Four corners

06Apr08

This is where you have been.

Four white-washed corners of despair. One perfectly round hole set into the thick cast iron door. Sporadic flashes of eye at the hole from day number one. They are watching. You. Day number two. Press yourself into a corner. You think it is the least conspicuous of the four. You think the eye doesn’t catch this corner. Grace, you think, Grace, arms wrapped across yourself. Eyelashes brushing forearms, elbows pushed into the empty cavity of stomach; you make yourself very small.

Day number ten. You realise it gets you anyway. You are as naked in corner one as you are in corners two, three, four. You wonder how many more eyes you will see. So next time it appears - silently, without warning - it finds you waiting with your eye looking right back from the other side of that cast iron door. Remembering the four insurmountable inches between your eye and the other is what stops you from blinking. One green iris, speckled gold. Day number ten. This green eye pulls away first. Slide down into corner three, you sit on your heels. Triumph.

Day 50. They watch you around the clock. Obtrusive yet silent. They’ve laid down a strip of carpet. It runs from the the top of the spiral staircase, past one-oh-one. One-oh-two, one-oh-three, one-oh-four. Right past one-oh-ten. Outside every door, holding corners of white-washed despair identical to these four of yours, this cushioned circuit deadens the heavy footfalls of boots. Grace, you whisper into the enveloping frozen darkness, horizontal, as tense as the stiff board under your back. No longer so sure you believe in the worth of chasing independence, when racing towards it leads you further and further away, like childhood nightmares of stumbling backwards into the arms of a cut-throat despite your legs running you away.

Day unknown. You have stopped counting days and old floorboard stains from before. The hands belonging to the green eyes push a metre of rope through a small, rectangular hatch in the wall. It lands at your feet. Untwist the separate strands and pass out three crimped parts of a whole, wait for the next metre and repeat.

1:30 am. Green eyes don’t stop at the hole in the door. It takes the rattle of a key to shatter the illusion of insurmountable obstacle slash safeguard. Green eyes come right on in. Green eyes on yours, which, from your seat in corner four, rest eye level with a crotch. Green eyes heavy with disgust, green eyes pulling your puppet strings to your feet. He ties your hands together and leads you - clanking, blinking, stumbling - along the carpet and down spiral steps - pushing pulling at every single part of you, and every follicle cries out, every breath you draw in stabs at your chest, every step chafes the skin on your wrists.

1:32 am. A room six times the size of yours. One altar. Ten lit candles. Four corners, white-washed. Green eyes hurls you into the centre of the room, shouts here, MacCarthy!, as if he’s playing catch and you’re the ball. Grace. Grace a little reminder of your old freedom to chase independence. Grace, you choke. The two of you are surrounded by twenty fixed bayonets and uniformed men, twenty challenges playing in brown and blue and green eyes. Grace clasps a ring in her left hand, thumb strangling four long fingers. When your turn comes, the words I do fall from your mouth and a second later green eyes has you by your upper arm, squeezing five fingertip bruises into you. Ten minutes, he says, pulls out his wrist watch and flings the two of you back into your own four corners.

Too much to say, you listen to ten minutes passing and touch fingertips. You watch her memorise the new angles of your face.

2:00 am. And this is where you are now
bare feet on cobbles
khaki fabric pulled across eyes so tight not even a thin sliver of cobbles is left you
wrists rubbed raw with the rope they will push at the next man breathing in your trapped air
back pressed into the wall they throw you against
and somewhere, you don’t see them, twenty men with fixed bayonets
one of them has green eyes
Stand there, he says, and after this there is a silence as twenty men take aim
and Grace is waiting for the sound they make as they shoot,
and you fall,
head hitting cobbles (the second sound Grace waits for)
the ring from her clasped hand now in yours.

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