Shamsudin said the planet had heated up. They turned off smokestacks and stopped flying. Some, like my parents, altered the way they lived. Factories were shut down. ‘You asked me about the Koran,’ he said. ‘But I understand it as a doctor. For all our knowledge, things happen that we do not understand. Sometimes, the patient dies not from her illness, but from the medicine.’
As it turned out, the smoke from all the furnaces had been working like a sunshade, keeping the world a few degrees cooler than it would have been otherwise. He said that in trying to do the right thing, we had sawed off the branch we were sitting on. The droughts and storms that came in the years after put in motion all the things that followed.
Life in cities had ended.
I asked him about the world beyond the north, thinking of the plane, but he shrugged.
‘The whole world is a barer and less interesting place,’ he said. ‘Human misery has few varieties: tent camps, forced labour, hunger, violence, men taking food and sex by force. You yourself have seen them all.’
I’d finished the roof before he came to the end of his talk, but we both stayed up there, resting on the peak in the sunshine. His vertigo had passed. We were still up there talking when the guards came and yelled at us to come for the evening head count.
*
For a while, I passed in the camp as a man. I kept myself to myself, bathed alone, and rounded up the clean rags I needed each month discreetly. But sooner or later I knew the truth would come out. Living the way we did, there was no getting away from it for ever. I was braced for a rough ride when it did. The men in there thrived off each other’s weakness.
I was in the bathhouse when it finally happened. Two yahoos stumbled in and yanked my pants off me as a joke. They were too stunned by what they saw to make anything of it, but when I came in from the fields that night, I could tell by the looks I got that my secret was out.
‘Come and bunk with me, Makepeace,’ said the taller of the two that had found me. ‘I’ve got fourteen inches of kolbasa to share with you.’
I could hear the snap of his trousers as he pulled out his johnson and waved it at me.
It seemed like the whole hut snickered with him.< />
I was mending my work gloves but I looked up when he spoke, and I guess my eyes betrayed the contempt I felt.
‘Better cover her head. I’ve seen prettier faces on moose.’
‘I’ll just turn her around …’
And so it went on. The two of them alternating menace and foolishness, saying how they’d do this and do that to me.
I felt a prickle of interest from around the hut as the others put down their work, or folded their cards to watch. Over on the far side of the bunks, where the muslim prisoners kept together, Shamsudin and Zulfugar were watching with grave, troubled faces.
Already, some of the other prisoners were joining in the sport, goading them to make good on their boasts. These men who ordinarily feared and distrusted each other felt a little easier now they had baiting me as their common purpose.
I thought it was better to be silent. It didn’t do to appear weak or craven, but equally too much tough talk was like buying things on tick, and sooner or later you had to pay up. I bit off the thread and slipped on my glove to check the new seam.
The taller fellow was still bragging away. He was enjoying his new notoriety. But some of the other prisoners were getting bored with just words and were urging him to do what he was boasting of.
Slowly, to a chorus of jeers and whistles, he made his way across to the bunk where I sat. I was on the lowest bunk of three and he had to crouch down to it.
I told him he was blocking my light and to get out of the way.
Next thing is he reached in with his hand to grab me. It was awkward and cramped for a man of his height, and he came at me with a looping arm so I went straight for the crotch of his pants with my gloved hand.
I don’t know if he was as big down there as he claimed, or I just got a lucky hit, but I put enough darning needle into his khui to send him back howling to the far side of the hut. I heard later it went an inch deep. The laughter that followed him was so loud that I thought it would lift the roof off the place.
Only Shamsudin wasn’t laughing. He had his eyes cast down at the floor and when he raised them, I seemed to see only coldness in them.
I didn’t feel he should have stuck up for me, but maybe he did. And we both knew that things being the way they were at the base, this wouldn’t be the end of it.
*
The next evening after muster Shamsudin bumped me as we were walking in to eat. I was too surprised to say anything. He said sorry immediately and knelt down. ‘You dropped this,’ he said, and pressed something cold in my hand.
It was the haft of a trowel, snapped off at one end, and about six inches long. I appreciated what he’d done for me. The guards frisked us for knives at the muster, and if it had been found on him, they’d have made life hard for him.
I whet it on a rock and I made it a handle with rags and window putty. Each morning, I hid it in the corner of the outouse. Each night, I’d pick it up and keep it under the balled coat I used for a pillow.
It was a strain on my nerves to have to wait up, keeping an ear on the whish of breathing in that cramped hut, but I took the same kind of pleasure in it that I used to take in hunting at night, or making a new firearm in the workshop, with all my awareness fixed on a single point. And more than once, in the course of those wakeful evenings, I regretted that I never had a shiv in my hand when Eben Callard and his friends had burst in on me, all those years before.
*
They waited over a week to try to catch me unawares, but when they made up their minds to come I was ready.
I heard their feet slap onto the floor as they slid out of their bunks and come padding across to where I lay with my eyes shut.
They had shivs too, of course, but I was soberer, and quicker and angrier, and I caught one of them in the throat, and the other a bunch of times in the back and ass as he ran away squealing. When the guards had run in with their lanterns, it turned out he’d cut his own finger half-off in his panic.
The guards dragged me to a punishment cell, and as I went I cursed the lot of them and told them that anyone who tried that with me could expect the same. Both the men lived, which was a pity, but they couldn’t save the finger.
*
They made me stay in the punishment cell a few nights, which was no hardship. I was pleased with how things turned out and I expected to be left well enough alone after that. I understood that the guards wouldn’t kill me because we were of some value to them — why else drag us all that way and keep us fed and housed? And I was looking forward to getting back to the farm work when they let me out.
The only upshot of it was one day when Boathwaite was making his rounds of the fields; he came up to the cart where I was baling hay and made conversation with me.
He said, ‘I gather you had a contretemps with Stavitsky and Maclennan.’
I shrugged. I knew who he meant.
He told me about Maclennan losing his finger.
I couldn’t pretend to be sorry about it. And nor did he.
*
Because I couldn’t abide my companions in there, and Shamsudin didn’t dare risk his position in his new muslim family by being open about his friendship with me, I was always slower to hear the current rumours than the other prisoners. That didn’t bother me at all, since most of what they talked about was nonsense. I gleaned enough overhearing conversations in the barracks where we slept. I realized early on that it made no sense for Boathwaite to go to all this trouble to round up farm labour, but because of my solitariness it was a while before I understood the real reason for our being there.