Then he lit a cigarette, rolling tobacco in a margin of his Bible.
— The guys say Matthew burns better, but I prefer the Epistles.
He inhaled an acrid drag and handed it to me.
— St Peter, St Paul, makes no difference…
We smoked in silence. I was looking round the dark room. Rotten food was piled up in mucous mounds along the wall. An accumulation of filth, of moist decay, of decomposition. And then the shit, spread right up to the ceiling. Finger marks. A crucifix hanging on the broken light switch. I shivered.
When they led me to the cell, the screws were wearing masks. The air was as thick as a sewer. I didn’t know that a smell could line the throat. By the time night fell, I had almost grown used to the stench, my sticky legs, the cold, the darkness, and all of our shit.
— Is cimí polaitiúla muid!
A voice from far off. The shout from a cell. My language.
— We are political prisoners! Aidan threw back, hobbling as far as the door.
— Táimid ag cimí polaitiúla! I roared in turn.
Up until that point, I hadn’t seen another soul. Only the screws’ hateful faces. And now here was this clamouring from my comrades, my friends, my brothers in arms. Dozens of furious, stony, beautiful voices. A magnificent din. Cries accompanied by raised fists, hammering the doors with bare flesh. I listened for my child’s voice in the heart of all that anguish. And then again I didn’t want to hear.
— Tiocfaidh ár lá! the first prisoner took up, roaring over the tumult.
— Tiocfaidh ár lá! the others responded. ‘Our day will come!’
— That was your first evening prayer, my companion smiled.
And then everything went quiet.
At night, Aidan would sometimes cry. He’d whimper like a child, pulling the blanket right up over his head. One morning I looked at him. He was sleeping on his belly, mouth open, cheek squashed. His arm was trailing on the ground. White maggots were wriggling in his hair and on the back of his hand.
After thirteen months, I looked the same as him. My hair was covering my ears and my nose in greasy clumps. My beard was long and messy. One face mirrored the other. I could see my gauntness in his drawn features, his dull skin, his eyes rimmed in black.
In his corner of the cell, he used to organize cockroach races. And I’d make him recite the thirty-two counties of Ireland.
— Meath… Mayo… Roscommon… Offaly…
I taught him Irish words. The prison essentials.
— Póg mo thóin!
— Kiss my arse! That was his favourite war cry, and he muttered it every time a screw opened the door.
We had decided to shit together, to make a ceremony of this private act and transform the humiliation into a shared ritual. He’d crouch down to the left of the door, I’d go in my hands. Then we’d smear our excrement over the wall with fingers spread wide, in big warm circles. In the beginning I used to vomit. The savagery of the image, the violence of the smell. And then, bit by bit, I learned to turn my disgust into rage. Fresh coats over dried coats, I spread the human rendering without feeling ashamed.
The prisoners had fashioned pipes out of rolled-up cardboard and they used to slide them into the cracks between the cell doors and the ground. At a set time, just after the meal, we would all piss into those tubes, spilling our urine into the corridor.
— They’ll never break us! my friend used to say.
We were forbidden visitors and post, locked up night and day without exercise. We had given up passing the time. We spoke little. We used to sit with our heads down for hours on end. Often, we wouldn’t even dare meet the other’s eyes.
— If we get out of here, we can never tell anyone about this, Aidan said one day.
— But everyone on the outside knows about it, I told him.
He shook his head.
— You think they know, Tyrone? But what is it they know, for Christ’s sake? Nobody can understand what we’re living through in here! Shit is just a word to them, Tyrone! It’s not matter! It’s not this filth that slides between your fingers!
One morning the warders opened our door, yelling, accompanied by helmeted police. They were running in the corridor, banging the walls with their batons. At the howling of the other inmates, we got up. Aidan pressed himself against me, back to back, nape against nape. We chained ourselves together, arm of one clasped through the other’s, fists clenched against our chests. We were bellowing at life, at fear. We shook with our fury. We formed a single body, which they broke apart with savage blows.
I was knocked to the ground, my blankets snatched away from me, then dragged by the legs into the corridor. The line of clubs. Protected by their riot shields, they were taking their revenge on these fucking Irish, on their blankets, on their shit, on their insults, on their contempt. They were beating naked men. Heads, legs, backs, raised arms. They were marking us. They were leaving their traces.
I was pulled by my beard and hair to the shower room. I struggled and shouted. I no longer hurt, no longer felt anything. The shouts from the others were intoxicating. For a moment, I thought they were going to kill us. Terror. There were three screws. They were keeping me on the floor. Arm locks, hands gripping my neck. I repaid them by scratching, spitting. And then I was lifted up like a sack and thrown heavily into a bathtub of freezing water. They were going to drown me. I threw my arms and legs about. A blow to my jaw. I fell back, head hitting the wall. They were washing me. They were scouring a year of resistance away. A screw was scrubbing me with a hard brush. My back, my arms. He was rubbing down a bad horse. Scraping the shit off a toilet bowl. He was puffing, mouth open, threatening my father, my mother, and all the pigs of my kind.
He shouted.
— That’s for Agnes Wallace, you filthy bastard! Does that mean anything to you, Agnes Wallace?
My howls were drowning out his voice.
— And William Wright? That means nothing, either? You IRA scum!
He was scrubbing me violently, scraping me clean. He held my hands on the lip of the bath and forced the bristles under my nails. He was barking names in my ear.
— William McCully! John Cummings!
He was whacking rhythmically with the back of the brush.
— Robert Hamilton! John Milliken!
Milliken. I remembered. A head warder of the penitentiary administration, shot by the IRA on his way home.
Good Christ! He was avenging his dead.
— Thomas Fenton, you scumbag! Desmond Irvine, you murderer!
The second screw had taken over. He was tearing my hair out. He ploughed into my skull with blunt scissors. He cut, he slashed.
— Micky Cassidy! Gerald Melville!
Then I responded.
— James Connolly! Patrick Pearse! Eamonn Ceannt!
I bellowed with all my might. Blood for blood, rage for rage, their victims for mine.
The scissors took away part of my ear.
— Albert Miles!
— Tom Williams!
— Nazi! shouted the screw with the brush. Filthy fucking Nazi!
I had blood in my eyes. The third screw was choking me. He had wrapped his forearm around my neck. He was squeezing. I could barely breathe. My mouth was open, tongue hanging out, I clenched my jaw in vain. Before my eyes, on his tattooed arm, the pole of a Union Jack pierced through the Irish flag.
— You killed Danny Finley!
They pushed my head under the water and kept it there, one hand on my skull, the other on the nape of my neck, legs hobbled by two arms and a boot on my waist. Until I passed out.