Bang (14 page)

Two similar-to-each-other-looking officers came to
extract her, pulled her out by a fist of her hair. They dragged her away, her
plumbers’ overalls bumping across the ground, grinding her backbone, missing
the cushions thrown down for her that looked so stunningly comfortable. She was
too dizzy to stretch for them, too tired, too disorientated, too depressed, too
far gone, too Systemized. They stood her up and pushed her though two
translucent-barred doors, saying, ‘Try breaking out of here and you’ll find
yourself in a worse place than if you’d stayed. Live with the junkies. Become
one. Misery is closer than you know.’

‘Get out of here!’ screamed one of the junkies, as the
second translucent-barred door slammed shut behind her.

‘Go right back out the way you came in,’ shouted
another.

‘Just cos we’re junkies doesn’t mean we’ll accept you.
Just cos we do drugs doesn’t mean we’ve got no pride. We don’t want to hang out
with you. Go away. Just go away.’

On a blub of emotion, Delilah turned to check the
door, and straightaway knew she shouldn’t have. They’d defeated her already,
these hung-out junkies with the long drawn faces. But by now she’d tried the
door, the second barred door she’d in come through, and it had opened. What was
all this about? She knew she had to think clearly. Yet just when she needed her
brain’s strength the most, it remained stubbornly at its weakest. The door
slammed shut behind her and she turned to try it but the junkie had locked it.
He waggled the transparent key in her face. He popped it in his mouth and
swallowed. It got stuck and he writhed on the floor, hands to throat. Delilah
tried the first door she’d come through but that was locked too. She was
trapped now in a space between two locked translucent-barred doors, which had a
see-through ceiling and a see-through floor, a space too narrow to sit down
properly in. Hundreds of people, prisoners and officers and tour parties of
pointing children, stared at her, laughing, wondering what she’d do next, and
munched popcorn bought from a popcorn seller with a necklace of unpopped
popcorn and an abnormally large head that had a yellow ticket stuck to it that
read
Fine: Head overdue for compression
. Even the writhing junky laughed
at Delilah’s predicament as he choked and a key shape moved down his neck. She
slumped, or tried to. ‘I am a loser,’ she muttered sadly to herself. ‘I have no
self-esteem.’ She could feel her nerves convey messages of her uselessness
around her body. It wasn’t so much that it was painful – her body was pain
anyway – as it was the deep, deep sadness. Something about this sadness
cancelled out confidence, too, and siphoned away any remaining get-up-and-go
she might have had. ‘I’m emptying,’ she thought. And they all looked on,
stared. And they knew, too, crunching their popcorn, that she was a hopeless
useless loser, emptying out, without a chance of getting a friend, of being
liked, of getting out of here, of being anything ever again. She knew they
knew. She knew they were right. She wondered what she had left for the System
to take from her.

The plumber came now swaggering over. Delilah’s heart
gave a happy jolt. Everything was involuntary these days. She couldn’t help it.
Like the flash of helpless love she knew her eyes gave him. She couldn’t help
that either.

‘Don’t give me none of those flirty looks,’ he said,
‘you don’t mean nothing to us. Stupid moo. You ain’t worth tuppence. Bleedin
totty!’

He sparked up his weld torch.

‘Burn me, then,’ muttered Delilah. ‘See if I care.’
And she didn’t.

‘Give it a rest, love. Jesus. Birds like you, always
overreacting.’ Avoiding her gaze as he worked, the plumber welded up the locks
on both see-through doors, doing so with an opaque weld stick that glowed and
went globular in the flame, then dripped and hardened clear in the keyholes,
enclosing Delilah, permanently she guessed, in this clear-barred prison. Then
the plumber set about cutting the whole section away from the junkie pen. The
junkies made no move to escape when the plumber cut the last connection and
cracked Delilah’s cage away. Two officers toppled it over and soon were pushing
and shoving it along the floor, while another officer struggled over with a
heavy-mover’s whistle and a barred door that slotted perfectly into the hole
left behind, a door with
Junkie Pen 111 – return after prisoner trapped
in two door cage
engraved on it, so Delilah knew that this door had been
removed and the double-door arrangement installed specifically to ensnare her.
When she last gave the plumber a fleeting glance, which included perhaps a
final beg for help or at least a call for some friendly eye contact, she earned
herself nothing but a rude finger. And then she let him go. And that got her.
She had nobody. She wasn’t just alone. Nobody wanted her.

The officers righted her cage, which left her
uncomfortable. ‘You’d be more comfy if you knocked yourself over and got a
chance to lie down, but then we’d have to punish you. That would be worse than
the comfort gained. You would regret the decision. But it is your decision. We
at least in Remand 111 leave you with decisions. Decisions, decisions,
decisions. The choice is yours. There’s another option, of course. You must
decide. Think about it.’

Then the similar-looking officers marched off. They
could have been, Delilah wasn’t sure, the same similar-looking officers from ten
floors higher. If so, both had put on an equal amount of weight under their
chins and on their buttocks, which hung like bags of water, making it
impossible to tell them apart by body shape. Warden 111 sat on a clear wall and
picked at his toenails, eyeing Delilah with a look that said something about
her future, something she couldn’t decipher. Because he could speak with his
eyes, Delilah worried he’d be able to read with them too, and she lowered her
lids and decided that no one would see her thoughts. Which were: What will
happen when I am found guilty of Gentle’s murder, as I surely will be, what
then? Is this why prisoners kill themselves.

And what is my other option? Think about what?

All Remand 111 stared and hissed and booed and jeered
and spat and moved by on moving floors looking genuinely hateful.

‘Sing,’ demanded the two officers. ‘Sing for your
supper, disliked prisoner, with the bad knees and not-very-good elbows.’

They gave her examples: ‘La da di da,’ sang one, or
was it the other? ‘Di di da la,’ sang the other, or was it the same one?

She’d do anything now, her hunger in charge, and
elaborate. She knew that though she had a rough speaking voice, she had the
voice of an angel when it came to singing. Or so she’d been told. She hoped she
hadn’t been lied to. Her trust in even the long past was put to doubt, here, in
Remand 111, where your trust mechanisms were messed with. There was a song she
liked to sing in the shower of her housing unit, not that she’d ever do
that
again. Food was top priority now, food and water. A meal went round and round
on a strip of moving floor. One officer pointed at it, so did the other.
Her
meal? Must be. Delilah launched into the piece of popular music. She could hear
with her own ears that despite her recent maltreatment she still could sing,
was doing all right, more than all right – was doing well.

‘Scarecrow!’ cried a prisoner.

‘Squawk, squawk, squawk,’ shrieked a junkie.

‘Eeeech,’ screeched Warden 111, counting his fingers
but looking dismayed as if their number didn’t tally with the number he’d
expected.

‘What a racket,’ called somebody, yawning and
pretending to wake up. ‘Can’t I get any sleep round here? Is someone killing a
chicken?’ Remand 111 laughed. Delilah sang on, determined to be fed.

One officer said, ‘Stand on one leg, while you’re
about it.’ This was old, not a new form of humiliation. Delilah, lifting a
knee, did so.

She sang on.

Then she decided she wouldn’t stand on her leg
anymore. It was one of those moments. She stopped singing.

‘Stand on one leg.’

‘No, I won’t.’

‘Sing!’

‘No,’ said Delilah, decisively. ‘No.’

‘No food for the Remand 111 prisoner.’

Delilah said, ‘I don’t care anymore. I’ve had enough.
You won’t beat me. Even if you kill me. Go on, kill me.’

‘Asking to be killed is hardly original, prisoner.
Still, I’ll get on to Officer Jeffrey about it. Why don’t you exercise your
other option? Go on, you know it makes sense.’

And here it came.

After this: up there on the moving floors that went on
to split into ten lanes beneath the fake blue skies that sometimes went pink
and she’d never seen and never now would, Delilah had been law-abiding. What
laws had she in her life broken? She’d read, once, controlled literature and
been punished with a cabbage to the head – a cabbaging, they called it. She’d
stolen a pair of slippers, ruined now, from the office administrator with the
rolled-up lilac colour chart. She’d killed a man, an officer. But with the push
of a flat-palmed hand to his chest and nothing more, was it really a crime? She
was a good hairdresser – and had only once given a customer a cut they’d
described as criminal, and that had been on a bandaged man blinded by an
escalator crash and awaiting an eye transplant, so didn’t count. Oh, and she’d
taken to the fast lane that fateful morning, done so without her Life to prove
she had the necessary license. A violation. She was a victim of crime. She
wasn’t a criminal.

So here it came.

The two officers said together, ‘Take your pill.’

She’d quite forgotten about that pill. Her other option.
Her orange option. Was it still there? Those hands in Hand and Voice Chamber
111 had surely nabbed it. They’d been all over her, right through her plumbers’
overall’s pockets. With a light thumb she frisked the outside of the pocket,
feeling, without alerting onlookers, as any practiced junkie expertly might,
for the discoid lump. She felt it with a jolt of her thumb, and a jolt to her
system: the orange drug was there. Fear wiggled in her. Drugs were scary. Until
you got to know them, or so she’d heard from those who had (some of the
hairdressers were recreational users). Then you and drugs became friends, drugs
turned you on, before drugs turned on you – something friends did, too,
sometimes, not that she and the plumber had been friends necessarily, but he’d
turned on her. Still it hurt. Drugs could hurt, too. But could the drug be any
more scary than Remand 111? Would it make her collapse in her cage and fall
asleep, thus assuring her punishment. Would it damage her? Would it kill her?

Would it
release
her?

All the power and possibility of that lump in her
pocket. This was what drugs were, she thought now, as much as the payload they
in turn delivered.

‘Well?’ This was one of the officers.

‘You gonna do it?’ This was probably the other.

‘Go on.’

‘You’ll like it.’

‘No, sell it!’ cried a junkie. ‘I’ll buy it. I’ll give
you a good price.’

‘I’ll pay more,’ shouted another junkie.

‘Me! I’m your man. You won’t look back if you strike a
deal with me. I’m ready to do business.’

‘No. Mine.
I
want it.’

‘I need it. He doesn’t. Don’t sell it to him.’

‘Ignore her. Men need drugs more than women do. She’s
a right bitch, that one. She shouts “Me! I’m your man” but she’s a woman. Who
in their right mind would sell drugs to a woman who says she’s your man? You
wouldn’t, would you? She doesn’t even know what sex she is. She wants to
straighten herself up and work out such fundamentals. She’s a disgrace to all
womanhood. I expect you’re embarrassed of her yourself, being a woman. You want
to pull out her hair, scratch her eyes, push her so she falls and breaks her
heels – look how tall they are, like she is on stilts – or twists an ankle.
You’re good at pushing people. Like you did that furry officer.’

‘Don’t sell it to him,’ said the woman, who had
sagging arm skin and dewlaps, and wasn’t young anymore or very attractive and
probably never had been, thought Delilah, not recognising her yet. ‘Give it to
me. We should stick together. Honk it over to me, sister. I’ll look after you.
I’ll show you the ropes round here. I’ll be your friend. You can trust me, I
used to be a teacher. I might even have taught you. Did your teacher ever hit
you on the head with a cabbage? It was me! I did that to all the girls. Always
have a cabbage handy, that’s my motto. Here, I’ve got one right now. Give me
the pill for a cabbage. Pill for a cabbage. You must be hungry. You look it.
Here.’ The ex-teacher junkie kicked the cabbage around the floor of the junkie
cage, but because she was a junkie she kicked it too hard and its leaves broke
off and soon it was flapping around looking very sorry for itself, until she
gave it one last huge kick that sent it though the bars, explosively, its
ragged heart rolling to nearly within Delilah’s reach.

The male junkie said, ‘You don’t want to sell it to
her, she’s mad. What a nutter. What she did to that cabbage she does to
everything. She’s wasteful. She’s the kind of person you give a gift to and
they say thank you but don’t mean it, then you discover they’ve never even used
your gift, or have given it to someone else, or are telling people quite openly
that it’s the worst gift they’ve ever had. You spend weeks choosing them
something special, then they break your heart. She’s like that. She’ll never
really be your friend, she’s just saying it. But I would. I’d be your friend.
Ask my friend here with the long blonde moustache. He’s been my friend for many
years. Even Officer JJ Jeffrey remarked, when he arrested us for assaulting a
girl who’s fingernail we pulled off and for a light-hearted prank replaced with
a prawn shell some students had given us, that we were terribly good friends
because we often looked into each other’s eyes and patted each other on our
arms. Always will be, friends, me and him. I’ll be your friend as well, if you
give me the pill. Pill for a pal. That’s me, your pal. You and me, we’ll get on
like a house on fire. I’ll even ditch my friend with long blond moustache for
you, if you want, if you give me the pill. Yes, I’d do that, that’s how strong
our friendship will be,
already
is.’ He turned to the moustached friend:
‘Okay, loser, you’re dumped. Go hang with a new crowd. You bore me. You were
fun when we first met. But now you just stick around hardly saying anything
interesting. Besides, your habits annoy me. You bring me down. I’m down enough
as it is, being a junkie, and the last thing I want is to see another long
face. If you’re depressed, that’s your problem. I don’t need it. When I met you
I was at low ebb myself and knew our friendship wouldn’t last, I was just using
you to get my spirits up. But I’ve done that now and am forging ahead with my
new best mate.’ He turned to address Delilah. ‘See? That’s how committed to you
I am. I really like you. A friend for life, that’s what you get when you get
me. Tell me, buddy, what’s your name?’