House of Ashes (8 page)

A fountain stood in the centre of the lower floor but there was no water flowing through it. He stood next to it and looked upwards to see a high vaulted ceiling, rows of opaque windowpanes and
lots of green oxidised brass, all arranged in a square. He was underneath the tower in the centre of the whole structure which was the House of Power. He realised the dragon was directly above him,
pointing its scaly head towards the direction of the wind. He shuddered just to think of it; they should have taken more note of it and its spell. The tower and its structure reminded him of some
kind of intricately woven ladder upwards to the sky, but it offered no way out.

Along from the fountain there was a cool corridor and many doors leading off the hall, most half open. The brothers must have come down here early on and rounded up anyone still in the House at
6 p.m. The lower floor had a deserted feel, like a museum. He walked past door after door, peeping into some of the rooms, feeling very small and like a burglar. And then he saw a door which looked
older than the others, shut. He was still holding his rifle, which he had got used to, and yet still didn’t know how to shoot, let alone reload. It stank in his hands of gunmetal and sweat.
He opened the door, twisting the doorknob hard, and it opened with a push and he shrieked when a large ginger cat ran out, hissing. It fizzed its way down the corridor away from him, furious. Then
it hopped up and sat on the ledge of the fountain and glared at him. It began to clean itself and glare and clean itself alternately and Ashes felt guilty to have annoyed it so much.

Ashes pushed open the door to find the room inside was very light, spots of colour all over the wooden floor. Ashes saw the coloured spots came from a stained glass window and in the window he
saw Jesus Christ pinned to the cross gazing upwards. Ashes gasped and crossed himself as he’d seen Christians do. Jesus seemed to be blazing there against the afternoon sun, which was still
strong. He was up on the cross on Calvary, the two thieves next to him, Jesus who was executed for treason, for preaching compassion and for challenging corruption. Ashes shivered and saw that to
the right there was a wall of books, and the wall of books went around and encased the room and it was as if Ashes had been given a gift, a secret chamber in this vast monument built in the style
of Victoria. The House of Power was a feminine place with its coolness and its fountains and fancy
tra la la
upstairs; all gold and white and embroidered with bows, the red carpet, the
chandeliers. And at the heart of it, there was this library. A haven from the hell they had brought in. They had made a terrible mistake, he knew this now. They had injured and killed a woman, and
others too. They had shot up the place and ruined the House. The City of Silk was on fire. They had even locked up a cat. His wife Jade might never speak to him again.

Ashes leant his rifle against the bookcase and he allowed himself to scan the shelves. He saw history, law, encyclopedias, atlases, books of maps, books written by a famous ex-prime minister of
Sans Amen, a book about the voyages of Columbus, and books full of old art plates, many files, papers and leather-bound books which looked meaningless, like a kind of wallpaper. Hundreds of books
like these. But there were no novels or volumes of verse and the region had many fine novelists and poets. And nothing of Fanon or Fat Clay of Cuba, not even any words from Mahatma Gandhi or Martin
Luther King. None of the great mystical poets, Kabir or Rumi or St Francis of Assisi, no books about living or dying well like those written by the holy sages in Tibet. There was no Bible, no
Torah, nothing of the Quran or the Upanishads.

He turned around to face the window and Jesus there on the cross. He saw a man who said
The first will be last and the last will be first
. He crossed himself again and thought that
somehow he did not feel righteous or noble or revolutionary. Somehow, his revolution had gone to pieces. He picked up his gun and he felt its weight and how useless it was in his hands; he
didn’t even know if it was loaded or not. He looked at the man on the cross and found himself saying ‘sorry’ aloud. It just fell out of his mouth because he felt so ashamed of
himself. He left the room glad he’d found it, a place to be safe, away from it all; and yet in his heart, in the most intelligent part of him, he felt destitute.

*

Upstairs in the chamber the Prime Minister was still lashed to a man who Ashes now knew was Mr Bertrand Cranleyson, the Minister for National Security. Mr Cranleyson and the
PM were the most high-level hostages they had captured. Both had been seriously wounded in the legs by Hal the night before. Though the blood had stopped seeping, both men were in poor physical
shape. The Prime Minister’s eyes were sealing up and his face was blue and purple from where he’d been kicked. And yet he had an air about him of being the victor. He had a rakish
aspect about him too; his moustache was a thin line across his top lip, his sideburns were defined, like he had modelled his facial hair on a celluloid pimpernel. His skin was olive brown and his
teeth were very white, and when he spoke it was as if he had been given elocution lessons. Also he had something that Hal hadn’t counted on, a human quality no one else in the chamber
possessed, and in some strange, unspoken way it was the very thing all the hostages and brothers were aligned with. The Prime Minister had stood up to the gunmen, to Hal’s leadership, and
he’d risked his life in doing so. He had been shot for his disobedience. But what he’d really been shot for was that he refused to acknowledge Hal’s leadership. Under duress the
Prime Minister had claimed his rightful authority. He would rather die than relinquish it.

The Prime Minister was suffering physically – and yet psychologically he was defiant. In some ways, he was still the most powerful man in the chamber. He had made sure everyone knew who
was the official leader. His pants had been wrestled back up by one of the brothers and he was no longer so rudely exposed. But with his swelled up face and his legs caked with clots of blood, he
didn’t come across as vulnerable. He spoke like a dignified person, slow and articulate, and the brothers didn’t know quite how to respond to him. The hostages were used to him and even
seemed to like and respect him. Hal hadn’t counted on all of this, and neither had Ashes or any of the other brothers. Half of those in the putrid, reeking, shambolic chamber still deferred
to the Prime Minister. The PM had showed Hal that his power was useless against him; Hal could go ahead and shoot him. Hal had threatened to do so and the Prime Minister had called his bluff
because he had been willing to be shot. Now Hal knew he couldn’t threaten to shoot him
again
without making himself look like an arse. The PM had shown he was prepared to die for his
country and he had exposed Hal: Hal wanted to live and the Prime Minister was prepared to die.

So now the Prime Minister, all battered and bruised, an old colonial and yet dashing, had kept his power. And that power was greater than Hal’s. The Prime Minister had demonstrated what
power really was, that it was important enough to risk life itself for. And Ashes was stricken with a mixture of remorse and hopelessness for his own cowardice and weakness. He had fled upwards to
the ceiling; he had vanished under duress.

The PM’s bravery had had an effect on everyone. The hours dragged by. Parakeets squawked in the berries in the palms around the House. The ceasefire had lasted most of the day. No news
from the outside. Hal kept in constant contact with the Leader but still neither of them had spoken to Colonel Howl, and Father Sapno was due to come back at 6 p.m. One of the brothers had brought
a pack of cards and four of them played all fours. From the windows they had all witnessed the looting in the streets, the fires everywhere, men walking brazenly down the road carrying TV sets,
beds, table tennis tables, boxes of expensive imported sneakers, standing fans, ladders, bolts of cloth, bags of rice, ironing boards, golf clubs, skate boards, tyres, boxes of rum. They spotted
one man walking slowly down the street with a chandelier balancing on his head. The army couldn’t stop the looting; the whole regiment was fully occupied with surrounding two locations in the
centre of town. The police had all run away. The police weren’t trained for this; they couldn’t keep control of the looting even if they tried. Ashes saw that not one of the looters,
his fellow countrymen, seemed interested in what was happening in the vivid magenta House of Power. They all walked past it. Some pointed and stared; one or two looked up. Fat Clay of Cuba had
trained thousands to march on Havana in the end. The Leader had half-trained not even a hundred. There was a method to a successful revolution, Ashes was beginning to realise.

*

At five in the afternoon there was an important piece of news. Hal came into the chamber. ‘Delta Force are here.’ He announced this mainly to his men, but in some
way he found the fact thrilling, that they had caused such a stir, like he was saying it to a larger audience. ‘They Americans have landed.’ Hal went over to the PM. ‘You,’
he said. ‘You will make sure there is no foreign intervention, okay?’ He kicked the PM in his injured legs and the PM howled.

Breeze looked worried. He walked over to the PM and prodded him with the nose of his rifle.

‘What is Delta Force?’ he said to the PM.

The Prime Minister regarded young Breeze with his august attention. He gave him a thorough looking up and down, enough to make Breeze squirm in his army boots.

‘They are a specialist fighting force within the army of the United States of America. They have come to my rescue. They have come to rescue everyone here who you have barbarically
captured and tortured, young man.’

Breeze swore, saying
muddercunt
under his breath. He steupsed and swaggered away, hiding that he was trying to think about this information. Everyone else also absorbed these facts. Hal
disappeared with his walkie-talkie crammed to his ear.

Breeze came back.

‘Why the blasted focking Americans interfere?’ he said. ‘You tell them focking Yankee muddercunts to take their focking Delta focking muddercunt fancy specialist troops and
stick them on the ground right here. We go blast their skinny white arses from here back to Washington DC.’ Breeze aimed his gun out the window and made as if to pull the trigger.
‘Pow,’ he said.

Greg Mason whistled.

Arnold cackled and danced and said, ‘Yeah, man.’ Many of the younger boys laughed.

Ashes felt ashamed. This was no way to speak to the PM.

Mr Mahibir said, ‘Young boy, have you not heard of the Monroe Doctrine?’

‘The what?’

Now Greg Mason was paying attention.

‘The Monroe Doctrine. It was penned many years ago. And it is a Doctrine which means that Latin America and the whole of the Caribbean region have a “special relationship” with
the USA. They have sworn to protect us, you could say.’

Breeze looked suspicious. ‘No. I never hear about that.’

‘I’m sure neither has that arse your Leader,’ said the PM.

Greg Mason said ‘Ay,’ as if to demand respect, but it was clear Greg was interested and hadn’t heard of the Doctrine either.

‘The Americans saw off the Europeans in the end. They wanted the Europeans to stop all their warfare and land-grabbing in the New World and so they pledged to act as . . . well you could
say . . . peace makers, in the Latin American and Caribbean region. They have done so ever since the treaty was signed in 1823.’

The PM looked at the small teenage boy with the big gun, the boy from the slums of Sans Amen who had no parents, who had little schooling, who was already hard as a bois man. He said: ‘You
cannot just take control of a country, my good friend. Even a small one like this. Sans Amen is part of the
world
. And the
world
cares. The world looks on and the world, most
often, tends to get involved, tends to stop this kind of thing. Didn’t you know?’

Breeze looked sullen.

Greg Mason said, ‘Wait, nuh. That friggin Monroe friggin Doctrine is an ancient piece of paper. It mean the American imperialist superpower get themselves involved with everybody business.
They are the
worst
colonisers. Breeze, you don’t go listening to this crap. This black man is an old colonial. He ’fraid for his life. Delta Force can come right here and kiss
my arse.’

Just then there was a heavy thud and the walls of the chamber shook.

‘Get down!’ shouted Greg Mason. ‘We are under attack.’

I was thrown hard hard against the wall. I crammed my hands over my ears to muffle the sound of screaming and bullet-hail and the clamour of all the other terrorised people in
the room. Plaster rained down on us from the ceiling. The room shook as if it had been punched from outside. The whole House swayed and heaved with the onslaught of that second attack.
Jesus
Lord
. I crouched down low and tried to keep very small. I closed my eyes and counted, hoping the screaming would stop. It was a few seconds before I realised that the screaming wasn’t
just the others; I was screaming too, screaming for my children, ‘I want to live, I want to live.’ I needed to stay alive in all of this, somehow. That was all. I couldn’t die.
What would happen to my son and daughter? I urinated on myself, with shock. That second attack took everyone by surprise; no one thought Howl would come like that, so hard. A ferocious onslaught.
It was late in the afternoon on the second day. Most of the women had been immediately let go; it was just myself and Lucretia they kept; we were also Ministers in the cabinet of government. It was
just us in there with all those men and boys.

I glimpsed between my fingers and saw that the smoke was head high in the chamber, mauve and black, and it was like the air itself was alive and wailing a song, gasping for its own oxygen. The
air was so thick with smoke and debris it was choking on itself. Chunks of plaster fell from the walls, big slabs of the cornice work had cracked and come plummeting down from the ceiling. One of
the columns had keeled over, as if it had died on its feet. It had been shot to pieces. The air was all shredded up and bullets came again and again and again. They slammed into walls and sliced
through windowpanes, shattered glass rained all over the floor and then some kind of rocket was launched. A comet with a tail of fire hurtled through one of the windows and went down, down through
the corridor. It exploded in the back parts of the labyrinth of the House. A savage fire must have started in there, which was a new terror, fire in the House!
Jesus Lord
. Fire. If they
didn’t kill us by bullets, they would smoke us all out. It seemed like a fire was raging in a far wing too, where the army was blasting rockets in through the windows. Everyone was on the
floor, including all the gunmen; no one could move, let alone return any fire. All the young boys had thrown down their guns and I could see most of them were cowering in terror, just like us. Some
of the gunmen were in the tearoom. I could hear one of the young boys crying for his mother. The army was attacking with full force. I was glad and at the same time it meant we were in big trouble.
What would happen to my children?
, was all I could think. They needed their mother. They say your life flashes in front of you when you think you’re about to die and this is true. In
those moments flashes came to me: a massive leatherback turtle I once saw with its fins hacked off at a beach on the north coast, flipped on its back, dying in the sun, its massive female head
leaking tears; sleeping in our hammocks made from bamboo poles in the rainforest, hiking with my father, bathing in the waterfalls up in the mountains; the birth of my first child, our daughter
Gloria; the first nervous and wondrous day I ever sat in this very chamber.