Guantanamo Boy

by Anna Perera

  How is that possible in two and a half seconds? In the time it takes for Khalid to say his own name?

  Khalid wakes covered in sweat, perspiration running down his neck. The two-and-a-half-second dive is still on his mind. How can anyone plan what they are going to do in that amount of time? Suffering a slight headache, dry mouth, he glances at the air-conditioning unit bolted high on the wall behind him, wondering why the green light is off.

  Now there’s a spider on the grill. Tiny quivering legs climb slowly inside the unit. Perhaps that’s the reason it’s not working. Don’t they check them? What do they do all day, these soldiers?

  He places a sticky hand on his chest and the orange uniform feels wet. Hot pools of sweat are forming on his damp skin.

  With no chance of release from the dense heat, Khalid lies on his side. Keeping as still as possible, he breathes gently to bring his temperature down. Concentrating on each breath until he can bear to reach for the half-empty bottle of water on the floor at the end of the bed.

  Then a peculiar faintness passes over Khalid as he tries to sit up. His head’s worse, hurting badly now. His fingers feel weaker than jelly when he tries to unscrew the tight blue lid from the bottle.

  After a swig of warm water, he senses a metal clamp tightening around his forehead. Forcing him to make a superhuman effort to focus on putting the bottle down without knocking it over. But when Khalid lifts his chin, the gray room swivels round ominously. Rising, swerving, moving in hills across his eyes. Flashing round to nuzzle the back of his head. Then pulsing and pulsing before coming back in a sickly rush.

  Eyes popping, a broken man jumps ogre-like from the gray walls. Reaching for his throat from the pit of a nightmare. Arms wide.

  A booming sound shoots from Khalid’s mouth with a heart-rending roar. Hands tear at his screwed-up face and he bashes the back of his head on the wall. Numbing his brain. The pain is a welcome relief as he thumps and thumps his head, suffering the kind of torment only a prisoner knows. Locked out, not in. Not here, not there. Not human at all. The only reminder he’s real is the ache, the sharp pain, again and again. The moving walls hold whatever’s left—together—for as long as the pain throbs and throbs. But are they walls?

  When the air-conditioning light suddenly twinkles green, the walls fall back to steady the room. Khalid widens his eyes, sweat dripping from every pore. Forehead throbbing. Has he been going mental for minutes and hours or days and weeks? What month is it? Did he hear someone saying “Happy Christmas”? Or did he imagine it? Without a clock or a calendar, he can’t tell. Plus, the ceiling lights—are they getting brighter? Or is he imagining the increasing glare?

  Groaning with pain, he begins flicking through the pages for the passages in the Qur’an he’s come to know well, turning quickly to the blessing of Moses. Hoping to find clues about how to deal with the pain that’s eating away at his guts. The holy book is his only link to outside help of any kind. Praying he’ll learn to become a better person and not the bitter, angry guy he turns into whenever he thinks of his cousin. Tariq’s never far from his mind. All Tariq ever talked about was himself and where he’d been and that stupid game. By the time the dinner trolley comes squeaking down the corridor, Khalid has been driven almost crazy by the memory of how devoted he’d been to his cousin.

  “Yes, cuz. No, cuz. Two bags full, you’re so clever, cuz.” Why didn’t he just tell him to get lost? All those times he’d crept downstairs when everyone was asleep. Nights that Khalid had wasted telling Tariq how brilliant Bomber One was going to be. And it wasn’t, no way, it was just OK. But why, oh why, did Khalid care if Bomber One was going to be great or not? Why did he care so much about how Tariq felt about himself?

  Sickened by the idea of Tariq’s smiling face bearing down on him, to get the thought of Tariq out of his mind, he escapes in other ways too. By the time the trolley stops outside he’s shocked to see perfect tooth marks sharply outlined on his arm. He’s been biting himself. Why the trauma comes out this way, he doesn’t know, but lately it has.

  Khalid doesn’t notice the twinges of pain on his arm because today his fractured mind can only locate the many pictures Tariq had e-mailed of himself. All of them were digital photos of Tariq with his friends pulling mad faces. One with his dad and three brothers, lucky him, grinning at the camera as if everything in their family is perfect.

  For a second, Khalid thinks he hears a car door opening and closing, but it’s only a dinner tray snapping into place.

  Khalid glances at the gristly meat, boiled tomatoes and ball of undercooked rice and goes for the small banana first, before rubbing hard and trying to make the red tooth marks on his arm disappear.

  A sudden surge of energy comes over him now.

  His stomach feels better—yes. His heartbeat’s slower—yes. But the passage in the Qur’an he wants to read is still swimming in front of his eyes. The unchanging words are spinning in groups of three or four. The shapes jump out to confuse him, linked as they are without meaning to his previous, less shadowy brain.

  Spreading white rice with the plastic spoon on the lumps of gray meat to disguise the gristle, Khalid’s half tempted to tip the lot on the floor.

  Fading away into something beyond sleep for an hour or two after he’s eaten, he joins up the dots on the wall to make a giraffe shape with a rabbity ear. Then he eyes the eight gravy marks on the floor to see if the distance between two is smaller or larger than another two. Sometimes he counts the footsteps going up and down the row. Over and over again. Now and then he loses track, often when his fingers settle on the weird ridges of skin between his smallest toes. Is it night-time? Or morning? Did he eat breakfast today? Or did they forget to bring it?

  Waking up to trace the red scratches on his face, Khalid catches sight of the spider speeding to the door and breathes a sigh of relief.

  Perhaps he’s slept too long. Weeks, for all he knows. Only learning it’s early morning when the call to prayer wakes him up. For a while, Khalid imagines daylight breaking outside.

  An unexpected feeling of peace spreads over him at the memory of being outside in the sunshine. Hoping, by concentrating on this, the last of the wooziness in his head will fade away. When did he last go out? He can’t remember.

  But he mustn’t lie here forever . . .

  Grabbing at the walls, Khalid stumbles to the door, banging and kicking. Someone shouts his number: “256!”

  The metal flap’s unlocked, snapping open. Slamming against the wire. Khalid punches the corridor through the beany hole, yelling and swearing.

  Two minutes later, they come for him, attaching the shackles with nifty hands. Khalid raises his bruised head.

  “Thanks!” he says. Feeling a strange pleasure at the sight of ordinary human beings instead of the dark things flowing through his mind. Even though they’re guards, he’s suddenly grateful to them.

  “Get up,” one guard says, shackling him tight. The word “up” takes on a nice meaning that was never intended. And why? Where’s he going now?

  It’s good for Khalid to walk. As he goes down the corridor, he realizes he’s OK. He’s just been hallucinating bad things. Good things too. Knowing the dark dreams, strange fantasies of Niamh and David Beckham, might have damaged his ability to tell what’s real and what’s imagined. But by creating bad feelings, he’s stopped himself from dying inside, and even though they have seen him through the long wait, the pressure on his brain when he wakes up is still too much to bear. That’s why he tries to bang it away on the wall.

  At least I know it now, Khalid thinks to himself, and I’m not going to let them win.

  At the same time, he realizes this awareness might just save his life. He makes an effort to take in his surroundings. Grounding himself by staring at the soldiers’ laced-up black boots—which are highly polished but have dusty creases. Stopping high above the ankles, they look almost girly, those big boots, with those jungly combat trousers that are a bit like the combats Niamh sometimes we
ars.

  Another reason to concentrate on the here and now is because it keeps the demons at bay and might just prevent the nightmares from returning. David Beckham can take a hike. Too much is at stake. Madness, for a start.

  Gray linoleum, Khalid notes, as they reach the end of a long white corridor, past cells so enclosed by wire it’s impossible to make out the faces of the men inside. There are people here a lot worse than me, Khalid realizes, as he sees a man desperately banging the wire with his bleeding head. His fetid wound the size of a cup.

  He’s led outside and his senses are assaulted by the rapid whistling of a nearby bird, dazzling sunshine, countless shadows. He’s almost blinded by the sudden piercing light. He was here a few days ago. Wasn’t he? Heart pounding, Khalid’s led over uneven ground to a wooden shelter. Watching his shadow shuffle along beside him, a whiff of disinfectant hits him, followed by the sound of running water. The smell reminds him of the routine. His shadow overtakes him as they round a corner to arrive at the row of basic showers. Khalid likes the showers now. He hated them at first, but he likes them now.

  Armfuls of shackles and chains just to walk him to the showers? Yeah, Khalid always smiles at that.

  Two prisoners try to hide their nakedness, as they do every time the guards herd them under rusty shower heads that release the thinnest trickle of water. Khalid hurries to undress, used to the routine, while others hide their embarrassment with their faces in the crook of their arm. Doing their best not to look at anyone.

  The birdsong disappears as Khalid throws his head under the cold stream of water. Closing his eyes for a moment to catch the feeling of sunshine on his bare skin. The square of hard soap smells of vanilla ice cream and is pretty useless, but the tingling, refreshing sensation of rubbing his wet face makes Khalid feel alert and clean. Much less like the sweating maniac he was before and more like the kid who once scored two goals in the Rochdale Junior League quarter-finals.

  When Khalid opens his eyes he stares straight into the kindly face of Masud, the necklace-seller from Cairo whom they beat with a pipe and he met in the dark room in Karachi all that time ago.

  But Khalid’s not going there again. Oh no, not right now. Not while he’s enjoying being outside under the shower. No matter how good it feels to imagine Masud in the shower next to him, he knows it might as well be David Beckham.

  “Khalid, you are here? For why?” the vision whispers.

  For why? The words pierce Khalid’s brain for a moment. Prodding it to come up with an answer. But he can’t if he doesn’t know why. Know anything. Especially why the water is calling his name.

  “Khalid. Khalid.” Trickling his name—the water. Am I upside down? About to drown?

  Stumbling forward, Khalid catches his big toe on a stone.

  “Khalid! Take your hands from your face. Look at me. Look.”

  Instantly, Khalid opens his eyes, balancing himself by staring into the man’s face.

  “Masud. It’s really you?” Shocked to recognize his friend from Karachi is actually standing there, cleaning his large ears with a corner of yellow soap.

  “This I’m learning—they’re bringing young people to Guantanamo? I’m not understanding. You can see me now?”

  Nodding, Khalid steadies his breathing, deciding to believe his eyes as he takes in Masud’s gaunt, clean-shaven face. Then he catches sight of the soldiers moving slowly to the end of the row to gossip, thinking the prisoners are too ashamed of communal washing to communicate with each other right now.

  “I’ve been, like, weirding out in my cell,” he tells Masud. “Too much time to think. I was, like, in Kand—Kand—Kandahar, as well.”

  “Kandahar? You?” Masud’s shocked. “Me, they taking me from Karachi to Morocco. Hang me from wall for long time.”

  Khalid turns white as Masud explains how, instead of a pipe, they beat him with a strap attached to a wooden handle. Cracked his ribs. Kept him in an underground room in a shuttered house in the middle of nowhere. How one man held a gun to his chest for an hour and promised to kill him, saying his wife was already dead.

  “That man, you see him.” Masud points to a wiry man being led away. “Him went to Jordan. They have blind him one eye. Americans having many prisons like this all over world.”

  Taking care to hide his shock from a passing guard, Khalid whispers, “How do they get away with it? Where are the police?” Shrinking at the memory of his own abuse. Afraid they’ll come for him again if he talks about the drowning, the sound of his own voice mixed with the noise of the trickling water tips his brain too close to the surface of his other self for Khalid’s liking. For mentioning, yet.

  Wiping water from his big, dark eyes, Masud continues, “This I’m knowing for sure is against the law they set in Geneva. Certainly. No one here has received a trial. They cannot keep a child like you on your own. This is cruel torture. What camp are you?”

  “Delta Skelta.” Khalid gestures to the nearest gray building.

  “They take you for exercise from that camp? What happen your head? Bruises there you have. You arm. You must stop hurting you arm. Stop biting.”

  “I can’t!”

  “Khalid, no do this hurt to yourself. Stop. Ask for lawyers. For help. Shout for paper to write letters,” Masud says quickly before the soldier hurries in their direction after getting suspicious of their friendly gestures.

  Khalid turns his face away and blinks, trying hard to mix his tears with the veil of cold water running down his face.

  “And sign everything. Say, ‘Yes, Bin Laden he very good friend.’ Agree all suggestion. Don’t let this happen, Khalid. Take no pride in holding against threats. Pray, Khalid. Pray and learn. I learning better English. Me practice good,” Masud shouts as they drag him off, dripping wet, to get dressed. “Remember, they will have to account to God for this one day.”

  A soldier forces Khalid to step away from the muddy water to make room for another man, head bowed, clutching a rag to wash himself with.

  That guy needs his toenails cutting, Khalid notices while bending down to pull up the orange suit. But the harsh color suddenly smacks Khalid in the face, too bright in the shimmering sunshine for his sad, crying eyes to absorb. His fingers won’t stop shaking and his body’s trembling and suddenly he can’t breathe.

  I did sign everything, Masud, he thinks, and look where I am now.

  “Did you catch the baseball game on TV last night?” a soldier asks his mate. His gun on Khalid’s every awkward move, until he’s shackled tight.

  And all Khalid can think is, How many seconds did that take?

  18

  EVERY SHRED

  Khalid wakes up one morning to a new sound. The sound of music. Rap music throbbing in his ears. Drowning out the call to prayer. Drowning out the early-morning noises of the base he’s become so familiar with.

  Sparking the memory of the sound of house, techno and hip-hop booming from the old speakers in Nico’s bedroom, black foam pads peeling from the corners. Khalid’s suddenly back there, wide awake. Himself again. Clear in his head for a while. Recalling both of them singing, jumping along to the driving beat, rapping about life in mean streets that were way cooler than Rochdale. Hearts on fire, hands in the air—the delicious smell of fish and chips drifting up from the kitchen. In the ghetto—yeah. Khalid’s just getting into the rapping when it stops. Ending as suddenly as it started. Making him think it’s a trial run for something. An experiment to test the loudspeakers?

  Khalid smiles, remembering a time when Nico wrote a rap of his own called “Hey Leona.” It was rubbish. Nico was a good singer but he had too much confidence. Believing the moment he wrote it he was going to be the best in the world, he even entered a rap battle online, where one of the real rappers said it was the worst thing he’d ever heard in his whole life. And everyone, all the people logged on to the site to hear them battle it out, agreed.

  The next day Nico bought a trumpet in the school jumble sale, even though it had a massive d
ent down one side. But Nico didn’t mind. The rest of them did, though, Khalid especially. Every conversation after that was interrupted by a deafening blast from the old thing.

  Khalid looks again and again at his life, as though he’s searching through an old photo album for the millionth time. Days and weeks pass by with him revisiting incidents and events he hadn’t thought anything of at the time. Always yearning to be back there, pushing the play button on Nico’s CD player, looking at his collection of Star Wars figures on the windowsill, the poster of Eminem on the wall. It hurts so much sometimes it makes him want to end it all.

  He really wishes he’d had a girlfriend. That Niamh had put her arms around him just once. He imagines being married to her and living in a nice big house with a flat-screen TV and music piped into every room. They’d have kids who were brilliant at football and clever as well, and that makes him feel good—for a bit.

  With a sudden bout of pins and needles in his right leg, Khalid sits up, totally cross with himself for not yet being able to talk to girls in the way he should.

  “First look her in the eye,” Tony said. “Then give her a compliment, say something nice—I like your shoes. Girls have a thing about shoes. Say that, or nice coat. Anything you can think of to make her smile. Then lay a hand on her shoulder, know what I mean?” But Khalid finds all this stuff harder than it sounds. Although he likes to give the impression he’s all right with girls, in actual fact he’s just as awkward and lacking in confidence as Holgy, who blushes whenever a girl gives him the once-over.

  Khalid’s mind traces and retraces every reaction to every girl who’s ever looked his way—who’s ever passed him in the street and caused him to turn round. Like the first time he met Niamh in the library last year.

  She joined the school a year ago when she was fourteen, having moved to the area with her family from Ireland. At first everyone sort of ignored her—she was just the new girl and she seemed nice and that, but so what? It was only when the GCSE art students put some of their work up in the library that Khalid became aware of her.