Bang (12 page)

‘I’m in a bad mood now,’ he said. ‘Nobody cares about
me and I don’t like being alive. What is the point?’

Delilah knew that to engage the Whipping Boy in such a
conversation would inevitably lead to her saying things he didn’t like hearing.
Leading to her being punished. Some conversations were like that. This was one.
With Gentle came plain unpredictability. With the Whipping Boy came predictable
unpredictability. His instrument was his
Voltaire
but his young mind
delivered the pain.

‘I felt better, marginally,’ he said, ‘after whipping
to death that old warden.
Go to sleep. Go to sleep.
What a whiner.
Taking his eye out like that, so effortlessly, felt good. After you left to go
and see the surgeon, I went for the other eye and I couldn’t get it. Ten
attempts it took. What’s all that about?’ This was the same question Delilah
had concerning the surgeon. What surgeon? ‘Until that day I could whip a Life
out of a man’s hand from twenty feet without touching a hair on his head. Then
suddenly I discover that I’ve lost it. I’m pissed off. It’s lucky you’re here
for me to practice on with no one watching. If I lacerate your face, who’s
going to know? I hate everything. Okay, bitch, take a pill and bend over. We’re
gonna have some fun.’ He tossed Delilah one of those glowing pills. ‘Pop that.
Get your kit off. Bend over. Put your head between them. I’m going to do you
from behind, take your eyes out.’

At this point, and unexpectedly, though when one
thought back about it perhaps it made sense, the Whipping Boy started crying.

‘Oh what is happening to me?’ he blubbed. ‘Why am I
feeling like this? Is it just growing up? Everybody hates me. I hate everybody.
I bloody hate them, you know. I do. I do. There’s nobody my own age down here
to play with. No one to talk to. At school I’m in with older pupils. They don’t
associate with me because of my spots, and they’re frightened of me because of
my
Voltaire
.’ He swung his whip above his head, it hummed deeply. ‘It’s
no wonder I’ve turned to drugs. Take your pill.’

The deeply humming whip approached Delilah. She put
the pill in her mouth, then swallowed, then popped it in her pocket. A trick
almost as old as the mugger’s
Look.

‘You’ll come up fast off of that,’ said the Whipping
Boy. ‘This is good batch of pills. Top quality. I’m not addicted to them. I
just like them. If I wasn’t so unhappy I wouldn’t need them anyway. They don’t
affect me like they affect other people. Some people they give mood swings to.
Not me. I’m solid. I could stop tomorrow if I wanted. But what’s the point?
Have fun while you’re young, I say. How old are you?’

Delilah, keen to avoid removing her clothes and
bending over and having her eyes whipped out, and extra worried having just
spotted the warden’s other eye rolling about on the Whipping Boy’s homework and
staring reproachfully at her, answered in her most appealing tone, ’19.’

‘Still a teenager, then. When’s the big two-oh?’

‘Soon.’

‘Doing anything special?’

‘Don’t know yet. Depends how busy I am. What will you
do for your eleventh?’

‘Get off me head, probably. Go dancing with Gentle.
Don’t know yet. Haven’t decided. I’ve got an exam the next day. It’s not fair.
If I fail it for any reason, I will have to whip somebody for the sake of it,
that’s just the way it is.’

‘Do you get nervous?’

‘What?’

‘Nervous, before exams?’

‘What? Used to, before I started doing the pills. Not
any more. I can’t remember the last time I was nervous. Maybe when I went to
the dentist. But my teeth were fine. I can’t believe they used to rot once upon
a time. What about your teeth? One’s missing. How did that happen? Let me look
in the hole. Open up. Come on, you stupid old woman, open up. Does that hurt?
No. Does
this
hurt?’ The whipping boy prodded in Delilah’s mouth. As she
winced, some information came though on the Whipping Boy’s Life, which diverted
him.

‘You’re due at a hearing,’ he told Delilah, ‘and
you’re late. They’re sending two officers for you. Looks like you get to keep
your eyes another day. I wonder what your hearing’s about. No one has a hearing
without dropping at least ten floors. But if I were you I’d expect more. A lot
more. My voice will break soon, by the way, just you wait.’

By her prisoner’s face, and the terror she couldn’t
wipe off it, and the guilt the murder gave it, the two officers recognised
Delilah for what she was, a prisoner not a plumber. They took her away in the
lift that went
left
. The lift said nothing, and Delilah decided not to
try to strike up a conversation. On the whole it was quite a friendly lift but
it might treat her differently in the company of two officers. Or ignore her
completely. Which would be upsetting, down here in the System, where she needed
all the friends she could get. There was probably a law, anyway, about talking
to lifts. She kept quiet. One of the officers said, ‘Got you. Found you.‘ And
then they were there. In another place she didn’t want to be.

7
– A H
earing

Thousands of flies buzzed round this same room that
had witnessed the near loss of her finger. A figure smeared by their swarming
sat at the far end where previously had remained an empty seat, and gave by its
hunched posture the impression of a judge or some other officiating personage,
who now instructed, ‘Somebody do something about these flies. I will not have
it. I just won’t. I hate flies. They are dirty. And I don’t like the way they
fly, either.’ He or she, for their gender so far was unclear, as almost was
their species, clattered a gavel down and a cloud of flies exploded into
flight. These flies had red thoraxes and had been named, not necessarily very
inventively but perhaps with acuity, by the genetics students who’d created
them, as
bloodbottles
. Subsequent to facing and failing to reject
assorted charges these students now survived, or tried to survive, some floors
below. Interestingly, one of the charges related to the naming. Blood Bottles
had been, in the form of actual bottles, a specialist line the Former Bottle
Manufacturer had been about to release prior to his flipping one day at the
office. He, with the Authority, was still pushing this unresolved part of the
case against the students for copyright breach. A matter further complicated by
virtue of the Authority taking measures to ensure such copyright wrangles did
not come up in the first place, by assuming ownership of
all
words. The
Authority owned the language, it was simpler that way. However, the students
were claiming, unsuccessfully at this point, that the Authority had not put
this remit in writing (with the words it owned), therefore its legal standing
was doubtful. This was proving unprovable. But the students had to defend
themselves, and prisoners, like they, like Delilah, were as such up against the
System, and destined to lose. The Authority made sure of that.

For now, though, the name stuck and the bloodbottles
flew freely, apart from when they bumped into each other because there were so
many of them. The judge broke though their collective buzz to demand of
Delilah, ‘Where the hell have you been. We’ve been waiting. You’re late! We do
not possess patience for this kind of behaviour. When a prisoner is invited to
attend a hearing, the prisoner is expected to turn up on time. A tardy arrival
can only work against the prisoner. The prisoner must be made aware that a
single unit of time is allotted per hearing. If the prisoner misses that whole
unit of time the prisoner is assumed by the System, acting on behalf of the
Authority, to be fully guilty and sentenced accordingly. Were the prisoner to
arrive, say, halfway through the hearing, the prisoner would be assumed half
guilty, though not necessarily half innocent, and would be sentenced on that
basis. Were the prisoner to be found innocent, having arrived halfway through,
the prisoner would still be half guilty and therefore required to serve a
sentence proportionate to the charge, a half in this example. You are ten
percent late and therefore already ten percent guilty. Do not get your hopes up
about being ninety percent innocent, because you are not, and quite frankly we
do not need a hearing a establish so. It is called a hearing because you will
be
hearing
what we say to you. And then the next thing will happen,
whatever that might be. At this stage it is too early to say. And when the time
comes to say it, it will be too late for you. Bailiff! Kill those flies. And
pass me the charges.’

As the judge spoke, Delilah realised that it was the
ugly superintendent from the launderette. With flies landing on his or her face
and crawling across it, his or her ugliness was escalated and became offensive.
Delilah thought that she perhaps found such abhorrent faces so distasteful
because at the other end of the facial spectrum were beautiful faces that gave
her, so unaccountably, these sexual urges considered today so detrimental. If
so, ugliness served a purpose, and she was therefore all for it, though would
never attest to this in court, or in a hearing.

‘I know exactly what you’re thinking,’ said the
superintendent, which sent a shock through Delilah causing a judder that sent
flies flying off her. ‘You’re thinking that were you to arrive at your hearing
early, or an exact unit of time before your unit of time was due to commence,
you would be innocent when the time came for your hearing. We toyed with this
idea. But voted it out as too complicated to administer and too prone to
miscarriages of justice, something we are keen to avoid, thus the onus must
remain on conviction, not acquittal.’

Busy with a noisy whistling apparatus that sucked air
through a pipe, the bailiff worked at reducing the bloodbottle population. Some
he trod on, leaving the floor bloodstained, for in these flies the usually
pus-white haemolymph was haemoglobin-red. His face was bloodied too, or gave
such an impression, because he’d splatted flies against his skin. He appeared
to lick his lips, which Delilah did her best not to watch, but like many
spectacles of the grotesque, found herself drawn to.

‘Now, your case,’ said the superintendent. ‘The fat
man’s murder. We have good news for you. The fat man has been found to have
died of natural causes. He passed away in his sleep. His hairy teeth cannot be
explained. But natural causes is the word. You are more-or-less in the clear,
Delilah, on that account.’ This was the first time Delilah had heard her name
spoken for many days. It gave her hope, presaged a change of fortunes, she
thought. But when things, fortunes or not, were presaged, they usually got
worse. ‘Here it gets interesting,’ continued the ugly superintendent. ‘Because
this fact of natural causes has come to light exceptionally early, you have not
yet completed the statutory remand period required for a suspected murderer.
You cannot therefore be released at this time, you understand, because it would
be unfair on other prisoners who serve far more lengthy remand periods before
being found guilty, or in exceptional circumstances innocent. To release you
would quite possibly give rise to cries for judicial review from prisoners who,
by happenstance in the most part, have been found innocent years later, by
which time they want their years back. Obviously, for obvious reasons, this is
in nobody’s interests. Clearly, therefore, on that basis, your incarceration
must continue.’

Then the superintendent said, ‘However.’ Whether this
‘however’ was intended to stand alone or to introduce a counterpoint, Delilah
could not be sure. While it hung in the air, as words sometimes did, the
bailiff vacuumed flies from the superintendent’s head of hair and hairy nostrils.
The superintendent banged his gavel, exploding another red cloud, and said,
‘For lesser crimes you have committed, for which you cannot be tried, due to
the vagaries of the law prohibiting a fair trial, you have already served the
System and would be due for release tomorrow, or even yesterday – though
if you had been released already you would have missed this hearing and
therefore been found 100 percent guilty in your absence and arrested
immediately. However, release for these pettier crimes is outweighed by your
remand, which still stands, and, after this hearing, you will be transported to
System Remand 111. There you will mix with other remand prisoners, and complete
your remand, remand for a crime you have just been found not guilty of but are
legally bound to serve. You future, in Remand 111, is by no means certain.’

What a set-up, thought Delilah. Now, I’m glad I killed
Gentle, even if it was an accident.

‘However, this is not all. And here we approach graver
matters.’

There was now a sudden silence. Even the flies stopped
buzzing.

‘An officer by the name of Officer Gentle has been
found murdered. Before he died, he claimed that you murdered him. This in
itself presents problems because he was still alive at the time of his claim,
and therefore could not make the accusation of murder, as he did, in the past
tense. Unfortunately for you however, he then died, or, to put it another way,
completed his being murdered. Associating forever your name with his death.
Lawyer Poy Yack, recently freed up from prosecuting you in the fat-man case,
will take this case instead and prosecute you. Because he is a betting man,
though, and cannot resist the force of the bet he made with the fat man, he
will also
defend
you. This is excellent as it removes from you the onerous
task of procuring a defence lawyer – who anyway wouldn’t stand a chance
against that demon brief Poy Yack. Nor probably would any lawyer you retained
gain full possession of all the evidence until after the trial, by which time
it would be too late, and too late for you also having spent such quantity of
time in the System as to be rehabilitated upon release. Lawyer Poy Yack, who
will make full disclosures of evidence to himself, whichever hat he at that
time dons, will defend you in the mornings and prosecute you in the afternoons.
A very satisfactory arrangement, we all feel. I trust you are happy with this.
Do you have anything to say?’