House of Ashes (20 page)

I felt queasy. Sick. I found it hard to breathe. Everything was too much by then. I’d been hallucinating, having night sweats and day sweats too. My body was five days
without food and I could feel it straining, shutting down. I was able to walk around but I had to hold on to things to do so. In my hallucinations I saw the wise, inquisitive head of a leatherback
turtle surfacing from the sea, gazing towards the beaches of the north coast of Sans Amen, ready to lay her eggs. I saw many turtles, dozens, maybe even hundreds, approaching to nest, huge,
tentative and pregnant with new life. I saw the Sans Amen of the twenty-first century, the House of Power painted green. I saw a female Prime Minister in the future, a woman perhaps no different to
the male leaders of the past. I had a gnawing desolate feeling in the pit of my stomach that it would be many decades before Sans Amen grew mature. This wisdom was coming, though, this change the
gunmen so hastily grabbed for. It must come. Bathsheba, the freedom fighter, her baby shot dead in her stomach. A citizen murdered in the womb. Bathsheba had wanted this change too.
I will not
run away from all of this,
I pledged to myself and to my own children, and the sons and daughters of the other mothers of the city. I was still alive. But everything was different now in Sans
Amen.

I was hanging on, just. My ears rang with tinnitus, as though I could hear a distant screaming. A rage had struck up in me and it was as if my insides were shrieking. My outer ear could now hear
this sound of inner distress. My body was damp with my own sweat and urine. The stench of this five-day chaos was omnipotent in the air.
Tomorrow, dear God. Tomorrow. Let it end soon.
The
PM had been gone just a day and he’d kept things stable. The PM had kept us all alive. Now there was no battle, no tension between the gunmen and the army. The gunmen had been cut off from
their Leader; there’d been a small mutiny. They had stacks of ammunition left, in boxes down the hall. They’d brought enough bullets and explosives to last another week at least; they
could still blow up the whole place. But the army weren’t negotiating and Hal, unable to speak to the Leader, didn’t know what to do.

I could see Mervyn was now struggling with his legs and feet. For hours at a time he would unbuckle his braces and then he would crawl about on the carpet. He would rub and massage his shins. He
never once complained or showed distress.

‘Mervyn, are you okay?’ I said. Mervyn didn’t look at all okay.

‘No.’

‘I didn’t think so.’

He laughed. ‘I think we have survived the worst, hopefully we all going tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Five days. No food. Very little water. I figure every single person here now on the
verge of collapse. It can’t last longer. The gunmen are as dehydrated and exhausted as we are.’

I didn’t want to bring up what Mrs Gonzales had said. It felt inappropriate right then. He was one of the few good guys in the cabinet, like the PM; it seemed the good guys had been hurt
in all of this, on both sides. Five days ago he was a man I hardly knew. I wanted to hug him. Or maybe I wanted him to hug me.

‘Let me give your feet a rub,’ I said.

Mervyn shot me a look and he blushed.

I didn’t give him a chance to say ‘no’ out of politeness. I pulled one of his feet towards me and rested it on my knee and I began to massage the ankle and arch with my fingers
through his sock. I sensed he was embarrassed but I knew what I was doing, keeping my fingers moving slowly and in circular movements and this kept him quiet.

‘I saw you tending to Mason,’ I said.

‘There really isn’t much I can do. He’s been badly shot. The bullet needs to be removed. They’ve lain him down in one of the back rooms. I applied a tourniquet. His leg
will become infected if he’s not seen to by tomorrow. He could lose it.’

‘That bad?’

‘Yeah. Boy, that quiet-looking feller with the glasses, I never figure he could shoot.’

‘I could shoot a gun now, if I had to. This situation bring out a side in us we never use.’

‘I bet you could shoot. I think I could too, by now.’

I kept massaging his ankle, the ball of his foot. He winced.

‘The PM is on the outside, he will take charge. I guess they making decisions all now. But I still worry for these young boys. What will happen to them.’

‘Aspasia, you
still
feeling sympathy for these crooks? Half of them would shoot you dead.’

‘Not now.’

‘Yes
now
. All of them is crooks. Including that boy Breeze you like so much and that spooky quiet one, Ashes. They are crazy fellers. Gunmen. Is like you can’t see
them.’

‘I am a mother. Some of them same age as my own children. They should all be in school.’

‘I suspect many of them
are
at school.’

‘The Leader’s school?’

‘Life is school, Aspasia. Revolution is school. They getting educated right now.’

‘I’m serious. What will happen to these young boys?’

‘They will get justice.’

I kept massaging Mervyn’s ankle; his foot was hard and stiff, like a piece of wood. Just walking, for him, was an act of defiance. I looked over to the other side of the chamber. Breeze
sat by the window, rubbing the long neck of his rifle. He rubbed and rubbed, all the while staring out into the real world, where the army were encamped. He looked like he was trying to make his
gun disappear. He looked skinnier, a scrap, a stick boy there with his stick gun. He had charged in, blazing, a crusader, a young knight storming and enveloping a castle. Now he looked emaciated.
He kept pressing and patting his groin, as if it was tender there. He had hurt himself, maybe, or strained a muscle. He had been limping too. Only days ago he had been an innocent, a fool. Would he
spend the rest of his life in fights, duels, trying to cool his wound?

*

Night was closing in and I felt the urge to get up and stretch my legs. I struggled shakily to my feet, and then I straightened my skirt. Mrs Gonzales got up too, her head
naked, and the two of us supported each other towards the hall and down the corridor. Mrs Gonzales opened the washroom door and disappeared and I kept on down the corridor, one hand running along
the wall for support, the other hand holding my scarf to my nose. I glanced into the room with the dead woman and grimaced; I walked past it and turned left into another room, equally ruined. I
noticed a telephone on the floor, the receiver strewn next to it, and I stumbled past it, dragging a chair to the window. I wanted to sit and see if any of the lights would come on in the City of
Silk. I managed to position the chair near to the window and yet at an angle to avoid the army snipers. I sat down on it and a cool breeze came in through the window onto my face. I breathed in and
could smell a dim sea scent, the scent of mud flats, of the gulf beyond. Tears ran down my face in tiny streams and the urge to retch came. My body hiccupped and spasmed but I brought up nothing.
It was the stench. And it was my body quaking in the early stages of starvation. I sat on the chair and watched as clusters of fireflies of lights began to appear, the lights of our city, a
metropolis by the sea in the middle of an archipelago of islands.

I wondered about the other island nearby. They must be aware of this chaos in the neighbourhood. I thought of Cuba. Havana was nothing like the City of Silk. It had an empty feeling. So much had
been cleansed, taken away from the common citizen; so much had been eradicated. Thousands of poor people living in abandoned grandeur. Trees sprouting from rooftops, a black market economy. Salsa
and sex were all that was left to the man in the street, and yes, our old African religion, santeria. Havana had been cleared of crime by revolution. I had some notion that my own City, the City of
Silk, corrupt as it may be – dirty, drug-ridden, half-civilised, Victorian in design, elderly, decaying, violent – would never succumb easily.

Something moved. I broke from my thoughts and turned my head towards the door. Hal was standing there in his soiled camouflage fatigues. He looked ravaged and tired, not the man who’d run
in five days ago, a tidy beret on his head, the man who’d kicked and shot the PM. He was staring down at the telephone.

I gazed at him and willed him to look at me and he glanced upwards. This man with so many big ideas had been to the same school my son was now at. I nodded at him and said, ‘I look forward
to tomorrow.’

Hal didn’t reply. He was looking at me and past me, out the window.

‘Lady, don’t be so sure.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you don’t know what we know.’

‘And what is that?’

‘You see this thing, what happen here?’

‘Your revolution?’

‘This nothing compare to what going to happen soon, this week, tomorrow, or the next day.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Yeah, something big going and happen soon, in the world. Big.’

‘And this is part of it?’

Hal nodded. His eyelids were heavy and his eyes were hard. All he had now was a photocopied piece of paper with some ministers’ names in his back pocket. And he had ‘news’ up
his sleeve. Something big. I found that this didn’t feel interesting at all. I was a politician, sure, but right then I was annoyed by the very thought of bigger news than this.

‘We all have good intentions,’ I said.

Hal was gazing down at the telephone again. I turned back to the view of the City, some of the lights now on, but there were holes here and there; the City now looked different. The police
station across the road was wizened, its colonial arches tarred and ugly. I could see the army and their covered trucks everywhere, their nightlights, the cordon they had made around the House of
Power. I was thankful for them, a force of loyal, well-trained men.

‘I had good intentions,’ I said to Hal and looked over to the door. But Hal had disappeared.

It happened very quietly. At dawn, on the sixth day, the army convoy was standing there. Two white buses. One for the hostages, one for the gunmen. The hostages would be
released and I was chosen to be the first one to walk out.
Thank God
. I was ready. I could have run down those steps, even in my weak state. The final negotiations with the army had
happened overnight. Surrender. It was happening, finally. Soon I would be outside, free. I would see my children, my husband; it would be like a miracle. To be out of that chamber, to be back in
the world. The last few days had taken me out of myself to another realm. There had been numerous deadlines, several moments when I thought I might be safe and clear, only to be disappointed. I
still had to be patient. I wouldn’t feel free until I was away from the House, well away.

I found I wanted to say something to almost everyone in the chamber. Most of the ministers I wanted to thank, many I would. But it was the gunmen . . . it was the teenagers . . . I found them
the hardest to leave behind. Their motives for being here were confused and complicated. The PM, he’d been on the outside for some time now; hopefully he was safe and alive. What had he
decided? Everything would be done by the book; they would be dealt with honourably and well within the law.

I didn’t want to look anyone in the eye. The ordeal had in some way been intimate . . . and humiliating. Hal wanted to send the two female MPs out first, me and then Lucretia Salvatore,
and then Mrs Gonzales. They wanted to demonstrate they still had no war with women. They wanted this show of respect. The army buses were waiting, the press were too. Guns and cameras were trained
on the House. The young boy Breeze was still sullen and skulking in the corner of the chamber, gazing out into the street full of army men with balaclavas on and press with long camera lenses. The
man called Ashes had vanished.

Hal gave me a look which said,
Okay, it’s time
. I pressed Lucretia’s arm, gave Mrs Gonzales a look which said,
We’ll meet again
. I bent and kissed
Mervyn’s cheek and said, ‘Thank you.’ He had watery eyes and looked, finally, at the end of his good cheer. He smiled, thinly.

Hal led me out. ‘There,’ he said, pointing to the public gallery. ‘You walk down those stairs and then the army will guide you at the bottom.’

I nodded. I wanted to say something to Hal. Something. What? I was sorry for him too. He had made the mistake of his life. He might be executed for all of this, hung like a rat. I didn’t
want this to happen. I couldn’t hate him. I said nothing, there were no words fitting. Instead, I covered my nose with my scarf and began my descent, one step by one step down the staircase
of the public gallery, out and down. My legs were shaking, but I had to get out. Visions of it all being a trick came to me, or some kind of trap. I’d become meeker, conditioned somehow to
captivity. It was strange not quite knowing what to do.

Quickly I came upon the lifeless body of a man in uniform, his body black with congealed blood and buzzing with flies. The stench was overwhelming. I tried not to look but found myself staring
and gagging; it was one of the security guards. He’d been shot several times in the chest, perhaps in the first minutes, when the men had stormed the building. There was a swipe of blood on
the wall behind him from where he’d fallen, the blood now dried and caked. I crossed myself and said a prayer for him and his family.

I forced myself down another flight of steps, holding on to the railings. My eyes were blurred, sheets of tears fell down my face. I thought I might slip and tumble down the steps head first. I
stank and was covered in blood, my own urine, a fine dust of plaster from the ceiling. I knew Hal’s gun was at my back. He wouldn’t shoot but he was watching me. I was soon free, and
yet I might faint. My kids! My son and daughter, I was stepping towards them. My time on earth had been halted. It would start again. Only then, as I was escaping, the trauma began to emerge, in
shakes, in overwhelming dizziness.

At the bottom of these steps was the ground. I walked slowly towards this idea of ground, holding my hand to my nose. I would be okay.
Keep walking
. Then the sun was pounding down on
me. I was outside. And there – more horror. Strewn like toys, other bodies. Men and women lay dead on the ground. It looked like they had either jumped from the balcony of the chamber or from
the windows, or had been shot while trying to do so. Three bodies, stiff and lifeless and swollen. New ideas gripped me. What had happened? How big was this?