I looked to my left and saw Dinger. He had a huge grin on his face.
“Come here often, wanker?” he said.
The guard came back with our boots and went out and joined his mates who were sitting a few feet away, keeping an eye on us.
“Muslim or Christian or Jew?” one of them said.
“Christians,” I said. “English. Christians.”
“Not Jew?”
“No. Christians. Christians.”
“Not Tel Aviv?”
“No, not Tel Aviv. English. Great Britain.”
He nodded, and gob bed off to his mates.
“My friend here,” he said, “he’s a Christian. Muslims and Christians are Okay in Iraq. We live together. No Jews. Jews are bad. You are a Jew.”
“No, I’m a Christian.”
“No, you are a Jew. Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv no good. We don’t want Jews. We kill Jews. Why you come in our country? We don’t want war. War is your problem.”
He was just talking, rather matter-of-factly, and seemed quite sensible. Iraq has a large Christian population, especially around the port of Basra.
“We are not Jews, we are Christian,” I said again.
“Aircrew?”
“Not aircrew. Rescue.”
If he’d wanted us to be Muslims or members of the Church of the Third Moon on the Right, that’s what we would have been. I was just nodding and agreeing with everything, apart from the Jew bit. It was the early hours of the morning and we could sense the guards’ attitude: “We’re bollocksed, you’re bollocksed, we have to look after you, let’s just do it without any problems.” Dinger was rubbing his feet. “Is it all right if I help him?” I said. They gave a wave that said: Yeah, do what you want. Dinger and I leant forwards to examine his feet. “Bob?” I whispered in his ear. “Don’t know.” “Legs?” “Probably dead. What about Mark?” “Dead. When did you get caught?” “Mid-morning. I heard you being brought in in the afternoon.” “Are you all right?” I said. I couldn’t believe I’d asked such a bone question. What a dickhead statement. He eyed me with a look that said: You knobber! The guards suspected that we were communicating, and one of them came over to stop it. Dinger asked him for a cigarette. The guard spoke pretty good English, but Dinger said, “Cig-ar-ette?” as if he was talking to a lunatic, and made the motions of smoking. It didn’t get him anywhere. We both had a slightly better idea now of what was going on. I knew that Legs was probably dead. I still didn’t know about Bob. We sat there for about an hour, but couldn’t communicate any more… My body was aching all over, and I was falling asleep. Your body gets so psyched up when you are being filled in, but when there is a period of calm, all the little aches and pains get magnified because you have nothing else to worry about. The feeling reminded me of school. When you have a fight as a kid, you’re all sparked up, and it doesn’t hurt so much initially. It’s a couple of hours later that the pain comes out. My lips were still bleeding. My mouth had been split in several places during the beatings, and the wounds kept trying to congeal. But even the slightest movement made them reopen. My arse and lower back were sore from sitting all day on the hard concrete. The injuries made me feel even more exhausted, and I wanted to get my head down. I nodded off, my head lolling on my chest, then jerked awake a minute or two later. This went on for about half an hour. Then Dinger and I leant against each other and dozed.
We were woken by the slamming of doors and the sound of talking. The glow of a Tiny lamp appeared at the bottom of the corridor and got bigger and bigger. Finally the lamp appeared, with lots of bodies behind it. We knew we were off again.
We were handcuffed and blindfolded-not aggressively, rather nonchalantly. We stood up and shuffled together along the corridor and out into the open air. A Land Cruiser was waiting with its engine running.
Our blindfolds were taken off again as we got in, though I had no idea why-perhaps there was just a breakdown in communications. Off we went, two guards in the front and one in the back.
“Baghdad? Baghdad?” Dinger sparked up, nice and friendly.
“Yes, Baghdad,” the driver replied, as if he was stating the obvious.
The driver knew all the back doubles. We drove for ten minutes through busy back streets. The vehicle had its headlights blazing. The guards didn’t seem particularly bothered when I strained to see road signs and street names. I didn’t see a single written word. There were no large magnificent buildings to be remembered and identified later. All the houses had flat roofs. By the look of it this was the slum area of the city. It must have been a residential area because there were no signs of bombing. It didn’t even look as if there was a war on. The roads were tarmacked but full of potholes, and the sidewalk areas were just dust. Old cars were abandoned at the roadside, being pissed on by dogs.
We stopped outside a pair of large, slatted wooden gates. They opened inwards as soon as the vehicle arrived, and we drove into a small courtyard not much bigger than the Land Cruiser’s turning circle. Squaddies were waiting for us, and I felt the familiar knot of apprehension tighten in the pit of my stomach. Dinger and I looked at each other blankly.
I wanted to look up as we were hustled out of the vehicle but made sure my head was down so I didn’t antagonize anybody. It was pitch-black, and at every moment I expected the filling in to start. We were dragged into a block and along a corridor that was hardly wider than my shoulders. It was totally dark, and the jundie in front of me had to use his torch. We got to an area where there was a row of about a dozen doors, all very close together. The jundie opened one, pushed me inside, took off my handcuffs, and closed the door. I heard a bolt sliding and a padlock being applied.
There was no ambient light whatsoever. It was so dark in the room that I couldn’t even see my hand in front of my face. There was a gagging stench of shit. I got down on my hands and knees and felt my way around. There wasn’t much to feel. The room was tiny, and it didn’t take me long to discover the two porcelain footpads either side of a hole about eight inches in diameter. No wonder my new bedroom stank. I was in a minging Arab shithouse.
You have to take advantage of every situation, and here was an opportunity to get the sleep I desperately needed. I wasn’t going to waste time thinking about anything. There wasn’t room to stretch out so I maneuvered my body so that I was bent around the pan.
There was no ventilation and the smell was overpowering, but there you go. It was just a relief not to have been beaten up. I fell asleep immediately.
10
I woke up feeling as if I’d been drugged. Doors further down the corridor were opening noisily. There was some talking; I could hear it but I was not really conscious of it because I was in such a daze. I wondered what time it was. My body clock had completely packed in, and I didn’t even know if it was night or day. It should be a priority to keep track of times and dates, mainly because it makes you feel a little bit better, but also because it keeps your mind sharp. If you lose track of days, then you’ll lose track of weeks and then months. Time becomes meaningless, to the point where you lose touch with reality. Therefore you should make all attempts to keep a grip from day one. You look at people’s watches if you can because they always have numbers; there’s no such thing as an Arabic watch face None of the guards so far had worn a watch, which was pretty switched on of them. But I was wrecked, and such considerations were irrelevant at this stage. I was more concerned with whether I was going to survive. I was still in a stupor when they came to my door. “Andy! Andy! Andy!” a guard shouted through the door in a jovial, holiday camp kind of voice. “Is it Okay, Andy?”