Time to collect your dinner, he says.
I don’t even know which screw it is. Legs wobbling, I climb to my feet; I’m aching everywhere, blood. I collect a portion of beef stew that goes straight into my toilet—no middle man required. I feel too weak to lift my plastic utensils to eat. All I want is to relax. All I want is to sleep. Three more times that night I pray. Dreams come creeping.
Eight.
Am I building these thoughts from popular myth—from movies? I don’t know. But what I see is this:
The prisoners are working. They are shackled to the benches on which they will spend the remainder of the day. It’s a little after midday, but you wouldn’t know that, not down here, below decks. The light is all but non-existent; the air is thick, muggy and it stinks of male and female sweat. There is no gender demarcation aboard the ship. Here is Dott. Here is Noor. Callused hands on a long oar. Dott is sitting nearest the small portal, rowing in time with the other three men on his bench—one bench among scores of benches identical to one another. Male or female, torsos are exposed. Dott’s back is sliced red from where he’s been whipped and struck as part of his penal servitude. Why are they rowing? The ship doesn’t move as a result. This is punishment for the sake of punishment: backbreaking physical labour, intended to squash ambition, thoughts of liberty and body energy. He doesn’t see me. However, I can’t be invisible: other rowers see me, turning to face me as I walk down the aisle between the benches. Perhaps they think I am one of the jailers, there to whip. Scared of me? Who can blame them? My face is new to them, I’m sure of it. How can they know I mean no harm to anyone? How can they know I mean the opposite?
There is noise behind me, in the gloom. I turn. Descending the wooden stairs I once tripped and fell down is a large man with a face full of hair. The beard is matted and long, the moustache spanned out like seagull wings. Even his eyebrows are thick as adult thumbs, tied one to its partner with no gap between. He asks me what I’m doing. In fact, he asks me what I think I’m doing, which is a much more difficult question. Turning on my heels, I walk purposefully back in his direction. Although rowing doesn’t stop in this galley, there is a marked deterioration in effort and strength; prisoners want to see what is happening.
Change of leadership, I tell the hirsute slave-driver—he who is also a prisoner on board the ship, one who has risen through the ranks to be able to command the men and women who are newer to life on the water. The man is amused.
Do you think so? he asks me.
I know so, I say.
I remove the small shank I have secreted in my loincloth; I too am topless—pigeon-chested and weak-looking, but the power of my intention can’t be in doubt. The nights are long on board the ship. I have managed to fashion a knife of sorts by sharpening a piece of wood I have torn from the one of the walls of one of the living quarters, lower still than the galley, below our feet, in the bowels of the vessel. As with everyone else present, I am a prisoner. Rebel too; or so it seems.
We don’t need to do this, I tell the man whose name floats through the air in waves, from his head to mine.
His name is Ayaan. Along with several other stormtroopers (four or five, I think) he helps to run this boot camp. He has wielded authority over me before, I realise; this is my second time aboard the Oasis. I have served a previous sentence—for what I’m not sure. No more certain than I am of what I’m doing here on this occasion—unless my sole purpose is that of liberation.
We don’t need to do what? he asks me, eyeballing the shank in my right hand. Stay where you are, he continues nervously.
Let them go, I demand.
You know I can’t do that, says Ayaan.
We’ll take our chances.
In the oil? Impossible! No one survives the oil.
How many have tried?
A good many. Now enjoy the remainder of your rest period. When it’s your turn to row, I assure you you’ll have an easy shift.
I don’t believe you. My back is stinging, where I was flogged yesterday.
Not by me!
It doesn’t matter who by.
Will you stand aside?
No.
Ayaan removes from a loop on his belt the whip that is coiled there like wire. The whip is only three-quarters unfurled when Ayaan flips the weapon with a wristy motion: the business end of the whip strikes out; there’s a warning crack of air about a palm’s width from my left eye. I’m aware of how accurate Ayaan can be with his weapon of choice; he’s a marksman with it. The shot, I know, is merely to frighten me back into submission—and it nearly works. The thin rope is on the floor after the assailment. Taking the force of what needs to be done as my spur, I stamp my bare foot down on to the whip—he tries to pull it back—and I attempt to pace along it like a tightrope walker, climbing up the weapon as I stride closer. The sharp end of the wooden blade—I dash it into Ayaan’s left upper arm. He whimpers with the discomfort, the pain lending him strength in his other arm. Pulling harder on the whip, he burns through some of the skin on my feet; I am knocked off balance as he retrieves the whip I’m standing on. A fight begins. Dissimilar to a fight at Dellacotte, there is no noise from the onlookers. Sure enough the rowing stops—that pointless, pointless exercise—which will shortly be noticed, but not one of the prisoners breathes a word of encouragement. They watch as Ayaan and I grip and wrestle, punch and bite. He is the stronger, no doubt about that, and I understand that my knife to the arm is no deterrent. Though I don’t wish to hurt Ayaan (as far as I know, he has done nothing wrong to me other than follow orders) a stark reminder of whose dream this is is required. I pluck my shank from his bicep. As we struggle on, it is like being in a waxwork museum: not only does no one speak, no one moves either. Though I don’t pay much attention to those around me, what I do see when I get a fraction of a second to glance—what I see are dead eyes, lifeless eyes. And two sudden movements. Ayaan and I are wriggling on the wooden floor; splinters bite at my exposed, rough and raw skin. I notice a woman with dark hair—a woman in her early sixties—make the sign of the cross on her chest. The second movement is Dott standing up. Ayaan is striving to prevent me from stabbing him again. And while I don’t want to have to stab him again, I can’t see a valid alternative. He has a job to do. His job is bringing his problems upon himself. I can’t tell him this. My sharpened piece of wood is aimed for his shoulder. It is my opponent’s deflective blow that knocks the point elsewhere: the wood slides effortlessly into the left side of his neck. Ayaan’s eyes are wide with horror. I hope what my eyes say is apology enough. As blood starts, first to trickle, leak, then to spurt, I roll away from his writhing body. When he starts to scream I understand that Noor and I will have to move faster than ever.
You’re all free! I shout.
Not only a gross exaggeration, but an oversimplification to boot. We remain on a ship in the middle of a vast body of polluted water. There is no way back to shore, other than to swim; and once ashore? There is no home remaining for prisoners, however close to the ends of their sentences some of them might be. I try to read the mood of the gathered slaves. Attempting to rile them to mutiny, it seems, has been as effective as nailing the oil to a wall. If anything, what fills the eyes in those few not stunned to inertia by months and years of pointless physical abuse, is resentment. I have torn the status quo.
Come on! I say to Noor. You can be free!
We ascend the wooden steps, but Ayaan’s screams—possibly even the unexpected stench of his blood, as if the wound I hope won’t be fatal has unleashed the rotting insects of his soul—have alerted his muchachos. Three more men, similarly hairy as this particular watch’s driver, arrive near the crest of the stairs. One of them—the youngest, I would guess—is carrying a strap: a snub-nosed automatic pistol that seems out of place, but I’m confident will be no less convincing for it.