Mado had spent the last five years of his life preparing for this moment, spending every moment since he was ten dreaming of it.
But then why… why am I so scared? he wondered, looking down at his trembling hands. Hands that were larger than most his age had any right to be—hands that seemed to belong to someone else whenever they were clean.
He looked up toward the hilltop where his master had parted ways with him to allow him to take this final test alone. But Mado knew, despite not seeing them, that they were there waiting. Waiting to see if I'm a failure…
He took a deep breath before looking forward to the house of madman Ilunga, whose home was located several kilometres out from the heart of his village. Mado had remembered a time when having to walk to knock on the door of the decrepit house—a small hut, in truth—had been the scariest thing he had ever done. But now, Mado could not think of any reason why the memory would make the top twenty.
He had a slight urge to see if the old man was still there, but Mado could not sense him and so kept on moving. He had probably just gone into the Forest; Mado had become good at lying to himself, as to why? Well, no one knows the reasons of madmen…
"That is what makes them madmen," he said, for the sake of hearing his own voice. He had not spoken French in so long that it was jarring. His master had no patience for anything other than Javanese, his mother tongue. But the two had settled on Russian as a common ground between them. Mado hated it; it was the only other option, it amazed him that his master knew it. His master was a terrible man; not even at his most delirious would Mado have thought otherwise, but that is what made him such a mystery.
Mado had grown up watching the man go from murdering a roomful of people for daring to laugh as he lost $500 in dominoes, to watching the man sit on the edge of a mountain to paint the sunrise with the tranquil sounds of a waterfall in the distance.
He had always wondered why God would allow such a man to enter his already terrible life, but despite the broken orbital bones and tooth loss from backhands to the most minor of offenses, Mado had been thankful for the man's inclusion. It was not to say that he did not hate his master, because he did—with every bit of his heart he did—but the man had given him a purpose outside of dying in a mine. Through his master, Mado had deepened his relationship with the only thing he had left, his rage. He had always been an angry kid; that much could not be helped living where he lived, but he had always been warned against giving in to that anger. That had happened to his father; it had led to his death and Joseph being punished in his stead. Joseph, in turn, had given in to his anger after the humiliation of his wife being pulled out of their home by their mercenaries, and that had led to him dying in a shootout dressed as one of the rebels. Mado had given in to the temptation when they dropped Joseph's lifeless body in front of their door, and it had led to his first black-eye. Thankfully for himself, he was only an eight-year-old boy, and so the vengeful outburst that was the culmination of every terrible thing he had ever experienced in his life was only a child whose tears were amusing to his—
Mado looked at the wall of the house he had just destroyed, thankful that the madman was indeed not there.
But that just confirmed what he had been too worried to admit, the madman is dead…
They had kept him around because he had been amusing too, but eventually they had gotten bored of the mad ramblings of the man and decided to kill him.
They would have gotten bored of me too…
But his Master had come along before that could have ever happened. His mother had cried when the large Javanese man appeared to pull him out of the door as he wailed. He gave his mother a powerful backhand that looked like he was swatting a fl—
"Huh?" Mado looked around to see himself in the village, wondering how he got here from the Madman's house to the single road they used to ship out the diamonds and lumber out the village from the mines.
He could feel eyes on him from everyone who had been going about their day when a random black man dressed in a red Nike shirt and Levi jeans walked into the heart of their village.
Of course they do not remember me, he almost laughed. He had been a ten-year-old boy when last they saw him, and probably chalked up his disappearance to another boy who had run off to join the rebels or had spoken out too loudly about his grievances. Mado could not fault them there at all because half his childhood friends had met either one of those fates. He turned to see them sitting around a truck, counting the diamonds collected from the mines that month. One of the men, dressed in his full and black military attire, turned to say something to him in Russian, but Mado could not hear him. Not because he could not understand, but because his heart started beating as he stood there, the memories bombarding his mind—
Mado looked down at his hands, which had once been shaking but were now still, balled into fists, and drenched in the warmth of a substance he had become well accustomed to. The first time he had ever seen blood—outside of the odd cut and bruise from playing in the sand with his friends—had been the third night he had spent with his captor. He had been thrown into a room with a man tied down in a chair and a cricket bat in the corner. His master simply pointed to the man, who had been gagged and smelled of shit, and said something to him in his native tongue. He then left a crying Mado in that room for an entire day before coming in the next day. He had appeared the next day to remove the gag of the tied-up man to force-feed him food that looked terrible but smelt like heaven. Mado had tried to beg, but he received a slap to the face for his weakness. The next day, Mado had become desperate enough to try to snatch the tray from his master's hand, but the man laughed as he held up the tray and threw him across the room. Mado got up and screamed with everything his little lungs had left, and that only deepened his master's laughter. But he did get a sausage thrown at him after being slapped again. His master pointed at the cricket bat, then to the crying Russian, before leaving again. He did not need to speak Indonesian to know what the man had wanted from him, but despite his anger at hearing the Russian speak, he did not have it in him to follow through.
The third day, Mado had been so weak that he barely had the strength to get up and pick up the picture that had been slipped under the door. It was his mother, her corpse lying on the ground as several men dressed in the black military attire he had come to hate stood around it. That had been enough for Mado, who stood in a room drenched in blood from the mangled corpse on the ground. He was sobbing when his Master came into the room and dropped the Russian's black jacket onto the corpse, a golden star he had come to hate more than anything sewn into the back. His sobs turned to laughter then, and his Master laughed with him.
Mado looked down at the corpse he had torn in half and the warmth filled his heart with joy. The fear they had in their eyes as they pointed their guns at him brought back that laughter, and Mado's fear was a distant memory. This, he thought as he walked through their bullets, not a single one had a chance of tearing through his shroud, this… Gods, thank you for this…
He remembered his father as he took one man by the neck and squeezed his hand hard enough for the man's head to pop off his body. He thought of Joseph's wife, who his brother had beat to death when she had returned to him sobbing in her torn dress. Mado picked up the truck to scatter diamonds onto the dusty ground as he swung it hard enough to send two corpses flying through the air and exploded when he launched it over the horizon. Mado could not tell anyone what he did as he thought of his mother, but his mind was occupied with her wrapping her arms around him, as she told him stories and the two shared a meal for Christmas. For the first time in a long time, his jaw ached as he relaxed and lived in a memory that was surely a hallucination, but he did not care for why this was happening. No one could discern the reason for why he felt this way in the midst of him butchering these men from a cold land. But reasons were for the sane.
By the time the memory ended, he was sat on the stoop he and his mother had sat upon when they celebrated his favourite Christmas. The entire village had been destroyed somehow, and there were corpses everywhere he looked, but Mado did not mind. He was happy and that's all that mattered.
He only realized he had been covered in blood when the wind came in. He felt colder than he otherwise should have. "I usually wash the blood off before it stops feeling warm."
His Master snorted, "I always wondered why you bothered with such nonsense. Look at your hands."
Mado did as instructed, and they were crimson from fingertip to the edge of his wrist. "Yeah?"
"Whether you wash them or not, they will always be like this. Those men are dead, and those hands dealt the blows. Why wash them if that will never change."
Mado's hands had always felt dirty, but the image of them covered in dirt and dust from the mines came to mind. But this… Mado liked this image and feeling more…
He looked up at the man who he hated more than anything in the world—Russians excluded—and said, "Why now?"
Hartono shrugged, taking a seat next to him on the family stoop. Mado wanted to punch him and then continue bludgeoning him until his hands were warm again. His Master put a cigarette in his mouth before snapping his finger and igniting a flame that hovered over his index finger, bringing it to the cigarette between his lips.
He took a long drag, and just before Mado was about to attack him, said, "Because you needed two things before you were ready. The first being closure. Second being justice, and know that true justice can only be administered in kind. An eye for an eye, a life for a life."
Mado frowned up at the man who just blew some smoke in the air as if he had just said something that made sense. "Okay, but ready for what?"
Hartono of Java stood up and lightly rubbed his head, which had been sheared bald before he came here, "School. Now go and wash up,"
"But you said—"
"I know what I said," his Master blew a puff of smoke in his face. Where he would normally have struck him, he said, "But I can't have you like that in England."
Mado frowned again but this time, kept his questions to himself.
Why the fuck do I care about England?