Storytelling

There's a TV up on the wall, high up on the wall, mounted on a black metal arm, the way they are in hospital rooms and cheap hotels. The screen is small and curved with a thick plastic rim, red LEDs glow in the rim beneath the screen. None of us have the remote but the channel keeps changing, silent zap of the channel changing and the image changing and the two loud soundtracks jammed together. It's always the same shit though, reality shows, adverts, celebrity news.

Doctor Greene looks around the table and says, "Well it looks like we've got some time on our hands. Lots of time in fact. And nothing passes time like telling stories. So how about we all tell each other the story of how we came to be here?"

He asks it like a question but it isn't a question. He has this way of leaning forward when he speaks, leaning forward and staring you right in the eyes. It reminds me of a poker match I once saw on TV, a pro-poker final, the guy who won always locked on to his opponents eyes before he played, gauging their intentions. Doctor Greene looks all round the table — I get my turn too — but no-one says anything, no-one wants to show their hand.

Finally the middle-aged, middle-eastern looking woman whose voice I have not yet heard says, "I will explain. I will tell you the story of how I came to be here. And I promise you, I hope I will never have such a story to tell again."

"Five years ago my husband and I were due to travel to the city of our birth. We were to fly out late in the evening, arriving early the next day. We had packed our suitcases and were just about to leave our apartment. Please do not think I am exaggerating when I say that we were just about to leave our apartment when my husband received a phone call that would change our lives forever. Forever."

Her voice is quiet and graceful and calm. At first I wonder how I can hear it over the stitched-up jabber of the TV. Then I realise I can hear her because she is calm, the way a white sheet stands out on a line of multicoloured wash.

"When my husband put the phone down his face was quite pale. Quite pale. He said he did not know who the caller was, that he spoke our native tongue but his voice was muffled and his accent was thick. He told my husband they were to meet that night, at ten o'clock that very night, in the concourse of the central train station. I told my husband it was impossible. We would not be able to catch our flight if he met this man, the meeting would have to be delayed until our return. He simply looked at me and told me that this could not be done. It could not be done."

She pauses for a sip from the glass in front of her. It is only when I look at the water in the glass and see the level of it shaking and clouding that I remember we are on a boat. The throb of the motor, the queasy smell of sea and fuel, the white walls rising and falling.

"Of course I argued with him. I told him that whoever was making him do this had no right to, that it was immoral to force us to miss our flight and our reunion with our families. But the mention of rights and morals just seemed to make him smile. And when I suggested we call the authorities he laughed out loud. He actually laughed out loud."

"He went to the train station and when he got back he told me not to unpack our bags. We were still flying that night, he said, but not to the destination we were expecting. I asked him where we were going and he said he did not know. He would be informed at the airport."

"At this point I became hysterical. I began to shout and tear my hair. We cannot let them do this, I screamed, we cannot let them take control of our lives. But my husband only held me so I could not hurt myself and told me over and over that if we did this thing for them, this one thing, then it would all be finished and we would never hear from them again."

"That was five years ago. Since then our lives have been an endless stream of secret meetings and unexplained assignments. We have travelled everywhere, never to destinations of our choosing. We have assumed so many identities that I sometimes have difficulty remembering my real name. We have been threatened, pursued, imprisoned and released. We have been subjected to interrogations so brutal and humiliating that I do not dare to recall them, not even for a moment. We have travelled in aeroplanes, helicopters, cars and trains, and now, almost five years to the day since that first telephone call, now we are travelling on a boat."

She takes another sip of water and an advert for a sports car comes on the TV. A male voice like growling exhaust says, What's your poison, as the car's sleek lines emerge from black, with the spotlight spreading across the sleek black hull, then the voice says, Veleno, as the car revolves on an unseen pedestal and a logo is seared by light into the bottom of the screen.

Doctor Greene leans forward and says, "That's an awful story, truly awful."

Someone snorts with laughter.

"But tell me," he continues, "Where's your husband now?"

The middle-eastern woman looks down at the table. I see now that she is quite beautiful, the downward sweep of her lashes, the graceful curve of her cheekbones beneath her skin. I see now that she is quite beautiful, and must have been far more beautiful when she was young, and in all those years of beauty and youth I see a sadness as soft and shocking as a freezing mist, and I do not want to see any more, I only want to warm her pain, her cold numb pain.

"My husband is no longer alive," she says, when she finally looks up. "My husband is dead and I am in the power of the organisation who manipulated and murdered him. They will not let me go. I know too much for them to let me go."

"Sounds like they've really got you under the cosh," says Doctor Greene, and the snort of laughter comes again. "I bet if you breathed a word of that to anyone they'd do you in."

The middle-eastern woman holds his stare.

"Yes. That is correct."

"So how come you just told us?"

The laughter becomes more general and the channel switches to a reality show where one contestant is bouncing on a pogostick while the rest cheer him on. The volume is higher than it was before and when she speaks her voice must swim against two currents, the choppy froth of the reality show and the deep and dangerous swell of laughter.

"I do not need to justify myself to you. After all the pain I have been subjected to, I do not fear your judgement and I do not need to justify myself to you."

Doctor Greene says nothing.

"Let me ask you this Professor Greene: do you know how it feels to be dehumanised? To be used as a pawn in someone else's game, with no respect for your feelings or your pain? Do you know how it feels to lose the love that you hoped would endure your entire life, to be left all alone against a foe so vast that a single person can no more oppose it than they can oppose the influx of the sea?"

The contestant on the reality show falls off the pogostick. He picks it up and throws it across the garden, shouting at the other contestants, saying who gives a ---- about a ----ing pogostick, and Doctor Greene doesn't speak and no-one speaks around the table except the middle-eastern woman who says, "Well I do. I know how it feels and I know how it hurts, believe me I know how much it hurts…" but now her voice has lost its calm, it has gone loud and raw and shrill, and I can no longer hear her through the TV, all I can hear are the contestants arguing about who's next on the pogostick, and it seems like a dream I have had many times before, or like a sequence in a movie I am not really watching, when the metal door opens at the top of the stairs and the black-clad guards step inside, when their boots clatter down the metal steps and they wait for the middle-eastern woman to rise from the table, when she stands and bows goodbye to us as formally as to a head of state and follows them up the steps with her posture perfectly straight and with no effort to stem the tears flowing down her face.

When the door closes the man who snorted says "Guess it wasn't a happy ending."

People laugh quietly and shake their heads as if the laughter is a fly that has landed in their hair.

"Everyone likes a happy ending don't they?" says Doctor Greene.

The boat ploughs through the halftamed sea and the hull lifts and falls and the floor lifts and falls and we ask ourselves, am I happy, am I winning, am I happy, am I through?

"It's been quite a cruise," says the man who snorted, "quite a cruise. I knew it was gonna be wild but man, I didn’t think it would be anything like this. When I rolled into port in the back of that convertible with my guitar in my lap and the wind in my hair I said, wow, this is gonna be a trip. These two chicks picked me up on the edge of town. One of them asked where I was going and I said anywhere you want honey, anywhere you want."

"So they drove me down to the ocean, burning round those hairpins like they was being chased by all the demons in hell, or like the demons had already caught them and set their asses on fire and the sea was the only thing big enough to put it out. And I was playing my guitar the whole damn time. The sun falling into the car and the shadows of the trees overhead and that smell of heated up pines and man, I was making music all the time."

An advert comes on the TV, a black-and-white ad with a black man and a white man riding horses through the desert. It's an advert for jeans, but neither of them are wearing jeans or anything else and even their horses aren't wearing saddles. They ride bareback and bare-assed over the desert that doesn't even look like a desert, just a drift of sand on a studio floor. The black man hollers and digs his heels into his horse and the white man loops an imaginary lasso over his head, muscles swimming up and down his side. Then the black man's horse begins to gallop and he pretends to draw a gun, two fingers fused against the white desert sky; he pretends to shoot and the recoil of his fingers and the tremor of muscle down his back are almost in synch with the two soft gunshots that come from outside.

"Bam bam," says the man who snorted, "Who's there? Who's fucking there?"

He laughs like a teenager stealing a car and says, "So I was sitting in the back with my guitar all unplugged just picking and sliding with the world going by and you couldn't hear nothing over the wind, 'cept I could, I can hear it all, I don't even have to touch my guitar, the music comes alive in my head. Anyways it must have been good 'cause when the chicks pulled over at a place to dig the view one of them said to me, 'you sure can play the guitar', and the other said, 'how about you play something just for us?' Well they got in the back, one on the seat beside me and one down in front of me, and I don't need to tell you the sky was burning purple and red and all the pine trees were on fire and that blue blue sea way below, man, that was bubbling and boiling like a witch's brew, shit, whole thing damn near bubbled away, fishes flipping and flapping on the ocean floor just like my hands was flapping round the fret, 'cause I never stopped playing man, I never stopped."

He pushes his hair back from his eyes and throws a big bright smile around the table. A smile is a hug made of thoughts and light, moments and light. I want him to hold me with his smile and I want to hold him with mine, I want the car to stop revving and the flames to go out, I want the big bright smile beaming with praise and the curly hair ruffled with praise and the innocent lies of a little boy.

He pushes his hair back from his eyes and says, "But the real fun started when I hit the ferry. God damn, can't have been ten minutes before this chick caught my eye. She was up on deck, sunning herself on a lounger and oh my my, oh my momma, all licked up with lotion, just her thong still on, lying on her front with her titties crushed under and them smooth brown curves rising and falling like the landscape of Mars. Hell that's what I said to her, when she turned her head and asked can I oil her back, eyes all hidden under shades, I said good god damn you gonna take me to Mars and I don't think I'm ever gonna want to come back."

"So my hand's going up and down her back, taking rides along her thighs, and I don't need to tell you the music was in me like dreams in the night, way I was touching her, it was like her body was a grand piano, scales and arpeggios up and down her spine, glissandos round the sides. I guess she was digging it too 'cause pretty soon she says, 'I have a cabin down below. Care to join me?'"

A man is undressing a woman on the TV. She tries to stop him, or pretends to try, until he rips open her blouse and she hisses, What about Juan-Carlos?

"Well we got off that deck pretty quick, through one of them metal doors and down the steps. She's holding my hand down them echoey steps and I'm thinking, where you taking me honey, where you taking me?"

The woman on TV is naked apart from her heels; the man has taken off his tie. He pushes her onto her knees and as she undoes his belt her face is a sofa-lipped pantomime of fury and lust.

"Well we keep going down and it keeps getting darker and she says 'almost there', that sweet summer voice bouncing off the walls. I don't know how she could even see, it was so goddamn dark, if she wasn't holding my hand I swear I'd of been scared as a little boy, a little fucking boy."

When the man is done with the woman's mouth he helps her to her stiletto'd feet and bends her over a desk. You bastard, she hisses, lifting one knee onto the desk.

"We stop on the stairs, some kind of break in the stairs, and I can't see shit, just the sweet warm feel of her hand in mine and she says, 'so how do you like my cabin?' I'm like what the fuck? but she doesn't answer, she just stands there holding my hand and I start to dig it, she ain't even got a cabin, she just got her hand and her heart and that rhythm coming through her skin and that's all she needs, that's all she needs, she's like, wow, electric!"

The desk rocks, the woman moans, flesh trembles around globular breasts.

"So we're standing on the stairs and all these shapes and colours start throbbing up from our hands, spirals and stars and all kinds of fucked up shit pulsating out of our hands, and sounds too, man, the shapes are the sounds if you can dig that shit, and it all starts pooling together in my head, it's like a symphony, a multicolour motherfucking symphony inside my head."

The TV switches to a weather report.

"A lot goes on in your head, doesn't it?" says Doctor Greene.

"What did you say?" says the man who snorted.

"I said a lot goes on in your head."

"What the fuck's that supposed to mean? Think I'm making this shit up? Think my life never happened to me?"

Doctor Greene says nothing.

"You listen to me Mister Greene. You think you're pretty fucking smart don't you? But you don't know shit. You never heard the music in your goddamn life. You never felt it burn inside you" — he rises to his feet, shouting — "The whole lot of you, nothing but a bunch of grey little fucks. If you could hear what I've heard, if any motherfucking one of you could hear what I've heard…"

He continues to shout as the door opens at the top of the stairs and the guards' boots come clanking down and the weathergirl smiles at the round yellow suns on the green and blue map.

"Far out," says Doctor Greene, when the door shuts again. "Burning trees and boiling oceans. Reminded me of the book of revelations."

He sits back with his hands behind his head.

"So who's next? Whose extraordinary story will entertain us now?"

His gaze travels around the table. People squirm like kids who don't know the answer at school. When my turn comes a turbulence I did not expect wells up inside me. My mouth goes dry, my heart pounds, my head fills with ridiculous words.

Doctor Greene smiles.

"I think we have a candidate."

I try to sidestep with a puzzled face — who, me? — but it doesn't work. He can see straight through me.

I glance at the television, hoping for relief. It switches off.

"I…" I say, and the whole table turns to me.

I look down to gather my thoughts. I can still refuse, Doctor Greene is not a torturer who can make me talk. No-one can make me talk. But I have to tell my story. I have to have that moment when the spotlight falls on me, when everyone else fades to black and I am all alone in the blazing cone of light.

"I was born…" I say.

I close my eyes. I do this both to assemble my words without distraction and to let them know that I am searching deep inside myself, that my story will be heartfelt and profound. I sense they will wait for me, sucked in by the vacuum of my pause. But what will I say? This is my chance to draw a shining thread from the tangle of my life, to make something beautiful and clear out of all that awful confusion. And it's more than that. It's my chance to be reborn, to become the image my story will project, to fill with flesh and blood the perfect line my words will sweep behind them.

"I was born…" I repeat, opening my eyes.

I scan the faces around the table. They look afraid. They are afraid, that their stories will be dull, their lives will be tasted and thrown away. They fear my silence, the drama of my few words. They know that for one to succeed the rest must fail. And I do not want to hurt them. I want the glory of their praise, the glamour of their envy, but I do not want their pain. The beasts at war inside me are changing shape. Still brutal, clawed and fanged, they are no longer the golden hunted bird and the many-headed ogre. They are two apes, small and black, who screech and crash through the woods and bare their teeth with the same cruel fear.

Outside, something heavy hits the water.

"And I have lived…" I say, rising to my feet.

My chair topples backwards. The boat sways beneath me. My heart throbs for battle, but not the battle I expected. This is how it is, how it always is. My enemy is not the one who came to kill me. She is the one who promised to protect me. I must tell the story that will end her story, end her life, face down on the beautiful ocean with a belly full of gas and lungs full of brine. When crabs eat her eyes, when her flesh drifts off in chunks, when her bones crumble into sand, then I'll be free.

"We're waiting for the punchline," says Doctor Greene.

"And I will die!" I scream across the table.

I don't even wait for the guards. I walk up the steps to the open door where they are standing without looking back. I am surprised by how gently they guide me onto the deck. Outside the sun is blinding, the air is slick with salt. The guards hold me on either side, one hand on either arm. They steer me across the deck. People are smiling, a lady holds her hat against the breeze, a small dog yaps and runs around. The guards walk on either side of me, holding my arms, I feel them pull one after the other, left then right then left then right. They lead me past a family eating ice creams, a girl lying on a sunlounger, an old couple holding hands, a young man with a guitar case slung across his shoulder. They make me sway, left then right, left then right. They take me to the railings at the back of the deck where an Arabic-looking woman is trying not to be sick and her husband has his arm around her. I hold the railings and they make me sway, left then right, left then right. A grey-haired man breaks off from staring at the sea to turn to me and smile. I gaze at the wake spreading behind us, the water we are leaving behind. I think about the people I have met and will not meet again, the stories they have told me, I think about the water, the sea, the water, the sea.