Never Apologise, Never Explain - James Craig [44]
The first time he was tortured, Pettigrew shat himself almost before the cattle prod tickled his balls. His interrogators laughed and then made him eat it. They laughed even more when he immediately vomited the shit back up. They told him to eat it again. He tried, but this time he could not even manage to get it into his mouth. After some curses and some punches, they hosed him down.
More electric shocks, this time to the anus. He started shitting blood, bright crimson splashes on the floor rapidly darkening in the heat. That caused more hilarity. They hosed him down again. By now he welcomed the water jet. If nothing else, he could be clean.
The questioning was random and perfunctory. This was not sophisticated intelligence-gathering, and they were not interested in any answers. They had a lot of people to get through and could only waste so much time on each individual. No one cared about anything he had to say. No one recorded anything. No one took any notes. He was like a fly having its wings pulled off by a bunch of sadistic schoolboys.
It was all a charade. Emotionally, Pettigrew had closed down. He could feel the pain, but he didn’t have any thoughts about it. There was nothing he could say that could make him useful to these people, nothing to hang on to that could fire a determination inside him to live. It wasn’t a question of trying to survive. It was just a question of seeing it through.
Their only question was what do you know?
‘I know nothing,’ he would say, as calmly as possible.
‘What do you know?’
‘I know nothing.’ That was true enough, even in the beginning. By the third or fourth time they asked him, he could barely remember his own name.
They would give him a few slaps, maybe another shock, and ask again.
‘What do you know?’
Slap.
‘I know . . . nothing.’ Pettigrew couldn’t even think straight enough to make something up. Names? By the time that they finally got round to him, who was left? Who could they not have possibly rounded up already?
‘What do you know?’
Slap.
‘Nothing.’
Pettigrew didn’t want to make anything up. He knew that if he started giving them any kind of ‘information’ that it could only prolong things. By now he just wanted it all to be over as quickly as possible.
‘What do you know?’
Slap.
‘What do you know?’
He had nothing more to say. There were no more words. He was on a journey back to a time before language, before words; to a time when all you could do was howl.
After his second torture session, Pettigrew was told that he would immediately be shot because he was a fucking Communist whore – both a traitor to the Church and a traitor to the country.
They blindfolded him and pushed him up against a wall. Someone stepped in front of his face and said softly, ‘It’s over for you. The good priests are coming back now. The ones Allende stopped from teaching; the ones who were banned from hearing confessions; the ones who had to work as taxi drivers to make a living. I mean the priests who defended the Supreme Court and the Constitution of the Republic of Chile and opposed the creation of a Communist state. The ones who love the Church and don’t want to see it destroyed by faggot perverts like you.’
Pettigrew said nothing. All he could think was, It’s finally over.
‘Understand this: the Marxist invasion of the Church is at an end. The theology of liberation is dead.’
He could sense the excitement in his beating breast. Thank you, God.
‘You are dead.’
The voice stepped away and there was silence for five, ten, fifteen seconds. The safety-catch of a pistol was flicked off.
Someone cried, ‘Fire!’
A gull squawked overhead.
He stood there, shaking, refusing to still be alive. It should have been all over by now.