House of Ashes (6 page)

Instead, people had already been looting. Out in the quiet dark streets he could see shops and banks and buildings and that everything had been smashed up; he could see towers of smoke down by
the docks hanging over the city, still visible in the street lamps. But now these looters had all gone to sleep. There was no one picking about. A curfew had been imposed. A State of Emergency had
been declared. Now the city was very still. Usually at night, downtown was lively, especially at the Square of Independence where the vendors sold swamp oysters and barbeque ribs. Now all was quiet
and the city smelled of sea breeze and petroleum and burning buildings.

Ashes knew the city well. He was born here, up in the hills to the east. Born and bred son of the City of Silk. He liked it here and had never left the island, no need to. He could see the big
wide world on television and he saw nowhere else too different and certainly not any better than Sans Amen. Sans Amen was one of the northern islands of the archipelago; the other islands which ran
in an arc southwards were similar, in a way, but also each one was particular. Some were more mountainous; one was entirely flat – that one was overrun by tourists. Different languages were
spoken on the islands, Spanish, French and Dutch; each had its own creole language too. Trinidad, in the very south, had oil and carnival, it was the only island he was tempted to visit. Trinidad
had also started the tradition of calypso, and those singers had always been – and some still were – revolutionaries too. They were the great bards of the Caribbean and they sang things
like they were. They sang about life in the street and about corruption in their own House of Power. Generally politicians were afraid of them and what kind of songs they brought out around
carnival time. Yes, he would like to go to Trinidad, if anywhere at all, and visit a calypso tent and listen to a great old calypsonian like Lord Wellington.

Otherwise, everything Ashes desired was right here. He hadn’t even seen much of the rest of Sans Amen itself. There were remote parts of central and southern Sans Amen he would never know
or see, quiet sleepy villages in the old sugar cane belt; places where men still gathered in gayelles on basketball courts to stick fight and bet on who was the best warrior amongst them. There
were masjids and churches all over the island, temples to every version of God. There were mountains in the centre, full of deer and ocelots, and there were swamplands full of howler monkeys and
anacondas to the southeast, and plains which still raged with fire every dry season, generations after the cane fields had disappeared. There were small fishing villages on the southern and eastern
coast he would never know. Leatherback turtles came to nest on the beaches on the north coast, though he’d never seen one. He was a humble town man; so was his family. His wife’s family
came from nearby. It was like that – they were a clan, all neighbours. Everyone knew each other.

Then he saw the holy man. Father Jeremiah Sapno was walking towards the House of Power from the north side of town. The streetlights lit him up and it seemed like he was walking out from an
orange haze. He had his hands in the air and he had a cross around his neck. He was walking down the street away from the soldiers.

A shot rang out.

Father Sapno ducked.

One of the young brothers had taken a shot at him.

‘Hold your fire!’ Hal shouted. ‘Jesus
Christ
. Don’t any of you know what is going on? There’s a frikkin ceasefire. Don’t shoot the man.’

Father Sapno had stopped walking.

‘Come,’ shouted Hal. He was up on the balcony above the wrought-iron gates which barricaded the main foyer on the ground level of the House, the side which looked down to the big
square in the centre of town where old men gathered to play chess. But Father Sapno looked uncertain.

‘Come, come,’ gestured Hal upwards. Hal quickly moved back inside, out of sight of the army snipers.

When Father Sapno appeared in the chamber he looked very scared. His hands were still in the air and they were shaking. He gasped and crossed himself and said, ‘Oh, Jesus Lord,’ when
he saw all the ministers trussed up face down on the floor and all the blood on the carpet. Everything was shot up. He gasped at Arnold in his Santa hat and at all the young boys with guns bigger
than them, and at Greg Mason who looked like his very mother had taught him how to kill. Ashes felt ashamed. He didn’t want a holy man to see him in this kind of situation. He couldn’t
look at the priest.

The House had already started to stink of death. Those who had been shot dead had been dragged to other rooms. The gunman who’d been killed had been taken away too, but his tongue was
still on the carpet.

Father Sapno gagged and pointed at it. ‘Have some common decency,’ he said, and Ashes was glad because he had been thinking the same thing. It was an awful sight and yet he
hadn’t been strong enough in his stomach to pick it up. Hal ordered Breeze to take it away. Everyone looked at Father Sapno and Father Sapno looked at everyone else, all the brothers with
their guns and the hostages. He was a man with a wide-open face, a shadow of a beard surrounding it; he was naturally jovial, it seemed, because gracious lines were etched on his face, even at a
time like this. Hal looked disconcerted. The situation was a mess.

‘Where do you want me to go now?’ Father Sapno said. ‘I only have an hour. The army wants to know your demands and I must then go back and report to them. An hour.’

Hal nodded and said, ‘Come this way.’ He had been on to the Leader and there was now a list of demands. They had untied the Minister for Health, Dr Mervyn Mahibir, and the Deputy
Prime Minister, Mr Elias de Gannes, and there had been talks. Hal and Greg Mason led Father Sapno and these ministers and some of the ministers who’d split from the PM down the corridor; they
went to the room with the Liquid Paper graffiti about God. Ashes felt glad. Also he felt disappointed. How had everything gone so badly wrong so quickly? Although he didn’t know the exact
plans, it was common knowledge in the commune that some of the Leader’s men had been in training in camps in the countryside; some were even sent to the deserts far away. There had been
ideas, plans, for a New Society. This had been no pot shot, no quick grab. He couldn’t believe that the plans had misfired, that the revolution was already over. That couldn’t be the
case, so soon. They had boxes and boxes of explosives down the hall.

The Prime Minister groaned. Another minister, Minister Sheldon, the one who’d frozen and remained standing rather than ducking when they stormed the chamber, was also bleeding a lot. There
was a puddle of blood now by his ankle. Ashes worked as a porter at a health centre in his neighbourhood, but he wasn’t trained to deal with medical matters; he was no nurse. Even so, he
could see this minister was barely breathing and it worried him. It was possible he might die too if he wasn’t seen to. The female ministers were very subdued. They were both hiding under
chairs. One had urinated into a glass and it stood next to her. It looked very . . . intimate . . . and it made him feel unsure of going anywhere near them.

Many of the brothers were standing around. Some had forsaken their everyday names; they had spiritual names and they had shaved their heads and grown their beards and they were men with wives
and families. The men who were trained for this looked more serious and mature. He could see a cold confidence in their eyes and in their posture, a seriousness of intent. None of these brothers
had any questions or regrets so far, not like him. They were still following orders. If he didn’t know who they were, he too would be scared of these men. They weren’t fooling around.
The Leader had attracted thousands of brothers and sisters over the years, but these men were a hand-picked bunch.

Ashes was now worried, scared for his life, and he promised himself that if he got out of there alive he would get off the island and take himself on a trip. He would take his wife and his sons,
they would go to Trinidad. They would go for carnival, and he would go to Lord Wellington’s tent and sit and listen to him and the other calypsonians sing. In particular he liked the song
called ‘Jericho’, an old tune now, by Lord Wellington, but it was about a time just like when River was shot. It was a song about the guerrilla fighters of Trinidad, not so long ago
fellers, all shot too. He liked the name of the hero in the song, Jericho, because it was the name also of a famous city in the Bible. Jericho was a town where palm trees spread their roots to an
underground well in the desert and so the city was lush and green, an oasis in those arid holy lands. Jericho was known as the City of Palms. And yet the subterranean roots of the palms may have
had something to do with why the walls of the city fell flat when the Israelites ransacked it, claiming it back and slaughtering everyone inside. Jericho, in his mind, was also a City of Blood.

Dr Mahibir had arranged the cheese puffs on a chipped parliamentary plate. He had lined some of the less broken teacups up along the counter in the tearoom and he was making
tea. Ashes noticed that the doctor limped around, but could see no wound. He hadn’t been injured, yet something was wrong with one of his legs. It wasn’t a new limp; his awkward manner
of walking looked like an old habit. He seemed in quite good spirits considering everything. He had been the first hostage to be untied; he was useful. Hal had let him free in order to assess the
wounded, hostages and gunmen alike. They had found a First Aid kit in another cupboard in the tearoom; it had bandages and ointments and so Dr Mahibir had gone about attending to people as best he
could. One of the young boys had accidentally shot himself through the foot and he had bandaged the wound. Several of the brothers had been nicked by bullets. But Minister Bartholomew Sheldon
needed to be taken away to hospital immediately, he advised. He had been badly shot in the back of the thigh and he would bleed to death by lunchtime. The Prime Minister had stopped bleeding, but
he was also diabetic and could lose his sight without his medication. They should take him to hospital too, but the PM insisted he would be the last parliamentarian to leave the House. Hal refused
to let him leave anyway. The doctor had been up all night tending to the injured. Now he was making a tray of tea and cheese puffs.

Some of the brothers had eaten the chicken in the fridge. The woman under the table in the back room had died. Father Sapno had left hours ago along with the Deputy Prime Minister, Elias de
Gannes, and they had a list of demands written down on a scrap of paper: 1) that the Prime Minister would immediately resign; 2) a free and fair election to be held in 90 days; 3) a reversal of
plans for the IMF loan; 4) reinstigation of the Cost of Living Allowance; 5) a full amnesty for the gunmen. Under the list of demands were the signatures of every minister in the chamber, including
the Prime Minister’s, signed while Hal pointed a pistol to his head.

If these demands were not met, Hal and the Leader had decided they would blow up the television station and the House of Power with all the explosives they had with them. They would not be
taken. They would kill everyone, including themselves, in the name of their righteous cause. They would go down fighting.

‘Would you care for a puff?’ Dr Mahibir asked Ashes.

Ashes stared at the tea tray. ‘No thanks, I’ve already had one.’ And then he remembered he hadn’t yet eaten the puff in his army pants pocket and that now it must be very
squashed. He couldn’t eat anything. His feelings were very off centre and his heart was like a stone in his chest. Things were very badly wrong here in the House and he remembered the dragon
he’d seen on top of it as they stormed in, hissing and looking threatening, and he’d thought this was a very bad sign. The House was protected. Ol time dragons – here, in the
Caribbean. King beast. He’d seen plenty at carnival time, an ol mas figure. But this dragon was different; Queen Victoria had brought it with her. The Queen and the dragon were some kind of
team.

And yet Dr Mahibir casually went about offering tea, like he wasn’t worried at all. He had made a big metal teapot full of Lipton’s and several chipped cups were stacked on his tray.
He was offering tea and puffs to the hostages and brothers alike and this was very confusing, as though everyone in the chamber was the same when they clearly were not. Ashes wondered if any of
this was correct hostage-taking behaviour; surely the tea and puffs were much too informal. And already Hal had agreed to cut free the plastic handcuffs of the hostages; he wondered if this was
wise. Overnight many had tried to loosen the bands and they had only drawn tighter and begun to lacerate their wrists. The hostages were simply being guarded now, on rotation. The two female MPs
should be let go, Ashes felt. They were having an effect on all the men.

Breeze was taking his role in the revolution very seriously; Ashes thought he looked like a miniature version of the Leader. His eyes were pensive and his lips were full; he was a
serious-looking person already. His skin was very black and he was thin and stringy from a short lifetime of poor eating. Ashes knew he had come to the commune straight from court. Breeze had been
bailed by the Leader rather than face six months in the overcrowded, rat-infested, lice-ridden gaol in town for petty theft and fraud – and for that he was loyal. Breeze was a street boy,
wily as hell, an apprentice criminal already at fourteen years old; almost as hard as Greg Mason. If the Leader hadn’t saved his arse from prison he would have become a common crook. Breeze
had been given a dormitory to sleep in, albeit not much more than a scooped out abandoned bus, but he had been given shelter at least, three meals a day, free medical care, a peer group of other
boys, also bailed from prison. And, most of all, Breeze had been shown the spiritual path, a way to purify his soul.

The City of Silk had many poor homeless boys like Breeze and no one but the Leader had shown any interest or care for them. They were nobody’s concern. They had either run away or were put
out of their homes early on, abandoned by their own families, and ignored by those in power. And so it was an act of divine will that Breeze now had power inside the House of Power. Ministers were
afraid of him and his tall gun. He had recovered himself from the army’s attack. He had removed a tongue off the carpet when no one else would touch it. He had refused puffs and tea. Hal and
Greg had started using him as their chief assistant.