The other boys do the same. The deep sleepers are dragged off their cots. Faces are slapped hard to waken them. Then chaos as the beating on the door explodes. Door hinges pull like gum from a thorn tree as the door comes smashing down.
Dozens of eyes in the dark looking in at them.
He is third in line. The punches are rapid and powerful. Knuckles kneaded by rock and arms loaded with muscle cut into him. Nausea rises from his gut. The blows continue as he tries to think of home, yet the pain shreds his mind.
The next man is on him but he daren’t look down. The next boy tips forward, knees buckling on thin stilts. He hits the floor face first.
Isak shifts his eyes to the opposite wall.
Boys are crying. The aisle between the rows of beds is congested. The oumanne walk over the bodies into the night. The last one turns spitting at them. His bulky form has no face and Isak feels the spittle on his cheeks.
“We’ll be seeing you fucking roofies sometime.”
The bungalow breathes and someone switches on the lights. He jumps off the bed, next to the boy whose nose is bleeding.
Isak wipes the hairless face with marbled eyes and shattered spectacles. “Are you OK?”
The boy appears not to hear, picking up the pieces. “Are they coming back?”
“Next time we’ll be ready for them. I promise you.”
He looks at the boy with a thin chain around his neck. It has a red snake on the plaque. On his t-shirt is written, Jaws, and there’s a small figure swimming above the massive snout of a shark.
“We’ll be ready,” he reassures him again.
The boy smiles weakly.
Isak measures the damage around him. Boy’s blood on the cement floor and it’s only been forty-eight hours since they’ve been there and there is another four months to go.
“Vasbyt, guys, vasbyt,” he says to them and to himself.
* * *
Dogs with dripping paws around his head make him aware of what has happened. Their raspy tongues licking his face, stinking of smoked meat and cabbage.
His breath disappears as air escapes from his punctured lung. Face down he lies. Bones snapped, crushed and bruised, himself frozen by calamity and cold. Whining, they keep watch as he spits out grit and chipped teeth. He tries to shout but the garage swallows the sound.
Later, much later, men in socks drag what is left of him up the hill to the house. He lies on white tiles and wonders whether the dogs will clean his mess too.
His father is on the phone calling the doctor. Not for his mother because his father repeats his name, over and over. A blanket is thrown over him. He waits for them to pull it over his face and there is a great cold coming in from the door.
Men in white coats pick him up, drop him on the frosted ground, then pick him up again. He can see inside his father’s head. All is revealed, a longing for a land of mountains and sky and his father thinks he will die, that he sees right behind his eyes.
There is a siren wailing and the siren is for him. Out by the door one of the men loses his grip and the stretcher tips a second time and he feels himself go down and he can do nothing to stop it.
He lies in rose bushes, their fragrance comforting. “Souvenir de Madame Leonie Vionenot,” he helps them out.
“Verdomme!” There’s a swearing and scramble around him as they roll him back on.
He is straitjacketed by pain. “Stop!”
No one hears him as they load him into the ambulance.
“Back, back, back!” the men shout and he wants to remind them that one can never go back, what is gone is gone, but he cannot speak.
Under the flashing light a masked man bends over him with a syringe. And the needle is stuck in his arm.
“Stop!” he warns them in his head but it is too late. The cold is not from outside but from within, creeping up his legs into his chest and then into his head. He sees their smiling faces with outstretched arms to take him with them and he isn’t afraid any more. “Let’s go!” he calls out with relief, feeling himself die in her arms as wings lift him up.
* * *
And she is dancing. Her bare feet cracked at the heels and the child is pressed against her breast. He can see her thighs through the cotton skirt, the dimples below the buttocks as she rocks the child to a song.
The walls are black. She has painted the walls black without his consent.
He stands before her but she ignores him, dropping her chin, the room in disarray. There is paint on the table and the brushes lie hard in the sun.
Terracotta, the walls are terracotta and he will not live in such a house, with walls the colour of mud. So he paints over those dark walls while she sits on the couch watching him. Layer upon layer of white but the brown shines through the whiteness.
And they do not speak of the walls, her silence worn like a shawl that she wraps around herself.
“Let’s go,” he tries again but instead the cot moves beneath him.
A medic in green kicks open a door and the lights are green for go.
A woman controls him and the machine. Metal plates are pressed under his bruised flesh. They chat over his body, seductively, as he lies stripped on the trolley but for the mask over his face feeding him oxygen.
Then he is out of the green room and the medic whistles a tune brightly as they go into another room where he is buried in a vibrating tunnel. A voice through an intercom commands him to lie still as the winking eye looks into his brain. He wanders whether he has feet and whether he will walk again.
“Dead still.” The voice speaks to him and his eyes twitch in answer to the irony of this and his coldness towards the caricature of a man on the scooter.
He is pulled out, unstrapped and trollied back.
The ceiling is white and the fluorescent bar needs cleaning. He is plugged into machines with pipes and nodes.
He fell. He can remember falling and twisting and not knowing where was up or where was down. That is all he can remember and their faces, when the cold came over him he saw their faces, but their faces are gone.
He tries to bunch his fists but he cannot find his hands.
There is another cot next to his. His father lies asleep and this room could be a morgue if it weren’t for sounds behind the screen, the farting and coughing of old men. Through the night he sees men in white and faces looming over him and they speak about him as though he is dead.
A withered hand touches his face. Isak looks up. It is an old man with an arm in a sling, who talks to him in Dutch that is impossible to understand and the clearness of his gaze makes Isak want to weep and he wonders if this is what morphine does to you, make you long for something you’ve never had.
Without hesitation the old man feels the hardened bandage around Isak’s head, barking at the night nurse. His father sits up in the cot next to him but it is Danie, his sallow complexion, in contrast to the other’s face, reddened by wind. The old man speaks agitatedly, pointing at Isak’s head.
“Your acrobatic skills gave us all a fright.” Danie swings his legs off the bed, rubbing his eyes. His shirt is crumpled and there is grey stubble on his chin.
The clock on the opposite wall to the cot says it is five in the morning.
The old man turns his attention to Danie as Isak’s head is unwound and the dressing replaced. Panic sets in. Will his mind fall out through the hole in his head?
“He wants