster, had happened in a squared-off mile of town. I looked at my watch; it was just past noon. I had been missing for six days. The sun was mired behind thick clouds. The day
was overcast and the colours of the city were hazy and muted. The rains were coming again; they would wash the city, bath the tired old city built on soil so loved by silk cotton trees. The phone
rang and I jumped. The gunfire had done that to my nerves. Would I always jump like that? I found the phone by the bed and picked it up.

‘Hello?’

‘Darling, it’s me.’

Tears fell.

‘Thank God.’

‘Are you okay?’

I shook my head and choked. The sound of Marc’s voice brought on thick emotions. I sat down.

‘I’m not so great.’

‘We’re coming to see you as soon as we can.’

I nodded. Everything felt hot and light and fluid. Like I might dissolve. I might even expire, there, from relief.

‘You’re safe now.’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘I love you.’

‘Good. I love you too.’

It felt like months since we’d seen each other. I felt like a teenager, my heart beating at his voice. Love struck. Needy. Dazzled. Weak. And safe. The army wanted to keep us at the Hilton
for one night. We all needed to be debriefed, seen by doctors. I needed the privacy; I was grateful for this time before I met my family.

‘Can I speak to the children?’

He handed the phone to my son, James.

‘Mum?’

The flood came: the blessing of relief. ‘Yes, it’s me, my love. It’s me.’

‘We’re coming to see you . . . tomorrow.’

‘I
know
, I know,’ and I rocked on the bed, holding his voice in my hands, the voice of a son of the city, my son,
my boy
. The terror of the boys with guns engulfed
me too; they were all related, these sons. Where were the mothers of those boys inside there? I was grief stricken and yet I was free.

‘I’ll be seeing you tomorrow,’ was all I could manage. ‘I love you.’

I put the phone down. My face was wet. I sat on the bed, not knowing what to do. I was still filthy and I stank. I’d been told food would soon be sent to my room.

I ran the taps in the sink in the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face. In the mirror I saw a version of myself, a person I recognised and used to know. The face in the mirror had a
sullenness which reminded me of someone else . . . the young boy, Breeze. I looked like him now. Sullen and vexed. Six days, but the lines looked like they’d invaded for good; I was
different. There was a storm in my face. I was angry. How long had I been angry? Before this had happened, or during the whole thing? My cheeks hung. My eyes were reddened where they were supposed
to be white. I touched the skin on my forehead, just to make sure I could still feel. There I was again, Aspasia Garland, free, alive, back in the world. I could now do as I pleased, but I felt
very ill at ease. As I stood looking into the mirror words came.

‘I deserved this.’

The words fell out of my mouth onto the ground. ‘I deserved this.’

That was the new sense, the mood of my new and future womanhood, a guilt and a responsibility associated with this anger on the streets and with that young boy, Breeze.

*

There was a knock at the door and when I opened it there was a uniformed member of the hotel staff standing there with a courteous smile and a tray at his shoulder. I thanked
him and took the tray to the bed and uncovered the plates to find a mountain of hot stew chicken and rice and two different salads and bread rolls and fruit. My stomach rejected even the sight of
the food. I sat down on the bed again and poured myself a glass of Coca-Cola from the bar and coughed on its fizzy sweetness. A large television sat on a table in the room and I switched it on and
flicked to the local news and found nothing but a cartoon film about a little mermaid.

I flicked to other channels, quickly finding CNN, to see what looked like a line of armoured tanks in convoy rolling in the middle of a desert. Sand dust billowed from the tank treads. I could
barely guess what I was looking at. Tanks? A desert, somewhere in the Middle East, far away? I found the control panel and turned up the volume.

A young, fresh-faced white male reporter in a flak jacket was saying something about an invasion. Tanks. Where was this? I picked up a bread roll from the tray and began to tug at it.

Apparently an invasion was taking place. The tanks were rolling in to a small fortress by the sea in the Arabian Gulf. The fortress was being bombed and the line of tanks were from a much bigger
country nearby, a desert country ruled by a violent dictator. This much bigger country was invading its tiny neighbour, suddenly and without warning or provocation. One massive country was invading
its neighbour by land and by air. Bombs were landing on a fortress by the sea . . . the young, fresh-faced reporter was saying that the fortress had been well defended once, from invasions by sea,
but now the residents were helpless. People from another state were arriving to claim this smaller ancient fortress city for itself. An old dispute. There was news footage of lines of men praying
in a masjid and a young boy saying something in Arabic, something about God. He was about the same age as Breeze. I stuffed some of the bread roll into my mouth and found myself chewing on cloth.
What had Hal said to me?
Something big
.

I was stunned. Surely the two invasions weren’t connected? They couldn’t be. One was a bungled and spectacular failure on a tiny island in the Caribbean sea; and this . . . this was
an altogether bigger bid for power. This involved the world: superpowers, jet fighters, NATO. I wondered about the news teams staying in Sans Amen; if they were already booking their tickets to fly
out. Did any of these journalists notice a connection between the last six days and this bigger attempted coup d’état?

I coughed on the roll and swigged some Coke to get it down; I stared at the line of tanks and then I didn’t want to see anymore. I turned the TV off. I lay back on the bed. I closed my
eyes and it was only then I could hear it again, the noise in my ears, the sound of distant shrieking, the sound of an inner screaming.

Violence is man re-creating himself
, said the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. Ashes took this to mean that somehow violence could be a positive thing. But when he looked
around at the empty and destroyed chamber of the House of Power, he felt despair. Their valuable hostages were now free, people had been killed. The place was shot up – and yet Fanon was
suggesting this had some higher meaning, that there was a grander pattern, historic and purposeful, to this violence; it had been significant in the great scheme of things. It could lead to new
creation. But Ashes didn’t feel the least bit positive. He had lost track of his spiritual growth and his sense of selfhood had been crushed. He was going to be imprisoned or publicly
executed over this. His children were now fatherless. No. He didn’t feel any sense of purpose, any resonance with Fanon’s words. He didn’t want to die for others to grow. He was a
stupid man. He had read too many books, too many words. He felt no pride and no vindication in what he’d been part of the last six days. And now there was no slipping away, no getting off
lightly. No way out of the House but on the bus waiting for them outside.

It was their turn now to walk out. None of them could even talk to each other. Ashes knew he was no one special or important to his country. All those notions were ill-begotten fantasies of six
days ago. He wanted none of this business with guns and bullets. He bet Frantz Fanon had never held a gun in his hands. He had said things that needed to be said. He was a black Caribbean man and
he was only twenty-seven when he wrote it down: the white man does not see the black man. This was a revolutionary thing to say, then, in the 1950s. But Fanon had never held a gun. And now that
Ashes had held a gun, fired it and shot someone, he felt it was irresponsible to write revolutionary literature and to stir people up.