Bang (13 page)

Delilah opened her mouth to object.

‘I do,’ said JJ Jeffrey, ‘Thank you, Superintendent. I
would like to ask the prisoner how it felt to kill my friend and officer, the
decorated officer Jonathon Gentle, may he rest in peace. And I would like the
defendant to respond, in due course, to the Whipping Boy, who upon hearing the
news, crashed, and can no longer revise, putting his exam and his eleventh
birthday in peril. He and Officer Gentle had planned to go dancing. These are
not small matters. It is to these questions that I would like the defendant to
return answers.’

‘You may proceed.’

‘Prisoner, tell me why you decided to drown officer
Gentle. Was it not obvious to you that a man who took such pride in mastering
the controls of Shower Unit 101 did so because he had a fear of water and could
not swim. Further, any man who
could
swim, would not by choice, at least
I’d imagine what I am about to say to be the case – not go round dressed
in synthetic fur boots and hats that would clearly, and I emphasise the word,
prohibit
him from swimming to safety. By such process of thought I contend that you
murdered by drowning the officer, but left him just enough air in a pocket by
the door of Wet Room 102 so that when the plumber came to switch on the
stopcock, allowing him to take the ride in the aforementioned shower unit he
was so looking forward to, he could discover the officer. You had been planning
this for weeks probably, months. Such a murder required on the part of the
murderer intricate knowledge of the inner workings of the System. And here you
got cleverer still. By ensuring that the only witness, the plumber, was washed
away when he opened the door – he still has not been found,
Superintendent, but he is only a plumber – you conveniently disposed of
your insider, the said plumber. What do you have to say to this?’

Delilah opened her mouth to say she didn’t know what the
officer was talking about, but didn’t get a chance to speak.

‘Bring in the dead officer!’

Officer Gentle, his face aghast, as Delilah had left
it, the wrench in his hand, as she had left it, too, and dry, very dry, was
wheeled in, and laid out on the table. There was a faint scent of death and the
flies, with an excited swarming buzz, made immediately for his dead body, and
soon Officer Gentle was a moving red mass.

‘Remove the officer!’ cried the superintendent. ‘
Porter 102
, take him away.’ Porter 102, a
well-fed person, wheeled Gentle out, leaving the hearing room completely
fly-free. ‘Bailiff, make a note to use Officer Gentle in future fly removals. I
have never seen such an effective fly-removal tool as dead Officer Gentle. Such
is his effectiveness that I am tempted to say that he his more useful in death
than in life, but, at this legal juncture, I feel such comment would be
insensitive, so I shall keep my thoughts to myself.’ The superintendent then
chuckled to himself, at his thoughts. And JJ Jeffrey glowered at his, and
picked the shell off a hardboiled egg, dropped it to the floor and popped the
egg in his mouth. He did not chew it, he opened his lips around it, to reveal
its bright white ovoid, and, as such, turned to face the gallery, which Delilah
had not noticed before and appeared new, and looked up at the Whipping Boy, who
now smiled briefly though his tears before waggling his
Voltaire
menacingly at Delilah. She had not expected, really, that moving the officer
over to the stopcock and placing the wrench in his hand would make his death
look like a terrible self-inflicted accident. It had been a long shot and it
hadn’t worked. She entertained the possibility, though, that the officer had
actually come back to life, turned the stopcock himself, and then drowned by
his own stupidity, and had since been dried by someone else’s. You never knew.
But that, of course, was the System: that you never knew.

‘Then,’ said JJ Jeffrey, now munching his egg, ‘you
went to see the Whipping boy to score some drugs. This is unlawful. It is one
thing for the Whipping Boy to take drugs, he is on the right side of the law.
But you, you are on the wrong side. Drugs intensify matters. You wanted drugs
to increase the sensation of criminality that criminals like you have running
through their veins. You were high after your killing spree and wanted to get
higher still. If we had not apprehended you when we did it is my conjecture
that you would have gone on to murder many more. You’d just got started, you
had the taste for it. You are a murderer. Murderers murder, that’s what they
do. Thank the Authority for the System, I say. Justice will be done.’

‘Thank you, JJ,’ said the launderette superintendent,
‘very well said. I endorse your comments, weightily. Does the prisoner have
anything to say, before it is taken down?’

‘Yes,’ said Delilah. ‘Whatever happened to innocent
until proven guilty?’

‘What are you talking about, girly? We have the legal
system we have now because that system was proven not to work. The System has
no interest in systems that do not work. Why would it? What criminal can,
anyway, truly be found innocent once accused of a crime? True acquittal never
existed. Exoneration? Pull the other one. No, no, girly, the System is very
happy with its system, thank you very much for asking. However, your card is
marked. You do not seek justice but self-reward. What would a hairdresser like
you know about justice, anyway? It does not help your cause, you know, to come
from such an employment background. How can I, a judge, take a hairdresser
seriously? You see my point, don’t you. That hair and the law do not mix.’

Delilah said, ‘And that’s your defence, is it?’

‘My defence?
My
defence? It is you, not anybody
else, that I must remind, because not anybody else has forgotten, that requires
the defence. I do not like you and will therefore let you into a secret that a
hairdresser is unlikely by its wit alone to grasp. You, a prisoner, are allowed
a defence only to get your hopes up. This was agreed to at a dinner party a
long time back by some eminent lawmakers. By getting the prisoner’s hopes up,
by allowing it to defend itself, the System can then dash, is I believe the
word, dash, those hopes. I say to you now, get your hopes up by all means.
Defend away with your hopes for the best. But do not expect such actions to
retail freedom. Sleep at night, if you can sleep, with you hopes. Convert them
into dreams, covert them, run them through your mind while you’re in a chamber,
as I’m sure you will be sooner or later. But do not bring them into your
hearing. Because if you do I will take them away.’

And he had. He had done exactly this. Delilah knew
that in all her life she had never felt so deflated.

She was led away. Dragged drooping would be more
accurate. Next thing she became aware of was going down. Not left, not right,
definitely not up. But down. Down,
down
.

8
– A
Cage

‘You have failed a drug test.’

‘I have not taken a drug test,’ an enervated Delilah managed
to say on a puff of what she reckoned might be her last breath.

‘Don’t nitpick with me, prisoner. I’m the warden down
here and what I say goes. Put her in with the drug users. If she’s not one yet,
she will be soon. Welcome to Remand 111.’ The warden of Remand 111 –
Warden 111, to give him his official title – had a deep voice. So deep it
vibrated Delilah’s chest. Had his words been pleasing, her chest might have
interpreted the vibrations as an agreeable, if not sought-after sensation, and
she would have liked him – and perhaps thought about going to bed with
him. Not that she had much of a taste for that sort of thing these days. As it
was, Warden 111’s low-frequency voice served only to reinforce his words’
nastiness, their deep, and felt, cruelty. He said, connecting far inside
Delilah, ‘These are the kindest words you will hear for a long, long time, so I
will say them again, deep as they are: Welcome – to Remand 111. From now
on you will be treated with nothing but unkindness. Get used to it. Become
accustomed. Because it will get worse. Stop. What was that? Did those eyes of
yours say something? I think they did. Take her to the chamber!’

And so it began.

In Remand 111 were moving floors. Remand 111 was open-plan.
There was no privacy. It looked like a place that wasn't quite finished yet, or
a place about to become something else. Delilah’s first mistake was to step
onboard the moving floor next to the officer who’d grabbed her arm. Lots of
people laughed meanly at her, knowingly: no, a remand prisoner had to walk on
the unmoving floor next to the officer, or, in Delilah’s case, run to keep up
with him. She fell once, and the officer stopped and bent and banged her knee.
He took another look at the knee and said it was the worst knee he’d ever seen,
told her he hated her and her knee, said he’d never liked her, not in all the
time he’d known her, there was nothing about her to like, that her elbows
weren’t up to much either. He liked every other single remand prisoner, he told
her, but hated her intensely. He went purple-faced bursting with dislike.
People agreed and called out that her they hated her too – ‘Me too. I hate
you enormously’ – but said they liked each other a great deal. They made a
great commotion attempting to outdo each other with their derision and
detestation of Delilah, who had been popular in life, popular as a hairdresser,
popular with her clients after giving them the latest style, and took this
particularly badly. But now she was running along again next to the officer,
towards the chamber, whatever the chamber was, fear and worry affecting her
legs, her hairdressing days far, far behind her. Or a very long way above her
anyway.

Hand and Voice Chamber 111 comprised a small circular
see-through door centred in a great see-through drum. The whole cylindrical
contraption was constructed from transparent material. All that wasn’t
transparent were the people inside it, of which there must have been 40 or 50
diametrically opposed like spokes around the inside of the rotating drum, their
feet secured at the largest circumference, and their hands, secured by their
wrists, stretched beyond their heads to form the Hand and Voice Chamber 111
itself. Into which Delilah was now inserted through its circular door. She
landed on the hands, these hands that formed the inner chamber, and the hands
began to push at her, poke her eyes, pick her nose, tickle her, fiddle with
her, slap her, squeeze her, pinch her, grab at her plumber’s overalls. Hand and
Voice Chamber 111 went slowly round and round and round. Sometimes it pretended
with a judder (a judder that had the cadence of an unkind laugh) to be about to
stop, but never actually did so.

Many voices spoke, sometimes as one, sometimes in a
vocal jumble, and sometimes shared words, even letters, in a feat of
coordination that Delilah was in no state to admire.

‘You are nothing.’

‘You’ll never be liked.’

‘You won’t last long, not in a place like this.’

‘You haven’t a friend in the world.’

‘You’re the worst hairdresser there ever was.’

‘Customers
pretended
to like your style.’

‘They felt sorry for you.’

‘For being so ugly.’

‘And so unpopular.’

‘Having such bad knees.’

‘Those awful elbows.’

‘She’ll start crying soon.’

‘Diddums.’

The hands kept pushing, pulling, twisting, slipping
in, yanking out, and even caressing, and the voices talking.

‘She’s crying.’

‘Make that skirt cry forever, I couldn’t give a toss
about her, like,’ said the plumber, sounding like he meant it. Which, for Delilah,
who had seen him as an ally, a friend, really hurt. He twisted her ear. That
hurt too. And poked his little finger in her ear hole then her mouth, spreading
earwax around her gums. He wasn’t pretending to be nasty, was just being nasty.
Delilah felt extra let down: she remembered his kind face, his words ‘You know,
you really ain’t a bad-looking bird at all, not even if I say so myself’. She
really started balling. She couldn’t help herself. The more she cried the
meaner they were to her.

‘I’m going to pull out her eyelashes.’

‘I’ll do the hair under her arms, twist it out.’

‘Scratch her chest so the warden’s deep voice hurts
her.’

‘She’s got nothing going for her.’

‘I’d hate her anyway.’

‘So would I, even I hadn’t been threatened with
food-poisoning.’

‘Shsh. Tell her what she is.’

‘She’s alone.’

‘There’s no one here for Delilah. No one anywhere for
you.’

‘You’re completely alone.’

‘Please,’ said Delilah, when she could take no more.
‘Please.’

So they shouted and screamed and just got a whole lot
worse.

Hours this went on.

Until they got bored. Then they said, ‘Everybody,
ignore her.’

And that’s what they did. For the next however many
hours. With their voices at least. Their hands continued talking. Their hands
said horrible stuff. Twisted her arm. Had her by the short and curlys. Poked
fun. Hand and Voice Chamber 111 went round and round and round. Revolving
Delilah and revolving her. Pretending to stop, never doing so, with its nasty
laugh of a judder. Delilah couldn’t sleep. She got no rest. She didn’t know
what to do, she really didn’t. There wasn’t anything she could do – except
wonder what to do. The answer was nothing. As so often it was in the System.
Nothing but wait. It would get worse. Worse would at least be different. Worse
would be
something else
. Then she could wish for what had gone before.
Even if it was this. That would give her something to do. It was what she did,
it bided time. Time was the problem.