Bang (15 page)

‘Delilah,’ interrupted the ex-teacher junkie. ‘And
she’s giving me the pill because I taught her so well and made her what she is
today. Without me she’d never have done so good. She has a fantastic life ahead
of her and it’s all thanks to yours truly. I sure did put that girl on the
right path. Alleluia. Over here, Delilah, toss us over the pill. To me. Give it
me, there’s a good girl. I’ll make you a grade-A student.’

If I take the drug, thought Delilah, with the orange
pill now between her finger and thumb, it might be the best experience of my
life. I wonder if I’ll really buzz. I wonder what buzzing is. I wonder why it’s
called buzzing. Will it be noisy, this buzzing? It might be quite fun, I
suppose, to get off my tits, whatever that might mean. On the other hand, I’m
not in a good head space right now (she surveyed Remand 111 carefully, and
agreed with herself) and I wouldn’t want to put myself on a right downer, at
least I think that’s what the other hairdressers called it. So no, I’m going to
say no. I won’t get pilled up to my eyeballs, but instead exchange the pill not
for that junkie’s friendship – he pulled out my fingernail and replaced
with a prawn shell! – but for my ex-teacher’s cabbage, which I will asked
to have boiled. What’ve I got to lose? I mean, it can’t get any worse round
here, can it?

She delivered the pill into one of the officer’s
hands. Whichever officer it was he had been standing there for a while now with
a hand outstretched. He said, ‘What am I supposed to do with this? You think
because I’m indistinguishable from him that I’m an easy touch? You prisoners,
you treat us all the same. No wonder I don’t like you.’

‘Why was your hand outstretched, then?’

‘I thought you might like to hold it.’

‘But you don’t like me.’

‘What difference does that make. People who don’t like
each other hold hands all the time. I thought it might be nice. We could
present a united front to people and pretend we’re together. People who hate
each other do do that. But if you’re not interested, because you feel so
powerful now, then tough luck.’ He paused, his eyes welling up. ‘Oh just give
me the stupid pill and I’ll do whatever you want with it. You’ll want that
cabbage boiled, no doubt. You ungrateful girl. You don’t care about me. You
never did. I don’t know why I tried so hard.’

‘Please,’ said Delilah, demurely as she could.

The teacher took the pill upon receiving it, and the
other junkie went about mending the friendship he’d just dissolved and went
back to hating Delilah. She waited for her lunch. Or was it supper or
breakfast? Her stomach was way ahead of the meal, and kicking up all sorts of
new pains now the possibility of food was on the table. It got ready to eat.
Delilah presently smelt the not usually pleasant wafts of cooking cabbage.
Then, boiled grey, out it came, a knife and fork beside it, but bent and laid
the wrong sides, the fork the prop fork.

‘Urgh,’ said many of the prisoners as they were let
out of their cells and invited by bowing officers who’d dressed up as waiters
to sit down at a long prison table at which a great and luxurious meal had been
set. ‘You’re not going to eat
that
, are you? Cabbage is foul.’

She was. And she couldn’t wait.

Then Officer JJ Jeffrey came flying into the room, not
literally, but, and quite accidentally, knocked the boiled-grey cabbage off its
platter (it rolled back towards its original owner in the junkie pen, who was
already too high to get to the feast) and made for Delilah.

Officer JJ Jeffrey bore in his arms a black, black
garment.

‘Execution,’ shrieked a prisoner, laughing and going
at a huge pink prawn with many eggs in its pouch, which looked like prawn eggs,
but were redder than prawn eggs usually were, for some reason.

JJ Jeffrey said to Delilah, ‘Put this on! Where is the
plumber? Put this on, prisoner! Where is the plumber with the prisoner’s
wheels? There he is. Stop eating prawns, man, and sucking those eggs greedily
into your greedy plumber’s mouth, come over here and do the wheels. The wheels,
where are the
wheels
?’

As instructed, the plumber came over, his mouth full
of prawns, not looking too well, nearly as grey as Delilah’s boiled cabbage.

Officer JJ Jeffrey was angry. ‘What kind of a plumber
are you. You’re in no fit state to do the wheels. Where did you get those
prawns from? How dare you eat prawns in an officer’s presence. How dare you eat
prawns at all. There are eggs coming out of your nose. Why are they so red?
Urgh! Here, give me the welder. I’ll do it myself. If I must. Give me the
welder! What are you waiting for. Are you deaf? What is wrong with your ears?
Are they full of wax? If a plumber can’t even keep his own ears clear how can
he be expected to unblock pipes? No wonder you’ve been put on remand, I wouldn’t
hire you. Give the welder here, now I say. Now!’

‘I had a knock to the head,’ said the plumber.

‘Shut up.’

‘I don’t know who I am.’

‘Silence.’

‘Do
you
know who I am?’

‘Be quiet!’

‘Would the Missing Persons Officer know who I am?’

‘Hush!’

‘I remember only a huge gush of water, then,
then …’

‘Stupid man!’

JJ Jeffrey snatched the welding equipment and the
wheels roughly from the plumber and propped the cage up on the cabbage which he
had retrieved from the high junkie, who, if the feasting prisoners were any
comparison, looked quite good on the effects of the orange pill. The cabbage
squashed immediately. The officer demanded, ‘Who boiled this cabbage. In the
absence of a hydraulic jack, how can I prop up a cage on what should be a good
hard cabbage in order to carry out important welding work if some irresponsible
person, some
idiot
, has taken the cabbage away and boiled it so that it
flattens like an old brain. I work with nincompoops, incompetent nincompoops.
Plumber, hold the cage. Not like that. Like
that.
’ The officer sparked
up the welder and set about welding on the four wheels. ‘I love welding. Look
at that burn! See how it melts.’ Delilah could see her grey cabbage stuck to
the underside of the see-through base and she reached under and scooped it away
and it tasted fantastic, seasoned too, just rather grey. ‘Get your black dress
on! Spit out that cabbage, it is disgusting. Look how I wield the torch. Such
skill I have. I love welding. I should have been a welder. Turn around, turn around,
give me a twirl. Yes, marvellous.’ He shut off the welder with a snap. With
Delilah dressed, he peeled a hardboiled egg, held it half in his mouth half
out, opened his eyes so wide that they too looked like protruding eggs, gripped
the still-smoking cage, and pushed. Inside, Delilah shook with fear, knowing
what came now. But, on a mouthful of warm grey cabbage and weakly, she had to
ask anyway (because to know the worst was to know the truth), ‘Where are we
going?’

‘Funeral. Where else would you be going, dressed like
that. Funeral!’

They’re going to kill me,
thought Delilah. I asked for my death and now I’m getting it.

‘I love a good funeral.’ The
officer gave the cage another rough shove and wobbled it away, with its fed,
scared, black-robed occupant, tugging at her mouth again, tugging away.

All she wondered now was how she would die. Because
she knew death wasn’t far away.

9
–
A Funeral

‘The service will be long. Very long. You might get
bored. The System has bored people to death in the past, you know. I know, I
was there. I cannot be bothered to talk to you about this now. Why aren’t you
noting down what I say?’

Delilah gave Officer Jeffrey a blank look, and stared
past him at the lift.

‘What’s going on here? Get out of our way!’ shouted Officer
Jeffrey at an officer in a pith helmet and inside-out uniform escorting a
prisoner into the lift, who shouted, ‘Get out of our way! Get out of our way!’
back at Delilah and Officer Jeffrey.

Wheeling Delilah past the commotion, Officer JJ
Jeffrey complained, ‘It’s people like him that boil cabbages. Why am I
surrounded by such idiocy? Wherever I turn, a fool.’ He stopped briefly to
straighten his pith helmet in a mirror and comb the damp hair that grew past
it. He slipped dark glasses on over his transplanted eyes and resumed the
journey. ‘Stop wobbling,’ he shouted at Delilah. ‘Stop wobbling your cage like
that, you stupid woman.’ Some more water leaked from his pith helmet.

‘We are gathered here today,’ said the
Minister of Authority Theology beginning the
service in the Theatre of Religion 10, which was quite light lilac in colour,
‘to celebrate the life of a cherished and beloved person, a, a
sweetheart
.’

Never expected to hear myself
called that, thought Delilah, her big eyes taking in Theatre of Religion
10 – the silver-track-suited minister, the many-coloured light-boxes, the
fat box up there by a bunch of old candles, presumably empty and waiting for
her body. Everyone began sitting down. Delilah stood in her cage in the aisle.
There were old candles on her roof, too, which kept falling over and dripping
wax into runnels that led it into a mould of a key that looked very much like
the key the junkie swallowed. Delilah was, it had to be said, quite the centre
of attention. But what did one expect at one’s own funeral. To be ignored? She
dismissed the congregation’s glances, their interrogative stares, with a guilty
dismissiveness: she was going to killed, fine, but couldn’t it be done more
understatedly. How unfair, too, that following her grey cabbage she felt the
best she’d felt for days and was now about to meet her maker.

The minister groaned lamentably,
really laying on the religious aspect of all this, thought Delilah, and said,
with a longing sigh, ‘Gentle by name, Gentle by nature. A lovely and loving
man. A gentle man and a gentleman.’ Which was met with murmured
appreciation – and Delilah’s dropped jaw. The minister in the silver
tracksuit leaned far over the pulpit and mopped his brow, which nearly toppled
him, and said, ‘Jonathon was, in the truest sense of the word, a darling, a,
I’ve said it before, a sweetheart. He will be missed. We cherished him.’

Delilah ventured that perhaps
another officer named Gentle had just died, or been killed, someone she hadn’t
met, someone she hadn’t murdered. Anyway, everybody clapped and there was a
standing ovation. Then, the ovation over in seconds, everybody sat down again.
The minister coughed rather pathetically and, sniffling into a handkerchief
he’d put to his nose in a way that had no effect other than to draw people’s
attention to his sniffling, said, ‘I remember first meeting Jonathon. I was
fresh out of the Academy, having specialised in Scientific Theology, and, while
the Centre of Disinformation tempted me with its promise of a sound and
fulfilling career, of passing on the ‘word’, I met Jonathon dancing one morning
under the pink inauguration skies of our previous Authority Head, Authority
Head 05, may he rest in peace, and opted instead for the Authority. I have not
looked back since. Indeed, in the Authority, I have had a
freakishly’
–
here for some reason he made a high-pitched noise – ‘successful theological
career on the few floors above and the many floors below, helped in no small
part by the Authority’s implementation within the System of such a healthy, if
prolonged at times, death penalty policy as to keep me very busy with
prisoners’ last rites’ – he eyed Delilah, pertinently – ‘which, I
might add, really are quite lucrative. Still, a man must earn his living.
Let
not the dying go to waste
, as any good religious man will tell you.’

‘Here here,’ rejoined the
Whipping Boy, dressed as a choirboy over his sharpened-studded leather, and
within
Voltaire
range of Delilah. ‘Is it time for my ode yet?’

‘Not yet, Whipping Boy, thank
you. My eulogy must go on far longer, it is what the dead expect, they have no
wish to be skimped on. No, Jonathon was an inspiration to me and to us all. A
larger than life character at times, with a bold streak of the like one rarely
sees. He wore extravagant clothes, fantastic fur. He was a master at cleaning
prisoners in Shower Unit 101, how they loved him, how they will miss him and be
all the dirtier for it. Then his dancing. Yes, he danced, danced all day long,
for those of you who didn’t know.’ The minister peered over his half-spectacles
at Delilah and pursed his lips briefly, dabbing the handkerchief to his dry
face. She had never seen Gentle dance and doubted he had the coordination to
waggle his toes without falling over. The minister drank something that
resembled wine and ate something that might have imitated pretend bread.
‘Decorated too, many-times decorated, he was an officer of the Authority who
carried out his duties in the fairest manner. In truth, he would never have
harmed a fly. Which brings me neatly to a very funny story. A story about
flies, and about what has happened to the funeral feast. What would a eulogy be
without some light relief? Ha ha. Silly me! I’m a silly bugger. Poor Porter
102 – and you’ll understand why I call him poor in a moment – was
charged with the responsibly of removing Jonathon from a hearing he’d been
attending while dead. Now, it just so happens that Porter 102 job-shares as
Chef 102 and had been very merrily carting the dead Officer Gentle, fly-ridden
it has to be said, towards the kitchen, when officers at a lift called him to
their aid. Not thinking, Porter 102 propelled Gentle’s trolley through his
kitchen’s flappy doors and rushed over to aid officers, who were struggling
with a particularly errant lift designer they’d just arrested. Can you believe
that this fool lift designer was ordering the lift – I repeat,
ordering
the lift, the elevator itself, my gentle flock – not to take him to Shower
Unit 101: “I designed you,” I’m told he was shouting at it. “You are my baby,
my child. How can you do this to your father? Don’t listen to the officers,
don’t do it. I love you. Why couldn’t you have kept your mouth shut? Why tell
the plumber the Authority didn’t have its head screwed on properly. She wasn’t
even a real plumber!” Needless to say, as this fracas proceeded, resulting in
the lift designer being sedated with a blunt instrument – has anyone seen
my silver staff? I’m joking, of course! I am a very funny man – the flies
in the kitchen leapt off Jonathon’s body and onto food that, rather
unfortunately, was being prepared for his funeral feast. That food that has
since been reallocated, though I would not like to be the one eating it –
hee-weee! Consequently we have no food. For this you must blame poor Porter
102 – who is currently in his capacity as Chef 102 being severely
punished, which is deserved, I’m sure you’ll agree, for the hunger we must now
endure, leaving us unable to use delicious funeral food to lessen our grief at
Officer Gentle’s death. While, on a happier note, Porter 102 was decorated only
this morning in his capacity as porter for coming to the aid of the officers so
quickly and effectively – deserved commendation, I’m sure you’ll all agree,
also.’ The congregation simultaneously booed and applauded, something
inhabitants of this world had become accustomed to. ‘Jonathon Gentle was a
great man, with more greatness to come. A sad loss. No, I’ve said that.
Cherished, that too. What else? Yes, he shone brightly. A shiny star. Twinkle
twinkle. May he rest in peace.
Let us
pray. Please kneel, the floor was dusted specially this morning.’ The minister
finished quickly, with the aid of a sneeze, ‘On your knees!’