Internment

Internment

I’m not a good man. Weighing my actions, the good against the bad, I probably fall on the wrong side of morality. When I was younger and had more charm than sense, I had a few affairs with married women. I stopped when I saw family portraits, it’s hard to look into the eyes of children whose world will be torn apart if they find out what you were up to.

I’m older now, maybe a little wiser. I still know I’m a bad man. I don’t deserve what happened. No one does. My date certainly didn’t.

 She’s single. Just the kind of woman I should have been with from the start. She has this smile that looks like a dentist’s advert. Her eyes are brown and green and always seem to have the saturation turned up. She has freckles like a leopard has spots. Her hair is rusted fire.

We met at the cinema. We’d just been in the same screening of a horror film that everyone was raving about and as I walked out of the projection theatre behind her I’ll admit I was being less than a gentleman staring at her as she pushed the door open for me. She was just opening the door the way good people do for other people. She wore black jeans and a Chick and Bore-T emblazoned jacket which is an instant high score for me.

 Just as she hit the light of the corridor outside, we both said, “that was shit,” at the exact same time. She turned around and gave me that smile.

The wind didn’t blow, angels didn’t sing, a beam of light didn’t shine down from heaven but I said, “jinx, you owe me a date,” before I had time to think and the smile which had faded for a moment was back with a vengeance.

She nodded, pointing to her mouth, asking if I would un-jinx her.

“If you say yes, you can talk. If not, just leave me here to wallow in what could have been.” As usual I was flirting on autopilot.

She shrugged and walked away. I let out a huge sigh of disappointment until she said, “yes, but you’re buying the first drink.” She waved a hand towards the door, bidding me to run after her. I did.

On the first date I paid for everything. We talked about every book, game, and hologram franchise I love. Rebiya generally agreed or smiled and pretended to. That was for four hours. We had to leave when the restaurant closed. I walked her to her train and watched her go.

That was a few days ago. We’ve been messaging each other all week. She finally got the chance to share her opinions when I didn’t have the chance to spew opinions endlessly without her getting a word in.

I gave her the address to my place. She was only half an hour away on the train. There’s only so much space for our people to live in now. I hoped the police wouldn’t bother her on the way over. Police had been doing more ID checks than ever. I don’t know why they bother, their cameras read body language, temperature, and facial recognition to check our records. It sucks that we have a record whether we’ve done anything or not.

Rebiya made it to my flat without too much bother. We sat at my tiny table in my tiny kitchen waiting for the oven come microwave to finish baking my homemade lasagne. The whole place is only just bigger than my arm span. I have posters on the cabinets to cheer it up a little and a hologram projector between the light and the smoke detector on the ceiling.

She’d dressed up. A nice dress that showed off how much of a woman she is. I was more nervous than I usually am. Usually I’m only thinking about misbehaving, and usually with someone who isn’t single. Rebiya was the kind of girl I dreamed about but assumed wasn’t real or that I’d never meet one. She knew what I was talking about and wasn’t comparing me to some absent husband or boyfriend.

The lasagne wasn’t my best. In my excitement to cook for her I’d forgotten the salt. It was bland but she smiled and told me she liked it. Liar.

As we ate there were sounds of shouting outside. The police were arresting someone and taking it very seriously. Rebiya and I tried to ignore it. We couldn’t help and getting involved was sure to get us in trouble as well.

As a few minutes of shouting became half an hour I looked out of the window and swore. Police and army officers were everywhere outside along with school buses and coaches. They were pulling people out of their houses in chains, dozens at a time.

The sharp bang of a baton hitting my front door almost made me soil myself. I looked at Rebiya, not knowing what to do.

“Open the door and come outside with your hands in the air,” said a voice. The officer wasn’t from our district. None of them were. People like us weren’t allowed to join the police. We weren’t allowed to do much of anything recently.

“Alright. I’m going to open the door,” I said. Looking at the pretty girl on the other side of the table I whispered to her. “Creep upstairs and hide.” I touched my index finger to my lips to warn her to be quiet.

She was frozen to the spot. I touched her shoulder and tried to push her gently towards the narrow staircase to my room. She was a rabbit in the headlights.

“OPEN THE DOOR!”

“Yes, I’m coming,” I said. I was only a foot from the door anyway. I looked at Rebiya and had the horrible feeling that I might never see her again. People were being arrested constantly and only a few of them came back.

I kissed her. All the fear that always sits in my stomach was drowned out by the rush of hormones as she kissed me back, throwing a hand up to hold my neck so that I couldn’t pull away.

“You have five seconds to open the door. Five. Four.”

“I SAID I’M COMING!” I yelled. I was furious that they were ruining the moment. I was furious that they were at my house for no reason. I was furious that they had my people boxed in like animals and they beat us and judged us day after day.

I took two steps to the door and threw it open.

A baton hit me in the face. Arms wrapped around me and dragged me out. I was thrown to the ground. My hands were forced behind my back. I heard the metallic click of shackles being locked around my ankles. My hands were cuffed. I was lifted back to my feet.

I turned back to see Rebiya being dragged out of my house and jackbooted soldiers squeezing through my door to search the place. After a moment they were back out, saying it was empty. They didn’t even close the door.

Police in navy blue were outnumbered by assault rifle wielding soldiers in green camouflage. My neighbours were being shackled as well.

I saw the buses where women were being taken separately from men and children were wrenched from screaming parents. One mother fought so hard to hold onto her son that four soldiers couldn’t tear her away until they knocker her out with the butt of a gun.

Rebiya was taken to one of the women’s busses.

“I’m sorry,” I shouted to her.

“It’s alright,” she replied in a yell, fighting to face me as she was bundled away, “it was a good kiss.” I watched her being practically thrown up stairs on the bus, one of the last before the doors closed and it hummed into life.

I wanted to watch her drive away as if it would help but I was being nudged towards another bus by the barrels of rifles and trying to hop up the bus stairs with my ankles bound together. A soldier used cable ties to bind our cuffs to the handle on the back of the seat in front of the men on the bus.

The man next to me was sobbing uncontrollably and had wet himself. I couldn’t blame him. He was saying names, I guessed his wife and children, staring out of the window with a huge bruise over his eye was already. I looked around and recognised people from doorsteps and the local shop. Some people hung their heads as if staying quiet would make being ripped from their home end better. Others sobbed. Some yelled until they were hushed by others on the bus or were beaten into submission by a soldier.

My heart was beating faster than it ever had before. I watched a soldier bang the side of the bus twice and heard the engine rev up. We were on our way and we all knew we wouldn’t like the destination.

There were so many busses. Half of the country’s busses and all the soldiers and police seemed to be rounding up my people to take them away. It was unreal. I looked back and I saw busses behind. I could see as many when I looked for the window.

Some of the passengers were half naked, ripped from their beds or showers when fascist minions kicked in their doors to kidnap them.

The bus drove for hours. Rebiya came to mine at lunch time. An hour later we passed through the concrete wall with razor wire that surrounded the pen the country had made of our city. We drove beyond the countryside into the desert. Red sand was all we saw for hours as the sun set. Lights on the road behind us said that the many busses were still with us, in front and behind.

All of us whispered after dark. Everyone was convinced someone else would know what was going on. We all stank of sweat and worse. One old man hung limp out of his chair, suspended by his wrists. The man next to him had screamed that the old man was dead until he realised the soldiers in the front few seats didn’t care.

In the middle of the night, after some had fallen asleep from the exhaustion of being terrified for hours, the busses slowed down. I saw soldiers next to a checkpoint before high concrete walls disappeared into shadow away from the illumination of the headlights.

The soldiers shouted again to wake us up. Half of the bus jumped in fright. Using a combat knife, a soldier cut the cable ties that stuck our handcuffs to the handle on the seat in front of us. He cut some of the men and told them to shut up when they yelped.

We were told to get off. One by one we shuffled forwards and if we fell trying to get down the stairs it was just more for the soldiers who called us terrorists to laugh about.

It turned out the limp man in the chair had been dead the whole time. He was cut loose and thrown down by the side of the bus like trash. The soldiers swore as if it was his fault for not being a good kidnapping victim.

In the dark we shuffled towards a tall building that looked like a high school except for the bars on the windows. Anyone who walked too slowly was beaten to make them move faster. Most of the people the soldiers were hitting were old men. It was hard enough for a young man like me to shuffle along with my feet only able to wiggle about an inch at a time.

We were split into groups of twenty and herded into an open concrete space where a line of soldiers aimed down the barrels of their riffles as our restraints were removed. I wondered why for only a moment as we were ordered to strip off all our clothes.

We threw our clothes into a skip then lined up against the wall.

I looked at the line of gunmen. I was naked, cold despite being in a desert and ashamed. Was I about to die?

Then it hit me. Freezing cold water from a cannon hit us, knocking young and old off their feet to the hard concrete beneath us. I fell, twisting my ankle as I went. Water hit me like a fist in the face. I spat with my eyes closed. I was as confused as I was scared.

Some of the old ones who had been knocked down by the jet of water couldn’t get up again. Old men who looked due to die anyway were insulted and mocked by the soldiers who sounded young and bitter. They called us lazy. They called us benefit thieves.

We were ordered to move on to the next area to receive our clothes. I helped a man who looked more than eighty to his feet. He thanked me, both of us trying not to think about our naked bodies in the cold.

I walked where I was told to go, into a dim corridor with soldiers calling me stupid and telling us all to move faster. We walked up to a window that looked like the desk at a bank. A soldier passed out identical orange tracksuits to us all as if it was normal. We were in another open area for a moment, told to get into the clothes which all had sequential numbers on them. When he was dressed, I hooked the eighty-year-old man under the armpit to help him along. He nodded weak thanks to me as we walked.

The next step in our dehumanisation was a room with twenty chairs and twenty soldiers with electric razors. We had new cuffs slapped over our wrists, glancing fearfully at men in the corners of the room with guns.

sat in a chair next to the old man and cried as a soldier cut off all my hair in the most slapdash way possible. To let me know he was done he slapped the side of my head hard and told me to move.

Cut hair itched on my skin as I walked, helping my aged companion along. We were shuffled into a lift big enough for a car and taken up a level. We walked past endless metal doors from 201 until arriving at 232. A guard opened the door with a swipe key. A red light went green we were all pushed inside. We trudged in and the door closed behind us. The electric lock clicked, and we heard the metallic clang of a bolt being drawn across the door.

“Why are they doing this?” asked one.

“Because they can,” said the old man. He was breathing heavily. He turned to look at me and tried to give a reassuring smile. He looked like a melted candle with veins. The smile faded. He couldn’t even pretend. I couldn’t blame him.

I looked around the long, cramped room. Everything was grey. Ten bunkbeds, twenty beds for twenty men and no more than enough space for us to squeeze between them. There were no sheets and something that barely qualified as a mattress. There was a ceiling fan and a sprinkler. The strip light was protected by a grilled cage. There was a window but all we could see was blackness beyond the grey metal of the bars. I saw the toilet, just a metal bowl without a seat or lid. There was no curtain for privacy.

“We should try to sleep,” said the old man. “I don’t know what they have planned for us, but we’ll face it better with some sleep.”

“Where did they take the women?” asked a man just a few years older than me. His lip was bleeding, and his eyebrow had a gash in it.

“I don’t know,” said the old man. “Try to get some sleep.”

“How can any of us sleep just now?” another asked, raising his voice in a growl.

“Don’t get angry with him,” I said. “We’re all in this nightmare together. They’re doing this to all of us. None of us know anything. We can’t do anything.” Even as I was saying the words my heart was sinking. “We need to support each other if we’re going to survive.”

“My children,” said one man in a sobbing gasp. Hands clapped him on the shoulder. The anger which had been bubbling had died down.

“My name is Merdan,” said the old man. “I think we should all sleep. I’m going to try to. I need the lower bunk. I’m too old to reach the top one. He crawled onto one of the beds and lay down with everyone watching him. Not knowing what else to do I climbed up onto the bed above and lay down.

Looking at the low, grey ceiling I thought about Rebiya’s face. I thought about my family. I wondered if I was ever going to see them again. I could hear crying. It wasn’t loud sobbing but the subdued crying that is never quite silent. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. Anger kept me awake for what felt like a long time. Eventually I sensed that the light had been turned out. Having nightmares about whatever was happening and dreams about Rebiya, I fell asleep.