The Abrupt Physics of Dying (22 page)

He awoke heart pounding. A bright light blinded him. Someone grabbed his wrist and wrenched him to the floor. He landed with a jolt. Carpet, the legs of a chair, a pair of boots, black trousers, black shirt. Another man behind, picking up his duffel bag and shaking his stuff out onto the bed. Jesus Christ. He made to get up but was driven back to the floor by a withering kick to the ribs. The other man was picking through the contents of his bag, clothes, field instruments, a couple of books.

‘What the hell?’ he yelled, pulling himself up onto all fours.

The man in black jammed his boot into Clay’s back, pinning him face down to the ground. His spine twisted under the weight. He turned his neck to face his attacker and looked straight down the barrel of a handgun.

‘Take whatever you want,’ Clay breathed.

Black’s boot smashed into his face, driving his upper lip back into his teeth. His mouth filled with the haemic taste of blood.

‘
Mafi
mushkilla
,’ Clay spat. ‘No problem.’

Another blow snapped his head back.

The other man continued to take the room apart, drawers, mattress, backpack. Black grabbed Clay by the hair and pulled him to his feet. ‘
Yallah
,’ he barked.

Childhood Drawings

He was hustled down to a vehicle waiting in the lane behind the hotel, hands tied, something hard and mean jabbed into his back. One of the men got in beside him and pushed his head down between his knees, a vice grip around the back of his neck. For half an hour, maybe more, he watched an empty blue-plastic water bottle roll around on the floor of the truck. Then the sound of a jet taking off – they must be passing near the airport.

After what felt like hours but could not have been more than a few minutes, the vehicle stopped. Doors were flung open and he was pushed out into the night. He glimpsed a two-storey building, half-finished, the brickwork un-rendered between concrete pillars, rebar sprouting from the roof beams, another vehicle parked in the dirt. He was about to turn and face his attackers when everything switched off.

There was no light. It was hot. The air was thick with the smells of the ocean, bunker oil, human waste, his own blood. He was still in Aden, at least it smelled like Aden. He swivelled the weight of his head, a troglodyte whose eyes had long-since skinned over, evolution eliminating what was no longer required. If the sun was on the far side of the planet, or shining down on the harbour, here it made no difference. He looked at his watch, but the fluorescent dials did not show. He tapped his wrist where his watch should be. Abdulkader’s
ring gone from his finger, too. He started to crawl across the stone floor, sweeping one hand before him, but a barbed spike of pain drove through his side and he collapsed to the floor.

Without the sun or the stars for reference, time seemed to eddy and curl and lose cohesion. He had no concept of how long he had been in this place. Only the coagulant sealing the gash on the back of his head provided some measure; time reduced to a wattle of hair and blood, or the click of a stick across the spokes of a wheel that did not turn.

He fell into a fractured sleep and awoke in a spasm of pain. He tried to swallow, but his mouth was dry, his throat swollen. Thirst gripped him like a panic. In stages, he managed to bring himself to his feet. He swayed in the darkness, hands fending the depths. He staggered forward, searching for some limit to his universe. Something hard now at his fingertips, vertical. A wall. With one palm flat on the surface and the other arm forward he paced to his right. One, two, three, another wall. Turn. One, two, and again. Turn and continue. And then a seam, a change of texture. A door. Around again. A cell, six square metres at most. He traced his fingers along the edge of the door. No light showed, no current of air pierced the gap.

Fuck this. He pounded the door with his fist and called out, but was driven to his knees by a lance of pain. With the tips of his fingers he explored the swelling under his left arm. Cracked ribs, two at least, maybe three. The gash in his head had reopened and he could feel his scalp peeling back, the upright nails of ruptured sutures edging a budding flower of blood. He turned and rested his back against the wall and filled the void around him with every curse he had ever learned.

Perhaps they had forgotten him. Surely Rania would have started looking for him after he failed to appear at the rendezvous in Dhamar. She had contacts; she could exert pressure. He imagined her headline: ‘Foreign oil worker disappears amidst accusations of poisoning’. He hoped that was exactly what she’d written, a clear message to Al Shams that he had kept his side of the agreement,
enough to keep Abdulkader alive. They could not keep him indefinitely. He had heard stories of kidnappings that had lasted months, in the North, up towards Sa’da. Those had been tribal, mostly, the hostages treated with kindness, some leaving as friends with apologies all around. But this was different. Those men had been professionals, military perhaps. And this was a prison cell – not some stone goat shed up in the hills.

There was no sound save that of the workings of his body and the scream of pain in his head that seemed to grow and grow. He could not remember ever being so thirsty. Surely they would bring him water.

After a while he rose to his feet and faced the door as if it was a sparring partner. With all the focus he could gather he brought the edge of his fist down hard on the metal. I am a British citizen, he screamed. I want to speak to someone from the British Consulate. But there was no sound in reply, no light. He waited, panting in the heat, forehead pressed against the steel. Again he pushed away and hammered as hard as he could, repeating the words like a mantra, again and again until all that came forth was a rasp and he collapsed to the floor.

In the distance, a clutch of trees in a barren landscape, a desert plain, Yemen perhaps, but these are mopane tress. Ovamboland? He is searching for a place to shelter the abandoned children who huddle around him, feed and clothe them. He has money, bills from half a dozen nations, paper coloured with childhood drawings. Enough to do something. The desert is littered with abandoned military equipment, rocket launchers with empty rails, the charred bodies of tanks. There is old oilfield equipment also, a water tanker on its side, sand flowing from a gaping wound in its steel vessel. The skin of the plain has been cut open, the material scraped into long rilles that frame a white track. Near the trees, at the side of the road, there is a vehicle. It lies on its back, wheels to the sky. He walks towards it. It is a Ratel, an armoured transport. He knows what he will find, has been here so many times before. He tries to turn away, but he is drawn in.
Now he can see the holed belly, the blown-out hatch. And there is the space in the twisted metal. He will never forget that opening, the bodies inside limp and torn and still, the blood everywhere, beading on the metal, so much of it, such a deep, vivid red, its earthy sweet smell, the driver unconscious but breathing still behind the wheel.

A flash of light, a hollow clang and then darkness again, the crumbling firewall of a nightmare. He lay on the concrete floor and listened, eyes straining, blinded by the sudden illumination. Water. He could smell it. He got to his knees and groped ahead until his hand touched something cool. A cup. He sniffed the contents and lifted it to his mouth. The liquid flowed across his tongue and down his throat, pure and sweet, the most perfect thing in creation. Three gulps and it was gone. He crawled to the edge of the cell and leaned back against the wall and raised his knees to his chest and stared out into the darkness. He had crossed a threshold. Here, it was disequilibrium that held sway. Everything was coming apart. It had happened quickly.

His body’s natural functioning continued. Without a toilet, he was reduced to squatting in the corner of the cell. Time was measured now only by the seemingly random deliveries of water and foul, inedible food, and the accumulating puddle of piss and shit in the corner. The stench of his own body amazed him. He was soon driven to the far corner, from which he seldom ventured, save to scurry over and recover the precious cup of water that appeared at the door.

He could feel himself weakening. The gash in his head had opened further, and was probably infected. He hadn’t eaten since before talking to Ali. The smell of his own faeces kept him in a permanent state of nausea. He began to lapse in and out of consciousness, until he could no longer tell where the dreams ended and the reality of his existence began.

Sometime later he awoke on the concrete floor. The dreams had gone. He sat up, took a deep breath, felt the pulse of his heart, even and strong. Four times light had come. If he replaced the empty bowls by the door, they were taken away and brought back full. If he did
not put them in their initial positions, the door was closed as soon as it was opened. The pattern was regular, he could see it now, morning and night. Two days he had been here, then. His body had already started to adapt to the rhythm. The next delivery was coming soon. It would start with the distant rattle of keys on a chain, the turning of a lock. Then footsteps approaching, boots on concrete, two sets, one crisp and sharp, the other shuffling. A key would rattle in the door lock, then after a moment the bolt would slide, hang up for a second, and then grind into place. One guard, the sharp walker, would open the door – he was the key man – and swing it open about six inches on quiet hinges. A blinding wedge of light would shoot across the floor and onto the far wall. Now he knew that the ceiling was high, perhaps three metres. At first he had closed his eyes, but then he began to gather information about his cell. On the third visit he had noticed a vent or window of some sort near the top of the far wall. Four times now he had seen it, concentrated on it. And in those few seconds of illumination, Shuffler would step forward and retrieve the bowls, his small dark hand reaching into the cell to pluck up each bowl in turn. Then he would clang two metal bowls onto the floor and slide each forward in turn with his sandalled foot, spilling some of the water. Then back, three shuffled steps and the slam as darkness came again.

With this clarity came a realisation: these people, whoever they were, had no intention of communicating with him. They were not after information that he might have, they did not want money or political leverage. He was being removed, made to disappear in a place where vanishing was commonplace, left to rot.

The fifth delivery came, same pattern, same timing, the flash of light, a star exploding, and then darkness again. Clay sat in his corner and ate the paste from the bowl, pushing his face into the mould, reaching with his tongue. He dared not use his fingers, by now surely crawling with
E-coli
or worse. He drank, used the rest of the water to wash the back of his head, letting it drip from the bowl onto the wound, listening to the sound the droplets made as they ran from his matted hair and hit the floor.

After a while he stood and walked to the other side of the cell. He put his hands to the wall, moved them across its rough surface, feeling for any imperfection, imagining its construction. Rendered breeze block, he guessed. That meant seams. He worked across the surface with his fingertips like a blind man, found a horizontal furrow about chest high, traced it along, gauging its depth. He found the place where the furrow was deepest, pushed his thumbnail into the groove and scored the cement. With his fingertip he tested the spot, felt for some expression. Nothing. He stepped back to the far side of the room, found his water bowl, brought its edge to bear on the groove, worked away with short hard strokes. Soon he could feel powder on his fingers. His pulse took a jump. He worked the bowl harder, with both hands, like a carpenter over a plane. The noise it made filled his ears, echoing from every surface, but he kept on. After a while he felt something raining on his feet, reached down to touch it, a soft fine powder. Cement. He worked until his arms were burning, retreated to his corner, rested.

Four times he returned to the spot, worked the edge of the bowl into the deepening groove, felt the mortar coming away, falling to the floor. He worked his finger into the rough opening between two blocks. It was no more than half a centimetre deep and a couple long, but it was enough. He swung his foot up and dug his two middle toes into the groove, and wedging his left hand against the adjacent wall, levered himself up until he was standing face to the wall. He reached up with his right hand and found the lip of the vent, swung his other hand over, and pulled himself up until his head was level with its base, his feet dangling. It was actually a recess in the wall, an opening about the size of a small suitcase. He rotated a wing up onto the ledge and extended his arm. His hand flailed in the void – it was deeper than he could reach. He hung there for a moment, breathing hard, resting.

Something crawled over his hand, brushed the hairs on his forearm, the lightest touch. He stilled himself, held his breath. A current of cool air reached him, flowed over his arm. It was coming
from the end of the vent. Even over the reek of shit and urine, he could smell the outside, clean and fresh, the scents of early morning coming on this small current. He pushed his head into the vent, breathed deep, tried to fill himself with it. Perhaps this was ground level, his cell a basement, this a window well of some sort. He tried to wriggle his way in, wedge himself into the space, but the opening was too small, his shoulders too wide.