House of Ashes (9 page)

I want to live
, was all I could think. Save us – and all of these young boys. Just where were their mothers?

The commander of the gunmen, the man they were calling Hal, was a man I’d heard of; everyone in politics had heard of him. He too was face down on the floor in the chamber, his hands over
his head. The young boy called Breeze, who’d been watching me too keenly as far as I was concerned, was also flung against the wall. He crawled towards me for protection in all that confusion
and I found myself holding him tightly as if he were my own son. He had wet himself too. He was crying and cussing and shouting for it all to stop. I was sure I was going to die, that we were all
going to die at any moment.

The army had gone mad. Colonel Benedict Howl was a great man, but something of a colonial too, just like the PM. He’d been trained at Sandhurst in England I’d been told, and the PM
trusted him. He was tough and dynamic. He and his men weren’t taking any bartering or demands from this bunch of street crooks and criminals and half-baked radicals left over from 1970.
Thank the Lord
the army of Sans Amen was not only loyal but well trained. All the officers had been to England. That damn badjohn calling himself the Leader had been nothing but a pest for
years, a vigilante and crook and a self–appointed spiritual leader of some hybrid religious order. God only knew who he thought he was and what they worshipped. But we had been watching him;
we’d even positioned an army post next to his compound. But obviously the army on guard had been asleep the day before this outrage. Asleep! How had a band of heavily armed insurgents managed
to leave the compound in broad daylight?

The army were attacking and yet they might kill everyone in doing so, including the PM and his cabinet ministers. The PM had already shown he was prepared to die – and that had been seen
as a go ahead,
Blast them all
. But I wasn’t prepared to die, not then, not for my country, not for anyone. I’d never seen courage before, but I saw it then, when the PM shouted
Attack
down the line. My blood ran cold.

And then I was holding a scared boy in my arms and for a few minutes it seemed like he’d fallen sleep or had fainted from shock. His body was limp. I was about to die with him, this hard
little street boy, rather than my own son James. How had this happened? I prayed and closed my eyes and hoped it would all end quickly. But the gunfire continued and the walls thudded and shook.
Fire and heat and thick gun smoke, and it was as if earthquakes were being hurled into the room. A tidal wave of bullets rolled in, the four horsemen had arrived, sailing through the windows of the
House of Power on steeds made of ammunition. It was the end of the world as I knew it. A part of me was dying right then and there, with that little boy in my arms.

The bombardment lasted all of forty-five minutes. When it was over, I opened my eyes; I was still alive. The young boy Breeze revived and kicked himself free in a way which reminded me of seeing
my son kick out in his sleep. He rolled away from me and began cussing his head off to the other men. I tried to focus in the smoke and saw that Mervyn Mahibir’s calipers had been blown off
in the attack. They were strewn a few inches from me and they resembled a heap of metal bones. The poor man was crawling on his stomach across the carpet towards them.

‘Oh, God, Aspasia,’ he gasped. ‘You okay?’

‘Mervyn,’ I cried. ‘Me? What about
you
?’ And I realised my face was wet with tears, my nose was streaming. I coughed on the smoke and wiped the mucus from my
face. Since it had started I had managed with the physical pain and various humiliations; I had coped. Now I was near the edge of my ability to stay centred. I was dizzy and faint and hungry and
weak. In one day everything was different. I might die. This was a very real threat. I might never see my husband, my children again.

‘Look, come,’ and I held out my hand to help him across the floor.

‘Jesus, Lord, what de
hell
are they using outside? I go speak to them when we get out. All that blasting was unnecessary. I took my braces off to give my legs a rest from
standing. And then they shoot the place up.’

‘Mervyn, they are simply following the Prime Minister’s orders.’

‘Well those orders not a great idea.’

‘Well at least they are showing who’s in charge.’

‘And they going and kill us all in here if they keep this up.’

Mervyn crawled a bit closer, across shreds of plaster and glass, and then I helped him up on to the platform near the speaker’s chair and together we buckled the braces back on to his legs
and slipped his pant legs back down to cover them. I hardly knew Mervyn. He was one of those ministers who never made a big show of himself in the House. For a few seconds we just sat there and I
squeezed his hand and he squeezed mine back and we didn’t say anything, both of us silently recharging. Like the PM, I felt different about Mervyn now; I felt respect, and I was glad he was
there. He always appeared to be jovial in the House, a reliable and steady type, clear-minded and well spoken. He was an experienced parliamentarian – but who would ever have guessed he was
brave? You find out so much about people in these kinds of conditions. The PM and Mervyn were courageous. He gave me a look and I gave him back the same look. Would we ever meet and speak again on
the outside? Would we ever work together again? This was the end of something, we both knew that. Right then, I had no real ideas about what was happening, only terror and despair.

‘Thank you,’ I whispered.

*

Day had turned to dusk. We were facing our second night under the gun. One of the gunmen had switched on the lights in the chamber and I wondered how long the army would keep
the electricity supply connected. We were to spend another night on the floor, with the lights on, which meant no sleep would be possible. Chairs everywhere were overturned, everything was broken.
People were still lying on the ground, afraid to move. The PM was covered in a fine silt which had fallen from the ceiling;
thank God
he was okay, thank God he was still alive. It was
disgraceful what they had done to him, but he seemed resolute, as if he was still leading us. I knew his wife, we’d met many times at public functions, she was a good woman. She would be so
worried but she would know him, that he would be strong like this. The gunmen hadn’t got the better of him. He was almost as composed as usual, but I sensed his fury and indignation.

The young boys and men began to collect themselves again. Hal had roused himself and had disappeared to one of the back rooms to talk to the lunatic man they all called the Leader. The Leader
was a famous man on the island; he’d made himself known with his marches and his posturing. It was said that he was squatting on government land, causing a great pain in the backside to our
government and the one before. He had built a temple and a school and was preaching his mixture of ideas. Rumour had it he was a vigilante of sorts too, intercepting those who sold drugs on the
street. Was that what all this was about? He wasn’t really trying to capture power and reassemble a new order. He was just so damn vexed about the land. Or maybe he just wanted a job, high
up; he wanted to be Minister of Defence, something so. Everyone knew who the Leader was.

I could see that Lucretia Salvatore, my colleague and Minister for Cultural Affairs, was handling things in her own way. She had been very subdued from the start, had tried as best she could not
to get involved. I could see this was a good option. Everyone, hostages and gunmen alike, was coping in their own way. For my part, I had found it hard not to get caught up; my attitude towards the
young boys and their guns had altered completely over just twenty-four hours. My fear and loathing of them had ceased, mysteriously. I found myself fascinated by them, and ashamed of myself as a
minister. These were boys from the slums, from the east of the City of Silk, boys who still needed parenting. They needed help from society and the state. Their toughness was a kind of
façade. They were loyal and obedient to Hal and the older men, and yet they were clearly out of their depth. Many of them had cried during the bombardment. The one that cussed a lot, Breeze,
he was the one I’d actually grown fond of. It was strange to think this way. I had come to almost
like
one of the gunmen. He seemed so very, very serious, and yes, even dangerous in
demeanour, and yet he didn’t scare me. I saw flickers of concern in the young boy’s eyes, like he was constantly trying to understand everything.

The older gunmen were different. They were hard-shelled men mostly from the streets and they were full of contempt and, yes, I was afraid of their show of discipline. One of them, the man
wearing a Santa hat, was clearly deranged. He could do something very wrong at any moment – shoot us all, or even shoot himself. I noticed Hal was keeping an eye on him. The big guy they
called Mason I also recognised. I was sure he’d been in gaol before, for shooting a police officer, or something that serious. He was very gruff and the one most obviously dressed like a
mercenary or a bandit. And then there was the quiet, scholarly-looking gunman, Ashes; I’d heard them calling his name. He was tall and slim and wore spectacles, clearly the misfit of the
bunch. He looked like a man who might work in a library, not the type I associated with this kind of thing. He’d been helping Mervyn with his doctoring and making tea. He was a mild-mannered
man, the only one with a conspicuous air of spiritual intent. He kept slipping off and I wondered if he had been leaving the chamber to pray.

It was night again. The darkness activated my deepest fears. Would the looters be able to climb through the windows? Would jab jabs now show up in the dead of night? Would the gunmen shed their
combat fatigues to reveal themselves as devils underneath? All kinds of ideas came and played their own havoc. The mind gets messed up in conditions as bad as this. Who were these ruffians? How had
they gathered and caused such chaos? They were men from a commune down the road, a spiritual community on the outskirts of town. Everyone was aware of them. The Leader often threw his weight
around, making noise and threats, and it was true there had been times when government ministers had even hired his men as armed guards. Our government knew that some of the people the Leader had
attracted were ex-criminals and ex-radicals. But none of us guessed they were
this
dangerous.

The room stank of sweat and blood and shit, and the shreds of glass everywhere meant it was best not to move. I could hear the groans and prayers of others and also long periods of a mournful,
desolate silence. And when I closed my eyes the room swung about, and I spoke to myself saying,
Aspasia
, t
he thing is to stay calm
.
Take every hour as it comes
. On the
outside I knew there were ministers who were free; they and the army would be thrashing out what was best to do. Thank God the Attorney General had escaped; because of that stroke of luck a proxy
government could be formed. The Americans had landed and now it was up to Colonel Howl to use them or send them back. The foreign press was on the island too, which meant the world was watching.
Everything had backfired for the Leader and his band of men, and quickly.

I found it hard to concentrate for long; my mind kept slipping and it was hard to stay focused. I felt like I wanted to go to sleep. Or as if the whole insurrection was all happening several
feet away from me, or in another room. I wanted to disappear. It was all I could do to breath and stay aware. My children,
my darlings
, Gloria and James, I kept thinking of them. They were
still young, fourteen and eleven. I ached to speak to them, to let them know I was okay. The army was in the process of rescuing us. But mostly, on and off, there was a nagging thought.
Was the
young boy Breeze right? Was all this our fault
?

*

Hal had come back from his urgent meeting with the Leader on the walkie-talkie. He looked fierce.

‘Right,’ he addressed his men. ‘The army have made their position clear. They want to intimidate us. They will be planning to storm the building at some point in the night. I
want all the hostages on the floor, face down.’

At this command the men and boys began to move and shout orders to round us all up. By now almost all the ministers had been conversing with the younger boys; we had been having frank and open
conversations about politics and there’d been debates about the nature of democracy and power. It felt like there was no reason to be so afraid of them, and yet now the boys were prodding us
like cattle. They’d reverted to being killers.

The young boy Breeze had come to tie my hands back together and he was trying hard not to make eye contact. ‘Keep still, Mrs Garland,’ he commanded and I did as he said. He’d
obviously denied or forgotten that I’d held him safe in my arms.

We were all lined up now, in the centre of the chamber, face down on the shrapnel-shredded carpet. The men and boys were standing above us and somehow this was even more frightening than the
bombardment.

‘Right,’ said Hal. ‘Each of you choose a hostage.’

This caused some prevarication, as though the men hadn’t quite understood the command. It felt odd to hear the word ‘hostage’. I wondered if the gunmen were as disorientated as
I was. Had they begun to care? Had they seen we weren’t so bad after all? Things were now much more personal. We were
all
hungry; all of us were frightened – and we’d
talked, communicated, eaten puffs, shared the putrid latrine. Things were mixed up. Plus the army was now holding
them
hostage.

I could feel a gunman hovering above me.

‘Now, I want you to mark your target,’ said Hal.

I turned my head sideways, enough to see that young Breeze had chosen to mark me. I gave him a look I’d never given anyone, a stare of disbelief which was also a plea for mercy . . . for
my children.
Don’t kill me, little boy, I have to live for my children
. But this son of the city was about to shoot me through the back of the head. Prayers wouldn’t come. The
young man’s face was locked down and his eyes were glazed over. He didn’t see me. I was scared of him then. He could do it; he could shoot me dead.