Sorj Chalandon - Return to Killybegs

I hadn’t trembled in a long time. In front of the five warders, I took off my clothes without a word, without a look. I thought of Jack, of my boy, who had entered this room five months earlier. A mirror was placed on the ground. I crouched down without them having to ask, opened my anus with my fingers. I was fifty-four years old. The screws were younger than me. One of them handed me the prison clothes, carefully folded, petrol-blue with yellow stripes. I looked the kid in the eye and spat on the fabric.

The warders didn’t like my gesture. I was beaten. They threw me naked into a cell with a final kick in the back. My forehead hit the ground, my cheekbone. I was lying on my stomach, I sat up with difficulty. My thumb was sprained, a couple of my ribs were cracked. I was bleeding from the mouth and nose. A burning trickle was rolling down the back of my neck. The top of my head was damaged. I ran my hand over it. A bite. A chunk of flesh was missing. My left leg started to shake. I hugged my chest. It was cold. I looked around the cell. In a corner lay a scrap of a man, buried in his mattress.

— Jack?

I didn’t recognize my voice. Like a creaking door.

I was afraid it might be him, and I hoped it wouldn’t be. But it wasn’t. It was someone else’s son. He turned to me, got up slowly from his corner of the room. He was very young, slender or scrawny, more grey than pale, with a chaotic beard, and hair to his shoulders. Without a word, he took the folded blankets from the free mattress, draped them over my shoulders and sat down beside me. Then I lowered my guard. I don’t know why. That gesture, maybe. That coarse gentleness, that watchful silence. Perhaps also his eyes meeting mine. I breathed in little jerks. I released the warmth of my urine. I was pissing. The warm, glistening pool expanded underneath me. He didn’t move back. It reached his bare foot, surrounded it, continued its path of piss under the bed.

He held out his hand.

— Aidan Phelan, West Tyrone Brigade.

— Tyrone Meehan, Belfast Brigade.

He smiled.

— Danny Finley’s friend, I know. And it’s an honour for me.

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.