Coming Through Slaughter - Michael Ondaatje [40]
Am going to the pound. McMurray and Jones holding my hands. Breastless woman in blue pyjamas will be there. Muscles in the arms will be there. Tie. Belt. Boots.
They make me love them. They are the arms looking after me. On the second day they came into my room and took off all my clothes and bent me over a table and broke my anus. They gave me a white dress. They know I am a barber and I didn’t tell them I’m a barber. Won’t. Can’t. Boot in my throat, the food has to climb over it and then go down and meet with all their pals in the stomach. Hi sausage. Hi cabbage. Did yuh see that fuckin boot. Yeah I nearly turned round ’n went back on the plate. Who is this guy we’re in anyway?
The sun comes every day. Save the string. I put it in lines across the room. I watched him creep his body through the grilled windows. When the sun touches the first string wham it is 10 o clock. It is 2 o clock when he touches the second. When the shadow of the first string is under the second string it is 4 o clock. When it reaches the door it will soon be dark.
Laughing in my room. As you try to explain me I will spit you, yellow, out of my mouth.
In the summer they were up each day at 4.30. They washed and moved among themselves for an hour and then by 6 they filed in and took forks off the table, ate. At 7 they held the forks above their heads so they could be collected. Meals silent in the mornings and noisy at lunch. That was their only character.
On Monday mornings he cut hair for them. He was never much of a barber but the forms said he was one. So he shaved and cut in a corner of the dining room with an old man who was better than him but who died two years after Bolden arrived. He was asked to train someone new, he didn’t react, but a couple of them learned by watching him. One of the patients, Bertram Lord, came every week and tried to get the scissors off him and each day as the shift ended Bolden held up his arm with the scissors and razor and they were collected and locked away.
Lord, who knew of Bolden’s reputation, was always trying to persuade him to escape. The noise of Lord so constant it was like wallpaper and Bolden could blot himself against it without even having to turn away the meaning of the words, using the noise as a bark around himself.
Till the day of the escape he had never seen Lord do anything more than talk, so that when Lord saw his chance and without hesitation jumped, Bolden was for the first time impressed. Though not having listened to the shadow who had been using his silence as an oracle, he had no idea what Bertram Lord was up to.
Everyone was jumping on the tables to look. It had begun with Antrim who was getting his weekly needle so he would detour his fits, forget to express them. He had begun to argue with Dr Vernon, some ridiculous reason. The doctors had alternated arms with Antrim who was certain that this week it was supposed to be his left arm and Vernon had begun rolling up the right sleeve. Vernon had put down the needle to calm the furious patient when Lord passing the open room had leapt in scooped up the needle and thrown his other arm around the doctor’s neck.
He dragged the doctor down the hall with the needle held inches from the eye, he forced the guards to open the doors. The two guards hesitated and