Jesus

The room is the size you would expect. Just big enough for the single iron bed on the right with its matching low iron hoops at its head and foot, its thin brown straw mattress an inch or so too narrow for its rough wooden slatted base. A pale unbleached linen sheet is slung across the bed, a lumpy pillow in a matching case is where it should be, and a short scrap of black woollen blanket, more of a baby shawl than something that would cover an adult, lies in a huddle where you are presumed to put your feet.

Above the bed is a dark wooden cross, compact enough to hold in your palm. Jesus, also of wood but in a lighter stain, is nailed to the cross, his crowned head lolling down to the left. His naked body casts the lightest of shadows onto the white adobe wall. Aside from Jesus and the bed, there are only two other pieces of furniture in the room, a wooden commode containing a red plastic bucket to the centre of the left wall, and a short metal shelf to the right of the door overlooking the foot of the bed. An empty toilet roll and a sliver of green soap lie in the middle of the shelf. Both are covered by a thin layer of black dust.

The window, directly opposite the door, is head-sized and circular, a porthole latticed with ironwork. The door, painted grey, is metal and dense, without a handle on the inside. Splashes of grey paint fleck the floor and the bare frame around the door. In the centre of the door, at a height suited to an average-sized male, is a peephole. A peephole that only operates one way. The floor is unpolished pine plank, splintering around the feet of the bed and the commode. An animal, a rat perhaps, has chewed a walnut-sized hole through the edge of the floor on the window side of the commode.

The room is blessed with a bare light bulb dangling from a fraying brown cord. The light is off and there is no switch in the room, nor any electricity sockets.  The room has the pale dull feel of an autumn evening after a heavy rain shower, thin strands of light spotting and dissolving across the bare floor.

If you stand on your tiptoes at the window, your face hard up against the iron lattice, you’ll be rewarded with a restricted view of a bright white gravel yard, the stones too sharp to walk across in your bare feet. Containing the yard, perhaps twenty metres from the window, is a tall mesh fence topped with great spirals of razor wire. It is not possible to see beyond the external walls of the room to the rest of the building. How big it is. How small. Whether there are others. Or just her.

Alicia sits on the bed, cradling her head in her hands. The mattress digs hard into her tail bones, and she shifts from side to side trying to find relief.  She lifts her head to look at Jesus on his pointless cross. Was he there to taunt her? To give her solace? Or was he simply the only decoration they had available? She clenches her fists and spits gob onto the planks between her bare feet. The gob, white and frothy and imperfectly round rests there, just rests. Her eyes follow the line of the floorboard to the other side of the room.

A wolf spider scuttles out of the rat hole and up onto the wall beside the commode. A bluebottle buzzes after it, bouncing on and off the wall. She focusses on the creatures. The fly following the spider. Everything is the wrong way round. She shouldn’t be here. Not her. This place is for other people. She was only doing her job.

She stands up, shivers, takes four steps to the window, raises her hands to the metalwork and grips it hard. Shakes it. It stays firm, solid, the wall at least a metre thick. Outside, the yard is empty. She knows what happens there. There’d been rumours. Stories whispered on the move. Always outside. Always in places of confusion and noise. Never told by anyone who had been there. Her belly contracts. Bile rises up her throat. They were just stories. Attention seekers, the soldiers said. Agitators stoking fear and foment.

She lets go of the bars, glances at Jesus, approaches the metal door and pounds it with closed fists. The lack of sound surprises her. She can make only soft thuds that are almost doll-like. She hammers again, harder, clenching her jaws as her knuckles thud and scrape blood onto the thick metal. No response. Not even the echo of her own violence. She doesn’t know how to shout. She turns, slides down the door and sits hard onto the floor. She was just doing her job. Keeping her head down. She remains on the floor until she’s driven onto her feet, stumbling with a dead right leg, by the roar of an vehicle engine.

Back at the window, pulling herself up higher, she can see the tall wooden watch tower. The red, white and black flag sags in the haze of smoke from the fires that have been burning in the foothills as long as she can remember. The smog gives the tower a two-dimensional feel, as if it was cut from cardboard, a children’s toy. Even the phalanx of rifles does not seem real.

The fly buzzes past her hands, glances off her neck and disappears behind her. She turns to watch it. It has settled on the bare bulb,  with a clear view of the spider now on the wall to the right of Jesus. The bulb trembles as a cold breeze pushes acrid dust into the room, wafting burning rubber and diesel.

Alicia, wearing thin black cotton pyjamas, forced onto her on arrival, pulls the sheet off the bed, wraps it around herself, and tucks the scrap of blanket around her neck. She stalks the room. Round and round and round she stalks. She is a ghost, a fighter, a beggar, a hag. Splinters trace the soles of her feet. And then the floor shudders. The wall vibrates and Jesus shakes and rattles. The vexing roar of another engine.

It’s a mistake. Her ID expired. Someone with the same name. The same employment history. Another engine roar. And another. Heavy tires on thick gravel. Acceleration and power. Outside, men’s voices in a language she doesn’t understand. Shouting. Commands and responses. The clack of metal on metal, the clunk of wood on wood. The tinkle of glass. The roars moving and diminishing, moving and diminishing. Fewer and fewer voices.

The spider is on the wall above the shelf, the fly closing in from the top edge of the empty toilet roll.

They are leaving. In their tanks and armoured cars. With their stamping boots and annihilations. Acceleration. Power. She kicks the metal door with her bare toes. Her tongue searches her mouth for sound. Pushes over blistered lips. She throws off the sheet. Clambers onto the bed. Steadies herself as the mattress shifts and slides beneath her feet. She splutters as more diesel smokes into the room. With one hand on the wall to steady herself she pulls Jesus and his cross off the wall, steps off the bed, and approaches the door again.

The spider is dangling from the ceiling. Spinning, spinning. The fly hovers and buzzes, ever decreasing circles just below the spider.

Alicia twists Jesus in the red chap of her scaling hands, in the grouted grime of her life lines, across the bloodied smear of her knuckles. Then, gripping him by his feet in her right hand, she takes a step back, bends her knee, and batters him against the door. Again and again and again.

Battering him until splinters of his thorned crown dance across the room.

Battering him until each arm of his cross has cracked and broken and fallen.

Battering him until his face is an empty hollow wound.

Battering Jesus again and again until the bluebottle is trapped in the fresh web, the wolf spider is resting, and the only sounds are buzzing and whining and thrumming and rousing.