On the Brinks Page 10
Just when we thought the barbarians couldn’t get any more barbaric, the British Government’s cynical response to Archbishop O Fiaich was to increase the number of wing-shifts and beatings.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Josef Mengele and the Human Wart
An event has happened, upon which it is difficult to speak, and impossible to be silent.
Edmund Burke, trial of Warren Hastings
A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
Those prisoners – including myself – who had been naïve enough to believe Archbishop Ó Fiaich’s statement would force the British Government to see sense, were in for a nasty surprise. Early one morning, we were moved, one at a time, to an empty wing that had just been painted. The move was uneventful – each of us was placed in the shower area and told to remove and shake the tiny cloth that covered us, then proceed through the Circle to the newly painted wing. While no force was used, the eerie feeling of a necklace of silent screws watching your every move was unnerving. Despite this, the general consensus was, “Not too bad.”
Our second move was five days later. While not traumatic, it was differentiated by the introduction of a seemingly innocuous prop: a mirror. This object would subsequently become a nightmarish presence, one that would haunt us to the very end of the protest. And beyond.
On our third move, the mood changed dramatically. Tension permeated the air, introducing an almost tangible taste of copper into your mouth. Instead of three screws, there were now six. The tiny towel was forcefully pulled from you while the screws straddled you naked over the mirror, forcing you to squat by their sheer force of numbers.
As each new wing-shift came into operation, a new brutality would be added: hair pulling, face slapping, kidney punching, kicks in the genitals, anal probing and spits in the face. Individually, they were not monumental terrors, but collectively they played havoc with your mental and physical stability. The screws had carte blanche from the British Government to implement the tortures du jour, and they carried them out with relish. We had promotion written all over us – their promotion. If they could break us, by hook or by crook, by fist or by boot, then everything was there for the taking.
Each prisoner had his own nemesis among the screws, and mine was known as the Human Wart. He was a sadistic pervert, whose repertoire of party tricks included urinating in the mouths of sleeping prisoners and watching them through the security flap as they went to the toilet. His favourite proclivity was the use of a miniature hangman’s noose that he carried with him during the wing-shift. Once the prisoner had been forcibly squatted naked over the mirror, Human Wart would pull out the noose and swing it like a pendulum.
“Tock-tick get the dick. Tick-tock get the cock.” Then he would place the noose over your penis, laughing at your futile efforts at struggling. “Hold ’im steady, men. Will ye fer God’s sake stop that wrigglin’ like a fish! Hold ’im! That’s more like it. There, now!”
“There, now” meant the noose was tight around the penis.
“Up ye get. Good boy. That’s the way.” He would be pulling hard, forcing you to move like a dummy on a string, his acne-ravaged face grinning from ear to ear. The fear that he would decapitate your penis from the scrotum never left your terrified mind, making it easy to hate him.
Only two things were certain after that. First, when a naked finger probed your arse, it was the Wart. And second, God had ceased to exist.
The five days it had initially taken the screws to clean a wing were now reduced to three. Bonuses of large sums of money were being used as incentives for them to work continuously, speeding up the wing-shifts at a frightening rate. Instead of hearing the dreaded We’re moving! once a week, we now had to face it two or three times a week, with grinning screws telling us to: “Keep it up, lads. I’m buyin’ the wife a cracker wee car with all this overtime money. Goin’ to Spain next week with the kids. We’ll buy you a wee poke with a big Cadbury’s flake stuck right in it.”
Unfortunately, not all the prisoners could keep it up. Some opted to leave, no longer able to endure the madness. There was little sympathy for those who left, as each time a prisoner came off the protest it encouraged the screws to step up the brutality, in the false belief that the rest of us could be beaten off also.
A few weeks later …
“What do ye think now, Finbar?” I asked, watching the screws across the yard steam-hosing the wing we had just vacated. We had just been through a rough wing-shift, and two men had squeaky-booted. Morale was at rock bottom.
“Could be worse. Look at H3. What a nightmare that Block is. Everyone seems to have had their nose broke by the screws.”
“That’s that animal Paddy Joe, the PO,” said Seamus, a normally quiet prisoner. “The ’Ra [IRA] should be goin’ out of their way to get that fucker, show the screws that we can get them any time, any place. Shoot a few of ’em, then we’ll see how tough they are. Wouldn’t be naked prisoners who’ll be comin’ to their fuckin’ house, and it won’t be their dicks they’ll have in their hands. Fuckers.”
We were all taken aback. Seamus was perhaps the quietest man on the Blanket; he simply never swore, let alone talked about killing people.
“You’re one hundred percent, Seamus. It’s time the ’Ra got the finger out and started putting pressure on these bastards,” I said out the window – though not too loud. You never knew when the screws would be outside the cell, listening.
“That’s right, Seamus,” Finbar enthused.
“If only I were out,” Hippo said. “I’d fix the bastards.”
“We’re talkin’ ’bout one in the head, Hippo. Not borin’ them to death,” laughed Cowboy.
We joined in the laughing, and only stopped when someone shouted that there was a civilian coming down the wing, surrounded by a bunch of screws.
The civilian turned out to be a “doctor”, and one we would never forget. His attire consisted of a tweed jacket with elbow patches, brown pants, and a green pair of Dunlop water-boots that reached practically to his thighs. He wore a bow tie, which earned him the nickname Doctor Dickey-Bow. He was a mercenary, brought in by the Brits to implement a new policy; one that they hoped would break the protest.
And just when we thought we had faced everything they could throw at us, along came the horror of forced washing.
We had heard rumours that some men in one of the other blocks had been made to run the gauntlet of kicks and punches, only to be grabbed by screws and thrown into a bath of freezing water. There they were scrubbed with yard brushes, disinfectant and Ajax scouring powder. We hoped it was only a rumour, but the problem with rumours in the block, if they were negative and nightmarish, was that they were usually true. Only the good ones were lies, and we soon realised this latest rumour was no exception.
You could hear a pin drop as Dickey-Bow opened the flap on each cell door, staring in for a minute before writing something in a folder.
“What the fuck do ye think he was writin’?” asked JCB nervously, after Dickey-Bow had gone.
We could hazard a guess, of course, but nobody wanted to say it. Nobody except bucket-mouth Hippo.
“Victims. Bet yer balls on it. Dickey-Bow’s lookin’ to see who’ll be the one for the Grove Baths, the old rub-a-dub-dub, Blanket-man-in-the-tub routine.”
“Shutta fuck up will ye, ye morbid bastard, Hippo,” shouted a voice in the wilderness. “Hopefully it’ll be ye.”
“You know somethin’, Hippo?” said Cowboy. “Ye’re the only one who could squeaky-boot and not a word would be said against ye. It would be good for morale if ye were to take yerself off.”
Hippo thought he was joking. Little did he realise the truth.
“I’ll be here when no one else is here, Cowboy. So don’t go holdin’ yer breath.”
“We’ve had plenty of so-called hard men saying exactly the same words, Hippo, only to fall at the fist hurdle and not even attempt to come on the pr
otest,” said Joe. “And look where they are now. Up cleaning the screws’ boots and makin’ their tea. So be careful yer words don’t come back to bite you on the arse.”
Days later …
Two days had now elapsed, without any sign of Dickey-Bow. It seemed like we could breathe a bit easier.
“Looks like it was just a rumour, Sam. Old Dickey-Bow must’ve taken a powder and blown. Probably couldn’t bear the smell,” JCB said.
“Forget about it, JCB,” Cowboy said. “Ye know the rule.”
None of us had dared to mention Dickey-Bow, for fear of jinxing ourselves. It was an unwritten rule: don’t talk about anything negative that hasn’t yet happened, otherwise it’ll happen.
But it was too late. Finbar was the first to hear it: “Ssshhhh! Will youse keep quiet for one minute? Listen.”
We all strained to hear. It was music. Ghostly. Simon and Garfunkel’s classic, “Bridge Over Troubled Water”. The first music we’d heard in years, and it was beautiful. At least until we realised the fiendish significance of the words: When you’re weary, feeling small … A tap was releasing water into a bath. You could almost smell the rust from its years of neglect … When tears are in your eyes … Laughter was coming from the screws … I’ll comfort you … Footsteps approached, halting. Our stomachs churned; hearts pumped …
Thoughts raced around my head: A perfect measure of silence is as threatening as the actuality when you learn to experience and understand the ruthlessness of that silence, how it manipulates. In the silence of our minds, each of us could hear the flap go up and knew what lurked outside, waiting.
Dickey-Bow, armed with his list of victims, nodded silently to the screws before requesting a door to be opened. It was impossible to hear what was being said, but a few seconds later a mob of screws rushed in, trailing a naked prisoner out by the ankles and hair. The man moaned from the pain, but Dickey-Bow simply walked nonchalantly behind. It was terrifying to witness, and we were powerless to do a thing about it.
Like a bridge over troubled water … water … water … The screws had deliberately stuck the needle on the last word.
Another door opened and another prisoner was dragged out, placing the same thought firmly into each of our minds: Am I next? What will they do to me? Why doesn’t anyone give a fuck about what they’re doing to us? If this was happening in Russia there would be a universal outcry … Fuck you, JCB, you jinxsy bastard!
Suddenly there was an absence of movement, a core of quiet, and stillness complete. The blood started throbbing in my head as the screws stopped between my cell and the adjacent one. Dickey-Bow was talking in a whisper to the screws. I froze, as if any movement would alert them to my presence. I started to tell God I would believe in Him again if only they would leave me alone – leave us all alone. But when I heard the key slowly turning in the lock, I told God not to worry about the rest, just save me. Take him next door. He’s only been here a couple of years. Take Hippo. That bastard deserves it, God. I’ll even start going to Mass again if –
But it was all in vain. God was away somewhere. Probably doing a heavenly crossword puzzle, because right in front of my eyes stood the dreaded Dickey-Bow, a phalanx of screws at his side.
“How do you do?” he said, by way of introduction. “I’m a doctor.”
Allegedly, so was Josef Mengele, I wanted to say, but lacked the balls at that specific moment in time. I refused to acknowledge Dickey-Bow, which didn’t have the slightest impact whatsoever.
“You’re asked to come for a wash. Will you come, please?” His voice was void of emotion, the words innocuous yet slippery as a greasy fried egg.
Trying to prevent your chest heaving at the best of times is an effort, but being naked leaves no room for pretence. My entire body was shaking.
“Answer the doctor!” Human Wart growled.
“It’s okay, gentlemen. Please escort the prisoner to the ablutions, where I can make a better observation of his needs.”
My needs? I doubted if my needs could be facilitated in the wash area.
Refusing to walk voluntarily meant being transformed into a Roman chariot and dragged naked up the wing by the ankles, your skin on fire as it flayed against the ground.
Water … water … water … water …
I remember sailing through the air, naked, the truly exhilarating experience that birds must feel at the start of take-off. A swirl of colours glided over my perspective as I watched my penis wobbling from side to side, making horrible slapping sounds, as it winked at me like a one-eyed pirate. When they dropped me into the bath of freezing water it took away my breath, but that was the least of my worries as my mouth and nostrils began to fill, and fear of drowning raced in my brain.
Water … water … water … water …
“Always the hard way, youse boys,” the Human Wart said, as other screws pulled me up for a few seconds of air. “I think youse love all this.”
Water … water … water … water …
They started to pour the disinfectant into the bath and onto my hair as a shampoo. Next came the Ajax, which was scrubbed into my skin with the yard brush. If you thought you had any skin left after the Roman chariot, you knew now it was all gone after the scrubbing. The Human Wart, God love him, was fastidious in seeing me clean, paying special attention to my penis and genitals, while Dickey-Bow, seemingly fascinated, stood writing notes and smiling at the wonder of it all.
Water … water … water … water …
The disinfectant was taking its toll on my stomach, and I felt that at any minute now I would throw up. That was when hands started pushing me further, down deeper, into the water and I knew I was going to die – not in a gun battle with British and Loyalist terrorists, but drowned in a fucking filthy bath in Long Kesh. Yet, through it all, in my mind, I believed I could accurately form a picture of how the bath had been apportioned, where the screws had positioned themselves. Reflecting on it afterwards, I realised I was having an out-of-body experience.
Suddenly, the sound became peaceful, dissolving into an accommodating stillness, a degree of salvation.
I can remember becoming aware that I was now back in my cell, but how I got there was a mystery. It was near dark and the wing was quiet. Every sorry part of my sorry body was aching. Only the smell of disinfectant and Ajax in my hair and pores told me it had all been for real.
The only good thing to be had from it all came the next morning, when JCB told me the news we had all waited and prayed for. Hippo, the man who would be here when nobody else would, had squeaky-booted. Dickey-Bow had been the final straw to break that particular camel’s back.
CHAPTER TWENTY
John Wayne, Where are Ye when we Need Ye?
MARCH 1979
Never find your delight in another’s misfortune.
Publilius Syrus
The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law.
The Nuremberg Principles
Outside the cell’s embrasure, crows had assembled, disturbing the Sunday morning peace. They had encircled a dead rat, not believing their luck.
“Fuck off, ye bastards!” screamed Goose, who could no longer bear the insanity of the caw-caw-cawing.
Tranquillity spent, another morning in the Blocks had begun.
An hour later, the hollow thud of doors being slammed into their niches could be heard, emitting prisoners to the canteen for Mass.
I, along with a few others, had ceased attending Mass since the Angel of Death had made the remark that cleanliness was next to godliness. A not-so-subtle vilification of the protest by this Judas priest, minus the heavy metal.
While the wing became sleep-inducing with the legato of responsorial psalms, I decided to go for a walk, pacing the liquorice- black floor, accumulating feet to yards, yards to miles, in a going-nowhere wanderlust.
As I child, when I went to the zoo, I would watch the beat-up lion pace up
and down in its tiny cage. I thought it was following me, waiting to pounce and fell me with its great paws. Unfortunately, the truth was less colourful: the poor beast was depressed.
Pace pace pace went the lion, trying desperately to burn the depression off, only to have it return more vengefully once it stopped walking. Occasionally it would leap at the wall, bouncing off it with the dead thud of a busted ball. Bewildered. Sad. Pathetic.
Pace pace pace went I, the same depression burning my chest, feeling an affinity with that old lion. In my mind’s eye as I walked, the sky opened, revealing a delicious picture, a kaleidoscopic quilt of orange and blue bleeding into a vermilion peacock, proud in all its splendour. A gull hung motionlessly on swirls of invisible beams, laughing.
“Sam?” JCB called from next door, in a barely audible stage whisper. He had promised me a synopsis, a rough for A Book at Bed-Time, a cowboy book as requested by Cowboy, our foremost authority on the Wild West.
Cowboy loved cowboy books. He always said that if they were good enough for Yeats, then they were certainly good enough for him. Cowboy was a legend, having escaped from British prisons at least twice, and been shot at more times than Charles De Gaulle. Rumour had it that he had full-sized cowboy guns tattooed on either side of his body, and that the Brits had shot him while he was sunbathing, claiming the guns looked real!
“Yes, JCB? What’s happening?” I replied.
“Cowboy’ll love this one, Sam. Of course, I don’t expect verbatim, so I’m givin’ ye artistic freedom to embellish.”