“Ants, bloody resourceful things!” she commented at one point, followed by a short monologue on their habits.
“Aren’t they something?” This in reference to several stuffed owls starring moodily at a distance neither of us was privy to. Eventually she pulled me aside. “Don’t you think we should see that curator contact about the brass object?” she asked, reminding me of the very reason we’d come to the museum in the first place.
“Sorry for dragging you along, I’m not feeling so well. I don’t think this is the right place for it anyway.” I answered, turning to walk away quickly, leaving Mrs Harris trailing in my wake. She threw her hands up at our corpse audience in their glasshouses before following me. I was embarrassed and sad. Tears blinded my vision. Angles of light in alliance with the picture frames lodged in the corners of my mind. A hard bottom swallowing the sound of rolling bottles pulled me under. Damp trails on my cheeks wet the feet of people on stairs and escalators all over the city.
Outside I took deep breaths as if oxygen was running low. The rain had stopped but the world was shrouded in a dim, muggy airlessness and you wish you’d stayed indoors. Mrs Harris placed a steady hand on my back. She seemed to understand that moments of grief could loiter around corners.
She smiled patiently. “I know just the thing to make you feel better,” she said pushing back some hair from her face. I thought of the butterflies, of their beauty silenced behind a manmade prison and cried even more. A crack emerged in my mind’s eye, shimmery from salt water and blinking. Mrs Harris’s teeth flashed white. Then, I saw butterflies being fed on my tears, growing taller, wider, like plants until in the thousands they smashed through their glass cabinets destroying them entirely.
Peter Lowon Journal Entry February 14th 1956
Ultimately, people will let you down, the reverence you once gave them shrinking to the last drop of tea in a cup. I know this from experience. I have settled into army life. I am now used to the routine of being told when to wake up, eat, train. The comfort of rubbing your finger over a willing rifle, the daily exchanges between the feuding door locks and their keys. We are ticking clocks simply waiting to stop. There is beauty to the unexpected when it happens, whether good or bad, because it doesn’t take your feelings into account.
Consider this: a proposition from a General, a soldier dead forever, and a brass head. If I offered these bare bones to a thousand people, there would be a thousand different stories and a thousand different attempts to make skin cover these bones. Two days ago Mr Caretaker man finally found something worth discovering. A soldier named Mohamed Fahim’s dead body was found in the small, cramped outhouse toilet with his hands behind his back and his head crushed in the throat of the toilet. As deaths go, it was an undignified one, since when the traces of life left him, his last breaths must have smelt of a shit and piss. I can say this. I can also say that there will be no real investigation; his death will be ruled as an accident. Although how a man can accidentally kill himself in a toilet is highly suspicious. This is what the army do, they protect themselves and ironically there is no sense of injustice.
I do not know about Emmanuel and Obi but I have been stashing the guilt I feel in my uniform pockets, inside the soles of my boots and under my bed in my squashed green bag with its sturdy, reliable strap. We are good actors and didn’t even know it; we were appropriately shocked like every one else, enquiring if anybody had seen anything or how come no-one had come upon his body for most of the day. This act in itself is normal; people ask questions they know the answers to all the time, like you are eating egussi soup and pretending not to know that in fact what it tastes like is what lies taste of. Mr Caretaker man looks sad but unruffled. He has been reeling off questions to soldiers left, right and centre. Somebody should remind him he is only a caretaker!
Three nights ago, on a calm, balmy evening at the barracks when most of the officers were wandering about, and anybody could have been anywhere, I, Obi and Emmanuel were playing cards in the common room and drinking beer and stout, poisons that were good for us. Looking back, I think I must have been drunk, I did not feel like myself and I was laughing a lot even when something wasn’t funny. I was choking a little on my laughter when General Akhatar walked in. Initially it surprised me that he was unaccompanied. He was out of uniform and is a big, imposing man with neatly cut hair and cold black eyes. The left side of his face sinks in on itself, as though someone had repeatedly punched him there. It is a hazy picture but a picture still. He was jovial, he laughed with us, cracked a couple of jokes, even stopped to sip from a can of beer. Then came his request, although it seemed more like an order because of his no nonsense tone. Would we be willing to kill a fellow officer who had not only disgraced himself and the army by propositioning the General in a shameful way but had also put the General’s life in danger? He would pay us of course, he said. Plenty money! Easy money. Obi, Emmanuel and I looked at each other, at the General’s smiling face and easy manner. We communicated in the short silence that followed. I squeezed the glass bottom of my Guinness, Obi tapped his knee, Emmanuel leaned forward. Say yes or no to the promise of rewards and advancement through the army. In time, I cannot say if I had been sober whether I would have walked away. I would like to think so. In the few nights since, when I lie with the little conscience I have, I tell myself this. But that night when we walked away from that room we were high and ambitious.
Mohamed Fahim was alone in the quarters he shared with other officers. He was in the hard, familiar bed when we got there, not quite asleep but his chest was rising and falling. I wished I had thought to ask him what he knew that was worth killing for but I could barely breathe, my hands shook. My heart raced. The fear in Mohamed’s eyes made me panic, made me feel sick. I could sense his confusion, his shock but we had come too far. There are witnesses who saw what we did, but they are things and not people. They cannot speak. If it could, the doorframe of the dormitory would say that we plied his fingers off when he held it, desperately. The dark, long corridor just outside it would state that Emmanuel covered his mouth as we dragged him through and that he kicked and fought all the way. Emmanuel had one red eye from drinking earlier and sweat covered his forehead. The toilet bowl with its shaky black seat would say that Obi held his head down and that he turned his face away as if he couldn’t bear looking. That he slumped to the ground and held his head just after Mohamed took his last breath. I vomited a little on myself, I am ashamed to say this but I remember thinking, even after what had happened, that I hoped I could get the stains out of my uniform. It is a miracle nobody saw us, we disappeared out of there like magic, the tensions between us pulling our bodies along. Immediately afterwards, I felt disconnected, like there had been two of me, one fleeing the scene and one watching as I did so. Following a heated exchange, Obi and Emmanuel went off to be seen, to blend in. They seemed surprisingly more sober, but I suppose murder can do that people. For sure I was a sinner now, and no amount of praying about the blood of Jesus would wash this sin away. I saw the blue-eyed Jesus falling to his knees in the prayer room, floored by the weight of what we had done. In the corridor I walked over my last steps, wishing someone could pull my elbow and yank me out of the night, the scenes beforehand, the meeting with the General. My mouth became dry like sandpaper, I found myself in the bunkroom I shared with eight other officers including Obi and Emmanuel. Suddenly, each identically made bed became a pit you fell into, no matter how cautiously you climbed. I sat at the end of my bed and began to take my uniform off. I washed my shirt at the sink round the back. My fingers trembled. As I undid the buttons, my right leg seemed to spasm uncontrollably. I will never forget the sound of a man pleading for his life, begging us to stop. And how his voice sounded thin and shriller the more he must have realised that there would be no return for him that night. Inside my bed, in my white singlet and shorts, my body felt hot as if I would burn through the sheets. A couple of soldiers began to drip in. “British gentleman, you dey sleep already? He’s a funny one that guy, my friend get up. Should we leave him?” I recognised the voice and didn’t move a muscle. I closed my eyes and longed for the chaos of the following day to come.