by Louise Welsh
A voice from the landing commanded, ‘Step away from the door.’
Magnus did as he was told and was rewarded by the sound of a key turning in the lock.
The screw’s mouth and nose were hidden by a cotton mask like the one the doctor on the news had worn as she tended the sick child. He was an older man, a heavy smoker from the look of his lined eyes and sallow skin. The screw coughed and Magnus hoped it was a reaction to a thirty-a-day habit.
‘No association today.’ He shoved two packets of sandwiches and two bottles of water into Magnus’s hand and began to close the door.
‘My cellmate needs a doctor.’
Magnus nodded towards Pete-the-Pervert curled beneath a blanket on the bottom bunk and saw what he had been avoiding. The man was slick with perspiration. He had thought Pete was deep in sleep, but his eyes were open and Magnus realised that his cellmate was caught in a fever. The screw took a step back. Magnus asked, ‘Is this what they’re talking about on the news?’
‘Do I look like a doctor?’
Across the landing someone battered against their door. The rhythm was taken up by the surrounding cells, a fast tattoo that reminded Magnus of the football terraces. The screw’s hand moved to his keys. Panic tightened Magnus’s chest, but instinct told him it was important to keep his voice reasonable.
‘They say that whatever this is, it’s infectious. He should be in isolation.’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’ The screw’s mask moved with his words. It was damp with saliva and Magnus saw the shape of his mouth, wet behind it. A clamour of shouting joined the banging. The racket boomed across the atrium, dissolving words into echoes, the music of fear.
Magnus said, ‘I’m only on remand. All I did was to try and stop a girl from being raped. I’m innocent.’
‘I know.’ The screw glanced towards the noise and then back at Magnus. ‘I can see it in your eyes. You’ve got a rapist’s charm, but you won’t get my knickers off without a fight.’
The cotton mask trembled and Magnus realised that the screw was laughing. He shouted, ‘At least move me to another cell …’ but the door was closing. Magnus heard the key turning in the lock and though he added his fists to the banging that echoed through the wing, the warder did not return.
Five
Magnus thought Pete might be dead. The wing had shaken to the sound of screaming, chanting and banging throughout the night, but the brightening dawn had stilled the noise, as if the prisoners were vampires forced to take cover from the sun. Pete had kept up a muttered conversation with himself for most of the night, but daylight had quietened him too and it was a long time since the bunk had rattled with his coughs, or swayed in response to his twists and turns. Magnus knew that he should rouse himself, get off his mattress and take a look at his cellmate, but the thought of the man curled beneath the blanket on the bed below, like a corpse shrunk in its coffin, gave him the horrors.
Magnus had kept the television on all night, trying to focus on something other than the noise around him, but Pete’s ramblings and laboured breaths had insisted their way into his head. Pete had been talking softly to some girl, asking her to be nice to him, telling her she was beautiful, a sweet thing, a real doll, until Magnus had wanted to slide the pillow from beneath his cellmate’s head and suffocate him with it. Men at sea shared smaller cabins, but this was a voyage he had been press-ganged into.
It had been Friday night when they locked Magnus in Pentonville. ‘Emergency measures,’ the warden who processed him said. ‘You’ll be in court Monday morning.’ There had been no explanation of what had prompted the crisis or why he was being held in prison, rather than a police cell. Magnus had remembered the recall of Parliament Kruze had been dismissive of and selfishly hoped that theatres were under emergency measures too – at least until he got out.
The screws had allowed Magnus a phone call and he had rung his agent, Richie Banks. The phone had switched to Richie’s voicemail and although Magnus had only left a short message, he was not permitted a second call.
Magnus’s voice had grown higher, and more like a liar’s, with every insistence that he had not touched the girl, except to free her from her attacker. Eventually tiredness won and he had surrendered to the indignities of prison admission. He answered questions about his medical history and mental health from a screw who looked like he had spent so long staring into the sun, it had all but burned the retinas from his head. Then Magnus had stripped naked, bent over to show there was nothing taped beneath his balls or secreted between his arse cheeks, and dressed in a prison tracksuit rough from rewashing. He had tried to comfort himself with the thought that the girl would clear him when she recovered, but the memory persisted of her huddled against the alley wall with her hands over her eyes, as the bin men set about him.
His thoughts were in danger of spiralling. Magnus looked at the patch of blue beyond the barred window. It was Monday morning. Someone would come to take him to court soon and, whatever the outcome, they couldn’t leave him locked up with Pete. Magnus turned the television down and held his breath, hoping to hear approaching footsteps or the jangle of keys that would signal his release. His ears seemed to sing with the silence. There was nothing, not even one of Pete’s rattling gasps. He turned the television volume up again.
Someone would come. First there would be the click of the hatch, the individual pack of cereal and portion of milk. Then a trip to court in a prison van and the chance to explain everything. If things went his way, he could be home in his flat by the end of the day. The thought brought warm tears to Magnus’s eyes.
There was a name for the virus now: V596. Naming the disease seemed to make its existence more real, but the television had also shown images of people around the country acting normally. London was not bowed, a jaunty TV presenter had said, standing in Oxford Street among the usual chaos of tourists, shoppers and slow-moving traffic. As far as the city centre was concerned it was ‘business as usual’. A couple of young Asian girls had bumped into the presenter in their haste to get to Topshop. The BBC had replayed the clip at intervals throughout the night and into the morning: the busy street, the reporter’s laugh as the girls knocked him off balance, the girls’ hands fluttering up to cover their mouths. Magnus had watched and re-watched it and thought he could see the reporter tensing in anticipation of the surprise collision.
‘Pete? Pete?’ Magnus’s voice sounded puny in the still brickness of the cell. ‘Are you all right, mate?’
He did not expect an answer and none came. Magnus tried to remember how the wing had sounded on previous days. He recalled slamming doors, the echo of footsteps, the shouts and laughter of men, but he had been caught up in his own misery and perhaps the prison always fell still in the early hours, at the intersection of early risers and the late to bed.
Magnus did an inventory of his body’s hurts. The bin men’s punches had buried the pain of Johnny Dongo’s fist-in-the-face beneath their own ache. His head was groggy from lack of sleep, and his belly felt empty and sick, but he had none of the symptoms Pete had been tormented by, no cough or sweating, no vomiting or diarrhoea. He leaned over the edge of the bunk. Pete was a foul-smelling huddle on the bed below. Magnus remembered an ailing sheepdog his mother had nursed in her kitchen, the strangeness of seeing the dog in the house, his mother saying, ‘It’ll not be long now. He’s turned his face to the wall.’ Thinking about his mother made Magnus feel ashamed. She would never leave Pete to suffer alone, whatever his crime.
The Judas-flap scraped back. A second later Magnus heard a key turning in the lock and swung himself off his bunk. It was a different warder this time, a younger man with a broad, red face, cheeks like boiled ham and the beginnings of a beer belly.
‘Fuck.’ The screw’s hand went to his nose. ‘It stinks in here. Kildoran and McFall. Who’s who?’
The warder looked like he had been up all night, but his skin was healthy beneath the tiredness, his voice free of the rawness that had made Pete’s
words sound as if they were being bled from him. The sight of the man, ugly and healthy in the doorway, made Magnus want to sob with relief.
‘I’m McFall.’ He held up a hand in a gesture that was part salute, part supplication.
The screw gave Magnus a sour look. ‘Kildoran?’ He squatted down and stared at Pete, keeping his distance from the bunk. There was no reply and the warder turned to look at Magnus. ‘Turn him over.’
‘What?’
‘Roll him on to his back.’
Magnus took a step backward; his spine touched the wall.
‘He might be infectious.’
‘Just do it.’
Magnus saw a gun in the warder’s hand. His stomach gave a queasy flip. No, he realised, it was chunky and decorated with yellow flashes. Not a gun, but a Taser.
He leaned in and touched Pete on the shoulder. ‘Pete? Pete? Are you awake, mate?’ Are you alive? he thought, but there was heat coming from the reeking body. Magnus looked up. ‘I think he might still be with us.’
‘I asked you to turn him over, not give me your medical opinion.’
Magnus took a tentative hold of the blanket Pete had cocooned himself in and rolled the man towards the edge of the bed. Pete groaned. He had been sick in the night and his face was soiled with vomit. Magnus tried not to gag.
‘How long has he been like that?’ The disgust Magnus felt was in the screw’s voice.
‘He might have been ill already when they put me in here on Friday. It got worse on Saturday and much worse last night.’
‘And you didn’t think to report it?’
‘I reported it.’ It was a struggle to keep his voice calm. ‘I was told he’d be moved, but nothing happened. I’ve been locked in with him all weekend, watching the quarantine alerts on TV. For all I know I’ve got it too.’
The hand that held the Taser twitched. Magnus flinched again, but nothing happened.
The screw said, ‘I wouldn’t worry. You look like the kind of selfish bastard that always survives. Half an hour later and you’d probably have been chowing down on the poor sod. Come on.’
He stepped out of the cell into the landing. Magnus followed him.
‘Am I going to court?’
The screw gave Pete a last glance and then locked the door on him.
‘Courts are suspended.’
The screw touched Magnus’s shoulder with the Taser, steering him to the left, along the landing, past rows of bolted doors. The air outside the cell was cleaner, but Magnus thought he could detect some taint beneath the usual prison odour of men, bleach and cheaply catered food. It was the kind of scent that might waft from a city three weeks into a refuse strike, bitter and sugar-cloying.
Magnus said, ‘It’s illegal to hold me in prison without a trial.’
‘Bring it up at your hearing.’
Netting was stretched across the higher landings, like safety nets in a circus big top, to deter ‘jumpers’. Discarded lunch wrappers and other detritus were cradled in it. Magnus wondered if it would be strong enough to hold a man. You would be taking a chance, unless you truly wanted to kill yourself. Either way, he guessed there would be a beating waiting when you got down.
Other men were being moved from their cells too. A warder accompanied each prisoner, as if the authorities had become nervous about being outnumbered.
‘How many people are ill?’
The screw ignored the question. He took the one-size-fits-all key on his chain and inserted it into a cell door.
Magnus said, ‘At least let me have a shower. I’ve not had a wash since I got here.’
‘You’re fucking lucky we’re shifting you. If it was up to me nonces would be left to rot.’ The screw’s tone was amiable, as if he had grown used to hating and made his peace with it. ‘The Home Office has told us to keep healthy prisoners together and that’s what we’re doing.’
He opened the door. A thin man was sitting on the top bunk staring down at his hands which were folded loosely in his lap. Magnus’s first thought was that the man was praying, but then the prisoner turned his face towards him and Magnus saw the sullen twist of his mouth. His head had been shaved some time ago and his hair was growing back, dark and thick, like suede.
‘I don’t share.’ The man’s body looked spare, but Magnus got an impression of broad shoulders beneath the prison-issue tracksuit. ‘Check with the governor. He’ll tell you why.’
‘I know why,’ the screw said. ‘But the governor’s indisposed, so you’ll just have to put up with it. Say hello to your new cellmeat, Mr McFall.’
Magnus hesitated on the threshold.
‘Come on.’ The screw gave him a grin and a shove in the small of his back. ‘Mr Soames won’t bite, will you, Jeb?’
Magnus would have liked to beg, but he stepped into the cell. The door slammed and he heard the jangle of keys, the sound of the barrels turning in the lock. The cell walls were the same rank yellow as the cell he had just left, the patch of blue beyond the window bars might have been the same scrap of sky he had been staring out at for the last three days. He slid into the bottom bunk. The mattress creaked above as the other man lay down, so close that Magnus could hear the rhythm of his breaths.
Six
It was seven in the evening. The time that Magnus should have been stepping up on stage to begin the warm-up to Johnny Dongo’s show. He wondered if the show had been cancelled and pictured the empty auditorium, the rows of seats and abandoned aisles. Johnny would be furious, if Johnny was still alive.
Magnus was lying on his mattress listening to the racket of bangs and chanting coming from the other cells and looking up at the wooden base of the upper bunk. Names, obscene drawings and mysterious tags were scrawled across its surface. Danny takes it up the arse … RICKY B IS DEAD … there’s nowhere like home … There had been points when the hammering fists and raised voices had been so loud that his bunk had tingled with their vibration, but now it was possible to distinguish individual voices among the clamour.
‘They haven’t fed us.’
It was the first time Jeb had spoken since the screw had put them together. Magnus wondered if his new cellmate found the drop in volume as unnerving as he did. He waited a beat before replying.
‘No.’ There was a television propped on a shelf in the corner of the cell, a small flat-screen, not much bigger than the laptop he had at home. It had been blank-eyed and silent all afternoon. Magnus asked, ‘What about turning the TV on, Big Man?’
The question hung there, ignored.
Jeb said, ‘This your first time?’
Magnus had been held in police cells overnight once, on a drunk and disorderly charge, not long after he arrived in London, twenty-one and full of his own exoticness. The booking sergeant had been Scottish too, a big Aberdonian with more than a passing resemblance to the Reverend Ian Paisley. ‘Cool your jets, wee man,’ he had said as he poured Magnus into the police cell. ‘You’re in danger of getting your teuchter arse kicked.’
A disembodied pair of breasts stared down at Magnus from the base of the upper bunk, their nipples like eyes. He wished he had a pen to blot out their gaze.
‘First time in Pentonville,’ he said, hoping he sounded like a veteran. ‘You?’
‘I’m seasoned.’ Jeb’s voice had an accent to it, somewhere flat and northern Magnus could not place; one of those nowhere towns that used to have a mine or a factory. Jeb said, ‘They shouldn’t have put you in with me.’
Magnus kept his voice as expressionless as the other man’s. ‘Maybe not, but they did.’
Outside on the landings they had launched into a favourite in their repertoire: Why are we waiting? Why are we fucking waiting … Magnus closed his eyes. There were definitely fewer voices than before. He thought about what the penalty for being billeted with Jeb might be: a pair of hands around the throat, a pillow to the face, a boot to the groin, or worse? He was growing tired of being afraid, but the fear persisted. Magnus took a few deep breaths, as if he were about
to step on stage, and repeated his question. ‘Any chance of putting the TV on, Big Man? There might be some news.’
‘TV’s fucked.’
‘I have a knack with TVs.’ It was a lie. ‘I can have a go at it if you like.’
The body in the bed above shifted and then Jeb leaned down and stared at Magnus, his face large and too close; no smile, just the grim line of a mouth set in a blank face.
‘I lost my privileges.’ His eyes were brown with large irises and long lashes. Cow’s eyes, Magnus’s mother would call them. ‘They took the digi-box away.’
Magnus wondered if the man was on medication and if so what would happen if it ran out. He was not much of a fighter. A fast jab of wit had always been his most effective weapon.
‘Do you have a radio?’
The bunk creaked faintly as Jeb flopped back on to his mattress.
‘I told you, no privileges. Who gives a fuck what’s happening out there anyway?’
‘How long have you been without privileges?’
‘Haven’t you learned not to ask questions?’
Jeb’s voice was a slamming door, as final as the turn of a screw’s key but Magnus had been alone with his thoughts for too long to keep quiet now that the silence between them had been broken.
‘There’s stuff happening on the outside you want to know about.’
Jeb snorted. ‘You guys straight out of the van still believe outside matters. It doesn’t. Not in here.’
‘Maybe that used to be true, but the outside has found its way inside. What do you think that rammy’s about?’
‘The screws are on strike, or they’ve accidentally-on-purpose done some fucker in, or the government’s cut prison food in exchange for more votes. Whatever it is doesn’t matter, beyond the fact that they’re not feeding us and that racket’s beginning to mash my head.’
‘It’s more than that, it’s—’
