Angry Words, Empty Voices.

A police custody room, detached and nondescript, a shade after midnight. A single light bulb, harsh and unforgiving. A woman. An illegal. A trespasser on foreign soil. Smuggled in by boat and truck, property of the people traffickers. Lost and alone, found wandering the anonymous back streets of Camden Town, a photograph of a dead husband and the body of a dead baby both abandoned in a Kings Cross bedsit. Hunched over the bare table, head bowed, hands clasped tightly, eyes shut as if in prayer. Slowly her lips begin to move; mouthing formless shapes at the solitary shadows, incomprehensible yet somehow strangely discernable, articulating the voices in her head.

Shush now – there’s no need to cry. It’s all going to be fine, I promise. Listen – the crying has stopped; he’s quietened down because you gave him the strength to sleep forever. Our dear child’s resting in the loving arms of the Lord, his delicate features now light up the face of Heaven like the soft glow of fires in the feuding towns below our village. God needed his angel back – now he has become someone else’s savior. I understand why you had to do it. The sickness had long since faded from his pale face while the hunger that seized his empty stomach waved goodbye for the final time, and the sad tears that misted over his youth have evaporated and condensed like cool droplets on a summers day. Your love could never reach his tiny heart – he was a tired little boy who needed security, comfort, and hope in this unjust world that harshly refused him of those few simple pleasures.

I need you to listen as what I have to say concerns us both. I need you to see how truly sorry I am for all that has happened and that I screamed out of pain and not anguish. Not for myself but for you. For us both. I want to apologise for the distress I caused you, but you need to know how much it hurt. Not just the pain of those last few days but the whole of the time. The months I spent inside you listening to your screams and cries as those men, the strangers who always came in the night, used and abused you as you became the object of their animalistic lust, their carnal rage, their primeval desires. I too felt jagged tears as they ripped you inside; their detached indifference and hollow laughter serving only to disguise the callous brutality of their actions, as if the dirty money they handed to your so called guardians somehow legitimized their sickness. I too felt each blow, each laceration, each burn, from the inside out. It is said by some followers of Islam that constant dreams of an unborn baby boy suggest grief and hardship in the future; a life of despair and desperation and here, as I stare out from the other side of life, I cannot help but wonder how this all came to pass. I'm here but I'm not. I see but am unable to touch. I feel but am unable to be felt. I exist in a void.

His death wasn’t your fault. You tried to prepare a life full of stability and hope, but instead it turned around and struck you like one of your many guardians. I’m sorry that I couldn’t be there. If only I’d have known, if only I’d have stayed behind, if only. To think I was slain in my slumber which was brought on by restless hours of worrying, fearing the worst, and the torture of not knowing what state my absent family were in. My apologies will never be enough for all the pain you’ve both suffered. You gave him an escape route, another path and a different journey to uncover. Our dear child’s tears now trickle down from the Heavens and into the rain – will you too allow him to wash the sin away from your tainted mind? The sadness in those long, lonesome nights echoes through your smile; happiness has become an unknown term in your soul’s vocabulary. The bitter tears wept by your heart through those four seasons voice the words your lips were never strong enough to; I could feel every fragment of your anguish and despair. Those dirty animals leered over your abused body while admiring their apparent ‘handiwork’, the word used to define the pain inflicted on you – their souls are condemned to the fires of Hell. You have fallen into the darkness of His ways like a dead leaf in the midst of Autumn, tempted by the Crown of Sin shadowing his head. Pray, my love – find the Lord and He will guide you out of the shadows and into the light. Allow the Sun to shine once more in the wintry world that darkens your daylight hours; beautiful things are thwarted in growth in this cold season. Be brave – I’m here by your side, waiting.

Sometimes I feel like Sisyphus, eternally condemned to keep rolling that heavy boulder uphill. Life must inevitably be lived forwards, though it can only be truly understood looking back. But with our vision cast ahead, we are obliged to make choices even though those very choices may cast our lives to date in an entirely different light. Good moves made now will often be seen in a different light. Was that how it seemed to you – a good move? Were you not taught as a young girl that when in despair our spirits may rise up to ravishing music? Did you not dream of a better life for us both? How I wish I could have been beside you in your hour of need instead of being hidden away, down there between the contingent truths, searching for an identity among the indiscernibles. But when one cannot speak one is obliged to keep silent. But it is within that very silence in which I now reside. I called out to you, begged you to notice, implored you to listen. But you cast me aside in my hour of need. Shook the very life out of me. Was I really the demon those witch doctor’s talk about, the one who needed to be placated? Or was I nothing more than a psilocybin, a persisting perception disorder, running down a dream on the law of diminishing returns? I ask you this not out of morbid curiosity, but from a burning sense of injustice. You carried me across continents, brought me to this place of bright lights, and then abandoned me to the darkness. None of us are innocent, but you alone are guilty.

You’re wrong. Your mother tried to redeem you, Moses; she gave everything she had in order to protect you, to save you from a life full of misery. She thought you would grow into a man worthy of a title and rescue those who are suffering, but this world refused her dreams like they were ridden with disease, abolishing any trace of hope. That woman fought against all types of war that divided her mind and body and yet she still continued to battle when all the light had long since faded from her smile. You look through the eyes of resentment, tortured by the need to know why; the Lord openly embraces your soul and offers the warmth of a better place, but you are quick to refuse it. The wounds that scar your innocence bleed the tears your heart cannot cry. Point the accusing finger of blame at me as well as her; guilt lays in both our hands as together we were the ones who brought you into this world. How can her love be questioned when the sacrifices she made darkened her beliefs? She wanted you and she needed you. Why do you taunt her now? You speak of these injustices handed to you on a silver platter yet you have escaped, but still the shadows of the past cast your mind into eternal darkness. The Devil implants His hatred into your mouth and fuels the anger in your words. Forgiveness is the true path of death and one which inevitably has to be accepted. Silence is the music of freedom; she set you free, my child.

You call me Moses – he who was marked for immortality, abandoned yet saved. But was I not saved then abandoned? My world is one of complicated shadows; of shapes and patterns, of strange sensations like no others. There are outlines and outskirts, but no substance. Indescribable, inconsequential, inescapable. A stifling physical presence that holds me down with invisible hands and seems to squeeze the very breath out of me, as though I am being crushed by some misanthropic phantom. I listen to your words. Empty. Hollow. You talk like a traffic jam – loud, urgent, intense, but ultimately going nowhere. You call yourself Father and speak of The Lord as if somehow that will make everything right. But how easily you forget whose side of that so-called Holy War you were fighting on. You were a renegade, a mercenary, a gun for hire, fighting for the money but not the cause, prepared to kill for your own enrichment. Working for the Yankee dollar. But where did it get you in the end? Just one more dead baby in a world full of grinning corpses.

Money couldn’t fill the hollowness inside. You seem to forget the reason for my absence and disregard the moments I lost when I signed that death warrant. Did you really believe it was choice I made? A gun was forced upon my conscience in the same way that the words of Jesus taunted Peter’s guilt; we refute the fate that we will inevitably receive. You talk so freely of abandonment, yet I see a woman who suffers more now than she did before. Free will is something given to those fortunate enough to have choices; your mother was never free. We are taught throughout our lives the difference between right and wrong, and yet the evil committed is spoken and heeded more than the actions of the good. The sixth commandment states that no man should kill, yet are we not all guilty of this sin? Time is throttled by our very hands, relationships butchered by our sharp tongues, love slain by our meaningless actions. My words are little more than sounds to you; you’re hearing, but not listening; you’re grasping the point, but are unable to comprehend. Why do you fight this love that surrounds you?

You speak in terms of memories and hopes, but how can I possibly have those with no past to embrace and no future to anticipate? Time is an illusion and eternity solves nothing. The ‘woman’ you speak of was little more than an empty vessel, a human container carrying your tainted cargo. I think of Wittgenstein and ask myself; is a riddle solved by the fact that I survive forever, or is this eternal life no less enigmatic as our present one? What, if in reality, your whole life has been wrong? Consider that while you spout your meaningless platitudes. I know you hear me because I’m speaking, as you are, through her head. There is no God, just as there is no Devil. Only light and darkness and you, my so-called father, who condemned me through hypothetical consent to a short and brutal existence. For exist is all I ever did, like squeezing out sparks through a clenched fist – one tiny flicker and then they’re gone. I too flickered, only to burn. Now I am dust. We may be speaking from different sides of a vast emptiness, but you and I have more in common than we may care to admit. Remember…we are the dead.

A mercenary, that’s all I was – in it for the money as they say. People change and life moves on; time doesn’t stop ticking because we’re stuck in a ‘void’. We’re talking, but we’re not; we’re screaming pieces of sound, but we can’t be heard; we’re living through her head, but we’re dead. Lost in a world devoid of time. Gone. Vanished. Alone.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum. Look at her, sitting there alone. Can you not feel her emptiness? Taste those bitter tears. Now look at us – screaming angry words at each other across infinity, using her mind as a conduit in order to transmit our cruel and unusual punishment. We laugh in each other’s faces while she teeters on the edge of madness. What have we become, you and I? We’re one and the same. There is nothing to distinguish the truth from the lies. I love and despise you in equal measures. You are me and I am you and we are one together…

A woman alone in a police custody room, silent tears streaming down her pain-ridden face. Behind the glass a pair of eyes watch the proceedings with the barest flicker of interest. It’s a routine report on a routine case. Just another crazy lost in an unforgiving world.