Bang (27 page)

Cagee was jostled forward, distraught already that the
school he’d been promised – or mislead into believing he’d head – had
in fact metamorphosed into a courtroom. Now further distraught at this outburst
of dislike, or hatred, toward him – only because he didn’t have any hands
and had a funny walk, he thought. But this had happened before. Why didn’t
people like him? The lady friend, she whom he’d cared so much for, he’d had his
accident and never heard from her again. It hurt, caused tears. Yet still, as
he was kicked to floor by the 999, he knew he couldn’t stop caring about her.
'Tell my lady friend that not a day went by when I didn't think about her and
miss her,' he called out, choking on his tears, wiping them away with the
feather-duster glove on the arm that Officer JJ Jeffrey had broken that day,
and it had just rebroken when he'd been kicked to the floor. ‘Please don’t have
me
Voltaired
. I beg you.’ His pitiful eyes attached themselves to
Delilah’s. Their relationship, she thought, up till this moment had been one of
uncertain exchanges; now across the baying crowd the two acquired a helpless
unity. ‘Ho ho,’ hoed the Whipping Boy, drug-high, enjoying his new voice,
taking centre stage with his trusty
Voltaire
deeply humming above his
head. ‘One, two, eyes gone. Over here, Headmaster, it’s blindness time.’ He
sniffed orange powder from the side of his fist and shook his head as it took
effect. ‘I LOVE my
Voltaire
,’ he boomed and threw a swing that grabbed a
standing up Cagee by the shoulder and pulled him down.

‘I thought you liked me,’ said Cagee to the Whipping
Boy.

‘Like you? I can’t stand you.’

‘Help,’ said Cagee. This was for Delilah. But what
could she do?

‘You are to blame for this,’ the Superintendent told
her. ‘If by now you’d pleaded guilty, this wouldn’t be happening to your
friend. But you don’t care. Loyalty to you is an other-worldly concept. Look
how your fragile friend breaks to pieces under the
Voltaire
.’ It was
true that a feather-duster glove that may or may not have contained part ulna
or radius had just gone skidding across the floor, that the higher-heeled of
the two shoes appeared severed from its leg, possibly with a foot still in it,
and was being kicked about by the bailiffs, two of whom had stretched their
stripes apart to form a goal, and had just this moment scored causing riotous
cheering.

‘I will leave his eyes till last,’ called the Whipping
Boy, ‘so that he sees the whole thing.’

‘This isn’t fair,’ said Delilah.

‘We’re one hundred and eleven floors underground,’
replied the Superintendent, still rising in rostrum higher and higher, and
lowered his eyes at Delilah while simultaneously pulling a hair from each
eyebrow that raised them high in the process. ‘And you’d do well to remember
that.’

‘Tell my lady friend I miss her, please,’ said
Cagee again – and then an eye was gone. It was quickly over from then on
and left Delilah with a sick feeling. The crowd, who’d got what they wanted,
now weren’t so sure they’d wanted it, and became subdued. The Whipping Boy
gathered his breath, sniffed more orange, looked unperturbed, and felt inside
his studded pants: it all seemed to make more sense down there now.

While the Superintendent snarled, ‘Well, that’s calmed
them down for you, girly, just what you wanted. Don’t tell me you didn’t plan
the whole thing. Stupid you might be, selfless you’re not. Sacrifice your old
friend Cagee – who went to such lengths to befriend you on your first
day – that’s right, just to calm the crowd so they become less likely to
goad me into delivering a harsh sentence. However, consider yourself thwarted
by your own ruthless ambition, in that regard. You have said goodbye now to any
leniency I might previously have had at my disposal. Lawyer Poy Yack, proceed,
if you’d be so kind, and bring to its swift conclusion this torrid affair. My
blood is boiling now, at the sight of her.’

Poy Yack began.

As he spoke – explaining to Delilah that she
would not leave this courtroom an acquitted woman – the bailiffs dragged
over a box with written on its side
The
Headmaster
, tipped
Cagee’s body into it and dragged it away, picking up his body parts as they
passed, throwing them in.

Poy Yack was saying, on the subject of there being no
witnesses for the defence, ‘And, such a witness would, additionally, favour the
case for the prosecution. How is one to refute evidence if none is put? Thus
the prosecution has procured a witness for the defence. His name is Shane.
Bring Shane on.’

Shane was brought on, hissing at Delilah that he’d
tried paying her bail and that she’d better not have said anything about
him – or she’d be in for it, when this was all over. Which puzzled her.
She did not recognise him.

‘Can you confirm that, of your own volition, you
approached the prosecution, after we located you as the man who tried posting
bail for the defendant, and offered to vouch for her good name?’

‘I can,’ grunted Shane. And huffed.

‘Describe your relationship with the witness, if you
would be so kind, and remember this is a court.’

‘It’s not as though I know her too well myself, sir,
but she has had a relationship with my friend.’

You, thought Delilah. Now she recognised him, without
his disguise, the man who’d put her here, the man with the tan – the Man
With The Tan. She was furious. She wished she
had
told the Authority
about him. But, now she came to think about it, the Authority hadn’t even asked
about the man with the tan, the man who’d mugged her and started all this off.

‘Your friend?’ asked Poy Yack.

Shane said, ‘Harry.’

Delilah let out, more involuntarily than anything
she’d let out of her body in her life, a roar.

‘My goodness,’ exclaimed the Superintendent. ‘Do I
take that roar to mean that the defendant is acquainted with this Harry
character, and angered by this information? I think I do.’

‘Harry says she’s a slut, Superintendent,’ said Shane.

‘That’s right,’ said Poy Yack. ‘Unbridled, wanton,
wild.’

‘Words along those lines.’

‘No, witness, those words exactly.’

‘Yes, sir.’

It all made sense to Delilah now. The cool fortune of
Lifes in Harry’s hands that day. The two of them, Harry and Shane, were in it
together. But get her out of the System on bail so she wouldn’t talk? Get her
out? These two had put her
in
here. Something stopped her, now, from
telling the court this. She knew the System. She couldn’t trade a pickpocket
for her freedom; she was a murderer, accused at least, though death did seem to
follow her around. She couldn’t point the finger at the root of her
misimprisonment, and hope to extricate herself. That was the System.

‘And the defendant’s behaviour is okay, do you think,
Shane?’

Shane huffed again and told Poy Yack, ‘I do not think
that such behaviour is okay, no. Society’s sexual mores are a thing best kept
in check. Carnal profligacy never did set a good example and certainly does not
today. Intercourse, such as it is, is unnecessary now and was undoubtedly only
fractionally less so back then. Reproduction did not require the repeated
couplings men and women chose to pretend it did. They blamed instinct Nature
had put in them but Nature was not to blame. They were. We have at last
established this.’

‘We, witness?’

‘The Authority, sir.’

‘Continue.’

‘How, I struggle to imagine, did persons, famous or
responsible, leaders of that period believe they could function successfully in
their famous or responsible roles while also engaging willy-nilly in such
sexual encounters. A powerful man caught in the vulnerability of nakedness was
not a virtuous man, nor a man capable of producing a good decision, not with
all that rudeness on his mind. What, for instance, did those licentious
leaders–‘

‘You speak of leaders, do you consider Delilah a
leader?’

Shane gave another his huffs, which the crowd seemed
to be rather enjoying and probably helped shake off what was their shock at
Cagee’s treatment and their collective responsibility for it, and said, ‘She
gives the impression of, in a manner of speaking … there is something
about her that suggests such a propensity, yes, certainly, for …’

‘Leadership?’

‘Yes,’ said Shane.

‘Leadership. She’s a leader?’

‘It is so. Without a doubt, sir.’

‘And there you have it, Superintendent. Shane vouches
for the Defendant’s character and does so in
glowing
terms. What, after
all, could be more laudatory than the endorsement upon your character of
leader. Leader, Superintendent.’

‘Yes,’ said the Superintendent, ‘positive testament
indeed. I do see what you mean. It is rather worrying, isn’t it. Thank you,
Shane.’ He resumed plucking his eyebrows, which he’d forgotten he was doing,
and wasn’t quite sure why he’d started, so hadn’t realised that he’d stopped,
or how long for. At this point Delilah finally realised, or finally accepted,
that whatever happened here today, the outcome could not be good, could only be
bad.

‘Any sign of that plumber, yet?’ called the
Superintendent.

Two bailiffs ran out of the court, in search of him.

‘Court adjourned,’ called the Superintendent.

Officer JJ Jeffrey rushed out, too, quite obviously in
need of a toilet, quite obviously in search of one, squirting egg yolk from his
mouth, and shouting, ‘Ice, ice, I want some ice.’

The popcorn seller with the unpopped-popcorn necklace
and abnormally large head, to which another ticket fine had been stuck, did his
rounds. He popped corn in a machine on his back and made a lot of money –
especially off the party of schoolchildren, who looked very much like the bunch
who’d laughed at Delilah in her cage not so long ago and in this very room back
when it had been Remand 111. Perhaps they were System children. They probably
were. They’d certainly enjoyed the whipping more than the adults. It was a
fallacy that children didn’t like violence, or turned away from it. Then JJ
Jeffrey rushed back in, looking refreshed, and walking very differently, and
gave the Superintendent a nod, which woke him up at the exact moment that the
popcorn seller’s head finally burst.

18
– A
Death
Sentence

For Delilah, strange, this feeling of heading towards
a place she didn’t want to go, knowing there was nothing she could do about it,
to halt it. I’m a brick, she thought, cracked bashed and fissured, sinking
through water, plummeting, and I can’t even see the bottom yet. Where will I
stop? The popcorn seller was stretchered out bouncing in stretchy stripes and
the trial went on around her, and kept on getting worse.

‘Gentle,’ cried the Whipping Boy when the clear casket
containing the skeleton with the uncertain smile was presented, marked up now
as
Evidence: Officer Gentle
. The Whipping Boy ran over and flung himself
on his dead friend. A single solitary bloodbottle crawled over the officer,
through him, in and out of his skull’s upturned nostrils, seeking a last
morsel, a last meal, a final resting place to lay its eggs. Gentle had been
rejected by the Former Bottle Manufacturer on the basis of his being tainted by
these flies. Now even the fly rejected him and sought escape from the casket
and crawled upside-down on the roof. ‘Oh Gentle,’ sobbed the Whipping Boy, chopping
out lines of orange on the roof (frightening the fly) and sniffing it up. Then
he beat his hands on the casket, much to the crowd’s consternation, who feared
its clear walls would crack and the fly escape. Given this treatment, the
casket fell off its trestles to the floor. The powdered orange went everywhere.
After sniffing the floor clean the Whipping Boy noticed with more howling that
though the casket had remained intact the officer’s skull had split cleanly in
two – rather suggesting that the wrench
had
killed him, not the supposed
drowning claimed by Officer JJ Jeffrey. That skeleton, Delilah would have liked
to smash it into little pieces. But the bailiffs took it away, carried again in
a cradle of their stretchy stripes.

There was no plumber coming here today, Delilah knew
this. There might be something else she didn’t know, in fact she knew there
was, but there was no plumber. He had become a red herring. Perhaps he always
had been. Saint the filmmaker had suggested so.

Poy Yack asked the next witness, ‘You have a grievance
with the defendant, is this correct?’

‘I own a hat, boot and glove shop, specialising in
fur, fake and genuine, and do have a grievance with the defendant, yes.’

‘What is this grievance?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘What is the grievance?’

‘Officer Gentle and Mr Cagee were my customers, then
they came into contact with the defendant and the next thing I know they’re
dead. I have lost two customers, that is my grievance.’

‘Your grievance has been heard and will be considered
when it comes to sentencing. It is a good grievance.’ Poy Yack indicated that
the witness may climb down.