The Gone-Away World (16 page)

“Fucking Nazis,” Sebastian says. Iggy isn't at all sure that's what they are—the frequent invocation of Holocaust imagery is counter-constructive because—

“If it puts you in a chicken-wire box,” Sebastian says firmly, “and treats you like a sub-human, and it wears a sexy uniform and claims all this is for the greater good, it's a Nazi.”

At which point they storm into the cell and pull him out and hood him, and Sebastian looks steadfast except that as he reaches the door I hear him start to cry. It's probably not the case that they “storm,” not really. We can see them coming. They walk with purpose, and there are several of them looking muscular in their spiffy uniforms, but while they fling open the door, it is nothing when compared with their earlier entrance through the butler's pantry at Cork. They do not shout. There's no flash grenade, no barging and shoving. Still and all, they do what they do with the ease of long practice and a powerful kinetic energy, an odour of power which hurls us back from Sebastian and allows them to scoop him up as if weightless and carry him away. They do not bring him back. We keep expecting them to, but they don't. They do not bring anyone back, and gradually our warehouse gets quieter and emptier and more afraid.

I find myself talking. Almost everyone else is quiet, and most of them are sitting or leaning, but I cannot stop pacing and my mouth seems to be running by itself. I want to know if this can possibly be lawful, and if it isn't, whether that's better or worse for us. I ask if anyone has any experience with arrest, or any legal training, and Barry (the second unionist) points out that anyone who does might not wish to say so in a detention area which might well be monitored. That stops me asking questions for a while, but inspires me to search for listening devices until Iggy points out that they wouldn't have to be visible. I keep searching, in case they're there and I'm
supposed
to be able to find them, and Iggy starts to tell me to be quiet and sit the fuck down when the men come again. Barry walks towards them, offering his hands, but they ward him off. They step around him and past me, and they draw Iggy firmly out and cover him up, and when he stumbles they drag him along until his feet catch up.

“Not good,” Barry says.

“Why not?”

“Well, if they want us in order, it follows they know who we are, doesn't it?”

And if they know who we are, or think they know, then this is at least not a simple mistake. They believe they have something. Barry shrugs and sits down. Clearly, he says, the ones they take away are simply placed in a separate area of confinement, so that they will not be able to prepare us for what's to come. It'll be fine. May take a bit longer to untangle, but it'll turn out right.

I preferred it when he wasn't worried enough to reassure me, and I wish he weren't shaking so much. I worry that I'm going to die here, disappear for ever. I tell myself this is part of the interrogation. It doesn't help.

The men come back, and the officer's boots are leaving little dark red prints. I hope to God he has walked through a freshly painted road sign, but know that he has not. They take Barry and he gives me a nod and says “Bear up” and this annoys them so they gag him before they hood him. Twenty minutes of eternity later there is canvas sliding roughly over my skin and it smells strongly of someone else's cheap cologne.

Walking hooded is a curious thing. I cannot see, cannot hear properly. The not-soldiers must hold my arms to guide me. I am dependent on them, but they in turn have to take care of me to this small degree. They are in loco parentis, and I am their ward for the journey from where I was to where I am going. The one on my left leans close.
Couple of steps, one, two, all right, stop
. . .
there's a good lad.
He seems genuinely pleased.
Turn around
. . .
now. Sit. There we go
. . .

They put me in a chair. It is uncomfortable, and it is damp. Someone has sweated a great deal in this chair, and possibly more—there is a lingering smell of bleach. They leave the hood on. The guy on the left—he's moved, actually, but it's the same voice—murmurs again:
Now then. You be well-behaved, all right? Much better off that way.
In the background, someone laughs at him and calls him Mr. Nice.
Yes,
he says,
yes, I fucking am.
From which I deduce that there is also a Mr. Nasty. Mr. Nice draws back from my shoulder. The air is just a little cooler without him. I wait.

Then I hear a loud scraping noise. The floor beneath my feet is your standard warehouse concrete, rough and porous, and so I realise that someone has drawn up a chair opposite my own. It is a moderately heavy chair, an office chair without wheels rather than one of those plastic disposable chairs they put in conference centres. The hood is whipped off with disdain for my nose and chin, which suffer minor friction burns, and I am eye to eye with a relaxed, bucolic geezer in a grubby general's jacket who seems to be in charge.

His face is not a surprising face, in the sense that it is big and red and somewhat covered with pale spiky stubble. His eyes are narrow and seem small because they are turned down at the outer corners, as if someone has stitched his eyebrow to his cheek. Part of me recognises this feature as an epicanthic fold, and helpfully supplies the information that it is common in persons of Asian descent, but rare in Europeans (what most Americans call Caucasians despite the fact that the peoples of the Caucasus mountains are a diverse bunch, and certainly not Anglo-Saxon) and sometimes associated with Down's syndrome. Since the man in front of me is clearly and inescapably not Asian, and since it is profoundly unlikely that a person with Down's syndrome could rise to this rank in the services, it seems the general is a minor biological curiosity—but that also is not the cause of the shock I experience on seeing him. I am surprised, even stunned, by the visage of this individual because his name is George Lourdes Copsen, and he is the father of Gonzo's donkey-loving princess bride, Lydia, and I know him and I know that he knows me. I last saw him across the table of a “guess the number of sweeties” stand at the Soames School fete. George Copsen did not guess well. He did not guess at all. Using a pocket calculator, he collated the guesses of the three hundred or so other entrants and produced an answer that was accurate to within the margin of error (i.e., when we came to count them we were unable to prevent one of the first-years from eating between five and ten sweeties). He eyes me with the air of a man who has already been briefed, has seen the file, knows the score, isn't tied to a soggy cushion and who holds a small remote control with a significant red button on it, all of which he is.

“How are ya?” says George Copsen conversationally, and I essay an insouciant nod to demonstrate how much I am in control of the situation despite the fact that I have just been abducted from a dining club by a paramilitary force and strapped to a chair. Unfortunately they have secured my head in some fashion and so I pull some muscles in my neck and look like an idiot. George Copsen grins in a friendly way and suggests I use words, so I tell him I'm fine. Good. A bit nervous, actually, and George Copsen says that I probably should be, but he's going to sort all that out now.

“All you need to do,” George Copsen says, “is tell us who recruited you, and what the cell talked about, and what actions they engaged in, and who the others were.” And he grins again.

Which is a problem for me because I was never actually recruited. I was signed up sight unseen and I was boned by a wild Italianate activist and I fell in love with her for what I now perceive to be less-than-highbrow reasons, but I was not in fact ever a member of anything more radical than a fraternity of windy drinkers and the rather large club of young men who have acquired radical opinions as a way of getting laid. George Copsen produces a file from somewhere out of my field of vision and leans close. He opens the file like a family Bible and proceeds. His voice is filled with reproach, as if I am a new puppy which has peed on his carpet.

“It seems many of you boys and girls of good family were very much influenced by one particular character. Let's call that person
Mr. A,
shall we? Hell of a man.”

Sebastian. Christ. You are so fucked. And they want me to add to it. And what would Gonzo do? Gonzo would never be here. Gonzo is a track and field star, a footballer, a hero to the masses and a lover of profoundly conventional college girls. Gonzo is a free market, entrepreneurial, registered good guy. But Gonzo would never turn on a friend. Not now, not ever, not for any price and not under someone's guns.

“‘
Mr. A
was central to all actions carried out by the cadre at Cork.'” Since when did we have a
cadre
? I'm not even sure what one is. “‘He was a leader to us and a confessor to any who wavered. Without Mr. A, the thing could not have existed.' That's the one called Iggy. What's his real name?”

It's a harmless question. Iggy's clothes still have name tags from his schooldays. “Andrew,” I tell George Copsen.

“Here's your man Quippe: ‘
A
taught us various techniques of subversion ranging from bribery and blackmail to sexual procurement and demolitions.' ”

Quippe has clearly gone to town on fantasy. Mind you, perhaps he was encouraged.

“And then there's this little lady: ‘I was recruited by one of my fellow students. I cannot overstate the power of his convictions or his resolve. In my case the avenue of approach was sexual; he seduced me and effectively addicted me to his physical presence. He inscribed himself upon my opinions at the same time, and introduced me to the club known as Caucus, which as I have already stated is a front organisation for the indoctrination and training of terroristic elements. I feel now that I lived between sexual obsession and physical fear of this man at all times. Thank you for' ”—and here George Copsen's voice is suffused with some emotion which I take to be pity but which might in another setting be hilarity—“ ‘for
rescuing
me.' Sounds like quite a trip.”

Aline, I think, has omitted to tell me that she was once a paramour of Sebastian, or that he exerted such a strong and lasting terror. Except that I have begun to realise that George Copsen is not talking about Sebastian, and this is confirmed when Sebastian's terse, punctuated statement also blames Mr. A for all the world's ills, and it is becoming very apparent that George Copsen is not looking for me to confirm this story, to add to the flames which will burn Mr. A on the pyre. Aline and Iggy and Quippe are describing someone I do not know, someone I have never met until this curious proxy introduction. I am very much afraid, however, that they have dressed me in this bloke's coat and hung me out on the line. George Copsen shows me Aline's signature, flowing and elegant and somehow still wearing handcuffs in bed. And he nods and tells me yes, they all say I am Mr. A.

Even now, Gonzo would not give them up. He would not detail their transgressions, would not recall time and place or accuse them in turn. Gonzo would stand firm and demand a lawyer and his rights and he would
cast his despite
in George Copsen's face. I do my best, which is miserable, and I say that I don't know why they would have said any such thing, although I am bleeding within and only barely refrain from crying.

At this, the general's face goes a little grave and he suggests that I consider my position, so I tell him the whole story from start to finish and he listens attentively and then explains that he was not speaking figuratively. His recommendation was to be taken as a literal instruction. He produces a ladies' powder compact from his eminently male pocket and folds out the mirror, displaying to me between the spots of expensive cosmetic the full profundity of the deep shit into which I have gotten myself.

The sense of smell is deeply associated with memory. Old men, blind and senile in deckchairs on the lawn at Happy Acres, recall lucidly the things which happened to them around cut grass and in the flower beds of youth. This moment imprints on me in reverse, as it were: from the moment of revelation in that little room in Jarndice until this day I cannot smell that particular face powder without choking with fear. It is worn by dowager ladies with stiff manners and powerful personalities, which probably does not help, but I do not see them. Instead, I recall the slow process of putting together a picture from the two-and-three-quarter-inch mirror held in Copsen's hand. George Copsen's hands do not shake particularly, but he isn't a statue either, and so the mirror wobbles. This is not in fact a problem but an advantage; the mirror is too small to show me at one moment the nature of this chamber. My dawning horror relies on a phenomenon called image retention, which is also the basis for cinematic film: the human visual apparatus holds on to scenes for a moment after they are gone. A full representation can be assembled from disparate elements. A sequence of twenty-four slightly different frames becomes a moving image. And thus also I construct my predicament from a scattered series of circular reflections, and I have to concentrate to do it. Perhaps George Copsen knows this, and intends to focus my mind.

The reason this room smells of bleach; the reason the seat is damp and a little slippery; the reason my head is restrained and my hands will not move, is that I am in an execution chamber. I am sitting in an electric chair. A thick trunk of cable runs out like a rat's tail from the wall and connects to the base near my feet. If necessary, enough electricity can be run through this apparatus to set my brain on fire.

Lydia's father is considering whether or not to execute me on the spot, has his finger on the button, and in fact might push it by accident if I were to give him cause to clench his fists or even should he sneeze. This is highly illegal, and no doubt if anyone ever finds out, the general will be in big trouble, but this will (and it is plain that George Copsen follows every point and counterpoint of this debate) matter very little to the smoking, baked long-pig remains of a falsely accused undergraduate without the sense to appreciate when his arse is in a sling and when it is not appropriate to stand on constitutional ceremony.