Here's a thousand words dreamt on the train and then written in Starbucks:
Betrayal
He had seemed like a god to us when we had started work there, or so we had joked when we had come to know the man better. A brilliant mind and a supreme knowledge of human strengths and frailties, wrapped up in someone who seemed only to speak when he had something important to say.
That was twenty years before, and now he couldn’t stop talking. I had heard from one of our group that he has dangerously ill, confined to a side ward in the city’s hospital. Naturally I went to him. I hadn’t seen him for fifteen years, not since he had left for Britain ahead of the bloody tidal wave that had washed over our country.
A silent nurse ushered me through to his room, which seemed full of sound. His voice, rich and strong as it had ever been, was telling a story. There, motionless except for the movement of his lips, the gentle rise and fall of his chest and – almost imperceptibly – the feverish fluttering of his eyelids and lips, were the ruins of my beloved friend. I was shocked by his lips. They were dry, cracked and seeping blood that trickled into his constantly moving mouth. I turned to look at the nurse, who now broke her silence. “I know, but he begged us to leave them be.”
She left me to sit with him. And as I listened to the almost impossibly fast speech emanating from my friend, I realised that he was telling his own life. The nurse explained afterwards that it had begun as his other faculties had started to fail him. The doctors had been baffled by his sudden deterioration, but tissue samples had shown that he was dying. In the land to which he’d fled for safety, my friend had contracted a further variant of the variant of the disease that they’d fed to their own livestock. And now his brain was rapidly erasing itself. First his motor functions had gone – all but those that sustained life and allowed him to talk. And talk is all he had done for a fortnight. A full voice when awake, a quiet whisper even when he briefly slept.
They’d moved him to this side room to give his fellow patients respite from his endlessly detailed autobiography. Now the staff were simply waiting for the disease to suffocate him. But it would not, it seemed, until he had finished. And that was why I came, day after day, to sit by his bed and listen to his words. Because at some point I knew that the story would turn to us. Words that were better left unsaid would undo the lives that we’d built. I couldn’t let that happen.
The facts are known: there is no need to repeat them here. Fifteen years before, in the crackle of radios, on the corners of streets and in houses next to our own, a hatred had grown and erupted into a killing time. I and my friends found ourselves, unwillingly, on the side of the killers, marked out by our blood. He, alone in our group, was on the side of the victims. The friends and family whose lives he was now re-telling alongside his own in that quiet room had been swept into unmarked graves. Their identities had been erased by a nation’s single act of forgetfulness: we had forgotten for a terrible moment that we were brothers and sisters. We, this small group of his friends, had realised the threat, and had hidden him in our houses, moving him whenever the bloody wave threatened to catch up with him.
He had spoken to us decisively. This was a forest fire, he said, that would not end until it had spent all the human fuel it could find. We would have to fight fire with something even more powerful. Just as you create breaks by razing belts of trees around a fire, he told us, so we should act speedily and brutally to remove those who were stoking this violence. So we who were numbered among the killers now plotted to kill a number of them. One by one, through car bombs, side-street executions and domestic shootings, we severed the heads of this insanity. Slowly the flames subsided. We rebuilt our lives and hid any signs of our complicity in these necessary killings. And we smuggled our friend to safety and exile in Britain.
Now, more than a decade later, he was nearing the point at which he would betray us. If he did so in his whispered sleep, or alone and unnoticed, we might be safe. If, however, a nurse, a doctor or an orderly overheard our names and our actions, we would become known. This was no police state and the police were far from all-seeing. But the press was hungry and paid well, far better than the hospital wages or doctors’ salaries. Truth and reconciliation had their limits and on those borders waited the angry families of those we’d killed. They would have their revenge and, worst of all, might re-ignite the still warm remains of conflict.
“Help me.” For a moment I missed the message. “Help me,” he said again, hardly pausing from his story. His eyes momentarily caught mine and told me all I needed to know. “Help me,” he said a third and final time. I stayed until the nurse came to see me and then I went home to plan.
The next morning his story had reached the outskirts of our conspiracy and I knew that I had to act quickly. Alone with him, I leant over his face and kissed his swollen, sore and bleeding lips. In my attempts to soothe their pain with my wet mouth, his blood mingled with my saliva. My lips lingered at his and then I moved to rest my head on his forehead. Slipping my hand under his frail neck, I paused for a moment. His beautiful, midnight-black skin was soft against mine. His words were now no more than a background murmur in his sleep. I loved him now as much as I had loved the tall, strong man who had led us fifteen years before. And with a sharp movement with my hand, I snapped his neck. His memories were at once silenced. “Forgive me,” one of us said, then all was quiet.
He had seemed like a god to us when we had started work there, or so we had joked when we had come to know the man better. A brilliant mind and a supreme knowledge of human strengths and frailties, wrapped up in someone who seemed only to speak when he had something important to say.
That was twenty years before, and now he couldn’t stop talking. I had heard from one of our group that he has dangerously ill, confined to a side ward in the city’s hospital. Naturally I went to him. I hadn’t seen him for fifteen years, not since he had left for Britain ahead of the bloody tidal wave that had washed over our country.
A silent nurse ushered me through to his room, which seemed full of sound. His voice, rich and strong as it had ever been, was telling a story. There, motionless except for the movement of his lips, the gentle rise and fall of his chest and – almost imperceptibly – the feverish fluttering of his eyelids and lips, were the ruins of my beloved friend. I was shocked by his lips. They were dry, cracked and seeping blood that trickled into his constantly moving mouth. I turned to look at the nurse, who now broke her silence. “I know, but he begged us to leave them be.”
She left me to sit with him. And as I listened to the almost impossibly fast speech emanating from my friend, I realised that he was telling his own life. The nurse explained afterwards that it had begun as his other faculties had started to fail him. The doctors had been baffled by his sudden deterioration, but tissue samples had shown that he was dying. In the land to which he’d fled for safety, my friend had contracted a further variant of the variant of the disease that they’d fed to their own livestock. And now his brain was rapidly erasing itself. First his motor functions had gone – all but those that sustained life and allowed him to talk. And talk is all he had done for a fortnight. A full voice when awake, a quiet whisper even when he briefly slept.
They’d moved him to this side room to give his fellow patients respite from his endlessly detailed autobiography. Now the staff were simply waiting for the disease to suffocate him. But it would not, it seemed, until he had finished. And that was why I came, day after day, to sit by his bed and listen to his words. Because at some point I knew that the story would turn to us. Words that were better left unsaid would undo the lives that we’d built. I couldn’t let that happen.
The facts are known: there is no need to repeat them here. Fifteen years before, in the crackle of radios, on the corners of streets and in houses next to our own, a hatred had grown and erupted into a killing time. I and my friends found ourselves, unwillingly, on the side of the killers, marked out by our blood. He, alone in our group, was on the side of the victims. The friends and family whose lives he was now re-telling alongside his own in that quiet room had been swept into unmarked graves. Their identities had been erased by a nation’s single act of forgetfulness: we had forgotten for a terrible moment that we were brothers and sisters. We, this small group of his friends, had realised the threat, and had hidden him in our houses, moving him whenever the bloody wave threatened to catch up with him.
He had spoken to us decisively. This was a forest fire, he said, that would not end until it had spent all the human fuel it could find. We would have to fight fire with something even more powerful. Just as you create breaks by razing belts of trees around a fire, he told us, so we should act speedily and brutally to remove those who were stoking this violence. So we who were numbered among the killers now plotted to kill a number of them. One by one, through car bombs, side-street executions and domestic shootings, we severed the heads of this insanity. Slowly the flames subsided. We rebuilt our lives and hid any signs of our complicity in these necessary killings. And we smuggled our friend to safety and exile in Britain.
Now, more than a decade later, he was nearing the point at which he would betray us. If he did so in his whispered sleep, or alone and unnoticed, we might be safe. If, however, a nurse, a doctor or an orderly overheard our names and our actions, we would become known. This was no police state and the police were far from all-seeing. But the press was hungry and paid well, far better than the hospital wages or doctors’ salaries. Truth and reconciliation had their limits and on those borders waited the angry families of those we’d killed. They would have their revenge and, worst of all, might re-ignite the still warm remains of conflict.
“Help me.” For a moment I missed the message. “Help me,” he said again, hardly pausing from his story. His eyes momentarily caught mine and told me all I needed to know. “Help me,” he said a third and final time. I stayed until the nurse came to see me and then I went home to plan.
The next morning his story had reached the outskirts of our conspiracy and I knew that I had to act quickly. Alone with him, I leant over his face and kissed his swollen, sore and bleeding lips. In my attempts to soothe their pain with my wet mouth, his blood mingled with my saliva. My lips lingered at his and then I moved to rest my head on his forehead. Slipping my hand under his frail neck, I paused for a moment. His beautiful, midnight-black skin was soft against mine. His words were now no more than a background murmur in his sleep. I loved him now as much as I had loved the tall, strong man who had led us fifteen years before. And with a sharp movement with my hand, I snapped his neck. His memories were at once silenced. “Forgive me,” one of us said, then all was quiet.
