In the Morning I'll Be Gone Read Free

either side of him, which increased his sense of isolation, as did the high window, the enclosed exercise yard, and the guards who had been instructed never to talk to him or respond to his questions. But it only took him a few days to remember his old skills. He learned again to use the time and not to let the time use him. He read the French novels they gave him and what was left of the English newspapers after the prison censor had had his way with them. Censor is a lowly position in every culture and no doubt what the man cut from the pages revealed more than they could possibly imagine.
    He began writing his thoughts down in the journals they left for him. On every other page he made drawings from memory of his mother, siblings, and scenes from Derry. He must have known that when they took him to the exercise yard or the shower block they read and photographed what he had written, but he didn’t care. He wrote poems and notes for political manifestos and stories about his childhood. Perhaps he even wrote about me although I doubt that, and certainly my name was not mentioned in the materials British Intelligence subsequently gave me. In truth I was never one of his best friends; more of a hanger-on, a runner, a groupie . . . For a while in the sixth form I was even a comic foil, a court jester . . . until he tired of me and promoted some other loser into that position.
    As the weeks dragged on, Prisoner 239’s journal entries grew more elaborate. He described his experiences growing up in the Bogside in the 1950s and 1960s. He talked about that awful day in Derry when the paratroopers had shot dead a dozen civilians who had only been marching for equal rights . . . He mentioned how Bloody Sunday had galvanized him and every other young man in the city.
    Including me, of course. In fact the last time I had seen Dermot McCann in the flesh was when I had meekly sought him out and asked whether I too could join the Provos. He had turned me down flat. “You’re at Queen’s University, Duffy. Stay there. The movement needs men with brains as well as brawn.”
    Of course, after I had joined the peelers he had no doubt expunged all thoughts of me from his life . . .
    On that last December day, Prisoner 239 had taken the thin white mattress off the bed and placed it on the cell floor. He wrote in his journal that if he lay in the corner of the cell near the door he could occasionally see a thin cirrus cloud through the high slit windows. He could smell the desert on the southern Khamseen, and although he wasn’t supposed to know where he was being held, he knew that he was southeast of Tobruk, probably less than a dozen miles from the Egyptian border. Freedom . . . if he could get out and make a break for it. And if anybody could get out of a Gaddafi dungeon it was Dermot McCann.
    He lay on the floor and wrote about the sky as it changed colors throughout the late afternoon. He described the ful and flat bread they brought him at six o’clock. He wrote about the night-time prison symphony: keys turning in locks, the squeak of sneakers along a polished floor, men talking on the floor below, a distant radio, vermin outside in the hallway, a lorry clanking along one of the border roads and, when the wind was right, the howling of jackals at one of the desert wadis.
    Prisoner 239 wrote and waited. He explored the vistas of his own mind and memory. “Society improveth the understanding,” he scribbled on the very first page of the book, “but solitude is the school of genius!”
    On that final December evening, he lit a red candle stub (red wax was on the notebook), made a drawing of a fox, fixed his blanket about him, and went to sleep. No doubt he woke with the sun, and when the guards came into his cell to bring him breakfast perhaps he sensed the change in their mood and attitude. Maybe he noticed that they were smiling at him and that one of them was carrying a brand-new suit of clothes.

December. It had been a year now